Chapter Seventeen
The block parties had been getting more intense as everyone seemed to be spiraling faster as they drew closer to the drain they were destined to go down.
That evening’s spectacle continued the trend. I sat on my front lawn like a Buddha garden ornament trying to tranquilize the thoughts inspired by the time spent earlier in Blaine’s lair, thoughts of everyone seeing everyone else as something to conquer: sexually, physically, financially, competitively. Parent looking at parent as a starving cartoon character sees their co-star: as a succulent meal floating in a thought bubble over their head; only instead of a roasted turkey-looking version of the person across from them, they imagine dominating them like a very life-like sex doll, or beating them up, or driving past them in a new car giving them the finger, or dunking over them in the driveway basketball court and throwing their head back to scream the results to heaven. Then I imagined they couldn’t all be thinking those things; no, quite the contrary, some of them would get off on being the abused: on being the human sex doll, the punching bag, the sad sack, the hapless defender. Meanwhile, parent looked at child as the next great hope to make the dreams of victory come true, or to stem the losing streak. I even supposed that some hoped their child would become a bigger loser than they were if that’s what they needed to feel better about themselves. As for the children’s perspective, I imagined it was the same as the grown ups’, and that their fantasies of being on top or on bottom applied to either a fellow child or an adult (either their own parents or someone else’s).
As the sordid visions mounted as quickly as my failures at keeping them at bay, my posture slumped and expression tightened, and I looked less like a Buddha and more like someone on the floor of a padded room being watched by the orderlies to see if a strait jacket was going to be necessary.
That also seemed to be Shay’s interpretation, more or less, as she sat down next to me.
“Things didn’t go well with Blaine, I take it.”
“Worse than any worse-case scenario I imagined.”
“How so?”
“I not only couldn’t save our friendship, I now hate mankind.”
“You mean humankind,” she ribbed.
“You’re right,” I said, agreeing with her as though it wasn’t a joke. “Women and children. Them too.”
“What happened?”
“I asked him the same thing.”
“And?”
“He said he grew up.”
“And growing up means…?”
I took her cue and tried to come up with a summary for what Blaine said. I re-crossed my legs, did my best to get back into Buddha mode, and took my time. I wanted to get it right. I looked around at our neighbors, young and old, for inspiration.
“Everything is a negotiation,” I decided. “But not really. One side has already won. They have the upper hand. They just decide if they want to give up anything.”
“Like you and me,” she said.
I surrendered a smile. “I guess so.”
Feeling a part of the fray and not pretending to be above it was liberating. This was exactly what I was hoping for when I sought her after fleeing Blaine’s house, and I appreciated her more than ever.
So much so that when she said “I found a house” I didn’t recoil. I was actually rather eager to express my gratitude in some way, to give in and relinquish the upper hand.
“That’s where you were this afternoon?” I asked.
“You were looking for me?”
“I needed you.”
She kissed me and this time I enjoyed it. I decided that this was the one I would record as my first kiss. I didn’t care if anyone saw us. I was proud of myself. I didn’t need to sneak her under a fence and hide her in my room. This was my friend. This was someone I respected.
We pulled away from each other and while she looked at me, I looked around to see who noticed. Nobody seemed to. I was disappointed. I did see Chris finishing a hot dog and slinking off into his garage and through the door that led to the backyard. I imagined he had a date with Dulce. Unlike Blaine’s underground relationship with Lana, about which I felt self-righteous, when it came to Chris and Dulce keeping their rendezvous secret, I felt bad. There may have been something about race or class that pressed upon them, but I had a feeling it was mostly because neither was someone you’d want to bring home to your parents, and they each knew it: about each other, and about themselves. I was now not only proud of my association with Shay, but grateful.
“Which house is it?” I asked.
“The North house.”
“Is there a house that’s more to the north than the rest?”
“No,” she giggled. “The North family. The Norths. Remember them? They left way before school was even done, like in March, before a sign even went up in their front yard. Their daughter was in about fourth grade, I think.”
