David Crabb - The Mayor of the Freaks

 

In San Antonio, Texas, in 1991, I was a goth kid. I had a very specific group of friends. We wore a lot of dog collars as fashion accessories. There was a lot of torn fishnet and misty black eyes. We changed our names to things like Raven and Salem and Epiphany. [audience laughter] We made facial piercings out of office supplies, [audience chuckles] and we wrote poetry that was really way too dark for any of you to understand. [audience chuckles] And I love this group of people so much because I spent most of middle school as a closeted outsider, and when I met these kids, I finally felt like I found my crew, like being gay was the least interesting thing about me. They were like, "That's all you got?" And we're so happy being so sad together. [audience laughter] 

 

And then a few years into high school, my mom told me that she was getting remarried and we're moving to a very small town called Seguin, Texas. Now, Seguin, you might think of Texas as all the same, like Dallas, the TV show. But San Antonio is a quite large city. I think it's like the eighth largest city in America but Seguin was super tiny. Like, there was nowhere to buy clove cigarettes. I was so pissed. [audience chuckles] I started high school in Seguin, and I felt more like an outsider than I ever had before. I would wander the halls with my black fingernails and my rubber band bracelets, and I was surrounded by girls with spiral perms and Daisy Duke shorts and guys who wore flannel and loved Pearl Jam.

 

I felt like Jane Goodall. [audience laughter] I was creeping through the jungle, hoping they don't realize I'm not a monkey. [audience chuckles]. A few months after going to school in Seguin, I heard that there was going to be this party in New Braunfels. It was going to be a freak party, like a bunch of misfits and weirdos, and I was so excited. New Braunfels was a little town about 20 minutes away, so I got all done up in my all-teen gothy. I put on my favorite Siouxsie and the Banshees shirt, which was torn in just the right places. I put a light powder on my face, which I always did, but I never blended it at the jaw. So, when you look at photos of me, I look like an albino that just got a sunburnt neck somehow. [audience laughter] 

 

And then I gelled my hair back into this little vampire Lestat ponytail, and it was so tight that when the gel dried, it kind of raised my eyebrows in a look of surprise. [audience laughter] I drove to New Braunfels, and the party was in a trailer park. I went into the trailer and it was very dark and very loud, and I couldn't make out much at first. It was clear that these people were freaks, but these freaks were not my kind of freaks. These freaks were mostly male. They seemed super aggressive, and they were almost all bald. I had inadvertently come to a skinhead party. [audience laughter]

 

I suddenly felt like the gayest person that was ever born. [audience chuckles] Like in the psychological movie that experience in my head, I was dressed like a [screams] Las Vegas showgirl and I was voguing. I saw this door on the side of the trailer, and I ran out to this deck on the side of it, and there was one of those blue buzzing bug zapper lights and I tried to de-gay myself as quickly as possible. I wiped off the makeup. I shook out my little ponytail but then I just had a weird voluminous bob. [audience laughter] It was worse. And then I thought, I know, I'll smoke, because smoking is really tough. Smoking is butch. I'll have one of my Benson and Hedges Menthol Lite 120s. [audience laughter] 

 

So I take these sweat-logged matches out of my pocket and I'm trying over and over again to light this match when this flaming Zippo gracefully rises from the darkness and it lights my cigarette. And I look up, and towering above me is the largest human being I had seen up to that point in my life. He was a massive skinhead with little suspenders and these oxblood Doc Martens boots. He introduced himself. He told me his name was Max. And I said, "Hi, I'm David." And we made some very awkward small talk for about two minutes, and then there was a lull. And he looked at me and he said, "Hey, has anyone ever told you that you look like someone?" And I said, "Probably the lead singer of Depeche Mode. I get that all the time." [audience chuckles] And he said, "No, dude, I think you look like that girl that sings in that band Deee-Lite."

 

And I thought, “Oh, this is when it happens. This is when I get pushed to the ground and kicked to death with those Doc Martens boots.” [audience chuckles] But I started laughing. I'm not sure if it was my nerves or the cough syrup that I recreationally drank to get high on the way to the party, [audience chuckles] but I thought this was the funniest thing that I'd ever heard in my life. And I started aggressively cackling like a hyena. [imitating hyena laugh] [audience chuckles] I couldn't stop.

 

And I looked up, and all of a sudden, this huge skinhead, he's laughing, too. And he has these little happy Buddha eyes and these dimples and these chubby cheeks I just want to pinch. He's like a big, overgrown toddler skinhead. [audience chuckles] And we stand out there on that deck and talk for hours. And when we do, every single person from this party comes out to greet Max. All sorts of people, skinheads, guys with Mohawks, these two patchouli-stinking girls in these 10,000 Maniacs T-shirts. It’s like they all know him like he's the mayor of freaks in this little town.

