The True Detective (10 page)

“There I was. I was thirteen. What was most important to me was that I was in the company of this boy from the high school who I happened to believe was a sort of god, you know, as you do at that age. He certainly was, to me, just about the most incredibly
striking
person in existence, even as he was pushing me in the back with the others. He was an absolute hood and terrible in school—I suppose he dropped out before long—but he had to be the most fearless, most
daring
person in the world. Fairly tall, fairly thin, an Italian stallion with long blond hair, of all things, hanging down to his black leather jacket. From behind he looked like a woman’s ad for Clairol. Artie DelGreco was his name.

“Once, when I was in the high school, on a stairway, and saw him coming down the stairs, I froze. I stood there and stared at him, star-struck, although I didn’t know at the time that it was anything more than boyish hero worship. He was so famous. I remember seeing some friend, saying at once, ‘Hey, guess who I just saw . . .’

“They began to get a little rough. Saying things, saying they knew what I liked to do, things like that. I didn’t mind at first, but they started to hurt me. One of them—it wasn’t my hero,
thank God—slapped my face backhanded, so my nose started to bleed. ‘You
wanna
suck us off, dontcha?’ he kept saying. ‘You wanna suck our cocks, dontcha?’ I cried and said no no no, and swallowed blood and wiped blood from my mouth and so on.

“The same boy just blasted me in the stomach then. I buckled and went down, and when I tried to get up, which I can tell you wasn’t easy, he shoved me, by my shoulders, as hard as he could, and I went sprawling. He was saying they were going to kill me if I didn’t do it, and so on, and then Artie DelGreco said, ‘Take it easy; let’s just ask him in a nice way.’

“Well—what I did, there on that oil-stained cement floor—I turned or twisted in a way that I was looking up at this boy over whom I had had this remote but serious thing. And I said, ‘Just don’t beat me up. Don’t beat me up.’

“This little smile came over his face. He was looking right into my eyes. As he did this, as he looked, he rubbed his hand over his crotch several times. He said something like ‘This is what you want, isn’t it?’

“I didn’t say anything. I just looked up at him, at his eyes, while he felt himself. But I was taken.

“Just like I am now, just thinking about it,” the man adds in an even softer whisper, as his face comes forward and Vernon realized he has just touched his lips to the side of his neck.

“He unzipped his jeans,” he says. “Let his tool sort of unfold out. There it was sticking straight out. Only I was hard, too, and very excited. ‘Don’t let them hurt me,’ I said to him, for all kinds of obvious reasons. He said ‘here’ or something, and reached himself out, and so I did it. I just let him put it in my mouth, and right into my heart, you know, and I was born. He just rode it in and out, and . . . the truth was, I was so taken with it, and with him, and with who he was to me at that time in my life and how deeply connected we were as human beings—which
I bet he knows, too, today, no matter where he is or what he is doing—that I just closed my eyes and let it all be. Nothing in my life or in the world mattered, not anything, for at least those few minutes. Maybe forever after.

“See?” the man adds, sliding up over Vernon from behind. “Every time I recall that day it gives me the most genuine feelings. See? I know, I know I promised not to press you, and I won’t, but . . . it might relax you, too, you know.” There are the man’s lips again, on his neck. He presses closer; where Anthony was as smooth and hairless as a pear, this man feels like he is covered with steel wool, with hundreds of small wires lying flat.

Vernon doesn’t reply; he isn’t sure where the man is and is confused and doesn’t know what to say or do. As he shifts away, the man maintains contact, reaches around him on both sides to soap his chest and belly, teasing about his center without touching. “Feel how high I am,” he whispers. “We can do anything you like. Your ass feels wonderful. I can make it awfully nice in there, if that’s what you’d like.”

Vernon keeps what distance he can. A spark—a shock—shoots across his temples as he feels trapped or claustrophobic and required to pay. He feels he is degenerating, as the man continues around him and he has nowhere to go.
This is a nervous breakdown
, Vernon is saying to himself as the man slips his hand down over him and stops. And holds. Vernon urges response in spite of his tension. He closes his eyes. No response is forthcoming, though, and the man drops him. “Shit,” the man says.

