“3B,” Dad says. “That’s what he told me.” He knocks.
“I have to pee.”
“Jackson, open up,” Dad says, knocking harder. “You’re brother is about to wet himself.”
A door creaks open across the hall as a woman pokes her head out. “Yes?” she says. She has short, black hair and alabaster skin. Her skin looks like one of Mom’s porcelain plates she uses only on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Her lips are a natural peachy-pink color. She wears a red V-neck sweater, a style that I read about in one of my magazines, flattering on women with big breasts. Tricia wears V-neck T-shirts. The longer I stare at her; the more my blood drains from my head down to my dick. “Can I help you?” she asks.
“Can you?” Dad asks.
“I’m sorry?” she asks again. A sick, hospital stench wafts from behind the door.
“I’m sorry. My name is Ballentine Barker.” He extends his hand. “I am Jackson’s father. Is he in, love?”
Don’t call her love, I think.
“Jackson lives across the hall, Mr. Barker. In 3A.”
“I’m rarely wrong about this sort of thing,” he says, looking at the other door. “I was sure he said 3B.”
“I am rarely wrong as well,” she says. “Funny how even when we’re wrong it still feels like we’re right.”
“Yes. Funny. I’m sorry for the inconvenience,” Dad says.
“Not at all,” she says.
“Sorry for the bother,” I say with an English accent, like I am some kind of big-dick prince talking to some peasant girl in the market and she’s selling me a ripe pomegranate.
“Nice accent,” she says. “You should be an actor.”
“I’m Jeremy,” I say.
“Franny,” she says.
We shake hands. Her skin feels cold but soft and I can feel my heart beat faster and warm fluid flush through my veins. My dick gets hard. I look into her brown eyes and want to pull her down to me and plant one on her. Her smile disappears and her eyes narrow on me.
“Oh my goodness,” she says. “Your nose.”
I open my mouth and taste blood, gushing from my nose and onto my lips. Fuck. I never get nosebleeds.
“Let me get you some tissues,” she says.
“That won’t be necessary,” Dad says, pulling out his handkerchief. He clamps it to my nose. “He gets these from time to time. Low iron levels. Needs a banana. Thanks again.”
Franny smiles and closes the door, her smile a bullshit smile, a sympathy smile.
Dad gives up the handkerchief and knocks on Jackson’s door.
“You okay?” Dad asks. “The nose, it’s okay?”
“Iron levels,” I say. “Probably the bananas.”
Dad slaps me on the back.
Jackson finally opens the door and combs his fingers through his greasy hair. His eyes are almost completely shut, probably because he’s stoned. He’s also completely fucking naked. I hate it when he does this. He has this need to walk around naked. Hates to wear clothes. Says they slow him down. His shaggy brown hair, the hair on his head, tangles in crazy curls, spiraling in all directions as if he just woke up. His body is lion-like, muscular. And while describing my brother’s body sounds like a faggy thing to do, it’s the only way I know how to explain what he looks like. People always ask him if he’s a model. He just eats that shit up.
My boner disappears right on cue.
“Stop knocking so loud,” Jackson says, resting his head on the doorframe.
“Don’t put on any clothes on our account,” Dad says. “Expecting company?”
“Not until later.” Jackson struggles to keep his eyes open, affected by the light. He adjusts his junk, scratches, then walks away, his vanilla white ass nodding with each step.
You should know that Jackson recently named his junk Roscoe. He told me about it after he’d graduated from college a few months back. At his graduation dinner, actually. Mom, Dad, Jackson, and I had dinner at this fancy Italian restaurant called De Amici in Baltimore’s Little Italy, a few streets over from Fell’s Point. Dad said that De Amici was Italian for among friends. It was weird, all of us being together again after the separation. Mom got up to go to the ladies’ room and Dad went to the bar to hit on our waitress, which was when it happened. Jackson said he had to tell me something about his dong.
“I named it,” he said.
“You named it?”
“I named that shit.” He raised his hand for me to high-five, but I didn’t.
“Gross.”
