I’m already awake when I hear the groan of the newspaper truck out my window. Then the thud of the bundle in the driveway. The sun is just a smudge of orange through the trees but it’s already hot and steamy. I’m so tired I don’t know how I’m going to pedal the route and I try to remember whether I still have some of those uppers Ricci gave me that he stole from his mother. Something like that could get me through. But if I have it right, I only have a ragged joint left and some No-Doz.
This is all my own fault. Exhaustion is a consequence of energy expended. It was past midnight when my parents closed their door and I crept quietly downstairs. Opened the liquor cabinet with the key they hide under the plant. Slugged some of my father’s Dewar’s. Chased it with some of my mom’s schnapps. And when I turned on The Tomorrow Show, Tom Snyder was pointing at me with a cigarette in his hand. Would you please join me in welcoming to our show, The Clash! Topper rattled on the snare like a machine gun and Strummer punched at his telecaster, shaking and hollering. I felt my heart going. There he was. The man I knew could save me, beamed into our house all the way from New York City. That mysterious otherworld my father disappears to more and more lately.
I pull on a t-shirt and shorts, my white canvas Converse sneakers with the holes in the sides. Then I’m downstairs and into the kitchen where the dishes are piled up from the night before. My father’s empty beer cans are collected on the countertop and I feel his presence up there, listen for his snoring. But this early there’s just the buzz of the July heat coming through the window screens like an overture to some alien invasion.
I go into the basement and then the bomb shelter cutaway, breathe in the radon and the mold. Built in the sixties and seventies, all the houses in our neighborhood have this extra block and mortar room. Ours is empty, except for folding lawn chairs. No canned vegetables or dry goods stockpiled. We’re not that paranoid, careful family afraid of the bomb, prepared for the apocalypse. We figure Russia’s missiles are aimed at New York City, not us, far enough outside the blast radius in the loamy upstate greenbelt. Here we sleep soundly like nothing is wrong.
I pull one of the chairs over and stand on it to look for my stash. A shoe box I hide atop the rusting steel cross beam of the foundation. Just like I thought, the inventory is low, so I pop a couple of No-Doz, grab the sorry looking joint, and then I’m back upstairs and outside with the bugs and the humidity and the neighborhood cats wandering back home, groggy like me, from wherever they were during the night. I find the bundle in the driveway and cut the string with my pocketknife, start folding the newspapers the way my father taught me and place them into my canvas shoulder bag: headline on the outside and at the top. Tight and crisp so they fly when I throw them.
When that’s done I sit back, light a cigarette and look around. I love this time before anyone is awake. Away from the mess of the house. Before my sister starts her yelling at people and my baby brother starts shitting himself and my mother tells me to change his diaper. The sun isn’t all the way up yet and people aren’t out running around and ruining everything. Just the cicadas humming and the sound of the gypsy moths eating the leaves on the trees.
I smoke my cigarette and think how stupid it is that when my father is home I feel so on edge. And when he’s away, I want him here, as if something is missing. I start to wonder again about this other woman and whether he sees her when he is in the city. But I know that’s just a waste of time, there’s nothing I can do about it anyway, and so I get off my ass, sling the bag over my shoulder and get the bike going, winding through the streets and dodging the mobs of black flies. I survey the houses as I pass and play my game of trying to guess what the families inside are like.
On the other side of the neighborhood there’s a house all boarded up with plywood like it’s haunted. Black smoke stains still visible on the outside. Two years ago some guy strangled his wife, then lit the place on fire and shot himself in their bedroom. Sirens in this town are unusual, so every kid in the neighborhood rode over and assembled in front to watch the blaze. Dropped our bikes in the street and stood there slack-jawed watching the siding melt and the greasy flames curl under the eaves. Even from far away you could feel the heat. Smell the carpeting and the drapes and the tongue and groove paneling being cooked. We watched the firefighters unroll these big heavy hoses, open the hydrants and douse the whole thing in a steady shower. And then eventually, after dark, under the bright light of a noisy diesel lamp, they brought the bodies out in white sheets.
I remember thinking how weird it was that the place was so neatly manicured. The sculpted bushes, fresh paint, lush lawn. The regal front door and perfectly hung shutters. And then fire busting through an upstairs window, raining glass down on the fancy brick walkway. I had this feeling like maybe all of it was something that should have happened at our house instead. Our driveway is cracked and sunken. The garage roof sagging and mossy. Gutters choked with pine needles. Before he leaves for New York City, my father writes me a list of chores: stack the firewood, sweep the garage, rake the leaves, cut the grass. But our lawn is scarred with bare patches of sand and when I push the mower around, large brown clouds rise up and drift down the street like ghosts haunting the neighborhood.
