Chris McCormick - Desert Boys

One night — not much later, but long enough afterwards so that my father and I had stopped pretending I cared about sports — I decided to get rid of the signed ball. Maybe the baseball was a reminder of the heteronormative boyhood my father pined after for me, but the truth is I simply thought the baseball ugly. The sloppy, illegible signatures were scrawled in a hideous green ink, and the spherical shape of the thing itself didn’t seem to belong with the rectangular shapes of my books, magazines, and video game cartridges. Even the furniture in my room was boxy and sharp, and the ball — a lone, edgeless blob — bothered me. I needed to get rid of it, and fast.

During my period of baseball-inculcation, I had seen the movie The Sandlot, and I planned an almost precisely opposite plot. I waited until my parents and sister had fallen asleep, opened my bedroom window as quietly as I could, and chucked the ball over the neighbor’s wall. His yard was full of towering, wispy grass I’d always mistaken for wheat. My hope was that the ball would nestle at the bottom of that tall grass, and be lost forever.

And for a brief time, it was. I explained to my parents, tears in my eyes, how I’d taken the baseball to school. To show off. Somehow, on the walk home I guessed, the ball had fallen out of my bag. “Stupid!” I said, palming my forehead. My mom absolved me using the loving, passive voice: Accidents happen. A mistake was made. A lesson has been learned.

My father — who had probably taken the day off from work to take me to that Dodgers convention, probably spent more money on admission and gasoline for the drive than he’d spent on himself over the course of the month — only said, “That’s too bad.”

Eventually — weeks later? a year? — the neighbor knocked at our door while I was at school. Having cleaned up his backyard, he discovered a baseball he assumed was ours. When I came home, my father was sitting on my bed, cradling the ball in his hand, careful not to touch the signatures.

“What’s so bad about owning a baseball?” he asked. “What’s so wrong with keeping a gift? And why would you lie? Who taught you to lie?”

I didn’t know which question to start with. My answers — nothing, nothing, self-protection, innate ability — wouldn’t have done much good anyway.

My dad stood and placed the ball back where it had been on my desk, alongside my books. He said, “You know I’m an excellent listener. Why won’t you talk to me?”

8. The Antelope Valley is not the California most people imagine. This could be a good thing, but almost never is. Instead, it’s a point of pride, which is almost always claimed by people who are proud of the wrong things.

9. Members of NLR, including March, were indicted for the murders of three black teenagers in East Palmdale. March is currently serving a life sentence in the California State Prison, Los Angeles County — fifteen miles from where he stabbed to death a fourteen-year-old black boy named Curtis Allen, a member of a rival gang called SHARP: Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice.

Redlining — discriminatory zoning restrictions I didn’t understand until my late teens — effectively segregated town: east for minorities and the working class, west for the well-off whites. The Sharps seemed like the only people willing to change the place. That skinheads could even be black seemed to break down, for me, the central tenet of segregation: that certain people behaved in certain ways, and thus belonged together.

As a teenager, I considered joining the Sharps, but I was too small and too weak and too afraid to declare sides, let alone join a gang. Another way of saying this is I wanted everyone to like me.

10. My friends and I dug trenches in the desert, shot each other with paintball and airsoft guns, built fires and jumped the flames on our bikes, forced each other to eat dirt and cactus and snake meat, rode our bikes to the aqueduct, ignored the signs warning of drowning, put our feet in the water, stripped off our clothes, sunburned on the cement slope, downloaded songs whose lyrics were growled, burned CDs, and, while collecting dented beer cans and abandoned bullet casings deep in the desert, listened through a boom box, growling along.

11. My mother served me breakfast in bed every Sunday until I was fourteen years old. “For my pashas, ” she said, calling me her prince.

12. Everyone started driving pickup trucks and SUVs and taking up two parking spots apiece. Once I saw a black F450 diagonally block four spaces outside Wal-Mart. Dangling from the back of the truck, as if the symbolism weren’t clear enough, was a giant set of chrome testicles.

13. In the fall of 2001, Mom was working in Men’s Suits at Dillard’s. At least three times a week, she said, she helped a customer who, hearing her accent, asked to be helped by someone else. “They say they want a man’s help.” She was wearing her pajamas as she told us this, but she was still the daughter of a tailor. “I’ve been altering suits for how long?” she asked no one in particular. “The reason is me. They hear my accent, think I’m Muslim. These beeble are idiots,” she said. “Don’t they know what Muslims did to Armenians a hundred years ago?”

My dad laughed. “These people don’t know what an Armenian is, ” he said. “Honey, these people don’t know there’s such a thing as a hundred years ago.”

14. My best friend, Robert Karinger, shot me with an airsoft gun on the left half of my upper lip, which swelled nearly to the size of my thumb. We were out in the middle of nowhere and all I wanted was ice. Karinger and Dan Watts both called me a faggot until I got tears in my eyes, which is when Karinger spat on the ground and turned away to shoot cans. Watts, feeling bad maybe, started to compliment the way the fat lip made me look. “Like a badass,” he said. “Like a boss.”

15. People told me I didn’t have a violent bone in my body, but they didn’t know my bones vibrated to notes of violence like tuning forks.

16. The word “faggot” became so ubiquitous among my friends that sometimes, when I’d slink off to the desert to lie alone in the dirt and let the universe rocket through me for a change, I’d whisper, “The stars are faggots, the moon’s a faggot, the Milky Way’s a faggot, but I’m no faggot.”

17. Though we lived on the east side of town, my sister and I tested well enough to surpass the zoning restrictions and attend a better-funded west-side high school. Our mascot was a Confederate soldier.

18. After being shot, I wanted to see my dad — or, I wanted him to see me. My lip was still fat and sore and, from what I could see in my bike’s chrome frame, turning a shade of plum. I rode out to the furniture store where he worked, and tethered my bike to a lamppost whose bulb, despite the hour or so left of daylight, sputtered on just as I disarranged the combination on my lock. Inside, my dad and two other salesman played cards at an overpriced oak kitchen table.

Dad introduced me to his coworkers, who looked up briefly from their cards to say hello.

“Slow day, huh?” I asked.

My dad said, “Just died down soon as you got here. Busy, busy beforehand.” I looked to his coworkers for confirmation, but they kept their eyes on their cards.

I lifted my chin, trying to catch the light on my fat, purple upper lip.

“Notice anything different?” I asked.

My dad took his time to study my face, raising an eyebrow when he gave up.

“I should get back,” he said. “See you for dinner?”