The Kid (47 page)

“I, like, totally ignore him, raise my eyebrows like, Is this dude crazy or what?

“‘Well man,’ he goes, ‘what
do
you remember?’

“My Lai is feeling me, raises her eyebrow, and looks Jaime’s pitiful ass dead in the eye and says, ‘Why don’t you shut up, bitch, and get the fuck out of here.’

“‘Yeah,
whatever
this is, this is not the place for it.’ Scott.

“‘You don’t remember trying to rape me when I was a little boy.’

“‘Little boy! Motherfucker, you’re older than I am!’

“This has an effect on everybody, like who is this hairy-ass motherfucker?

“Amy who’s, like, been in stunned mode says, ‘Well, that is . . . is something. How old are you, Jaime?’

“‘Twenty.’

“‘Abdul is only nineteen,’ My Lai comes in hard. ‘So when did this shit happen? Not like I really fuckin’ care or want to know. I mean, like, dude, you
always
been older than him.’

“‘You’re not going to get away with this.’ Jaime.

“‘You’re crazy,’ I scoff, ‘totally wrecked, man. If anything, it was you pulling the creep on us younger kids.’

“‘Your coffee is cold, dude, and your shit seems kinda tired, maybe you should go home and get some rest, you know.’ My Lai. Then she says, ‘You know,’ again.

“He doesn’t get she will fuck him up.

“‘Like, leave, dude, you’re not welcome here.’

“He gets up with her staring him down, and I don’t see him anymore for a long time.”

I’m tired of talking. I take the skin of my wrist into my mouth and bite down hard, hard as I can. Blood fills my mouth drops down cherry red onto the white sheets.

“Oh no, Abdul! Oh no!” he groans.

Oh yes, I think. Who do you think you are? You just walk in here with your fucking turban black ass and start talking shit to me. I ain’t crazy don’tcha know who I am? Who we are, My Lai said we were dancing death—more powerful than life. I miss her—voices are rushing down the hall in white padded shoes. It’s the nappy-headed assholes coming to tie me down and inject me. Watkins and his crew! Well, come on, motherfucker. He busts into the room. Ah, I leap out of the bed, slam him dead in the jaw with my fist dripping with blood. Down that black motherfucker goes. Ha, ha! Then he’s up, screaming. Everybody is screaming. The doctor and the marshmallow-shoe crew is holding back Watkins, who got up screaming.

“You black motherfucker! I’m going to kill you!” Watkins.

“Watkins, get back, he’s not dangerous!” Dr See.

“He’s not dangerous, he just hit me!” He breaks loose, they get him again.

“He’s bleeding—”

“Fuck that shit, his ass is going to die or wish he was dead.”

I already wish I was dead.

“Get out, Watkins!”

My blood is all over everything, the white-suited little black flunkies, the sheets, the white walls.

“Get out of here right now!”

“What do you mean, ‘Get out’! I have the right to defend myself, you Arab motherfucker.”

“I mean it, get out of here! And if these boys don’t get you out, I’ll call security. And if I have to do that,
that
will be your job!”

“Are you crazy, I was doing my job. I don’t have to be hit by nobody! Ain’t
nobody
gonna hit me and I don’t defend myself, motherfucker!”

“You are not defending yourself now. The boy is not moving, he has backed off. You are trying to retaliate, and you don’t have that right. Look, if you don’t get out of here, I will have your job.”

“And I will have your ass.”

“Please!” Dr See claps his hands like a sultan and says to the crew, “Get him
out
of here.”

They drag him out still frothing at the mouth. I lay back down on the bed, pull the bloody sheet over my head, even though I know it’s too late to act like nothing’s happened.

“Why did you do that?” he shouts.

“I’m going to keep on doing it.”

“Why?”

“He was going to hit—”

“Why did you bite yourself!”

“It’s my body!” I shout.

“Oh, great, that makes a lot of sense.”

“Is that why I’m here, because I make a lot of sense?”

I hear feet in soft shoes coming down the hall fast, an army of them, ten twenty thirty faces like black death masks. Dr See gives orders, a cold alcohol wipe, needle sting, then
plunge.
It gets dark in me, then outside of me, and I leave.

