Chapter One
We always played football games in Stu's yard. It was the only vacant lot in the neighborhood so kids came from miles around to play there. Stu was a big kid. He was fat and had a round face that rarely smiled. Both his parents were lawyers and had met at law school. They were quite stuffy and had a strange accent from back east.
After school, we would all meet by the small red toolshed in the corner of Stu's yard. We would choose teams and then play football until dark, never really keeping score, but just enjoying the game. Dark would come and I would walk back over to my yard, put the football away in the garage and go into the kitchen. Mom was like a statue. She held the same pose over the stove my whole childhood, calmly waiting for something to finish cooking.
What she cooked was usually quite good, but occasionally she would slip something nasty in, as if to keep us alert, awake.
Summer nights might be especially surprising. Vegetables were in great quantity because my father had a garden in the backyard as well as one out at our farm. The summer I was five, dad tried growing brussels sprouts out at the farm. The spring had been real dry, no rain had come and the ground was a slab of stone. But the brussels sprouts came up out of the ground, pods of proud vegetation. Mom steamed them in water at the stove and then mixed in big globs of margarine right before she put them down on the table.
I didn't like the look of them. The rest of the meal was normal. The chicken was fried like normal and the noodles were the same. Even the salad had the same dressing on it like every night.
I stared at the brussels sprouts.
Three of them sitting like green tumors on my plate. Green turds left by some garden fairy.
"Try them," my dad rumbled.
I poked at them with my fork.
"Just take a bite, dear," my mother said.
I didn't say anything. I didn't do anything. I just sat in my place at the table and ate the food I was used to. My sisters noticed that I wasn't eating the brussels sprouts.
"Mom, Adam isn't gonna eat them," one said.
"Well he will sit there and not get up until he does," my dad said.
Everybody was done. They had all eaten their chicken and their noodles and had even eaten the brussels sprouts. My plate was clean also, except for the three brussels sprouts that looked somehow like dried testicles that had been ripped out and dumped on my plate.
I heard my mother talking to my dad over by the sink as they rinsed their plates.
"When I bring out desert he will eat them," my mother whispered with a nod.
They came back to the table. My brother was busy kicking me in the leg, but he stopped when mom set the desert plate down in front of us. She had made strawberry short cake. Everybody heaped up their plates with the pound cake and mom went around the table with a can of whipped cream, spraying out mounds of the stuff on top of the glistening berries.
When she got to my plate she frowned at me and passed on by.
"Adam, honey," she said. "You won't get any shortcake until you have at least one bite of your brussels sprouts."
I didn't say anything.
My sisters were having the time of their lives as they made loud lip smacking sounds over their cake. In minutes the desert was gone, inside them. I would not get any.
I sat at the table and hated them all for that. I wanted to pick up the little green things and throw them at them. My mother scooped up the dishes and took them to the sink. She cleaned the kitchen and left, turning off the light as she went.
"You can't get up until you try one bite," she said from the gleaming doorway.
I sat. The small clock on the stove read 9:07. I had been in the chair, motionless for three hours and it was now bedtime. My father entered the kitchen to get a beer. He snapped on the light and a look of wonder crossed his features.
"What the hell?" he asked loudly. "You're still there! Adam, just take a bite!"
I crossed my arms and sighed. They would not bust my will on this matter. The brussels sprouts would not win. Could not win.
"Oh all right then," dad said. "C'mon."
He lifted my up out of the chair using my arms as handles and set me on the linoleum floor. "Go to bed," he said.
I trudged up the stairs like a weary soldier. I was tired. Beating the brussels sprouts had taken a lot out of me. I brushed my teeth and went into my small room. I could hear my sisters in the next room. They were listening to some of my brother's records and it sounded like they were dancing around. Finally, one of them gave a piercing shriek and then they both exploded with shrill laughter.
I got out of bed and walked down the hall to their room. I poked my head in the door and raised my voice up louder than the stereo.
"Shut up!" I said.
Chapter Two
Jason was a buddy of mine from down the street. When he was really young, his mother had died in a car wreck. This made Jason seem odd. It was like he was cold inside, he didn't smile much.
Jason had a bunch of older brothers. They were all so much older than us, and it seemed as if they were really mean. They were always walking up to Jason and punching him for no reason. My older brother never did that, but then again my older brother was off at college for most of my youth. Jason had a older sister too, Marsha, older than everybody else. She used to babysit me when my parents went out to eat and my sisters couldn't take care of me. I think that I liked Marsha, but I do not really remember her all that well. I remember that she had dark hair that was short and she had big round lips that were always wet. Everybody said that Marsha looked just like her mother.
One day, I was over at Jason's house climbing in his trees. We had talked about getting a game of baseball together, but we needed to get some more kids to make up teams. We walked up to Stu's house and asked his mom if she could get him. She did and Stu came bounding out of the house with his mitt. Next we walked up the block to Stan's house and he joined us. Finally, after covering most of the neighborhood we had ten guys to play baseball.
We set up the bases and chose up teams. I was pitching and Jason was hitting.
"Hey, can I play?" We looked over and leaning on Jason's fence was Ellen.
"Get outta here," yelled Jason as he stepped away from home plate. He waved the big red wiffle ball bat we were using at her.
Nobody in the neighborhood liked Ellen. She was a year older than me and lived right next door to my house. She had moved in a few years earlier from Cleveland and had bright red hair. Ellen was eight or nine years old when she went through puberty. She gained a bunch of weight and her bra size was easily a thirty-eight with a D cup. We all used to make fun of Ellen, it was hard not too. She would run around and look down at here boobs, staring at them. When we made fun of her she would say that she was too mature for us and then she would run and stare all over again. Most people at the time were telling Dolly Parton jokes but we told Ellen jokes.
So there she was, hanging over the fence, pushing her huge boobs out. Somebody, Stan or Stu, yelled at Jason to let her play and so he did. She was on my team.
I threw the tennis ball a thousand times and pitched like a demon. Our team scored a couple of times, but Jason was a good pitcher too. When we finished, we sat on Jason's driveway and talked about the game.
Out of nowhere Ellen said that she had a hickey.
"No way!" I shouted. We all new what a hickey was, but we didn't know how they were made.
"No really," she said, "I gotta a hickey right here." She pointed a finger and touched a spot high on her breast near her neck.
"Lets see it," said Stu.
"No way!" Ellen giggled. "I would have to show you my boob!"
"Aw that's okay," I said, "we all seen them anyway. You can see into your bedroom from my parent's room."
Ellen looked sick. "You mean you guys have been watching me?"
"Naw, it's kinda boring," I said.
"I ain't seen you," Stan said.
"C'mon Ellen," Stu said, "show us your hickey."
Ellen gave a small smirk. She stood up and wiped the dust off of her shorts.
"Okay, but we gotta find some place to do it."
"Lets go to the toolshed," Stu suggested.
We all got up off the driveway and walked to Stu's yard. The red toolshed was in the corner by his parent's cherry tree and it always stunk like cat piss. Ellen slid the bolt of the door back and walked in.
"Not all at once," she said and it kinda sounded sexy.
One by one, we all went in. I didn't want to at first. I thought Ellen was silly and lying to us about the hickey. When Jason came out of the toolshed, we knew something was up. He had this big grin on his face and that was rare. He never smiled.
"Did you see it?" I asked.
"Did she have a hickey?" Stan asked.
Jason nodded his head and kept on smiling.
