Clay's Way

by Mastbaum, Blair

  I want to hit him. “You’re acting like an idiot. Slow down.” I hold on to the dashboard.

  “Sam, I’m warning you, man, you better shut the fuck up.”

  “No, face up to me. Fucking baby.” Tell me you love me. That’s all I want to hear. Tell me you were sad when I left last night. I see his fist tighten and his arm pull back.

  His teeth are clenched hard, making his jaw muscles shake.

  Sweat drips down the sides of my torso.

  He punches the seat inches away from where I’m sitting and rocks back and forth, like a caged animal, too wild for this small space.

  I try to put the mirror back on, but the bracket is broken now, too.

  He turns the radio way up and pushes my hand away from the window. His anger smells like a rancid variation of how he smells during sex. “Fuck the mirror!” We nearly hit a car going by in the other lane. He lays on the horn. “Fuck you, bitch. Fucking idiot!”

  I’m sick of this. I want to make him hurt. I want him to cry and feel a loss of control. I don’t care what the repercussions are. I don’t care what he thinks. I want to kill him. I can’t help it. I cock my fist back and punch him in the shoulder as hard as I can.

  He slams on the breaks. The tires squeal to a stop in the middle of the lane.

  “Get the fuck out!”

  He reaches across me with his muscled arm.

  I hunch down, afraid he’s going to hit me.

  He pulls the door handle and shoves the door open on my side.

  I look down and see the road. It’s rough and hard.

  “Leave me the fuck alone!” Every word is punctuated. He pushes me out.

  I fall onto the side of the road, my elbows and butt taking most of the fall.

  He throws the rear view mirror at me. It hits me in the forehead with a sharp sting. Then my backpack comes flying into the ditch. He peels out, the back of the truck fishtailing and black smoke flying up.

  I lie back on the gravel, bleeding, out of breath, full of adrenaline, and confused. I feel guilty.

  The sun becomes a white, blinding haze, blurred by my tears. The salt in my tears burns the scrapes on my face. The sting feels appropriate. My bruises feel deserved. I set chaos into motion. I feel like I should be pissed off, or turned on, or arrogant and brooding, but all I am is hopeless and sad. I thought falling in love was supposed to feel good.

  I can only imagine what the people driving by in cars this Friday morning think of me. I’m dirty, cut up, bruised, with dried blood on my face. I look so obviously discarded, lying on the side of the road. I feel like I’ll never stop crying. There’s only one thing I can do. I have to get up and go on. I stand up and climb up the ditch to the side of the road. I’m dizzy. I lose my balance and fall on my knees over the white line.

  A teal convertible rental car screeches toward me.

  “Oh, fuck.”

  It squeals to a stop only feet in front of me.

  I’m being paid back by the universe for screwing with Clay. He hates tourists more than he hates anything. It was him, that asshole. He sent this car.

  A tourist lady in a big straw hat jumps out and runs over to me with a terrified look on her face.

  “Are you all right?”

  “What’s it look like?” I stand up and brush the dirt off my shorts.

  “You should really be more careful.” She walks back to her stupid car.

  “Fuck off, bitch.”

  She jumps in and drives off.

  Chapter 13

  Gusty winds

  Ferns quivering, panicked.

  Oncoming storm

  I walk home thinking of a haiku about what happened and I can’t come up with one, so I go through the ones I’ve memorized about Clay and about how I felt when I though he’d just drop everything including his stupid surferboy ego and fall in love with me. I’ve got a million in my backpack. I walk into Coconut Grove, a neighborhood of old beach shacks, a short cut to my house. My fucking knee hurts and a think trickle of blood is dripping down my leg right over the band-aid that Clay’s mom gave me. God, I’m pathetic. Cuts on top of cuts. I’m not meant to be uninjured I guess. My blood is meant to spill out of me and clump in the hairs on my chins. I walk down the street looking at houses, wishing I could have one of my own. There’s lots of dudes in the 20s that live here when they move out of their parents’ houses because this neighborhood’s cheap and fun and there’s usually some good parties on Friday nights, not that I’ve been to any except the one Clay took me to and that’s probably the last time that’s going to happen.

