MERIT BADGE: TITS
I’m looking at tits.
I’m looking at tits while trying to look like I’m not looking at tits.
We’re in the dressing room of a strip club, and it’s even worse than the pool hall in terms of where not to look, because there are bare tits and bare ass cheeks and private parts covered with tiny triangles of fabric everywhere, swirling about me, and I feel dizzy from the sheer effort of the look/don’t look thing and the totally surreal I-can’t-believe-this-ness and from all the thoughts banging around against each other in my head.
I don’t know where to start. We pulled up to a curb on a side street, and Josh issued fragmentary instructions over his shoulder as he tromped ahead of me on the sidewalk: Just be cool, everything will be fine, I just need to talk with someone, just be cool, figured you should come along, see what this is like, just be cool, just be cool. Then we reached a door that looked like nothing and Josh banged on it and a huge—HUGE—black guy leaned out, had a quick conversation with Josh, and let us in. A hallway, a turn, thumping music growing louder and fading, another turn, then holy shit that woman walking toward us is just wearing a thong and high heels, then Josh nodding to another HUGE guy standing next to a door, and then we’re through the door and in the dressing room and Josh is greeting several of the strippers and kissing cheeks, and now he’s standing against the opposite wall, talking earnestly with a woman (girl? woman?) who is putting on her dress as she speaks.
I am just inside the door, leaning against the wall, thinking invisible, invisible, invisible. The room has a floral carpet and big mirrors and long vanity tables that stretch along both sides. There’s a doorway at the other end, and women go in and come out. Lockers?
The lights are fluorescent. The room smells something like cinnamon and sweat and flowery deodorant. The women look like the porn stars Danny and Steve and Paul and I watch on the Internet, too much makeup and those weird fake tans and boobs that look rubbery solid. Their makeup makes them seem older than they are. Some of them are very, very pretty. Stop looking at her.
It’s very busy and crowded and feels like a restaurant kitchen, a constant stream of strippers going in and out the door to my left, checking themselves out in the mirrors, bumping into each other, chatting, laughing, the room loud with their conversations and music playing through bad speakers, interrupted periodically by a soft splutch of static and then a man’s voice announcing things like, “Crystal to the floor. Crystal and Dani to the floor.”
The music club felt wrong, the pool hall wronger, the guns and bikes wrongest, and this wrongest-est.
Invisible. Invisible.
Nipples, nipples, nipples.
I can’t wait to tell Danny, Steve, and Paul about this, if they’ll believe me.
The weirdest thing: When Lesley brushed against my arm I felt a charge that went right through me and jabbed me right down there. Here there are boobs and asses and naughty bits, and I don’t feel anything like that. Everyone is so businesslike and distracted that there’s nothing sexy about it at all. On the other hand the urge to look is overpowering, because, hey, tits.
Josh is still talking. Once again I have the impression that he’s totally forgotten that he brought me along or that I even exist at all.
At first the invisibility spell seems to be working, because either no one notices me or they just don’t care that a thirteen-year-old boy is standing in their dressing room. But then I start seeing the glances as they move past me, the quizzical expressions, the frowns. I catch at least one exchange of raised eyebrows. They know I’m looking. They know. I shouldn’t have looked at all. I should have kept my eyes closed! I shrink down against the wall and start examining my fingernails like there’s a vitally important secret message written on them.
“Excuse me.”
At first I don’t realize the voice is directed at me.
“Excuse me,” repeats the voice, more stridently. I look up. One of the women is standing directly in front of me, arms folded across her boobs, her head tilted to the side, chin sticking out.
“Who the fuck are you?” she demands. She has very dark hair and sparkly purple eye shadow. I think she’s about twenty.
“Who the fuck are you?” she says again, because instead of answering I’m standing there with my eyes wide, making dying fish movements with my mouth.
“What are you doing here?”
