I bet you a million dollars there are less than five books in this whole house. What kind of life can you have in a house without books?
I give up counting my spots, walk into the kitchen, and look at a room full of strangers.
“Good morning,” the foster mother says. “Do you want a bowl of cornflakes?”
She’s a short fat woman. If this were a fairy tale, she’d be the evil stepmother who eats children. This isn’t a fairy tale, so she’s just a loser who gorges on food like alcoholics drink booze.
The foster father grunts from behind his newspaper. Foster fathers like to grunt and read newspapers. If I had to describe this guy to a police sketch artist, I’d say he looks like the sports section with a bad haircut.
“Excuse me,” the foster mother says to me. “I said good morning.”
I don’t say anything.
“Hey, young man,” the foster mother says. “We have rules around here. And rule number one is be nice.”
“Whatever,” I say.
The foster father puts down his paper and stares at me like I was a news story about a killer tsunami. He’s got one eyebrow and a thick forehead like a caveman.
He’s eating cereal flakes, but his breath smells like beer and onions.
“Good morning,” he says.
“Whatever,” I say again.
The other kids, the real and the fake ones, all stare at me. It’s a riot of cold blue eyes. Those kids know what I’m doing. Some of them already hate me for being a jerk. The rest of them are bored. They’ve seen it all before.
“Good morning,” the foster father says again.
He’s challenging me. He thinks he’s stronger than I am. He’s bigger and taller and older, sure, and has a million more muscles than I do, but I am stronger. I am stronger than all of my fathers.
“What…ever,” I say, for the third time.
And I say it slow and hard and mean, like each letter was a cussword. And I don’t mean the little cusswords like dick and shit. I mean the big ones like cock and cunt and motherfucker. I think it’s strange how curse words frighten and disgust some people. Yes, there are people afraid of certain combinations of vowels and consonants. Isn’t that hilarious? Don’t those wimps realize that each and every word only has the power and meaning you assign to it? If I decided that plop was a dirty word, and started using it to curse people, and convinced enough people to use it as a curse word also, it would eventually become an obscenity.
“Hey,” the foster father says. “Look at me.”
He’s one hundred and eighty-five pounds of blood, and I want to punch him in the carotid artery.
“Don’t you look at me that way,” he says. “Don’t try to stare me down.”
Of course, I keep staring at him.
“Stop staring at me,” he says.
“Plop,” I say.
“What did you say?”
“Plopping plop.”
Jesus, I sound like a pissed-off Dr. Seuss character. That thought makes me laugh.
“Are you laughing at me?” he asks.
“You bet your plopping ass I’m laughing at you,” I say.
I know he wants to punch me.
“I’m going to say good morning one more time,” he says. “And if you don’t return the favor, you don’t get to eat breakfast.”
Yeah, like that’s a real threat. Yeah, like I haven’t been hungry before. Yeah, like I care.
“Good morning,” the foster father says.
“Fuck you,” I say.
Two
MY ZITS GIVE ME superpowers.
After I cuss out my new foster father, I put on my cape and fly right through the roof of the house.
I am Zit Man, master of the Universe!
Okay, I don’t fly. I dodge the foster father’s angry slap at my head, shove my foster mother against the wall, and run out the front door.
I run the city streets, randomly turning left and right and left and right, because it just feels good to run. I used to dream that I could run fast enough to burn up like a meteor and drop little pieces of me all over the world.
I run (and burn) until a police car pulls up in front of me. I’m an absolute genius, so I turn around and run the other way.
Come on, fuzz boys, you can’t catch me. I’m an orphan meteor.
Two cops jump out of their cruiser. It takes them only thirty-five seconds to catch me.
They crash into me and send me sprawling to the sidewalk.
They try to grab my arms, but I punch one of them in the ear, and I bite the other cop on the hand. They hold me down and handcuff me.
I’m fighting and kicking because that’s what I do. It’s how I’m wired. It’s my programming. I read once that if a kid has enough bad things happen to him before he turns five, he’s screwed for the rest of his life. So that’s me, a screwed half-breed who can’t do anything but spit and kick and bite and punch.
“Zits! Zits!” one of the cops yells. “Calm down! Calm down! It’s me! It’s me!”
I recognize his voice. I know this guy. He’s arrested me a few dozen times. He’s always been pretty cool. I trust him not to hurt me, so I calm down a little.
“Officer Dave,” I say. “It’s good to see you again.”
The cops laugh. I’m a funny kid, even in handcuffs.
“Zits, why you think you’re so bad?” Officer Dave asks me. “How come you always punch the moms and never the dads?”
“I just punched your partner in the ear,” I say. “And he’s a dude, I think.”
“You punch like a girl,” that cop says.
“Fuck you,” I say. “I didn’t punch that foster mom. I pushed her. Look in the dictionary. There’s a big difference between punch and push.”
“Tell that to Judge Ireland,” Officer Dave says. “I’m sure she’ll appreciate the vocabulary lesson.”
Dave is a big white dude. But he’s got one of those gentle voices like he’s talking you down from the ledge of a tall building. Most cops are pretty cool, I guess. It’s a tough job. And most of them just keep quiet and do the work.
I don’t like cops, okay? I just have respect for them. A tiny bit of respect. I think a lot of them had drunk, shitty, or missing fathers, just like I did. I think many of them endured chaotic and brutal childhoods, so they become cops because they want to create order in the world. And those cops, forever reminded of their troubled youth, often try to rescue kids like me. Good cops are lifeguards on the shores of Lake Fucked.
Like Officer Dave. He’s never said much about his life, but I can tell he’s scarred. And he knows I’m scarred, too. The wounded always recognize the wounded. We can smell each other.
“You and me aren’t so different,” Officer Dave has said more than once. “We’re like the sun and moon, kid. Different bodies, but we’re orbiting in the same sky.”
Yes, Officer Dave is a poet. He even formed a police officer poetry slam team and metaphorically battled against teams of firefighters, judges, defense attorneys, and homeless kids.
Dave is okay.
Of course, plenty of cops just like to be assholes, and having a badge means you get to be a professional asshole.
“You think you’ll get Russell as your lawyer?” Officer Dave asks me.
Russell is a public defender, the tallest, skinniest, whitest lawyer in Seattle. And man, oh, man, does he talk fast. I maybe catch every third or fourth word. He’s crazy good, I guess, but I wonder why he doesn’t go make tons of money at some corporation or something. I guess he’s yet another lifeguard who likes to save drowners like me. I bet you anything that Russell has about twenty-nine stray cats stinking up his house.