Read Skipped Parts: A Heartbreaking, Wild, and Raunchy Comedy Online

Authors: Tim Sandlin

Tags: #Fiction, #Coming of Age, #Humorous

Skipped Parts: A Heartbreaking, Wild, and Raunchy Comedy (9 page)

BOOK: Skipped Parts: A Heartbreaking, Wild, and Raunchy Comedy
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At 10:30 I turned on the porch light and drank a Dr Pepper along with two aspirins and a Valium. I went in the kitchen and got out Lydia’s shot glass and Gilbey’s in case she came in after I fell asleep. I even opened the bottle and measured out her first two ounces. It felt kind of strange to be going to sleep in an empty house. I set the TV on a white-noise station and maxed the volume.

I took
Life
to bed with me and fantasized various Brigitte Bardot rendezvous in hopes of enticing up another wet dream—fat chance. I dreamed I was being chased by Lee Harvey Oswald.

Sam Callahan ran down a long, narrow hallway that reached forever. He passed doors on the right and left but whenever Sam tried to open one, he found it locked. Behind him, limping in bandages, came Lee Harvey Oswald with his mail-order Italian rifle. Lee Harvey’s eyes were sunk into deep hollows. He never slowed, kept coming and coming.

Panic gripped Sam by the bowels, he pulled at doors, he threw his shoulder into doors, but Lee Harvey kept coming. Sam reached the end of the corridor—another locked door. His brow poured sweat, his hands trembled, he didn’t want to die. Sam pounded on the door.

“Help me, please. Don’t lock me out.”

Lee Harvey kept coming.

Suddenly the door fell open and Jack Ruby faced him. “This is for Jackie and the kids,” he said and pulled the trigger.

Sam felt his stomach on fire. He fell back into Lee Harvey Oswald’s open arms.

8

Friday wasn’t the first night I’d ever spent alone in a house. In Greensboro we lived in an eight-bedroom deal that Lydia called the manor house even though it was in town. Caspar supposedly lived with us, but Me Maw was in and out of the Duke hospital so much he took an apartment in Durham. I think he couldn’t face living in the same house as Lydia without Me Maw there too.

For a while we had a live-in maid, but she remarried her ex-husband, and a cook came around in the daytime. Lydia mostly stayed home doing the TV and 10:30 knockout deal, only every few months she’d go social on me and I’d wake up at two in the morning in an empty house. Lydia was basically a binge or starve person when it came to fun.

Just about the earliest memory I have involves waking up in a dark, abandoned house. I must have been four because I remember the Roy Rogers pajamas and I think I outgrew them by the time I hit five. I was asleep in Caspar’s bed.

All my early life I slept on whatever bed or couch was closest when I got tired. Sometimes, it was Lydia’s bed with her, other times I fell asleep under my own single bed. Then there were the five extra bedrooms. I pretended each was a different planet. Mercury was neat because the bed was round and covered by a curtain.

But this happened before rooms were planets. I wet Caspar’s bed and woke up crying. There must have been a dream, I don’t remember. Anyhow, I stripped off the Roy Rogers pajama bottoms and hopped down on the cold floor. With all these beds to choose from, no reason to sleep in a wet one.

But the hallway was really dark, dark as death. Normally Lydia left the bathroom light on and the door cracked so the hallway had a soft glow of security. I wasn’t used to blackness.

I felt the wall, then the wall on the other side. I sat down and yelled “
Lid-ya
,” but no luck. Pitch black and alone, I couldn’t believe it. Monsters lived in the dark—and slugs and rats, rats who could see me but I couldn’t see them. They would bite my face in a second. Things could take away my arms and legs.

I hollered “
Paw-Paw
,” which was Caspar, but I didn’t hold out much hope for him. He’d have kicked me out of his bed if he was home.

I crawled down the hall—afraid I’d lose the floor too if I stood—to Lydia’s room but it was a cave. I pulled myself up and stood at the door and cried, trying to will her into place. The steps going downstairs were no better. I had to turn around and slide on my front, one step at a time. I heard a sound and peed again. Somewhere along the way, I took off the Roy Rogers pajama top.

A clock glowed in Caspar’s library, which had been Me Maw’s bedroom the last year when she couldn’t do the stair deal. I pulled some books off the shelves and walked head-on into a globe of the world. In the kitchen, I opened the refrigerator and made light and everything wasn’t so bad anymore. I ate some grapes from the vegetable bin, then rolled into a ball, using my body to block open the refrigerator, and fell asleep.

Lord knows why I remember that.

***

Maurey’s knock on the door made me jump like I’d been hit by a rock. In three months we’d had four knocks—two Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Girl Scout turning cookies, and a guy looking for Soapley. I’d begun thinking the outside world couldn’t touch me while I was at home.

