Little Boy (5 page)

Actually, it wasn’t her, but her friend,
Lynn. It turned out that Lynn was silent yet present at the dance.
She said she’d seen me in the stairwell, as Maria pointed to my
crotch, but we hadn’t talked other than hello. When she described
what she looked like—tall, greasy, tons of make-up—though she
didn’t use those words—I vaguely remembered seeing her, too. So I
spoke with Lynn at first, because Jeff’s sister was too nervous to
talk to me. Frightened’s more like it.

Lynn and I talked for about ten minutes. The
usual B.S.: “What music do you listen to?” “Are you a Yankees or a
Mets fan?” That sort of thing. And every once in a while, I’d hear
cackles and gasps in the background as Jeff’s sister whispered to
Lynn, trying desperately to conceal her nervous laughter and listen
in. Finally, Jeff’s sister got on the phone and we talked for a
while. Long story short, she bored the living shit out of me. I
don’t remember if it was Lynn or Jeff’s sister, but one of them
gathered the guts to invite me to Jeff’s party the following
weekend. I said I would come and got the hell off the phone,
confused.
Hooray! Two girls called me! Fuck: I don’t want to
go!

What could be worse than dancing the night
away with the Jeff and his pudgy sister at that high school dance?
Dancing the night away with Jeff and his sister in Jeff’s basement,
that’s what.

That following week was hell. Each day Jeff
would ask me if I liked his sister, if I wanted to date his sister,
yada, yada, yada. I was dying to tell Jeff that the only difference
between him and his sister was he had bigger tits and shorter
hair.

I didn’t know how to respond to Jeff’s
persistence, so I pretty much ignored him. I was already
contemplating the prospect of dating Lynn, believe it or not.
Although I hardly remembered what she looked like, I knew that the
laws of teenage friendship mandated that she be better-looking than
Jeff’s sister. And one member of Jeff’s orbit of friends, I
recalled, reminded me of a horse the night of the dance, if only
for a brief moment during her laugh. Was Lynn the sexy, super-tall
girl that hee-hawed when Maria embarrassed me? I hankered for
answers to this and other questions. I thought about speaking to
Jeff about Lynn. But he was so high on me dating his sister that I
had to maintain his friendship to get closer to Lynn. Pissing him
off was the last thing I needed to do.

My inquiries could have aroused suspicion and
Jeff might’ve uninvited me to his party, right? But that’s what I
thought I wanted—until I became fixated with Lynn. And it wasn’t so
much that I liked Lynn—hell, I hardly remember what she looked
like—but I knew that she liked me, and that was all that mattered.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Lynn’s phone
call was not a girly front for her fat friend but an implicitly
flirtatious petition for my presence at the party. Lynn knew she
was prettier than Jeff’s sister. And man, did she have me by the
balls. It’s kind of sick to think about in retrospect, that for the
entire week, as Jeff’s sister probably grew more enamored with me
by the moment, I was simultaneously falling for Lynn, and her,
probably, for me.

Fast forward to the party the following
weekend: Surprise, surprise, I wound up hooking up with Lynn. I
couldn’t believe it. We played this game called Seven Minutes in
the Closet, where somehow a guy and a girl wound up being put in
this closet together, while everyone else waited outside, wondering
if the chosen two were making out.

First I got in the closet with Jeff’s sister.
I didn’t do a goddamn thing but feel nauseous. “So, whaddaya wanna
do?” she kept pestering me, with a nasaly voice that warranted no
less than death by strangulation. Desperate to evade her paws, I
jammed my finger up my nose in an effort to disgust and hopefully
repel her. But she tried to kiss me anyway! “Bitch, I got my finger
up my nose!” I said. Or at least I wanted to say that. Luckily, the
seven minutes transpired quickly and the door flung open to a
gasping crowd which included not only Jeff, but Lynn, too.

Moments later, Lynn and I got in the closet
and—bam!—we hooked up. It was astonishing. My hands grappled with
her little tits as she squirmed and danced in sheer delight.
Ecstatic about the sheer irony of the evening, I kept thinking:
I’m at this party to get to know Jeff’s sister, and I’m fondling
her better-looking best friend!
Oh, what a feeling!

