Boys Don't Cry

If I’ve learned anything throughout the twenty-one years of my life, it’s that the most interesting people that you will ever meet are found at diners. The normal person usually would not go up to random strangers and talk to them, but every now and then I’ll see someone who catches my eye and I just have to hear their story. Even at that point, I still would rarely ever go up to them and actually try to hear what they have to say. Tonight, though, I just saw a young man who I was certain that I could help.

It was getting close to midnight in Philadelphia and I just got finished watching some shitty horror movie with a few friends. This movie was about a bunch of undead hicks killing off random teenage kids at a trailer park. Generic, yes, but it was actually quite entertaining. There was one scene towards the end of the film where one disgusting forty-something year old looking zombie man cut chunks of skin off of a teenage boy and cooked them for jerky. For some reason while watching this scene all five of us became ridiculously hungry, which I know doesn’t sound normal, but there was just something about peeling off human flesh that reminded me of meat and made me really crave Crown Fried Chicken. We sat around for about half an hour talking about getting food and (after a few prank calls) decided to go head out to Little Pete’s, a popular diner in Philadelphia.

After a lot of fucking around while walking to the diner, we finally arrived around one o’ clock. We walked in and took our seats at the bar area and waited for the waitress to come take our order. While we were waiting, a scruffy Mexican looking kid took a seat two chairs to the right of where I was sitting and threw his head into his arms on the bar like he was about to fall asleep. He looked like the kind of person you would see balling his eyes out while reading Shakespeare; a really romantic Spanish kid. As soon as I saw this, I assumed he was depressed, and rudely smirked at Maxine, who was sitting to my left. We started joking about what was wrong with the kid until we realized how inconsiderate we were being to the poor boy. At this point, our waitress came over and took his order (before ours, that bitch). He ordered a cheeseburger and a coffee; strangely the exact same thing I was planning on ordering. I figured, hey, I had been depressed before and I also love cheeseburgers and coffee, so maybe I should talk to this kid and see what was wrong. Maxine gave me the go ahead so I tapped him on the shoulder and said “what’s up?” Giant mistake.

I introduced myself and so did Maxine, but he didn’t say a word. He stared at me for a few seconds as if he thought that I was a ghost until he finally said “I’m Julio.” Now that I knew that my racist assumption that he was Mexican was correct I was kind of relieved. I asked him what was wrong. He was about to explain but then the waitress came out with all of our food. We both bit into our burgers and as soon as he swallowed he said, “Have you ever been dumped?” I had more than a few times, but I only responded with, “yes.” This cued an hour long story of his life.

“I feel like it was just yesterday when I kissed her for the first time. Charlotte was the love of my life.” Maxine cracked up when he said this; I assumed it was because the girl’s name was Charlotte. Seriously, who is named Charlotte? Maxine asked how long they had been dating.

“Fourth of July, 1997.” Eleven years ago. This was a shock because Julio didn’t look a day over twenty. We eventually found out he was twenty-seven. “That first kiss was the best day of my life. It happened over in Rittenhouse Park, a few blocks from here. I just sat in that park for six hours reminiscing about that day.”

Everything Julio said just got more and more depressing, yet Maxine and I couldn’t help to laugh at everything. Luckily his head was down on the bar most of the time, so he had no idea. He went on to tell us more details about the park and the weather conditions on the day of his first kiss, then to the direction the wind was blowing, then even to how many clouds were in the sky. This kid’s memory was fucking ridiculous. I barely even remember my first kiss with my last girlfriend.

About fifteen minutes went by and we finally decided to ask why she had dumped him. “She didn’t technically dump me. We lived together in an apartment right across the street. About five months ago, I came home from work an hour early than usual. I work at Starbucks and sometimes we close down early if no one is coming in. Anyway, as I walked into my house, I hear a lot of scuffling and strange voices. I walked upstairs and Charlotte was in bed talking on the phone. This struck me as odd because I knew I heard someone else’s voice. I looked around and saw out of the corner of my eye that the closet door moved an inch. I opened it a naked man was standing there. Charlotte tried to explain, but couldn’t come up with any good excuses. The man left and she told me that I wasn’t turning her on anymore. That was the last I saw or spoke to her.”

