King Suckerman

Jimmy Castle crushed his cigarette in the tin ashtray he had lifted from Red Barn, blew his last lungful of smoke out the open window of his room. He had lit a cone of incense, which burned in the mouth of a ceramic frog, to cover any of the nicotine smell that remained. Not that his mother would be anywhere near his room for a while; Mom was upstairs in her bedroom doing her daily traction, and Jimmy’s room was down two floors from hers in their split-level house.

Jimmy turned up the V on the Miida compact stereo he had purchased from a fast-talking salesman named Stehman up at the Luskin’s-Dalmo in Wheaton. The Miida put out good sound. Jimmy had been listening to Brain Salad Surgery up until a few minutes ago, and now he had switched the mode button over to the radio, where WGTB was playing The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway today in its entirety. GTB played the most progressive shit, especially late at night. Jimmy would often lie in bed listening to the station well after his parents had fallen asleep. It was on those nights, when Jimmy was really tripping on some good THC, that he had been introduced to groups like Can and freaked-out bands like Gong, whose album You was his current favorite. “One Nation Underground” was the station’s slogan; Jimmy had the bumper sticker Scotch-taped to the dust cover of his turntable.

Jimmy dug hanging out in his room. He still had his childhood dresser and still slept in the same single bed he had always slept in. On the wall was a fluorescent Ravi Shankar poster, handed down to him by his older brother, Noah, that had Ravi sitting cross-legged, playing sitar against what looked like a giant orange bumblebee. Next to the dresser sat an old cushioned chair on which he mostly threw his dirty clothes, and beside the chair was a wicker wastebasket that he kept by his bed on weekends in case he needed to lean over in the middle of the night and puke.

Over his bed hung a black light; Jimmy never used it when he was alone, since all his friends told him it would radiate his nuts and make him shoot blanks. But he turned it on when he could get a chick over the house to get high during school hours while his parents were at work. Not that this happened a lot — it had happened exactly twice, with two different girls. After they’d smoked a joint, Jimmy and the girl had gone to the bedroom to “check out some tunes,” and Jimmy had turned on the black light, thrown his one Barry White record — Stone Gon’ — on the platter, and made his move. Due to a hair-trigger problem, though, Jimmy had still not busted his cherry. On both occasions he had shot his load into his jeans as soon as he touched bare nipple, enduring the awful pffft, pffft, pffft sound of his jiz spurting over the elastic band of his briefs, the sound reddening his face. But Jimmy was determined to fuck a girl before his eighteenth birthday, and he would continue to try.

Jimmy dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved T. He would’ve liked to put on a pair of shorts, but he knew Dewey would call him a faggot if he did. He’d rather be hot than take a bunch of Dewey’s shit.

Jimmy slipped his cigarette pack behind his sock, went upstairs, stood in the foyer. He could see his mom in her bedroom, facing the door, sitting in a chair in her paisley housedress and wearing a neck brace on a cord run through a pulley and balanced by a water-bottle weight on its other end.

“Bye, honey,” she said, unable to turn her head. She had slipped on the stairs a year ago and fucked up her back real bad. “Have fun.”