Little Boy (11 page)

“I’m happy to be here with you, too,” I said,
and then took a deep breath. And then I did the strangest thing. I
grabbed her hand and placed her palm against my face. I felt like
I’d just gotten off a roller-coaster and needed the reassurance, I
guess. She smiled. Again. Come to think of it, other than during
her story, she smiled the entire day. I’ll never forget that smile,
and the feeling of making someone smile all day. That’s a
once-in-a-lifetime feeling.

Suddenly, it was six o’clock. The air cooled,
as the sun began to set in the orange sky above the pond. We sat in
silence for a few moments, and then held each others hands on the
walk back to the subway.

On the ride back to Queens I was exhausted,
even though I’d spent so much time laying down by the pond. So I
asked her if I could lean my head against her shoulder and close my
eyes, and she said yes. It was beautiful. The ride was bumpy and
noisy, and the subway had its usual stench of urine and garbage,
but I didn’t mind. As corny as it sounds, I felt like an angel
nestled on a cloud in the sky and quickly fell asleep on her
shoulder.

She woke me as the train pulled into our
stop. I decided to be a gentleman and take her all the way back to
her house, instead of just letting her get on the bus by herself.
As we walked up her block toward her house, I leaned forward like I
was going to kiss her, and she poked her little head up, ready to
kiss me back. Then I sort of dodged her head and whispered into her
ear: “I want to kiss you, but I won’t until I break up with Lynn.
There will be time.”

Gracefully, she smiled and said thank you and
then walked up to her door and went inside. I must have stood there
for twenty minutes or so before I actually left. I didn’t want the
moment to end because, deep down inside, I guess I knew that our
relationship had reached its zenith.

Chapter 6

Cruising Altitude

It was sort of around then, I suppose, that I
started to lose my mind. Not go crazy, but literally lose my mind.
Most teenagers, I think, were still learning stuff at that age. Not
me. I think that I learned up until around that time—around my
junior year in high school—and then, slowly and steadily, I
stopped.

Thing is, my grades stayed about the same. As
you know, I’ve always gotten straight A’s. I excel in History and
English because I love to read and write and memorize interesting
facts. My vocabulary has always exceeded my years, and that’s
invariably helped me get terrific grades. Although I never liked
school much, it was always easy to get A’s because I knew how to
give teachers what they wanted. Until sixteen or seventeen, I was
always a great student.

But it wasn’t just academics. Maybe a better
way to describe what happened is this: I stopped gaining knowledge.
The older I got, the less I wanted to learn. As a matter of fact,
maybe I never wanted to learn at all, even when I was five or six.
But by my late teen years I had experienced an emotion generally
reserved for the middle aged and elderly. The word I liked to use
at the time—and the word I can still use now, really—is
jaded
. I was jaded. I’d just about had enough with school
and tests and learning and all that bullshit. Like that time I
worked in the office over the summer. I was really excited to get
the job, because it paid a lot, and it was near dad’s office
downtown. But I remember the first thing I said to my dad as I
walked through the door of my house after my first day at work:
“This job sucks.”

And I really did hate it already, after only
one day at work. When I got to work, my boss explained my
responsibilities to me—some photo-copying, some collating, some
phone calls, some errands, and what not. The usual office bullshit.
I knew it would be a boring job, but I also knew that Dad had
gotten it for me, so it was kind of important that I impress the
boss and my co-workers, and make my dad look good. I didn’t have to
kiss their asses or anything, I just had to do as I was told. I
couldn’t just go through the motions of working. I had to show them
I cared about getting the job done right.

But I didn’t care.
The moment I left
the office on the first day, I knew that I’d loathe every day I
spent at that place until it was all over. It wasn’t a matter of
simply hating the work. It’s why I hated it—because I’d mastered
all of it on the first day. I did some photo-copying, made a few
phone calls, faxed some documents, wrote some memos. And then I was
bored.
I know how to do all this shit
, I thought,
so why
bother coming in tomorrow?
And my goddamn boss expected me to
repeat these mundane tasks all summer long.

