“You know how it is, rockin’ and rollin’ and a whatnot.”
“Nice, Danny Zuko.”
“You like Grease?”
“I publically like Grease, but I secretly love Grease 2.”
“I figured you for a Cool Rider type.”
Beth raises “You want to be my Michael Carrington?”
“I don’t do leather pants.”
“Seriously, how long has it been since we’ve hung out?”
“What do you mean? We randomly run into each other all the time.”
“No, I mean when did we last really hang out?”
“Two summers ago.”
“Wow. That’s what I thought. I remember you were dating that exchange student that summer.”
“You mean the summer you and Hatch dated?”
Beth shakes her head. I can’t tell if she’s picked up on my disgust or is merely considering her own. “You remember it your way, I’ll remember it my way.”
“Fair enough,” I say.
“Now, about that foreign exchange student,” Beth says. “She was from Portugal, right?”
“Brazil.” I offer her another cigarette. “But she spoke Portuguese.”
Beth grabs a book of matches from under the ashtray and lights her own cigarette this time. “I remember her being quite the little hottie. I just assumed you held on to her.”
“I held on to her for one date, if that’s what you mean.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Nope. Took her to see Pretty Woman, got shot down later that night in my backyard when I tried to talk her into skinny-dipping.”
“That’s awful.”
“That’s nothing.”
“I hesitate to say this…” Beth takes a drag off her smoke and leans back in her chair and folds her arms. “But indulge me.”
The alcohol did all my talking for me. Over the last half hour I told her about almost everyone—Emily, Summer, Pattie, Nicole, Maria, Angelina, Harper, Monica. I left out the stories about Hatch’s red-headed cousin and the engaged-and-then-married girl possibly named Kathy or Katie.
Beth looks at me in disbelief. “Are you finished?”
“I think so,” I say.
She stands, clapping.
“Hey, I was in a bad place, okay?”
“Sounds like a good place to me. Although I would’ve paid good money to see that Summer chick lay your ass out.”
The fact Beth continues to flirt with me tells me she’s either fearless or just plain insane. “Your turn,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
“You seem different.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know…more confident, maybe? It’s not that you were ever a wallflower, but you seem to be almost glowing. Am I making the least bit of sense here?”
“More sense than you realize,” Beth says. “I credit my new vibe to getting out of this town.”
“You have something against Empire Ridge?”
“Not so much Empire Ridge as I do my gymnastics coach.”
“You had an okay high school career, and last time I checked that coach gets The Ridge in the state finals pretty much every year.”
“And for every trophy on her mantel, she has a girl in therapy with an eating disorder.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah, ouch is right.”
“Hey, you two, how about a picture?”
The voice startles me. Beth is unfazed. She introduces us. Her name is Sylvia, Beth’s roommate from Illinois. Sylvia is holding a camera.
Beth stands up, as if this was her plan all along. She walks behind me and wraps her arms around me. She squeezes her face in next to mine. “Be a good sport, Hank.” She gives me a small peck on the cheek and turns to the camera. Our faces touch. “And try not to break my heart tonight.”
I put my hand on hers, smiling. “Never.”
Chapter forty-one
Grand Prix is Purdue University’s half-ass answer to Indiana University’s Little 500. Breaking Away, Cutters, “The Italians are coming!”—yeah, that Little 500. Only instead of bikes, they race go-karts. Same as Little Five, Grand Prix is just another elaborate choreographed excuse to drink for an entire week straight.
Count me in.
My sister, Jeanine is a freshman at Purdue. She’s doing pretty well, all things considered. Keeping up with her course load, pledging a sorority, not getting any STDs. Just what’d you hope for from a freshman, let alone one whose Dad recently got gutted by a Ford Bronco. In lieu of going to my classes at IU, I’ve been crashing at her dorm for almost a week. Today, we decided to go watch the Purdue University concert band give a free show at the Slayter Hill amphitheater, little more than an open stage in a sea of inebriated college kids.
