Bad Stereotypes - 7. Friday 22nd October 2008

When you’re thirteen, the world is your oyster, or at least that’s how it seems. I was officially a teenager, and I had been a nice enough kid that I was given relative freedom to go with my age, and my curfew wasn’t until ten. There was a group of us, high achievers with autonomy, who hung around in the early evenings at skate parks or scraps of woodland, in town if it was summer and the shops were open, mucking around, playing games and generally being kids.

At secondary school I had discovered running, and I loved to beat other people out for standing 50 metre dashes and longer races, on the track or off, and in the quiet parts of the evenings when sensible people were in eating dinner or at the cinema we used to race the length of the car park. Sometimes on foot, sometimes with bikes, and my proudest moment was sneaking in three lengths ahead of this burly kid from the year above on a BMX when I was on foot. Winning was awesome.

That autumn it started to be obvious to me that I was not like the rest of my friends. I mean, we were alike, we liked the same sports, same teams, same video games; but I was different from them in one really big way. Girls fascinated all my friends. It was like the females in our year had grown some weird magical powers (which I later found out were referred to most often as ‘tits’) and the guys could not get enough of them. They fawned over the girls who gave them either way too much attention or none at all, and the clumsy process of flirting began.

I knew from the get go, that I did not like girls, at all. Sure they were pleasant enough when you got chatting to the bright ones who liked music and weren’t totally obsessed with their hair, but they were far from my first choice of company. But it wasn’t until the first day I met Jim that I knew that what I liked, and what I wanted, was something else. The October was also when we started hanging around at the car park late enough to catch glimpses of the older kids who used it as a place to race and show off their wheels.

Jim Barton was called Jim-Boy by all his mates, and was, to my fevered teenage mind, the most beautiful creature that had ever walked the earth. He was seventeen, he had a car (it was red, though I’d be damned if I could tell you what kind it was) and he dressed like a rock star. From the first moment I saw Jim-Boy, my body knew what it wanted, and it wanted him. I burned, I stayed sitting down a lot so no one would know, but that first time. That was hard.

I’d never had an erection before. The strange tightness, the wafts of pleasure that I did not understand and the desire to run my fingers over his skin and run away simultaneously. I breathed deep, said my goodbyes to my friends as soon as I could and panicked. The following few days it was just the same, except that I knew it was going to happen, knew that seeing Jim-Boy was going to send my mind and body reeling. To me, at that age, he was a god.

The older kids, those who could drive, drink clandestinely and smoke in the empty car park would roll up around nine, looking like they owned the world. Those first few times they chased us off, and the nicer kids all left around then anyway, so there was only a small group of us who became eventually tolerated by Jim-Boy and his crew. We were allowed to watch, we cheered the racers that won, tried to steer clear of those who lost and failed to bum alcohol and cigarettes from the older kids. When they spoke to us, we tried to be cool.

I tried not to get caught staring at Jim-Boy.

Staring at Jim-Boy, waiting for Jim-Boy and generally thinking about the tall muscly young man with the ripped jeans, leather jacket and tattoos took up an awful lot of my time. I would watch him work on his car, jacket off, t-shirt strained against his big arms and shoulders. I never saw him wear a jumper, even when it was cold. He would sit on the hood of the car and smoke, play cards with his mates, race up and down the car park and throw squealing handbrake turns in at each end. It was easy to say that I worshipped him.

That Friday I had been extremely pleased to, having just been visited by my Godfather, be wearing my latest present from him. I had regaled Dale with tales of the car park in phone calls which were not monitored by my parents and he had bought me my first leather jacket from the city by the sea. It was black with a silky lining, and I felt very grown up to be hanging around with my friends in my new leather jacket and jeans, even if I was still wearing trainers. We mucked about on the railings, some the guys trying out parkour stunts and shit with skateboards.

And then Jim-Boy showed up with a roaring engine, gunning his car down to the far end of the lot, swung around a pillar and raced back around towards where we were hanging out. We cheered as he got out of the car, looking every inch a rock and roll god, and nodded to me. It was just a jerked chin ‘hey bro’ sort of greeting, but I felt like a king.

As it got later, the older crowd got bigger, and most of the ‘nice’ kids had left, the few of us that remained at closer to the group, oversaw the games of cards and the smoking. Jim-Boy was the coolest thing that ever lived, sitting on the bonnet of his car with a roll-up, foot on the grill, elbow on his knee, flexing the bicep covered in thick black ink.

Giggling.

Three guys in skinny jeans rounded the corner, heading for their cart, talking animatedly about whatever film they had seen. Three guys in skinny jeans with really well cut hair, and shirts that looked like they cost a lot of money. Three guys giggling. Fucking giggling. The shortest one checked Jim-Boy up and down and grinned. The shortest one; he looked like me, like the way I thought I would look if I grew up and decided to wear pink.

No one was quite prepared for the way Jim-Boy jumped down his throat.

“The fuck are you looking at faggot?” He practically growled, his voice was so low.

The other guy blanched, stepped backwards, glancing around in a panic. Jim-Boy took that as an invitation to leap off the hood and start after him. He stood really close, not more than a foot between their bodies as he glowered down at the pretty boy.

“Yes?”

“Er….” The black haired boy whimpered, a squeak like a mouse being trodden on.

“You wanted to look queer. Look away.” Jim-Boy grabbed his upper arm in one big hand, skinny bicep crushed, twisting, “Shy now are we pretty fucker?”

“Oww…”

“Dude!” Jim-Boy’s mates are looking at him oddly, uneasy, “Jim!”

Jim-Boy snarled and knocked him back, the kid sprawling on the asphalt.

“Fuck of faggot.”

The shortest guy who looked a bit like me scrambled up, shaking like a rabbit, and dashed to his friends. Jim-Boy stared after them, hands in his pockets, shoulders rigid., then turned. We were all looking at him, but he looked at me.

“Bay. You, kid. With me.”

I scrambled up, and though I was scared of Jim-Boy’s angry frame, I followed him without a hesitation, not a moment. He swung into his car. I jumped into the passenger seat, and Jim-Boy squealed out leaving rubber on the tarmac. He drove like a maniac around roads down which my father travelled sedately until we parked up in a small green space not far from my house. Jim-Boy lit up another roll-up and smoked in silence for a long minute. The glow from the cigarette made him demonic and otherworldly. I breathed silently.

“Nice jacket.”

“Um, thanks.” I fiddled with the leather cuff.

“You looked scared back there kiddo.” Jim-Boy took another deep drag on his cigarette, “You scared of me?”

“Y-yes.”

“Good.” Jim-Boy lent over me towards the door, his arm over my chest, his face and the lit cigarette making my breath hitch. The door popped open. “Fuck off, Bay. You and the rest of those fucking queers.”

I scrambled out of the car into the night. It was cold. Jim-boy slammed the door from the inside and pulled away, leaving me shaking on the grass siding. I wrapped my skinny arms around my skinny torso and though of the look in Jim-Boy’s eyes when he’d spoken to the guy who looked like me. He hated guys like that. He thought that I was a guy like that. I needed not to be a guy like that. Ever.

I never went back to the car park.