Though his team still won, and though the coach only told him to get more sleep, and though his teammates’ gibes were friendly, he labored to understand his lapse, which was involuntary and seemed uncontrollable. He read Aristotle on causality, sought an efficient cause, and came up with something that made sense: There were only boys in his life. He spent all his time with boys.
With only a month until summer, CJ was able to keep his eyes and mind on the tasks in front of him. Back in Michigan, he told his parents that he no longer saw the need for them to spend their hard-earned cash on a private school for him. When they proclaimed their eagerness to continue doing so—what else was money for, a good education unlocked doors, etc.—he mentioned his desire (which was true!) for a more mainstream cultural experience; as it was, the only kids he knew how to talk to were snotty rich kids. He didn’t need a third argument, populism being something both parents felt obliged to encourage, though it made them nervous.
So his place was canceled at Grosvenor, and he felt on the verge of hopeful. His brother was glad to see him. There was a girl a few houses down who didn’t seem to mind talking to someone younger. But starting eighth grade at the local junior-senior high school, he found that the kids he used to play with had knotted into groups with their own jokes and vocabularies. They didn’t purposely exclude him, but he felt excluded, like a foreign exchange student, and he spent time trying to figure out if he was superior or inferior. Lonely, bored, and angry, with five years of the same yawning before him, along with homework on subjects he had already mastered, he sassed a teacher who should have retired years ago and received a detention.
It was that afternoon in the cafeteria when the potential for kinship opened to him. In the shuffling silence of the twenty or so detainees trying to amuse themselves without attracting the monitoring teacher’s attention, a high, musical voice rang out: “Man, oh man, I broke a fingernail! Does someone have an emery board?” Heads turned, including CJ’s. There was something interestingly theatrical in the delivery. His eyes came to rest on a small blond girl two tables away with a savagely comic expression and long red fingernails. She was waving her manicured hand. “That’s okay,” she said, “I’ll take care of it.” She stuck a long-nailed finger in her mouth and bit down, bit it off, her finger, the whole thing past the knuckle. There was a room-wide gasp. The teacher approached; some kids snickered. Then the girl spat out a red and white glob, which turned out to be the masticated wax remains of a red-nailed vampire finger. In the maelstrom of laughter CJ picked up his books, moved to her table, and met Vera DeVito, who was whip-crack smart and didn’t give a shit about that or anything.
It was a match. Adolescent misfits, their alliance gave them pleasure and safety. They hung out after school, honing their acerbity. Kids who messed with either of them dared double ridicule; soon there was no messing. But in certain ways they were too similar. Some weekends they spent alone because they were both too proud to make a phone call. They were wary of each other. Their affection was anxious, tentative.
Then (ta-da?) I entered the picture. It seems weird to applaud myself, but CJ and Vera both told me that the seed for what we would call 4EVER only began to sprout when I joined the group. It wasn’t love at first sight. I had arrived at LJHS the same fall as CJ, and we three had some classes together. But they were kids I avoided, clever and sharp-tongued, and what would interest them in me? I spoke in class only when called on and ate lunch with other quiet, solitary girls.
The second semester I was further perfecting my isolation. I had art right before lunch, and the teacher allowed me to eat my sandwich in the room and keep working, a privacy undisturbed till the day CJ walked in. I remember my drawing, a pen-and-ink of a nude woman with bigger-than-regulation hands and feet. I had just finished it and signed my name, Kay Campion. CJ eyed it awhile, then he said with a kind of drawl, as if he were acting the part of someone impressed, “So this is a Kay Campion?” But inside the joke, I felt real admiration. I looked at what I’d done, and it seemed good to me too, and suddenly I had a voice. “Yes, it is!” I said. “Are you familiar with, uh, Campion’s work?”
