I lived with my mom and stepdad near the reservoir in a neighborhood called Waterwood where each house had the same worn-out, rotten-looking, gray-shingle exterior. When Suede first moved to Waterwood, the kids in junior high couldn’t believe his weird name and called him Sweetie. That stuck until everyone got more creative, called him Blue Suede Shoes, Can’t Get Laid Suede. Other than the name, he was forgettable.
Then, the summer before high school blessed him. He’d always had a large head, but he arrived in ninth-grade homeroom six-six and lean. Once he figured out he was bigger and stronger, he kicked Buck Simpson’s ass for bullying him and got suspended. He returned to school, a new pecking order established overnight. Buck, until that point one of the populars, began to huddle and scowl with the skateboarders on the fringes of the soccer field.
Suede and I bonded when I found his missing cat, Belch. I’d recognized the tabby stripes from a hundred paces.
He opened his front door and eyed me like it was a trap.
“Your cat’s on the road,” I said, with proper solemnity.
We stepped through knee-high weeds to jump the ditch. Belch’s orange collar had melted in the heat and stretched on the asphalt like chewing gum. We observed a moment of silence on the road shoulder as cars slowed to gawk.
He turned, eyes quivering like he might hit me. He shook my hand.
“I’m going to get a shovel,” he said.
High school became the Suede show. On the junior-varsity basketball team, he could’ve played forward, center, or point-guard—didn’t matter. Suede trounced the competition, assisting, faking, passing, alleyooping from hand to gargantuan hand for the slam. The rest of us were pivoting plywood boards to bounce the ball off before he scored, installed to provide the illusion of teamwork. We lined up afterward and chanted in the losers’ faces, “Good game, good game, good game,” but they were never good games.
In the beginning, he loved the adoration. He stayed an extra hour in grubby gymnasiums afterward just to jaw with old farts who waited to snap pictures with him. He got his face in the local paper with the headline: “New Star on the Horizon.” As a forward on the soccer team, he jumped a foot higher than the other players and headed the ball into the netting. Each game was Suede’s show and visiting teams were reluctant witnesses to his greatness.
Winning always bent him philosophical. On the bus ride back from away games, he’d sit on the half-seat with a sweaty cheerleader on his lap and proclaim, “The world is open. You’ve got to take what’s yours while you can. None of us are here for long at all.” He’d put a cigar in his mouth, fifteen-years-old. Nobody stopped him because he was bigger than the law.
I’d read my Homer and Ayn Rand. I wanted to be a warrior poet, a rich one.
We, myself and Suede’s teammates, always believed we were better than everyone else, and his dominance eliminated any doubt.
At Suede’s house, rows of curio cabinets displayed crystal and the grandfather clock chimed on the hours and half-pasts. Couch cushions bulged with stuffing. His father worked for a massive accounting firm in Jackson and his mother, Cindy Pickens, was a housewife who sewed buttons, wore an apron, cleaned his room, polished the silver. The off-white walls were free of scuffs even around the baseboards. We needed only mention a want in passing and it would appear on a TV tray wielded by Cindy, Queen of Waterwood, like she crouched around the corner, listening for her cue. She wore makeup and was shapely in the hips under the apron. I often pictured her riding a horse and wearing a wolf-pelt bikini.
My own house—my own life—was empty and pedestrian. My mother worked as a receptionist at a doctor’s office and wore housecoats and slippers whenever home. My stepfather was a salesman for General Mills who would sit around in his underwear, polishing his Browning rifles. They’d invite me to watch HBO with them dressed like that. I’d shake my head and retreat to my room, ashamed. Even as I hid, I wore my best polo shirt, thinking of the future, always the future, because the present depressed the hell out of me.
At Suede’s house, waiting for him to appear, I’d make small talk with Cindy. She named him after her favorite fabric to touch, just loved the sound of it. Once I asked her what she was doing that Saturday afternoon. Her eyes lit with tiny fires.
“Well,” she said, “I’ve got Suede’s lunch at one o’ clock, baseball practice at three, and dinner at six. Then a glass of wine and off to bed.”
She went on about Suede’s future sports engagements. As I listened, I ogled her, tried to suck her through my pupils. Suede was truly master of his house. I took mental note of this for my future kingdom.
My father was stationed in Hawaii. He sent beach postcards I tacked on the bulletin board over the aquarium where I sometimes found dry twisted fish bodies stuck to the carpet and covered with ants. He wrote on the cards in thick black ink: HANG LOOSE! SURF’S UP!
