Little Boy (35 page)

Each morning I woke charged with jealousy.
Wicked thoughts began to dance and play within my mind before my
first cigarette, teasing and taunting me like little children with
BB guns. The thoughts knew who was boss. I could fight like hell
each day, and occasionally win a battle against my own shame, but
it would eventually win the war. Burglars can’t help but rob a home
when the door is left wide open with nobody home.

My days went something like this: One moment
I’d be in school, doing math or history, and then—wham!—a thought
would whack me with a punch in the jaw. With each thought, the
swelling and stinging intensified in the form of more thoughts; the
pain and thoughts grew exponentially. More images of Maria kissing
some faceless boy I’d never met; more pictures of her smiling
little face laughing at another guy’s joke; more fear and hatred
for people long gone from her mind.

Sick thoughts. Crazy thoughts.

These thoughts were more intense when I was
with her. When I gazed into her eyes, memories of times of which I
wasn’t part of multiplied like amoeba, first two, then four, then
eight. And then, within minutes, a thousand crazy thoughts would
permeate my mind, forcing me to stop whatever I was doing and obey
their lead. After being bombarded by these thoughts, my heart would
feel empty and weak, and soon be overcome by resentment.

No, not resentment.
Hatred
.

I hated Maria for her past. Not because her
past was particularly despicable, but because she had a past,
period. There was a time before me, A.J. L’Enfant, and I couldn’t
bear to think of it. And yet I thought about it all the time.

Laying nude on Maria’s bed, wrapped in her
soft arms, it would begin oh-so-innocently. Amidst a beautiful
conversation with Maria following sex, or a snowball fight, or
whatever, that little devil would appear on my shoulder and
whisper, “Ask her, A.J. Ask her.” The devil knew precisely what
particular worry was rupturing my head at the moment:
ex-boyfriends, alcohol, whatever. Seldom did I subtly introduce my
fears to her as a best friend should feel comfortable doing.
Usually, I’d accuse her, out of the blue, of drinking again. She’d
always deny it, of course. But I’d persist. I wouldn’t—no, I
couldn’t—let her forget about what she did with her cousin Upstate
the previous summer. It was tattooed on my brain. Occasionally,
during one of Maria’s moments of rebellion, she’d say something
like, “Yea, well you drank, too.” Then she’d fold her arms and
smirk, seemingly victorious. But the little devil would remind me
to remind her that I drank primarily because of her, because she’d
upset me so much, even though that was the furthest thing from the
truth.

One day—I think it was in mid-March, right
before Easter—Maria and I went shopping at Queens Center Mall. What
followed was a typical scenario from that period in my life. We
were in Stern’s looking for an Easter dress, but Maria couldn’t
find anything she liked. I admit I was getting a little frustrated,
because she’d already tried on a dozen dresses and I just wanted to
go back to her place and relax. “Let’s try The Limited,” I
suggested. As we entered the store, a fat guidette tapped her on
the shoulder and started screaming happily.

“Is this the infamous A.J.?” she asked. “The
greatest boy alive you’re always talking about?”

Maria smiled. “Yep,” she said, locking her
right arm around my left. “This is my lover boy.” She gently
brushed the back of her hand against my forehead and pushed the
hair out of my eyes, just like mommy used to do.

“Maria’s always talking about you,” the girl
said. “It’s always ‘A.J. this and A.J. that.’ I never hear anything
else! You’re one lucky guy to have a girlfriend like Maria. She’s
so proud of you going into the Air Force and everything. She says
you’re going to take her up in a jet and make out with her in the
sky.” She giggled and looked for Maria’s approval.

“We’re going to do more than make out up
there,” she said, giggling back at her friend, tugging me closer.
My face turned tomato-red. I’d never heard Maria talk that way to a
friend before. True, I hadn’t realized how much she really admired
and loved me. But I also had never heard Maria talk to anyone that
way before.

Sensing my discomfort, Maria quickly changed
the subject. The girl left five minutes later. As if to say,
Relax, A.J.
, Maria pinched my butt and smiled up at me.
“Sorry you had to hear all that,” she said. “But you see, you don’t
have to worry, because I talk about you with my friends all the
time.”

