(three) Smear the Queer

(three) Smear the Queer

It wasn’t until after Halloween that the news The Polks’ Clan was moving to Houghton Lake made it to Jake’s dumbfounded ears. David Polks, the tyrant of South Martin St. would be out of his life for good. Jake’s spirits visibly lifted in anticipation of slowly repairing his reputation and character. He fantasized about the day when the rest of the kids on the block would accept him regardless of what the former resident of 716 South Martin thought. When they would cast off their former ways and bring him into the fold. He was sure that Mr. Polks’ opinion and the opinions it begat in the minds of his sycophantic followers would fade and a truer more flattering portrait of Jake would emerge. The kids would see him for the cool, funny and eminently fascinating person he was, instead of the groping, desperate and awkward freak into which David Polks had conjured him.

And, he still had his Lions Hat. Which meant he still had at least a lone talisman of Cool upon which he could build his new lore. The pom-pom had been separated from its rightful place and his Mother had threatened to reattach the member. Jake had to plead with her not to sew it back on, explaining that he liked it better without the pom-pom. She, in her vast wisdom and inconsideration for her son’s wants, told him he didn’t know what was good for him. He explained to her that it made him look like a pansy, for which she chided him. He hated to refuse her attempt at doing something so quaint and motherly as the times were few and far between that she swam to the surface of her depression and hypochondria to actually take up the reins of raising her last child. He hated to agree with David Polks, but he was right about the hat sans yarn snowball; it was cooler. It was that fuzzy globe that was the difference between looking like a prancing Nancyboy and looking like a Longshoreman. In the end, she had forced the issue and he had to resort to a full-blown Hissy Fit in order to get his way.

He had learned from the master. His mother was supremely accomplished at the Hissy Fit or the Blow-Up or the Guilt Trip, whatever you wanted to call it. It was a desperate kind of interpersonal performance art, a melodrama of sorts, that was taught to successive generations in strictly a silent Mentor-Protege manner. Jake watched intently being the receiver of many a Fit and marveled at the skill and deftness in the way few heavy sighs and extended closing of the eyes could make one change one’s mind. Occasionally, if he stood fast to his opinion, she would fall back on the Voice.

The Voice was always the breaker. She would raise the pitch of her voice and add a warble to it; a tremolo of which even Johnny Mathis would be proud. This was usually accompanied with the beginning of a mock-sob-filled “Why are you doing this to me”? Or, “After all I’ve done for you”. Or,”Don’t you love me anymore”? Nothing could survive the onslaught of performed emotion and pathos emanating from his mother’s contorted face.

The fact that his mother relented in the matter of the pom-pom showed how far he’d come in his training at getting what he wanted through guilt. Later, much later, his finely tuned prostrating and cunning manipulation of voice and gesture would get him his first car, his dad’s old 1974 Dodge Dart. This fact alone, that he was saved from being ridiculed for the yarnball on his head should’ve been enough for him to eek happiness out of for at least two days. Something unexpected eclipsed that happiness and sent it into pure joy.

The U-Haul was parked outside The Polks’ House for three days. Jake began to fancy the color orange. It made him happier. Many of the boys were still busy trying to deal with their emotions, but Jake had already gone through the separation anxiety straight to accepting his life without the asshole-in-training. The boys had taken to treating David Polks as if he had recently contracted brain cancer. They were terribly morose while around him and a few had even spoke of him in the past tense in his presence, which made Jake smirk with joy. The boys had taken to just hanging around David’s porch, talking of things they had done, things that they all would do in the coming days. David would speak of his new house and invite everyone up to Houghton Lake during the summer. There would be water fights in the lake, everyone would try the tire swing and they would camp out, look at the stars and make up stories about people that they didn’t like.

Of course, none of that would ever happen. The children had no power to sway adults in their vacation plans. And, adolescent minds wander faster than an unattended toddler. When David left, no one would stay in touch with him. By the first snow, his name dropped from conversation. No one speculated as to what his new school was like or how he was doing. He would disappear from the neighborhood and the neighborhood’s collective memory. The only thing remaining would be the house, which would always be called The Polks’ House, no matter how many families would occupy that abode.

A Ryder truck replaced the U-Haul and the new family arrived with it.

The boys sat on Morris Shuler’s porch, which, in itself, was rare. Morris’ dad was a very hard worker. He and his wife had five sons and one very strapping young tomboy, so strapping she might as well have been a son. He expected his son’s to have the same work ethic, even on Saturday and especially during the summer months. He apparently liked parenthood not for the nurturing and shaping of a young child into a good moral person, but for the seemingly endless supply of Free Labor.

