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By fifth period a third of the school knew, some of the crueler ones giving the old “Heil Hitler” salute behind Denise’s back as she passed them in the halls. All day long her eyes sought after the perpetrators of the laughter and all day the sound abruptly shifted to a fade before her stare could focus and penetrate them.
In Mrs. Jones’s class, Earth Science, seventh period, I heard about Denise’s mustache from Amelia St. Claire, which was shocking, because Amelia wasn’t the type to gossip. She was in all the clubs, including the religious one all the Episcopalians flooded on Tuesday morning. Nothing special, I guess, just shocking, coming from her.
I thought about it a lot, especially that first night. It repulsed me. I mean, I kind of had a crush on the girl for a while and then all the sudden this stuff about a “Hitler mustache” comes about and gets me thinking she’s gross.
A few weeks later Mathew Darby wrote on his Twitter feed: What a night. And yes, it’s true. #HeilHitler.
Turk Van Deeson was the only kid I talked to that year who thought the whole thing with Denise was fucked-up. Just so typical, he said. People can be so fucked-up and stupid. It’s like sociopathic behavior or something, almost, if you ask me — all these Dahmer wannabes, these Nazis and pederasts of the fucking future, walking the halls like they own the goddamn century — so fucking typical. They should be counting their prayers, really, you know, if they pray, that she didn’t come in here blasting away with her daddy’s glock. Really, man — I’m serious as a fucking heart attack. I wouldn’t have blamed her, if she had. Alright, maybe that’s a little dramatic. But what do I care? My conscience is clean.
He searched his backpack for a lighter, came up empty-handed, then looked around the school parking lot to make sure we weren’t being watched.
You got a light?
Sorry. I don’t smoke, I said, lying.
He looked at me with those strange burning eyes of his.
Really, I told him, I don’t.
He hissed, called me a fucking liar, spat on the sidewalk, and wiped his hand, with this penned-on skull near his knuckles, through a greasy clump of green hair.
All of this eventually culminated in me asking Denise to the homecoming dance after P.E. one day. I crossed my fingers and scrunched my face. I worried she’d notice the yellow pit-stains on my T-shirt, that I hadn’t showered with the jocks in the locker room because I was too scared of their manlier physiques and abundant pubic populations, but she didn’t care about all that, and, to my surprise, she said yes, and with no reluctance of voice either — just pure sweetness, a voice like candy. She had this big smile across her face and her skin looked made out of only the best things of the earth.
My mom dropped us off at the school at 8:00.
By 8:15 we were ten blocks away, at Sunrise Park, fooling around by the seesaw.
By 8:20 my fingers were lost inside her, my mouth wet and tugging at her lips and tongue, latching to her teeth and sucking in her breath by the lungful.
It’s true, by the way, what they said about her pubic foliage, the historical horizontal shape, and I took it all in, too, all I could swallow of it — and it was beautiful and righteous and everything that hadn’t been said or taught or even permitted of me to think.
We never talked to each other again.
Every time I think of Denise, my heart gurgles. I didn’t understand it for the longest time. But I think sometimes truth can only come out as gurgles, and most of the time, that’s the only way it makes any sense. Sounds like a heart with holes, taking on water. The truth of my story is my heart was already fucked and sinking, long before the rumors even began. It’s not an excuse, it’s a fact.
I think I’m in love.
What if the diviner tells us that when he holds the rod he feels that the water is five feet under the ground? or that he feels that a mixture of copper and gold is five feet under the ground? Suppose that to our doubts he answered: “You can estimate a length when you see it. Why shouldn’t I have a different way of estimating it?”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
Black Friend
The only black friend I had growing up was a guy who could skateboard better than anybody I’d ever seen. I envied him. For a brief time, he was a hero of mine. Another kid I used to skate with called him a “nigger” one day, face to face under the shade of a maple. Dude’s a nigger with white nipples, he said. It was crazy. I froze where I was, back against bark and with my heart all choked up into my throat like a fist, waiting for the violence to come on like a warm blanket of phlegm. But my black friend only smirked and moved away from the tree branches, laughing. He could’ve killed the kid if he’d wanted to. Apparently he wanted for deeper things. He wanted the things in being you can never even come close to touching — the things there are no words for.
10 Albums
My Bloody Valentine (self-titled)
John Fahey’s Death Chants, Breakdowns, and Military Waltzes
Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures
Under the Pink—Tori Amos
Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate
Here Come the Warm Jets—Brian Eno
Bowie’s Diamond Dogs
The Cure’s Disintegration
Tupac Shakur’s Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z.
Moonpix—Cat Power
You’ve Got It: That Model Look, Like in the Klein Ads
Hey Bro,
When you’re on meth you get to looking like a hag in no time. Pretty soon you start terrorizing your family with thefts. Threatening phone calls slice through the wires almost every other day. Sometimes you chew your fingernails down to where they nearly bleed and, when there’s nothing left, you start chewing pens and DVD cases and cigarette cartons and toenails. You spit the bits all over the floor. One time you got pistol-whipped and punched in the nose. You pick at your face and wonder why you’re ugly. Sometimes you masturbate for hours, so desensitized to your own touch that you wouldn’t feel a needle tunneling the canals of your urethra, too busy jostling the shriveled thing in your fist to even notice, watching outsized twat flutter on the television screen like some kind of obscene butterfly fading into light. Your bedroom smells like a mildewed shoehorn, or ass, I can’t really tell the difference. If I didn’t love you so much, I wouldn’t tell you this, but when you came back home after months of street-life, the way you looked actually made my stomach feel all kinds of fucked-up. I don’t know if I was disgusted or relieved, but you looked like a skeleton vacuum-packed in cellophane, ready to strike a pose beneath any ghetto streetlight. I wanted to thrust a bucket of lard at you and hand you a spoon. I wanted you to have something thick and meaty around your bones so you’d never get cold at night. It was striking, the way your tiny arms shivered. I thought the streets had killed you. Yet there you were, sifting through me like an apparitional thing. I thought about reaching over and searching your wrist for a pulse, anything, mud, but I pulled back. I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to see the look on your face when I told myself the news.