I used to believe you could cross a line. And once you had crossed it, you would never be the same. Metaphysically. If you stabbed someone. If you killed someone. If you ate someone. If you fucked someone. I remember after the first time I had sex, examining myself in the mirror afterward. Was I different? Or was I exactly the same? I was horrified to see my face there, my piranha underbite, my blackhead-seeded nose, the exact same, too-tender pink eyelid skin. Nothing, I suddenly knew, nothing could ever truly change me. All magic vanished from the world with a hiss.
So why was I so uncomfortable with Bunny hitting Ann Marie in the face? Why did the thought of her kissing Coach Eric make my stomach clench? Why was I so incredibly angry that she had soaked that house in coyote urine?
Why did I still refuse to talk, really talk, to my mother, even after all these years?
I was walking home from my shift at Rite Aid, deep in an internal reverie, when a car door popped open right beside me and I almost screamed, sure I was about to be murdered.
“It’s me, oh god, I scared you! Can we talk?” It was Anthony. He was sitting in the driver’s seat of the dark car and he looked like hell. The bags under his eyes were fat as change purses.
“I shouldn’t,” I said, knowing that I would, that I wanted to get in the car and that I was helpless before that want. The most I could do was delay. “My aunt has forbidden me from talking to you or seeing you,” I said, as dryly as I could. “Or she’ll kick me out.” I shrugged in my coat. It was cold from the night sea breezes and I could feel my own saliva chill on my lips. My neighbor Mrs. Cowan’s black cat, the one with no tail, meandered down the road ahead of me.
Anthony visibly deflated. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he said. “You poor fucking kid. I’m so sorry.”
I had never heard Anthony swear before, but here he was using no-no words. It felt good, how bad he looked, how rattled he seemed. Like all this had been a big deal for him too. Like I mattered.
“I don’t want to get you in trouble,” he said, looking out his windshield into the middle distance, like he was on a highway, was driving through a forest of things that were just shitty. That’s what his face looked like. Like when he looked at the world, all he could see were things that were stupid and shitty. I swung myself into the passenger seat and slammed the car door behind me. My book bag was in my lap. It was suddenly awkward and quiet in the car; we could hear each other breathe.
“I realize I am behaving like a psychopath,” he said. “I—I’m not trying to stalk you. For whatever myopic reason, it did not occur to me that continuing to contact you could be putting you in jeopardy. That’s very helpful to hear actually. It makes your silence less personal.”
That wasn’t what I wanted him to say, but I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t say anything in response. I wanted to press my silence into him like a knife. I wanted to hurt him with it. I cleared my throat.
“I see,” he said.
And then I couldn’t stand it anymore, because somehow, frighteningly, I could not remember why I was mad at him in that moment, and yet I still felt all the physiological sensations of anger: the prickling in the throat, the hammering heart. I wanted to make him say he loved me, and I wanted to hear his voice, just unspooling, saying more and more in the darkness. “You lied to me,” I said. That seemed like the clearest of the transgressions. It was the place to start, even though I knew it wasn’t why I was angry with him. I had lied to him just as often. I lied to everyone. I assumed that most people lied to each other, constantly, habitually. This soup is delicious, I love your earrings, of course I’ve read Proust…Civilization itself was a lie, North Shore was a lie, clothing was a lie, language was a lie.
“I did,” Anthony said, and nodded.
“I’m not an excuse for your midlife crisis. I’m a person,” I said. “I’m not a convertible you buy when you figure out you’re going bald.” I was getting shrill. I tried again, more reasonably toned. “Or maybe this has been an ongoing thing? Maybe you’ve been cheating on your wife this whole time with different boys?”
“No,” Anthony said, “you were the only one.”
“I just don’t get it, are you gay? Or?”
“I think I’m bi,” he said.
“Jesus,” I said. “I can’t believe you fuck women.” I had wanted, as different as we were in age and background, in this one way for us to be the same.
“The fact that you think it’s disgusting is one of the reasons I’ve always shied away from dating men,” he said.