“Easy on the wheelchair, sis.”
We’re splitting a joint, the contents of which we affectionately refer to as “wheelchair weed” or just “wheelchair” for its tendency to incapacitate you for long periods of time.
“How’s school?”
I laugh. “Still there, I think.”
“When’s the last time you actually went to class?”
“Three or four weeks ago, maybe?”
“Jesus, Hank.”
“It’s my life, sis.”
“But can’t you just—”
“Talk about something else?”
“Okay, how about Lex, then?”
I choke down my smoke. “What’s there to say?”
Alexandra EncarnaciÓn, “Lex” as she’s known to her friends, is Jeanine’s roommate. She’s half-Dominican: dark hair, tall, long legs, with a toned, brown body. Lex and I have been fooling around the entire week, and Jeanine hates it.
“So we have a few cocktails and some random fun together. It’s no big deal.”
“Random drunken sex. Gee, that’s something new for you.”
“It isn’t like that.”
If I’m being honest, it’s never like that with Lex. She’s the ultimate sexual pragmatist. Anything goes, save for the actual act of sexual intercourse. I think I’ve managed to get everything inside her except my dick. And in return, she gives me frequent heavy petting, followed by a hand job and, in rare instances, a bad, overly toothy blow job. I don’t think I’ve ever met a girl who loves cunnilingus so much. Last night she pulled me into a closet at a fraternity party, grabbed me by the ears and pushed my face down into her panty-less crotch after ten seconds of foreplay. The irony of her chosen nickname actually sounding like “lick sex” doesn’t escape me.
I sneak one more toke before passing the wheelchair. “Jeanine, I think I might have feelings for Lex.”
“No, you don’t. You deal in impulsive emotions like I deal in verbs.”
“Funny.” I start giggling. “I really don’t like her that much. I just wanted to see your eyes bug out. You looked like a fucking alien.”
“Watch yourself, Hank. You’re really vulnerable right now.”
“Maybe.”
“We all are—you, me, Mom, even Jack. And the drinking sure as hell doesn’t help things.”
“I’ll figure it all out. How about you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Been to any good shows lately?”
Jeanine takes a hard toke off the wheelchair. “Shows?”
“Concerts, I mean.”
“Not since the Dead show at Deer Creek.”
Like any teenager on the cusp of her twenties, Jeanine’s taste in music has undergone a profound change. The days of Tiger Beat magazine, walls plastered with Kirk Cameron posters, and New Kids on the Block concerts have been supplanted by a High Times subscription, Nelson Mandela posters, and Grateful Dead shows. Gone is the sister in near hysterics screaming and crying, “Jordan Knight looked at me…oh m
y God, he looked at me!” In her place is the sister saying, “Man, that was the first time the Dead played ‘To Lay Me Down’ at Deer Creek in two years…far out.”
It’s not always been this easy with me and Jeanine—the brother–sister mentoring, the frank discussions, the not beating the living crap out of each other. She was barely out of diapers when I sent her to the hospital with a ruler stuck in her throat. Although, in fairness to me, she already had the ruler in her mouth. I just kicked her feet out from under her. She enacted her revenge a couple years after that. I was running down the hallway, turned a corner, and there was Jeanine’s foot. I tripped and the top of my head hit the corner of the wall. Went to the ER and received ten stitches. To this day, short hair just doesn’t work on me because of that scar.
Jeanine and I signed our armistice when I got my driver’s license. She needed someone to chaperone her at boy-band concerts. I needed an excuse to be around thousands of hormonally charged teenage girls. I got her and her best friend, Dana Black, into Color Me Badd’s hotel room at the Omni Hotel on the northeast side of Indianapolis. Six months later, a couple television writers ripped off our true-life adventure for an episode of Beverly Hills 90210. The Omni was now the Bel Age. David Silva played me, with Brenda Walsh and Kelly Taylor passable in the roles of Dana and Jeanine. Okay, maybe they didn’t rip us off—isn’t saying that libel?—but talk about your fucked-up coincidences. And it doesn’t end there. Shannon Doherty and I were both born on April 21, 1971. I think I might be on to something.
