When I was a kid my friend Nick and I made a potion together. Nick was French; his dad had a pointy beard and spoke with an accent. We got a big rectangular plastic tub and put snails in it and red pyracantha berries, which were poisonous and made the blackbirds drunk so they flew into the windows and died. And we took cat poo from the sandbox with a plastic shovel and put it in the soup. At the end we peed in it. My penis was like a mushroom and my French friend’s was draped in skin, like a monk’s cowl.
We tried to get my little brother to drink it but he wouldn’t. We left our potion in the backyard in the rectangular tub. One day I found a dead rat next to it.
In fourth grade Mr. DeFelice was my teacher. He was younger than all the other teachers. He said his name meant he was always happy. He told us he ate pizza and drank beer at Luigi’s in Mountain View. That was the next city over, but far for me. He said he was good at Top Gun on Nintendo. He could get to the space level. A jet in space doesn’t make sense.
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In ninth grade we watched a lot of Holocaust stuff. We saw pictures and then a film of the naked bodies being bulldozed. Penises on the men and vaginas and breasts on the women. They didn’t seem like real penises. I looked close. Some were big.
I had a cat named Toby. He was put to sleep at the vet’s. Gassed? Buried? Incinerated. Way of all flesh and fur.
Ed was at my very first Y camp when we were eight. He was half Korean from his mom, and his dad was a big, white, bald dork. One morning Hulk took us to the lake. It was so cold. We had our towels around our shoulders. Mine was The Incredible Hulk, Ed had The Dukes of Hazard. There was a Confederate flag on the side of their car.
Hulk said we were all in the Polar Bear Club. He was the whale of the club.
We took our shirts off. Nobody had muscles. Hulk said he would give a Coke to whoever went in the lake naked.
One night in ninth grade we were drunk and wandering around the neighborhoods in a pack. There were some girls with us too. There was nowhere to go and no more alcohol.
We walked through Mid-Peninsula, the school for bad kids who got kicked out of other schools. They were allowed to smoke cigarettes during their brunch break. They were mostly white and they wore a lot of black. One year a kid brought a gun to school and shot his ex-girlfriend at brunch because she had a new boyfriend. Then he shot the new boyfriend. Then he shot himself. The girl didn’t live, but the new boyfriend lived.
We never had any black friends. Not before high school and not in high school. But we liked black rappers. Dr. Dre, 2Pac, DJ Quik, Too $hort, and the Geto Boys.
At water-ski camp there was a black girl, Angela. She had no friends at camp because she was weird. She would talk about aliens. She said she and her brothers saw aliens, but it sounded like her brothers were her only friends and that her brothers were the ones who came up with the alien idea.
We dared Howard to make out with her in the back of the bus. He did one night. On the way back to the campsite he kissed her, but it was messy, like two lizards. We were in the seat in front of them and we saw him feel her small breasts, and under the towel he felt her vagina. We looked back and saw it all. It was a purple towel with nothing on it. He was the first of us to do all that, but it was with the black alien girl.
I had my first girlfriend in fourth grade, in Mr. DeFelice’s class. Her name was Simone. She was pretty and blond like Madonna. After she broke up with me I would watch Who’s That Girl? to remind myself of her. Once Simone said Mr. DeFelice asked if he could take pictures of her at his house, but her mom wouldn’t let her go.
Ute’s name was the name of an Indian tribe. He was Italian but his parents were hippies and accountants at Whole Foods. His older brother was named Rain, he was two years older than us. Rain had the biggest dick of all his friends. He would walk around naked and show it, all his friends talked about it. They called him “Calcium.”
Calcium broke all the basketball records in high school and had sex with tons of ugly girls.
Later, in high school, Ute had sex first out of all of us. It was with a black girl, Venus.
I had sex last. I was drunk at a party at my friend Barry’s house. We did it in a bedroom, Susan and me, and then stayed the night. In the morning, I waited till she left, and then I walked home alone.
At water-ski camp we told everyone about Howard and the black girl on the bus. There was a handsome guy, Chad. He got into a fight with Howard and punched him in the eye. Chad didn’t get in trouble because he told the counselors about what Howard did to Angela.
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After I had sex once I had sex a lot. The second time was in Susan’s bed. I was about to come and I pressed my foot against the footboard. My long toenails scraped against the board like cockroaches. After, when we pulled away, it was sticky and frothy. Buttery, like pulling apart a Baby Ruth.
She rolled over and cried.
When I was eight, we all loved Coke. The bright red can with the cold brown liquid. There was one machine back at the main counselor’s cabin. If we did something good we got a can.
Everybody in the Polar Bear Club wanted a Coke. But no one wanted to get naked in front of Hulk. Hulk took his shirt off. He was fat and pale and had hair on the front of his shoulders. His stomach was like curdled milk. There were little chunks of ill-formed fat that showed through the skin when he moved. The skin on his stomach was as white as the inside of a radish.
In fourth grade, in Mr. DeFelice’s class, I had to sit next to Sasha Alexander. She wore the thickest glasses I’ve ever seen. She had short red hair, lots of freckles, and no friends.
The class practiced writing cursive. We had to write our desk partner’s name. Mr. DeFelice came around to inspect. He told me my x in Alexander looked like a swastika.
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In eleventh grade we studied the Civil War. There were the Bad Confederates and the Good Guys in the North. Some people still believe that the Confederates were right.
The water-ski camp went to Knott’s Berry Farm. Ute and Howard and I and the others weren’t allowed to go into Knott’s Berry Farm because of the fight Howard had with Chad and because of what Howard did with the black girl and because he told that we had made him do it. The head counselor and his wife wanted to kick us out of camp, but instead we missed out on Knott’s Berry Farm. It was Hulk’s idea. We stayed in the parking lot by the bus with Jane and threw a Frisbee. Jane had to stay because she was our counselor. She was sad for us. That was when she told us that she was the black sheep of the family.
At the very end of the day we got to go into Knott’s Berry Farm. We saw Chad. He had his T and C tank top on. He had met a local girl in the park. His friend told us that Chad had got to second base with her already when they went on the mine ride. She was blond and pretty.
Riding back to the campsite, Ute drew pictures of people being burned in ovens. He burned Howard and Chad and Hulk in his ovens. They went in as they were—it looked like them, Ute was good at drawing cartoons—and they came out as skeletons.
A little kid told about the drawings. Hulk came back and saw the pictures. Back at camp he told us how bad the Nazis were and that it was not something to joke about.
Nobody in the camp liked us.
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Ute was handsome but he was a nerd too. He drew lots of pictures. Ed and I drew pictures with him. We made our own comic called The Alien Brothers. We drew ourselves like vicious aliens and killed the people in our school.
In fourth grade Sasha Alexander was the biggest dork I could ever think of. Buckteeth and short red hair and glasses. She said she could play basketball better than me. I laughed. We played at lunch and I won. She didn’t admit that I won. Back in class I told her she was a dork and a poor loser, and she stabbed me in the arm with a pencil. The hole was gray from the graphite.