Pulphead: Essays Read Online Free Page A

that). Slowly, their talk became an ecstasy of self-definition. They were passionate to make me see what kind of guys they were. This might have grown tedious, had they been any old kind of guys. But they were the kind of guys who believed that God had personally interceded and made it possible for four of them to fit into Ritter’s silver Chevrolet Cavalier for the trip to Creation.
    “Look,” Bub said, “I’m a pretty big boy, right? I mean, I’m stout. And Darius is a big boy”—here Darius broke in and made me look at his calves, which were muscled to a degree that hinted at deformity; “I’m a freak,” he said; Bub sighed and went on without breaking eye contact—“and you know Ritter is a big boy. Plus we had two coolers, guitars, an electric piano, our tents and stuff, all”—he turned and pointed, turned back, paused—“in that Chevy.” He had the same look in his eyes as earlier, when he’d told me there were Jews. “I think that might be a miracle,” he said.
    In their lives, they had known terrific violence. Ritter and Darius met, in fact, when each was beating the shit out of the other in middle-school math class. Who won? Ritter looked at Darius, as if to clear his answer, and said, “Nobody.” Jake once took a fishing pole that Darius had accidentally stepped on and broken and beat him to the ground with it. “I told him, ‘Well, watch where you’re stepping,’” Jake said. (This memory made Darius laugh so hard he removed his glasses.) Half of their childhood friends had been murdered—shot or stabbed over drugs or nothing. Others had killed themselves. Darius’s grandfather, great-uncle, and onetime best friend had all committed suicide. When Darius was growing up, his father was in and out of jail; at least once, his father had done hard time. In Ohio he stabbed a man in the chest (the man had refused to stop “pounding on” Darius’s grandfather). Darius caught a lot of grief—“Your daddy’s a jailbird!”—during those years. He’d carried a chip on his shoulder from that. “You came up pretty rough,” I said.
    “Not really,” Darius said. “Some people ain’t got hands and feet.” He talked about how much he loved his father. “With all my heart—he’s the best. He’s brought me up the way that I am.
    “And anyway,” he added, “I gave all that to God—all that anger and stuff. He took it away.”
    God in His wisdom had left him enough to get by on. Earlier in the evening, the guys had roughed up Pee Wee a little and tied him to a tree with ratchet straps. Some other Christians must have reported his screams to the staff, because a guy in an orange vest came stomping up the hill. Pee Wee hadn’t been hurt much, but he put on a show of tears, to be funny. “They always do me like that,” he said. “Save me, mister!”
    The guy was unamused. “It’s not them you got to worry about,” he said. “It’s me.”
    Those were such foolish words! Darius came forward like some hideously fast-moving lizard on a nature show. “I’d watch it, man,” he said. “You don’t know who you’re talking to. This’n here’s as like to shoot you as shake your hand.”
    The guy somehow appeared to move back without actually taking a step. “You’re not allowed to have weapons,” he said.
    “Is that right?” Darius said. “We got a conceal ’n’ carry right there in the glove box. Mister, I’m from West Virginia—I know the law.”
    “I think you’re lying,” said the guy. His voice had gone a bit warbly.
    Darius leaned forward, as if to hear better. His eyes were leaving his skull. “How would you know that?” he said. “Are you a prophet?”
    “I’m Creation staff!” the guy said.
    Jake stood up—he’d been watching this scene from his seat by the fire. The fixed polite smile on his face was indistinguishable from a leer.
    “Well,” he said, “why don’t you go somewhere and create your own problems?”
    I admit that these tales of the