Little Boy (16 page)

I told them about how perfect Maria was,
about how beautiful she looked, and how well we got along. I told
them how she’d opened up to me in Central Park, and that my kiss
with her was the best I’d ever had. As a matter of fact, I told The
Family that I’d be happy never even sleeping with Maria, and just
kissing her for the rest of my life. And, most importantly, I told
them how much I respected Maria, because I did respect her so
much.

She was beautiful, smart, and funny. She was
wonderful. I felt like I’d been struck by a lightening bolt on our
date, and I was still charged up. I told all my friends this, and
they couldn’t believe it. I could tell by their faces that they’d
never seen me so intense. My arms were crossed in front of me,
close to my chest, as I recounted the entire date to them. Oh, how
I wanted to hold her right then and there!

When I was finished telling them about the
date, my friends stared at me in silence. Speechless, they simply
nodded, because they really were happy for me, and so surprised at
how much I liked her. Then the bell rang, signaling that lunch was
over and that classes would resume in five minutes. We got up from
the table and were about to take off, when Paul leaned in toward me
and said firmly: “Be careful, L’Enfant. Don’t screw it up.” What a
jerk.

***

The following weekend was the first of the
summer. School had just ended and I’d planned on celebrating by
seeing Maria, but I forgot that I’d already made plans to go
Upstate with Mike and Kyle.

Almost every weekend during the summer, Mike
drove Upstate with his parents to the country and slept in their
cabin for the weekend. Kyle and I had always made fun of Mike,
saying that he couldn’t afford to go on a real vacation. But we
were only joking, so when he invited us to go up there with him, we
gladly accepted. The only bad thing was that Mike’s parents had to
drive us, even though me and Kyle had just gotten our licenses. We
ragged on Mike for that, but it wasn’t too bad. Mike’s parents were
cool; they’d let us do whatever we wanted, as long as we stayed out
of serious trouble.

It was a great weekend. We had so much fun on
the way Upstate that me and Kyle and Mike decided that we should
secretly form our own family within the existing one.

“What should we call it?” I asked.

“How about the Mets?” Mike asked.

“
How about the Mets?”
Kyle said,
imitating Mike with a goofy voice. “What are we, ten fucking years
old?”

“You have a better idea?” Mike asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “We play lots of
jokes on Paul and Rick. We need something to indicate that,
secretly, just to ourselves. How about the Con-Men?” Mike smiled
and signaled a thumbs-agreement; Kyle, however, disapproved.

“I don’t like it—too negative. And besides,
we don’t con people; we just joke around with them.” Kyle said.

I glanced at Mike for support, but he changed
his mind and said he agreed with Kyle.

We never did think of a new name to
distinguish ourselves from the rest. It’s too bad, because I really
liked my idea. At least, I thought, I was still the leader of
whatever we were.

We had a lot of fun at the cabin that
weekend. But there was one thing in particular that still makes us
all laugh to this day. Kyle, Mike, and I had a Physics teacher
named Mr. Dick junior year of high school. That’s not a joke—that
was really his name. And even though Mr. Dick really wasn’t that
bad a guy, me and Mike used to make fun of him all the time.

First of all, Physics was hard. We all did
horribly Dick’s class. The last day of school we got our final
grades, and I got something like a sixty-nine average in the class,
my worst ever. Mike and Kyle almost failed, too. And second: How
can you not make fun of a guy named
Mr. Dick
?

Outside Mike’s cabin, we threw our Physics
books into the campfire. Then we danced around it like injuns,
yelling “Goodbye, Dick! You fucking dick!” We tore off each page of
each book meticulously, slowly lowered them into the fire, and
watched as each individual leaf singed. I would never have to be in
his class again.

I always like to burn bridges like that. Once
something bad is over, I try to do something to end it with a bang.
Mr. Dick’s class actually ended rather undramatically. Until I
suggested to the guys that we should burn the books, we’d planned
on toasting marshmallows, not much else. But for some reason, I
felt the need to issue Last Rites. That way, I’d never have to feel
bad about it again. No, it was so I’d never feel regret about it
again.

