Palo Alto: Stories (8 page)

I had my first girlfriend in fourth grade, in Mr. DeFelice’s class. Her name was Simone. She was pretty and blond like Madonna. After she broke up with me I would watch
Who’s That Girl?
to remind myself of her. Once Simone said Mr.
DeFelice asked if he could take pictures of her at his house, but her mom wouldn’t let her go.

Ute’s name was the name of an Indian tribe. He was Italian but his parents were hippies and accountants at Whole Foods. His older brother was named Rain, he was two years older than us. Rain had the biggest dick of all his friends. He would walk around naked and show it, all his friends talked about it. They called him “Calcium.”

Calcium broke all the basketball records in high school and had sex with tons of ugly girls.

Later, in high school, Ute had sex first out of all of us. It was with a black girl, Venus.

I had sex last. I was drunk at a party at my friend Barry’s house. We did it in a bedroom, Susan and me, and then stayed the night. In the morning, I waited till she left, and then I walked home alone.

At water-ski camp we told everyone about Howard and the black girl on the bus. There was a handsome guy, Chad. He got into a fight with Howard and punched him in the eye. Chad didn’t get in trouble because he told the counselors about what Howard did to Angela.

*   *   *

After I had sex once I had sex a lot. The second time was in Susan’s bed. I was about to come and I pressed my foot against the footboard. My long toenails scraped against the board like cockroaches. After, when we pulled away, it was sticky and frothy. Buttery, like pulling apart a Baby Ruth.

She rolled over and cried.

When I was eight, we all loved Coke. The bright red can with the cold brown liquid. There was one machine back at the main counselor’s cabin. If we did something good we got a can.

Everybody in the Polar Bear Club wanted a Coke. But no one wanted to get naked in front of Hulk. Hulk took his shirt off. He was fat and pale and had hair on the front of his shoulders. His stomach was like curdled milk. There were little chunks of ill-formed fat that showed through the skin when he moved. The skin on his stomach was as white as the inside of a radish.

In fourth grade, in Mr. DeFelice’s class, I had to sit next to Sasha Alexander. She wore the thickest glasses I’ve ever seen. She had short red hair, lots of freckles, and no friends.

The class practiced writing cursive. We had to write our desk partner’s name. Mr. DeFelice came around to inspect. He told me my
x
in
Alexander
looked like a swastika.

*   *   *

In eleventh grade we studied the Civil War. There were the Bad Confederates and the Good Guys in the North. Some people still believe that the Confederates were right.

The water-ski camp went to Knott’s Berry Farm. Ute and Howard and I and the others weren’t allowed to go into Knott’s Berry Farm because of the fight Howard had with Chad and because of what Howard did with the black girl and because he told that we had made him do it. The head counselor and his wife wanted to kick us out of camp, but instead we missed out on Knott’s Berry Farm. It was Hulk’s idea. We stayed in the parking lot by the bus with Jane and threw a Frisbee. Jane had to stay because she was our counselor. She was sad for us. That was when she told us that she was the black sheep of the family.

At the very end of the day we got to go into Knott’s Berry Farm. We saw Chad. He had his T and C tank top on. He had met a local girl in the park. His friend told us that Chad had got to second base with her already when they went on the mine ride. She was blond and pretty.

Riding back to the campsite, Ute drew pictures of people being burned in ovens. He burned Howard and Chad and Hulk in his ovens. They went in as they were—it looked like them, Ute was good at drawing cartoons—and they came out as skeletons.

A little kid told about the drawings. Hulk came back and saw the pictures. Back at camp he told us how bad the Nazis were and that it was not something to joke about.

Nobody in the camp liked us.

*   *   *

Ute was handsome but he was a nerd too. He drew lots of pictures. Ed and I drew pictures with him. We made our own comic called
The
Alien Brothers.
We drew ourselves like vicious aliens and killed the people in our school.

In fourth grade Sasha Alexander was the biggest dork I could ever think of. Buckteeth and short red hair and glasses. She said she could play basketball better than me. I laughed. We played at lunch and I won. She didn’t admit that I won. Back in class I told her she was a dork and a poor loser, and she stabbed me in the arm with a pencil. The hole was gray from the graphite.

Mr. DeFelice didn’t do anything about it.

