“YOU LIKE TO GET FUCKED, don’t you?”
Mickey Johnson was seven and a half years old and sitting in the back of the school bus, beads of sweat collected all around his brow and temples. He wasn’t even tall enough to see over the seat in front of him but he dared not look to his left ’cause there would be the bogeyman himself—Cortez Williams.
Cortez was eleven, foul breathed, and bigger than most of the kids at the elementary school (he had been held back three times). Mickey knew that if he looked Cortez in the eye he would be really starting trouble and the school bus was close to Cortez’s stop. Mickey held his breath and closed his eyes, frozen. Cortez persisted.
“You be puttin’ ding-a-lings in yo’ mouth. You a faggot.” Cortez reached over and started pinching Mickey’s nipple to the point of pain over his Hulk Hogan T-shirt and then he bit him hard on the top of his ear.
The school bus was old and dilapidated—it was probably once the top of the line when it was made in the sixties, but some twenty years later, it was showing its wear. In the winter it was an icebox and now in the summer, one month shy of school being out, it was an oven. Even with all the windows rolled down. You could feel when the engine shifted in the floor of the bus, and at that moment, the engine gave a shift right as Mickey’s heart did. As was the rule with this ritual, Cortez pressed his advantage harder and harder the closer he got to his stop.
“You be getting dicked in the butt.” Cortez gripped Mickey by the privates so hard that Mickey started to cry. Cortez unlatched his hand and in a swift motion took Mickey’s hand and placed it on the crotch of his shorts. Mickey noticed Cortez wasn’t wearing any underwear—Cortez never wore underwear.
This is how it started.
Sometime at the beginning of the year, all the classes K–6 sat in the ball field for the beginning-of-the-year speech given by the principal. The rural elementary school boasted just under two hundred students so all the classes fit comfortably on around two acres of field. Earlier that summer a drunken transfer truck driver passed out at the wheel and smacked his rig right into the school, completely destroying the sixth-grade classroom. It was probably the most exciting thing that had ever happened in that town. Mickey remembered watching the evening news with his grandparents as a white woman with a perm and a Minnie Mouse T-shirt cried and held her crucifix necklace and pointed it at the camera, saying that it was a miracle that it happened during the summer while school was out and how “the Divine worked in mysterious ways.”
Presently, the principal was talking some jazz about how he loved each and every student and how God protects. Mickey’s mind was elsewhere. He wondered what it would be like to be sitting in a room quietly, then all of a sudden a truck ran through it—he couldn’t picture it. He lost his train of thought and turned around. Sitting on his butt, legs folded in front, was Cortez in plain view, in little track shorts with no underwear. Mickey could see Cortez’s penis. It gave him a nervous butterfly feeling and Mickey stared at it perhaps a beat longer than he should have. Cortez was sitting with his upper torso leaned back and propped up on his elbows: he wasn’t really trying to cover himself, and he noticed that Mickey had noticed. The two made eye contact and Mickey quickly turned around.
Later there would be the first confrontation. Mickey’s class and Cortez’s class took bathroom breaks at the same time. A group of about fifteen boys would all wait in line. If the urinals were taken, the boys would crowd to the two doorless stalls that held a single toilet each. Three or four boys would urinate together at a time. To Mickey’s left was Louis Gerbins, who everyone made fun of because he pulled his pants and underwear all the way down to his ankles to pee. Mickey undid his Superman belt and was relieving himself next to Louis when Cortez poked in the stall right next to Mickey, pulled down his track shorts (he seemed to favor track shorts), and let loose a stream of urine all across the belly of Mickey’s shirt and the front of his jeans. When Mickey was asked what happened he blamed it all on Louis, who was promptly paddled, and Mickey was sent back to the bathroom to put on the change of clothes his mother insisted that he keep in his cubbyhole year-round.
It was now nearing the end of the school year and Cortez’s attacks were becoming more frequent. Mickey always waited to see the town sign. “Welcome to Belle Mina,” it said. It was a blip of a town off the I-65 highway. In the distant past the second governor of Alabama had made his residence there. Since the plantation slaves could not pronounce “Belle Manor,” the town was named “Belle Mina” after that. Mickey didn’t know this. All Mickey knew was that after the sign, the next stop was Cortez’s house and that’s when the torture would end.
It was a bus of thirty kids. Four white ones who were let off first, and then the Black students who were let off in the nooks and crannies of the farm town.
Cortez lived near the edge of the township in what they called “Camp Town”—several acres of cotton fields surrounded by woods. He lived on a plot of land that was all red clay (no grass grew there ever) and on the plot sat seven dilapidated trailers that all belonged to members of Cortez’s immediate family. Cortez lived in one trailer with his grandmother and uncle, who was drunk all the time. The bus came to a stop.
“You gon’ be my girlfriend,” said Cortez to Mickey, and forced a kiss on his lips.
