|
 |
The Ditch
(excerpt)
I remember the first time I went over to Scott Gillespie’s house. I was twelve and he was a year older. It was early spring and his family just moved in down the street. We were living on the south side of Houston in a house my grandparents owned. They let us live there for free, since my dad was always in-between jobs. That’s the way my mom put it. I heard my grandmother put it other ways. Scott came to the door one day and asked if I could come over. He was a tall, gangly kid with a silly grin. My mom would later say he looked like a stray dog. “A little too eager to please,” she said. There weren’t that many kids in our neighborhood, though, so I couldn’t be picky. We ended up sneaking a bunch of his dad’s old Playboys into his bedroom, which was their converted garage. I sat on the dank queen-size mattress, flipping through the pictures; shoes off, mouth open. There was Cher, straddling a bedpost over two pages with a feather boa draped across her shoulders, her silky hair reaching down and lightly touching her dark, almost black nipples. Scott put on a Jimi Hendrix album and jumped around the room with one of the Playboys. He laid down on the ground with it, pressing his face into Miss September, pumping his legs to the rhythm. I put my face into Cher, smelling the stale paper. Before I knew what was happening, Scott got on the bed and fell into me, wrestling my back into the sheets, pinning down my shoulders. His eyes stretched out wide like a cat.
“Get off me,” I yelled, grabbing his sweaty arms and pushing him off. He was laughing with a kind of meanness.
“I was playing,” he said, throwing a magazine at me as I rolled off the bed. I felt the hot, stale air of his garage room closing in on me. The hairs on my arms stood up.
“Fag,” I said, throwing the magazine back.
“Oh baby, did he hurt you?” He placed his lips up to the cover and giggled. I finally let out a laugh, but it was forced.
Later, while I stood guard, he put the Playboys back, neat as toothpicks, in the hall closet.
“My dad counts these,” he told me.
“How do you know?” I asked him. He didn’t answer. He was focused, the wildness and laughter creased back into his cheeks.
|
|