Desert Boys

by Chris McCormick

  As millions of Armenian women had done before her, my mom set each cup upside down over its saucer with care and with grace. Then she crossed herself. For Mom, the possible contradictions between a soothsaying tradition and a devout faith in the Bible were nonexistent. I’d heard her say many times that Armenians were the first Christians. “For us,” she would explain, “there is no difference between religion and culture.” I’d argued with her on that point in the past, but now was different. Now I just stared at the gold-rimmed bottom of my overturned cup, half-seriously willing my future to read a certain way. I felt nervous, to be honest, and restless. I was sweating.

  “Patience is the biggest thing,” she said, noticing. She reminded us not to peek until the sludge had dried on the inside of the cup. A few minutes passed, and we were all so curious as to our futures that no one dared start a conversation. At one point, Jean giggled, and I laughed at her for enjoying this so childishly. My mom said there was nothing wrong with enjoying this like a child, because no matter how old you were, you were always a child when people talked about your future.

  Jean said, “Please don’t say anything about Patrick. Promise?”

  “I can’t promise anything,” my mom said. “His face might appear in the coffee, and I’m supposed to ignore that?”

  She turned over my sister’s cup first. Jean and I were rationalists. We knew how silly we were being, how superstitious. Still, we also knew this might be the last time, so we studied our mother’s face as she inspected the patterns against the porcelain walls of the cup. As she read the lines and waves and peaks and dips of the coffee grounds, we read the crannies along her forehead and the cracks in her painted lips, the bluing, beautiful pouches beneath her eyes, flanking the bridge of her long, arched nose.

  “Interesting,” my mom said, and Jean couldn’t help scooting forward on her seat. “Very interesting.”

  “What does it say?”

  “Do you see these?” My mom tipped the cup toward Jean to point out a number of circular blots near the lip. “These are very rare.”

  “What do they mean?”

  “Children,” my mom said. “One, two, three, four—four children in your future.”

  “Oh, come on,” Jean said.

  “I’m only the messenger,” my mom said.

  “What else?” Jean said. “Tell me there’s something besides kids.”

  “Let me see,” my mom said. “Daley, go get my magnifying glass out of the computer room.”

  I found it easily in a drawer. The handle was white porcelain like our cups, painted blue in a paisley pattern. The circle of glass was the size of our saucers.

  “Okay,” my mom said, taking the magnifying glass. “Let me see.” She adjusted the distance between the glass and the cup like a trombone player in a game of charades.

  “Well?”

  “Well,” my mom said. “This is amazing.” Again she tipped the cup so that Jean could see her future. “You see these ripples, how they start far apart from each other and then get close together? That means you will be rewarded for your good work. It will take time, but your good work will be widely recognized.”

  Jean liked this, but I pointed out how arbitrary it was to read the ripples as getting closer together. “Why isn’t it the other way around?” I asked. “Why don’t you say they start close together and drift apart?”

  “How many years have I been doing this,” my mom said. “I know a start from a finish, okay?”

  “My turn,” I said, preferring to be a nonbelieving participant over an enlightened spectator.

  “Okay,” my mom said, and began to read my grounds. Jean turned her own cup over in her hands as if she could check her results for errors.

  “Look at this splash mark,” my mom said, holding my cup. “This is your first book! It will be a big splash.”

  “Yeah, the splash thing,” I said. “I get it. But, Mom, I write for the internet.”

  “Shut up,” Jean said. “At least it’s not children.”

  My mom ignored this and kept reading my fortune. “First book,” she said again, “and what’s this?” She reached for the magnifying glass on the table and took a closer look. “It’s like a little star you see in books,” she said. “What do you call it?”

  “An asterisk,” I said, and the tiny mark on the cup did, surprisingly, look just like an asterisk. “What does it mean?”

  For a minute, I thought my mom had finally been stumped. She’d never seen this particular accident, and she was taking a long time to come up with some wishful thinking to pass off as a fortune.

  “Well?”

  My mom looked at me. For the first time in a long time, we met eyes without saying anything.