Vernon dies a little, standing there.

“Goddamit,” the man says.

Vernon is becoming naked now and doesn’t know what to do.

“I guess I thought we’d get right through things and have a good time,” the man says. “I’m sorry.”

“Well, it’s my fault,” Vernon says.

“Doesn’t matter,” the man says.

“I just—I don’t know,” Vernon says.

“I think you’d better go. It’s just going to get worse.”

“Go?” Vernon says.

“I think so.”

“You want me to go?”

“If you don’t mind. The party’s over.”

“Oh.”

“Get on with your life and so on. I don’t mean to be rude.”

“Oh,” Vernon says again.

The man moves past him, leaves the shower, and Vernon hears him say, “You better rinse off.”

Naked now, Vernon doesn’t know what to do next, cannot get himself to move. His skull feels as thin-shelled as an egg, feels close to cracking from pressure within and spilling. He sees the drain on the floor; he would slide away into the drain if he could, into the city’s waste, into the oblivion of the ocean nearby.

He has to step out; he has to have the man see his face, on the slightest glance. He cannot die and escape so easily; he still has to pay. The several steps, a slight eye exchange are what he must do, what he must put up with, he is thinking. So he does put up with them; they are a part of dying, he thinks as he steps, washed, past the translucent plastic shower curtain and reaches for his underpants on a wooden chair painted banana yellow; his eyes are filled with tears as he steps into and lifts the underpants up over his damp legs.

T
AKING UP PLASTIC
-
COVERED MENUS
, C
LAIRE FOLLOWS A
man and woman making their way to the last booth. Her legs have started to fill with sand. It’s how she thinks of waiting on tables. Her legs are hourglasses, empty at first, when the work is most pleasant, but with sand sliding in on every step she takes carrying menus, napkins and silverware, cheeseburgers, fries, bowls of chili, smiling, talking, wiping tables, carrying dirty dishes back to the plastic tub.

Every week it seems the sand flows in just a little more quickly.

Chili. More orders for chili. “How’s the chili?” a man asks.

“I guess it’s fine,” she says.

Thinking of Eric, on her way to the kitchen, she glances past the pool table to where he had been standing. She runs her eyes over the men and boys leaning against the wall, and seeing that he isn’t there, seeing the slightest space of blank wall where he had been standing, and missing him, she goes to the window opening to place the order.

T
OO NERVOUS TO SIT
, M
ATT STANDS IN THE HEART OF THE
Mall, watching the flow of people entering. There are benches before him, among red bricks and indoor plants, but he feels he would
really
look like a wimp if he was sitting down when she walked in. Guarded by the plants, he watches, and there she is, coming his way, moments ahead of time, for which promptness he all once adores her. To his surprise, though, she moves a little less boldly than he would have expected, even as a foolish smile is breaking out on his own face. She is black, he sees and remembers; yes, she is black.

He heads around the centerpiece to meet her; she is scanning shoppers sitting there. He sees her eyes discover him. “Hey,” he says in a laugh and, reaching—he had no idea he would do such a thing—takes her hand for an instant in both of his.

They turn to walk along the Mall’s avenue, past jewelry and cookie displays. He hears her say, “You seem really different.”

“I do?”

“Like you’ve changed,” she says.

Glancing at her face he sees that yes, it is the girl Vanessa, with her black skin, her flash of red lips and white teeth. And they are together, which gives him this complicated and sensational feeling.

“I hope nothing’s wrong,” she says.

“No,” he says.

“Not having second thoughts about being with a black chick?”

“Oh, no. No. Not at all. Are you?”

“Me? Heck, yes, man. Well, not second thoughts.”

“Say that again?”

“I’m
aware
I’m here,” she says. “It’s a little cool, but a little scary, too.”

“We just look like friends, don’t we?”

“Which is what we are—friends.”

“Want to get a Coke or something?”

“I guess it’s a little more than friends. That’s why it feels scary.”

“I like the way you say things,” he says.

“Meaning what?”

“You don’t fool around. I just like to talk to you.”

“Yeah? How about Papa Gino’s then, white boy, for a Coke?”

