She had a sort of store-bought Salt-N-Pepa accent. “Uh-huh.”
“Doan know why … he a sorry-ass fucker.”
Juice put on some Anthrax and cranked it till our ears bled. “You ress your pretty head, Robobitch,” Juice said, and spat out the window, and put the Porsche in reverse.
First Anquanna lay with her head in her arms, then she rolled over and lay on her back, then she sat up and shoved her head between her knees, and I thought I heard crying, but the music drowned her out. When at last she looked up from the cradle of her thighs I saw the most amazing face that I had ever seen. Her eyes were like prizes under carnival glass, her lashes were fat and swept back with black mascara, her lips were thick and slick and licked wet with fleshy lipstick, and her face was as ripe and as polished as a plum. Add to that a look of immeasurable contempt for any object caught in her immediate line of vision and you had, in a word, the most fascinating creature I had ever felt the urge to let my fag’s eyes linger on. Her face was so arresting, I could almost overlook the vestige of the black eye disappearing on her skin. But I couldn’t overlook, because of that same battered beauty, the fact that it was Juice who most likely gave it to her, whose “on the rag” alibi, so ugly in itself, became a euphemism for something uglier. When Juice dropped her off and kissed her wetly on the cheek she said, “Fuck you, Leon,” and she murmured in my ear: “Leonard Compton’s full of shit. Don’t believe a word he says. I trusted his ass. Look what happened to me.”
On the way to Sacred Heart, Juice dropped me at St. Patrick’s—I wanted to see if my father was at mass. In-
side, there was the usual flock of old ladies, their blue hair like a bumper crop of van Gogh’s irises. On the altar Fr. Diaz was blessing the host, and when he saw me, he lifted it high like a tennis ball, and made a serving motion. I smiled and waved. Then I surveyed the aisles. And I checked out the pews. I even peeked in the confessionals. But my father wasn’t there.
Because of Anquanna we were late for convocation. Or so Juice claimed. It was all because of me.
“Who cares?” Juice yawned. “Motherfuck if I do. I on inschool suspension already, Toby Sligh. McDuffy nail my ass fuh being late from senior lunch.”
“You’re lucky you’re alive.”
Juice didn’t say a word: what happened in the alleyway on Wednesday was behind him.
“Maybe I let McDuffy fuck me up the ass the way you an’ Lamb do, I get outta my suspession,” Juice said. “Shit, I wanna play hooky too. You the only two out in the whole senior class. We thought you was doin’ community service, or maybe each other—ahem-ahem-ahem.”
Juice slapped the stickshift and hit the interstate. He was doing eighty, easy. I’d never seen him so uptight.
“I was sick as a dog,” I told Juice. “I still am. My folks have flown the coop. It was like Home Alone.”
Juice’s voice dropped an octave. “You playin’ me, Toby?’
“It’s the truth, Juice,” I told him. “I never been so alone.
We drove along awhile, Juice staring at me. When he spoke, his words became sticky with something.
“Whatchoo been sick with?”
“The flu.”
“And the symptoms?”
“Sweats, squirts, vomiting, fever, the works.”
“You still got a fever?”
I nodded. “A little.”
Juice was looking at me. He reached out and touched my forehead.
“Toby, you hot.”
He slowed down a little. He was looking at me softly. He turned the Anthrax down.
“You seen a doctor, boyee?”
“I haven’t got the money.”
“I’ll give you fuckin’ money!”
“God, Juice, I’ll be okay.”
“Don’tchoo gimme that Little Homeboy on the Motherfucking Prairie ‘Juice, I be okay’ big-man bullshit! You gonna see a doctor. I take you during lunch.”
“You can’t take me, asshole—in-school suspension?”
“Fuck d’at shit! Like somebody finna catch me.”
“They’ll expel you if they do.”
“ ‘They’ll expel you if they do.’… Lemme worry ‘bout that, you faggot-ass fool! I getchoo to a doctor, you cracker-assed Q-Tip!”
He popped out the Anthrax and slid in some Kenny G. Juice was the kind of guy whose moods were in his music.
“Lemme see your tongue.’’
“Go fuck yourself, ‘boyeee.’ ”
He grabbed my jaw and laughed.
“Dr. Feelgood say ‘Ahhhhhh!’ ”
I opened up and showed him. He whistled like a redneck. I opened up wider, and his hand shook a little.
“Your tongue’s all coated. You on antibiotics?”
I told him I wasn’t.
“How long i’ss like that?”
“Two days,” I mumbled.
“Ain’t gettin’ any better?”
“A little,” I lied. “Now you’re scarin’ me, Juice.”
“We’ll getchoo to a doctor,” Juice said, and hit the gas. “Best damn doctor plastic money can buy. Where’s your moms and pops, T.?”
“Fuck me if I know.”
“Tha’ss to the curb. Ain’t you called the police?”
“Is Leonard Compton telling me to call the police?”
Juice was looking at me; he couldn’t stop looking at me.
“You was sick by yourself and you didn’t even beep me?”
“Didn’t want you to worry.”
“You so full of shit. I betchoo called Ian.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I betchoo called Lamb.”
“Just fuck off!” I shouted.
We drove for a while. My ears were burning up. Juice could be a bastard. He could really cut you deep.