“Let’s try it,” Maurey said when I opened the door. She was real pretty and brunette standing on the snow. Her eyes had blue sparkles, like she was interested in what she was doing.

“My mom’s not home.”

“She and eight other drunks rented a motel room in Dubois when the bars closed last night. They’re having a party.” Maurey let herself in. She had on Levi’s and a red parka. “My second cousin Delores is there. Delores’s husband told her mom in the hope of getting her dragged out, but it didn’t work, and her mom told my mom and I overheard. Delores and Lydia are the only girls at the party.”

“I’m making oatmeal. You want some?”

“Funny how news travels in a small town, isn’t it. Got some coffee? I want to explain the rules before we do this.”

“Do what?”

“Have sex. Why else would I be here?”

I focused on the label on the back of Maurey’s jeans as I followed her into the kitchen. Ever since I was a little boy, I’d wanted to have sex with a girl, even though I didn’t know what that entailed until recently. The main reason I’d wanted sex was because, as I understood it, you got to see her naked. I couldn’t really conceive of a goal loftier than seeing a woman without her clothes. Rubbing myself against one or having one see me naked were somewhat disquieting thoughts that I’d avoided up to that point.

“We’re going to perform sex now?” I asked.

“After coffee.”

Maurey and I sat across from each other at the kitchen table—a giant wood slab thing with area cow brands burned into the top—and dumped spoonfuls of sugar and about a can of milk into two mugs. I still didn’t like coffee that much, only drank it because I felt like I should. All addictive things are distasteful when you first start out. She blew across the steam and sipped. “You already taught me one thing I didn’t know, Sam.”

“What’s that?”

“Coffee. Now we’ll teach each other something.”

“You think Lydia might come home today?”

She wrinkled her nose and looked closely at the cup. “Doubtful. Ray, that’s Delores’s husband, he says they just sent out for Chinese food and two cases of Schlitz.”

“Where can you get Chinese food at eight-thirty in the morning?”

Maurey dumped more sugar in her mug. “Dubois is a weird place. Think you can get a stiffie?”

I glanced at my lap and thought about Brigitte Bardot. “They seem to come and go. I haven’t figured how to control it yet.”

“Maybe it’ll happen naturally.”

“I’ve heard something about putting it in the girl’s mouth.”

“I’m not doing anything that might make me sick.”

We stared into our nearly white coffee for a while. I was hungry, but I’d turned off the oatmeal and it seemed sacrilegious to turn it back on when I was on the edge of the Great Chasm. This was more important than food. This was what Lydia said grown-ups lived for.

“We’re both virgins,” Maurey began.

“I never said I was a virgin.”

She gave me the evil eye. I bit my thumbnail. “We’re both virgins,” she began again, “but someday we’re going to find ourselves doing it.”

That someday confused me. I thought we were going to do it after coffee.

Maurey continued. “When my time happens, I don’t want to come off like a squirrel, I want to know what’s going on at all times.”

“That makes sense.” I stared at her fingers on the mug. The mug said
Fort Sumter
and had a picture of an army base on the side. Maurey had the smallest hands in the world.

“So you and I are going to learn about this thing now while it doesn’t matter, so we won’t be fools later when it does.”

“Today’s sex doesn’t matter.”

She stared me right in the eye. “We’re just friends helping each other learn a new skill. Just friends can’t really do it. This is practice.”

“Will we still be virgins afterwards?”

“I don’t know. That’s part of what we’re going to learn, where the line between virginity and nonvirginity really is.”

I’d always understood it as a clearly marked frontier. “What do you think?”

“I think it’s either when you stick it all the way in or when the boy squirts. You better not squirt.” She looked at me suspiciously, as if I was secretly planning to play a trick and squirt in her.

“I won’t squirt. Promise.”

“And no kissing. Kissing is mushy, emotional stuff, and we can’t do it if you’re going to get mushy.”

“No mush.”

We were silent awhile. The refrigerator kicked on. I could hear the toilet running in the bathroom. Downtown, the volunteer fire siren howled. It would continue for a minute while the firemen rushed to the station, then there’d be ten minutes of truck sirens. It happened once a week or so, whenever creosote built up in somebody’s stovepipe and the chimney caught fire.

“I’m not sure you can do it without mush,” I said.

“We can do it.”

“Dot and Lydia both say it takes emotionalism.”

I know Maurey thought I was just trying to trick a kiss out of her, and maybe I was. Unless you count a cheek peck on Janey Silverman in the fourth grade, I’d never kissed a girl. Like seeing one naked, kissing was another goal. It was hard to believe I was going to skip right over all the intermediate thrills and go straight to intercourse.

“You told me your mom had done it with lots of people. It couldn’t have been emotional every time.”

I shrugged. I didn’t know how often and with how many people it was possible to be emotional. “We could try it first without kissing and if it doesn’t work we could kiss without meaning it.”

