Sometimes
I like to imagine what people from high school are up to. Every so often, I go
back to Dick. He was a quiet guy, kept to himself. I think I heard someone say he’s
living in Marcellus, NY now. I imagine he’s a bigger guy now. When we left
school he had a beard coming in. I think when he thinks of me it probably goes
something like this:
Dick’s been stacking the aisles all
day. His arms are tired. His underwear has been turning underneath his pants
all day, making everything chafed. He’s uncomfortable. His glasses keep falling
down. Still, this day is like all other days to Dick, nothing incredible will
happen, but a few entertaining customers will come in, maybe a nice looking
woman. He’ll talk, flirt, and laugh. He will try to do as little work as
possible.
He does a crossword puzzle, and the
bell on the door rings. He doesn’t look up.
“Heya dick,” Barry says. “How the
heck is this weather so crummy?”
“Oh, hi, Barry,” Dick says. “I think
it’ll get better. Life always does, even if you don’t really ask it to.” The
bell over the door rings. Dick looks back down.
“Well, I don’t wanna keep you. I’ll
just take one of these,” Barry says, motioning to the town newspaper. He pays
and let’s Dick keep the change. I suppose Barry is a very nice man. Let’s say
he comes to the store frequently. He’s one of those old men who smells funny;
one who doesn’t have much to do, so he uses trips to various stores to get his
necessary interaction for the day.
The bell on the door rings. A man at
the door asks in a high pitch, “Excuse me? Excuse me? Did you see my boyfriend
come in a moment ago?” His pants are skinny and white, his hat is brimmed and
feathered, his bone-structure magnificent. He looks like the type of person
that people see without seeing. They don’t see exactly how odd his mannerisms
can be, or how odd his fashion sense is, but they call it “unique” instead.
Dick shakes his head, slowly, looks
back down, snorts and relaxes his eyes.
“Excuse me, sir. Excuse me! I’m
sorry, but I know he just came in. He must be in the restroom. UGH! Thanks for
the help,” he says sarcastically.
Just then it occurs to Dick that he
knows that fella. He sees that fella all the time in fact. Usually he just
speaks to faces—faces that remember him, but that come up utterly blank in
Dick’s own recollection. It must have been the bone-structure. “Wait! Wait a
second. I know you. Ahhhh, yeah, aren’t you the fella that came around last weekend,
flashing a fake ID? That was a good one!”
“Yeah, ha, that was me,” the man
says, dropping his high pitch. “Glad you woke up! Ya know, I really am 21. We
just like to joke around sometime, show our old fakes. I can show you it now if
you’d like,” the man says.
“Go and find your friend for
crissakes. We can chat about nothing and all its lies later. Later. Later.
Later,” Dick says with his voice trailing off.
A yelp from the back of the store precedes
the two customers. When they get to the front, they stand with their asses on
the counters, as if they’ve pal’d around the place a lot; as if they are as
comfortable as anyone could get. The audacity annoys Dick. He lets it go. He
likes them, because the other day when they came in, drunkenly knocking down
snacks around the counter, they were kind enough to pick everything up, and
confident enough to ask for beer, even though they were driving and already
wasted. He knew they were 21, and he knew they liked to play peculiar jokes on
people. He had once seen them hiding behind the pumps, but he lost interest
before he saw what they did to the cars pumping gas. Dick lets them get their
asses comfortable on the ledge of the counter.
Dick decides to open the
conversation. “So. You two gay today?”
“I don’t know George. What do you
say? We gay now?” A tall man in cargo shorts and a blue polo shirt says to his
white panted companion.
“Yes, no? That’s so boring. Why
don’t you tell Henry and me a story, then we can tell you a story!” George says.
“What the hell do you think this
is?” Dick asks.
“You don’t get any business here
anyway, we’re in Marcellus!” Henry says.
“You two seem a little queerer than
before. What the hell’s gotten into ya?” Dick says.
“You, Dick, you’ve gotten into us,”
George says.
