by David Amsden
“You okay?” T.J. was asking now.
“Of course,” I said.
“You know I’m just kidding around with you?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Of course.”
The only thing I was really sad about that night was that I no longer wanted to tell T.J. about what had happened earlier, with me and Claudia. I mean, it’s not that I didn’t get it. I understood. I just wanted to tell him, because it made me feel older. But when T.J. asked about her, like he always did, all obsessive, in the bathroom now, I just said—
“She was too worried about you and Mom to really do anything.”
I still tell so many stupid lies, and every time they just end up making everything worse. Like now, when T.J. said—
“Well, that’s okay. Gives you something to think about in the bathroom.”
God, was I pissed off. Not that I showed it. I never show people when I’m angry. I just told T.J. goodnight, said I was going to the kitchen, to get a glass of water. But really I just went in there and very quietly opened up the silverware drawer. We had these cheap steak knives, with the serrated blades, and I took one out. And look, it just made sense to push it down on my hand, on my knuckles like that. I still do this sometimes, and no one gets it. I have a stupid tendency to mention it to women, this habit, like they’ll actually understand. But all they end up doing is just looking at me like they’re deaf. It just makes me feel stupid. That’s it. I’m not saying I’m some genius, but, sometimes, you just want to feel real dumb.
So I pressed down now—
I moved the blade just slightly over my knuckles. Then I put it back and looked at my hand. Here it comes. Yeah, there’s the blood. It’s right when you see the blood that you feel dumb.
But I’m in bed now, and still can’t relax. So I call up Claudia. She says my voice sounds funny, but I just ignore her, and ask her for something, a favor. It was about the most hysterical request you’ve ever heard, so it made sense that her response was—
“Wait, what do you mean?”
“You know, just tell me how to do it. What you just did.”
“Are you serious?”
“Are you in bed?”
“No, I’m sitting with my parents watching television.”
“Serious?”
“No,” she said. “Of course I’m in bed. It’s eleven o’clock.”
“So?” I said. “Will you?”
It wasn’t like phone sex. I want to be clear about this. What happened was more like phone instructions, like one of those lines you can call about cooking a turkey right, or programming the VCR. Only this was how to get yourself off. I didn’t want Claudia to tell me to close my eyes, and pretend she was right there in some freak lingerie she’d never wear in real life. It was nothing like that. I just wanted her to tell me how to do it, alone, by myself. If that makes any sense.
It was funny. My knuckles hadn’t had time to scab over, and the movement of my hand was making them bleed a lot more than you’d think. Other than that, I don’t think the details are worth going into. I mean, they’re so easy to conjure up on your own, commonplace enough.
“Did you do it yet?” Claudia asked at one point. It was taking some time, but she was so patient.
“No, not yet,” I said.
“I don’t really know what to say anymore.”
“Just tell me what to do,” I said.
And what can you really say about it once it did finally happen? That it was climactic? Because that’s not really what seems important.
What’s so perfect is the conversation me and Claudia had afterward. I thanked her a lot, and she was all like you’re welcome, you’re welcome.
Then she told me about herself. This was the really crazy part.
“Hey you know what?” she said.
“Huh?”
“I do it too,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“What you just did,” she said. “I do it too. In my own way I mean. I’ve sort of been doing it forever.”
“No way,” is all I could say to this.
“I did it just now,” she said.
“What?”
“I just did it,” she said. “The same thing you did.”
“No way!” I said.
“That’s why I kept asking if you were finished,” she said. “I was already done. I was being selfish.”
“You bitch!”
“Whatever.”
“I didn’t know girls did it.”
“They do,” she said. “At least I do.”
“Well,” I said.
“I know.”
“That’s crazy,”
“Oh shit,” Claudia said. “My mom’s about to yell at me for being on the phone.”
“I just can’t believe it.”
“Meet me by my locker in the morning,” Claudia said. “I gotta go.”
I just laid there for a minute now, very still, looking up at the ceiling like it may open up, lift me straight up to God knows where. But then the phone, one of those Sports Illustrated football kind, started making that annoying chopping sound. I hung it up, then decided I’d do it again, what the hell, completely by myself now. It was fine—well, almost. I mean, the blood had dried up finally. The only problem was that right there, of all the things I could think about, I end up thinking about T.J. Right afterward, I mean. I thought about how he was right. It pissed me off how he was so right about everything. About how now everybody was doing it.
FIVE
I’ve learned since not to talk about sex, not with anybody. Bring the subject up with me today and I’ll just sit there, look at you until you shut up. I won’t even ask the simplest questions. If you’re lucky, I’ll nod. That’s it.
But it was different then, different that next night. I was in the bathroom with T.J. and I just sort of wanted him to know I was thinking about it, seriously considering having sex. The thing was, I wasn’t. I just wanted him to think I was, because that way I’d be older to him, more like a friend. You know, less like a brother.
“How old were you?” I was asking him.
“Fifteen,” he said. “I was fifteen.”