I look for Josh for rescue, but he’s immersed in his conversation. Incoherent sounds coming out of me. Aggle flaggle klabble, like the little girl in Knuffle Bunny. Blaggle plabble. It’s full on now, total panicked brain lockup, the sweating, the pounding in my chest, the trembling. The frog has left the building.
“What is this fucking kid doing in here?”
She has a very penetrating voice, cutting through the chatter and music. More faces and nipples turning toward me, the nipples quickly eclipsed behind hands and forearms.
“Seriously, who is this kid?”
“He’s with me, Terri,” says Josh from across the room. Terri twists and spots him.
“Josh? Who is he?”
“He’s just my brother.”
“I don’t give a shit. I don’t want him staring at my boobs.”
Her words have shredded whatever remained of my invisibility cloak. All the eyes and nipples in the room are staring at me accusingly. Robes are being hastily put on and tied, the herd realizing there’s a sneaky, underhanded hyena in their midst.
“Jesus, Josh,” Terri is saying, “it’s bad enough that I’ve got to deal with some middle-aged asshole rubbing his hard-on against me. Now I’ve got some ten-year-old looking at me and jerking off!”
I was not jerking off! I don’t even have a hard-on! But the words never make it out of my brain. I’m dying from shame and embarrassment, all these women thinking I was standing there and jerking off when I wasn’t, although admittedly I might have been maybe storing up some images for a future session, and they all look like they know it.
“I’m getting Jake,” announces Terri.
“You don’t have to get Jake,” says Josh.
“I’m getting Jake,” she says, poking a finger at Josh, and stalks off, I’m guessing to go get Jake.
I flee.
It’s the panic thing, just like I did with my brother in the kitchen at the beginning of all this—sheer unthinking flight. “Run away! Run away!” like the knights in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I think I hear Josh calling after me—Isaac, wait!—but I keep going, head empty, running down the hallway, following our path back out to the alleyway, except someone has swapped the hallways and there’s no exit where I expect it. A turn, another turn, running fast, my fear growing even stronger. I have to get out of here—now. This way? No. Next. No, not this way. The hallway blurs in front of me, tears filling my eyes. The music louder, then an open doorway ahead of me, strippers going in and out. I get to the doorway and realize it’s the entrance to the main floor.
It seems immense. I can see the stage, which hugs the wall and then juts out to a pole, and then hugs the wall and juts out to another pole again. Strippers are gyrating to loud music. Groups of men around small circular tables, watching, talking, drinking. Further on is a bar with topless women behind it. All the illumination in the room seems pooled around the tables and the stage, the walls disappearing into the shadows.
“There he is.” Terri’s harsh voice, slicing through the pulsating beat. I look over my shoulder and see her, see her finger jabbing in my direction, pointing me out to a sweating, dough-faced man with a combover. Jake.
He’s coming toward me, filling the hallway.
I look out across the floor. There, beyond the bar, is the exit. I dart out into the room, trying to squeeze around and between the dense tables, tripping over unseen legs. I think I hear Josh shouting again but don’t turn to look. A server is coming toward me with a tray of drinks. I change directions toward the safety of the shadows along the walls, hoping to vanish into the c
ool darkness and slip away unnoticed. Then I get close and feel a surge of revulsion. The shadows are alive and writhing with movement, like a nest of snakes. There’s a banquette along the wall, men filling every space on it, their legs spread, heads tilted back, while the strippers grind on top of them like they’re humping. I stumble along, repulsed, the banquette an endless line of men, men who look like my teachers or my neighbors or my father, their eyes closed or riveted on an ass, mouths open, licking their lips, some scrunching their faces up like they’re coming.
Three carpeted steps down to the main floor, girls dancing on the stage to my left, the rectangle of the bar in front of me, the exit just beyond that. A man staggers away from the bar, into my path, his back to me, and I push him aside angrily, feeling him yield and totter away, saying, “Hey!” But I’m already at the exit, darting past another massive doorman, up the steep steps to the street, the music fading and light changing as I make it to the sidewalk at a full run and plow right into Lesley McDougal.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
FLIGHT
I’m on the back of her Vespa and we’re flying through the streets.
