Boy Sorceress Pt. 01

"I detoxed. All the fucking way. All alone and miserable in that tiny cell, squatting on the shitter whenever I wasn't rattling the bars and screaming at the same five deputies, day in and day out. They never touched me, afraid I'd give them AIDS, or something. And after I detoxed, then came the sobering up." He sighed. "Every day, the other cells saw people coming and going. They were drunks, idiots, scum of all kinds. Not a one of them had any compunction about complaining loudly over how the world had given them a raw deal, or how they weren't getting any respect, or fair treatment.

"I heard a lot of myself in those words. For the first time, I could hear the truth, you know? There was no one talking at me. No insults, or putdowns. There was no agenda, no sanctimonious lecturing. There were no lies and all that crap. There was just these assholes complaining about bullshit that either had nothing to do with them, or was their own fault entirely. I had no choice but to listen to them. As I found myself hearing them say many of the things I had said to myself and others, it slowly dawned on me that I was an asshole, too." He chuckled bitterly. "Concrete floor under me, concrete ceiling above me, two walls of concrete, two walls of bars I couldn't squeeze through...I had no choice but to confront my inner asshole."

He shrugged. "After that, things were easy. I decided to change and started to work at it. I envisioned what I wanted to accomplish and broke down the path to my goals into tiny, easy steps. Then I started taking them. I rolled over on my dealer and the D.A.'s office cut me a plea bargain. I got off with a suspended sentence. I was released, got a job bagging groceries and started to make amends with the people I had hurt. I've been doing that ever since. Taking things one step at a time and changing myself and my life for the better."

"Wow."

He sighed. "Yeah. The trick is to never spend a single day without doing one thing that makes you and your life better. Just one thing is enough. Those days pile up and grow and...before you know it, things have changed." He smiled again. "I'm a cashier, now."

"Well, that's...that's good to hear, Skip. Real good to hear. But why are you hanging out with Larry McGill? He's an asshat."

"Oh, don't judge him too harshly. He lost his job a while back and can't find another. I was just trying to help him."

We came to the end of the block. A loud Chevy Impala roared by, right in front of us. I looked after it unhappily. It badly needed a tune-up. Skip looked both ways and then tapped my elbow. "Come on! The coffee house is on the other side of this block."

I followed him across the street, asking, "How does getting drunk with McGill help him?"

Skip shrugged. "You gotta reach out to people when they're willing to listen."

"Is that what you do now? Save people from themselves?"

Skip laughed. "I guess I'm just trying to get people to see how much potential they're wasting."

"Well, you're wasting yours. The only thing Larry McGill's ever been interested in hearing," I hiccupped, "is the sound of his own voice."

"I didn't think you knew him that well."

"I don't." My earlier anger resurfaced in full force, aided by the buzz that I still had going. I lifted an arm and pointed backwards. "And he doesn't know the first fucking thing he was talking about in there! None of that shit is true! None of it!"

Skip nodded and grimaced. "Well, some of it is." I must have made a face, cause he stepped closer to the building we were passing and held his hands up. "The part about Mitchell and Ashley spreading tales about you, I mean! That really did happen."

"Bullshit," I spat.

He looked uncomfortable as he reached up and laid a tentative hand on my shoulder. "Really wish it was, Kevin. I'm sorry, but everyone heard the stories. People called you Frankendick behind your back."

"You're lying," I said, sounding totally unconvinced with my own denial. He just bit his lower lip and shook his head. We slowly resumed our walk down the block. "That's what she was really saying," I asked him, "that I had ripped my own dick off?"

"That you sliced it off on your zipper when you tried to whip it out at her."

"Fucking cunt," I muttered. My heart was pounding in my throat. I felt like wringing her lying neck. "She...that's...first of all, I never wear pants with zippers!" I poked a finger between the buttons in the front of my pants. "See! Studs and buttons! I always wear buttons! I've always worn button-up jeans! Never zippers!" I pulled my finger out and shook my head. "Fucking cunt!"

"Care to set the record straight?"

I shook my head, but said, "That's not how it happened!" The anger and the booze were conspiring to remove the last of my inhibitions. I was seriously considering getting in my car, driving all the way to Yale and pummeling her into the ground.

