Boy Parts

He smells of baby powder.

I pull the corners of my mouth into place with my fingers and see what it looks like when I show my teeth. It always looks a little smirky or sneery, I think, or like the anxious grin of an agitated chimp. I’ve never had a nice smile. A shame – you spend all that money on a set of veneers to find out your teeth were never the issue.

He went to the toilet, and I remember thinking what a fuck-up this was. He was just a dork, not a weirdo like the others had been. He’d been in there for fifteen minutes or so. I couldn’t hear anything through the paper-thin wall, so I nudged the broken door open, and found him perched on the toilet lid, chewing a used tampon he’d fished out of my bathroom bin. One hand in his jeans, eyes half-shut, head tipped back. He didn’t notice me till the flash went off on my camera.

his justification for this was a weird narrative about being a Jewish man and reconciling his identity with capitalism pushing the Nazi aesthetic, and fetishising big blond women. Shiksa Goddess is scrawled on the back of the photo in his handwriting.

At the time it felt revolutionary, but everything does when you’re twenty.

I’ve demoted him. Demoted from better looking, thinner friend to man-in-corner-rolling-joints.

It’s like a Jewish funeral in here, but with more class As.

The feeling is like when someone sees a mark from where you’ve self-harmed, and you slap your hand over the cut, or the burn, or the bruise. You’ve tried to hide it and, in doing
79
so, made it even more obvious that mark is not an accident.

In the land of the borderline autistic, the man who can make eye contact is king.

It’s easy for me to cry when I’m tired, when I’m poorly, when my eyes are already streaming.