Monday, November 8, 2010

Doipske Head Faggot

Doipske Head Faggot
By Philip Bram
It makes no sense why they called me that. I remember one of my brother’s friends calling me Phoidoip, but how it evolved into Doipske Head Faggot, I have no idea. Nonetheless, that was my name for many years growing up in the small town of Altus Oklahoma. 
They were fucking brutal, my brother and his friends. I remember his one friend, Toby, who was a bit older and wore a class ring. Any time I was unfortunate enough to run across him, it was required that I stand before him with my head bowed and my hands clasped behind my back. He would really draw it out, slowly turning the ring around on his finger so that the large stone faced down. He would make many practice movements, honing in on the exact spot on my head he wanted to hit. “How ‘bout here? No, no, I like this area right here, right above your ear.” I would stand there, cringing, sobbing, waiting for the blow. It was a sickening sound, more of a crunch than a crack. You could feel it deep inside your body, down to your toes. The bump would be there for days. I was seldom without one. 
One of their favorite things to do was gather up all of my father’s racquetballs, throw me in the corner of a room, and unleash. I would look diseased from all the colorful welts. The torture would continue from there. Often they would fold me up in our neighbor, Jeff Johnson’s fold out couch. I’d be in there for hours while they sat on top of me, farting and playing Atari. I learned to slow my breathing, to calm myself. About all I could do was wiggle my fingers and toes. I remember once it was raining and I was in there all day. For lunch I got a cold weenie. My brother lifted the mattress a bit and held it up to my mouth. I took small bites and chewed carefully so I would not choke. “Hurry the fuck up, faggot!” he yelled. I had nothing to drink. It’s strange, I got to where I really didn’t mind being in there. After a while they would forget about me and I sort of enjoyed listening to their voices, to all the things they said. 
Then there is the one day I will never forget, the day they forced me to beat up my friend, Kenny Pearson. It was summer and Kenny’s family had just moved into town. His father had been hired as the new basketball couch for the local junior college. They moved into a house on the other side of the neighborhood and Kenny and I had been hanging out nearly every day. He was an only child, painfully shy, weak, even skinnier than me. He had a feminine quality about him that was exacerbated by his shyness. Yet it quickly dissolved as I got to know him. I was the only kid who liked him and was constantly having to defend him from my other friends. He had had surgery on his heart as a baby. He showed me the long pink scar the first day I met him. It looked a lot like one of my mother’s scars. I can’t remember where he had lived before only that it was a long way away from southwest Oklahoma. 
Kenny was afraid of everything. He was afraid of thunder and lightening, of tornadoes, he was afraid of dogs and cats, horses and cows, snakes, skunks, even horny toads. He wouldn’t ride his bike on the street, he wouldn’t climb a fence or go up on a roof, he wouldn’t jump on a trampoline, he wouldn’t wrestle or play football, he wouldn’t go “nigger-knocking” (yes, everyone, even my black friend, Enith, used to call it that) or TP-ing, and he would never in a million years speak to a girl. About the only thing he would do was play basketball. After all, his father was a basketball coach. Of course he never wanted to play One-on-one, just Twenty-one or Horse. He could really shoot.      
One of the first days we hung out, I took him crawdad hunting. He refused to climb down into the irrigation ditch. He just sat up there at the edge on his bike, looking down at me as I waded through the murky water, turning over block after block of quarried granite, searching for pinchers, for antenna, for bubbles. I caught a ton that day, enough to halfway fill my father’s tin minnow bucket. They were mostly small ones with soft translucent shells, pinchers no bigger than eyebrow tweezers. When I climbed out and walked over to show Kenny, he freaked. “Get ‘em away from me! I mean it, get ‘em away!” he yelled. 
“Okay, okay,” I said, “jeez.”
I grabbed my b b gun which was propped up against my bike, walked over to the concrete wall, and started lining them up for execution. When I turned around, Kenny was peddling away fast.
“You’re a murderer!” he yelled. 
What he was most afraid of, and for good reason, was my brother and his friends. The day it happened I woke up to the sounds of my mother sobbing and talking to herself in her bedroom. She had just gotten back from the hospital the night before. My father had already left for work. I didn’t want to see her, I didn’t want to see what she looked like. I got up and got dressed, grabbed a Pop.tart, and left for Kenny’s. He had lent me his basketball a few days earlier and I dribbled it down the street towards his house.  