“Vaginas are disgusting,” I said. “So many folds, and the smell.” I had never seen a vagina in my life, but I felt confident I never wanted to.
“No one’s body is disgusting,” Anthony said quietly.
“You watched your wife push a baby out of that thing and you still want to fuck it? Color me confused is all, not my cup of tea.”
“Or maybe,” he said, “it’s easier for you to joke that your sexuality is about hating vaginas, instead of the fact that it’s about loving cock. Maybe being mean about women makes you feel better about the ways people are mean to you.”
“Don’t fucking psychoanalyze me.” None of this was going how I wanted or needed it to go. Why had I even gotten in his car? I just wanted to be by myself and cry. I didn’t want to fight, or explain myself, or understand. I just wanted to cry with no one watching me and then smoke a cigarette in a bathtub. It seemed insane that such simple desires were so impossible to fulfill, and yet it would be years before I would have my own space, my own house, and be allowed to smoke in a bathtub.
“I cheated on my wife with you,” Anthony said, “but that doesn’t make my entire life a lie.”
“Doesn’t it, though?”
“No,” he said, his voice resounding. He squeezed the leather of his steering wheel until it squeaked under his huge palms, and then he suddenly released it, raked his fingers through his hair, shaking with rage. “What the fuck am I doing here?”
“You tell me,” I said.
“When I was your age,” he said, his nostrils flaring, his rage contorting his face into something beautiful and strange, “I fell in love with my friend.”
The way he said the word “friend” hurt me, and I knew already the kind of story it would be.
“And he loved me. And we kissed each other, touched each other, all of it was a secret. It was so secret it was almost a secret from ourselves. We didn’t know what we were doing because we couldn’t afford to know. It was so dangerous just to be ourselves that it seemed dangerous to see, to feel, to be. It was like a dream where one thing morphs into another, and what maybe started out as a fear that we were not like other boys, that we were attracted to men, became a fear that our deepest selves in every particular were blasphemous, and that if we ever truly communicated with anyone the world would end. It was another time, there’s no way you can understand what it was like.”
“I understand,” I said, and I thought I did.
“My mom, she didn’t grow up watching Will & Grace. It was—I’m sure you have some stereotype in your mind about what the world was like before Prop 8 was struck down, but you will never understand what it meant for it to be that way, the kind of—the kind of deformity of consciousness that takes place. The way you can pretend you aren’t thinking certain things, refuse to notice that you notice what you notice. Anyway, I will never know exactly what happened or why, but word got out at school. I don’t know how someone found out. But the bullying was…was so tremendous that I had to leave the school.”
“My friend,” I said, my voice nervous on the word because it meant so much and it meant so little. Bunny was my only friend, but she was not my friend in the way that Anthony had used the word. She was not my lover, and yet, in some way I knew I loved her more than I had ever loved anyone before, more even than I loved Anthony. “Not a boyfriend, just a friend, beat up another girl because that girl saw us making out. In your car. And she was telling. And now the girl is in the hospital in a coma and she might not wake up. And my friend might go to jail, or else maybe nothing will happen. Her dad is really rich, so.”
“You weren’t out,” he said, a guess instead of a question.
“I mean—I wasn’t not out. I wore makeup and I had my little piercing and my sass. I’m sure people knew. But no, I was not out out.”
“Sometimes I wish I could have grown up in your generation. Just the freedom. Gay, bi, poly, queer—you could—I know it feels like the world is ending now, but coming out won’t end your world. You’ll see—it will be—”
And then I was so angry that the words ripped out of me just like the string on a FedEx envelope shreds the cardboard, unzipping myself, exploding with thoughts I didn’t even know I had inside me until I spit them into the close air of his car. “You tell me, ‘Oh, you don’t know what it was like, you could never understand the past, it was so hard’—well, you can’t fucking understand the present. You don’t know what it is to grow up in a country that has only ever been at war. To do active shooter drills in fucking kindergarten. To grow up knowing you’ll never make a living wage. You’ll never own a house. That the whole game is rigged, and you’ll work your whole life and have nothing to show for it.
