by Jonah Black
“You going to Amerishrinks?” said Lucy. She acted like everybody went there.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Isn’t Dr. LaRue the best?” Lucy said, letting her head fall back and giggling. “He’s such a hottie!”
Yeah, right, I thought. Dr. LaRue sure is sexy.
I think Posie sort of read my mind. “Lucy thinks all doctors are hotties,” she said.
“Oh, come on. That little mustache? The way he’s always snorting and stamping his feet like a big old horse?” Lucy giggled again. “Wouldn’t you love to do it with Dr. LaRue? Just tickle him and melt him like a stick of butter? I would!”
I couldn’t believe the way she was talking. But Thorne seemed to be getting off on it.
“Hey, you can tickle me anytime,” he said.
“So is everyone here like, seeing a shrink?” Wailer asked. He didn’t sound happy about it.
“Oh, Wailer,” Posie said. “Everybody goes to Dr. LaRue!” She winked at me.
Wailer’s mouth dropped open. “Thorne, you ever seen this guy?”
“Yeah, me, seeing a shrink!” Thorne said, like it was totally impossible. “I don’t think so!”
Wailer nodded. “Dude,” Wailer said. “We’re the only ones here who aren’t mental!”
“How crazy is that?” Thorne said, shaking his head.
“Oh, Thorne, don’t feel left out,” Posie said. “You’re more screwed up than anybody.”
“Thank you,” Thorne said, smiling happily.
“Hey, Wailer,” Posie said. “Let’s get back in the water.” She picked up her board and looked out at the ocean like it was a big bowl of ice cream she couldn’t wait to eat. Wailer looked at Posie with pretty much the same expression.
“Later, Jonah,” Posie said, and they both ran down the beach and jumped into the surf.
We sat and watched them for a while and seriously, they’re the best surfers I’ve ever seen. Posie looks like a superhero when she’s surfing. She just glides across the water like it’s nothing, with this beautiful smile on her face and her hair flying out behind her. It’s unbelievable.
“So, Thorne,” I said after a while. “How are your parents? Are they still running the motel?”
“Yeah,” Thorne said. “But Pop is branching out. He’s got a new business, taking tourists out on a catamaran. You know, sunset cruises and bachelorette parties. Stuff like that.”
“How’s the house? Did they get the porch done ever?”
“Oh, we moved,” Thorne said. “We’re down by the cemetery now.”
“Thorne won’t have me over to his house,” Lucy said to me.
“It’s being remodeled,” Thorne said. “I’ll have everybody over when the place is fixed up.”
“I think he’s lying,” Lucy said, pinching Thorne’s arm. “Doesn’t it sound like he’s lying?” she asked me.
“Hey,” Thorne said, “if you can’t trust me, who can you trust?” And the way he said it made me think maybe he really was lying.
Lucy rolled her eyes and looked at me like I was the only other person in the world who knew how full of it Thorne was. She was wearing big gold hoop earrings that swung back and forth.
“So, Jonah,” Thorne said. “Are you ever going to tell me why you got kicked out of boarding school, or am I going to have to torture it out of you?”
“Give me a break,” I said.
“Well, how about like, a general idea. Like, you flunked out? Or your pops didn’t pay the tuition? Or they caught you smoking crack?”
“I heard there was a fire,” Lucy said, quietly. She started twisting her short brown hair around her index finger and I couldn’t stop watching her. It was like she was knitting. “I heard you almost died.”
It was kind of strange that Lucy said she’d heard there was a fire because on my last night at Masthead I went down to the train tracks, which was the only place I could get any privacy, and burned my old journals. I stood there watching them go up in smoke and just looked at the pages as they turned brown. It was sad how fast they disintegrated. Two years of my life, just ashes in only a few minutes. I started keeping a journal when I went away to boarding school. I was waiting for my plane to Pennsylvania, and I went into the news shop at the airport and saw this blank book and I thought it was cool. So I started writing that day, and I never stopped. I filled five blank books up in two years. But after everything that happened, I didn’t want to risk people reading them, so I burned them.
