***ALERT***DO NOT READ IF YOU ARE (A) MY
UNDERAGED COUSINS OR (B) MY PARENTS***IT MIGHT BE EASIER TO SWALLOW ONCE IT'S IN HARDBACK AND I SIGN A COPY FOR YOU***DON'T LAUGH***YOU'VE BEEN WARNED
Well, here it is: a new/old excerpt. Some of my loyal readers (and yes, they do exist even though they steadfastly refuse to post comments on my blog and instead send me direct e-mails because they're not really "
bloggy people") have read part of this before on the blog. But never before have I posted something so, um, graphic (or, as the agents like to say, "edgy"). But here are two unabridged chapters. Feedback welcome, as always.
Why am I posting from
The Nineties again? Easy. This is a little gift for all those people who wrote nasty things to me about
Zac Efron. And below, as mentioned in a previous post, you'll find the part he was meant to play, the part that will win him his Oscar--Chris Graeme. Back to
Zac: if you don't believe he can act, at least you can admit, after watching
High School Musical and
Hairspray, that (a) the guy's got range, and (b) he can take direction. Even master-of-the-universe John Waters has predicted (though who knows what the location of his tongue relative to his cheek was when making this predication) that
Zac would go on to do a couple more big musicals, then play a drug addict and win an Oscar.
I have his drug addict! I have his drug addict! You'll meet Chris in the first chapter below ("Brett"), then lose him for a while. Stick with it for a payoff toward the end the second chapter I posted ("Alessandro"). For those who wonder, Chris is a central character in the rest of the book, important both to Ruthie's downfall (such as there is a downfall) and her self-discovery (though it's not as touchy-
feely as all that). That is to say, things get worse. Plenty of opportunity for
Zac to stretch his chops.
Why am I so bent out of shape about young Mr.
Efron? Maybe it's because he's the first actor in a long time that I just adore onscreen without secretly wanting to, um, you know (hello Russell...Viggo...Johnny...Christian...Adam...others).
C'mon, folks--he's only 19. Does that mean I'm all grown up? I hope not.
Anyway, here you go. Call me,
Zac. I'll sell it you and you can pull a Vinny Chase. It can be your
Medellin...
(Sorry for the difficult formatting. I work and work on it and it's still hard to read on the blog. Then I work some more, then I remember the three thousand better ways I could be using my time and just hit "post".)
Brett.As a thank-you to Mr. Ed for helping me get the
DemiTasse show I bought him an electric coffee brew pot. He kept a ratty little percolator in his office and drank coffee all day from a chipped mug that he made during one of the ceramics class’ open
Raku lunches. Twice since August the advanced ceramics kids had fired up an outdoor kiln during lunch hour and let students and faculty create their own pieces to fire. It made campus smell burnt and
autumny and the newspaper ashes would flutter around the yard for days afterwards.
Raku is decorative, though, not meant to hold food. Mr. Ed’s mug was lumpy, big—cappuccino-style—and left a wet ring wherever he set it. But I figured it had some sentimental value, so I replaced the percolator instead. I gave it to him on a Friday afternoon.
“Ruthie, this was really unnecessary,” he said. “Thanks, but you
didn’t have to.”
“I hate when people say that after they get a gift,” I said. “It makes the giver feel silly.”
“Okay, sorry. Thank you. But permit me to say that it’s possible you might also be a beneficiary of this gift.” He smiled.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know how that coffee disappears from your percolator all the time. It’s very mysterious.”
“Ah, well. I’ll have to find someone to help me drink the full pots I’ll be making with my nice, new machine.”
“Test it on Monday,” I said. “I might be persuaded.”
As usual, I ate dinner with my family that night then left home around eight, after the dishes were cleared. And, as usual, I had nowhere to go. I just had to get out. Had to see if maybe there was someone else in the world I was supposed to meet.
Most nights I swung by John’s apartment first. Because he lived only a few blocks away and would always entertain me for a while. And because he
hadn’t yet kissed me, even though I could see the hard-on that often raged beneath his white pants when we sat on his couch talking, and I was kind of running a contest with myself about whether he ever would.
But I
didn’t feel like Spaghetti-Os or placid conversation, so I went to
DemiTasse and settled in to a seat at the bar that faced the window to the patio and parking lot, where I could watch autumn advance upon suburbia. Brett was too busy to bring the drink out, so he sent a
barrista with my usual. I pulled out
Pepere’s sketch pad and pretended to flip through drawings as I scoped the crowd. Mostly girls. Two in a corner that I knew but
didn’t acknowledge. A professor-type with graying hair and a raincoat piqued my interest, but then
Reff tapped on the window.
Reff. He held my interest for a day-and-a-half at the end of summer, before Morgan. He was always at the coffee shop and I’d given up trying to ignore him and let him take me to the De
Anza drive-in, where his brother worked the nacho cheese machine and got us into the double-feature free. I kissed him during the first movie and let him put his splintery hands under my shirt during the second. The next morning I met him for breakfast and he took me on my first motorcycle ride. We went all over the waking city, around the sharp bends of north Campbell, into the foothills off Sunrise and down through the cookie-cutter homes blooming stucco on the far east side. I wore his helmet and sat snug behind him on the one-
seater.
By the time we stopped at a music store two hours later to buy him a new set of drumsticks, I knew was done with him. When we got back to my car, waiting at
DemiTasse, I stepped off the bike and was uneven. Jagged stumps for heels. I looked at his bike, where the rubber soles of my shoes had melted black treads onto his exhaust pipes. Not knowing what to do, I distracted him with kisses and didn't return to
DemiTasse for weeks.
Now he was tapping on the window. He had a red
bandana tied around his kiwi-shaped head and was all wild grins. I gave him a wan smile in return. His unceasing interest would dissuade any other would-be suitors from buying me a coffee. I looked at the Professor—his eyes were already on the window, annoyed.
Then two things happened at once. A van pulled into the spot where
Reff’s motorcycle was parked and crushed it like a soda can—the metal and rubber folding upon itself until it was fully pinned between a wall and the van—and a kid sitting outside spit an enormous mouthful of water in my direction. The water hit the glass window at my eye-level then cascaded down onto the notebook of the man with whom the kid was sitting.
Almost everyone in the shop rushed outside to see the damage.
Reff stood with gaping eyes and an open mouth in front of his mangled machine. A white-haired couple and a mass of hazel smoke poured out of the van and Brett ran outside with a fire extinguisher. I retrieved a quarter from my wallet, went to the pay phone next to the community bulletin board and ran my fingers over the keys in circles as I told the police there had been an accident at Speedway and Country Club.
