The Book of Joe (14 page)

“I want to.”

She considers me for a moment, and then shakes her head lightly, as if whatever she thought she'd seen has turned out to be a trick of the light. “Wayne has my number,” she says.

I look at her, nodding stupidly. I'm still not fully comprehending that after so many years of being canonized in my mind, this is really Carly again, standing in front of me, ever so slightly weathered but fundamentally unchanged.

“Well,” she says. “I have to get back to work.”

“Sure.” I say her name as she starts to walk away.

“Yeah?” she says, turning back around.

I hesitate, unsure of what I'm going to say until the words are out of my mouth. “I still know you,” I say.

Carly smiles, a genuine smile so heartbreakingly familiar it takes my breath away. “Joe,” she says softly, “you don't know shit.”

I watch the soft curves of her calves as she walks away, the smooth muscles beneath them flexing and extending with each step. I always loved her legs. She was glad to see me; I'm pretty sure of that. Of course, that doesn't really mean anything in the overall scheme of things, but maybe it does. Since I came back, my past has achieved a fresh, reckless immediacy and nothing seems completely out of the question. I sit down on one of the attached styrene chairs in the lobby, suddenly incapable of standing. What it all comes down to is this: I still love her.

Maybe.

eighteen

I don't know where I'd been planning to go when I stormed out of the hospital room after my argument with Brad. Probably I would have just cooled down in the cafeteria for a half hour before going back upstairs to rejoin him. But after speaking to Carly, sitting still to eat a soggy prewrapped tuna sandwich is out of the question, and so is returning to the silence of the hospital room to squirm in the harsh glare of Brad's disapproval. Something lying dormant in me has been stirred up by seeing Carly, and now I'm a pulsating bundle of raw energy, twitching, antsy, and surging with adrenaline. I am suddenly claustrophobic in the white, sterile hallways of the hospital and feel as if I might start bouncing off the walls if I don't get out. I leave my cell phone number at the nurses' station and head outdoors, feeling strangely keyed up. Later I'll get Carly's number from Wayne and give her a call. We'll sit and talk, and eventually the strangeness will start to wear off and then . . . Well, I can't really see past that, but it still feels exciting in an old, familiar way. In the meantime, I decide as I climb into my car, I'll go visit Wayne.

The damp aroma of steaming vegetables and curry engulfs me as Wayne's mother lets me in with a mumbled greeting before retreating through the swinging door of her kitchen. Her frown makes it clear that I will not soon be forgiven for my borderline blasphemy the night before, and my counterfeit smile and cheery greeting make it equally clear that I couldn't care less.

Wayne is propped up in his bed on pillows, scrupulously smoking a preposterously fat joint when I enter his room. He looks pale and remarkably haggard, his eyes squinting deep in their sockets, his lips heavily chapped. When he smiles at me, his teeth look like large, jagged stalactites in his receding, colorless gums. I wonder if he's possibly lost even more weight since last night. “I really shouldn't have let you drink like that,” I say, alarmed by his deathly pallor.

“You're not the boss of me,” he says with a wan grin. “And besides, you're not looking so pretty yourself.” I look pointedly at the fatty hanging loosely between his fingers. “For medicinal purposes,” he says. “I shit you not.”

I wheel over the leather desk chair and sit down at his bedside. “I don't want to be a nag, but don't you think you should be in a hospital?”

He frowns and closes his eyes. “They recommended a hospice,” he says. “But I'm not going to lie in some white room, doped up on painkillers and antidepressants, waiting for the end. How would I know when I'd actually died?”

I nod sadly, for the first time fully comprehending how far along Wayne is. He isn't looking at a matter of years or even months. Weeks is probably more like it, or maybe even days. It must have taken a Herculean effort for him to get dressed and come over to see me the way he did last night, and I feel like an idiot for not having recognized the full extent of his condition. I should have driven him home and put him right back into bed. Instead, I took him out drinking.

“Have you seen Carly yet?” he says.

“Why do you always go right to that?” I say, although I've been waiting for him to ask.

“Because it's what matters.”

“Other things matter too.”

Wayne opens his eyes, takes a short drag on the joint, exhaling a thin gray plume of smoke as he sits up a little. “Here on the cusp of the hereafter,” he declares with mock gravity, “I've been granted a certain wisdom, for lack of a better word. An ability to see things with a clarity I never before possessed. It's a parting gift, I guess. You won't be advancing to the next round, but here's a consolation prize, and thanks for playing. That sort of thing.” He pauses to smile ironically at his analogy before continuing. “I suppose that not being weighed down with the normal, self-absorbed concerns over health, wealth, and the future, my brain is freed to finally see the greater truth in everything. Or in other words”—he pauses, giving me a sharp look—“what really matters.”

