Little Boy (3 page)

I can’t adequately explain how I felt when I
saw this girl. My mind began racing so fast. I remember breaking
out into a cold sweat. All at once, I felt both love and
hatred—both obsession and revulsion—for this girl I’d never even
seen before. She was sexy, yet cute; confident, yet timid; mature,
yet callow. She looked just like Maria. And she walked right by me
as swiftly as she had arrived.

Chapter 2

Dancing in the Dark

The thing about Maria is that I think about
her all the time. Sounds like a load of shit, huh? Hell, lots of
people think of lots of stuff “all the time,” right? But—and this
must be made perfectly clear before I go on—I literally think about
Maria
all the time.
No thought in my head is absent of Maria
altogether.

It’s hard not to, because she was my first
and last love, my first and last real girlfriend. Sometimes I think
about her for a second or two—like if I hear a song that we danced
to or pass by a restaurant we ate in—and a moment later I’ll think
about her in a different way. But usually, like that day in the
park, tons of stuff pops and flashes and echoes through my mind,
like fireworks blowing up at the bottom of the Grand Canyon at
midnight. It’s like I’m on an acid trip until someone pinches me.
Actually, it’s more like a bad movie that you just have to sit in
the dark and watch until it’s finally finished—and then, just when
you think it’s finished, it starts up again, and you have to watch
it all over.

It’s impossible to get Maria out of my mind
when that happens. It’s almost as if I have to re-live my whole
relationship with her, from beginning to end, before my mind
finally moves on to something else. And that something else is
always Maria.

As cliché as it sounds, Maria changed my
life. Had I not met her, I would’ve wound up a total geek or an
alcoholic. Probably the latter.

In high school, when all these losers were
dating lots of girls and getting laid, I never saw myself as much
of a player. I guess I was pretty good-looking. And I think I
usually got along pretty well with girls initially because of that.
But still, in the end it was usually the more socially attractive
guys—the goddamn jocks and hoods, especially—that got the girls,
and not me. It always seemed that the bigger the asshole the guy
was, the more the girls liked him.

Honestly, beyond my initial attraction, after
a few minutes of conversation most chicks began to bore me.
Nervously, I’d start cracking jokes about their hair or clothing,
fearful that there was nothing else worth talking about. They
weren’t always funny jokes, though. Having a sense of humor is a
good thing, and that always helped me get girls to pay attention to
me, on top of my looks. But what I mean is that more often than not
my joking would become demeaning, as if I was blaming the girl for
my boredom. I’m not sure if I noticed it before I met Maria, but I
certainly noticed it today.

Marriage was a frightening thought, always.
If I ever fell in love with a girl, how the hell would we manage to
stay interested in each other for maybe thirty, forty, or fifty
years? My friend Mike tells me that his parents, married over
thirty years now, have developed a
rut
. Basically, they’ve
had the same jobs since they were married; they go on vacation the
same time each year to the same place; and they spend every
possible weekend at his trailer in Upstate New York.

But Mike speaks of this rut
fondly
, as
if it’s okay to have a predictable relationship with the only
changes being his Mom’s ass swelling and Dad’s hairline receding
more and more each year. Frankly, the thought of getting to know a
chick so well that you could detect her fart a mile away was
pathetic. It made me want to vomit.

With such fears embedded in my mind, I always
found it hard to justify being civil to a girl for more than five
minutes after I met her. Occasionally, I’d date a girl just to have
a girlfriend, because that was the cool thing to do. But I knew
that after a few months of relentless conversation and ho-hum
dates, a rut would develop and one of us would decide to break it
off.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that before
Maria, I never believed in love.

***

I met Maria at the first high school dance of
the new year, on February 2, 1992, with about four months left to
go in my junior year. Back then, everybody went to the dances. Once
a month, that was
the
place to be.

After getting dropped off by our parents,
every month we’d spend three hours stuffed in a muggy gymnasium,
all hoping to leave later that night with a phone number. Singing
“I got her number, I got her number,” hoods would skip out of the
dance at eleven, showing off to their buddies. How I longed to be
one of those guys.