That one hook-up spelled the end of my
short-lived relationship with Jeff’s sister. That was pretty
obvious at the next school dance a month later, where she ignored
me like the fucking plague.

But that next dance was where I really met
Maria. Lynn and I had been dating for about four weeks by that
point. I’d heard her mention Maria on the phone occasionally, but
it wasn’t until the dance that I realized Lynn and Maria were good
friends. Inseparable! And all I kept thinking was:
How could
Lynn like this bitch, this cunt who made fun of me at the last
dance?
I wanted to punch Maria for doing that to me; but,
beginning that night, I wanted to kiss her even more. As crazy as
it sounds, I liked her because she thought I was an asshole!

During the dance, Lynn wandered onto the
gymnasium floor with Jeff and his sister. I didn’t feel like
dancing at all, so I loitered all alone in the hallway. All of a
sudden I was depressed. Guidos and hoods and preppies shucked and
jived by with girls on their arms as I moped around in the hallway,
staring at the beige and black-tiled walls surrounding me. Everyone
was staring at me. Fright hit me like a bucket of cold water as I
shivered with loneliness. I wanted to walk the hell out of that
dance. I kept thinking:
Maybe I’ll take the subway home and get
mugged, and then Lynn’ll feel bad about abandoning me
.

There was a person trailing me, a hunter. I
felt him. At first in a brisk walk, I quickly picked up speed. I
was being chased around my own school!
Who the hell is it?
I
wondered. I ran up the stairs toward the coat check. I figured:
If I get up the stairs quick enough, I’ll escape from this
guy
.

But as I reached the top of the stairs, I saw
only my shadow.

I was scared for a just second more, and then
the fear went away. Without warning, I was alone once again. Now
less frightened, I sensed a presence. Of what, exactly, I didn’t
know.

All I remember after that point is walking up
and down the halls, doing nothing except looking behind me now and
then. Talking to myself, wondering what to do now that Lynn was
gone for a while, I thought about dancing with some other girl,
just for the hell of it. But I really hated dancing. And besides, I
had no idea how to ask a girl to dance. I always just somehow wound
up doing it.

So I walked over to Zachary, the janitor at
my school. Zachary was an Iranian immigrant. He’d see me after
school, hanging out with my friends in the cafeteria or something,
and he’d come over and ask us if we wanted some sloppy joes left
over from lunch time. They served sloppy joes pretty much every day
in high school.

So we’d eat the sloppy joes and all, even
though they tasted like crap and caused diarrhea like a son of a
bitch. We loved them, though. How often does somebody give you
something for free, right? We all had a lot of respect for Zachary
because of that. The poor guy, he didn’t have to give a shit about
the kids that caused the messes he spent all day cleaning up. But
he did. What a guy.

I approached Zachary in the hallway right in
front of the girl’s bathroom. The school usually turned one of the
boy’s bathrooms into a girl’s bathroom during the dances. He said
to me something like: “Do you want me to open up the gym storage
room so you can bring a girl in there?” I had no idea what he was
talking about, so I asked him what he meant. He said that the gym
storage room had all these soft mats inside, the kind we used when
we worked out during Phys. Ed. I thought that was so cool. I mean,
here was this lonesome immigrant janitor trying to help me get laid
at the dance. As I said: What a guy!

Then, suddenly: Fate.

Just as I was about to tell him that my
girlfriend was M.I.A., I spotted Maria coming out of the bathroom.
She was so beautiful, I almost cried. I remember thinking: e
ven
better-looking than Rachel, the girl who whacked me off just down
the hall
. Mounds of sleek black hair draped over her bosom and
down her back. Don’t ask me why, but I felt compelled to make her
like me. Rachel and Lynn and Jeff’s fat sister and all these other
girls had fallen all over me left and right, but here was this one
girl who hardly paid attention to me. The night we first met, all
she’d noticed was my open fly.

One month later, Maria didn’t even see me as
she exited the bathroom. As sick as it sounds, that drove me
wild.

Disregarding Zachary’s suggestion, I grabbed
Maria by the shoulder with my sweaty fingers. She yelped
out—“Uh!”—like I was assaulting her. At that moment, I guess, all I
wanted to do was make Zachary think she was my girlfriend. In the
back of my mind, however, something else was transpiring: I was
making Maria mine.