It couldn’t have been more than nine thirty or ten o’clock but it was already hot as hell. I turned the corner past the Garrison’s and there was Jeff Johnson standing in the alley. He was a wrestler, State Champion at 145 pounds. I kept walking, kept dribbling. Then Eric Brewster appeared. He stepped out from behind a camper tailer parked in a driveway. I hadn’t seen him a long time. He was a wrestler too and would go on to wrestle at OSU on a full scholarship. He and Jeff began following me. My heart was pounding. Before long there were five of them: Jeff, Eric, Toby, the one with the ring, my brother, of course, and Raymond. Raymond was the one I hated the most. There was something wrong with him, something dark and twisted. He scared the shit out of me. I wanted him dead. They circled around me. 
“Hey, Doespsk... Head Faggot,” said Jeff. 
“Where you going, Ski-Bo?” said my brother. He also called me Ski-Bo or Olive Oil. He would often look at me with a sad, pitying look while reaching out to grab one of my more bonier parts like an elbow or a knee. Ever so gently, he would pinch it between his thumb and forefinger, careful not to crush my delicate bones. “Oh, Ski-Bo,” He would say, shaking his head, tsk-tsking in disbelief at my frail condition. God, I hated him for it. It devastated my ego. I would’ve rather him just wipe a booger on me. 
“You’re going to that other faggot’s house, aren’t you?”
“They’re gonna suck each other’s dicks.”
“They don’t even have dicks.”
Raymond ripped the ball out of my hands. 
“Yeah, I guess they lick each other’s twats!”
“Give it back, it’s not even mine!” I yelled. 
Raymond bounced it a few times then threw it as hard as he could right at my face. I covered up with my arms just in time but the blow still knocked me down to the pavement. The ball went bouncing down the street. Jeff picked me up by my shirt collar. 
“Here’s the deal,” said, Jeff. “You’re going to kick that little faggot’s ass or we’re gonna kick yours.”
“What?” I said.
He grabbed my shirt with both hands and lifted me up over his head. The collar cut hard into my neck. 
“Ow, ow,” I cried. 
“God, you’re such a pussy,” he said. He let go and I fell back down to the pavement. 
“Get up, let’s go,” said my brother.
“NO!” I said.
“I said, get up!”
“No, you can’t make me.”
My brother reached down and pulled me up by my hair.
“Ow! Ow! Ow!”
He then leaned his face down into mine. We were nose to nose. His warm breath made me sick. I didn’t smell bad but it still made me sick. Then quietly he said, “You want me to tell ‘em?”
“Tell us what?” asked Toby. 
My brother looked around, smiling. 
“What’d the little fucker do?” asked Eric.  
My brother looked back at me. He let go of my hair. I knew exactly what he was talking about. A couple of days before he busted me masturbating with my mother’s electric massager. He put his arm around my shoulder and shook his head. He took a deep breath.  
“The other day I walked into his room and...”
“I’ll do it,” I said.
“What’s that?” asked my brother, leaning in as if he didn’t hear me. 
I shrugged him off. “I said I’ll do it.”    
“I still want to know what he did,” said Eric. 
I had the ball back and I dribbled it closer and closer to Kenny’s house. When I got to his house they all scattered and hid behind bushes, behind cars, behind Kenny’s big brick mailbox. I went up to the doorbell and rang it. Kenny came right out. 
“Hey, Phil, did you get to practice much?”
“No, I had to go with my Dad to Oklahoma City to pick up my Mom.”
“Oh... Hold on let me go get my shoes.”
He went back inside. I dribbled the ball out onto the driveway and took a shot at the hoop. It was an air ball. 
“You suck!” One of them yelled.    
Kenny came back out. We took turns shooting. He was in a really good mood. 
“Hey, you want to go to Six Flags with us? We’re going in two weeks and my parents said I could invite a friend.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. We’d spend the night in a hotel the night before. You wouldn’t need any money.”
“I’ll have to ask.”
“I really hope you can go. We’ll have a blast!”             
I looked around. Jeff had stepped out from behind the mailbox. He gave me a dirty look and hit his fist into his palm. He then slipped back into hiding. 
“Twenty-one?” Kenny asked. 
“Okay.”
“You shoot first.”
I took an easy shot and missed. 
“You’re not following through,” he said. The way he said it made me mad. “Here, watch.” He dribbled the ball a couple of times and swished it. “See, it’s all in the wrist,” he said with his hand still up over his head, tipping his wrist back and forth. Little faggot, I thought.  
I went over and picked up the ball. 