  “Hey, Sammy-boy! What you doin’ in my hood?” I hear a girl’s voice yell.

  I stop and turn around, but no one’s there. I start walking again.

  “Sam! It’s Kendra!”

  I stop and turn around, and there she is in a purple bikini by a tall wooden fence – and smiling, holding a green garden hose in the front yard of her new house.

  She looks happy and carefree and all that, so my misery stands out even more. I wonder if she sees my confusion.

  “Hey.” I slowly walk over to her front yard, which is basically just sandy dirt with some dead yellow grass and weeds in big clumps and two cartoonish-looking pot plants growing side-by-side near the front door. “Nice pot plants.”

  “Yeah. They’re growing like crazy, but I think I have two females, or two males, or something, because they won’t make THC. If you smoke it, nothing happens.” She throws the hose down, still running. “Come see my new abode, Sammy.” She runs up to me and hugs me, then notices that my knee is bleeding over another band-aid. “What happened?”

  “Skating. I’m perfecting my kick-flip.” Yeah right, as if I could possibly perfect a kick-flip.

  “Well, come inside. I’ve got some alcohol or something. You think rum would work?”

  “Maybe in my mouth. I don’t know about the scrapes. I bailed pretty hard.” I follow her up the three steps into her house, which is basically empty except for a flowered rattan couch and chair that obviously came from the Salvation Army down the street, and a couple surfing posters and old dried leis on the wall. “Nice place.”

  I would want my own house to be cooler than this, but I’m still jealous that she has one to herself. I follow her into the kitchen and over to her table, a card table with a tiki-patterned tablecloth. I scan a photo collage on the kitchen wall. There it is: the photo that Kendra took of me, Clay and Steve passed out in Steve’s room at the party. It’s in a collage with tons of other party photos. I check it out as much as I can without letting Kendra know I care about it. I’m lying just inches from Clay, just inches from his chest. I think about lying there and how in love I felt, and I wish time would reverse. I set my backpack on a chair and sit down in another one.

  Kendra gets a bottle of cheap rum from the cabinet and pours out two shot glasses. She hands one to me, picks up hers, and we both throw them back.

  The rum burns my throat, but almost instantly I feel a little better. I guess I’m already on the road to becoming an alcoholic, drinking to numb my problems.

  “Here.” She pours another shot and dumps it out on my knee. It burns like crazy. The rest runs down my leg. She soaks up the run-off with a paper towel that has pictures of little loafs of bread on it. “That should do it.” She gently wipes the blood from my shin.

  I take the paper towel from her. “I’ll do it. My blood might be poisonous.” I’m afraid she can smell me. I smell like balls and sweat and anger and confusion, and I don’t want her to think I never take baths. The paper dies red when it touches my cut.

  Kendra pours another two shots. “Here…”

  We down them and then another two. She doesn’t want to leave just a little bit in the bottom of the bottle. I’m pretty drunk now which happened really fast. Kendra’s drunk, too, but not as drunk as I am.

  She’s been partying for a lot longer than me, but she’s turned red because she’s Asian. Most Asians turn red when they drink. I like it. I asso
ciate my friends being red with having fun because it usually means that Jared and I came up with some little boy scheme to get some brews or a fifth of some crap.

  Clay doesn’t turn red--he just gets more aggressive, more confident, more sexy.

  “I’m glad you came over, Sammy, but where’s your board? You said you were skating.”

  “I broke it.”

  “Ahh… I see,” she says like a mystic would say, all-knowing and sort of evil. “You seen Clay lately?”

  “Here and there.” I look down at my hands and feel really, really sad all at once and I can’t control it at all which is scary and sort of feels good at the same time. I feel tears forming in my eyes. Damn you, fucking salty tears! Don’t ruin this for me. Don’t tell her things I’m too afraid to say myself. My body is betraying me. The tears come rushing out.

  Kendra looks like she’s going to cry too, and she does. But she’s also smiling. “What? What is it?”