“Do you think fourteen’s too young?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. No.”
“It’s not like I feel fourteen with her,” I said.
“Watch out,” T.J. said, putting his hand on my shoulder, leaning forward to wet his face in the sink. He used very hot water, part of his strict hygiene routine. I always had to add the cold, and wait, when I washed my face.
“What about, you know, condoms?” I asked.
“What about them?”
“I don’t know. They seem annoying.”
“They are,” T.J. said.
He was sort of laughing, by the way.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Have you ever tried to put one on?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“What do you mean, what do I mean?” T.J. said. “Have you ever tried to put a condom on, when you’re alone?”
I wasn’t sure what to say here. I mean, of course I had tried to put a condom on when I was alone. When you’re fourteen, and have erections ninety percent of the time, you come up with ways to pass the time. So of course one day I had gone down the street to the 7-Eleven, like I just wanted a Big Gulp, and stole a box of Trojans. And I nearly went through all of them trying to get one on. But I didn’t think it was necessary to go into all that, so I just said, real adultlike—
“Yeah.”
“Yeah what?” T.J. said.
“Yeah I maybe have put one on before.”
“Okay, now we’re getting somewhere,” he said. “Watch out.”
He was leaning into the sink, spitting his toothpaste out.
“Yeah,” I said, “and they are sort of annoying.”
I turned the water to cooler now, wet my face. I had never really been too into washing my face before T.J. started living with us, but he was always stressing ho
w important it was to be clean. So I squeezed the soap into my hand, Oil of Olay we used, and started scrubbing. T.J. was talking about condoms still.
“Can I ask you something?” he was saying.
I nodded, bent down, turned on the water, and was rinsing my face when T.J. asked pretty much the most personal question anyone’s ever asked me.
“Were you hard or soft when you put it on?”
I just kept throwing water onto my face, like I was the dirtiest kid ever, had spent all day smearing mud and grease all over my face, and was trying to get the last of it. But, eventually, I had to stand back up and look at T.J. in the mirror. I didn’t say anything. I just looked at him.
“So?” he said.
“What’s that?” I finally said.
“Hard or soft?”
“Oh…,” I said.
“Hey, if you can’t have this conversation, what are you gonna do when it comes to actually having sex?”
That had been the problem with T.J. He always had these sterling points on tap that made me feel like an idiot. But the thing was, I hadn’t been all that nervous, or uncomfortable with the topic, considering the almost clinical way that me and Claudia spoke to each other. Not to mention this was the mid-nineties, when AIDS education was all the rage. From fifth grade on my teachers had found every way possible to tell us about AIDS, about herpes—hell, they’d find ways to sneak syphilis into a trig equation. Still, I couldn’t for the life of me remember anyone talking about condoms being used except when you were anything but hard. Like what were all those awkward banana analogies for anyway?
So I spoke up—
“Hard,” I said.
“That’s the thing,” T.J. said. He was all calm, like we were talking about a baseball player, how his stats didn’t show how vital he was to the team. “That’s just the thing.”
“What is?”
“Being hard,” he said. “It’s more difficult,” he said. “Putting them on, when you’re hard.”
“It’s harder when you’re hard?” I asked. To this day, that may be the stupidest thing that’s ever come out of my mouth. But T.J. didn’t seem to think it was funny at all. In fact, he was getting more serious.
“Exactly,” he said.
“Really?”
“Yes,” he said. “A lot of people don’t know this. When they’re young, I mean. Like you.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Yeah. You know that kind of halfway state? That’s what you’re after. That’s what you want. Do you know what I mean?”
“I think so.”
“And then you put it on and it’s easier. Then you get yourself hard, into the condom,” he said.
This was a lot to digest. I’ll be honest. For the most part, I thought he was full of shit, even more confused than me. But then again, if you’d have seen this guy, how handsome he was, you’d just know this guy had been with plenty of women. I mean, he hadn’t dated anyone yet in Maryland, but he had lived in Florida of all places. I figured Florida was a much more sexual place than Maryland. So as I placed my toothbrush under the tap, put the toothpaste on it, and started brushing, I thought about all this. Taking into account the adventure I’d had trying to get a condom on, it started to seem like maybe there was some sense to what T.J. was saying. Maybe he could see this, my thought process, see it on my face, because I was spitting in the sink when I heard him saying—
“Do you have any condoms left? Look, I’ll show you what I mean.”
I put some water in my mouth, sloshed it around. Then I spit it out. I stood up straight. I didn’t say anything.
“Do you have any condoms?”
And still I didn’t say anything, but it was the strangest thing: I was nodding. I was saying yes.
“Where?” he asked.
Not saying anything, I opened the drawer under the sink. Before I could even get a condom out, T.J. was squatting down at my knees, digging in there, fishing one out.
“Okay,” he was now saying, tearing it open, holding the thing in his hand now. “You know you put this end down, right? You sort of pinch the top like this.”
