When I got in from the track, the last of the football team was in there changing after practice. I walked to the far bank of lockers, along the wall, where my locker was. I could hear them cavorting and laughing, and as I walked I could see out of my peripheral vision that one of the five or six of them was Brent Baucher.
I sat on the wooden bench and swirled the black dial back and forth, and behind me, in the center aisle, the five and Brent erupted in laughter. The sound bounced around the cement room. That laughter had been in that place forever; it was something that those boys had found when they got to high school.
“You looked, motherfucker! Faggot looked!”
“Cecil looked! Faggot looked!”
“No I din’n,” said Cecil’s voice, but it was drowned in laughter and the sounds of bodies moving around.
I changed as fast as I could, my shirt first and then quickly off with my shorts and on with my jeans.
Then I realized that the locker room was very quiet, and when I looked over my shoulder the six of them were standing in their underwear and they were all still muddy and dirty and covered in grass, and I saw Baucher’s chest in a tight white tank, hair sprouting everywhere, and then I noticed something that made my mind jump; they each had one testicle sticking out of the pee hole in the front of their underpants; endless balls, pulled tight against scrotum skin; pink, brown, and paste. For a flash of a second, I saw Brent’s: large, kidney shaped, blue veined, and hairy.
I looked up and saw their faces and I knew I was not supposed to be looking at those balls, that that was what they wanted.
“Faggot looked!” said someone. And then they all said it, while they tucked in their balls and moved toward me. They screamed that I was a faggot as two held me down. One sat on my face—Cecil, I think; his crotch smelled sour and rich, and his balls in their cloth sack were on my chin. Down below, the others pulled my jeans off and my underwear. Someone grabbed my balls and twisted. At first it felt like a bubble in my stomach that went up to my throat and filled it, like my balls were up there and choking me, and then they twisted further, and the skin of my scrotum burned as it twisted and chafed against itself.
“Again!” someone yelled.
“Again!” another person yelled. They were all yelling “Faggot” again, and my balls were twisting again, and before I started screaming into the white wall of Cecil’s underwear, and biting at the chalky brown of his inner thigh, I realized that I could not hear Brent’s voice in all the yelling. Before things went black I realized that Brent’s silence meant that he was doing the twisting.
Brent is very stupid. He gets all Ds and Fs in his classes. I have World History with him; he said that the Black Plague was started by a combination of gays and rats. We studied the French Revolution in that class. One time, I masturbated to David’s painting of Marat. It was a picture in my textbook, and I let the come go right in there, and then I closed it. Now the pages are cemented together, and dead Marat is plastered against the guillotine forever.
This is Brent’s joke: “What’s the difference between a faggot and shit?” I didn’t know the answer. “Nothing, you fucking faggot.” He told that joke one time, and then kicked my foot to trip me into dog shit on the quad lawn. I didn’t fall, but everyone thought it was funny.
Brent says I’m a faggot because I quit the football team freshman year. I asked him about it and that’s when we had our first little scene.
“You think I’m a fag because I quit the team?” I said.
He stopped. He had his usual black San Diego Chargers hat on backward. His long face looked surprised, and the one stoned-looking eye opened a little bit more.
“You are a fucking fag,” he said. He looked like he was getting a little emotional about it. I could see it in his retarded eyes.
“Why do you think that?” I said, and my voice trembled.
“I don’t think it, you are!” Then he walked off. It’s weird, but I think it’s because he was going to cry. After that he always called me a faggot.
After the locker room I decided that Brent needed to die. He was never going to get smarter, and he was a bigot. And I couldn’t stop thinking about his acne-corroded flesh being opened, and his thin racist blood matting the hair of his beastly body.
I was standing over near the underpass next to the school where people smoked. Some people called it the Bat Cave.
“You really want one?” said Barry. Barry was my friend. He was chubby and lovable, and Mormon, and smoked pot and loved John Bonham.
“Yes,” I said. “I want one.”
I wanted a gun.
Barry couldn’t get me one, but he knew a guy who could.
“Sheeze, well, okay, but… sheeze, all right, I have to talk to Teague.”
Teague went to Menlo, a private school in the next town. Teague was infamous. Barry knew him because Barry went to Menlo in eighth grade.
Teague was dating a girl named Kate Keller who went to the all-girls school, Castilleja. My mom used to teach there. Kate and Teague fucked all the time, so people said. One time, Barry told me that in eighth grade Teague took Kate to Wayne’s World and fingered her during the whole movie. Just watching and working.
Everyone knew that Teague could get guns.
Two days later, on Thursday, Barry came up to me in the cafeteria at brunch. I was in the food line. Barry put his face close to mine, but he wasn’t looking at me. He whispered, “Here it is.”
I looked right at him, but he was looking at the back wall, like he was pretending he wasn’t talking to me.
“What?” I whispered at his big Mormon ear.
“T’s number.”
While he said that he was putting a piece of paper in my hand.
“Don’t look now,” he whispered. He still wasn’t looking at me.
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.” And I put the note in my jacket pocket.
Then it was my turn to order at the food window. I stepped up and said to the woman in the hairnet, “Hi, Ann, can I have some Tater Tots and a Diet Coke?”
While Ann was getting my Tots, Barry stepped over to me again. This time he was looking me in the eyes.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” he said.
“I won’t,” I said. I made sure I was looking right back at his eyes.
He looked at me like he was trying to determine something, but I doubt that he could.
Then he said, “You coming to Battle of the Bands?”
“Yeah,” I said.
At lunch that day I sat with some people, but I didn’t listen to them talk. I kept feeling the crumpled paper in my pocket.
In math class I sat in the back. It was AP Calculus, and I was the youngest in the class. Mr. Case was large and dark and bald. He was the assistant football coach under Coach Peterson, the cock. He looked so thick, like hardened tree sap; his eyes were a little crossed and he had a lazier left eyelid than Brent Baucher. He lived three hours away in a place called Angels Camp, on the way to Lake Tahoe.
Mr. Case drove three hours each morning to be at school, and then drove back after football practice to be with the angels.
I was good at math, but not as good as others. My dad forced me into it, so I had no love for it. I tried to think of the equations on the blackboard like little winking eyes and explosions the way Stephen Dedalus did, but it all just looked like a bunch of work that I didn’t want to do.
I fingered the paper in my pocket, and then I pulled it out. I unfolded it and it was the ripped corner of Barry’s English handout. The typed homework part of it said, “. . . what does George do after Lenny dies? Write a different ending that… ,” but the rest was ripped off, and underneath that, Barry had written “T” for Teague, but the T was slanted and it looked like an X. Underneath the T was the phone number, written in a scraggly and uneven hand.