The First Time I Tell My Son to Fuck Off
he is thirteen and (let’s be fair) has started testing out fuck the way a few years ago I added a dash of patriarchy to my speech until, finally, the dam broke and now if you can’t hear it, I think you probably have some work to do. He’d said fuck when he stubbed his...
The Receiver
Four adolescent boys throwing a football around in a front yard on a fall day in Virginia. Playful insults, some bragging, gossip about someone not there, making this other the subject of ridicule, which dislodges and redirects the ridicule away from anyone present. A boy here needs to hit insults like tennis balls flying at...
Mea Culpa
I laughed at gay people. I did. I snickered at their crewcuts and sashay and flagrancy. I snickered at the way they bristled about their rights. I did. I accused them of inventing disco. I laughed at their thing for feathers and glitter and fragrance and form-fitting uniforms. I grinned at the epic extravagance of...
Dumber Than
A box of rocks. That boy—oh, you know the one. Dropped his cat from that second-story sleeping porch just to see if it was true, what they said about cats always landing on their feet. Bawled when that tabby hit and bounced, lay dead on the cement walk. Dumber than dirt. One day in school,...
Step
Jake has decided to move with his father to Alabama. Tonight. No time for discussion. Try to think of some positive images of stepfathers in literature, film, even television. I dare you. I would have said Joe Gargery, the simple blacksmith from Great Expectations, but he’s Pip’s brother-in-law, I eventually deduce, not his stepfather. Mike Brady...
Heavy Metal
To avoid the Hernandez brothers, lean tough kids with scarred knuckles, reputations, and stolen cigarettes, I cut through the back lot of the local body shop on my way home from school, passed slow by the twisted wrecks and starred windshields, awed by the hard lines and the graceful curves where Detroit’s finest met bridge abutments...
The Power of the Cap
I used to drive defensively through thirty miles of back roads on my way to work. In a land of pick-up trucks and long-finned, rusty Cadillacs, if I overtook, or tailgated, or flicked my brights too often, I could get the finger. Or an angry male might speed up, so I couldn’t pass in time...
Just Desserts
It seemed only fitting that the Manzelli boys should be poisoned in our garage. It was there, after all, amid the monkey wrenches and hopelessly sealed cans of turpentine, that they perpetrated some of their most memorable mischief: dropping a pencil into the gas tank of Dad’s ‘69 Camaro, pouring varnish on our lawn mower,...
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