Sweet Like Sugar

by Wayne Hoffman

  It wasn’t beautiful. But the weather was warm, the condo was easy to maintain, and my grandmother had befriended a few other women there. She didn’t complain. Not about the noisy air-conditioning, or the neighbor’s cat who was constantly digging up the flowers by her front door, or the cancer that had already taken both her breasts and showed few signs of giving up, radiation treatments notwithstanding.

  Rachel, who was graduating high school the next month, was relieved of her family obligations, allowing her to spend spring break in Ocean City with her friends. So I slept alone on the foldout couch in Grandma’s living room, awakened every morning at five thirty, when my grandmother would get up to read the paper. My parents, in the guest room, could sleep later—sometimes until nearly seven—but I was up at dawn with Grandma. Not because I wanted to wake up, but because I had to fold up my bed so she could read the paper on the couch.

  This was not the image that most people conjured when they heard the phrase “spring break.” But there I was: stiff-necked and sleepy, pouring prune juice for a sick old lady in an apartment that smelled of burnt coffee and farts and Glade PlugIns. Let the good times roll.

  I was the youngest person at the Royal Floridian Senior Village, by several decades, except for a guy I saw by the pool one afternoon. He was a few years older, maybe sixteen or seventeen. Dirty blond hair, unkempt and shaggy, hung over his eyes. His skin was fair but sun-freckled. His feet, his hands, his Adam’s apple, his baggy black swim trunks were all too big for his skinny frame. He looked about as excited to be there as I was.

  We didn’t introduce ourselves. He was with a man I assumed was his grandfather. I was across the pool with my father; my mother had taken my grandmother to the doctor. But he did nod in my direction, an acknowledgment of shared frustration, of both of us being somewhere we didn’t want to be, somewhere boring and hopelessly uncool. I nodded back, lips pursed. I know, I know.

  A couple days later, my parents had mercy on me and took me to the beach. Being at the beach with Mom and Dad wasn’t exactly a thrill, but at least I had a few hours away from Little Old Lady Land. I spent most of the day in the ocean, neck-deep in the water, letting the waves carry me.

  It wasn’t until late afternoon, when we loaded up the rental car to head back to Grandma’s, that I heard the news on the radio: Kurt Cobain was dead.

  “Who’s that, Benji? Someone you listen to?” my mother asked, turning to face me in the backseat. I shushed her and told her to turn up the radio.

  “Nirvana,” my father half whispered to her. He was always slightly hipper.

  “Oh,” my mother said, turning to me again. “You have some of their CDs, don’t you?”

  I shushed her again. “I’m trying to hear what happened, Mom!”

  She turned back around with a harrumph. My father turned up the radio. By the time we got back to the Royal Floridian Senior Village, I’d learned that Cobain had shot himself.

  “That’s a real shame, Benji,” my father said as he got out of the car in Grandma’s parking lot. “I remember when John Lennon was killed—it was just a few days after you were born. . . .”

  “Such a waste,” my mother interrupted. “Drugs, I bet. They make people crazy.”

  I ignored both of them and strode toward the condo, scowling. I wanted to watch the coverage on MTV, but Grandma Gertie was watching some stupid game show on her only television set. Not that it mattered. She didn’t have cable anyway. I took a shower.

  I didn’t talk at dinner. Grandma didn’t ask any questions; either she didn’t notice my silence, or my parents had already explained the situation. After dinner we sat in the living room and watched whatever was on network TV that night. I waited for the commercial breaks, watching for the news briefs.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. Kurt Cobain was dead, and I was stuck in the one place on the planet where nobody even knew who he was. Lying on the foldout couch in the dark, I could hear Nirvana songs playing faintly inside my head.

  Or were they inside my head?

  I got up and walked to the window and slid it open a crack. The music got a little louder. I picked up my T-shirt and shorts from the floor and put them on, then tiptoed to the front door and opened it as quietly as I could, stepping outside barefoot.

