Lost Memory of Skin (29 page)

what about w a girl?

ew!! no way!!

what about bjs?

not saying.

He said he’d take that as a yes to blow jobs and suddenly had an erection:
gets me excited,
he typed.

She changed the subject then, asking him if he had a cam on his computer or cell phone so she could see what he looked like.

No cam, he told her, and no cable to download pictures from his cell phone to send as a PDF from his computer.

She asked him if he looked like anybody she’d know from TV and how tall he was. She said he must be muscular from being in the army like all those guys in the TV ads that try to get guys to enlist.

He admitted he was short, five eight, he said, adding three inches. But yeah, pretty muscular though not bulging like a bodybuilder. He wasn’t sure if he looked like anybody she knew from TV but people sometimes told him he reminded them of Michael J. Fox who had some kind of disease he was always going on about, Parkinson’s or epilepsy or something, although he looked pretty normal to the Kid. It was his mother who had pointed out his resemblance to Michael J. Fox which at the time he had not taken as a compliment except for the fact that the actor was famous and presumably rich.
i don’t have any diseases,
he reassured Brandi.
i’m clean and healthy as a teenager.

lol,
she wrote back.
u don’t know teenagers.

used 2 be 1 myself a few years ago.

She asked him his real name and he told her. Why did he use iggyzbro for his online name? she wondered and he told her his pet iguana was named Iggy.

She was surprised to learn that there really was an iguana after all and wanted the Kid to describe Iggy in detail because she had never seen one before and wondered why anyone would want an iguana for a pet.

So he described Iggy in affectionate detail and when he got to the part about the two penises and that Iggy was going through his brief sexually active cycle and was turning from green to orange he realized he was starting to flirt about sex with brandi18 again as if he himself were turning from green to orange and had two erect penises. He didn’t mean to go there. He didn’t need reminding that she was only fourteen and he was twenty-one but somehow her questions and comments kept drawing him back to sexual innuendo and inquiry until they both, the Kid and brandi18 too, were getting dangerously explicit—dangerous at least for the Kid. When he read back over their string of e-mails it seemed she was only being playful yet her play kept drawing him forward until finally he typed
id rly like 2 hang with u some nite when your mom’s away.

what wld we do?

whatever we want 2 do. just c what happens. i could bring beer and a movie.

what kinda movie?

a sexy 1. u ever watch p?

whats p?

u no. porn.

o ya, i watched a couple on pay-per-view when my mom was away. she found out frm the bill and was pissed.

turn u on?

ya!

were u alone? or w yr bf ?

no!! only alone.

wld be fun 2 watch p 2gether.

maybe.

The Kid asked her for her street address and she gave it to him which he took as a clear invitation to visit her. He asked when her mom would be away next and she said this coming weekend she was going on a gambling cruise on a ship out of Calusa with the people who worked at her office.

all weekend?
he wondered.

ya!

He said he’d come over.

She reminded him that his car was still in the shop. He’d not be able to drive out to West Calusa Gardens unless he could borrow a car. Better wait till his Beemer was fixed.

He said no, he could take a bus. He’d do a search on MapQuest and find the closest bus stop and walk from there. He lived in the north end of the city and there were buses running west to the suburbs and back every half hour till midnight and every hour after that. Even if they hung out till late he could still get home, he said and waited for her answer to come up on his screen.

After a long five minutes he finally heard the
ping
signaling the arrival of a new e-mail and the announcement from the AOL woman,
you’ve got mail
. It was brandi18. Who else? He never got e-mail, never heard that announcement except for spam. He clicked it open.

sorry. had a phone call from my mom checking up on me. i’m sorta grounded.

what 4?

grades. so r u coming fri or sat?

i’ll come fri. c what happens and maybe sat. 2 if u like. u might invite me 2 stay over.

yr 2 old. and a guy. my moms’ll kill me if she finds out.

she wont.

bring the beer. my moms counts her stash when she gets home.

k. i’ll bring some surprises 2.

like what?

u’ll see. Around 10 ok?

k. bye. gotta log out and delete. my moms is home. sometimes she reads my e-mails when she gets home. she’s a bitch. c u fri around 10.