Christ, I can’t tell you how awful that
summer was. I did everything to escape boredom. The office had an
airy bathroom with a huge window in it. For some reason, it
remained open throughout the summer, sucking an air conditioned
draft right outside where it met the humid New York air.
Occasionally, I’d race into the bathroom not to take a shit, but to
elude the sheer boredom of the job. Staring out that window, gazing
up at my dad’s building in lower Manhattan, I’d light a cigarette
and blow the smoke into the hazy exhaust rising from the streets
below. Occasionally, I’d spot a Concorde jet racing over the
Manhattan skyline across the East River, en route to Europe, or
some other faraway place. Dreaming of the excitement of sitting in
that cockpit, longing to be a pilot with an exciting mission to
conquer each new day, I’d smoke and smoke and smoke, wondering how
the hell I’d ever survive at the Air Force Academy if I couldn’t
even tolerate the most simplistic office tasks.

What the hell
, I figured,
I’m
better than this job, I was born to fly
.
I’ll show Colorado
Springs a thing or two
. I knew all I had to do was wait, wait
for the end of the work day, the end of each summer, the end of
high school, when I’d finally rediscover my mind and refresh it
daily with the thrill of aviation.

Until then, however, I’d keep collecting
paychecks or taking tests, just like every other schmuck in the
world.
Why
, I thought,
do employers pay people to do
grunt work—to staple and fax and file? It just proves that everyone
out there is full of himself
. The average Joe endures the toil
of the most ho-hum work simply to feel better about placing it on
his resume and feigning its importance to get a slightly higher
paying, but equally menial, job. These are things I never realized
before that summer job.

All this ties into me losing knowledge.
Suddenly, nothing around me was interesting. Well, that’s not true,
exactly. I liked TV. I was into girls. I’d occasionally read a good
book. I loved cigarettes. But that was really it. Besides those
things, not much really caught my eye, and not much was worth
paying attention too.

I remember reading a book called
The
Little Prince
back then, thinking that it described my life so
well. I identified not only with the story, but with the author. It
was written by Antoine Saint-Exupery, who was one hell of a pilot
during World War II. His plane disappeared off the coast of France
in 1944, when he was gathering intelligence on the Nazis for his
native France. What a cool way to die. I remember thinking that if
I could choose my own death, it would be just like his. That way, I
wouldn’t actually die; I would just “disappear” one day while
flying, while doing what I love to do.

Years before the war, Saint-Exupery flew a
Caudron C-630 Simoun, a very small plane but still a beauty. It’s
WEFT: 34-foot, 2-inch wings; a Renault Bengali 6Q-09 inline 220
horsepower piston engine; a slab-sided, light alloy fuselage; and a
single tailfin, rounded at the top. On December 30, 1935,
Saint-Exupery’s Caudron crashed in the Sahara desert. He and his
co-pilot survived the crash landing, but according to his memoir
they had only grapes, two oranges, and some wine, hardly enough to
make it through the first day. By the third day they were
dehydrated and experienced hallucinations. On the fourth day they
were rescued by a Bedouin on a camel.
The Little Prince
begins with a pilot being marooned in the desert, probably a
reference to Saint-Exupery’s experience.

The book was inspiring, and it described me
perfectly. In it, the little prince spends all of his time cruising
around the galaxy on a rocket ship, ostensibly searching for fuel,
but in actuality for the meaning of life. The little prince loathed
grown-ups because everything to them was a “matter of consequence.”
In other words, everything was so serious to the grown-ups that
they never took the time out to use their imaginations. I remember
that in the book, the little prince makes a compelling comparison.
He says that, on the one hand, you could sit around doing
complicated mathematical equations all day, making believe you were
accomplishing something. On the other hand, you’re really not doing
a damn thing unless you’re using your imagination. I guess what he
was trying to say was, why should anyone get praise or pay for
doing something that requires no imagination, no emotional
quotient? I always thought that was very profound.