He looked at Cortez’s hair. It was baby soft and blond on the tips, naturally. Cortez was a Black boy with blond hair. Now, someone had said Cortez’s daddy was a white man. Nobody knew. But his mama had run away after he was born; she was last in New Orleans. It was understood that he was the son of one of the white men whose family owned the property Cortez’s family lived on—that was the way Mickey’s grandma had explained it. All Mickey knew was that Cortez intimidated him, and that his presence held Mickey in place like a magnet. Hate was not the first emotion Mickey could conjure when thinking about Cortez, though. Whatever “it” was, it rumbled in his stomach, like a fear or excitement, like those three seconds before a roller coaster hurled itself from a very high peak. Cortez unlocked his lips from Mickey’s and Mickey exhaled hard. He was left alone with that feeling of relief that washed through him whenever Cortez exited the bus.
MICKEY LIVED WITH his grandparents and his dad. His parents were never married and his mother had moved up to Kentucky to finish her master’s degree. “I’ll come back when I can get a better job. I’ll move us into a bigger house,” she said, packing. The next day she kissed and hugged him within an inch of his life and left for school. Mickey’s mother was studying speech pathology; it was explained to him that she was studying to help kids who couldn’t speak well mute their r’s and clip their vowels, whatever that meant. He missed his mother, naturally, and the way she read to him each night. The last book he remembered her reading to him was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It was his favorite. Sometimes Mickey had half a mind to grab his clothes and sail up a river—or at least he would, if he could swim.
When Mickey got home, the air inside his grandparents’ house was smoke-filled, gamy, and peppery. His grandfather had come in drunk and was cooking a rabbit he had run over on the road somewhere; he was fond of running over animals with his car. He was making gravy for the meat and the thought of the poor rabbit in the pan was making Mickey sick to his stomach. “Is that dinner, Pa?” Mickey asked, really hoping it was not.
“No, this ain’t for little boys, ya hear? This is for Dad. I’m taking you and your grandma to dinner in town tonight, so save your appetite.”
Mickey saw through the window that his grandma was in the backyard taking clothes off the laundry line. If they were going out to eat later he knew that she would be taking her biggest purse to dinner, as always.
Mickey’s granddad drove an older Cadillac—what year, Mickey couldn’t remember. It only played eight-track tapes and his granddad had to use a converter to play Mickey’s favorite tape, a gas station compilation of sixties soul-pop tunes. Mickey sat in the front seat in between his grandparents and swayed his little body to “The Oogum Boogum Song,” the Supremes, and “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me.” The tape had to be his favorite thing in the world.
The trio got up the highway on their way to Quincy’s. Quincy’s was a steak house and country-style buffet. Their signature was a type of yeast roll put on the table before your meal, and the commercial for the restaurant featured a cartoon anthropomorphic yeast roll with arms and feet singing, “I’m the BIG. FAT. YEAST ROLL.” It was all certainly a carry.
Mickey’s granddad had been a cook at Quincy’s some years before and said he couldn’t eat the food there because he knew it was all “utility-grade” meat—that is, animals they would find dead and turn into meat before rot set in. Mickey didn’t care; he always ate from the ice-cream bar first anyway. He liked the way the pillowy melted marshmallow foam drizzled down his soft-serve vanilla ice cream, which he often topped with gummy bears. Mickey glanced over at his grandmother going to town on a full plate of fixings. He looked down in her purse and, as expected, she had already found a way to sneak a hellified amount of fried chicken in there, all wrapped up in napkins, the grease from the chicken turning the napkins translucent. His grandfather was smiling at them both, sipping iced tea.
The three rushed back home so his grandfather could catch Jeopardy! The living room was dark except for the bluish light of the TV. Mickey looked down at his Black skin. The luminous effect of the screen made it look simultaneously iridescent and even darker than it actually was. Right as he got lost looking at himself his father burst through the living room door.
Mickey’s father was all about big entrances—you could feel the charisma of him six feet before he arrived. He said a quick hi to his parents, who didn’t even look up from the screen to acknowledge their son. Mickey followed his dad to the bedroom they shared in the back of the house.
Mickey loved his dad. It was mostly his smell—a mix of alcohol, pork cracklings, and cheap cologne. He would sit in his dad’s lap when he would play dominoes with the men at the pool hall in town, and lean his head against his dad’s chest just so he could smell him. It was a very peaceful smell.
Mickey sat on the bed and watched his dad’s nighttime preparty ritual (which happened most nights of the week). He would dash out of the shower, toss on cologne and deodorant and hair grease. After this he would always proceed to spray a grotesque amount of starch on his Levi’s 501s and iron them till they were stiff as a board. His father sometimes called him “Mouse” (’cause his name was Mickey). “Yeah, Mouse, imma find you a pretty stepmama tonight! Look at the crease in these pants! You could fuckin’ cut ya’self on ’em!” None of these stepmothers ever materialized, but either way, Mickey loved watching his father’s nightly beauty rituals. He was less like a dad and more like an older brother. It worked.
