Long Past Stopping

by Oran Canfield

  Even so, no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t bring myself to make the first move. Luckily she didn’t have a problem taking charge, and one night, while espousing my views on how utterly fucked up the universe was, she shut me up midsentence with a kiss. My anxiety disappeared instantly, and we made out under the stars for a few minutes until some other kids interrupted us by coming out to get a last cigarette before our in-dorms curfew.

  “Let’s go to your room,” she said.

  “Shit, it’s already nine thirty,” I said, looking at my watch. “We only have half an hour.”

  “Then we’d better make it quick,” she responded, already walking down the path back to campus. I wasn’t sure whether she meant what I was hoping she meant, and I was too freaked out to ask her.

  She made it very clear when we got to my room, though.

  “So, do you have any condoms?”

  “Wow…Uh…No. I mean…I’ve never even done this before,” I answered, figuring it was best that she knew in case I screwed the whole thing up.

  “Well, you better find one. I’ll be right here,” she said, sitting down on my bed.

  Nervous as hell, I went down the hall and knocked on a few doors to see what I could turn up, but no one was ever around right before curfew. Even if I did find someone, it wasn’t certain that they had any more use for condoms than I did. I thought about making a mad dash for the infirmary, where they always left a salad bowl full of condoms on the counter, but there was no way I could make it back in time.

  Just when I was about to give up, I heard voices coming from my friend Kazuhiro’s room. Kazu was the only Japanese student who made any effort to interact with the American kids. I felt a glimmer of hope because I knew he had a girlfriend. Too impatient to knock, I opened the door to his bedroom, which also served as a clubhouse for all the Japanese exchange students, who would hang out and play video games the rest of America wouldn’t see for another year.

  “Hey, Kazu. Come here a second,” I said, peering in. There were four other Japanese kids, all of them yelling at the TV screen while one of them played Super Mario Brothers 3.

  “What’s up?” he asked, looking up from the game.

  “Come here, I need to ask you something.” I was freaking out, and it must have shown by the sound of my voice. I only had a twenty-minute window left to lose my virginity.

  “Do you have a condom?” I whispered, after getting him to follow me out into the hall.

  “Ah,” he said, smiling. “I have, but it no work for you.”

  “What? What are you talking about, it no work? Just give it to me,” I pleaded.

  “Seriousry. No work. Very embarrassing, but Japanese condom too smar for you.”

  “Too what? Small? You got to be kidding me,” I said. “Just give it to me. It’ll be fine. It’s not like I have anything to brag about.”

  “Okay, but I’m terring you. Too smar.”

  He reappeared a few seconds later with a condom, and I ran upstairs as fast as I could.

  “Find one?” Dana asked when I got back to my room. She was already under the covers, and her clothes were on the floor.

  “Yeah,” I said, locking the door and turning out the light. I didn’t remember what was in my tape deck, but I pressed play to cover up any noise that might occur. It was Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica—not the most conducive music to lose one’s virginity to, but I was running out of time. I took off my clothes, got under the covers, and handed her the condom. Presumably she had more experience with them than I did.

  “There’s something wrong with it. I can’t get it on,” she said.

  I hadn’t even been paying attention to what she was doing for fear of finishing before she even got the damn thing on. Instead I was focusing on the lyrics to the song that was playing.

  meaty dream wet meat,

  It turned out to be the perfect music.

  “Really? He was right then?” I asked, taking the condom from her. Sure enough, the thing was the size of my thumb. I wasn’t sure who I felt worse for, myself or Kazu.

  “Fuck!” I said. “God fucking damn it!” I had been waiting my whole life for this, and finally, after years of fantasizing, there was a real, live, naked girl in my bed.

  “It’ll be fine,” Dana said. “You just have to promise to pull out.”

  Squirmin’ serum ’n semen ’n syrup ’n semen ’n serum,

  Captain Beefheart continued.

  Dana barely made it out of my room a few minutes before ten, but it seemed as though the news had already traveled.

  “Jesus Christ, man. What happened to you?” Matt asked me out in the hall as everyone was showing up back at that dorm.

  “What are you talking about? Nothing,” I answered, trying as hard as I could to look normal.

  “Oh my fucking God! You finally did it. Congratulations,” he said. Then Aaron saw me and figured it out as well. Even my art teacher, Thom, who was more like the crazy uncle I never had than a teacher, did a double take as he checked off our names on his clipboard. When everyone was accounted for, he found me and quietly asked, “So…how did it go?”

  “What do you mean?” How could he possibly know already? It had only been three minutes since Dana had left.

  “You know. How long did it last?” It seemed like a weird question, but after hesitating a moment I said, “I don’t know. Maybe ten or fifteen minutes.”

  “Ten minutes? Good job. I don’t think I even lasted thirty seconds. Seriously, though, what you just did is a big deal. Congratulations.”

  “Hey, Thom, how the hell does everyone know already?”

  “Are you kidding? Go look at yourself in the mirror, man. You’re too young to win the lottery. What else could it be?”

