Like People in History

by Felice Picano

  They went right in, but I stayed out among the strew of bleached, barnacle-crusted anchors and odd flowerpots—an old motorcycle helmet, an ancient table lamp hollowed out—scarcely containing the copious white, carmine, and fuchsia geraniums. Six unmatched pieces of old den furniture completed the informal veranda's decor.

  I'd halted because I'd noticed boys surfing, maybe six of them, each more accomplished than the other. I'd also recognized how good the boys had to be. Those waves were a surfer's dream—or nightmare: huge, so high you could have driven a Volkswagen through the tunnels they formed; regular as a bank clerk's hours yet so powerful that even that far from shore they exposed vast tracts of sand beneath each drawing-in of the tide.

  "You ready to ride the Thundering Appaloosa?" I heard a raspy yet young voice ask.

  I looked around and spotted its source: sitting astride the open sill of the bow window was a slender youth wearing the most bleached and tattered denims I'd ever seen. He was barefoot, with long, almost prehensile toes and the flat, apparently muscleless torso and all-tendons arms of a surfer since infancy. His face was small, deeply tanned, and highlighted by albino tufts of eyebrow and eyelashes and a trainer mustache, mostly hidden by an all-encompassing sweep of sun-streaked blond hair, cut as though with a bowl over the top, but allowed to grow out to weird proportions.

  "Is that what it's called?" I asked.

  "Nah!" he rasped, then tumbled out the window onto a persimmon leather chair, using it as a springboard to somersault onto his feet, "See ya," he rasped again, then raced away, around the surfboards and out of sight.

  "Where is that little son of a bitch?" a woman shouted, flying out the door after him.

  I pointed to where he'd fled. She ran past the flowerpots and anchors and stood in the sand calling after him, "Next time, I'll rip your nuts off!"

  She turned toward me. What I'd thought at first to be a middle-aged hag, from her voice and her stance and her girth and her sacklike house-dress, was in fact a young woman, quite fat, not pretty, with a large mass of uncombed reddish hair. "Who're you?" she demanded.

  "Came with Alistair," I said.

  "Oh," she replied. "I thought you were another Skeezix."

  She lumbered past me into the dilapidated house. "What are you waiting for? The butler? Come on in."

  The largest room contained less real furniture than the outside: a half dozen mattresses on the floor, alongside partly burnt candles in bizarre holders and a half-furled sleeping bag. One ajar door revealed a bathroom, another a bedroom with a real double bed, probably hers; a third room was bare except for more mattresses. The kitchen was old-fashioned, large, right out of "Ozzie and Harriet," nearly filled up by a round oak table and ten chairs. Judy, Alistair, and the woman were seated at the arc closest to the window, sipping coffee from mismatched mugs. As I sat down, the woman grunted her satisfaction and poured me a mugful from a battered old percolator, all the while continuing her tirade.

  "...think they can get away with murder, little bastards! Give them all the head and cunt and food and uppers and downers a boy could ask for, but ask one to do a measly little favor... little pricks!"

  "Jewel is housemother here," Judy said. Then she pointed outside to, I supposed, the youths riding the waves.

  "Last week I got this refrigerator from Harry Calpard... you know old Harry, horny old fucker! For nothing! Well, maybe not exactly for nothing, but almost nothing, and how long do you think it took me to round up enough of those peckerheads to help me move it? Three days! Three fucking days! While cheese went sour and OJ turned to motor oil in the heat. Wouldn't have gotten it even then if I hadn't put my foot down and said not a dick gets milked till I get that fuckin' fridge. What's your name, honey? You a homo like Stairs here? This fruit gets more action off my boys than I do, and what does he give them? A ride in an Alfa Romeo. Dumb peckerheads!"

  Jewel continued her monologue, not allowing me a break to get in an answer, getting more foul-mouthed and expressing more annoyance than I thought possible in one so young. Alistair and Judy sat back and laughed and goaded her on. I remained silent, picking up more salacious idioms, facts, and opinions in twenty minutes than I'd heard in my entire life. Clearly, she had been the model for their slightly wittier use of bad language.

