The Tender Bar (23 page)

I didn’t have the vaguest idea what a condom looked like. I’d never held one, seen one, or talked to anyone about one. I went up and down the aisles, looking for the Condom Section. I checked the toiletries aisle. I checked the office-supplies aisle. I checked the cooler.
Maybe condoms are perishable and need to be kept fresh.
Ice cream, soda, milk—no condoms.

Eventually I realized that condoms, like skin magazines and cigarettes, were naughty, and therefore must be kept behind the counter. I looked up and there they were, on pegs above the clerk, small boxes with pictures of silhouetted couples preparing to engage in the physical act of love. I slouched with relief, then tensed up.
If condoms are tools of vice there must be some age requirement. Better do something to make myself look older.
I grabbed a copy of the
New York Times
.

“That all?” the clerk asked.

“Yes. Um, no, actually. Throw in a box of them condoms there, why doncha?”

“What kind?”

“Medium, I guess.”

“What
brand,
stud?”

I pointed. He set a box of Trojans atop the
Times
. I slid a twenty across the counter. “Keep the change,” I said. He scowled and handed me the change.

Fifty minutes had passed since I left Lana. She was either terrified or furious. As I raced back to the mountain I pictured her up there, which made me think about the special spot where I’d left her, and I remembered then that I’d found that spot by trial and error, and that it had taken forty-five minutes of driving up and down and around the hump, in the dark. I didn’t know how I’d ever find it again. Fishtailing onto the long road that led to the base of the mountain I checked the speedometer. I was doing seventy-five and both the Hornet and I were shaking. I thought the Hornet might throw a piston rod. I thought I might throw a piston rod. Nothing looked familiar. How could anything look familiar on the side of a mountain in the pitch dark? I told myself to slow down, take it easy, I was going to kill myself in a car accident on the same day my mother was nearly killed in a car accident. I imagined her coming out of limbo, the doctor giving her the bad news. Your son is dead. “What was he doing on Camelback Mountain?” she’d ask weakly.

I came to a familiar fork in the road, but couldn’t remember if Lana and I had gone left or right. I turned left, mashed the accelerator and noticed that my foot had gone numb. The cactus stickers in my knee were oozing their poison into my bloodstream, which meant my leg would require amputation. I tried to pick the stickers out of my kneecap as I drove, and at the same time I began rehearsing what I would say to Lana’s father. He would either kill me—I remembered he’d played defensive end for the Chicago Bears—or have me arrested.

A more ghoulish scenario took shape in my mind. Lana, deciding that I was crazy, and that I’d abandoned her, might have wandered away, gotten lost, stumbled in the dark, and fallen down a ravine filled with snakes and lizards and wild bobcats. Did they even have wild bobcats in Scottsdale? Probably. And like sharks they were probably attracted to the smell of blood. I remembered the cut on Lana’s leg. When the police found Lana’s mauled body, no one would believe she’d agreed to wait for me on top of the mountain while I went for condoms. Everyone would think I’d asked for sex and Lana refused, so I’d killed her. I drove faster, feeling the numb sensation in my knee spread to my hip. Not only would I go to jail for murder, not only would I lose my leg, but each day in the yard the other prisoners would ask the same question:
How’d you lose your leg?
It would be poetic justice, divine retribution for all my whining about people asking what JR stood for, just as this night was divine retribution for trying to get laid while my mother lay in a hospital bed, bandaged and broken and adrift in some heavily medicated limbo.

I was passing the same houses, the same cacti, over and over. I was driving in circles, going around and around the hump. I couldn’t even say for sure if I was on the right hump. Was it the first or second hump? I turned on the radio to steady my nerves and thought of my father. I cursed him. I punched the radio.
If my father had been around when I was growing up I’d know about condoms and none of this would be happening! If he’d
used
a condom none of this would be happening!
I pulled to the side of the road, put my head on the steering wheel and wept. From someplace deep inside me I brought up great shuddering sobs for my mother, for myself, and for Lana, who at that moment was being eaten alive by wild bobcats.