I went in next. The light was very dim because there was only one window in the toolshed, high up above the plywood door. Ellen was sitting in the corner, her bra was off and crumpled on the floor before her, looking like a broken kite with wires sticking out.
"Come here Adam," she said and I knelt down on the floor next to her.
She raised her shirt over her belly. I could see very little until her white breast came into full view. She lifted the big thing up and held it out away from her body. It did not look like the boobs I had seen in my brothers dirty magazines. It was flabby and the nipple was really dark. It stood out against her white skin starkly.
"See it?" she asked.
"No," I sighed. "Oh wait, there it is." right above her nipple was a purple bruise. It faded into her white skin.
"Do you want to touch it?" she asked.
A million things flooded my mind. I was scared and nervous, it felt like I had sat on an anthill. I put a dirty hand up and cupped her breast. It felt warm and nice, but it shocked me. I scrambled to my feet and scampered out of the toolshed, my face pale.
Stu was the last to go in. He was in the toolshed for a real long time. The rest of us hung around the shed, at first listening in, but it was silent in there so we started to toss the tennis ball we used for a baseball around. Jason began hitting grounders at us.
A noise like a yelp came from the shed. Stu came running out wiping his mouth and trying to spit something out.
"S-she tried to kiss me!" he gasped.
That was it. This wasn't part of the bargain. And like I said, nobody really liked Ellen, so we all went into the shed and dragged Ellen out. I remember yanking her by the hair, it was so red and she was yelling at us to stop. She clutched her bra in a small white hand.
When she stood up, she had tears in her eyes and she was shaking. Jason walked up to her and poked her with the wiffle ball bat. "Get outta here," he shouted.
Ellen looked like a hunted animal, but she did not move. Jason raised the bat and then brought it down hard just as Ellen turned to run. The fat end of the red bat landed with a slapping noise on the top of her head. She screamed and began to run. Jason chased her all the way to the edge of her yard, swinging and connecting. Ellen staggered into her house.
A few years later, we found out that her dad had given her the hickey.
Chapter Three
We used to have this real rough game that we would play. It was called "knights" and was a pretty bloody game. First we started off with sticks and garbage can lids; sparring back and forth in the back yards, but soon we began to devise more cunning weaponry.
A guy named Greg who didn't live near us came up to play the game one day. He was a thick kid with a dimple right in the middle of his double chin. He liked to fight, and he usually won. So Greg came up to play knights with us but he brought a homemade bow and arrows with him. The arrows were made from thin, straight sticks that he had whittled to a fine point, and had black electric tape for feathers.
Another kid that lived kinda far away named Andy, held up his garbage can lid and yelled at Greg to shoot an arrow at him. He wanted the arrow to strike the lid and see if it would punch through the thin metal. But Greg either did not know how to aim his bow, or he shot the arrow low on purpose. The arrow screamed away from the bow and stuck in the meaty part of Andy's thigh. He dropped like a rock and was yelling for us to pull it out, but most of the guys just laughed at him. I didn't laugh, I didn't like that Greg guy and I was pretty good friends with Andy.
I yanked the arrow out of his leg and helped him up. He wasn't bleeding badly but the arrow was coated with a thin slick of blood that went up the shaft about four inches. After that day, Andy wasn't allowed to come over to play knights anymore.
When he got to his feet, he rushed at Greg, windmilling his arms and screaming "sonofabitch!" at him over and over. Greg hit him square in the forehead with the knobby wooden bow. Andy went down again.
I helped him up again, but the fight had gone out of him. He had a slender bruise forming right between his eyes where the bow had struck him, and tears were running out of his eyes. He hopped on his bicycle and rode off, calling Greg a mother fucker as he peddled.
We resumed our games. We picked teams and spent days after school beating the hell out of each other. The weapons got better and better as we played knights. I even took some old wire coat hangers and cut them into little segments. Then I bent them into rings and sewed them to an old pair of work gloves that my dad wouldn't miss. I had some gauntlets now and soon began to sew more of the rings into a old sweat shirt. It was amazing! The hanger-mail I had created made the arrows we used bounce off with no harm, unless one got you on the head or legs.
Stu took a bar of metal out of a chain link fence somewhere in the neighborhood and cut a point on the end of it with his dad's coping saw. He ruined three blades on the stubborn metal, but he finally got a good point on it. Next, he began to wear an edge into it with a grinding stone. He tore that up to and his dad gave him the belt when he found out about it. But that didn't matter. Things were getting pretty high tech for us ten year olds. We had real weapons now and were capable of great bodily damage. I came home with a lot of slash marks and puncture wounds, but I told my mom that I had been playing football. She believed me. I had to hide my armor in the garage under the lawn mower to keep her from finding out what we were up to.
We played knights for two solid months during the summer. One day, while beating the hell out of each other in Stu's yard, my dad came home from work early. He saw what we were doing and turned a deep shade of red as he ran across the yard towards me.
"My trash can lids!" he screamed. "What have you done with them?"
I stood there dumbfounded. I looked down at myself, all bloody and bruised. My hands had cuts all over them and my trash can lid shield was a dented mess. A few months before it had been a new lid, but now it was slashed and dented and looked like a mangled soda pop can.
Dad yanked the lid out of my hand and went around to the other guys, taking the lids away from them. He dragged me off to the house.
After that, I wasn't allowed to play knights anymore either. They took my cool armor and threw it in the trash. My mom did it on trash pick up day right when the garbage men got there to keep me from digging it out of the trash. Dad took my bow and broke it with his knee. He threw that on the wood pile next to the house, but I don't remember it ever making it to the fireplace the next winter.
As for me, I got a good whipping and had to pay for new garbage can lids. I was grounded until I could pay for them, so I had to get a paper route. I was working at age ten! It took the rest of the summer folding papers, putting rubber bands on them and delivering them at six o'clock in the morning to pay for the lids, so my summer was shot to hell. I couldn't even go to the pool. I was only allowed to leave the house to do my paper route and play on the baseball team. Three games a week.
Dad said that if I wanted to play at war and fighting, I should just jump in real life and learn the "hardest" way. Mom agreed.
That night, after my whipping, I sat in my little room and looked out the window. It was just twilight and the fireflies were just beginning to send out their magical glow. In the next yard I heard the clang of metal on metal and the fierce yells of battle. My mind wandered.
Chapter Four
Everybody wanted a pocketknife. The circus had gone through town and one of the midway prizes that a kid could win was a tiny pocketknife with only one blade on it. A friend of mine at school had won a handful of them and was giving them out to everybody the next day at school. Now Mike, was a good friend, but he did not come over to my house very often because he lived clear on the other side of town and it was too far to walk. That day he had made plans with his mom to walk home with me and she would pick him up at six o'clock that night.
My parents were out of town on vacation and my oldest sister was watching me for them for some quick cash. She was just like my mom, always perched near the stove, and she even sat in the same spot my mom did on the couch when we watched television.
So Mike came over and he gave me one of the pocket knives. It was beautiful. It was the finest thing anyone had ever given me, with a silver mother-of-pearl handle and a tiny sliver of a blade. I was happy. Mike had given me his last one, and we took them out to the back yard to whittle and dig with them. A boy has to have a pocketknife!
Stu was out playing in his yard, so we wandered over there to show him the knives. You could see the green jealous gleam in Stu's eyes as we popped open the blades and waved them in front of him. I let him hold my knife and he sighed.
