Ed King (13 page)

He paused again. A few people were nodding. Ed turned the next page of Alice’s script. “The Lord is mysterious,” he read. “It’s no fault of the leper that he’s a leper. In olden times, lepers were banished. They had no chance. They were shunned and died alone. Find yourself a leper and your life was over. One day you woke up with a sore on your arm, and that was the end for you.”

More nodding. Ed nodded, too, as if commiserating with the congregation about the dark, unjust past. “All right, the ritual sounds completely strange. The ritual is even ridiculous and stupid. Here’s God telling Moses that if a Jew wants to make the house of a leper clean he needs to find a priest, and that priest needs to find two birds, cedar wood, scarlet, et cetera, bring it all to the house, kill one of the birds in an earthen vessel over running water, dip everything else in the blood of the dead bird, and sprinkle the house with the blood and water seven times.” More smiles, more laughter, more inside-joke nodding. Ed smiled, too, then waved at his grandmother. “Here,” he read, “we have to think of God like the Wizard of Oz, handing out medals and certificates of achievement. Abracadabra, two birds, seven sprinkles, a little scarlet, a touch of hyssop, and presto—the leper’s one of us again, he doesn’t have to go into the desert, God makes the way for his impossible
aliyah
, just as he led the Jews to the Promised Land and, in 1948, to
Ha’aretz Israel
. God has a plan and a method to his madness, even if it looks like just smoke and mirrors, even if to us it’s dead birds and water. But if you think about it, is that different from a Bar Mitzvah? I stand up here, I say the magic words, and—presto!—today I am a man.”

Another pause. Ed turned the last of Alice’s pages. A few “hmmm”s, more chuckles. Pop, Ed saw, had his handkerchief out and was wiping his eyes while holding his glasses. A few other people were crying, too, but most of the congregation was beaming.

“Actually,” Ed read, “I’m the same kid I was an hour ago, except there’s now been this ritual, my Bar Mitzvah, my own personal dead birds and
slaughtered lambs, with you, my friends and family, as witnesses. Thank you all so much for coming.”

Clapping in the synagogue wasn’t generally done, but a number of people couldn’t help themselves. Someone even called out, “Brilliant, brilliant!” and from there Ed launched into his list of specific thank-yous.

Ten-year T-notes, savings bonds, checks for fifty or a hundred dollars, and cash tucked into gilded cards—Ed, in his reception line, standing between his parents, stuffed all of these into the side pocket of his coat while shaking hands and suffering hugs and kisses. The well-built girl who attended Ed’s basketball games turned crimson again while congratulating him inaudibly. Later, after lunch, and after Dan had stood up at the head table to thank in particular the friends and family who’d traveled far to be there, Ed lured her into the empty choir room, put his hands inside her blouse, and squeezed. She told him no, he did it again, she insisted no, he squeezed even harder. Then she pulled his hair, kicked him in the shin, called him a jerk, and fled in tears.

That summer, Ed went girl-crazy. Swim team was impossible. The girls in their racing suits, with their wet thighs and tan lines, plowing through a hundred laps before hauling out at poolside—where they giggled, whispered, breathed hard, rolled, and made wiggling adjustments to the nylon across their butts—for Ed, they were live pornography. Almost every day after swim team, he jerked off in the Kings’ basement bathroom. Sometimes he took a mythology book with a full-page print,
Hylas and the Water Nymphs
, that depicted naked naiads emerging from lily pads to lead a young hero to his doom. Sometimes he took a Dionne Warwick album. He also liked Herb Alpert’s whipped-cream girl, and Peggy Lipton from
The Mod Squad
. Then there was Raquel Welch as a mute cave siren in
One Million Years B.C
. and, even better, Welch attacked by antibodies in
Fantastic Voyage
. All of this was mixed up with the fifteen- and sixteen-year-old mermaids with whom he cavorted six days a week in the pool, especially a girl named Tiffany Wicks, who had a lithe, blond swagger like Peggy Lipton’s. And Samantha Caldwell—Sam—with swimmer’s shoulders, a nose plug, a latex cap, and a ritual of elaborate crotch adjustments each time she hopped onto a starting block. And Terry Tomlinson, who was as skinny as Twiggy and had a face like Mia Farrow’s. And Barb Marconi, whose sunburned nose, blue eyes, and round butt popped up in his imagery constantly.

Then there were the Jewish girls at B’nai Brith Camp, where Ed jerked
off quietly in a cabin full of fellow campers also quietly jerking off. It was the summer of the American Bicentennial, and these thirteen-year-olds liked fireworks and masturbating.

