I was born to wish for more than I can have. No little fishing hole for Demon, he wants the whole ocean. And on from there, as regards the man- overboard. I came late to getting my brain around the problem of me, and still yet might not have. The telling of this tale is supposed to make it come clear. It’s a disease, a lot of people tell you that now, be they the crushed
souls under repair at NA meetings or the doctors in buttoned-up sweaters. Fair enough. But where did it come from, this wanting disease? From how I got born, or the ones that made me, or the crowd I ran with later?
Everybody warns about bad influences, but it’s these things already inside you that are going to take you down. The restlessness in your gut, like
tomcats gone stupid with their blood feuds, prowling around in the moon- dead dark. The hopeless wishes that won’t quit stalking you: some perfect words you think you could say to somebody to make them see you, and
love you, and stay. Or could say to your mirror, same reason.
Some people never want like that, no reaching for the bottle, the needle, the dangerous pretty face, all the wrong stars. What words can I write here for those eyes to see and believe? For the lucky, it’s simple. Like the song says, this little light of mine. Don’t let Satan blow it out. Look farther down the pipe, see what’s coming. Ignore the damn tomcats. Quit the dope.
Two thousand and one was the year I had everything and still went hungry. I was a General. A freshman, and already I had that. Fridays, being worshipped, wearing my number 88. Roaring out of the Red Rage field
house with my herd of men. Big tackles, locker room wrestling, all that
hard flesh on flesh was like feeding a whole other empty stomach I never knew I had. Even the bad felt good. Pushing myself in the weight room till every string in my arms was on fire, my chest clenched like a heart attack, the guy spotting me saying Jesus, man, your face looks like a damn hemorrhoid. Laughing because it’s so fucking good to hurt that bad. Most people never get anywhere close to being that much alive.
Learning the plays by heart and then making them on the field, there are no words to describe. It’s an act of magic to take an idea and turn it into
bodies on bodies, a full-participation thing for all to see. Like what’s said about the Bible, the word made flesh. Learning to read the QB’s mind, knowing what he’ll do almost before he does. The Generals were always a running team, but now the Demon was changing their game. Passes fired and completed, you’d hear the stands go dead for one heartbeat before they roared. Excuse me for saying, but damn, it’s like an orgasm. To blow up a crowd by doing what nobody expected.
Coach Winfield was like a father. Just guessing on that obviously, but he was the first and only man that ever saw what I could do. Not just do for
him, there were those, many in number. This kid can cut my tobacco, make me a buck, eat my shit. With Coach, everything we did, we did for God and country but specifically Lee County. More than once I got mentioned by
name in the Courier, because who doesn’t love the shooting star, “From Foster Homes to Football Fame.” I got a tiny bit full of myself over that, but Coach was more so. If he had his eye on me at all times, driving me hardest, that was his patriotism. I knew he’d lost a lot in his life. The young wife, and before that, his career, getting hurt and messed up as a kid not much older than I was now. I knew he went to bed too early, that he drank to shut himself down. And I also knew that whatever good a man like that could still feel for another person, he felt for me.
So I had more than I deserved. Ms. Annie, for another example. In high school art was a real class, for juniors and seniors, but she gave me special permission. I could take her class all four years if I wanted. Assuming I stuck around that long. Lee High is where kids like us come to our
crossroads of life: walk up the steps of the big brick box and turn right, through the front door into the classrooms. Or left, down the long chain-link tunnel, past a thousand army and navy recruitment posters, into Lee Career and Tech. Nothing arty down there, trust me.
Thanks to the September 11 thing that happened that fall, the posters now were stapled on top of each other, and the recruiters likewise. Let’s go kick terrorist ass, they all said, and many answered the call. Why not. Lured by
the promise of one paying job at least, between high school and death.
Because the attack itself didn’t seem quite real. To us, skyscrapers are just TV, so watching two of them fall down, over and over, looked like the same movie effects of any other we’d seen. We knew people died. We had our assembly, flags down, sad and everything. I’d had nightmares of falling like that from on high. I know it was real buildings. And they still have lots
more standing in those cities, so I guess that’s a worry. Here, if any
terrorists came flying over, they’d look down on trashed-out mine craters and blown-up mountains and say, “Keep going. This place already got taken out.” It was hard to see how September 11 was my fight. As far as doing good for my fellow man, my better option was football.