"I wish I had a knife, but my mom won't let me have one."
Just then, Stu's mother pulled into the driveway in her station wagon. She hopped out of the car holding two large bags of fast food.
"Stu, supper's ready!" she cried and Stu followed her into the house.
Mike and I went back to my yard, but soon heard Stu and his sisters talking over their meal at the picnic table. We went back over.
They had hamburgers and cheeseburgers and chicken nuggets. We watched them as they sucked cola down with that annoying noise that straws make. Stu's oldest sister asked Mike and I if we would like some of her fries.
"Sure," we said in unison and plopped ourselves down next to her at the picnic table.
She gave us both a napkin and spread the fries out on them. Mike and I smiled as we chomped the thin things and dipped them in sweet ketchup.
As we ate, one of my fries fell down on to the bricks of their patio. I reached down and popped it into my mouth, not even thinking. When I looked back up, Stu and his sisters were agape. Their eyes were wide and their mouths hung open. They had never seen a person eat something off the ground.
"Did you eat that fry after it fell on the bricks?" one of the sisters asked.
"Yeah," I said and resumed eating.
"That is gross," said Stu.
"Sick," said the other sister. "Adam, you're a Martian!"
With that, they all jumped up and began dancing around the patio singing "Adam the Martian, Adam the Martian, Adam the Martian!" while Mike and I sat on the picnic bench and watched them in wonder.
"And another thing," Stu said to his sisters, "Adam has a knife!"
He said it like he was accusing me. His sisters stopped their dancing and froze as if I was a ferocious animal about to pounce on them. I finished chewing my fries and got up.
"Mom!" one of the sisters screamed.
"Shhh!" I hissed at her. "Don't tell!"
"Mom, Adam's gotta knife!" They made it seem like it was the worst crime in the world for a young boy to have a knife.
They made me feel like I was a murderer.
Stu's mom slid the sliding glass door back and pointed a finger at me.
"Come with me," she said sternly.
I didn't know what to do. Part of me wanted to run home-it was only next door, but another part of me knew that I was guilty of something, and that I should go with her. I took a few steps back towards my home, Mike was already running.
Stu's mom came across the patio like a windstorm. She grabbed my by the collar and yanked me into their house.
"Sit down," she said as she pointed at the kitchen table. I sat and she began dialing the phone.
"There doesn't seem to be anyone at your house Adam. Where is everybody?"
"Mom and dad are on vacation and my sister is still at school."
She thought for a moment and then asked me if I knew the number for my sister's apartment on campus. I gave her the number and she called. I could hear the phone buzzing through the receiver as she waited for my sister to answer. Then she did and I couldn't catch the rest of the conversation.
When she hung the phone up, she held her hand out to me, palm up.
"Give it to me, Adam." she said coldly.
I thought of jabbing the knife into that palm. I wanted to so badly, but instead I placed it, unopened, into her hand.
"Now," she said evilly, "go upstairs and wait in Stu's room."
I looked at her and it seemed to me that she was the most fearsome monster in the world, more terrible than any witch or dragon. I started to cry.
"Knock that off, or I will give you something to cry about."
I walked up the stairs and sat on Stu's bed, waiting for I don't know what. It was getting dark outside and I was too scared to get up and turn on the light. What was Mike doing? He had to have gone off home by now. Soon I saw my sister's beetle pull into the driveway and she got out. She stalked up to the front door and met Stu's mom on the front porch. I saw Stu's mother hand my sister my beautiful new knife, which she quickly put in her purse. They both glanced up at the window and saw me there, looking down. Both their faces were pale in the fading light and the looked like demons from hell.
"You can come down now," I heard Stu's mom call out.
I slowly walked down the steps and looked at my sister.
"Wait til mom hears about this," she hissed. Then she bullied me out to her car and drove around the block to our house. Mike was sitting on the front porch, his head popped up when he saw the beetle pull into the driveway.
"What happened?" he asked.
I didn't get a chance to answer. My sister gave him and evil look and shouted at him.
"Get your shit and get in the car," she said to Mike's stunned face.
Then she turned to me and said, "get upstairs and take a bath, I want you in bed by the time I get home."
She got back into the car and tore off, taking Mike to his house. Later that night I lay in bed and could not sleep. I had not eaten any dinner and I missed my knife. I could hear my sister downstairs watching television with one of her boyfriends. That made my blood boil. It was way after midnight when I drifted off to sleep.
My parents got home and my sister gave the knife to my dad. I would see him use it from time to time, cutting fishing line or using it to cut an article out of the newspaper, and it always gave me a pang of regret. That was my knife! I asked him about it years later, and he told me that he had lost it someplace. I wanted to kill him.
Chapter Five
Years later. My brother and sisters have moved out to go to college, to have babies. I worked hard at a grocery store and saved up enough to buy a car. I had taken to going over to a new friend's house. His name was Tim, and he had straight, dirty blonde hair that hung down in his eyes and stuck to the sides of his face like wet seaweed.
Tim was the friend to have. He was a grade higher than me, a junior, and he was two years older than me. Tim could buy beer; you could back in those days when you were eighteen. He introduced me to it, and I have never looked back.
I would have five or six little seven ounce beers and get a good buzz. Then I would climb into my beat up car and drive home. Tim would always say to be careful on the way home. "Don't get busted," he would say in his deep voice as his hair wagged.
Tim could always out drink everybody that hung around. He would drink five beers to my one and you couldn't even tell he was drunk. One night I saw him consume a case of beer without even getting up to use the bathroom.
Somebody had the great idea of lighting a fire in Tim's fireplace. It was happy and nice as the flames really got going, but then something odd happened. The smoke from the fireplace roiled out from the flames. We had forgot to open the chimney flue. The room filled with smoke in an unbelievably short amount of time. We all ran out of the house, clutching our beers and screaming.
Tim's sister sat on the curb, drunk and crying. "My house is burning down," she sobbed.
Finally somebody said that we should go in and see what was up. The house wasn't being consumed by flames like we all figured it should have been by now. We crept up to the front porch like rats, waiting for something to happen.
I poked my head inside the screen door and looked towards the room where the fireplace was. Clouds of smoke floated around the ceiling and the house smelled like fried bacon. In front of the fireplace on a soot covered sofa sat Tim, a bottle of beer in his hand.
"You idiots!" he shouted at us. I felt like a child. "When you light a fire, you have to open the chimney up!"
I went back into the house, followed by the rest of the rats, and we all sat down around the fire drinking. My glass had ashes in the bottom of it, but I drank it anyway. It made me feel brave to do that, but not as brave as Tim. When he had opened the chimney flue he had burned his hand pretty badly on the hot metal. I saw him pressing his frosty beer into his palm, wincing. But I never heard him mention anything about it.
Another guy that use to hang around Tim's house was named Joe. Joe was short, fat, had a lot of blackheads, and was very, very Italian. We used to beat up on him pretty good, but he was tough and could take it. Joe came over to my house one day to play some football in Stuart's lot next door. That day, he met and fell in love with Ellen (of hickey fame).
All day long, at school he would pester me about her. "Is she seeing anyone?" He would almost drool whenever she pranced by, looking at her huge boobs still. I didn't have the heart to tell him that usually, when I got home from a night of drinking at Tim's, I would usually bang on her window. She would come out in her sweaty night clothes and ask me what I wanted. "Like you don't know," I would drawl.