  From the sidewalk I could tell where the music was coming from. I walked toward the parking lot and followed the sound to a silver Buick Regal, parked, with its lights off. The guy who’d nodded at me at the pool was sitting in the driver’s seat.

  He saw me standing there, and with one arm he invited me to join him. He unlocked the car doors and I got in the passenger side.

  He was smoking a cigarette. He’d kept the windows up to avoid waking up the whole complex, but this meant the car was filled with smoke. Nonetheless, I got in and shut the door. Sitting in a black tank top and baggy black shorts, he was playing In Utero, Nirvana’s most recent—and apparently last—album on the car’s tape deck.

  He looked over at me. “My grandfather’s car,” he said. “Only tape deck I’ve got. Fucking Walkman’s busted.”

  I nodded.

  “Still can’t fucking believe it,” he said. “You like Nirvana?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Unreal, right? Stupid asshole shoots himself.”

  “Yeah.”

  He stubbed out his cigarette in the car’s ashtray. From the looks of it, he’d been there for a while. He extended a hand. “Jimmy,” he said.

  “Benji.”

  “Who you visiting?”

  “My grandmother.”

  “That’s cool,” he said. He reached for his pack of cigarettes and held it out toward me. I shook my head.

  “Shit, man, what are you? Like thirteen?”

  “Fifteen,” I said, lying. Did he know it was bullshit?

  He took a cigarette out, then stopped. “I got a joint, too, man. You wanna get stoned?”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “Come on, man. It’s good stuff.”

  He turned off the tape and took the key out of the ignition. He opened his door.

  “Where you going?” I asked.

  “Can’t smoke a joint in my grandfather’s car, dude. He’ll smell the shit.”

  He shut his door and started walking across the parking lot. I got out and chased after him across the asphalt, toward the pool.

  “Jimmy, it’s locked,” I called in a stage whisper.

  He waved me off. It didn’t matter if the gate was locked—he was climbing the fence.

  This was pushing it for me. But what was my option—go back to Grandma Gertie’s foldout couch? I climbed the chain-link fence and joined Jimmy by the pool.

  Sitting on a plastic lounge chair, he lit up a joint and took a deep drag, then passed it to me. I took a shallow puff, held it in my mouth, and started to cough.

  “I’ll show you,” he said. Then he taught me how to inhale, holding the joint up to my mouth, his fingers brushing against my lips, his eyes looking directly into mine through the flame from his disposable lighter. I got the hang of it. I always was a fast learner.

  “Feel good?” he asked. And I did. After two or three hits, I’d forgotten about Kurt Cobain, and my sick grandmother, and my shitty spring break. All I was thinking about was Jimmy, who was now kicking off his tennis shoes and pulling his tank top over his head.

  “Let’s go for a swim,” he said. And he smiled at me.

  “I don’t have a swimsuit.”

  “It’s just us,” he said. He unzipped his shorts and pulled them down.

  In the dim glow from the lampposts around the pool, I could make out Jimmy’s body: his skin pale, his smooth stomach and legs making the tuft of blond hair below his waistline all the more surprising. And on his hip, a small tattoo of two fish, one above the other, swimming in opposite directions.

  I told myself I shouldn’t stare, but I couldn’t possibly look away. I sat frozen, my eyes fixed on his crotch.

  “Like it?” he asked.

&
nbsp; I swallowed and looked up at his face.

  “Fish,” he said. “Because I’m a Pisces.”

  He ran his fingers over the tattoo.

  “My parents wouldn’t let me get a tattoo,” he said. “So I got one where they’ll never see it. I mean, fuck them. I’m a senior already.”

  I nodded.

  “Come on, it’s warm enough,” he said, jumping into the deep end. When he wasn’t looking, I peeled off my clothes and lowered myself into the pool on a ladder.

  He was right. It was warm, even at night.

  Jimmy dunked himself under the water, emerging only a few feet in front of me, pushing his wet hair out of his face.

  “Cobain was a Pisces, too, you know,” he said.

