Little Reef and Other Stories

by Michael Carroll

  For a long time Phil and I had only exchanged a few scant emails to stay in touch—until, of course, those recent, terrible back-and-forths by email between us. I hadn’t directly spoken to Phil in years. But we’d been talking a little in the last week or so. I was ripped by the news, and suddenly I was back in his life, and he was back in my mind. So I flew the fuck back to Florida.

  Although he was basically straight, Phil and I had slept together in high school two or three times. One night when most of our classmates were at junior prom and my parents had driven up to the St. Marys for the weekend to fish, I asked Phil to stay over. He confessed that he was part werewolf and said that he believed this meant he was a bisexual. He was open to trying it out. I blew him and at first I thought it was going to take too long. We went to sleep in my bed holding each other. The next morning I scrambled him some eggs while he colored a sketch of a satanic-looking superhero he’d created in his sketchpad. We didn’t kiss; he didn’t talk. I looked at what he was doing and touched his shoulder as I was serving him. He growled, ate, then went home.

  And I hated myself for that stupidity of having touched him like a lover, like a girlfriend.

  Someone, not our friend Cindy, told me that Phil was getting into drugs with some of the other kids in gifted, the ones he played Dungeons and Dragons with, and I seethed inside. I was a priss who would never finish even one beer at a pool party if the teen host’s parents were not at home. In fact, I disliked the taste of that stuff, so who was I? Since the night of the blow job we spoke less, and I was hurt—and before school was out for the year and summer began I told him in the hall in front of our lockers that I couldn’t be his friend if he kept on getting high.

  “That’s your old tomato?” he said, sniffing, sneering. Old tomato was one of our jokes.

  “That’s my ultimatum,” I said steadily, nodding, then waited and watched as he slunk off.

  That summer I went to Memphis for a couple of months to be with relatives and to avoid growing up, I think. I helped out in my grandmothers’ gardens and read books in the AC. I was not homosexual. I kept telling myself that. But I knew I was the gayest person I’d ever met—so in love.

  I got my second chance with him during our senior year. Phil lived in my neighborhood, and one night while my parents were in bed he scratched on my screen and I opened my window and helped him wriggle over the sill into my room. We whispered. He said he’d missed me. I think I was crying, but in any event I told him I’d missed him and could we start over. I was a snob and an idiot, I said, and then he quietly growled and we kissed for the first time, deeply. We took off each other’s clothes and kept kissing and also for the first time he went down on me. I wanted to keep the lights on and he settled for a desk lamp. He asked me if I had any Vaseline. I put a robe on and crept into the hall, stopping to hear my father’s snores. Then I hurried to the bathroom, opened the cabinet carefully, and found the Vaseline. In the bedroom he kissed and licked and bit me some more, quietly growling, then he put the Vaseline on both of us and I crouched on my bed in front of him on all fours and he slowly entered me, which didn’t hurt at all, only at the beginning and then exquisitely as my head went numb and white noise bristled in the canals of my ears and my vision went blank. Somehow he knew to tell me to take deep breaths. I pushed back against him and it was over in two or three minutes. He pulled out and let himself into the hallway. He was dirty and needed to wash up. I held my breath and led him through the den and let him out through the French doors. He sprinted across the backyard and scaled the fence. There I was in my sweatpants, shirtless and feeling delicious, my naked arms folded across my chest, taking in the night air. I must have smelled the air carefully. I must have thought, now just let me sleep.

  The next morning I got out of bed forgetting about the bites and my mother said to me in the kitchen, “Did you have a date last night that you failed to mention to me? My God, you have hickeys. Hickeys! You sneak out and see some girl? You’re all marked up with hickeys!”

  “I was scratching at these mosquito bites and I guess bruised myself,” I said, yawning.

  “Bullshit. That’s a hickey, that’s a hickey, and that’s a hickey. Can’t fool me on hickeys.”

  I just mostly miss my sweet little Gretchen and my big cool Pops,” he was saying. He looked cadaverous yet pinkish, and I could see some of Phil’s old contours. “My big sweet Pops.”

  I smiled encouragingly and said, chuckling foolishly, “Why do you call Derek Pops?”

