Watch Your Mouth Read Free

Cyn and me. She was going to teach singing and I was going to run the Arts & Crafts Shack, spreading thick white glue out for children to play with. I couldn’t possibly stay in Locust.
    All this was fine with my laid-back professor, Ted Steel, a large, oversensitive man the likes of which make political con- servatives rant and rave about the leftist dogma passing for ac-
    ademia nowadays. Although Mather was named for a Puritan, nobody read him there, and the permissive climate had torn the pedagogy apart like a hymen. Did you catch that odd phrase in the Handbook, the one that didn’t belong? “The traditional bounds of the semester”? That’s how Professor Steel talked. I let him think I was sleeping with my first man and he agreed to mark me “incomplete.”
    Cyn and I were taking her family car to Pittsburgh for the summer, but we couldn’t fit everything in the trunk and we wanted to leave the backseat free because it was a six-hour drive with plenty of deserted side roads. Steel had signed off on spe- cial library privileges so I could write my final paper while ex- ploring my gay identity in Pittsburgh. I wasn’t sure what I was going to write my paper on, so I withdrew the maximum amount of books and shoved them into a big box at Mathermail, where every September wide-eyed freshmen retrieved heavy trunks filled with clothes and graduation presents (unabridged dictionary, popcorn popper, coffee maker, unabridged dictionary). Some sullen high-school part-timer, probably sav- ing up for a car so she could tug orgasms out of pimply actors in relative privacy, took my money and said the box would arrive in Pittsburgh. It never did. Every so often I still get letters from Mather’s Library informing me of approximately three hundred thousand dollars in overdue fines.
    I called and called. I called everybody even remotely con- nected with the postal service. They all had pimples, lied about statistics, and couldn’t locate my box, and that’s how Cyn and I ended up living in her parents’ house in Pittsburgh, Pennsyl- vania, during the summer before my senior year at Mather Col- lege. The curtain rises.

Wasps—circumstances as the result of attacks by—Fiction
    Our story begins with wasps. Like the head of a grandmother, a grey and wrinkled nest was perched high in the corner of the Arts & Crafts Shack of Camp Shalom, a Jewish day camp in the Pittsburgh area. It was pretty much Shalom’s inactive volcano— about eight years back somebody got stung but nobody else, and eight years back it was a kid nobody liked. So went the rumor.
    But the Stock twins, Abby and Pinchas Stock, were readying the Arts & Crafts Shack for the onslaught of little Jews and Jewettes. They were scheduled to be counselors and were earn- ing some extra money cleaning up the camp, a job which no- body but the Stock twins thought was anything but lounging around the grounds, taking a dip in the lake, and shooing gnats away from the nightly barbecue. The Stock twins took their job with a rabbinical seriousness. The Stock twins thought that they should clean up the camp, and when they saw what first looked like Grandma Stock, decapitated at last, they figured they’d bet- ter get that wasps’ nest down before it hurt somebody.
    For the camp-wide barbecues, the fat and friendly lesbians who worked as cooks used the mausoleum-sized brick barbe- cues by the side of the lake, but for counselors-only get- togethers there was a bright blue kettle on wheels. Abby Stock wheeled it over to the Shack while Pinchas found a stepladder and a broom with whiskers so dusty that the act of sweeping with it was a textbook example of dramatic irony. Having gleaned from somewhere that smoke was the thing that one did to wasps, the twins got a fire going in the bright blue kettle and threw some construction paper on the grill. A thin pillar of smoke—Pinchas, something of a Torah nerd, made a Moses
    joke—wafted its way toward the nest whose wrinkles