When I returned to my espresso con
panna, the water-spitting kid had joined the fray but his companion was still in his seat, writing on a damp sheet of paper. And he was handsome. Not handsome in the movie star sense, but in a primal way that tugged at my insides.
He had a definitive jawbone, and it gave me the impression that his mind was always made up. His face was dark with stubble but the red pattern on his neck meant he’d shaved in the morning. His hair was the black of wet asphalt, so black that it was reflective, and though short in the back, in front it hung over his eyes just enough so that he kept pushing it back with his hands. His eyebrows were dark and sharp as his jaw, and grew thick over his deep-set eyes. Just as I wondered what color they were, he looked up and I was caught. But I couldn't stop looking into his eyes, which turned out to be green.
We stayed like that for several moments, which felt like several minutes, until I thought I would never be able to look away. And then he smiled. And though over the course of weeks, months, nearly a year, he would smile at me many times, this was the smile that I always came back to in my dreams; the smile, full of warmth, that forgave me in advance for everything that had not yet passed; the smile that I would focus on in my mind over and over again while other men were biting my neck and driving themselves desperately into me.
“Dude, did you see that Chris?” the kid said, breathless.
He dropped my gaze. Then he nodded at the kid, picked up his notebook, came inside and sat down next to me.
“My friend Rabbit,” he said. “Is a spectator in the worst sense.”
His baritone voice, low and rugged as salt, sent a wave through me as if he’d blown in my ear. My thong went damp.
“I’m Chris,” he said, after a moment. “And I’m sorry about Rabbit spitting water at the window. That boy is uncouth. But in his defense, he was only trying to rescue you from the dude with the motorcycle.”
“How old is he?”
“And you are?”
“Oh, sorry. I’m Ruthie.”
“Ah. And he’s nineteen.”
“Whoa. I thought he was your son.”
“Oh, he’ll love that one.”
“And how old are you?”
“Twenty.”
“You mean you guys are like the same age?”
“Yup. Why? How old did you think I was?”
“Older than twenty. You just look, you sound—”
“Nope. I’m twenty. Still interested?”
“Who said I was interested in the first place?”
He leaned in until his face was maybe an inch away from mine.
“How old are you?”
“Same as your friend,” I said. “Nineteen.”
He sat back in his chair.
“Nice to meet you, Ruthie who’s nineteen.”
He ordered another coffee and spent an hour showing me the poems and recipes in his journal while the accident outside was cleared away. He wanted to be a chef and had clippings from
Bon Appetit and
Cook’s Illustrated pasted everywhere. He recorded recipes he wanted to try and ideas for meals. He also wrote little poems about food. A copy of William Carlos Williams’ “This is Just to Say” was taped inside the front cover.
“For instance,” he said. “Did you know that this coffee is the best in town?”
“No. It’s just close to where I live.”
“They’re one of the few who roast their own beans and they do it right. But you should never order the food here. The pastries and bread are all trucked from a commissary that services tons of local places, including hotels and jails. It’s days old by the time it gets here. Full of preservatives or just plain stale.”
“Good thing I
didn’t meet you last Tuesday when I ordered the cheesecake.”
By the time Rabbit came back in and we were introduced, I was showing Chris my sketch book. He told Rabbit to get lost and said he’d like to go somewhere with me, somewhere quiet.
“But I’m afraid to take you to my place.”
“Why?” I said.
“Because my house kind of looks like the Brady Bunch house.”
“Huh?”
“Oh, you know.
Faux stone hearth. Orange shag carpet. Wood beams that don’t hold anything up. Plus it’s an old shack out by lower
Sabino. Real rustic.”
“I don’t care.”
“And I live with my grandma.”
“So?”
“So the house smells like old people.”
“Then we’re out of luck because my place is a no go.”
“Why?”
I considered lying. My roommate is sick. There’s a study group going on. It’s my policy.
“Because I live with my churchgoing parents,” I said.
He laughed and gave me directions to his place.
“See you in fifteen minutes,” he said.
His place was not easy to find. It was a dark night and his house was outside the city limits, at the base of the
Sabino Canyon.
Sabino is a natural oasis at the south tip of the Coronado National Forest, divided into the well-groomed and much-hiked upper canyon and the more agrarian lower canyon. From the lower canyon the creek trickles forth into sparse neighborhoods with big ranch houses and few fences.
The drive took half an hour, and my stomach lurched the whole time. I decided not to have sex with him. It
wasn’t officially over with Morgan yet and anyway it
couldn’t hurt to make Chris wait.
When I finally turned off the dirt road and parked in his driveway, the overgrowth made it hard to tell the front from the back. I went around to what I thought was the front and found no door, then circled back to the other side. A small path led through a fence and a yard with a rusted
swingset to what looked like a kitchen door. There was no doorbell. I fidgeted and was about to knock when he appeared. He had changed from a Polo into a tee-shirt but still wore his jeans.
“What took you so long?”
“It’s a long way,” I said.
“I know.”
He took my hand and pulled me into the house and into him, kissing me soft and slow, his other hand on my cheek and then in my hair.
In his bedroom he sat me down on the twin bed and turned out the lights before I got a good look around. He knelt down on the floor, took my face in his hands and kissed me again. We kissed until the stubble of his face made the skin around my mouth bleed with a metallic thrill. We kissed for so long that I started to think he
wouldn’t even try to fuck me. And then he took off my shirt. And his shirt. And when we were left with nothing but our underwear he climbed up on top of me and kissed me some more.
He was slim-waisted and tone, but his body was softer than I expected, malleable. I touched his neck, his back, his chest, his stomach. He plunged his head in my neck and breathed. I kicked off his boxers.
“I don’t want to do this yet,” he said. “I want to know you first. We don’t have to do this tonight.”
“Right,” I said. “Um, me too.”
He returned to my neck and memories of sophomore year’s sex ed slide show flooded my brain.
Contact contraction. Black. Crusty. Boils. Contact contraction. Falling off.His hands crept and crept. The sterile Planned Parenthood exam room glowed in my mind’s eye.
Herpes. HPV. Chlamydia. Trichomoniasis. Gonorrhea. HIV. HIV. HIV. “But maybe you should put on a condom anyway,” I said. “Just to fool around, um…I mean. Safely.”
He straightened and I blushed at the awkwardness of my own words.
You might not get Gonorrhea but he’s never going to call you. “Yeah. Of course.” He got a condom out of his bedside table and put it on. Then he sat up and put his hands on my breasts.
“So pretty,” he said, and kissed the dip in my chest.
My breath caught with a gasp and I pulled him back down onto me.
I came the first time just as his cock slipped past my underwear and into me without us knowing it. I
didn’t even realize we were fucking until his quick rocking, the warm stab of his orgasm, made me come again.