“It’s not gross, Stumps. It’s awesome.” It drives me up the fucking wall when he calls me Stumps, but I know he only does it to get a rise out of me. Why Stumps? Because I’m as-short-as-a-stump. Yup. I’m not sure he will ever call me Jeremy ever again. Mom said he would grow out of this childish phase of his life after he graduated college and entered the real world. I guess we are all still waiting.
“Why would you name your dick?”
“Why wouldn’t I name it?” Then, he said, “I named him Roscoe.” Jackson smiled, eyeing a girl at the table next to us, black hair to her shoulders, glasses. Dad leaned over the bar to the female bartender, pointing to a specific bottle of vodka that he wanted. And Mom never came back to the table at all, sneaking out the back entrance, I think.
What exactly is wrong with my brother that he named his penis Roscoe?
Maybe Jackson is just hyperexcitable, like me, and needs to be put on Ritalin, like me. I wonder if Dad knows about Jackson’s dick? I want to make it rhyme now—Roscoe Domingo eats black flamingoes, instead of baby dingoes. Yup. Would he think Jackson was normal, like he thinks I am normal on my medicine? Maybe when they find out that I’ve stopped taking the medicine then they’ll see just how fucking hyperexcitable I truly am.
45
Jackson lives in a studio. He has everything pushed into it: single bed, desk, three-legged table, micro-kitchen, and a stool in the corner instead of a chair. His clothes are both stacked in a corner and flung across the floor, his sheets tangled and twisted at the foot of his bed. I stand in the only uncovered space of floor and tip my head back, still pinching my nose. I don’t see a bathroom. For some reason, all I can think about is the Titanic—bigass boat, tipping up on one end and sinking beneath freezing water. White foam water.
“Jesus,” Dad says. “You smell like Las Vegas.”
“What a nice surprise,” Jackson says, back on his bed under the only window. The window is covered with a black sheet, tacked into the wall. “Stumps, what’s wrong with your nose?”
“Late night?” Dad asks, walking into the micro-kitchen to see if there is a girl tucked away somewhere, naked, recently sexed. He pokes through the dirty dishes piling out of the sink, knocks around an empty bag of cookies, and leans into an ashtray, inspecting the ash and beige butts.
“Earlier than usual,” Jackson says.
“What did you do last night?” Dad asks.
“Some girl.” Jackson clears his throat and rubs his temples with his knuckles. His attention is clearly fractured, his focus fuzzy at best. “I wine and dine. Hit it and quit it. Jackson Barker Power Hour up in here. Sometimes two, if I take a certain baby blue pill.”
“Classy,” Dad says, stomping across the apartment. He doesn’t like to talk about prescription pills. “It’s dinner time. Time for dinner. Now get dressed.”
“You guys want to watch this zombie movie I got?” Jackson asks. “Zombie Strippers! Jenna Jameson’s in it. Porn queen extraordinaire.”
“Porn is for the perverted,” Dad says. “Get dressed.”
“Stumps, you have Coach O’Bannon yet?”
Dad smells something in the corner of the room—a pile of dirty clothes. “It is amazing to me that you get anyone up here at all. You live like a heathen.”
“I am who I am,” he says.
“If you spent as much time on a job search as you do on your fuckability statistics, you’d be a CFO by now.”
“My general rule of thumb is thi
s—if I find a girl who’s a six, above average, and it’s after 10 P.M., then that’s it. I shut it down. I don’t get greedy. Chances are I won’t find much better. I call it the Six-by-Ten rule.” Jackson claps at me. “So what size Speedo did Coach O’Bannon make you wear? Small?” Jackson asks.
“I haven’t had gym class yet,” I say. I forget that we had most of the same teachers at Byron Hall. “What do you mean what size Speedo?”
“Tell that little Asian mushroom, Brother Lee, that Jackson says yo,” Jackson says. “He’ll die.”
“Where is your bathroom?” I ask, annoyed as fuck. I look at the blank white ceiling, keeping my head tilted. No zombie posters here.
“The fuck’s wrong with his nose? No one answers my questions,” he says.
“Your brother has a bloody nose,” Dad says.
“You get in a fight?” Jackson raises his fists. “Knockout king? Stumps could never—”
“Jeremy could hold his own in a fight, if he had to fight,” Dad says.