“Hank, Shannon Doherty was not born on the twenty-first. You always say that. She was born on the twelfth.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“I’m sure you need to stop hooking up with my roommate.”
“I’ll try.”
“And you’ll fail miserably.”
“Yes, I will.”
“Oh well…” The orchestra is silent. She smiles and looks at me. “You ready?”
“For what?”
I haven’t missed a day of Grand Prix week. It’s Thursday evening, and I got here last Friday. I’ve been here ten days out of the last two weeks. Jeanine has me working kitchen crew at her sorority. I’m still shaking the cobwebs out from yesterday afternoon’s drinking game, Century Club. One shot of beer a minute, every minute, for a hundred minutes straight. It’s not the beer that gets you—a hundred ounces is barely over eight beers. It’s swallowing all that air. I was an honorary Phi Kap for the day in a Century Club face-off against Sigma Chi. Most bailed out at or around a hundred. I won the competition, both barfing and pissing myself at three hundred and two shots. I beat the next closest guy by a hundred shots. A halfway serious petition was circulated to initiate me into the Phi Kap house on the spot.
Jeanine explains to me this Grand Prix tradition of charging the water fountain in front of the amphitheater when the band starts playing the William Tell Overture. She’s disrobing down to her sports bra and boxers as she explains everything. I grab the wheelchair out of her hand, hoping to get too stoned to notice my half-naked sister.
The wheelchair helps. I play along, taking off most my clothes as well: the jeans I bought yesterday for two dollars at the West Lafayette Goodwill, the Minnesota hockey jersey Grandma Louise bought me in Rochester when I volunteered to chaperone her to the Mayo Clinic because no one else can tolerate her for more than twenty-four hours straight. We watch the band apply layers of plastic to themselves and their instruments. The conductor walks to the middle of the stage looking like the Gordon’s Fisherman. He taps his music stand and raises his baton just as the wheelchair weed eases me into the folds of memory.
Sixth grade. Louisville, Kentucky. Christmas 1981. Dad had used his connections as former assistant band director to bring the University of Notre Dame concert band down to play a one-night, sold-out show at Trinity High School. They played a three-hour set. I sat by Dad, stood as he stood, clapped as he clapped, leading ovation after ovation. After they finished what we all thought was to be their last song, I whispered into Dad’s ear, “But what about the fight song?” Then the conductor, Notre Dame Band director Robert O’Brien, stepped back from the music stand. He turned, looked right at Dad, and offered him the baton. Dad stood. The crowd stood, cheering wildly. Mom was crying. Dad smiled a smile as big as I’d ever seen. Dad grabbed the baton. He walked to the middle of the stage…
Jeanine grabs my hand. “Let’s do this!” We charge the fountain in our underwear. About fifty people in similar states of undress are right there with us. Several, of course, pretend they’re riding a horse down the hill, knowing the song only as the theme music to The Lone Ranger. They shout “High ho, Silver, away!” to the crowd. Most are armed with some type of water-emitting contrivance—squirt guns, water balloons. The full orchestra performs in front of us, raised on a stage above the fountain. Everyone, from the conductor to the bass drummer, is decked out in full, head-to-toe all-weather gear. The first-chair violinist gets squirted with a Super Soaker. The second and third chairs laugh…right before two balloons whiz by the conductor’s head and nail them both in the head.
I lose Jeanine in the crowd. I look up at the conductor, already soaked to the bones. His sheet music ink-smeared and indecipherable. He’s smiling, laughing. He punches the air with his hands, pointing to the brass section, pushing them, louder and louder. I close my eyes. And I pretend the “William Tell Overture” is the “Notre Dame Victory March.”
Chapter forty-two
Adam West and Burt Ward survey the scene, striking typically heroic poses.
“Leaping libido, Batman!” Robin says. “Is that man having sex with a twelve-year-old girl?”
