Little Boy (6 page)

You don’t look like the B-1; you resemble it
in more significant ways. What I mean is that all the B-1’s
subsystems are duplicated. If a subsystem has one failure, the
mission can be completed by using the back-up. And if the back-up
fails, then the mission can still be safely aborted with the bomber
returning to base. You’re just like that, only you have an endless
back-up system. It’s almost like you have an infinite number,
because no matter what happens to you, you always makes it
through.

But when I was first alone with Maria, the
jet I thought of that night was the Curtiss P-40B, the first
American monoplane fighter. It was used by the Flying Tigers, the
American volunteer group that helped China defend its Burma Road
supply line against the Japanese from 1941 to 1942. Most people
have seen the P-40B, even though they probably didn’t know it at
the time. It’s a small plane that always has mean-looking shark’s
teeth painted on the front. I don’t know why they painted those
teeth on there, but it looked really cool. Since I was young, I’ve
fallen in love with a lot of jets and planes. But that P-40B is
still my favorite.

Maria didn’t exactly growl like a P-40B that
night, but she did have a look on her face like she could have
chewed me up and spit me out if she wanted to. She appeared both
ferocious and cuddly, like an attack bunny. I didn’t want to lose
that look. I didn’t want her to walk away. Had she marched away
that night, I don’t know what I would have done.

“Hey, Maria,” I called out. “Just chill out!
I didn’t mean to scare you or anything.”

“Yeah, right,” she said. “What the hell do
you want, anyway?”

The chip on her shoulder was larger than the
situation demanded.
She’s such a Guidette
, I moaned to
myself.

“I’m sorry, but like I said...” and then I
just trailed off, because I could see she wasn’t getting the point
and wasn’t about to either. “Let’s just talk for a while,” I told
her. “Okay,” she said.

We sauntered over to the bottom of the
stairwell. Nobody was around because the dance still had almost an
hour left to go, and most people didn’t start running up the stairs
to get their coats until after the last song of the night. We were
all alone. It was time to make my move.

“What’s up?” I asked her.
How
original
, I thought. It was a pretty lame thing to say because
every hood at the dance greeted every other hood with that phrase.
Actually, it sounded more like this: “‘Sup?” It seems like no
matter where I walked in my high school I heard one greeting ad
nauseum: ‘Sup? Sup, sup, sup—a thousand times over, all day long.
And, of course, if you’re really happy to see someone, you drag it
out: “Suuuuuuuuuuuuup?” How fucking stupid. I’m still pissed at
myself for beginning my conversation with Maria that way.

Maria gazed at the ceiling, unimpressed.
“Nothing,” she said.

She looked at her nails—they were hot
pink—and then up at me. “Your name’s
A.J.
, huh?”

“Yea. A.J. ” I was surprised that she even
remembered my name. Then again, I was dating her friend, so she’d
probably heard it plenty of times before.

“What do the initials stand for?”

“My first and middle name, Anthony Joel.”

“But you prefer,” she trailed off in
confusion, “…
A.J.
?”

What kind of question was that?
I
thought. “Yea, so?” I answered, defensively.

“What’s your last name?”

“L’Enfant. A.J. L’Enfant. Like it?” My voice
cracked as I said “like it.” I was so goddamn nervous.

“Cute.” She was being sarcastic.

I thought hard for a few moments. I had no
idea what to ask her. “Uh, well, what’s your last name?”

“Della Verita,” she said. It sounded
Italian.

“That’s a beautiful last name.” And it was. I
was going to ask her what the hell it meant, translated, I mean.
But a more important question struck me: “Why aren’t you dancing
with all the other hoods?”

“Uh, what do you mean? You mean that everyone
here that’s dancing is a hood, you mean that
I’m
a hood?
Didn’t I see you dancing with Lynn earlier? You’re pretty
judgmental.”

