Blackbird (18 page)

“The end,” I said. “Slow fade to black.”

“Johnnie Ray,” Marshall said after a moment, enfolding me into his arms again, “you are beautiful, you know.”

“Sure, sailor,” I snorted in my best Barbara Stanwyck who-needs-ya attitude, “you’d say that now. Now that I’ve laid bare my scarred little soul, and made an utter and complete spectacle of myself, I’m sure you feel quite sorry for me.” Then I was Bette Davis. “Well, I don’t want your pity.”

“Anybody ever tell you you can’t take a compliment for shit?”

And he jabbed his fingers into my belly.

I let out a western-movie wild-Indian war-whoop to make any of our respective Native American forebears proud, and leaped out of Marshall’s arms, landing sh-bap on the floor.

“Don’t ever
do
that,” I said between gasps. “I am
so
ticklish.”

“Oh,
are
we, now?” Marshall grinned fiendishly, his face a Lon Chaney grotesque, and crawled toward me on all fours, affecting a ghoulish laugh.

I crawled away backward, crab-style.

“Marshall … Marshall, don’t. Just don’t!” Marshall approached, slowly, slowly. “Marshall, don’t you dare” – I began to giggle in anticipation – “just don’t you – ”

And he was all over me, with six or seven hands and about a hundred tickling fingers, all over my chest and belly and armpits. I was soon completely helpless, laughing and shrieking and gasping for breath. I attempted in vain to fend off Marshall’s surprise attack, but was soon too weak with laughter to struggle. As I screamed and wept and nearly hyperventilated, Marshall suddenly stopped.

I lay on the floor, Marshall sitting straddling my waist, my eyes closed, trying to catch my breath, every now and then a leftover giggle leaking from between my lips.

I felt the warmth of Marshall’s breath on my face, and opened my eyes just as he kissed me for the second time, very softly, on the lips.

I lay back with what I hope was a passable take-me-I’m-yours Rita Hayworth attitude, and waited for Marshall to sweep me up into his arms and carry me into his bed. But when I opened my eyes again, Marshall was looking down at me, the corners of his lips lifted in a little smile.

“You’re beautiful,” he said, “but you’re silly.”

And then he was up, and in the kitchen, opening and closing drawers, looking for something.

“If I roll a joint, will you smoke it with me?” he called amid the racket he was raising.

I sat up quickly.

The question had come riding into town out of nowhere in particular, on a beast of questionable pedigree. It caught me off guard.

Here my main concern for the evening had been getting Marshall and me out of our clothes and into the nearest bed, and just when I thought maybe we were at last on the same wave-length, Marshall comes up with this.

Who was directing this movie, anyway?

“Uh … I’ve never done that before.”

“I thought not.” Marshall had located a baggie containing maybe a couple of tablespoons of pot (I had seen the stuff, been offered it on a couple of occasions – I was in Drama, after all – but had never accepted), and a sieve. “Will you?”

And I thought, God Bless America. I didn’t know. Would I?

The reason why I had never smoked the old devil weed before was simple garden-variety fear. Not that I’d ever
really
believed all those anti-drug films they’d been showing since junior high. I had always maintained the possibility that Sonny and Cher had been lying through their imperfect teeth as they extolled the dangers of marijuana. Besides, almost everybody I knew had smoked pot at least once – even some of the Mormons. And none of them had ever jumped out of a fifteen-storey window, head filled with smoke and delusions of flight. Not one of them had stepped in front of a speeding double-decker guided-tour bus, thinking himself the god of internal combustion. Or mistaken a gas flame for a chrysanthemum. Or finger-painted abstract art on walls with his own blood. Or been committed to a quiet, tasteful mental institution, believing himself to be a Lipton flow-thru tea bag.

Obviously, these were mere fictions, myths, and rumors trumped up by the police and the PTA to frighten some of America’s more gullible youth away from recreational narcotics. And, in at least one case, they had done their job only too well. For, while I had never been entirely convinced that smoking pot would turn a healthy young man’s brain into butterscotch-pie filling, neither had anyone really managed to convince me otherwise.