His father threw on a pair of pristinely white Converse and a green Izod polo, grabbed the keys to his ’76 Volkswagen Beetle, and hit the door. “See you when I get home, Mouse, stay up and wait for me, ok?”
“Ok, Papa,” said Mickey. His father picked him up off the bed and hugged him tight and kissed him on the forehead. He sat him down and was off.
Mickey always wanted to tell his dad about Cortez but always kept the matter close to himself. For one, he didn’t want his Father Bear thinking he was a punk, and two, he knew that any kid who snitched on another kid was a dead kid. If he got Cortez in trouble he would have to fight Cortez and all his scary-ass cousins for the rest of his life. It was all very lose-lose.
Mickey’s grandparents had gone to sleep and he pulled out two VHS tapes from a pile by the TV. One was a bootleg copy of an hour of BET videos and the other was also a bootleg copy, of his favorite movie, Flashdance.
He put on the BET tape and rewound it to his favorite spot—the Janet Jackson “Pleasure Principle” video. What wasn’t to love about Janet Jackson? She had it all: she had bangs, she drank water out of a bottle (this baffled Mickey), and she was a dancer who lived in a warehouse. Was this a thing? He cross-referenced it with Alex, the protagonist stripper / performance artist in Flashdance, who also more than likely drank water out of a bottle, but most definitely was a dancer who lived in a warehouse. All the evidence was clear; all the coolest people were dancers who lived in warehouses (he was on the fence about the bottled water part). As always, Mickey alternated the tapes and practiced the routines until 2:30 a.m., when his dad got home, and Mickey would curl up beside him and hear about all the gossip at the club.
The next morning Mickey missed the school bus. He and his dad were up talking too late. His father called in sick to work and took Mickey to breakfast and dropped him off at school ten minutes after the morning tardy bell had rung. He was late with a stomach full of Hardee’s biscuits and strawberry jam. He felt satiated.
He stepped into Ms. Dickerson’s class and spied the new boy—he and Mickey were wearing the same sleeveless gray ThunderCats T-shirt with a full print of Lion-O (the team leader) on the front and the red-and-black ThunderCats emblem on the back. In Mickey’s head, immediate friendship seemed like the next step.
“My mom goes to Dollar General too!” exclaimed Ed, Mickey’s new immediate best friend. He had this feeling in his stomach now, the same as when Cortez would bother him, only much more violent, yet sweet too, like three packets of Pop Rocks fizzing in his stomach all at once.
Ed was from Texas. Mexico before that. He was dark, but not like Mickey. He was more medium brown, like a cinnamon color, as opposed to Mickey’s indigo. He had an accent that Mickey had only ever heard on TV before.
He had a rattail and his bangs almost covered his eyes. Ed’s father and mother both went to Athens State University, the college in the next town over; they were finishing agricultural degrees. Ed had no brothers or sisters. Both boys agreed that they wished they had “Cheetara” T-shirts (the female psychic feline warrior from ThunderCats). They also both agreed that they should share crayons all day.
After school Mickey sat sweating on the bus. Ed was right next to him. Ed’s parents had moved into the renovated old post office in the center of town. This was along Mickey’s route. Mickey had focused on Ed so entirely that he hadn’t noticed that Cortez wasn’t riding the bus that day.
The windows were all down on the bus and Mickey could waft Ed’s smell—Dial soap and sweat. It had a sweet smell to it, different from his dad’s, but still, a peaceful smell.
“I never talked to a Black person,” said Ed, which he punctuated by putting his arm around Mickey’s shoulder. Ed smiled big and removed his arm and they both sat close, elbow touching elbow, side by side. They both watched the cotton in full bloom as the bus raced through the fields.
The bus let Ed off and Mickey waved goodbye to him and then it hit. Cortez was nowhere to bother him.
He breathed a sigh of relief and sank back into his seat. He almost wished Cortez could have been there to see his new friend Ed. He even fantasized about him and Ed beating Cortez up.
Mickey went straight to the room he shared with his dad. He wrote Ed’s name on the wall in pencil and erased it over and over and over again.
The next day at school Ed didn’t show up, and neither did Cortez. Both boys missed the next day and the one after that.
Ms. Dickerson explained to Mickey that Ed’s parents had found more suitable housing near campus and he would start attending the elementary school in the town the next county over. He then heard from his grandmother that Cortez’s uncle and cousin had been arrested and he was in New Orleans with his mom again. It was the end of the school year so none of it really mattered. There was a new feeling in Mickey’s stomach now. It felt like the bottom was falling out of it.
Later that day on the school bus with neither predator to probe him nor friend by his side, Mickey let out a big sigh as the bus stopped to drop the other kids off. He was bored.