Sometimes, if it was late enough, we would do it on her parents couch, her red head thrashing back and forth as I really gave it to her. Once, we almost got caught, but I hid in her basement until her dad went back upstairs. Other times, when her parents were still up, or if she felt nervous, we would do it in my back yard on my parent's patio furniture.
I make it sound like it was an easy thing, getting into Ellen's pants, but it was not. She knew what I wanted, and she used it to make me listen to her stupid stories. She knew, and she would make me say things that I really didn't mean.
"Tell me that you love me," she say as she snaked a hand across my chest.
"Alright."
"No," her hand stopped. "You have to mean it."
"Alright," I sighed. "I love you." My voice tasted like dirt in my mouth.
"You need me?"
"Um," I stammered. "I need you Ellen."
Her hand resumed it's movements, and I would work across her body quickly. There was no telling when she would start up again.
"Tell me what you want," her voice was becoming husky now, like she was getting drunk off of my attention.
"Oh Christ Ellen," I paused and said into the little red wisps of hair on her belly.
Her hands would come down to the sides of my head, pulling up. "Tell me."
"You."
Pop! Her hands went back to whatever they had been doing before, and I resumed my trek downwards. Usually when I got her panties off, I would find a matted, dirty patch of hair. Her privates would have stinky pieces of fluff from her pants stuck to them. I hated this part of those nights, but Ellen would deny me any further action if I did not perform this act first.
I dove in.
With my eyes closed, and my mind somewhere else, I usually got through this chore quickly. Her body would bounce once or twice and that would be it. Sometimes her meaty thighs would clamp around my neck and head like a gooey vise. I would have to yank them apart or I would strangle.
Ellen would then take me in her hands and give me a total look of disgust. She would put herself on top of me and buck like a untalented circus seal. I would let go and then I would get up to go. Her power over me was spent until the next time I went out and got drunk.
I made my way across the wet grass of our back yards and into my house. Usually I would still be putting my clothes on by the time I reached my parent's living room. And there my mother sat, glaring at the late night television and fuming at me.
"You are drunk," she would mutter.
Her eyes never leave the television as she said these words. For some reason, I always got the impression of a crow, with lifeless eyes, sitting on a electrical wire staring down at nothing in particular.
I made it to my room and fell asleep, only to wake the next day, hung over, and with a list of chores, if it was the weekend, or with dirty looks if it was a school day. I would do it again after work that night.
Joe also worked where I worked. He was in the produce department and I was a cashier. Joe got fired because he left a cart full of ice cream out of the freezer overnight. It had totally melted by the time the morning workers arrived, and there was an inch of ice cream slime all over the floor of the produce department.
Joe came into work that afternoon and the manager screamed at him while he smoked a cheap cigar. Dale was the managers name. He was tall, skinny, and had a greasy mustache. He told us that we were all worthless right in front of the customers, and then stormed off into his office.
Joe clutched his produce apron in a lifeless hand. It was almost tragic to watch as he collapsed inside. He had never lost a job before. His shoulders sagged and he walked out of the building. For some odd reason I felt like laughing. I told you we used him as a punching bag. He was over at Tim's house that night, and he drank more than I ever had seen him drink before. He got into Tim's mother's liquor cabinet and started in on a bottle of gin.
Tim tried to calm him down, but you could hear him muttering curses at the grocery store, at the manager, at everyone. Finally, he passed out on Tim's sister's bed and threw up spaghetti on the floor.
Chapter Six
That night, another nice, amazing thing happened. While Joe had been guzzling the gin, Tim's sister arrived home. She was very stoned and had to be hauled into the house by her best friend. I am not sure if her name was Kristi or Kristin, but I had seen her in school talking with Tim and his sister. She had red hair that fell down to her mid back and she always wore dark clothes. Like all bright red heads, she had very pale skin and wide green eyes that hid in a field of freckles. She placed Tim's sister on a sofa and covered her with a blanket. Then she wandered off to the kitchen in search of something to eat. I sat in silence drinking my beer, occasionally laughing about a joke. But my mind was on Kristi. I found my eyes wandering off to the direction of the kitchen, where by some trick of the light I could catch a hint of shadow as she messed around.
Kristin came out with a heap of plain noodles on a plate. The noodles steamed and looked delicious. She asked if anybody wanted any, and everybody jumped up. She said that the rest of the food was in the kitchen, and sat down on the opposite end of the sofa from me.
"Why didn't you go get some of the noodles I made?" she asked.
Her eyes were mildly red and her words were slurred just a bit.
"I didn't think that you made them for me."
I couldn't take my eyes off of her and I felt nervous inside because she had scooted closer to me on the couch.
"Don't be silly, I made them for everyone. What's your name?"
I told her and then felt my stomach sink and my palms started sweating despite the fact that they were clutched tightly around a cold beer.
"How much did you cook?" I asked and felt awkward.
"Enough for everyone," she giggled. "I put a whole pack of noodles in there."
I was starting to feel better now that she had warmed up the room with her light laughter. My gaze wandered around the room and then finally rested on her eyes.
"Adam," she said nervously. "What is it? Do I have a noodle on my chin?"
It must have been the beer, or the timing, but I could not help myself. I pulled her close to me and she made a small squeal as kissed her. She pulled back quickly and looked as if she was going to cry. I felt about two inches tall, and she grabbed my beer from the table in front us. I watched her throat move up and down as she swallowed down the last gulps. For some reason, I was turned on even more and I felt a nervous lump form in my stomach.
"Want me to go get another one for you?" I asked.
"Yeah, you better get a couple." She pulled her legs up underneath her butt on the sofa, for all the world looking like a relaxing kitten.
I wandered out to the kitchen. The guys were perched around the table eagerly forking mouthfuls of noodles into their mouths, and making smacking sounds as they chewed.
"What's up?" Tim said as he chewed.
"Kristin wants a beer," I said flatly.
I opened the refrigerator and though to myself, what the heck? I grabbed a whole six pack and made off towards the sofa and Kristi.
"Jesus," Tim said loudly. "I thought she wanted a beer, not the rest of them."
"There's more in there," I said over my shoulder. "If we run out I'll go get more."
I left the kitchen and heard them laughing and yelling. When I got back to Kristin, she was laying lying down on the couch. She had taken the thick, black sweater off and her body was alive under a white t-shirt.
"Here," I said and handed her a beer. I didn't know where to sit, she had taken up all the space on the sofa. I put the beer down on the coffee table and sat down on the floor next to her. A long, nervous silence passed. It seemed to go on forever, punctuated by gulps of beer and the crackle of cigarettes being inhaled.
"Don't you want to kiss me again?" she asked.
"I'm not sure," I said with a grin. "The last time I did it, it didn't work out all that well."
She turned a red color and set down her beer. She swayed her head to move her long red hair out of the way and kissed me. It was such a sexy thing to watch happening. I felt outside looking in, as if I were some sort of self voyeur looking in on a dirty secret. She took my hand and led me to Tim's sister's room.
Nobody seemed to miss us. Tim and all of my friends came out of the kitchen and resumed the drinking. I could hear them banging quarters on the coffee table. Krisin and I got undressed in the dark. We could hear a soft buzzing as Joe snored.
I touched her, and she touched me. I felt hot and chilled at the same time. She was so beautiful and vulnerable at the same time. Her red hair blazed even in the darkness. We made love-I actually think of it that way, even if it only happened once-in that tiny, messy bedroom, and then slept on the floor.