Suppose (I thought), suppose it only blew the minds of some people and not others? Maybe it had to do with body chemistry or genetics or something. Who was to say that I might not be that unlucky one-in-a-thousand, found in a corner of a sparsely furnished duplex in an inexpensive corner of town, glassy-eyed and drooling, mumbling, “I am an orange.”

Besides (I had very nearly forgotten), the stuff was illegal. God Bless! I never even jaywalked. Mother of Mercy, what was I getting into here?

What would Ricky Nelson have done?

“Well?” Marshall sat cross-legged on the floor facing me, with the little bag of mossy stuff, the sieve, some cigarette papers, and a saucer on the floor between his sandaled feet, and rolled a paper full of pot between his fingers. (I imagined the reefer and its surrounding paraphernalia, tagged Exhibits A, B, C, and D, after the entire police force burst in and found enough contraband to send us both up the river for a long, long time.)

“Well?” He licked the cigarette closed and slurped the length of it.

Decide decide decide.

Yes! No! I don’t know!

“Johnnie Ray” – Marshall stroked a slow figure-eight across the back of my hand with his fingertips – “there’s nothing to be afraid of.

Really, I think you’ll like it.”

I looked into Marshall’s wide-set deep-brown eyes. He smiled a long, slow one, made a Groucho Marxist gesture with his eyebrows and the joint, and said, “Hey, babe – take a walk on the wild side.”

Chapter Sixteen

I didn’t feel anything, at first.

“Of course you don’t feel anything,” Marshall said. “You don’t just take the smoke into your mouth and blow it out. Here: take a good, long hit. Take some air in with it. Good. Now, hold it.”

I felt a little silly, sitting cross-legged on Marshall MacNeill’s hardwood living-room floor, holding in big lungfuls of marijuana smoke, waiting for my mind to blow.

“Okay, now let it out.”

I exhaled a smokescreen.

“I still don’t feel anything.”

“Would you just give it a minute?” Marshall smiled, took the thin, rather inexpert-looking cigarette from my fingers, inhaled with expert-looking tf-tf-tfs, and offered the joint back to me.

“Take another one.” I smoked in imitation of Marshall. “You should be comin’ onto it pretty soon. This’s pretty fair shit.” I took in what seemed a goodly amount of smoke, and held it.

Suddenly, I felt my chest expanding, seemingly to bursting, and I coughed and coughed and uncontrollably coughed, and I rolled around on the floor clutching my chest and hacking, and I might have heard Marshall say something about water, and my stomach was spasming and I couldn’t breathe, just couldn’t catch my breath, and I thought I might throw up, and then Marshall was holding me, trying to hand me a glass of water – it was a Minnie Mouse glass from Disneyland – and I couldn’t seem to grip it. Then Marshall was practically feeding me some water. And slowly, slowly, I caught my breath.

As I did, I began to realize that I was feeling rather strange. Off balance. Not quite myself today, thank you.

And Marshall said, “Are you all right?”

And he looked so close, but his voice came from far, far away.

My head felt light as the steam from a cup of hot Nestle’s Quik.

And my body, oh my my my my body felt all fluffy and fuzzy, like my chest was made of fun fur, and my lungs of cotton candy.

Candy is dandy, I thought, but sex won’t – and I giggled a funny little Billie Burke giggle that seemed to come from somewhere across the room.

“Johnnie Ray?”

And he sounded so faaaaar awaaaaaay.…

“Johnnie Ray, you all right?” Marshall looked more beautiful to me than he had ever looked before. Like he was shot through gauze, like Loretta Young in
The Bishop’s Wife
.

I giggled that funny Glinda-the-Good-Witch giggle again.

“What?” Marshall laughed.

“What?” I laughed, at nothing in general and everything in particular. “I shouldn’t say, of course,” Marshall said, “but I think you’re stoned.” I was still laughing.

“Me, too.”

“Do you like it?”

“I think so.”

I looked around the room. The light seemed not so much light as a glow. It looked as if the evening had been shot in Technicolor by Twentieth Century-Fox, circa 1944. I suddenly thought of
The
Gang’s All Here
, with Alice Faye and Carmen Miranda; and Benny Goodman (and his orchestra), who performed a silly song called “Padooka”: “If you want to, you can rhyme it with Bazooka.”

