“Who knows,” Franco said. “Probably screwing my mother. Fucken used-car salesman. Parakeet breeder.”
I thought “parakeet breeder” was a pretty funny way to say fag, but it didn’t make me laugh, cause I didn’t like him talking about his ma having sex, especially with a sleaze who colored his hair. I never even really officially met her—she barely left the house—but I saw her take the garbage out a couple of times and she looked used-up, like she belonged in a bathrobe 24-7 and it hurt her teeth to eat. It was a mean thing to say, I thought, what Franco said about her.
“That’s not nice to say that about your ma,” I said.
“To say what?” Franco said.
“That she’s screwing some guy.”
“My dad used to say it all the time,” he said. “All the time.”
Me and Franco became friends the day we saw his dad’s ghost. That was the first day of the fifty-four-day run of me and Franco hanging out together, which was also the first day we ever hung out together. At that time, Franco was just friends with Helio who was my friend. Helio had weird chromosomes or genes or whatever and was brown like a Mexican guy, but Italian like most of the rest of the neighborhood, and his stomach wasn’t just a six-pack but an eight-. We’d been friends since fourth grade, when he got kicked out of fifth and put in my reading class. Five out of six times, on average, he beat me up in a fight, but that wasn’t just because he was strong. About two out of three times, he’d fight me in front of people, which put me off guard because he was funny and girls liked him, too, and so they would cheer for him like he was the home team and I was the away team. Even if I’d been like the home team and him like the away team, though, I don’t think it would’ve changed our outcomes too much, cause it was just people watching that screwed me up. When it was just me and Helio fighting, I won one in two times. That’s about seventeen percent of fights won overall compared to fifty percent of fights-fought-in-private won, and considering that me and Helio used to fight, on average, three out of seven days a week for nearly three whole school years, my stats are reliable. Unless I mean significant. I get it confused sometimes, the difference between reliability and significance, and that’s one reason why even though I’m supposed to be the junk at math—it’s mostly my math skills that got me tracked into gifted—I think that, really, I’m just above-average good at it. Which doesn’t even make me feel a little bit bad cause those other guys in gifted are serious pussies. All I’m trying to say is it’s highly unlikely that my outcomes against Helio in public versus private fights can be accounted for by freak accident. I tried explaining that to Jenny Wansie once cause we were alone in the nurse’s office together and it seemed like she finally liked me to my face a little bit, but then after we were done having our temperatures taken and mine was high and hers was normal, which I think made her mad at me, she said that I was a freak accident, and then when I came back to school the next week from having the strept throat, all her girl friends started calling me “Freak Accident,” then they called me “FA,” like eff ay, and then the guys who were friends with the girls called me “Fa,” like fah. Some of these guys were on the basketball team, and I beat two of them up for saying Fa to me, but it doesn’t do anyone any good to beat basketball guys up because fighting isn’t why people like them. It’s basketball. And even if I had it in me to make it so they couldn’t play basketball anymore, by breaking their fingers or cutting important connective tissue in their legs, it wouldn’t do any good, cause it would make them pitiful and me this dickhead. I was in love with Jenny Wansie so hard. Still am. It really broke my heart. It breaks my heart. Sometimes I call her on the telephone and she talks to me about boys she likes. She sometimes calls me “So La Ti Do.” I told my ma because I didn’t understand. My ma said it was a term of endearment, but my ma thinks I’m the smartest and the handsomest and she thinks that everyone else thinks so, too.
But Helio used to steal cigarettes for Franco is why him and Franco were friends, and one time Franco asked him to steal a can of butane, too, and when we brought all that loot back to Franco in his garage, he offered for each of us to take a cigarette, which Helio did and I didn’t do, and that’s maybe when Franco and I started our friendship because, right as soon as I said no to the cigarette, Franco said to me that I was a smart kid. He said, “Smart kid.” But if that’s not when we became friends, it was a couple minutes later, after him and Helio were finished smoking.