  “Well?” I said again. And then I was struck with fear, convinced she could see it—my life in San Francisco with Lloyd.

  “You’re going to live a very long life,” my mom said, looking back into the cup. “One hundred, one hundred ten years.”

  “That’s not what it says.” I could tell by her hesitation that something rotten lay in my future.

  The sound of bare feet kissing the hardwood floor came from the hallway, followed by the unmistakable drawl of my dad’s yawn.

  “Hey,” he said, meeting us in the kitchen. “What are you guys up to?”

  “Reading fortunes,” Jean said, lifting her cup.

  “Anything good?”

  “Yeah,” Jean said, “if you like children, old age, and successful careers.”

  “Children, check. Old age, check. Two out of three ain’t bad,” said my dad.

  “And what about you?” he asked my mom, hands on her shoulders from behind her chair. He kissed the top of her bald head.

  “We haven’t done hers yet,” Jean said. “Mom, let’s make Dad his own cup so we can do his, too.”

  “Nah,” my dad said. “I just want regular coffee. Our fortunes are tied together anyway. Read your mom’s, and you’ll read mine, too.”

  “Daley,” Jean said. “Help me out.” I scooted my chair over to my sister and leaned into her. She flipped my mom’s cup, and we began our inspection.

  I could hear my dad at the counter, running water for his Folgers.

  My sister and I conferred. A black wiggle draped one side of the cup. Two smudges intertwined near the lip. I pointed to this and told Jean I saw an infinity sign. She saw it, too.

  “We’ve got it,” I said. “Mom, Dad: you’ll both live forever. You are the first people in the world who will never die.”

  My mother slapped the table, startling everyone to silence. “You’re not taking it seriously,” she said, as angry as I’d ever seen her. After a minute, she reached across the table to touch my wrist with her fingers. They were cold. They had thinned so much that she couldn’t wear a ring. “You’ll never have a child,” she said. “That’s what I saw. I’ll put it that way, Daley, that you’ll never have a child.”

  “He can have one of mine,” Jean said, and this got everyone, even Mom, to laugh a bit.

  “God knows what I’m trying to say,” Mom said, letting go of my wrist with a little pat.

  God’s not the only one, I wanted to tell her; Jean and Dad knew what she was trying to say, too, and had for years. But God would have known more, wouldn’t he? He would have known how much I loved my mother and how much I resented her, how desperately I needed her and how urgently I needed to rid myself of her, how impossible it was for me to imagine my life after her death and how many times I already had. Among a million things, her death meant that I would never have to introduce her to the man I loved. In equal parts, this liberated and devastated me.

  “At least,” my mom said, “read my fortune seriously. At least you could do that.”

  And to some extent, I could. What I knew about her future was this: that she would not sprout wings and ascend to heaven, that she would not, in a time of danger or despair, come to my aid. But the more closely I examined her cup—the coffee grounds, yes, but also the cracked,
orange prints of her lipstick at the rim, the ghosts of her—the more I couldn’t be sure.

  THE STARS ARE FAGGOTS, AND OTHER REASONS TO LEAVE

  1. No word, in the desert’s language, for “moderate.” For months, the heat clocked in at three digits until, for months more, the temperature dropped below freezing. The surrounding San Gabriel and Tehachapi Mountains acted as perfect curtains behind which we could either hide or misbehave. Most preferred the latter. In the Antelope Valley, even the plants—Joshua trees and cacti—were ugly and mean, and the Santa Ana winds conspired with the tumbleweeds, compelling them to dart through traffic like suicide bombers. From the Bic’d and Doc Marten’d skinheads to the howling and hungry coyotes, from the braided, defensive leaves of the California juniper to the resentful and resented black and brown teenagers dragged there from Los Angeles—in a place where toughness and tribalism permeated everything living and everything dead, it was not the best thing to be a sentimental, thin-skinned fag like me.

  2. You wouldn’t know by looking at me, but my mother was raised in another country and spoke with an accent. One effect of the accent was that she pronounced p’s as b’s. When I was a child, this seemed inconsequential to me—my sister and I heard the correct pronunciations from our dad, and were rarely thrown by Mom ordering bineabble on the pizza, or asking if we’d prefer black, green, or bebbermint tea.

