Whiskey & Charlie (3 page)

* * *

Charlie goes to the hospital first thing. He wants to be in and out before his mother arrives, dreads the thought of having to talk to her about the situation or, worse still, talk around it. Easier to avoid her altogether. Rosa will be there, of course; she hasn't left yet, as far as Charlie knows.

Standing outside Whiskey's room, Charlie sees her through the glass pane of the door. She is sitting with her head bowed, as close to the bed as she can get. Charlie thinks she must have fallen asleep, opens the door gently so as not to startle her, but she looks up at once and speaks without greeting him. Charlie knows then she has been awake all night, thinking, wanting to talk, waiting for someone to come.

“This is not the way he want to die,” she says. Her Spanish accent, somehow thicker in a whisper, makes what Rosa is saying sound even worse than it already is.

Charlie flinches at the word
die
, the word no one else in his family will say. He doesn't know if he believes that Whiskey can hear them, but he doesn't want to stand right next to him and talk about him as though he's already gone. He pulls Rosa away from the bed.

“You mustn't think like that, Rosa,” he whispers. “You know what the doctors said. There's a good chance he'll recover.”

“Fifty-fifty, they said,” Rosa insists. “That means good chance of dying.”

“Well,” Charlie says lamely, “that's the worst-case scenario.”

“Do you think so, Charlie? I think worst case is for months he stays alive like this, for years he lives, these machines doing the things he used do for himself. Worst case is he wakes up with brain damage, and the Whiskey we know is gone.” Her Spanish accent, somehow thicker in a whisper, makes what Rosa is saying sound even worse than it already is.

Charlie sits down in one of the hard hospital chairs. It is less than twenty-four hours since he received the phone call from his mother, and in those hours, his only thought has been that Whiskey must not die. He must not die because he, Charlie, needs more time. He and Whiskey have not been friends, have not talked or laughed together for months, years. But he had never thought it would end like this. They're still young, only thirty-two; there should be forty or fifty years, at least, for them to sort out their differences. He had always thought there would be time.

Now he sees that there might be things worse than Whiskey dying, that they might have all the time in the world and it wouldn't make any difference.

“He want to die in that crazy car, or jumping out of airplane,” Rosa says.

Charlie thinks that if Rosa hadn't come along, Whiskey would have died like Elvis, of booze and drugs and too many cheeseburgers, although knowing Whiskey, they would have been hundred-dollar cheeseburgers made of Japanese beef from calves that had been massaged with milk. He doesn't say this to Rosa. She is sitting with her palms up in her lap, and he notices for the first time how small her hands are. He wants to give her something.

“You're right,” he says eventually. “Whiskey's always been a daredevil, even when we were little kids. Once, when we were about six or seven, he dressed up in his Superman suit and jumped out of a tree in our driveway with a rope tied around him. He probably would have broken his neck, but the rope got caught under his armpit, and he dislocated his arm instead.”

“He never tell me that,” she says.

Charlie smiles at the memory. He had almost forgotten it himself.

Charlie found out about
Delta
of
Venus
on the first day of term because it was Whiskey's friend, Grainger, who owned the book. But he didn't actually read any of it until a couple of weeks later, by which time every boy in the school was talking about it. Grainger had been on holiday to France and claimed to have bought the book from a kiosk, an ordinary kiosk, selling newspapers and chewing gum and cigarettes. It was a well-known fact that France was a land of sex maniacs, that you could buy things there that you couldn't possibly get your hands on in England, and there were plenty of other boys who'd come back from holidays with dirty French comics. But Grainger's book was different. For starters, there were no pictures. In theory, when you read something dirty, you could make up your own pictures. But some of the scenes described in Grainger's book were beyond Charlie's imagination; he could find no place for them within his own concept of sex.

Not that he would have called himself an expert. At the age of fifteen, sex was one of those subjects you pretended to know everything about while knowing almost nothing. If you asked questions, you were exposed, tainted with the word
virgin
, and would never live it down. Finding out more without risking exposure, that was the challenge.

Charlie had no sexual experience of his own to speak of, except for a fumbled kiss with Michelle Perry in a cupboard at a party, during a game of spin the bottle. Other boys had come out of the same cupboard with different girls and much better stories to tell. Tom Costello had put his hand up Louise Barker's skirt, Chris Lennox had felt Claire Corbell's breasts, and, allegedly, Charlotte Graham had put her hand down Joel Orton's pants.

Would things have been different if it was Charlie who had ended up in the cupboard with Charlotte Graham? Would she have put her hand down Charlie's trousers—down anyone's trousers? Or did Joel possess some skill that Charlie had not yet mastered? Could Charlie have touched Michelle's breasts if he had tried? How did you know if a girl would or wouldn't? How could you change her mind?