"In her defense, she only told the story after Marshall told about your dick reattachment procedure and everyone started asking her what happened. It didn't help that you missed a few days of school and when you did come back, you walked kinda funny for a week. I think she did it more out of a desire to save face, for the both of you, than-"

"Save face?! Both of us?!" I exclaimed as I raised my hands in frustration. "The lying cunt! She's the one that cut me!" I shook my head. "I can't believe that cunt! I can't believe all of you! Frankendick? What the fuck?!"

Some cars passed by on the street. I guessed that I was loud enough even for them to hear. My guess was based on how Skip nervously glanced at them. "Hey, man, you know me. I was too out of it to do that. Honest."

I screamed in frustration. "Fuck!"

"Like I said, care to set the record straight?"

I actually didn't. If this was true and everyone was convinced I had a tiny, scar-covered dick, then they could all just go fuck themselves. However, I was too angry to cool off and a bit too drunk to think straight, so I said, "She stabbed me in the dick with her long, sharp talon! She's the one that sent me to the ER with a blood-soaked crotch! That lying, vicious cunt!" I let out a roar of frustration. "And then she spreads those lies about me?! Fuck!"

"It's okay," Skip said, "let it all out. It'll be alright."

"Nothing's ok! I have fucking nightmares about women with nail extensions! If Emma Stone, Amanda Seyfried and Megan Fox showed up in my bedroom, wearing nothing but nail extensions and begging me to fuck them, I'd punt them through the goddamned wall!"

Skip chuckled. "Ok, I get-"

"The fucking cunt had the audacity to claim I cut my dick off!? She's the one that poked a hole in it!" I suddenly rounded on Skip, stopping our walk. "That's all it was, you know! Just a deep puncture that bled a lot, cause the dick is full of blood. Nothing else, ok!? I had to get two tiny stitches and had to avoid getting a chub for two weeks and that was it! They didn't reattach anything, cause nothing was torn off!"

Skip put his hands up. "Ok, Kevin, I-"

"Those are fucking lies! All of them! I can't believe she'd do that!"

I was a bit too angry and buzzed to admit it to myself, but the story of her betrayal did start to ring more true with every moment I spent dwelling on it. We had broken up after the dick-stabbing. Actually, I had dumped her as I was driving myself to the hospital and she got the school in the unspoken breakup settlement. She had already been the divine empress of the observable universe and I knew that I was to be a pariah my senior year. You can't dump Ashley Williams on the side of the road and expect to still be part of high school society.

But she had promised me she'd never tell anyone. She had been in tears, begging me to promise I'd never tell anyone about what she had done and promising to make something up so the rest of the school didn't bother me. I had kept my end of the deal.

My senior year had been spent studying to crush my tests and training to crush my opponents on the field. I had avoided talking to anyone for more than a minute straight. Nowadays I can't even recall if I had gotten any party invitations that whole year, or not. I do know that I had no intention of ever dating a girl who had even the tiniest of nails and that excluded pretty much all the girls in my class. For all I knew, they could all have been laughing behind my back the whole time, but that didn't make any sense.

"Lies," I declared, more calmly now that I spotted a flaw in the story. "If the whole school was talking shit behind my back, my teammates would have told me about it. Hell, they would have thrown half the senior class into the dumpstersbefore coming to tell me about it!"

Skip winced.

"What?!"

He shook his head. "Nothing."

I leaned over him and spoke in a very deliberate tone, "What. Is. It."

Skip swallowed. "Well, now, I was finally expelled around that time, remember? And everyone avoided me long before that cause I was held back a year and-"

"Spill it!"

"The quarterback was the ringleader of the Frankendick society," He blurted out and nearly cringed. I just stared at him, wondering if I had heard him wrong. "Way I heard it told, he used to hold court in lunch hall and mock you for lurching around during practice like you were Frankenstein. Like your dick was infecting the rest of you."

I don't know what it was about that, but something made things just click inside my head. It was like I had been standing in a dark room and now someone turned on the light. I turned and continued slowly walking.

Skip fell into step beside me. We walked silently until we reached the corner. He pointed down the side street. "The coffee house is that way."