I stand by the tracks just staring at this sad pile of ashes and then I hear sirens and the fire department rushes up in their trucks and the firefighters jump out in their black coats and yellow hats and one of them comes up to me and says, “Jonah, is everything okay?”
“Sophie,” I say, “it’s done. They’re all destroyed.”
And she says, “Are you positive?”
And I say, “Yes, don’t worry; no one will ever find out.”
“Good,” she says. Then she reaches her arms out to me and as she does the front of her fire coat falls open and she isn’t wearing anything underneath. The wind is blowing smoke in our faces and she wraps me in her coat and I kiss her over and over.
“Jonah?” Thorne said, kicking sand at me.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said in a voice that basically meant, Leave me alone.
Nobody said anything for a while. Then Lucy stood up and said she had to head home and she walked back up the beach to the parking lot. Thorne and I just sat there watching Posie and Wailer out on the waves.
“They’re pretty serious, aren’t they?” I asked Thorne.
“Wailer and the Hoffster? Yeah, they’re serious, all right. It’s so lame,” he said.
“But they look good together,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I’ll remind you you said that,” Thorne said, shaking his head. “If you ask me, he’s ruined her.”
I was glad to hear that Thorne doesn’t like Wailer, either. Thorne’s pretty perceptive, come to think of it, even though these days he acts like this cool dude who doesn’t think about anything but sex.
We sat there for a while. Then Thorne said, “So you’re a junior? Is that like, permanent?”
“No way,” I said. “It’s a mistake.”
“It better be,” Thorne said. “The juniors suck.”
After a while Wailer and Posie came in and dried off, and Thorne gave Wailer a ride home in his Beetle. That left Posie and me sitting there, watching the ocean.
“I’m glad you’re back,” she said. “It seems like you’ve been gone forever.”
“Two years,” I said.
“It feels like longer than that,” Posie said.
Posie and I never really talked while I was away. I talked to Thorne all the time on e-mail, but Posie doesn’t like e-mail. She wrote me four letters on this blue whale writing paper I gave her for her birthday when she was ten. One time, she sent me this big piece of dead skin from a blister on her heel. She Scotch-taped it to the letter and drew an arrow pointing to it and underneath the arrow she wrote, “My blister.” I guess it sounds kind of gross, but I just thought it was funny. I still have the letters.
Posie rested her elbows on her knees and looked out at the surf. Her skin was glistening with tiny beads of water.
“The waves are perfect today,” she said. “Did you see how I dropped into that barrel? It was awesome.”
“You looked great,” I said. “I never knew you could surf like that.”
“I love surfing with Wailer,” Posie said. “It’s like connecting with someone on a whole other level.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. What else could I say?
“Oh, Jonah,” Posie said, turning to me. Her nose was running and her eyelashes were wet. She looked beautiful. “I think I’m totally in love!”
It was hard to be excited for her. I just kind of smiled.
She started poking at the sand with a little coffee stirrer that was lying around. “So why won’t you tell anybody about w
hat happened up at boarding school?” she asked me.
“It’s not that I won’t tell anybody,” I said. “It’s just . . . complicated.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” Posie said. “But I’m around if you want to talk, or whatever. You know that, right?”
I was watching Posie’s wrist as she flicked the sand around with the coffee stirrer. Her wrist bones are so pronounced and sturdy-looking. And yet her arms are covered with fine blond baby hairs. She’s a paradox.
Posie punched me in the arm, hard. “I said, right?”
“Right,” I answered, although I couldn’t remember what we were talking about.
“Maybe I’ll come by one of these nights in the outboard and we can buzz up the Intercoastal. I’ll do it just like I used to, okay? I’ll tie up the boat on your dock and knock on the glass door outside your room. Nobody even has to know.”
“All right,” I said.
Posie looked at her watch. “Hey, I just want to catch a few more waves before sunset. You don’t mind, do you, Jonah?”
I shrugged. “Nah, I better go anyway,” I said.
Posie jumped to her feet. “I’m really glad you’re back!” she said.
