Play Me Backwards

by Adam Selzer

  “They want me to send a picture of my scrotum?” Jacqueline asked with a laugh. “Girls don’t have scrotums.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  We all had a good chuckle, and Paige put a hand on my shoulder. “See?” she said. “Leon is hilarious. And he’s never texted me anything gross.”

  I was beginning to see what it was about me that Paige seemed to like. I might have been a loser, but I wasn’t an aggressive loser, and I at least had enough sense not to start a date by texting her pictures of my scrotum or anything. Maybe I was a pretty good catch, by certain very low standards.

  I had noticed over the course of the dinner that among this crowd, the one that circulated around the football team, Paige was sort of the shallow end of the pool. I mean that in the nicest possible way—not that she was shallow or a person of little consequence, but the other people in the crowd were just a bit more popular, a bit better-looking, and a bit better dressed than she was. She wasn’t in over her head, exactly, but maybe she operated on the fringes of the group, the same way I did among my crowd. I fit right in with the burnouts and bums of the Ice Cave, but I wasn’t that fucked up. I didn’t have a drug counselor or a parole officer. I didn’t drink too much, and I hadn’t committed any crimes. Not the kind you could get arrested for, at least.

  Paige and I were both a bit out of our depths among our own crowds. Maybe together we could find a niche of our own.

  After dropping Jacqueline off, I drove to Paige’s house and we made out in my car for a bit. If we weren’t in front of her house, we might have even moved to the backseat. But all the lights in the house were on, and she was fairly confident that her little sister was spying on us through binoculars.

  The evening had gone well. For both of us. I’d been able to get a conversation about turds going, and she’d gone through a date without getting any pictures of balls sent to her.

  Those may have been pretty low hurdles to clear, but at least we’d cleared them.

  9. EXPERIENCE

  After I dropped Paige off, I headed to Stan’s place. His parents had never gone through with selling the house, so it was the same house I’d been to all those years before, but he’d long since moved out of the room where we’d played video games that one time and into the walk-out basement. This made the back porch into a private entrance to Stan’s place, so I was never actually in the house itself, just the basement. I don’t think I ever saw his parents once; sometimes I wondered if he even had any. The upstairs occupants might have just been a group of demons who used the old bedroom as an office now. How else could you explain the fact that he got away with making so much noise? Like the hangover cures, it defied rational explanation.

  Stan’s basement room was not so much a bedroom as a suite. In addition to his bed there was a couch and an armchair—his “throne”—that had been spray-painted black. The cushions were always kind of sticky, but being able to tell yourself it was just the paint was kind of reassuring. Adjacent to the main bedroom was a bathroom, a laundry room, and a storage room. It was, in many ways, a more spacious version of the back room of the Ice Cave. The wood-paneled walls were covered in posters for metal bands and newspapers from days when the headline was about some terrible disaster. There were stains on the walls and the ceiling that I never asked about. Here, we devoted our weekends to the pursuit of evil: playing video games, watching movies, and eating ungodly amounts of nachos.

  When I arrived after the outing to Hurricane’s, Stan was reclining in the chair, drinking one of his concoctions and playing a video game. The ashtray held a whole pile of cigarette butts.

  “There you are,” he said, like he’d been expecting me. “How did it go?”

  I pulled up a chair from the little table off the side where he ran Dungeons and Dragons games, and took a seat.

  “It went well, actually,” I said.

  He looked over at me. “Not so well that you got laid or anything, though, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  “Well, her parents were home, for one thing. It was a good first date. That’s all.”

  He focused on the game for a second, then nodded.

  “How long has it been for you?” he asked.

  “About a year.”

  “Was Brenda your first?”

  I nodded.

  Brenda.

  Brenda was a regular at the Cave and in the basement for a while. A peculiar thing about her was that when she had sex, she made noises like a cow. We all knew this, because she was not overly particular about who she slept with and wasn’t above doing it in the break room while people were working, or in Stan’s laundry room during parties, even though there was no actual door, just a burlap curtain that didn’t exactly make the room soundproof.

