"Not Even Camping Is Like Camping Anymore" by Dale Peck
Davis was pushing a tiny wheeled cart across the living room carpet when I walked through the front door. The cart was attached to a long stick that was pinkish red, like a dog’s penis, and some mechanism connected to the wheels’ axle caused a bunch of wooden balls inside a plastic bubble to bounce and clack against each other as he moved it back and forth. Davis called the toy a vacuum, but if it was a vacuum, it sounded like it was sucking up an endless stream of lost change.
“Hey, Gayvis, what’s up?”
In my experience, gay is one of those words, like penis, that’s always good for a laugh. Davis, however, didn’t laugh, or look up from his vacuuming.
“Well look who finally decided to come home? Would it have killed you to pick up a phone?”
Davis wore an apron made from one of my T-shirts held in place by one of my belts, double wrapped around his soft, tiny waist.
I dropped my gym bag in the middle of the floor and headed down the hall.
“Laird Swope! After I slaved all day to clean this house for you, and dinner still to get ready! The least you could do is—”
I slammed my bedroom door on Davis’s rant. His mom worked as a waitress at the titty bar out by the interstate. She worked the day shift, when there were six, maybe seven cars in the parking lot, tops. One of them was hers, and one of them was the stripper’s, and one of them was the bartender’s, and plus Davis’s mom was a little fat, so you know the tips sucked. My mom said flat out that the only way she could possibly make ends meet was by blowing truckers. I could see how a mother like that could drive you crazy. My mom wasn’t half as bad as Davis’s, and she made me nuts.
I cracked my laptop just as Davis hipped open the door, his vacuum clackety-clack-clacking into the room behind him, my backpack hanging off his tiny shoulders like a catamount mauling a calf.
“Don’t you close the door when I am talking to you, Laird Swope.” My mom wasn’t very good at covering her tracks. The cache of Internet Explorer said that after she checked for updates on the gay porn site she read every day she looked up recipes for tuna casserole and green beans almandine, which turned out to be green beans with almonds. Great. Green beans and nuts.
Davis vacuumed my floor, his little voice barely audible above the racket. “All day I slave, and do I hear one word of thanks? One ‘Honey, the house sure looks great’ or ‘Is that a new hairstyle, darlin’’ or even ‘Screw it, babe, put the pork chops back in the fridge and let’s go to Olive Garden’? No. Nothing.”
“Davis, if you keep pushing that toy around I am going to shove that penis stick so far up your rectum you’ll have to vacuum with your ass.” “Rectum”: another one of those words. Davis didn’t seem to know this, but at least he dropped the penis stick and pulled his feather duster from the belt of his apron.
Was it creepy that my mom looked at gay porn? Or was it only creepy because she did it on my computer? The computer’d been a fourteenth-birthday present from my dad, which sent her through the roof. “Can’t afford child support but he can drop a thousand dollars on a computer? How’m I supposed to pay the mortgage with that?” I doubt the computer was worth a thousand bucks new and it was beat to hell by the time I got it, but at least my dad’s porn, or the porn of whoever he bought it from, was gender appropriate, even if the girls were my age.
Davis’s duster flitted and fluttered over the computer screen. “Laird! Looking at those kinds of pictures, and in front of me! Imagine!”
“This way I don’t have to imagine. Hey, Gayvis, why don’t you clean under the bed? Or in the closet? Or maybe on a busy highway?”
Davis worked his way down the desk, reached his duster up to the windowsill. He’d had it with him the first morning his mom dropped him off at our house, and before she left he was already running it over the TV and stereo. I caught the scene as I was heading off to school: a five-year-old with a feather duster and a kerchief tied around his head, I had to stop. His right pinkie stuck out as though he held a teacup, and a golden cloud enveloped him, iridescent in the morning light.
“Static electricity draws dust bunnies like bees to honey!”
I looked at the mother of the freak. A couple inches of stomach rolled out between her cutoffs and a Double-O Inn T-shirt. The Os circled her boobs and the “INN” had an arrow at the bottom of the second N that pointed to her vagina.
“Don’t you worry about Davis,” she said, sucking on a cigarette. “He just has his little routine.”
“I know how housework can get away from you, Mrs. Swope,” Davis said, lifting a china figurine from the TV, dusting it, setting it back down. “But don’t you worry, I’m here now. If you’ll just show me where you keep the cleaning supplies, I’ll have this place spic ’n’ span before you know it.”