She was even excited about the irrelevant details.
“There may be an animal inside,” she said. “Maybe a family of them. There’s a big hole in one of the window screens facing the back yard. That’s how I got in.”
I looked askew at her. She gave me a playful slap on the arm.
“If we make sure one of the rooms is clear and shut the door, it’ll be fine. And besides, it’s on a quiet street that no one parties on. It’s perfect.”
She reached out and took my hand. “Don’t worry. I won’t give you rabies.”
We kissed and got up to make our way to the house. A few people finally took notice of us as we walked hand-in-hand.
“About time,” said Nub.
“Yeah,” Shay replied. “Just when I’m about to leave.”
“You’re leaving?”
“Tomorrow.”
Nub fell silent. His eyes sagged and he reached out for a hug. Shay obliged and they held their embrace for quite a while. I enjoyed watching two friends say good-bye still as friends.
“We’ll keep in touch,” said Nub as they separated.
“Definitely,” Shay agreed.
“Where you guys headed?” he asked.
We hesitated and looked to one another for a manageable response.
“Oh, I get it,” Nub waved his arms. “Forget I asked. I’m happy for you two. Have fun. I’m gonna miss you, Shay.”
They briefly hugged one more time and we continued to our retreat as Nub gravitated back into that evening’s party.
“I’m happy for us, too,” Shay said as we turned the corner and veered away from the grill smoke and the drinking and the laughter.
I smiled at her and was going to respond in kind, but seized up with a sudden sense of dread. So I just kept smiling as best I could, which was convincing enough to Shay, as she maintained her contented stride. While she knotted her arm around mine and started to lean on me as we walked, I frantically tried to figure out what was happening to me so that I could find reasons to refute myself and get back to looking forward to being with her.
We turned another corner and found ourselves deeper into deserted territory. The red-lettered signs were even more dense, burnt lawns with white foreclosure crosses stuck in them far outnumbering the well-manicured patches. The occupants of the few homes still occupied were not home, opting for yet another night out on the next block. We could have gotten together right there on one of the front lawns and had just as much privacy as the empty house would provide.
I realized it was privacy that was freaking me out. We weren’t on display anymore. I couldn’t show off. It was no longer about demonstrating to everyone what a great guy I was compared to Blaine. Now I had to actually be with the girl I was so proud to be with. I had to make her feel as good as she made me feel. And I wasn’t sure I was able to do that, or if I even wanted to try.
We came upon the house and she led me through the side gate. I thought that if I just went along with her then everything would be fine. I enjoyed kissing her enough earlier, but was now afraid that had merely been out of gratitude and relie
f. Well, if I could fake her out with my smile, maybe my kisses would be convincing, too.
She led me to the window with the hole in the screen and she was saying something, had been talking the whole time, but I was too busy trying to calm my fears behind my smokescreen smile. She picked up on my apprehension, and I managed to hear her ask if everything was okay; it may have been the second time she had asked.
“What kind of animal do you think it is?” was the first digression I could think of.
“Raccoon, possum,” she speculated. “I think if it was a mountain lion or a bear someone would have noticed by now.”
“Maybe a skunk?”
I was now fully back in the moment as I found myself looking right into her eyes, which were loading up some anger.
“Are you wussing out on me?” she said.
“Don’t play some kind of manhood card on me, Shay.”
“So you are.”
“I didn’t say that. I said shaming someone into being with you seems like a pretty crappy way to do it.”
“Because I said ‘wussing out’?”
I sighed and decided to use my agitation as energy to forge ahead.
“Just get in the house,” I quipped, gesturing to the battered screen. “I’ll show you who’s a wuss.”
“Ooh, baby,” she teased, happy to be back on course.
I followed her in, and we stood in the hollow room. It smelled less like animals had been there and more like people had not: a musty layer of disuse overwhelmed any other scent. There was also a feeling that seemed to haunt it, the spirit of a dream cut short. We wordlessly started to walk through the rest of the house, looking it over as though we were interested buyers, perhaps because acting like a young married couple would enhance the mood, but more likely out of curiosity, and as a respite from the anticipation of what we were about to do; a chance to examine the evidence from a seminal phase of our lives before engaging in the next one, before creating a memory that was going to be inescapable for each of us, either good or bad.
