Graham the Fucking Cracker
It starts off like this: you’re eleven years old, you’re walking home from school, kind of sulking because you got detention ‘stead of recess. It’s a big overcast and muggy. Your head hurts, your lightweight red backpack is thumping on your back, you’re throwing a baseball into your mitt hard, to overcome the stress of the Little League game you just lost.
It’s the last block to your house in general, run-down suburbia. All the houses are the same with different colored doors. One time you tried your key on the neighbor’s doorknob. S’how you know everything and everyone is the same, just, in different clothing.
A car slows down.
Black Mercedes, year 1995. Nice car. The tinted windows roll down.
A man with a shaven head and sunglasses calls out to you.
You know what to do in this situation though, right? Ten hundred ‘run the other ways’ and ‘don’t take strangers from candy’ have prepared you for this, eh? You drop your glove and mitt and take off running. The man opens his car door; you can hear it scuffing against the cement sidewalk. You hear thumping footsteps and the heat of your compressed heart making its way up your throat to be gurged.
You’re grabbed from behind, legs swinging, and rushed back to the car, thrown in the front seat and pushed aside. A man from the back puts a calloused hand over your mouth.
You’re panicking.
It ends up like this: you’re twenty years old and lying on a couch with your wrists sliced vertically. The middle goes like this.
There’s something about being white and named Graham. Nobody can think of anything to call you except Teddy or Cracker and for Christmas gifts you get an assortment of multi-pack graham crackers because people think it’s cute and hey yeah, actually, it’s not.
In fact, I do not like graham crackers. Even as a child, when I thought that it was COOL to have my name written everywhere, I didn’t like the crackers. They taste like cardboard. Stale cardboard, as it were.
I lived with my grandmother, who by the way is senile, until I was eleven. All I really remember about that time is the floral wall paper and the musty scent of everything, and how we only really ate old people food like FiberOptic and leftovers stored in Tupperware, and multivitamins. Any “snack” that I ever got for school was stale. And she clung to the idea that I LOVED graham crackers—which I didn’t. Don’t.
It was my mom’s idea to name me Graham, that’s one thing—really, the only thing I knew even as a child. I was born and I guess as she was holding me and they were asking “What are you going to name him? What are you going to name him?” she looked to her left, and there was this tray of rancid hospital food. And her options were as follows: Grape Juice, Apple Sauce, and Graham the Fucking Cracker.
Ergo.
We got home and she passed me immediately off to my then seventy-year-old grandmother while my grandpa was sleeping. She was going out for an afternoon walk to rejuvenate and took the car and that was that.
The point, I have found, is not to dwell on things.
My grandpa told me the whole story of my mother before he died, when I was eight. What happened is, she was staying with my grandpa and grandma for a little while, to get back on her feet, apparently. And she came home and had been drinking too much sherry and told my grandmother, in a moment of confidence (rare), that she was pregnant again but getting an abortion in a few days anyway. My grandma told my grandpa and they holed her up in a room until she was part her first trimester, and so she was stuck giving birth.
It was unfortunate, her life. But I don’t believe in abortion, anyway.
When I was fourteen I had a lot of sex. I had a mad sex drive around thirteen and couldn’t go long without it, but at fourteen, I couldn’t not have sex. I was constantly getting off in the bathroom and reading hardcore porn and God if you’d have seen it. I was a crazy motherfucker. I’d literally walk up to a random stranger on the street, and the conversation would go like this:
Me: Hey!
Random Person: Er, hello.
Me: Do you wanna FUCK?
RP: Excuse me?
Me: Come on! It’s okay! Come on, let’s do it. Come on!
RP: Get help you sick, sick little boy.
I don’t think that I was sick. Well, yeah, I guess I was. But I think that I had good reason to be sick and that’s the only way I can escape the absolute shame of being the crazy kid who ran around begging strangers for sex. In L.A., if you’re a decent looking kid, it isn’t too hard to get an eighty-year-old to take you on and pay you damn good money too. But it’s like this disease, like you’re a leper and caught the black plague too, if people know what you’re like and who you really are. You have to run away from home to get away from your crazy, eighty-four year old grandma’s penetrating eyes.
Please, please, do me a favor. If you ever get into a situation like this, don’t, don’t, DO NOT run away. That will only start problems and I guarantee you, unless you think those glassy eyes are going to kill you, like Edgar Allen Poe shit, stay at home, and pretend to be normal.
I didn’t. That explains why my life’s gotten so fucked.
I ran down the street to the grocery store this morning and bummed a cigarette from a man loitering about, and looked him in the eye and said, “Hey I’m Chad,” and I rubbed my hand along my thigh and blinked a couple of times. That was the signal. He introduced himself as Jerry and it went on from there in the 1986 blue Sedan parked in the Shell station.
This afternoon I met with a woman in Bel Air. She has hair extensions and professionally done make-up. Her name is Lauren. She’s twenty-five. Her husband is sixty. Does that give you a mild clue as to his net worth? Somewhere around eighty, ninety mil, eh? We slammed in her bedroom and then I yanked my clothes on and took off running down the streets.
I was just making my rounds.
Just make the transition better! At the moment, it seems like two different stories.