museum of oddities, and the thing I want the most is genuine sympathy from someone. Well, there’s Cody, but that’s not exactly a strong friendship, either.
Cody Ulrich is a beautiful boy except for one abnormality. He’s a pseudo-hunchback. He comes from a line of unflagging chain smokers—his father Earl’s license plate reads M EARL BORO—and that included the pregnant Mrs. Ulrich, who decided that lighting a ciggie up after her intrapartum feasts of pickles and strawberry jam would only be fair since she was perpetuating the species and all. The result was a baby born with one dead nerve running along his shoulders, one that pulls them forward.
We met last year in Mrs. Nolan’s class. I wish that I could give you some grand reason why we became friends, but the truth is that we were seated next to each other. Cody often forgot to bring a pencil to school, and I was always the person who had to give him one. The second week of class, I lent him one that had red and white stripes on it, like a candy cane, and he looked at me like I had just turned into a unicorn. I expected that he would never talk to me again, but later that day, he wandered over to my empty lunch table, slammed the pencil on the table in front of me, and said, “I guess yer all I got.” Thus a friendship was born.
As if to match the elderly slant of his body, Cody has developed the cynical drollness of a Vietnam vet, and I am usually the recipient of this disposition.
“Who gets a splinter in their ass?” he asks over lunch in the cafetorium—which should actually be called a gymnacafetorium, as it is the venue of not just lunch and pageants but games of dodgeball and pep rallies. I am eating my usual sack lunch of Capri-Sun fruit punch, three sticks of celery, a cup of apple-sauce, and two Ziplocked roti , the brown burn spots on them akin to the moles covering Lunchlady Packer’s skin. Cody is eating school food: a rectangular piece of pizza so undercooked in the cafeteria kitchen’s industrial-sized oven that I think I see ice crystals covering the cheese. “Seriously, Keern. Yer such a sissy.”
“‘In his ass.’ Not ‘their.’ And I am not a sissy,” I insist. Cody is the only person to whom I can say anything with any trace of insistence since no matter what he says, he’ll always be the token hunchback. “I’m not the one who did something wrong. They pushed me!”
“Well, what were ya thinkin’ hangin’ out with Sarah and Melissa anyway? They’re two of the prettiest girls in school. Why would they be friends with you ?”
Oftentimes, it seems that Cody is simply a human embodiment of my shame. He always seems to say what my self-esteem has already told me.
“I am floundering,” I say, pensively.
“What?”
“‘Flounder.’ ‘To act clumsily.’ It’s one of my vocab words for the week. It’s also the name of Ariel’s sidekick in The Little Mermaid , remember?”
He laughs, his hunched shoulder fluttering like the wings of a captured moth. “And ya don’t think yer a sissy? Anyway, if yer not too busy watching The Little Mermaid for the millionth time, ya wanna come over today after school? My parents are visitin’ my grandparents in Louisville today.”
I know what this means. It means Cody wants to spend the afternoon looking at Playboy .
How to explain the universal intrigue of a tit?
There is something ever-calming about the roundness of a tit, its buoyancy, the peacefulness of the concentric circle in its middle, darker. The posturing of a tit can vary so greatly, and yet the allure of it never dissipates. Tilted forward, the iris of the eye looking at the ground, the rest of the flesh fatly stretching. Or facing upward, splayed across a chest, lolling around like a plate of Jell-O, the eye quavering. Or staring straight ahead, serene in its sternness. A tit reminds me of Madonna. It can be brash and wild when it wants to be, and yet there are those “Live to Tell” moments when
Cody Ulrich is a beautiful boy except for one abnormality. He’s a pseudo-hunchback. He comes from a line of unflagging chain smokers—his father Earl’s license plate reads M EARL BORO—and that included the pregnant Mrs. Ulrich, who decided that lighting a ciggie up after her intrapartum feasts of pickles and strawberry jam would only be fair since she was perpetuating the species and all. The result was a baby born with one dead nerve running along his shoulders, one that pulls them forward.
We met last year in Mrs. Nolan’s class. I wish that I could give you some grand reason why we became friends, but the truth is that we were seated next to each other. Cody often forgot to bring a pencil to school, and I was always the person who had to give him one. The second week of class, I lent him one that had red and white stripes on it, like a candy cane, and he looked at me like I had just turned into a unicorn. I expected that he would never talk to me again, but later that day, he wandered over to my empty lunch table, slammed the pencil on the table in front of me, and said, “I guess yer all I got.” Thus a friendship was born.
As if to match the elderly slant of his body, Cody has developed the cynical drollness of a Vietnam vet, and I am usually the recipient of this disposition.
“Who gets a splinter in their ass?” he asks over lunch in the cafetorium—which should actually be called a gymnacafetorium, as it is the venue of not just lunch and pageants but games of dodgeball and pep rallies. I am eating my usual sack lunch of Capri-Sun fruit punch, three sticks of celery, a cup of apple-sauce, and two Ziplocked roti , the brown burn spots on them akin to the moles covering Lunchlady Packer’s skin. Cody is eating school food: a rectangular piece of pizza so undercooked in the cafeteria kitchen’s industrial-sized oven that I think I see ice crystals covering the cheese. “Seriously, Keern. Yer such a sissy.”
“‘In his ass.’ Not ‘their.’ And I am not a sissy,” I insist. Cody is the only person to whom I can say anything with any trace of insistence since no matter what he says, he’ll always be the token hunchback. “I’m not the one who did something wrong. They pushed me!”
“Well, what were ya thinkin’ hangin’ out with Sarah and Melissa anyway? They’re two of the prettiest girls in school. Why would they be friends with you ?”
Oftentimes, it seems that Cody is simply a human embodiment of my shame. He always seems to say what my self-esteem has already told me.
“I am floundering,” I say, pensively.
“What?”
“‘Flounder.’ ‘To act clumsily.’ It’s one of my vocab words for the week. It’s also the name of Ariel’s sidekick in The Little Mermaid , remember?”
He laughs, his hunched shoulder fluttering like the wings of a captured moth. “And ya don’t think yer a sissy? Anyway, if yer not too busy watching The Little Mermaid for the millionth time, ya wanna come over today after school? My parents are visitin’ my grandparents in Louisville today.”
I know what this means. It means Cody wants to spend the afternoon looking at Playboy .
How to explain the universal intrigue of a tit?
There is something ever-calming about the roundness of a tit, its buoyancy, the peacefulness of the concentric circle in its middle, darker. The posturing of a tit can vary so greatly, and yet the allure of it never dissipates. Tilted forward, the iris of the eye looking at the ground, the rest of the flesh fatly stretching. Or facing upward, splayed across a chest, lolling around like a plate of Jell-O, the eye quavering. Or staring straight ahead, serene in its sternness. A tit reminds me of Madonna. It can be brash and wild when it wants to be, and yet there are those “Live to Tell” moments when
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