Baby

Lamb ♣ 21 | LGBTQ+ Serial Fiction

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CONGRATULATIONS again to

Terry Freedman

of Eclecticism: Reflections on literature, writing and life who won a free one-year paid subscription for correctly guessing the literary source of my newsletter’s name, FORD KNOWS.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, “God” is Henry Ford, the father of the assembly line. In a world where children are grown in glass bottles and their destinies pre-determined by chemical and psychological conditioning, “Our Ford” and “Thank Ford” are common phrases. “Ford knows” only appears once, but it made a cheeky impression.

SAVE THE DATE

The wrap party for Lamb will be on Saturday, November 9th at 4 PM Eastern time. Profound apologies to readers on Australia and Tokyo time—that’s awfully early on a Sunday morning, but we will forgive you if you show up in jammies and pin curls.

All are welcome to hear an early preview reading of the final episode of Lamb, as well as a brief excerpt from the novelette-length short story written by the character Lamb which will appear exclusively in the printed and ebook versions.

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Start at the beginning:

We Regret to Inform You | Lamb ♣ 01

Original photo by Mekuria Getinet on Unsplash

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Baby

♣ ♣ ♣ 21 ♣ ♣ ♣

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After the debacle junior year with the Box, things seemed to calm down. Snyder, the senior dick who oversaw that whole episode, graduated along with a big chunk of the other jocks, so Thomas lost most of his posse. 

For the most part our class was known for being more level-headed and serious about academics, so Thomas didn’t have any luck forming a new Gestapo early senior year. Some of the younger boys who had tormented Lamb that night actually expressed some remorse to him later—a couple wrote apologies in his yearbook—so we were headed into senior year with relative peace except for one unfortunate detail.

Lamb and I had been in the same dorm sophomore and junior years, and Thomas had always been in a different one, but senior year on move-in day, who was already running all over Short House when we walked in the door with our trunks but the big man himself. Our pleas on our dorm request forms (“please, please, please Short House”) had neglected to mention the other most critical factor in the room assignments (“...and not with Thomas!”) Still, with senior year upon us and me to look out for him, I was pretty sure I could keep a lid on things; even Thomas wasn’t so cocky as to think he could get away with hazing another senior.

Truth be told, we didn’t spend a lot of time in the dorm. Most Wednesday and Saturday half-days we were either down at the pump house smoking cigarettes and weed (by that time my brother was dealing out of his off-campus apartment at USC) or we’d take the shuttle into town and hang out at the beach, Denny’s, or the movies. Sometimes we’d take weekends at my parents house out in Lancaster, and during the winter we’d go skiing up at Mountain High, the little ski resort up in the San Gabriel Mountains that was only about an hour’s drive away. 

Night skiing was our favorite—we’d get super high in the car when we got there, and then head up to the top of this quiet, shadowy mountain. Not a lot of people, usually; we’d pretend we were super spies and go streaking down the slopes at top speed with hardly anyone else around. There was this one side trail through a clump of pine trees, we’d swoop up and down and around the trees and moguls; at a couple of spots you had to duck under tree limbs—dangerous, maybe, if you didn’t know they were there, but we’d been so many times we could almost ski our secret run with our eyes closed.

Things were looking up, and when spring rolled around, Lamb got into every school he applied to—my parents pressured me to go to USC because that was where my dad and brother went and it was closest to home, so that was a done deal. Lamb had his choice of Harvard, Stanford, and USC, as well as all the UCs, but he hadn’t made his decision yet when the whole business with Thomas finally came to a head.

There was this freshman kid named Polley in our dorm who was just so small and thin you were afraid to breath next to him for fear you would blow him away; the very kid who early that year was coming up the stairs from his room as Lamb was going down and tripped over his own feet, landing in a heap on top of Polley and fracturing his wrist. Anyway, Lamb felt really bad, took the kid up to the infirmary and all that, and felt a little protective of him from then on.

Problem was that Polley was an easy mark for Thomas, who was looking for an outlet since his old crew had graduated and taken all their shenanigans with them. He was relentless with his harassment of this kid, mainly centered around this kooky comforter Polley had brought with him from home. It was this odd Native American pattern in pastel colors, like something you’d see upholstered on your hippie aunt’s sofa, and it was literally the first thing you saw when you walked into his room.

Naturally, Thomas seized on it the first week of school as he was marking his territory in Short House, and I mean actually grabbed it off of Polley’s bed and went running down the hall hooting and hollering as everyone was standing around one afternoon before dinner.

