You Can Say You Knew Me When (28 page)

I showered, then put on the same clothes I’d taken off. I tried to nap but kept checking the clock. Time was teasing me through an agonizingly slow dance. I rolled a couple of fatties, puffing away until I slipped into a twinkly high that turned truly surreal in front of the strobing cable TV wasteland. At ten thirty I shuffled back to the car.

He was standing in the parking lot, checking his pager and punching numbers into the pay phone. A heap of clutter surrounded his ankles—a filled backpack busting against its zippers, a blanket, a pile of compact discs, and a dark, sculptural object revealed by my headlights to be a two-foot tall replica of Darth Vader’s head.

I stepped out of the car and leaned against the door, and the blistering tirade Jed was delivering into the phone rumbled over in agitated waves: “That’s bullshit, dude…That’s totally a lie…I am definitely not
dealing
, dude.” I was halfway through a fresh cigarette by the time he took note of me. Still his ranting went on, climaxing at last in a “Fuck you” and the chunky slam of the receiver.

He approached me with an arm extended and was immediately guiding my fingers through a ritualized three-part handshake. “Dude, I am seriously stoked to see you, ’cause they just fired my ass.”

The sudden nearness of him put me off balance; my brain was trapped somewhere between the idling pot high and the adrenaline rush of finding myself back in this alien world. He shuffled on his feet, relaying an argument between him and Miguel, his boss, that had culminated in Jed clearing out his locker.

“You kept all that junk here?” I asked, walking toward the Darth Vader bust.

“This isn’t junk, dude. This is my
shit.
” The rant started back up: His parents had kicked him out of their
fifty-room mansion
when he dropped out of college; his stepfather, George, was a
cheap asshole millionaire,
his mother
a two-faced cunt
—that was her on the phone, the “dude” he’d just told to fuck off—and they wouldn’t let him back until he agreed to take
some bullshit computer job
. “‘George has a friend with a promising new Internet start-up,’” he mimicked. “I’m like, dude, go to my website, it’s called Suck My Cock Dot-Com.”

I hadn’t figured him for a spoiled rich kid, though this was possible, with Silicon Valley so close. Still, it occurred to me that he was making the whole thing up—that he was broke by circumstance, not by choice, just some liar drug dealing his way through California—but that hardly mattered to me, because I was lying, too.

I kicked up a corner of his blanket with the toe of my boot. “So, are you, like, homeless?”

“Whatever. I just keep moving. Sometimes I sleep on the beach or crash at a friend’s. I’m saving up—I got a fat stash locked away, and I’m about ready to take off to some rad Third World country like Costa Rica, where my parents can’t hassle me and I can live hella cheap.” He exhaled and added, almost as an afterthought, “And fuck hella pussy.”

“Right on,” I said, playing my part.

“You got a cigarette? Thanks, dude. No, let me light it.” He turned around and flipped his middle finger at the restaurant. “Fuck you, Miguel! I should bring down some vengeance on his greasy ass. So, dude, you want that E? I’m using all the Force I can on you so you’ll say yes, ’cause I could seriously use the Jackson.”

Puffing on the cigarette and bouncing on his toes, he waited for my answer with alluring, con-man eyes. It was a relief to have him silent for the moment. I slowly pulled out another cigarette, pinched it between my thumb and middle finger and sparked it up in my best cool-eyed Johnny Depp imitation. Through an extended exhale, at last I spoke. “That’s why I came back.”

“Rad.” He turned and started moving toward his bags. “We gotta do this somewhere besides this parking lot, ’cause they will fully call the cops on my ass.”

He said his car was being fixed, and that I should drive us to the beach, so I helped him gather his things up, making a point of throwing most of it in the trunk, a half-assed security attempt in case he was planning on pulling a knife and robbing me. He climbed into the front seat and dropped his backpack between his legs.

“Say adios to Casa Adios,” I announced. I spun the wheels toward Route 1 and slammed on the gas, burning rubber like a sixteen-year-old doing donuts behind the high school. Jed tumbled into his door and whooped.

“Adi-mother-fuckin-os!” he yelled at the restaurant. Its lights went off at this very moment, as if shouting good riddance back at him, leaving him to his own devices. Leaving him to me.

