Crazy Enough (10 page)

“Sure I am,” I lied to him a bit later, a bit drunker, and still sixteen. “I'm actually nineteen. How 'bout you come back here when everyone's asleep . . . midnight.”

As the party wound down, I chatted up one of the hired bartenders as he was packing up the booze and getting ready to split. He had a homemade-looking tattoo that I could see the tip of, sticking through his shirt sleeve. He asked me if I might want a drink before it all got put away. I told him I could find forty bucks for something else.

Later, I helped him carry a box of glasses to his catering truck where he sold me a decent amount of blow, neatly packed in a rectangular fold, a torn piece of a page out of a porno magazine.

At the height of summer, it seems to take forever for the dark to take hold and steep the world in one of its rare and fine velvety nights. It was near nine when the sun finally gave up the day and that plummy, hot black soaked in. Most of the people had left, or gone off to bed and the big old house grew quiet and settled as it ticked towards midnight.

I did a fat line in the bathroom, then walked around the wide dewy yard in the dark, away from the house lights, waiting. My bathing suit was still damp but the summer night was a warm breath, silk around my skin. The grass and earth were cool and wet under my feet and the dark jangled with cricket songs. Delicious nerves were ringing throughout my young wires, waiting, nearly invisible in the inky black.

I felt like a kid on an adventure. The frosty numbness in my nose and lips and the tickling excitement of the night and the blow, my belly feeling suspended by a strumming rubber thread. In the dark I pretended I was a dancer, swaying my hips around and grinding in wide exaggerated circles. I was an animal, a creature. I could hide in the bushes and scare the shit out of this guy as he walked up the lawn, or I could run away and howl at the moon, pouncing through the cool grass, naked and hidden in the deep backyard. I could blow this clown
off and skip the whole to-do. Then I saw someone ambling up the street, and held my breath for a split second.

Here he comes.

This was the first time I had experienced somebody exerting any effort to get to me. He had to sneak out of his house and walk about a mile in the pitch dark up a country road, all based on the hope I would be where I said I'd be, and that he would get some when he got there.

The distance from the street to the pool was about seventy-five yards, so I had a minute or so to set the scene. I wanted to have it arranged so, when he saw me, it was like the movies. I trotted through the dark and slipped into the pool, dunked under and dragged the backs of my fingers under my eyes to right my eyeliner that had started to run. I stretched my arms out along the edge and gently kicked my legs in a slow, rhythmic, cancan. Hair wet and slicked back, I smiled at him as he walked out of the dark, towards the eerie blue glow of the pool.

Been waiting for you, sailor.

He smiled back, stopping at the edge. He undressed and walked into the blood-warm water and swam towards me.

No talking. Nice. I dove deep through the water under him to a ladder at the deep end and spun around to face him as he followed. We made out at the ladder a little, kissing deeply, groping, wet and clumsy, still a little drunk. His mouth was pool water and scotch. I slid down into the water to take him in my mouth a few times as I held my breath, blowing bubbles around his cock and between his legs. After more splashing around we found an empty room where we could go at it for hours.

It was one of those stinging, sweat-soaked marathons where parts of your body ache and cramp where other bits lose all sensation from the desperate pounding. I don't know if it was the coke or the booze, but the guy stayed marble hard and could not come.

I refused to stop or even wince, for fear of betraying the hurting parts. I was all pornographic moaning and a squealing good time.

My stubbornness in keeping the good times rolling wasn't so much for Mr. Marathon Esquire; he was good looking enough and not too bad a guy from what I could tell. No, my hell-bent determination to fuck through the pain was to bruise this into his memory banks. All of his future encounters would be compared to this one, to me.

This was my power. This was my only grip on being something, anything. I would replay in his head while he throbbed in his hand or some other sucking mouth.

Raw and sore himself, he finally called a temporary ceasefire. I tucked him into my mouth cooling off his dick by swirling ice cubes around it with my tongue. He was holding my head up by my hair. Suddenly, looking down at my face, with my makeup having been all fucked off, he must've seen the kid I actually was.

“How old are you?” he asked, a bit out of breath.

“Mmmummph?” I hummed around him and the ice.

“How. Old. Are. You. Really?” The word
really
trailed off with the unmistakable ring of already knowing the answer and that the answer was all kinds of bad. I never really considered the legal ramifications of these scenarios. Pretty much every man I screwed around with was older than me except one guy in high school who was my age. Mr. Marathon actually sounded scared. Jesus, friends and some family were all over this house sleeping off the hot day and the buckets of free wedding liquor.

He could be seriously fucked if anyone even saw him here. Poor guy.

He pulled my head up quick by my hair and looked at me harder through the dim light.

His cock popped out of my mouth so I tapped it lightly on my chin, smiled and cooed sweetly and reassuringly up his sweaty torso. “Okay, okay, I'm thirteen.” I went back to licking him. “Why?” I asked, tapping him against my lips, smiling.