***
The bliss
hadn’t dissipated by morning. I woke early, tingly with the memory of the romance-novel night. Chris with green eyes. Chris who touched me with benevolence. Chris who had to call.
I
wasn’t working the first shift at the Deli, but I
couldn’t stay at home for fear my mother would look at me and see, flashing across my face like scenes in a movie, the night that had passed. I’d read that pregnant women grow more perceptive as they grow more rotund and it was holding true in our house.
Morgan and I
hadn’t spoken in the six days since Julie’s party, so from a technical standpoint we
weren’t broken up and I
didn’t see the point in mentioning it to my parents. But on Friday morning my mother had asked “why
didn’t you tell me you and Morgan broke up?”, at which my father lowered his paper and said “Broken up, eh? He
wasn’t good for you, anyway. Knew it from the start.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, he was delightful,” my mother said. “Of course,” she added, as she stroked hair away from my face, “I
didn’t know him as well as Ruthie.”
So when her flannelled belly appeared from behind the refrigerator a split second before she did on Saturday morning, I dumped my orange juice down the sink with a “love you mom” and left for
DemiTasse.
It was empty. I ordered an espresso con
panna and a scone from the girl at the register and sat in the back, on one of the cushy chairs, to start work on a collage I was making for the baby’s nursery. I’d collected negatives of family photos and wanted to pair them with my charcoal interpretations of the pictures. It was to be a surprise for my mother.
But a few minutes after I started into a picture of my brothers making a snowman the only year it snowed on Christmas in Tucson, Brett came out with my order and sat down next to me.
“I thought you
didn’t work mornings,” I said, thinking of last night’s mascara crusting up my eyes. I was glad I flossed.
“I just came in early to cover for someone. It means I get the night off.”
“Oh.”
I raised my eyes to look at his face and was lost in it. My Brett. Brett who I’d loved since the day DemiTasse opened. I used to hate the name Brett: a name for frat boys, men who wear muscle shirts and guys whose parents don’t read much.
But he changed all that with his slender face, his raised cheekbones, his richly golden skin, the shocking blue eyes that were beacons on his face and made my toes curl whenever he cast them my way. He was pretty like a girl, with long eyelashes, a glossy magazine complexion and a curvy mouth I knew intimately in my fantasies. His hair was shaggy around the ears and neck, the exact color of peanut shells, and even though he seldom needed to shave, I got the feeling he passed through puberty in all the ways that counted.
All I knew about him was what I gathered from our snippets of counter conversations: he went to the University, his parents lived in Flagstaff, he had an older sister, he drove some sort of vintage car.
“There’s a foreign film festival on campus so maybe you and I should finally get to know each other outside of this place,” he said.
“As long as they’re not French,” I said. It came out more stilted than I intended. I smiled to show it was all in good fun and took a quick sip of my drink. It scalded my tongue.
“What?”
My tongue throbbed at the tip.
“The films. They can be from anywhere but France,” I said.
“You don’t like French films?”
“I don’t like French men.”
He reached over and brushed the top of my upper lip with his index finger. His fingers were slender and long. They smelled like smoked cigarettes: not in the stale way of airport lounges or old persons’ homes, but in the cinema-sexy way of James Dean and leather jackets, of Marlon Brando shouting “Stella” from a steamy New Orleans boulevard and brawny tobacco leaves seasoning in the sun. I wanted to taste them. I wished I’d waxed my upper lip instead of letting my mother convince me to bleach the peach-fuzz.
“Whipped cream,” he said, and showed me. For a moment I thought he was going to lick his finger, but then he wiped it on his apron. “Anyway, lucky for you tonight is Iran.”
“Well that should be interesting.”
“But now I’m going to sit here while you explain why you don’t like the most romantic country in the world.”
I rolled my eyes. People who haven’t been to France always think it’s seductive.
“I said I don’t like French men. Anyway, don’t you have to get back to work?”
“Do you see any customers?”
When I left for work Brett had heard a censored version of my summer in France and was set to pick me up at 7:30 to try Iranian cinema. Picking me up. Guys never picked me up. I was forever driving guys around.
Bryans let me cut out of work after two hours. At home my mom left a note that she and dad had taken my brothers to the zoo. I pushed the button on my answering machine and examined myself in the mirror.
The first message was from British Leonard. We never saw each other outside of work, but he called a lot. He didn’t have anything to say.
The other message was from Chris. He’d called early—10:15.
“I know it’s goofy to call so soon.” His voice crackled on the tape. “Oh boy. I hope you won’t think I’m desperate or anything. No, I don’t think you will. The short of it is I have to see you right away, tonight, this afternoon, in ten minutes. I can’t wait to see you. I couldn’t sleep much last night. Were you up, too? Okay, you have to call me. I gave you my number, right? I’m going to give it to you again. Maybe we could go out to dinner or something. Or just come over and we’ll make love, since—”
On impulse I strained to turn the volume down on the machine and peeked into the hallway even though no one was home. I closed the door.
“—uh-oh, can you say that on an answering machine? Anyway, the number is—”
I didn’t need to write it down. I’d already memorized it.
I called Chris and told him I was busy. His voice shot warmth between my legs. We agreed to meet Sunday at his place. An hour later he called to ask if I was really busy or just saying that. I told him he was starting to sound a little desperate.
“Shit,” he said. “Shit, shit. I was afraid of that.”
I had to handwash a gauzy paisley skirt and a moss-green shirt that matched my eyes because my mother wouldn’t let me put the lavender water I brought back from France in her washing machine. I set them out to dry, then changed my mind and washed an old pair of jeans and a yellow tee-shirt that matched my hair. I shaved my legs, big toes, underarms, arms and bikini line in the shower. Then I took a bath. Then I took another shower and gave my hair the olive oil/lemon juice rinse.
It turned out handwashing is not a good method for denim, so I compromised with the paisley skirt and yellow shirt, which were just the other side of matching and looked funky without seeming granola. At least not too granola. I put on a toe ring. It looked sexy. I took it off again, because I didn’t want Brett to think I was one of those girls who wore toe-rings.
He rang the doorbell six minutes early and looked at the ground when I answered. My parents were playing Scrabble and I wanted to escape without introductions.
“Wow. You live here?” Brett said. He smelled like apples and Marlboros. I wanted to touch his face.
“Yeah,” I said. “With my parents. It’s cheaper.”
“Oh,” he said. His forehead crinkled, but he didn’t ask my age.