 

At one point, I mentioned something to him. I'm like, "Oh, you know the skinhead over there?" And he's like, "Dude, dude we're not skinheads. We're not bigots. We're SHARPs, Skin Heads Against Racial Prejudice." [audience laughter] I had not heard of that ever. And then he proceeds to break down their manifesto, which he gets very excited about. He explains to me that what they want to do is take the aesthetic of the enemy and subvert it. He tells me that where skinheads wear white laces for white power, SHARPs wear multicolored laces for unity. [audience chuckles] He tells me that while skinheads are straight-edged, they don't smoke weed, take drugs, drink, whatever that they do it all. That he huffed a bunch of Scotchgard half an hour ago.

 

Max and I became super-fast friends. And in a few months, summer came. And it was so exciting because as opposed to waiting for the weekends to hang out, I could basically hang out all the time in New Braunfels. My mom was just so happy that I had a friend at all. She was like, "Go be with your friend." And it was really fun because we're both only sons, and I think we sort of felt like brothers. His house was my summer house. His mom was my summer mom. He was my summer brother.

 

But there was a weird thing about hanging out with Max in that I wasn't used to being around his friends. They were super machismo. We would go to these parties and the same thing kept happening. We would walk in and then he would go to get me a drink. And within 30 seconds, there would be some giant guy with a septum ring being like, "Why are you here?" [audience chuckles] And just when I would think I was going to die, he would reappear with my beer, towering over everyone and ask, "Is there a problem here?"

 

I felt like Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard. [audience laughter] Hanging out with him was really, really great. We really enjoyed each other's company and we loved talking to each other. Increasingly, we would go to these parties and we wouldn't even really interface with his friends. We would just find some little nook or a corner or go in the backyard and we would talk. We would smoke a joint and have these long existential conversations. We'd talk about it. “Most people suck. Music was cool. The government was ruining everything.” And it was cool because it didn't matter what was happening nearby. In the living room, there could have been a bunch of SHARPs powerlifting cinder blocks while screaming, "Oi, oi, oi."

 

But it didn't matter because when I talked to Max, he looked at me like what I was saying was the most important thing he'd ever heard in his life. And no one had ever made me feel like that before. And when Max talked to me, it was the same. It was like everything else just sort of turned down and faded away. And there was just Max. A few weeks before my senior year was going to start, we're going to this party and we're pre-gaming at his house. We pre-gamed the same way every time we went to a party. I would be in his room, in the mirror, getting all of my little brooches and things I needed for my look together. And he would be in the kitchen, raiding the liquor cabinet. He had these two gas-station-to-go koozies, and he would make our drinks, him a Jameson and Coke, and me a Bacardi and Diet Coke. [audience chuckles].

 

We got in the car and we started driving to this party. And on the way, he told me that we had to make a pitstop. So, in a few minutes, we pulled off the highway, and we drove through this grove of trees, and we ended up by this riverbed. And there were these four cars already parked there in a circle with their hazard lights on. And Max told me to wait in the car, and he'd be right back. And he joined this huddle of SHARPs in the middle of all these cars. There were maybe six or seven of them and I watched as they started walking very slowly in a circle.

 

And then they started marching in a circle, kind of like angry roosters kicking up all this dust. And then I looked, and in the middle of this circle was this little baby SHARP, this kid that was a year or two younger than us. He had red hair and freckles. He was in this oversized bomber jacket. I'd seen him at parties before. And then one of the guys spit on the kid's face. And then they all just started punching the hell out of this kid, and he fell on the ground immediately. And when he fell, they kept punching and screaming and kicking. And as I'm watching this through the windshield, I'm looking for Max, thinking, “Where did he go? Did he go to pee or something? Can he come back and stop all of this?”

 

But then I see Max's face, and his eyes are bulging out of his skull, and his teeth are stripped and spit is flying out of his mouth. And he is kicking and punching this kid just as hard as any of those other guys. And as I watch this, I do realize what it is. I know that it's a beaten. It's this sort of ritual to welcome a new SHARP. But that doesn't make it any less terrifying as the kid screams. And even when I roll up the window, I can still hear the kid just screaming and screaming and screaming.

