The Boys of My Youth (24 page)

I walk through backyards until I get to Renee’s block and then I walk in the street. One time Elizabeth, Madelyn, and I walked
around this block with our shirts off and tied around our waists. It was about three in the morning and the houses were dead
and silent, the streetlights shone yellow spots on the pavement. We walked and walked, with our arms over our heads, letting
the night air get on our skin. I’m not in the mood for any of that nonsense tonight. There she is, sitting on Renee’s front
porch.

“I thought they got you,” Elizabeth whispers hoarsely. Her hair is going eight different ways and her cheeks are pink, her
voice is croaky.

“I went in a doghouse with a dog,” I say. “And they came right past me, and are they pissed.” I tell her some of the words
Danny and Stuart were whispering.

“Eek,” she says.

Since there are no parents on the premises, we decide to wake Renee up and tell her what happened. Through the front window
we can see the two littlest kids asleep on the floor in front of the snowy TV screen. Stacy has on a diaper and socks and
has her head resting on a bed pillow without a case. Amy has on a T-shirt and no pants whatsoever, and has her head resting
on a skanky stuffed dinosaur. Renee is asleep on the couch under an afghan, a book open across her chest. We tap on the window.
Stacy stirs and puts a thumb in her mouth. Amy rolls over so her face is against the dinosaur’s face.

“Seems like a shame to wake them up,” I say, and then tap louder. Renee startles awake and the book falls off her chest.

“Don’t wake the babies,” she whispers as she lets us in. She
has drool on her from sleeping on the couch, and we don’t want to point it out but we do anyway. “Oh,” she says, wiping it
off. We follow her out to the kitchen where she sits at the table, yawning. I sit on the counter and Elizabeth looks in the
refrigerator.

“We would have been dead if they’d caught us,” I tell Elizabeth. She concurs. We tell Renee what happened. She confirms what
we already suspected: Stuart Garcia is dangerous. And she’s in a position to know — she went steady with him in grade school.

“He wanted to drop me and go with Maria Valdez,” she says sleepily. “So he threw a steak knife at me and it hit a tree. He
got about forty swats with the wooden paddle from the principal.” I repeat for her in great detail the words I heard him saying
while I was jammed into the doghouse. It was an altogether stunning display of swearing, and we can’t help but be impressed.
Stuart and Danny have suddenly put themselves on the map.

“Those guys will say
any
thing,” Elizabeth remarks. She’s having a bowl of cereal, using milk that is thin and watery with a faint blue cast.

“How’s that breast milk taste?” I ask her. She stares into the bowl for a second and then shrugs, takes another spoonful.

“What would you’ve done if they caught you?” Renee asks. In some ways Renee is the perfect friend, she’s genuinely nice and
asks you just exactly the questions you are prepared to answer. She is also pretty, with thin shiny hair and round brown eyes
and a mouth that smiles even when she’s just reading or listening to a teacher. The boys love her, too, and cluster around
her, which works out well for her friends, who are neither nice nor friendly.

“I would’ve just started screaming,” Elizabeth answers. And it’s true, we all know it.

I make a slow-motion kicking gesture with my foot. “Right in the old codpiece,” I say. Elizabeth makes a snorting noise and
then has a nose attack right in Renee’s kitchen. It’s when she can’t breathe through her mouth — she’s still eating cereal
— and her nostrils slam shut. She has to reach up and pry them open manually so she can get air.

I try to help her and we wake the babies up accidentally.

“Shit-fuck,” Renee says wearily. The babies wander out to the kitchen, blinking their eyes in the brightness and whimpering.
They both try to climb on Renee, who stares patiently at the ceiling for a second and then helps them up on her lap. They
look at Elizabeth and me with blank, defensive eyes, Amy with her thumb jammed in her mouth, Stacy with her hand down her
diaper.