“And what does really matter?” I ask, inhaling a whiff of secondhand ganja so strong it stings my throat.

He grins at me, not answering, and looks out the window. The sun hangs low in the purple sky over the roofs of the houses across the street, and the afternoon light is quickly fading into the soft pink hues of evening. “Do you remember that day we cut school and took the train into the city—you, me, and Carly?” he says.

I nod. “Sure. We went to the Central Park Zoo and then saw a movie.”

“Back to the Future,”
Wayne says, closing his eyes as he remembers. “We were the only ones in the theater.”

I have a sudden, vivid flashback of Carly doing cartwheels down the empty theater aisle in the middle of the movie and then skipping back to our seats, her face flushed with excitement, as Wayne and I applauded. I'd forgotten about that, and, recalling it, I feel a hot lump in my throat. “We had Kentucky Fried Chicken afterward,” I say. “Brought a bucket of it on the train and stuffed our faces the whole way back.”

Wayne nods, smiling. “All that shit with Sammy was going on then,” he says. “I was still in denial that I was actually gay. That was a tough year for me. I was scared and confused, and I had this big secret I didn't feel safe sharing with anyone. But that day we all had a great time, better than if we'd done it on a Saturday.” He turns away from the window and looks at me. “The three of us laughed a lot that day. That's what I remember most. And that for one day, I completely forgot about my secret and just enjoyed myself, for the first time in ages.”

I nod, feeling my eyes becoming moist. Sitting there with Wayne, I can actually recall the way that day felt, the sensation of it, and what it felt like to be me then. The crisp autumn air, the noise of Manhattan, the delightful, conspiratorial sense of being somewhere we shouldn't have been, the flush on Carly's cheeks from the cool wind as we walked through the zoo.

“That day mattered,” Wayne says emphatically. “There were plenty of other days that mattered too, but not nearly as many as there should have been. I've thought about it a lot. What makes a day like that matter so much, and why there are so many less of them as we get older.”

“And what's the answer?” I ask.

“It's simple, really. We were doing what we wanted to do, instead of what we expected ourselves to do.” He leans back in his pillows and takes a long, greedy drag on the joint, shaking off the ash into a cup by his bedside. “I'm here to tell you,” he says, his voice high and clenched from the herb, “that at the end of the day, which is where I currently reside, nothing else matters but the things that truly matter. This is nothing you didn't know before, but even though you know it, it doesn't mean you really know it. Because if you really knew it, you'd act on it, man. Shit, if I could go back now . . .”

His voice trails off, and he's quiet for so long that I think for a moment that he's fallen asleep, but then he leans forward and takes a deep breath. “I am now going to invoke a cartoon character,” he announces solemnly.

I indicate the joint. “What's in that thing?”

“Don't fuck with me when I'm being wise, Joe.”

“Sorry.”

Wayne rolls onto his side to better face me. A smattering of gray ash falls from the tip of the joint and disappears into a fold in his comforter as he readjusts himself. “You remember the old Roadrunner cartoons, where the coyote would run off a cliff and keep going, until he looked down and happened to notice that he was running on nothing more than air?”

“Yeah.”

“Well,” he says. “I always used to wonder what would have happened if he'd never looked down. Would the air have stayed solid under his feet until he reached the other side? I think it would have, and I think we're all like that. We start heading out across this canyon, looking straight ahead at the thing that matters, but something, some fear or insecurity, makes us look down. And we see we're walking on air, and we panic, and turn around and scramble like hell to get back to solid ground. And if we just wouldn't look down, we could make it to the other side. The place where things matter.”

“I understand what you're saying,” I say. “But Carly and I were so long ago. People change.”

“The things that matter don't change,” Wayne says, turning the joint around and expertly placing its glowing tip into his mouth, what we used to call glow-worming. “The distance between you and them just gets progressively bigger. There's obviously still something between you two.”

“Is that what she said?”

“I might be reading between the lines a little,” he admits, pinching out the joint and tossing it into the cup. “But really, Joe, what the hell do you have to lose?”

We look at each other, and I can feel my eyes watering again, although it might be from the weed smoke, which by now has permeated every corner of the room, filling the air like sweet incense. “I saw her today,” I say. “At the hospital.”

Wayne stares at me. “You asshole. How long were you going to let me lie here laying on all that bullshit before you told me?”

“You were on a roll.”

“Fuck you,” he says with a grin. “How'd it go?”

“I'm not sure. We said we'd get together.”

He leans back in his pillows, looking pleased. “Excellent.”

“It doesn't mean anything,” I say.

