Lambchop

By: A.T.Cross

Originally published on Perigee.net

Within a month of moving to Southern California, they worried at my sanity. I didn’t go out much, spent most of my time reading, and never brought friends home. I didn’t have any. They were straight-edgers, the religious type. Caught up in the American myth of a wife, kids, and pension plan. Suburbia seethed it, worshiped it, draped itself in consumerism and the whole superficial tight-ass mentality. They decided that reading all the time was unhealthy, so they sent me away on a church youth group retreat, the boys’ Mexico surf trip.

The older boys planned a weekend excursion to Cuatros Casas, south of Rosarito. Aside from the fact that I don’t surf, and that I had already been admonished by a youth pastor that the yin yang patch on my backpack was Satanic, I succeeded in wasting away the first day without major incident. We surfed at a break just south of a beached shipwreck. I spent most of the day on my borrowed surfboard, a ten-foot monster with a busted fin, affectionately called “free Willy”. It spent most of its days in the youth group rec room, where people wrote scripture all over it in sharpie. I was inundated with dogmatic spiritualism, scrawled lines of where I was headed once I died. It seemed that God had been tossing a few spectacular waves into the half-submerged ship. I looked around for burning bushes, but there were none, so I paddled in. I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the tide pools.

The trouble came at the campfire. We were all sitting around, they were singing hymns. I took off to water a cactus, and on the way back, spotted something crawling out of a hole, a small rat, probably half dead. Emaciated and oily, she clawed at the dust around her, maybe climbing out of a predator’s den. I picked her up and carried her to a bush nearby. The way had it figured, she’d die, but she’d die in peace.

I was back at the fire for five minutes when another boy discovered the rat and went for the fireworks that they bought in Ensenada. By the time I got to the huddle, they had her tied up in a paper plate with a few lit M-80s. I managed to plant an elbow in one kid’s back and landed a poorly aimed punch to another’s chest. When the youth pastor pulled me off, I got a good kick to the arm of the kid with the firecrackers. The contents of his bag rained down around us.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I screamed at the pastor.

“You just sit down.”

“They’re blowing up a rat.”

“That’s not the way to stop them.”

There was a dull pop. It didn’t die the first time. They went for a new paper plate and scrambled to find the rest of the fireworks. The pastor held my shoulder as I made to charge again.

“You have lizards,” I said.

“Yeah, so?”

“What if they were over there blowing up an iguana?”

“It’s a rat.”

“I keep one as a pet. To me, that’s fido over there.”

The second explosion didn’t get her. They laughed and screamed. My neverending lord of the flies nightmare. “Why don’t you stop them?”

“You can’t just go swinging into a bunch of kids because they don’t agree with your philosophy.”

“The Hell I can’t. They’re over there blowing up an animal.”

“It’s not for me to judge. Besides, God gave us dominion over all the animals.”

“Not to blow up.”

“Are we going to have a problem?”

“Are you gonna stop them?”

“I think perhaps that you should pray for understanding.”

“Eat shit and die, sheep.”

I spent the rest of the evening reading in my tent.

The next day I spent most of my time wandering the tidepools. I found this huge speckled purplish nudibranch; they call it a sea slug, but they’ve got nothing in common with a banana slug. Under water they open to reveal rows of delicate edgework, like translucent blown glass lace. I’d only seen pictures; the thing had to be the size of my fist all closed up, its decorative lace edges held flat all around it. Another kid walked up, pulled an M-80 out of his pocket, lit it and tried to push it into the folded slug. He was bent over right next to the edge of the rock, so I just pushed him off into the surf, lit M-80 and all.

I wasn’t allowed away from camp after that. When we got home the youth pastor had a talk with my folks. After a long conference they decided that my antisocial behavior was proof of my need to be around the saved, so they sent me on yet another youth group excursion, this time to Six Flags and an overnight in a motel across the street. I guess they thought it might be easier to control me in a large group scattered around a big amusement park.

My parents’ attempts at domestication were beginning to annoy me. I knew the bus system well enough. I had my own interests; I had no need for enforced leisure activity. For five bucks I could waste away my weekends at a coffee shop, happily reading. Instead, they pack up my shit and pay a hundred and fifty bucks to make me miserable. That’s just bad business.

I was outcast from the guys.  Somehow, I’m sure that a few of them still harbored some sort of resentment over the firecracker thing. We were herded onto like gendered busses and pulled onto the freeway. I pulled out a book and got lost. The rest of the bus sang along to Christian alternative music. The only guy that even acknowledged me was a stony-eyed surfer named Beau. A credit to surfers everywhere, he was incidentally, the only guy that hadn’t jumped up to blow up the rat with the others on the surf trip. We had nothing in common, of course.