We knew the floor plan, as we had lived in the same maze for the duration of our friendship. So we knew that the last room we were approaching was the master bedroom. And as we entered, we even knew where the bed had been, according to the imprints in the carpet.
“They were a pretty young couple,” Shay broke the silence. “They must have had some good sex in here. Maybe they left some toys or whips or something…”
She went to the closet, which was slightly opened, and slid the door all the way to the side. The sound of the tiny wheels rolling along the tracks was suddenly replaced by her screams.
An enormous cat bounded out of the closet. Only it wasn’t a cat. It was a raccoon. Its eyes caught the fading natural light and glistened. It stopped in the doorway of the bedroom and glared at us through its mask.
“Go away!” Shay barked. “Shoo!”
But the animal stood in place; not in a threatening manner, but in a way that seemed to dare us to do anything about it. I figured it was my turn to try something. I stomped my foot in its direction. The raccoon flinched slightly, but didn’t turn tail.
“What do we do now?” Shay asked.
“Hold on.” I went to check the master bathroom and found a spray bottle of cleanser under the sink that the Norths must have used to clean up after themselves during the move. I brought it into the bedroom and brandished it at the raccoon, spraying the bleach-smelling liquid. It retreated slightly, and with a few more squirts, trotted down the hall.
Shay slammed the door behind it and shivered with grunts. It occurred to me that maybe the raccoon stood its ground because there was a family of them left behind in the closet.
“Aw, man,” Shay responded to my hypothesis. “Well, would you check please? I already got jumped.”
I agreed strictly out of obligation and tiptoed to the closet. Standing at the edge of the opening, I bowed just far enough to look inside. There was barely enough light for me to see it was empty.
“Nothing,” I announced. Then a light clicked on and I jumped with adrenalin.
“How can you tell?” said Shay as she manned the light switch by the bedroom door.
“Turn it off!” I snapped.
“Sorry I startled you.”
“Someone might see the light in the window!”
“Oh, yeah.”
She turned it off.
“That reminds me,” she said. “Do you think anyone heard me scream?”
“Nah,” I assured her. “Too much noise at the block party. And somebody would have come knocking by now.”
“Maybe they couldn’t figure out which house it was and they’re running up and down the street looking around.”
The master bedroom did not have a view of the street. We looked at each other, and at the closed bedroom door.
“Together,” she said.
“Together,” I agreed, and we braced ourselves at the door as if preparing to storm an enemy bunker.
“Lots of noise,” I reminded her. “Just in case it’s still out there.”
“But we’re checking to see if anyone heard me scream. Now we’re going to yell?”
“Well,” I shrugged, “if anyone did hear you, then this will draw them closer, and we’ll know for sure when we look out a window.”
“That’s why I fell for you,” she said. “So smart.”
“I’m just good at making up excuses for things. Ready?”
“Ready.”
I turned the knob and we went screaming and yelling down the hall with arms waving. As we started to realize the raccoon was not there, we turned our braying and flailing into dance moves and ooh-ooh chanting that kept the beat for us as we grooved around from room to room and laughed at ourselves. We barely managed to remember to check one of the front windows, and the moment after we did, we were all over each other.
We paused after a couple of minutes to move back to the master bedroom, so we wouldn’t be under a front window, and we would be in an adult room rather than a kid room. Even though none of the revealing decorations and furnishings remained, we still knew which room was which, and one of the major points I had learned about sex from my months of observations and minutes of experience is that it’s as much a mental act as it is a physical one. As if to further prove my conclusion, somewhere during the walk from one room to the other, my doubts took advantage of our break to shadow me again.
