Erasure (6 page)

“I’ve got to see two more patients and then we can go,” she said. “You’re lucky, no picketers today. They must be in church or at a coven meeting. You’re okay out here?”

“Yes, Yvonne is taking care of me,” I said, but the receptionist had cooled to me. She offered a mechanical smile and wagged the eraser of her pencil in the air. “I’ll be waiting.”

When I was fifteen, my friend Doug Glass, that really was his name, asked me if I wanted to ride over to a party with him. This was during the summer in Annapolis. He was a year older and had his own car. I was excited to go. When we got there the music was loud and unfamiliar, the bass thumping. The air was full of male voices trying to dig down another octave and girls’ giggles. We stood out on the lawn first and I held onto a beer in a plastic cup until it was warm. I hadn’t acquired a taste for it yet and, to tell the truth, I was afraid it might make me throw up. We were in a part of Annapolis I’d never visited before, but I could see the spire of the capitol building, so I knew about where I was.

“Yo, brother, what’s yo name?” a tall boy asked me, blowing cigarette smoke not quite in my face. “I’m Clevon.”

“Monk,” I said.

“Monk?” he laughed. “What the fuck kind of name is
Monk?”

Right at that second I didn’t want to tell him my real name was Thelonious.

Another guy came up and the tall one said, “Hey, Reggie, this here is, now get this,
Monk.”

“Kinda looks like a monkey, don’t he?” Reggie said.

“What’s your real name?” Clevon asked.

“Ellison,” I said.

“That your first name or your last name?”

“Last.”

“What’s your first name?”

“Theo,” I lied.

Clevon and Reggie looked at each other and shrugged, as if to say Theo was an okay name not worthy of ridicule.

“Why they call you Monk, little brother?” Reggie asked.

I didn’t like the way “little brother” sounded. “Just a nickname,” I said.

Doug came back over to me and said, “Come on, Monksie, let’s go inside.”

“Monksie,”
Clevon and Reggie repeated into their cupped hands as they chuckled.

“Let’s go back to the beach,” I said to Doug, following him toward the house. “This is boring.”

“Let’s go inside first. Don’t you want to see some girls?”

As a matter of fact, I did want to see girls, more than anything. But what I was going to do when I saw them was anybody’s guess. I just hoped none of them would call me
little brother
or ask me my name.

The lights were dim inside and the center of the floor, of what I took to be the living room, was studded with gyrating dancers. Doug started bopping and pointing at people as we moved across to the other side. I didn’t know Doug all that well, but still I was amazed that he was familiar with so many people. He stopped beside a couple of girls. They had to nearly shout to be heard over the music.

“Some party!” Doug said.

“Yeah,” the girl said.

“This your sister?” Doug asked.

“Yeah.”

Then they watched the dance floor for a while. Doug was now my hero, the way he had talked to that girl was amazing to me. Then he turned to her when a slow song came on and said, “Dance?”

“Yeah.”

I was left with the sister. She was pretty, wearing a skimpy sundress which showed her shoulders. There was a turning light somewhere and every few seconds her neck and thighs became clear to my view. Her skin was beautiful. She caught me looking and I apologized.

“I’m Tina,” she said.

“Ellison,” I said.

“Dance?”

“Okay.”

I worried about more things in the following three minutes than I ever had in my life. Had I put on deodorant? Had I brushed my teeth? Were my hands too dry? Were my hands too moist? Was I moving too fast? Was I actually leading? Was my head on the correct side of hers? I held her loosely, but she pulled me close, pressing into me. Her breasts were alarmingly noticeable. Her thighs brushed my thighs and as it was summer I was wearing shorts and could feel her skin against mine and it was just slightly too much for my hormonal balancing act. My penis grew steadily larger through the song until I knew that it was peeking out the bottom edge of the left leg of my pants. Tina became aware of it and said something which I couldn’t make out, but included the words “baby” and “all right.” Then someone switched on the lights and I heard the voices of Clevon and Reggie saying, “Look at Monkey’s monkey.” I ran out of the house and down the street toward the Capitol.

I made my way to the city dock where I found my older brother with the family boat and some of his friends. He asked if I was okay and I told him I was and asked if I could hang out with him. He looked at the other guys and grudgingly, he said yes. They were awkward with me there and didn’t say much and one by one they peeled away and left us.

“Climb out there and untie us,” Bill said. “How’d you get over here?” He started the motor and got us moving.

“Doug drove me. Took me to a party. We got separated.”

“Oh.”

“Did I mess up your party?” I asked.