She bent down and kissed me on the cheek and her wet breasts pressed into my shoulder. Then she ran down the beach with her board and flopped into the waves on her stomach. I looked down and there were two round wet marks on my shirt.
I was glad I was back, too.
I got up and got my bike and walked with it down the beach for a while, thinking about everything that had happened in the last couple of days.
I’m not sure I can write down exactly what I was thinking. It was just a mix of stuff. First I was feeling really happy. Then I started thinking about Posie and Wailer and Thorne and Lucy and whoever else is Thorne’s favorite flavor of ice cream or whatever, and then I got kind of depressed and lonely. I was thinking about how Posie said she was in love with Wailer and how it didn’t seem real somehow. And then I started thinking about love in general and wondering if it isn’t all just a bunch of crap. I mean, Mom and Dad said they loved each other, and now Dad lives in Pennsylvania with Tiffany and Mom is here in Pompano talking about sex on public radio.
So I walked down the beach thinking all sorts of screwed-up thoughts like that and getting more and more down. After a while I got to the old lifeguard stand and I climbed up and watched the sun set. The beach was deserted. There was a sign on the side of the tower written in chalk: OCEAN TEMP: 68. WINDS: 15 MPH. WARNING. MAN-OF-WAR. RIPTIDES. UNDERTOWS. I could still see Posie out on the ocean, surfing. She looked so relaxed and alive out there. She looked like she belonged.
At that moment this old guy suddenly climbed up the tower and sat down next to me. He must have been about eighty. He pulled out a cigar and lit it and blew a big cloud of smoke out toward the sea.
“She’s a peach, isn’t she?” he said.
“Who?” I said.
He pointed at the water with his lit cigar. It had a band of paper on it that said CORONA NEGRO. “The mopsytop.”
He blew another cloud of smoke. It was blue.
“I tell you,” he said. “Girl like that’ll make you wanna walk the doggie!”
He laughed like this was the funniest thing he’d ever said. I looked at him like he was insane.
“Don’t look at me like that, Chipper. It’s what we’re here for.”
“What?”
He leaned toward me.
“To love women!”
I just nodded. He seemed pretty harmless.
“Name’s Pops Berman. I live over there.”
He pointed with his cigar toward the big condo building called Niagara Towers. He shook his head. “Viagra Towers,” he said sadly.
“You’re retired?” I asked.
“Hell, you gotta be retired to live there. You got a pulse, they don’t let you in.”
“I’m Jonah Black,” I said.
He tipped his baseball cap. It was a Red Sox cap, red with a fancy B. “Hello, Jonah Black.”
I liked Pops. His voice was deep and crinkly and full of experience. But he seemed like kind of a joker, too. And his breath smelled like peanut butter.
He looked out at Posie surfing.
“It’s a world full of miracles,” he said. “A world with women in it. What do you think about their incredible cabooses, Jonah Black? Don’t you love their incredible cabooses?”
Pops kind of shouted when he talked, like Regis Philbin. I looked at my watch. “I gotta go,” I said. I stood up.
“I’m not crazy,” he said. “I’m telling you God’s truth. Is there anything in the world like them?”
“Like what?”
“Women’s arses! Unbelievable!”
“I guess,” I said. I started to leave.
“Okay, Chipper. You remember what I said then,” Pops said.
“Okay. About what?”
“About why we’re here.”
“Which was what again?”
He shook his head, disappointed in me.
“Women! To love women!” he shouted.
“Okay.”
I climbed down the ladder and wheeled my bike up to the road. Behind me I could hear Pops singing on top of the lifeguard tower: “’Hello young lovers, wherever you are. . . . I’ve had a love like yours. . . .’”
I pedaled north, past all the beach motels and the seedy condo developments. The wind was gusting and the palm trees were rustling and I saw a coconut fall out of a tree and shatter on the blacktop of A1A.
I thought about what Pops had said.
I don’t know if I want to love all women, but it might be nice to love one. And to have her love me back.
“But I do love you,” Sophie says, pulling up next to me on her mountain bike. “Don’t you know that by now?”