I went along with her anyway. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, and I didn’t want her to lash out at me as a response to that hurt. So as we lied on the floor, I kept returning her kisses and moved my hands around to places I was comfortable with, like her back and the sides of her thighs, and rubbed those places vigorously to give the impression I was enthusiastic. And when she started moving her hands to places on me that made me wince, I contorted that reaction into a passionate moan and pressed myself against her tightly enough so that her hand would get stuck between us. She finally caught on when she managed to slip past my defenses and feel that I wasn’t getting hard.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, trying to sound concerned but doing a mediocre job of concealing her irritation.
“Nothing,” I replied, doing an even worse job of sounding unconcerned.
“Don’t do me any favors,” she gave up all pretense and sat up to mope with her chin on her knees.
It was dark now, and I was glad I couldn’t see her very well as I spoke. I felt as though I needed to work out some ideas, and doing so out loud would help, in the way writing down thoughts can help make sense of them.
“I started to think of the future,” I said. “I don’t want to start doing this for the wrong reasons because I’m afraid maybe I’ll keep doing it like that. I don’t want to convince myself that I’m attracted to someone or convince myself that someone is anything other than good sex.”
“And what am I?” she said, still wrapped around herself. “Am I ugly? Or am I a piece of meat?”
”Nobody said anythi
ng about being ugly or a piece of meat.”
“How else am I supposed to take your comments, Nick?” she unfolded herself and turned to face me by propping herself up on one arm. I couldn’t make out any of her features, but the feeling of being stared at was unmistakable.
“Just because someone isn’t attracted to someone else doesn’t make that person ugly. It’s a personal opinion.”
“You’re right,” she dismissed me, turning away and sitting cross-legged. “Forget I asked. Like we don’t already know. We’ve talked about this before, and now your limp dick makes it official.”
“Stop it,” I raised my voice. “Just stop it. There’ll be plenty of guys who are going to think you’re hot, all right? Plenty. Forgive me for seeing you as a friend. I wish I didn’t, Shay. Believe me. I’ve thought a lot about it. You’re awesome. My girl problems would be solved for the rest of my life if I could fall for you. But did you think I was lying to myself all this time? That all you had to do was jam your tongue into my mouth and I’d see the light?
“I guess I thought you were a typical guy.”
“Ah, here we go,” I said, settling down into the assumption she was questioning my masculinity. “Forgive me for not wanting to fuck anything that moves.”
Only it wasn’t an insult. I realized that when I noticed she was crying softly.
“Oh, God,” I said. “I’m so sorry, Shay.”
Her head was down and her heaving back was curved in my direction as she tried to brace herself against her tears.
“Shay…”
I was waiting for her to tell me off.
“Shay…”
I thought if I said it often enough, she would finally turn and unleash a great big Fuck You right in my face.
“Shay…”
I wanted her to. I wanted her to blow my hair back with anger.
But she didn’t. She just kept weeping. So I shut up and sat behind her.
We sat there for quite a while. By the time she recovered it was pitch dark except for a dim glow cast through the window by a streetlight on the next block beyond the vacated backyards. In addition to the weak light, the next block also provided the faint sounds of the latest party now in full swing. Shay took a deep breath that distinguished itself as the one she was using to finally pull herself together.
“I don’t care if it’s a lie,” she said. “I just want to feel good.”
I thought about what she said for a few moments. Then I moved closer to her and kneeled behind her, rubbing her back and her shoulders. She reached back to confirm that I was free from hesitation, that I was a typical guy after all. She made quite sure.
We didn’t actually have sex. We ground through a fully-clothed dry run, which may have been technically safe, but proved to be physically painful in its own way afterwards. My lips throbbed like a skinned knee, I could tell I was going to have a collection of rashes around my torso, and it felt as though I pulled every muscle in my crotch.
We didn’t say much as we walked back to the noisy block where everyone went to forget their mistakes. We held hands, and asked each other if we were okay a couple of times. Our answers sounded identical, in that the only feeling informing them was exhaustion. I barely wondered if I had satisfied her. I was too busy being disappointed in myself. Whatever it said about me that I couldn’t go through with anything until I had been assured of power, control, and no obligations, it made me no better than what I had seen through the windows over several weeks of midnights.