My father is away at work more and more for longer stretches of time, and when he comes home I hear him talk about the Bronx, Queens, Manhattan. Places I haven’t been and know only from the news or movies I see on HBO. I hear him explain how he’s trying to get approval for a new underground highway that will run from 42nd Street south to something called the Battery. They’ll dig a tunnel under the city, he says, running parallel to the Hudson River, and replace the closed, crumbling Westside Highway. He describes the Battery as a section of listing, rotting piers that extend into the river from a toxic landfill the size of ten football fields.
I hear him say New York City is about to go bankrupt and he describes the crime he sees. The sooty pollution hanging like a Saturn ring and hiding the tops of buildings. The smell of urine everywhere. From the evening news and his kitchen table stories I have images of burned-out buildings, graffitied subway cars, acres of smoldering trash. Cars stripped bare and abandoned on concrete blocks. He brings home copies of the New York Post in his beat-up leather briefcase and the headlines make my heart race: 24 Hours of Terror. No One Is Safe. Fear City. The photos are like scenes out of that movie The Warriors and when Swan and Ajax take on the Furies and the Orphans, my father points at the screen and says That’s the way it is alright.
I have come to understand that to know New York City is to know my father. To understand where he disappears to. When he leaves, his suitcase is heavy and bulging, and I look at him, into his eyes, and send out a wish that he will one day take me with him.
I pedal and sweat and think about fall when I’ll be a freshman at an all-boys Catholic military school in Troy. I don’t tell anyone how nervous I am about the new kids or navigating the city bus to and from the campus, the rumors that the Christian Brothers and the military staff beat the students. The fights in public school that landed me in detention have taught me that fear is an impractical emotion. I tell myself I can take a punch and secretly hope that Troy is as gritty as I picture New York City to be. Like The Warriors or Richard Price’s The Wanderers, I wonder if there’s a gang I can join and imagine myself fighting the Troy High students in back alleyways and abandon warehouses.
When I’m finished with the paper route I don’t feel much like going home. So I ride north on Beechwood and take a right on Hemlock. Both streets border a shabby nine-hole pitch-and-put golf course. A rusted chain link fence runs along the roadside and sad scrub-pines dot the fairways. The grass is scorched in long stretches and mottled green discs of algae grow on the surface of the black water ponds. But men are out there sweating in checkered shorts just the same, wearing black socks and white V-neck t-shirts, towing their clubs behind them on two-wheeled pull carts. I ride slowly past the little red clapboard shack with the blonde girl in the white halter top who hands out the scorecards and stubby scoring pencils at the first tee. She has her transistor radio going and Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” ricochets around the open spaces. Lost inside, adorable illusion and I cannot hide. I circle back again for another glance and think maybe this time she might see me. But I know I’m invisible so I pedal off to the other side of the course and find the cut in the fence and pull my bike inside. Lay it down in the tall grass.
This spot is shaded and hidden by a group of white pines near the third hole. The green on the other side of the trees. The tee maybe 80 yards across another pond fed by an orange stream delivering a mysterious foam like root beer. From here I can see up and down the road in both directions but no one can see me. I come here when my parents are fighting. Or to escape my father when he wants to drag me to the house he’s trying to renovate in the country. My mother warns him that the repairs are sucking up what little money we have. It all creates a blanket of worry we can’t seem to throw off. He started this project before interest rates went out of sight and lines at the gas station meant no new sneakers. Patches ironed onto my threadbare Levi’s. He drags me out of bed on the weekends and we go to the house, haul demolition to the local dump, hang drywall, lay insulation, working as quickly as we can. It never seems to be fast enough.
I take the newspaper bag off my shoulder, ball it up for a pillow and stretch out, smoke the joint, and stare at the passing clouds for a while. The breeze makes the trees whisper and I listen for their words. Close my eyes and eventually nod off for I don’t know how long. I dream I’m Richie White in Over the Edge. I wear a black leather vest and the scars across my neck and chest and arms are gone, my skin white and immaculate. This gives me a new confidence I’ve not known. I run from the cops through arid landscapes under a cloudless sky, hide out among tall weeds and sage brush. Joe Strummer appears in his Wayfarers and Mohawk, tells me to fight for my rights. I steal a car, roll it over in a fiery crash and the flames rise up around me. The cute blonde girl at the golf course cries over my casket and I see my parents grieving. I’m hovering above it all, floating, and taking it all in. They clutch each other sobbing and seem to finally understand my anger and sorrow.