  I took his advice and went to the bathroom. It was true. I couldn’t stop smiling, no matter how hard I tried, which I actually found rather disturbing. Could getting laid really destroy the cynical, negative, misanthropic self-image I had worked so hard to achieve?

  For almost two weeks there was noticeably less bitching and moaning coming from me. Once the thrill of finally having sex wore off though, the old Oran started reemerging, and most of my grumbling was directed at Dana.

  “I can’t work with you staring at me like that. It’s making me nervous,” I snapped at her while I was working on a painting in the art studio. For about an hour I had managed to pretend there was nothing unusual about someone staring at me while I stared at a canvas, but that was as long as I could take it.

  “Do you want me to leave?” she asked, obviously hurt.

  “No, but look around. There are better things to do than watch me. Why don’t you make something?” I asked.

  “I like watching you,” she answered.

  Watching me paint? Clearly she’s fucking crazy. I didn’t like it one bit. Feeling trapped and suffocated, I told her I didn’t think it was going to work out between us.

  MY SCHOOL WASN’T big on traditions, but we did have two yearly events that were unique to us. Instead of proms and home-comings, we had Ring Turning and Fire Run.

  Ring Turning was a bizarre treasure hunt devised by the seniors, in which the juniors had to solve hundreds of clues, sometimes taking them as far away as Flagstaff or Phoenix. The goal was to find where the seniors had hidden their class rings. There was never any warning for it either. One day a solitary index card with a clue would be pinned to the bulletin board, signaling the start of Ring Turning, and giving the juniors one week to follow the clues and find the rings. Nothing was off-limits: The clue “Fireman Award” led to a spot out in the desert where a kid named Howard had passed out directly on top of a campfire, which the other students had successfully put out by pissing on him. “Sheathed/Unsheathed” led the clue seeker to the creek, where in a drunken stupor I had given in to peer pressure from fifteen other kids who wanted to see what an uncircumcised penis looked like. As seniors, we were let out of all our obligations in order to take shifts ambushing the
juniors with high-pressure fire hoses whenever they tried to go to class, eat in the cafeteria, or make any attempt at walking by one of the many fire hydrants on campus. During Ring Turning the school was turned into a war zone, with the juniors and seniors looking like guerrilla freedom fighters, covered from head to toe in red mud.

  Shortly after Ring Turning, the headmaster informed me that Fire Run would happen on the next Wednesday, at 2:30 a.m. I quietly spread the word, and that night, the seniors waited for everyone to go to sleep and watched for the security guard to give us the signal. Armed with flashlights, we snuck out of our dorms and hiked about a half mile off campus to the top of a thousand-foot rock, where we had been amassing a pile of scrap wood over the course of the year for a bonfire. When we lit the fifteen-foot bonfire, the juniors started running through the dorms banging on pots and pans, setting off fire alarms, and yanking everyone else out of bed. We then stood around the top edge of the rock formation holding gigantic flaming torches in the air until we could hear the students cheering us on from campus, at which point we started running down the sheer side of the rock as fast as we could using our torches to light the way. Miraculously, no one had ever been seriously injured during Fire Run, especially considering that a fair number of us were drunk at the time. A couple of kids always got bruised up or sprained their ankles, but even they had so much fun they probably would have gone straight back up and done it again.

  I had been antsy as hell all year to go out and make my mark on the world, but running down the side of that mountain made me realize just how lucky I was to have spent four years at this wacky place, doing things most kids would never get to experience, and this was only one of the countless once-in-a-lifetime experiences I had there. How many kids were lucky—or unlucky—enough to get dropped off in Mexico, or the Hopi Reservation, or the middle of Tucson, or Oaxaca for a three-week field trip, virtually unattended?

  Mostly I was going to miss my friends and teachers, whose only expectation of me was to be myself. Unfortunately, I didn’t fully appreciate what an amazing experience high school had been until I found myself running down the side of a rock at three thirty in the morning, jumping over cacti and trying not to light myself or anything else on fire. I couldn’t imagine a more appropriate end to what had been an amazing four years.

  OUR GRADUATION CEREMONY took place on the quad, where all thirteen of us seniors sat around while the teachers spoke of their hopes for us and singled some of us out for awards. Despite my shitty grades, I ended up getting the overall achievement award for my creative abilities and duties as the student-body president. I had also managed to get a scholarship to go to the San Francisco Art Institute.

  Once we received our diplomas and were shaking hands with our teachers, I found Gary.

  “So, who was it?” No one had come up with any ideas about who was involved in the student-teacher relationship he had told us about.

  “You haven’t figured it out yet? All right. You can’t tell anyone, but it was me,” he answered.

  “You? That’s fucked up. I had no idea.”

  “Of course you didn’t.”

  “Aha. The only reason you told us you knew was to take attention off yourself.”

  “And it totally worked,” he said, gloating.

  “Yeah, but you haven’t told me who it was with,” I said.

  “Jesus. I can’t tell you that, but I’ll give you a hint. She’s wearing cutoffs.”

  “Everyone’s wearing cutoffs,” I said, looking around. But there was only one girl I could see Gary risking his job over. “Wow” was all I could say when I figured it out.