  I couldn’t get a word out in response. Maybe it was the pot. Maybe it was Kurt Cobain. Maybe it was Jimmy.

  While everyone else in the complex slept, Jimmy floated silently with his eyes closed, back and forth in front of me on his back, as if his body were a raft I could climb aboard. But I didn’t move. I clung to the ladder with one hand, feet not touching the bottom, watching the water lap at his tattoo: two fish swimming underwater one second, two fish out of water the next.

  Frankie had lots of tattoos. We’d been dating for weeks and I’d seen them all.

  He was a tough-looking guy: shaved head, black boots, permanent scowl. Nobody would have guessed that he had a Hello Kitty tattoo on his butt. Which is exactly why he had one. “I can tell a lot about a guy with this thing,” he told me. “Some guys think it’s too faggy and it ruins their fantasy. And some guys pretend they haven’t even noticed it. All of those guys are the wrong guys for me.”

  I had laughed the second I saw it; apparently, this was the right reaction, because I’d been invited to see it many more times. And every time, I laughed again.

  Most of our early dates involved going out—to a bar, to a club, to a party—and staying up late. I’d crash at his place on Capitol Hill and head home in the morning. We cracked each other up, but we didn’t really talk that much on our dates; it was hard to have serious conversations over the music and noise. But I sure liked looking at him. There’s a reason he was a model.

  When work picked up, though, I was too exhausted to keep up with Frankie. Sometimes he’d go to a party alone and I’d meet him in the city afterward. Or he’d go to a club with a friend and I’d join him a couple hours later. Then we’d go back to his place, but I’d usually fall asleep right away, before I’d even caught a glimpse of Kitty. I was no fun and we both knew it.

  I started begging off dates with him, telling him to go out without me. A few times he convinced me to change my mind; a few times he didn’t. Once or twice, he didn’t even try.

  But then Halloween came, and with it, a huge party in a warehouse on U Street. Some DJ I’d never heard of from Berlin was being flown in, along with a DJ from London I’d also never heard of. How could I resist? We’d bought tickets in advance, fifty bucks a pop.

  When the day finally arrived, I just didn’t feel up to it. It was a Wednesday, a work night, and I had a string of deadlines in the coming week. I called Frankie from my office and told him that one of his friends could use my ticket.

  “You’re not getting out of this one,” he said. “It’s Halloween. That’s like gay Christmas.”

  “I’m Jewish,” I said.

  “Okay, gay Yom Kippur.”

  “That’s not really a party holiday.”

  “Well, how the hell should I know?” he said. “Gay Hanukkah.”

  “Oh, now I get it,” I teased. “I’ll grab my dreidels and come right over.”

  “I hate you,” he said sarcastically.

  “Did you say you hate Jews?” I asked, still joking.

  “Not all Jews; just you, Benji,” he said, now getting peeved. “I never see you anymore. And it’s Halloween, for Christ’s sake. I even got us matching costumes.”

  “What’d you get?”

  “Angel’s wings.”

  “That’s the gayest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “They’re perfect,” he said. “Hardly any fuss. Just take off your shirt and slip these on. Easy to dance with—not too hot. And we’ll match. Come on . . .”

  The image of Frankie, shirtless, wearing fluffy white wings, was certainly a strong incentive to give in. But I knew I’d be yawning before the party really got started.

  “I’m just too tired, Frankie.”

  “You know, there’s an easy way to stay awake,” he said. Apparently, he’d scored some crystal, more than enough to get us both through the night.

  “I don’t do that stuff,” I told him.

  “Have you ever tried it?” he asked.

  “I don’t need to try it to know that I don’t do it.”

  “It’s just one party, Benji.”

  “On a school night,” I reminded him—although that concept was probably lost on Frankie, who, as a model who made most of his money posing nude for magazines and websites, didn’t have any regular day job.

  “This isn’t some afterschool special,” he said. “It’s not like you’re gonna turn into a meth junkie overnight.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “Because I’m not gonna do it.”

  “It’s no big thing,” he said. “I do it all the time.”