The fighting didn’t work as well as I hoped. Granted, it set me off as a lunatic. At least people left me alone, and the intrigue of a bestial nature was apparently working some kind of rebel card with the womenfolk, I gathered. Which is why, when they unloaded us from the creepy little youth group busses, the sun maybe a little too bright, the build up of adolescent hormones set off some sort of chain reaction. That and they deposited us to feed in the food court of a modern American adolescent mating institution, a mall. The pair of herds were lined up across the parking lot and dismissed. Two coagulant masses seethed towards an entrance, and I stalled to watch them go. A couple bunches of puritanically pure-bred monkeys repelled by the condemned natural forces that should attract them. People get strange about hierarchy in captive groups like this. It’s a monkey trait, I’m sure.

I watched the women walking ahead. There were a few pretty faces that I’d seen getting off the bus. She was one of the most popular, long dark hair, dark eyes. Her dad was worth a few million from what I’d gathered. People were still talking about her coming out party. They all wore tuxes, apparently. She was single and sought after.

My parents gave me fifty bucks for souvenirs and food for two days. I looked around for transit busses. Two hours by freeway, there must be a train station nearby. All malls have transit centers. Transit centers are like streams, if you catch the right ride, you’ll eventually reach whatever civilization you want. It’s all a matter of making connections. The youth pastors followed me all the way to the front doors, though. Short of ditching them in a good crowd and bolting for an exit, there was no way to lose the pair of shepherds behind me.  

If it weren’t for a few National Geographic magazines, I wouldn’t know how to act in social situations, much obliged to Jane Goodall for the lessons in etiquette. I followed the groups at a distance. I’m lost in malls, but not so lost that I really cared to walk with them. I caught the dark-haired girl smiling at me a few times. There would be no need to make an escape. She’d do nicely. She was way out of my league, and we all knew it.

I got cheap Chinese food and sat in the corner. From my seat I could see the whole of the group and their interactions. The gender groups positioned themselves strategically opposite one another, men and women broken off into cliques of Alphas and Betas, each eyeing their respective gender groups. The Alpha males presented super-masculine displays in headlocks and various grunts which fell and rose according to the women’s attentions or lack thereof, and as I had hoped, the dark-haired debutante sent sentries in my direction for investigation. Two of them sat down at my table.

“Mind if we join you?”

“Not at all.”

And the jungle cries rose to a fevered pitch at the Alpha table.

I’m going to spare you the banal details of the rest of the trip. We reached the motel late, were force-fed scripture and testimonials until nine, and watched some thoroughly entertaining videos on the rapture. I took to hoping that it would happen before the end of the weekend so that the youth group might vanish. No luck. I was accepted into the group of females; they took me with them on all the rides the next day. Call me a non-threatening male figure. All the while, the dark-haired girl and I played out our flirtatious little games. She heard about the rat thing. She told me that I was valiant. The rumor amongst the boys’ group, however, according to Beau over a snow cone, was that I was gay. He nodded and smiled at me. “Whatever gets them to sleep at night,” I said. He followed the girls and me around the rest of the day. They didn’t split us by gender on the way home, and my little dark-haired debutante slept the whole ride curled against me and wearing my jacket. I sensed a little hostility from the other guys. Except ol’ Beau. He was sitting in the seat ahead of us, chatting it up with a blonde he’d been flirting with all day.

Ah yes, connections.

Up until that point, I might have considered myself a loveless individual. They kept me as far from females as they possibly could. Unless, of course, it was a good Christian girl. When they found out about our religious practices, however, they changed the policy. Their excuse for scaring away my debutante was that my little dark-eyed darling was most definitely after more than just a friendship, which would explain to me why it was that I was always trying to get her out of her clothes.

But sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll were the downfall of two sons, and they clutched me to their sides with renewed fervor. They may have intended to keep me chaste until after college. Every female was out to get pregnant and make me the father, according to the folks, as always assuring me that I was prime husband material and bound for greatness in the plastic world of well preened lawns and PTA meetings; provided that I could avoid females until after the degree, that is. And I abided by their laws. They were the parents. They must know what life’s about. I was sure that it was their job to know that sort of shit.

Their last attempt at church activity was to sign me up to wear a costume at some children’s event. This way it was less likely that I’d find some girl to fool around with behind the church. The lady with the costumes gave me Barney, that annoying purple dinosaur with the perfect white plastic teeth. I actually made an effort to behave. I put the suit on, walked out onto the field. Within a few minutes a crowd of children surrounded me, slack-jawed and glassy-eyed. I can only imagine that this is how Jesus felt. Little throngs of wide-eyed believers flanking him on every side.   

The rest was a big misunderstanding. I was dancing around for the kids and whatnot. I thought I’d get all personal and give the kids that moment where Barney cuts loose and gets to know them as individuals. I bent over to pick up this little kid. The visibility really wasn’t so great in that suit anyway, and his head was so small that when I bent over, Barney’s enormous jaws enveloped the kid’s head. Before I know it, all the kids are screaming, the little boy got his ears caught in Barney’s teeth, he’s screeching right in my ear, parents are howling at me.

After they dislodged the kids ears from Barney’s insidious white plastic smile, they rushed me off the field, one of the youth pastors gripping my arm a little too tight and cursing me at a strained whisper. I was informed that the church elders decided that I was probably not worth saving.

They didn’t make me go to church much after that.