We were all just sitting there on Franco’s brown couch in the garage, listening to Franco III yelp about her chain being too short, and Helio said, “Can I put the butane in your lighter?”
And Franco said, “I don’t got a butane lighter.”
“Oh,” Helio said.
And Franco looked at Helio like he wanted Helio to ask him a question, but Helio’s not so smart—he’s smarter than Gino, but he’s not very smart, especially about people. One time I called him “Hell-io” by accident because I was yawning while I was trying to say his name, and he thought I was making fun of him, even though I was his best friend. He punched me four times in my back because of it and the next day he called me “fat stuff” in front of Jenny Wansie, which was one of the rare occasions where I really beat him up in a home/away situation.
I said to Franco, “Why’d we steal you this butane if you don’t got a lighter that needs it?”
Franco said, “So we could huff it.”
“Drugs?” Helio said.
“It’s not really drugs. It’s a inhalant,” Franco said.
“You want us to be huffers with you,” Helio said. “You’re a huffer,” he said. He said it fast and mean, with his lips all twisted. He was scared, and he didn’t want us to know. He’s tricky like that, Helio, dishonest about his feelings.
Then Franco, who was maybe my friend then, or would be in another couple minutes asked me, “What’s wrong with this kid?” He was talking about Helio. Then he said to Helio, “What’s wrong with you, kid? You sound like health class.”
“I don’t want to be a doper,” Helio said. He cracked his knuckles and made his eyes squinty instead of saying “Period,” like, “I don’t want to be a doper. Period.”
“Don’t be stupid,” I said to Helio. “A doper does drugs. This is a inhalant.” I looked at Franco to make sure I had it right, and Franco shot me with both of his pointer fingers.
“Exactly!” Franco said. “Now, you huff this butane with us, or you go away. Period. And don’t you ever say I’m a huffer again. Got it?”
Helio got it. He hugged himself a little, but he stayed on the couch.
“Here,” Franco said. “This is how you do it.” Then he did it.
The way you do it is that the butane comes in a long metal can with a straight silver metal tip about three quarters the height of my thumb’s length, but a lot skinnier. Then there’s the white plastic tip shaped like a construction cone that’s about half the height of my thumb’s length. The white plastic tip fits over about two thirds of the silver metal tip. Each tip has a hole at the top. When you put the white plastic tip in your mouth so that the top of the ridge at the bottom of it is against the front of your teeth, you push the can into your face until the bottom of the ridge of the tip is against the top of the can, which means the silver metal tip goes inside the can as far as it can and then the butane comes blasting out into your throat. It’s cold and tastes a little bit sweet. You have to aim right and huff deeply, or else you get it on your tongue and it tastes fuzzy and bubbly and you have to gag a little bit. If you do it right, things change almost immediately. First, if you try to talk, your voice is very low, which I don’t know why, but I think it’s because the butane makes your voice box so cold and your voice box needs to be a little bit hot to form more high-pitched noises with the cords it has inside it. That’s not so important, but there’s a tradition around it. After you’re done with your turn huffing, you hand the can to the next guy and say something to show that your voice is frozen low. Since silence in your e
ars when you’re huffing isn’t silence but this really warm kind of wah wah wah that lasts till the inhalant wears off, what you usually say when you hand the can over is “Wah.” Franco went first and demonstrated. He said “Wah” to me, fell back into the couch, and gave me the can. I huffed it for longer than Franco, said “Wah” to Helio, fell back into the couch, and gave Helio the can. Helio let go of one of his shoulders to hold on to the can, but he only took a squirt of it, and I think he got the bubbles cause what he said was “Weh,” and it wasn’t so low.
Next thing I knew, all the things were gigantic and all the nothings were tiny. I looked at Helio and he was so much bigger than the garage door, I couldn’t understand how he got into the garage without cutting some of himself off first. I thought that was funny, and then I noticed I was warm. I tried to put my hand on Helio’s shoulder to show him I was his friend and isn’t this cool, but it took so much strength to lift up my hand, cause it was not only gigantic, but dense. Everything was dense, even the nothings, and it felt like the couch was slowly moving backward. Franco was the densest and the most gigantic. Just one of his blue eyes was bigger than all of me. I almost said to him, “Franco, you have the biggest blue eye,” but right when I thought of it, the butane began to wear off and I thought that might have sounded really faggy. I tapped Helio on the shoulder, and he gave me the butane. I huffed the butane.