“Of course not.”

“Really.”

“I know.”

We smile at each other. “That was a great day, wasn't it?” I say.

“The best.” He rolls onto his back, pulling up the blankets. “I need to get some rest,” he says. “Come and see me tomorrow if you can.”

“You bet,” I say, getting up to leave as I consider the merits of what Wayne has just said. Maybe there is something to it, or maybe he's just stoned out of his gourd.

“Joe,” he says. “Remember what happens to the coyote when he doesn't run off the cliff.”

“What happens?”

Wayne's smile is crooked and ever so slightly crazed. “A fucking piano falls on him.”

         

Downstairs, I find Mrs. Hargrove waiting for me in the living room. “I want to show you something,” she says. I follow her through a set of French doors and into a den that is completely overrun with piled boxes, large and small, all unopened. A wide array of major Internet retailers is represented: The Sharper Image, Nordstrom, Amazon.com, Circuit City, Brooks Brothers, Sears, L.L. Bean, Gap, and a host of others. I turn to Mrs. Hargrove, who is peering suspiciously at the packages, her forehead lined with deep creases of consternation.

“What is all of this?” I say.

“He buys things,” she whispers to me as if revealing a dark family secret. “Day and night. He just orders things off that godforsaken computer.”

“What for?”

“How should I know?” she snaps, her voice edged with hysteria. “Every day I get packages. And when they come, he doesn't want to open them. Tells me to just put them in here.”

I stare in puzzlement at the jumble of cartons. There are easily forty or fifty of them, scattered in haphazard piles around the room. “Have you asked him about it?” I say.

“Of course I asked him,” she practically hisses. “He has no answer. I don't think he even remembers what he ordered.”

“I think this might be a symptom,” I say. “Some form of dementia from the illness.”

She gives me a frazzled look. “What am I supposed to do with all of this stuff?” She looks back at the boxes, haunted by them. “What in god's name am I supposed to do?”

When I leave a few moments later, she's still standing there like that, staring desolately at the roomful of unopened packages.

nineteen

1987

Bush Falls was named for a pair of medium-sized waterfalls that fed the Bush River in the woods just off Porter's Boulevard. There was a well-known urban legend surrounding these twin waterfalls, concerning a couple of high school kids who parked on the bluff overlooking the falls to make out. As things heated up, the girl, in a fit of passion, dared her date to prove his love by jumping over the falls, offering up her virginity as the prize. Naturally, he immediately threw himself into the swirling, frigid waters and was carried over the falls. Here the versions vary, with some claiming he accomplished this feat in the nude, and others saying he was fully dressed. Some accounts have him breaking his arm on one of the large stones that protrude from the pool of water beneath the falls, and others have him emerging unscathed. These details, and others, have been argued through the generations with all the ardor of a Talmudic debate, but there is universal agreement as to the story's conclusion. He returned triumphantly to the car, drenched and shivering, where he found his girlfriend lying gloriously naked in the backseat, ready to fulfill her side of the bargain and warm him with the sweet, wet heat of her surrendered virginity.

Not surprisingly, the woods immediately surrounding those waterfalls remained the most popular make-out spot in town. If you were a girl who didn't intend to put out, you avoided the falls, because agreeing to go was an unspoken covenant that you would be forthcoming with your favors. If you were a guy who didn't plan on getting some action, chances were pretty good that you didn't actually exist. Every once in a while, one of the more daring boys, in a hormonal frenzy, would brave the falls again, usually having secured a similar promise from his date. The occasional fatality served only to heighten the excitement, and the rule that evolved over time was that if you happened to be there with a date when someone went over the falls, you had a moral and historical obligation if not to actually have sex then at least to step up your usual routine significantly.

This ritual and its contemporary bylaws were surprisingly well respected by teens of both sexes, enforced by an unspoken collective conscience, a social contract between teenagers more binding than any rules imposed on them by the authorities. Like playing spin the bottle in the fifth grade, it somehow lent an air of validation and provided a forum for communication in the otherwise awkward business of incrementally increasing the output in budding sexual relationships. Sex in the back of a car might be regretted later as something tawdry and a poor setting for the surrender of innocence. This was something the girls worried about much more than the boys, who would have been happy to have sex bent over in a stinking dumpster. But if it happened at the falls, you were a part of a sacred tradition, the next generation in a revered and enchanted history. There was a sense of destiny to it, as if the place was part of some romantic heritage, a sexual legacy for the teenagers of Bush Falls.

