by James Franco
After a while I started the car and drove slowly back toward Mr. B’s. I had one more cigarette in the old pack. I had turned it upside down so I could make a wish. I put it in my mouth and lit it and made a desperate wish.
Tar Baby
This guy, A. J. Sims, and I, we got a bottle and drank it in his bedroom in the basement of his house. Vodka, clear and burning. We drank it straight from the big glass bottle.
A.J. had seven brothers, older and younger, so there were clothes, cups, and trash all over the house and some of the walls were flaking paint. There wasn’t much space, and all A.J. had for privacy was this shitty little underground room with a bed two inches off the floor, and his boom box and his hip-hop mix tapes.
I was pretty drunk that night. We were listening to the Pharcyde. I was drinking much more than he was. I sat in the one chair by the desk and he sat on the bed.
A bubble came up from my stomach and burned my throat. It came out rank and when I swallowed it tasted like acid.
Just then, I don’t know why, I said, “Oh, crap, A.J., fuck you.” I laughed and my esophagus was burning.
A.J. looked up from his deep thoughts on the bed.
“Don’t say that shit, bitch,” he said, and he was not laughing.
“What shit?” I said.
“Fuck you, Teddy. Don’t be sitting over there like a grinning baboon sayin’ shit. I’ll fuck you up.” He wasn’t really looking at me.
“Okay,” I said, and drank some more from the bottle. It was a great bottle, really smooth. Smirnoff. I took a sip of tap water from a little orange plastic cup.
Then A.J. was up and pacing around the room. Three big steps in one direction, three steps back, over and over again. He was hunched over in a white T-shirt that was grayed from washing, and his wiry forearms were flexing and unflexing.
He had moved to Palo Alto from LA the year before, so he thought he had a reputation to maintain. He was just a skinny little guy with a bowling ball head, but he arrived talking big. For a while he got a bit of respect because he wrote good graffiti and claimed that he liked big black asses. His tag was “Icer” for some reason, and then he changed it to “Ajay” because it was like his name but spelled differently. He always drank a lot of pineapple juice to make his come taste good. “Like cocoa butter,” he said.
Three months after his arrival, he was a joke. Everyone saw he was actually psycho. As soon as he got drunk he would do stupid things like put cigarettes out on his arms or ride his scooter into a wall. And he would talk even bigger when he was drunk. He’d say, “Nigger.” One night he said the wrong thing to some of the black guys and got beat up. He wasn’t so tough after that. He was alone a lot. That’s when he started doing weird things even when he wasn’t drunk, like doing the cigarette burns at school. He really had no friends. Except me. He was a little bald weirdo, with burns up his forearm like leopard spots.
It was ten o’clock and I was staring at the tape turning in the boom box. Little gears rotating. The Geto Boys were talking about dick sucking, and licking scrotums and assholes. A.J. was back on the low bed with the ratty blue blanket and he was making a call.
“Yo, shut up for a minute, I’m calling April,” he said. “Turn that shit down.”
I turned the music off. We sat there while he waited. A long depressing quiet as the phone rang.
April was in our class, but she was better than us, mature and experienced. She had an older sister, and she’d introduced her to a lot. When April showed up in our town from Arizona at age thirteen with her tan and muscular legs, she had already fucked. She knew about dicks and talked about them to us in whispers. She knew that some bent in funny ways.
I had a crush on April right away. In eighth grade I called her once and tried to act cool. At least she was nice. She lived near me and sometimes we would go to the park near her house and sit on the swings and smoke pot out of her little pink pipe. After we got into high school she started fucking older guys. This guy Denny Johnson and this guy Adam Cohen. They played water polo, and were really tall. Also my friend Barry.
Then A.J. was on the phone with her. He was smiling. I sat in the chair and cursed him in my mind.
“You should meet us,” A.J. said into the white phone. Then he was listening very intensely. He wasn’t such a gangster then; he was just a sweetie.
“. . . well bring your sister with you. It will be cool,” he said. He was looking at me like he was making sure I wasn’t laughing at him. She was saying something because I could hear the little buzz in the phone.