“Wahhh,” I said.
“That’s a boy,” Franco said. Then he huffed. Then I huffed. Then Helio did a little.
“Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh,” Franco said, and his gigantic hand was on my shoulder. His other hand was pointing. “Dad?” Franco said.
“Your dad’s home?” I said. Then I saw. It was a gigantic dense guy who you could see through in some places. His mustache was the same as Franco’s, but less black and more thick. He had his hands in front of him, by his waist. His hands were moving around while his wrists stayed still. It seemed like he was either telling some great story, or he was listening to some boring story and saying, “Come on, already, get to the point, already,” except he wasn’t saying anything.
“Dad?” Franco said. “How are you, Dad? I love you, Dad.”
“Pleased to meet you,” I said. “This is really amazing. Do you mind if I ask you what’s it like in the world of pure spirit, Mr. Iafarte?”
Franco told me, “His name’s Domenico.”
“You got different last names?”
“Iafarte’s my ma’s.”
“Your ma’s?” I said.
“Yeah,” Franco said. “We changed it after the hospital. It was a pain in the ass.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t know why anyone was in what hospital, or when. I wanted to ask, but I never asked. I don’t know why I apologized, either, but I felt like I should apologize. Franco didn’t seem to notice, anyway.
Looking at him, I got the feeling that the ghost of Mr. Domenico was sad, but he wouldn’t let anyone know because it would make him feel like a jerk if we knew how sad he was because then we’d get sad and it would be his fault. I thought maybe it had something to do with the hospital, that maybe he died in the hospital, from cancer or something, and felt guilty about it. I had no idea, though. That butane spins you out.
“I love you, Dad. Do you love me, Dad?” Franco said.
Mr. Domenico didn’t say anything. He started to fade, and then he disappeared. Franco was shivering.
“Helio,” Franco said, “that was my dad, yo. Franco I. Did you see him? How big he was? I told you how big he was, right? But I bet you didn’t believe it. But now you do.”
“I didn’t see,” Helio said.
“He was right there,” I said.
“Bullshit, fat stuff.”
Franco said, “Hey. Helio. Go away. Don’t come here no more.”
Helio sat there for a second, and then Franco III barked and then Helio left. Franco raised up the butane can like how I saw this king in a movie raise a gold cup of wine, and he said, “More for us, Clifford. More for us.” Then he rubbed his eyes. It felt good that he called me my name and then called us “us,” and by that time we were friends for sure.
My dad didn’t like it that I spent time with Franco, but I got good grades so he didn’t say I couldn’t. I heard him tell my ma that if he told me I couldn’t hang out with that delinquent wop son of a wife-beating degenerate gambler wop, then I’d never learn that that’s what he was. A delinquent wop. When my dad says some guy’s a wop it means that the guy is such a bad guy that he makes all Italians look bad, including us. Like for instance even Finch, the famous hitman, who’s half-Irish—my dad calls Finch a wop. It’s funny because he likes to tell Finch stories. Everyone around here likes to tell Finch stories. Finch is this hitman who lives somewhere close, though no one knows where, but if it’s not in the neighborhood then it’s somewhere else in Chicago. Everyone says Finch killed everyone who was ever famous and killed, but that he never got caught for any of it, which is why they call him Finch. I don’t get it, but that’s what they say. A lot of kids think Finch is as fake as Santa Claus. I don’t think so, though, and neither does Franco. Franco told me once that he sometimes wished his dad was Finch and I said so did I. I think everyone wished that sometimes. Even though everyone likes to hear stories about hitmen, though, my dad pretended that he didn’t like to hear them because he didn’t want to set a bad example for me. When he told me the Finch stories—like the one about how Finch killed that Nixon and made it look natural because Nixon was dying and Nixon knew that Finch killed that Hoffa, and Finch knew Nixon was gonna rat him out from his deathbed (Nixon’s) right before Nixon died if Finch didn’t get Nixon first—my dad didn’t say, “I’ve got a Finch story to tell you, have