The film was baffling. It was shot on video and shown on a TV set tethered to a rolling cart at the front of a small, white-tiled room. Not many people were there, maybe eleven. It felt more like a class than a festival. The chairs were horrid: blow-molded plastic with high metal arm rests so Brett couldn’t have put his arm around me even if he wanted to. The plot involved unrequited love and a woman who packs herself up in a box and ships herself to England so she is free to take a lover. I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be a comedy or a drama.
After the show we got seltzers at a frozen yogurt shop and walked over to his apartment, which was on-campus. Brett was a photographer. He’d built a loft to sleep on and fashioned the rest of the space into a makeshift dark room. There were some prints on the wall and a few rolls of negatives hanging from a clothes line and the smell of developing chemicals.
He took pictures of ordinary objects—a crushed can of 7-up, an old tire, a portable phone receiver, the back of a wooden chair.
“These are stunning,” I said.
He shrugged.
“No, I mean it,” I said. “It’s so refreshing to find a photographer who takes pictures of something other than gravestones and the backside of women.”
“I’m just working on technique.” He was muttering to dispel the compliment, but his face swelled with pride.
We climbed up the little wood staircase and sat crosslegged on his loft bed and he talked while I looked at his face, made mysterious by the inky red light that consumed the room.
Next to his bed he had a large, green apple-scented candle in a glass canister. It was covered in fingerprints and some of its soft wax had been scooped out around the wick. A few greasy pubic hairs were embedded in the cavities.
I fingered the dimples on my Grand-Mére’s bracelet and tried not to look, but my eyes kept stumbling back to the candle as he talked about transience and art and his connection with the camera. I wanted to look at his face, commit its details to memory, but was drawn to the accidental clue into the exotic male id. A girl, if she had something equivalent to the candle, would never leave it out.
Maybe it meant he didn’t have a girlfriend. Not a steady one, anyway.
Eleven approached and I had to go home. I decided to talk to my parents about a midnight curfew the next time they seemed amenable. Maybe even 12:30.
I wanted like crazy to kiss him—to settle the softness of his lips—and it almost happened on my porch when we stood for a few moments under the yellow light, not shivering in the cool night because the air between us was electric, as it always is late at night on porches between men and women. But then he smiled and looked at his feet.
“I really enjoyed getting to know you,” he said.
That was it. Not “I’ll call you.” Not “let’s do it again.” Just that he enjoyed getting to know me.
I locked the front door and tiptoed into my parents’ bedroom to tell them I was home, then got in bed without washing my face.
Brett didn’t love me back. Chris wouldn’t have been such a letdown. He’d already left me another message. He was the only person I could think of who wanted me. Even my parents wanted another daughter. The world seemed vast and flat, like it did after I got high with Trent over the summer.
I wanted to try it again. Cocaine. I’d missed something, I was sure of it. Maybe Chris knew something about it. Maybe he’d gotten high. Maybe I would ask him.
Alessandro.The thing about Mr. Ed was that he was huge on influences. Since August he’d already introduced me to the works of a dozen artists, and I was obsessed with Oskar Koskoschka, an Austrian Expressionist known for self-portraits full of angry brushstrokes. I’d been working on a series in his style because I still needed several pieces for my finished portfolio and a bunch of self-portraits seemed like an easy route. But I also needed the third drawing for my Riz-dee application, and I was getting desperate.
“It has to be totally original and there are no guidelines, other than it can’t overlap with anything in your portfolio,” I said to Mr. Ed. It came out more whiny than I meant it.
He was changing the record on an old turntable he kept in one corner of the art studio. He dropped the needle and The Clash’s Know Your Rights came on. He reshelved a Mozart album in a paint-splotched sleeve.
“Oh god. How are we supposed to work with music like this?” I said.
“Music like what?”
“So loud. And with dumb words. I like the Tchaikovsky.”
“Yes, I know. If it were up to you we’d listen to The Nutcracker every day.”
He sat down at his large desk, in the middle of the room, and picked up a 4B pencil. He was working on an example drawing of a tennis ball for a shading unit in his second period class.
“Or Billy Joel, the Nitty-Gritty Dirt Band, Dan Fogelberg, Jim Croce—“
“I think for this piece for Rhode Island you could benefit from studying artists like Hans Hartung and the Art Informel movement,” Mr. Ed said.
“I don’t have time to study. I have to draw. And there are so many movements. Modern and Post-Modern and Meta-Modern and Contemporary. Every artist seems like a new movement. How do you keep all these things straight?”
He laughed and stuck the pencil behind his ear.
“I paid a great deal of money in order for someone to teach me how to keep them straight.”
“Are you an Art Informel painter?
“No. Definitely not.”
“So what are you?”
“I don’t know if I am anything. But right now I’m interested in the Pittura Metafisica.”
“The what? Anyway, why can’t I benefit from studying that instead?”
“You don’t have to do what I do. I might be all wrong, you know.”
“How come you don’t make all of us learn this stuff as part of class? Why do you pick on me with the hard stuff?”
He looked at me over the top of his glasses and down the long slope of his nose.
“I think you know.”
Our eyes caught for a moment before I looked away.
“Yeah, but—”
He pushed his glasses back up and took the pencil from behind his ear.
“Okay, Ruthie. Study Pittura Metafisica. Study it all. I was just trying to help you with the assignment. Just throwing out ideas.”
At home I looked up Art Informel and Hans Hartung in the new electronic CD-Rom encyclopedia my dad brought home from work. The work was spontaneous and irrational. It defied conventional, and even unconventional, form. Until senior year I’d been influenced by Vermeer, Van Eyck and Hammershoi. People I’d studied in my art history class. I liked painting interiors and every day life and light as it looked to me. Those were the things that concerned me. I didn’t feel ready to paint life and light as it was in my head—or worse—look at objects and light and then interpret and reconfigure them to match what was in my head.
“Here’s the thing,” I said to Mr. Ed the next day. “I don’t think I have enough ideas to do Art Informel kind of stuff.”
He was sitting on Lara Polk’s stool, fixing the shading on the stem of a lily in her painting. She smiled at me.
“Or maybe you have too many,” he said, without looking up. “One of the reasons I recommended it was to help you let go of some of your preconceptions about art. And about ideas.”
He got up and moved to the next student’s easel.
“What is he talking about?” Lara said.
“I don’t know. It makes my head hurt.”
“I like the self-portraits you’re working on.”
“Thanks. I like the way you can see the reflection of the table in the leaf of your flower.”
“Thanks.”
Mr. Ed liked the metaphysical painter Carlo Carrà. I’d never heard of him before, but Mr. Ed had his prints everywhere. Carrà created eerie interiors that provoked claustrophobia, and I thought I’d try composing that type of still-life in one corner of the studio. I started by bringing in stuff from home and a thrift shop. My dad took me to a junkyard and I picked out an old door. In the studio I arranged a near identical set-up on each side of the open door, with a few things askew. There was half of a naked mannequin, an oval mirror, a chair, keys on a rusty chain, a three-foot Eiffel Tower and a bowling ball.