“Is this bloody nose a masturbation injury?” Jackson asks. “Too much rub-and-tug?”
“Fuck you,” I say.
“Language,” Dad says. “What’s her name, the girl across the hall?”
“Franny,” I say, checking the handkerchief for my blood.
Dad’s phone buzzes. “Ballentine here,” he says. “Wait. Let me get someplace quiet.” He walks out. I wonder if that is Mr. Rembrandt calling him. I wonder what he’d be calling about. Adults always seek privacy during phone calls, ditching me for technology.
“You want to hear all the juicy porno details about Franny?” Jackson asks. “You know I’m going to tell you anyway, right?”
“Stop. Don’t. Where is your bathroom?”
“We run into each other at a bar and we start slinging them back and she’s all grabbing at my jeans, clawing up underneath my shirt. She’s digging for the boy. She wants Roscoe. So she pulls me outside to that abandoned building. We find this hole in the fence and slip under and go inside and she pushes me up against the wall. Dirty abandoned building sex.” Jackson crawls to the end of the bed and grabs the DVD. He holds it out to me. “I only picked this up to see some titties and trust me, this one has a lot of good titties. You know what a good titty flick does for a sex addict like me.” I don’t take it from him, so he throws it at me, instead. “Watch it when the old man’s not around.”
“Jackson, I have to tell you something,” I say, looking at the door, still closed. “He’s going to be back soon, so please listen, okay? I think Dad’s in some kind of trouble.”
“What is it?” Jackson looks intrigued. Jackson makes a circle with his thumb and index finger and then pokes his other finger through the hole. This is sex to Jackson.
“This new teacher at school gave this video to Dad and I found it in Dad’s office and I watched it and it has this man on it and the man is strapped to a bed. I don’t know exactly.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” he asks.
“The video my teacher gave him. It’s a cult or something. I don’t know exactly.”
“Did you ask him about it? Because it’s probably some kind of kinky sex thing he’s into and doesn’t want us to know about it, the old prude.”
“It’s not sex. It’s different. I don’t know. I need your help. He’s different, Jackson. Something has happened to him. Please.” Jackson’s eyes close like drapes falling over an open window.
Dad reenters. He looks Jackson up and down like he’s only now realizing he’s naked. “We were going to go to dinner, but clearly that isn’t going to happen,” Dad says. “So now we are going to leave.”
“I have to pee,” I say, dabbing the handkerchief to my nose. The blood has stopped flowing. There are other red stains on it, dried, darker than my own.
“You going to The Hall’s first mixer, Stumps?” Jackson asks, breaking linear thought yet again. “High school girls are ripe for the plucking. Back corner. Next to the vending machines. I call that the cooz corner. Remember that.”
“It’s a mixer, Jackson. It’s just dancing,” I say.
“Not dancing,” Jackson says. “Fucking.”
“Stop,” I say.
“Boning,” Jackson says.
“Enough,” Dad says.
“Porking,” Jackson says.
“Gross,” I say.
“Dicking,” Jackson says.
“Stop,” Dad says.
“Pounding,” Jackson says. “Hammering.”
“I don’t even think that one makes sense,” Dad says.
“I have to pee,” I say.
“Both of you—obey me,” Dad says.
“Cumming,” Jackson says.
“Did you hear what I just said, goddamnit?” Dad asks. “Spooging,” Jackson says. “I’m going to the bathroom.”
“Language,” Dad says. “Language, language, language.”
46
There’s no lock on the door. A grimy black stain eats away at the shower curtain. The white tiled walls have turned brown, outlined in black mold where the caulk holds everything together. The medicine cabinet mirror hangs lopsided from the wall. A condom floats at the bottom of the toilet bowl, and a second clings for dear life to the seat. It dangles long and wide and I use toilet paper to knock it into the water, flushing quickly. Did he fuck one girl twice? Or two different girls once? The toilet water sucks down in a swirl and refills the bowl with more brownish rusty water. I drop the Zombie Strippers! DVD and rush my fingers over my belt, unbuckle, unzip, drop my underwear to my ankles, and sit down—my underwear bunched at my ankles.
I hear Jackson and Dad in the other room.