He pushed back from the computer and lighted a cigarette. He was sweating and noticed that his hands were trembling. He was frightened of what he was doing, had done, would do if given the opportunity. But it was too late to back off now. What had begun as an itch had turned into a barely conscious fantasy that had become a plan and now a promise. He wasn’t frightened because she was only fourteen—he had almost blocked that out and besides she looked and sounded older on Facebook and in her e-mails. He was scared and nervous because he had never invited himself to visit a girl at her house alone, had never dared to—no girl had let him believe that he wouldn’t be laughed at for even asking her for more than the time of day. And here this pretty girl was asking him to bring beer and a skin flick and see what happens.

Okay, he’ll see what happens. He’ll have to buy some condoms. How many or what kind or size he wasn’t sure. He’d never bought condoms before, had never even checked the rack to see if they came in different sizes. He figured he’d need extra-large probably unless they only came in one size and were really flexible.

And he’d have to rent a movie from the adult section of Moviemasters, nothing too hard-core, no gangbang or cum-shots although maybe cum-shots are sexy to girls and not just guys. He wasn’t sure what was sexy to girls. Except for vibrating dildo films and the occasional chick-on-chick lesbian films which didn’t really get him excited anymore porn seemed pretty much designed for guys. She was white so she’d probably only want to see white people fucking at least this first time. Maybe down the road she’d be interested in watching a black dude with a donkey-dong getting blown by a white girl.

She’d probably want to see something with a story attached at least at the beginning—one of those movies that start out with the husband going off on a business trip leaving his beautiful wife home alone and horny and this young stud comes over in his tight cutoff shorts and no shirt to clean the pool while she’s watching from the window upstairs and getting all wet so she puts on her bikini and goes down to the pool and lies on a chaise to sunbathe. The pool guy checks her out and asks for a glass of water and she brings it to him from the kitchen and when he finishes and sets the glass down she runs her finger down his bare chest to his crotch. And then the action starts and you don’t need the story anymore till the end where the husband comes home and suggests jazzing up their tired sex life by inviting someone to join them and they look out the window at the pool guy and the next scene has both guys fucking the wife one from behind and her blowing the other and the two guys come at the same time: The End.

He’d look for one of those at Moviemasters tomorrow which was Thursday and watch it alone first to make sure it had enough of a story to interest a fourteen-year-old girl. It wouldn’t matter if it didn’t interest him because he’d already seen it and hundreds of others just like it. He’d be dealing with reality this time. Not illusion. He’d be watching and actually touching a real female human being’s body, skin, breasts, legs, ass, vagina, instead of just pictures made from electronic pixels whose colors and movement and arrangement on a screen were predetermined and controlled by a script and director and a half-dozen camera angles. That’s what frightened him. That’s why his hands were trembling as he lighted another cigarette. He was about to bump up against and break through an invisible membrane between the perfectly controlled world locked inside his head and the endlessly overflowing unpredictable, dangerous world outside.

CHAPTER EIGHT

E
VEN
THOUGH
HE
’
S
STILL
NOT
SURE
WHAT
exactly the Professor is after especially with the treasure map bit the Kid mostly trusts him now. Since the night he took the bus out to West Calusa Gardens to visit brandi18 he hasn’t trusted anybody. Period. No one is who he or she seems to be. Not even the other men living under the Causeway. Including the Rabbit who probably made up all those stories about teaching Kid Gavilan how to throw the bolo punch.

That’s okay, the Kid’s not complaining, it’s just the way things are. Everybody has a secret agenda and a secret life. Starting with his mother and moving out from there. Tony Perez had a secret agenda at the light store. Benbow and his goofy sidekick Trinidad Bob. The U.S. Army. It didn’t matter who, people near or close to him, individually and in groups were all using him to advance their own hidden interests. Even brandi18. The Kid was nothing to her except an entertaining fool for her to laugh at and feel superior to. She was maybe the worst. The real problem is that the Kid doesn’t know what his secret agenda is or if he has one.