  All the time? I wondered if he’d done it when we were together. Would I even have known?

  “Is that supposed to impress me?” I asked, a bit more snidely than I’d intended.

  “I don’t really care,” he said coldly.

  I was no prude: I drank, I smoked pot when the mood struck me, and I’d even dropped acid a couple of times at Maryland. But crystal was a different story. My parents would have shaken their heads in disapproval if they knew about the pot and the acid, but at least I could be pretty sure that they’d done the same things growing up in the sixties—even if they’d never admit it. But crystal? My parents wouldn’t even know what it was, exactly. I knew: It was dangerous, addictive. This is your brain on drugs, blah blah blah.

  Frankie gave up, called me an asshole, and hung up after wishing me a “happy fucking Halloween.”

  I slammed down the receiver and kicked my desk. I yelled at the phone: “Asshole!”

  I thought about my options. I could call Frankie back and apologize—but for what? Having a real job? Not wanting to snort crystal? I knew where the party was; I could go and meet him there and just pretend nothing had happened. Or maybe I could show up and ignore him and try to meet someone new right under his nose. “Oh, I really wanted to come to this party,” I’d say when he noticed me. “I just didn’t want to come with you.”

  No, I thought, I don’t want to deal with Frankie at all. Not right now and not again.

  But just because I’d miss the party didn’t mean I couldn’t do something else.

  I called Phil, who’d told me about a Halloween party in a friend’s apartment downtown, a party I’d already told him I couldn’t attend. I hadn’t seen him much since I’d been dating Frankie; I hadn’t been spending much time at bars lately—and those times when I had been at bars, I’d usually been with Frankie, so Phil had begged off. Phil didn’t like him. “I don’t trust him, Benji,” he’d told me the night I introduced them. “He’s bad news.” I was belatedly coming to the same conclusion. With Frankie out of the picture for the night, Halloween suddenly seemed like a perfect time to reconnect with Phil. Except that he wasn’t answering his phone and I didn’t know where the party was. I’d missed my chance.

  I called Michelle on her cell phone, but she was out with Dan at a costume party. “We’re Bill and Hillary Clinton!” she told me. “Who’s who?” I asked. She giggled and, without asking what I was doing for Halloween, told me she’d see me in the morning.

  I called my parents, but they were watching one of those CSI shows that they loved; they were already annoyed at having to answer the door for trick-or-treaters who couldn’t wait for commercial breaks, and they sure didn’t w
ant to waste more time on the phone.

  “I thought you were going to a party with your friend,” my mother said.

  I hated how she used that word. My father would never have said it that way, so belittling. But I gritted my teeth rather than start an argument.

  “That didn’t work out,” I said.

  I heard their doorbell ring.

  “The party or the friend?”

  That word again.

  “Both.”

  Their doorbell rang a second time. My mother shouted to my father, “Sid! Get the goddamn door! I’m on the phone!”

  I guess he didn’t move fast enough.

  “Jesus Christ,” she grumbled, then called out in a forced cheerful voice, “I’m coming! Hold on!”

  I could hear her put on her phoniest happy-mom act as she handed out goodies to the kids: “Oh, you’re a very scary monster! And what a pretty little princess you are! I think you each deserve two pieces of candy for having such wonderful costumes!”

  Then the kids left and she was back to her old self.

  “Benji, are you still there?” she asked as she closed the door. “Go home already!”

  Then she hung up.

  I decided I’d just as soon stay at the office and get some more work done. Right after I lay down on my couch.

  “You are so totally pathetic.”

  This was Michelle’s idea of sympathy. When she and Dan woke up and realized that I wasn’t home, she assumed I’d had some fabulous night on the town, probably staying out till dawn with a bunch of queens in unbelievable costumes, really doing Halloween up right, before stumbling into the office hungover. She called me at work to hear stories about my amazing adventures.

  She woke me up. I had fallen asleep on the couch—clothes on, shoes on, lights on—and my nap turned into an all-night affair. No trick. No treat. No miniature candy bars.