  But one day my third-grade class had, for some reason, a sleepover party. The party wasn’t actually held overnight; the kids were simply supposed to wear pajamas, bring toys, and pretend.

  As far as I can remember, my father had never said the word “pajamas.” I’d only heard my mom say it, usually after coming home from work, when she’d tell my sister and me to join her in getting comfortable.

  At one point during the pretend sleepover, I made all the boys laugh by asking which of the girls had the best BJ’s. I didn’t understand why they were laughing, but I enjoyed the boys’ attention. When one of the girls told the teacher, no matter how much I cried and argued my innocence, Mrs. Chance issued me a demerit for using foul language. She said, “You’re lucky I’m not calling your parents,” but that’s what I wanted most in the world: for my mother to exonerate me, for my father, the Midwestern all-American, to tell me what I had done wrong.

  3. Drew Reuter, the boy across the street, was obsessed with professional wrestling. His favorite wrestler was a face-painted, arm-tasseled bodybuilder named Ultimate Warrior. Drew owned all the action figures, and let me play with every one of them except for the Warrior. We played in his front lawn, where the toys stood as tall as the wildest tufts of crabgrass. I was eleven years old and he was twelve when he asked if I wanted to play with Warrior. I said, “Heck yeah.” He pulled his penis from his shorts and said he’d let me play with Warrior if I licked him. Some other boy might’ve called him queer or punched him, but I felt my own erection forming. I remember thinking the penis and the stomach must be connected, because as my erection grew, my stomach shrank, turned hollow as the plastic muscles of the action figures. Now and then a car passed, and I timed my lick perfectly between them. Drew wanted more than the one lick, and I obliged. Soon he moved to his mother’s house, and we never played together again.

  4. Otherwise, I had exactly zero sex in the Antelope Valley.

  5. When my sister was a sophomore in high school, and I was in the sixth grade, she waited until my parents were at work to bring home a boy named March. He was pale as a used golf ball and had recently shaved his head with a Bic razor. I could make out two fresh, bloody nicks at the back of his skull. When I caught him and my sister kissing on the patio swing in the backyard, Jean yelled at me to mind my own business. March told her I hadn’t done anything wrong. This—a boy standing up for me—made me like him. When Jean went to the bathroom, he pulled me aside and said, “One day, you’ll be a dude trying to get some pussy, and some little brother’s going to get in your way.” He laughed. Then he asked, “Want to see my tattoos?” He lifted his shirt, and I saw a purple big-wheeler along his smooth white rib cage, a pair of crossed pool cues over a flaming eight ball, and a set of initials that read NLR. I asked what these stood for. “My crew,” said March. “My motherfucking crew, man.”

  6. The Nazi Low Riders tried to indoctrinate my sister. This is cheating—I didn’t know this until after I left. March tried to tattoo Jean with a homemade needle, and my sister, from his couch, kicked him in the teeth and ran away.

  7. When I was ten, the only objects that really belonged to me were a few books and magazines, some video games, and a baseball signed by two famous and rich Dodgers. My dad had taken me to a convention center to get the ball signed, and when one of the famous and rich Dodgers asked what position I’d go on to play in the big leagues, I told him, “Home,” which made everyone laugh. My dad explained how we were just getting me started in the game, and that although I had a lot to learn, I seemed to love it and that’s all that matters, isn’t it?

  The famous and rich Dodgers agreed. Love of the game was the difference between the good and the great. They didn’t mention what kind of person was indicated by pleasant, yielding ambivalence.

  One night—not much later, but long enough afterwards so that my father and I had stopped pretending I cared about sports—I decided to get rid of the signed ball. Maybe the baseball was a reminder of the heteronormative boyhood my father pined after for me, but the truth is I simply thought the baseball ugly. The sloppy, illegible signatures were scrawled in a hideous green ink, and the spherical shape of the thing itself didn’t seem to belong with the rectangular shapes of my books, magazines, and video game cartridges. Even the furniture in my room was boxy and sharp, and the ball—a lone, edgeless blob—bothered me. I needed to get rid of it, and fast.