you heard this one?” He said, “I got a dumb wop story to tell you. This story is about that hitman Finch who’s just another dumb wop. Ready?” My dad explained to me about dumb wops at the very beginning of the summer, on the evening of the seventeenth day in a row me and Franco hung out, when I saw him after I’d been at the garage all day and I accidentally said to him, “Hey, w’su’, nigga.” He didn’t cuff me or anything because he’s not like that, but he yelled at me about how that wasn’t a good word to use inappropriately. He said that only black people can call each other nigga and get away with it, just like only Italians could call each other wop and get away with it. I told him it was different for blacks than Italians because when blacks say nigga it doesn’t mean anything bad, usually, but when my dad says wop, it means something really bad. My dad said that that was unfortunate, Cliff, and very sad. Then he made a sad face and started saying about how he was a Democrat even though lots of Democrats let women kill babies which was wrong but not as wrong as white people calling black people niggas and meaning it badly, but I sort of drifted off, thinking about how I’m Italian and lots of black guys at my school call me nigga, like “Get outta my way, nigga.” Or “Look at this roly-poly little nigga here.” And I was trying to figure out if they were being totally mean or mean with some niceness mixed in, because a lot of times I can’t tell when black guys say stuff to me what exactly they’re saying and because even though they called me fat slur words, they always added nigga, and that’s what they called each other, so maybe they were saying, really, “Cliff, you’re a real fatty, but you’re one of us.” It was a nice thought. I was having fantasies about being one of those guys because the girls liked them a lot at our school. It went like this, how girls liked you: Number one was basketball players. Number two was guys who got haircuts at salons and listened to music where five guys sing and there’s no guitars. Number three was black guys. There was no number four. Some of the real geeky girls liked tough guys but only if the tough guys would be their boyfriends, but those girls were ugly, and they always would be.
After the grilled cheese sandwiches on the fifty-third day, I got home before my dad. My ma said to wash my face and change my filthy clothes because she could always smell it on me when I hung out with Franco and it was horrible. “You smel
l like that garage, Cliff,” is what she said. So I washed up really fast with paper towels—just my pits and my face—and then I changed out of my black T-shirt and into this polo my dad brought back from Laos that was colored baby blue. I changed in the bathroom in front of the mirror, which I forget sometimes how bad it is to do that, because I get stuck there, counting my rolls to see how much bigger I’m getting, and it’s always bigger because I got no discipline. And by the time I was done my dad was home, and he didn’t give me a hug, and guess why. It was because he was worried I was a fag. He’s always worrying about something. Plus I think I looked like a fag in that shirt. Baby blue with a collar.
“What do you and Franco do all afternoon at that filthy garage?” my dad asked me.
“We talk about stuff,” I said. “Life and stuff.”
“What about girls?” He got right to the point. “Do you talk about girls ever?”
“Not really.” I told him not really because first of all it was true. I was always scared that if I talked about girls, Franco would want to go get some girls, and that would mean he’d ditch me, and where would I be for the afternoon? Either fighting Helio or stuck at Theo’s with Gino is where. And also the whole Jenny Wansie thing was embarrassing to talk to anyone but my ma about, especially my dad and Franco.
“Do you like girls, Clifford?” he said. When he said it, my ma brought out the steaks, and I hoped maybe he’d forget what he asked. So I cut into the steak and I told my ma that it was some delicious steak. “Hey!” my dad said. “I asked you a question.”
“About what?”
“Don’t play dumb with me, Cliff. About girls. You like ’em?”
“Sometimes.”
“Name me one you like.”
“I don’t really—”
“He likes Jenny Wansie,” my ma said. “You’re crazy to worry, Carlo. Your son’s the biggest heterosexual on the block.”