We stood on the perimeter of Shay’s last block party at The Ranch. I saw her Mom and Dad twisted into a drunken, clumsy make-out session being cheered on by a small crowd of likewise drunken parents. I glanced over to see if she saw them, too. She did, and caught me looking at her.
“Are you going to say good-bye to me tomorrow?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said, and meant it.
“I only want you to do it if you really want to do it,” she said, without a hint of irony.
I couldn’t help but laugh. She caught on and laughed as well.
“Do you want to hang out some more?” I asked. “Join the party?”
She exhaled. “I already said good-bye to Nub, and it was really nice. Running into him again would be awkward.”
“That’s a good excuse,” I complimented her. “Take it from an expert.”
“Everybody here is an expert.”
She gave me a fatigued grin, let go of my hand, and walked away.
I waited for her to turn and look back one more time, but she didn’t. She walked straight to her house and went inside. So now she was feeling ashamed? Her options all along had been either anger or shame? Anger if I didn’t go through with it, and shame if I did? I really knew how to make a girl feel good.
Nub and most of the remaining kids were several doors down the street, staking out some pavement beyond the party boundaries to play Kick the Can. I was too worn out to play, probably not even capable of running in my condition, so I hopped the fence to see if I could spend some time at Miggy’s and decide if I wanted to talk about what happened with Shay. If Lourdes was there, she could provide some sound insight if I could muster the nerve to talk about it with her.
But there was something like a block party going on in The Barrio, too. Peppery smoke was rising from the backyards, Banda music blared from a car parked on one of the dirt paths separating the ramshackle homes, and dozens of fluorescent camping lanterns perched and hung throughout the site. My first impulse was to smile at the improbability of something good coming from our parents’ lost summer, that the faint clamor of a never-ending party from over the wall, and perhaps the first-hand accounts from Miggy and the boys, had motivated more frequent celebrations of community on this side of the divide.
As I stood and watched, however, I realized that I was not interested in stepping out from behind the darkened outskirts and into their light. It struck me as presumptuous after all the weeks of Ranch Ranch parties that were not explicitly off-limits, but certainly not welcoming. And it would have been uncomfortable, anyway. I heard the language I couldn’t speak, the laughter I couldn’t access, and felt as though I should stay on my side. The shared experience was purely on the surface. We all liked to eat, to laugh, to listen to music, to forget, but how we did all of the above was so different. I spotted Lourdes flirting platonically with a couple of older men, one of whom called his wife over to tease her about something Lourdes said. The wife waved her husband off and shook her head, and they all got a kick out of whatever was happening. I couldn’t identify Miggy. He could have been anywhere, since each house seemed to be open to everyone else, and about half the fun and all the work seemed to be going on indoors. I couldn’t spot any of the other guys either, including JD and Chuy, so I figured they were all together and up to something in one of the homes. I missed going to school with them. I missed having the neutral ground on which to meet.
I continued my observations for a while. As much as I wasn’t compelled to crash their party, neither was I interested in ours. I watched all the beer being consumed with smiles and laughter, saw Lourdes take a swig from her sparring partner’s bottle, which incited approving howls from the circle of which she was the center of attention, and I came up with an idea: as long as I had already experimented with intimacy that night, I may as well make it an adulthood doubleheader and see what alcohol was about.
The ice chests in the garages that lined our block parties were never monitored; most of them had beer and soda mixed together in the same bin. I climbed back over the fence and found that tonight was no exception. I didn’t even have to leave our own garage to find a few cans of beer floating around in some ice water amongst the box-store brand colas. It was a brew I had often heard the parents making fun of for how watery it was, which was perhaps why there was still some left in the cooler, and which was fine by me, since I figured I should start with something as close to water as possible. I snuck them over the fence and found a spot on the
ground between the two parties. I could see theirs and hear ours.
