“I’m not talking about wins and losses,” I say. My eyes are moving back and forth between the two men who have rudely injected themselves into my discussion with Kyle. “The debate is quarterback ability. Tony Romo is better than Tim Tebow.”
Everybody around us groans, and now the third man wearing a Tim Tebow jersey jumps in. “What’s the point of being a quarterback other than to win?”
“I’m just—” I say, but I’m cut off, because now the second one is back at it.
“You’ve got big balls, bad-mouthing Tim Tebow in Denver, dude.”
A chorus of “Yeah” goes up in McDonald’s. Kyle is sitting there with a shit-eating grin on his face. I’m not even sure where that saying comes from. Why would anybody grin after eating shit?
I try to talk, but everybody in the restaurant boos me, and a couple of people—including Kyle—throw french fries at me.
This sucks.
On our seventh lap around the big shopping center parking lot, Kyle, who is walking a couple of steps behind me, says, “Will you buy me a Tim Tebow jersey?”
I stop, turn, and stare at him. I am incredulous.
“You must be kidding. After what happened in there? You have big balls.” I didn’t like the men in the Tim Tebow jerseys, but I like this saying that one of them introduced me to.
“You owe me a buck,” Kyle says.
“‘Balls’ isn’t a curse word.”
“So I can say ‘balls’ as much as I like?”
Kyle has me cornered. I don’t think I should lose a dollar on a word like “balls.” On the other hand, I don’t think Donna will be pleased with me if I send her son home and he’s saying “balls” all the time. I think she will be especially angry if she finds out that I gave him permission to say it.
“OK,” I say. “Your debt is now down to two hundred and one.”
“What about the Tim Tebow jersey?”
He has incredibly big balls.
“No.”
“If I’m good the rest of the trip?”
“Maybe.”
“If I call my mom twice a day?”
He has relentlessly big balls.
“Yes.”
Back in the Cadillac DTS, we take a big loop around Denver, out past the new airport, to Interstate 40 East. For part of the trip, Kyle chats happily on my bitchin’ iPhone with his mother, and as he hangs up, he tells her that he will call again when we reach Cheyenne Wells. After the phone is back in my hands, he reminds me that he’s part of the way to a Tim Tebow jersey. This annoys me.
Near the small town of Deer Trail, 119 miles from our destination, Kyle tells me to pull off at a rest stop so he can pee. It’s good timing—I have to pee, too, and we’re now able to renew our contest.
We’re alone in the restroom, which is a nice development, as I’m feeling a little silly about this even as I’m powerless to stop it. This is one of the struggles of my condition, particularly the obsessive-compulsive part of it. I wonder what Dr. Buckley would say if I told her that a twelve-year-old boy and I were comparing our levels of urination. It’s difficult for me to even imagine telling her such a thing, although I surely would if she were still my therapist, because I told Dr. Buckley everything. I have not reached that level of trust with Dr. Bryan Thomsen. I suspect that Dr. Buckley would say this is the sort of compulsion I should work harder at controlling.
Having learned how to pee into the bottle at our previous stop, I fill mine with no trouble. From the stall next to me, where Kyle is, I hear a gurgling sound.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Nothing.”
I walk around to the front of the stall and peek through the opening between the door and the wall. I can’t believe what I see.
Kyle is kneeling at the commode, and he has pushed the bottle into the toilet water to fill it up. This is cheating. This is also really, really gross.
“Kyle!”
He jumps and drops the bottle into the toilet.
“Shit!” he yells, and I make a mental note to add $10 to his debt.
“I can’t believe this,” I say. “You’re cheating. Did you cheat at the last rest stop, too?”
He leaves the bottle in the toilet water and slams through the stall door, almost hitting me in the face as it swings open.
“Shut up, Edward.”
“That’s another ten dollars for being rude. With that and the s-word you just said, you’re at two hundred twenty-one.”
Kyle’s hands are balled up into fists. “Do you think I care? I’m never paying you, so you can just forget it. You can forget your stupid game, too.”
“It’s your stupid game, Kyle. You’re the one who wanted to do it, and that’s what I’m going to tell your mom when I tell her that you’ve been cheating.”
“‘That’s what I’m going to tell your mom,’” Kyle mocks me in a sing-song voice. “You’re not going to tell her about this, you big tattletale. Don’t be stupid. How do you think that’s gonna look? ‘Hey, Donna, Kyle and I were peeing into bottles.’ You’re an idiot.”
Kyle has really hurt my feelings now. I’m not an idiot. I’m developmentally disabled, not stupid. He’s right that I probably shouldn’t say anything about this to Donna. I suspect that her reaction would be similar to Dr. Buckley’s, if not worse, and while I do not like to trust supposition, I’m not willing to seek out the facts on this matter.
Kyle is already out the door of the restroom. I follow him, tossing my bottle of urine into the trash as I go. I call for him, but he doesn’t look back. He just flips me the bird, which is a euphemism for holding up one’s middle finger. He’s at $231 now.
I jog to try to catch up to him. The whole thing flummoxes me. We were doing so well, and now we’re not. Kyle is sitting in the passenger seat of the Cadillac DTS, and his face is pressed against the window, as if I’m holding him prisoner.
I climb into the driver’s seat and start the car. Kyle doesn’t face me and doesn’t acknowledge me.
Darkness is coming. We have two hours to go on our drive. Michael Stipe is singing about going all the way to Reno. I look to the west, where Reno is. That’s where John Charles Fremont and Charles Preuss went, or close enough. Charles Preuss didn’t like it out there. I don’t like it out here. I wonder why I came, but I can’t stop now.
I put the car into drive and head back to the interstate.
I feel alone. I used to like that. It’s the worst feeling ever now.
TECHNICALLY THURSDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2011
I’m glad we’re here for only two nights. This bed is too hard. I cannot blame that for why I am awake at 4:21 a.m., however. My father visited me in my dream again, and now I am flummoxed, because we were not in Cheyenne Wells, Colorado, although I am physically in Cheyenne Wells right at this moment. We were in our old house in Billings, the one I lived in with my parents before I was kicked out after the “Garth Brooks incident.”
It’s hard to remember now that I’m in the conscious world rather than the dream world, but I think I was the same age as in the Cheyenne Wells dreams. I’m going to assume that I was, although assumptions are dangerous things. That, at least, would make the dreams track.
In the dream, I’m nine years old and my father and I are in the front yard, and he is chasing me. I run and laugh and try to elude my father, until finally his big hand clutches the back of my shirt and pulls me in. He wraps me in a bear hug and we tumble to the ground, and I am not scared. I am laughing and having fun, and my father rolls me onto my back and lies gently across my chest, binding up my legs with his right arm so I cannot move.
“One… two… three,” he says, and then he gets to his feet and makes noises like a crowd is cheering for him and says, “And the new champion, Ted ‘The Bear’ Stanton!” He holds his arms aloft and dances back and forth on his toes like Muhammad Ali and makes more cheering noises.