  Jack had come out with his wife, Georgia, and my six-week-old half-brother, Christopher. “I just want to say, I’m really proud of you, son,” he told me.

  I didn’t show it, but it totally pissed me off. I didn’t think he had the right to be proud, considering he’d never been involved in my life. True, he paid my way through school, but I wanted to be angry so I chose not to think about that part.

  As if he were psychic, he went on to say, “I know I had nothing to do with it, and I’m not taking any credit, but I’m proud of you anyway.”

  “Well, thanks. And hey, now you have another chance,” I said, referring to Christopher, who may have been a cute baby, but it was hard to tell since he was recovering from a rash that completely covered his face. I wanted to feel some kind of connection with him—after all, he was my brother—but babies made me a little uncomfortable. Or maybe it was that I thought I was supposed to act a certain way around babies that made me uncomfortable. Jack seemed genuinely excited about Christopher, though, despite the bags under his eyes.

  “And here,” he said, pulling an envelope from his pocket. “This is for you.”

  I looked at the two hundred-dollar bills he gave me, and thanked him, trying to hide my disappointment.

  THE NEXT DAY, hung over from getting drunk with my friends and teachers—another high school tradition I hadn’t known about—I set out for my new life in California with Eli, who had come back to see us graduate, Aaron, and two other friends all packed into my tiny Honda. We only got a half mile from campus before the car made a loud noise and died.

  When we got it to the shop, the guy told me it was going to cost two hundred bucks and it would be three days before they could get the part. I handed over the envelope Jack had given me, and Eli called his mom to come pick us up and take us to her house.

  twenty-six

  In which a learned doctor tells our subject about the god Iboga, enemy of Chiva

  GOING BACK TO my first rehab in Redwood City was certainly a blow to my ego after all the shit I had told them, but I was fucking beat down, confused, and had lost all hope. I was experiencing incomprehensible demoralization, as they called it in the recovery scene, and I had to admit that it described my situation perfectly. Not a single one of my bright ideas had worked, and I was finally ready to listen to these fucking people. If they tell me to go to meetings, I’ll go to meetings, I thought to myself. If they tell me to get a sponsor, I’ll get a sponsor. If I have to live in the clean and sober house with four other guys in the same room, I’ll live in the fucking clean and sober house.

  “Just have a seat, someone will be with you,” the receptionist said when I checked in.

  I sat down and looked through the stack of magazines they had sitting on a desk. Although I had been in that room many times, I had never really noticed it before. It was like a waiting room at a dentist’s office. They even had one of those Highlights magazines I remembered from the last time I had gone to the dentist, when I was twelve. I was looking for the carrot, the starfish, the fork, and the number seven that were supposed to be hidden in one of the drawings when Barry, the head honcho himself, came out. He didn’t seem pleased or unhappy to see me. Just unusually official.

  “Hi, Oran,” he said, without adding any type of “how have you been?” or “good to see you.” “The staff is all busy at the moment, so let’s get the physical out of the way now.”

  He led me back to the examination room and told me to take off my clothes. It was weird. Usually he tried to be funny—cracking jokes, making the clients feel at ease. This time, it was all formality. He checked my heart rate, blood pressure, and reflexes, before I noticed him putting on a rubber glove. Grabbing a bottle of KY jelly out of a cabinet, he asked, “Can you drop your drawers and bend over for me, please?”

  “Um, I don’t think that’s necessary. I feel fine, really.”

  “I’m the doctor, and I think it’s necessary. Just bend over. It’ll be so quick you won’t even know what happened.”

  “Do you have to? You never did it last time.”

  “Hey, Oran. Here you are for the third time, and you still think you know more than the professionals? Now bend over!”

  He was not fucking around. This wasn’t on the list of things I thought they would ask me to do to stay clean, but I turned toward the bed and bent over. If they tell me to b
end over so they can stick their finger in my ass, I’ll bend over and…. The whole thing was done before I could even finish my thought, but I still felt violated.

  Barry, on the other hand, seemed to lighten up a bit afterward. “All clear, everything’s fine. No growths, polyps, or vegetations—you’re good to go,” he said in a more relaxed tone of voice. I put my clothes back on in silence.

  “Hey, man, I don’t like doing that any more than you do,” he said.

  “It didn’t seem that way,” I responded. “Can I go now?”

  “We’re done. You can either wait in the lobby or go join the yoga class and Eileen will come get you when she’s ready.”

  “What happened to Jan?”

  “Jan’s got a full caseload. We’re putting you with Eileen for now but will revisit it when Jan has an opening.”

  It wasn’t long before Eileen came to get me. We went to her office, where she told me to start from the last time I was there.

  “Well, I jumped out the window and caught the train back to San Francisco,” I started.

  “Why did you jump out of the window? You could have just walked right out the door. The whole house had to get in the van and drive around looking for you,” she interrupted me.

  “Because I would have had to deal with twenty people trying to convince me I would be dead within the first ten minutes of leaving,” I answered.

  “True.”

  “It was like I was possessed or something. I needed to get high right then.”

  “Okay, go on.”

  I told her an abbreviated version of the next two years, but it still took a while.