Waking Beauty (11 page)

Grade nine. It seemed as if almost every girl in school was getting some form of action. The beauties, of course, had as much or as little as they chose. Ditto the cute chicks and the sort-of-cute chicks. Even the orthodontisized, dog-faced girls with half-decent bodies were attracting their share of hormone-fueled attention when the nights had worn on and the lads had smoked enough pot, or dropped enough E, or consumed enough booze. It took all of these elements working
in concert to convince Servan Carp that I was a temporarily acceptable canoodling partner. It occurred after a Friday-night Youth Center dance—a kind of sanitized faux-rave that was held weekly in the school cafeteria. Kids from grades seven, eight, and nine danced the night away—not to techno, mind you; it was mostly mainstream rap and disco remixes, but they waved their stupid glo-sticks around and sucked on their ridiculous pacifiers anyway. I didn’t dance, wave, or suck. I gravitated toward the marginally cooler stoner kids who spent the greater part of those Friday nights in the ravine behind the school, getting drunk and high. At that point I was still managing to fit in with my class-clown shtick, and was allowed to orbit the group because I provided fat-girl comic relief, and almost always provided a reasonably full, forty-ouncer of booze, pinched from my mother’s endless and carelessly monitored stash.

Servan Carp was new to the clique. A recent immigrant from Romania, Servan had been doing everything possible to instantly assimilate himself. Within days of arriving at Tom Thomson Junior High, he had shed his Soviet-looking sweaters and Zellers grandpa jeans and adopted the standard hip-hop costume—the bloated Nikes, the fat and fake gold necklaces, the Starter football jersey, the oversized, falling-down pants that made him look like a rodeo clown. Even in his hip-hop uniform, there was something inherently geeky and Romanian-villagey about Servan (he wouldn’t have looked out of place with a few goats trailing behind him), and he was doing his best to overcome this by being a boisterous “party animal,” consuming awe-inspiring quantities of alcohol and drugs in daring and dangerous combinations. Everyone called Servan by his last name, Carp, and he thrived on the endless jokes about him being “pissed to the gills” or “drinking like a fish.”

There were initially six of us together in the woods that night. I remember that Servan had been demonstrating his hopelessly uncool, therefore amusing, therefore redeemably
cool break-dancing moves precariously close to the edge of the steep and muddy embankment where we regularly assembled. There was much laughter and shouting, especially from Servan, who had taken E, smoked several joints, and swallowed most of the contents of a plastic soda bottle full of home-brewed Romanian hooch-palinka, I think he called it. The plan was to get sufficiently buzzed and then go inside for a while to check out the dance (i.e., stand on the sidelines and mock the dancers—my specialty), but when it became apparent that a couple swigs of the Carp family’s combustible cocktail had rendered Rachel slack drunk and perhaps fully seducible, Leon dragged her off into the bushes. Thirty seconds later, Bonnie (Leon’s ex) led Steve away to their own little woodland revenge session. That left Carp and me alone, awkward without an audience, uncomfortable in sudden silence. He tried to lighten the moment by signaling to the departed lovers, making loud jungle-animal noises: ooh-ooh-ah-ah monkey screech, lion roar, elephant blast.

“Shut the fuck up,” came Leon’s stern reply from deep in the woods.

Servan obeyed Leon. He laughed weakly. He made a barely audible monkey sound and took a long pull of palinka.

“Well, I guess we should go in,” I said, noticing that Carp was looking pale and sweating heavy in the cool night.

“Yeah,” he said. “I will just make a piss.” He moved to the edge of the embankment, where minutes earlier he had been spinning acrobatically on his shoulder blades. I heard the zipper come down, I heard the arc of urine hitting soil, I heard Servan groan with relief. Then I heard twigs snapping, a strangulated cry, and a distant splash.

I moved quickly but cautiously to the edge—I was pretty tipsy myself—and, hanging on to a sapling, peered down into the blackness that had swallowed Carp.

“Hey,” I said. “Are you—”

“I’m okay,” he whispered, from deep in the darkness.

To be honest, that far-off and diminutive “I’m okay”
struck me as patently hilarious after the cartoonlike sound effects of his ill-fated pee ’n’ plummet, but I realized that I was stoned, and unable to accurately judge the severity of the situation. I suppressed a powerful urge to laugh and listened for sounds of movement down below. There were none.