Carly and I lost our virginity there in the backseat of my dad's Pontiac on a cold January night, with the snow falling like a curtain over the fogged-up car windows and George Michael singing “Careless Whisper” on the car stereo. To this day, the opening bars of the sax solo instantly take me back to that night. Say what you will about car sex, but thirty million horny teenagers can't be wrong.
Wait, can you lift this leg a second? Put your arm over here. Is that okay? Wait, that's not it. Move it up a little. Oops, sorry. Wait, now it's good.
There was a good deal of awkward fumbling before we managed to achieve penetration, and just as I began getting into the rhythm, Lucy appeared unbidden, stretched out magnificently across my consciousness in her bikini, and I went off inside Carly like a volcano.

“I'm sorry,” I said, blushing. “That couldn't have been too much fun for you.”

Carly waved away my embarrassed apologies with a happy grin and kissed me warmly. “We did it,” she said triumphantly.

“Did it hurt?” I asked.

“Not as much as they say,” she said. “I always suspected that was just propaganda to keep us virgins longer.”

I laughed and told her I loved her. She said it back, and before long we were at it again. This time I was able to last, bringing her to a loud, unrestrained orgasm.

“Mm,” she said afterward, purring into my chest. “Much, much better.”

“We aim to please,” I said, feeling like a major stud even as I felt myself shriveling up like a prune inside her.

“You know,” Carly said, curling up in my arms, “we're going to have to do this all the time now.”

         

Kids starting in with sex are like Columbus landing on the shores of the New World; even though there are millions of natives running around in full view, they still think they discovered the damn thing. We did it everywhere: in my father's car, her parents' Jacuzzi, my bed while my father was still at work, and once in a ladies' room stall at the Megaplex, which I don't necessarily recommend. There was no stopping us. For a while, everything was either foreplay or the afterglow, and life was beautiful. Then Wayne and Sammy made up, and everything went to shit.

Apparently, Carly and I did not have the market cornered on unbridled teen sex. Unbeknownst to us, Sammy and Wayne were heavily engaged in their own sexual coming of age, albeit a necessarily secretive one. They hadn't even told me they were speaking again. I found out like everyone else did, when Wayne's unsuspecting born-again mother stepped into his bedroom one night and interrupted him and Sammy in the steaming throes of naked passion. I never got the details on the ugly scene that followed, but it ended with Wayne's being kicked out of his house. He crashed at Sammy's for a few days, but when Mrs. Hargrove learned that he was living with Sammy, she stormed the Habers' house, demanding that her son leave with her at once and immediately accompany her to see her priest. Wayne refused to see his mother, and Lucy was ultimately forced to slam and bolt the door when Mrs. Hargrove's rage threatened to turn violent.

Elaine Hargrove stood outside in the bitter cold of that winter night for the better part of an hour, wailing insanely for her son and cursing Lucy and Sammy at full volume, until one of the neighbors finally called Sheriff Muser. He arrived ten minutes later and, after some heated negotiations, finally managed to coax the hysterical woman into the back of his car. He then knocked on Lucy's door and insisted on speaking to Wayne, who verified that contrary to his mother's claims, he was not being held there against his will. Muser drove Wayne's mother home, undoubtedly getting an earful from the distraught woman the whole way back, and recommended that Mr. Hargrove call the family doctor for a sedative. That evening the good sheriff advised his son, Mouse, that he didn't want him showering after games and practices with a homosexual. Mouse probably had the phone in his hand before his father had left the room, and by morning every kid in Bush Falls High knew about Sammy and Wayne.

When Carly called that night to tell me she'd heard the news from one of her girlfriends, I was stunned—and I already knew they were gay, which just goes to show how adept I'd become at the whole denial thing. My dad was still at work with the car, so I took my bike and pedaled frantically up the hill to Sammy's house, a sense of dread beating steadily in my intestines like the lowest keys on a grand piano. Sammy and Wayne were camped out in the den, watching
Cheers,
when Lucy let me in. She took one look at my sweaty, panicked expression, and her smile vanished. “Oh, no,” she said, closing her eyes. For a minute it looked like she might faint, and I reached out to steady her. “He can't go through this again,” she said, fighting back tears, and I thought,
Again?

Since neither Wayne nor Sammy had seen fit to tell me that they were even friends again, they pretty much knew something was up when I didn't seem surprised to find them together. “What's up, Joe?” Wayne said awkwardly while Sammy stared at me apprehensively.

“They know,” I said, still panting slightly from my frantic bike ride. “Everybody knows.”

“Everybody knows what?” Wayne said, but I could tell he understood. No one said anything for a full minute, and then Sammy said, “Fucking Muser,” and sat back, a look of abject misery on his face. On television, Diane kissed Sam and then slapped him across the face and the laugh track laughed.