  From what I pieced together, Jewel had been married to a Seabee— "You never met a more scum-faced liar and thief, but he was hung like a negro donkey and beautiful as a picture book!"—when she was sixteen, and when he vanished two years later, she got the house, now universally known along the beach as "Jewel's Box." Directly in front of it was the Topanga Pipeline, favored by surfing denizens for thirty miles up the coast. One or two of them began to stop by for a "glass of OJ" and since Jewel was lazy and lonely, they'd stay for a hop in the sack. More and more of the youths started visiting, hauling junk over, bringing in mattresses, hanging out, sleeping over when things got difficult at home, until little by little, inexorably, without her quite knowing how, Jewel had become in her own words "functioning provider, bedmate, and mother confessor" to a gang of them.

  Despite her complaints, it was clear that Jewel had gone from being a fat and unattractive teenager and neglected wife to being a local character—"al-leged in my own time." Her newfound fame, all the attention she got, the constant boys underfoot, the abundant sex she got from them were far more than a girl from Covina with her looks had any reason to expect out of life.

  "Not that one of them is any good except for riding the pipeline and slipping a dick into a wet place," she concluded acidly.

  As though on cue, the surfers arrived, all of them looking like slight variations on the first boy I'd seen: yelling, shoving their boards deep into the sand, punching and pushing one another, falling over the veranda furniture, spilling into the house through doors and windows, filling the kitchen, demanding food and drink, kissing, pinching, and groping Jewel, slapping palms high in the air to Alistair and Judy— until they had pretty much disrupted everything and emptied the coffeepot and several shelves of the refrigerator, and Jewel had had enough and simply stood there shrieking, "Out, out, out!" And all of us were forced out onto the veranda—except for one youth, Sandy, who was peremptorily called back in by his hostess, and who sheepishly returned inside, to a chorus of hootings, moanings, and fake orgasms by the others.

  Judy, her car, and Alistair's cash were requisitioned for a trip to Granny Pizza, down the road. I joined her and "Crash," a red-haired boy, to bring back the goodies. All the short distance to the take-out place and back, Crash sat behind us, backward on the Vette's ledge, so that his legs lay spread across the trunk and his head lay in my lap—Judy would grab his nose instead of the gearshift every once in a while and say, "Oops."

  While we waited for the pizzas, Crash told us he was the best backward surfer in the country, probably the world, which I thought a dubious distinction at best.

  "I do everything backward or upside down," Crash said in his slow, deliberate way, and he went on to expound his theory of upside down and backward to us—"Ya see, if everything were upside down, then no one could hassle ya, because no one would know what side was up, ya get it?"

  To which Judy replied, "Does that mean Jewel has to smell your nasty old feet while you're boffing her?"

  I was surprised to see Alistair stripped down to his bathing trunks, surfing the pipeline with the others when we got back. Surprised, I suppose, to see how well he fit in with the others, who joshed with him and seemed to accept him as one of their own.

  After we'd all eaten and lain around on the sand complaining that we'd eaten too much, I was also lured into the water. One of the fence boards was pulled up for me to ride, and Sandy, returned to his friends— "Hey, Lamebrain! It's your turn to play slip the weenie," he shouted to another lad as he exited—rode out next to me beyond the breakers, and in between chewing a wedge of vegetarian whole-wheat pizza and constantly rearranging his penis in his jams, he tried to explain to me how to "take the ass end of a wave
" without killing myself.

  Following about a hundred spills and near drownings, I managed to keep my footing long enough to ride a minor tunnel all the way in, stepping off the board onto a half inch of water and dry sand just as they did—to assorted cheers and jeers.

  That was the signal for us to leave. Judy was already at the car, and I was shocked to see that it was almost sunset. The boys were still on their boards out at the breakers as we drove away.

  "Have fun?" Judy asked, as she dropped us off at the house.

  I'd thought that she'd paid particular attention to me that afternoon, given all the boys she'd been surrounded by. She'd gotten up from her towel to urge me on when I was riding a wave; she'd praised my nerve and resolve when I'd finally succeeded in taking one in.

  "Sure," I said. "What about you? You hardly got wet."

  "I have my own kind of fan," she said enigmatically. "Tomorrow?"

  "Sure," I replied.