“Sometimes I look at all these houses. These mansions. Sometimes I walk through this town and wonder: Who needs a house like this? Who needs a three-car garage? Who needs a master bedroom big enough for a couch by a fireplace? Who needs fucking LaCantina doors that slide so the whole front of your house is open? And the answer is: Everyone. Everyone wants their own personal fucking mansion, and everyone is willing to do whatever it takes to get one. We’re like rats at the feeding machine, pushing the lever, confused when all we get are shocks. And sometimes I walk around this neighborhood and I wish that everyone in it would die and all the houses would turn to ash and fall down in piles of clean black powder like sand, and everything that has ever been done could be undone.”
“God, I love you,” Anthony said, looking at me with his wet brown eyes, pure and beautiful as the eyes of a deer. I felt I could see him as he had been at every point in his life: as a hopeful little boy, as an arrogant teenager, as an earnest college student, as a tired father, as a man, a brave man, a man who chases after his own vitality and refuses to give up on what is right even when it’s wrong.
Reader, I fucked him in his car.
Part of the fallout of my conversation with Aunt Deedee was that I had been relocated to the tiny room that had been a walk-in closet on the first floor, and so I no longer had a window into Bunny’s bedroom. I no longer had a window at all. Jason had our old bedroom to himself, which delighted him. Whenever we encountered each other in the house, he would address me as “faggot.” “Good morning, faggot!” he would say. “Would you like some cereal, faggot? There’s milk left.”
I think Aunt Deedee had hoped that the small victory of kicking me out of his room and forcing me into a literal closet (!) would pacify him, and he did seem happy about it, but he did not seem satisfied. A fire does not stop after consuming a single log. I knew he would keep trying to get me out, but all I had to do was get through senior year. I could outlast him. For me, the situation was also a kind of improvement, since I had a new solitude in my tiny room, where I was free to watch porn or makeup tutorials without censure.
In retrospect, it seems clear that I should have had more of a reaction to being treated so uncivilly in my own home, a space where I was supposed to be, at least in theory, safe. But I had never been safe in my own home. Not even as a child. In fact, I had been much more alarmed when my own father commented that he thought one of the bag boys at the Albertsons might be a “poof.” I had no idea what being a poof meant, but I knew it was dangerous. I didn’t immediately associate it with sexuality, at that age, around six or seven, I associated the word with a makeup poof, something soft and pink. Jason calling me a faggot and thinking it was funny or rebellious or interesting to do so was disgusting, yes, but also pathetic and childish. A bit of the moron doth protest too much, methinks. So I would answer him: “Hey, dudebro, why don’t you go drink some ranch and swim with your shirt on?”
“Go suck a cock, homo,” he would say when he saw me getting home from school.
“Your pussy is way too dry to be riding my dick like this,” I would say as I shouldered past him into my room.
And I think my rage felt as good to me as his rage felt to him.
The only place it was tolerable to exist in my house was in my tiny, windowless room, which was fine for studying or sleeping, especially at first, but as the weeks wore on, I found myself spending more and more time at Bunny Lampert’s house, even though I was still finding Bunny extremely hard to take. For one thing, she had begun wearing her mother’s (very large) sapphire engagement ring on her right hand. This, together with her ridiculous new office wear, made her feel elegant, causing her to use her arms and arch her torso in new, oddly artificial ways. Maybe she wouldn’t even finish high school, she said, languorously stretching. Maybe she would get her GED and go to work for her father. Maybe she would marry Coach Eric, who was still coaching her three times a week. It would be nice, she admitted, to play volleyball for the sheer joy of it. She had gotten so narrow in her thinking, focused on the wrong things. “I mean,” she said, leaning in conspiratorially, “it’s just a game!”
