Mississippi Sissy Read Free Page B

games, Kevinator?” he asked, running his hand along the bristles of my flattop, a miniature version of his own. “Gotta get me a RC Cola in the coaches’ lounge. I’ll be right back.”
    Left fatherless amid the faint smell of liniment and a landscape of inchoate pubic hair, I felt a pleasing knot inside my stomach. Pimply-faced hit me hard atop my head. “Hey, man!” one of the players shouted and hit Pimply-faced back. “Don’t pick on Coach’s kid. Just ‘cause we pick on you.” The player, on his way to the showers, lifted me to his chest, the sweat of his neck slick against my cheek. “You okay, buddy?” he asked me before kissing my scalp and putting me back down on the concrete floor. I scampered over to his vacated locker area. I sat down surrounded by the player’s discarded gym clothes. I picked up his jockstrap. Pimply-faced laughed at me.
    â€œWhat’s so funny?” my father asked, coming through the door while chugging his RC. Pimply-faced pointed my way. I hid the jock behind my back. “What you got there, Kevinator?” my father wanted to know. “Want a sip of my RC?” He walked toward me. I looked guiltily up at him. I held the jockstrap out, flourishing it with the pliancy I was developing in my wrist.
    A few of the players began to snicker.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” the teammate who had rescued me asked as he headed toward us dripping from his shower. He began to towel off in mid-stride. I would not let his jockstrap go. My father, surprised by my strength, finally pulled it from my grasp. He tossed the strap to the player who now stood naked at my side.
    â€œHere. I think this is yours,” my father said. “So . . .” was all he said next. The locker room was quiet. He chugged the rest of his RC. “So . . .” Pimply-faced sneered at me. “Take him to the coaches’ lounge while I finish up in here,” my father told him.
    â€œYes, sir,” said Pimply-faced, who was glad to grab me a little too roughly. I took one more glance back at the boy who had lifted me to his sweaty chest before I was deposited next door in the lounge. “Coach said he’d be right in for him,” Pimply-faced told the three other coaches before he returned to the locker room to collect the latest pile of dirty towels.
    My mother had furnished the lounge with fried chicken and macaroni’n’cheese and fatbacked butterbeans, and the coaches had piled their paper plates with the food. The three of them stopped chewing and stared down at me. I put my hands on my hips and stared right back. One of the men, smoking a Winston, resumed shoveling mac’n’cheese inside his mouth next to his dangling cigarette. Hot ashes from the reddening butt flaked away and fell on the floor next to me along with some melted cheddar that did not make it into his mouth. The fear that was now knotting my stomach was not pleasant at all. I folded my arms atop it. The smell of the dyingcigarette, the mama-aroma of all that fried chicken, the countenance of a glob of congealing cheese, the slightly whispered snide remark—“Can you believe this sissy is Ses’s?”—that sneaked out of the side of the man’s mouth along with a serpentine puff of sickening smoke, the longing I had to be back inside that locker room, the
longing:
It all combined in one queasy moment and caused me to vomit right on the man’s shoes. “Shit,” he said, spitting now some of the macaroni on me. He stubbed out his cigarette and stared down at the mess I had made. The other two coaches began to laugh and choke on their food. “Goddamn it. What’s so funny?” the man demanded.
    My father entered the lounge with his empty RC. I began to cry. “What’s the matter, Kevinator?” he asked, kneeling at my side. I pointed at the vomit. “Sorry,” my father said. He