Shiiiiiiiiiiiit!
Now I was in trouble.
I had to think quickly. “No, no, no!” I replied, feigning a
shameful look. “What I mean is, well, I’m just wondering why you
ain’t dancing.”

Curtly: “First of all, you’re wondering why
I’m
not
dancing, not why I
ain’t
dancing. Second, I’m
not a hood. I hate hoods. Third, I just don’t like to dance,
okay?”

Okay. So in the five total minutes I’d known
Maria she’d already dissed me twice: first my appearance, and then
my grammar. All this from a girl whose demeanor and accent could’ve
easily cast her in any number of Martin Scorsese films.

I contemplated making fun of Maria in
response.
No
: Her uncle, Joey the Wop, would surely hunt me
down and slit my throat after hearing that his little Goddaughter
was insulted by some loser named A.J. I thought about asking her to
dance.
No
: Too pathetic and slavish. I imagined replying to
her insult with a kiss.
No
: She’d slap me silly.

Every available reaction was faulty. I was
outmaneuvered. Trapped. In short, I was in love.

Here was this beautiful girl that dressed
pretty much like all the other loser girls at the dance—but she
didn’t like hoods! And best of all, she hated dancing! Don’t even
get me started on dancing, because I hate it. I
despise
it.
And I never understood why all these jerks enjoyed jumping around
like freaks to that God-awful music. Usually, if I was forced into
dancing, I’d totally ignore the music being played, like the night
of the Deck the Halls Ball. Sometimes, I’d just think of a song I
really liked, usually a Beatles song, and dance to it instead. As
the horrendous music pulverized my goddamn brain, I’d hum
The
Long and Winding Road
or
She Loves You
, or something.
That’s how much I hated dancing; that’s how much the music played
at those dances sickened me.

And hoods—forget about it! The worst thing
about hoods is that they thought they were normal. They didn’t
realize—actually, worse: they didn’t care—that they were a bunch of
followers. Not only was Maria a beautiful Italian Princess, but she
hated the two things I hated most. In the endless sea of adolescent
negativity, we discovered that we had two crucial dislikes in
common. How ironic.

My ears stood at attention and I knew I’d
struck gold.
What a break!
I thought. The hardest part of
getting acquainted with any girl was discovering some mutual
interests. Already, we had important things in common.

I could always tell a good joke to get a
girl’s attention, but anything beyond that was excruciatingly
difficult to conjure up. Stuff that came so naturally to the hoods
and jocks—the small talk, the chit-chat, the shit that followed
“sup”—was a pain in the ass. I was a good conversationalist, but
the trouble was in getting one started with people, especially
girls, most of whom couldn’t care less about current events outside
the newest shade of lipstick. Without realizing it, Maria had
opened up a door to my true personality. It wouldn’t be the last
such time.

“You don’t like dancing?” I practically
yelled out to her. “Jesus, I despise dancing.”

“Well,” she said, “I don’t
despise
it.
I just don’t like it, okay?”

I was in heaven. This information hit me like
a punch in the chest. I stood there silently for a few moments, in
awe. You really don’t understand how
hot
dancing was, and
how rare it was for someone to dislike it. When I look back on it
now, I still think how amazing that one thing was.

She started to look bored, so I asked her
what else she didn’t like. Maria thought it was a pretty dumb
question, I could tell, so she didn’t really bother answering it.
But even though she looked bored, she was sexy. Very sexy.

“Well, what I mean is, why don’t you like to
dance?”

“It’s not that I hate to dance, it’s just
that I hate it when I meet these stupid hoods and all they want to
do is dance. I can’t meet a guy and start to like him that way. I
have to talk with him first, and then I know if I want to dance
with him.”

I wanted to propose to Maria right then and
there. She wanted to talk first! I couldn’t believe it! What a
stroke of luck. It was time to go in for the kill.

“So,” I said, “we’re talking right now,
aren’t we?” That’s why I grabbed you before—I really wanted to talk
to you before I asked you to dance.”