In the garage my mother and stepfather constructed the biggest model train set of all time. They wore engineer hats and blew tiny whistles. New boxes of train track, railroad crossing signs, plastic mountains and trees kept appearing on our doorstep. My stepfather wanted real smoke to come out of the locomotives, so the garage and kitchen always smelled like burnt vegetable oil.
I’d sit in the loft over the living room, make paper airplanes and toss them into the ceiling fan. On good days I could get one stuck on each blade. No matter how much paper I wasted or how many planes wound up behind the sofa and entertainment center, my mother never mentioned it. By bedtime, she’d have the living room spic and span again, like none of us existed.
A year went by with Suede carrying our teams. Then, out of the blue, Becky Myrtletree became Suede’s eternal love. To him, she was a queen, a between-class, hall-walking dream. He worshipped her cheekbones and fanny curve. To me, she wasn’t much. Why settle for a Dixie Cup when you could have The Grail? But by the third movie date, they’d named their children: Penelope, Preston, Porgy, and Petunia.
In a brief phone call, he told me he’d met Becky’s parents. Of course, they were smitten by the idea of an all-star son-in-law. But even in those halcyon days there was foreboding.
As tenth grade wore on, I began to see less of Suede, which felt cruel and mean. But nothing would be ordinary again. The unexpected seemed the price of admission.
“You know,” he said one night on the phone, “I told Cindy not to sign me up for any more extracurriculars so I could go out with Becky. You’d have thought I’d slapped her. She sat on the kitchen floor a good hour.”
“What was she wearing?” I couldn’t help myself. My hormones were half-banshee and wailing.
“Sometimes,” he said, “you’re a total psycho.”
A couple days later, we were sitting on the bleachers in P.E. and practicing our hook-shots with wadded up notebook paper on the garbage can.
He said, “I told Cindy I was finished with basketball. She cried and begged me not to quit soccer, so I kept that one.”
Soccer was the lesser sport, but I didn’t say so. Suede was lopping off pieces of himself. The lack of coaching could only lead to aimlessness. What good was all that power without discipline? I imagined him twiddling his thumbs, staring out windows into darkness. Immortality within reach, yet he turned away, like if Icarus nosedived on purpose before he could even melt.
“What are you going to do with yourself?”
He hummed for a minute and said, “Whatever hurts my folks the most.”
I began cutting women out of magazines. The aprons, the lips, the violin shapes. I extracted images from my mother’s Cosmopolitans and People Magazines. With an X-acto knife, paste, and poster board I assembled a shrine to Cindy Pickens. My mother barged in my room while I was culling from her magazines one day. I scrambled to hide the scraps, realized it was futile, and sat frozen. I’d cut from some of my stepdad’s forgotten Playboys and felt lucky I’d tucked those between the pages of The Fountainhead and Children of Dune.
“Oh.” She picked up some of the cutouts. “Very nice.”
We never laid hands on each other in our family, but she touched my hair, frightening me.
“Do what you love, sweetheart,” she said. “Do what you love.”
She left and went out to the garage, electric trains whining forlornly along the tracks, and closed the door.
The finished collage looked nothing like Cindy, but I worked until something about it stood my arm hairs on end. Then I put The Doors’ “L.A. Woman” on repeat and sat for hours, stared at the poster-board shrine, dreamed of the future. Once I earned my fortune I could make her mine.
One night when Suede was out with Becky, I went to see Cindy. She answered the door in her apron, lipstick freshly applied and glistening. I almost jumped her in the foyer, with Suede’s dad watching TV in the living room, but pulled myself together.
“I’m worried about him,” I said.
Her lashes moistened with tears. She grabbed my hand—the touch burned into the crotch of my heart—and led me to the den.
“He won’t be my Suede anymore!”
“It’s like he’s lost!” I said.
“He’s wasting his life on…on…that bitch!”
The venom in her voice stopped my blood. Her face twisted around the word, and for a moment I didn’t recognize her. She composed herself, apologized for swearing, and went on.
“Fighting with me. Locking his bedroom door. Not letting me wash his clothes anymore. He told me he doesn’t want to go to college. He just wants to roam the country, work whatever job there is.” She brought a handkerchief out of her apron pocket and cried into it. “That’s not our plan!”
“There, there,” I said, patting her luscious knee. I had no idea what there, there meant but actors comforting actresses sure did. She leaned against me and cried. I tried to cover my erection with my shirttail.
“It’s like,” she said, “he’s been replaced by someone I don’t love.”
“It’s going to be all right. I’ll keep an eye on him.”
We sat together like that until we heard the TV turn off. Mrs. Pickens rose quickly and trotted out of the room. She stood in the entry, smiled at me through smudgy eyes, and I stared for a silent moment at my muse. I poked out my chest and aimed my chin at her with a new sense of purpose as she opened the door for me. I tipped my imaginary hat and left.