She smells of clove cigarettes and of some sort of perfume and of her. I can feel the warmth of her torso radiating through her white T-shirt, the outline of her bra visible through the fabric. My hands are resting on her hips, and I’m incredibly conscious of them and incredibly conscious of my crotch and of the tiny space between my crotch and her rear end, a space that despite my best efforts disappears each time we go over a bump, leading to a moment where I’m involuntarily grinding against her, and then immediately reposition myself, wiggling back guiltily on the cracked vinyl of the Vespa seat.
Do not get a boner.
Strands of her hair have escaped the confines of her helmet along the lower edge, and the wind whips them back to tickle my face. The scooter vibrates and hums beneath us. The rain has stopped but feels like it might start again, and we’re traveling in a tunnel of lights that smear and streak by: streetlights, neon, cars. Her neck is pale and freckled and delicate and beautiful, and once the idea of kissing it crosses my mind I am not able to uncross it. It’s almost overwhelming.
Do not get a boner.
When I nearly ran her over outside the bar there was a confused moment of What are you doing here? and What’s going on? and Did Josh bring you here?! And then I interrupted my own incoherent explanation and just said, “Please, I want to leave.”
She hesitated, looking at the strip club entrance and then back at me, and decided. “Okay,” she said, and I climbed onboard.
We pull to a stop at a light, the wind noise dying for a moment. “Lesley,” I say, “can I stay with you? I don’t want to go home.”
And she says, “Okay.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE ARMS OF A WOMAN
MERIT BADGE: SLEEPOVER
I do not want to sleep.
I’m so tired. My thoughts blur and wander, my eyelids weighted down and closing in gentle slow motion, then opening again halfway to focus on the parallel strips of light on the ceiling from the venetian blind. I’m afraid to sleep, afraid that if I do it will all go away, and I don’t want this particular now to end, ever.
I don’t want to sleep because she’s next to me on the futon. She’s lying on her side, her back to me, wearing nothing but her T-shirt and some flannel boy boxers, the elastic rolled once at the waist. The sheet is bunched up and forgotten down by her feet—our feet—and if I roll on my side and scootch back to the edge of the futon I can look down at her pale and perfect legs, the freckle on her right thigh, the shamrock tattoo on her calf.
Nothing has happened. We haven’t had sex or even kissed, although she did kiss me on the forehead. Although it’s not like I thought for a second that we were going to do anything. Although maybe I was hoping. Although I knew that was impossible and ridiculous. Although hope springs eternal. Although I don’t even feel horny. This is better than horny, better than anything. What I feel like is that I’m hearing every beautiful song I’ve ever heard, all played at once. I feel like I’m floating in those songs, that I am those songs. I’m lying in bed next to Lesley McDougal and the universe is perfect. I feel that way even when her cat steps on my face for the third time and I have to push it off the futon again, its body soft and yielding like an accordion, making it hard to move.
I don’t want to fall asleep, so I shift positions, turning slowly to my side so as not to wake her. I can see her ribs, delicate through the shirt, rising and falling with her breath, up, down, see the pattern of her vertebrae, the curve of her pelvis, and I reach out my hand and hold it an inch from her surface, feeling her warmth.
The ride on the Vespa lasted forever and was too short. We pulled up in front of a four-story apartment complex in Uptown, dark brown bricks covered with ivy. She parked the Vespa at the curb and we climbed off, and she took a moment to turn and stand there, helmet under one arm, and look at me, smiling and shaking her head. Then she just said, “C’mon.”
The building was old and dark and smelled old and dark: dark floors, dark wood trim on the walls. I followed her up two flights of stairs, neither of us saying a word. It’s after midnight and I’m at a girl’s place and no one even knows where I am.