  Brenda got along great in the back room of the Ice Cave. Now and then she and Jenny would try to outdo each other and see which of them could be the bigger freak and, even though Jenny was very much into doing things her parents didn’t want her to, Brenda always won. Jenny still had a filter in her head telling her when enough was enough; she might take off her shirt in the break room now and then, but the bra stayed on, at least, and she didn’t sleep with just any guy who happened to be around when she got bored. She never sucked a guy off for half a bottle of vodka. I didn’t know for sure Brenda had done that, but I heard that she did, and knew her well enough to believe it.

  Jenny hated Brenda.

  I didn’t like her all that much myself, but somewhere along the line Brenda decided she wanted to fool around with me, and I wasn’t in much of a position to say no to much of anyone at the time. I didn’t have had the nerve to, really. So I started making out with her now and then. After a few weeks at second and third base, she dragged me into the laundry room in Stan’s basement, stripped naked as nonchalantly as you would to take a shower, and told me to get to work.

  She didn’t really make it seem like I had an option, so I did as I was told.

  I wasn’t a very good worker, though.

  For one thing, it took me forever to get it up. At home, in bed, just thinking about naked girls was enough to get me hard, but here was one in person, and it was like all the nerves and veins leading to that part of me had been cut off.

  She should have cut me some slack. Given that I was only inches away from several pairs of Stan’s dirty underwear, not to mention a litter box that hadn’t been cleaned out in a while, it wasn’t the easiest place to get in the mood. There are probably less erotic places to do it in the world, but I really, really don’t want to do it in any of them. But rather than encouraging me or helping out, she rolled her eyes, reached out, took a hold of me, and tried a few tricks with all the enthusiasm of a repairman working on the engine of a car. I half expected her to give my nuts a quarter-turn and say, “Here’s you’re problem, right here. You should be having these rotated every six months.”

  I should have just put my pants on and left, but what would she tell everyone if I did? There wasn’t much to do but close my eyes and try to focus and think about someone else.

  Even after I finally got hard enough to get the condom on, it took way more effort than I would have imagined trying to get inside of her. I kept trying to, like, slip it in, and she kept saying, “Just push.” And then I’d push at the wrong place and feel like an idiot. When I finally got it in, I couldn’t imagine she was enjoying herself too much. I sure wasn’t.

  After about five minutes I went “Uhhhh” and shook around a bit, effectively faking my own orgasm before pulling out. Brenda either believed it or just didn’t care—either way, it made me feel like an even bigger loser than usual. It was sort of a relief to me when she dropped out of school and moved to Council Bluffs with some thirty-year-old guy a few months later.

  So that was my first time. My second wasn’t any better.

  For part of junior year I went out with Mindy, a girl I actually sort of liked—or, anyway, didn’t actively dislike, at least at first. Some girls seem great when you’re no
t going out with them, but as soon as they start kissing you, they turn really, really mean.

  Mindy, for instance, was nice and occasionally funny when we were just hanging out as friends in the break room, but once we started going out, she started constantly telling me how big her ex-boyfriend Darren’s dick was. Every time we were near a large, cylindrical object, like a water bottle, a tube of cookie dough, or a roll of paper towels, she would point it out and compare it to him. He was usually said to be bigger. Over time Darren’s member began to take on nearly inhuman proportions in Mindy’s stories. If they were to be believed, the guy must have needed underwear specially designed by a team of engineers just to walk down the street without getting curvature of the spine. He would have had to commission John Deere to make him a special wheelbarrow he could lug his nards around in. If he wanted to text someone a picture of his scrotum, he would’ve needed to set the camera up on auto-timer and then hike half a block away to get them to fit in the frame.

  Needless to say, I did not measure up.