I was thinking about opening the door to a new life when I left home and worried that it wouldn’t change much of anything about my life. At least that’s what I hoped admissions counselors would think I was thinking. Unless that seemed rote to them, in which case…
“I think the mirror is a bit much,” Mr. Ed said. “It’s redundant, and besides, you’re just showing off.”
“But do you think it’s the right message?”
“You should think less about the message and more about the physical intricacies of your piece.”
“God. You’re telling me to think about stopping thinking. I’m totally lost. Do you at least like the composition?”
“It’s a little derivative.”
I picked a full palette of paint up off the corner of Patty Torres’ desk and hurled it at the mirror. I expected Mr. Ed to flinch or step back or something, but he just stood there while the colors glooped down the mirror, all over my still life and onto the floor.
“Now how is it?”
He scratched his back.
“Do you feel better?” he said.
I didn’t respond. The class was silent, and people were holding brushes midair, staring at me.
“Well now you have something,” Mr. Ed said, and smiled. “That’s an image I haven’t seen before and I think the blemished mirror sends the right message. See how much of your own reflection you can get. I’d get to work on it, though. It’s going to be a big effort, and I won’t let you come in on the weekends.”
“I can’t anyway,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say. “I work all weekend at the Papa-Go Deli.”
***
In November two big things happened at the Papa: British Leonard quit to pursue smoking dope full-time and Bryans hired Greta Halter to work weekends. I found out about British Leonard because he called one night when I was at Chris’ and left a message saying he was sick of “the bureaucracy of the deli” but he hoped we could still be friends. I found out about Greta when I opened one Saturday and saw her name scrawled across the dry-erase schedule in the back. I called Bryans at home and woke her up.
“What the fuck?” I said.
“What the fuck yourself. I worked until midnight last night.”
“Greta Halter? How come you didn’t tell me?”
“She needs a job and she’s friendly with Cooper.”
“She’s such a bitch.”
“She’s not so bad.”
“Whatever. If I have to work with her, I quit.”
“Look, just because you’re fucking the boss doesn’t mean you get to make hiring decisions. You not only have to work with her, you have to train her. Learn to love it.”
My cheeks burned. I banged the phone against the wall a few times before I hung up, but I bit my tongue. The second night I was with Chris we were riding in his ’83 Honda Civic when he got pulled over for speeding. When the sheriff looked at his driver’s license he smiled, wagged his finger at Chris and told him to slow down.
“My grandfather was a popular mayor with the cops, so I speed all the time,” Chris said, after the patrol car pulled away. “I never get a ticket.”
“Your grandfather was mayor?”
His grandma’s crumbling house with old cars in the driveway and “No Trespassing” signs didn’t seem mayoral.
“Yup.”
“Which mayor?”
“Mayor Graeme.”
“Oh shit,” I said, and giggled.
“What?”
“I work at the Papa-Go.”
“That’s funny.”
“And so the grandmother you live with is Mrs. Graeme?”
“Indeed.”
“They say awful things about your grandmother at work.”
“All true.”
“Man. This is weird.”
He turned on the ignition but left the car in park and pulled me into his arms.
“Wanna raise?” he said, then kissed me deeply.
***
Maybe it was because Greta was unsure at work or maybe I’d just seen her at her worst, but it turned out she wasn’t so bad. She was a quick study, and listened carefully when I taught her how to clean the thermoses, juice the carrots and ring up the croissants. She liked to hug and was always putting her arm around me and saying things like “well, we’ve stocked the salad bar, now let’s seduce the artistes,” which is what we called the sandwich makers. I tried to put the image of her and Wilbur out of my mind, and by the end of her third weekend we were hanging out.
She lived with her mother in a one-story townhome with cottage cheese ceilings and shag carpet. Her mother was a technician who worked the night shift at a missile plant outside of town and was not often home. Greta had a large supply of cocaine in a Kleenex carton under her pillow. It was already powder, finer than white Caribbean sand but not as delicate as powdered sugar, and she kept it in a heart-shaped silver box underneath the tissues. The box let off a mild but specific scent when she opened it, like a room full of office supplies and a forest after a fire and something I couldn’t put my finger on.
“I don’t usually get high on coke,” she said. “Well, not all the time, anyway. But a friend of mine had two eight balls and we got high a few days ago and he left me a teener, so I’m just going to work through it. I think it’s cut with something, though, because it tastes a little weak and anyway that’s probably why he had so much.”
“Cut with what?”
“I don’t know. Baking soda. That’s what I’ve heard.”
“Oh. Is that dangerous to snort?”
She laughed.
“Not more dangerous than coke.”
“Oh. What’s a teener?”
“Half an eight ball.”
“What’s an eight ball?”
She applied some mauvy lipstick then wiped it off again.
“Ugly color. Oh well. Um, an eight ball is like a really big chunk of coke that lasts a while and that’s how it’s sold. Like you would buy a bushel of wheat or whatever, you buy an eight-ball of coke. Or a teener. Or less.”
“I thought the color was okay.”
She tossed me the tube.
“It’s yours.”
“How much does an eight-ball cost?”
“I’m not sure. I never buy my own coke. I guess like $80. Or maybe that’s a teener. Maybe, like, $150.”
“How long does it last?”
“Depends. Sometimes one night, sometimes weeks.”
I was silent. During the school year $150 was most of my biweekly paycheck, a little more, even, if I didn’t pick up the noon to four shift after opening.
“Anyway, you should try some. We’ll get high and then go to my friend Aless’ house. He’s having a party.”
Greta took a razor from the zippered pocket of her wallet and used it to scoop coke onto a mirror she kept under her bed. She cut six thick white lines then thinned them out over and over again and cut them in half so there were twelve small lines. She used a straw to snort half of them. She held the mirror out to me.
“No thanks,” I said. “Anyway I don’t think I’m dressed for a party.”
She went to her closet and tossed me a pair of chunky corduroy pants.
“These are too small on me,” she said. “You should try them on. I’ll give you a cute polo to wear with them, too. It’s real tight.”
“Yeah, but I haven’t showered since work. I reek of onions.”
“You can shower here.”
So I used her buttermilk soap, salon shampoo, men’s cologne and discarded lipstick and looked not unlike Greta when we were ready to go, except I wore my hair down. I called my mother and told her I was hanging out with Bryans and another girl from work, which didn’t seem a complete fib.
I also called Chris, but he couldn’t make it to the party. Five nights a week, including most weekends, he worked as the sous chef at a tony Tanque Verde Boulevard restaurant while he saved for culinary school.
