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?”
My dad laughed. “These people don’t know what an Armenian is,” he said. “Honey, these people don’t know there’s such a thing as a hundred years ago.”
14. My best friend, Robert Karinger, shot me with an airsoft gun on the left half of my upper lip, which swelled nearly to the size of my thumb. We were out in the middle of nowhere and all I wanted was ice. Karinger and Dan Watts both called me a faggot until I got tears in my eyes, which is when Karinger spat on the ground and turned away to shoot cans. Watts, feeling bad maybe, started to compliment the way the fat lip made me look. “Like a badass,” he said. “Like a boss.”
15. People told me I didn’t have a violent bone in my body, but they didn’t know my bones vibrated to notes of violence like tuning forks.
16. The word “faggot” became so ubiquitous among my friends that sometimes, when I’d slink off to the desert to lie alone in the dirt and let the universe rocket through me for a change, I’d whisper, “The stars are faggots, the moon’s a faggot, the Milky Way’s a faggot, but I’m no faggot.”
17. Though we lived on the east side of town, my sister and I tested well enough to surpass the zoning restrictions and attend a better-funded west-side high school. Our mascot was a Confederate soldier.
18. After being shot, I wanted to see my dad — or, I wanted him to see me. My lip was still fat and sore and, from what I could see in my bike’s chrome frame, turning a shade of plum. I rode out to the furniture store where he worked, and tethered my bike to a lamppost whose bulb, despite the hour or so left of daylight, sputtered on just as I disarranged the combination on my lock. Inside, my dad and two other salesman played cards at an overpriced oak kitchen table.
Dad introduced me to his coworkers, who looked up briefly from their cards to say hello.
“Slow day, huh?” I asked.
My dad said, “Just died down soon as you got here. Busy, busy beforehand.” I looked to his coworkers for confirmation, but they kept their eyes on their cards.
I lifted my chin, trying to catch the light on my fat, purple upper lip.
“Notice anything different?” I asked.
My dad took his time to study my face, raising an eyebrow when he gave up.
“I should get back,” he said. “See you for dinner?”
I asked if I could use the bathroom before heading out. He pointed me past the poker game into the back of the store. In the bathroom, I looked into the mirror and found that the swelling in my lip had gone down to about normal. The healthy pink color had returned. On my way out, my dad shouted a friendly, “See ya, son!” As I unlocked my bike, I checked my reflection again in the chrome. The plum color had moved to my forehead. I realized the color was on the bike, an old splatter from a paintball.
19. My sister, visiting from college, told me my acne — spreading from my forehead to my throat, purple cysts studding my back, chest, and shoulders — wasn’t “normal.” Jean said, “Everyone gets pimples, but your pimples are getting you.”
20. I’d seen queer men on TV, and I made it a point not to let my wrists go limp, not to speak my s’s like a cartoon snake. But one day, Roxanne Karinger told me I walked “different.” Recently I’d been fantasizing about her brother, and I was afraid she’d caught on.
“Different how?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Roxanne said. She was two years my junior, but her girlhood made me admire her and even want, at times, to be her. “Like, more of a bounce? Your heels never touch down.”
After that I walked in small, lazy steps. I leaned back and kept my weight on my heels. Took twice as long to get anywhere.
21. My mom took me to a dermatologist and, after listening to his suggestions for medication, said, “He used to have the cleanest skin.” She hadn’t said “smoothest,” she hadn’t said “clearest.” She’d said, as if I’d neglected to bathe, as if my acne were the manifestation of a deep filth within me, “He used to have the cleanest skin.”
22. Every fender in town carried a magnet in the shape of a ribbon to support the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Once, in the Best Buy parking lot, forty-three magnetic ribbons adorned the bumpers and front grille of a yellow Hummer. By the time I walked past, the count had been reduced to forty-two.
I’d stolen the stupid magnet as a joke to myself, as a kind of silly protest, but when the Hummer’s owner yelled at me from across the parking lot, I started to run. The owner caught me, tackled me to the curb along a parking-lot island filled with coconut-sized rocks and miniature cacti. I lay on my back, and the man stood, shoving his foot against my chest like a pro wrestler. In size and looks, he bore a striking resemblance to Danny DeVito, but he was strong, giving me just enough air to breathe. He plucked the magnet from me and said, “What the hell is wrong with you?”
I said, “It was a joke.” Blood trickled down my arm — I’d been scratched by one of the cacti — but I was too afraid to feel any physical pain. My qualm with the magnets — why wouldn’t these flag-wavers actually support the troops, by demanding the end of the war? — gave way to a stuttering desperation to escape unscathed. “I’m sorry,” I said, nearly crying. “I didn’t think you’d miss one of your five hundred magnets.”
That’s when he told me he had forty-three: one for every AV kid hurt or killed over there. Before letting me go, he said, “You may have taken my son, you little fuck.”
23. My parents went into debt so I could take a drug called isotretinoin, which dried my skin to flakes. For six months I couldn’t be touched. My mom would blow me a kiss from across the living room, and if I blew a kiss back, the powder of my skin would blossom from my palm like chalk. At school I stayed in classrooms at lunch to avoid the sun, and when I got up to leave at the end of the day, I had to brush off my seat and desk. Everywhere I went, I left pieces of myself.
24. Once my skin cleared up, Jean took me to one of the four new Starbucks in town and bought me a caramel frappé. I asked about life at UCLA, but she kept batting away my questions. “The real question is,” she said, “when are you going to come out already?”
According to Jean, Dad had asked her if she thought I might be gay. “You should ask him,” she’d said, “but what if he were?” My dad said all he knew was that Mom couldn’t find out. “It would kill her,” he said. “Being from another culture, it would kill her.”