Part 13 (1/2)
I eyed them appreciatively. ”I'm still not gonna dance,” I said.
Flash rolled his eyes and we took turns sucking up the good stuff until the c.o.ke was long gone and my sinuses started to burn.
For the rest of the evening, we subsisted on sc.r.a.ps of leftover snack food from the trip up-beef jerky, cheese curls, and warm Mountain Dew-and since we could no longer sit still, we resorted to a somewhat frenetic and disjointed version of charades. We alternated positions in the front of the room, performing wildly animated renditions of song t.i.tles and TV shows, while the viewer basically ignored the game from the couch, eventually looking up and saying something like: ”I give up.”
”Lucille Ball, stupid. I Love Lucy I Love Lucy. Duh!”
To mellow us out, we did chilled Jell-O shots off one another's bellies until the sky lightened up and I came to realize that Flash's parents' cabin was a riverfront property.
”Come have almost-s.e.x with me,” Flash pleaded, slapping the empty spot next to him on the oriental rug. There was a big difference back then, it's worth pointing out, between ”s.e.x” and ”almost-s.e.x.” A girl could have engaged in ”everything but,” been promiscuous enough to make even Madonna proud, but still, no matter how skilled she was at giving head, crossing that last frontier was a big deal. It was ”reserved” for someone special.
I settled in next to Flash and he kissed the side of my neck with his parched, sun-cracked lips before gnawing gently on my ear. ”b.u.mp, charlie, nose candy,” he whispered. ”She, her, lady flake . . .”
That's pretty much the last thing I remember from that night- Flash's warm breath on my earlobe, the litany of c.o.ke nicknames, and his itchy socks against my ankles as the ceiling fan whipped around, creating dark, elongated triangles that cut, repeatedly, across our strung-out faces.
The next morning, I woke up naked but for a wide-brimmed sombrero adorned, all the way around, with little bells-the kind you typically find on cats' collars. I've no idea where the straw hat came from or why I'd woken up wearing it; but it jingled with earsplitting clarity as I made my way down the hall to the bathroom, the lumpy comforter draped around my bare shoulders and drag-DEBORAH ging behind me. When I flipped up the toilet seat, there, in the bowl, was Flash's limp and waterlogged social security card floating around and around and around in the now blueish water. His runny, blurred signature was still legible: ging behind me. When I flipped up the toilet seat, there, in the bowl, was Flash's limp and waterlogged social security card floating around and around and around in the now blueish water. His runny, blurred signature was still legible: Ronald P. Anson Ronald P. Anson.
Ronald. His real name was Ronald.
Roughly a year after my rendezvous with Flash, my family moved from Pittsburgh to Philly so that my mom could take a ”real job, with benefits” at Temple University. She was a clerk in the admissions office but h.e.l.l-bent on the idea that if she held the job long enough, she'd somehow get smarter by osmosis. During this time we vacationed in Brigantine, a sleepy South Jersey island nearly as populated with dive bars and drug dealers as it was with washed-up sand crabs and tall, gra.s.sy weeds. There was never enough money for designer-brand clothes or frivolous food items or the slicker-looking school supplies, but somehow my mom had managed the mortgage on a small beach bungalow. She went in on it with Viki, and they alternated weekends.
Situated just across the bay from Atlantic City, Brigantine was a bedroom community for casino workers. Each evening, card dealers and c.o.c.ktail waitresses, hotel maids, bartenders, and lounge singers made the trek over the bridge onto the glittering Vegas ”mini-me” strip. Here, barely out of earshot of gagging slot machines spitting up coins, is where I lost my virginity for the third time, the one I count as ”official.” I was nineteen, not yet aware of what had really happened with Flash, and still holding out for ”that special someone.” It's what goes on record in the annals of ”important girl moments” in my mind because a) it involved another person, and b) I remembered it.
I was on c.o.ke quite literally that night-a makes.h.i.+ft bed of flattened cola boxes laid out discretely by a bank of sand dunes on the beach. The little nook, sandwiched between a spindly wood fence and a ten-foot-high mound of sand flecked with bits of jagged sh.e.l.l, was a landmark of sorts-couples tramped there after dark for some privacy-but it never received a deserved nickname, like ”makeout point.”
Sean was a bartender at the Big Brown Bar, or ”B-cubed” as we called it, a local dive with a jukebox that leaned toward reggae and soul, and a shabby back porch that emptied onto the beach. We'd met in a darts tournament. As I stared down the bull's-eye, nibbling the inside of my cheek to harness my concentration, I caught Sean ogling. I reminded him of an old girlfriend, he told me later. I had the same pouty mouth.
