The Brad Chapter

This is a full chapter from a much larger piece of work, The title is a working title.  This is it still a work in progress. Enjoy:


The rain had been falling steadily for hours. It finally let up and the grey skies began to separate, revealing a brilliant blue. A semi-frantic knocking rattled the screen to the front door of our house. Our house was a four bedroom ranch-style home in a quiet sub-division in the desert out skirts of Phoenix. The neighborhood was isolated and surrounded on three sides by the vast and expansive sonoran landscape. It was primarily populated with military families from the nearby Air Force base.

I answered the door. Brad was standing there panting. Out of breath he managed to say, “Let’s . . . go. . ."

“Go where?” I questioned.

“Just . . . hurry . . . up.” He panted back. I quickly put on my shoes, grabbed my jacket and ran out the door, shouting as I left, “Bye, Mom. Be back later.” The screen door rattled shut and Brad and I ran off.

We ran into the desert. It was difficult to keep up with Brad. His excited energy kept him several large paces ahead of me. He waved his arms coaxing me to move faster. The neighborhood sank further and further toward the horizon behind us. We came up a hill to find Stewart waiting for us. He stood there with a wheel barrel filled with gardening tool. Three shovels, a hoe, a pick axe, and a steel rake were piled neatly in the steel bowl of the wheel barrel.

Stewart, Brad and I were all in the same 6th grade class at Sun Meadow Elementary School. Stewart and I both came from military families, both of our fathers worked at the base. Brad’s family was not involved in the military. Brad’s parents were divorced and he lived with his grandparents along with his mom and little sister. Brad rarely talked about his dad. A few weekends a year he would go visit him, and that is all we really knew. Brad and I had been friends since we could remember. Stewart’s family moved into the house next door to Brad’s grandparents and the three of us became fast friends.

“What’s all this for?” I asked

“We are going to build a fort.” Brad and Stewart said in unison.

The recent rain had softened the hard caliche soil. People constantly dumped truck loads of yard clippings and other trash in the desert around our sub-division, old boards and other scraped building materials were always strewn about. This made fort building easy for three 12 year old boys. We traded turns digging and moving soil. When one of us got tired he could stop digging and go look for boards, old lumbar, or just about anything that could be used as walls and roofing material. Within a few short hours we had dug a 10 foot by 12 foot square hole, 3 feet deep. It was decided that would be sufficient for a partially submerged fort. We added several arms to the hole to act as entry ways and escape hatches.

We continued to work on the fort for the rest of the weekend and through the next week. After school we would spend the last few remaining hours of sunlight constructing and modifying the fort. By the next Saturday morning we were done. It looked like a ram-shackled third world dwelling, but to us it was the Taj Mahal of desert forts. Brad, Stewart, and I stood outside the entry porthole admiring our craftsmanship. “Come on I got just the thing to celebrate.” Brad said as he lifted the plywood hatch and climbed into the fort. Stewart looked at me and shrugged his shoulders, then followed Brad inside. As I crawled into the large room that made up the interior of our fortress, Brad was unzipping his jacket. Tumbling to the floor was half a pack of cigarettes, two small bottles of whisky, and an out of date copy of Playboy magazine. “I took this shit from my granddad.” Brad told us, pulling a lighter from the front pocket of his jeans. I didn’t have any experience with the things lying in a pile on the dirt floor. I had never seen a naked woman before, let alone smoked a cigarette or tasted alcohol. We all took a cigarette from the pack and began smoking. We passed the liquor and the nudie mag between us. The liquor was gone quickly but the cigarettes burned slowly. Every time Brad would look at a girl in the magazine he would turn it around to show us saying “Look at the tits on her!” or “Check out the bush on this one!” Each girl in the magazine was more beautiful than the last. The way Brad spoke about the women in the pictures wasn’t like the normal Brad we knew. He was different and we weren’t sure why. Brad turned the page, “Eww! Gross! Look at this hairy nigger.” He said disgusted, “No one wants to look at her monkey ass.” He ripped the page out of the magazine and wadded it into a ball. Stewart and I both awkwardly laughed, we didn’t really know what he was talking about. I had never heard anyone refer to another person as a monkey, except when my mom would tell my brothers and me to stop monkeyin’ around. Then Brad took the lighter and set the wadded page on fire.

We continued to pass around the magazine looking at the beautiful woman and admiring their flawless bodies. When Brad’s next turn to look came around he turned the page to a gorgeous blonde with ruby lips and large breasts. “GEE-ZUS-CHRIST! I bet this is what Valerie Shelton is gonna look like in a few years.” He said. Valerie Shelton was a pretty little blonde girl in our class. She was the first girl in our grade to start to develop and everybody had a crush on her.

“MAN! Those tits are the nicest I’ve ever seen” he continued, “If you guys could make out with any girl at school, other than Valerie, who would it be?”

“Oh man! I wanna make it with Amy Ingles.” Stewart broke in.

“Gross dude, she’s a chubb-o.” Brad teased.

“Fuck you, Brad, I like her, she’s nice.” Stewart fired back.

“Chill out dude, I’m only bustin’ yer balls, she’s cute enough I guess. What about you Derek? Who do you wanna swap spit with?”