I thought of the Hemingway story Bill and Bud had made me read, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” and the opening line about the summit of the mountain, called the House of God, where lay the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. “No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude,” Hemingway wrote. What was the point of that goddamned story? Was it that curiosity had killed the cat? Was the leopard trying to get laid? Did leopards look anything like bobcats? Why read stories unless they could provide some practical help in emergencies like this? I considered phoning Bill and Bud, but I didn’t know their home numbers. Then I thought of phoning Publicans. Of course! Publicans! Surely Uncle Charlie or Steve would know what to do. Then I heard them asking me why I was on top of Camelback Mountain when my mother was in the hospital, and I also heard them laughing.
The kid tried to lose his virginity—but instead he lost the girl!
I would take my chances with Lana’s father and the homicide detectives before I’d face the men at Publicans.

Ahead was a mailbox that looked like a red barn.
Lana commented on that red mailbox when we drove past it.
How cute, she’d said, pointing, and I remembered turning left. Now I turned left again and saw a familiar house with a wagon wheel in the front yard. Then a cactus with more than the usual number of arms, which had made me think of Jedd—and then the dirt road that dead-ended at the slope beside the special spot.

Leaping out of the car I yelled up at the stars. “Lana!” No answer. “Lannnaaa!” I tried to sound like Tarzan. I tried to sound like Brando yelling, “Stelllaaa,” but I sounded more like Costello yelling, “Hey Abbott!” Maybe she was refusing to answer. It was my only hope.
Please God let her be angry but alive.
Before beginning to climb I had another thought, one I would always remember with equal parts astonishment and shame.
If Lana is still there, still alive, I might be able to explain and apologize and maybe we can still—do it. In which case I’d better put on the condom now.
Since I’d never seen a condom I’d need light to slip it on, and the only light on that dark mountaintop was in the Hornet. I got back in the car, turned on the dome light and opened the box of condoms. No instructions. I placed one condom on my finger. How could such a little cap stay put during sex? I didn’t know and I didn’t have time to figure it out. I placed the rolled-up condom on my flaccid penis, like a beret, then struck out for the summit.

“Lana!”

My voice echoed across the mountain.

“Lana!”

Nearly two hours had passed since I left her.

“Laaaaaana!”

The pain in my leg was blinding, and my knee wouldn’t bend, which made the climb take longer. At the top I chinned myself up and peered forward. I saw Lana at the far edge of the cliff, curled in the fetal position, asleep. I crawled toward her. She woke, reached for me. Her breath smelled like Juicy Fruit and Löwenbräu. “Have you been crying?” she asked, kissing me. She pulled me on top of her. I could barely support myself on my numb leg, but she helped me, guided me. “It’s right—here,” she whispered. Inside. Then deeper. She rocked me back and forth, showed me how, until I understood. I looked out across the valley, all those lights, all those houses, all those windows I’d peered into as a boy. Finally someone was letting me in.

After, Lana and I lay on our backs, shoulder to shoulder. “Your first time?” she said.

We both laughed.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be. It’s exciting when it’s someone else’s first time.”

I told her about my hunt for condoms. “I never had anyone go to such—lengths,” she said.

She fell asleep with her head on my chest while I counted stars. Turning my head I saw, in the dirt nearby, gleaming in the moonlight like a clam, the unused and rolled-up condom. Had I become a man and a father in the same heedless moment? I didn’t care. Either way I was no longer a boy.