“I get off at four,” Davis’s mom said, reaching a finger into the fold of her navel and pulling out a belly ring. “But sometimes I run a little late.” She let go of her belly ring and it disappeared again. I looked up to see if maybe her hair had gotten longer.
“Laird,” Davis said now, somewhere behind me. “I want to talk to you about your mother. I know I must sound like a broken record on this, but I’m not sure how much longer I can continue to live with that woman.”
On screen, Tina told me she’d been saving it all for me, but I knew she hadn’t.
“Always with the telephone, and the TV, and the nail polish. All day the woman does her nails. Would it kill her to do one load of laundry, or even rinse her toothpaste blobbies down the sink? And our love life has suffered since she moved in. I hate to say it, Laird, but you know it’s the truth.”
No, Tina hadn’t saved anything. But she was willing to show me what she’d learned from giving it away. That was what I liked about Tina.
“And her friends! Don’t even get me started on her friends.”
My mom’s “friends” were the other kids she babysits. This had been her brainwave last spring, which coincided with her getting canned from the café for spending more time flirting than working: unlicensed day care. Substandard service at bargain-basement prices. The business didn’t actually have a name, but my mom referred to it as Broken Homes, Not Broken Bones.
Meanwhile, Tina wanted me to take it out of my pants. Just then there was that knock/open thing my mom did, and her face appeared in the doorway with the phone tucked under her ear. As a well-prepared teen, my computer faced away from the door, and I glared at my mom over Tina’s teased hair as if it was me who’d caught her doing something. “Davis, honey, your mom just beeped in. She’s gonna be late so you’ll be having dinner with us, okay? It’s tuna casserole, your favorite.”
Davis had clambered on the bed and was running the edge of his apron—i.e., my shirt—between the posts of my headboard.
“It’s not ‘Could we have tuna casserole tonight?’ or even ‘I’m feeling like tuna casserole, what about you?’ No, it’s ‘It’s tuna casserole, your favorite,’ as though it was my idea all along.”
“Green beans almandine, honey. You’ll love it.”
“And does she even ask what my husband, her son, who pays for the roof over her head, wants for dinner? No-o-o.”
“Your husband hates tuna casserole,” I said. “And green beans. And nuts. Except his own, of course.”
“Oh, Laird, don’t encourage him, he’s weird enough as it is.”
With a little scrolling I was able to make Tina’s face disappear, and my mom’s took its place. The result looked like one of those caricatures you get at the State Fair, with the head all big and the body tiny, and the boobs sticking out from either side of the skinny abdomen like balloons tied to a stick. It occurred to me that the creepiest thing about my mom looking at gay porn on my computer was that she looked up recipes immediately afterwards.
“I do not like it when you look at me that way, Laird Swope. You are a very disturbed boy. No, Dan, not you,” she said into the phone. “My other boy. And baby? The yard is looking a little raggedy. You think you could get out the mower and—not you, Dan. My other baby.” She closed the door, her giggles faded down the hall. An afterimage of red nail polish hung in front of my eyes, although I couldn’t remember actually seeing her hands.
“Fine, I’ll make your tuna casserole. Anything you want, Mother Swope.”
I closed the laptop on Tina’s headless body, swiveled the chair to face Davis. He was taking the soccer clothes out of my bag. T-shirt, shorts, socks. Despite the fact that they were soaked with sweat and caked with mud, he folded them up one at a time and put them in my dresser. He stopped when he came to the jock, which he held up with a questioning look on his face.
“Dear?”
“It’s the wrapper from some headcheese I bought today.” Davis put his free hand on his hip and frowned skeptically. “No, really, smell it. It smells like headcheese.”
The jock was gray and kind of caky, the cup still in it. Davis brought it close to his face and his nose wrinkled. He sniffed once, then a second time. Then a third.
“I don’t believe I care for headcheese, dear.” He threw the jock in the wastebasket beside the bed, which was mostly filled with crusty tissues.
“Oh, do you have a cold?” He pawed through the wastebasket, taking out tissue after tissue and lining them up on the windowsill like sharp-edged snowballs. “You should tell me these things, I could have picked up some Nyquil while you were at work. You’ll be up all night. Laird!” Davis called as I walked out of the room. “I hope you didn’t forget it’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow!”