Greta took the other six lines of coke before we left. I flossed.
The party was in an unfamiliar west-central part of town that reminded me of where Jeff the bowler lived—all the streets were ultra dark. We turned right by a fried chicken and spaghetti joint and all of civilization disappeared behind its blinking neon sign. Another right onto a dirt driveway where people were congregated around an unlit public phone booth that was wildly out of place. Down the long driveway, we passed several mobile homes and a trailer before Greta directed me to park in front of a large house with a fenced-in yard.
A bunch of people were hanging around a keg in the yard, including a few from my A.P. classes. I nodded hellos as I followed Greta inside, unsure how everyone knew each other.
In the kitchen there were dirty dishes piled in the sink and a twenty-something couple drinking bottled beer and smoking. The woman rocked a baby in his carrier atop the formica counter.
The living room was dark and a blacklight illuminated a Led Zeppelin poster and two Bob Marley posters. Trent and Cami were making out on a La-Z-Boy at the far end of the room. Jessie from Calc was making out with her girlfriend on another La-Z-Boy. A bunch of people were lounging on two couches, watching
Scarface and passing joints. A goodlooking guy with black hair and faded acne scars got up to greet Greta.
“Bueno baby,” he said.
“Hey Aless, this is my boss, Ruthie. Ruthie, Alessandro.”
“Hey,” I said. He shook my hand. “I’m not really her boss.”
“It’s cool, it’s cool, welcome to my house.”
He called down the hallway and a tubby guy came out of a bedroom, smiling, with a lithe boy who wore a goatee.
“Shit, Ricky,” Aless said. “Connie is here. You got to get your fuck-pole boyfriend out of the house before your girl sees him.”
“Oh,” Ricky said. “Shit. That’s alright, wull. Ernesto was just going.”
Ricky patted Ernesto on his ass and he shuffled off through the kitchen without a word.
“This is Ruthie,” said Aless. “She’s a friend of Greta’s. Ruthie, this is my roommate, Ricky.”
“Hey, mija,” Ricky said. He also shook my hand. Then he called out and a lanky guy came from another bedroom and I was introduced to Ricky’s brother Adrian. Greta was royalty: everyone gathered close to talk to her, be near her, brush against her.
“Where’s the bathroom?” I said.
When I came out Jessie and her girlfriend were waiting to get in. Jessie held a telephone in her hands, and the cord dragged down the hall behind her.
“Oh shit, it’s Ruthie from Calculus,” she said, and hugged me. “Where’s Morgan?”
“No more. Gan. No more-gan.”
She looked at me, eyebrows knotted.
“Sorry, stupid joke. We broke up,” I said.
“Oh shit. I thought you were going to marry him or something.”
Jessie was a large, loud Filipino with beautiful eyes and an uneven haircut. She introduced me to her girlfriend, Myra, a white girl with oily skin and a floral dress.
As I was trying to extricate myself to find Greta, Alessandro came over, said “sorry girls” to Jessie and Myra, whisked me inside the bathroom and locked the door. For a minute I thought he was going to kiss me.
“Greta told me you could pierce my ear,” he said. He was a little breathless and had a visible tick in his right eye.
Jessie pounded on the door behind us, and shouted “muthafucka.”
“She did?”
“Yeah, can you?” His pupils were huge.
“Um, I think those girls want to use the bathroom.”
“No. They just want to call a porno 900 number and have sex in the bathtub. I’m sick of paying their fucking phone bills.” I nodded and tried not to widen my eyes. “So can you pierce my ear?”
“I guess. I don’t know why Greta said that, though. Why do you want me to do it?”
“Okay, what do you need?”
I got my ears pierced at the doctor’s office when I was little, and then added double holes and a third on one side at the accessory shop at the mall. That was the extent of my ear piercing experience.
“I guess a needle and a match—”
“Is a lighter okay?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“And I brought some alcohol and a potato.”
“Why did you bring a potato?”
“You’re supposed to put it behind my ear so the needle doesn’t poke into my head,” he said.
“You know more about this than I do.”
I used some toilet paper to wipe his right ear lobe with alcohol then held the needle under the flame of the lighter, the way my mother used to before she removed splinters—although she always used matches, waving out the flame when the needle turned black.
“Are you sure you want me to do this?”
“Definitely.”
I took a breath and put the needle to his ear, squinting to see if it was centered. The surface of his skin broke like a tooth piercing the peel of an apple. I stopped.
“Wait. Do you have an earring?”
“Hold on,” he said, and left the bathroom. He came back with a box of dental floss.
“String some of this through the needle and tie it in my ear,” he said. “I’ll get an earring on Monday.”
Where did he keep the dental floss if not the bathroom? I wondered if he was like me, with spools of floss everywhere.
It seemed like an Andy Warhol movie as I drilled the needle through his flesh. It was hard to get through his lobe, but satisfying—like popping a zit you didn’t know was ready—even when he flinched in pain as I burrowed deeper. He sat on the edge of the bathtub and I kneeled on the floor in front of him to reach his ear, our mouths only inches from each other. He grabbed my thigh and squeezed hard when the needle hurt. He smelled good, like aftershave, sweat and a beer, and heat radiated up from his body.
When I’d finished tying the floss into a tiny knot he asked how I knew Greta. I asked him what he did.
“I’m saving up for drafting school,” he said.
I didn’t know what drafting school was, so I just nodded.
In the living room I found Greta in one of the La-Z-Boys talking to Trent. Cami was gone. There was nowhere for me to sit, so Trent let me sit on his lap. I was there for ten minutes and he had a hard-on the whole time.
Then Adrian came out and asked Greta into the back room and she dragged me with her. In the back room sheets were hung over the closed Venetian blinds and the door was closed behind us. A bunch of older guys and one girl stood around a dresser snorting coke. The room smelled of rotting cucumber peels. Adrian handed me a rolled-up five dollar bill.
“New guests first,” he said.
On the dresser was a mirror with three long lines—much larger than the ones Trent and Greta had cut. The sight of them sent my stomach into my throat.
I knew it was different than in Greta’s room. That if I didn’t do it, I would look like an idiot. I held my left nostril closed, put the bill into the right, closed my eyes and snorted a whole line, left to right.
“Oh shit,” Adrian said. “You took a couple spoons at once. I thought you were a novice.”
“Sorry,” I said. It came out as half a cough. Some of the guys sniggered, but Greta gave me a closed-lip grin and mouthed “wow.”
