Hot Pink (24 page)

And Tina said, “Don't.” Tina goes to college at UIC. She was a junior, like I would have been. “Don't say fag,” she said.

“Fag faggot fag,” Cojo said. “It's just words. It's got nothing to do with who anyone wants to fuck.” He took out a cigarette. He said, “This is a fag in England.” He lit the cigarette. He said, “I know fags who've screwed hundreds of women. I know fags who screw no one. Have a fag,” he said. He gave the cigarette to Tina and lit a second one for himself. He said, “That rapist Mike Tyson's a fag. And my cousin Niles. He's screwing his girlfriend even as we speak to each other here in this very car. There's fags who like windmills and fags on skinny bicycles. I know fags who fix cars and fags who pour concrete. Regis Philbin's a fag. Kurt Loder and that fag John Norris. Lots of TV and movie guys. Rock stars. Pretty much all of them. So what? It's a word. It means asshole, but it's quicker to say and more offensive cause it's only fags who say asshole like it's any kind of insult. Even jerk's better than asshole. Asshole's a fagged-out word, and fag's offensive. And it should be offensive. I want it to be offensive. Someone calls me a Polack? I'm offended. But I'm a fucken Ukrainian, you know? I don't give a shit about the Polish people. No offense, Krakow, but I don't give a fuck for your people. Someone calls me Polack, though, I'll tear his jaws off at the hinge. And cause why? Cause he's saying I'm Polish? No. Cause he's saying Polish people are lowlifes? No. He's trying to offend me is why. When he's calling me Polack, he's calling me fag. He's calling me asshole. So fine. You're pretty. Okay. You smell good. You say smart things to me when you're not telling me the right way to talk. Good news. I like you. I want to spend all my money on you. I want to take you on vacation to an island where there's coconuts and diving. Miatas are for assholes if it makes you more comfortable. But the asshole in that Miata's got fagged-out taste is what I'm telling you.”

Tina said, “You've thought about this a lot, Cojo.”

“I got a gay cousin,” he said. “A homosexual. Lenny. He fucks men, and that's not right and it makes me sick, but that's not why he's a fag. He's a fag because whenever someone calls him fag, it's me who ends up in a fight, not him. He's a fag because he won't stand up for himself. Imagine: your own cousin a fag like that. That's how it is to be me. Not just one but two fags in the family—Lenny the homofag and don't forget about Niles the regular fag who all he does is chase girls—but I'm the only one can say it, right? About how my family's got some fags in it, I mean. Don't you ever bring it up to me. It's like a big secret, and tell the truth it makes me uncomfortable to talk about, so let's just stop talking about it, okay?”

Joe was always talking to girls about Lenny. Sometimes Lenny had cancer and sometimes he was a retard. In 1999, he was usually Albanian. But there wasn't any Lenny. I know all Joe's cousins. So do the Christamestas. Lenny was fiction. But I didn't say. If he did have a cousin Lenny, and this Lenny was a gay, Cojo would defend his cousin Lenny against people who called Lenny fag. So Cojo was telling a certain kind of truth. And it never really mattered to Tina, anyway. She'd just wanted to know Joe cared what she thought of him, and the effort it took him to come up with that bullshit about fags and assholes—that made it obvious he cared. And Joe is definitely crazy for Tina. He discusses it with me. All the things he wants to buy her. Vacations on islands with sailboats and mangos, fucking her on a hammock. They'd still never fucked, but they mashed pretty often. So often it was comfortable. So comfortable they started in the backseat of the car, which was not comfortable for me, sitting next to Nancy, who's staring at the carton of patties in her lap while the sister gets mauled. I hit as many potholes as I could. The Ike's got thousands.

Finally we arrived at the wrong barbecue. We were supposed to go to 514 Greenway and we went to 415. It was my fault. I wrote it down wrong when Sensei Mike told us at the dojo on Friday.

But 415 was raging. Fifty, forty people. Mostly middle-aged guys wearing Oxfords and sandals. Some of them had wives, but there weren't any babies, which always spooks me a little, a barbecue without babies. Like if you ever had a father who shaved off his mustache.

