Lisa Taddeo
Paul Mackie
Excerpted from Joyland, March 2018
At Milton, there was a kid named Paul Mackie, who was good-looking and incredible at tennis but also super weird and none of us were that close with him. He was ridiculously funny on occasion. He had this thing where he was trying to beat his own record at how quickly he could come from jerking off and he would just announce it in the morning at breakfast, he’d lean over to you while you were spooning pale scrambled eggs onto your plate and he’d say, real quiet and slow, thirty…four…seconds, and you’d smile and he’d wink and take the white scrambled egg spoon from your hand and that would be that.
We were fourteen and fifteen and there was something both darkish and also child-like about it. Because most of us were either having sex or trying to have sex at every turn, and there Paul was, beating off with the newfangled exhilaration of a twelve-year-old.
There were rumors that Paul’s uncle had fingered Paul’s asshole and concurrently jerked himself off when he was a kid. Probably Paul had started the rumor. He said the things aloud that you thought to yourself, but at that age you didn’t applaud someone for being autistically honest. He once said to me and some other guys, Why is it that when we get our hands on something with a funky smell, like pussy or our own ass crack, we smell only the back of our hands, the fingernails? We bring our hands up like this, super fast, and just smell the top? Like it’s less gross that way.
As the year progressed, Paul started to crack. By early spring he was eating meals alone with a coverless edition of As I Lay Dying. He also always had a yellow legal pad on him, and a pencil. He scribbled a lot, left-handed, even though we were pretty sure he used to be a rightie. He talked in the hallways to himself. We’d never seen him in the showers, he’d never gotten naked around anybody, as far as anyone knew, but now we’d see him occasionally come wet-haired from the field house, wearing clothes over his damp body, like he hadn’t toweled off.
One night the prefect was on a date so Heinz the fat German kid was hosting a party in his room. I went and knocked on Paul’s door. Come in, he said, after a very long time.
I opened the door and he was on his bed, hands folded across his chest, looking right at me.
Heinz has a 30-pack in his room. Julia and the French chick already made out. You should come down.
Appreciate the invite buddy, but I’m working. Twenty-six seconds.
He had these really nice cordwain high-top sneakers on, that I’d never seen before. He was wearing them on his bed, which wouldn’t have been weird except for the fact that he was in boxers and a t-shirt.
Nice kicks.
Thanks.
Okay so if you change your mind, come down.
Ten four.
I started backing out and closing the door behind myself, when Paul said, Hey buddy?
Yeah?
You have a soul. Remember when it closes in on you, that it’s better this way.
I closed the door and went back to Heinz’s room. Julia and the French chick were toplessly rubbing chest against chest, their medium-sized tits plastic-bubbling against each other and two nutless creatures whose names I never learned were playing cards on the burgundy carpet stained with beer and cratered with cigarette burns from the long winter. Heinz lit a fart on fire. He had the pinkest cheeks and looked like he’d live, fat and happy, till 90.
Six weeks later Paul stood up on the bench of a lunch table and said, loud enough that pretty much everyone could hear, THIR-TEEN SECONDS. Later that night, he hung himself from the holey rafter in his room. The prefect found him and shrieked like a young lady, so a bunch of boys semi-circled the doorway. Paul was naked except for the brand new sneakers, laced to the top. His hair was gelled back like a greaser and his eyes were closed. Apparently, there was a smile on his face. I didn’t see him but Hudson did. He was shaking and trying not to cry when he said, Man, Paul Mackie had, like, the biggest dick, that I’ve ever seen.
