Night Terrors

by Ashley Cardiff

  Then one day, Craig had to run a sudden errand and Jesse and I were left alone.

  Jesse asked me if I’d heard of some obscure post-grunge band and I was completely amazed because I! Had! Not! He put on the CD and I wasn’t into it but it was still exciting that he knew about music I didn’t. We sat there on opposite ends of the living room, as I fidgeted nervously in my polyester adult costume strung together from mall stores and the space between us got smaller and smaller.

  It had to start somewhere. He started it. And so: “Does it bother you that I’m twenty-four?”

  There is no way to answer a question like that when you’re in such a situation. I froze where I sat and waited for my heart to slow down. He was finally naming the unspoken thing, finally remarking on all the tension that had transpired for what felt like ages but was actually about a week and a half.

  I could do this. “. . . No.”

  In that exact moment, his expression went from this silly cultivated artist’s incredulity to what can only be described as tractor beam fuck eyes. He said, “It doesn’t bother me either.” He might as well have added a patronizing “Do you understand?”

  On the inside, I was screaming, Of course it doesn’t bother me! Obviously it doesn’t bother me! Can’t you tell? There’s no conflict here! Moreover, the subject of our age difference was a perverse thrill. How, then, to keep the conversation going?

  I started to feel a little bit the provocateur myself. “Why not?”

  His gaze didn’t waver. “I’m not going to let someone I’ve never met tell me how I can or can’t feel. I’m not going to live my life by some law in a book somewhere. Some book I’ll never read.”

  If alarms are going off in your head, it’s because you’ve spotted a sexual predator. Some teenage girls, unfortunately, do not recognize these signs. Notice how he deceptively couched this statement in a language of having “controversial feelings” as opposed to simply “wanting to fuck an impressionable young girl.”

  He continued, “I shouldn’t be penalized because of some antiquated, puritanical beliefs. We shouldn’t be penalized. It’s not our fault this country is so repressed. I’m not repressed. I”—and the gaze lingered over the rest of me—“don’t think you are either.”

  I stared at him blankly and was still as stone in my mall clothes. I would probably agree to anything he said I was.

  “We could go,” he said, alighting on that old trope of the romance in fleeing together, “we could go to France.” For lack of originalité.

  My knowledge of France at sixteen was informed entirely by the chef in The Little Mermaid. Despite that, I suddenly wanted to go to France. Additionally, I wanted to be with someone who wanted to go to France, who had reason to think France was a good place to go. Pretty much everything about France suddenly seemed amazing.

  “Can you imagine?” he said and he paused dramatically and let that stare land back on my face and linger for a while and then he outright said it and it still floors me to this day: “Fucking in Paris?”

  I was transported. There we were, postcoital in whatever limited way I understood that to look like, endlessly adult, beautiful and sweaty. Age, nothing but a number. Baskets of baguettes and croissants in the foreground, room service. Satin sheets. Every curtain, carpet and comforter a riot of flowers, as I apparently believed the French were partial to loud floral prints. We lay in a bed in a beautiful expansive room in the most magnificent hotel in Paris: the Eiffel Tower.

  I nodded. I could totally imagine “fucking in Paris.” Again, mind you, I did not understand the actual “fucking” part or Paris, as both still confused and terrified me. But I could vaguely grasp the idea of it. The liberty of our encounter, unencumbered by American law. I didn’t want to be repressed! I wanted to reject repression! The French just got it. They didn’t care if you fucked children.

  He closed the gap between us and was beside me on the couch, hovering near my face, engaged in a sudden hilarious pantomime of inward struggle. He wanted to kiss me but he could not! Because of Puritans or whatever! (Sorry, by the way, but all feelings as a teenager are accompanied by exclamation points.)

  Suddenly he was over me, putting his lips almost to mine, wincing visibly and pulling away. This was so hard for him! It was wrong! He didn’t want to be right! This was the last moment for a little while that I would exercise some good judgment, because I recalled finding the whole display so genuinely silly that I became embarrassed for him and kissed him so he would stop.

  This was not my first kiss, but it was the first I remember indelibly. It was electric and thrilling and strange. Something I perceived as passionate, but for him was something else. He was older and experienced and was a man with a man’s body and I knew that because he wore a tank top. Just as the excitement began to sweep all reason away, the front door swung open and Craig walked in. He burst out laughing and ran back outside. Jesse sprang up and ran after him. I found them faux wrestling in the front yard—which is a weirdly common response young men have to things that make them uncomfortable. The whole thing was so weird that no one really said anything, they just giggled uncontrollably and wrestled. Which proved, of course, that everyone involved was adult enough for love and sex and Paris.

  I hung out for another hour or two and Craig made fun of us a lot. When it was time for me to go, Jesse walked me to my car and kissed me again. I drove home that night wondering if I was in love with him because this is how hormones work when you are sixteen and fucking dumb. This is also the part where I wish someone could have explained to me what was happening.

  The next week, my time at Craig’s didn’t abate any; I just spent it differently. Jesse and I made out breathlessly in his room. We’d stop suddenly at my insistence and start talking about our age difference. We talked frankly and endlessly about my virginity and how he’d like to take it. He presented himself as someone who could show me a world I didn’t know existed. Then we’d make out some more.