I was watching it all in the mirror, even though he was right next to me. But now, as he slid his boxers down, the sink was blocking him in the mirror. You know what I mean. So I sort of glanced down to my left, at him next to me. And I’ll admit that it was comforting for a minute, at first, to see that I was pretty much the same size, because it’s not like me and my friends were so mature that we hung out all day with our boxers around our knees.
But then I just got that empty feeling that I think everyone gets looking at men like this. Or maybe it’s just me. But I’m convinced there’s just something sad and empty to looking at men in this state. They look helpless.
“All right,” T.J. was saying. “Are you even watching here?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Do you see what I mean?” he said. “Look. See what I mean?”
I just nodded. He didn’t really seem like he was all that interested in my responses anymore.
“Just like this,” he was saying. “That kind of halfway state. Yup, just like this.”
But here’s the thing: I wasn’t trying to watch all that intently. Like the wrestling, I was just waiting for this moment in my life to be over because you knew the next one, whatever came right after this, would be better. But I could see enough to grasp that he was having even more trouble than I’d had. I mean, that thing wasn’t getting on him anytime soon.
“Yup,” he was still saying. “Sort of just like this. Damn it. Wait. Here, here,” he said. “Just like this. You just roll it right over. See?”
Again I nodded. This time, just sort of at myself, in the mirror. Like yes, this really is your life. I mean, it’s one thing when a guy looks helpless, but T.J. was now far beyond that infamous halfway state.
“Okay!” he was now saying. “Okay! Look at that. Here we go. See there? Told you, didn’t I tell you? Are you even watching this?”
I nodded. But maybe my eyes were closed.
“Yeah, yeah. Now feel that.”
“What?”
“So you know. Give me your hand. Come on. Quick. You should feel this, so you know,” he said.
“I don’t know—”
“Yeah, yeah!” he was saying. “Seriously! Come here!” he said. “Come here! Quick! Oh, God! Feel that right there!”
So all that really happened next is I slipped up a bit. It was like this: I was downstairs having lunch with Mom, and she was telling some joke about T.J. with one of her employees, something about how T.J. was stuck in the closet or whatever. He wasn’t living with us anymore, turned out he had no design skills and Mom had to fire him. He was back in Florida now, waiting on John Ritter at the Ritz Carlton Hotel.
“He’s so stuck in the closet,” Mom’s employee was saying.
“Totally,” Mom said. They were laughing pretty hard.
“Oh I know what you mean,” I said.
It’s funny, how this just came out. I was laughing myself, or at least trying to, but all of a sudden the two of them were looking at me, all serious, like I had done something wrong.
“Wait,” Mom was now saying. “What do you mean exactly?”
But it wasn’t with her I went into all the detail. That was with the damn detective she hired. You just should have seen that guy. You should have heard the questions he asked me, the way he wanted to know every last part of the story. He kept saying I’m sorry, I really am, but could you please be more specific? Like when you say he didn’t touch you anywhere, where exactly didn’t he touch you? No, he didn’t touch me. Not really. I don’t think. No one ever touched me. Do you understand? Listen to me, please. Listen to me—
But he wasn’t listening. This was his job. This is how he paid for his house, how he fed his kids, how he bought his wife new curtains. And I was messing this up. That’s why he always seemed so mad at me for holding back.
PART TWO
CHILDREN AT PLA
Y
Perhaps he expected to be punished upon his return, for what, what crime exactly, he did not expect to know, since he had already learned that, though children can accept adults as adults, adults can never accept children as anything but adults too.
—William Faulkner, Light in August
SIDE MIRRORS ARE POINTLESS
Slow down! Cousin Stacey was all like slow down! Please! She was really flipping out, in that annoying teenage-girl way, real exaggerated, like if they don’t have something to panic about, they’ll actually go crazy.
I was hearing her, but I wasn’t really listening. We were in my Honda Prelude, driving all sorts of reckless around Uncle Ray’s new neighborhood. He had moved out of that little awful home, in that neighborhood no one really knew about, and into this neighborhood that didn’t even exist the year before. It was one of these developments of wannabe plastic mansions, everything so new there wasn’t even grass yet. No front lawns. No backyards. Just dirt, a ton of dirt, dirt with bulldozer tracks on it. And these huge houses, all done up in this shade of brown I can only describe as very tame. Most of them were still up for sale, the houses. That’s the type of neighborhood this was, where no matter what, most of the houses would be up for sale. And there were three models total, every third one you passed was the same. So driving around, it was impossible to feel like you were going anywhere. It was like driving on a treadmill.
But right now I was just really liking the roads back here. You should have seen these roads. They were so new, that smooth muted black, not one crack anywhere. It was like me and Stacey were the first ones driving on these roads ever, and you just had to go fast. She was eighteen now, me fifteen. I was on my learner’s permit, so I needed her in the car, to be legal. But I was still the one teaching her how to drive stick.
“Oh God come on slow down,” she was saying. “You’re gonna kill us.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “Just relax.”
“I’ll relax when you slow down.”