“Alright! Alright, you fucking weirdoes,”
Dick says with an approving smile. “What kind of story?”
“How about this: what’s the worst
thing you’ve ever done? I hear that’s a pretty common pickup line,” George says.
“I’ll tell ya what, fine,” Dick
says, smiling slightly again. “I went to high school about an hour away from
here. I’ve only seen one tranny ever around here.” He gave them both long looks
to grab their attention. Henry grabs a brownie and begins to eat it. Dick
continues, “Well, I remember there was a tranny in my graduation year. At first
you couldn’t really tell it was a tranny. He just seemed like a weirdo, putting
makeup on with guy clothes, that sort of thing.”
“Did anyone ever say anything?
Where’s this going, Dick? You gonna tell us about how you got a BJ from him in
the bathroom?”
“Yeah, fucker. I got a BJ and now
I’m here to confess it to you little shitheads. Here’s my soul, splatter it
with some redemption. Will ya? Oh, please? I mean I can’t understand how you
can ask someone to tell a story—”
“Okay, Dick. Henry is being mean,
just keep going,” George says.
“Well, okay, the tranny’s name was Jesse.
She only hung out with Asians, even though everyone around here is a little
racist against Asians, and I think she was too, actually. He, or she? He,
before she was a she, would walk around ignoring everyone. I would’ve spoken to
him. Everyone knows I’ve never been a bigot! I had a couple classes with Jesse.
In history she would raise her hand and talk about how slavery wasn’t so bad.
She would say stuff like, ‘The north and south needed to be separate,’ in this
voice that just oozed artificial. It just couldn’t have been how his voice
always sounded, but it was hard to tell after a while if it had always been, or
was just an invention. In eleventh grade Jesse started looking more and more
like she wanted to. She even got some boobies. She threw away her guy clothes.
People said her dad beat her, but I don’t think many people cared. She seemed
like trash, and that kinda thing just happens to white trash.
“When she sprouted those tits, and
wore those skirts, people started getting confused. They’d look once, twice,
three times. They’d look and look and look and then finally would come to some
conclusion. It was a big school so not everyone knew everyone, but everyone
knew there was one of her types in the school. When people figured out which
you could hear them say, ‘Found her!’ Truthfully it was confusing as hell. Lots
of people would accidentally look at her butt wiggle down the hall, forgetting she was a he whenever she stopped looking the same. What’s in your pants
buds? Dicks, right? Well, if she could look so different I could see anyone
with a dick pretending not to have one, anyone without one pretending to have
one. And the desire is so confusing, boys.” Dick trails off for a moment. George
and Henry exchange glances. He looks at the bottle of water he has sitting next
to the register, takes a sip, and looks outside. His eyes water, Henry yells,
“Wait, you can’t stop there!” and Dick continues talking.
“At the end of eleventh grade, I had
some foreign exchange students in town from France; they were pretentious lil’
assholes. They fucked constantly. I think the oldest might have been 15. My guy
was pretty quiet, really fashionable. Weird face though. One day we were in the
library, and he just stared at Jesse for about twenty minutes. His eyes ate her
up. Desire. She flipped through pages. She got up and went to the bathroom,
passing pretty close to our table, so he got a good look at her. His eyes
bulged real big, he clutched his stomach, went running out into the hall. He
puked on the floor, and screamed, “It’s a fucking guy!” so that everyone
started chuckling, and then pouring laughter everywhere, and everyone knew why
he threw up, and felt sorry for him—being confused and everything. He
complained about America for the rest of the day, and I nearly choked him, but
he probably doesn’t know that. At night, I would go home and think about Jesse,
think about trying to make myself puke, like the Frenchman. I wasn’t sure what
I was trying to get out of me, but I never puked.
“Truthfully, I felt bad for the Frenchman.
I don’t know exactly when, or even what started it, but I started following
him. I would watch him walk home; I would run past his route home during
cross-country practice. I could smell him sometimes. When I was younger, I
wished I smelled like a girl. Jesse smelled a lot like my sister.