My best guess was that I was neither boy nor man, but something in between. In limbo. Even Sheryl would have to admit that much. I wondered if shedding boyhood was something like amnesia, if you forgot yourself and your old life, forgot all the familiar things you thought you would never forget, and started fresh. I hoped so. I wished it were so on the brightest star I could see. And I wished there were someone I could ask.

nineteen
| FUTURE ME

M
Y MOTHER CAME HOME FROM THE HOSPITAL AFTER A WEEK,
her arm in a large cast. Upon waking each morning she would move from her bed to the couch and sleep on and off throughout the day, because of the pain medication. The good news was, her doctors had concluded that she’d suffered no brain damage. And her memory had returned. But she didn’t speak much, and when she did her voice was a faint, far-away rasp, without any inflections. Her voice, it seemed, like her face, had gone blank. After school, after my shift at the bookstore, I would sit in the chair opposite the couch, alternating between watching my mother sleep and filling out my Yale application.

The first page was a minefield, full of loaded questions, like
Father’s Legal Name.
I thought about typing “Johnny Michaels.” I typed “John Joseph Moehringer.” Next question:
Father’s Address
. I mulled several possibilities. “Not sure.” “Unknown.” “Missing.” I typed “Not Applicable” and stared hopelessly at the words.

Bill and Bud had been crazy, or callous, persuading me to apply to Yale. The finest school in the nation wasn’t about to let its students be contaminated by the likes of me, a low-rent loser, a gypsy who didn’t know his father’s whereabouts. Undoubtedly the admissions committee dropped applications like mine into a special basket with a little sign:
WHITE TRASH
.

Yale doesn’t care if you know where your father is, Bill and Bud said when I confronted them.

I snorted.

“But if it bothers you so much,” Bill said, “find him.”

As if it were that simple. Then I thought, Maybe it is.

Time had passed. I was almost seventeen, a different person—my father probably was too. Maybe he was curious about me. Maybe he’d phoned Grandpa’s house, looking for me, only to have someone hang up on him. What if my father would be pleased to hear
my
voice? It was possible, especially since I didn’t want anything from him anymore. Though I was ashamed to admit it, I no longer hoped to sue my father. That plan had fallen away and in its place was an aching desire to meet him, to find out who he was, so I could start deciding who I might be.

Finding him would be easy, I figured. After all, I was taking journalism classes in school, writing for the school newspaper—my first story was a transparently fawning profile of a local disc jockey—and I was delighted to learn that one of the primary things reporters did was find people. My search for my father would be my first try at investigative journalism. And if I found that he was dead, so be it. There would be peace in knowing, and I would be able to type “Deceased” under
Father’s Address,
an improvement over “Not Applicable.”

I couldn’t tell my mother about my search. She’d feel betrayed that I wanted to meet the man who had tried to kill her, especially after a drunk driver had nearly killed her. So I conducted my search in secret, after school, using the phone in the journalism office to call radio stations and comedy clubs across the nation. No one knew where my father was living, or if he was living. I went to the library and checked phone books from scores of cities, but there were always too many Johnny Michaelses and no John Moehringers. After a month I hadn’t turned up a single lead.

While my mother was at the market one day I quickly dialed a former colleague of my father’s at WNBC in New York City. I’d spent weeks trying to coax the colleague to the phone, and this was the only time his secretary said he’d be available. As he checked to see if he had a number for my father, my mother returned. She’d forgotten her grocery list. “Who are you talking to?” she asked. I shrugged. The man came on the line and said my father had left specific instructions that his whereabouts were not to be given out. I argued, but he hung up. My mother sat beside me and we both stared at the phone. She asked if I wanted her help. “No,” I said. She touched her arm, the one that had been broken in the car accident. The cast had only recently been removed, and the arm had atrophied. It gave her frequent pain, and now I was giving her more pain. Also, while recovering, my mother hadn’t been able to work, and our bills had piled up. She was stressed about money, more stressed than usual, and I was adding to her stress.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t apologize. A boy needs a father.” She smiled sadly. “Everyone needs a father.”

My mother went through her papers and pulled out an old address book. She thought she might have a number for my father’s sister in Florida. She put on her glasses and reached for the phone with her atrophied arm. Not wanting to listen I went to my bedroom and worked on my Yale essay.