I let go of her and she looked at me,
startled as all hell. Even though we were a few feet apart I could
feel her heart pounding. A vein in my temple beat like a drum.
Before she had a chance to speak, I placed my arm around her
shoulder as if she was my lover. I admit it: I was really turned on
after all the commotion. She was so hot and startled that I wanted
to kiss her right then and there in the goddamn hallway in front of
the janitor.

Zachary winked at me and nodded as if to say
“good for you,” and went back to mopping the floor. But he managed
to catch a glimpse of her cleavage, the horny bastard.

Maria was wearing a low-cut scoop-neck
blouse—a black one, I remember. God, her tits were enormous. How
she managed to walk upright with those things hanging off her I’ll
never know. I loved standing there with her in my arm for that
brief second, like she really was my girlfriend. I almost started
to bawl, however, when I realized that she wasn’t really mine, that
she, in fact, hated me.

I pulled her near the wall and began
explaining that I was only trying to impress the janitor. I said:
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Let me just explain!”

Maria was still panting, scared and out of
breath. Each time she inhaled, I felt as if her soft breasts were
getting closer to my face. But they weren’t.
At least I have her
attention
, I thought,
at least she’s not running
away
.

I explained to her, repeatedly and with bated
breath, why I grabbed her, because she didn’t seem to get it. We
shared a long, quiet, private moment. As I gazed into her eyes, I
inhaled her beauty.
She’s so lovely
, I thought. Maria had
the kind of eyes that sparkled in pitch darkness. She had soulful
eyes that were searching—for a friend, for a confidant, for
something—but to no avail. They reminded me of the eyes of this
cartoon dog I used to watch when I was a kid, the way they
drooped.

On the surface, she was just another slutty
Guidette at the dance. But despite her tight, stylish clothing, she
looked somewhat conservative that night. Any clothes covering
Maria’s fabulous body at all made her look like a virtuous lady
rather than a bimbo, just as a snow-white wedding dress turns a
whore into a princess.

After she relaxed a bit, when she finally
understood what I was saying about Zachary, Maria gazed up at me
with her tremendous eyes like a little girl lost in a big mall who
had just located her daddy. She pulled away from me briskly, and,
in a frighteningly monotonous voice, said:

“Christ, you’re a maniac.”

***

I remember the exact thought penetrating my
cranium as Maria said that to me: jet airplanes piercing the night
sky. When I get excited to the point of bliss I always think about
jets. Not commercial airliners like Boeing 747s. I mean real jets,
the kind used in war.

I’ve always loved jets, probably because you,
Dad, were an awesome pilot in Vietnam. You got me into aircraft
when I was very young. I still remember everything you told me
about your career. You flew the B-52D Stratofortress. It was used
to bomb Communist strongholds in Southeast Asia and enemy supply
lines. It had only four small tail guns but could go almost as fast
as the speed of sound, about 600 miles-per-hour, and could fly
halfway around the world non-stop at an altitude of 30,000 feet.
Its ability to avoid the enemy at such speeds and altitudes made it
an invaluable weapon in the war.

I used to write away to NASA and the
Department of Defense when I was a kid asking for photographs of
the B-52D Stratofortress and all the modern jets. I wrote to all
the space centers, like Kennedy in Florida, LBJ in Texas, and the
Jet Propulsion Lab in California. I also wrote to the Air Force,
and they always sent me tons of pictures and aerial maps and other
intelligence. Well, okay, “intelligence” is a bit of an
exaggeration. But whatever they sent me, it was all so cool. And
there were a lot more air bases and space centers I wrote to, a lot
that most people haven’t even heard of.

As a kid, every few weeks I received a
package in the mail, filled with colorful photos of all these jets.
I loved naming them after people I knew. Different people reminded
me of different aircraft. Dad, you never reminded me of the B-52 at
all. You’re more like the B-1 bomber, which, you told me, replaced
the B-52. The B-1 can carry more armament than any other combat
aircraft. It has a variable wing, which means it can be pushed
forward for subsonic flight and pushed back for supersonic flight.
Remember when you told me that?