After that whole story, Maxine and I were still in shock that he said this had happened five months ago. Julio looked as if his wife had just died, not cheated on him over half a year ago. I couldn’t say anything about this though. I knew that would only make him angry and stop talking to us. There had to be something else that had happened to make him like this. Luckily, he told us that there was more to the story.

“I’ve been depressed ever since she left me, but I was starting to do a lot better with it. Until today. Today was definitely the worst day of my life.”

We sat there for a minute waiting for him to elaborate on this story, but he said nothing. He just continued to drink his coffee and finish his burger. I didn’t want to ask in case it was too sensitive, so I turned around and tried to get into the conversation that my friends were having. Once I realized that they were all just sticking toothpicks up our friend Cerise’s and lighting them on fire, I turned back to Julio. “What was so bad about today?” I asked.

“I was supposed to be promoted to manager at Starbucks today. My shift started at eight this morning, so I set my alarm for seven, got up and dressed and went to get in the shower. I turned on the water and waited for a few minutes and the water would not get warm. After waiting for another few minutes, I decided to just take a cold shower. I fucking hate cold showers. I got in and immediately got out. It was too early and too cold in my apartment for that. I got dressed and left my house dirty.

“On the walk to work, I saw a plastic bag on the sidewalk and kicked it. I usually do this whenever I see trash on the sidewalk; it’s some sort of weird habit I have. Figured that this was not just a plastic bag, but a plastic bag that some stupid asshole kid put over a pipe that was sticking out of the ground. I couldn’t feel three of my toes after kicking this and I fell to the ground and passed out from the pain. When I woke up, I was still sitting in the same spot and there were people walking by and laughing, thinking I was some sort of bum. I touched my foot and it was perfectly fine, as if I never kicked the pipe in the first place. I guess I had just jammed it too hard. I checked the time on my cell phone and it was after ten. I was over two hours late for work. I ran to Starbucks and my boss was sitting at the counter waiting for me. I tried to explain to him what happened, but I had no proof. My toe was perfectly fine at that point, and I suck at faking things.

Julio paused to take a sip of his coffee. I figured that he just wanted me to assume that he got fired, but then he continued.

“I didn’t get the promotion. I was stuck as assistant manager until I could prove myself worthy of being the manager.”

“What the fuck?” I was thinking. This guy’s day so far was not nearly as bad as I assumed it was. I assumed that there had to be more, but no. That was it. He got up to go to the bathroom and wash his hands so I turned to Maxine. “Is this guy serious?”

She told me she would talk to him when he came back, which ended up being ten seconds later. I had to pee now, so I let her talk to him while I went back to the bathroom.

I was in the bathroom for no longer than three minutes, but when I returned Julio was gone. I asked Maxine where he went, and before she could even answer, our friend Ray answered for her. “That creepy fuck just ran out of the diner without even paying so he could go get his ex-girlfriend back.” Maxine then told me that she had convinced him that if he went out to talk to Charlotte she would definitely get back together with him. This did not seem like such a smart idea to me, since it probably wasn’t that good to get this guy’s hopes up. He had apparently told her that he was willing to get passed the fact that she cheated on him if she would get back together with him. I didn’t even bother to ask if she had talked to him about the story of his day today, but I guess it didn’t really matter since I was never going to see this man again.

It was well past two in the morning by the time we finally headed out from the diner. We had about ten blocks to walk back to Ray’s house and it was bitter cold outside, so we were not too excited for the walk home. As we headed south down 15^th street, we started to hear sirens coming from every direction. Of course we had to go see what was going on. We stood there for a few minutes trying to figure out which direction all of the fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances were headed. When we realized they were all stopping somewhere west of us, we started to run in that direction.

