Palo Alto Stories

“I’m really not here to mug you,” I said.

He didn’t say anything.

I said, “You want to frisk me?”

“Yeah,” he said, like it was a regular thing. So we stepped off the sidewalk and through the edge of the church parking lot to the brick side of the chapel. We were behind a large juniper bush, hidden from the road. I put my hands on the bricks like I was being arrested and he frisked me. He touched me under my arms and on my sides and on my butt a little. Then he was done.

“Okay?” I said.

“Can I feel your balls for a second?”

“What? What the fuck?”

“Come on, man, be cool and just let me feel your balls for a second.”

“Aw, man,” I said. “I was trying to be nice to make you feel safe and you pull that shit?”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

We walked out of the church and along the sidewalk, and we didn’t talk anymore.

A car full of teenagers drove by and yelled to us. I didn’t know them but I wanted to be with them. They were stopped at a light at Embarcadero. I ran up to the car and asked to be let in, but they wouldn’t open the door. When the light turned green the car started moving, but I held on to the open window and ran alongside. The girls inside were shrieking. It was like they were scared but excited too. The car went faster and then I was falling and I slid on the street on my back. The car drove off and when I stood up the old man with the dog was gone.

I walked past a bunch of houses. I was coming up on another elementary school called Duvenek and I knew that meant I was close to Ofra’s. I climbed the chain-link fence and crossed the wet grass field. I passed through the outdoor halls and drew a few purple and yellow flowers for the kids. Then I wrote FUCK SCHOOL.

Outside the school there was one more street to go and then I was at Ofra’s. When I got to the mouth of her driveway I could hear the buzzing voices of the party. People were probably around the pool in the back, and April and her sister and Emily were probably there too. I was sure A.J. wasn’t.

I didn’t go in. I walked down the wide street with all the mansions. The mansions ended and the street started to narrow. Soon there was thick foliage on both sides and the sidewalk ended. I walked over a small arched bridge and there I was, in East Palo Alto.

It was darker over here. Fewer streetlights. The houses were slanted and there were metal bars in front of the windows.

I was mad at everyone but there was nothing I could do.

I started yelling. First it was just screaming, no words.

When cars passed, I yelled at them, “Hey! Take me! Take me! Take me out of here! Take me with you.”

I yelled at every car that passed. Nobody stopped.

Ten minutes later a cop car drove up and took me away.

You can’t fight the Tar Baby, that’s what he wants. You punch that Tar Baby and he sucks you in. Once you get wrapped up with the Tar Baby, he loses his shape, he becomes a sticky, black goo-monster and he gets all over you. The more you fight, and stretch him, and struggle, the more he gets all over you, and then you can’t move and you’re just a pile of tar. After a certain point, you are the Tar Baby. Instead of button eyes, you still have your real eyes, looking out from under the tar.

I Could Kill Someone

There are many ways to kill someone, but a gun seems as good as any. The big thing that gets you caught is motive. It’s pretty obvious that Brent Baucher hates me, but who would expect me to get a gun and kill him?

He’s on the football team. He is not handsome. He’s fit, but he’s a beast, very hairy arms and legs: strong, pale, discolored things.

I’m told that I am good-looking, but I hate my body, and my face, and my curly hair. And I’m shy.

Brent has a large bulging forehead that makes his eyes sit deep in his skull. The bottom of his face is too long, like it was squeezed in a vise. There are white-capped acne bulges, pink and irritated. And single hairs coming out of strange areas.

In World History I once saw him doodling on a returned exam. Next to the red Fat the top he wrote “uck ’em all.” Then under that he wrote “Niggas Unite.” Then he scribbled out his last name and wrote “Too $hort,” like the rapper.

I’d like to take Brent out of reality, just as simple as leading him through a door.

I don’t like violence. I don’t play video games, and I don’t go to horror movies. I like Steel Magnolias; I like Sally Field.

One time, in my sophomore year, I had to stay after school and run around the track because I had been late to Mr. Peterson’s PE class twenty times in a row. That gray afternoon, going around, I thought about the oval of the track, and the rectangle of the football field within it, and the smaller rectangles of the field defining the yard lines. The memory of all those circles and rectangles is tied up with what happened later in the locker room.

When I got in from the track, the last of the football team was in there changing after practice. I walked to the far bank of lockers, along the wall, where my locker was. I could hear them cavorting and laughing, and as I walked I could see out of my peripheral vision that one of the five or six of them was Brent Baucher.

I sat on the wooden bench and swirled the black dial back and forth, and behind me, in the center aisle, the five and Brent erupted in laughter. The sound bounced around the cement room. That laughter had been in that place forever; it was something that those boys had found when they got to high school.

“You looked, motherfucker! Faggot looked!”

“Cecil looked! Faggot looked!”

“No I din’n,” said Cecil’s voice, but it was drowned in laughter and the sounds of bodies moving around.

I changed as fast as I could, my shirt first and then quickly off with my shorts and on with my jeans.

Then I realized that the locker room was very quiet, and when I looked over my shoulder the six of them were standing in their underwear and they were all still muddy and dirty and covered in grass, and I saw Baucher’s chest in a tight white tank, hair sprouting everywhere, and then I noticed something that made my mind jump; they each had one testicle sticking out of the pee hole in the front of their underpants; endless balls, pulled tight against scrotum skin; pink, brown, and paste. For a flash of a second, I saw Brent’s: large, kidney shaped, blue veined, and hairy.

I looked up and saw their faces and I knew I was not supposed to be looking at those balls, that that was what they wanted.

“Faggot looked!” said someone. And then they all said it, while they tucked in their balls and moved toward me. They screamed that I was a faggot as two held me down. One sat on my face—Cecil, I think; his crotch smelled sour and rich, and his balls in their cloth sack were on my chin. Down below, the others pulled my jeans off and my underwear. Someone grabbed my balls and twisted. At first it felt like a bubble in my stomach that went up to my throat and filled it, like my balls were up there and choking me, and then they twisted further, and the skin of my scrotum burned as it twisted and chafed against itself.

“Again!” someone yelled.

“Again!” another person yelled. They were all yelling “Faggot” again, and my balls were twisting again, and before I started screaming into the white wall of Cecil’s underwear, and biting at the chalky brown of his i

Brent is very stupid. He gets all Ds and Fs in his classes. I have World History with him; he said that the Black Plague was started by a combination of gays and rats. We studied the French Revolution in that class. One time, I masturbated to David’s painting of Marat. It was a picture in my textbook, and I let the come go right in there, and then I closed it. Now the pages are cemented together, and dead Marat is plastered against the guillotine forever.