Lee Career and Tech looked like a path to freedom, definitely. A shot at working in an auto shop, no more to be held prisoner at a desk? Yes please. But Mr. Armstrong had nailed my destiny to the classrooms. Spanish, Geometry, Personal Finance, like I would have need for any of that. I stuck it out for one reason only, my daily hour of Ms. Annie. That was the plus
side of being in her art class. Downside: having to share. She was sweet to everybody, it turned out, walking around the room saying “Nice
composition,” or “I like your use of color there,” or at the least, “I can see you worked really hard on that, Aidan.” I had to do the same assignments as everybody else, elements of design, linear and grid drawing, value shading. Life drawing. She had us take turns sitting as the model, but clothes stayed on, so. Not like my earlier art enterprise. This was about proportions and such, tension versus a body at rest. I won’t say I didn’t learn things. Oil paints, all these pigment colors with automotive names: titanium, cadmium, cobalt. For homework we did still lifes. Angus helped me think of excellent ones, like False Teeth in Salad Bowl. If I did cartoons now, they had to be on my own clock.
All the middle schools fed into Lee High, which meant I was back in school with my own people. A Maggot-Demon reunion. And Emmy, a junior like Angus. But all going our different ways, as you do. I was a jock. Maggot mainly hung with the Goth girl Martha that cut his hair. Emmy sang in the choir that Ms. Annie was director of, and ran with the popular end of the arty kids, Drama and them. What Angus had to say about the
Drama girls, you can guess. But even still, I was sharing those halls with
people that knew me. Some were my wingmen, some had put ice down my back. One of them still remembered my mom. It felt like I existed.
What I didn’t have was the thing I thought about night and day. In high school now, a General, and I’d still not been laid. Not the full thing. For various reasons, it hadn’t happened. My number-one crush being twenty- some years and a marriage outside of bounds. And a teacher. I knew they had laws, thanks to that home ec teacher scandal in Gate City that people
won’t stop talking about until the sun goes cold. No way. But girls my age seemed young, more heavily into showcasing the goods than backing up the inventory. Angus had tainted my judgment.
And then I fell face-first into Linda Larkins. Long-legged homework club flirt, older sister of May Ann. She was out of high school now, nobody I would run into, but out of the blue sky one day she calls me up. I’m waiting for “Sorry, wrong number,” but she’s discussing Friday’s game, how great I looked. And then without even a warmup stretch, she’s talking about my tight end like that’s a sight she’d like more of, she’d bet my ass is all muscle and hers is pretty tight as well, had I ever had my tongue up a pussy like hers. With Mattie Kate and Angus not six feet away pouring Cokes over their ice cream. This is the kitchen phone we’re on, and me shitting bricks, saying I appreciate that, okay I’ll think about that, thank you. I kept my front to the wall and made a break for privacy.
This was to become a regular thing. I would mumble something and run to take the call upstairs. We had a phone up there on a long cord we could drag into our rooms. I was a good liar. But Jesus. This girl. I’d have her breathing in my ear, I’m about to come, and Mattie Kate is outside the door hollering, “Do y’all kids have anything to put in a dark load?” Linda would not stop until we both got ourselves off. Full-color descriptions. Sometimes I’d have to fake the big finish for safety reasons, like if I had people waiting on me and needed a hasty exit. But holy crap. For a young male, a blueball shutdown like that I’m pretty sure could be fatal.
I kept expecting her to give me the coordinates for a meetup, but no.
Linda Larkins was all phone sex during my entire freshman year. It never even occurred to me that I could just hang up on her. She was older and had singled me out, which felt like getting drafted to the NFL—you go where you’re chosen. I spent a lot of time trying to come up with things to say to sound more grown-up. Meanwhile, I still did the usual stuff with other girls—homecoming dances, dates, all that. But it put a strange twist on things. Even if I was out on a normal date or making out, there was this woman, who could probably suck the enamel off a phone receiver, waiting to cap off my night.
As always, Angus had plenty to say about the girls I was seeing, usually calling them immature. But this time, he had no idea. No clue about the older woman who had me by the proverbial balls.
The Peggots started inviting me over for Sunday dinners again, no longer worried that I was trying to wiggle my way into being adopted. I had forgiven them for all that anyway. It worked out in the end—not just because Miss Betsy was rich and sending checks to Coach every month for my upkeep, but because she was my real family in a way, making up for what I never got from my dad.