“Should I get help?” I said.

“No!” he hiss-whispered.
“Please
. I’m okay. Go away.”

He was obviously embarrassed. And who wouldn’t be after tumbling dick-first through one’s own piss into a ravine? I listened for a few more seconds. Nothing. No sounds of getting up or dusting one’s self off. This suggested seriousness. I decided to spare Servan the indignity of immediately calling on Leon or Steve for assistance. Instead, I sat my ass on the ground and inched/slid my way down the slope to the river—which was more like a stream actually, about three feet wide and maybe eight inches deep in the middle. Still, I figured even in his pre-plunge condition he could’ve easily passed out, and if he passed out facedown in the water…The headline CARP DROWNS flashed in my head.

“Hey, Carp, where are you?”

No response.

I saw his white Nikes first, sticking up like rocks in the river, the toxic water eddying around them. Luckily only his lower legs had gone in. He was stretched out diagonally on the damp bank. He had his arms folded over his chest like a corpse. As I got closer I could see that he had put his penis away and zipped up his muddy jeans. I could also see that his jersey—the one he wore to school almost every day—was irreparably torn, and that his face was scratched and bleeding.

“Carp,” I said, kneeling beside him and nudging his shoulder.

He opened his eyes and smiled up at me. “I’m okay,” he whispered. “I’ll see you in there.”

“Sit up. Come on…” I tried to help him, but he waved me off, then sat up abruptly.

“Yo,” he said. “You want to smoke a fattie?” He patted his chest as if there were fattie-containing pockets there, but he had stripped off his jacket earlier in the evening. “Let’s smoke a fattie.”

“I don’t think so. Get your feet out of there.”

He looked at his feet as if he had just become aware of their existence. He pulled them out of the river and struggled to stand up. “Fuck,” he said, staring at his sodden Nikes. “Fuck!” Though he had gone in only past the ankles, his voluminous pant legs had absorbed water to above the knee, and the weight of it was pulling his pants even farther down than usual, exposing most of his underwear. He stood there trickling. Skinny and pale. White Fruit Of The Looms glowing eerily in the moonlight.

“Are you all right?” I said.

He touched the scratch on his forehead and surveyed the warm blood in his palm. He examined his torn jersey. Then—with his shoes making squishy sucking sounds—he walked unsteadily to a large flat rock, hoisted up his jailin’ trousers, and sat down. He covered his face with his hands and hunched over. I could see his shoulders begin to heave. At first I thought he was vomiting up the palinka, but he wasn’t vomiting, he was crying. Silently. I sat next to him on the rock and put my hand on his back. The heaving increased. I rubbed softly in a circular motion on his upper back. Bony. Narrow. The heaving slowed and eventually subsided. He hadn’t made a sound. Carp surreptitiously dried his eyes before lifting his head and looking at me sharply.

“I didn’t cry,” he said accusingly.

“I know.” I looked him in the eye. “I never said you did.”

He held my gaze for a few seconds, realized that I was going to be kind about it, and then sighed deeply. He sniffed a couple times and wiped his nose. He stared at the ground and said, “Don’t tell, okay? Don’t tell those guys.”

“It’s no big deal, you just slipped.”

“Please,” he said. “I beg of you.”

Again I wanted to laugh. Never had Servan seemed more uncool or more likable. “I won’t tell,” I said solemnly. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Swear that you won’t tell any person?”

“I swear that I won’t tell.” And I didn’t. Until now.

“My parents are going to kill me,” he said, tugging on his wrecked jersey.

“Just tell them you got in a fight. Tell them you were defending someone who was getting picked on.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll tell them I was defending a Romanian that was going under attack by a Hungarian gang.”

“Um, I don’t think there are a lot of marauding Hungarians around here. Maybe you should just tell them—”

“Yo, Steve, Carp! Where are ya?!”

In response to Leon’s call from the top of the embankment, Carp clamped one hand on my forearm and motioned with the other for me to be quiet.

“His jacket’s here,” I heard Rachel say boozily.

“So is the hooch,” said Leon. “They’re around. They’re probably just dicking with us.
Hey, Rachel, you wanna smoke a joint? I got a nice big joint here in Carp’s jacket. And we can have it all to ourselves. Unless, of course, there’s anyone out here who would like to join us…
?”