It took us a few minutes of looking around for Sensei Mike before we noticed this banner hanging off the fence. It said
HAPPY TENURE,
PROFESSOR
SCHINKl!
By then, we all had bottles of beer in our hands. The beers tasted yeasty. They were from Belgium. That's what set the whole thing off.

The four of us were half-sitting along the edge of the patio table, trying to decide if it was more polite to finish the beers there or take them with us to look for Sensei Mike's house, when this guy came up and made a show of adjusting his sunglasses. First he just lowered them down the bridge of his nose so we could see one of his eyebrows raise up. But then he was squinting at us over the frames and he had a hand on his hip. He stayed that way for a couple of wheezy breaths, then tore the sunglasses off his face with the other hand and held them up in the air behind his ear like he was gonna swat us. Instead, he let the shades dangle and he said, “Hmmmmmm.” The sound of that got the attention of some other people. They weren't crowding up or anything, but they were looking at us.

The guy said, “Hmmmmmm” again, but with more irritation than the first time. Like a whining, almost.

“How you doing?” Cojo said to him. Nancy leaned into me, but it was instinct, nothing to make a big deal of. Tina held her beer close. Cojo was smiling, which is not a good thing for him to do around people who don't know him. His smile looks like he's asking you to stop making him smile. It's got no joy. It's because of his smile that I retrieve the cars when we work the lot together. If customers tip, it's usually on the way out.

Real slow and loud, the guy said, “How's. your Belgian. beer?”

So the beer was his and he was attached to it in some sick way. Like fathers and the end-piece of the roast beef. He wasn't anyone's father, though, this guy. He was being a real prick about the beer is what he was, but it was the wrong barbecue and he was harmless so far. He was tofu in khakis. About as rough as a high school drama teacher. Still, he could've been Schinkl for all we knew, so he didn't get hit.

“You want one?” Cojo said. He said, “I think there's one left in the cooler by the grill.”

The guy stared at Joe, just to let him know that he'd heard what Joe said but was ignoring him. Then he spun on Nancy. He said, “Is that
ground chuck
in your lap, young lady? Do you mean to wash down those patties of
ground chuck
with my imported. Belgian. beer?” He poked the meat.

I said, “Hey.”

“Hay's for horses,” he said, the fucken creep.

A woman in the crowd—they were crowding up now—said, “Calm down, Byron.”

He poked the meat again, hard. Busted a hole in the plastic wrap. Nancy flinched and I had that fucker in an armlock before the meat hit the ground. Joe dumped out his beer and broke the bottle on the table edge. We moved in front of the Christamestas, like shields. I had Byron bent in front of me, huffing and puffing.

I didn't want the girls to see us get beat down, but I thought about afterward, about Nancy holding my hands at my chest and wiping the blood from my face with disinfected cottonballs, how I could accidentally confess my love and not be held responsible since I'd have a serious concussion.

Byron said, “Let go.”

“You got a thin voice,” I told him.

I pulled his wrist back a couple degrees. His fingers danced around.

Every guy in that yard was creeping toward us, saying “Hey” and “Hey now.” There were too many of them, broken bottle or no. All we had left was wiseass tough-guy shit. “Hey,” they said. And Joe said, “Hay's for horses,” and I forced a laugh through my teeth like I was supposed to. They kept creeping. Little baby steps. Tina whispered to Nancy, “Can we go? Let's just go.”

“Just let go of me!” Byron said. “Let go of me!”

I said, “What!”

He shut his mouth and the crowd stopped moving. They stopped right behind where the patio met the grass. That's when it occurred to me the reason they weren't pummeling us was Byron. They didn't want me to damage him. And that meant that I controlled them. I thought: We got a hostage. I thought: All we have to do is take him out the gate on the side of the house, get him to the car, then drop him in the street and drive off. I was gonna tell Joe, but then Nancy started talking.

“Do you guys know Sensei Mike?” she said.