We finally found them all around 18^th and Chestnut; only a block away from where the diner was. There were four police cars, an ambulance, and two fire trucks sitting there with their lights and sirens on. One of the fire trucks had its ladder extended up to what seemed to be the six floor of the building it was parked in front of. There were two men on the top of the ladder and they looked like they were untying someone. We walked a little closer and froze in shock when we realized that it was Julio, hanging from the seventh story window with a noose tied around his neck. “No fucking way,” we all spontaneously thought. We all stared at each other, not knowing what to say. None of us were even really able to open our mouths.

We stood there for close to half an hour in silence before we decided to head back to Ray’s. No one mentioned Julio during the walk back; we all just acted like it didn’t happen. I don’t think any of us were really able to deal with the guilt of Julio’s suicide. It wasn’t exactly any of our faults, but at the time it really seemed like he wouldn’t have done that if we hadn’t had that conversation at the diner. When we arrived back at Ray’s, we decided we were not going to talk about this ever, even though we all knew that it was going to be really hard living with this. We all agreed that Julio would have done that whether we were talking to him or not. All of us then parted ways and went home.

I awoke the next morning and went straight to my computer to read the news. I wanted to see what they said about Julio’s suicide. I found the article right away, and reading it gave me the biggest chills I had ever had in my life. The headline said something that I could only hope that Maxine would never hear about, although if she was anything like me she probably already read it. Luckily, I found out that this article was only printed online and not in any paper newspaper, so maybe she wouldn’t get a chance to read it. I decided that I had to do everything I could to make sure that she would never read this headline:

“MAN HANGS HIMSELF IN CENTER CITY. SUICIDE NOTE SAYS ‘WHY DID YOU LIE, MAXINE?’”

I'm writing a memoir.

I was in second grade when I met Kevin. For the rest of elementary school, I considered him to be my best friend. From then until five or six years after I met him, we literally did everything together. At the time it seemed that the two of us were perfect together. Little did I know Kevin would be the boy who would put me on a downhill spiral for the rest of my elementary and middle school career.

It all started when we were in sixth grade when he called me to tell me that he had just purchased a “boner” from Best Buy. When I had first heard this, I smirked a little bit. I was in sixth grade so the word “boner” was new to my vocabulary and hilarious to me. It was one of those words that me and all of my friends would write over all the nerds’ homework and think we were fucking hilarious for doing so. But right after the smirk, I started picturing disturbing things in my head. I still remember all the horrible images that were flying through my mind when I heard him say that sentence. I couldn’t stop picturing Kevin and his dad stepping up to the cashier at Best Buy, putting a giant erected dick on the counter, having the nice old women who was ringing them up scan the tiny barcode on the shaft, then walking out to their Wrangler and strapping it down to the roof with bungee cords (in my mind, the dick was GIGANTIC).

With this image floating around in my head, I failed to realize that Kevin was still on the phone repeating, “No you retard, I said BURNER. CD BURNER.” Kevin and I had spent all of our latter elementary school years wanted a CD burner. This was back in the mid nineties, when having a CD burner in your computer was something that normal households weren’t capable of affording. We saw so much potential in being able to create our own mix CDs so that we wouldn’t have to make our parents go out and spend money on real CDs for us to listen to. Plus, we could download songs for our friends and burn the songs onto a mix for them for a few bucks. This never really worked out, because Lars Ulrich scared the shit out of us with the whole Napster thing, so we thought we would get arrested for selling these illegally downloaded songs. This is all beside the point though. So now I knew that Kevin wasn’t saying the word “boner,” but the word “burner.” I wiped the sweat beads off of my forehead and told him how awesome it was that he had a CD burner, and then I hung up the phone and went back to doing my homework.