Carp squeezed my forearm and then, perhaps to silence me more than anything else (did he think that I couldn’t refuse a toke?), leaned in and attached his mouth to mine. He stuck his tongue in there and moved it around. Palinka fumes, stale marijuana, and a touch of fresh autumn mud. It didn’t taste bad.

“They probably went in, but they’re coming back out,” said Rachel. “Let’s just go find them. I have to go to the bathroom anyway.”

“Jerk-offs,” said Leon.

I heard them move off through the woods toward the schoolyard. I expected Servan to stop necking with me as soon as the voices trailed away and they were clearly out of earshot, but astonishingly, he persisted. I concluded that while it was
my first real kiss and I didn’t really know what I was doing, I must have been doing it right, or right enough anyway, because after a few minutes of mad mouth action, he reached into my jean jacket and started kneading my breasts. It felt okay, but I was dead nervous, afraid that Servan’s hand would move a couple inches lower and discover my belly flab, the existence of which I took great pains to hide under loose layers of clothing. In a preemptive move, I lay back so that my bunched stomach would flatten out (Carp went with me, his mouth fixed on mine). The rock was cold and jagged and dug into the back of my head, but I didn’t dare sit up, as Carp had taken my recline as an invitation to inch his hungry hand down into my pants. He wrestled with the button on my Levi’s for an excruciating amount of time before successfully popping it. He got the zipper down, thrust his icy fingers into my undies, and wriggled around in there. I felt the scratch of a fingernail as he located my hole and plugged a digit inside. More wriggling. It didn’t feel so great, to tell you the truth. And while I was relieved that he hadn’t drawn his hand back in disgust, I pretty much just wanted him and his nails out of there. I endured another thirty seconds of frantic poking, because I wanted to be polite and also seem as if I was experienced and accustomed to that sort of thing, but then I suddenly had this memory flash of Servan, earlier on, touching his bloody face with his hands, and a hot wave of HIV fear wowed through me. I grabbed him hard by the wrist and yanked him out of my pants. He used the tense grip to swing my hand over to his own crotch. Following his lead, I popped the button and dug around in there until locating my target. I had seen guys miming masturbation, and I imitated this rapid up-and-down stroke, marveling at the fact that it didn’t seem to hurt, and wondering if an object of this size could possibly fit inside me. Then, just as I was completing that thought—concluding that, no, it could not—a few mils of watery splooge squirted out of Carp’s tool and, for the first time in twenty minutes, he withdrew his tongue from my
mouth. I dried my hand on my pant leg and then brought it to my nose for a covert sniff.
Salt. And the tap water in the fishbowl after I added the Sea-Monkeys
.

Carp sat up, zipped up, and stood up. “I think I should go home,” he said.

“Um, yeah, me, too,” I said, shivering a little. Dejection descending. It wasn’t like I was expecting a protracted cuddle session, avowals of undying love, or even a lousy walk home, but neither was I expecting Carp to suddenly stumble to the river, empty the contents of his stomach into the polluted water, then turn and scrabble up the side of the ravine without saying another word to me.

I took it as a bad sign.

Sure enough, when I next saw Servan—midday Monday in the Burger King down the street from our school—he acted as if nothing had occurred between us. Clearly, Carp wanted to eradicate his little bottom-feeding frenzy.

“Oh, man, I was hammer-headed,” Carp said to the assemblage of Whopper-munching stoners. “I was so wiped out of my head, I can’t remember anything after that second spliff. Don’t even ask me how I got home, ’cause I don’t even know how I got home!”

So: Nelson Rumack’s kindergarten kiss, Martin the Tickler’s prepubescent grope, and Servan Carp’s watery white squirt—my entire sexual history up to the age of twenty-two and one quarter. With that abysmal record, it wasn’t likely that I’d forget my sensational encounter with Studly Guy too soon. No. Sex was suddenly available to me. Sex with good-looking guys who wanted to call me again and have more sex. After years of loneliness and frustration, the opportunity to lose my loathed virginity had finally arrived.

As I walked away from the construction site, I remember feeling strangely liberated, oddly powerful. As long as this Beauty thing held out, I was laughing. I could pick and choose. I could have whomever I wanted.

I headed for Art & Trash.

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