  Alistair put a comradely arm about my shoulder as we walked to the house. "Don't get carried away, okay?" he said, as the Vette sent up a sheet of gravel driving away.

  Before I could ask him to explain, we were inside, and Cousin Diana was standing there, holding a hand over the phone receiver.

  "Whenever you find the time, Mr. Dodge."

  Alistair let go of me. "What is it now?" The change in his voice was evident.

  "I want to talk to you about Dario," she said.

  "What about him?"

  "Don't you want to shower and change, honey?" Cousin Diana asked me.

  I took that as a command. Despite the noise of the shower from my rooms at the end of the big house, I could hear them shouting at each other.

  That first day seemed to set the pattern for the following weeks. We'd get up, breakfast around the pool, Judy would come by or would phone, and after Alistair had annoyed Inez and played whatever game it was he was playing with Dario, we'd spend the rest of the day away from the house: hanging around Westwood's shopping area—filled with students and teens—or stopping by the Malibu beach house of a once famous German émigré novelist, to visit his two adolescent children, or driving down to Hollywood and Vine and wasting time, or sunning and playing volleyball at Will Rogers State Park with Siggie and Marie-Claude and other friends of Judy's, under tall cliffs at the top of which perched an enormous glass and redwood-roofed structure. I was told Aly Khan had erected it for Rita Hayworth as a honeymoon cottage. To each side and beneath the edifice—now a restaurant— could be seen cannon-emplacement bunkers built high into the cliffs during the last war, now gunlessly guarding the shore from Japanese sneak attacks. More often, we'd end up at Jewel's Box, which I soon realized was the preferred spot because it was farthest from interfering parents.

  Before I'd left, my mother had told me that Alistair was different from the snotty know-it-all little boy he'd been at nine. During my first weeks in Southern California, I had to agree with her assessment. Possibly because he wasn't a stranger, but in his own element, Alistair was far friendlier to me, far easier with me than I had any right to expect. He introduced me to strangers without a hint of that involuntary wince teenagers make and other teens instantly recognize as saying, "I don't like him either, but I have to!"

  Alistair left me and Judy together with no compunction while he went off with the others. He never once put me down or sneered at me. He would quietly and in detail explain who people I'd just met or was about to meet were and what their relationships were. Whenever I did something to show that I too fit in—chugalugging a bottle of beer, taking a strong wave into shore—he'd make sure the others knew of it: "Hey! Did you see that!"

  Which hardly constituted intimacy. Alistair never told me anything in the least bit private, certainly not his hopes and dreams—and he never asked mine, or even allowed such a topic to arise. I knew that Judy wanted to become a Broadway dancer—a gypsy, she called it. Or a pediatrician. She wavered day to day. I told her my own troubles with my family that summer, how I'd come to hate everything about my life, and had so managed to annoy and depress them all that finally I'd been shipped off to here, this paradise, to cheer me up and, they hoped, to change my attitude. I didn't think I'd yet managed to change my mind about the complete hopelessness of my condition come next fall, when I was slated to go to a state college to study who knew what for Lord knew what kind of eventual career—all of them stank so far as I was concerned.

  No, Alistair never spoke of his future, of his mother, or of Alfred. He never mentioned his father either. They seemed to see each other less and less as Alistair got older. And the one time I brought up how great I thought his business project was, Alistair said, "Who wants to work all one's life? This development ought to net me a half million. I'll invest that, and when I get my trust fund at twenty-one, I should be able to do whatever I want." Although what this latter consisted of, he wouldn't even deign to hint to me.

  At first I'd assumed that he and Judy were going steady. Wasn't that why he'd been about to warn me on that first day? But as the days passed, I became increasingly uncertain about their relationship. Although Alistair and Judy were together every day, they never held hands, or smooched, or vanished suddenly, to make out the way all the "steadies" I'd ever known did. Once we would arrive at a place, Alistair seemed to leave Judy pretty much on her own. She'd pull out a paperback book or a fashion magazine and read, or talk to Jewel or Marie-Claude or me. From the instant we'd met, I'd thought Judy both incredibly pretty and ultrasophisticated. The more time I spent with her, the more I realized how much of that was merely on the surface. Underneath, Judy was very like the girls I'd known in high school: a little anxious, a little confused, eager to be liked, maybe even loved. When I asked if she minded Alistair ignoring her so much, she said, with a bit of irritation, "He's not my keeper, you know!"

