The Language of Men (24 page)

"I can't," I said, "It's raining."

He looked at me. "It's a car, dude. You drive the fucking thing. That's what it's there for."

I was compelled to argue, but out of habit. He was right. I peeled the cover off the car and drove him to the station.

After a full day of classes, I parked the Taurus and sat in the dark driveway. Our neighbor's cat crept out of the bushes, tripping the sensor on the flood light above the garage. The bright light bounced off her eyes before she darted back into the bush. I sat in the light for a few minutes, then it shut off. When I opened the door, the dome light flicked on. I walked up to my house and turned back toward the Taurus. Through the lit interior, I glimpsed the blue cover of the Dodge parked next to it. Then the dome light shut off and the driveway was dark again.

My father was on the couch watching
Easy Rider.
My mother sat in her chair, flipping through
Better Homes and Gardens.

"Guys, I need to talk to you."

My mother tucked her legs underneath herself. My father gripped the top of the couch and pulled himself up.

Internal combustion—the words shot out of my mouth: "I'm selling the car and moving to Boston."

My father clicked off the TV. He scratched the sandpaper stubble on his neck.

"When did you decide this?" he asked.

"I don't know. I sent in my applications and I figure I'll need some cash to get me started and.." My voice trailed off. I turned up my palms and shrugged. I thought about my brother filling out his college applications by himself, without the help of a cousin or friend or our parents. Even though he left and came back, I felt he had changed, experienced something that didn't exist in arrivals or departures, but somewhere in between.

My father made a sound in his throat. "Just like that, huh?"

I didn't say anything.

He scratched his stubble again and raised his eyebrows.

"Hey, if that's what you want. I'll bring home For Sale signs tomorrow." He flicked on the TV and lay back down. My mother smiled and flipped a page in her magazine.

That was easy, I thought.

The summer before I left, we drove the Dodge to a show, the For Sale sign taped to the back window. The guys at the show looked at the car differently now that it was available. They licked their lips, moseyed over like cowboys sizing up a burlesque dancer, cupped their faces and peered into the smooth black interior. My father and I got out, walked through the crowd, wandered over to the swap meet. Behind us the crowd of leather and denim—patches and buttons and pins proclaiming their positions in the world—inched closer to the Dodge, its irresistible candy-red paint.

I never talked to the woman who bought it. I wasn't there when my father sold it to her: I was finishing up my final exams. He told me that she brought a small white envelope filled with seventy-two hundred dollar bills. She didn't ask any questions. She didn't try to negotiate. She didn't even test-drive it. She told my father that her father had the same car years ago, but her brother had crashed it. She was buying it for her father for Christmas.

"Not bad," my father later said to me. "I think we broke even."

I HAD BEEN working as a busboy at a restaurant in Northport for a few years. One of the waitresses, Alba, was a tough old biker chick who didn't mind when I hid in the kitchen, pretending to refill the salad dressings. She used to pinch my ass and call me nicknames like "Chubby" or "Scooter." Sometimes she'd ask me if I wanted to play "kiss and touch," then she'd laugh and smack me lightly on the cheek. She was the female-version of my father, and I looked forward to when we shared shifts.

One day, she called me over to the hostess stand.

"Chubby, what's your story? You got an old lady or what?" Alba shook a Virginia Slim from her pack and lit it with a candle on the bar.

"No," I said.

She exhaled. "Why the hell not?" The way she asked her question made it seem like all I had to do was get off my lazy ass and go pick up a girlfriend.

"I don't know," I said. "I haven't been thinking about it. And I'm leaving soon anyway."

"Honey, if I was twenty years younger..." She laughed, then took a long pull on her cigarette. "But you don't wanna waste your time on a wrinkled old thing like me. There's a new girl starting here tomorrow. Gorgeous. You two kinda got the same personality."

Great, I thought. If she's anything like me, we'll just sit and stare at each other all night while our minds ramble through worst-case scenarios that will never actually happen.

"I don't know," I said. "I think I should just wait."

Alba squinted, but I wasn't sure if she was blocking her eyes from the smoke or trying to get a better look at me. She stubbed out her cigarette in the glass ashtray, then took a quick sip of coffee.