The Coach Eric business was extremely distressing. He had kissed her at the end of one of their practice sessions on the beach. There were several volleyball courts down at the beach, free for anyone to use, and mostly they remained unused except in the height of summer, but Eric and Bunny spent an afternoon down there three times a week. That Friday they had stayed to see the sun set; the sun was setting earlier and earlier as winter settled in, and they’d sat, sweaty and exhausted in the sand, their bodies too close.
“I could hear his knee creak when he moved it,” she said to me later, rapturous. And then he had kissed her, and, as she put it, “smashed her down on the sand.” I took this to be the most unromantic description of dry humping I had ever heard, and I did not ask questions, desperate to have no further particulars root themselves in my imagination.
“This is,” I said as brightly as I could, “a super-bad idea! And you should stop! Immediately! ’K?”
“Phh,” Bunny said. “Says the king of online hookups.”
I had lost credibility with her.
The next time they met, he told her it was a horrible mistake, never to be repeated, that she must not tell anyone, that they must go on as before, that he would hold himself in check. But of course it proved “difficult to control himself” around her, and Bunny for her part was doing absolutely anything she could to break his resolve, from wearing her shortest, tightest shorts to accidentally spilling water all over her breasts. She was a comically large Lolita. Coquettishness was also not something that came naturally to Bunny; “on the nose” was her flirting style in toto.
“So then I said that having a nice butt was like my number one quality that I was looking for in a husband, and he kind of did this thing with his eyebrow, like, did you just say that? And then I said, ‘And you have a nice one!’ And he blushed!”
I mean, I was fish-mouthed, just blinking, trying to take it all in.
She would say things to him like “Dang, I hope I don’t get sand in my cootch, I’m not wearing any underwear!”
It was madness. It was lunacy. She was a child bull in a china shop of adult social norms. I didn’t think I could handle hearing about it for even a single day more.
After Thanksgiving, there was a long weekend to endure, and I was dreading seeing her, but spending time in my own house was out of the question. Jason had friends over and the living room was a miasma of farts, Axe body spray, and cultural appropriation. “Na, son,” they crowed to one another, bouncing on the balls of their idiot feet, “she a trap queen!”
I was expecting to find Bunny ebullient with her latest frontal-assault flirtation, but instead she was somber and preoccupied. Ann Marie had been comatose for more than a month, and I realized, looking at Bunny as she chewed her thumbnail on her father’s white sofa, that she had lost quite a bit of weight in that time. Her cheekbones were more prominent, giving her face angles that made her look more like her mother. “Will you look at something for me?” she asked. She got out her backpack, which was white canvas and covered in small black hearts. She pulled out a wad of opened mail, handed me the clump, and went back to chewing the skin around her thumbnail. “What do those look like to you? I mean, do you think I’m reading them right?”
I opened the first one. They were letters from the IRS. Some were notices of deficiency, some were notices of examination. They spanned, in the tax years they referenced, almost a decade, and the amounts they listed as owed were staggering. For 2007, they claimed Ray Lampert still owed $107,000 in back taxes. For 2009 he owed $65,489. There was a notice of a tax lien placed against their house. There were notices explaining that his bank account had been frozen. What was most confusing, as I sorted through them, was that there was not a clear escalating time frame. The notice claiming his bank account had been frozen was from five years ago. The lien on their home was new.
“Where did you find these?” I asked. “I’m guessing Cassie doesn’t know about this.”
“I don’t know,” Bunny said, rubbing her eyes with the palms of her hands. “That bitch would die for him.”
“So how did you get these?”
She sighed. “They were in his office here at the house. I mean, they weren’t even hidden. They were just on his desk. I was never curious about what was on his desk before, but I got the mail today and there was a notice they were putting a lien on the house, and so then I went looking and found the rest.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, “he’s been making money hand over fist, so why not pay his taxes? It just seems so weird!”
“He’s been overextended,” she said. It was such a Ray word, such a typically grandiose euphemism, but for what exactly?
“Upstanding city council member and tax dodger,” I said, in a game show–host voice, but she didn’t laugh.
“What’s going to happen?” she asked me.