We always played football games in Stu's yard. It was the only vacant lot in the neighborhood so kids came from miles around to play there. Stu was a big kid. He was fat and had a round face that rarely smiled. Both his parents were lawyers and had met at law school. They were quite stuffy and had a strange accent from back east.
After school, we would all meet by the small red toolshed in the corner of Stu's yard. We would choose teams and then play football until dark, never really keeping score, but just enjoying the game. Dark would come and I would walk back over to my yard, put the football away in the garage and go into the kitchen. Mom was like a statue. She held the same pose over the stove my whole childhood, calmly waiting for something to finish cooking.
What she cooked was usually quite good, but occasionally she would slip something nasty in, as if to keep us alert, awake.
Summer nights might be especially surprising. Vegetables were in great quantity because my father had a garden in the backyard as well as one out at our farm. The summer I was five, dad tried growing brussels sprouts out at the farm. The spring had been real dry, no rain had come and the ground was a slab of stone. But the brussels sprouts came up out of the ground, pods of proud vegetation. Mom steamed them in water at the stove and then mixed in big globs of margarine right before she put them down on the table.
I didn't like the look of them. The rest of the meal was normal. The chicken was fried like normal and the noodles were the same. Even the salad had the same dressing on it like every night.
I stared at the brussels sprouts.
Three of them sitting like green tumors on my plate. Green turds left by some garden fairy.
"Try them," my dad rumbled.
I poked at them with my fork.
"Just take a bite, dear," my mother said.
I didn't say anything. I didn't do anything. I just sat in my place at the table and ate the food I was used to. My sisters noticed that I wasn't eating the brussels sprouts.
"Mom, Adam isn't gonna eat them," one said.
"Well he will sit there and not get up until he does," my dad said.
Everybody was done. They had all eaten their chicken and their noodles and had even eaten the brussels sprouts. My plate was clean also, except for the three brussels sprouts that looked somehow like dried testicles that had been ripped out and dumped on my plate.
I heard my mother talking to my dad over by the sink as they rinsed their plates.
"When I bring out desert he will eat them," my mother whispered with a nod.
They came back to the table. My brother was busy kicking me in the leg, but he stopped when mom set the desert plate down in front of us. She had made strawberry short cake. Everybody heaped up their plates with the pound cake and mom went around the table with a can of whipped cream, spraying out mounds of the stuff on top of the glistening berries.
When she got to my plate she frowned at me and passed on by.
"Adam, honey," she said. "You won't get any shortcake until you have at least one bite of your brussels sprouts."
I didn't say anything.
My sisters were having the time of their lives as they made loud lip smacking sounds over their cake. In minutes the desert was gone, inside them. I would not get any.
I sat at the table and hated them all for that. I wanted to pick up the little green things and throw them at them. My mother scooped up the dishes and took them to the sink. She cleaned the kitchen and left, turning off the light as she went.
"You can't get up until you try one bite," she said from the gleaming doorway.
I sat. The small clock on the stove read 9:07. I had been in the chair, motionless for three hours and it was now bedtime. My father entered the kitchen to get a beer. He snapped on the light and a look of wonder crossed his features.
"What the hell?" he asked loudly. "You're still there! Adam, just take a bite!"
I crossed my arms and sighed. They would not bust my will on this matter. The brussels sprouts would not win. Could not win.
"Oh all right then," dad said. "C'mon."
He lifted my up out of the chair using my arms as handles and set me on the linoleum floor. "Go to bed," he said.
I trudged up the stairs like a weary soldier. I was tired. Beating the brussels sprouts had taken a lot out of me. I brushed my teeth and went into my small room. I could hear my sisters in the next room. They were listening to some of my brother's records and it sounded like they were dancing around. Finally, one of them gave a piercing shriek and then they both exploded with shrill laughter.
I got out of bed and walked down the hall to their room. I poked my head in the door and raised my voice up louder than the stereo.
"Shut up!" I said.
Chapter Two
Jason was a buddy of mine from down the street. When he was really young, his mother had died in a car wreck. This made Jason seem odd. It was like he was cold inside, he didn't smile much.
Jason had a bunch of older brothers. They were all so much older than us, and it seemed as if they were really mean. They were always walking up to Jason and punching him for no reason. My older brother never did that, but then again my older brother was off at college for most of my youth. Jason had a older sister too, Marsha, older than everybody else. She used to babysit me when my parents went out to eat and my sisters couldn't take care of me. I think that I liked Marsha, but I do not really remember her all that well. I remember that she had dark hair that was short and she had big round lips that were always wet. Everybody said that Marsha looked just like her mother.
One day, I was over at Jason's house climbing in his trees. We had talked about getting a game of baseball together, but we needed to get some more kids to make up teams. We walked up to Stu's house and asked his mom if she could get him. She did and Stu came bounding out of the house with his mitt. Next we walked up the block to Stan's house and he joined us. Finally, after covering most of the neighborhood we had ten guys to play baseball.
We set up the bases and chose up teams. I was pitching and Jason was hitting.
"Hey, can I play?" We looked over and leaning on Jason's fence was Ellen.
"Get outta here," yelled Jason as he stepped away from home plate. He waved the big red wiffle ball bat we were using at her.
Nobody in the neighborhood liked Ellen. She was a year older than me and lived right next door to my house. She had moved in a few years earlier from Cleveland and had bright red hair. Ellen was eight or nine years old when she went through puberty. She gained a bunch of weight and her bra size was easily a thirty-eight with a D cup. We all used to make fun of Ellen, it was hard not too. She would run around and look down at here boobs, staring at them. When we made fun of her she would say that she was too mature for us and then she would run and stare all over again. Most people at the time were telling Dolly Parton jokes but we told Ellen jokes.
So there she was, hanging over the fence, pushing her huge boobs out. Somebody, Stan or Stu, yelled at Jason to let her play and so he did. She was on my team.
I threw the tennis ball a thousand times and pitched like a demon. Our team scored a couple of times, but Jason was a good pitcher too. When we finished, we sat on Jason's driveway and talked about the game.
Out of nowhere Ellen said that she had a hickey.
"No way!" I shouted. We all new what a hickey was, but we didn't know how they were made.
"No really," she said, "I gotta a hickey right here." She pointed a finger and touched a spot high on her breast near her neck.
"Lets see it," said Stu.
"No way!" Ellen giggled. "I would have to show you my boob!"
"Aw that's okay," I said, "we all seen them anyway. You can see into your bedroom from my parent's room."
Ellen looked sick. "You mean you guys have been watching me?"
"Naw, it's kinda boring," I said.
"I ain't seen you," Stan said.
"C'mon Ellen," Stu said, "show us your hickey."
Ellen gave a small smirk. She stood up and wiped the dust off of her shorts.
"Okay, but we gotta find some place to do it."
"Lets go to the toolshed," Stu suggested.
We all got up off the driveway and walked to Stu's yard. The red toolshed was in the corner by his parent's cherry tree and it always stunk like cat piss. Ellen slid the bolt of the door back and walked in.
"Not all at once," she said and it kinda sounded sexy.
One by one, we all went in. I didn't want to at first. I thought Ellen was silly and lying to us about the hickey. When Jason came out of the toolshed, we knew something was up. He had this big grin on his face and that was rare. He never smiled.
"Did you see it?" I asked.
"Did she have a hickey?" Stan asked.
Jason nodded his head and kept on smiling.