"I invited her to your going-away party."

"What! No. No, you didn't."

She cackled and stood up. I asked her again and again if she was joking, but she wouldn't answer me. I stood at the hostess stand as she walked behind the bar, through the kitchen's saloon doors, into the cloud of steam rising from the dishwasher.

Word got out about my going-away party and by the end of the night, some of my old friends showed up at my parents' house. It felt like the season finale of a sitcom, when all the minor characters return to fill in the plot holes. Their voices sounded different, deeper, as if they'd gone through a second puberty. Our conversations were superficial and, after a few beers, vaguely nostalgic. I remember a part of me thinking how ridiculous the whole situation was, how our decade-long friendship had come to an end just because I had dated one of their exes for a year. I had violated a code. Whether or not the code still applied didn't matter; the violation was permanent. As the night went on, our conversations seemed to edge closer and closer to some kind of an apology. But no one mentioned it.

All night I kept an eye on the door, wondering when Vanessa would show up. After a while, I thought she wasn't going to come, and I couldn't decide if I was relieved or disappointed. Alba had been telling me details about her for the last two weeks, but I already knew Vanessa, sort of. We had gone to school together since kindergarten. She was in a lot of my home movies. While she sang in our 3
^rd
grade production of
Horton Hears a Who!,
I played a tree. In our Halloween parade in 5
^th
grade, she dressed as Raggedy Ann and, at five-foot-five, towered over me and the rest of the boys.

Near the end of the party, she walked through the door with a couple of her friends. I pretended not to notice. I moved from group to group, conversation to conversation. I refilled the coolers with beer, went to the bathroom several times. Eventually, the party cleared out and it was impossible to hide.

I remember our first conversation, how we talked about the restaurant. I told her that Alba was trying to play match-maker. Vanessa laughed and said Alba had been talking me up, too. At first, Alba referred to me as "Chubby," so Vanessa had no clue who she was talking about. When Alba finally said "Anthony," Vanessa remembered.

I laughed. "I'm surprised you knew who I was."

"Come on," she said. "Fifth grade. Halloween. You were the Grim Reaper. And I was gigantic. Seriously, I had boobs in third grade."

We talked the rest of the night, but what I remember most is the way her face looked when she listened. She turned her head a little to one side. She smiled and nodded, even when I took long pauses, trying to find the right words. Though she later told me she was nervous, she didn't seem that way. She didn't finish my sentences or repeat what I said in her own words. When she spoke, her voice was soft and quiet. I leaned close.

She laughed.

"What?" I said.

"Nothing," she said. "It's just that most people can never hear me."

Vanessa was already going to school in Worcester, about an hour from Boston. After the party, we made a plan to drive up together. I asked if she wanted me to write down the directions, but she said she knew how to get there.

A month later, she accepted an internship in Namibia. She would be gone for six months. As her departure date approached, we took long, aimless drives through unfamiliar suburbs between Boston and Worcester, sometimes talking about what our plan was, other times describing our old teachers from elementary school. Neither one of us had tried a long-distance relationship before. I was under the impression, from my friends and my brother, that situations like that were doomed. We agreed to give it a shot.

A photograph. When it was taken, Vanessa was on the other side of the planet. A few members of Team Destructo and I are walking down the street in lower Manhattan. It's raining, and I'm not wearing a shirt. My hair is long and my beard is full. I am in my Jim Morrison phase, which means I am binge drinking and writing bad poetry. In my hand is a wet, beer-can-shaped paper bag.

I don't remember who took the picture, but I remember clearly what happened after. We stepped down into a subway station and in the middle of the staircase, I threw my fist through the fluorescent light above our heads. Bits of powdery glass fell on our heads, sprinkled the steps. A girl we had just met asked me what the hell was wrong with me. My friends laughed. We high-fived at the bottom of the steps as a K-9 cop adjusted his rifle. His German Shepherd bared its teeth. I was no longer drunk, but I pretended I could barely stand.

"You gotta be shittin' me," the cop said. "Up against the wall."

He patted each of us down, then told us to turn around. His dog sniffed my kneecap.