“. . . then bring your sister and Emily too.”
I was warm and drunk. Inside, I felt things flow through me and I thought about cartoon rabbits and about William Faulkner and how he drank all the time. I thought that someday I would be him.
When I was a baby, my mom read to me from Uncle Remus. I thought about the Tar Baby, his body steaming, just after Br’er Fox pulled him out of the cooking pot. A raw, coal-dark coagulum that Br’er Fox shaped into a slick black, shining, seal-like thing. A little black podling. No face until Br’er Fox pulled off Br’er Bear’s two jacket buttons and stuck them on the black baby and those were the eyes.
Button eyes are a crazy man’s eyes.
Buggedy bu ggedy bu ggedy boo,
I have crazy eyes, how about you?
A.J. looked away and listened. I couldn’t believe April was talking to A.J.
“No, Teddy is here. Yes, Teddy,” said A.J. into the phone. Then he turned to me. “She says hi.”
“Hi, April,” I said, but he didn’t relay the message. He was facing the wall again.
“Yeah, he’s all drunk,” he said. “He can hang out with Emily.”
“Emily” was Emily Kraft, a big slut. She was a year older than us.
A.J. said, “Come on,” five times in five different ways, like she was teetering on an edge and he was gently trying to blow her over. Finally he said, “At Addison,” and his voice went a little higher. Addison was an elementary school down the street from his house.
“We’ll be on the jungle gym,” he said to the phone. He was smiling but not at me. The little guy had actually convinced them to come over. “. . . yeah, we got d’vodka… cool, see ya in the school yard, peace.” He said “school yard” like he was singing a song.
After he hung up he stopped smiling and didn’t share any of the joy. “They down,” he said, real serious.
“‘D’ vodka’?” I said.
“Yeah, we got d’vodka, motherfucker, you got a problem wit that?”
“No,” I said. “I’m glad we got it.”
He was putting his jacket on. It was a Carhartt jacket, real plain. I had a brown corduroy one with a fur collar from J.Crew. I took it off the back of the chair. Some guy on a TV show had one too.
A.J. reached across me and took the bottle and screwed the cap on.
“You’ve been drinking this like a motherfucker,” he said.
He tucked the large bottle under his jacket and it bulged.
“Let’s go, bitch,” he said.
A few of the brothers were shifting around in shadowy corners of the basement level, and when we walked upstairs there were some more sitting and lying on the floor in front of the TV. They were watching Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. I saw a little grape juice, deep purple and luminescent, at the bottom of a plastic glass.
Outside, it was a little cold, and the sound vacuumed out to quiet, nothing but a few cars passing in the distance along Middlefield Road. We went through the chain-link gate into the dark school yard. I sat on the end of the slide and the metal was cold under my ass. A.J. stood in the tanbark and paced a little; the bulge was still under his arm. Then we waited.
After five minutes I said, “Lemme get some of d’vodka.” I was surprised but he reached under his jacket and handed the bottle to me. He put his hands in his jacket pockets and looked all around, alert but cool.
I unscrewed the red cap and tilted the bottle to my lips. The stuff we
nt down and I pictured the clear liquid with a magical pink inner glow.
“Save some of that shit,” A.J. said. A few cars passed but not the girls. I drank from the bottle again and it was a scary plunge because I always wanted to take too much. It hurt, but it was also impressive, like being in the hands of a bigger force. And because of that, a relief. A.J. still wasn’t looking at me so I took another sip and my throat burned sharp and my brain swam in cold water.
A long silver-blue Cadillac passed, going very slowly. How we must look to adults: shitty teenagers in brown jackets, hanging around the school yard in the dark.
I thought again about the Tar Baby from Uncle Remus. The Tar Baby and the briar patch and Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Bear and Br’er Fox. I could probably get A.J. to fuck the Tar Baby if I made it look like a girl. Get his dick stuck in the tar. A.J. was so lonely and angry, and all his feelings got computed in strange ways. He said he had had a girlfriend in LA, a black girl. She must have hated herself. April was white, but A.J. really liked her.
