He said, “Another fucking retard. He pissed himself. Look!”
The men laughed and the woman dressed in the pink wig lit up a cigarette as she rolled her eyes at me and shook her head.
“We should put this pathetic sack of shit out of his misery,” said a short cop. He was dressed like a bum, but his badge was hanging around his neck. It shimmered under the streetlights. He had a compact modern pistol in his hand, like what cops on TV carry. I worried that he was really going to shoot me between the eyes, because he looked at me like he didn’t believe I should exist, and all he had to do was pull a trigger to make me disappear forever. He had the power.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it. I didn’t want to be the root of so much trouble. I was starting to believe that the angry cop was right about me. “I didn’t mean to cause any inconvenience.”
He shook his head disgustedly—like I was dog dirt he had just accidentally stepped in—and then he walked away, scraping me off on the rough cold sidewalk until his sole was completely clean of me.
I hope you have surmised by now that I am not a retard, Richard Gere.
I am “above average intelligence.”
Mom always told me that, anyway. She said I scored remarkably high on an unconventional IQ test my elementary school required its students to take, but that the world doesn’t always measure intelligence the right way.
“The world likes money better than truth,” Mom also used to say. “So we’re screwed!”
She used to laugh so hard whenever she said that.
“And you’re just a little off,” Mom would say. “Off in the best of ways. Perfect the way you are. My beautiful son. Bartholomew Neil. I love you so much.”
My young grief counselor Wendy says I am “emotionally disturbed” and “developmentally stunted” from having lived in a “codependent relationship” with my mother for so many years.
I don’t think Wendy likes Mom very much.
She once said Mom fed off me, which made my mother sound like a cannibal with a bone through her nose, stirring me up in some giant cauldron perched upon a pile of flaming wood.
Mom wasn’t like that at all; she was no cannibal.
This all went into my notebook.
Wendy told me I was “emotionally disturbed” and “developmentally stunted” when I asked why I needed a grief counselor, since I wasn’t really sad anymore that Mom had died—when I told her I had made peace and didn’t cry at night or anything like that. I had no grief to manage. She was wasting her time.
“She died peacefully because of the morphine,” I said. “And I’ll see Mom again in heaven.”
Wendy the grief counselor ignored my mention of heaven. She said, “You say you haven’t even cried yet. Yet. You are most likely repressing many emotions.”
“Do birds repress things?” I said, as a joke, keeping my eyes on my shoelaces, and Wendy laughed in a good way that made me feel like I had stumped her with her own metaphor, and was therefore not a retard.
But as I was saying before, Mom had to come get me out of jail, and it took so long that my pants were dry by the time she got there, but my thighs had chapped from rubbing against wet jeans because I was pacing while incarcerated.
There was this interesting Puerto Rican man in my cell wearing makeup and he kept blowing kisses at me and saying he wanted to “cut me gently” whenever the cops weren’t around. I know he was Puerto Rican because he had on a T-shirt that read PUERTO RICANS FUCK BETTER. Although maybe he could have been a non–Puerto Rican who just liked to have sex with Puerto Ricans, I suppose. Regardless, it was interesting and unusual, so I wrote it in my notebook.
That night, after she bailed me out of jail and took me home, Mom told me that self-gratification—while it was technically a sin in the Catholic Church, sometimes referred to as the sin of Onan—was probably the path for me. She wasn’t really mad at me for getting arrested, especially after I told her what had happened—how the pink-haired woman had basically jumped out of an alley and began to rub against my leg before I could say or do anything. Mom nodded and said she wished she had told me about self-gratification before all of this happened, but such talks were usually the job of the father, and my father had died far before I was old enough for sex talks, so Mom really isn’t to be blamed.
That night Mom came into my room, sat on the edge of my bed like she used to when I was a boy, pointed above my headboard to the crucifix—her gift to me when I was confirmed—and she said, “That guy hung out with prostitutes. He got arrested too. So you’re in good company, Bartholomew. Don’t let this rip you apart inside, okay?” When I didn’t respond, Mom said, “I wish you had run into a Vivian Ward instead of an undercover cop.” She was referencing Julia Roberts’s character in Pretty Woman, which I don’t have to tell you. “I want more. I want the fairy tale,” Mom said, just like Julia Roberts said to you in the movie. “I want the fairy tale for you, Bartholomew. If I couldn’t have it, I want it for you. So keep believing in fairy tales, okay? Keep believing that even some prostitutes are good-hearted women. Believe. Pretend even!” I don’t know why—maybe because Mom was always so hopeful for me, and I never could manage to confirm her wild suspicions about her only son—but I had to turn my face away from her. I felt the tears coming, the pressure building up behind my eyes. Mom ran her fingers through my hair for a few minutes, like she did when I was a boy. Even though I was too old to be tucked in like that, I was glad she did what she did. It made the angry man in my stomach fall asleep. It was like her hand was able to perform a miracle that night. “I want the fairy tale for you, my sweet, sweet trusting boy,” she said once more before she turned out the lights and exited my bedroom.