The daily routine would be this. Morris would come out to play late because he was always finishing his chores. At quarter past five o’clock, when he saw his father’s big blue Suburban turn the corner, he dove into the nearest bush or one of the other boys’ backyards, where he would hide until his father remembered he had a son who needed to be working and called or came looking for him.

So, the boys sat speculating on whether the kids in the family were gonna make the cut. They’d already seen a pink 20’’ Huffy with a rattan basket exit the yellow truck, but girls didn’t count, not yet, anyway.

Then they saw it. And, they all knew immediately this new kid was going to be a force with which to be reckoned.

Out of the back of the van came a high-gloss black finish, aluminum mag-wheeled, freestyle, Mongoose moto-cross bike with a Haro numberplate attached to the bars sporting the number 1 in deep blood red. The kick-ass bike was one thing, but someone with the bravado to give himself the number 1 was another. Not only was this kid cool, but he knew it. Jake’s testicles tried to retreat into his abdomen, to a happier place and time when they were younger and weren’t in danger of being kicked. His head throbbed in rhythm to the thrumming of his foot against the side of the porch.

“This guy’s a Badass or the little girl’s got a lezzie for a big sister”, Scott Carson breathed lowly into the circle of friends on the porch.

The side door to the house opened and the all got the first glimpse of the new kid.

He was bigger than all of the kids, except Jake. He wore navy suede Pumas, grey boot-cut cords, a blue windbreaker with a hood and a Detroit Tigers hat. The glasses he wore got darker and darker as he headed toward the van. By the time he mounted his bike, they were sunglasses.

“You could help, Edward” his other brother shouted at him, his cigarette bobbing up and down on his lip, cascading ash down the front of his coat.

“Fuck you, I’m going to the store for Mom’s smokes”.

Jake was now very close to losing control of his bladder.

This kid not only swore, he was a twelve or thirteen-year-old who could pass for seventeen. The other kids tentatively watched him pedal off on his bike as he bunny-hopped and jumped curbs until he was out of sight.

“What hubris”, Jake said loudly.

The other kids blinked into his face, silently.

“What the hell are you talking about?”, Morris said, cautiously darting his eyes up to the window of the door to check for brothers or parents as he said the word ‘hell’. Morris, being raised a strict Catholic was told he could only use the word in church.

“Balls”, Jake replied.

“Oh”, the others chimed in, nodding in agreement.

Jake was cursed--had cursed himself, really--with knowledge beyond his years in public school. You, see, bored out of his skull one rainy day, he began scouting about the house. He had gotten into the cupboard below the hall bookshelf and taken some of the books that no one would care were missing. All the flashy, brightly colored romance novels his mother read and the smattering of westerns his father read lined the bookcase above like soldiers presented to the General, polished and ready for action. All the good books where down below: The Collected Works of Wm. Shakespeare by a Texas publisher with all the sexual innuendo and references to “Hymen” excised, The Story of America-an eleventh grade History Text no doubt left there by one of his older brothers, volumes A-C through T-V of the American Heritage Encyclopaedia, including the 1976 and 1977 yearbooks and dog-eared copies of Alice in Wonderland, Catcher in the Rye, Peter Pan and Soul On Ice.

What puzzled Jake more than the inclusion of Eldridge Cleaver’s book was the fact that the copies were dog-eared at all. Not one of his family seemed to have the sophistication indicated by such an eclectic collection. Not even his mother would put down her latest 100 page novella de amore to crack the binding on any of these tomes. In the end he rationalized it away by thinking that the books must’ve either been loaned to the family by others in hopes of broadening the family’s horizons and never returned. Or, that they were going through what must surely be a natural process of decay from neglect.

“Balls the size of Softballs”, Alex said

“The size of Bowling Balls”, Morris improved.

“The size of Jake’s head”, Scott chuckled.

The boys laughed at Scott’s comment. A feeling came over Jake, sinking in like wet snow through a wool sock; a feeling that with all the things that had changed in the last few weeks, things still remained the same.

They retired to Morris’ backyard, to the leaf-strewn plot of ground that in summer would be Mrs. Shuler’s garden. Where, in the smolder of August, Morris and the boys would wade into the waist-high green with salt shakers, plucking bulging red tomatoes pregnant with juice from the vine and plunging their teeth into them like rabid vampires. Now there was a thick smooth bed of brown, gold and orange maple leaves. At the back of the garden, stacked in cords next to the chainlink fence rested a nicely weathering pile of pine. Smoke trailed from the house’s chimney and, caught by a downdraft, floated down and dissipated just above the boys’ heads. The clip of the brisk air and the homey scent of burning wood would be burnished forever into their memories, filed under “F” for Fall.

