I am still young enough, unformed enough, to be mistaken for a girl. Underneath my clothing there is nothing to betray otherwise, a sun-carameled body best left on the sand at the mouth of the ocean. The waves lift me, carried on salt, my name, my social security number, my everything washed away. To return to where we came from, isn’t that our only purpose? To see, only then to unsee? It is very brief, and for most, uninstructive.


***

Remember, as a child, breathing underwater, spinning in the kitchen until the linoleum blurred, standing on your head, next to your brother, the pressure in your head changing the complexion of the room, childhood, always in sepia, peppered through with buckshot? Waxed paper cup taped to a wall, tuna fish gasoline filled halfway, then the great ignition before the ceiling of the world explodes in angry lovely pinks and oranges?


***

Synchronized hand claps and the glossolalia between notes save lives, however it is the vocal hiccup that reigns supreme. Please allow me to preface this by saying I am not a musician, though I have studied music for many years, both as an appreciator and as a failed practitioner. I was in band during all four years of high school, drum section, without knowing how to play a single instrument. My band instructor, Mr. Howell, liked me for some reason, and allowed me to stay. Perhaps I was myself a vocal hiccup? I have listened to thousands of hours of music, pop, rock, hip hop, electronica, pre 1995 country and western, Stockhausen, Penderecki. As I said, as a student, a lover of beats, a practitioner of silence between notes.


***


If I stand perfectly still in my father’s garage, the fillings in my teeth pick up radio signals. It helps if the radio is an old black Philco, if the garage is on a Sunday, if gasoline-painted rags sit in the corner like silent rabbits, quivering and dangerous, ready to ignite. This began at age twelve, twelve being a magic number (one plus two is three, three is also a magic number, the father, the son, the Holy Spirit). It began when I first heard either Shock the Monkey, by Peter Gabriel, or Don’t Stand So Close to Me, by The Police. Whichever song it was, from then on I was destroyed – I would never again return to the innocence of pre rock and roll, pre orgasm. I was now a tainted child, the devil’s music irradiating my cochleae, my interest sustained by little else save the music pulsing in my headphones. My older sister Kim is partially to blame, society the rest.


***


Twelve years old, 1982, I am on a camping trip in the mountains, far from the lights of the city, with several adults. I am the only child in the group. My fingers still sticky from an air bladder I removed from a fish earlier that afternoon, and I do not like the stink on me, washed my hands in shallow water at the lip of the lake several times, but it’s as if my body has been marked with death. It bothers me that I am responsible for the suffering of another being, like the summer afternoon, aged ten, when I shot a beautiful white pigeon from a palm tree with my Daisy rifle, not expecting the fall, fifty feet much too high, my aim too much like a girl’s, babyish and uncentered, and when the animal fell dead onto the grass, I ran to it, horrified, and it was as if I had died there too, on the lawn.


***


I was placed here for a reason – to mirror your desire. I photograph well. In the evening, around the campfire, after the women stopped talking about things women talk about – I resented them because Mr. Martin said Maybe you should join them – teasing me for no reason, why was he singling me out – I wanted to be left alone – but here I was, under the stars, the sky a thick impenetrable blanket like the blanket my father lay on to work on cars, at the salvage lot, where I could stand between two rows of ruined cars and pee in the darkness, pulling on the evil tail that made me think of Jaime, at school, three chairs in front of me, until the milk came, and the fire crackled and popped and sparked orange in the darkness and woke me, sleepy-eyed, pulling me from a September classroom back into the here and now, a bag of jumbo marshmallows being passed around, I took two and pushed a thin branch from a sapling into the center of them, and I could feel Mr. Martin’s eyes on me as I watched them bubble and turn black and become something entirely different, which is the same thing I wanted, to be burned in fire, reborn, and bubbling against the skin of perfect strangers.


***


I am a sulky boy, the burden of my sexuality forever humming in my mind. There is a boy in my sixth grade class, an unnamed planetary system I am drawn to. I have difficulty erasing his shoulder blades from my mind. My legs cellophaned in old jeans from last year, when I was in fifth grade, the fabric so tight I consider them obscene, a thread-worn second skin, and a great personal embarrassment as I am growing faster than my pant legs can accommodate, and my shoes are blue cheap knockoffs designed to look like Adidas, except everyone at school knows they are not Adidas. I beg my mother to please buy me a new pair of shoes, a new pair of Adidas, my feet hurt, I complain of cramped toes, and pain – You’ll have to wait until Christmas, which seems forever from now. October or November, and my skin continues to grow every day, my fingers push through my gloves, my arms push through my Pendleton coat like the special effects in a werewolf movie. But I am working class, and clothing is expensive. You will have to wait, my mother says. I can get a part-time job, I offer, and buy my own clothes. No, my mother says, then your brother will want the same, but secretly I know she is punishing me for who I am, my body on display like a girl’s body at a Saturday morning car wash, stooped over a fender, every accentuated curve an abomination against god, and no amount of soap can wash this sin from me.