  “Nothing. Aloha all around. Nothing at all.” I start crying even harder, like almost sobbing, and it’s so pathetic that I can’t stop it.

  “Sammy, you know I know you’re gay or whatever, right?”

  “What?” Any little second to compose myself is why I just said that. I heard her perfectly clear.

  “That I know you’re gay. I’ve known you were since you were like 10 or something.” She gets up and goes to the fridge for a couple cans of guava juice. “Are you and Clay like…?” She sits down and pops open her can of guava. “I’ve always suspected he was, but he couldn’t admit it, which torments him and makes him act so… you know the tough surferboy act.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “About Clay or about you?”

  “Both. I mean me, no, I mean him.” I bury my head in my arms on the table and talk into the tablecloth, which smells like fake pineapple for some reason. “I’m totally in love with him.” My ears start ringing and my heart goes nuts. This is fucking gnarly major ripping shredding shit that I’ve never told anyone before ever and probably never will again.

  “Does he like you back?”

  I lift me head up from the table. Kendra’s so cool. “I think so, but he’s so… closed, fucked up, you know how Clay is. He’s a lizard.” I reach for my backpack to get my haikus. I would never do this if I wasn’t drunk, but right now, Kendra seems like the perfect audience. I’ve never read them to anyone but Jared and he doesn’t take me seriously, and I have such a strong urge to share with her it’s killing me. “You want to hear a poem I wrote?”

  “You write poetry? That’s so cute.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I do too, Sammy. I’ve been trying to get published since I was like 17.” So Kendra is doing something. I always thought she was just happy working for her dad at his psychiatry office. “Read me one of yours and I’ll read you one of mine.” She goes and gets a folder from her bedroom and comes back and sits down. “OK, you first.”

  I get really nervous suddenly. It’s a weird feeling but I sort of like it. I unzip my backpack and find one about Clay that I write probably soon after we first did it in his room. “I write haikus. They’re not true haikus like five-seven-five, but they’re like haikus. They say in English, haikus don’ t have to stick to the formula because the words are so different from Japanese words. Anyway… ” I hold up a paper with about six poems on it and pick one to read. “Trail of hair into surfer’s shorts. My dick turns hard -- in love.” Fuck, I’m embarrassed, but Kendra looks slightly impressed. “I’ll read another one. That one’s not very good. OK… Chameleon surferboy, riding waves by day, imagination by cool evening.”

  “Sam, I think you’re on to something. OK, here’s mine… God, this is so great you write poetry! OK, here’s mine.” She holds up a piece of notebook paper. “Hawaiian sunsets from white sand to white sand, won’t you take my caramel Asian female hand, and caress it with care, then breathe some fresh air, and tell me thy love that you’re there.”

  OK, Kendra’s a poetry dork, but I am too, I guess, so I guess I can live with it. “That’s cool.” I shove my haikus back in their dark backpack and ask for another shot of something.

  “Yeah, Sammy, for a fellow poet, anything.” She stands up and opens the cabinet above the stove. “Vodka, dark rum, Amaretto--I don’t even know what that is…” She searches through the bottles.

  “Vodka’s cool.”

  She takes the bottle down, pours me a shot, and hands it to me.

  I gulp it back, almost gagging on its fucking lighter fluid taste. “Ah!” I lean back and almost fall back in my chair.

  “Easy boy.” She laughs and eats some mochi crunch seaweed crackers out of the plastic bag with Japanese writing on it.

  “Eh!”

  Kendra and I both jump. We turn to look at the front door, which is wide open on the far side of her almost empty living room and there stands Clay looking sweaty and ripped and angry and scary and sad and sort of needy.

  “What’s up?” he calls out.

  I look at Kendra. “Nothing. What’s up with you?”

  “Hey Clay-boy. Amazing. You haven’t stopped over here since I got my new couch.”

  “That thing’s fucking new?” I guess living with your parents has some small advantages.

  Kendra stands up. “Come in, dude.”

  He walks in, obviously freaked out that I’m here. What, is Kendra like the therapist of every gay boy on the island? He sits down on the chair across from me, acting like he hardly knows me.