Two weeks went by and I had completely forgotten about the whole “boner” incident. It was two nights before Halloween, whatever year that was, and I went with my dad to Halloween Adventure so that I could pick out a costume to go trick-or-treating with. I remember really wanting to be Jason Voorhees that year even though I had never even seen any of the Friday the 13^th movies. I was only twelve years old, so my mom assumed I was too young to watch anything with that much gore and language. I guess that makes sense, but then again she let me watch the last Nightmare on Elm Street film with my stepbrothers and that was ten times more gory than any of the Friday the 13^th films (that movie really did scare the shit out of me though, even though I wouldn’t admit it.) Anyway, back in the nineties, the Halloween stores always had an adult costume section. I’m pretty sure they still do actually; the aisle just isn’t blocked off from kids like it used to be. There was a black curtain on each side of the aisle, and every time somebody went in or out I tried to peek in. I was too young to understand what would be in the aisle that I wasn’t allowed to see. At the age of twelve, you don’t realize that Halloween isn’t just a holiday that kids dress up for, so you have no reason to think that there would be a section of a Halloween store that isn’t appropriate for children. As I peeked past the curtain, something really interesting grabbed my attention. It was a giant hot dog costume. I really needed to have this costume, so I ran away from my dad and through the curtain.

My eyesight has always been 20/20, so I’m still not sure how I didn’t notice this from glancing past the curtain: the costume was not a hot dog at all; it was a giant black cock in a hot dog bun with cum and blood dripping out of the top and covering the shaft like ketchup and mustard. There was a hole for a face right on the head of the dick and there were huge balls where the leg holes were with giant red veins emerging out of them. Immediately after seeing this, I screamed at the top of my lungs and tried to run away, only to crash into the other side of the aisle and knock it onto the ground. I looked up at all the damage I had caused and saw the dick costume sitting right in my face, which caused me to scream some more. My dad angrily grabbed me, apologized to the manager of the store, and took me back to the car without getting a costume.

I spent the car ride home getting yelled at by my dad. He kept asking what had happened but it was far too awkward to tell him the truth of what I saw. If I mentioned the dick it would just start a whole “sex ed” conversation, which everyone knows is the most awkward conversation to have with your parents as a child. I may have only been twelve, but I already knew what dicks and vaginas were for. I guess I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what a vagina looked like at that age, but I knew enough about what dicks looked like to know that I shouldn’t be that freaked out when I saw one. Maybe it was just my homophobia starting to kick in at an early age. Not really homophobia I guess, but more of that stage I would soon go into in middle school where we called everything that everyone did “gay.” If a guy shook another guy’s hand, it was gay. If a guy went to the movies with a bunch of other guys and no girl, it was gay. I’m pretty sure it was this stage that scared the gayness out of Kevin and made him decide to get a girlfriend, but that’s a completely different story.

We returned home from the unsuccessful trip to Halloween Adventure around nine thirty, which was about my bedtime at that age. As I tried to get ready for bed, everything I looked at looked like a dick to me. I couldn’t brush my teeth because my tooth brush was just a skinny erect cock that I didn’t want to touch my teeth with. I couldn’t wash my hand or face because the soap dispenser looked too much like it was dispensing cum out of an irregularly shaped phallus. I couldn’t even shower because it felt too much like a giant penis was cumming all over my entire body. I had to get this out of my head before I fucked myself up for the rest of my life. The only thing I could think to do was call Kevin.

“Kevin, I need your help. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about dicks ever since you called me about your CD burner a few weeks ago.” No, that’s not going to work. He would just make fun of me for the rest of my life if I told him that. As I was sitting next to the phone to think of what to say to him, the phone started to ring. I looked at the caller ID and it was coming from Kevin’s house. I guess now I had to say something to him. “Hello?” I answered.

“Hi, Jason. This is Kevin’s mother. Has Kevin been acting strange around you recently? I just went through his book bag and found a notebook with a bunch of inappropriate drawings that all had your name written under them.”

I was now completely confused. I had no idea what this could possibly be about, and I really didn’t care to know. I was too busy freaking out about what I should say to Kevin when I finally talked to him. “What were the pictures of?” I asked.