The funniest part of the evening, however,
was when I got up to go to the bathroom. I was going to go inside
the cabin, but then I thought of an even better way to do it. When
we were all finished burning up the books, as the fire crackled in
the chill of the night, I pulled down my pants and said, “Adios,
Mr. Dick!” and pissed all over the campfire. Mike and Kyle were
laughing so hard that they almost choked. I took a long, proud
piss. But the fire didn’t go out.

Mike followed suit. He ran over to the fire
as if he was trying to beat Kyle to the punch and then he pissed on
the fire, too. It was disgusting to watch, but still funny.

When he was done, Mike and I slapped each
other five, grabbed hold of each other’s arms like we were dancing,
and screamed and laughed like maniacs. It was one of the happiest
moments of my life, getting rid of Mr. Dick and Physics, once and
for all.

But Kyle wasn’t about to let us get away with
such originality that night.

“I’d piss on the fire,” he said, “but I don’t
have the feeling to go.”

Me and Mike stopped dancing and looked at
each other triumphantly. We felt bad for Kyle, because he didn’t
have to take a piss. I thought:
Finally! Nature has halted Kyle
from upstaging me!
But just as we were about to settle down,
Kyle spoke up again.

“I said I didn’t have to piss,” Kyle
announced with a sly grin. And then, just as he finished that
sentence, he ran toward the edge of the waning campfire, dropped
his pants, yelled out “Shit on you, Mr. Dick!” and blasted a dump
on top of the charred Physics pages. The blaze quickly transformed
into a pissy, shitty-smelling heap of smoldering wet ash. We
thought it smelled bad before, but Kyle’s dump turned it into a
toxic wasteland. God, was it awful. A noxious haze filled the air.
It was like the agent orange my father described to me—it just
clung to air in the cool, quiet night, making our eyes water as
though it were a big onion. But we didn’t care, because it had to
be one of the funniest things that me and Mike had ever witnessed
in our lives. Kyle was a human fire extinguisher for a night.

When he was through, Kyle pulled up his pants
without even wiping, and sat down right next to me and Mike.

“Hot shit!” he said. “Almost burned my ass.”
We collapsed on the ground, and rolled in the leaves,
hysterical.

***

The next day, we all went down to the ball
field to play softball. Mike knew a lot of people up there, because
he and his family went to their cabin so often. He introduced to me
to about eight or nine people, and one in particular named
Stephanie.

Stephanie and I were on the same team, me the
pitcher, and her catcher. Like a pro ballplayer, she’d run up to
the mound every inning, supposedly to advise me on my next pitch,
but in reality to flirt. She wasn’t bad-looking, either. I didn’t
really like blondes that much; but she was the prettiest girl
there, so she was good enough to flirt with.

As we talked, it became apparent to Mike and
Kyle that she was hot for me, so they left us alone. Although I
felt guilty at first, I quickly changed my mind and figured there
was nothing wrong with a little flirting. And I guess it felt good
that she liked me and there was nothing wrong with that. I was so
goddamn confident from being with Maria that I was unafraid to
pursue her. I knew she would like me, I just knew it. And if I was
wrong? Well, big deal, because Maria was waiting for me back in the
city.

We played six innings and tied four-four. I
hit a grand-slam, but so did Kyle, who was playing for the other
team. Kyle and Mike are sharp enough to know when something’s up
with me and a girl. As soon as the game ended, they took off.
Stephanie and I talked about nothing in particular. We had nothing
in common, other than the fact that each thought the other was
cute, I guess. Then she started getting a little closer to me on
the bench. For a moment, I thought she was going to kiss me first,
and then I thought she wanted me to kiss her. I didn’t really want
to, though. I just felt good talking to a girl that seemed to like
me.

“So, you’re from the city, huh?”

“Yea, Queens, what about you?”