“No, Robin,” Batman says. “That appears to be merely a young adult male in his early twenties. And the girl you speak of is in fact in her early twenties as well.”
“But that’s impossible.”
“Impossible, Robin? Note the slight pooch in her stomach.”
“Yes, what of it?”
“It is a pooch that could only come from four years of bad decisions and even worse drinking and eating habits.”
“Of course, college,” Robin says. “Free beer and starchy food.”
“Precisely, Boy Wonder.”
“But what about?”
“Down there?”
“Yes, Batman. It’s just so…smooth.”
“Smooth perhaps, my young sidekick. But there are traces, a shadow if you will. Logic dictates that she shaves.”
“Holy bare bush, Batman!”
“Bare bush indeed, Boy Wonder.”
I painted a life-size mural of Batman and Robin on Jack’s bedroom wall after we moved into the new house. At the moment, the Dynamic Duo is watching me have sex with Harper Donovan in my little brother’s race car bed.
Since we were eighteen, Harper and I have been the friends with benefits, the friends that have sex, whatever you want to call it. We don’t go out on dates, have never dated, and don’t have any plans to date. We’re the unspoken asterisks in each other’s life. She’ll get in a fight with her boyfriend, come over to my place, and we’ll have sex. When I recall relationships with other women, I don’t necessarily recall having sex with Harper during that time though we may indeed have had sex. The sex just happens. It’s like eating or breathing. The arrangement makes perfect sense to us, but it offends almost every other girl I know. The guys of course want to know my secret. They want me to write a book, give seminars, but mostly just introduce them to Harper.
Harper and I almost hooked up as sophomores in high school. She transferred from Prep after winter break and flirted with me for weeks. Half the sophomore class met at the theater for the premiere of Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol. Harper offered me the seat beside her. I said, “No thanks,” and shot her down before a young and mop-headed Sharon Stone even made it onscreen. Sitting next to me, Hatch said out loud, “Hell, Ha
rper, I’ll take you up on the offer if Hank is too stupid not to.”
Later that week, when I totaled the Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser, Harper and Hatch were actually making out in the backseat. They were a couple for most of the summer.
Harper and I fooled around a little in high school, nothing major. In fact, the only significant encounter was when we didn’t do something. We were seniors. It was Grad Night at Kings Island. I smuggled a pint of Beam and a couple joints into the park. Laura was back at Bucknell. Hatch and Harper smuggled my near-catatonic butt out of the park. The party followed us to our hotel room, at which point Hatch laid me in bed, tucked me in, then proceeded to have sex on the floor with his girlfriend. Harper passed out next to me, in my arms. Maybe I thought Harper was Laura. Then again, maybe I didn’t.
There was nothing dramatic or even memorable about our first time. It happened in college, freshman year. I ran into Harper one random Thursday night in downtown Bloomington. Penny beer night at the Bluebird—penny beers, quarter pitchers, dollar well drinks. It got ugly fast. After some suggestive dancing on the dance floor, Harper took me back to her apartment room, and we just did it.
Harper lifts herself off of me. She sits on the side of the bed naked, silhouetted in the light of Jack’s Batman nightlight. Harper is a very pretty girl: light brown hair that curves in at the base of her neck, large eyes, odd but strangely attractive conical breasts, and a trim if not athletic body with thin arms, the beginnings of a pot belly, and thin legs. She could have better posture, as she has a tendency to hunch forward.
Tonight was the first time we’ve been together since my twenty-first birthday. Easily our longest drought. She took off all her clothes, got on top of me and stayed there. Her orgasm was quick and business-like. Mine took a little bit longer, which isn’t anything new for me, at least with Harper. I don’t know if it’s her pelvic approach, if she has a crooked vagina, or if I’m just too damn drunk whenever we get naked, but when it comes to sex with Harper, I can always count on a sore dick and hitting my target heart rate.
I help Harper with her coat, walk her out to her car. “You going back to Bloomington?”
Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride Page 23