“Do you have to go on the big-girl potty?” Renee asks her. She shakes her head no and closes her eyes. Suddenly we’re all
tired, even Elizabeth and me. We take the kids and Renee leads the way upstairs. She pokes her head in all the bedrooms: B.J.
is asleep on Renee’s bed, Alex is asleep on the rug beside his bed, Cindy is sleeping in B.J.’s bed. I have Amy, who’s as
heavy as a sandbag and smells like sour milk and baby shampoo. We finally put them on the king-size bed in the parents’ room.
There’s no sheet so we cover them with the funky, crumpled-up bedspread and tiptoe out. B.J. is seven and weighs a ton so
I take his feet and Elizabeth takes his arms and we carry him like a hammock between us and dump him into Cindy’s bed so Renee
can sleep alone. She whispers good night and we’re gone, back into the cold spring air.

It takes about two blocks of freezing cold before we decide we have to ride instead of walk. We find a boy’s bicycle with
a long banana seat in somebody’s backyard and take it; Elizabeth pedals standing up and I ride on back, with my legs stuck
straight out on either side. When she gets winded I take over,
but I sit while I pedal, which scrunches her. I can’t help it; I’m tired.

When we get to the big hill we leave the bike leaning against a tree and trudge ourselves straight up for one block and then
it’s two blocks of flat ground, and then we’re at her house, sneaking back in.

I go first in case somebody’s up; at least we know they won’t throw a pop bottle at me. The coast is clear. Elizabeth steps
into her bedroom and suddenly we’re wide awake again. We debate about calling up the Garcias, and then, in an unusual display
of restraint, don’t. Instead, we go out to the kitchen and prepare a cake mix we find in the cupboard. We take it back into
the bedroom and lie on the bed in the dark, eating cherry chip cake batter with big wooden spoons. We’re wound up now, it’s
impossible to think about sleeping.

We discuss the Jeff Bach situation for a while. We come to the conclusion that it’s hard to like someone so blond. “I like
dark-haired guys, I think,” Elizabeth says. I can see the shadow of her profile in the bed, she’s gesturing with her wooden
spoon.

“Me too,” I say.

There is a long silence. It’s late, four
A.M.
or something. We’re finally getting tired again. She puts the batter on the floor next to the bed; I hand her my spoon and
she drops it into the bowl. A few minutes pass.

“I might like Danny Garcia,” she says tentatively. Another minute goes by.

“I might like Stuart,” I say. She thinks this over. I turn on my side and she cuddles up right behind me; we sleep like two
spoons whenever we’re in the same bed.

“Stuart’s dangerous,” she whispers.

“I know it,” I say softly, into the darkness, and then we’re both asleep.

It’s nineteen seventy-something, summer, nighttime, black country road running through rural Illinois, the sky is immense.
Three miles ahead are train tracks that can be sailed over if you approach them right, all four tires will leave the ground
at once. We’re heading for our house, a two-story farm job with a big garden out back, a bunch of pigs that are not our responsibility,
a summer kitchen with spiders and mice, and two dogs who wait patiently all day for us to get home so their lives can begin.
I’ve thrown my lot in with the guy in the driver’s seat, and he with me. We’re both certain we’ll never amount to anything,
which only bothers us when we think about it. Right now we’re high on dope and each other, and the night air smells like rain.
The road is white where the headlights hit it, and everything else is pure black. The car is old and bumperless, with a plywood
fender that has a dent where an agitated friend of ours karate-chopped it. The tape deck is not for the faint-hearted; the
sound inside the car is huge and all-consuming. Right now it sounds like someone is playing a guitar using a razor blade for
a pick, and the question being asked is Are you experienced? The answer is No, we aren’t, but we’re working on it.

Coming up on the long stretch before the giant Dip in Pavement and the subsequent railroad tracks, Eric glances over at me
for an instant, assessing my mood, then pushes the lights off and we streak through the blackness down the center of the highway,
dark moving inside of dark, our faces faint in the dashboard light. It sounds for a moment like the guitar player is saying
Areyouanidiot? and then I decide to be into it.