“I know,” I tell her. Then she waves and bikes off way into the distance.
I can’t keep up with her. She’s fast.
(Still Sept. 6, after work.)
I wrote that whole last part while I was waiting to see the Swedes about my job. Now I’m back home, sitting on the dock in the dark, watching the yachts go by on Cocoabutter Creek. I wish we had a yacht.
After I left the beach I rode around Pompano for a while, and eventually wound up at First Amendment Pizza. I sat there for almost an hour, writing in my journal, waiting until things calmed down. Finally Mr. Swede came over to talk to me.
“Yonah!” he said, like I was his long-lost son. “Yonah Black!”
Mrs. Swede dropped her pizza paddle on the floor. I guess she hadn’t noticed me sitting there all that time.
“It isn’t him!” she said.
“It’s him,” Mr. Swede said.
“It’s me,” I said.
“Yonah,” said Mr. Swede. He took off his apron and hugged me. Mrs. Swede waited till he was done, and then she hugged me, too. Being hugged by her is like sitting down in a big old armchair with all the stuffing falling out of it.
“I wanted to ask you if maybe—”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Swede.
“Of course,” said Mr. Swede.
“I’m back for good now so I was wondering if I could start—”
“You vant to get back to vork, you get back to vork. Here,” Mr. Swede said. He handed me three boxed-up pizzas and two videos. “You make delivery. First day back at vork! Zings go better now! Yonah Black, back on yob!”
“But how much am I going to get p—”
“Ve vork dat out,” said Mr. Swede.
“Make delivery,” said Mrs. Swede. “Talk later.”
So, just like old times, I was back on my bicycle, delivering pepperoni pizzas and rental movies around Pompano.
It’s weird. Sometimes I feel like my life takes care of itself. I mean, everything just happens, and I go along for the ride. I don’t feel like I’m making any choices, I’m just living kind of accidentally. I wonder if anyone else feels like this, or if I’m crazy.
Anyway,
the first delivery I had to make was down in Cypress Cove to this guy named Sawyer. So I went west on Tenth as far as the water treatment plant, then south on Fifth Avenue and across Atlantic on Cypress. I leaned my bike against a palm tree and went up to the door with a pepperoni-and-green-pepper pizza and a movie called Sorority Catfight, which I’ve never seen. Sounds pretty dirty, though.
Mr. Sawyer opened the door like two seconds after I rang the bell. He was wearing a white shirt and a blue tie and his boxer shorts. It looked like he came home from work, took off his coat and his pants, and dialed First Amendment and ordered Sorority Catfight and then sat there drinking a gin and tonic until I showed up. He looked like the kind of guy who’d give you your driver’s test at the DMV. Which I actually need to take again, soon. But that’s another story.
Mr. Sawyer handed me twenty bucks and said, “Keep the change,” which was a five-dollar tip, so he wasn’t all bad. I took the twenty and he closed the door and while I biked away I could imagine Mr. Sawyer eating pepperoni and watching the girls from Delta Thigh Delta have a pillow fight.
Next I rode south to McNab and over to the High Ridge Estates. This was a big, two-story, million-dollar house. There was a Volkswagen Jetta in the driveway, which didn’t seem to go with the fancy house. They had ordered Titanic, but no pizza.
I rang the bell and a girl came to the door. I held up the videos and said, “Video guy.” She smiled and then I realized, it was Cheese Girl from the school cafeteria!
She took the tape from me. “Wait here a sec and I’ll get the money,” she said. She left me there without inviting me in, so I had to stand in the doorway looking down the hall at this crazy blue cuckoo clock. Then she came back and gave me ten bucks.
“Keep the change,” she said.
The movie only cost $3.99 to rent. “Are you sure?” I asked.
“Sure. I stole the money from my mother, anyway. She’d hit the roof if she found out I was renting it again. I’ve seen it like a hundred times already.” She looked at me with huge brown eyes. “Have you seen it?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve seen it.”
“Isn’t it just the saddest movie ever? I love it!”