With their sloppy hair and wide, baggy jeans
that generally hung low enough to show a little ass crack, they
were neither admired like jocks nor dissed like nerds. It was as if
the Guidos of the late ‘80s had morphed into a similar animal of a
different species. Pot- and cigarette-smoking, hip-hop-dancing
losers, they wore colorful baseball caps, always backwards, of
teams they’d never heard of, and drank forties of bitter malt
liquor on street corners all over Queens. And they always seemed to
walk hunkered over, like hunch backs, like hound dogs following a
scent on the pavement. With their dark, floppy clothing and
multicolored caps, hoods resembled homeless circus clowns to those
who despised them. Nobody ever put these guys in charge of St.
Ann’s, or any other high school for that matter, and yet somehow
they ran the place. Everybody stood in awe of the hoods. No—we
feared them. And we scorned them if only because they couldn’t be
them.

Rebels without clues, my small circle of
friends and I refused to join the ranks of the faddish hoods,
opting instead to maintain the Guido style of the late-80s. Donning
my Cavaricci jeans and a white turtleneck, I sat amongst my pals in
the cafeteria dance after dance during my first three years of high
school. Sipping Cokes and sweating to death, I’d think:
Damn
,
why did I where a turtleneck?
And then:
Because it looks good, that’s why
. The sweat would dribble
off my brow and create a puddle between my chalk white Nike
sneakers. I remember seeing that puddle many times.

Occasionally, I’d hang out with a girl at a
dance, pretty much ignoring my friends except to stop by and show
off my latest catch. My friends were always cool about that, and
they would’ve done the same thing if they had girlfriends.

Most nights, though, my friends and I
remained in the cafeteria, part by choice, part by fate. The dance
floor was so dark and stuffy that there was hardly a chance to hear
a girl say her name, never mind have a conversation. Some guys
grabbed complete strangers off the floor and jumped around like a
bunch of monkeys. They’d dance all night, most of the time with
people they knew all of two seconds beforehand, or didn’t know at
all. Not me and my friends, though. We’d sit there all night and
hang out, striving to block out the hip-hop music emanating from
within the gym, quietly ranking out the jerks and their chicks as
they passed by.

Late September of last year, while sitting in
the cafeteria jabbering about the oppressive heat, the awful music,
or some other bullshit, I was introduced to Maria. I’m trying
desperately to recall the name of the guy who introduced me to her.
I recollect his greasy blonde hair and chubby face so well, but his
name: Jeff Something…Jeff Rifkin…?

…Ripken! Jeff Ripken! Christ, does that name
conjure up some memories!

I sort of knew Jeff before the dance; he’d
sat next to me in Physics class that year. But it wasn’t until this
dance that I really started to talk to him. I’ll never forget him
approaching me by the soda machine in the corner and saying, “Hey,
guess what? My sister thinks you’re cute.”

It’s funny how a minor event, the smallest
detail, can shatter lives.
My sister thinks you’re cute.
That single innocuous sentence moved my world. What if I had been
in the bathroom taking a piss when Jeff brought his sister around?
Would Rick or Mike or Paul or Kyle be sitting in their rooms right
now, writing what I am writing, doing what I’m about to do?

Probably not. But it’s an interesting
thought.

Anyway, until that point, I’d never bothered
to speak to Jeff in school unless I was asking him for an answer on
a test or something. But dances, like drugs, changed personalities.
Sometimes, they made even the weakest kids feel confident and bold.
Jeff was one of the least popular guys in school. But arriving at
the dance with a girl—even though it was his sister—thrust him into
the spotlight, and made him somebody other than he was: a big shot.
From a distance, most people probably assumed his sister was his
girlfriend. I’m sure he did little to change their minds. That
assumption was enough to make him strut around like a cock on a
farm. And to impress his sister, he made believe that he was
buddies with the whole goddamn school. The sorry fat-assed
bastard.