I wake to the sound of distant voices, sit up and look across the fairway through the trees. They’re out there on the tee box, all hairy legs and black socks, beer bellies and red faces. I down a couple more of the No-Doz and pull my bike through the cut in the fence, and roll back out onto the road.
It’s like the heat has sucked the oxygen from the atmosphere. The sun like a giant ray gun aimed on the back of my neck. I pedal to the pool, coast into the parking lot and up to the double glass doors propped open with cinder blocks. Normally there’s no way I would be here, but I’m high, and I can’t go home, and the heat is too much. Kids are everywhere, milling around in bare feet and sun burns, chlorine-bleached hair. Sucking on freeze pops they buy at the front desk, the clear plastic sleeves scattered across the pavement. There’s another chain link fence around the pool, maybe eight feet tall with a pond on the back side of the property that’s rank with sewage on hot days like today. The baseball fields are to the south, the sagging two-story club house to the north. I recognize a lot of faces but I don’t bother with conversation and go inside, walk past the shirtless college kid in a blue speedo checking pool passes. He shouts after me about my ID but I wave him off and say I’ll bring it next time.
Inside, there’s the cacophony of voices rising into the blue sky, the tanned lifeguards perched in tall chairs at each corner getting paid to sit around in their sunglasses and red bathing suits, twirling whistles at the end of lanyards. I take off my shirt and shoes and stash them under a picnic table, and scan the water for an open spot to go in. But standing there I become aware of the eyes on me.
A group of girls in bikinis standing in the shallow end begins to whisper behind cupped hands. Some small child on the pool deck points at me and his mother pushes his arm down, spins him around and walks him away. I look down at my chest and see how the light emphasizes the scars and red swirls of skin, thick and raised, angry and raw. It’s like I’ve been turned inside out from my collar bones to my stomach, blotches of burn marks like pink paint on my biceps, and jagged markings across my neck.
I hurry to the pool edge, drop down into the cool water and the noises go away, the staring. I sink to the bottom and think of how I’d like to stay here. I start counting, watch the kicking legs out there under the surface, hearing only muffled voices now. When I get to thirty my lungs start to sting. At sixty, stars blossom in my vision alternating with frayed clouds of gray and black. At ninety I have to pop back up to the busy surface again and into the laughter and bright sun. I gasp for air and cough, swim over to the side and hang onto the lip of the pool. Disappearing for a while has worked. No one is pointing, everyone seems to have moved on, and from here I figure I can wait to exit when there isn’t a lot of traffic.
For as long as I can remember I’ve gotten questions like, Were you in a fire? Does it still hurt? Questions I don’t want to answer. I try not to feel sorry for myself. My father tells me You have to get over this. So, I think of ways to get over it. Cut out newspaper and magazine clippings about kids that have it worse than me: brain tumors, birth defects, car accidents that end in disfigurement, paralysis. I save the stories in a folder or post them on the wall of my bedroom as a reminder.
Out of nowhere, the lifeguard in her chair above me blows her whistle and shouts at a little kid, maybe eight, not to run around the pool deck or he’ll have to sit it out. YOU mister! Slow down, she yells. The whistle has the effect of quieting everyone, and he stops with a look of terror on his face, bursts out crying and slinks away. I know that kind of terror. Being the center of unwanted attention. I remember being that vulnerable. When something like what she did from her perch up there in that painfully blue sky could leave a mark. I look up at her. Blonde hair pulled back, perfect skin the color of honey, her nipples hard in her red suit. She was that young once. I don’t know why she doesn’t remember.
“You love blowing that whistle don’t you.”
She looks down at me and tilts her head. “What did you say?”
“What else can you do with that pretty little mouth?” It just comes out of me. Like the words are someone else’s.
She stands up, blows the whistle again, louder and longer this time, and looks out across the pool to the guard shack, waving her arms and pointing down at me. Then she descends the ladder and even in my dulled state I gather what’s happening and lift myself out. But before I can get to my clothes stashed at the picnic table she’s already on me yelling: Who taught me to talk like that? Who do I think I am? When I finally turn around, Speedo is in my face.