Turning, they go through an awkward reversal of direction and an amount of smiling. He touches her arm above the elbow, and it is nearly daring. What they are doing is no longer imaginary, he thinks. They are together.

At the counter, while she sits at a table covered with red-checkered oilcloth, he orders and pays for two medium Cokes. Standing among the pizza buyers, he smiles at the menu on the wall and smiles still as he carries the two paper cups to the table. He has never felt more self-conscious. To complicate things, she suddenly says, “Now what are you thinking about?”

He looks at her.

“Tell me,” she says. “I can tell you’re thinking about something.”

He lies. “I was thinking about what a good idea it was to call you up,” he says.

She seems not to buy it.
“Really?”

“No, that’s not true,” he says. “What I was thinking was, looking at your hands—was that I’d like to touch your hands.”

“Well?” she says.

He looks at her.

“Why don’t you?” she says. “I could go for that.”

He laughs and still doesn’t dare. It’s all too much, he says to himself. As if seriously, he looks into her eyes; she looks into his in the same way.

“Want to go someplace we can mess around?” she says.

He keeps looking at her and doesn’t move, as blood determines on its own to occupy his face. “Where?” he gets out.

She takes a moment. “Our garage,” she says. “My mother’s Buick. She never uses it.”

“Far from here?” he manages to say.

She only continues to look at him as if to say, what a silly thing to ask.

His face is flushed and he cannot hold her gaze any longer; he glances down. He strains at once to look up at her, but his neck is so stricken it doesn’t want to cooperate.

“God, I have messed up again,” she says.

“No. Oh no,” he says.

“Oh, I have,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not anything,” he says. “I’m out of it, that’s all.”

“I shouldn’t come on like that,” she says.

“No, it isn’t you, really,” he is saying. “It isn’t.”

“Let’s just back up and start over,” she says.

“It’s okay,” he says.

“Tell me something
else
you’re thinking,” she says.

“Just what you said,” he says.

“Listen, all I meant by that was—well, I didn’t mean what you’re probably thinking I meant.”

He looks at her.

“I just said that, you know, for shock value.”

“Well, that’s okay.”

“Except you look like you found a rattlesnake in your lunch bag.”

He laughs, shrugs as if to say it’s true.

“So,” she says. “Tell me what you’re thinking
now
.”

“Same thing,” he says.

She pauses. “Okay, let’s go then. But it ain’t to do what you think.”

She smiles, looking at him over the red-checked oilcloth; he suddenly leans toward her and, surprising himself as much as he might surprise her, says, “I’m just dumb about stuff.”

He resumes his position, and now she is the one who appears confused. “Which means what?” she says.

“Just what it says.”

“You’ve never even kissed no girl before, have you?”

Well, that’s what he meant, he is thinking, and as he looks at her her larger meaning turns in his mind. “I gotta go to the bathroom,” he hears himself say.

He is in the center of the Mall, walking among people he doesn’t see, when he asks himself, as if realizing he has committed some kind of social error, do you say to a girl you have to go to the bathroom?

He walks through a wide opening into a department store and finds and then enters the men’s room, with its beige tile and brushed stainless steel, and seeing himself in the mirror, he cannot deny that something about what he sees is different. As an afterthought, he tries a breath in his hand.

Heading back, he feels no less light-headed. As if, he thinks, all his life he has been housed, held—in a membrane—and here at last he is breaking through. It was a little like this when he first realized he could swim.

Around him are women’s nightclothes, colors so lightly blue, so faintly pink and beige, so laced and silken that they seem to tend toward creating some puzzle of a creature within the trees. In the looks of a saleswoman whose lips glisten red, whose eyes and eyelashes look like miniature birds in small cages, whose cheeks are dusted perversely pale—in the midst of her perfume he seems to receive another glimpse.

“Ready to go?” he says, approaching the table, not sitting down.

Reaching to take his hand, to steer him into sitting again on his side of the table, she whispers, “One thing I want you to know. Don’t you go thinking I meant what I didn’t mean. I think it’s cute you never done nothing with no girl, if that’s what you meant. But don’t you think I meant what I didn’t mean, because that’s not what I meant at all.”