There they stood tossing the brightly colored foam football around and hurling petty insults at not only each other, but also each other’s mother. The impromptu game of verbal one-ups-manship was cut off abruptly when they heard the sound of a pair of knobby tires rolling haltingly up the driveway. Jake turned to see the new kid dismount his aluminum horse and walk it to the grass.

“Hey”, his breath puffing out in one short cloud.

A chorus of “heys” followed. Jake stood witnessing the awkward dance that was unfolding in front of him. The boys surrounded the interloper in a semi-circle with him at the head. Then came the questions:

What’s yer Name: Edward Stephens

Where ya from: Bad Axe, in da U.P.

Where’d you get yer bike: Rick’s Bike Shop in Iron City.

And so it went for fifteen minutes.

Jake marveled at the hardness that resonated off this kid. It seemed every answer had either a “K” or and “X” in it. The towns he frequented were peppered with words like “City”, “Cement”, “Bad” or “Iron”. These weren’t pleasant suburban names like “Royal Oak”, “Sterling Heights” or “Pleasant Ridge” No. This kid hailed from the Michigan’s Outback, The Man from Bad Iron Cement City.

They learned that his Dad worked for Ford in the iron shipping end of the company, but was transferred to Pontiac, the city not the carmaker, due to layoffs and restructuring. His mother was a homemaker, as were many other of the kid’s moms, except Richie Valen’s mom who had a lucrative ceramics shop in her basement, kiln and all; the proceeds of which fed her two and a half pack of More Menthols a day cigarette habit. Edward’s, “call me Eddie”’s, folks had a pool table, a Spirit of ‘76 pinball machine and a brand new Atari 5200 video game with a color T.V. which was the jewel in the crown that was their Game Room/Basement. Eddie even had a skateboard, and not one of those cheap plastic skateboards, but a real plywood one with clear red wheels that reminded Jake of Strawberry Jell-O.

With every cool thing that was mentioned, Jake made a mental note. This kid was all surface, no substance. He had all the trappings of popularity that would ease his transition from the sticks to the suburbs. He was a suburban kid who had been stuck in rural jerkwater and now he would bloom. Jake saw his imagined future dwindling away like a sweet dream moments after waking.

“You guys wanna play Smear the Queer?” He offered, breaking Jake’s moment of melancholia.

“Sure, Jake’s the Queer”, Morris blurted quickly, knowing that David Polks had always said it during the opening of every game. “Jake’s the Queer” was sort of the National Anthem sung just prior to kick-off. The boys spread out on the field of leaves with Jake equidistant from each of them, alone, in the center.

‘Smear the Queer’ wasn’t a game really, but more of a version of cutthroat Rugby with no teams and very vague rules. It was more or less short bursts of chasing the person with the ball, ‘The Queer’ followed by process of dragging him down to the ground and johnny-piling on him, or ‘Smearing’; hence the name. No one was really queer, except Morris, which they didn’t found out until way, way later. And, the tackling and what Jake’s mother called “Roughhousing” was just a way to blow off the excess testosterone that was coursing threw their pubescent veins and arteries. It in no way resembled anything you could truly call ‘smearing’.

Except for this time.

Call it posturing. Call it anxiety produced by the introduction of new blood in the water. Call it unbridled friskiness. Whatever it was, it was not pretty. This was the harshest round of ‘Smear the Queer’ ever played on South Martin St. Usually, the boys would play a few rounds until they got hot and sweaty and then they take off their coats and play in their sweaters and sweatshirts. But, this time they’d sweat through those and were playing in their long sleeve thermal Long John shirts.

Most of their thermals were that ambiguously off-white cream color. Morris sported the top half of a faded red union suit. But, Eddie’s thermal was black. Jake hated him now. Hated him for everything that Jake couldn’t and, if it really came down to it, wouldn’t want to be.

They stood, puffing out huge clouds of steam like penned broncos, in their thermals and hats. Tendrils of steam rose from the backs of their necks and from the dark wet fields running down the centers of their backs and chests.

Eddie was holding the ball, ready to toss it in the air again after being hauled to the ground at the end of a very long chase. All the boys were ready, hands on their knees, except Jake who was still trying to suck down enough air to fill his rotund body. He held his side and winced in pain.

“Time out, time. I got a cramp”. This was a relevant reason for a time out. This was pain that was caused by your body, not to it, therefore it warranted attention.

“C’mon, Pussy” Eddie barked.

Jake swallowed a gulp of air and nodded ‘okay’.