“Time to leave, tough guy.”
I pick up my things and try to get my shirt on but I’m wet and clumsy and it won’t go past my shoulders, so I pull it off and focus on tying my sneakers instead. “Look at him,” Speedo hisses. “You seen anything like that?” The girl slaps his arm but he laughs. “What? Seriously.”
With my sneakers on now I stand up and light a cigarette, and Speedo tells me I can’t smoke here. But I give him the finger and look out at everyone watching this scene unfold where I play a starring role. I contemplate the long walk across the pool yard in front of such an audience, take a drag of my Marlboro and blow it in the direction of Speedo. This makes him angry and he closes the distance, and I get that feeling: an electricity that turns something on inside me. Suddenly I am Ajax in The Warriors, ready to take on someone bigger, stronger, but she grabs him, says, “John, stop.”
I turn and head out. My shirt off. Walking the pool deck in the sun. Speedo follows behind and throws more names at me. Tells me he’ll see me around. I can’t hide. But it’s just noise now and I’m already gone in my mind. Wishing Speedo took a swing. Thinking about Ajax and Swan and Cochise. They fought their way through the night to safety. All the way to Coney Island from the Bronx. All the way to dawn. The ocean with its arms open wide to take them in. But there’s nothing and no one like that here for me I know, and by the time I cross the pool yard my scarred skin has dried and I’ve decided to pedal to Hascol’s place and see if he has more weed.
~
I pedal across the ball diamond and onto some old, rutted cow path. That takes me to the farthest reaches of the subdivision where the construction halts and the empty hay fields pick back up. In the distance, sagging red barns seem swallowed by the tall grass. Remnants of the dairy farms all of this used to be.
Out here, the paved road ends abruptly, like time has stopped. Exposed roots tangle the ground that haven’t been grubbed out yet. A couple of backhoes have been left in place, their deep corduroyed tracks baked into the dried mud, and sections of black iron drainage pipe are stacked up taller than me. I lay my bike down, climb up into the cab of one of the trucks and light another cigarette, place my feet up on the dash, and listen to my own breathing. Nothing moves in the heat. A dead calm.
I wait a while and let the stillness seep in, try to forget what just happened. When I’m alone like this something comes to me I can’t explain. Something that’s like being gone but still here. A place and sensation of in between. Something I don’t have a name for.
I think of my mother. When she tells me the story, she describes holding me in her lap in my father’s Pontiac. He was speeding through the streets of Albany to St. Peter’s Hospital, blowing through red lights and stop signs. I was twenty months old. It was a large pot of water from the stove that came over the top of me at full boil. She tells me she saw whole sheets of skin slough off from my chest and neck, fold and slip away in front of her. One, then a minute or so later, another.
~
When I roll up to Hascol’s place his guitar is coming through that Marshall amp and out his open bedroom window. Full gain and the fuzzy effect of the overdrive going. I let myself in through the front door and the air is so much cooler. Heavy velvet drapes block out the windows, and when I remove my shoes, this plush orangey wall-to-wall carpet swallows my toes. I take the stairs and go down the hall and when I open his door he looks up in between licks of “Sweet Leaf” and smiles. The usual cutoff jean shorts and that mop of blonde hair.
“Hey, amigo. What’s happening?”
“Just got thrown out of the pool. Almost came to blows with the lifeguards.”
Hascol shakes his head. “Fuck those losers, man.”
“Yeah. I guess. You have?”
“A friend in need,” he says, and unshoulders the guitar, rifles through some clothes in his dresser and comes up with his pipe. But then we discover its missing the screen so we find some scissors and head to the basement laundry room and cut a tiny square out of the lint catch from the clothes drier. Once we’re good to go we light up, exhaling into the drier vent like that might make a difference.
Eventually we go back up to his room and he sits on his bed and I stretch out on the floor and look out his window while he plinks on the guitar some more. Clouds drift by and from up here I can see most of the subdivision. The pool, the clubhouse. Groups of homes all resembling one another built in rows and half circles. Then the wilting corn fields in the distance that used to be farmland. I can’t help that all of it reminds me of Matt Dillon again in Over the Edge, and I look over at Hascol while the lines come to me.
“My son and his friends are part of this community,” I say.