  Another time, while slathering suntan lotion upon the creamiest skin of her upper back, I said, "When you and my cousin are married..."

  She sat up. "Married? You're kidding?"

  "I thought..."

  "If I marry anyone, it'll be Tab Hunter. Or Troy Donahue." She laughed suddenly. "Well, one of us will marry Tab Hunter or Troy Donahue."

  "One of you?"

  "Stairs or me," she said, as though I should already have known that. "My upper thighs, Stodge, please," she added, using the name she and Alistair had invented for me and which constituted my acceptance.

  I could have, I should have, asked right then what exactly Judy meant. I thought I knew, but I was both confused and fearful of the explanation. Partly because the signals around me were so confounding.

  Back home, in school, among my friends, boys that were effeminate or wimpy or sometimes just ugly, poorly dressed, and pimple-faced were often called faggots and fairies: everyone agreed; no explanations were necessary. In junior high, we'd been more open, more free. We'd played a game in class and through the halls where we'd do something, anything, to draw attention to our crotch in some way, and when someone fell for it and looked, we'd shout with joy, "Gotcha!" And it had been commonplace to push someone and yell out, "Eat it raw! Through a flavor straw."

  At first, it seemed the same among the Jewel's Box gang of youths. They were always calling each other "homos," and should one of them become too tender or solicitous, another would quickly bare his bottom and say, "Kiss this, queer!" Jewel and Alistair and Judy were constantly referring to various people—among them my cousin—as "pervs and perverts." Walking with Crash and Sandy along the boardwalk at Venice one afternoon, I'd been surprised to hear Sandy say of a man sitting on a bench, "That guy's a hummersexual."

  "Homosexual," I corrected.

  "We call 'em hummersexual, because whenever you pass one, he goes, hmmmmmmm!" Sandy illustrated.

  Sure enough as we passed by, the man went "Hmmmmmmmm!"

  Yet sometimes when I'd go into the house at Topanga for an OJ or soda, I'd find two or more boys napping together on a mattress in the darkened smaller bedroom, their clothes off,
their legs and arms entwined, their hands wrapped around each other's penis. And whenever Alistair went into the smaller bedroom with one or more boys, "to drink beer and fool around," as Crash explained it, the door was firmly closed and everyone else excluded, suggesting something more than beer drinking was going on. Then there was the discussion held around an impromptu beach fire one overcast afternoon after Sandy's older brother Cryder had spent a night in jail for "soliciting" on Santa Monica Boulevard.

  "Soliciting what?" I'd asked.

  "Money, stupid," Stevie said.

  I'd seen Cryder riding the Topanga Pipeline, a lean, aggressive boy. He didn't look like the type to beg for money on a street corner.

  "I don't get it," I admitted, already expecting their jeers.

  Stevie took it upon himself to explain. "Let's say you need some cash, fast. Can't get a job at our age, right? So you go a block north of Hollywood Boulevard, where the steps stick out almost to the street, and you sit there and wait till some guy comes by in a car. When he stops, you talk a little and he asks if you want a ride. You say sure, and you get in and you tell him your ma didn't get her paycheck and you need twenty bucks and he says sure, okay."

  "He gives you the money just like that?"

  "Well, usually you have to put out." Stevie emphasized the last two words. "We've all done it one time or another."

  "It's easy," Spencer agreed. "I never wait more than five minutes."

  "I made fifty bucks once," Crash boasted, then was forced to explain that that had required two drivers stopping.

  All of which left me even more confused. What had they put out? What had they or the drivers done? If it was what I thought it was—no! It couldn't be! I let the subject drop.

  After all, I didn't need money; after all, I was interested in Judy, who seemed interested in me. But although she'd slap my hand away whenever I was oiling her body and tried going into her bathing suit, she never got up or walked away. And once, when she was on her stomach reading and I was watching her bathing suit's dropped straps threaten to bare one of her breasts, she suddenly turned to me and saw what I was staring at and, to my surprise, pulled the blue cotton cup right off it, revealing a pointed red tip.