“But…” she said with a perplexed look on her
face, and didn’t bother to finish. She restarted: “Well, we can
talk, but I can’t dance with you because you’ re going out with
Lynn. And you also like Jeff’s sister.”

Now this I couldn’t believe. Somehow, I had
gone from speaking to Jeff’s sister on the phone to liking her.

“But I don’t like her!” I demanded. I had to
get that crazy thought out of her head.

“Well, whatever, but you’re going out with my
friend. And if you don’t like Jeff’s sister, then you’re a jerk for
leading her on.”

She had me there. I
was
dating Lynn,
and I did lead Jeff’s sister on. What could I say? I certainly
couldn’t tell her that I didn’t really like Lynn, and that I didn’t
plan on dating her for long anyway, because that would’ve made me
look like an asshole. So I did the next best thing.

“But Lynn and me had a fight tonight,” I
said. “And I don’t think we’ll be dating much longer.”

She didn’t believe me at first, but I pressed
on and convinced her that Lynn and I did have a fight, even though
I just hadn’t seen her in a while. It was only a little temporary
lie, because I was angry with Lynn, and the next time I saw her, I
was going to tell her how pissed off I was for leaving me alone at
the dance. Hence the fight.

“Listen,” she said, “we can talk, but that’s
it.” I was happy. I knew that once we started talking, and once I
was on a roll, I could probably dance with her, or even get her
phone number.

So we started to talk right there in the
stairwell. We’d been talking for a few minutes already, of course.
But now we were
conversing
; now we were the only two
teenagers at the dance actually talking and learning from one
another. I told her about my love affair with jets, and that I was
thinking about entering the Air Force Academy, which was only
half-true. I couldn’t just
join
the Air Force. I wanted to
become a pilot at the Academy in Colorado, and to do that you had
to undergo a long, grueling application process.

”You remind me of the Curtiss P-40B monoplane
fighter,” I said. I told her all about what it looked like, and how
well it maneuvered. She was pretty impressed, not really because
she looked like a plane, but because I actually knew what I was
talking about. I wasn’t acting phony like all the other guys I
knew. I figured if she likes my conversation, she’d like me. But I
wasn’t about to make believe I was into something I wasn’t—like
dancing, for example—just to impress her. This was a first in my
otherwise boring teenage life: For a moment, I felt the best way to
impress her was to tell her the
truth
. If only for a night,
the door to my heart was open; only honesty could coax her into
peeking inside.

We talked and talked and talked. The tension
on Maria’s face melted off and gave way to a gentle, easy smile. We
talked about the movies we liked and the sports we played and the
music we listened to. It was the usual stuff, for the most part.
But we were actually having a conversation, we weren’t just going
through the motions of one. That conversation spawned a discussion,
one between two mature, interested adults, not two high school
kids.

She was flirtatious, and smart. “You look
just like Al Pacino,” she said.

I wondered:
Is that good?

I said: “You tawkin’ ta me? You must be
talkin’ to me. I don’t see anyone else around.” Maria squinted her
eyes and shook her head every so slightly. “Do you know who said
that?”

“Yea,” I said, “Al Pacino in Raging
Bull.”

Now she was squinting so hard she looked
Chinese. And then: like a machine gun, she fired: “First of all, ya
stunad
, it’s Al Pacino I was tawkin’ about, and second,
that’s not from Raging Bull. And third, that was Robert De Niro in
Taxi Driver
.”

“Are you sure?”

“About which one?”

“All of them.”

“I watch the movie with my father like every
weekend,” she insisted.

“Which one? Raging Bull?”

“No!”

“Then why’d you mention Raging Bull?”

“I didn’t, you did!”

“I don’t get it.”

“Oh my goodness!” Maria exclaimed.

I was sort of playing with her, but I admit
she

knew more about movies than me.

“I know you’re not a moron,” she said, as if
she knew what I was feeling at that moment. “I’m just messin’ with
you.”