I’d heard about San Gregorio, a beach marked by driftwood deposits, from which structures were built by overnight campers. The parking lot was a slab of black, hedged by dunes, disappearing into a bigger slab of black, which was the dark Pacific. The night was featureless, thick enough to skim with a spoon, ready to swallow unsheltered travelers whole. In the newly quiet car, forty bucks and two capsules of Ecstasy changed hands. I mentioned to Jed that I was from San Francisco, and he immediately launched into a monologue about how the rave scene in San Francisco had
totally tanked
, how the police had been busting all the warehouse parties so that you had to
haul it to Oak-town for kicks
, but now
Oak-town was blowing up
and
the cops were coming down on that shit
, so now he was saving up for a big rave in Baja, though this friend of his said it might be
all hippies and older people
. “No offense,” he added.

“You calling me a hippie?”

He laughed, muttering, “True, true,” and reassured me that his whole life he’d
kicked it with an older crew
. At this point I brought out the joint I’d started back at the hotel and proceeded to get him high and me higher. I’d been bluffing my way through this conversation—my rave experience consisted of two parties, one on each side of the Bay, where I’d tripped away the hours transfixed by the body-painted flesh of the shirtless, skinny boys spiraling around me. I drifted in and out of Jed’s stories, so crushed out on him aesthetically that any words he spoke were beside the point. Every now and then he’d look to me for encouragement, and I’d glimpse again that trust I’d spied back at the restaurant.

“Hey dude, you find the Sea Foam?”

“Yeah, thanks for helping me out.”

“Dude, you gotta get your girlfriend down here and take advantage of the pay-per-view. Stay up all night watching some rug-munching porn, some total
Red Shoe Diaries
shit.” He raised his palm, and I met it in a high five.

“I almost called her. Even though she’s mad at me, I thought I could get her to talk dirty. You know, tell her I was horny and missed her and shit.”

“Take matters into your own hands,” he said.

“Almost did that, too,” I said. I laughed too loud, too enthusiastically, entertaining thoughts of enacting one of those bi-curious porn scenarios:
Man, my girlfriend won’t let me fuck her, and I’m so horny. Wanna help a buddy out?
A host of clichéd warnings was ringing loudly:
playing with fire, walking on thin ice.
Fire and ice was about right. My temples throbbed with hot blood and my legs were shivering. But for some reason the possibility that I’d wind up on the knife end of Jed’s potential homosexual panic was not deterring me.

“Speaking of pulling my dick out,” I said, “I gotta take a piss.”

“Yeah, me too.”

I stood with my back to the car hood, looking over the dunes to the ocean, and next thing, Jed was planting his feet alongside mine, unsnapping his fly and lowering his zipper. I heard the rustle of his underwear. It was torture not to look down there. Nerves, arousal and confusion conspired against me, and I couldn’t piss. Jed hadn’t started up yet either. The silence stretched awkwardly.

Then he spoke. “Faggot.”

My breath stopped. I darted a glance at him. His head was lowered, his gaze on his cock, both hands at his crotch—but he was also smiling, and not maliciously.

I took a chance and fired back: “Cocksucker.”

His smile widened. “Ass licker.”

“Fudge packer.”

He burst out laughing. “Butt muncher.” I heard his piss slice the air and hit the sand.

His laugh was downright giddy, infectious. Whatever muscles had been damming up my piss finally let loose. I spit out, “Corn holer.”

He had the giggles now, barely able to get out the words. “Ball biter.”

“Finger fucker.”

“Turd pirate.”

And on like that until we ran out of insults and our dicks were back in our pants—but still we laughed. Uncontrollable, side splitting, the mother of all laughter birthing a litter of fresh laughter. One of us would run out of breath and the other would get quiet for a moment. Then the pregnant silence would burst open again.

From some other set of eyes I looked upon the whole scene with rapt astonishment.

We stumbled along the shoreline, smoking more pot and checking out the driftwood huts, empty of vagabonds but fascinating to look at—sculptural, inventive, spooky. The sky was pricked with stars, and we stared up at them together.