Now, one of the few rules of the game was that once you ran and were tackled you could 1) throw it up to let someone else run or 2) fake the throw and run again. This addition of chance and subterfuge only heightened the intensity of the game. The boys stood in a loose circle and awaited Eddie’s choice.

Eddie faked the throw into the air and then cocked his arm back and drilled it directly at Jake’s chest. The only reaction he had was to close his arms around it. And, that’s when the boys broke their stance.

Jake eluded Richie’s feeble attempt at a diving tackle with quick fake he’d seen Billy Sims do during a Lions game on T.V. Richie always went for the dive, even if he wasn’t close, because he thought it looked cool. Morris clutched at Jake as he plodded past him, but grabbed air. Jake ran, unimpeded, toward the open end of the garden. He turned and stood facing the boys as they spread out in the middle of the field of play; creating their own pathetic version of Pittsburgh’s Famed Steel Curtain.

“You gotta run sometime, Fat Boy” Eddie sneered. “C’mon, let’s see what you got”.

Jake ran for the hole between Eddie and Scott Carson. He switched the ball over to the side Scott was on and stiffarmed his way past Eddie’s circling grasp. He had never expected Eddie to be this easy. He reveled in this briefly until he felt Scott latch on to his upper legs, slowing his movement considerably. Alex pitched in to help his brother and Morris jumped on Jake’s back, tipping the scales and sending Jake to his knees, then to his belly in a small graceless heap. Eddie arrived too late to do anything, but sit on the top of the helter skelter johnny-pile.

“Get the Fuck off me. I can’t fucking breathe” Jake whimpered from the bottom of the mound of smelly, sweaty boys. They untangled themselves and Jake lay on the ground gasping and pumping the cool air into and out of his apparently underutilized lungs.

“C’mon, Wheezie, Throw up the ball”. This was the extent of Alex’s bravado. He didn’t like calling names, especially to Jake because Jake was the closest thing to a friend. Jake treated The Twins Carson as separate entities, even when their mother dressed them in matching Coca-Cola shirts and tan slacks. Jake’s insistence on individuality was a kindness for which both were inwardly if not outwardly grateful.

“Who you calling Wheezie, Inhalerboy?” his brother Scott answered back.

“Frick off” Alex spit back at his twin.

“I’m tellin’ Mom”, Scott returned.

“I said ‘Frick’ not ‘Fuck’”, Alex pleaded.

“Now, I’m really tellin’”, Scott laughed.

“Quitchabitchin’” Eddie cut in. “Like a coupla fairies the way you talk”.

Jake rolled onto his stomach and brought his knees up under him, supporting his weight on the Nerf Football beneath. He raised up slightly to his knees and put one leg out in front of him. For a moment he looked like a player on a Fleer football card, posed, one knee down, helmet in front of him, holding a pigskin in the crook of his arm.

That’s when he left the ground and flew, head first, into the woodpile. Through the din of the newly forged bells echoing their painful song to the corners of his skull, Jake could make out Eddie saying the following words:

“He was gonna run, I swear.”

“Whatcha go and tackle him for?”, Scott asked with a whine.

“He was gonna run.”

“He was not”, Morris said, darting his eyes toward the back door of his house to see if his mom would come charging out and beat them all with a rolling pin for being too rough.

Jake pulled the Lions Hat back from where it had settled in front of his eyes and turned on his back. His hands flew to his head and the pain subsided. It was just a short little knock, not the full on wallop he had suffered at the hands of the Unholy Jack Goff/David Polks Tag Team Alliance, but it did smart a bit. It wasn’t until he saw his friends’ faces that he knew he was in trouble.

“Man, yer bleeding” Richie said in a curious way that sounded like equal parts fascination and revulsion.

“You better go home”, Alex said. “You’re gonna need stitches”.

“He’s not gonna need stitches”, Eddie downplayed, fearing a lawsuit or reprisal, it was unclear which.

“It’s just a scratch”. This kind of underplaying would later ingratiate him with the Clayton High School Football coach, whose motto was “You’re fine. Tape it up and get back in there”.

Jake took his glove off and reached his hand up. He drew it back with the tips covered in crimson.

In a shot he was up, grabbing his shirt and coat. This added burst of energy quickened the blood flow. He bolted into a run and leaped the new kid’s bike as he exited the yard.

“Wait, where you going, Candyass? We’re still playing”. Eddie’s voice faded as Jake left the driveway and yanked the Lions hat off his head. It was covered in blood. He looked back briefly and noticed that no one was following.