 

 

PLIÉ STRAIGHTEN RELEVÉ,
tendu into second, plié, straighten, I really get off on opening out into plié, pressing my muscles, antagonist agonist, to open my thighs as I bend my knees. They don’t want to open, the muscles, tendons, ligaments want to stay closed, be comfortable, not hurt. But I press on and out.

Roman says, “Bend, open wider. Put your heart into it. Everything you do, put your heart into it. You as strong a dancer as your plié is strong. I seen a few dancers who is not got good deep pliés, but not many. You got a good body; work on putting something into it, saying something. Every time you move, you should be saying something. People look at you and read your story like a book. Did you know that? That’s all we have is our bodies, dancers, and you can’t hide or lie. If you do, nobody want to look at you. You hiding, Abdul. Show me your heart. Don’t worry about fouettés, so what are you going to be, the swan in act three where she does thirty-two fouettés? The black swan?”

I don’t know what he’s talking about, I had never seen
Swan Lake,
but I kept that, “the black swan.” That’s what I was, no more ugly black duck! My Lai hated him because he liked me. She hated the way he taught his class, his accent, she made fun of how he walked. She was so mean sometimes. I fell in love with her body, her smell, her juice way before I fell in love with her. First it was just the way the bitch
moved,
then the tough pieces of her cunt hair, her briny cunt, hips, and tits—so hard it was like sucking a lollipop. I grooved on that, I never even knew I wanted to do that before, suck a girl’s tits. She would start to writhe and arch.

“Put your finger in me, put your finger—no, go like this, yeah, in an’ out like you’re fucking me, don’t stop sucking my tit, stupid! You gotta do both at the same time. This is way cool,” she panted, cumming on top of my fingers. I felt for her what I think Roman felt for me, desire and terror, but I didn’t have what he had. He had control. My Lai had the money. I loved her, love her. But I don’t know if she loves me. She only said it once, and that was when she . . . well, whatever. I don’t want to think about that. I call up the picture of her in my mind laying on my bed, her thighs open as a baby’s to ask my own thighs in class to open past that point where my body thinks it can’t go. I pretend her body is mine and push my legs open; my legs believe the picture in my head more than they believe their own almost-hard-as-steel tendons and tight ligaments. When I’m fucking her, she cums in heaves and spasms; I feel like a volcano, rock outside and liquid on fire inside. She taste like water, tears, piss, curry powder sometimes, not like how Roman said she would, “Stinking pussies!” He hates girls, and how would he know if their pussies stink? “I like how you taste,” I tell her between catching her clit in my lips till she screamed. I don’t feel alone when I’m slamming. I ain’t afraid to die when I’m slamming. Tombé pas de bourreé, tendu, fourth position, plié TURN TURN
TURN
!

Mornings intermediate advanced ballet, afternoons contemporary jazz, evenings we have rehearsals. For a while it’s like having parents: not having to worry about money for classes or clothes, dancing on scholarship, living off handouts from Scott’s and My Lai’s parents. Restitution, My Lai called it. Freeloading? Where’d bucks like that come from? Endless, no fucking bottom, how could they afford to just give and give to their kids, while me, Amir, Jaime, Etheridge, and the rest of us little shits lined up in front of our pee plastic mattresses in our striped jailhouse pajamas like we were in Siberia or some fucking place? Shit, if we’d been in Siberia, we might have been better off, we would of maybe had a chance of getting adopted. Who knows, and what fucking difference does any of it make now?

We went to DKNY, me and My Lai. Of course I had seen credit cards before—what do you do, hand ’em to the clerk, they swipe, you sign? I never paid any attention before, because that wasn’t me, I didn’t have one. (Hey, hey, I’m the cash underground!) So I’m hanging with My Lai, waiting for her to go in, do her shopping so we can go get some sushi and fuck. And she digs in her bag and hands me this gold AmEx card with my name on it, talking ’bout ten grand.

“Go head, motherfucker, get dressed.”

My mouth falls open, it doesn’t compute as they say. She’s giving this to me? Total, new experience. With Roman, he had, but I had to ask all the time, half of the time I would just do without rather than ask, and I wasn’t going to go shopping with him, fuck that.