“I’m not sure if he noticed me. For
a while I would walk behind him thinking he was brave for what he was,
repulsive, nearly inhuman, an expressionless desire. Then I realized that he
was no different from me. He didn’t know me. I wasn’t really someone people
noticed at school, either. I watched drivers stick out of their car windows to
cat-call, I saw him give them the finger, call ‘em ‘dirty faggots,’ sometimes
even pick up a rock and chuck it at them. Desire.
“I had this really nice bat I’d take
out sometimes. One day, I skipped school, spent it with my bat, came to school
at the very end, followed Jesse with my bat. Fuck, I even called my bat “Jesse”
a couple of times during the chase.” Dick laughs.
Henry and George are engrossed,
their bodies are tense. Dick keeps laughing. Dick has that power over them in
that moment, and he laughs because he knows it. He knows they are assessing,
thinking, “the devil, or god,” but nothing in between. A few tears drip out of
his lids. George grabs Dick’s shoulders and shouts, “Keep going!” Dick doesn’t
want to keep going. A car speeds by outside and Dick imagines he’s in it, going
as fast he can into the nearest tree. Dick has this tingling—the kind of
tingling that acts like an oven light, but lets you know, “time to implode.” He
continues.
“When I got to the block before his
house I decided to speed up. A couple of times, I thought maybe I’d go home. I
didn’t know what I was doing out there. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do
next, but I found my bat in his head before the end of the block. I pulled him
down into the trees beside the road. He was unconscious before he even felt the
second blow. The bat fell over and over. My hands squeezed, but I wanted them
to relax. Most of the hits went to the core, the muscles. I pulled his body
back onto the walk. He wasn’t dead, I knew that. I went home. Desire.
“He didn’t go back to school for a
while, so everyone thought he was getting surgery or something. I felt freer by
then. I could laugh at those jokes now. I knew everyone was bones and flesh.
“I started going out with this
really cute girl named Sharron. She told me she loved me after a while. I told
her I loved women. When I touched her head, I could almost feel the tranny’s
bloody head. When we fucked, I thought about the pounding of the bat, but I was
gentle. I’m a gentle guy, anybody will you that. I think imagining her that way
might have been the worst thing I’ve ever done. Or maybe it was all of it put
together. Or, I can’t tell, but maybe it’s that I don’t feel terrible about it
all, I just feel numb, confused, desirous.”
“Dick,” George says. “You can’t be
serious.”
“What do you mean,” Dick replies.
“You’re a fucking psycho! That’s
what he means,” Henry interjects.
Henry is silent for a long time, and
laughs, boisterous, like the devil himself. He laughs for close to a minute,
and Henry and George are worried, then baffled as his face turns merry as ever.
“It’s a story about a guy, you
faggots, not me. I would never, assholes. You know me. You know me. You know
me! Faggots! Queers! Get the fuck out of here,” Dick says.
“Now what the hell do you think
you’re doing, Dick,” George says.
“What? You guys can come in here and
pretend to be gay, and I can’t make a prank of my own?” Dick laughs again.
“Oh, fuck you, Dick,” Henry says.
“Whoa, no thanks, guys,” Dick laughs
with his eyes squinting, unable to open.
“Let’s get out of here,” Henry says.
They walk toward the door, looking over their shoulder at Dick laughing,
clutching his hair. Henry notices the tears coming out of his eyes and rushes
to the door, taking off his feathered hat.
As they leave, Dick feels his
inability to implode, his confession turning into a joke. His words becoming
the wind; his humanity sees its own corpse and thinks it’s a replica. The bell
on the door becomes silent, and the room does. He feels the veil covering his
face, the marriage to silence and confusion. He grabs a paper to read, stops
sobbing, and feels the soft cotton paper. He reads.
Maybe he doesn’t think any of that.
Maybe he knows I knew he followed me. Sometimes I like to think of people I
went to high school with, because I know I need to. I just don’t know why yet.
When I think of him, I follow the lines on my scalp, I quail my own tears,
because I know no one will do it for me—there’s only silence.
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