What I came to notice about Sean, once he sparked my interest and I'd gone back, repeatedly, to B-cubed, was his erratic temperament. One night he'd be charged up and tending bar as if it were an extreme sport, all but tossing bottles in the air like Tom Cruise in c.o.c.ktail c.o.c.ktail. The next, he'd be sulky and sullen, quickly irritated. But like so many of the girls who padded behind him, I sat there night after night-ingesting ridiculous amounts of greasy fried mushrooms and teaching myself to blow smoke rings from b.u.mmed Camel Lights-until he remembered my name. His mood swings would come to make sense. Sean made an okay living mixing drinks, but his rent came from c.o.ke.
B-cubed sported a somewhat uninspired nautical theme, with lots of dark wood and hanging, knotted rope. From the porthole above the toilet in the bathroom, one could see Atlantic City in the distance, a toy, snow-globe skyline glittering against the sooty sky, its fuzzy reflection calling attention to itself in the murky water below. Brigantine was to A.C. what Brooklyn had been to Manhattan in the 1970s: a place you aspire to leave. But Sean never got Sat.u.r.day Night Fever. Sean took pride in hardly ever leaving the island. The last time he embarked from the fourteen-mile stretch of gravel and sand had been nine months earlier, to have a tooth pulled. Sean detested Atlantic City. ”It's a playground for s...o...b..es,” he'd say.
”s...o...b..es,” that's what they called the summering crowd.
Because s...o...b..es wore their weathered, strappy leather sandals, flip-flops from the five-and-dime, beat-up Converse All Stars onto the beach; then, after the methodical ritual of spreading out oversize towels, setting down coolers, and muttering some form of ”ah, smell that fresh air,” the flock of s...o...b..es would enter into a flurry of buckle- and shoe-strap-releasing and the subsequent, near-ch.o.r.eographed wriggling of newly emanc.i.p.ated toes. The locals, they didn't mind hot sand on their feet. The locals went barefoot.
We were s...o...b..es of the worst variety. We actually owned a house on the island. And B-cubed was situated, a little too conveniently, on the corner of our street, so that you had to walk past its rowdy entrance-which reeked of sweat, salt water, and coconut-scented tanning lotion-after every stint on the beach. The bar was popular not because it was any good, but because the owners were generous to underage drinkers and it was, simply, the nearest toilet around if you weren't the type to pee in the ocean.
Sean was in an especially spry mood the night we hooked up, full of jerky, happy movements and short bursts of laughter, all white teeth and lanky, toned limbs, lips so fleshy and red it was as if he'd just soaked them in a Dixie cup of Kool-Aid. I was sitting at the bar with several other s...o...b..e girls from the city who had equally weighty crushes on Sean, facing the open door, when a yellow Camaro with a wheezy m.u.f.fler pulled up and Sean slipped out. I recognized the driver from Island Pizza. He was still in uniform. Through the doorframe I could make out a slice of activity: Sean leaning a little too deeply into the driver's window, laughing nervously and glancing periodically over his shoulder. There was the quick, surrept.i.tious exchange of cash accompanied by another cautionary glance in either direction, then a handshake and ”See ya later, man. Yep.”
Back inside, Sean was leaning against a pinball machine thumbing through a wad of bills, when the Camaro screeched to a halt and did a 360. He stuffed the cash in his pocket and headed back out, a nothing-to-hide lilt in his step, walking straight into the car's headlights-too overtly confident to be anything but scared s.h.i.+tless. The Island Pizza guys were rankled over something and, illogically, as their voices rose they b.u.mped up the volume on their tinny car stereo.
Finally: ”Can you turn that G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing off?” Sean said. ”Fer Christ's sake.”
I couldn't make out what, exactly, the Island Pizza guys were accusing him of. But Sean's voice was fairly audible.
”No way, man, I work here. Weigh it out in the back of the car.”
More protesting from within the Camaro.
”Nuh-uh, there's nowhere private here, I've got customers, I'm on the clock.”
Perhaps I craved adventure, and this was my late-teen, melodramatic way of claiming it; or maybe it was the beer, which was finally kicking in; or possibly the confidence induced from finally having perfected the smoke rings. Who knows? But I strode outside and rammed up against Sean, as if I'd known him since we were kids. ”You need a place to go?” I said. ”Because my house is right there, the little yellow one on the corner.”