Uncharacteristically cool, Jeff introduced
his sister to my group and we all bull-shitted for a few minutes. I
checked out Jeff’s sister. She was fat. Well, not fat, but
certainly not thin. And she was pretty flat-chested, which sucked.
What a combo: fat and flat. And she didn’t seem to be capable of
closing her mouth. She wasn’t talking or anything; she just stood
there, right near my chair, with her rumpled mouth drooling like
she was a Basset hound waiting for a biscuit. I guess she was
nervous, because she was so close to a guy that she was hot for,
namely me.

We sat there for a while, me and my friends,
Paul, Rick, Mike, and Kyle, while Jeff and his sister stood next to
us, with Jeff doing all the talking. What he said I can’t remember
exactly. I just recollect thinking that if he kept his mouth open
any longer he was going to eat someone—or French kiss his sister,
whose own lips seemed propped open by toothpicks, as if she were
about to say something and then froze when she forgot what it
was.

Somehow we all wound up on the dance floor.
It was fucking pathetic. There we were, me and my friends and Jeff,
dancing around this one fat chick. Boy was she happy to get all
that attention. That’s what the dance floor could do to you. All
that music and murkiness and people shouting and having a grand old
time makes it easy to forget that you’re a big fat girl being
shared by five horny Guidos.

What’s worse is that I didn’t even know how
to dance. What’s worse than that is that I hated trying to make
believe I knew how to dance. But I did it anyway, because, like I
said, those dances really make you act like another person.

We were a solar system revolving around an
expanding sun close to supernova. I prayed she would explode and
end my misery swiftly. Finally, in a way, she did. Along came the
final dance—it was always the biggest dance of the night—the dance
to the slow song at the end when every loser that hooked up that
night dances with his loser girlfriend or whatever you want to call
her. Somehow I wound up dancing with Jeff’s sister to this dreadful
ballad that always blared at the end of dances called
In Your
Eyes
, by Peter Gabriel. Usually, by the time it started, I was
upstairs lunging for my coat in a math class-turned-coatroom. Not
that night.

There we were, dancing in the dark, me bored
as hell, and Jeff’s sister gazing into my eyes, loving every
goddamn minute of it. Just like when you see a retarded person at
the mall, I didn’t want to look at Jeff’s sister, and yet I
couldn’t look away. Smiling her foolish smile her mouth looked as
though it was trying to expel its tongue, like her face was smashed
against a pane of glass and she was suffocating to death. This,
apparently, was how she expressed joy. She had no clue that I was
making fun of her in my mind. I could tell that she thought I liked
her.

It revolts me to this day, but after the
dance was over I kissed Shamu goodnight. Right there on the dance
floor. I don’t know why I did it. I really don’t. I guess I just
wanted to make a homely girl happy.
Maybe Jeff will be happy,
too
, I thought,
and he’ll weasel me some answers on the next
Physics test.

My bloated admirer and I rejoined Jeff
shortly following the last dance. My friends had gone home by then.
On the way up to get our jackets, Jeff started waving happily at a
bunch of people descending the stairs. At first, it seemed like he
was attempting to show off in front of his sister. You know, keep
acting like he was best buddies with every guy in St. Ann’s. Then I
realized that the group consisted of a few girls. The only person
at my high school with tits was Jeff, so, if he knew them, they had
to be from his sister’s high school. As he introduced me to them I
remember being so bored that I wanted to run toward the door.

“This is Nicole,” Jeff said. “And that’s
Jessica. And that’s Maria.”

“Hey, what’s up?” we all said to one
another.

“Uh…” Maria said, cupping her hands over her
mouth as she giggled and stared at my crotch. “You’re fly’s
open.”

You’re fly’s open.
She exposed me.
Literally. Imagine that being the first sentence your fated lover
ever says to you. More embarrassing, however, was that Maria
announced her discovery to everyone within earshot, not just our
little group. And then she started pointing and laughing at me. No
polite glance in my direction. No whisper—
Psst…you’re fly is
open…
Only a public exhibit. I felt like Michelangelo’s
David.