We riffed on our similar tastes in art and our good luck in finding this rare piece, the artist being such a recluse. That sort of verbal play wasn’t anything I could keep up. And even now I sometimes wonder why they liked me so much. I was a novelty, a big cuddly doll that eventually they would set aside. But they kept calling, they didn’t want to do anything without me, and slowly, slowly, I started to trust them and like them. Once again I had friends. By tenth grade the three of us had earned if not high regard from the other students, at least the secure status of a rebel group. Vera and I stopped setting our hair, and CJ let his grow, dark curls springing out from his head like Bob Dylan’s. Girls still had to wear skirts to school, so I asked for a sewing machine for my birthday and made myself and Vera some long flowered skirts. Hippies, people called us, and we reveled in the gibe as it fell upon us, light and glittery like fairy dust.
Three was a triumvirate, a trinity, enough legs to hold up a stool. Except to play contract bridge, which CJ and I were teaching Vera, we didn’t need a fourth. Then halfway through the year, a boy from Detroit walked into CJ’s homeroom, tall, good-looking, probably bound for popularity despite his late arrival on the scene. At lunch in the cafeteria we checked him out brazenly. A face man, said CJ. Dumb jock, said Vera. I said, Please don’t talk so loud! I had no caption for him. I liked his face, and it made me nervous.
As we predicted, the new guy was embraced by the kids who thought most flamboyantly well of themselves. St. John Scully, with the broad, handsome face, big chest and arms, played football and basketball, liked the Doors, spoke mildly but with assurance, and started dating Cathy Kirk. Then out of nowhere, it seemed, a rumor started. St. John Scully didn’t try hard enough on the basketball court. He held back; didn’t care; didn’t play with heart. Facts about him were scrutinized, first by the boys who called themselves Trojans, and then by the general populace of LJHS, that (1) his mother was Cathy Kirk’s cleaning woman, (2) he wore the same three shirts to school on alternating days, and worst, (3) nothing you said to him would piss him off. One afternoon Cathy got on the school bus, and instead of taking her usual seat she said something that was reported as You give me the creeps and passed him by. It must have been hell for him. The hallway taunts crescendoed, kids competed in the invention of pejorative nicknames—Squirrely, because of his clothes, Gandhi because he wouldn’t fight back, St. John of the Cross because it sounded good. Someone would bump him accidentally-on-purpose just to see what he’d do, and kids would stop to watch what they had come to expect: Saint eyeing his attacker with mournful gravity, then walking on, swinging his long arms as if nothing had happened.
It was so sad and terrible that one day, in a burst of fellow feeling, I sat down at his lunch table. I didn’t know what to say. I almost got up in confusion, but CJ and Vera were on their way, if only to get a closer look at his fatal flaw. “You’re unreal, man,” Vera said as she put her tray on his table. “Do you realize that?”
He shrugged, swallowed the food in his mouth. “How do you know what’s real?”
Vera and CJ were merely curious at first, but there were no questions of theirs that this kid wouldn’t answer, no part of his life that he held back from us, and soon we were telling him and one another things that we had kept secret before. If my advent helped our group to like one another without reservation, it was Saint’s that turned the feeling into love. For Vera too, even when she gave him a hard time. “You’re a fucking saint,” she said, and that’s what we called him. And he was, an angel, agent and object of our yearning for beauty and goodness.
10
CJ
With the darkness thinning toward dawn, with his father’s rubber hanging from his dick, CJ leans out his bedroom window toward the beam of Saint’s upward gaze. An organ in his body that seems to reside between his stomach and his heart hurts so badly he co
uld weep, but he knows only how to be amusing. “But soft,” he stage-whispers. “What light through yonder window breaks?”
“Fuck you!” Saint’s voice rises to his ears. “You’ve got to help me.”
His friend’s problem is obvious. But CJ is lost in his cleverness and Romeo and Juliet, despite the fact that his lines belong to the figure standing below. It’s what he wants Saint to be saying to him: “Deny thy father and refuse thy name…and I’ll no longer be a Capulet!”
“Shit, man. I’m freezing my ass off!”
“But you look so fine! You look so—how you say in America? Cool?”
“CJ. Please?”
There’s pain in his friend’s voice. He hears it, and it strengthens him. “Don’t go away,” he cries absurdly, and pulls off his sweatshirt, his stupid rubber. “Hey, man, just keep your pants on!” Naked, he dances around the room in anticipation of something he hasn’t dared to imagine, free of everything that used to weight him to earth. Still naked, he descends the stairs, bursts out onto the dewy lawn. “You Looney Tunes! You fucking mental patient!”