It was July 20, 2005, seven months to the day into George W. Bush’s second term of office. Davis was five years old.
***
So. Mowing the lawn’s cool. Anyway, it’s something you can do and see what you’ve done—as opposed to soccer, say, which is something that’s gone as soon as you do it. Don’t get me wrong. I liked soccer, and camp “got me out of the house during the summer,” as my mom liked to say, but I didn’t quite get the point of it. There was nothing to hold on to unless someone took a picture—and that’s not soccer, it’s just a picture of it. And it wasn’t like I enjoyed mowing the lawn or anything, but I liked the tracks of cut and uncut grass. That day I mowed the word “FUCK” into the front yard and then mowed it out. Whenever a Japanese car went by I flipped the driver the bird. I don’t have anything against the Japanese, or their cars, but you have to have a system, right? Otherwise you end up hating everything.
Speaking of systems: Davis walked back and forth between the front door and the trash bin on the street. He held up his apron by the corners and carried something in the dimple with great delicacy, as though it were an unhatched egg. When he got to the bin he transferred the two corners of the apron to one hand and threw the lid open with the other—he had to heave his whole body to get the hinged lid to lift past ninety degrees and fall against the back of the bin—and then he pinched two fingers into the dimple of the apron and pulled out . . . wait for it . . . one of the tissues from my bedroom. He threw the tissue away, then turned around and repeated the process. He always closed the lid before he went back inside, and to top it off he only walked in the lines I’d mown, so that each trip took about five minutes. I appreciated his method, but God, the kid had issues. More issues than I had tissues, har har.
The whole Davis-is-my-wife thing started about a week after he began coming to our house. I got home from school and found Ari and Ina, the six-year-old Eggleston twins, sitting side by side on the couch, staring at Davis with expressions half fascinated, half paralyzed.
“Ladies,” Davis was saying, even though Ari was a boy, “I’ll tell you what my mother told me when I was your age. There are three things you need to do to keep your man. One: Never say no. It don’t matter if your ankles are swollen from a double shift out at the Oh-Oh Inn and all you want is a tequila slammer and a Sominex. When the little soldier lifts his bayonet you lie down flat and take one for the team. Two: Dinner at six. Always. A full man is a sleepy man, and a sleepy man won’t be out chasing tail, let alone starting a half-breed family in the trailer park on the south side of town. He is also slower on his feet. And three: always keep your waheena clean. There is nothing that makes a man bust your lip open faster than a stenchy waheena, and believe you me, thirteen stitches take a longer time to get over than the sting of a little douche.”
Ari, shy and obedient, raised his hand. “What’s a waheena?”
Ina, more worldly and dominant, elbowed Ari in the ribs. “You don’t have one.”
Ari looked like he was going to ask his question again, but then his eyes went wide and he clapped both hands over his mouth.
“Now watch, ladies, as I demonstrate the proper way to greet your man when he comes home from a hard day at work.”
Davis walked into the kitchen. The refrigerator door opened, followed by the sound of a popped top. A moment later, Davis reappeared with one of my mom’s Silver Bullets. He leaned provocatively against the doorframe, one hand stretched above him so that his dirty T-shirt rode up over an inch of equally dirty belly.
“Hello, baby,” he said in a breathy voice. “Can I offer you a cold one? Or would you prefer something . . . hot?”
Just then my mom walked in the back door.
“Don’t even think about it, Laird.” She pinched the beer from Davis and took a swig. Then, realizing Mrs. Eggleston was due any minute, she put the open can back in the fridge. “Isn’t he cute? He’s been going on about you all day.”
Davis regarded my mom with his hands on his hips and a disapproving frown on his face.
“Really, Alice. You had him for the first fourteen years of his life. It’s time to cut the cord.”
Davis’s mom showed up late that night, funky with booze and cigarettes, a sort of misty/smoky cloud enveloping her body, and then sharper blasts (the word “stenchy” came to mind) when she opened her mouth. A crusty stain, like brown gravy, or feces, stood out prominently on her stonewashed miniskirt.
Maybe it was because she talked so much trash behind her back, but something about Davis’s mom made my mom nervous, and she stood up from the couch and held out her hand. The only time I’ve ever seen my mom offer someone her hand like that is to pull them out of a pool or something.
“Hey, Miss Davis. Davis is all ready to go. Just let me get him.”