  When she saw me with my pants down for the first time, she shrugged and said, “You’d probably be fine for most girls. I just kind of got spoiled by Darren.”

  Maybe I shouldn’t have been so offended. It’s not like I wasn’t thinking to myself that her face wasn’t as cute as Anna’s, or that her hair didn’t glow the same way, or that she wasn’t as smart, or anything like that. I was spoiled too, having my first girlfriend be the girl of my dreams. But at least I had the sense not tell Mindy out loud that she didn’t measure up.

  By the time we actually had sex, instead of just fooling around, I had gotten to where I really didn’t like her very much at all anymore. The first time we did it she rolled off me after a while and said, “Well, it’s not what I’m used to. I couldn’t really feel that much. But it’s not your fault.” I guess this was her being nice.

  After that I just couldn’t get it up around her at all anymore. Every attempt to do it was embarrassing and ended in failure.

  This is something they don’t put into brochures about why having teen sex is a bad idea: If you turn out not to be very good at it, you’ll feel like shit. And if you’re dating someone like Mindy, she might suggest that you should let her sleep with her ex, too, which won’t make you feel particularly super. This gave me a whole new set of hangups that I’d avoided thinking about: What if Anna came back, wanted to go further now that we were older, and I couldn’t do it?

  Now I had to worry about it with Paige, too.

  I sat and thought of all this while Stan drank and killed zombie Nazis, just a few feet away from the laundry room that had been the scene of my first great failure.

  “You and Brenda weren’t a good match, anyway,” he said.

  “Definitely not.”

  “Mindy, too. That wasn’t any good.”

  “No. I think I might like Paige better than I liked them, but I haven’t really gotten over how bad those last two were, you know?”

  Obviously, I wasn’t about to tell him I had performance anxiety issues, but you can’t hide things from the dark lord. He probably already knew.

  “So, you’re worried that since you two may not have that much in common, you won’t have anything to do with her besides make out, and if that’s all you do, it’ll end up like being with Mindy all over again.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “That’s exactly it.”

  The dark lord nodded.

  “I’m going to give you guys something to do together,” he said. “A mission.”

  “What do you have in mind?” I asked.

  “Slushees,” said Stan. “I want the two of you to find out every flavor of Slushee, Slurpee, and Icee you can get in the Des Moines metro area. Every kind of novelty shaved-ice drink they make.”

  “Uh . . . okay?” I said.

  He paused the video game, lit a cigarette, stood up, and started pacing around the room. Wispy nicotine fumes trailed behind him and then surrounded him. I almost thought I saw Anna’s face in the smoke, but it had to be my imagination.

  “Most gas stations have three or four flavors,” he said. “Mostly cherry and a couple of soft-drink flavors, like Coke or Mountain Dew or Dr Pepper. Sometimes you see blue raspberry. Piña colada comes up now and then. You should probably try them all, but I really want you to find this one flavor I saw once called white grape.”

  “So that’s it?” I asked. “You want us to find the Great White Grape Slushee?”

  “Every other flavor too. But mostly that one. White grape. Find it and bring me one.”

  “So, is that why I’m supposed to be listening to Moby-Dick?” I asked.

  “Partly.”

  I thought it over. Going on a Slushee hunt sounded like fun. I have a collector’s mentality in my DNA, I guess. My dad buys rare junk to sell online at thrift stores and the flea market at the fairgrounds all the time, and he’s always on the lookout for old cookbooks to feed his food disaster habit. Sometimes in winter, when the flea market at the fairgrounds is closed and garage sales are out of season, he just gets the itch and starts driving around looking for pawnshops and stuff, hoping for a good score.

  I liked to go along with him. I used to collect old record albums with embarrassing covers, and you could usually find a few at any given thrift store—my favorites were one called Sex Education of Children (which showed a smiling old priest sitting in a library on the cover) and a bluegrass album called Satan Is Real (which had two singers standing in front of a cardboard devil that didn’t look real at all). Before I got into bad album covers, I was collecting old stereo speakers—enough to cover an entire wall of my bedroom. I wasn’t into actual hunting, like shooting ducks or whatever, but I guess I had hunting instincts in my DNA.

