Guns
I crawl into the strangeness of some books and movies just to feel something familiar, something normal. I leave my fiancé’s house to go to my apartment. It’s one o’clock in the morning. I’m driving a piece-of-shit Dodge Diplomat, a relic of the eighties. It’s the color of taco meat. It’s only about six miles home, but three miles in, the halfway point, I pull around the car in front of me, into the center lane, and stop at the red light. I feel like an ass for tailgating the guy, but I’m a nervous person, so I do what anybody would do and look over. Our eyes lock. A gun points at me through an open window. I press hard on the gas and peel through the light.
Did I learn anything?
No.
Has tailgating ever warranted a death?
The world is full of possibilities.
At any rate, when I got home I read the rest of Funeral Rites by Jean Genet and took a shower. I couldn’t decide which was better: I’m lucky I’m still alive or that should have been it.
Dumb Jokes I Heard over the Years in Wichita
(Age thirteen)
Q: What’s the difference between a large pizza and a black man?
A: Large pizza can feed a family of five.
(Age sixteen)
Q: What’s more enjoyable than stapling a dead baby to the wall?
A: Tearing it off.
(Age eight)
A: Knock, knock!
Q: Who’s there?
A: Little Boy Blue.
Q: Little Boy Blue who?
A: Michael Jackson.
~ ~ ~
Masturbation
My brother pulled his dick out in front of me. It was hard. He tried folding it in half, then realized it hurt and tried an up and down stroke instead. When he discovered he liked that, he didn’t stop, wouldn’t stop — would never stop. As soon as I left the room, I thought that that looked like a fun thing to do too, so I went into my bedroom and gave it a try. I started out, limper than all hell, by making shapes with it — a circle, a crescent moon — and then I made it serpent-like, thought it looked like the Loch Ness monster. I was scared, though, doing it. My heart pounded so hard it felt like there was a small animal in there trying to eat its way through my solar plexus. Then, slowly, the fear turned into excitement, turned into joy. And after a few proper tugs, when things started to harden up, I feared I too would never stop doing it. And I didn’t. A year or two later, I ejaculated all over the carpet, my first orgasm. For two whole years I’d been stopping just short. I looked down at the mess on the carpet, my butthole in a knot, and yanked my jeans up around my hips, feeling accomplished. There was a dirty towel in the laundry basket, which I used to clean up the mess. Then it came, out of nowhere, all these feelings I hadn’t really felt before — not that intensely anyway. I felt guilty, I guess, for feeling so good, like I didn’t deserve it or something, even though, deep down, I knew that I’d earned it. I mean, I was sweating like a gross-ass pig spun on a spit for days and my arm, Charlie-horsed through and through, was like a dead otter sewn onto my shoulder. There was guilt and shame swimming their circles inside me, but I convinced myself that they were just a couple of stupid little feelings that I would have to learn to live with. If only everybody in the world did the tug-pull and the rub-rub, and all at once, every single one of us, slow and synchronized, guilt-free, then we would finally have some sense of a peaceful world — and possibly, however momentarily, we would feel ourselves free from the shame of living.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Joyland
The time K and I rode the roller coaster and he took the seatbelt off and I was afraid he was going to die.
The time I kissed a girl on that white train that went back into the wooded area and down near the go-cart track.
The time I rode the Log Jam, got a nosebleed, and started to cry.
The time the guy on the lawn crew was mowing the ground under the roller coaster before the park opened for the day and then stuck his head through the slats at the wrong moment and got his head cut off by the roller coaster car coming down the main hill on a practice run — reading about it in the newspaper.
The time the park closed one last time, and we all silently wept.
I saw pictures of Joyland online, with the tagline, “Creepy Abandoned Amusement Park,” and I swear, I swear it, that was the last time I ever even looked.
Water Slides
There was this friend of mine who went into the bathroom after this other kid’s birthday party and slit both of his wrists. I was sixteen years old, the other two kids were fifteen, and the suicide-attempter was eighteen. It was two o’clock in the morning when it happened. We had been watching movies when he disappeared. The movie ended and he was still in the bathroom. That’s when we started to worry. We knocked and knocked and knocked. He didn’t respond. We knocked again, quietly saying his name through the door. No response. Alarmed, we took a coat hanger, bent it out of shape, and picked the lock with it. It only took a minute to work the lock and when we got the door open we found him, conscious, standing, watching his blood make small pools on the linoleum floor. There was panic in our hearts, but we were also fairly used to his behavior — we knew what to expect. We wrapped up his wounds the best we could, scotch-taping toilet paper around his wrists. But the tape kept falling off because he was bleeding through it. So we got into his car and drove to the 24-hour Walmart a few blocks away to get some supplies. It was a still, summer night. The stars were out, a cloudless sky, moon full and shining. When we got to Walmart, we came upon this aerosol stuff in the bandage aisle, a spray that seals up wounds (some kind of strange skin glue), also some butterfly tape, some gauze, and some duct tape, and went back to his house to get our nurse on. We were quiet getting back into the house, trying not to wake anybody, and then we made our way into the downstairs bathroom. It took some time but eventually we got him all fixed up, somehow stopped the bleeding. Luckily he hadn’t cut deep enough to rake a vein. By the time we were done with his damaged wrists, it was already closing in on five in the morning. We were going to caravan to Oklahoma City with our friend’s parents early that morning, part of the celebration, to spend the day at a water park. We’ll just be more tired if we only sleep two hours. We said that aloud a few times to convince ourselves of its staying power but knew it was a bad idea before our lips even moved. All we knew was that we were going to spend the day at a water park. We were going to smile. We had a two-hour drive ahead of us, a few packs of cigarettes and some weed to smoke. We made sure the slits in his wrists were watertight. We were not about to let anything get in our way. We were going to go shoot down some water slides.