“Can I borrow some green to get me through?” Jackson asks.
“How is the job search coming along?” Dad asks. “Any offers?”
“I’m considering my options,” Jackson says. “I’m also considering going back to school.”
“Business?” Dad asks.
“Law,” Jackson says.
“How much do you need to get you through?” Dad asks.
“Five hundred ought to do.” Jackson continues. “What’s this I hear about a homemade video of surgery?”
“Are you asking me something without asking me?” Dad bangs on the bathroom door. “Jeremy. Out here. Now.”
I say nothing. I do nothing.
“I don’t know,” Jackson says, laughing. “I’m asking you about this homemade video?”
“Are you coked out of your fucking head?” Dad bangs again. “Jeremy. Jeremy.”
I do absolutely nothing. I absolutely say nothing.
Fuck.
“I can’t keep up with you. You’re just like your mother, completely fucked in the head.”
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
FUCK.
“Jeremy,” Dad says. “Jeremy? Jeremy? You finished?”
I don’t fucking answer at all. Fuck no. No way.
“Why are parents so uptight?” Jackson asks. I hear the sheets drag across the floor. He’s out of bed and walking somewhere. “When one parent goes through what you went through with Mom, they can lose themselves. I’ve lost myself before. I know how it goes. It can take something pretty big to snap you out of it.” Jackson snaps his fingers. Leave it to him to be literal. “So Mom banged this other dude and left you for him—so what? You went out and found this creeped out thing and you want to keep it a secret. I get it. It’s cool. Don’t freak out about it. You’re lonely. Call it what it is. Be honest.”
“I know less about you than I thought I knew,” Dad says.
“Your perverted little secret is safe with me,” he says.
Dad doesn’t knock this time. Instead, he opens the door and looks down at me sitting on the toilet, pants at my ankles, underwear bunched up at my feet. I pull everything up.
“Were you sit
ting down?” he asks. He picks up the movie still on the floor.
I stare at a black amoeba-shaped stain on the wall. It’s the size of a basketball if a basketball was made out of water and grunge. Maybe someone spilled something on the wall. Coffee. Or tea. Or a pipe burst inside the wall and bled out. But why would someone have coffee or tea in the bathroom? Moreover, why would they have coffee or tea in this bathroom? And if a pipe did burst, how come the wall was never repainted? Aren’t landlords supposed to repaint an apartment every year?
“Honor thy father,” Jackson says from the other room, back in bed.
“Why are you wearing squeezers?” Dad asks.
“Tighty-whitey power,” Jackson says.
“Jeremy?” Dad asks. “Answer me.”
“Sits like a woman,” Jackson says. “Like a proper young lady.”
I want to say something nasty, something really nasty, but don’t say anything. I dodge past Dad and grab the movie out of his damn hands. Out of the bathroom and standing in Jackson’s apartment, I see him on his bed like a Greek Prince, the only thing missing a handful of grapes. He’s wearing his sheet like a toga and eating a corndog. Where the fuck did he get a corndog?
“What is wrong with you?” Dad asks.
“Stumps, you’re acting very vaginal,” Jackson says. “Vag-tastic with great vag-ilities.”
Dad and Jackson flank me in this fucking studio apartment, the walls coming down on me. I open the door and run down the stairs.
Zombie Survival Code in full execution.
47
I skip several steps at a time and hope with all the hope in the world that I trip and fall and tumble down the stairs and break my fucking neck and die. I hope that Dad and Jackson have to ride my corpse to the hospital where a doctor will tell them just how dead I am.
I crash through the building’s door and onto the sidewalk and run away from those fucks. I pass an alley where trash cans roll on their sides, spilling garbage across the wet pavement.
Dad and Jackson would leave the hospital together and drive to a bar where they’d get so drunk they’d drive off a bridge into a body of ice-cold water. The water would pour in through the cracks in the windshield and fill up the car fast, as they scramble to escape, the car slowly sinking. The electric locks would short circuit and the water level would rise up and they’d cling to each other, weeping like little bitches, and they’d feel sorry for themselves. They’d suck down their last breaths and shut down their ears and eventually die.
Zombie Page 14