“I mean—I guess, eventually, he’ll have to pay?”
“He doesn’t have the money to pay,” she said, “I mean, obviously!”
“Bullshit,” I said, “he has this house. I’m sure he has other investments. He’s just living in some kind of system of cycling delusions where he thinks he can catch up. But he’ll figure out that he can’t, and he’ll settle up with the IRS and maybe you’ll lose the house, but you’ll be fine.”
Bunny began to cry. “Where will we go?” she asked.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, “you’ll rent an apartment!”
She nodded, wiping her tears.
And then a young woman whom neither of us recognized opened the front door of their house, and Ray Lampert came in with a bandage wrapped in a thick halo around his head and bruising of Technicolor plum in perfectly symmetrical triangles under his eyes and on the tops of his cheekbones. Something was wrong with his eyes and he seemed to be blind, or his eyes seemed to be stitched shut—in any event, they were swollen and something was deeply wrong with the skin above them. The young woman led him to one of the pretty French armchairs and helped him heave himself down onto it. “Hello,” she said in a singsong voice, “I’m Charity!” She was wearing all black: tight black pants and a black lace shirt over a tank top. She was delicately pretty and had pale, milky skin.
“What happened?” Bunny asked.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Ray said, which led both of us to continue in our assumption that he had been in some sort of fight. “I had to get it done before we went to court and you never know when that’s gonna be.”
“Okay, baby,” Charity said, “I’m putting your meds in the kitchen. He should not drink on these pain pills! Okay, Bunny? Don’t let him drink. I gotta go to work.”
“You’re the best,” Ray said.
“Wait, w-what?” Bunny stammered.
“It’s a simple surgery. In, out, bing, bang,” he said. I noticed there was something wrong with his speech, some thickness to his consonants that I assumed was from the head bandage or the drugs.
“What surgery?”
“Just a little stuff,” he said.
As I examined him more closely, I began to understand that his eyelids were scored with crescents of black stitches in their swollen folds. I gasped and covered my mouth with my hand. “He’s had his eyes done!”
“It was a forehead lift,” Ray said, “but it really only makes sense to do the eyes at the same time.”
Bunny, beside me on the sofa, got up into a half crouch and was shaking with rage. Everything she said came out in a half yell. “You got plastic surgery? We’re about to lose our house and you got plastic surgery? What is wrong with you? And who is that girl? Is she the hostess from La Trattoria? Because she looks like the hostess from La Trattoria!”
La Trattoria was the fanciest Italian restaurant in town.
“Charity is a friend,” Ray said. “Who was kind enough to drive me to the doctor.”
He said this as though Bunny had failed to be kind enough to drive him to the doctor. She sputtered for a moment, then cried, “I mean, how much did this even cost?”
“It’s fine,” Ray said. I was beginning to understand what was wrong with his lips as well. He’d had them pumped full of collagen.
“Really, because I found a bunch of letters from the IRS saying they are going to take the house, and it doesn’t seem like it’s fine!”
“My lawyers are on it. Don’t worry. I’m sorry you were scared, but really everything is fine, Bunny Rabbit!” He looked at her through his squinty swollen eyes. Bunny was frozen on the couch, trying to decide whether or not to believe him. “You know me, Bunny. You know I’m the king of this kind of stuff.”
“Then why haven’t you paid them?”
“Because I don’t owe that money! The only way you can contest disagreements is by refusing to pay—if I pay but then say I didn’t owe that, I’ll never see the money again. They nickel-and-dime you every step of the way, you have to fight to get a fair shake!”
Bunny visibly softened, and I was astonished his pants didn’t burst into flame. I felt sick as I watched, even though, or perhaps because, I understood. She wanted everything he said to be true so badly that she would ignore all evidence to the contrary. “Jesus, Daddy,” she said, “you should tell me about these things!”
“I didn’t want to worry you with a bunch of bullshit.”
“And this surgery? Why would you have plastic surgery?”