I shook my head and crossed the street to keep walking. My crappy apartment was just three blocks ahead and one block over. Skip easily kept pace with me. I was dragging my feet.

"Look, Kevin, I know it must hurt to be betrayed by your team like that, but-"

"They were never really my team," I said, bitterness in my voice. "Do you know how I got on the team in the first place?" Skip shook his head. "In junior high, everyone I used to be friends with suddenly turned into monsters that picked on me cause I was poor and couldn't afford new clothes, or go out whenever. It was like they all formed the let's-mock-Kevin society one day. None of them dared bully me, cause I was the biggest guy in the class. Well, none except the senior year asshats. When they called me names and tried to take my chocolate milk, I lost it. I just...I hulked out and..."

That was just another example of the universe fucking with me. All the bullies at school could do whatever they wanted and they always got away scot-free. But the first fucking time I set one toe across the line, the whole world came down on me.

"One of the teachers saw me go nuts and intervened. The rest of the kids were sent home while I was sent to the Vice Principal. He offered me a choice: either the whole thing was reported and I got into trouble, or I joined the football team and gave it my all, every single day. So, I joined the team. I gave it my all and I went from pariah to school darling overnight. The heads of the school district, here in Riverside, were slobbering after me for a whole year before I was old enough to go to high school. They actually had some local people offer good jobs to my parents so we'd move here and they could get me for their team."

"Wow," Skip said.

"Yeah. I didn't know anyone in this town when I got here. The guys on the team were cool and they accepted me quickly, but they all graduated when I was a sophomore. The new kids that came along to replace them...I dunno, we just didn't connect. I felt like they were all jealous of me, or something. The quarterback especially. You know, the more I think about it, the more I believe he'd mock me in front of half the school. That fucker always had a thing for Ashley."

Well, in his defense, every guy in school had a thing for Ashley. Hell, most of the girls in school had a thing for Ashley, too.

"I'm sorry to hear that," Skip said. "But, hey, look at the bright side! At least your parents were no longer poor, right? You said they got good jobs?"

"And the move was paid for, too. But then they got greedy. When National Signing Day started approaching...whoo boy! There were all these scouts coming out of the woodwork and making all these offers to them." I shook my head. "It was disgusting. No one bothered to ask me what I wanted. I mean, yeah, I liked the fact that I changed our lives by being good at football, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to make a career out of it. Hell, I was definitely not sure if Icould make a career out of it. The NFL seemed like a different planet. I wanted to go to college to actually study and get a degree."

"Yeah, I remember people talking about your choice of school. I was out of it, but it was, like,the town gossip at the time. Did you go on to play college football?"

I drew a deep breath and slowly let it out. "Yes."

I glanced over and could see the wheels turning in his head. It was autumn and college football season was in full swing. "And you're not in college now," he observed.

I bit back a sarcastic comment and simply said, "No."

We walked down the block in complete silence after that. Skip could tell I didn't really want to talk about it. I looked at him when we squeezed past an old lady to overtake her. Something about the set of his mouth reminded me of people who found Jesus and then couldn't shut up about it. Or the way some rehabilitated alcoholics would preach at anyone holding a drink.

When we crossed the next street, Skip confirmed my suspicions by saying, "May I ask why you're not in college?"

I sighed. I had already been seen in Riverside. People were going to talk, so I might as well have the truth make an appearance, too. "Because I don't have the money for it."

"Didn't you get a football scholarship?"

"Yes, and it was yanked from me the moment my knee was busted up."

"They can't do that," Skip exclaimed.

"They can. You get a scholarship for every year you're on the team. They don't yank it from you so much as they decide not to renew it next year."

"Why did they do that? Players get injured all the time. They just come back the next season and play on."

I sighed. Normally, I wasn't in the mood to talk about this, but there was something in the tone of his voice, an earnest concern, or something, that just drew it out of me. Or, maybe, I was still too buzzed to be able to censor myself.

"My knee was destroyed during a game. It happens. It happens all the time. It wasn't my first injury and I had believed it wouldn't be my last, despite what the doctors had said. They had said that getting me to walk without a limp was the best we could hope for and that my career as an athlete was over, but I hadn't listened. It had hurt, but I had been hurt before and I had truly believed that if I got the surgery and I followed all the doctors' orders and did all my physical therapy, I'd make a miraculous recovery and come back to the field.