Humiliation, what I felt at the donut shop on 125th Street comes back to me now. Me thinking I was gonna grease on a dozen and the perv hadn’t given me a ten but that crumpled one-dollar bill, a hot feeling rising up in my chest when she put the donuts back. Rage, humiliation. I felt so stupid, such a sucker.

The same feeling with Brother John.

“Leave it!” Brother John shouts.

Leave the
books
? Pussy-face hypocrite, could he hear himself telling me books are our friend and how his life turned around, how he would have been like any of those guys out there nodding if it wasn’t for books? “Books took me from the crowded foster home on 155th Street.” Then the foster brothers, four dead, two in prison, he escaped. I always hated that story. I hated it for the missing parts, did he fuck
them,
did they fuck him, is that why he fucked me, us? Or is it some, some
magnet
in us?

He’s crying all over you, licking your butt, all the time talking in his nigger voice. I convinced myself I was special. Shit, if I ever kill anybody, it would be—
Have
I ever killed anybody? Maybe that’s why I’m in here! Did I kill Brother John that day? That’s what I had gone up there for, to save my own life by killing that fucking faggot. But maybe something else happened. Sometimes I think I’ll go to look in the mirror and I’ll see him there, that they made me,
made
me, be them. I’ll ask Dr See when he comes back. My thoughts are racing now, remembering in a hole full of colors and sounds, deep but not connected to the next thing. Dr See will know. I want to talk, but my mouth is dry cotton. I try to move my tongue. No happenings. Whatever they gave me put me on the opposite side of speech, like we’re boxers in separate corners. I have not shit in how long? I sat on the toilet and stuck my finger up my ass circling around hard pebbles of shit, pulling them out my ass one by one till I farted and finally some shit came out that wasn’t rock hard. I don’t dream much, but just now I dozed off and was dreaming, at least I think it was a dream. I can’t tell you because I don’t know if you’re really here or you’re in the dream.

What happened?

I was uptown somewhere, maybe walking along St Nicholas Terrace, that little lane behind the college that winds along the little cliff above St Nicholas Park and looks down on green grass, giant granite boulders sparkling in the sun, the playgrounds and wide black street below. You never know where you are in a dream, really, and I was dreaming, I think. But it was one of those days I was broke and just didn’t want to ask My Lai or Scott to hold me over till I got my next check from Starbucks; they didn’t care, but I did. I don’t want to be dependent on those motherfuckers all the time. So when he drove past me, crawling, then turned around and came back, older white guy, maybe some professor at the college or some white shirt, yeah. He was driving a black BMW, freak-ass car, you know, the kind of car I want to have someday. So he rolls down the window, I can feel the cold air from the air conditioner out where I’m standing on the curb.

“Want a ride?”

I look over my shoulder.

“We could go anywhere. It doesn’t have to be around here.”

“Where?”

“Take the Henry Hudson to the Bronx?”

I look around again, I could just be giving a lost white guy directions. The door opens. I get in. He is a medium-build old guy, forty-five, fifty, sixty, what’s the difference? They all look alike, losing hair, bellies with glasses.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

I look at him. Probably from the burbs; if he isn’t a professor, he’s a broker or a dentist or some shit.

“What’s
your
name?”

“Oh.” He like almost chokes. “Martin, Martin Wilson. I’m a teacher.”

He’s driving faster now. Good, I don’t want anybody to see me with this old white motherfucker. Not that I know anybody around here that much.

“You didn’t tell me your name.”

“Martin, my name’s Martin too,” I say.

“You’re kidding me.”

“Why would I do that?”

“I’ve got some good videos. You like videos?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Movies?”

“Yeah, sure,” I tell him.

“You’ll like these movies, and we can have a little fun while we watch.” His laughter is all nervous.

“Yeah, sure.” I hope this motherfucker doesn’t think he’s going to keep me up there all day, watching no fucking porn with his tired ass.

I forget the street, the exact area, the name of the bridge we crossed. But I know we crossed a bridge to get to the one-story flat white motel. It could have been anywhere.

“I’ll be right back. I’m going to pay for the room, and then we get the equipment out of the trunk and have some fun. Are you an athlete?”

He’s looking at me like I’m a package of Ding Dongs.

He comes back and then sure enough goes and gets all this shit out of the trunk—tripod, camera, video camera, videocassettes. He’s got one of those silver fold-up screens and lights.