I went in next. The light was very dim because there was only one window in the toolshed, high up above the plywood door. Ellen was sitting in the corner, her bra was off and crumpled on the floor before her, looking like a broken kite with wires sticking out.
"Come here Adam," she said and I knelt down on the floor next to her.
She raised her shirt over her belly. I could see very little until her white breast came into full view. She lifted the big thing up and held it out away from her body. It did not look like the boobs I had seen in my brothers dirty magazines. It was flabby and the nipple was really dark. It stood out against her white skin starkly.
"See it?" she asked.
"No," I sighed. "Oh wait, there it is." right above her nipple was a purple bruise. It faded into her white skin.
"Do you want to touch it?" she asked.
A million things flooded my mind. I was scared and nervous, it felt like I had sat on an anthill. I put a dirty hand up and cupped her breast. It felt warm and nice, but it shocked me. I scrambled to my feet and scampered out of the toolshed, my face pale.
Stu was the last to go in. He was in the toolshed for a real long time. The rest of us hung around the shed, at first listening in, but it was silent in there so we started to toss the tennis ball we used for a baseball around. Jason began hitting grounders at us.
A noise like a yelp came from the shed. Stu came running out wiping his mouth and trying to spit something out.
"S-she tried to kiss me!" he gasped.
That was it. This wasn't part of the bargain. And like I said, nobody really liked Ellen, so we all went into the shed and dragged Ellen out. I remember yanking her by the hair, it was so red and she was yelling at us to stop. She clutched her bra in a small white hand.
When she stood up, she had tears in her eyes and she was shaking. Jason walked up to her and poked her with the wiffle ball bat. "Get outta here," he shouted.
Ellen looked like a hunted animal, but she did not move. Jason raised the bat and then brought it down hard just as Ellen turned to run. The fat end of the red bat landed with a slapping noise on the top of her head. She screamed and began to run. Jason chased her all the way to the edge of her yard, swinging and connecting. Ellen staggered into her house.
A few years later, we found out that her dad had given her the hickey.
Chapter Three
We used to have this real rough game that we would play. It was called "knights" and was a pretty bloody game. First we started off with sticks and garbage can lids; sparring back and forth in the back yards, but soon we began to devise more cunning weaponry.
A guy named Greg who didn't live near us came up to play the game one day. He was a thick kid with a dimple right in the middle of his double chin. He liked to fight, and he usually won. So Greg came up to play knights with us but he brought a homemade bow and arrows with him. The arrows were made from thin, straight sticks that he had whittled to a fine point, and had black electric tape for feathers.
Another kid that lived kinda far away named Andy, held up his garbage can lid and yelled at Greg to shoot an arrow at him. He wanted the arrow to strike the lid and see if it would punch through the thin metal. But Greg either did not know how to aim his bow, or he shot the arrow low on purpose. The arrow screamed away from the bow and stuck in the meaty part of Andy's thigh. He dropped like a rock and was yelling for us to pull it out, but most of the guys just laughed at him. I didn't laugh, I didn't like that Greg guy and I was pretty good friends with Andy.
I yanked the arrow out of his leg and helped him up. He wasn't bleeding badly but the arrow was coated with a thin slick of blood that went up the shaft about four inches. After that day, Andy wasn't allowed to come over to play knights anymore.
When he got to his feet, he rushed at Greg, windmilling his arms and screaming "sonofabitch!" at him over and over. Greg hit him square in the forehead with the knobby wooden bow. Andy went down again.
I helped him up again, but the fight had gone out of him. He had a slender bruise forming right between his eyes where the bow had struck him, and tears were running out of his eyes. He hopped on his bicycle and rode off, calling Greg a mother fucker as he peddled.
We resumed our games. We picked teams and spent days after school beating the hell out of each other. The weapons got better and better as we played knights. I even took some old wire coat hangers and cut them into little segments. Then I bent them into rings and sewed them to an old pair of work gloves that my dad wouldn't miss. I had some gauntlets now and soon began to sew more of the rings into a old sweat shirt. It was amazing! The hanger-mail I had created made the arrows we used bounce off with no harm, unless one got you on the head or legs.
Stu took a bar of metal out of a chain link fence somewhere in the neighborhood and cut a point on the end of it with his dad's coping saw. He ruined three blades on the stubborn metal, but he finally got a good point on it. Next, he began to wear an edge into it with a grinding stone. He tore that up to and his dad gave him the belt when he found out about it. But that didn't matter. Things were getting pretty high tech for us ten year olds. We had real weapons now and were capable of great bodily damage. I came home with a lot of slash marks and puncture wounds, but I told my mom that I had been playing football. She believed me. I had to hide my armor in the garage under the lawn mower to keep her from finding out what we were up to.
We played knights for two solid months during the summer. One day, while beating the hell out of each other in Stu's yard, my dad came home from work early. He saw what we were doing and turned a deep shade of red as he ran across the yard towards me.
"My trash can lids!" he screamed. "What have you done with them?"
I stood there dumbfounded. I looked down at myself, all bloody and bruised. My hands had cuts all over them and my trash can lid shield was a dented mess. A few months before it had been a new lid, but now it was slashed and dented and looked like a mangled soda pop can.
Dad yanked the lid out of my hand and went around to the other guys, taking the lids away from them. He dragged me off to the house.
After that, I wasn't allowed to play knights anymore either. They took my cool armor and threw it in the trash. My mom did it on trash pick up day right when the garbage men got there to keep me from digging it out of the trash. Dad took my bow and broke it with his knee. He threw that on the wood pile next to the house, but I don't remember it ever making it to the fireplace the next winter.
As for me, I got a good whipping and had to pay for new garbage can lids. I was grounded until I could pay for them, so I had to get a paper route. I was working at age ten! It took the rest of the summer folding papers, putting rubber bands on them and delivering them at six o'clock in the morning to pay for the lids, so my summer was shot to hell. I couldn't even go to the pool. I was only allowed to leave the house to do my paper route and play on the baseball team. Three games a week.
Dad said that if I wanted to play at war and fighting, I should just jump in real life and learn the "hardest" way. Mom agreed.
That night, after my whipping, I sat in my little room and looked out the window. It was just twilight and the fireflies were just beginning to send out their magical glow. In the next yard I heard the clang of metal on metal and the fierce yells of battle. My mind wandered.
Chapter Four
Everybody wanted a pocketknife. The circus had gone through town and one of the midway prizes that a kid could win was a tiny pocketknife with only one blade on it. A friend of mine at school had won a handful of them and was giving them out to everybody the next day at school. Now Mike, was a good friend, but he did not come over to my house very often because he lived clear on the other side of town and it was too far to walk. That day he had made plans with his mom to walk home with me and she would pick him up at six o'clock that night.
My parents were out of town on vacation and my oldest sister was watching me for them for some quick cash. She was just like my mom, always perched near the stove, and she even sat in the same spot my mom did on the couch when we watched television.
So Mike came over and he gave me one of the pocket knives. It was beautiful. It was the finest thing anyone had ever given me, with a silver mother-of-pearl handle and a tiny sliver of a blade. I was happy. Mike had given me his last one, and we took them out to the back yard to whittle and dig with them. A boy has to have a pocketknife!
Stu was out playing in his yard, so we wandered over there to show him the knives. You could see the green jealous gleam in Stu's eyes as we popped open the blades and waved them in front of him. I let him hold my knife and he sighed.