“It’s just a studio,” she said when we entered her apartment, and I nodded, not sure what that meant, although it sounded apologetic. It was one big room with a small kitchen at the far end, and a door to what turned out to be the bathroom. A kitchen table, a futon sofa, bookshelves that were just planks of wood on cinder blocks, and that was it for furniture. There were some laminated ID cards on lanyards hanging from a peg on the wall. FILM CREW, they said. There were paintings on the walls. She saw me looking at them.
“I painted those.”
“They’re nice.”
She smiled. “You’re nice. You hungry? I’m hungry. Want some cereal?”
She sat me at her vintage table, the chairs mismatched, and poured me a bowl of Cap’n Crunch—as illicit in our house as a bong—poured herself one, then sat.
“Well?” she said.
I started telling the story sleepily as I ate, details coming out in disordered splotches, hopping around in time: We were at the strip club, I played pool, there was this guy at the pool hall, Indians, pushups—then interrupted myself again, like I’d done outside the strip club.
“Who,” I said, “is Trish?”
She was pouring more milk into her bowl as she spoke. “The devil,” she said through a mouthful of cereal. “She’s screwing, like, a dozen married guys. At least.” Then it occurred to her who she was talking to and she put the milk down, looking up at me guiltily.
“Jesus, I’m sorry,” she said, and reached out a hand to place it on mine. “I keep forgetting how young you are.”
“I’m not that young.”
“Okay.”
“I’m not.”
“Okay.”
My dad is seven years older than my mom, I wanted to say, and you’re only about six years older than me. That’s not that big a difference. But of course it is.
“I’m not stupid,” I said instead.
“Didn’t say you were.”
She patted my hand and released it.
“You look a wreck, Isaac. Bedtime.”
“You said you were going to pierce my ear.”
“If you want to, I will. But some other time. We need to sleep.”
“I want to talk more.”
“I’m tired, too,” she said, and stood to put away the milk and cereal. It was like at the restaurant when she got busy and her attention slipped away.
“She’s a stripper?” I said as I watched her put her bowl in the sink.
“Was. Is. Sort of. She still works the bar there sometimes. Can I clear?”
“She’s . . . his girlfriend?”
“She’s lots of people’s girlfriend,” Lesley muttered.
“But his, too.”
“Was,” she s
aid, depositing my bowl and spoon in the sink as well.
“Not anymore?”
“Right. Except that’s where the problem is. I don’t think he gets that part.” She looked at me. “C’mon, let’s shower.”
I had the very briefest meteor-flash of a fantasy that maybe she meant shower together, which of course she didn’t. She led me into the bathroom and gave me a towel and handed me a new toothbrush that was still in its plastic packaging. “Gotta have a few extra around for all the strange men like you that I bring home,” she said, and I said “Ha ha,” even though I suddenly got jealous, thinking of times that maybe she does do that.
I took a very quick shower, seeing myself from above, a shot that included me naked in the shower with Lesley just a few feet away from me on the other side of the bathroom door. The shower was an old-fashioned tub with a cloudy plastic curtain, the water splashing through the gap onto the tile floor. I kept the shower running while I peed so that she couldn’t hear it. Before I turned it off I quietly opened her medicine cabinet and looked inside: a jumble of toothpaste, aspirin, deodorant, shaving cream, girl razor, and a torn-open box of tampons, which made me feel a little embarrassed. I think I was looking for condoms. I didn’t find any, which made me feel better.
When I turned off the shower I could hear her on the phone.
“Kidnapping him? Really, Josh? Really? Josh, you took him to a strip club.”
Pause.
“Josh, you come over here and I’ll pepper-spray you, and then I’ll call the cops, and then I’ll pepper-spray you again.”
Pause.
“Yes, I will deliver him safe and sound, with his honor intact.”
Pause. She started to laugh, entertained by something he said.
“You’re gross, Josh. G’bye.”
She lent me a T-shirt and some cutoff sweatshorts. When she emerged from the shower she wasn’t wearing a bra under her T-shirt and I had more of the boob issue that I’d struggled with all night, the trying to look without looking. If she cared, she didn’t show it. She just said, “Help me get the futon set up.”
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