“Bazooka,” I said absently, stroking the cool floor, the wood grain seeming to come alive beneath my fingers.

“What?”

“What?”

Marshall and I lolled about in and around each other’s arms, for just how long I could not have begun to guess – time seemed as soft and gooey as Turkish taffy. Marshall got up every year or so to change records. He called on Lady Day. He called on John Coltrane. I was amazed at how clear the music seemed, as if my entire body were made of ears. As if I could not only
hear
the music, but see it dancing along the walls, feel it beat time against my skin.

I sat curled against Marshall’s body again, feeling sleep falling down upon me like a thousand cotton balls being dropped from the ceiling one at a time. It occurred to me that perhaps I should ask Marshall to take me home. Except I didn’t want to go. Except I wasn’t sure if maybe Mom and Dad might still be up, and would be able to tell I was stoned, and both die of heart attacks. Except I still hadn’t been to bed with Marshall. I barely heard Marshall say, “It’s probably getting’ kinda late.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess it is.”

“I probably should be takin’ you home now.”

“Yeah. I guess you probably should. I guess.”

There was a beat of silence, broken only by the sound of the stereo needle zigzagging aimlessly up and down the butt-end of
Astral
Weeks
, and the incessant minor-keyed humming of my brain.

“I don’t want to go yet,” I said.

“I don’t want you to go yet,” he said. “I wanted to show you something.”

“What?”

“It’s in the bedroom.”

Marshall’s bedroom furniture consisted of one big brass bed (not, I imagined, unlike the one in “Lay Lady Lady”), in an advanced (and probably permanent) state of dishevelment, and that’s it. His clothes sat semi-folded in corrugated cardboard boxes on the floor, or in careless piles in the corners. Marshall kicked aside one such pile with a sandaled foot as we entered the room.

We just stood there at the foot of the bed, me looking up into Marshall’s red-rimmed eyes (and he looking down into mine), both of us grinning like a couple of complete morons. Finally, Marshall bent down and kissed me, but really kissed me; his lips just barely parted mine, and his tongue tip wriggled in between them and tickled my gums. Boys and girls, that’s all she wrote.

We kissed and kissed, as hard as I wanted, as hard as I could, and nobody said, “Hey, not so rough.” We kissed until my neck began to hurt from pointing my face upward to meet Marshall’s; so Marshall kicked his sandals off, and I pried my sneakers off and stood on Marshall’s feet, and we kissed more. His mouth was somehow simultaneously soft and firm, and tasted slightly bitter from the marijuana.

I can scarcely describe the feeling of holding (at last) a man in my arms except to say that I didn’t have enough hands to touch him all I wanted. My inadequate pair scurried up and down Marshall as fast as they could, fingering his face, palming his chest, grabbing his ass, then back up again, finger-combing his newly cropped hair. Marshall kissed my lips, my cheeks, my neck; tongued my ears (I stifled a scream with the heel of my hand), licked my nose and bit my chin, and rubbed me as far as he could reach. He massaged my painful hard-on through my jeans, which I took as permission to grab for his. I outlined the thing in Marshall’s pants with my fingers, rubbed it up and down with the palm and back of my hand, and Marshall moaned into my mouth. We kissed and rubbed and tugged at each other until we both had to come up for air or suffocate.

“Let’s take our clothes off,” Marshall suggested through a couple of deep breaths.

“Yeah.”

We slithered out of our clothes, arms and elbows bumping in our clumsy attempts to hurry each other’s already frantic stripping. Marshall shoved my t-shirt up into my armpits; he traced my pecs with his fingers, making my nipples pucker. I stroked across his shoulders and down his chest (which was smooth as a baby’s; even I have a few hairs between my pecs – Marshall had none at all), and rubbed soft circles into his hard belly.

Marshall pulled open the buttons on my jeans, and rubbed my boner through my underwear before reaching in and grabbing it in his hand. The contact made me gasp. I shut my eyes tight and found I couldn’t remember a word of the Twenty-third Psalm. I was almost sure I’d shoot all over Marshall’s fingers right then and there. And suddenly I thought, what if it’s too small? Marshall shoved my jeans and underpants down past my thighs, and I stepped out of them.