“No, don’t worry about it.” I listened to the familiar thumping of the Evinrude and began to relax. The water of the bay seemed so peaceful to me. I looked at the sky.

Lisa and I drove over to the Capitol Grill and found a booth under an elk’s head. “Why do you like to eat here?” I asked her.

“I don’t know, something about all these boys making decisions.” She sipped her tea. “Okay, I’ve got one for you. You’re in a boat and your motor cuts out, but you’re in shallow water, but you’re wearing two-hundred-dollar trousers, but your ride to the airport is just about to drive away from the beach. Why is this a legal issue?”

I shook my head.

“Because it’s a matter of Row versus Wade.” She smiled a smile I hadn’t seen in many years. “Lame, eh?”

“Did you make that up?”

“I stay up late, what can I say.” Lisa looked about the room, then back at me. “It’s good to see you, little brother.”

“Thanks. It’s good to see you, too. You know, I’m really proud of you. Dad would be proud of you as well. That clinic.”

“It’s not very glamorous.”

“I don’t know what that has to do with anything.” I noticed a man at the bar staring at us. “Do you know him?” I asked.

Lisa turned to see and the man looked away. “Nope. Why?”

“He just seemed interested in you for some reason.”

“That would be nice.”

“I’m sorry about what happened with Barry. I always thought he was a joke.”

“You said as much way back when.” Lisa laughed. “Remember how mad I got at you?”

The waiter came and took our orders. He smiled at Lisa as he put away his pad. “How’s it going, Doc?”

“Fine, Chick, what about with you? Chick, this is my brother, Monk. He’s visiting from California.”

I shook the man’s hand. “Chick.” I watched him walk away and smiled at my sister. “He likes you.”

“Maybe, but I think he used to date Bill.”

“Oh.” We sat there thinking about Bill for a while until I felt I’d thought about him long enough and said, “I had a rather nice conversation with one of your patients. I didn’t get her name. She had a little boy with her and blue nails.”

“I know who you’re talking about. That’s Tamika Jones. Tamika Jones actually has two children. The little boy with her today is named Mystery.”

“Mystery?”

“That’s right. And her daughter’s name is Fantasy.”

“Mystery and Fantasy.”

“Named after their fathers. One was a mystery and the other a fantasy.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I wish.”

“I make up shit for a living and I couldn’t have come up with that.” The man from the bar was staring again, but when I caught him he got up, left the bar and headed for the door. “Sometimes I feel like I’m so removed from everything, like I don’t even know how to talk to people.”

“You don’t,” Lisa said. “You never have. It’s not a bad thing. You’re just different.”

“Different from whom?”

“Don’t get defensive. It’s not a bad thing. Actually, it’s a good thing. I’ve always wanted to be like you.”

It used to be that I would look for the deeper meaning in everything, thinking that I was some kind of hermeneutic sleuth moving through the world, but I stopped that when I was twelve. Though I would have been unable to articulate it then, I have since come to recognize that I was abandoning any search for elucidation of what might be called subjective or thematic meaning schemes and replacing it with a mere delineation of specific case descriptions, from which I, at least, could make inferences, however unconscious, that would allow me to understand the world as it affected me. In other words, I learned to take the world as it came. In other words still, I just didn’t care.

When I was thirteen and my sister was sixteen, she caught me masturbating with a magazine in the front basement. When she asked me what I was doing, I said, “Masturbating.”

My response was so casual that it gave her pause. As I was fastening my belt, she said, “You’re a pervert.”

“I might be,” I said. “I don’t know what a pervert is.”

“Well, you’d better not let Mother and Father catch you doing that. That’s all I have to say.”

“I hadn’t planned on it. And what if they did? Would they take it away from me?” My point made, I turned my attention back to the centerfold of my magazine.

“Where did you get that?” she asked. She glanced up the stairs at the closed basement door.

“I bought it.” Then to make her relax, “Father’s at the office and Mother won’t come down here because of the spiders.”

“It’s normal,” Lisa said, as if suddenly concerned about my scarring psychically.

“What’s normal?”

“Masturbation.”

“Do you do it?”

“No,” she said and turned red, leaned to start up the stairs.

“Thanks,” I said.

“For what?”

“For telling me it’s normal.”

“Okay,” she said.

“It’s normal if you don’t do it, too,” I said.

I gave a long look at Lisa’s cheeseburger as she pulled off the onions with her fork and set them at the side of her plate.

“Still not eating meat?” she asked.

“I eat it occasionally,” I said.

“One burger won’t kill you.”