Doll House

Judson had gotten into rolling queers. So I heard, but not from him. Donny said that he did and that he was strange about it. Judson, Donny said, would go home with a guy and take off his clothes and get into bed with him, and let him kiss him just once before he pounded him. How would Donny know this? Did Judson tell him? I wasn't about to ask.

I did hear Judson tell another story, though. I had gone with Tommy and Donny to the VFW post. That is where their parents were drinking, and Donny had to get something from his mother. I had never been in a VFW hall before. It was terrible and dim, old browns and metal grays, and it smelled like old drunks. There was a long bar with cheap spindle backed stools lining it and a large, empty dance floor with a small stage. There was dancing there on the weekends and bands of one sort or another would play. But not this night. The hall was mostly empty except for the drunks sitting around the bar. And there in the middle of them was Judson. We were talking to Donny's parents when Judson came over. Judson wasn't twenty-one and had never been in the service but he looked like he was thirty-five so I guess nobody questioned him.

While Donny was talking with his parents, Tommy and I talked to Judson who told us a surprising tale. He said that he had taken Donny's mother to a hotel and they had made love. He said she was really weird about it, though. The hotel was a cheap, crummy one out on the highway, a place where you could go just to do such things.  She insisted he take a shower first, he said, and after he was done she took a shower, too, and took a very long time about it before she came out. Then when they were done, she took another. Tommy and I just looked at one another saying nothing, but I know my eyes looked like Tommy's which were trying not to look startled. Sitting in the VFW hall with the smoke and the liquor and all the old drunks, just walking in and seeing Judson there as casual and natural as you'd like, that and the story he told--nothing seemed real. It was like I had entered one of Rod Serling's episodes of The Twilight Zone. Maybe I wouldn't have believed the story if it didn't seem so accurate.  There was no stretch of the imagination here.  Donny's mother was queer about cleanliness as if she were warding off the life that lay about her.  She acted as if she were above it all, as if she were a traveller visiting some foreign land, just to see, royalty, perhaps, traveling through the empire.  No one was allowed into their trailer, though Donny had let us come in once when his parents were gone, just for a minute while he got something from his room.   The trailer was immaculate looking like a photo in a brochure for trailer homes or trailer furniture, everything small and neat and carefully organized.  And that is the way his mother looked, too, pretty like a doll, and that is just the way her husband treated her.  You never saw her without her makeup done, her hair coifed.  Judson seemed an unlikely candidate for her fantasies, but who the hell knows about such things.  Jesus Christ.  Judson.  

After he told us the story, Judson walked over to Donny's parents with a big, disingenuous smile that was matched by Donny's father. Even if he knew, he wouldn't have wanted to tangle with Judson.  

When Donny was done and we were leaving, Judson came over to tell us one more thing. He was going home with one of the women at the bar, he said. I looked at the sad sacks sitting there, but I didn't say anything. Judson looked at us like a kid at Christmas and exhorted, "This is going to be something. She said she can take her teeth out!"  I don't think there was anything normal about him.  

It wasn't until later that I understood the last part.