“Look at this shit!” he yelled, waving it around like a flag. “What the fuck is this?! What a freak! Someone start a fire so we can sacrifice it to the goddess of homosexuality!”

Poor Polley was in tears his third day on campus, and for the rest of the year the gay blanket would be paraded around the dorm on a regular basis, and hidden in various spots just before lights out. Eventually Polley began to take it in stride, and always found it before bedtime, so the prank lost some of its power over the course of the year. He also had proven himself such a nimble soccer player they made him co-captain of the JV team, and when he grew four inches before our eyes and his voice suddenly changed over Christmas vacation, we stopped worrying too much about him.

One fateful night in the spring, however, proved Lamb’s unraveling. Thomas had stolen Polley’s comforter for the umpteenth time, and hidden it in a new place—right under Polley’s own bed, as it happens, but it was literally the last place he’d look because it had always been taken out of his room and stashed in any number of different places. Frustrated though he was, Polley refused to name Thomas as the culprit when the dorm master, Mr. Barth, came around at lights out and found the poor kid shivering under just a sheet in his bed. It was a particularly chilly spring, and so Mr. Barth went around questioning everyone about the comforter until he got to Lamb.

My door was open and I heard him reply to Barth, “Why don’t you ask Thomas? He’s the one who hid it—he’s been doing it all year.” I mean, points to Lamb for finally calling the bastard out knowing that there would be some kind of retaliation, but Thomas got detention for his year-long course of harassment and acted like Lamb shouldn’t have snitched, like he owed him a damn thing after everything he put him through? Fucking prick.

Anyway, about a week later the whole incident was all but forgotten by everyone except Thomas, apparently, because that’s when he struck back one night after lights out. Thomas got suspended for two weeks, not that it mattered much because seniors had all pretty much checked out for the rest of the year anyway with college acceptances locked in regardless of what grades or other disciplinary matters might arise. I suppose if he’d actually been expelled it might have made a difference, but the prank he played on Lamb didn’t really seem to warrant a stronger response despite the terrifying reaction Lamb had to it. He was obviously more on the edge than I or anyone realized.

So late one night, it must have been around 11:30 or so, me and Lamb were hanging out in my room. Seniors didn’t have lights out, and only had to be in their dorms after the ten o’clock curfew, so we were just fiddling around until I kicked him out so I could get some sleep. I was upstairs, he was downstairs, so off he went and I had barely drifted off when all of a sudden comes this tremendous shriek and everyone jumped out of bed and came out of their rooms to see who was being murdered, that’s what it sounded like.

Mr. Barth came running out of his apartment at the end of the hall, and went dashing down to the bottom floor where the screaming was coming from. Most of the boys were too scared to venture further than their doorways, but I had a feeling and followed Barth down.

It’s hard to describe the scene, in a way, because Lamb’s screaming was so loud and terrifying it was hard to actually take in what I was seeing. He was crouched on the floor in the hallway, doubled over in a fetal position, rocking and shaking, his hands over his ears, screaming and crying like I have never heard anyone in my life. Even when Barth ran to him and tried to calm him, he wouldn’t stop—everyone said later that he’d suffered a psychotic break, or at the very least a nervous breakdown, though I never had the courage to ask him about it. This went on and on for I don’t know how long until another one of the dorm masters arrived on the scene to investigate, and the reason for Lamb’s fit was discovered.

At the bottom of his bed, “someone” had taken the fetus pickled in formaldehyde from the biology lab and poured the slimy, shrunken thing under the covers so that Lamb had probably gotten into bed and felt it with his feet, only discovering what it was once he’d jumped out and pulled the sheets back—at least, this is what the dean of students told me they think happened after Thomas was questioned, confessed, and suspended. Apparently “baby” was the message he was trying to convey for snitching on him. They took Lamb off to the infirmary that night, and the next day his mom drove up from LA and withdrew him from school.

We were so close to graduation that I guess they just decided to give him a final grade based on what he had earned already so it wouldn’t affect his college prospects. He wasn’t at graduation, obviously, and when Thomas got back from his suspension, he was decidedly cowed and couldn’t look me in the eye for the rest of the year.

I had really hoped Lamb would also maybe go to USC so we could still hang out, but I suspect that his mom convinced him to go to Berkeley after all that, not just because it was a better school (she hadn’t yet married her new husband, and half the tuition for private schools was killing her) but also because all our drinking and smoking cigarettes and weed probably came out while Lamb was being treated for his breakdown, and she thought I was a bad influence.

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Episode 22: The Echo of Embrace

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