Out in the night air I felt like a man of experience. I needed only take what I wanted, anything and everything.
A month later Suede called at ten till midnight. Calls after nine-thirty made my stepdad spitting mad. I begged him to take his two cents and get off the phone.
“What is it?”
“Vagina,” Suede whispered.
The bewilderedness in his voice was proof enough. He was so many light-years ahead of us then. Until very recently, for the bulk of my short life, I’d assumed the female netherworld was U-shaped.
“So how do you feel?”
“Pickled,” Suede said.
“Is that good?”
“I think so.”
I sat back aghast in my beanbag, astounded he could speak after such an event. How could he go on with life so upended?
What was left to conquer? What was left to destroy?
In a dream I conjured Cindy Pickens in a field of fire and lilies. She wore her apron and a frilly blouse before her clothes popped off like bubbles. Naked, she was Shannon Tweed, Queen of Cinemax. Her skin frothed and spat with heat. She touched me and I woke up seething, convulsing. I gasped at the darkness above my bed while her burning image floated close, her net of auburn hair enmeshing us.
The next morning my mother caught me cramming my sheets into the washing machine. I wrestled them away from her. Finally, she saw the horror in my eyes and understood.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I forget how grown up you are now.”
Mortified, I kept turning the knob on the machine. CLICK, CLICK, SWOOSH. CLICK, CLICK, SWOOSH. Shame made me insane and stupid. My hands were like paddles.
“You’re growing up so fast,” she said.
She calmly turned the dial to the correct setting and tried to touch my cheek—I batted her hand away. Her eyes filled with hurt.
The tail of her housecoat followed her out of the laundry room. The machine hummed, twisted, and vibrated. I couldn’t wait to escape that house of guilt and mediocrity. I made sure Mother couldn’t hear me crying in there.
Junior year, Suede’s last soccer game became infamous. His events were always well attended, but even his father was in the stands for this, with Walkman headphones and a new John Deere baseball cap. Cindy, in her full glory, never appeared to look at anything other than Suede.
I rode the bench for much of the game because some of the guys had dared me to stuff the coach’s filing cabinet with inflated condoms. Becky Myrtletree sat in the stands, far from Suede’s parents. She was with her own flock of disciples, a fantastic bevy of ebullience. Before the game Suede had said he didn’t care who won.
“How much winning do we have to do?”
I nodded without comprehension. If I could relive that moment, I’d tell him what I learned from our many victories: you go on winning until there’s no one left who can touch you.
In the first half, he scored two quick goals. Since most of the visiting team was guarding him, he kicked the ball to Chuck, another forward. Everyone on or around the field, including Chuck, gasped. It was such a risk when the crowd wanted a sure thing. Chuck was so shocked he kicked it back to our goalie, who was so surprised he tripped on his feet and the visitors scored.
In the second half Suede refused to play offense. He only played spectacular defense and passed the ball to our teammates, who were catching on to the whole teamwork aspect of the game. But the crowd had had enough. They booed and threw breath-mints. Coach called time-out and gave Suede a talking to.
“You’ve got to score!” Coach frothed, his hands twisted into claws.
The referee blew his whistle. The ball came to Suede and he rushed down the field and booted it over the opposing goal and the red dirt hill behind. Coach took him out and put me in. No argument from Suede, but his father shouted and cursed his cheeks full of blood. Every time I looked at Suede, he was watching us, enjoying himself.
We won, but Suede’s fans booed anyway. They didn’t care what had changed in him. They didn’t understand what I’d tried to grasp, the philosophy and poetry of Suede. They wanted another massacre.
Afterward, his parents shooed him into the back of their Yukon. I saw the look on Cindy’s face before she climbed in the passenger side. It was like her son had dropped dead on that field.
The next day the school smeared us with gossip. Suede went crazy, they said. Crystal meth, cocaine, and acid. He’d whipped it into a cocktail and shot it in the vein. We heard that his folks sent him to one of those teen rehab facilities. They told Becky not to contact him anymore.
When he returned he was not our Suede. He slouched and smoked cigarettes in the parking lot with the Iron Maiden-shirt-wearers. In the neighborhood he ignored me, never looked my way. It felt like exile. I stared out my bedroom window at the highway roaring past Waterwood, the dandelion meadow where we’d buried Belch.
He grew his hair long and started a band that played primitive music in soiled garages: Suede and The Swedes. I saw the flyers and heard tongues wagging but cared only for Cindy.
