Palo Alto: Stories (15 page)

“I love you,” he said. I laughed because he was drunk. But I could also tell that he was a little serious. I looked right at him and it was in that moment I knew it meant nothing to say that. I got very quiet and looked away and we sat staring at our reflections. Then I said, “You remember that night in eighth grade, after Shauna’s bat mitzvah, we went to Gunn and sat under that tree? And I carved a heart in it?”

“Yeah.”

“I wish we could go back to that night.”

“Ivan and I cut it down.”

“The
tree
?” I said. He nodded in the reflection and smoked. “You cut down the whole tree? It was huge.”

“I know. One night last year we used his stepdad’s saw. Just me and him. It took a long time. That thing was probably there since the Civil War. Now it’s gone.”

Sitting there with Teddy, I knew I was making a decision, but I didn’t know what.

We smoked. The Camels weren’t my brand but they were okay in the night air.

After that I stopped seeing Mr. B as often. He said I was being a baby. I told him I needed to spend more time with
people my age, but when I wasn’t with him I just ended up sitting in my room at home. Tiff wasn’t even around. One night Mr. B asked me to babysit Michael because he had something important to do. I told him no.

“
Please
. He likes you, April.”

“No he
doesn’t
.”

“Yes he
does.
If you don’t do it for me, do it for him. He’s used to having you around.”

“Are you really going out?”

“Yes. I’d rather spend time with you, but I guess you won’t let me.”

I didn’t even kiss Mr. B when he left. Michael was seven now. He may have been used to me, but he still didn’t talk to me. He was in his regular position on the floor playing a game called Street Fighter. I sat on the couch and smoked.

“You’re not supposed to smoke in here.” I didn’t answer. I ashed in my Diet Coke can and watched him fight different characters. After my cigarette I told him that I wanted to play. I sat on the floor next to him and picked up the other controller.

“You have to pick. Who do you want to be?”

“I want to be the girl.”

“Chun Li? She sucks.”

“I don’t care, I want to be Chun Li.” He told me what to press. “Now how do I fight you?”

“You press the buttons,” he said. He was this Chinese guy and he beat the shit out of me. I pressed the buttons and my girl punched and kicked but it didn’t do any good. He killed me twice and the game was over. “Two cookies,” he said.

“What?”

“I get two cookies, I won.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That’s the rules.”

“No it’s not. Your dad said you get four cookies and you already had them.”

“Cindy lets me.”

“Who?”

“My other babysitter.”

“Who is she?”

“She’s my other babysitter. She lets me have cookies.”

I stood up and walked to the kitchen. He was telling me he wanted one Oreo and one chocolate chip when I walked out the back door.

I didn’t know where to go. I drove. Nirvana was in the CD player and I turned it off. I just drove and smoked. I didn’t want to go home. I smoked four cigarettes. I had only one more left so I drove to 7-Eleven. I bought some more Reds with my sister’s ID and a Diet Coke. Outside, I used the pay phone. First I called my sister, but she wasn’t there. I called Shauna and then I called Alice. Alice said there was a party and gave me the address. I got in the car but I didn’t turn the key. The lights inside the 7-Eleven made everything look yellow. The light fractured when I started crying.

After a while I started the car and drove slowly back toward Mr. B’s. I had one more cigarette in the old pack. I had turned it upside down so I could make a wish. I put it in my mouth and lit it and made a desperate wish.

This guy, A. J. Sims, and I, we got a bottle and drank it in his bedroom in the basement of his house. Vodka, clear and burning. We drank it straight from the big glass bottle.

A.J. had seven brothers, older and younger, so there were clothes, cups, and trash all over the house and some of the walls were flaking paint. There wasn’t much space, and all A.J. had for privacy was this shitty little underground room with a bed two inches off the floor, and his boom box and his hip-hop mix tapes.

I was pretty drunk that night. We were listening to the Pharcyde. I was drinking much more than he was. I sat in the one chair by the desk and he sat on the bed.

A bubble came up from my stomach and burned my throat. It came out rank and when I swallowed it tasted like acid.

Just then, I don’t know why, I said, “Oh, crap, A.J., fuck you.” I laughed and my esophagus was burning.