  His daughter was the senior in high school, I remembered, and his son, the oversized gay kid everyone picked on because of his effeminacy and his autism, was a sophomore. Derek was half-Asian; Phil’s second wife was Cambodian. He’d met the first while they were both working at the Walmart out on Beach Boulevard—when Phil was working as a pharmacist’s assistant and “between things” as he put it, finishing his degree, getting sober, about to get his first divorce, as it turned out. I was trying to keep the chronology straight. It seemed clear, Phil preferred Derek.

  Phil was sitting up in his crushed velvet swivel La-Z-Boy in his robe and sweats and said, “I call him Pops because he’s more mature than me in some ways—except when other people are around. He can laugh at me in a way I take fine, but only from Pops. Kid’s really hilarious when he wants to be, so I give him that—figure it’s his due. Those bratty fucks give him enough shit.”

  In school, Phil had never bullied anybody, even after tenth grade, when he’d gotten taller and had more muscle. It was his father who was the bully. But when we had first met, in middle school, Phil still looked chunky in his dark cords and Black Sabbath T-shirt and gray hoodie with drawstrings—the hoodie even on warm days to help hide what he called back then his blub.

  I said, “Does Pops come over a lot? Does your mom or Pops’s mother bring him over?”

  “He’s too scared. We’re close, and if I’m not with him I guess in some ways he can miss me less, not think about me. But I’ll have him come see me in the—y’know—when I’m …”

  Phil must have been determined to be the dad, but with a lot less money, that his own dad had never been to him. Phil had been artistically talented. He drew series of comic books when no one else I knew was into reading them even. He worked on the covers he’d like them to have with oil crayons with far more dense detail than the frames on the pages inside. He read Tolkien and played Dungeons and Dragons with the gifted druggies. The only thing we did together was go to the movies or swim in his pool. His father snickered and said flat out that if Phil wanted to go to college and wanted him to pay for it, Phil wasn’t studying anything artsy, he was going into a practical area. Which luckily my father had never said to me, just wanting me to go to college.

  “What do you want Pops to do?” I said. “I mean, what’s he interested in doing in life?”

  “Anything he wants. Look, he’s got long, black painted nails. He says he’s going to be a dress designer and do everything for Madonna, from her apartment to her clothes. Pops plans on marrying Madonna. He can’t decide if he’s going into architecture, fashion, or musical theater.”

  “That’s great. Jesus, Phil, you’re the best father he could possibly have. So incredible.”

  He half closed his eyes and said, “It’s nice of you to say that. It’s really cool, so thank you.”

  He was evidently tired. I imagined he was like that all day, of course. I’d dropped over by appointment, texting him. He’d said he was too tired to talk. We’d talk when I came over.

  The apartment had clean walls and overall clean but flattened-down tan carpet, and there was very little furniture in it. In the living room, just our two crushed velvet swivel La-Z-Boys. Mine was wobbly on its axis. I had to sit still not to pitch left or buck suddenly forward. He was already getting rid of most of his stuff, parceling it out to his younger brothers, keeping a dresser and the bed in the bedroom, minimum kitchen utensils, towels, linens. The fridge held his meds, some uneaten fruit, and several ind
ividual-sized bottles of Ensure nutrition supplement drinks, like instant shakes. When I saw those, getting myself some cold distilled water, I prayed stupidly that he could get better and beat the cancer just from having a pure infusion of vitamins and minerals. Not even for the two kids, for me. Not because I was still in love with him. I wasn’t. He wasn’t yellow, and I thanked my stars for that. The last time I’d seen him he was a bit overweight again, tan, and vivid. This was back at Walmart when Phil was finishing night school after flunking out of college in Gainesville. His parents were helping to support him because of his DUIs, and his wife had to pick up their daughter, Gretchen, from daycare then pick Phil up at work and drive him to his AA meeting. Knowing none of this, I had come in to buy soap and toiletries, right there in front of the pharmacy counter, and he called down from his perch, calling me Mr. West, and we’d stopped to talk, me dazzled, him full of “pressured speech” and epic confession. He knew, and I knew, that it was another brief encounter for us, and that we were about to say goodbye and not see each other again for a long while—the tendency of ours.