After thirty minutes April and the girls weren’t there. It was just us, cold in the cold.
A.J. had walked out of the tanbark onto the blacktop, and I was alone with the vodka for a while, but then he came back and started yelling.
“Save that shit for the girls, motherfuck!” he said, grabbing the bottle. He saw how much was left and yelled some more. I just sat there. He said, “You faggot ass, you shit-kissing motherfucker, you dumb fucking nigger, you shitfaced faggot, I oughtta kill you. . . .” Other stuff poured out, like he was talking to himself.
Some teenage girls walked by. They didn’t go to our high school. There was a big-boned girl with short curly hair to her ears and a skinny witchy girl with longer black hair. They stood in the gateway.
“What are you yelling at?” said the big-boned girl. She said it like she was older than she was. She must have been lonely if she was bothering with us.
A.J. answered her like he had been expecting them. “This faggot doesn’t know how to get any pussy, and drinks all my shit.”
The girls laughed a little.
“Really? He doesn’t know how to get any pussy?” said the big-boned girl.
“What an asshole,” said the witchy one. She was talking about A.J.
Then I spoke up. It was the first chance I’d had after the yelling.
“You’re the one who doesn’t know how to get girls,” I said to A.J.’s back. My words came out damp and wobbly.
A.J. whipped around for a second. Then he knew we were all against him. He was sensitive to that kind of thing. He whipped back to the girls.
“What the fuck do you bitches want?” A.J. said to the girls.
The big-boned girl had bangs and a nice smile and I liked her face. She had a fur-lined hooded jacket that I also liked, and I guessed maybe we would have been friends if we’d been somewhere else.
“We just wanted to see if you would give us a drink from your bottle,” said the big-boned girl. The witchy girl was looking at the black sky.
“You’re not getting any of this shit,” said A.J., holding the bottle to his chest.
“Okay, fine,” said the big-boned girl. There was one light on the back corner of the school building and some of it hit her mouth. I thought of a watermelon Jolly Rancher. Her lips were not a fat girl’s lips; they were thin, and very juicy pink-red. But she was smiling a little funny, only on one side, like she wasn’t sure if she should smile, and that was because A.J. was looking at her.
Then her lips were not in the light anymore because A.J. was moving toward the girls.
“Get the fuck out of here, bitches!” he said, waving the bottle. “We got some fine bitches coming, we don’t need fat-ass and skinny!”
“Fuck you, asshole,” said the big-boned one.
“Fuck you, you creepy little monkey,” said the witchy one. The girls kept yelling at A.J. as they backed away into the dark. Then it was quiet.
When A.J. came back, there was nothing to say. And nothing to do because he was holding the bottle. I was feeling okay; I’d had enough vodka.
This was the way the night had cashed in. Choices had been made and things happened, and here we were. It was sad and funny. My life was made of this. Stuff like this.
I thought about how Br’er Bear walked around with a nail sticking out of his club. When I was eleven, I hammered a nail into a baseball bat. It was very dangerous. I made other weapons. And when my camp went on a field trip to Chinatown, I bought a throwing star. I thought I needed all those weapons, and I hoarded them.
I used to throw the star at the fence in the backyard, and it would stick in. I threw it at the cat, Stoney.
When I was twelve I took karate at the YMCA. We learned katas and punches. I learned the katas really well. If you learned the katas, you got the higher belts. The order: white, yellow, orange, blue, green, brown, black. I was happy until I started fighting in school and the katas didn’t do shit for me.
A.J. was in such a bad mood compared to me, but I couldn’t help but laugh at him.
“Better shut up, clown,” he said.
“‘We don’t need fat-ass and skinny!’ Ha-ha, you’re fuckin’ funny, A.J.”
“Shut up, clown,” he said, and kicked some of the tanbark at me but it fell short. I was still laughing.
“Cocoa butter!” I yelled. “‘My shit tastes like cocoa butter!’” A.J. grabbed my fur collar and yanked it back and forth, like he was going to shake the laugh out of me, but I was still laughing.