"Which one of you did it?" He looked at each one of us. "I bet it was you," he said to one of my friends. "You skinny punk." The cop turned to the girls standing behind him. "Keep moving, ladies. G'head." I listened to the turnstiles click as each of them walked away.

The cop shook his head and told the attendant in the glass booth to get us a broom. As we swept up the broken glass, I heard the cop's leather belt creak as he shifted his weight.

"Pullin' this, now? With all this terrorist shit going on?"

I didn't know what 9/11 had to do with me breaking a light bulb, but the cop, and the dog, seemed convinced that our actions were particularly shameful. For some reason, he let us leave, and we met up with the girls waiting for us on the platform.

I wrote to Vanessa in Africa about my performance in the subway. I described it in detail, leaving out the parts about me being scared or acting drunker than I was. To my guy friends, in our little part of the world, I was a hero. In their eyes, I had achieved something.

Team Destructo had dispersed to different colleges across New England. Even though we were far apart, our objectives remained clear: #1—Drink. #2—Break Stuff. With enough alcohol, even our own stuff was vulnerable. When a group of us visited T.J. at college, we spent the better part of the night kicking out the wooden spindles on his banister. He got me back, though, when he came to my place and chucked two-by-fours off the roof and dropped 40-ounce beer bottles onto the cars behind my building.

We often tried to combine destruction with self-inflicted pain. Breaking beer bottles over our heads, lighting our chest hair on fire, punching ourselves in the face. We subscribed to the anger and adrenaline of punk rock and skate boarding. Though I was never much of a skater, I enjoyed watching my friends fall down.

The fact that we didn't know where our anger came from made us all the more mad—not that we questioned it or anything else at the time. "Mad" was a word we used constantly, but to us, the term meant "a lot," as in "I drank mad beers yesterday," or "I got mad homework." "Mad" was our way of saying
beaucoup.

Public urination was a popular activity for Team Destructo. Like a pack of wild dogs, we wandered the streets, marking our territory. Once we arrived at so-and-so's party or dorm room, it was only a matter of time before we pissed in the washing machine or on one of the beds. The riskier the place, the better. We kept an unspoken tally, and we were always trying to outdo each other. It wasn't rare to wake up to the rain tapping on the roof and realize it was actually one of us staking our claim on your beanbag chair.

We didn't think, we just
did,
and our impulsiveness was invigorating. Up until Team Destructo, I lived inside my head, or vicariously through actors or musicians. Then, simply by consuming a lot of Southern Comfort and punching out a window, I could make people remember my name.

We humped each other. Humping was hilarious, a sure-fire way of getting all the guys in the room to crack up. We'd sit on the couch, watching a movie, drinking beer and without warning, I'd roll over and straddle Marlon or T.J. and pump my hips into their chest until they gasped.

"C-c-cut it out, D-D-D'Aries."

But I wouldn't stop because the other guys were laughing, plus whoever I was humping had most likely humped me earlier that day and it was payback time.

Sometimes we snuck up behind each other and humped so hard we dropped our drinks, but that didn't matter; we kept humping. We held each other down on the ground and humped until we were both out of breath. Sometimes the other guy got pissed off and tried to punch his way out of the hump, but once the humping started, it was near impossible to stop.

At a beach party one night, Team Destructo stood around a large bonfire. A few high school kids showed up. One was the younger brother of a Team Destructo member, but they didn't acknowledge each other. After a few beers, one of the guys from our group threw the younger brother on the ground beside the fire and humped his face. He humped him so hard his glasses fell off. The kid cursed and screamed, but the humper didn't stop until he faked orgasm and rolled over on his back. His chest heaved. The kid lifted his head, his lips and cheek coated in sand. We had tears in our eyes from laughter.

When we got tired of humping, we punched each other in the balls.

Sometimes when I watched war movies, the narrator talked about soldiers "humping" up a mountain or across a rice paddy. A part of me laughed each time I heard the word because all I could think of was the freshman's face slamming into the sand. But the soldiers on screen weren't holding each other down and thrusting their hips; they were hunched over beneath the weight on their backs. They took slow, even steps. They marched.