When we were eight this guy pulled Ed’s bathing suit off. Ed didn’t have a mushroom. He was half Korean. We were scared to fight the big guy who did it. Hulk didn’t know about it, so the kid didn’t get in trouble.

In high school it was mostly white kids. There were only about thirty black students. Some were bussed in from East Palo Alto. Most of them hung out in an area in front of the school library. That was their spot. They got bad grades and wore parkas.

*   *   *

That night at Mid-Pen we were drunk and tired of walking. Me and Ivan and Ed and Jack stood on the cement-filled tire of a tetherball pole. We held the pole and rocked the tire back and forth and sang drunken songs. The rest of the group left.

We were drunk and we came up with our own songs. We sang about Heebs, and stingy Jews. Not meanly, just loud and funny. I sang loud.

Ute was mad about it, he asked how we could do that to Dave Frankel and Howard, and he left. No one cared. We didn’t care about Howard, he was a fool.

At water-ski camp we made fun of Howard and the black girl, Angela, so much. Late at night we snuck out of our sleeping bags and smoked pot. At campfire one night we dared Howard to push Angela in the water.

We sang “Wimoweh, wimoweh,” and then as everyone walked back to our sleeping bags, Howard shoved her in. She had all her clothes on. She hit her tooth on a log.

We got kicked out.

In high school Ute had so much pressure from his brother, Rain, to have sex. His brother made fun of him, and would get him drunk, and rip off his clothes, and tie him up. Ute finally had sex with Venus. The black guys made fun of Ute and Venus. They all wanted Venus.

*   *   *

The football players like Sam liked to make fun of Jews. He called people “Heebs” when they “Jewed” him. Sam played center on the team. He was fat and got no girls. He drank a lot of beer. Dave Frankel was Jewish and was on the team. He didn’t say anything to Sam about all his talk.

In History our teacher, Mr. Tyson, did a reenactment of the Anne Frank story. It was an elaborate thing that he did every year. It was staged on top of the machine shop in the storage room. He made the storage room look like Anne Frank’s attic. It was elaborate. Students played the Franks. At the end Mr. Tyson busted through the door dressed like an SS agent. He was pretty convincing.

When they kicked us out of camp, Hulk drove us to the Greyhound bus station in the middle of the night. Howard cursed at him the whole way. He called him a child molester and a little-dicked faggot. Hulk didn’t say anything. Howard kept going for the whole ride; it took about an hour. Howard’s face was red by the end. Whenever Hulk switched gears, Howard told him to “work that stick.”

At the Greyhound station in Redding, Hulk bought us all tickets and put us on the bus. He watched as we drove off. I saw him walk away before the bus was out of sight.

Then we were in the dark bus with the real people, travel
ing in the middle of the night. Most of the people were Mexican, and were sleeping. We were all quiet; there was nothing left to do.

There was a layover in Sacramento. We got out and wandered around. There was a seedy hotel near the station called the Henderson Hotel. It made us think of a slut at our school called Alice Henderson and we laughed about it. They sold hot dogs and beer in the lobby. The guy behind the counter said that Axl Rose had stayed there once.

It was one in the morning.

When we went back to the depot, Ed and I had both lost our ticket receipts and we couldn’t get on the bus. The woman in the customer service booth told us to go talk to the driver.

We went around to the side of the depot where the drivers had their lounge. Through the small window in the door we could see them. They were all black guys, sitting in there laughing and drinking coffee out of blue and white Styrofoam cups. They looked like they were having such a good time.

Part I
Vietnam

It was Sunday, at the beginning of summer. I was at Jordan Middle School, playing soccer with the Mexicans on the field in back. They were all in their twenties and thirties; I was sixteen. They were gardeners and construction workers and cooks. It was sticky hot out.

After the game, I saw two girls smoking on one of the portable metal benches the coaches sit on. I walked over.
One was an Asian girl with a beat-up face and a nice-looking body. The other was pale white and tall with curly hair. The Asian one passed a cigarette to the pale one. They were my age.

I was sweaty.

“Hi, I’m Roberto.” I put out my hand like a gentleman. The Asian girl smiled and said her name was Pam. We shook hands. The pale one smoked and didn’t say anything, or even look at me. She was like a big drooping plant.

