and thus he felt free to change it up. I’d heard versions ranging from G- to X-rated. “Stuff your greasehole-fryface, burgerking.” “Hide your oofhole-bruiseface, punchingbag.” “Plug your stinkhole-assface, widehind.” “Wipe your meathole-lipsface, cumdump.” Etcetera. All versions got laughs, though none beat the original—at least not to my taste—and, ultimately, I think I felt flattered to have had my family’s best saying appropriated by someone as handsome and affable as Jonboat. It helped, too, that he acknowledged my role in the process. When, just before Easter, he came up with the idea to add “Jonboat Say” to the front of the catchphrase and put it on T-shirts, he consulted me directly, and accepted nearly all the advice I gave. All of it except for one small piece, which eventually, though indirectly, caused the brief spasm of trouble between us.
We both agreed the T-shirts should be all-cotton and Superman red. We agreed that the image Jonboat had drawn—a balding and openmouthed fatman’s head (colossal uvula, flappy underchin fold) beside a disembodied hand and a motion-line array expressing an imminent, four-fingered slap—should be printed on the chest below “Jonboat Say” and above the catchphrase. We agreed that the lettering should look like it had the texture of spray paint, that the image should be black on a square white background, and that “gaylord” shouldn’t appear on the shirt, as “gaylord” would make it unwearable at school. I, however, was of the opinion that, absent “gaylord,” the comma should be restored to its original position between “piehole” and “cakeface,” whereas Jonboat claimed restoring it would ruin the shirt. He said that, first of all, with a comma before “cakeface,” the shirt would have to be considered “officially punctuated,” which would require a period be placed after “cakeface,” not to mention a colon, if not another comma, after “Jonboat Say,” and quotation marks around the catchphrase itself, i.e.,
JONBOAT SAY:
[almost-slapped fatman image]
“SHUT YOUR PIEHOLE, CAKEFACE.”
This, believed Jonboat, was more punctuation than a T-shirt could abide.
Secondly, he explained that, as his use of the saying had long since demonstrated, he thought it sounded better without the comma; that commanding a person to shut his piehole-cakeface was stronger than just commanding some cakeface to shut his piehole. With that I disagreed, though not too heartily, and I kept my opinion to myself. But I did suggest that a hyphen be placed between “piehole” and “cakeface” in order to really bring across the compoundedness of the two already-compound words. Jonboat wasn’t sure. He thought a hyphen might suggest “official punctuation,” giving rise to the problem that ditching the comma had already solved. Then again, it might not. A hyphen might be more like a spelling thing—more like an apostrophe. We briefly tossed around the idea of making “piehole(-)cakeface” a single word, i.e. “pieholecakeface,” but it looked like Italian spelled by a Slav, and we figured that even if readers of the shirt could recognize “pieholecakeface” as English, they were bound to be confused about where the stresses fell. And so we were back to do- or don’t-hyphenate.
Jonboat suggested we sleep on it.
* * *
I awoke the next morning erect and depressed. I was twelve years old, wanted someone to touch me, and knew no one would. In the months since Jonboat had bloodied Blackie’s nose, some things had changed. First and foremost, my mother had died, a loss so fundamental that it didn’t, much of the time, seem possible. I knew I would never see her again and, when I thought about that, I’d pull neck muscles crying, yet after having mourned just five or six weeks, I no longer thought about it—at least not so directly. Which may as easily have meant that I’d “entered a self-preserving state of denial” as that I’d “arrived at acceptance of the loss.” The therapists differed; I didn’t care. I didn’t know what any of it meant, and to try to sort it out seemed self-destructive, masochistic at best. The loss was too massive, the thought of it too painful, to analyze the style in which I chose—or was compelled—to feel it.
Plus there was my skin—newly oily and porous. And I’d developed dandruff, slight myopia, and whiskers over my upper lip too sparse and feline to call a mustache. The UV-sensitive, autotinting lenses of my overlarge glasses (black wire frames, vaguely aviator-shaped) never fully clarified; even in basements, milk was beige. My father no longer cared to fight about my haircut, and although it had remained the same for