A.J. looked up from his deep thoughts on the bed.

“Don’t say that shit, bitch,” he said, and he was not laughing.

“What shit?” I said.

“Fuck you, Teddy. Don’t be sitting over there like a grinning baboon sayin’ shit. I’ll fuck you up.” He wasn’t really looking at me.

“Okay,” I said, and drank some more from the bottle. It was a great bottle, really smooth. Smirnoff. I took a sip of tap water from a little orange plastic cup.

Then A.J. was up and pacing around the room. Three big steps in one direction, three steps back, over and over again. He was hunched over in a white T-shirt that was grayed from washing, and his wiry forearms were flexing and unflexing.

He had moved to Palo Alto from LA the year before, so he thought he had a reputation to maintain. He was just a skinny little guy with a bowling ball head, but he arrived talking big. For a while he got a bit of respect because he wrote good graffiti and claimed that he liked big black asses. His tag was “Icer” for some reason, and then he changed it to “Ajay” because it was like his name but spelled differently. He always drank a lot of pineapple juice to make his come taste good. “Like cocoa butter,” he said.

Three months after his arrival, he was a joke. Everyone saw he was actually psycho. As soon as he got drunk he would
do stupid things like put cigarettes out on his arms or ride his scooter into a wall. And he would talk even bigger when he was drunk. He’d say, “Nigger.” One night he said the wrong thing to some of the black guys and got beat up. He wasn’t so tough after that. He was alone a lot. That’s when he started doing weird things even when he wasn’t drunk, like doing the cigarette burns at school. He really had no friends. Except me. He was a little bald weirdo, with burns up his forearm like leopard spots.

It was ten o’clock and I was staring at the tape turning in the boom box. Little gears rotating. The Geto Boys were talking about dick sucking, and licking scrotums and assholes. A.J. was back on the low bed with the ratty blue blanket and he was making a call.

“Yo, shut up for a minute, I’m calling April,” he said. “Turn that shit down.”

I turned the music off. We sat there while he waited. A long depressing quiet as the phone rang.

April was in our class, but she was better than us, mature and experienced. She had an older sister, and she’d introduced her to a lot. When April showed up in our town from Arizona at age thirteen with her tan and muscular legs, she had already fucked. She knew about dicks and talked about them to us in whispers. She knew that some bent in funny ways.

I had a crush on April right away. In eighth grade I called her once and tried to act cool. At least she was nice. She lived near me and sometimes we would go to the park near her house and sit on the swings and smoke pot out of her little
pink pipe. After we got into high school she started fucking older guys. This guy Denny Johnson and this guy Adam Cohen. They played water polo, and were really tall. Also my friend Barry.

Then A.J. was on the phone with her. He was smiling. I sat in the chair and cursed him in my mind.

“You should meet us,” A.J. said into the white phone. Then he was listening very intensely. He wasn’t such a gangster then; he was just a sweetie.

“. . . well bring your sister with you. It will be cool,” he said. He was looking at me like he was making sure I wasn’t laughing at him. She was saying something because I could hear the little buzz in the phone.

“. . . then bring your sister
and
Emily too.”

I was warm and drunk. Inside, I felt things flow through me and I thought about cartoon rabbits and about William Faulkner and how he drank all the time. I thought that someday I would be him.

When I was a baby, my mom read to me from Uncle Remus. I thought about the Tar Baby, his body steaming, just after Br’er Fox pulled him out of the cooking pot. A raw, coal-dark coagulum that Br’er Fox shaped into a slick black, shining, seal-like thing. A little black podling. No face until Br’er Fox pulled off Br’er Bear’s two jacket buttons and stuck them on the black baby and those were the eyes.

Button eyes are a crazy man’s eyes.

A.J. looked away and listened. I couldn’t believe April was talking to A.J.

“No, Teddy is here. Yes,
Teddy,
” said A.J. into the phone. Then he turned to me. “She says hi.”

“Hi, April,” I said, but he didn’t relay the message. He was facing the wall again.

“Yeah, he’s all drunk,” he said. “He can hang out with Emily.”

“Emily” was Emily Kraft, a big slut. She was a year older than us.