“I just wanted to warn you,” I said. “You know, before you showed up at school tomorrow.”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” Wayne said in a hushed voice, his face devoid of any expression.

“Wayne,” Sammy said.

“Fuck!” Wayne shouted, getting to his feet. “I have to get out of here.”

“I'll come with you,” Sammy said, starting to get up.

“No,” Wayne said. “I want to be alone.” He grabbed his jacket from a chair in the kitchen and ran out the front door.

Sammy's eyes filled with tears. “You'd better go after him,” he said to me. “This is going to kill him.”

“What about you?” I said.

Sammy turned to me, the tears running unchecked down his cheeks, and gave me the most pathetic look I'd ever seen. “Everyone knew I was a faggot anyway,” he said softly, and for a fraction of a second I felt a powerful urge to reach out and strangle him. Instead, I turned and ran for the front door, muttering a jumbled farewell to Lucy, who hadn't budged from where she stood in the front hallway, staring at the wall, a stricken expression frozen on her face.

When I got outside, Wayne was gone and so was my bike.

         

It took me a half hour to walk home, and when I got there, I was surprised to find my father waiting for me in the kitchen, with a frown on his face. It wasn't the frown that surprised me; it was the part about his waiting for me.

“I just got off the phone with Coach Dugan,” he said slowly, absently clasping his massive fingers as he cracked his knuckles.

“Yeah?”

“He said Wayne Hargrove is a homosexual. Him and that kid who worked the press last summer.”

“Why the hell would he call you with something like that?” I said.

“He's looking to verify it.”

“Is the coach looking for a date?”

“You watch your mouth, Joe,” my father said sternly. “The coach has a whole team of boys to think of. This is serious business.”

“This is no one's fucking business,” I said.

He gave me a sharp look and then tilted his head slightly, as if a new thought had suddenly occurred to him. “Are you a homosexual?” he said, squinting at me.

“What's with the sudden interest in my sex life, Dad?”

“Just answer the goddamn question!” he yelled at me, pounding the table with his fist.

I leaned against the doorway and sighed. “Dad,” I said softly. “I have a girlfriend.”

He squinted at me in surprise. “You do?” he said a little too skeptically for my taste.

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“I just didn't know,” he said, looking relieved.

“I can't imagine how it never came up in all those meaningful talks we have.”

“What's her name?”

“Oh, please,” I said, heading for the stairs. “Spare me.”

“Where do you think you're going?”

“To smoke some crack. You see? There's something else you didn't know about me.”

In the hallway mirror I caught a glance at him, mouth agape, staring dumbstruck at the back of my head, and I figured it would be a few more years before he attempted another conversation with me.

         

Wayne showed up at around one in the morning, throwing pebbles at my window. I went downstairs to let him in, and we tiptoed back up to my room. He collapsed on my bed, still shivering, his face taut and raw from the cold. “I can't get a handle on it,” he said, bouncing up and down nervously on the bed as he blew into his hands. “It changes from minute to minute. Sometimes I think it's the kind of thing that will blow over after a few days, and sometimes I think nothing will ever be the same again.”

I was sadly leaning toward the latter view myself, but didn't think he needed to hear that just then. “Maybe you shouldn't go to school for a few days,” I said. “Let everything settle down first.”

“They'll all be talking about it, whispering behind my back.”

“What about Sammy?”

“Fuck Sammy,” Wayne said vehemently. “This is all his fault anyway. I told him that my room wasn't safe, but he had to keep on going at it.”

This was a little more information than I really needed at the moment. “Listen,” I said. “You're the star of the basketball team. If an asshole like Mouse is accepted because he's on the team, certainly a guy like you—”

“Mouse doesn't fuck men,” Wayne said pointedly.

“Mouse doesn't fuck women either, as far as anyone knows,” I said, trying in vain for even a small laugh.

“This is bad, Joe,” Wayne said, lying back on my bed. “This is a fucking nightmare.”

“What do you want to do?”

Wayne covered his eyes with his forearm and exhaled slowly. “I just want to wake up, man,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “I just want to wake the fuck up.”

         

I was the subject of much intense scrutiny the next morning as I made my way through the eerie hush of the school yard and down the hall to my locker. Students stood in clusters, conducting whispered conversations that ceased abruptly as I walked by, their glances ranging from inquisitive to accusatory. Wayne had opted to hole up in my room for the day, and before I'd even made it to my locker, I knew he'd made the right decision. In the two minutes since I'd arrived the stares and whispers were threatening to suffocate me, and I could begin to imagine what it might feel like to be Wayne today. Carly was waiting for me at my locker, and I almost broke down when she kissed me. “Are you okay?” she said.