I stood in the living room with Davis’s mom. The only light came from “7th Heaven” and the tip of Davis’s mom’s Capri when she took a drag. There was a white mark on the left side of her upper lip, but I couldn’t tell if it was a scar or just a crack in her lipstick.
“You named your son Davis Davis?”
Pfft. She sucked in smoke like she was doing a whip-it. Poof. The smoke she exhaled felt damp on my face, as though full of spores.
“I named him after his daddy.”
She fixed me with a kind of dead gaze, and I should have known to drop it. But I didn’t.
“I didn’t know you were married.”
Pfft. Poof.
“Who said I was married?”
Suddenly a scream came from the back of the house. “I . . . said . . . in . . . a . . . MINUTE!”
“Oh goddamn that child.” Davis’s mom whirled on her wooden heels, caught her balance on the wall, then thumped heavily down the hall. “Davis! Quit your fussing and get on out here!”
Davis was in my bedroom. He had dragged the chair in front of the dresser and stood on it, looking at himself in the mirror. He had my mom’s hairbrush, and he was brushing his hair down the side of his face with long even strokes. He wore one of my T-shirts, which he’d made into a sort of nightgown by cinching it below his chest with some- thing that I thought was a shoelace.
“Ninety-sixteen, nineteen seventy-three, nine two nine two nine—”
“He says he has to do both sides a hundred times,” my mom whispered.
“He can’t count to a hundred.”
“That’s sort of the problem.”
Davis continued brushing. His mouse-brown hair was charged with so much static electricity that it followed the brush up and down like a swarm of cobras transfixed by a flute. I wondered what he saw when he looked in the mirror.
“Ninety-ninety, one huntert.”
Davis put the brush at a perpendicular angle to the edge of the dresser. When he stepped down from the chair his nightgown rode up a little, and I could see he wasn’t wearing any underwear. He looked not at his mom, or mine, but straight at me
.“Ready to hit the sack, big boy?”
And, sashaying, he walked the three steps to my bed and plumped the pillow invitingly. I wondered if he thought the pillow was the sack he was asking me to hit.
Nothing moved except for Davis’s mom’s right arm. Three puffs of smoke filled my bedroom. Finally she hung her Capri from her bottom lip and walked over and grabbed her son and swooped him onto her shoulder with one final oof of smoke. Davis’s eyes never left mine until his mom turned around unsteadily. Inside my shirt his legs straddled her right boob, and the nipple was visible beneath her T-shirt, and mine.
“He don’t know what he’s saying. He’s just a little boy.” A thin singsong filled the room:
Never know how much I love you never know how much I care
It was Davis, singing “Fever” in a falsetto whisper.
When you put your harms around me I get a fever that’s so hard to bear
Davis’s staticky hair shot straight out from his head and attached itself to his mom’s as though thoughts were passing between them via wires.
“Penis,” I said. Davis giggled.
***
An incessant honking drove me to the kitchen, where I found my mom’s boyfriend Dan sitting in front of a children’s toy that was basically the dashboard of a car, complete with steering wheel and electronic horn. This wasn’t as strange as it sounds. No, nix that. It was every bit as strange as it sounds. Dan, you see, spent all his spare time “adapting” famous riffs from classical music for the horn of his 1999 Renault Something or Other, which he thought would get him on TV one day (“Why, yes, Regis, I do play an instrument: the French horn”). So you know, first of all, that he’s a winner, and, secondly, that his neighbors love him (the toy, in fact, was a “gift” from one of them, who heaved the box through his living room window). That night he was practicing something he called “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” which nonpretentious people know as the theme to 2001. The steering wheel was smaller than his hand, and, what with the intense look of concentration on his face and his wild hair—bushy and uncombed on the sides but thin on top—he looked like a circus clown in a midget car. His fondness for Hawaiian shirts didn’t help, especially since most of them were “pre-owned.” With Dan you had to use a lot of quotation marks.
The clock over the sink read a quarter past eight.
“Dan? Hey, Dan? Dan? Dan? Dan? Dan? Dan? Dan? Dan?”
Dan finally looked up. There was an innocent expression on his face, as if he was surprised to find that he wasn’t alone.
“Huh?”
“Open the pod bay doors, Dan.” Dan blinked.
“Huh?”
“He means the horn, honey,” my mom said in the kind of voice you’d use to talk to a five-year-old. “Playtime’s over, dear, it’s time for din-din.” She turned from the oven holding the casserole in mitted hands. Stopped.