Gotcha.

To this day I don't know why I lied to the guy, but the look on his face was priceless. The surge of panic, wrestling with desire, wrestling with eons of law school, reputation, more panic, and more lust stoked by the very, very, wrong thing going on, so dirty, so bad.

“Hurry up and finish,” was all he could manage.

Power.

Right around that time, my dad showed me how to break a guy's thumb by pinning it back against his wrist, a trick he picked up in the Marine Corps. It's a move so painful, he explained, I could drop a guy much bigger than myself. I assumed that he taught me that trick because he thought I was strong enough to be on my own, and didn't mind that I was always gone. I asked him recently why he didn't freak out or punish me: make me stay home, send me to military school, break my legs, and so on. He said he was terrified that if he tried to control me, it would push me even farther, that I would have run away for good, gotten arrested, or worse.

I had plenty of run-ins with cops, but thankfully didn't get arrested until I was eighteen (for possession of a class B substance, cocaine, and contributing to the delinquency of minors; the second
charge was ironic because the sixteen-year-old, whose delinquency I was supposedly contributing to, was my dealer). Being eighteen, though, meant my dad wasn't called. I spent one chilly night in a cell by myself, was fined four hundred dollars, and was told, if I paid on time, since it was my first offense, the charges would be taken off my record.

We'll see, if I ever run for office or try to marry a prince or something.

Besides that tiny footnote from my late teens, there were, of course, stupid injuries, car accidents, wicked fights, and oodles of drugs. I was part of a small crew of kids that the dealers loved. They would say things like, “Hey, Storm, I think these are Quaaludes, will you take one and tell me how you feel in twenty minutes? Oh, and don't drink.”

My punk-rock beggar friends and I all hung out at the Harvard Square T stop. There is a brick, circular, patio-type structure there where we could sit around and complain about society, talk about how punk was dead and harass passers-by for spare change. The boys would do skateboard tricks, and the girls would smoke and put on black, black eyeliner, using little circular mirrors on their superpale pressed powder compacts. It was where we heard about parties, fights, who was fucking who; the T stop was a great hangout.

On one particular day, to our collected rage and disgust, the city of Cambridge had festooned our hangout with blue plastic port-o-potties. Five of them, in a row, along a low wall, which happened to be my favorite sit and bitch place.

It was Harvard's 350th anniversary and the whole area around the campus had become a fucking glut of blue-blooded, overly entitled douche bags snobbing around in their maroon blazers talking like Thurston Howell III from
Gilligan's Island,
and they were all peeing out their gin and tonics in our hangout.

We were appalled.

The cops kept trying to roust us from the area, but like bees to a barbecue, we all buzzed back and continued our very important loitering. Since the public crappers were stationed where we normally all sat, a couple of us climbed to the top of the T stop itself. One of the guys was my buddy Starchild.

Imagine a featherless and emaciated turkey with a crooked, baby curl Mohawk and put a motorcycle jacket on it. Now, set its head on a swivel, so the head constantly swims on its neck as if trying to break free of it, and you might get a picture of poor Starchild.

He had done more drugs than Hunter S. Thompson. He was so completely brain-damaged; it sometimes seemed like he had been trepanned (when a hole gets drilled into your skull so you're high forever). Mental stability aside, he was a complete and total sweetheart.

The day of the reunion, he was very quiet. He sat up straight, eerily staring at everyone below our little rooftop perch.

My friend Keith and I were snickering at the preppy bastards tiptoeing around, trespassing on our land. We started to play a little game we'll call “Audacity Tag.”

As in, if you have the audacity to come into our house, then tag! You're it.

As soon as some poor sucker would get all situated in a port-o-potty, we would jump off the roof and knock on the thing, shake it and yell into the vents, literally scaring the piss out of them. Then, we'd clamber back onto the roof and duck down, so the sad sack wouldn't know from where the attack had come. When a corpulent man in a craptastic red-and-white Hawaiian shirt stepped into one, we launched our attack, trying to outdo the fear factor of the last.
We pounded, yelled, and pushed, and suddenly it rocked at such a treacherous angle, Keith and I backed away nervously.

“Whoa,” Keith giggled, as we heard a muffled expletive from inside the thing.

Just as it was wobbling back to right itself, with Hawaiian Punch still cussing inside, we heard a scream. We looked up just in time to see a low-flying, peeled swivel turkey sailing quite beautifully through the air.

Starchild had suddenly launched himself from the station roof onto the roof of the Johnnie on the spot, screeching, “Kaaa-yeee-haaa!” sending himself, Hawaiian Punch, and the port-o-potty crashing over onto the bricks, the latter landing on its door, trapping its ill-fated occupant.

Starchild sprinted down Dunster Street cackling. Keith's and my mouths hung open and time froze for a second. We were about to start laughing when the bottom of the Johnnie splooshed out its entire day's contents onto the bricks.