He laughs and quotes me back. “No more acid for me, man.”
He plays some Neil Young and I sing a few lines. Your Cadillac has got a wheel in the ditch and a wheel on the track. And then we say nothing for a while. Just watch the occasional car roll by, or some other kid passing on his bike, the sun just melting the road tar into gluey mud.
Somewhere in the quiet, Hascol nods off, and after I don’t know how long I notice the light has shifted. I get up and go down the hall to the kitchen. There’s the usual linoleum floor, gold countertop, shit brown cabinets, and I open the fridge, squat down to survey what they have. And just as I’m poking around, I sense someone behind me. I turn slowly and its Hascol’s mother standing there in her underwear and a t-shirt, looking like she just woke up.
“And who are you?” she says all groggy.
I stand up, close the refrigerator door. Try to smile. “Matt’s friend,” I say.
“Well, Matt’s friend. Have you and Matt been smoking pot?”
I look at her while I think of what to say. She’s younger than my other friends’ mothers. Beautiful. Her hair hanging halfway across her face. I realize my mouth is open but there are no words. I stand there and hope Hascol will be showing up soon.
“That’s what I thought,” she says, and shuffles past me to the sink in her bare feet. I watch her legs where they disappear under the hem of her t-shirt. She gets some water from the faucet. Then turns and leans back against the counter like she needs to go back to bed. “If you and Matthew want to do that sort of thing, like I always tell him, please go outside.”
There’s a long pause. I can’t tell if she’s expecting an answer or not. I don’t know if she wants one. I realize I’m still holding the refrigerator door handle. Like I’m on an amusement ride awaiting the sudden G-force drop ahead. I let go of it, fidget and start contemplating a way out. An exit. And that’s when I see it. This painting. On the wall of the adjacent room. A woman. Naked and holding a delicately placed sunflower just below her waist. There’s this yellowy glow behind her like a sunburst and I squint hard, see finally that it’s Hascol’s mom in the painting smiling back at me. It feels wistful and illusory but the portrait is a dead ringer. I look from the painting, then back to her standing at the sink, and then back to the painting again before I realize what I’m doing.
“What do you think?” she says. “I didn’t paint it. It was a gift. Someone I used to know.” I shift my weight around, try to think again of something to say, and listen for Hascol. Hope he’s awake. Hope he heard our voices and he’s coming now to rescue me. She turns from the painting to the window, stares out there like she’s been waiting on something a long time. Stares at the summer heat outside. Then back to me smiling. “Funny. It makes you uncomfortable. But it’s been hanging there so long I hardly notice it anymore.” We both look at the painting now, taking it in for a while. Just the sound of the refrigerator’s compressor working overtime. A dog barking from far away.
“There’s that cool light behind her,” I say. “I guess I kind of like that.” And she makes a surprised face, then squints her eyes at me.
“Oh, really?” she says. “Okay, Matt’s friend. What about the light?”
I take a breath, think of how to put it. And feel like I’m outside of myself again. That floating feeling. Like the dream earlier.
“Did you see Close Encounters of the Third Kind?” I say. She smiles again and I try not to look at her legs, or her almost see-through t-shirt. “You know the part at the end? When the spaceship doors open and there’s that light? The whole time there’s this thing the guy can’t figure out, right? Everyone thinks he’s nuts. His kids. His wife. He can’t explain what he’s feeling. But at the end the spaceship doors open and then we know. It was all about the light. That’s the thing he was looking for. It kinda reminds me of that.” She tilts her head, narrows her eyes. “Maybe if she turned around,” I say. “She would see it herself.”
She looks back to the painting and I look at it with her. And time seems to really slow down. I study how her hair falls gently across her bare shoulders. How the artist treated the curve of her waist and hips. The gentle contours, and the way her eyes look up at someone. Hope and an easy joy. The light behind her ethereal. A comfort.
I start to wonder who the person is that painted it for her. The artist. I want to ask. But even this high, I know better. He captured it just right, though. That moment in her life. She is in love. And she believes the person looking back is in love with her, too. You see it in her eyes. A belief. A time in her life we both know, standing in her kitchen like this, is gone.
“How old are you, Matt’s friend?” she says, after I don’t know how long. And then Hascol appears in the doorway, peeking around the corner looking a little nervous.