"I wish I had a knife, but my mom won't let me have one."
Just then, Stu's mother pulled into the driveway in her station wagon. She hopped out of the car holding two large bags of fast food.
"Stu, supper's ready!" she cried and Stu followed her into the house.
Mike and I went back to my yard, but soon heard Stu and his sisters talking over their meal at the picnic table. We went back over.
They had hamburgers and cheeseburgers and chicken nuggets. We watched them as they sucked cola down with that annoying noise that straws make. Stu's oldest sister asked Mike and I if we would like some of her fries.
"Sure," we said in unison and plopped ourselves down next to her at the picnic table.
She gave us both a napkin and spread the fries out on them. Mike and I smiled as we chomped the thin things and dipped them in sweet ketchup.
As we ate, one of my fries fell down on to the bricks of their patio. I reached down and popped it into my mouth, not even thinking. When I looked back up, Stu and his sisters were agape. Their eyes were wide and their mouths hung open. They had never seen a person eat something off the ground.
"Did you eat that fry after it fell on the bricks?" one of the sisters asked.
"Yeah," I said and resumed eating.
"That is gross," said Stu.
"Sick," said the other sister. "Adam, you're a Martian!"
With that, they all jumped up and began dancing around the patio singing "Adam the Martian, Adam the Martian, Adam the Martian!" while Mike and I sat on the picnic bench and watched them in wonder.
"And another thing," Stu said to his sisters, "Adam has a knife!"
He said it like he was accusing me. His sisters stopped their dancing and froze as if I was a ferocious animal about to pounce on them. I finished chewing my fries and got up.
"Mom!" one of the sisters screamed.
"Shhh!" I hissed at her. "Don't tell!"
"Mom, Adam's gotta knife!" They made it seem like it was the worst crime in the world for a young boy to have a knife.
They made me feel like I was a murderer.
Stu's mom slid the sliding glass door back and pointed a finger at me.
"Come with me," she said sternly.
I didn't know what to do. Part of me wanted to run home-it was only next door, but another part of me knew that I was guilty of something, and that I should go with her. I took a few steps back towards my home, Mike was already running.
Stu's mom came across the patio like a windstorm. She grabbed my by the collar and yanked me into their house.
"Sit down," she said as she pointed at the kitchen table. I sat and she began dialing the phone.
"There doesn't seem to be anyone at your house Adam. Where is everybody?"
"Mom and dad are on vacation and my sister is still at school."
She thought for a moment and then asked me if I knew the number for my sister's apartment on campus. I gave her the number and she called. I could hear the phone buzzing through the receiver as she waited for my sister to answer. Then she did and I couldn't catch the rest of the conversation.
When she hung the phone up, she held her hand out to me, palm up.
"Give it to me, Adam." she said coldly.
I thought of jabbing the knife into that palm. I wanted to so badly, but instead I placed it, unopened, into her hand.
"Now," she said evilly, "go upstairs and wait in Stu's room."
I looked at her and it seemed to me that she was the most fearsome monster in the world, more terrible than any witch or dragon. I started to cry.
"Knock that off, or I will give you something to cry about."
I walked up the stairs and sat on Stu's bed, waiting for I don't know what. It was getting dark outside and I was too scared to get up and turn on the light. What was Mike doing? He had to have gone off home by now. Soon I saw my sister's beetle pull into the driveway and she got out. She stalked up to the front door and met Stu's mom on the front porch. I saw Stu's mother hand my sister my beautiful new knife, which she quickly put in her purse. They both glanced up at the window and saw me there, looking down. Both their faces were pale in the fading light and the looked like demons from hell.
"You can come down now," I heard Stu's mom call out.
I slowly walked down the steps and looked at my sister.
"Wait til mom hears about this," she hissed. Then she bullied me out to her car and drove around the block to our house. Mike was sitting on the front porch, his head popped up when he saw the beetle pull into the driveway.
"What happened?" he asked.
I didn't get a chance to answer. My sister gave him and evil look and shouted at him.
"Get your shit and get in the car," she said to Mike's stunned face.
Then she turned to me and said, "get upstairs and take a bath, I want you in bed by the time I get home."
She got back into the car and tore off, taking Mike to his house. Later that night I lay in bed and could not sleep. I had not eaten any dinner and I missed my knife. I could hear my sister downstairs watching television with one of her boyfriends. That made my blood boil. It was way after midnight when I drifted off to sleep.
My parents got home and my sister gave the knife to my dad. I would see him use it from time to time, cutting fishing line or using it to cut an article out of the newspaper, and it always gave me a pang of regret. That was my knife! I asked him about it years later, and he told me that he had lost it someplace. I wanted to kill him.
Chapter Five
Years later. My brother and sisters have moved out to go to college, to have babies. I worked hard at a grocery store and saved up enough to buy a car. I had taken to going over to a new friend's house. His name was Tim, and he had straight, dirty blonde hair that hung down in his eyes and stuck to the sides of his face like wet seaweed.
Tim was the friend to have. He was a grade higher than me, a junior, and he was two years older than me. Tim could buy beer; you could back in those days when you were eighteen. He introduced me to it, and I have never looked back.
I would have five or six little seven ounce beers and get a good buzz. Then I would climb into my beat up car and drive home. Tim would always say to be careful on the way home. "Don't get busted," he would say in his deep voice as his hair wagged.
Tim could always out drink everybody that hung around. He would drink five beers to my one and you couldn't even tell he was drunk. One night I saw him consume a case of beer without even getting up to use the bathroom.
Somebody had the great idea of lighting a fire in Tim's fireplace. It was happy and nice as the flames really got going, but then something odd happened. The smoke from the fireplace roiled out from the flames. We had forgot to open the chimney flue. The room filled with smoke in an unbelievably short amount of time. We all ran out of the house, clutching our beers and screaming.
Tim's sister sat on the curb, drunk and crying. "My house is burning down," she sobbed.
Finally somebody said that we should go in and see what was up. The house wasn't being consumed by flames like we all figured it should have been by now. We crept up to the front porch like rats, waiting for something to happen.
I poked my head inside the screen door and looked towards the room where the fireplace was. Clouds of smoke floated around the ceiling and the house smelled like fried bacon. In front of the fireplace on a soot covered sofa sat Tim, a bottle of beer in his hand.
"You idiots!" he shouted at us. I felt like a child. "When you light a fire, you have to open the chimney up!"
I went back into the house, followed by the rest of the rats, and we all sat down around the fire drinking. My glass had ashes in the bottom of it, but I drank it anyway. It made me feel brave to do that, but not as brave as Tim. When he had opened the chimney flue he had burned his hand pretty badly on the hot metal. I saw him pressing his frosty beer into his palm, wincing. But I never heard him mention anything about it.
Another guy that use to hang around Tim's house was named Joe. Joe was short, fat, had a lot of blackheads, and was very, very Italian. We used to beat up on him pretty good, but he was tough and could take it. Joe came over to my house one day to play some football in Stuart's lot next door. That day, he met and fell in love with Ellen (of hickey fame).
All day long, at school he would pester me about her. "Is she seeing anyone?" He would almost drool whenever she pranced by, looking at her huge boobs still. I didn't have the heart to tell him that usually, when I got home from a night of drinking at Tim's, I would usually bang on her window. She would come out in her sweaty night clothes and ask me what I wanted. "Like you don't know," I would drawl.