“How’s the smoking?” I said.

“Fucking fine,” said the drooping plant. She passed the cigarette to Pam and looked off, across the field. She blew the smoke out through a little hole in her lips.

“‘Fucking fine,’ that sounds pretty good,” I said. I smiled big. I said to Pam, “Can I try that fucking fine cigarette?”

Pam laughed without sound and handed me the cigarette. The other one looked over her shoulder like there was something very interesting over there.

“Mmmmm, that
is fucking
good,” I said. “Fucking
fine
.” The drooping plant was not listening, only Pam was listening. She was pretty ugly, but when she smiled she wasn’t so ugly. And I could see up close that she had a really good body.

“Hey,” I said to the other girl. She didn’t look back. “Hey, here’s your cigarette.” She still didn’t look.

“Her name is Vicky,” said Pam.

“Vicky,” I said. “Vicky the hickey.” She still didn’t look. “Vicky, you remind me of a praying mantis,” I said. “You’re all long, and mantis.”

Pam laughed for a second, and put her hand over her mouth like she shouldn’t have. But then the mantis stood up.

“Pam, I’m going,” said the mantis.

“Don’t go,” I said.

“Fuck you,” she said to me. “Pam, are you coming?” she said.

Pam didn’t stand up.

“Pam doesn’t want to go, mantis,” I said.

“Screw you,” she said to me. To Pam she said, “Pam?”

Pam said, “No,” very quietly. The mantis turned and walked off across the field.

“Why don’t you go pray, and eat some of your mates,” I said to her back.

She walked crookedly and had a funny-shaped ass, like a heptagon.

I took another puff on the cigarette. It was a Camel. Some of the Mexicans called to me. They were carrying their soccer bags and water bottles at the other end of the field. They were waving. I waved.

I handed the cigarette back to Pam. She took a puff.

“Are you from around here?” I said.

She said she had just moved. She was going to start school with me at Paly in the fall. The pale girl worked at Midtown Video and they had met when she had gone in there to rent a video. She was the only person Pam had met so far.

I asked her which movie she rented.

“Pretty Woman.”

“I guess I ruined your one friendship,” I said.

“She wasn’t really a friend, just a girl.”

“I know,” I said. “Want to come to my buddy Tom’s and smoke pot?” I said. She said sure. Tom lived close to Jordan.

At Tom’s we smoked a lot of pot. Tom was there, we were in his room. We sat in a little circle near the open window and passed around a six-inch bong. We blew the smoke out the window. I got really high.

“Look at my eyes,” I said. “I’m Chinese too.”

She said she wasn’t Chinese, that she was half Vietnamese and half Caucasian. Then she said, “I’m adopted.”

I looked at her. I was so high.

“I love adoption,” I said. She looked at me weirdly, then she laughed. I liked making her laugh, because then she wasn’t so ugly.

“I love adoption
too,
” said Tom.

We all laughed some more. Tom was tall and blond and handsome. The Sunday sun from the window was warm on my back.

We were sitting there, and then I said, as if it was the best idea I’d ever had, “Let’s play ‘Camping’!”

She asked what Camping was.

“Tom, go get a flashlight. And a sleeping bag. We’ll pretend we’re out in the woods, camping.” Tom got up and went out to get the stuff. I went to the door and closed it, and turned off the lights. She was on the floor, watching me. I went to the window and closed the blinds, which made it pretty dark in the room. There was only the light from around the sides of the blinds, which glowed, a dull, radioac
tive orange. I took the comforter off the bed and went over to her.

“Roll up in this blanket with me, and we’ll pretend it’s a sleeping bag,” I said. I laid the comforter on the floor. I opened my arms, and she got close to me. We lay on the comforter, I took her in my arms, and we rolled ourselves up in it. Our heads were covered too. We giggled.

Then I heard the door open. Tom was there, but I couldn’t see him and he didn’t say anything. He was standing there, and we were lying there. We were being quiet, as if he wouldn’t know where we were if we didn’t make a sound, as if we were out in the forest. We were giggling but we kept it in. Silent giggling.

“I got the flashlight,” he said from the doorway. That really made us want to laugh, because it sounded like a question. Very quietly I said, “Shhh.” Her face was right next to mine. She was holding on to me tightly.