“Huh.”
“What?” Dan said.
“Davis only set two places at the table. Davis? Honey, where are you anyway?”
He turned out to be in the dining room, where he’d set two more places, complete with paper napkins his little fingers had folded into convincingly birdlike shapes, and a few bits of clover blossom in a glass, and a candle, lit. Because the table was so high, he was kneeling on his chair instead of sitting on it. He looked like an altar boy at a shrine. There was something worshipful in his expression.
“Laird? Darling? I thought tonight we could renew our vows.” “Davis, I told you not to play with matches.” My mom blew the candle out, spattering wax over the tabletop. “Now come on, grab your plate and come in the kitchen with the rest of us. Laird, grab your plate.” In the kitchen, Dan had replaced his toy with a beer. There was a crunching sound as his spoon broke the crust on the top of my mom’s tuna casserole.
“The recipe called for just a little bit of dirty-sock cheese sprinkled over the top. I was afraid it would make it less crispy but it seems to have worked out O.K.”
Dan systematically skimmed off the top layer of casserole, which everyone knows is the best part, and put it all on his plate. He pushed the gloopy remainder in front of me.
“Here you go, Laid, dig in.” Laid was Dan’s idea of a joke. Dan was a bit of a jokester.
He watched intently as I spooned noodles on my plate. My mom’d been seeing him for about a year at that point, which was pretty much a record for her. I’d managed to stay out of his way, mostly, because he preferred to take my mom back to his place to screw, mostly. A lot of times he just sat in his car and honked, usually “Shave and a Haircut” or the Woody Woodpecker song, but sometimes he treated us to a couple of bars of Beethoven’s Fifth or Ninth, or the Lone Ranger theme, which I have to admit he played amazingly well. When he did stay I usually left, or went to bed.
A few drops of cream of mushroom soup spilled on the table.
“Oh, Laid, look at that! Looks like you could use . . . a tissue.” With a flourish, Dan pulled one from the breast pocket of his Hawaiian shirt.
My mom stifled a snort, barely.
“Laird has the sniffles,” Davis said, snapping the tissue from Dan’s fingers and blotting up the soup. “He also has all his hair.”
My mom let the second snort fly.
“The things that come out of that boy’s mouth!” She pulled his plate toward her and scooped casserole and green beans onto it. “It’s almost eerie how grownup he sounds.”
If you ask me, what was eerie about Davis wasn’t just that he talked the way he did, but that he talked the way he did and still managed to pay attention to what was going on around him. For example: my mom’s nails. They were, in fact, freshly painted. Not red, as I’d thought, but purple.
“Why thank you, Alice,” Davis said when my mom slid his plate back in front of him. And then: “It’s so nice to see you helping out around here. Now that Laird’s home.”
My mom’s grin hardened. “Like I said. The things that come out of that boy’s mouth.” She spooned green beans onto Dan’s plate, mine, then served herself. “Shut up, Laird. You’ll understand when you have kids of your own.”
“Alice raises a good point,” Davis said. “When are we going to have children of our own?”
Dan got up, got a second beer from the fridge.
“I mean really, Laird. What do we do it all for, if not to leave it to the next generation? It won’t mean nothing to us when we’re dead and gone.”
Standing behind Davis, Dan made the universal symbol for crazy over his head.
“Is it a crime that I want to have children, Laird?” Davis pushed his plate in front of my mom. “Load me up, Alice, tonight I start eatin’ for two.”
Dan returned to his chair, set his beer down heavily on the table. “Why don’t you start with that, Davis,” my mom said. “If you want seconds, there’s plenty.”
But Davis was looking at me, his face as round and deep and full as my mom’s casserole pot. “I wanna have triplets and name them all after you: Luh-hay-erd. C’mon, baby. Stick a bun in my oven. Knock me up. Get me in the family way. Take me right now, on the kitchen table. Let’s do it like teenagers!”
“Davis!” my mom said. “Laird is a teenager. You are not.”
Dan was staring at Davis with a look of fascination and disgust. What really bugged me, though, was that I knew the same expression was on my face.
“Good Christ. What uncle fucked that little boy?”
Dan’s dumb-ass comment made me think about what Davis’s mom had said that one time—about Davis being named after his daddy—but my thoughts were cut off by a smack. My mom’s hand, Dan’s cheek. Not particularly loud, not particularly hard, but apparently hard enough to piss him off. Before either of us quite knew what was happening, he was holding my mom’s wrists in one hand, squeezing her jaw with the other. Her fork clattered to the floor.