Maurey looked even more suspicious. “I’ve seen horses do it and horses don’t kiss.”

***

We went into my room since that seemed to be the place to commit the act. I sat on the side of the bed while Maurey sat in the chair at my desk. She pushed the
w
key on the typewriter down, then let it up, then back down again. She put her finger on the ribbon and made her print blue.

I held my hands in my lap. “I wish we didn’t have to be naked.”

“I’m sure that’s part of doing it.” She kicked off her snow boots. “Maybe we could leave our socks on. The floor’s kind of cold.”

“How about my shirt? I don’t see why I need to take off my shirt.”

“Why do you get to leave your shirt on but I don’t?”

“Women’s breasts are important to the deal. It doesn’t work if I can’t touch your breasts. All the books work that way. Men’s breasts are just for show, like a belly button.”

“I’m not showing you mine if you don’t show me yours.”

Five minutes and much futzing over buttons and zippers later, Maurey and I stood facing each other, down to boxer shorts and panties—and socks. Hers were red wool, mine white gym socks.

“You’re first,” she said.

“You first.”

We stared at each other. I went into a paranoia streak—what if it was a Wyoming ritual, as soon as I dropped my boxers she’d laugh and run away, or even worse, everyone in GroVont Junior High would jump from the closet and point at me.

“Oh, Jesus,” Maurey said, and she dropped her panties and stepped out. I had to follow. The silence was fairly eerie.

She looked down. “I thought you’d be bigger.”

“I’m not stiff yet.”

She poked at it. “When a horse gets a stiffie, it’s almost as big as his leg.”

“Time to stop comparing us to horses, Maurey. None of it seems to carry over.” I held out my finger and touched the nipple on the end of her tit. Touching a tit was the outer limit of my fantasy life. All my lurid dreams had come true. I was ready to put our clothes back on and eat some oatmeal. “Are you disappointed it’s not like a horse’s?”

Maurey brushed her fingertip through the ball area. “I was kind of scared to have you put something big as your leg up me. I couldn’t see how it would fit.”

As she touched under the ball sac, things perked up. “Holy moley,” she said.

I finally looked at the rest of her below the breasts. Maurey was mostly planes and soft colors. She smelled nice. “You’ve got hair down there.”

“So do you, silly.” She continued running her’ fingernail up and down and I continued to grow.

“I just didn’t expect girls to have hair in that spot.”

“Does it gross you out?”

It sort of did but I wasn’t about to admit it. “No. It’s kind of pretty. How do you see to find the tunnel?”

“It’s in there, only it doesn’t look like a tunnel from the outside.”

“A cave?”

“Yeah, I guess so.” I liked the area just below Maurey’s collarbone. That was the prettiest spot to look at, although the breasts were most exciting. They weren’t anything like the
Playboy
girls. Maurey’s were little pooches in her chest. The
Playboy
girls looked as if they had football implants.

“Is that as big as it gets?”

“I guess so. How do we put it in the tunnel?”

Maurey kept running her finger around the base. It felt real neat. I was getting used to having a girl see me with my clothes off and I thought this might be something I’d like to do regularly.

“Horses do it standing up with the stallion behind the mare,” she said.

“I told you to forget horses.”

“You’ve never seen anything do it.”

“I saw Soapley’s dog Otis doing it last week.”

“Bet he did it standing up from behind.”

Maurey turned around. Her hair came down almost to the bottom of her neck. Her back was real pretty, prettier than the front. Her little butt cheeks were like molded from a catcher’s mitt. “You have to get up behind me,” she said.

I tried but I couldn’t decide where my hands went. “This is awkward. I can’t see grown-ups basing their lives on this. Maybe you should bend over some.”

I knew it was coming, so I said in unison with Maurey, “Horses don’t bend over.” She laughed at that and the tension wasn’t quite so intense. I learned my first lesson about sex. Always make the girl laugh.

“I’m up too high,” I said. “Your hole’s way down here.”

She flinched. “That’s the wrong hole.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure. I think. The hole you go in is the bigger one up front.”

“I’m supposed to stand behind you and go in a front hole? Maybe if you stood on a chair or something.”

“None of the books say anything about the girl standing on a chair.”

“None of the books say anything. They skip this part and go straight to how wonderful it was.”

“Let’s take a break, Sam. Something’s not working.”

***

“Go get
Catch-22
. We’ll see how they do it.”

We sat side by side on the bed and read chapter twenty-three, where Nately gives three whores thirty dollars apiece to go to bed with his friends.

“Go to bed,” Maurey said. “That’s the key. Humans must do it lying down.”

“More comfortable than a girl standing on a chair. But I don’t have thirty dollars. You take a check?”

BOOK: Skipped Parts: A Heartbreaking, Wild, and Raunchy Comedy
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