  For the time, I was stopping things whenever they began to challenge the bounds of typical teenage heavy petting. The world of men was still frightening and bizarre to me and I needed to know that I was making the right decision. He was respectful enough when I wouldn’t let things go very far but his aggravation seemed to increase every time I drew his hands away.

  It was those conversations that kind of haunt me. The substance of all of them was that I was so much more than a teenager to him, that I was more perceptive and thoughtful than even his peers, that I was funnier and my interests were cool and adult like his own. I liked glam-rock and Westerns and post-punk and Russian literature. He flattered me, he coaxed me to believe that at sixteen I was more worldly than any woman he knew . . . except in one specific way. He wanted to be the man to change that.

  When I drove home at night, I would be alone on the highway, trying to meet my self-imposed midnight curfew. I would drive the whole way noiselessly mouthing over and over that I was in love with him. For some reason, though, I couldn’t bring myself to let anything happen between us. This is what I am now able to identify as a bit of miraculous self-preservation instinct, one of the few times in my life such a thing has ever reared its bland, prudent head.

  —

  One night, about two weeks after our initial kiss, I showed up for a party at the apartment and Jesse was drunk in the front yard, unable to stand. At least, I thought he was drunk. He’d fallen and his nose was bleeding. He paid no attention to me that night. I ended up crashing on the couch. The next morning, he was gone and I felt strangely rejected. I didn’t understand why he hadn’t waited for me. I didn’t understand why he hadn’t paid attention to me the night before.

  I was on the couch, bleary-eyed and puzzled when Craig came downstairs.

  “Where’s Jesse?” I asked.

  “Good morning to you, too,” he said.

  “Sorry.”

  “He went to
school to work on some music course assignment.” He looked annoyed.

  “Oh.” I looked down and wondered why he hadn’t woken me up to say good morning or goodbye or validate my maturity in that enormously gratifying way. “Thanks for letting me crash last night.”

  “Yeah,” Craig said and his delivery was uncharacteristically clipped, “hopefully it’s going to be the last party we have for a while.” He sauntered out into their small backyard and I watched him through the sliding glass doors as he began picking up the night’s empty bottles of cheap beer.

  I got up and followed him outside. “What’s with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  I stepped out onto the cold brick in the backyard and watched him fling bottles into a trash bag. I knew an edge when I saw one. “Seriously. What’s going on?”

  He looked up at me and scowled. “Well, Jesse keeps having parties and not cleaning up any of the shit.” He motioned to a pile of two or three enormous trash bags bulging with bottles of cheap beer. “You think he cleaned those up?”

  I immediately searched for some defense. “He’s got a lot of schoolwork.”

  “You mean his Introduction to Music Composition course? Which isn’t worth any credits? He dropped everything else but that and the play.”

  “Oh.”

  “But he’s still acting like he doesn’t have time to get a job.” Craig paused and looked at me and I could see he was debating internally. After another moment he said, “And he can’t pay utilities but somehow he can always score coke.”

  “Coke?”

  My small Northern California town was endlessly permissive of a specific strain of drug culture: marijuana was not so much ubiquitous as it was practically forced on you, while hallucinogenic mushrooms were widely available (if not encouraged) and LSD considered of a kind. These drugs promised to make you better understand yourself and the universe and inner workings of things and make you tolerate reggae and what have you, drugs I never tried growing up because I paid too much attention when my friends got high. So-called “hard drugs,” though, were demonized there like everywhere else, if not a little more because of their unnatural aspect. Cocaine was what movie villains did, as far as I knew, and movie villains didn’t care how their produce was sourced.

  “Yeah.” A bottle shattered on the bricks. Craig let out a loud exasperated sigh, leaned over and started gathering up the glass.

  “Jesse does coke?”

  “You haven’t noticed? He does coke all the time. His nose was bleeding all over the place last night.”

  “He fell.”

  “No, he ‘lost equilibrium,’ according to him. According to me he was drunk and coked up and tripped on a bush.”

  The idea of Jesse high on coke and falling into a topiary in their front yard was inconsistent with my romantic fantasies. He was measured, masculine, adult. Finding out the embodiment of maturity you’ve convinced yourself you love is kind of a fuck-up was like finding out the Giving Tree ate children. I was astonished. I refused to believe it could be true.

  “Ashley,” Craig said, “I know you have a crush on him and everything, but have you noticed that he’s a complete scumbag?”

  “No, he’s not,” I insisted. I was in love with him.

  “Yes, he fucking is. Do you think you’re the first sixteen-year-old girl he’s brought around?”

  That stopped me.

  “It was the same thing with a different one a couple weeks ago. Counting you, there’s been three since I’ve known him. Like, in the couple months he’s lived here.”

  “They were sixteen, too?”

  “Yeah,” and he emptied an ashtray bloated with wet cigarette butts into the bag, “one of them had just turned sixteen.” He returned to the scattered pieces of the broken bottle.