“What’s the matter with you?” he asked. 
“Nothing. One zip.”
My next shot was a brick. 
“Slow down, take your time.”
“Why don’t you shut up?” I said. 
“I was just trying to help.” 
The ball had rolled out onto the street. He hurried over to pick it up. My brother and Eric came out from the bushes. Kenny picked up the ball and froze. He looked back at me. I could tell he knew that whatever was happening, I was somehow a part of it. He was all alone and knew it. I looked down at my feet. The others came out and approached him. 
“Hey, faggot,” said Raymond. 
Raymond took the ball away from him. Kenny stood there, helpless. Toby came up and put an arm around him. 
“Relax, dude, we’re not gonna hurt you. We just wanna watch you two fags play basketball.”
They walked Kenny over to the driveway. Raymond tossed me the ball. 
“All right,” said Raymond, “whoever wins doesn’t have to suck my cock.”
“First one to eleven by two,” said my brother. 
They all went over to the grass to watch. “Hey, Doepsk,” said Jeff, “let him go first.”
Kenny began dribbling. He turned his back to me, sticking his butt out against me as he worked his way toward the goal. They burst out laughing.
“Look, he’s rubbing his ass on him!”
“They look like they’re fucking each other!”
Kenny threw a hook shot and it went in. 
“Hey, the little Homo can shoot.”
I now had the ball. I went in fast for a layup but I was out of control and Kenny stole the ball and easily made another shot. 
“Doepsk, you suck!”
Kenny pranced over with the ball and tossed it to me. “Two zero,” he said.   
Something was growing inside of me. I could feel it welling up with every breath. I stood there for a long time. Kenny was in front of me, hunkered down in his defensive stance. He knew he was going to win and he was really starting to get into it. He was finally going to prove something to someone. I looked over my shoulder at my brother and his friends. 
“What are you lookin’ at?” asked my brother.
“Do it,” mouthed, Jeff, “DO IT!” 
A dog barked. Then everything went quiet. I looked up and saw a jet plane moving through the sky, its two long white trails billowing out behind it. It was hard to believe there were people inside there, way up there flying through the sky. I looked back at Kenny. It was as if I had never really looked at him before, as if I had never seen this person before. He had so many freckles, his face was covered in them. Even his ears had freckles. My chin began trembling. 
“What?” said Kenny. 
It was at that very instant that it hit me. All the sadness, all the anger, the frustration, the humiliation, the disbelief, all of it, all of those feelings that I had been burying inside me for so long came rushing out of me. They merged into one enormous tidal wave of emotion that slammed into me with the weight of the world. There was only one place it could go.    
I saw Kenny’s eyes follow the ball when I dropped it. Then I saw him look at one of my fists. His lips tightened into a strange contorted smile. The first punch I threw hit him right in the eye. He covered up and I hit him hard in the gut. I hit him a few more times then threw him against the garage door. He fell to the ground. “STOP! STOP! PLEASE!” he cried. My brother and his friends rushed in around me. “Finish him!” yelled Jeff. I kicked him as hard as I could in the stomach and then in the face. He looked up at me in shock with his mouth hung open. I saw the blood oozing around his teeth. I kicked him again. He curled up in a ball, crying, moaning, no longer moving. 
“Holy shit!” I heard someone yell. 
“Should we stop him?”
Then I started crying. I kept kicking him while I cried. “Why am I doing this to you, Kenny?” I thought, “Why? WHY?” But I wouldn’t stop. It wasn’t Kenny I was kicking, it was my brother and his friends, it was my father, it was my mother, it was myself. “I’m sorry, Kenny, I’m so sorry!”
A car pulled over and a man came storming out. 
“HEY! HEY! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING TO THAT KID?”
“Shit,” someone said, “let’s get outa here!”
My brother grabbed me by the arm and we all ran off. We ran down the alley towards our house. We hopped the fence and they all stood around me. Our black lab, Babe, came running up all excited with her tennis ball in her mouth. 
“Dude,” said, Jeff, “you really fucked him up!”
“You’re gonna get in so much trouble,” said my brother. “You’re fucked.”
I went into the house. My mother was there in the kitchen, chopping vegetables. She looked horrible. She was emaciated, her skin looked yellow and her hair was greasy and stringy. I could see her scalp in many places. 
“Hi, Philby!” she said.
“Hi, Mom.”
“I’m making chicken spaghetti for dinner tonight.” 
Her eyes looked dead. She still had the plastic hospital band on her wrist. 
“What’ve you been doin’?”
“Nothin’” 