***

My host, Mr. Martin, is a friend of my father, and possibly a pedophile. Why does he want me here? He has one child, a daughter in her early thirties, who is spoiled, and has had everything she has ever wanted. I feel removed from her, as a wasp is removed from the surface of a peach before piercing its supple flesh. Her husband, Mr. Medici, is slightly more entertaining, a youngish thirtysomething drunkard with bad taste in women but good taste in music – forgivable, in my book. Darkness falls over us, a dirty blanket illuminated by campfire sparks and endless stars. The Medicis and Mr. Martin cook over the campfire, and there is another youngish couple, also in their thirties, I believe, though I didn’t care enough to notice, the man as bland and featureless as his wife, and my only desire is to disappear into the tent I will share with Mr. Martin for the next three nights, to pull on the nubbin of flesh between my legs while conjuring Jaime’s face as milkwhite stars pulse beyond the green canvas flap separating me from the adults. But before I can disappear, Mr. Medici asks – hey, do you like music? And it is as if I am seeing him for the very first time. Mr. Martin allowed me to listen to a cassette tape on the trip from the city to the mountains, the lake, which must have been two hours, one way, the cassette player in his dash equipped with auto reverse, and I can only assume he allowed this because he loved me, a love meant for girls. My cassette tape was Carnival by Duran Duran. I loved it because it took me from the here and now. I didn’t care if Mr. Martin liked it or not. I was that young, that foolish.


***

Yes I like music. That’s good, Mr. Medici said, we all like music. A black briefcase sat on the tailgate of his new white truck, a beautiful 1983 Ford F-150. The truck hovered off the ground like a coiled insult. That stupid man and his goddamned truck, Mr. Martin said on the way up, his lips curling around the word stupid. I knew Mr. Martin did not like his son-in-law. There was a certain power in knowing this. Mr. Medici was a simple man, a man who liked camping, watching football on television, and drinking beer. And he didn’t seem to notice I was a girl. He opened the black suitcase like a drug dealer. Inside, cassette tapes vibrated like rare jewels. He pulled Eat a Peach from the case’s dark innards. This is a good one, he said. A boombox sat on the edge of the tailgate like a large plastic June bug. Put this in, he said. I stood up and did as I was told, happy someone was treating me like a person and not a forbidden object. I’m going to bed, Mr. Martin said. Go ahead, Mr. Medici said, laughing, then just above a whisper, fucking asshole. I laughed, too.


***

Later that evening, my head buzzing from the single can of Budweiser Mr. Medici offered me. Don’t say anything to the girls, he said, winking at me. He motioned toward the suitcase. Put on whatever you want. I looked at the selections. How about this one? I held up Off the Wall. Oh yeah, that’s a good one. Off the Wall was the first Michael Jackson album to heavily feature vocal hiccups. I was alone with Mr. Medici, the women having disappeared into the tent with the third man, the invisible husband. Mr. Medici didn’t seem concerned with his wife’s absence. Don’t ever be afraid of who you are, he said. I stared at the Y in my jeans where my legs came together, the center of all my problems. My face felt tight, hot. Ok? I looked at him in the darkness, the orange of the dying campfire playing over his face. It took all my energy not to cry. Ok –


***

Vocal hiccups are messy and nonsensical, offer no explanation, and exist outside of time, a silver cord perfectly suturing two moments together. They are nonsense, but without them, the song itself becomes uncentered, softedged and tenebrous, a house without roof or foundation.


***

I am still young enough, unformed enough, to be mistaken for a girl. Underneath my clothing there is nothing to betray otherwise, and if I am sliced open, like the fish I hooked on the line earlier today, is there an air bladder inside me? If someone holds me down, will I sink? I think about Mr. Medici, shirtless, how I want to keep staring at him, unnoticed, how Mr. Martin rudely points out the obvious, in front of everyone – your eyes are going to fall out of your head, boy – and how I hate him for it, more intensely than I have hated anyone. // It took me a long time to trust music again, to listen without fear, without god breathing down my neck as I stared at shirtless men, brightly-colored wasps hovering above summer lawns, mowers moving smoothly under their hands, their gait assured, their backs slick with summer, their legs planted firmly on the ground, as if they owned the world, as if they belonged there.




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James Nulick is the author of the books Distemper (Acacia), Valencia (Nine-Banded Books), Haunted Girlfriend (Expat Press) and the The Moon Down To Earth forthcoming from Expat Press.

*Image credit: Photo of the author on the camping trip mentioned in ‘Four Foot Nine’ circa 1982. Photograph courtesy of the author.