  I remember feeling awkward, out of place, and not because I was in Walmart. I’d wanted to travel, be free. And I knew that he knew this about me, too. “Wow,” I’d said, taking in his slightly beat-up appearance. “Wow!”

  “Some fucking anecdote, right?” he’d then said, looking right at me, not looking off.

  I had stood there and said he looked great, then wondered if this wasn’t uncool, smiling at him longingly and not acting impressed or stricken by what had happened to him.

  “Well, you look terrific,” I said, and he frowned. “I’m glad you’re getting it all together.”

  “You’re the one who looks great,” he said. “How do you do it? Clean living? Hope so.”

  “I’m just here for a little bit,” I said, “passing through, actually. But you look and sound great. I’m still just so shocked. I didn’t think you were in town. You were really the last person I’d expect to see for some reason. I mean, there’s never any time. I just miss you, but you seem like you’ve got this one, like you’ve got it together, and I’m glad. Married! Child! So cool …”

  I told him I was just in town between grad school years and was headed back to Ohio. I hated my graduate program and wondered why anyone should do anything but live a real life. I was lying, though: I wasn’t going to finish grad school at all. I didn’t want to teach, no way.

  “No, man, I really fucked up,” he said. “All I do’s work and go to meetings and go home and fall in bed. But Laurie’s a saint. I know it’s bullshit to say that, but I’d be in jail without her. My asshole dad doesn’t want to see me, he just writes checks and my mom brings ’em over.”

  “God, tell them hi for me then, okay?”

  He made his way toward the counter, touching things along the way as though attending to them, accounting for them as a good employee, and I was making moves to go, too. I’d been surprised in my funk, hating the old home haunt, hating myself, wanting to chase the past away.

  Worse, I had the self-loathing feeling that we never should have fooled around. We might still be friends if we hadn’t fooled around, good friends, the kind who kept up with each other.

  Finally I waved my purchases at him, and he said, “Stay in school, dude. You got that?”

  Then I was mad at him. Jailhouse Joe wants to go avuncular, scare me straight, I thought.

  I walked away knowing I’d misunderstood him. And I thought of Mr. Johnson bawling a great son out over the rim of his scotch glass, the old man’s eyes looking boiled. I went overseas a year later, though, and heard that the old man had died suddenly of a heart attack. I thought of Mr. Johnson jiggling his scotch and ice and getting worked up over something Phil had said and keeling over, the way I’d actually imagined for years would happen. I’d seen too many movies, I thought when I heard about this from Cindy. Even more than for Phil I’d felt sorry for his mom.

  Mrs. Johnson came in, first knocking on the hollow construction of the apartment door then unlocking and pushing the door right open. Of course she looked older, but not a whole lot older than Phil. She’d moved out to the beaches years ago, away from our neighborhood, and played a lot of golf and tennis, but she was carrying a lot of weight that I supposed was appropriate to her age, and she still had a girlish laugh and a bright smile. She set down her plastic shopping bags, in the middle of the carpet, managing not to seem embarrassed by the sparseness and sordidness of the room, and went to kiss Phil on the forehead. Phil smirked and didn’t get out of his chair.

  I got up and she said, “Well, well, always the gentleman. Always the gentleman and hey, looking so good. So handsome, like always. So what do they put in that Manhattan water?”

  “We probably don’t want to know!” I said hugging her, then we pecked on the cheek.

  “Right you don’t,” she said, and she pinched my arm, and when I withdrew it she lunged in and got another snatch. “That’s right you don’t, mister. How are things in New York City?”

  “They’re fine, I just don’t have any money is all.”

  “Hey, but you can’t have everything,” she said and winked. “Can’t have everything, can you, Phillip? Phillip can’t have everything, I can’t have everything, but you’ve got Manhattan!”

  They were originally from Ohio and Mrs. Johnson was too tanned to dream of New York. Once Phil and I had dreamed of getting out of Jacksonville together and heading to New York as writing partners. We were going to write sci-fi and horror books. Phil said, “Mike’s a writer.”