My head throbbed and my right nostril was numb. It felt thick, like gravel, going up my nose. The sickening postnasal drip started almost as soon as I put the bill down. I remembered the afternoon getting high with Trent, and I swiped my finger where the line had been then rubbed it over my gums. Slightly sweet and plant-like at the tip of my tongue, then so bitter in the back I stifled a gag. I handed the bill to Greta. She quartered one of the lines with her driver’s license then took half of it and licked the license clean.
By the time she finished I felt good. A smile crept up my cheeks, directed at nothing in particular. My head was light on my shoulders. Not like medicine head, but easy to maneuver and painless. I bobbed it around the room and saw that everyone seemed friendlier than when I walked in.
Compadres. The rest of my body was not so much numb as vaguely tingly. The room throbbed with the heat of the guys—the carnal bulge of them. Looking around I saw Chris in all of them.
Mmmmm. Maybe you’re in love with Chris. Too bad he’s not here getting high with you. I raked my fingers over the pants Greta loaned me and delighted in the organic charge of the corduroy’s fiber. My heart was beating faster. A fat guy with a shaved head and a mustache winked at me.
Butterball, the fey drug dealer from school. How do all these people know each other?I looked at Greta and giggled.
“Oh boy,” she said.
We went to the yard and I chatted with some of the A.P. people. The air was cool but not chilly; silk on my arms. The Big Dipper was scooping up the darkness just above the horizon. Greta brought over a plastic cup of beer.
“Better not,” I said. “I’m driving.”
***
Twenty minutes later the high was gone and my stomach turned sour. I was sleepy. Greta and I went back to the room to get high before we left. I took a little more than before and hoped it would last longer.
My ears rang. My chest expanded with every gulp of air and the oxygen—palpable and wild—aerated my coursing blood, plumping cells in the farthest crevices of my brain with each loud pump of my heart.
We looked for Aless to say goodnight but couldn’t find him. Trent was gone, too. In the car we rolled down all the windows and I played
Big Shot too loud.
I laughed until tiny pricks of tears rose to the outer corners of my eyes.
“What’s so funny?” Greta said.
She’d pulled the scrunchie from her pony tail and her hair whipped at her cheeks in the wind.
Capture this moment. Every detail from the chipped blue polish on her nails to the way the autumn air smells of mint and Windex and burnt newspaper. This you’ll want to remember in your nineties. You’ll want to summon it and play it like a movie, remembering how, even if for only a matter of moments, you were fearless.“I said what’s so funny?”
“What was the deal on Halloween anyway?” I said. It came blurting out.
“Were you at Julie’s party?”
“Um, yeah.”
“Well sorry, I didn’t know you yet.”
“Don’t you kind of remember having sex with someone, like, two inches away from me?”
“You mean that kid?”
“Yeah.”
“That was a total hate fuck. Is that why you’re laughing?”
“No, I was thinking of this song. Laughing at the irony. What’s a hate fuck?”
“A hate fuck. He’s such a little punk-ass know it all. He was walking around that night like he ruled the world.”
“Yeah, he’s an asshole, so why did you let him fuck you?”
“First of all, he didn’t fuck me, I fucked him. I never let guys fuck me.”
“Oh.”
“Second, it was a worthy hate fuck. He deserved it.”
“I don’t get it.”
“The whole time I was fucking him I was telling him what a pencil-cocked, sorry-ass pathetic piece of shit, ugly lay he was.”
I stopped giggling.
“That’s what you were saying?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“And he didn’t mind, either.”
“Well, yeah, Greta. He was a fourteen-year-old getting laid.”
“Whatever. Someday the memory will come back to haunt him and he won’t be able to get it up anymore because he’ll know what a stupid piece of shit he is and his wife will leave his impotent ass.”
“Jesus.”
There was a lull in the conversation and the thumping in my chest and rush of wind got louder.
“So where are we going now?” Greta said.
“I’m going over to Chris’ restaurant to see if he can get off early. I’ve got an hour until curfew.” I tried to speak above the wind.
“It’s so quaint that you have a curfew.”
I stuck out my middle finger.
“I can drop you off or you can come with.”
“Drop me off at my friend Peter’s house,” she said.
“Okay. Who’s he?”
“Just some guy I know. He’s a guitarist.”
“Oh,” I said.
***
Chris could not get off early, but he sent out a napkin on which he wrote “call you later, baby” and a slice of triple chocolate cake adorned with whipped cream, prickly pear coulis and two cherries to resemble female anatomy. Like a gag birthday cake.
I headed home via DemiTasse. Brett brought me an espresso con panna with a half-smile.
Mmmmm, Brett. Mmmmm, Chris.At home I jilled off in the shower and then started making a present for Chris. A tiny handmade picture frame that I’d fill with a tiny handpainted picture of us. Maybe I’d give it to him for Christmas.
He called around 1:30 a.m., just after I went to sleep.
“I was so hot for you after you sent out that cake,” I said.
“That was the general idea.”
I told him about the party.
“Cool.”
“Why, have you ever done it before?” I said.
“Yeah, I don’t mind getting high every once and a while. Did you like it?”
“Yeah, I kinda did.”
“That’s cool, we should get some and get high together.”
“Okay, when?” I said. “Are you working tomorrow?”
“No. Do you think you can get some?”
“Cocaine?”
“Baby, don’t say it over the phone.”
“Oh,” I said. My cheeks burned. “I don’t know. I guess I could go over to the house I was at last night.”
“Did they seem cool?”
“Yeah, they’re alright.”
“By the way, you don’t have to come through my yard anymore. I took the bottom screws off the screen outside my bedroom. And the window’s always open a crack to let out the smoke. So if you come over tomorrow, just park on the other side of the house—”
“And hop through the window?”
“Yeah. I mean, you can, right?”
“I can. Did you take the screws out just for me?”
“Just for you. Immediate access, if you know what I mean.”
“Right. That or you don’t want me walking by your grandmother anymore.”
“Listen, baby, I gotta go. Belle called and her electricity got turned off again and she’s all upset, so I promised I’d call her before two.”
Belle was Chris’ ex-girlfriend. They dated for a year and then she left him to go to college in Phoenix. She called with a new crisis at least once a week.
“Whatever,” I said, and hung up before he could defend himself.
Greta came into work early on Sunday to open with me. We put the eighties station on the radio and turned it up loud while we washed the windows. When Bryans came in she switched it to standard-issue Kasey Kasem.
Where Have All the Cowboys Gone? came on. Greta stuck her finger down her throat.
“No kidding,” I said. “Anyway, I plan to pay my own bills”
“Yeah, right. Not with the Papa paychecks.”
“Speaking of which. I’m looking to drop a little money. Do you have Aless’ phone number?”
She stopped sweeping for a moment and looked at the ceiling.
