Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

The Kid has decided to embellish his story a little here and there, make it more interesting to the Professor so he’ll think he’s converting the Kid from being a sex offender into a regular law-abiding citizen with a normal sex life. Whatever that is. The Kid believes that in some sense he already has a normal sex life, as normal as anyone he’s ever known well enough to get a good idea of what they do. Except of course that he’s never done anything with or to anyone himself and is still technically a virgin. That’s not normal. He also admits that it probably was not normal to watch as much pornography as he did from the age of almost eleven until he was busted. Seven to eight hours a day and sometimes more from the time he got home from his afterschool job at the light store well into the night until he finally fell asleep in the gray dawn light. When his mother came in to wake him for school his computer screen would be showing three naked guys fucking a Chinese girl. His mother takes the mouse in her hand and says, You’re too young for this. You better be paying for it yourself this time, buster. Then she sits down at the computer and with her eyes dimming watches the gangbang drag out in front of her as if it was a Ninja video game. Hurry up and get dressed, you’re gonna be late for school.

Plus he knows — or rather he believes as he has no evidence to the contrary — that it was not normal for him to be jerking off five to ten times a day especially as he grew into his late teens and should have been getting blow jobs from girls like the other guys at school. But masturbating had become as automatic and normal a bodily function as swallowing or clearing his throat of phlegm.

On the other hand it’s not normal that he hasn’t masturbated once since the night he was arrested. He tried a couple of times to jerk off but he couldn’t make his dick get hard no matter what porn video he played in his mind, even the kinky scenes that used to make him come without his even having to touch himself. Nothing worked. So he gave up trying. He was only doing it because he thought he should be jerking off once a day given his youth or at least a couple times a week. Once he gave up trying to get hard, once he accepted that he really wasn’t sexually normal, he felt better. Calmer. As if by giving up trying to scratch an itch that he couldn’t reach the itch went away.

As the seven other current residents of the camp beneath the Causeway one by one approach the Kid’s tent more or less at the appointed time to be greeted by the Professor in a to-the-Kid strangely hearty way, the Kid squats next to his dog and his parrot and feeds them. He cuts the cube of Spam into small chunks for Annie and breaks the doughnuts into walnut-size pieces that he hands piece by piece to Einstein. The parrot takes each piece of doughnut gently from the Kid’s fingers with one clawed foot like a prehistoric hand and studies it for a second as if examining it for dirt or contamination and passes it onto his beak and swallows and blinks. He opens his mouth and shows his yellow tongue and seems about to speak. The Kid opens his mouth too. Silence. The Kid hands the parrot another piece of doughnut. The parrot takes it in his claws and stares at the Kid. The Kid hears Einstein say in a creaky but clear voice: Thank you. I like you. You’re a good kid. You may be fucked-up sexually, but you’re normal.

The Kid looks over at Annie who has finished off the Spam and is now smiling gratefully at the Kid. He says to the dog, Did you hear that, Annie?

Annie nods and wags her tail slowly.

The Professor turns and says, Hear what?

The Parrot. Einstein.

I’m afraid I missed it. Sounded like a squawk to me.

Yeah. I guess that’s all it was. A squawk.

IT’S A MOTLEY BAND OF BROTHERS THAT HAS gathered around the Professor. The Kid is surprised that they answered his call except maybe for the Rabbit who has a mocking way of looking at life and enjoys finding ways to express it. It’s something he shares with the Kid. Or rather it’s something the Kid learned from the Rabbit and now applies to almost everything and everyone that comes to him. When he first arrived at the Causeway settlement — after living for a month on the streets of Calusa and in the public parks and the occasional abandoned building and being hassled and chased off by cops and private security guards and maintenance people — the Kid didn’t have an attitude other than the one that had got him safely through three months in the minimum security prison in Hastings.

A “correctional facility” it was called — he was being corrected, he believed, and made every effort to help them succeed. He was passive and obedient and cooperative. Everyone including the guards liked him and thought he was a little simple. Maybe borderline retarded. It was how he had behaved all his life in school and at his job at the light store and in the army. Until the night he took the initiative to hitchhike up to Ottawa to see Willow his favorite porn star and brought back all those DVDs to give to his buddies at Fort Drum. Big mistake. After that one initiative, that one departure from his usual compliant docility, he’d gone quickly back to his old tried-and-true personality like a turtle into its shell. For him for years his computer and its access to the Internet and pornography and sex-talk chat rooms had provided the shell and kept him from loneliness and dismay and the explosive desperation that often follows hard upon. His computer kept him from turning violent and he was self-medicating with an addiction to pornography to the point where he was no longer using it to get high or hard but merely not to be bored or harmful to others.

Maddie who ran the weekly group therapy sessions at Hastings explained all this to him. She told him that it was as if he had been addicted to heroin during those years and the only real cure was for him to look inside himself and learn what or who was the true cause of his rage. She was a small thin brittle-looking woman in her early thirties with a cloud of curly green-tinted hair. She painted her fingernails black like a 1990s punk queen and said she had a pierced nose and tongue and other piercings on her body that she had to take off and check in a locker every time she came to the prison which she probably thought impressed the inmates in group. But the men serving time at Hastings were mostly upscale white guys convicted of fraud and embezzlement and Type 2 and 3 sex offenders like the Kid none of whom was particularly impressed. Especially not the Kid who saw her as just one more of the kind of girls and women who thought he was weird and pathetic and treated him accordingly.

They got no argument from the Kid. He was weird and pathetic. Had always been that way. Even his mother thought he was weird and pathetic. Many times when she didn’t think the Kid was listening he heard her say it to her women friends or to the guy she happened to be sleeping with and sometimes she even said it to the Kid himself right to his face. Although she always said it with a warm affectionate smile as if she actually preferred weird and pathetic to normal and praiseworthy. So that on one level it made the Kid feel good when she said it: You’re such a loner, such a loser, your only friend is that goddam iguana you’re obsessed with, you’re scared of girls, you don’t play sports like the other boys but at least I don’t have to worry about you getting into a gang or doing drugs, you never seem to have any friends at all, you’re not interested in cars like other boys your age, you’re not turned on by video games, your clothes are like an old retired janitor’s clothes, you spend all your hard-earned money maxing out first my credit card and now your own debit card on Internet porn sites that you have to be eighteen or older to watch anyhow, mister. Don’t forget that. She tousles his hair and smiles and her eyes fill. You’re so short for your age and so skinny. It’s my fault you’re the way you are, honey. I tried. Lord knows, I tried, and I might have found a father for you if I believed that any father is better than no father at all. But I didn’t believe that when you were little, and I sure as hell don’t believe it now.