  “That was always the dream, right?” she said, looking adoringly on.

  We’d always had this flirty rapport, this quick flame to friendliness and intimacy, in their kitchen or on the screened-in porch next to their pool. Phil knotted and knotted a rubber band.

  I said, “But hey, Candace. Take my chair. I’ve been sitting all day driving.”

  “Driving in this hellhound heat and traffic?” she said. “Thank you, I will. I bet you don’t miss the Jacksonville traffic. That’s one thing. Don’t miss that. And Dick died, you knew that.”

  “I did,” I said. “Cindy Cross told me. She wrote me a letter not long after it happened.”

  “Well, not a day goes by. Nothing changes; he’s still sort of here. But I swear, the traffic. And how is she, Cindy? Phillip—I’d nearly forgotten all about her—you guys been in touch?”

  Phil said blandly, “She came and saw me last week. I told you that, Mom. Jeez.”

  “That’s right. I stay so busy, Mike. I’m all awhirl. I have five freaking grandkids!”

  I was sitting on the floor to the side and I said, “It doesn’t seem possible.”

  “Thank you, but should it seem possible that your best friend from high school has a pair of kids in high school, when you’ve hardly changed?” She pitched it to a holler: “Hardly at all!”

  I felt this power again that I’d felt back then. I’d been a pretty boy, once I’d dropped a lot of weight from dieting and running, lost the zits with the help of the burning cream, and gotten the braces off. I had been sometimes happily in love with her son: did she have any idea? Moms of the world had to be as randy as the rest of us. We were now the age Candace had been then.

  A moment of quiet passed, unnervously, wherein she and I kept smiling at each other.

  Phil said, “Mom, did you remember Dickie’s card?”

  “Oh, damn it,” she hissed, then smiled at me for sympathy. She rolled her eyes.

  “I’d like to be able to describe it when I call Dickie up and thank him for making it.”

  “It’s in the glove compartment,” she said, clapping once, and hitched left in the chair.

  I offered to go out and find it so she wouldn’t have to get up out of the tricky chair yet. Her car was right out front. I opened the passenger-side front door and the inside smelled like cigarettes. I found a manila envelope curled and crammed in the glove compartment and undid the brass clasp and slipped o
ut the homemade card. It was done in Magic Marker, which made me think of Phil’s earliest colored drawings in sixth grade. It read, “Dear Uncle Phil, I’ll come see you real soon, okay? Before that I hope you get better and better. Love, Dickie (the Third).”

  It was a picture of a man and a boy in the basket of a hot-air balloon, a close-up, which I thought clever. (Whenever my father made photos of anyone, he backed up so that expanses of a brick-veneer side of a house dwarfed the human figures he’d shunted to the lower right corner of the picture, their faces obscured by shadow or erased in strong sunlight.) On the card, the man’s spidery hand rested lightly on the boy’s shoulder. Only the bottom section of the colorful striped balloon was shown. The sky was streaked a cloudless pale blue, banners flapped from the tethers attaching the basket to the balloon, and the boy waved at the viewer with a friendly, frozen howl.

  Before I left I made Phil a pan of rice, which he said he’d take with a little parmesan. He said just to give him the Kraft container and he’d sprinkle it on. He called from his chair while I was lifting the lid to check the rice: “Hey, are you planning on seeing Cindy while you’re here?”

  I stirred the rice, waited, then replied, “I guess so. I thought I’d give her a call at least.”

  “Cool.”

  He asked me to bring him his meds in from the kitchen counter. And when I sat carefully down in the chair again and he swallowed the pills with wads of rice and distilled water, he told me things—not about his fears but about his kids, how he regretted that they didn’t live together, even though they had two different mothers. I settled in for a while longer and enjoyed myself.

  I’d already decided to wait her out, and you know how much I always liked Candace,” I said.

  Phil’s and my friend Cindy was a married mom of two, and I wanted to give the moms of the world a shout-out, although since I’d realized I was gay I’d never wanted to be a parent.

  “That was your time to be alone together,” said Cindy. “Candace is sweet, she probably thinks it’s partly her fault—or more than partly. Moms just naturally will. I feel sorry for her.”