He: You got AIDS.
She: Well, you got the her-pess.
(Understood, the latter, by all who heard it, and held to be a great victory over the original statement.)
I doubt the town child normally smelled marijuana smoke as it infused a junior-high classroom in which the great-grandmotherly teacher was too blind and too daft to regulate, or even to locate, the smokers, though obviously they were situated in back, as where else would they be? I doubt the town child ever turned around in such a situation to behold a teenager who already lacked teeth he had but recently grown, his pale lips in league with the rotted or punched-out dentition to form a grin of great contentment, his shirt open, his shoes removed, the waistband of his jeans, at which he pointed helpfully with the hand not involved with the joint (or with the hand that was: I do not recall), breached by the tip of a full-on erection.
This young man deserves, I know, and may even expect, to be spared my derision, as he was likely the product of a true poverty, as opposed to the simple poorness my own family had caught, but what was the place in all this of the erection? What was its purpose? Why did it demand my attention, that ordinary barb attached to an ordinary child? why do I pay it any now, thirty-some years after our initial acquaintance? Why must I remember that it followed me out into the hallway when class was over, and might have pinned me against the wall had its host not been forced to ferry it off to a remedial lesson elsewhere? Why must I suspect that its object was, by force of will, or by divine intervention, to join with me there, or with some notion of what I might become, and thus fail, not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, to crawl up out of what generational ignorance hole had prompted it to peer out over the top of its jeans in the first place?
Names
Because these words could refer to an actual boy, with an actual penis, which at one point reared up at me during my actual childhood, I might be expected to name the boy, or else his penis, but I think that neither necessary nor wise. “Boy” and “barb” and “teen” and “penis” will suffice here, being names enough to identify what animated our rural societies then and mostly animates them now; names enough for what the land regularly charms and deploys against invaders old and new; names enough for what put those deep bruises on a bus-mate’s face after her father discovered that a brown boy had caused her pink belly to swell (the issue here being not the swelling so much as the brownness that had gone into her and would eventually have to come back out); names enough for what prompted a newly nonvirginal idiot I knew, by birth and inclination a suburbanite, to crow like a perverted farmhand after only a few short months in that place, “You ain’t never had none o’ that stuff, han ya boy?” We called him Han Ya Boy for the next two years.
His name alliterated comically, this proud initiate to the Park and Ride, but I remember him best by how perfectly ashamed I felt for all of humanity on account of what he had said. The pregnant girl had a name too, so apt to her sweetness and her situation that it would be a pleasure to render it here, though in truth I remember her less by her tag than by the fact that she quietly confided in me, of the boy who had climbed through her window that night, “He mmped me. He mmped me good.” She actually said the “mmped.” What is a name compared with that?
What is a name compared with I have the fear of Jesus in me or They had to use the jaws of death? Why are writers so easily enamored of the stupid technique by which “John” is made to convey a certain blandness, or at most the notion “herald,” while “Jane” calls out with her own sort of blandness, even if the clumsy intention is to reference Lady Grey, say, or Ms. Mansfield, or any number of other Janes (or Jaynes) who by their boldness lost a plain or pretty head? Whether I am beyond such tricks or they are beyond me is beside the point. I will permit myself neither the luxury of names that have no claim on my memory nor the laziness of them that have plenty. “Ronnie” means more to me than every “Romeo” and “Charles” in the world put together, more than any flighty and bothersome “Jay,” yet its employment here would rent me only a word-doll we might dress up poorly between us, powerless (it or we) to render what the land led actual Ronnies to say and do out there, always to my chagrin. Could any doomed “Juliet” or “Emma” or “Daisy” possibly compete with my doomed “Jennifer” or “Cindy” or “Sera”? Surely not, though even the most talented reader might gather from the latter three no more than queen (the first) and ashes (the second) and angel (the last), in which case all is lost, despite the fact that those particular interpretations, in that particular order, do draw an eerily accurate map of the tractor path down which American country girlhood is usually forced to sashay.
The one character I am tempted to name at all in this narrative, if only as a form of copyright protection for his descendants, is a boy whose name I do not even remember, though he produced what is easily the best line from my childhood, if not from my entire life. I say “boy,” but in actuality he had failed so often that I guessed him to be in his early twenties by the time he caught hold of me in the back of a junior-high classroom, and hypnotized me with eyes no less horrified than my own, and yelled, by way of boast or introduction, “My dick don’t get hard till it sees the pussy!” Later on I heard he was killed in a car wreck, along with some others, but that line of his is immortal, or ought to be. In walking, waking life there was a name for him, but not for that. Some actions, some utterances, deserve to be their own name.
Rifle
It was a rifle, not a shotgun. “Shotgun” might sound better here, and might make for a flashier tale, but it was a rifle nonetheless, and I did not load it, and I did not intend to fire. That is, I had a fair idea of how to load a rifle, and I knew where the ammunition was bound to be kept (conveniently near the firearms, praise Jesus, in my house as in any other), and I was a good enough student even then to match the numerals on the box with the caliber requirements of the gun. Still, I did no such thing. I merely retrieved the rifle from the closet under the stairs and carried it down with me to the road below, thinking not of the violence it could do but only that it seemed, of the possibilities before me, the closest to what I imagined a Hatfield or a McCoy might have on him, or a sun-bloated corpse from the War Between the states: a dark brown stock devoid of any style, a long steel barrel devoid of any accuracy: a gun that looked able to kill, and was purposed for that, but seemed wholly unconcerned with where its hole was finally punched. I confess that my father owned such a gun, and that I fetched it out of the closet one bright afternoon and took it down into the road, thinking not to bring destruction along with me but surely a kind of terror.