  So looking for a rare Slushee flavor sounded like fun, and it would give Paige and me something to do besides hanging out with her friends or fooling around. Not that I didn’t like fooling around, but one thing leads to another, and my past experience in that realm hadn’t exactly been encouraging. Just thinking of going much further than we had brought back that gnawing feeling in my guts.

  “Speaking of gas stations,” said Stan, “do you know which one Dustin was at when he met that girl?”

  “No.”

  Stan grinned.

  “Kum and Go,” he said.

  And we laughed.

  If there ever comes a day when I don’t think that gas station has a hilarious name, I’ll know that my heart has died.

  10. STEADY AS SHE GOES

  The morning after our first date I found Paige in the hall at school and told her I was planning a quest to find the Great White Grape Slushee, and every other Slushee flavor, and asked if she’d come with me, starting that afternoon.

  “That sounds sort of weird,” she said.

  “Yeah, but it’ll be fun,” I said. “Can we at least try it?”

  “I guess. I have a yearbook meeting, but I can go after that.”

  So after her yearbook meeting we spent an hour or two in my car, listening to Moby-Dick and seeking out Slushees. She thought it was awkward just to go into a gas station, look at the Slushee machine, and then leave without buying anything half the time, but she went along with it the same way I went along with going to dinner with all of her friends at Hurricane’s, I guess. We had three kinds of Slushees that day, but found no sign of a white grape–flavored one.

  The next day, Tuesday, I went to Casa Bravo, since Paige was working that night. They couldn’t get me a seat in her section, so I sat at the bar and she slipped me some free appetizers when she could get away from her tables. One of the other servers, a middle-aged woman that I think used to be a substitute teacher that I had once or twice, came over and congratulated me. “You’re a lucky boy,” she told me, in her raspy smoker’s voice. “Paige has a great ass, doesn’t she?”

  I didn’t know quite how to respond to that without looking like a complete douche bag.

  I wound up sitting at that bar for several hours;
about the only time Paige and I got to talk at all was when she came to the bar to roll silverware into napkins at the end of her shift. The nice thing about restaurant work is that you never know for sure when you’re going to get off work, so she could be cut from the floor at nine thirty but tell her parents she was there until ten, giving us a solid half hour to fool around in my car without arousing suspicion.

  On Wednesday after school we were back on the road, heading out to West Des Moines to go to a Quick Trip that I seemed to remember having a bigger Slushee selection than average. Paige seemed a bit baffled that I was really serious about the quest, but I was. I was under orders, after all. And if I filled up on Slushees in the afternoon, I could just get the soup or whatever the cheapest thing on the menu was at whatever restaurant we met her friends at later. It looked as though group outings to chain restaurants were going to be a regular feature of my life from now on.

  Those first few days set a pattern that we stuck to for the next couple of weeks.

  Most days we had about an hour between school and work to go out on Slushee hunts. On the occasion that neither of us was working, there was always some group of her friends going to one of the chain restaurants to hang out in the evening, but on those days we’d usually have several hours between school and dinner, and the hunt took us all over the Des Moines metro area. The gas stations with the most unusual flavors tended to be in the parts of town that needed a new coat of paint, where aluminum siding was the dominant architectural feature, and where you were always seeing busted cars and construction equipment by the side of the road. Those places were only about ten minutes down I-35 from Cornersville Trace, which by comparison looked so idyllic that you wondered how any kid in any house could ever have anything to complain about.

  On the group outings that usually followed the Slushee hunts, I did what I could to hold up my end of the conversation, which was usually just a matter of turning the subject to poop, which worked most of the time, though now and then Paige would gently suggest that I should think of something else to talk about.