These were the questions that plagued Charlie, questions he could not ask and could not find the answers to: not in the encyclopedias and medical books at the library, not in their father's awkward and incomprehensible talk about
the
birds
and
the
bees
, not in the explanation they had been given in health education by the dried-up, flat-chested Miss Pennacombe, who, it was agreed, could not possibly ever have had sex herself and therefore could have nothing to teach them. Certainly her interminable description of the sperm fertilizing the egg had done nothing to help Charlie decipher the dirty jokes he heard, though he always laughed anyway, hoping he was laughing at the right moment.

He thought he understood the mechanics of it, the what-goes-where. But that, to Charlie, was not sex. Sex was what he had seen in the dirty magazines boys at school had pilfered from older brothers or stolen from newsstands. Or, at least, that was what Charlie had thought, until he read what was inside Grainger's book.

Delta
of
Venus
. That was the title. Nobody knew what it meant exactly; no one could have used the words in a sentence, but they were passed from boy to boy, muttered and snickered over until they came to represent everything you needed to know about sex and didn't know how to find out. Very few people had actually seen the book. Apparently, it had a very sexy cover: a picture of a naked woman, but not like a centerfold, more
arty
, so you couldn't see her face. In fact, you couldn't even be sure which part of her body you were looking at, though you had a pretty fair idea. After the first week, no one got to see the book at all, apart from Grainger's close friends, Whiskey included, who confirmed for Charlie that the rumors about the cover were true.

All the other boys ever saw were the photocopies. Grainger made the photocopies at his dad's office on a Saturday morning, and at school on Monday, you could buy them for twenty pence a page. You couldn't choose which parts you wanted; it was the luck of the draw. But according to Grainger, who claimed to have read the whole book, there wasn't a page that wasn't dirty, so it really didn't matter which one you got.

The first week, he made twenty copies, and he'd sold them all before lunchtime on Monday. The following Saturday, he made a hundred copies, and he put the price up to fifty pence. It didn't matter if you'd paid twenty pence the week before; fifty pence was the new price, take it or leave it. You weren't allowed to show them to anyone else or swap them, and anyone who tried to make their own copies wouldn't be sold any more. Those were the rules. No one argued. Everybody wanted the photocopies, and Grainger was the only one who had them. They were shocking and disgusting, and he got rid of a hundred in two days. With the help of Whiskey and his friend Joel, he sold them before school and after school, between classes, at recess and at lunch, in the bathrooms and behind the bike shed and on the school bus. Even when he made one hundred fifty copies, there still weren't enough to go around.

Charlie did not have to pay for the photocopies, because Whiskey got them for free, as many as he wanted. Charlie had mixed feelings about this setup. On the one hand, he was relieved that he did not have to buy the copies himself. Once he had read a few, he knew there was something wrong about them, something that made him feel guilty and shameful. Charlie suspected he was not the only one who felt this way. He noticed that though everyone was talking about the photocopies, no one actually talked about what was in them. You bought them, put them in your bag, and took them home, and when you came to school the next day, you said “I got the baron and the little girls” or “I got the woman and the dog.” But you didn't talk about the things you read.

The story of the man who pulled the corpse of a naked woman out of a river and then had sex with her dead body was disgusting to Charlie, but when he read it, his penis got so hard it was almost painful. There were sentences he read over and over again until they got stuck in his mind and he couldn't close them out. Charlie had rubbed himself raw over the story of the Cuban and the nymphomaniac, and for days afterward, one sentence went around and around inside his head. On the bus and in his math class and at the dinner table it would come to him unbidden—
She
was
moist
and
trembling, opening her legs and trying to climb over him
—and it took all of Charlie's willpower and concentration to control his erections.

There was nothing you could say about that. So you didn't talk about the stories with your friends; you didn't talk to anyone about them. Even when he got the copies from Whiskey, Charlie couldn't meet his eye. The thought of buying them at school, like the other boys had to, was unbearable. He was sure that if he had to make that transaction, in front of other people, every one of them would know what he was thinking, what he did alone in bed at night once the light was off. So he was grateful to Whiskey for sparing him that humiliation.

At the same time, he resented him for once again being at the center of something that Charlie was on the outside of. For although it was Grainger's book, Grainger was part of Whiskey's gang, which meant that in the eyes of everyone at school, Whiskey was as much a part of it as Grainger himself. Whiskey had seen the book, knew the story about where it had come from, was helping Grainger to sell the copies—it might as well have been his own book. Whereas Charlie, as always, was on the sidelines, hadn't so much as glimpsed the book, didn't even have the gumption to buy his own copies, but had to get them secondhand from his brother, and for that, Charlie hated him. For he knew this book was just the beginning, that in sex, as in sport, Whiskey would be Charlie's superior: he would go further faster, and Charlie would be left behind, as he had always been since the day they were born.

