Nick Bones Underground

by Phil M. Cohen

  Now, understand, virginity by high school graduation was not a badge of shame. But it was no great honor, either, despite what the rebbes taught. We had both dated but found no girl inclined to help us alter our condition. Still, we resided in New York City, the sex capital of the world. There, every guy over the age of fourteen got laid, didn’t he? Brooklyn girls in particular were reputed to be genetically coded to engage in fellatio. And we were Brooklyn boys programmed to receive.

  I could wait it out. My right thumb and forefinger, a dab of Vaseline and an aging Playboy hidden between the mattresses were my panacea. By December of my senior year I had been accepted on a generous scholarship to Columbia. I was confident that my intellectual charms and reasonable good looks applied Uptown would land me in the arms of a girl well before Thanksgiving. I could survive on hope, and Miss September.

  But Shmulie’s libido pressed upon him, and he lacked my patience to peacefully delay gratification.

  “Nicky,” he said frequently. “Nicky, I’m going to graduate high school a virgin. How can I go to Cornell and not have stuck my schmeckle in a girl? What are they going to think of me up there?”

  On such occasions I’d say something like, “They’re going to think you’re a virgin, like at least half the rest of the freshman class.”

  He was frantic. As senior year moved toward its conclusion, his desperation evolved into shame, virginity a deep moral failure. He excelled in school. He missed earning a perfect 1600 on the SAT by a mere few points, but scored a perfect 800 on the chemistry achievement test. Cornell offered him a scholarship exceeding mine.

  Shmulie’s life was set. He merely had to go to college, get a bachelor’s, then a PhD and await the multiple offers from big companies. But the hormones rushing about his body muddled the long view. He craved sex.

  By the middle of senior year, he surrendered utterly to the demands of his libido. He pressed through his day with a permanent erection. Only the hours spent in his ever-expanding basement chem lab could assuage his obsession. Descending to this place became the equivalent of a cold shower, of which he took several daily.

  What he actually did down among the chemicals he did not share. He would enter the lab upon returning home from school, frequently skipping afternoon classes, to play with all the stuff in vials that now occupied one large wall in his basement.

  “I’m working on something special,” he’d say, but gave no clue as to what.

  ***

  One Monday in April over lunch Shmulie said, “There’s a dance Saturday night at Midwood Science. Let’s go and see if we can pick up a couple of girls. We can take them drinking. I have a little something that’ll guarantee we get lucky.” An unmistakable lasciviousness filled his voice, and something emanated from his eyes I neither liked nor trusted. But the idea came from my buddy, Shmulie. Without enthusiasm, I agreed.

  Going to another school’s dance was nothing out of the ordinary. I’d never done it before, but frequently the yeshiva’s male students would remove their yarmulkes from their heads and attend dances at the secular schools in the area.

  Over the course of the week, whenever I attempted to wrest from Shmulie what trick he had planned, he’d clam up. This silence did not make me happy. Come Saturday all I felt was dread. I wore a black turtleneck, black blazer and gray slacks. I left my yarmulke at home, worrying greatly, yet hoping vaguely, I’d get lucky. I walked over to Shmulie’s at a quarter past seven. He was wearing a white shirt and vest with a gray sport coat and black pants. The vest did a little to cover his belly, which had been on a nonstop expansion campaign for the last two years. Still, nearly everyone could clean up well, and Shmulie was no exception.

  Midwood Science was a fifteen-minute walk from Shmulie’s. As we approached, we saw a crowd threading its way inside the building to the school’s cafeteria. We paid our eight-dollar entrance fee. The cafeteria, which seated hundreds for lunch five times weekly, had been emptied of tables and lamely decorated with multi-colored crepe paper, streamers, and balloons. It had been converted from a place that served Beefaroni and little squares of Neapolitan ice cream into someone’s vision of a dance hall. Onstage, Jerry Dollar, a well-known New York DJ, was spinning old-fashioned platters and patter faster than a French bullet train. He serenaded the crowd with a well-chosen combination of rock and Motown.