“It’s an investment,” he said. “For the business. You have to look young, look good, you know, plus with the forehead lift, it’s interesting, they basically cut away a strip of your forehead at the hairline, so it hides that you’re balding. It’s like a two for one!”
“But couldn’t you have told me you were getting it?” she asked.
“Honestly, I didn’t understand it would be this big a deal. I mean, look at me. I look like shit! I thought I could turn in early and you’d never notice. Wear some makeup, what’s it called, concealer, for a couple days!” He smiled, shook his head to show what an idiot he’d been about it.
“You do look really horrible,” she said.
“I look like they messed up a Raggedy Ann doll!” he said, and they both laughed. “Let’s order a pizza!”
And they ordered a pizza. And I stayed, and I ate it with them. Somehow, the night was weirdly fun. Pizza grease and red wine got on the IRS letters. Ray convinced us that he could have just one glass of red wine with his pills, and Bunny said we should get to have a glass if he did, and for some reason I drank it with them. I held the glass in my hand, and I couldn’t believe I would really drink it, because not crossing this line had been a deep part of my self-identity. I took a sip. It tasted exactly like it smelled. I was ready for a whole new world. I was ready to be a different person. A terrible person.
After the first glass, I understood why every, or almost every, adult I knew did this. I felt amazing. My body was like rippling water, full of energy, nothing hurt, and everything was funny, even me, especially me. I couldn’t stop the things that came out of my mouth, and at one point I made Ray laugh so hard his eyelid suture tore a little and he started bleeding.
“Stop,” he moaned, holding a Domino’s napkin to his bleeding eyelid. “Stop!”
“Mr. Lampert,” I said, holding out an imaginary microphone, “why did you feel the need to do this terrible thing to your face?”
“I don’t know,” he gasped, still dabbing at his eyes.
“Was it a fear of death?”
“Eh, death. I mean—I don’t love the idea of dying, but no, I don’t think it was death.”
“Then was it fear you would no longer be able to attract the pussy?”
“Jesus!”
“Answer the question, sir.”
Bunny was clapping, laughing, delighted with this game.
“Honestly, yes. I mean, it was terrible. I mentioned to Charity about maybe getting work done, and I’m expecting her to say, no, no, you don’t need it, but right away she chimes in with ‘That’s a great idea!’ ”
“Do you love Charity?”
“No, but she’s a freak in bed,” he said.
“Well, you know what they say about a woman who’ll eat ass—don’t marry her, but keep her in your phone.”
Ray laughed at this like it was the funniest thing he had ever heard. “You are too much, Michael,” he said.
“Next question, marriage equality: Were you for or against?”
“For!” he cried.
“Hallelloo, hunty!” I said.
“Gay people should be able to do whatever they want. Except maybe teach little kids.”
“Wh-what, now?” I said.
“Well, I don’t know, I just—teaching preschool or something. Or even elementary school teachers. That doesn’t seem right to me.”
Bunny’s mouth was literally hanging open and her eyes were bulging out of her head. She couldn’t believe her dad was saying this. But I could.
“Yeah, you think gay teachers can turn little kids gay? How do they do it? Pheromones, or like pixie dust, or do you actually think that we’re all pederasts who want to fuck little boys?” I was still pretending to speak into the imaginary microphone for some reason.
“Well, I don’t know,” Ray said. He was still smiling, like we were going to have some kind of interesting fucking debate.
“This isn’t Fox & Friends,” I interrupted him. “I don’t care about your opinions, Mr. Lampert, because you are a cesspool of a human being with the moral compass of a gnat.” He was squinting at me through his busted, swollen eyes, trying to tell if I was joking, if this was some fun read, hashtag the library is open. Bunny had both hands clapped over her mouth, just watching. “You think this town loves you, but have you noticed you don’t have any friends? You’ve built a child’s idea of a rich man’s house and you live in it like you’re the king, but what are you king of? Money you don’t have? A daughter who doesn’t like you? No wonder your wife drove into traffic, you’re a fucking joke.”
And then I got up, and I left, and no one stopped me.