Becky Myrtletree had begun dating Buck Simpson in Suede’s absence. The entire school anticipated a rematch, but the calendar pages flipped without bloodshed. Simpson, back in the ascendancy, made threats, but only after he was sure he was in the clear. By the start of senior year, Suede had quit school and moved out of Waterwood to work at a gas station in Richland, a squalid backwater to our south.
One night not long after he moved, I knocked on Mrs. Pickens’ door, hoping to catch a glimpse of the apron, the knee, the red lips or wringing hands. There was no answer. I knocked again, harder. The lights upstairs went out.
I wanted to tell her about my future rising like the morning star, the future I tasted like it sat on my tongue. I’d go to school and more school, learn the art of making money and turning women’s heads. I’d grow my lip fuzz into a mustache. I’d have my own castle and cars, curio cabinets and grandfather clocks. If she had answered the door, I would’ve told her, “For you, I’ll remake the world. I’ll build happiness from nothing.”
I stood on that lawn and stared up at the black windows until the sprinkler system engaged and wet me to the knees. I wasn’t special. For every Suede, there were billions like me making do with what floated in the wake.
I scuttled back home.
A few weeks before graduation, Suede and The Swedes played The Black Wall, an old train depot converted into an all-ages venue. I climbed through a cloud of smokers to pay the door charge, got my hand stamped with a smiley face. There he was, Spawn of Cindy, onstage and shouting into a microphone while sweaty degenerates down front mashed against each other.
I stood in back to watch him prowl and loom over the crowd like an acrobatic Svengali. When the audience teetered on the edge of riot, he’d grab the nearest girl’s hand and croon to her while the band downshifted from rock to roll. If the audience got bored, he’d scream and berate them until the band whipped back up full blast. He threw melted beer bucket water and the crowd cooed and licked. Everything he ever did on the field, the way he commanded attention and made us feel, he did it onstage for the rabble.
He leaned on a table afterward as kids mumbled up to shake his hand. The Swedes pushed around equipment and laughed at inside jokes. I waited my turn. Suede smirked at me.
“Hey,” he said, “how’s my mom doing?”
“I went by a while back but she wouldn’t see me.”
“Yeah, I know the feeling.” He took a long swig from a water bottle. He looked ruddy and handsome under the lights, at home in the world in a way I’d never be. I finally realized I hated him.
“Listen,” he said, “a few of us are going over to my buddy’s place. It’s an apartment on Old Canton Road. BYOB.”
“I can’t.” I bit my cheeks. “Homework.”
He nodded and cocked his head in a new way, like he recognized me from somewhere other than school and Waterwood. Like he knew each cell of me already and had lost interest. “That’s a shame. Maybe next time.”
We shook hands.
In the parking lot some thirteen-year-olds were shotgunning Colt 45 and smashing empty cans on their foreheads. One of them said, “Hey, you know Suede?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Because he fucking sucks,” the kid said. He high-fived his laughing friends.
I kicked that kid in the nuts.
The rest scattered into the bushes while I grabbed him, blacked out for a few seconds, and came to, snarling, “You don’t know him! You don’t know shit!” and pressing his face into the hood of a Datsun. When I let him go, the bum launched into the night, reappearing under the farther streetlights.
My arms and chest flexed. My mind was bleached with rage.
I felt ten feet tall.
I learned things in college about finance and women. After two years, I had a mustache and a few conquests under my belt, though I still thought of that night with Cindy on the couch, her naked knee.
On Christmas break, I went to Northpark, the shiniest mall in the land, to buy my mother a scented candle. I wandered out swinging the bag where the broad corridors intersected and dullards sat on uncomfortable benches spackling their faces with sugar. That’s where I saw Cindy Pickens shuffle out of a shoe store. She wore a shabby dress, years out of style. I’d never noticed her dim sense of fashion, not to mention how the years were hanging on her neck skin.
Standing on the gleaming marble tiles, in the midst of seasonal commerce and all of humanity streaming past, I was transfixed. My heart had been so drunk, it made me question all my judgments about Cindy and Suede. The last I’d heard, Suede and the Swedes had made an album and gone touring in an ancient station wagon. In my mind, he was still years ahead of me, but what if he’d fled someplace I never wanted to be, like prison or New Jersey? I steeled myself to ask about him as she approached. When she saw me, I imagined she’d grasp my hand, grateful and chatty. We could catch up by the fountain of lucky pennies. Perhaps she’d say, “I’m divorced,” and offer a breathless, “I’ve been thinking of you.”
She stared through me instead, no recognition, with a look of befuddled desperation, like the newly blind groping for the light switch. A chill of December air conditioning blew out of the jewelry store as she rounded the corner.
It was just as well. I vowed, right then and there, to never again let anyone get so close.
Farewell, my grail.