Saint stares a second, then he puts a hand over his eyes. “I didn’t mean to set a trend. All I want is a pair of jeans. Shorts. Something?”
His friend’s request is a disappointment. Under other circumstances, CJ would have deflated and started in with the gibes. But in the predawn light there’s a weird radiance around them both, though CJ can’t tell if it’s coming from Saint or his own brain. In the middle of Saint’s chest is a patch of curly red hair; CJ wants to touch it. Saint stands with his weight on one foot, in the fluid S-curve of the statue of David. “At least,” Saint implores, “get me a bathing suit!”
There are times in a person’s life when, even as an event is occurring, you know you might not ever understand it. CJ has often conjured scenes of sex, love, pain, and death, but in the realm of the actual, he is at sea. In the breaking dawn, his friend’s large, pale body obliterates everything that CJ has ever conceived. Like a young child—the only persona he can inhabit now—he reaches out and tags Saint. “Touched you last!” he cries, and gallops off across the lawn, arms outspread in a dream of flying.
He falls but doesn’t hurt himself. The grass is soft in Eden. He starts rolling over the damp, cool lawn, dizzying himself till there’s no top or bottom, no ground or sky, just this moist, sweet-smelling semi-dark all around him. He remembers a family car trip to Canada, the moment when, after a night of wakeful car sleep, he opened his eyes to pale green foggy hills in a fragrant newborn world. Saint is standing nearby, arms awkwardly folded. CJ leaps up and dances just out of reach. “You’re it. Loosen up, boy.”
Saint runs clumsily, only half into the game, like an adult entertaining a child. Fine with CJ. He runs a circle around Saint, then dances back. “You can’t catch me.”
Saint’s long arm whips out and tags him. Saint takes off.
CJ must now reassemble. Saint, the clumsy hippo, is suddenly swerving, dodging. He takes cover behind a tree, pops his head out. “Evil creature!” cries CJ. “Foul fiend!”
It’s all around the mulberry bush, the monkey chased the weasel. It’s Sambo’s tigers running round and round the African tree, chasing the boys till they all melt to butter in the heat and speed. Saint stumbles. Close behind, CJ trips. They fall, skin on skin. There’s the taste of salt, CJ laughing or maybe weeping.
Sprawled, the boys don’t look at each other. It’s not the first time they’ve touched. The group exchanges hippie hugs as a matter of course. They pat, they stroke T-shirted shoulders. But their hands on each other’s sweaty backs this morning feel dangerous. Personal. Intentional. They move apart, gazes sliding by each other. CJ is suddenly afraid of what Saint is thinking. “You came all the way here in your birthday suit. That’s so bizarre,” he says.
But it’s not what he means. It’s not bizarre as in freakish, it’s bizarre as in marvelous, miraculous; a wish granted, idea made flesh. He chances a look in Saint’s eyes, conveying these thoughts telepathically. Saint’s freckled skin looks fragile, easily scratched. His smile is frightened or generic.
CJ is very close to panic now. Saint keeps smiling his stupid smile, his gaze every which where, and CJ knows what Saint isn’t looking at. CJ himself doesn’t even have to look to know. A final attempt at coolness, he sits up and crosses his legs, allowing his dick to do whatever it wants. He pushes it down into the grass, and it pops back up, pop goes the weasel! Trying to be funny. Is he funny? He wants to laugh, to duck himself back into the silliness of a few minutes ago—he’s rarely silly and longs to be (if only Saint’s cock were as unruly). But Saint looks uninvolved, his smile seems to hide pity, and what did CJ expect?
More than ever now, CJ needs to be cool. Which means make a joke. Is that a banana in my pocket or am I in love with you? Or he could say, Do you think I want to fuck you, huh? in a tone that renders the notion absurd. But the feeling of more-than-disappointment, of bereavement, of being booted out of Eden, obliterates irony. He wants to tell his friend that he dreams about him, that he loves him, not just sexually, but that too. When the time comes he will happily die with him, or for him. But his jaws are locked, his mind stalled out. If he were standing at that moment on the bluff, he’d jump without anybody’s hand in his, he’d jump and that would be that, dust to dust, like Goering in final, uncontestable control of his life.