“I’m from Poughkeepsie. Not the city, though.
I live in the
suburbs
of
Poughkeepsie
,” she said.
“It’s like the pit of hell.” She was funny. I grabbed her hand and
placed it on my thigh. She didn’t hesitate. In fact, she ran her
hand up to my crotch and then smiled like she wanted to kiss
me.

Time was in slow motion. On one hand, I just
wanted to finish talking to this girl and be on my way. On the
other, I figured it would be cool to kiss her, because I rarely
kissed two different girls in the same week, and that alone would
just make Kyle and Mike flip. And Maria had said she kissed like
ten guys. I had to catch up with her. I just had to.

But then, just as I thought she was about to
lean in and kiss me—just as I thought I was going to kiss
her—Mike’s father pulled up in the car with Mike and Kyle in the
back seat.

“We have to go get some firewood,” Mike’s
father said.

“Yeah, firewood!” Kyle said, busting my
balls.

I looked at Stephanie—half in disgust, half
with lust—and told her I had to go. I got into the car and we all
went off to get firewood. I never saw her again.

What a close call! I don’t really know what
would’ve happened that day with Stephanie. But between the Mr. Dick
fire and the firewood thing, my friends and I haven’t stopped
talking about that weekend at the cabin to this day.

Chapter 9

Love

As soon as I got home from Mike’s cabin, I
called Maria. We talked for almost three hours. We had a lot of
catching up to do since I was away all weekend. I told her about
Mr. Dick, and the campfire. But of course I never mentioned
Stephanie. Maria said that she was beginning to trust me a lot more
quickly that she’d expected. She said that she thought about me all
of the time. And the cutest part was that she’d spent the weekend
while I was away doing laundry and cleaning her house. Apparently,
neither of her parents ever did the laundry. Her moth was too busy
working, and her father didn’t do shit. Maria said she’d been doing
the family laundry since she was seven years old.

She said that she thought about me as she was
doing the laundry. That was so damn cute. She had a way of being
cute without even trying; it was truly genuine. She also had a way
of being sexy without knowing it.

“How often do you wash your bras?” I asked.
It was the first time I showed her my horny adolescent side. Rather
than get offended or change the subject, she answered in her own
special way, like she always did. “As often as they need to be
washed,” she said. I loved that.

“Have you ever let a guy touch your breasts?”
I asked.

Maria was a bit startled by my bluntness.
“Well,” she said, “I’ve just never felt comfortable going that
far.”

I continued to press the subject, partly
because it was turning me on, but mostly because I would never
touch a girl’s breasts without finding out how she felt about it
first. She admitted that she’d thought about letting me get to
“second base,” as she put it, when she was hanging her bras out to
dry. We’d accomplished “first base” in Central Park on our last
date. “Second base,” as every teenager knew, was feeling a chick
up—or, if you were a chick, getting felt up. “Third base” meant
putting you hands down a girl’s pants, or maybe even eating her
out, or, if you were a guy, getting a blowjob. And a “home run”
was, well, a home run. I’d just turned seventeen and,
coincidentally, Maria had just turned sixteen, so neither of us
felt like Babe Ruth. But we both wanted to begin rounding the
bases. At least, I did.

Like I said, Maria had a unique way of being
cute about stuff like that. Gentlemanly, I told her that we’d go to
second whenever she was ready. “I might be ready sooner than I
thought,” she said. That was all I needed to hear. My plan was
simple: I was going to head for second the next time I saw
Maria.

And that next time was two days later. I
parked my rusty green, 1982 Buick Skylark out in front of her
school, The Megan Louis Academy, and waited, trying to look cool,
as an occasional student popped out through the doors. I’d picked
Maria up from school before, but never in my car. I always despised
the bastards that already had their cars and waited out in front of
Megan Louis for their girlfriends—radios blaring, engines
racing—not giving a shit what anyone thought. So that day I turned
up my radio, and leaned up against the side of the car with a pair
of sunglasses on. Actually, they weren’t on; they were sitting atop
my head, ready to be put on should the sun get too bright. I was so
cool, and I had the confidence to approach any girl I wanted to and
say, “Hey, baby, ya want a ride?”