“When I think of a new life growing inside of me! Oh, Laird! I know that’s what God put me here for! To bring a little love into the world!”
“Uh, Dan. You wanna let go of my mom?”
“Shut up, Laird. This is between your mom and me.”
“If there were more loving homes in the world, there’d be less violence. Less war. We could start a revolution, Laird. You and me. Right here, in our own home.”
“Uh, Dan?” I made a little knocking sound on the table, and Dan looked over to see that I had my knife in my hand. “That’s really not cool.”
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Davis rubbing his belly with one hand. Full men rub their bellies vigorously, with both hands, but pregnant women only use one. Only use their fingertips, only touch gently, as if afraid to wake the child slumbering within. As with everything else, Davis got the details perfect. Only the body was wrong.
Dan let go of my mom and settled back into his chair. “Jesus Christ, Laird, calm down. It wasn’t nothing.” He picked up his beer and drained it in one long glugging gulp.
My mom unfolded her napkin into her lap. “I’m sorry I hit you, Dan. But you shouldn’t talk that way about Davis. Especially not in front of him. Laird,” she added, picking up her napkin and patting her lips, although she hadn’t started eating yet. “Put the knife down, please.”
Dan burped, and then he picked up his fork and began shoveling a green-and-gray mixture of tuna casserole and string beans into his mouth. “Somebody should get that boy help.” It was unclear whether he meant me or Davis.
My mom looked at me and then she looked at Davis, as if trying to decide.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” she said finally. “Where the hell is that woman?” Her eyes looked at the left side of her plate, the right. Not seeing her fork, she picked up her spoon and started eating. It was a teaspoon, so she was forced to take Davis-sized bites.
Davis had already finished eating, and held his plate out for seconds.
***
But Davis’s mom didn’t come, and at 10 o’clock, with Davis curled up next to me on the couch—Dan was already in bed—my mom said it was time both of us hit the hay.
“He can bunk with you.”
“Aw, Mom. Why can’t he sleep on the couch?”
My mom looked around our living room. Some run-down places look better in dim light, but ours looked worse: the shadows in the warped paneling seemed to hide deep voids, and the upstretched arms on the dancing figurines my mom “collected” (she found a box of them at a garage sale and bought the whole set for ten bucks) looked like sinners running from the Second Coming. The picture frames on top of the TV were dark rectangles, and at this point I can’t even remember whose faces hid inside them.
“He’s five years old. That’s just too depressing.”
“It’ll be like camping.”
My mom shook her head. “Not even camping is like camping anymore. Now take a pillow from my bed. Preferably the one under Dan’s head.”
I carried him down the hall. I was surprised by how light he was. I wasn’t a big kid, wasn’t particularly strong, but Davis felt lighter than the pillow I tugged from beneath Dan’s snoring head. Dan didn’t wake up at the jerking motion, but Davis did, and when his unfocused eyes squinted in my direction I remember I wanted him to say something that’d make it clear the whole Davis-in-an-apron thing was just an act. That he knew who he really was. Who I really was. Instead he curled his arms around my neck and turned his face into my chest and whispered, “Finally.”
I pulled his shorts off him, laid him on the outer edge of the bed, then got undressed and climbed over him to the side next to the wall. I figured it was better he had the outside, in case he had to pee in the middle of the night. I realized I’d forgotten to give him his pillow, which sat on my dresser, on top of my laptop. Circuits crossed, fired, fizzled: the pillow from my mom’s bed, the laptop with its pictures of Tina, Davis’s whistling breath on my right side, the cold flat wall pressing against my left shoulder. I mean, Jesus Christ, who needs to look up a recipe for tuna casserole?
Voices came from the other side of the wall:
“Who took my pillow?”
“I’ll take your pillow, mister.”
“Aw, baby, you’re not still mad? You know I didn’t mean nothing.” A pause. “That kid gives me the creeps. It’s really got to come from somewhere.”
“Oh, Dan. Dan, Dan, Dan.”
“What? What, what, what?”
“If you were a parent, Dan, you wouldn’t care where it came from. You’d care where it was going.”