I ignored her compliment. “Who was that?” I
asked.

“That was Cindy. She’s in my history class.”
Wide-eyed, Maria cupped her hands over her mouth in embarrassment.
“Oh my God, I didn’t introduce you, I’m so sorry.” She said it
strangely, as if she was muffling a chuckling, but not a humorous
chuckle, more of a nervous one, a reaction to fear. She seemed
afraid of me.

Looking back on it now, it’s pretty obvious
that I should’ve put my arm around Maria, smelled her luxuriant
hair, and not said a thing. But in that mall on that day for
whatever reason I chose manipulation. It was business as usual. I
hadn’t realized that she didn’t introduce me to her friend. So now
I had two things to be pissed about.

“You seem pretty chummy with Cindy, don’t
you?”

“What—well, she’s my frie—.”

“I’ve never heard you mention her before.
When did you meet her?”

“What difference—?”

“And you didn’t even introduce me to
her.”

“But I already apolo—”

I stared at her intently.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, “but I swear I
talk about you all the time.

“When did you meet her?” I repeated,
blandly.

“At a school dance, during my freshman
year.”

“You danced with her?”

“No. I mean I was there with friends and they
introduced me to her, and we became friendly.” Maria was perplexed.
I wasn’t sure where I was going with my questions. But then the
lightning struck: “Did you dance with any boys at the dance?”

“God, A.J., please don’t do this.”

“Answer the question, please. Did you dance
with any boys at the dance?”

“A.J., this was like two years ago. Who
remembers?”

“Please stop bullshitting me, Maria.”

“Okay, all right, I danced with a boy that
night. Just a few times. Happy?”

“Who was he?” I could tell that Maria was
exasperated with my line of questioning. I could also tell that
she’d already given up, and was willing to toss any answers out
there, hoping to shut me up with one of them at random.

“I don’t know. Some kid. He was in my eighth
grade class.”

That she’d met this boy in elementary school,
not even in high school, meant nothing to me. “Was he cute?”

She looked suddenly as if she’d found the
answer she was looking for: Just praise him and he’ll stop. “I
don’t know. Not as cute as you, baby,” she said, gently placing her
fingertips on my cheek.

“But he was cute, right?”

“Can we please stop talking about him? Jesus
Christ! I don’t even remember his name!”

“I bet you do. What was it?”

“I told you, I don’t remember!” she shouted,
nervously. Passers-by, shopping bags in hand, slowed down to stare
at us.
At me
.

“Think hard.”

Tapping her foot on the floor, she thought
for a while, in desperation, and then said: “Donald.”

“So you do remember his name. You were lying
before, weren’t you? Why did you lie to me?”

By this point in the argument, one watching
from afar might have assumed that I was an attorney and Maria my
hostile witness. The issue at hand was trivial, and yet I pursued
it doggedly. The end justified the means. She could have been
arguing her preference for catsup over mustard, or her passion for
Shakespeare over Austin. But invariably, in the dark corners of my
mind, I felt she was lying about whatever topic was at hand. And
catsup v. mustard might seem like a silly comparison, but my
distrust was just that juvenile. It was an eerie and bizarre
suspicion of even the tiniest details.

Occasionally, I’d catch her in a lie. In all
probability, she didn’t intend to lie in the first place, just like
that day in the mall. But I guess sometimes she was so nervous when
I questioned her that she forgot her own goddamn name. I was a
pretty tough inquisitor. I could have been a great lawyer, I’m
sure.

“Well!” I shouted. “Looks like we have a liar
here, folks!” People looked at me.

Maria ran.

Through the mall’s tall revolving glass doors
she dashed, out on to bustling Queens Boulevard. I gave chase in
hot pursuit, my arms and legs chugging like a locomotive. Shoppers
became spectators as I pushed the door open and searched for Maria
outside. I quickly spotted her little puffy winter coat bouncing
down the street in a whirlwind. Three blocks and one thousand pants
later I finally caught up with her, clasped her shoulder, and
whipped her around to face me.

“Let’s just end this, A.J.,” she said, with a
hint of a tear in her eye. “I just can’t take you anymore.”