I think that around that time—right around
when I went out with Maria, even before I broke up with Lynn—was
when I started becoming caught between the two extremes, like a fly
trapped in a web. I was growing up, I guess, so I had to start
acting serious, to appreciate “matters of consequence,” however
inconsequential they were. Dad, you wanted me to do well at that
summer job, and Mom, you wanted me to quit smoking. All ‘matters of
consequence,’ if you ask me. But, at the same time, I didn’t want
to act serious. That’s why I say I just stopped gaining knowledge.
Because the more I learned, it seemed, the more serious I had to
be—the less TV I could watch, the less bullshitting I could do. So
somehow—and I don’t really know if it was conscious or not—I just
tuned out. I really didn’t want any responsibilities. I was trying
so hard not to be like the grown-up in
The Little Prince
.
The serious adult I was supposed to become constantly wrestled with
what was left of the child. I tried so hard to hold on to that
little prince within me that, I don’t know, I somehow wound up
being different than both. A lot different.

***

I really missed Maria after a while. I
thought about her constantly—about her voice when I wasn’t speaking
to her, about her body when I wasn’t holding her. Sometimes, I even
helped myself fall asleep imagining her cuddled in my arms, her
perfumed hair draped across my chest like a security blanket. I
couldn’t wait to see her again. We continued talking on the phone
for a while, and she kept asking me to go out again. But I had to
break up with Lynn first.

It was about a month since I’d first gone out
with Maria, and I’d pretty much given up on calling Lynn
completely. Like most guys my age, I never broke up with girls. I
just sort of let them fade away. Sometimes, Lynn would call and I’d
rush her off the phone. Other times, I told my parents to tell her
that I was busy or not home. This strategy forced Jeff, a Lynn
loyalist, to give me cold glances at school. He and his fat sister
were always wondering what was going on with me and Maria. Jeff
probably was wondering why I was still dating Lynn when I’d gone on
a date with Maria—I know he knew about me and Maria, because she
had a big mouth. I stopped speaking to Jeff after a while. He was
such a nosy goddamn bastard, anyway, and so was his sister.

One day, Lynn just stopped calling me. I was
so pissed off. Until that point, even though she knew something was
up, she’d still call me and act nice. I couldn’t believe she had
the nerve to break off all communication with me. The least she
could do was formally break it off. I didn’t know what to do. I
thought about asking Jeff or his sister for help, but I knew they
didn’t give a shit by that point.

About a week went by and I didn’t hear from
her at all. Just to fuck with her, I decided to surprise her after
school with some flowers. Lynn and I were supposed to be
celebrating our four-month anniversary—I think it was four at that
point—so I knew she’d be real happy to see me. And I knew that all
her friends would be there, too, as she walked out of class that
day. So when Lynn came out at around three o’clock or so, I hoisted
the flowers above my head as she was walking down the hill to the
subway stop. She almost wet her pants, she was so happy. I recoil
at the thought of her sappy announcement. “You remembered!” she
kept saying, with a smile on her face as wide as her head. All her
stupid friends giggled around us, saying “awww” and “how sweeeeet.”
But Lynn was happiest, and I knew that for just a few moments,
she’d forgotten all about Maria. And so had I.

I escorted Lynn onto the subway, with all of
her stupid friends giggling and smelling the flowers and saying how
beautiful they were. We didn’t get off at her stop, though.
Instead, we went to the Queens Center Mall, where every hood and
his girlfriend loitered for hours after school each day. Lynn and I
walked around for a good hour or so. She was shopping for a bathing
suit, as I contemptuously eyed every hood that walked buy, each
dressed typically with a pair of mile-wide jeans and a backwards
baseball cap.

We didn’t hold hands or make any other sort
of physical contact. But the more I looked at Lynn, the more turned
on I got. Suddenly, I started to become really horny. God, there
she was in that little plaid skirt—she still had her uniform on—and
a blue blouse unbuttoned twice at the top. It’s amazing how all the
girls at her school wore the same blue and yellow plaid skirt, but
when you looked really close, each one looked so hot in her own
way. Some were big, some were small, some short, some tall. Just
thinking about it now drives me nuts.