  I give him a dirty look, as mean as I can, even though he looks kinda sweaty and vulnerable and hot.

  “You wanna shot, Clay? Me and Sammy here were just boozin’ up the afternoon.”

  He glances at me, then at Kendra. “Sure, sistah. Pour it.”

  Kendra pours him a shot of Vodka, then she pours herself and me another one each. She sits Clay’s and mine on the Formica table, then sits down with us. We all sort of look at each other, but it’s like we’re all embarrassed about something. Clay won’t look at me. I won’t look at him. We’re both just staring at Kendra and she’s looking back and forth between us like she’s waiting for us to jump up on the table and make out or start punching each other. We all take our shot.

  “What’ve you been up to today? Any waves out at Sandy’s?” Kendra shuffles papers on the table--her poems.

  “No, just chilling.” He shifts his weight and leans back in his chair with his arms behind his head, probably a combination of trying to look casual and unconsciously wanting is to smell his own armpits. “I’m thinking about going camping. The Big Island or Maui, or Na Pali Coast would rip.” He sort of looks at me, like the least he can without not looking at me. “You wanna come, little brah?”

  I look at Kendra.

  She looks at Clay.

  Clay looks like he’s going to cry right here on the spot, though I don’t think he knows it.

  Kendra stands up. “I have to move my clothes to the dryer. Be right back.” She walks out the back door to her detached roach-filled garage.

  Clay’s face changes immediately. “You wanna come?”

  “I don’t know,” I say as bratty as I can manage, “Maybe…”

  He leans forward then he rubs my leg under the table, up into my cut offs, just inches from my balls. “Come on, dude. It’ll be rad--all nature good mana and no people…”

  “Yeah.” I can’t even think with Clay’s hand near my dick, and anway I’m starting to spin from the alcohol and my head feels like it’s going to shoot off.

  Kendra opens her back door.

  Clay pulls his hand away in a flash and leans back in his chair.

  Kendra holds up a tiny tanktop, like only big enough for Barbie. “I hate dryers. When I was little, we hung things out on a clothesline. You strong boys think you could build one for me?”

  Clay almost falls backward and I almost laugh. “Sure.”

  Kendra throws me the tank top and I hold it up to my chest.

  Clay says, “So yo
u wanna come or not, Sam?”

  I look back and forth between Clay and Kendra for a second. She’s so warm, so normal, so nice to me. Clay’s so fucked up, so arrogant, so insane. I can’t not go with him. I’ll regret it forever. “Yeah. Sounds cool.”

  “OK, excellent. I’ll give you a ride. Let’s prepare the gear.” Clay heads to the door.

  “Bye.” I look at Kendra and she looks kind of worried, but what the fuck? I grab my pack and follow Clay outside and get in his truck, which is still muddy as shit from the cane road last night. I look at him now that we’re alone.

  “What?”

  “How’d you find me here?”

  “Coincidence.”

  “Yeah, right. You totally looked for me.”

  He looks cagey, paranoid. “I gotta get out of here.”

  “Why?”

  “I need to get the fuck out of here.”

  “Why?”

  “I just do, man. Is that alright with you?”

  This is so fucking rad.

  Chapter 14

  Feel the same fear I do:

  Terrified of wind.

  I watch out the window as Clay drives like a maniac.

  Samoans drive around looking tough. Boys with new girlfriends hang out in the park and smoke cigarettes. Skateboarders ride wide-open, newly paved streets. Everyone is normal but us.

  We pull into his driveway.

  Susan stands up from planting flowers. “Clay, my ray of sunshine,” she says sarcastically.

  I get out of the truck and jump down to the pavement. “More like an eclipse.”

  She laughs.

  Clay makes an exaggerated sad face, like “poor me.”

  “What’s wrong?” Susan asks in her sarcastic tone.

  “I can’t lose this nag.” Clay points to me and walks up to the house.

  She notices my black eye and the scrapes on my cheek. She stands up straight and looks at Clay. “Oh my God. What happened?” She gives him a suspicious look.

  “Don’t look at me! I didn’t do it.” He walks inside, slamming the screen door behind him.