I wasn’t used to drinking something bitter; everything I had drunk throughout childhood, aside from water, had been sweet. The closest comparison I could make to the taste of beer was the club soda I once had when Dad took me to an insurance convention and we went to an expensive restaurant and, not wanting to look juvenile by ordering a Coke, I was faked out by the word “soda” in the title. The club soda had also tasted like carbonated sea water, but since beer was supposed to create some sort of giddy feeling, I stuck with it and drank quickly enough to conduct my experiment, but not so fast that I felt bloated with belches awaiting their turn.
My initial reactions had little to do with lightness or euphoria. I felt ponderous and very focused on my surroundings, albeit in small doses and on very specific items; the bass line of the music from over my shoulder at The Ranch was a source of close scrutiny for a short while, then a small narrow window glowing from just below the roof line of a house in The Barrio in front of me caught my unremitting attention as I wondered what or who was casting the shadow that flowed through it every so often; I tried to see if the shadow adhered to a pattern, if the beats or seconds between its movements could be measured. I tried to connect the bass beat of the music to the restless shadow. I tried to forget what happened earlier that evening, which I had assumed the beer would help me do, since forgetting struck me as a key reason why our parents were drinking so much, but I found the alcohol made the memories that much sharper, the recollections more vivid.
I still had one more full can remaining when I decided to stop the experiment and summarize my findings, lying back and looking up at the stars for inspiration. That’s one thing I always appreciated about The Ranch’s distance from civilization: you could see every possible star visible to the naked eye. I found it interesting that people seemed to rely on sex and booze to help them forget their troubles, or ease their loneliness, when from what I could tell based on my brush with each, all circumstances were amplified instead. Maybe the effects varied from person to person. Regardless, I decided that both were better suited for good times rather than bad, since they seemed to enhance whatever peak or valley was providing the backdrop for the screwing and drinking being done.
I laughed into the sky, up to the stars, at fancying myself such an undiscovered genius. Oh, if only the world knew. If only someone who could spread the word were lying there with me, and could edit my thoughts to make them more coherent to those in need of what I had to say. But I was alone in the dark, on the other side of my fence and beyond the circle of light cast by The Barrio. I sat up and looked around, imagining that this is how animals see our world, the same perspective of the raccoon we had driven from the master bedroom of the North house.
I stood and started making up my own animal spirit dance, lunging and prancing with a high-pitched wavering moan. I thought of how much more impressive it would be with bells jangling from my wrists and ankles, and a deep drum beat, and a magnificent outfit of feathers and animal heads, and about two dozen other people doing it with me.
“So this is why people formed tribes,” I said in between wails. “To make their spirit dances kick ass.”
Then I laughed at myself again, at my wit and my stupidity, and added, “So this is why people drink.”
I raised the intensity of my dancing; I shoved some gravel into the two empty beer cans and shook them rhythmically in lieu of a tribe, I howled louder, spun around faster, and stomped my feet harder, as though prodding any underground spirits to swallow this whole development, to return this patch of earth to a time before Rancho Hacienda ever happened. I whirled myself into a frenzy until I fell down and into hysterics.
Then I settled into a sleep I wasn’t sure should be called passing out or napping, as it didn’t last very long. The parties were still going on at The Barrio and The Ranch. Each was more subdued, though; attendance dwindled on the dirt paths of Miggy’s neighborhood, and the music had been turned down in mine. I got up and dusted myself off and rubbed my scalp, sending mini dirt clods and pebbles flying from it. The remaining full can of beer caught enough light to catch my eye. I picked it up and out of curiosity threw it as high into the sky as I could to see if it would explode when it came back down. It did slightly, a small hissing dribble coming from the top, but not enough to be satisfying. So I threw it again, enjoying the feeling of doing the kind of thing we all did before the invasion of the parents. This time it spewed a fountain of beer that waved back and forth as the can rolled to and fro from the pressure being released.
When the show was over, I sprung back over our fence and went up to my room for a fitful sleep, alternating between anxiety at having to face Shay in the morning, and sadness at having to say good-bye to her.