“Goddammit, these fuckin’ pimples!” Uncle Ball dropped his head on his table and growled. “Why does this whole family’s skin suck?” He turned to me and pointed at his nose. Right on the tip of it was a tiny red spot. “Do you know who is going to see that, Jesse?”
“No, Uncle Ball, who?”
“Everybody, every-fuckin-body. That’s who. I’m going to look like Oily if I stay like this. God, his face looks like an infected cheese grater. No idea why he is getting laid. None. Anyway his chick is kinda hot, but how am I going to nail her if I have this Rudolph nose?”
I was six, so I giggled.
His eye turned to me and flamed. Then he spun, jumped from his chair, and grabbed me up, tossed me on his bed and tickled me.
“Now listen, your mom is getting married and she is doing it at the church that I go to school at.”
I knew what he was going to say, and I grinned. I was looking forward to this part all day.
“The church won’t marry her if her kids aren’t baptized. Do you know what that means?”
I shook my head.
“Some shit about Jesus. Listen, that is not the important part. See, if you get baptized, you have to have a godfather. Your mom has asked me if I would be your godfather. Do you know what that means?”
“Means if they die I get to be your son!” I blurted out. He laughed and nodded.
“Yeah, if I am your godfather, then if your parents bite the big one, you will be raised by me.”
“Will I get to change my name and become a Mocking?” I beamed. Mother had told me this part, too, but I wanted to hear Uncle Ball say it.
“Is that what you want?”
I was already nodding.
“You want to be a Mocking Man?”
I nodded again, grinning and giggling.
“Well okay then. All we gotta do is talk your parents into dying for us and you will be a Mocking.” We both laughed. He turned to the far corner of the room. “Now on to the important stuff.”
My heart sank. I started to feel sick as I watched him take his shirt off. “See, look at me. I’m so fucking skinny that I got nothing to show them when I take off my shirt. So I do this.” He bent over and picked up a weight bar. “This is a curling bar. It has these weights on it, and if I pump my arms like this.” He began to curl. “My muscles will get bigger and I will become a fucking stud.
“I’m behind, because Uncle Wrath was benching 160 when he was my age, and I am only at 130. But he was not as devoted as me, and he was not as handsome as me, and I will do this until I am fucking huge.
“Now you are ugly.” He laughed. “Not so bad now, but damn you looked like a tiny sack of shit wrapped in PJs when you were first born. That is going to stay with you forever. You’re always gonna be hard to look at, and you are fat. Look at that belly. You’re my little Butterball, but that can’t go on forever. I am going to put you on a diet. No candy.”
“What?” I whimpered.
“Well, not no candy. You do it like this.” He reached onto his dresser where a pack of Reese’s Cups sat. One was gone. Maybe he would give me the other one. He held it to his nose and smelled it. “I love these things, but I only let myself eat one every two weeks. I keep them right here and I get one every two weeks. Then vegetables and a lot of meat so I can put on the muscle, and I run a lot. I am…” He turned and picked up his weights again. “…lifting all the time, and soon I’ll be a fuck machine.”
I looked at the ceiling. He had all the pennants of all the baseball teams lined up on his ceiling, pointed alternating directions, some of them very old. I looked at them, trying to change the subject, because I knew what was coming next.
“What’s that one?” I asked.
“Cincinnati Reds. Look, this is important. We will talk baseball in a second. Do you remember what I told you? What I said about the girls in your neighborhood?”
“Yeah, you asked how many girls were in my neighborhood.”
“And?”
“There’s Meek, Cage’s sister, but she is older than me and kind of hates me.”
“What music does she listen to?”
“Madonna and Prince.”
“Oh if she listens to Madonna and Prince then that girl is a whore. Did you know that Madonna is a white girl?” He was beginning to breathe heavy, and he had just a bit of sweat on his forehead and chest. I looked away, turned to the dart board. “I was sure she was a nigger, but then I saw her on TV, and she is a blonde chick. Can you believe that? Prince is kinda a nigger, but you can’t really say that about Prince. Prince is the god of pussy. It just falls at his feet. I don’t understand it, but there it is.
“Hey, I want to play you a song.” He set the weights down and turned to his stereo. “This is Prince’s album. It’s called Purple Rain and there is one part on here, let me find it. Here it is. Listen to this.” He carefully set the needle on the record and the beat started.
“Wendy?”
“Yes, Lisa?”
“Is the water warm enough?”
“Yes, Lisa.”
“Shall we begin?”
“Yes, Lisa.”
“I swear those bitches are about to fuck.”
“Okay,” I muttered.