That was the pinnacle of the drama, however. The Island Pizza guys, Sean's ”clients,” as he referred to them, had been mistaken about his cheating them. And to smooth over the discrepancy, they offered us each a line before finally cranking their car radio back up and rumbling off down the street. Sean and I walked back to the bar, but when we got there, he led me past B-cubed and onto the beach. ”It's late, they don't need me anymore tonight,” he said. ”Come on.”
As we reclined on the sand, I mistook the gnawing in my stomach, the b.u.t.terflies, for some premature version of love. ”You're so cool, you know that?” Sean said. ”Thanks for doing that. Really, really cool. Yeah.” He stretched out the ”yeah,” a Jersey thing. ”Yeehhh.” Then he held my face and stared into my eyes as if they weren't mine, in a way that was far too familiar, too loaded with intimacy, for the short time we'd known one another. ”Yeah, you're all right.” And then we did it; simple as that.
Later, as we lay in each other's arms, the cardboard cola boxes under our bare backs, Sean turned onto his side and kissed my eyelids gently. He traced the bow of my upper lip with his index finger-over and over again-and, just before nodding off to sleep, he silently mouthed what appeared to be ”Trina.” Which, even under the muted rumble and crash of ocean waves, isn't remotely close to my name.
I spent the next morning tanning with a school friend, Amy, who'd driven up to spend labor day weekend ”with you!” she'd said. But she was a casual cla.s.smate, the type of friend who rotates in and out of your life according to the semester schedule; and I suspected she was really after a good browning of the neck and shoulders before cla.s.ses started up the next week. I didn't particularly enjoy sunbathing; but the night out with Sean had been significant enough that only a grossly girlish activity-gossiping while baking baby-oil-slicked bodies on those silver foils, say-would do.
As I filled her in on the night before, our tangerine wine coolers nearly the exact shade of our toenails, Amy went from puzzled to agitated to flat out rude: ”I don't get it. Why would you lie to me?”
”What do you mean?”
”You know I don't care how many people you've slept with. So why say Sean was your first?”
”I have no idea what you're talking about.”
”I know about Flash. We have Mid East History together. He told me all about your road trip.”
”But we didn't sleep together. I mean, we slept slept, but that was pretty much it.”
”That's not how he tells it.”
We went back and forth like this for a while, then Amy peeled the now warm and wilted cuc.u.mber slices from her eyelids and tossed them into the sand. She stood up and dusted off her roasted s.h.i.+ns and calves. ”Whatever,” she said.
I sat on the beach alone for quite some time after that, wringing my brain for details about that night along the Susquehanna River; but all I remembered with any clarity was the careening c.o.ke binge and my last moments with Flash before, apparently, pa.s.sing out.
Flash could have been lying, of course. Amy Amy could have been lying, though I don't see why. She'd only recently taken a liking to Sean and she wasn't even a s...o...b..e, not officially. But there was no way to know for sure after what had happened in Viki's office so many years earlier. No proof, in other words. So I wrote off the first time as unfortunate, the second time as a sloppy mistake, and I trudged back to join Amy inside the Big Brown Bar. It was Friday and still warm outside and, well, could have been lying, though I don't see why. She'd only recently taken a liking to Sean and she wasn't even a s...o...b..e, not officially. But there was no way to know for sure after what had happened in Viki's office so many years earlier. No proof, in other words. So I wrote off the first time as unfortunate, the second time as a sloppy mistake, and I trudged back to join Amy inside the Big Brown Bar. It was Friday and still warm outside and, well, the first time the first time-that was worth a round of shots.
After I returned to college for my senior year, Sean did a stint at the Jersey State Penitentiary for dealing. And when Viki was carted off to rehab that fall by her newly appointed fiance-a ”sea captain,” he called himself, but really he just operated one of those boats that carried tourists across the bay-we sold the beach house because my mom couldn't keep up the payments. Flash, who knows what happened to him; but he was well-equipped with a large vocabulary, at least. And except for a few lines off the back of a navy three-ring binder on the way to a concert that year, I didn't bother much with c.o.ke anymore. I preferred beer and pot and mineral water with a spritz of lime. But one thing was certain: I walked differently now. I held my head up high and walked like a lady.
I had to. You know, consider the alternative.
Leslie Barton
NINA REVOYR NINA REVOYR was born in j.a.pan and raised in Tokyo, Wisconsin, and Los Angeles. She is the author of was born in j.a.pan and raised in Tokyo, Wisconsin, and Los Angeles. She is the author of The Necessary Hunger The Necessary Hunger and and Southland Southland, which was a Book Sense 76 pick, won the Ferro-Grumley Award and a Lambda Literary Award, and was named one of the ”Best Books of 2003” by the Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times.
golden pacific