“Oh, hey Mom,” he says, stepping into the kitchen. He shoots me a glance, eyebrows raised, like Is everything cool here? And I nod, give him the thumbs up. “Mom?” he says again, but she’s off somewhere else, still looking at the painting. And smiling, but with tears in her eyes now. “You okay?”
~
Later, Ricci slides open the screen door and comes into the house like a panther from out of the night. Black hair, dark skin, wiry thin. He lives a short hike away through the subdivision in a raised ranch with his three brothers and his mom. My drug buddy when I need one. Always willing to gamble for a thrill. The sky is bleeding pink and orange, twilight giving way to dusk, something in those colors holding the capacity of adventure. “Let’s go,” he whispers impatiently, and I make a face like I’ve been waiting forever on his ass.
My mother calls to Ricci from the family room where she’s watching the news. Ears like sonar. I tell him to go talk to her while I fill a bag with my father’s beers. He disappears and I listen to him in there putting on the charm. We’re going to play capture the flag with some kids in the park, he says. Just another summer night. And she says be careful, her standard caution. I call back we won’t be too late, but don’t wait up just the same. And then we’re out the door and into the half-light of dusk.
We walk the streets with the bats crisscrossing overhead in drunken flight. Their silhouettes darker than the sky. I explain to Ricci that Hascol had some good stuff earlier today, and he tells me he has something even better. A real surprise. We cut through backyards to shave time, look into the windows as we pass. Lights coming on, filling up the houses, the blue flicker of televisions. News anchor narrations spilling out through open windows.
I think of my father, still not home, out there working. I don’t know where he sleeps when he is away and picture dank hotel rooms among the mean streets of New York, harrowing and lawless. And after a while, we find ourselves at the edge of some lush backyard lawn. Ricci stops and peers hard into the kitchen where this scene is unfolding. A family sitting down to dinner. Two small kids, the parents. No one we know. I pop open a couple beers, hand one over, and we watch.
They seem to move about carelessly, the father and mother, like it’s this way every night. Connected by an easy habit and routine. The moon is up now, casting tree shadows, and I look at Ricci looking at this family and wonder if he’s thinking of his mother. A few years ago, she fell in with a clique of born-again Christians and she’s convinced Ricci and his older brother are going to hell. She lays her hands on his forehead, closes her eyes and mutters gibberish she thinks is the holy spirit speaking through her soul to heal him, guide him, save his soul. It’s her pills he steals and now he takes one from a plastic snack bag and hands it over to me.
“What do we have here?”
“Go ahead, man. You’re gonna like it. Called a lemon.”
I slug it back with some beer. “Lemon,” I say. “Courtesy of Mom again?”
He nods and smiles. “Let the holy spirit in, man,” he says. “And if that doesn’t work, call in a prescription.”
We go back to watching the family some more, and I’m suddenly struck by how there’s a neatness in some people’s lives. A stillness and calm. Some of us, though, are immune to gravity. Some of us are spinning loosely in space, arms outstretched, just out of reach from one another. I think of that family in the house that burned down and look over at Ricci and he looks back at me, and I almost ask him if he knows about this, the floating sensation. But he finishes his beer and throws his empty into the bushes, motions it’s time to go.
We navigate a path through the clumps of woods in between the lots and my mind goes to a night, years ago, when my father and I were home alone, before my little brother was born. We were watching TV together and I was on the floor while he sat behind me in his chair. I think it was a Hogan’s Heroes re-run. The blundering Colonel Klink and Stalag 13. Debonair Colonel Hogan. When a commercial came on, I turned to ask my father something but he was gone. Confused, I wandered upstairs to look for him.
He was sitting on his bed with the phone, his back to me, the door opened a crack so I could see in. He had his elbows on his knees and he was looking down at the floor, the receiver up to his ear. I miss you too. I don’t know. Maybe next week. Maybe the week after. I pushed the door open and he turned, a look of surprise and concern. I have to go, he said and hung up. Hey pal. I didn’t know you were there.
Eventually Ricci and I get back onto the street and follow the music and voices to another raised ranch like so many others. We go around to the back where a group of older kids are sitting on the deck, the girls hanging on, the guys acting drastic and indifferent. Faces downlit from the floodlamp in the eaves. Hollow eyes, cheekbones like vampires. They cease the talk between them and regard us with contempt. Just in time I feel Ricci’s meds kick in with this bright clarity, like the beginning of a wonderful symphony, the violas and cellos sounding the beginning of a journey. And all of a sudden, I know exactly who I am. Everything is clean and crisp, even in the dull light. Ricci says, “What’s up motherfuckers?” like a pimp, like he belongs here, and I know he’s feeling it too. But no one answers, just dead stares like we’re too young to be here, like we just risked getting pounded.
