While I was reading this to Fred, sometimes my gaze would catch a picture on the far wall. It was an image from In the Night Kitchen. Those three laughing bakers had such fat faces. Heavy-hanging cheeks and bulbous noses like genitals. I didn’t want to look, but the picture kept grabbing my eye. Fred lay there with his eyes closed and his mouth open. He was higher than I was.
At the end of the book the rainbow vows to never touch the earth again.
“That shit was stupid. That was your favorite book?”
“Yes.”
“Faggot,” said Fred. He didn’t open his eyes.
I looked up and saw those bakers again. They were cooking up the naked boy in a pie. I was happy there with Fred.
“Those fucking goblins were gay!” he said.
“Not so loud,” I told him.
Fred didn’t open his eyes. “They suck the juice out of rainbows? Rainbows stand for faggots.”
“Shut up, Fred.”
“What? They’re gay! Rainbows are gay!” His eyes were a little open now.
“So?” I said.
“So, don’t get all worked up over it. It’s just a fact, you and the Rainbow Goblins are gay.”
“Shut the fuck up, Fred,” I said.
“What? They’re a bunch of dudes, and they all hang out all the time. That’s all they did, hang out together. All those dudes.”
“So?” I said.
“And they lived together in a cave.”
“So?”
“All in a cave! Gay! Dirty and gay,” said Fred. As if he was the cleanest guy.
“Great fucking point, Fred. I mean, what children’s book character isn’t gay?”
Fred didn’t answer. Then he said, “A lot of them.”
“Cat in the Hat?” I said. “Gay. The Grinch? Gay. Hungry Caterpillar? He turns into a butterfly, gay!” Now Fred was thinking about it. I continued, “The Runaway Bunny, the bunny in Goodnight Moon, the Velveteen Rabbit, Peter Rabbit, all gay. All rabbits are gay.”
“No.”
“They’re sensitive, but different, but also like boys, but then also not.”
He thought, and then said, “Yeah, I guess they are.”
“The little boy who flies around naked in Night Kitchen, and Max from Where the Wild Things Are, gay!”
“Bullshit, Max isn’t gay.”
“Bull true, he dresses up in his little white wolf suit, so gay. And then he tells his mom to fuck off…”
“That’s not gay…”
“. . . and then he goes to an island and hangs around with a bunch of monsters who party with him all night, dancing and parading him around on their backs.”
“That’s so weird, but I think it’s kind of true,” said Fred.
“All little-kids’ stories have to be like that. They have to be all soft and gay, so that the moms are okay with it.”
Fred sat there, and then he said, “I want a wolf suit.”
“Yeah, me too,” I said.
“I can’t think of anything sexier than a skintight, furry wolf suit,” said Fred. He was really laughing a lot, almost too loud. Those three bakers looked like they were laughing too.
That night I had a dream. There were rainbows everywhere and I was driving all over town in my dad’s busted car, wearing a white wolf suit. The car was making this horrible grinding sound with a whine underneath it. Whenever I hit another car, it just bounced off me and I would cackle.
Two days later, I went into the library to work. The place was empty as usual. I stopped at the front desk. Judy, the brown-haired one, was there.
“I really like it here,” I said.
“We like you, Teddy,” she said. “You’re always welcome here, even after everything is over.”
I said thank you and walked toward the back room. Down the hall, Mags, the gray-haired one, came out of the bathroom and slowly made her way toward me. When we passed, I smiled, and she smiled a wrinkled smile and said quietly, “Good boy, good boy.”
Fred didn’t come in. I rediscovered all the Bill Peet books. He usually wrote about animals and drew great pictures. I went through all of them. There was one about a hermit crab called Kermit the Hermit who hoarded all his stuff, and one about clumsy circus lions, and another about a little mountain goat with huge horns that he could ski on, and a peacock with a scary face patterned into his plume, and a pig with the map of the world on its side, and this clumsy beast that was part rhino, part giraffe, elephant, camel, zebra with reindeer horns called a Whingdingdilly. And there was this one about a dopey sea serpent named Cyrus that terrorized galleons. It was good to read those books again; all the feelings came back to me.
Once upon a time there was a giant sea serpent named Cyrus. Even though he was a horrible looking monster he wasn’t the least bit fierce. All he ever did was wander about in the sea with no idea of where he was going.
“I’m tired of wandering,” said Cyrus one day. “I wish there was something more exciting to do. . . .”
Part II
Wasting
Things got bad at the Children’s Library. I started taking the books home without checking them out and then not returning them. Sometimes Fred and I would get high and draw dicks and pussies on the animals in the books and then put them back on the shelves. One time I was in the Secret Garden and I tried to carve APRIL into the bench, but I didn’t finish because one of the librarians came out, so the carving just said APRI, but the R was a little unfinished and the I was really light.
Then one day after school, my mom told me my probation officer wanted me to call her. I called from the kitchen phone while my mom washed vegetables in the sink. As the phone rang I watched my mother with the vegetables and I realized what a small woman she was.
“Hi, Janice,” I said into the phone.
“Teddy, I’m gonna need you to come to my office on Tuesday after school.”
“That’s the day I go to the Children’s Library.”
“You’re not going there anymore and you know it.”
“What do you mean? I love that place,” I said, and my mother looked over.
“Well, you screwed it up,” she said. “I’ll see you at three twenty on Tuesday. Don’t be late, and you better not drive here.”
My mother was holding half a green pepper. She looked so sad. The water ran in the sink.
On Tuesday, during first period auto class, Barry Chambers and Bill and I went out to the train tracks to try some of the weed that Barry had been growing in his backyard, on top of the shed. We walked down the tracks a little and stood near the Bat Cave. No Goth kids or anyone else was around. Barry had the stuff rolled in Saran Wrap. He unrolled it and there were two thick, glistening buds. Barry broke off enough for a bowl and filled his smooth porcelain rainbow pipe. The stuff was strong. When I coughed, Barry said, “See, I got the good shit.” Bill took some and he coughed too.
“How’d you grow that?” said Bill.
“I just ordered the seeds from Amsterdam and followed instructions,” Barry said. Barry was Mormon and cuddly like a sea lion and Bill was half Mexican and dumb.
After we smoked we sat on the rail of the tracks. The graffiti on the cement wall of the Bat Cave looked good. ORFN was up, and MSTK, and REVERS, written backward, and the best was LUST. With my eyes I kept tracing the way the letters flowed into each other. They were so well done I could taste them like chewy candy.
“What’s up with you and April?” I asked Barry.
“April is crazy, but we’re gonna fuck.”
Bill had been quiet the whole time, but he said, “Yeah, fuck that shit.” I guess he meant April was the shit and Barry should fuck her. His eye whites were pink and the veins were apparent. He was yukking.