I yelled and yelled for a while, telling her
that if she’d just have simply answered the questions, none of this
shit would’ve happened. Eyeing a cop across the street, I quickly
settled down.
This isn’t worth going to jail for
, I thought.
A dire look blanketed her face, as though she didn’t have a friend
in the world to run to.

I tried to console her. “Maria, we’re best
friends, and whatever is bothering you is okay. You can tell me
anything.” It was a bullshit tactic, as if she was responsible for
this fiasco, not me. She didn’t say a word in response. Instead,
she turned away and boarded the Q58 bus and went home. She didn’t
even bother to ask me for a ride.

***

Thinking back on that period in my life, it’s
hard to believe that such bullshit didn’t break us up much earlier.
Things remained tumultuous between us for a while, then they
settled down. That was our rut. Just like Mike’s parents, only they
liked theirs. Just when I thought the wounds were beginning to
heal, the suffering would start all over again.

In late March, Easter break rolled around. On
Good Friday, the first day off for more than a week, Kyle, Mike,
and Rick invited me out to a bar. I balked at first, wondering how
I could possibly explain my choice to Maria. But a morbid sort of
divine intervention extended its ugly hand and pulled me toward my
fate that evening. “Yes,” I said. “I’ll go.”

Tears explode from my eyes as I recall this
critical decision in my life. I remember the details because
they’re here before me in living color.

Kyle brought us to Kearney’s Pub, an old
Irish pub that hadn’t seen an Irishman in years. A real dive-bar
I’d passed a million times on Queens Boulevard. Every Monday in
class, The Family overheard hoods and Guidos bullshitting about
their weekend at Kearney’s. Stormin’ Forman, Christian Matzelle…all
those guys used to high-five each other, talking about all the
shots they’d done and girls they’d hooked up with. Kyle and the
rest were hardly offended by such conversations, but I was. Even
though I’d gotten drunk at Rick’s over the summer, and several
times since then, I swore I would never disrespect myself by going
to a shitty bar frequented by hoods.

Nevertheless, I found myself inside. When I
first walked inside, I remember smelling an odd combination of oak,
beer, and cigarette smoke. Our sneakers went
squick, squick,
squick,
and got stuck to the floor like it was a movie theater.
There were no seats in the bar, save a few bar stools with red,
torn-up cushions. And there were mirrors across from them, behind
the bottles of liquor, so you could watch yourself slowly get
buzzed, and then drunk.

It was almost ten o’clock, but hardly anyone
was around. Kyle said he’d heard that girls from Stella Maris High
School hung out there. Actually he said
Stella Mattress
.
That was the school’s nickname because the girls were known to
screw around a lot. “Where are they?” I asked, hankering to meet a
bunch of drunk Catholic school girl sluts. Kyle brushed his cheek
Marlon Brando-style and said, “trust me, Gahdfaddah, they’ll be
here.” Rick, Mike, and I looked at each other out of the corner of
our eyes, as if to say, “Kyle had better be right about this
place.” So we drank beers out of little plastic cups and
waited.

When I’d first entered Kearney’s I felt as if
Maria was somehow forcing me to be there. But as I gulped one beer
after the other, that feeling of coercion dissipated and was
replaced by culpability.
I have no one to blame but myself,
I thought. Kyle, always the most perceptive of The Family, and like
a solid
consigliere
, pulled his stool beside mine and
consoled me.

“What’s wrong, Captain A.J. ? he asked.
“Maria been treatin’ ya bad? Want me to break her legs for ya?”

He was only kidding, of course. But he was my
consigliere
, my advisor, so he was supposed to lift my
spirits like that. And I could tell by the look in his eyes that he
was genuinely interested in my reason for being at Kearney’s. He
knew how much I hated bars. I responded with an incredulous glance.
I placed my hand on his shoulder. “Kyle, my plan is simple: I want
to meet a girl tonight, fuck her, and forget all about Maria. We’ve
been fighting so much lately, that whatever happens tonight can
only make it better.” I gulped the backwash at the bottom of my
cup, the remnants of my fourth beer in just under forty
minutes.