  During my period of baseball-inculcation, I had seen the movie The Sandlot, and I planned an almost precisely opposite plot. I waited until my parents and sister had fallen asleep, opened my bedroom window as quietly as I could, and chucked the ball over the neighbor’s wall. His yard was full of towering, wispy grass I’d always mistaken for wheat. My hope was that the ball would nestle at the bottom of that tall grass, and be lost forever.

  And for a brief time, it was. I explained to my parents, tears in my eyes, how I’d taken the baseball to school. To show off. Somehow, on the walk home I guessed, the ball had fallen out of my bag. “Stupid!” I said, palming my forehead. My mom absolved me using the loving, passive voice: Accidents happen. A mistake was made. A lesson has been learned.

  My father—who had probably taken the day off from work to take me to that Dodgers convention, probably spent more money on admission and gasoline for the drive than he’d spent on himself over the course of the month—only said, “That’s too bad.”

  Eventually—weeks later? a year?—the neighbor knocked at our door while I was at school. Having cleaned up his backyard, he discovered a baseball he assumed was ours. When I came home, my father was sitting on my bed, cradling the ball in his hand, careful not to touch the signatures.

  “What’s so bad about owning a baseball?” he asked. “What’s so wrong with keeping a gift? And why would you lie? Who taught you to lie?”

  I didn’t know which question to start with. My answers—nothing, nothing, self-protection, innate ability—wouldn’t have done much good anyway.

  My dad stood and placed the ball back where it had been on my desk, alongside my books. He said, “You know I’m an excellent listener. Why won’t you talk to me?”

  8. The Antelope Valley is not the California most people imagine. This could be a good thing, but almost never is. Instead, it’s a point of pride, which is almost always claimed by people who are proud of the wrong things.

  9. Members of NLR, including March, were indicted for the murders of three black teenagers in East Palmdale. March is currently serving a life sentence in the California State Prison, Los Angeles County—fifteen miles from where he stabbed to death a fourteen-year-old black boy named Curtis
Allen, a member of a rival gang called SHARP: Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice.

  Redlining—discriminatory zoning restrictions I didn’t understand until my late teens—effectively segregated town: east for minorities and the working class, west for the well-off whites. The Sharps seemed like the only people willing to change the place. That skinheads could even be black seemed to break down, for me, the central tenet of segregation: that certain people behaved in certain ways, and thus belonged together.

  As a teenager, I considered joining the Sharps, but I was too small and too weak and too afraid to declare sides, let alone join a gang. Another way of saying this is I wanted everyone to like me.

  10. My friends and I dug trenches in the desert, shot each other with paintball and airsoft guns, built fires and jumped the flames on our bikes, forced each other to eat dirt and cactus and snake meat, rode our bikes to the aqueduct, ignored the signs warning of drowning, put our feet in the water, stripped off our clothes, sunburned on the cement slope, downloaded songs whose lyrics were growled, burned CDs, and, while collecting dented beer cans and abandoned bullet casings deep in the desert, listened through a boom box, growling along.

  11. My mother served me breakfast in bed every Sunday until I was fourteen years old. “For my pashas,” she said, calling me her prince.

  12. Everyone started driving pickup trucks and SUVs and taking up two parking spots apiece. Once I saw a black F450 diagonally block four spaces outside Wal-Mart. Dangling from the back of the truck, as if the symbolism weren’t clear enough, was a giant set of chrome testicles.

  13. In the fall of 2001, Mom was working in Men’s Suits at Dillard’s. At least three times a week, she said, she helped a customer who, hearing her accent, asked to be helped by someone else. “They say they want a man’s help.” She was wearing her pajamas as she told us this, but she was still the daughter of a tailor. “I’ve been altering suits for how long?” she asked no one in particular. “The reason is me. They hear my accent, think I’m Muslim. These beeble are idiots,” she said. “Don’t they know what Muslims did to Armenians a hundred years ago?”