I thought a moment, “I kinda like Amber Casitas.” I said finally. Amber was Valerie’s quiet, half-Hispanic side kick. She had long, silky black hair and beautiful olive brown skin.

“Damn, Derek. I didn’t know you like the dark meat. You shoulda said something I woulda let you keep that picture of the monkey woman.” Brad laughed.

“Yer an asshole.” I told him. He laughed a little harder. “What dogface would you make out with?” I questioned him and his taste in women.

“Miss Applewhite.” He said without missing a beat.

“She is HOT!” Stewart laughed.

“She’s a teacher dipshit, she doesn’t count.” I protested.

“The hell she doesn’t, I said what girl in our grade, since she is our teacher, she counts.” Brad stated proudly. He mused at how he liked women, not girls. That was more like the Brad I knew, he always had to do one better. If I thought a girl was cute, he had seen hotter. If I thought a car was cool, the one he liked was cooler. So it didn’t surprise me that Brad would rather make out with our teacher then any girl in class.

By the time summer hit, the fort was our regular hang out. Stewart stole a couple of extra packs of cigarettes from his parents and stashed them in the fort before his family left for an extended camping trip. Brad was also leaving to spend a few weeks with his dad. For the next month or so I was going to be by myself. I wasn’t looking forward to it, but at least I had a few cigarettes and the nudie mag to bide my time.

As the fourth of July approached I began to count the hours until Stewart returned home. They were due back that holiday weekend and as far as I was concerned it was worse than waiting for Christmas morning. I realized that summer that I hated being alone. I also realized that, even for a twelve year old boy, there was such a thing at too much masturbation.

The Wednesday before the big holiday, I went to the fort to puff a cigarette. Supply was running low and with Stewart and Brad gone, I was limiting myself to half a cigarette at a time to make them last. I was shocked to find Brad inside the fort smoking a cigarette. He was sitting with his back against the far side wall. His hands propped on his knees. There was a small pile of used cigarette butts between his feet. He said nothing as I crawled in. I could tell he had been crying. He was beaten up pretty bad. Both eyes were blackened. His left one was swollen shut and a kind of deep purple color that made my stomach turn. His nose was crusted over with blood and he had scrapes and bruises from head to toe. His right forearm was wrapped in a store bought gauze bandage and a quarter sized circle of blood and puss began to seep through. “Holy Shit! What happened to you?” I asked in disbelief. Brad didn’t answer; he stared off into nothing and took another drag from his cigarette. “Are you ok?” I rephrased the question. After a short delay he answered, “My granddad beat me up.” He didn’t look at me. He just talked, staring straight ahead.

“What? Did you call the cops?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“No,” he paused.

“Did you go to the hospital?” I continued to ask. He just scoffed and shook his head no.
“You don’t do shit like that in granddad’s house,” He said, “You take your punishment like a man.”

“What happened to your arm?”

“He burned me with a cigar.”

I said nothing after that. I sat silently next to him and we shared the last two cigarettes stashed in the fort. Neither of us talked.

“Fuck him.” Brad said, finally.

“Yeah, fuck him.” I repeated. I looked over at Brad and saw a tear roll out from his right eye. He turned his head a looked back at me. Before I could even think to move, Brad kissed me on my mouth. I jumped up. I was taken completely off guard.

“Whoa! What the fuck are you doing?” I stood there in complete shock. I could taste the blood and cigarettes from Brad’s mouth. I looked at him in disgust and left as quickly as I could. When the plywood hatch slammed shut behind me I could hear Brad sobbing inside.

Making my way back home I tried to make sense of everything that had happened. I didn't hang out with Brad after that. Weeks later, Stewart said he saw Brad loading his belongings into his dad’s pick-up. He told Stewart he was moving in with his dad.

I never told Stewart what happened, I was too embarrassed to mention any of it to anyone. I didn’t find out until years later that Brad’s grandfather had been molesting him for years. Brad finally stood up for himself and threatened to go to the cops. His grandfather beat him for even thinking of turning him into the police.

The primary male figure in Brad’s life showed affection with inappropriate touching and kissing. I came to realize that Brad had displaced ideals of how males showed affection. I came to terms with my own feelings from that day. I stopped blaming Brad for what happened between us. He was more mixed up than I ever realized and none of it was his fault.

In the bus depot, as I waited for the 8:15 to Denver, I saw Brad loitering around the men’s room. I watched from a distance as he panhandled for change. Periodically he would stop male travelers as they entered the bathroom. He would briefly converse with them briefly before following them into the lavatory. After several minutes the men would leave and Brad would post up along the wall by the door.

A few years earlier, a crack-head displaying similar mannerisms approached me outside a men’s room at the Metro Mall. He asked me if I had any crack he could buy. When I said ‘no’ he asked if I needed my dick sucked. I, again, declined. I offered him a smoke to leave me alone. From a distance I could almost hear similar conversations between Brad and these men. I had no doubt in my mind he was offering up blow jobs. I felt sad for him. I thought about what else had happened to him during the last thirteen years. I wondered what he might have been if things had been different for him.

My attention was broken when a loud muffled voice broke over the speakers announcing that the 8:15 to Denver was now boarding at docking bay 8-C and the departure time was in twenty minutes. I grabbed my green duffel and the picture of Karen and Duncan and made my way to dock 8-C.