The Taborskys had nailed a basketball hoop above their garage door. The rim seemed impossibly high and narrow. Could it really swallow the plump orange ball Mark had chucked at my waist?
“Shirts and skins!” Mark announced.
“Careful, he trips people,” warned his little brother, watching from the porch.
I refused to take off my shirt, so he took off his Detroit Pistons “Bad Boys” T-shirt, black with a skull and crossbones printed over a basketball.
Though I was supposed to look at the basketball, my eyes drifted down to Mark’s brick red nipples, his navel, his hips, and his legs, thick, toned, and laced with dark hair. Girls my age were starting to shave their legs, and their smooth creamy skin reminded me of spoiled milk. Maybe I’d have liked girls more if they had hairy legs.
Pausing mid-dribble, Mark said, “Here’s a tip. Watch the guy’s hips, not his chest. The hips tell you where he’s going to go.”
He’d noticed me noticing his body, yet he didn’t seem to care.
“Did your dad teach you that?” I asked.
“My dad can’t even dribble the ball. I learned it at basketball camp.” I hadn’t realized there was such a thing as basketball camp. “All the coaches were black. Don’t let them send you to one of those crappy camps with Jewish coaches.”
We played to 21, and Mark beat me 21-0. “You shoot like a girl,” he said, not unkindly, more like a scientist making an empirical observation. “What sports are you good at?”
“I’m the same at all of them.” True enough. I stood in left field during softball, warmed the bench for basketball, or ran along the sidelines for football or soccer. The other boys charitably avoided aiming any balls in my direction. In return, I occasionally helped them out in art class or with history homework.
“Any faggot can be good at sports.” Mark stretched his shirt back over his head.
“You just need practice. Use our net. I’ll be waiting for you.”
He’d be waiting for me, I thought, with his bared nipples, his scaly-skinned basketball, and crude talk about “faggots,” or as he called them, “faggies.” Mark claimed that a faggie had offered to blow him in the bathroom at Hudson’s department store.
“Never let a faggie walk behind you,” Mark advised before I trudged home in defeat. “They’re always trying to stick stuff up your ass, trying to give you AIDS.”
AN OLD SOUL
THAT FRIDAY, BOTH MY PARENTS WERE too busy to pick me up from karate class, so they sent my brother David in Dad’s old Buick. He’d clawed off the “Bush Quayle 88” bumper sticker and replaced it with one that said, “Nice Planet, Don’t Blow It.”
“Hey, you’re sweaty,” he said, mussing my hair as I ducked into the passenger seat. The floor mats were crusted with dirt and dead leaves, and the glove compartment kept falling open. He wiped his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t they have a shower?”
“I don’t like to parade around naked in public,” I said. “I’m not Dad.”
David giggled. “You’re funny, dude. You’re an old soul.”
“Have you been smoking one of your pot cigarettes?” I wanted to sound haughty and indignant, but David just giggled again. He had an unexpectedly unexpectedly high-pitched laugh.
David didn’t need karate class to learn to defend himself or a therapist to teach him to like girls. In high school, girls sought him out, mistaking his natural shyness around them for sensitivity. He was tall with hazel eyes with a kind of shine to them that caught your attention, and he had curly hair, a relaxed smile, broad shoulders. His high school jacket, pinned with varsity letters in skiing and track, now gathered dust in his bedroom. I went in there sometimes, traced the outlines of the letters, inhaled David’s distinct masculine smell, a mix of talcum, musk, and, oddly, decaying plant matter.
Now that he was in college, David had given up sports and cheerleaders to do things like build houses in Detroit that summer for Habitat for Humanity, which as my father pointed out, was a Christian organization. He’d stumble into the house late, sweaty, unshaven, and stinking of body odor since he’d stopped using deodorant. At breakfast, he drank wheatgrass juice, and at dinner, he avoided red meat. He replaced the Billy Joel posters in his bedroom with spiraling psychedelic prints and or posters of Neil Young and The Who. Because of David’s long hair, Dad started calling him “the ladyboy,” a name that on me would have left a bruise, but somehow made David seem more masculine.
When we got home, David invited me to hang out in his room, which faced the back of the house instead of the Taborskys’ place. I challenged him to a round of my favorite board game, called Masterpiece. Mom had bought it when I was younger to turn me on to art, though I bet now she was wishing she’d bought me a football helmet instead.
In Masterpiece, you had to bid on classic paintings from museums in New York, Paris, or Amsterdam, cities big enough to get lost in, and sophisticated enough so that no one as crude as Mark would want to visit them.
I drew a Renoir, prompting David to say, “I don’t get why you’re still into these kid games. You think much about girls?”
“I think about them,” I said. Recently, my family had become preoccupied with the subject of girls. Dad pointed out the lips, hips, asses, even boobs of girls on TV, as if teaching me to recognize the markings of a rare species of butterfly. David taught me to pronounce “Paulina Porizkova” and promised to buy me a poster of her for Hannukah. Mom prompted me to open doors and pull out chairs for any female nearby.
“Yeah?” David said. “So what do you think about when you have wet dreams?”
I’d bent my wrinkled Renoir card in half without realizing it. “I don’t have them.”
“Why not? You jerk off too much?” Expressions like “jerk off” rolled easily off David’s tongue, in the same natural way he flung baseballs or stained his jeans with mud and grass. My words, like my clothes, were always spotless.
I knew what he really wanted to ask, a question too horrible to state plainly.
We had a gay cousin who had an awful habit of squeezing your elbow or wrist when he talked to you and leaning too far forward into your face as if he wanted to eat it. His breath smelled of violets. My parents greeted him politely at family dinners and afterward shook their heads and said, “That’s a lonely kind of life.”
In seventh grade, we used to imitate the way our effeminate drama teacher would flare his hands around his mouth and urge us to “Sing out!” Occasionally he sprayed saliva when he talked, and we stayed far out of his spitting range in case he had AIDS. Not that we really thought we’d get AIDS, but AIDS jokes were popular that year.
Eventually we learned it wasn’t nice to tell AIDS jokes, though we still told them, just not when any adults could hear. In health class, our teacher told us how to stay safe and whispered the word “condoms.” You couldn’t get it from sharing a cup with someone, or kissing or toilet seats, at least they didn’t think so. On the news, I’d seen bony men in hospital gowns, their skin marked with lesions, their cheeks hollowed out like the pictures of Holocaust survivors they used to show us in Jewish History.
What if I had AIDS, from Mark? Shouldn’t I be tested? The detective had suggested it, but my parents refused to give their permission. Later I asked my mom why, and she said, “That’s for practicing homosexuals in New York. He couldn’t have been . . . He’s healthy. You’re healthy. You’re fine.”
But I worried that inside I was all messed up, as bad as those New Yorkers.
“Let’s keep playing,” I told David and drew another card, a Miro.
He said, “That one looks like a vagina.”