I put one arm out my window, to feel the night air and create some drag. He presses harder on the gas. The sky is distinguishable
from the ground only because it is blue-black, and
the land is black-black. There are stars. This is what they mean by barreling down the road. Not only could this be certain
death, but we may take somebody else out, too, which is troubling. He isn’t thinking of any of that; in fact, he’s got his
eyes closed, or else just the one I can see — he’s trying to freak me out. That settles it. I put my foot on top of his and
press it to the floor. I close my own eyes and imagine myself leaning into it, certain death. Darkness and his girlfriend,
Darkness, are out for a ride through the countryside in the summer night. We hit the dip and are airborne for a breathless
millisecond, then there’s that long, terrible dope-inspired instant that stretches out forever, where you don’t know if there’ll
be a train on the tracks or not, whether you’ll get to continue living.

This time we do.

“They clean your room and cook your meals so you can write about Stuart
Garcia?”
Elizabeth asks incredulously. She’s at her job in Chicago.

“Apparently,” I reply. I’m in the wilds of upstate New York, at an artist’s colony, sitting in a phone booth drawing pictures
and talking to her while she formats something on her computer, which keeps beeping.

“You should say he was dangerous,” she suggests.

I hate it here; why did I come here? All there is to do is write.

“You always go through this,” she reminds me. There is the sound of a tiny bomb exploding, a ding, and she exhales loudly.
“I just crashed my whole computer,” she explains.

“I just crashed my whole life,” I tell her mournfully. I’m afraid she’s going to try to hang up. “Who even cares about the
boys of my youth? There weren’t any, it was all imaginary. I’m making it up as I go along.” I draw a picture of a pit bull
on the phone book in the phone booth. It has pointy ears, bowed
legs, and giant teeth. “Now I’m drawing a giant-toothed dog,” I tell her.

“That’s good,” she says. “Remember that time you went to Florida to write and became troubled?”

“In the category of freak-out,
that
was the real thing.” I draw a palm tree with coconuts hanging off it next to the pit bull.

“I made you eat a banana that time,” she reminds me. We muse on that for a moment, until her computer comes back on line and
says hello to her in a voice from outer space. We hang up.

As a matter of fact, there happens to be a banana in my lunch. Every day they give me a lunchbox with a sandwich, a piece
of fruit, and a cookie in it. I eat the cookie, think about the sandwich, and put the fruit on my writing table, then I go
back to staring out the window of my studio. This is how professional writers work.

I went to Florida once to work on a writing project. I borrowed a house on Key-something, with a million-mile view of the
Atlantic, sliding glass doors, expensive furniture, and cockroaches the size of a man’s big toe. My friend’s sister, who was
lending me the house, showed me how you had to spray Raid directly on the bug in order to make it die. At first it seemed
unfazed, and then it wandered about a foot away and fell over. “They aren’t cockroaches,” she explained firmly.

“I’m not afraid of bugs,” I told her. “I
like
bugs, actually.” In fact, I’m married to one, is what I thought to myself. This was during a down phase in my marriage. I
was there in Florida because he wouldn’t stop seeing the wife of his best friend. “We’re not
doing
anything,” he would explain. “What are you — nuts?” The wife herself was miffed at me. “Why can’t we still be friends?” she
asked. I would speak to her only when cornered, and then only to call her names. She kept trying
though, calling my house at odd hours to ask me how I was doing in a concerned, schoolmarmish voice.

“Quit calling my house and quit screwing my husband,” I’d reply evenly. She’d sigh; I’d hang up. Once I took the phone off
the wall and threw it out the front door into a snowbank. Eric retrieved it wordlessly, dried it off, hung it back on the
wall. “You suck,” I told him. He stared at me for a long moment and then went back to whatever he was doing.

I was trying to make him miss me by going to Florida, but it wasn’t working. On the way down, while driving in my car, I would
have long imaginary arguments with him, where I hit every point square on the head and he was left speechless and remorseful.
I had him apologizing to me left and right, every hundred miles or so. Between that and singing to the radio, it was a pretty
productive trip down.