"I truly believed that if I kept the injury small in my mind, it would allow my mind to force my body to heal all the way. Mind over matter, right? So I started avoiding my friends and stopped returning their calls and messages, cause the first thing that came out of their mouths was usually my injury and I couldn't even think about that, let alone talk about it.

"Eventually, they stopped calling altogether." And that was my own damn fault.

"As soon as I was done with rehab, I tried to get back in the saddle. I warmed up my knee and did some light exercises. It only hurt a little and I worked through the pain. The very first attempt at doing my trademark zigzag sprint resulted in me collapsing in pain. My knee gave out, just like the doctors said it would.

"Another surgery and six more months of rehab left me depressed, alone and more than eighty pounds overweight. I have no friends, no job, no prospects and, worst of all, I'm back in a town I hate, cause I didn't know where else to go. Now I'm stuck here, trying to figure out my next move."

"You should try and go back to college," Skip suggested. "Get a degree. Get some more options. Learn what your options really are."

"I can't."

"Sure you can."

"I don't have the money for that."

"Well, you can get a loan and-"

"My family's credit history is awful. Except for my parents', who didn't evenhave a credit history until after we were moved to Riverside. Some-fucking-how, that's even worse than declaring bankruptcy."

"Look, student loans-"

"Are not an option. I didn't finish the year I lost my knee and I didn't manage to fulfill some crazy academic requirements for the football scholarship. Technically, they yanked it from me mid-year and I have to pay them back for a complete semester's tuition, plus extra expenses. They're lording this debt over me, so I can't qualify for a student loan, or transfer schools."

"Then finish the one you were attending. I don't know of it was your first choice, or not, but any college degree is better than none. Particularly in this economy. You could, maybe, change your major, or something." My fists tightened and I shook my head to myself. "Kevin?"

"I don't need to change majors, I need to pay tuition."

"Can't your parents help you with that?"

I snorted. "Even if they had the credit rating for it, they wouldn't."

"Why not?"

I huffed. "Because they don't approve of my choice of college."

"Why not? I mean, you went on to play college football."

"Because they're assholes, Skip! Because I stood up to them in the first place! Because ten other schools offered them bigger bribes and that's all they ever cared about! Take your fucking pick!" My fists tightened as the image of the last time I had spoken to my father popped up in my head. He had been sitting behind the wheel of a brand new Chevy my college had slipped him. Instead of being happy with it, he had been bitching about all the stuff that came standard with the high-end Lexus one of the other schools had promised him.

"Look, I get that you're angry, but...hear me out, please! You need to try and look at this from a different perspective. You went to college and made some good memories, too. You need to look back on the positive parts of your college experience and-"

I blew a loud, long raspberry. "You wanna know what my college experience had been like? Huh?"

"Yes."

I stopped and looked at him. He seemed like he was honestly interested. There was no guile I could see. That didn't mean much. I was acutely aware of the fact that I was the worst kind of dum-dum when it came to judging other people.

I sighed and continued walking. "My college experience consisted of getting up at four in the morning and hauling ass to the athletic department. There we watched tapes of our games, or the games of the team we were playing next. The coach would tell us what he wanted us to do and then we'd be out practicing. Then we had to do full workouts. And after that, we watched more tapes and had meetings, where plays were discussed.

"We were never finished before noon. Then I had to go and attend a full fucking load of classes. Ok, that bit was my own damn fault. The other guys on the team simply picked the easiest classes and divided up the work between them. They coasted towards meeting their academic requirements. I was the only idiot that was actually working towards a meaningful degree." I was never going to be an engineer now. "By the time my classes were over, I'd barely manage to put in a few hours at the library, doing my required reading, before I had to go to bed to wake up at four the next morning."

I shot Skip a look. "Think I had a lot of fun and pussy with that kind of schedule? Shit, man, if I didn't build cars over the summer breaks and sell them, I'd also have to find a fucking job to cover my most basic expenses. I have no idea where I'd find the time for that, on top of everything else. I spent spring break and the winter holidays catching up on my studying, goddamn it!"