Let’s face it: the reason I didn’t want Davis to sleep in my room was because nighttime was when I jerked off. My penis poked above the waistband of my boxers like a loaf of French bread sticking out of a grocery bag. I tried lying on my back but the blanket seemed to caress the tip. I tried lying on my stomach but the heavy weight of my body made me want to grind my hips into the bed. I turned on my side, and there was Davis, all of four inches away, and that was just weird. I turned to face the wall. I tried angling my penis so that it lay under the waistband of my boxers, and it popped out of the fly. Apparently my penis didn’t like being angled. I tried to think of the severed heads of chickens, the hair in the bathtub drain, the motherboard in my computer. Apparently my penis was not put off by abstract thought. I found myself wondering how the French got their bread home without busting the loaf in half: it bumped against everything.
“Penis,” I whispered, and laughed at my own joke.
The stereo went on in the other room. “Hooked on Classics,” Dan’s favorite camouflage. In approximately seven minutes he would patter out a bit of “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” or “Rhapsody in Blue” on the bedside table. If nothing else, his presence in our lives had been educational.
A few inches behind me, Davis turned. His breath came louder, and I realized he was facing me. In the quiet, his silent voice was strangely present, a singsong bouncing back and forth between my ears to the accompaniment of the creaking bedsprings in the next room. Davis’s words, the things he talked about doing, were a pretty straightforward imitation of the women in his life—his mom, and, let’s face it, mine— crossed with women he saw on TV. The fifties sitcoms Nickelodeon ran ad infinitum, with their bright-faced beaming slaves in starched aprons and permanent waves, and the ones on my mom’s soaps, who were a different kind of caricature, all sucked, tucked, fucked. The combination could only be called freaky, especially when it came wrapped up in a five-year-old boy’s impossibly tiny, incredibly fragile body. I remembered the weightless weight of him in my arms. Was I ever that small, I wondered. Was my mom? Dan? It seemed impossible that someone like Dan could’ve passed through such a stage before turning into his adult self, omnivorous, with a bladder that could hold a quart of urine and fingers that bruised, broke, smudged, and made music from the strangest sources.
Sometimes I felt like Dan. I wanted there to be a revelation, a single incident to explain away Davis’s behavior. The uncle or grandpa teaching Davis things he was too young to know, an overabundance of some chemical in his brain. But as far as I knew there was nothing like that. Aside from the general fucked-upedness of his existence, I mean, which was no more fucked up than mine or anybody else’s that I knew, there was no abuse, sexual or otherwise, no traumatic witnessings, no blows to the head. It seemed that Davis just knew what he wanted. That he was one of the few people in this world who wasn’t afraid to ask for it.
As if reading my mind, Davis sighed. His whisper wasn’t all fake sexy like the voice I’d been hearing in my head. It sounded like the voice of a little boy whose mom’d forgotten about him a long time ago.
“Laird? Please?”
“You shut your cakehole, Davis. Just shut your fucking mouth.”
See, the thing is, I wasn’t like Davis. I couldn’t let my mind go far away like he could and still keep track of the world around me. But when I tried to focus on the things that were right next to me, they ended up losing their edges a bit, and the next thing I knew there was a knife in my hand. Or a penis. Or my mom: why was it that she looked at pictures of gay guys who were all hairless and oiled and curved like, well, like really hard women, but then she went and picked a guy like Dan out of the lineup, whose only curve was his beer gut, and hair everywhere but where it was supposed to be? What I mean is, how come he made her happy, when she seemed to want something else?
Sniffles now. Little bitty sobs. I did my best to think about Tina, then realized my hand was moving in time to the creaks in the next room. And the music: Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Who in the hell fucks to something that’s basically a war requiem? And then suddenly a drum roll, so loud I jumped and rolled away:
“Bah-dah bah-bah-bah, I’m lovin’ it!”
I realized I was facing Davis. In the dark, I couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed, only that they were wet. His hands were folded under his cheek in the universal symbol of sleep and prayer, I could feel his breath on my face, and all I could think was, How do you tell a five-year-old that he’s made it impossible for anyone to touch him? But then I thought, What do we do it all for, if not for the next generation?
“Aw, fuck it, Davis. C’mere.”
Reader, I made him so happy it nearly killed us both.
Dale Peck is an American novelist, literary critic, and columnist. His 2009 novel, Sprout, won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Children's/Young Adult literature, and was a finalist for the Stonewall Book Award in the Children's and Young Adult Literature category.