“Nope. I can’t remember it. You can just stop by the house. Someone is almost always home. Do you remember where it is?”
“Yeah. Do you want to come with?”
“I get off earlier than you today. And anyway I’m going over to some guy’s house.”
“Peter?” I said.
“No. A guy named Chris.”
I looked at her but she was concentrating hard on her dust pile.
“Really? You’re going out with a guy named Chris, too?”
She blinked and nodded. Nodded and blinked.
When my shift ended I untucked my shirt and took off my hat. I had $107 left from my last two paychecks, and planned to spend no more than half of it on coke. The drive home from Aless’ had seemed easy, but everything looked different in the sunlight and I started driving in circles. I was about to give up when I saw the peculiar payphone. I pulled into the dirt patch in front of their gate, my heart racing and sweat gathering between my legs.
I put the emergency break on Elmer, then took it off again to leave. I flossed my teeth in the visor mirror, yanked the break back on and locked Elmer behind me with a beep from my clicker.
There were no audible voices as I let myself in the gate and knocked on the kitchen door. I fidgeted with my purse. Ricky opened the door, stepped out onto the concrete step and pulled it shut behind him. His stomach stuck out from beneath a green Papas and Beer tee-shirt and his hair needed combing.
“Hey,” I said.
“What’s up?” he said. His face was a blank.
“Um, I met you last night at your party, and—”
“Oh, right. You pierced Aless’ ear and shit. What’s your name, mija?”
“Ruthie.”
“Right, wull. Did you forget something or something?”
“Um, no.”
I fidgeted some more.
“Are you here to see Aless?”
“Uh, I guess.”
“Alright, come on in,” he said, and opened the door. “But I should warn you. I don’t know what he told you, but he’s got a girl here.”
“Oh no, I’m not…” I said, but Ricky had already stalked off through the kitchen.
I closed the door behind me and locked the deadbolt. No one had tidied up the kitchen. Things crunched under my feet with every step.
In the living room the blinds were drawn and Aless, Adrian and two girls were sitting on the floor around the coffee table. The TV was dead and there was no music. Ricky had disappeared. One of the girls was snorting coke off a large, beveled mirror. Aless stood up when he saw me.
“Oh, hey Ruthie,” he said.
“How’s your ear?” I said, flushed that he remembered me.
He touched it.
“It feels okay, but I’ve had a pounding headache since I woke up and I wonder if that’s how come.”
“You should take some Tylenol.”
“Yeah, maybe. I just woke up, like, an hour ago, though.”
The girl who had just snorted laughed.
“Hey, guys. This is Ruthie,” Aless said.
Adrian nodded.
“We met last night,” he said.
I smiled.
Aless pointed to the girl who just got high. She had huge boobs.
“This is Angie,” he said. “And that’s Connie.”
Connie waved at me.
“Sit down, sit down, Ruthie. I’m glad you came.”
I put my purse on a couch and sat down next to Connie. She had pasty skin and dry brown hair that fell halfway down her back. She wore a flannel shirt and a silver cross around her neck. She took the mirror from in front of Angie and passed it to me.
I hadn’t planned on getting high at Aless’ house and wasn’t sure I wanted to. I took the mirror, anyway.
Someone had cut the coke into sloppy lines with a razor. I counted eleven lines and five people. There was a piece of straw on the mirror and I used it to take two lines. They were thick and went up like cookie crumbs. I numbed my gums and gave the mirror back to Connie. The weight of my body lightened. Instant high. But it was not the euphoria of the previous night.
Connie used the razor to thin out three of the lines and took them, leaving the remains on the mirror instead of taking a number. She passed it to Adrian, who cleaned-up and took four lines. Aless took the last two and got a bag out of his pocket. The room was silent while he cut more lines, except for the metal-on-glass sound of the razor and a cricket inside a wall.
Why isn’t anyone talking? You feel like talking. You feel like talking about everything. Don’t they? Don’t they? Maybe coke is supposed to make you introspective. Try not to seem out of place. When the mirror came back around to me I took three lines.
Things progressed like that for about an hour. I didn’t want to ask Aless about buying my own coke in front of the others. I would have to go home and call him about it later, because I couldn’t stay all night and I was starting to worry about how much coke I’d taken. I felt fine. I felt great. I’d reached the euphoria on my third pass of the mirror and it had faded into a general sense of contentedness. The cricket chirped on in the wall and my heart soared with its song.
But you know you’ve taken too much.Just when I was about to get up and leave and was thinking about maybe hitting John’s place on the way home, Ricky came out of his room and told Connie he had to go to work and she got up and left with him. Then Aless said to Angie that she had better get going, too, and she whined, but then Adrian said, “c’mon, I’ll drive you.”
Nobody said anything to me so I stayed put. Angie kissed Aless before she left, sticking her tongue so far down into his mouth I thought he would gag. When she was gone he wiped his mouth.
“Let’s go to my bedroom,” he said, and I followed him back.
Is he going to want to fuck you? Do you owe him something because of all the free coke? He smells great. Maybe you should fuck him. But you might be in love with Chris. You should try not to have sex with anyone else. And besides what about Angie with the big boobs? You don’t want to kiss where she’s kissed.Aless sat down on the bed with his back against the wall. I sat down next to him. He didn’t say anything for a while but it wasn’t an uncomfortable silence. I broke it to ask him if I could get some coke.
“Maybe Adrian could sell you some,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“Okay. How much?”
“How much do you want?”
“Oh, not that much.”
“Well, probably you could get a teener for seventy.”
“Yeah, okay.”
We talked for about forty minutes. He told me about drafting school. It didn’t make much sense, but I gathered he wanted to learn how to draft building plans by taking courses at Pima Community College. I kept looking at the big digital readout on his clock.
When is Adrian coming back to sell you the coke? Why does he keep telling you he’s saving up to buy a drafting table?When Adrian got back Aless gave him my money and he gave me a plastic sandwich bag of coke. I pulled out the tiny lined book that I kept in my purse.
“Can I have your phone number? You know, in case I need…”
Adrian didn’t say anything, but Aless took the book from me and scribbled his phone number with my miniscule pencil. I wrote “Alessandro/Adrian/Ricky” next to the number and slipped the book back in purse.
The coke Adrian sold me was loose, not a rock. I figured for $70 I could take the two lines that were still sitting on the mirror in the living room. Two for the road.
At home I stayed up late into the night working on the collage for my soon-to-be sister.
***
Three days later Chris and I finished the coke I got at Aless’ and he got more.
“I didn’t know you were that into it,” I said.
We were sitting in his room, he on his desk chair and I on the floor, leaning back against his bed.
http://www.pw.org/mag/contents.htm