“Well…” She paused. “They were all pictures of… how do I say this… men’s personal body parts.”

This came as such a giant relief to me. Kevin was having the same exact problem that I was having. I asked her if I could talk to Kevin and he picked up the phone laughing about how his mom just saw a bunch of pictures of dicks that he drew. I asked him why he drew so many pictures of dicks and he just said it was because they were funny. Fuck, maybe we don’t have the same problem. He’s laughing at them and I’m becoming scared shitless of them. I couldn’t tell him that I’ve been thinking about dicks all the time and freaking out about them. What would he say to that? I said the only thing I could think of.

“That’s gay, you faggot.”

I hung up the phone and went back to my room and turned on the TV. I thought that maybe watching Home Improvement would get the images out of my mind, and to my advantage, it did. After about an hour I turned the TV off and went to sleep.

Sleeping was the worst idea I could have possibly had that night. What I dreamt that night still scares me to this day. I awoke in a room full of all different size dicks, all of them hard. Black dicks, white dicks, big dicks, small dicks; use any rhyme from any Dr. Seuss book and replace the nouns with the word “dicks” and it was all in this room. I ran out of the room as fast as I could, but all of the dicks were chasing me. They all had legs sticking out of their balls just like the costume did. I kept running from all of the dicks only to end up at a door. I remember being ridiculously scared and did not want to open the door, but I had no choice. If I didn’t open the door, I would be stampeded by a herd of giant multicolored penises. I grabbed the door handle, and on the other side was the worst thing I had ever seen in my life: a “CD boner”. It was a giant erected black cock in a hot dog bun, slightly different from the one at the Halloween store because it didn’t have legs. It was shooting cum and blood straight up into the sky, but even weirder was that the cum was on fire, and it was aiming straight at all the CDs on the roof. After the CDs would catch fire, they were falling off of the roof and around where I was standing, so I had to try my best to dodge them. The last thing I wanted was a flaming, cum covered CD. As I moved around like a snake trying to avoid getting hit by the CDs, the rest of the dicks behind me burst through the door. This is what woke me up.

I looked at the clock and it was four in the morning. There was no way I was going to be able to go back to sleep after that nightmare, so I pulled out a Goosebumps novel and started to read. I wanted to go wake up my dad and tell him about my nightmare, but for obvious reasons I couldn’t. I thought that maybe I could change the dicks into vampires or werewolves or something, but my dad knew that I wasn’t scared of any of those things. I was fucked. When you’re a twelve year old kid, the last thing you want to think about is how for the rest of your life you are going to be scared to death by penises. There had to be some solution to this. While I was thinking about this, I fell back asleep.

I decided that I was going to talk to Kevin about in school the next day. I sat down at my desk right across from him and said “hello,” but he was too pissed at me for calling him a faggot the night before to even acknowledge my existence. I needed to think of a way to get him to talk to me. I had the perfect idea.

While Mrs. Rodman was giving a lecture on the Oregon Trail, I sat there drawing dicks all over my social studies book cover. I figured that Kevin would talk to me if he saw that I was doing the same thing that he does. He glanced at it and smiled. I couldn’t tell if he smiled because he realized I was drawing dicks like him or because he got genuinely happy from the sight of penises. Turns out the real reason he was smiling was because Mrs. Rodman was standing right behind me, watching me cover my book with images of penises. “I think you need to go down to the principal,” she whispered in my ear. Fuck.

The rest of this story isn’t really interesting. My parents got called in to the school and I got suspended for three days, but that was really it. My parents realized it was just a stage that I’d be over really soon, so they let it slide. They were right. After seeing Kevin smile at me for getting caught drawing dicks, I no longer continued to see dicks in everything. I’m not really sure how that worked, but I wasn’t really complaining about it. The only problem was that I still had the image of the “hot dog dick CD boner” in my head. I just assumed I’d forget about it someday.

Never happened.