x x x

Delta
of
Venus
dominated Charlie's life, all their lives, for a little more than four weeks. In the fifth week, Whiskey, Grainger, and Joel were caught selling the copies in the science-block bathroom, and the jig was up. The book was confiscated, presumed destroyed; the boys were hit with a cane and suspended, and the proceeds of their sales, which totaled almost two hundred pounds, were donated to the Salvation Army. The situation was evidently too scandalous to be handled by a woman—the special assembly, for the boys only, was addressed not by their headmistress, Mrs. Aster, but by the deputy headmaster, who also happened to be the head of religious education. There was barely a boy in the school who wasn't implicated, and the hall had never been so still or silent, two hundred fifty pairs of eyes trained resolutely on the ancient woodblock floor as Mr. Daniels spoke of his
shock
and
disgust
over the confiscated materials and his
disappointment
at
the
lack
of
moral
fiber
evidenced by this incident.

The assembly lasted less than ten minutes, long enough for Whiskey, Grainger, and Joel to be made an example of, long enough for the same fate to be threatened to any boy caught in possession of such filth.

“The shit's going to hit the fan,” Whiskey joked to Charlie on the way home, but Charlie knew that Whiskey feared their mother's reaction more than any punishment meted out at school. To be caned was not a humiliation but a badge of honor, a sign that you'd been outrageously rebellious, and, as such, earned you the respect of the other boys. As for the suspension, Whiskey looked upon it more as a reward than a punishment.

Though the boys knew their mother must have had a telephone call from the school, she was ominously silent when they arrived home. They slunk off to their rooms, assuming she was waiting for their dad to come in from work before she made her move. But at dinnertime, she still said nothing, only glared at Whiskey, and at Charlie as well, as though he too was implicated, though she could not have had evidence of that. Or could she? Charlie prayed that she hadn't found his photocopies wedged beneath his mattress.

It wasn't until Whiskey attempted to excuse himself that she finally spoke.

“Sit down, William,” she said in a low voice. “What have you got to say for yourself?”

Whiskey shrugged, keeping his eyes on the table.

“Look at me when I'm speaking to you.”

Whiskey looked up but said nothing, knowing from experience that whatever he said would only make matters worse.

She looked at their father. “Bill, do you have something to say to your son?”

This surprised Charlie. Their mother was the disciplinarian; that was the accepted order of things. These were obviously deemed to be special circumstances, as they had been at school: a man-to-man matter. But Charlie could see that his father was unprepared, stuck for words.

“Not one of your better ideas, Whiskey boy,” he said eventually.

Their mother stared at him expectantly, waiting for him to go on. He let out a sigh, appeared to be thinking hard, and then he began nodding his head; something had come to him.

“Certainly very entrepreneurial though, I'll give you that.”

Charlie cringed.

His mother exploded.

“That's right, Bill, encourage him; that's the idea! Your fifteen-year-old son is producing and distributing pornography, and you tell him he's entrepreneurial! For pity's sake, is there anything at all between your ears?”

“All right, Elaine, calm down. I was just trying to have a joke. Whiskey knows he's done the wrong thing; I don't think we need to labor the point.”

“Labor the point?” She laughed then, a sharp, abrupt sound like the bark of a dog that has been unexpectedly shut outside. “No, you're right, of course. We shouldn't
labor
the
point
. Better to make a joke of it, give him a pat on the back, and with any luck, he'll leave school at sixteen to become a pimp. Is that what you want?”

Charlie was shocked to hear his mother use the word
pimp
. He sneaked a look at Whiskey, but Whiskey wouldn't meet his eye.

“Don't be ridiculous, Elaine, you're overreacting.”

“Overreacting? Do you have any idea how many times I've had William's headmistress on the phone this term? He can't stay out of trouble for five minutes. I'm at the end of my rope!”

Bill coughed. “Well, perhaps you're right. But the boy's already been punished. I don't think there's any need for us to get heavy-handed as well.”

Their mother snorted. “One week off school! You call that a punishment?” She turned her attention to Whiskey. Charlie did not often feel sorry for his brother, but he felt sorry for him then.

“There'll be no bike riding, no skateboarding, no television, no Atari. No phone calls, no hanging around at the shopping center, no listening to your records. And you won't be seeing your partners in crime, that's a certainty.”

Whiskey was flattened. “What am I supposed to do then?”

“There are plenty of ways you can make yourself useful around the house. I can give you a list so long you won't have time to scratch yourself. And woe betide you if you defy me, William, because I'll find out, believe me, and then you'll really know the meaning of the word ‘punishment.'”

x x x

By the time Whiskey got back to school, the whole thing had blown over. Once the book was gone, the source cut off, the fever subsided. When people stopped talking about them, the photocopies lost their currency; Charlie gave up reading them, left them for weeks under his mattress, eventually threw them away.