  Shmulie didn’t have much of a game plan except to find two girls who seemed attached to each other and not to any other males, quickly befriend them, and persuade them to leave the dance and accompany us to an as yet unidentified bar. Being under the drinking age would not pose a problem to the barkeep at one of Brooklyn’s finer watering holes. But most of the girls at this dance, maybe at all high school dances, skipped around the place arm in arm in packs of at least six, or were already partnered with a guy whom they clung to on the dance floor like a conjoined twin.

  We walked about the packed room, Shmulie peering intently into the semi-darkness for potential quarry. Finally, he spotted two girls leaning on a wall. He grabbed my arm. We walked toward them and at some remove gave them the once-over. Like something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon, our eyes bugged out, and our mouths watered. Their return gaze, infinitely more civilized, indicated they, too, might be on the lookout for partners for the evening. Both girls had long straight hair. One was blonde, the other brunette. Their shirts were suggestively low cut, but without revealing much. Both were pretty. Both had breasts. Both looked perfectly human.

  “Hi,” Shmulie said to them loud enough to be heard above the music. “I’m Shmulie. This is Nicky.”

  “I’m Arlene,” the blonde said. “And this is Leslie.” We shook hands lamely. Both girls began playing with their hair. Arlene gave me a look, a kind of a half-wink, indicating that she approved of me, leaving Leslie with Shmulie. Leslie’s eyes did not register wild enthusiasm at the prospect of partnering with Shmulie for the evening, but nor did she seem ready to flee to another city. We were matched.

  Jerry Dollar had just begun to spin “Tears of a Clown.” “Now if there’s a smile on my face, It’s only there trying to fool the public . . .”

  “You wanna dance?” I asked Arlene, surprising myself.

  She nodded, and we walked to the dance floor.

  For the first moment it was clumsy. The music was too fast to hold her close, but not so fast that we could not look at each other. I noticed a birthmark on her left cheek, a dark spot that formed a small oval. It added to her beauty.

  “Just like Pagliacci did I try to keep my surface hid,” the song went.

  Smiling in the crowd I try,

  But in a lonely room I cry,

  The tears of a clown.

  Arlene smiled and I reciprocated. Well, not exactly. I beamed, the result of two minutes on the dance floor with a girl whose existence not four minutes before was unknown to me.

  The song faded and the DJ announced, “Another song from Smokey, another face full of tears.” And “Tracks of My Tears” filled the air.

  This was a slower-paced song, and we moved into each other’s arms.

  So take a good look at my face,

  You’ll see my smile looks out of place,

  If you look closer, it’s easy to trace,

  The tracks of my tears . . .

  I wanted to sway with this girl for the rest of the night, for the rest of my life well into the afterlife. But when the song concluded, a hand grabbed my shoulder.

  “Let’s get out of here, man.” Shmulie stood with Leslie in tow, a look of gravity filling his face.

  “Maybe we could stay here,” I suggested.

  Shmulie leaned into me. “The plan,” he whispered. “The plan.”

  “Fuck the Plan,” I responded. “Let’s stay here.”

  “Listen, Nicky, I didn’t come to this goddam place to dance. This chick wants to go get a drink, and I suggest you and this one come along and do th
e same.”

  I looked at Arlene, who was looking at Leslie with a spark of silent concurrence. I could see Arlene wanted to please Leslie, who wanted to go to the bar.

  “Let’s go,” Arlene said to me. “We’ll go to a bar. There’ll be a jukebox. We’ll dance there.” Without enthusiasm I agreed. The four of us headed for the exit.

  Shmulie had already scoped out a bar not far from the school, and he pointed us that way. He pulled Leslie along, sauntering at an uncharacteristic pace, while Arlene and I moseyed over, holding hands, keeping the couple in sight. This was the first time I’d ever held hands with a girl. It was electric. I saw Shmulie heading for a dive called Freddy’s. He and Leslie arrived and entered immediately. Arlene and I made our way.

