GH O TI
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One Hitter By Alphonso Stein "Get up
faggot." The concrete
is dry and hot, almost burning my skin, temporarily overpowering the salty taste
trickling from my lip to the back of my throat. "I said get up you
faggot pieceashit." I
feel a dull pain in my side and I'm out of breath, coughing up blood on my
hands, trying to lift myself up, calling out for help, trying to illicit the barest
sentiments of mercy. He kicks me again, this time the pain is sharp. I grip
my side and hope to God he'll see how helpless I am, that I really am a nogoodpieceashitfaggotmuthafucker and that he in his
infinite hetero righteousness will take pity on me, laugh with his friend,
make cruel jokes and let me limp home safely. The
pain is bad but hardly intolerable. I've gotten worse beatings. The time my
dad came home early from work and caught me making out with Tommy Niccoli his pants half down my tongue in his ear his pink
hairless ass on the beige shag carpet all dissolving in a flurry of punches
and thrown furniture my arm broken in three places Tommy running half naked
down the street never speaking to me again. The whole painful incident
leading me out of the cloistered hills of Midwestern suburbia here to the
asshole of the world, Caesar's March, Nebraska, proud home of the Caldon Military Academy, a place where men are born and
faggots are destroyed. "I'm
not gonna tell you again." Rodney
Bozunovich—my over muscled aggressor—hovers over
me, grimacing. His girlfriend, a townie, latches onto his shoulders and
kisses his neck, smiling down at me with uneven teeth, taking deep
satisfaction in the punishment her boyfriend dispenses. Reveling in the humiliation
of the boy she'd originally set her sights on, all the lost nights, weekends,
and phone calls when I rebuked her advances, wishing to keep things friendly,
staving off her suspicions with an occasional kiss or fondle, before she
finally caught me with her brother in bed. From that moment on I was fried,
she told everyone. There's
nothing teenage boys hate more than an undercover fag. Friends become
unfriendly, teammates grow coarse and girls adopt a careful, mannered
coolness, discretely registering their own judgments in the form
of rolled eyes and giggles. And the people who hated you before—namely my current antagonizer—finally
have license to, a socially betrothed cache to kick my sorry ass from
here to "I
don't wanna fight." I try to say, but it
doesn't come out cause when I try to speak blood spills out of my mouth and
onto the ground, settling into the nooks of the cracked pavement. "I
warned you didn't I?" He
didn't, and when I arch my neck to look up and tell him so—pain shooting down
the interior of my jaw in tiny fiery beads—it prompts another kick, this time
to the side of my neck, collapsing my face into the ground. Black.
Jumbled
shapes and sounds all cram together in a timeless, formless glob forcing me
in and out of several dimensions, conjuring familiar scenes and voices in
unfamiliar and vaguely menacing ways. My mother stands at the foot of my bed
with a bloody unplucked chicken on a silver carving
dish, my first boyfriend looks on, laughing. The
room changes to the pastel coloured interior of a
nuclear submarine filled with an angry crew of imps, completely ignoring me,
fighting over who'll service the human headed silver grizzly bear dressed in
a doorman's uniform with a Montreal Expos baseball cap. He begins eating them
one by one—they don't fight it—slowly inching his way towards me when
suddenly I'm in the Amazon with a bikini clad Eleanor Roosevelt and she
offers me a Lowenbrau. I accept and when she runs to the crab infested bamboo
latrine to find one a screeching howl rings out from the distance and I'm
awake. The
air is cooler. I'm on grass. I'm on grass and everything hurts. I hear
children's voices in the far background, laughing. It's almost dark. I try to
stand up, but can't, I don't have the strength. I scale down my form to find
that I'm naked. Blue, red, magenta and yellow tulips drape my bruised flesh.
I'm in the town's flower garden. How appropriate. He placed a daisy in with
the daisies. There are no daisies however, but somehow I feel this detail was
lost on my attacker. Shameless
I move my hand down my stomach, brushing the dirt from my hips then quickly
checking to see if my member is still in tact—often times they pay special
attention to your dick I've come to learn, a further way to emasculate those
deemed non-masculine—but luckily it's fine. Untouched thank God. The
children I heard in the distance are playing ball in a sandlot across the
field. There are three of them—all boys—with one pitching, one batting, and
one catching. I sit up and watch them, hoping to wait past dark to walk back
to campus, lessening my humiliation under the veil of vast Nebraskan night.
They don't see me and I watch. They're
about nine or ten and play with just enough conviction to keep the play
competitive but not enough to suggest the game is anything more than what it
is, a leisurely way to pass time in a small, boring town. Watching them helps
me forget about everything—my recent beating, the throbbing pain, my wretched
nakedness, the recent social leprosy I'm come to know so well and the massive
black hole that is my future, both immediate and far-flung—and I appreciate
the diversion. The boy pitcher lobs one over the plate and the boy
batter swings wildly, missing by a mile. I want to go over and give him
tips—choke up on the bat, widen your stance, keep your eye on the ball—this
would make him feel better, make me feel better, them seeing me as the
varsity shortstop that I really am and looking up to me, beaming tiny aw-shucks
smiles, helping to bring me outta the perpetual
funk of my recent troubles and back into the folds of genuine human
kindness—but I'm bloody and naked, so I don't dare. Instead I just sit there,
ducking my face behind the stemmy, fragrant flowers
and watching the game from a distance, silently wondering when I can go home.
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