Free Pins: A Novel by Jim Provenzano Page A

the stage floor. Joey spilled onto his hand as the show cut to a floor wax commercial.
     
    At school, once, Joey felt like a naked guy on a Greek vase.
    Mrs. Bridges the art teacher was a lot nicer than the prim old nun at St. Augustine’s who coveted paper as if it were money. Mrs. Bridges wanted color, still lifes, figure studies, cartoons. “Experiment!” she announced.
    Sometimes kids got up on the big tables. Everyone would make a few jokes, but then get down to working, making the classmate’s form come to life on pencil and paper. So when Mrs. Bridges asked him to wear his singlet and shoes, he got teased for it, but it felt great with all the different versions of himself pinned up on a bulletin board for weeks.
    He lay on his carpeted bedroom floor, working on a few wrestling poses, positions he’d borrowed from the instruction books Coach Cleshun gave out. Mrs. Bridges said it was okay to “borrow” an image every now and then. He made the outlines, then decided to not draw the singlets.
    His pencil drew erections between the wrestlers’ legs. His eraser censored them. He used his own spit to smudge the lines, making the bodies seem to press out of the paper, sometimes even buckling out from the dampness.
    His drawing shoved safely away, images came tumbling into his head, interrupted by fascinated glances at his own cock. He felt so joyously lucky to have one right there on his own body.
    The remembered smells from practice came to him, then Coach Fiasole’s voice, softly, like the times he’d come in close, showing a move. Fiasole wasn’t married. Coach Cleshun had a wife, but no kids. That could mean something. He’d heard about married guys being gay or getting caught, then divorcing.
    He had to hold back just a few more moments, grabbed one arm around himself, licking, biting his tight biceps as if it were Dink’s or Bennie’s, then Dink’s again, then Paul E. Coyote’s legs, for a moment Dink’s father, a crazy image of himself as a little sperm, then Coach again, the guy in Return to the Blue Lagoon , then the kid who played Sara Gilbert’s boyfriend on Roseanne , but then back to Dink, it always came back to Dink, rolling with him, gripping, tangled up in him.
     
    He started up to what sounded like the garage door opening, but relaxed a moment, then got up to wash off. False alarm.
    Joey hid his drawings in a spiral-bound pad high up in the farthest reaches of his clothes closet. He knew better than to hide things under his bed, the first place Mike the Pest would look, the first place his mother hit during one of her Search and Destroy cleaning missions. The comfortable smell of his own body would be wiped away. His dirty clothes would disappear, then reappear, folded on his bed for him to put away. He wondered if his mother noticed the stains. She must have, because she never said anything.
     
    “Uh, this is Joseph Nicci from the Gotyou Collection Agency, calling for a Mister Donald Khors. Sir, it’s about your overdue credit charges. Please call me back.”
    He knew both Dink and his mom would laugh. Mrs. Khors once complained that regardless of the credit card’s name, she could never discover what she spent it on. Dink would laugh, so Joey would laugh, but he wondered if maybe Dink’s family was rich, but in a different way.
    By the time his mother and Sophia got home, Ricki Lake’s guests were discussing the ramifications of being a straight edge teen mom in a punk rock world.
    Sophia had ripped a coloring book to pages on the floor, with all the blank sides up, swirling with three crayons at once in each of her fists.
    “That’s it. Very nice. You’re gettin’ it,” Joey said as he knelt on his knees, watching her crayons rotate.
    “We did a song and I got a bird in da book an we played on the swings and I fell. Ya wanna see my boo-boo? It’s disgusting.”
    “Sure.” Her pre-school adventures never ceased to amaze him.
    The phone rang. His mother got it.
    Sophia