We step into the kitchen through the open door and right away we’re in the crowd of bodies, pushing and pulsing. Black midges are crawling around the white ceiling and moths are batting themselves against the light fixtures and there’s laughter and shouting mixing with the stereo. Cigarette smoke hanging in the air.
Most everyone is bigger and taller than us and it’s hard seeing over shoulders. This is a party of juniors and seniors, and we’re slowed way down trying to cross the room. I try to stay with Ricci and shoulder through, but I’m shoved around and eventually we’re separated, pulled in different directions by tides of bodies. “Look for the keg,” he says to me before he’s swallowed up by the crush and swept into the big family room. I get pulled the opposite way and eventually make my way down a dimly lit hallway with more bodies assembled along the walls.
I come to what I gather is the living room. Built in bookcases line the walls with delicate pottery and gold vases. But all the ornate furniture is pushed into the corners to make room for a group of kids sitting cross-legged together in a circle, holding hands, laughing but acting a little nervous. And while I’m trying to figure out what’s going on, it takes me a few seconds, but I notice the blonde girl from the golf course. She’s wearing one of those wrap-crop shirts, tan lines showing, and this close I discover how blue her eyes are. The guy sitting next to her is saying something into her ear, trying to get her to laugh, knocking his shoulder against hers, and she smiles and looks at him sideways.
On the opposite side of the circle is a kid holding a metal box painted army green. Some of the paint is chipped away showing the brushed metal underneath and a black telephone receiver is attached to the top by a thick plastic cord. He shouts to the group and gets their attention, and they go quiet, and he tells them to join hands, get ready. One person grips the silver dial on the side of the box and the kid winds the metal handle and it makes a high-pitched whirring noise, and then the circle starts to scream, breaking hands, laughing and falling backward, taking deep breaths. Eventually I wander over to the kid with the metal box and ask him what it is.
“Army field radio, man. We found it in the basement. Newcombe’s old man was in Vietnam. Put your finger right there.” He winks and points to the silvery disc on top of the box that I figure is the contact.
I look at the blonde girl again. The kid next to her pulls her close, kisses her cheek, and then gets up and disappears with their beer cups. I don’t even think about it, Ricci’s mom’s stuff, the lemon, working some powerful magic now, and I go sit down in the empty space he left open next to her. It takes a minute but she looks my way, tilts her head a little until a smile forms.
“Hey, don’t I know you?” she says. And I nod, smile back. “Aren’t you a little young to be at this party?” I shake my head and we laugh together until the guy with the radio shouts that everyone should get ready again, and she bites her bottom lip looking into my eyes, holding my gaze, and doesn’t even look at the scars on my neck and arms. “You sure about this?” she says, and her breath comes to me warm and sweet and I nod again, so she says, “Okay, well here,” and takes my hand like it was made to be there. “Now close your eyes,” she says, and the kid with radio starts to count it down. “And try not to let go, okay?”
With my eyes closed, I focus on her hand and wait for what’s next. Ten…nine…eight… And suddenly I see my day in front of me. Everything is there. I see Strummer and The Clash on the TV from New York City. I see my paper route and each of the houses with those burnt crabgrass lawns, the dirty vinyl siding. I see those golfers, and the lifeguards at the pool. Speedo and the girl I should have treated better. There’s Hascol with his guitar and his beautiful mother standing in their kitchen with tears in her eyes. And I see my mom back home on the couch all alone, waiting on Dad to drop back in from whatever world he’s in now.
I see that other family eating dinner, too. Me and Ricci watching them from the boundary of their yard like we’re a million miles away. The dance they did together. So effortless, easy and simple. Five…four…three…
And I see the house I’m in now. I can see myself sitting on the floor. I’m floating above the room. Drifting again, uncaptured by gravity. And the electrons from the radio are suddenly visible to me. Bright, tiny, shimmering diamonds sent through this chain of people all the way to the blonde girl whose hand is securely in mine. And then it arrives, just like she said it would, the impulse to let go, to give up. But my hand is in hers and her voice is there, rising above all the others, clear and beautiful, calling out to me from across the universe: Hold on…hold on…hold on!