But something about the Professor has gradually made him seem trustworthy to the Kid. It begins with his size, his enormous body and the way he dresses it. What you see when you first see him is what you get for the duration, a man so fat and tall and wide that you never get used to it—no matter how many times you see him he never looks normal. The bushy beard and long hair and the three-piece suit only add to his size and make no attempt to hide or disguise it. Most fat guys wear loose Hawaiian-style shirts or guayaberas and floppy trousers and try to make their beach-ball faces look smaller with short hair slicked back and going beardless or maybe keeping a trim little Vandyke beard so when you look at them you focus on their eyes and nose and lips and ignore the wide expanse of skin surrounding them. Nothing about the Professor’s appearance is part of a disguise. He doesn’t even wear sunglasses. Just squints in the glare looking like one of those Japanese sumo wrestlers.

The way he talks is trustworthy too. At least to the Kid it is. He talks like a professor, using long clearly pronounced words carefully in complete sentences but slowly said with a noticeable southern accent that the Kid guessed right away was from Alabama or Mississippi where the Kid has never heard of there being any professors so maybe he’s actually more of a regular person than a professor. He’s smart and educated, that’s obvious, but he doesn’t talk like he feels superior to people who aren’t as smart and educated as he is. Most of the people the Kid has met in his life who are smarter and better educated than the Kid either talk down to him from a great height or else try to sound like they aren’t really very intelligent and haven’t even graduated from high school which only makes the Kid suspicious of their attitude. He’s thinking of the social workers and psychologists he met in prison and a couple of teachers he had in high school who tried to get him to join in classroom discussions of current events or the books that were assigned even though the Kid never read newspapers except the headlines or watched the TV news or listened to radio newscasts and had not once read more than the first few pages of any of the books that had been assigned over his entire four years of high school. Most of what he knows about the history of the world and human life he’s picked up from scraps of overheard conversation on the street and at the light store where he worked after school and weekends and from remarks exchanged by his fellow students and later the guys in his outfit at Fort Drum and now the men living with him under the Causeway. The Kid is one of those people who have made up the mass of mankind since the species first appeared on the plains of East Africa two or three million years ago. Most of his troubles arise because he’s a twenty-first-century American and not some ancient East African or an early Cro-Magnon living with his extended family of hunter-gatherers in a cave in prehistoric Spain or a turnip-planting serf in medieval Russia or one of the early Calusa Indians harvesting oysters in the bay as the first ships from Europe hove into view.

He doesn’t think of himself this way, of course—he never heard of Cro-Magnons or Russian serfs and can’t tell East Africa from West—or he didn’t until the Professor came into his life and started interviewing him, just getting him to tell his story and then showing him ways to improve his life by being better organized and more cooperative with the men living under the Causeway with him.

Now slowly he’s starting to realize that he might be not exceptional but at least he’s important simply for being who he is, that he’s not really like the mass of mankind from the beginning of time whose entire lives and everything they chose to do or not to do is determined by their givens, the conditions and circumstances they were born into and the people they found there to accompany them in life. Until now the only living creatures who seemed to care what he did or thought and were therefore affected by his actions and thoughts were Iggy and Einstein the parrot and Annie the dog as if the Kid were closer to being reptile, bird, or four-legged animal than a human being alive and conscious in time with a beginning, middle, and end to his life, all three parts existing simultaneously in each separate part. His subjective life—his accumulated memories, wishes, fears, and reflections in the last few days—has started to take on an importance to him that it never held before. And consequently he’s begun to have a new interest in the subjective lives of the people who are connected to him starting with the Professor but including the men who live alongside him under the Causeway. Even the Shyster whose story up to now he has had no desire to know since he had no story of his own to compare it to.