  There was no real way to harness that particular drowning sensation of outrage and heartbreak. Not only was it devastating to realize all at once that he’d been lying to me—making me feel special and mature and somehow miraculously separate from other girls my age—but what felt so much worse was that I’d been dumb enough to buy it. Narcissism had led me to believe every word.

  Craig probably noticed the torment play out on my face and said quickly, “I’m sorry. That’s none of my business.”

  “No, it’s fine. I’m going to go.”

  “I’m sorry, Ashley,” he said and he just stood there with his handful of broken glass.

  I went back into the apartment and gathered up my things, humiliated that I’d been nebbish enough to bring a toothbrush like the neurotic kid I was. I walked to the parking lot, sat down in my car and began to cry. Eventually, I pulled myself together and drove home.

  I didn’t ever talk to Jesse again. I never even saw him again. I heard later that his financial situation got so bad that he could no longer afford coke and he switched to speed. Craig moved out and Jesse started doing so much speed that he couldn’t pay utilities, so he did speed in the dark. I heard he moved to Tennessee or Texas or somewhere, a few months later, after he met a girl on the Internet.

  I don’t tell this story to air out just how bad my judgment was as a teenager. Almost everyone’s judgment is pretty bad as a teenager, there’s nothing really special about mine. Even the reasonably intelligent, cautious to the point of neurotic ones like myself are still presented with the opportunity to make terrible decisions (constantly). I almost made one such terrible decision.

  But I didn’t. What’s disturbing is that I went through this brief, burning romantic affair with an older man—that thankfully nothing came of—and I didn’t learn shit. The tricky thing about learning from your mistakes is you have to actually make those mistakes. With Jesse, I’d narrowly avoided them. The whole thing didn’t equip me with a modicum of better judgment. The only thing that did happen is I became more reclusive for a few months and showed no interest in dating.

  One happy thing that came out of this, though, is I realized I’m lucky to have had my parents, who trusted my judgment enough and subsequently did not restrict any access to Jesse. If they had, I may have actually made that mistake because everything about him was already so appealing; letting him symbolize total rebellion on top of that might have made him irresistible. Most of the kids I knew in high school who lost their virginity to assholes did so after sneaking out bedroom windows.

  Granted, if your teenage daughter shows a romantic interest in the local coked-up unemployed actor with a taste for young girls, you could take a more hands-on approach to parenting as opposed to just hoping for the best. The option is there.

  FEAR OF PROMISCUITY

  The dumbest thing about the Jesse situation is how pointless it was. Sure it made me miserable, but when you’re a shy, insecure, socially inept teenager, you’re ripe to be exploited by anyone with a superego and a driver’s license.

  One day, at the junior college, I ran into the boy with black hair from my sociology class. He asked me out on a date, I said yes, we spent the evening playing pool at a pool hall and feeling very adult. Then we sat in his car before he took me home and I, true to my abject ineptitude, said, “What have we established here?” He said he didn’t know and wisely waited a few more weeks to ask me out again.

  We started seeing each other and he became my first “serious” boyfriend—by “serious” I mean as per some inscrutable equation of time together, mutual affection, and sexual activity—and was my first of practically every major formative sexual event. We had almost nothing in common except that we liked comic books and enough movies to feel bonded in the way teenagers find meaningful. He had a car and a grown-up job and his parents were nice to me. He was also a lot of fun and astoundingly good-looking.

  He broke up with me after about six months because I was needy and mercurial and annoying. I picked fights and demanded unreasonable things. When I was that age—at this point, seventeen—I didn’t think about
how accumulating pointless arguments affected the health of my relationships. I just thought about getting what I wanted all the time. It took about a month of crying and gestures and proclamations to convince him to take me back.

  There was a catch. He’d just moved into a new apartment with a bunch of dude roommates. They got a beer pong table and there were Playboy centerfolds over holes in the walls. He was at the age of being easily impressed with himself, that time of life when it’s okay to display one’s enormous DVD collection and not hide it away in a shameful place. Sometimes they cooked poppies that grew in neighboring yards, trying to make opium tea. It never worked, but the power of suggestion being what it is always made them behave like idiots when they drank it. What all of this meant was that he finally had a lot of freedom and he wanted to keep it that way. He was happy to keep seeing me but he didn’t want to do so “exclusively.”

  I was desperate to have him back so I agreed. This was not a decision I was prepared to make and so began perhaps the darkest period of my adolescence, which was in no way particularly dark considering how every emotion is so razorous when you’re seventeen. What I mean to say is that this was mine.

  His obsession with sex became more ruthless. He told me in unwavering but never pornographic detail about other girls. He seemed most proud of the ones considered “dirtiest” by his peers: one nicknamed Typhoid Mary and another one who blew the dealer next door for coke. I’m lucky he was religious about protection with them and I was religious about protection with him, because I could have a lot more to regret these days if it weren’t for that. I have to thank the California public school system’s sex education, which taught me about herpes and syphilis and gonorrhea and did a phenomenal job of convincing my teenage self that unprotected sex outside the confines of committed, monogamous relationships was for insane people (it still is).