  ***

  Freddy’s interior was dark, filthy, and smoky with the aroma of old beer and cigarette smoke hanging in the air, yellowing cheaply framed photographs of mostly dead sports figures on the walls. The patrons, mainly men, hovered over their drinks and smokes. The few women there unquestionably belonged.

  I wanted to go home. What were a couple of yeshiva bachurs with a couple of decent high school girls doing in this garbage dump? But Shmulie had taken a leadership role and was unrelenting. Though I will never be able to explain why, I complied. His pull dragged us into the bar, into the back to a table that had last been cleaned sometime in the ’50s. In this ghastly place Shmulie planned to make his move.

  “So what will you ladies have to drink?” Shmulie asked, a fox ready to pounce.

  The two girls looked at each other, again communicating wordlessly.

  Leslie said, “We’ll have whiskey sours, extra cherries.”

  “And you, Nicky?”

  Like Shmulie, I didn’t drink. What do men drink? I thought. Out of some memory, likely out of a noir picture, a word came into my head.

  “Bourbon,” I said.

  “Okay then,” Shmulie said, and went to the bar for our drinks.

  When he returned, he distributed the beverages and put a brown-colored drink with a cherry at his place.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Manhattan.”

  He sat down, raised his glass. In a grand gesture, he solemnly pronounced, “L’chaim.” And we all sipped our beverages, except Shmulie, who slugged his down like it was a Coke and he’d just run a mile.

  Arlene put her hand on my arm. “Where you going to college, Nick?”

  “Columbia,” I answered.

  “Nice. And you?” she asked Shmulie.

  “Cornell,” he said.

  “I’m going to BU, and Leslie’s going to Emory,” she said.

  “Fine schools, ladies,” said Shmulie.

  “I’m going to become a doctor,” said Leslie.

  “That’s great,” said Shmulie with forced enthusiasm. In his mind Leslie was already down to her knickers.

  Arlene asked me, “What’s it like at the yeshiva? Do you guys, you know, like, pray all the time?”

  “Not all the time,” I said. “Sometimes we study. And we eat lunch. Almost every day in fact.”

  “That’s cool,” she said, and giggled.

  Shmulie said, “Nick here’s going to become a big-shot professor.”

  “Cut the crap,” I said.

  “Are you?” asked Leslie.

  “Who knows?” I answered. “I want to study religion as a phenomenon.”

  “Listen to him,” said Shmulie. “Talking like an asshole already.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Arlene. “You seem, like, smart, Nick. Are you?”

  “Smart enough to want to dance with you,” I answered. I pointed to the jukebox. “Bet no one’s danced in here for years. Want to?”

  “Let’s see what they have in the jukebox,” she said.

  The music probably hadn’t been changed for twenty-five years. Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney.

  “I really like E8,” she said.

  I looked. E8 would get us Sinatra’s “One More for the Road.” I’d heard it once or twice. I knew it was slow and sad. That was all I cared about. Dancing slowly, to get away from Shmulie, to be with Arlene, and for a moment escape our gross surroundings.

  “Sure,” I said. I slipped two quarters into the slot and pressed the buttons.

  Sinatra’s silky voice came out of the jukebox. Arlene and I danced, defining a small circle. Once again we were alone. I could feel her all over me, pressing gently into me. I felt her breasts on my chest, and smelled the whiskey on her breath. When Sinatra ended, we played Nat King Cole, and after him, Tony Bennett. We danced, arms around each other’s waists. In this dirty little bar amid the smoke and the drunks, I found a little slice of high school heaven.

  Halfway through “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” Arlene stiffened.

  “Nick, I don’t feel so good.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know. My head hurts. Everything is loud and bright. Nick, it’s all way too bright.”

  I had no idea what to do. “Hold on for a minute. Maybe it’ll go away.”

  “I’m trying,” she said, panic rising in her voice. I could feel her heart beating fast through her shirt—incredibly fast. She gripped my waist as if I was a lifeline and she was drowning. Her face had taken on an eerie, ghostly expression. Her pupils dilated so wide they nearly filled both eyes. I held her waist but stood helpless as her panic mounted. She collapsed in my arms, her head back.

