Chris McCormick - Desert Boys

“Daley,” Jean said. “Help me out.” I scooted my chair over to my sister and leaned into her. She flipped my mom’s cup, and we began our inspection.

I could hear my dad at the counter, running water for his Folgers.

My sister and I conferred. A black wiggle draped one side of the cup. Two smudges intertwined near the lip. I pointed to this and told Jean I saw an infinity sign. She saw it, too.

“We’ve got it,” I said. “Mom, Dad: you’ll both live forever. You are the first people in the world who will never die.”

My mother slapped the table, startling everyone to silence. “You’re not taking it seriously,” she said, as angry as I’d ever seen her. After a minute, she reached across the table to touch my wrist with her fingers. They were cold. They had thinned so much that she couldn’t wear a ring. “You’ll never have a child,” she said. “That’s what I saw. I’ll put it that way, Daley, that you’ll never have a child.”

“He can have one of mine,” Jean said, and this got everyone, even Mom, to laugh a bit.

“God knows what I’m trying to say,” Mom said, letting go of my wrist with a little pat.

God’s not the only one, I wanted to tell her; Jean and Dad knew what she was trying to say, too, and had for years. But God would have known more, wouldn’t he? He would have known how much I loved my mother and how much I resented her, how desperately I needed her and how urgently I needed to rid myself of her, how impossible it was for me to imagine my life after her death and how many times I already had. Among a million things, her death meant that I would never have to introduce her to the man I loved. In equal parts, this liberated and devastated me.

“At least,” my mom said, “read my fortune seriously. At least you could do that.”

And to some extent, I could. What I knew about her future was this: that she would not sprout wings and ascend to heaven, that she would not, in a time of danger or despair, come to my aid. But the more closely I examined her cup — the coffee grounds, yes, but also the cracked, orange prints of her lipstick at the rim, the ghosts of her — the more I couldn’t be sure.

1. No word, in the desert’s language, for “moderate.” For months, the heat clocked in at three digits until, for months more, the temperature dropped below freezing. The surrounding San Gabriel and Tehachapi Mountains acted as perfect curtains behind which we could either hide or misbehave. Most preferred the latter. In the Antelope Valley, even the plants — Joshua trees and cacti — were ugly and mean, and the Santa Ana winds conspired with the tumbleweeds, compelling them to dart through traffic like suicide bombers. From the Bic’d and Doc Marten’d skinheads to the howling and hungry coyotes, from the braided, defensive leaves of the California juniper to the resentful and resented black and brown teenagers dragged there from Los Angeles — in a place where toughness and tribalism permeated everything living and everything dead, it was not the best thing to be a sentimental, thin-skinned fag like me.

2. You wouldn’t know by looking at me, but my mother was raised in another country and spoke with an accent. One effect of the accent was that she pronounced p ’s as b ’s. When I was a child, this seemed inconsequential to me — my sister and I heard the correct pronunciations from our dad, and were rarely thrown by Mom ordering bineabble on the pizza, or asking if we’d prefer black, green, or bebbermint tea.

But one day my third-grade class had, for some reason, a sleepover party. The party wasn’t actually held overnight; the kids were simply supposed to wear pajamas, bring toys, and pretend.

As far as I can remember, my father had never said the word “pajamas.” I’d only heard my mom say it, usually after coming home from work, when she’d tell my sister and me to join her in getting comfortable.

At one point during the pretend sleepover, I made all the boys laugh by asking which of the girls had the best BJ’s. I didn’t understand why they were laughing, but I enjoyed the boys’ attention. When one of the girls told the teacher, no matter how much I cried and argued my innocence, Mrs. Chance issued me a demerit for using foul language. She said, “You’re lucky I’m not calling your parents,” but that’s what I wanted most in the world: for my mother to exonerate me, for my father, the Midwestern all-American, to tell me what I had done wrong.

3. Drew Reuter, the boy across the street, was obsessed with professional wrestling. His favorite wrestler was a face-painted, arm-tasseled bodybuilder named Ultimate Warrior. Drew owned all the action figures, and let me play with every one of them except for the Warrior. We played in his front lawn, where the toys stood as tall as the wildest tufts of crabgrass. I was eleven years old and he was twelve when he asked if I wanted to play with Warrior. I said, “Heck yeah.” He pulled his penis from his shorts and said he’d let me play with Warrior if I licked him. Some other boy might’ve called him queer or punched him, but I felt my own erection forming. I remember thinking the penis and the stomach must be connected, because as my erection grew, my stomach shrank, turned hollow as the plastic muscles of the action figures. Now and then a car passed, and I timed my lick perfectly between them. Drew wanted more than the one lick, and I obliged. Soon he moved to his mother’s house, and we never played together again.

4. Otherwise, I had exactly zero sex in the Antelope Valley.

5. When my sister was a sophomore in high school, and I was in the sixth grade, she waited until my parents were at work to bring home a boy named March. He was pale as a used golf ball and had recently shaved his head with a Bic razor. I could make out two fresh, bloody nicks at the back of his skull. When I caught him and my sister kissing on the patio swing in the backyard, Jean yelled at me to mind my own business. March told her I hadn’t done anything wrong. This — a boy standing up for me — made me like him. When Jean went to the bathroom, he pulled me aside and said, “One day, you’ll be a dude trying to get some pussy, and some little brother’s going to get in your way.” He laughed. Then he asked, “Want to see my tattoos?” He lifted his shirt, and I saw a purple big-wheeler along his smooth white rib cage, a pair of crossed pool cues over a flaming eight ball, and a set of initials that read NLR . I asked what these stood for. “My crew,” said March. “My motherfucking crew, man.”

6. The Nazi Low Riders tried to indoctrinate my sister. This is cheating — I didn’t know this until after I left. March tried to tattoo Jean with a homemade needle, and my sister, from his couch, kicked him in the teeth and ran away.

7. When I was ten, the only objects that really belonged to me were a few books and magazines, some video games, and a baseball signed by two famous and rich Dodgers. My dad had taken me to a convention center to get the ball signed, and when one of the famous and rich Dodgers asked what position I’d go on to play in the big leagues, I told him, “Home,” which made everyone laugh. My dad explained how we were just getting me started in the game, and that although I had a lot to learn, I seemed to love it and that’s all that matters, isn’t it?

The famous and rich Dodgers agreed. Love of the game was the difference between the good and the great. They didn’t mention what kind of person was indicated by pleasant, yielding ambivalence.