Johnny America

 

David Mack­ey

by

David Mack­ey has new gog­gles for swim­ming and has dis­cov­ered two new things. One: When he keeps his head above the sur­face, be­gog­gled or not, the light is bent through the wa­ter, cre­at­ing the il­lu­sion that the feet of the per­son ahead of him are fur­ther away than they ac­tu­al­ly are. Two: Jes­si­ca Gold­stein from across the street wears an ill-fit­ting bathing suit and if he swims be­hind her when she does the breast stroke he can catch a glo­ri­ous glimpse of her much de­sired crack.

David’s moth­er is telling all her friends how proud she is of her son. He’s lost so much weight since he start­ed the swim­ming, she says. He’s there every day for hours on end. He’s a born again dolphin.

David Mack­ey heard that play­ing with your­self will turn you blind. He knows that’s not true. His vi­sion is get­ting worse, but it has noth­ing to do with that. That’s noth­ing but an old wives tale, told to scare old hus­bands and old sons. Just in case, though, he doesn’t tell his mom that he can’t see the board at school any­more. He moves to the front of the class, and though his grades don’t im­prove his teach­ers praise him for the bur­geon­ing in­ter­est in his studies.

This kind of ded­i­ca­tion, they tell his moth­er, might see him get­ting in­to some­where like Berke­ley. His moth­er is over the moon. Did you hear that, she says to David’s fa­ther. Berke­ley! His fa­ther grunts ap­prov­ing­ly and scratch­es himself.

David Mack­ey buys a dirty mag­a­zine from a store in New York on a field trip and the next week he takes it in­to school and un­sticks the pages to show pic­tures of naked girls to the oth­er boys in his class.

David has so many friends now, says his moth­er. I know that be­ing pop­u­lar isn’t the most im­por­tant thing, but still… They’ve all start­ed swim­ming too, say the oth­er moth­ers. He’s such a pos­i­tive influence.

I fuck­ing hate David Mack­ey, says Jes­si­ca Gold­stein. The big jerk off.

Filed under Fiction on February 16th, 2009

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Reader Comments

E wrote:

Heh heh. It makes me laugh like David Shrigley. I sup­pose he had to be Amer­i­can, oth­er­wise the pay-off is lost 😉

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