This chubby drunk guy was wobbling at the front of the crowd. He said, “What?” But it sounded like “Whud?” That's how I knew he was a lisper, even before he started lisping. Because he had adenoid problems. The first lisper I ever knew in grade school had adenoid problems. Brett Novak. He said his own name, “Bred Novag.” Mine he said, “Jag Gragow.” When people called him a lisper, I didn't know what a lisper was, so I decided he was a lisper not just because of what he did to
s
sounds, but because of what he did to
t
sounds and
k
sounds, too. So I thought this chubby drunk guy was a lisper, because I used to be wrong about what a lisper was and so “lisper” is the first thing I think when I hear adenoid problems. But since the chubby guy turned out to be a lisper after all, my old wrongness made it so I was right. It was like if Nancy wore hot pink. The color would look sexy on her, and because it would look sexy on her, I'd say it was hot pink, and I'd be right, even though I didn't know what I was saying. I'd be right because of an old misunderstanding.

“Sensei Mike?” said Nancy. “We came for Sensei Mike.” Her voice was trembling. I could've killed everybody.

The guy said, “Thenthaimigue? Ith that thome thort of thibboleth?”

This got laughs. The crowd thought it was very clever for the lisper to say a word like
shibboleth
to us.

But fuck them for thinking I don't know
shibboleth
. Some people don't, but I do. It's from the Old Testament. In CCD they told us we shouldn't read the Old Testament till we were older because it was violent and confusing and totally Christless, so I read some of it (I skipped Leviticus and quit at Kings). The part with
shibboleth
is in Judges: There were the Ephrathites who were these people who couldn't make the sound
sh
. They were at war with the Gileadites. The Gileadites controlled all the crossings of the Jordan River, and the main thing they didn't want was for the Ephrathites to get across the river. The problem was the Ephrathites looked exactly like the Gileadites and spoke the same language, too, so if an Ephrathite came to one of the crossings, the Gileadites had almost no way of telling that he was an Ephrathite. Not until Jephthah, who was the leader of the Gileadites, remembered how Ephrathites couldn't make the
sh
sound—that's when he came up with the idea to make everyone who wanted to cross the river say the word
shibboleth
. If they could say “Shibboleth,” they could pass, but if they couldn't say it, it meant they were an enemy and they got slain. So
shibboleth
was this code word, but it didn't work like a normal code word. A normal code word is a secret—you have to prove you know what it is.
Shibboleth
, though—it wasn't any secret. Jephthah would tell you what it was. What mattered was how you said it. How you said it is what saved your life, or ended it.

I said to the lisper, “I know what's a shibboleth, and Sensei Mike's no shibboleth. And you're no Jephthah, either.” It came out wormy and know-it-all sounding. I sounded like I cared what they thought of me. Maybe I did. I don't think so, though.

“Are you jogueing?” he said. “Whud gind of brude are you? Do you
offden
find yourthelf engaging in meda-converthathions?” He pronounced the
t
in
often
, the prick, and on top of it, he turned it into a fucken
d
.

All those guys laughed anyway. It was funnier to them than the
shibboleth
joke. It was the funniest thing they'd ever heard.

And I was sick of getting laughed at. And I was sick of people asking me questions that weren't questions.

I pulled on Byron's arm and he moaned. Cojo slapped him on the chops and the lisper stepped back into the crowd to hide.

The crowd started shifting. But not forward. Not in any direction really, not for too long. It swelled in one place and thinned in another, like a water balloon in a fist. It was in my fist.

I saw the lisper's head craned up over the shoulder of a guy who'd snuck to the front, and that's when I knew.

They didn't stop creeping up at the patio because they were scared of what I'd do to their friend and his arm. They stopped at the patio to give us space. They stopped at the patio so I could do whatever I'd do to Byron and they could watch.

I said to Nancy, “You and Tina go get the car, okay?”

Nancy reached in my pocket for the keys and whispered, “Be careful.” Then Tina kissed Joe. The girls ran off. It could've been a war movie. It could've been Joe and I going to the front in some high-drama war movie. It was a little hammy, but that didn't bother me.

As soon as I was sure the girls were clear, I asked Joe, with my eyes and eyebrows, if he thought we should run for it.

He told me with his shoulders and his chin that he thought it was a good idea.

Then I got an inspiration. I started yelling at the top of my lungs: “AHHHHHH!”

The whole crowd went pop-eyed and stepped back and stepped back and kept stepping back. I got a huge lung capacity. I think I yelled for about a minute. I yelled till my throat bled and I couldn't yell anymore. Then I dropped Byron, and we took off.