Sometimes, if it was late enough, we would do it on her parents couch, her red head thrashing back and forth as I really gave it to her. Once, we almost got caught, but I hid in her basement until her dad went back upstairs. Other times, when her parents were still up, or if she felt nervous, we would do it in my back yard on my parent's patio furniture.
I make it sound like it was an easy thing, getting into Ellen's pants, but it was not. She knew what I wanted, and she used it to make me listen to her stupid stories. She knew, and she would make me say things that I really didn't mean.
"Tell me that you love me," she say as she snaked a hand across my chest.
"Alright."
"No," her hand stopped. "You have to mean it."
"Alright," I sighed. "I love you." My voice tasted like dirt in my mouth.
"You need me?"
"Um," I stammered. "I need you Ellen."
Her hand resumed it's movements, and I would work across her body quickly. There was no telling when she would start up again.
"Tell me what you want," her voice was becoming husky now, like she was getting drunk off of my attention.
"Oh Christ Ellen," I paused and said into the little red wisps of hair on her belly.
Her hands would come down to the sides of my head, pulling up. "Tell me."
"You."
Pop! Her hands went back to whatever they had been doing before, and I resumed my trek downwards. Usually when I got her panties off, I would find a matted, dirty patch of hair. Her privates would have stinky pieces of fluff from her pants stuck to them. I hated this part of those nights, but Ellen would deny me any further action if I did not perform this act first.
I dove in.
With my eyes closed, and my mind somewhere else, I usually got through this chore quickly. Her body would bounce once or twice and that would be it. Sometimes her meaty thighs would clamp around my neck and head like a gooey vise. I would have to yank them apart or I would strangle.
Ellen would then take me in her hands and give me a total look of disgust. She would put herself on top of me and buck like a untalented circus seal. I would let go and then I would get up to go. Her power over me was spent until the next time I went out and got drunk.
I made my way across the wet grass of our back yards and into my house. Usually I would still be putting my clothes on by the time I reached my parent's living room. And there my mother sat, glaring at the late night television and fuming at me.
"You are drunk," she would mutter.
Her eyes never leave the television as she said these words. For some reason, I always got the impression of a crow, with lifeless eyes, sitting on a electrical wire staring down at nothing in particular.
I made it to my room and fell asleep, only to wake the next day, hung over, and with a list of chores, if it was the weekend, or with dirty looks if it was a school day. I would do it again after work that night.
Joe also worked where I worked. He was in the produce department and I was a cashier. Joe got fired because he left a cart full of ice cream out of the freezer overnight. It had totally melted by the time the morning workers arrived, and there was an inch of ice cream slime all over the floor of the produce department.
Joe came into work that afternoon and the manager screamed at him while he smoked a cheap cigar. Dale was the managers name. He was tall, skinny, and had a greasy mustache. He told us that we were all worthless right in front of the customers, and then stormed off into his office.
Joe clutched his produce apron in a lifeless hand. It was almost tragic to watch as he collapsed inside. He had never lost a job before. His shoulders sagged and he walked out of the building. For some odd reason I felt like laughing. I told you we used him as a punching bag. He was over at Tim's house that night, and he drank more than I ever had seen him drink before. He got into Tim's mother's liquor cabinet and started in on a bottle of gin.
Tim tried to calm him down, but you could hear him muttering curses at the grocery store, at the manager, at everyone. Finally, he passed out on Tim's sister's bed and threw up spaghetti on the floor.
Chapter Six
That night, another nice, amazing thing happened. While Joe had been guzzling the gin, Tim's sister arrived home. She was very stoned and had to be hauled into the house by her best friend. I am not sure if her name was Kristi or Kristin, but I had seen her in school talking with Tim and his sister. She had red hair that fell down to her mid back and she always wore dark clothes. Like all bright red heads, she had very pale skin and wide green eyes that hid in a field of freckles. She placed Tim's sister on a sofa and covered her with a blanket. Then she wandered off to the kitchen in search of something to eat. I sat in silence drinking my beer, occasionally laughing about a joke. But my mind was on Kristi. I found my eyes wandering off to the direction of the kitchen, where by some trick of the light I could catch a hint of shadow as she messed around.
Kristin came out with a heap of plain noodles on a plate. The noodles steamed and looked delicious. She asked if anybody wanted any, and everybody jumped up. She said that the rest of the food was in the kitchen, and sat down on the opposite end of the sofa from me.
"Why didn't you go get some of the noodles I made?" she asked.
Her eyes were mildly red and her words were slurred just a bit.
"I didn't think that you made them for me."
I couldn't take my eyes off of her and I felt nervous inside because she had scooted closer to me on the couch.
"Don't be silly, I made them for everyone. What's your name?"
I told her and then felt my stomach sink and my palms started sweating despite the fact that they were clutched tightly around a cold beer.
"How much did you cook?" I asked and felt awkward.
"Enough for everyone," she giggled. "I put a whole pack of noodles in there."
I was starting to feel better now that she had warmed up the room with her light laughter. My gaze wandered around the room and then finally rested on her eyes.
"Adam," she said nervously. "What is it? Do I have a noodle on my chin?"
It must have been the beer, or the timing, but I could not help myself. I pulled her close to me and she made a small squeal as kissed her. She pulled back quickly and looked as if she was going to cry. I felt about two inches tall, and she grabbed my beer from the table in front us. I watched her throat move up and down as she swallowed down the last gulps. For some reason, I was turned on even more and I felt a nervous lump form in my stomach.
"Want me to go get another one for you?" I asked.
"Yeah, you better get a couple." She pulled her legs up underneath her butt on the sofa, for all the world looking like a relaxing kitten.
I wandered out to the kitchen. The guys were perched around the table eagerly forking mouthfuls of noodles into their mouths, and making smacking sounds as they chewed.
"What's up?" Tim said as he chewed.
"Kristin wants a beer," I said flatly.
I opened the refrigerator and though to myself, what the heck? I grabbed a whole six pack and made off towards the sofa and Kristi.
"Jesus," Tim said loudly. "I thought she wanted a beer, not the rest of them."
"There's more in there," I said over my shoulder. "If we run out I'll go get more."
I left the kitchen and heard them laughing and yelling. When I got back to Kristin, she was laying lying down on the couch. She had taken the thick, black sweater off and her body was alive under a white t-shirt.
"Here," I said and handed her a beer. I didn't know where to sit, she had taken up all the space on the sofa. I put the beer down on the coffee table and sat down on the floor next to her. A long, nervous silence passed. It seemed to go on forever, punctuated by gulps of beer and the crackle of cigarettes being inhaled.
"Don't you want to kiss me again?" she asked.
"I'm not sure," I said with a grin. "The last time I did it, it didn't work out all that well."
She turned a red color and set down her beer. She swayed her head to move her long red hair out of the way and kissed me. It was such a sexy thing to watch happening. I felt outside looking in, as if I were some sort of self voyeur looking in on a dirty secret. She took my hand and led me to Tim's sister's room.
Nobody seemed to miss us. Tim and all of my friends came out of the kitchen and resumed the drinking. I could hear them banging quarters on the coffee table. Krisin and I got undressed in the dark. We could hear a soft buzzing as Joe snored.
I touched her, and she touched me. I felt hot and chilled at the same time. She was so beautiful and vulnerable at the same time. Her red hair blazed even in the darkness. We made love-I actually think of it that way, even if it only happened once-in that tiny, messy bedroom, and then slept on the floor.