Then, like the man in the Zen story who hangs by his fingers from a cliff while the hungry tiger prowls below, CJ gives himself over to the moment. His hand, as if accidentally, grazes Saint’s thigh. Saint’s dick stirs. He strokes again, as if he’s in a trance, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. And in the silence of the spreading yard, he hears the sudden intake of his friend’s breath. CJ’s eyes are closed—if he looked at Saint he would surely die—but his hand has closed over Saint’s dick and he can feel Saint feeling pleasure. It’s like touching himself, but so much better. He thinks of soldiers dying for their comrades, and of Moses closing his eyes before the face of God, and then Saint’s arms are around his back, they are touching each other at the same goddamned time, and there is nothing else to think about.
Afterward, breath slowing, CJ is ready to die. It should happen exactly now, at this peak, after which everything that is not this is half-assed and ordinary. But he is alive, the sun is rising, and questions ring in his mind: Did you like it? Do you hate me now? Or, oh God, do you love me? Saint’s wide-open eyes convey no information.
“Hey, man. Where are you?” CJ says at last, but Saint doesn’t seem to understand the question. “So, uh, er, do you still want them there blue jeans?” He laughs like a cretin. “Or do you want to flash back up Main Street and scare the tourists?”
Saint’s mouth curves into a frightened smile. CJ wants to embrace him, but Saint’s blank face walls him off. “I’ll take you up on those jeans,” Saint says at last, casually. “And a shirt, if you have one that’s big enough.”
“You can have one of Dad’s.”
Their words are painfully offhand. Saint has to work today. CJ, who would do anything for Saint, does the few things he is asked to do. He gives him clothing and drops him off at his restaurant.
11
Chicago Run
And then? With the Pledge, we might have seemed to be courting death, but it was also joy we were after. We wanted to feel our birthright, what we thought other, happier people felt—the sense of endless possibility, the world shimmering around us. To dance beneath the diamond sky.
And I think we did, at times, at first. But we were also at war within ourselves, and the next day, or even that night, we felt for the first time uncomfortable with one another. I didn’t know what had happened between Saint and CJ but it was easy to see that Saint kept himself on the far side of wherever CJ happened to place himself, while CJ’s jokiness became more frantic. To my shame, though, I wasn’t thinking much about CJ; my secret eye was on Saint and Vera. I had promised Jesus to die with His name on my lips if he kept them
apart and, to my surprise and relief, that particular prayer seemed to have been answered. All of a sudden, of the four of us, I was the one Saint wanted to be with, which left CJ with Vera, and all of us shrill and nervous as we tried to re-create our mutual affection as if from relics and old parchments.
The weather remained hot and densely humid. The wind off the lake peppered our arms with sand and tried to blow our magnetic cards off the board. But playing bridge imposed on us a sort of formal harmony, and we spent almost all of our waking time near the bluff that would witness our Grand Finale. Vera would come early to the park and stay late in order to avoid her father and brother. When Arlyn dropped me at school, I’d enter the right-hand door, count to fifty, and exit the left. Saint maintained his work schedule, but otherwise he was with us. As for CJ, with his mother gone and his father at work, his time was his own. Even with Saint acting like he didn’t exist, where else could he spend his last days?
Then toward the end of those stultified days something loosened up in us, or at least in CJ, since it was his idea. On Tuesday, Saint’s day off, with eight or nine days till the Pledge came due, we would go down to Chicago to see a Cubs game. We’d arrive in time for the opening pitch and return—after a postgame beer (courtesy of our fake IDs)—in time for Vera’s and my curfews. CJ was floating, almost giddy at the prospect of something new. And the following morning, dressed in bright blue, Cubs cap and Cubs T-shirt, he was parked outside the school with Vera and Saint in the car. He had a blue plastic Cubs change purse with four fat joints. “Root, root, root!” he cried. “I crave Cracker Jack!”
Once, in Lourdes Page 11