“Shut the fuck up, Teddy, or I swear to God, I’m-a fuck you up.”
He yanked me up by the collar. “Get the fuck up,” he said, and I was on my feet, but my head was going everywhere. “We’re going to Ofra’s.”
“Ofra’s?” He was already walking away from me with the bottle. I followed him out the gate and back across the street toward his house. His green Karmann Ghia was parked on the street. We got in. Funny old-fashioned interior with hard plastic seats.
Then we were driving and I was laughing again. A.J. looked so serious I couldn’t stop for a long while. When he finally spoke he was very quiet.
“All the clowns in the car better shut up,” he said. He was still looking out the windshield. I had my feet up on the dash and no seat belt, and when he said that I laughed harder.
“This clown is shut up,” I said. “What about the other ones?” And I cracked myself up some more. A.J. was driving really fast now.
Ofra Isaac was a girl in our class and she was having a party that night. She had a huge house in the nicest part of town. The funny thing about the nicest part of town was that it was the closest to East Palo Alto. There were all these mansions and then right down the road it was really bad. Kids would go over there to buy liquor and drugs, but a lot of the time they got into fights or got mugged. East Palo Alto was primarily black and Pacific Islander.
Ofra had a lot of parties at her house. Her parents didn’t care. The problem was that Ofra didn’t like me anymore, mostly because I got drunk all the time. The last time I was at her house me and my friend Ivan got in a fight. We stepped all over her white couch with our shoes and somehow we knocked the mezuzah off the front doorpost. Eventually we stopped fighting in her driveway, but Ofra wouldn’t let us back in.
“You don’t want to go to Ofra’s,” I said to A.J.
He didn’t say anything. I looked around for the bottle, but he must have hid it in the back. Nothing was funny anymore.
“What do you think, A.J.?” I said. “That April is waiting for you at Ofra’s? That you’re going to hook up with that ass?” His jaw flexed. “April hates you, A.J. Everyone hates you.”
It was about eleven o’clock and the cool air from outside was coming in steady through the old Karmann Ghia hinges.
“Okay, A.J. A.J. dog. One question. That’s it, that’s all you got to answer, one question, and then you can be done with me. You can throw me out of this car if you want.” He said nothing, just drove very fas
t, which was scary around the corners. “Okay, here it is. So what do you think you’ll be doing in twenty years? No, make it easier, ten years. What will you be doing?”
It was like he didn’t hear me, but he did.
“Rapping?” I said. “Are you going to be a rapper?”
No answer.
“Writing graffiti? Married? Maybe have a bunch of kids? With April? You think you and April are gonna have a million kids like your parents?”
A.J. braked the car really fast. So fast that my knees hit the metal dash and the back of the car started sliding. Then we were stopped. He reached across me and opened the passenger door, and then he had his back braced against his door and he was kicking me out the door. I was laughing, except not too much because his kicks hurt and I was trying to stop because A.J. was crying.
“Get the fuck out, get out, get out!” Then my ass hit the ground and I was outside in some grass and the cold air. A.J. drove off. He stopped a few yards away, reached across the seat, and slammed the passenger door. The green hump of the Karmann Ghia got smaller and smaller and then he was gone.
A paint marker that A.J. used for graffiti had fallen out with me. It had a purple cap and a purple body and on the side it said SOLID MARKER. I sat in the long grass between the sidewalk and the street, and when I took the cap off I saw that the paint stick was two colors: yellow and purple. A.J. had cut the purple paint stick in half and fused it with half a yellow paint stick so that the colors would swirl together. I put the stick in my pants pocket.
I was close to Jordan, my old middle school, where I first met April. I went over there. The lights in the roof of the outdoor halls were on. Some of the old feelings came back, some faces flashed, all things I didn’t like. I drew some large monsterlike baby faces on the walls and wrote FUCK ALL BITCHES LIKE APRIL SPARK in bad graffiti script. I had practiced graffiti writing a lot but I was never going to be as good as A.J., and I was really drunk. Next to one of the large baby monsters I wrote LOVE, A.J. SIMS NIGGA.