He stopped. He stood, holding the bloodied hat and looked back at the Shuler’s house, hoping one of the boys would burst from around the corner at full tilt. None did. Hot tears welled on his lower lids. His lips curled toward his nose and his eyes pinched shut, popping the tears out and down his ruddy red cheeks. He turned toward his house and quickly walked the two houses down toward Home. When he reached the edge of the lawn, he called for his Mom. His sister, who was in her usual place at the front door, dragging on yet another Winston 100, saw him first.

“Maaaaahhhm, come quick”. She howled as she threw down the last of her cigarette and rushed toward Jake.

“Oooh, Baby, are you okay?”, she soothingly breathed her smoky fog into his hot face. She grabbed the Lions hat and stuffed it in a ball onto the split at his hairline.

From behind her came his mother’s voice.

“Get him in the house. Let’s see how bad is it”.

Jake winced both from the sharp bite of the sore and his mother’s grammar. Jake saw his mother peering from behind the mesh of the screen door--Jake’s father hadn’t yet gotten around to replacing the screens with the storms--her face hanging palely, ghostly in the darkness that surrounded it. The tufts of blaze red hair, not her natural color, rose from her head in flames. She opened the door and the light cascaded in. Jake realized he’d never really seen his mother in the bleak daylight. It was always in the house, the shutters or drapes pulled, allowing only yellowed dingy light to pass into the rooms. Or, at night when the heavily shaded lamps were on, casting slanted, odd, German Expressionistic shadows about the rooms. Or, in the living room, illuminated only by the bluish flicker of Happy Days or One Day at a Time.

It was at the sight of his mother in broad daylight that his knees buckled and he fell to the ground, not the dizziness brought on by the recent head trauma and heavy loss of blood. Of this he was sure as they dragged him to the back of the Chrysler Town and Country.

“Mom” He mumble this as a vain incantation to ward away the mounting fear of death. “Mom”.

“Don’t you go to sleep. Don’t you dare. You hear me?”

Jake’s mother was from a school of thought that the more you threatened an injured child with at least the prospect of more pain, the more helpful and comforting it was. Denying the pain was something that was good for you. It made you stronger, healthier. Not in any way did it cripple you emotionally or keep you from having healthy relationships with loved ones or women. Never. That’s just good old common sense.

Jake throbbed and sobbed in his seat all the way to the “Doctor’s” office.

* * *

It wasn’t a real Doctor’s office. It was the office of his old pediatrician. Jake hated it in the pediatrician’s office, but it was cheaper than the emergency room and that meant better. Sometimes, he felt his mother took her cutting corners and thriftiness too far. She once asked the nurse if the doctor was running any “specials”.

Holding his newly bandaged head, Jake sat on a molded plastic chair meant for a child much smaller than he. In fact, he dwarfed most of everything in this minute child waiting room. The tiny furniture was dispersed across the expanse of the primary colored carpeting. Games were stacked neatly in the corner next to the toybox that nearly spewed its cargo over the side. The whole room had a strong bouquet of disinfectant with woody feces undertones and a slightly urine finish.

At the far end of the room, under a great stuffed swordfish, stood a murky 50-gallon fish tank on a black wrought-iron base. The ironic juxtaposition of the stuffed fish over the tank of live fish made Jake smirk slightly. He stood and the molded plastic chair that had vacuumed itself to his ass came with him. He pried it off and stepped toward the tank.

He imagined the fish looked up to the Big Floating God Fish. He was the Ideal toward which all fishes should strive. He could breathe the Pink Creatures’ air and He protected us from them. It was He who forced them to feed us and keep us well. It was He who made them clean our tank and give us little divers to mock and plaster castles to swim through.

Jake tapped at the side of the tank and a few of the fishes scattered. He left his fingers on the glass and knelt to touch his bandaged forehead to the coolness of the tank. A smaller fish swam slowly past his eyes and floated there showing his yellow-striped flank to Jake. The fish slowly turned and looked straight in Jake’s direction. He saw what passed for desperation and an awkwardness to fit in, to be right with the world around him. He saw the little fish in the big tank. He felt a profound sadness at his plight.

Jake’s mother turned toward the nurse behind the counter and asked.

“How much for the fish?”

The nurse answered her, shifting her weight from one thick rubber-soled foot to the other.

“That much and you can’t even eat it?”, she paused and held out the blood splotched Lions hat. The blood had darkened to a burnt burgundy.

“Forget it. Do you have a garbage can?”

The nurse pointed to the end of the counter.

Reversed, in the slight opaqueness of the tank’s glass, Jake watched his Mom step on the little lever at the bottom of the chrome cylinder, drop the hat in and release the foot lever. The lid slammed down with a muffled clank.

Jake rose unsteadily and followed his mother out into the bright sun.