She had been in the hospital for weeks and now, just like that, she was back, making chicken spaghetti. She had tried to kill herself with pills again. One day after visiting her in the hospital, my father and I pulled up in the driveway in his truck. He turned off the engine and I went to get out. “Hold on a minute,” my father said.
I sat back in the seat. 
“You know, one of these days your mother’s gonna really do it. You know that don’t you?”
I nodded my head. I went to get out again. 
“Where’re you going?”
“I’m going over to Kenny’s.”
“Not until you pick up the dog shit you’re not!”  
My mother put the knife down. “Come here and give me a hug,” she said. 
There was no phone call from Kenny’s parents that night. There never would be. To my knowledge, Kenny never told on me. We were never friends again and I was never able to bring myself to tell him that I was sorry. Whenever I saw him, he would turn away. I’m not sure what happened but soon after school started, he and his family simply moved away. I would never see him again. 
The next morning I was walking through the neighborhood on my way to the irrigation ditch. I was carrying my father’s tin minnow bucket, one of his old bamboo fishing poles, and a ziplock bag of ham slices. Someone had told me you could catch crawdads by tying some ham on a line and just lowering it into the water, that they would latch on and you could just pull them out. I was really excited to find out. 
I saw Raymond’s green Mustang parked on the street in front of Jill Miller’s house. Jill’s front door opened and Raymond came out. I cut through another yard into the alley. I wasn’t sure if he saw me or not but I hurried down the alley towards the wheat field. I got to the end of the houses, past the last wooden fence, turned the corner, and there he was. He had on cutoffs and a red tank top. He’d been working out hard all summer, getting ready for football. One long fat vein wormed out from each of his shoulders all the way down to his wrists. 
“You little fucking faggot,” he said. 
I dropped the bag of ham then threw the bucket and the pole at him and took off running. We ran through the field, through the tall blades of dried wheat. The ground had big hard clods of dirt and every so often my foot would land on one wrong, nearly twisting my ankle. “Come here, you little faggot!” 
We came out of the field onto the dirt road that leads to the irrigation ditch. He was closing in on me fast. I knew there was no hope so finally I just stopped. He threw me to the ground and got on top of me, pinning my arms down with his knees. He worked his crotch up to my face. He unzipped his fly and pulled out his dick. It was fat with a big purple head. One of his hairy balls flopped out too with many folds of lose skin. It smelled like onions. I turned my head away, crying. 
“STOP, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!”
He started slapping me repeatedly in the face with both of his hands. 
“You’re a little faggot aren’t you? You wanna suck my dick don’t you? Go ahead, suck it, suck my dick, you little faggot!”
He started jacking himself off. I fought like hell, trying to buck him off. I rolled my head back and forth, crying, screaming. I could feel his dick getting bigger, getting harder. It brushed up against my chin, my cheeks, my lips. He grabbed my hair and forced my head down into the ground with all his might. I could no longer move my head. He pressed his dick into my lips. They spread apart and the tip of his dick was now touching my teeth. 
Just then a truck appeared. It turned onto the road, heading our way. Raymond zipped up and hopped off me. 
“You’re fucking lucky,” he said, standing above me, pointing. Then he ran off. The truck rolled up and slowed to a stop. It was driven by an old farmer. His arm dangled out the open window. He wore a ball cap and had the biggest nose I had ever seen in my life. It was shinny and had many large bumps all over it too. He spat out a mouthful of tobacco juice. It splat not two feet in front of me onto the dirt.     
“You all right, son?” he asked. 
I sat up, wiping the tears from my eyes. “Yes, sir,” I said. 
“Okay,” he said and drove off. 
Very cautiously, I snuck back to where I had thrown the pole and the minnow bucket and the bag of ham. It was all there. I went ahead and went to the irrigation ditch and with the new system I caught more crawdads that day that I could have ever imagined. It was true, you tied a piece of ham to a string, dipped it in there, and you just pulled them right out. It was amazing.          

2 comments:

  1. Phil... This is great stuff.

    And very messed up... It's really amazing the cruelty that humans are capable of especially children.

    I also used to hunt for crawdads in that irrigation ditch. Me and a buddy of mine actually cooked some up and ate them one time.

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