From the boys’ showers, through a hole in the concrete, Ed and his cabin-mates watched girls going at their soap and shampoo, and caught glimpses of their shining wet—the term was—muffs. Best, though, were the late-night dances, held in the dining hall with the tables pushed aside and a rotating strobe light overhead. As soon as the main lights in the hall went out, Ed would head for a girl named Susan Weinbaum, whose principal features were long arms, long hands, long hair, a long waist, and, everyone in his cabin agreed, great tits. Ed hung on to her with the objective of making it to the night’s first slow dance, usually four or five numbers in, during which he felt he had every right to press Susan Weinbaum with his trapped, straining boner. She never said a word about this, not even when—it had to have been obvious—Ed splooged in his underwear. Finally, one night, on a tumbling mattress in a dark corner of the rec center, Ed got his fingers inside her panties. Believing the point was to simulate a penis, he poked at her until Susan Weinbaum said, “Ow, you’re hurting me. Don’t do that!” Then he went back to what he preferred anyway: squeezing her breasts, pinching her nipples, and grinding against her crotch.

That summer there was also the girl down the block with the stereo in her bedroom. She had a boy’s flat body and a bad case of pimples, but she also liked to lock her door, strip off her T-shirt, and give Ed a handjob. He asked, then begged her, to take him in her mouth, but she refused him with “No way, that’s gross.” She did, however, with her hand over his, teach him not only how to locate a clitoris but some good things to do once he found it.

Great information. Ed would get with a girl and, guided by her breathing, squirming, and clenching, do what it took to make her happy. Sometimes his attentiveness led to reciprocity, sometimes not, but his percentage of handjobs definitely went up, so the effort was worth it. He kept count of the girls who gave him handjobs—seven by the time he turned fourteen, including a straight-A ninth-grader whose secret was a tube of K-Y Jelly. After school, Ed and this girl would “study” in his basement, with the television on and cans of pop. She was good at what she did, so good that he always checked in at lunch to make sure they were
still on for after school. All fall, she and Ed studied hard in the basement, until, one afternoon, Simey popped up from behind a chair and said, “I’m telling Mom!”

Ed quickly stuffed himself back into his underwear. The straight-A student put her lubricant behind her back. Simey ran for the stairs, but Ed caught him by the shirt. Simey was pencil-necked, knock-kneed, and uncoordinated, so hanging on was easy. He was also a crybaby. “No!” Simey screamed now. “No!”

“Wimp,” said Ed, still holding Simey by his shirt. “You Peeping Tom. I ought to thump you.”

“I hate your
guts
,” answered Simey. “Let go.”

“Ouch, I’m so wounded,” Ed sneered. “Whatever, ya crybaby, but if you wanna get thumped, go ahead, Simey—tell Mom.”

“I
am
telling her.”

“See what happens.”

“I’m telling her
right now
.”

“Go ahead, wimp.”

Simey told.

Ed got an Apple II for his birthday and began to play, obsessively,
Dark Planet
. The object of the game was to storm a cavern protected, vigorously, by the vassals of the Shadow Lord—each of whom wielded a medieval weapon—and, once past them, to rescue a maiden. This mostly naked blonde was handcuffed in a lair replete with instruments of torture, and guarded by a salivating, red-eyed wolf-man—the evil Shadow Lord himself. Ed, battling away furiously, found himself admiring the Shadow Lord, and prolonged his duels with this trying foe in order not only to assess his bag of tricks but to watch the cuffed maiden writhe against her chains in orgasmic ecstasy.

As high school approached, Dan and Alice chose University Prep for their sons, because of its fine academic reputation and its record of sending grads to first-tier colleges. This was all fine as far as Simon was concerned, but Ed wanted to go to a public school, because, he said, he was tired of snobs and rich kids. Dan thought public school was a bad idea, but Alice thought Ed should make his own decisions, so Ed chose Nathan Hale High. He quit sports, took up smoking, and got interested in fast
cars. One Thursday night, when Ed walked in the door at twelve-thirty, he found his parents waiting sternly on the couch. Dan referred angrily to Ed’s friends as “greasers,” but once again Alice rose to his defense, this time by lauding the fact that he “embraced people from different socio-economic backgrounds.” Ed laughed at both of them and said, “Get bent,” which angered Dan so much he grounded Ed until Monday. Ed spent the weekend with his stereo on. Its bass thump could be felt in the kitchen.

“What the hell happened?” Dan asked Alice. “It’s like taking in a wolf cub—he grows up to be a wolf.”

“It’s just a phase,” Alice answered. “He’s a teen-ager.”

The phase intensified through Ed’s sophomore year, during which his parents were completely in the dark about weed, beer, LSD, and cocaine. Ed kept his stash of drugs and paraphernalia where they would never find it, and employed eyedrops, gum, sunglasses, and breath mints. He gravitated toward juniors and seniors, and became a regular at late-night house parties and at keggers in the deep lairs of public parks. Mostly, though, there was nothing to do at night except drive around at high speed, high or drunk or both, with guys who had licenses. One Saturday, in a downpour, Dan had to go to a police station at 2 a.m. to collect Ed, who could hardly stand up. “We’ll talk about this later,” Dan said, through clenched teeth, on the way home. “For now, the main thing is, don’t vomit in the car.” Ed did.