  “Nick, I’m scared. Really scared. I’ve never felt like this before. Help me.”

  Something wild was growing in her eyes, something dark and inevitable. But I had no idea what was going on. I half-carried, half-dragged her over to Shmulie and Leslie.

  “She’s not feeling well,” I said.

  “What’s the matter?” Leslie asked, as she stood and placed a hand on Arlene’s shoulder.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. Feels really weird and it’s getting worse. I’m scared, Leslie.”

  Then Arlene screamed so loud every boozy patron in the place raised their heads and looked our way. The bartender rushed over.

  “What’s going on?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know,” I said. “A minute ago we were dancing, and then she said she didn’t feel well.”

  Leslie put her arms around her friend to comfort her and help her calm down. But Arlene jerked away and staggered quickly about the room, knocking glasses off of tables, yelling incomprehensibly as if in a foreign language. We were powerless. She extricated herself from my grip and continued her aimless wandering around the bar.

  Before very long a cop car, siren blaring and lights flashing, pulled up to the bar. Two burly members of New York City’s Finest came running through the door.

  “What’s going on here?” one of them demanded of the bartender, who described Arlene’s strange behavior to him, as though the cops couldn’t observe this for themselves.

  The cops approached Arlene, who now stood still, lost and alone, her head bowed, her body bent over like an old weeping willow, her beautiful hair hanging down over her face.

  “Help,” she whispered to no one in particular. “Everything is weird. It’s just weird.”

  She collapsed.

  One cop looked to the other. “Call an ambulance. This girl’s on something.”

  I bent my knees, took her hand, and muttered the kind of palliatives people utter in times of crisis.

  “You’ll be all right, Arlene. Just hold on, just hold on, help’ll be here in a minute.”

  An ambulance pulled up, the techs not knowing what to do other than sedate her and bring her to the hospital. The three of us hailed a cab and joined her there. Throughout this nightmare, Shmulie remained silent; not a word.

  We sat in the waiting room outside the ER. Arle
ne’s parents arrived. With reluctance, we introduced ourselves. They were both dressed as though they’d been pulled away from a quiet evening in front of the TV.

  “What happened? What happened to my girl?” Arlene’s mother cried. Her father stood there, brow furrowed, quiet, fretting.

  Leslie, very upset, said, “We went to a bar with these two guys”—pointing to Shmulie and me. “We didn’t have more than a drink. We had a whiskey sour, just a whiskey sour, just one. We didn’t even finish them. We didn’t do anything else, Mrs. Shupack. I swear. Just a half a whiskey sour. That’s all.”

  Arlene’s father spoke up. “She knows she’s not supposed to have even one drink.”

  “Don’t bring that up now, Herb,” Arlene’s mother said.

  “Why the fuck not?” he answered. “And who are you?” he asked, looking at Shmulie and me.

  “I’m, I’m Nick Friedman,” I answered. “Arlene and I met at the dance. We went to that bar, to Freddy’s—”

  “You took my girl to Freddy’s? That shithole?”

  His wife grasped his arm and pulled on it so quickly and suddenly it startled him and he quieted down. “Herb, our daughter’s in the ER. We need to focus on her, don’t you think?”

  Herb looked at Shmulie. “Who the hell are you?”

  “My name’s Shmulie Shimmer.”

  “Do you know what happened to my little girl?”

  “No idea, sir,” he replied.

  I was likely the only one there focused enough to observe Shmulie’s face redden and his shoulders hunch. He was keeping something to himself, hiding something. These were the first words he’d spoken since Arlene’s breakdown. I wanted to know why someone as garrulous as my friend Shmulie Shimmer remained mute in the face of this inexplicable, ghastly turn of events.

  A doctor came out carrying a clipboard. Looking at Leslie, Shmulie, and me, he asked, “Were you with her tonight?”

  We nodded.

  “Can any of you tell me, did you see Arlene take any drugs? I don’t care how she got them. I just want to know if she took anything, and if so, what.”