A.J. said, “Come on,” five times in five different ways, like she was teetering on an edge and he was gently trying to blow her over. Finally he said, “At Addison,” and his voice went a little higher. Addison was an elementary school down the street from his house.

“We’ll be on the jungle gym,” he said to the phone. He was smiling but not at me. The little guy had actually convinced them to come over. “. . . yeah, we got d’vodka… cool, see ya in the school yard, peace.” He said “school yard” like he was singing a song.

After he hung up he stopped smiling and didn’t share any of the joy. “They down,” he said, real serious.

“‘
D’
vodka’?” I said.

“Yeah, we got
d’vodka,
motherfucker, you got a problem wit that?”

“No,” I said. “I’m glad we got it.”

He was putting his jacket on. It was a Carhartt jacket, real plain. I had a brown corduroy one with a fur collar from J.Crew. I took it off the back of the chair. Some guy on a TV show had one too.

A.J. reached across me and took the bottle and screwed the cap on.

“You’ve been drinking this like a motherfucker,” he said.

He tucked the large bottle under his jacket and it bulged.

“Let’s go, bitch,” he said.

A few of the brothers were shifting around in shadowy corners of the basement level, and when we walked upstairs there were some more sitting and lying on the floor in front of the TV. They were watching
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.
I saw a little grape juice, deep purple and luminescent, at the bottom of a plastic glass.

Outside, it was a little cold, and the sound vacuumed out to quiet, nothing but a few cars passing in the distance along Middlefield Road. We went through the chain-link gate into the dark school yard. I sat on the end of the slide and the metal was cold under my ass. A.J. stood in the tanbark and paced a little; the bulge was still under his arm. Then we waited.

After five minutes I said, “Lemme get some of d’vodka.” I was surprised but he reached under his jacket and handed the bottle to me. He put his hands in his jacket pockets and looked all around, alert but cool.

I unscrewed the red cap and tilted the bottle to my lips. The stuff went down and I pictured the clear liquid with a magical pink inner glow.

“Save some of that shit,” A.J. said. A few cars passed but not the girls. I drank from the bottle again and it was a scary plunge because I always wanted to take too much. It hurt, but it was also impressive, like being in the hands of a bigger force. And because of that, a relief. A.J. still wasn’t looking at
me so I took another sip and my throat burned sharp and my brain swam in cold water.

A long silver-blue Cadillac passed, going very slowly. How we must look to adults: shitty teenagers in brown jackets, hanging around the school yard in the dark.

I thought again about the Tar Baby from Uncle Remus. The Tar Baby and the briar patch and Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Bear and Br’er Fox. I could probably get A.J. to fuck the Tar Baby if I made it look like a girl. Get his dick stuck in the tar. A.J. was so lonely and angry, and all his feelings got computed in strange ways. He said he had had a girlfriend in LA, a black girl. She must have hated herself. April was white, but A.J. really liked her.

After thirty minutes April and the girls weren’t there. It was just us, cold in the cold.

A.J. had walked out of the tanbark onto the blacktop, and I was alone with the vodka for a while, but then he came back and started yelling.

“Save that shit for the girls, motherfuck!” he said, grabbing the bottle. He saw how much was left and yelled some more. I just sat there. He said, “You faggot ass, you shit-kissing motherfucker, you dumb fucking nigger, you shitfaced faggot, I oughtta kill you. . . .” Other stuff poured out, like he was talking to himself.

Some teenage girls walked by. They didn’t go to our high school. There was a big-boned girl with short curly hair to her ears and a skinny witchy girl with longer black hair. They stood in the gateway.

“What are you yelling at?” said the big-boned girl. She said
it like she was older than she was. She must have been lonely if she was bothering with us.

A.J. answered her like he had been expecting them. “This faggot doesn’t know how to get any pussy, and drinks all my shit.”

The girls laughed a little.

“Really? He doesn’t know how to get any pussy?” said the big-boned girl.

“What an asshole,” said the witchy one. She was talking about A.J.

Then I spoke up. It was the first chance I’d had after the yelling.

“You’re the one who doesn’t know how to get girls,” I said to A.J.’s back. My words came out damp and wobbly.