“When I was little,” I told him, “I thought that constellations were actually signs from faraway civilizations.”

“What, like intergalactic commercials?” he asked. “Alien Coke?”

“No. I thought they were directions. Telling us how to find them.”

“Those stars are already burned out,” he said. “So even if you followed the directions, like, where would they take you?”

“I didn’t think that far ahead,” I said, and fell quiet.

He turned to me. I could see in his stare that he’d registered my mood shift. He asked, “What are we gonna do now, Teddy?”

Hearing Jed call me by my father’s name made it all wrong. Because if anyone here was cast in the role of Teddy, it was Jed, which made me a latter-day Don Drebinski, lusting over the shoulder of this wide-eyed kid, and probably winding up the worse for it.

He came back to the Sea Foam with me; there wasn’t any doubt about it at a certain point. I had a room with two beds; he had nowhere else to go.

I lit the second joint as we drove. The coast road was narrow and twisty, but I was less concerned about driving stoned than I was about the unpredictability of him. His piss-and-insults game was a sure sign he had picked up a sexual vibe from me—or else a sure sign he hadn’t. And if he had and was still here, what did that mean; and if he hadn’t and still might, what would that bring? I was attuned to his every gesture and inflection, on alert for an unambiguous message.

His pager went off in the car—a
client
he needed to call back. “What’s up with not having a cell phone?” he demanded.

“I don’t believe in them.”

“Dude, you’re living in the past. Join the new millennium.”

“You sound like someone I know in San Francisco,” I said. “I’ll introduce you. You guys can gang up on me.” Woody meeting Jed: In a night of unlikely fantasies, this was the most cockeyed.

“I was thinking I need to check out SF again,” he said eagerly. “Can’t think of one fucking reason to stick around here.”

“What would you do in the city?”

“I dunno. Maybe I could crash with you.”

Sure, Jed, but first, let’s say we do something about this tension, knock around a bit in that motel bed, see how that fits, and then, maybe, we’ll drive to SF, one of my hands on the wheel, the other on the back of your neck, you trying out your newly acquired oral skills, while I try not to lose control, not take one last flying ride over the edge; if we get that far, then yeah, definitely, the city, welcome to my world, you’ll fit right in, it’s already a mess—.

“What’s so funny?” he was asking.

“Did I laugh?”

“You got that fucking evil smile going on. With that red hair, you’re, like, fully satanic.”

I squinted at him. “Are you afraid of the devil?”

“Whatever,” he said. A meaningless word, and no meaning on his face. Conversation over.

I didn’t mind that I’d spooked him a little.

At the Sea Foam he dumped his stuff on the bed closest to the bathroom—the one that I’d wanted—and picked up the phone.

I went into the bathroom. Over the peal of urine on porcelain, I eavesdropped on Jed as he talked drugs, recounted his ejection from Casa Adios, replayed his argument with his mother. “I checked my ass into a motel,” he said, with no mention of me. Then, floating the promise of
serious quality shit
and pay-per-view, he was inviting this client to the Sea Foam. Visions of white powder piled on the coffee table, submachine guns, a guy named Yuri in dark sunglasses. I nearly pissed on my leg.

“Hey, uh, Jed?” I called from the bathroom, doing my best to keep cool. “Look, dude, no strangers in the room. And easy on the phone; I’m paying for it.”

Face to face, he flashed me his gap-toothed smile. “No worries. He’ll never show. He doesn’t even have a driver’s license.”

He’d already found the remote and was selecting
PLAY
on the pay-TV menu. The credits for
American Pie
began to roll, with Jed enthusing, “This is my favorite fucking movie.” He laid himself out on his stomach, propped on his elbows, announcing lines before they were spoken.

“This is stupid,” I said, averting my gaze from his ass. “You know how many movies like this have been made?”

“Tell me you’ve seen another movie where a guy bones a pie. It’s a classic, dude.”

“
Porky’s
is a classic,” I answered. “This is a rip-off.”

“What’s
Porky’s?
”

“Before your time.”

“How old are you, anyway?” He eyed me with mild suspicion, as if he’d just learned I was a personal friend of his father’s.