Angus would drive me to the Peggots’, with U-Haul in the passenger seat since she needed hours for her driver’s ed. One time she got curious about the trailer where I was born, so we walked up to it. It made me pretty sad. There was a Big Wheel trike left on the porch, toys abandoned in the rain, and a naked doll half-buried in dead leaves, its hair cut off with just the little dots left on its scalp. A whole new family lived there now. Mom and I were nowhere.
Mrs. Peggot always would ask if my friend wanted to stay for dinner, and a time or two Angus did, but it was awkward. That winter she was into this black leather motorcycle cap, like they wore in the old movies prior to helmets. Mrs. Peggot, poor little thing, just stared at that leather hat with no gumption to make her take it off. So over here is badass Angus, over there
is Maggot with the eye makeup, black nail polish, and ever-expanding lip ring collection. Big shock, Demon is the nice-looking normal kid at the table.
They’d got so old, Mr. Peg worse than her. He always had the limp, but now it was the event of his day to get up out of his La-Z-Boy to come sit at the kitchen table. Maggot was taking his toll on them. He’d not say two
words at dinner, just the black eyes bugged at me from time to time like, Rescue me. Which he was in no need of, Maggot did what he pleased. He laid out of school plenty, and I’d heard about the molly parties, the
drugstore raids where he was ganking more than Max Factor. I wasn’t sure anymore how I fit into the Peggot situation.
One evening Mr. Peg got me outside, shoving his walker out the kitchen door, huffing and puffing over to his truck, supposedly for my second opinion on his battery cable. Actually, to discuss Maggot. Same truck, the Ram. Pretty sure Mr. Peg would be buried in that vehicle. He said he and Mrs. Peggot couldn’t handle Maggot anymore. They were getting almost scared of him. I didn’t ask if Mariah was getting out of prison any time soon. I tried to stick to the positive, that Maggot was a tenderhearted person underneath the cosmetics and death metal business.
Mr. Peg asked, “What is he thinking of, to go around looking thataway?”
I said I didn’t know. Not wanting to be a traitor to Maggot. But also, I really didn’t.
Mr. Peg elbowed the truck to keep his balance while he lit a Camel with his shaky hands. He smoked and looked up at the sky. His bottom eyelids drooped so their red insides showed. “Whenever I’s a boy,” he finally said, “we just done like we’s told. Is that so damn hard to do?”
I said we probably were more messed up nowadays due to TV and cable.
He asked why, though. What was so confusing? I don’t think he was wanting me to throw Maggot under the bus, just really and truly wondering what was so hard for us. Now, versus the old days. I said maybe the
difference was we could see now what all we were missing. With everybody else in the world being richer than us, doing all kinds of
nonsense and getting away with it. It pisses you off. It makes you restless.
Mr. Peg finished his Camel and stamped it out on the ground, shifting the heel of his old leather shoe side to side, grinding in slo-mo. Even for that small thing, he was hard pressed. “Do you reckon we spoilt him?” he asked. “Me and his mammaw? Because I’ll tell you something. She’ll go to her
grave a-wishing she done better for Mariah.”
I told him Mrs. Peggot had always treated me with the exact same
niceness as Maggot whenever we were small, and I was glad of it. That as far as home life went, I had run the full gamut, and theirs was the best by far. I didn’t think Maggot was mad or spoiled or anything like that. Just trying out being a different type person.
“Well, what kind of gal is ever going to have him like that? If he keeps on?”
I said maybe he was just having his wild oaks and would come around in time. Or else he’d find somebody. I reminded Mr. Peg of that thing people always say: There’s a shoe out there for every foot. Mr. Peg said he used to
think that, but now he wasn’t sure if Maggot even wanted to find any shoe to fit him. And I didn’t say so, but I kind of agreed on that. Or if he did,
because honestly don’t we all, probably Maggot’s kind of shoe hadn’t been invented yet. Or if so, they didn’t stock it in Lee County.
Weirdly, I kept thinking of Fast Forward, how he could look at us and
name the true person inside us. Even if we were pathetic losers for the most part. Fast Forward was proof that a kid could keep his head up and survive, no matter how shitty the waters. He’d called me a diamond. I don’t know what I thought he could do for Maggot. It just seemed like this was a situation for Fast Man.