After a prolonged consultation, and then a rift, with Alice, Dan grounded Ed for four weekends. Incarcerated in his room, he combed his quiff and plucked at a guitar attached to a used amplifier. For Ed’s sixteenth birthday, Alice made reservations for Sunday brunch at the Roosevelt Hotel, where she and Dan ate eggs Benedict and lox while Simon read
Children of Dune
at the table and Ed, appearing hungover, drank black coffee, yawned, and made trips to the bathroom. They gave him a card—
We’re Proud of You, Son
—and a check for two hundred dollars.

With this money, his Bar Mitzvah haul, and some cash he made selling pot, Ed bought a ’66 Pontiac GTO, fitted it out with a quadraphonic 8-track, painted it black, and added racing stripes. Behind the wheel, in his bucket seat, fondling his stick shift, Ed liked to irritate and anger other drivers. He also liked to go to empty parking lots to practice dangerous turns. Dan reluctantly paid for Ed’s car insurance, and Alice gave
him gas money when he asked for it. She also paid for his guitar lessons and for the karate class Ed decided to take after seeing Bruce Lee in
Enter the Dragon
. Ed, it turned out, was good at karate, with quick feet for someone who was six foot three and weighed two hundred pounds. His lessons should have had a silver lining for Simon, because Ed’s sensei emphasized “winning without fighting.” Instead, Ed took a fresh fraternal pleasure from inflicting pain on his younger brother in the guise of passing along self-defense tricks.

Near the end of his sophomore year, Ed met a girl named Tracy Stolnitz who’d just graduated from Nathan Hale and bussed tables in a Mexican restaurant. They did it in the back seat of Ed’s GTO, and then, for the rest of the summer, they did it as often as they could. Tracy not only was on the pill, she delivered in ways Ed hadn’t thought of. There were finer girls around, Ed knew, but Tracy was mouthy and droll as she talked around her cigarette. Her comportment was sallow, but her style in the sack was wild. She wore studded black leather and kept an elbow in a car window frame so that it was easy to flick ashes; either that or she dropped them in a beer bottle. She and Ed saw bands that summer in Vancouver, Portland, and Spokane.

They planned an end-of-summer road trip. There was a Battle of the Bands to hit in The Dalles, and this Stonehenge replica thing somewhere near The Dalles a guy had told Ed about, and there were some friends of Tracy’s with a house in Pullman, so they could stay there for a couple of days and go to this other Battle of the Bands, and then, on the way back to Seattle, Tracy knew some guys who had three-wheelers, and they could ride them or whatever. Ed told Dan and Alice he was going camping in the Blue Mountains, which wasn’t far from the truth.

With Tracy managing the 8-track, Ed drove east on the interstate at eighty-five, sometimes at over a hundred. That afternoon, he replaced his fuel filter on a butte while Tracy, with a beer bottle in her hand, hugged him from behind. The Battle of the Bands in The Dalles was a dud. For the Stonehenge thing, they split a tab of acid. Later, they slept near cottonwoods, under stars, Tracy wearing only her black leather jacket and a mastodon-tooth necklace that hung in Ed’s face when she climbed on top of him. Ed felt that he was living in a dream and that this was the high point of his life.

In Pullman, they went with Tracy’s friends to the second Battle of the
Bands in their plan, taking along some piquant Thai stick and a bottle of mescal with a worm at the bottom. The next day, at about eleven, after a last session in the sack that was dulled by a hangover, they started westward, with Ed speeding—of course—and with his 8-track blaring, through the low, rolling hills of the Palouse. The roads were lonely and ran between wheat fields. There were farmhouses, barns, stables, railroad tracks, and rows of implements, but despite all these signs, they saw few people. Sometimes they saw a huge farm machine at work, usually so far away it looked no bigger than a toy; once they passed a truck parked beside a grain elevator; once they had to slow behind a farmer on a tractor, but otherwise, there was no one. With opportunity knocking this way, Ed went joyriding on dirt tracks with no names or signage, leaving behind him a rooster tail like a tornado. These were roads with persistent washboards, good for forty tops, but Ed was taking them at ninety with his rear end drifting, scouting ahead for potholes that might demand maneuvering and for intersections where he could show off his sudden turns. “Watch this!” he’d say, Tracy would brace, and Ed would send his GTO perpendicular to the road in a geyser of dust and a spray of flying gravel, his inside tires nearly airborne. Yelling and hooting, he’d regain control during a series of decreasing fishtails, after which he’d be driving east or west instead of north or south, or vice versa, all the while working his Hurst shifter.