Fem

Part 1

Welcome to the jungle
It gets worse here every day.

You learn to live like an animal
In the jungle where we play.

-Guns n' Roses

*********

The summer went by too fast. The summer went by too slow. I swam in pools and jumped on trampolines. I read Cujo and Anne of Green Gables. I jerked off a thousand thousand times. I won the Showcase Showdown. I got the wind knocked out of me. I threw crab apples at cars. I lit things on fire and watched them burn.

A thousand thousand is a million.

I asked my dad what's Labour Day about and he said ask mom. I asked her and she said ask dad. I wanted to say, A long weekend for Labour Day doesn't make sense because labour, we should be working.

It was meant to be a joke but nobody laughed. No one wanted to hear it.

Being back at school is alright. It's only just the first week. I got to wear my new school clothes. With my mom I picked out a sweatshirt from the Bay. It has bright red splotches on it. Mr. Stalker said I looked sharp. Everyone else said it was a gay sweatshirt.

At recess we played smash. When it was my turn to get smashed, everyone said, You look so sharp, Marty, you look so sharp.

Everyone laughed. Jeremy got elbowed in the nose and bled on me. No one noticed the blood on my gay sweatshirt because of all the other gay red blotches.

*

You're only allowed to listen to Guns N' Roses or Bon Jovi or U2. Everything else makes you gay. REM makes you gay.

You're only allowed to play hockey. Everything else makes you gay. Basketball makes you gay. Tennis makes you gay. Gymnastics will get you killed.

Playing an instrument makes you gay.

Dancing makes you gay. Unless the lights are low and it's a school gym and it's a slow song. Then you don't have to move your body around too much. But dancing to a fast song makes you gay.

Looking at your fingernails wrong makes you gay. Having an earring in your left ear makes you gay. Or is it the right ear. It's hard to keep track because the rules keep changing.

*

It was picture day and Tori had flowers in her hair. I told her it looked like she'd been dragged through a hedge backwards. I heard that on a TV show once. I thought I was being funny. She ran out of the room crying.

*

Chad said a blow job is when a girl blows on your dick. I knew that was wrong. It wouldn't do anything, it would only tickle. I told Chad what a blow job really was, and he said if that was true, why wasn't it called a suck job. Chad said he'd ask his cousins if it was blowing or sucking. They would know for sure because they're in high school.

*

My dad has a ponytail. He wears leather sandals with socks. He plays the harp.

My dad is going to be a doctor, but not the medical kind. He'll be a doctor of music. People will have to call him Doctor Green. He has to finish his thesis first. It's also called a dissertation. He always says he's going downstairs to work on his thesis. But he's usually just going downstairs.

My dad shaves every single morning. When he's done, he taps the shaver three times against the sink to empty the hair. That's how I know it's time to get up, because of the tapping. I always go in to look at the hair in the sink. It's like iron filings. It's like black powder. I never get tired of looking at it, it's how I start my day.