 

Finally, they stop, and the kid stands up. And when he stands up, he has this swollen eye. His bottom lip is split in the middle, and there's this crimson ribbon just going down his chin and his neck and his chest. And then Max takes a step forward, and he shakes the kid's hand. And then another SHARP shakes the kid's hand. And then they start hugging him and patting his back and rubbing his head. And it's this big machismo lovin' all of a sudden. One of the guys looks and he notices me for the first time sitting in the car. And he points and he says, "Max, why did you bring him here? Why did you bring this faggot here?" And all the SHARPs turn and look at me, and they take a few steps forward. And even the little one that just got beat up, he's looking at me with this glimmer in his eyes. And it occurs to me that what they're about to do to me isn't a ritual. They won't necessarily stop, and they definitely won't hug me after.

 

One of the guys goes to open the door and Max stops him, and he says, "David's off limits." And everyone sort of freezes for a moment. The hierarchy is very confusing. No one knows what to do. And Max reaches in his pocket and he takes out the car keys and he gets in the driver's seat and we drive away. In the car, on the way home, I don't know what to say to Max, which really is upsetting to me, because the reason I love Max and the reason he's my summer brother is because I always know what to say to Max. He's my best friend. And I don't think Max knows what to say either, because he just turns up the stereo as loud as he can, and he grips the steering wheel and he looks at the road.

 

We got home that night and we went to bed. And early the next morning, I woke up before anyone was up and I left without saying goodbye. And the next day we didn't talk. And the next week we didn't talk and we didn't call each other again. It was like we just disagreed without words. It was like we both knew that what had happened had changed something in our friendship. That senior year of high school in Seguin, I actually did really well, which was shocking. I had been doing really bad in high school because of all the acid previously [audience chuckles] and not going to high school. But I pulled it together my senior year. I made no grade less than a C. My mother was so excited, she threw me a No Grade Less Than a C party for David. [audience chuckles] 

 

At the end of my senior year, I get an envelope in the mail, and it tells me that I've been accepted into college, which is crazy to me. I'm like, "There's something wrong with their automated system. What college would have me?" But I'm really excited to go to college. It's in this little town, San Marcos, about 30 minutes away. And a few days before I'm going to start, I go to this house party in that town. And when I open the door, the first person I see and hear from the back of the room is Max. And he screams, "Dude." And he comes at me like a linebacker. And I can tell everyone at the party is terrified. They're like, "What is this giant going to do to this tiny boy?"

 

But what Max does is he wraps his arms around me and he hugs me so hard that I have to say, "Please, dude, you're crushing my rib cage." [audience chuckles] We sit down on the couch and we start talking, and it's like no time had passed. It's just so good to see him. We're catching each other up about our friends and our families. And we realize in our conversation that Max has also been accepted to the same college as me in San Marcos. And this is mind blowing to me, the idea that now we're both adults and we're going to experience this new part of our life together in this new town, away from our crappy little towns. And at the end of the night, we hug goodbye, and no one has to apologize or talk about the past. It's just like that horrible night kind of evaporates.

 

A few days after that, Max was driving down this Highway Loop 1604 outside of San Antonio, and he lost control of his car and he flipped it, and he ended upside down in the emergency lane, and he was suspended by his seatbelt. And when he came to, he started to barge his way out of the door. And when he finally did, he fell right in front of an oncoming truck, and he was killed instantly. A few days later, I went to his funeral in New Braunfels and I hadn't been back to New Braunfels since that night of the beaten. And I looked around, there were hundreds and hundreds of his friends there because he was the mayor of freaks. And I wanted to talk to them, but it seemed as strange to talk to them without Max there as it had been when he was alive. And I got in this line of all these people waiting to greet his family. And I could see up ahead that I was getting close to his mom, my summer mom. And I was telling myself, “I'm going to say such profound, awesome things to her. I'm going to make sure she knows how cool her son was and how important it was to him that people felt like they belonged and how he made me feel like I had a friend.” But instead, when I get there, the minute I look into her eyes, I just collapse into her arms and I whisper in her ear, "Your hair smells so pretty." [audience laughter]

 

That was 20 years ago and for the last 20 years, every time I go back to San Antonio, I will drive to New Braunfels and I'll go to the cemetery where Max is. And I will go and I will sit and I will talk to him. I talk to him about the same stuff I always did. I talk to him about how most people still suck, but music's still pretty cool and the government is still ruining everything. And I'm not a particularly devout or religious person, but every time I'm sitting there talking to him, there will be this moment, and sometimes it's imperceptible, where the construction on the other side of the fence or the highway right by the cemetery, it sort of disappears. And in just that moment, there's just me and there's just Max. Thank you.