“See some chicks are lesbians, and they are fine. I don’t even want to talk about the fags, but some are lesbians and that is when two girls fuck. One is the dyke and…”
He described what a dildo was. He described what a strap-on was. But I was not there.
It was him. It was Shush. It was the alter who had been raped days earlier. See at this point I was six. The images whipping through Shush’s mind were horrific. The idea of all of it, all the sex and the sweat and the horror.
The coolest person in the world was flashing images at me that I knew would come back to me at night. Shush was being educated, and now all he knew was that the nightmare Char had forced upon him in the woods of White Creek, Wisconsin, in a van the day after his birthday, was a thing Uncle Ball wanted, too.
Sex was not even called sex back then. Only fucking. There were no soft and tender words for a woman’s genitals. There was no escaping it now. My greatest desire was to spend all my time with Uncle Ball. He was my favorite person in the world. And when he began to pull me into his sex life at the age of six, he was raping my mind.
It is called secondhand child molestation. When a minor is dragged through the details of an adult’s sex life and made to live with the hard, wet facts every day, it has a name. I never knew it. I didn’t know what to call it. But I knew it was a horror.
After he detailed the girl he was going out with that night, we played army men. A lot of you have seen a small, plastic green figure holding a gun or pointing. But almost no one knows how to play.
Army men are set across from each other. One side of the floor is yours. The other side is the enemy’s. You line your men up as best as you can. Try to set them far apart. Try to set them beside something like a dresser leg or a sheet draped over a bed. When all the men are set up, in comes the weapon.
Now Uncle Ball had taken two pairs of socks and folded them together last time to make a big tight ball, but some army men are laying down, and they are almost impossible to beat. They usually are the last to fall, and the last time we played, his fold came undone over and over again.
This time he had folded them together and wrapped them in duct tape. He pulled it out, held it in his fingers like a jewel he had stolen. “This is your doom, little man,” he said with a dramatic voice. “You want heads or tails?”
“Heads.”
He flipped a quarter, tossed me the weapon, and the game began. I threw it on his side of the battlefield. “Bustsh!” I yelled. Knocked over about nine of his men. He snatched them up and turned to me.
“I love you, kid, but Mocking Men don’t let anyone win. Competition is what it is all about. The entire world is about the number. That is all competition. So I’m not going to take it light on you.” He whipped his hand through the air and I flinched. I opened my eyes. He still held the weapon. He laughed and tossed it.
Twelve.
When almost all the men were dead, it became a game of who could kill the men laying down first. Rolling the weapon over them did almost nothing. So you stand, slam the weapon on them as hard as you can, and try to make them flip over.
He beat me. The competition phase of my relationship with Uncle Ball had come. As a potential Mocking Man, I was coming along nicely.
As I left his room, he asked if there were any more girls in my neighborhood.
“Tigress,” I said.
He stared at me blank faced for a moment before he shook his head. “That can get messy if anyone finds out. No, let’s not start on cousins. Try to get close to that Meek girl. You can probably fuck her if you push her. She likes Madonna and Prince. She is a whore for sure.”
Still wasn’t sure what a whore was, but in my dreams I saw them coming for me. I was on the ground, laying down, trying to hide. Their footfalls were coming. And when they found me, I would have to perform.
The next time I came to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, I went straight to Uncle Ball’s room. Grandpa insisted I run up there and talk to him.
He was on the chair again, staring into the mirror and scowling. “Fucking pimples.” He squeezed his face with his two pointer fingers and shook his head. “That’s the last one.” He grabbed a bottle and a cotton ball. He began to meticulously wipe his face.
“What is that?” I said.
“Rubbing alcohol. Be careful with it. It—” He hit a red spot and winced. “Stings like a muthafucker. This wipes away all the oil and, hopefully, no more pimples. But Jesse, sit right there.”
He pointed at the floor. He finished, tossed the cotton ball in the garbage, and sat cross-legged before me. “I got one.”
I immediately thought he was talking about candy, and I got really excited. I giggled. “Got what?”
“I found a slut. She was new to the school and she was younger than me. I’m sixteen. She is only thirteen, but I got her. It is hilarious. All the kids at school are calling her a whore. And she cries everywhere she goes. She won’t stop following me around, even though I told her I was done with her. But I got one. I wanted you to know.”
Hand on the shoulder. Right shoulder.
I stared at him. He laughed and looked at the ceiling. “I got one. Now I can get started. I’m behind, but I am learning.” He stood, swung his door-like window open. Staring out at the backyard in the sunlight, he smiled.
“Don’t worry. I’ll get better, and when I do, I’ll teach you all of it.” He looked at me with a look I had never seen before. “But you won’t be better than me. You just won’t.”
Jesse Teller 
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