“I’m sorry, Tobias,” Juice said, finally. His hand fell on my shoulder. “Sorry, Tobe,” he said to me.
At school I asked Juice what had happened to Anquanna. We were in the parking lot. “What happened to her face?”
Juice cut the engine, stepped out of the Porsche, and engaged the car’s high-tech security system. A voice like Hal the Computer on steroids said: “System deployed! Step away from the vehicle!” Far away across campus we could hear students singing: mass for our last day of classes, thank God. In four brisk movements Juice tied his tie and brushed designer lint off his Polo and said, “Anquanna got jumped by a Puerto Rican posse didn’t even go to the school that she be at, and they held her at knifepoint somewhere in a bathroom while that body-glove cunt took our money made the deal.”
“That’s how she got the bruises?” I said. “You didn’t hit her?”
Juice jacked up an eyebrow and took a step toward me. “Compton hits no one. I mean it, Tobias. Anquanna my cousin.”
I looked him in the eye.
“All right,” I said to him. “All right, I believe you.”
“Don’t give a fuck, Toby Sligh, whatchoo believe.”
Heidi, McDuffy’s recptionist, seemed pleased to see me. “How are you, Toby?” she said and swept her hair back, then wrote out late passes for the two of us in pencil so we could manipulate the time of our arrival and go to Circle K and get bum bottles of beer. Juice was the only guy, apart from my dad, with whom I ever had the least desire to drink. Juice had seen me drunk, Juice had gotten me drunk one morning on a thermos of mint Jagermeister and steadied my shoulders while I vomited schnapps all over a rival class’s Homecoming project. Our favorite place to get blasted was mass. We’d pass a flask between us underneath our missalettes and experience the spins staring up at stained glass. And since, after mass, we had classes together—Ethics and Latin and Political Science—we would sit in the back making sarcastic comments and burping with abandon while our buzzes tapered off.
“Did you have the same bug Ian has?” Heidi asked me.
I said that I had. “Is Ian still sick?”
Heidi shrugged: “Dunno! Yesterday his mom called, right about now, which was
sweet, ya know, really, ’cause it saved me from calling, and I have so much t’ do!”
Heidi said Mrs. Lamb reminded her of something (the Lambs were recluses and subject to speculation). Then she asked me if my mother was feeling any better.
“Yeah, uh-huh.” I coughed and looked at Juice. He was whistling at the ceiling. “Mom is feeling much better.”
While I was out Heidi had phoned our empty house and I’d said that my mom was even sicker than I was. Because Heidi liked me, and because she was busy, and because I had sounded like I had the flu I had, she hadn’t pressed the matter or put up any fuss.
“Oh yeah, could I have Ian’s telephone number,” I asked her, “to phone up, to find out how he’s doing?”
Part of Ian’s paranoia, ever since I’d known him, was never, never, ever to give out his parents’ number, as if I’d call his folks and say, “This is Ian’s boyfriend. Are you Lyle and Edith? Your son is great in bed!”
With a wink, Juice said, “I’m going to mass,” and headed for his Porsche while Heidi seized her Rolodex.
Ten minutes later, outside the Circle K, guzzling Magnum malt liquor out of brown paper bags, I called Ian’s number. It rang ten times, and a tranquilized voice staggered on the line and said, “Hello, you have reached the Lamb residence. Lyle and Edith are on business in Barbados. Ian is the temporary master of the household. If this is an emergency, phone our attorney. If this is for Ian, call his private number.” I didn’t even know Ian had a private number. “At the sound of the beep, please leave a message.” The beep was interminable. I hung up and left.
We made it to the year-end mass just in time for the recessional, a rousing revisionist Muzak rendition of the paranoid classic “I Am Behind You.” While the seniors and the bishop massacred the lyrics:
I am your shepherd,
I am your friend;
1 am be-hind you —
Until the end… .
Juice and I, reeling, improvised our own version:
I am your shepherd,
I am your friend;
I am be-hiiind you —
Right up your end… .
Afterward we swapped hissing shots of Binaca and dunked our bleary heads in the sacristy sink while the altar boy, a freshman, looked at us in wonder.
“Oh, Rrrochester,” Juice addressed the boy, “our towels!”
In the next room, the bishop washed his face sloppily.
“My name isn’t Rochester,” the freshman protested. “Rrrochester!” Juice groaned. “We’re making such a mess!”
“Who’s there!” yelled the bishop, splashing in the sink.
“Oh, Rrrochester, hurry!”
We received our towels and left.
Attached to a corner corner of my towel with a pin was a simple gold key in the shape of a cross. It was the key to the chapel tabernacle. I detached the key and let it drop into my pocket.
Incredibly, the last day of classes had arrived. The weekend was for study, and exams were on Monday, followed that evening by the celebrated prom. And even though all I could think of was Ian—whom I wanted to see, whom I wanted to talk to, whom I wanted to dance with, whom I wanted to hold, who had become in the course of my lonely viral trial a memory and, worse yet, a vague kind of threat—everything was so chaotic, everything was so anarchic that I found my worries swept up in the giddy rush of things. Seniors were arriving at school in gaudy ties, violating every conceivable rule of the dress code, and talking back to teachers in a way that was unheard of: in a way that suggested a subversive affection. In Ethics we got into a one-sided slugfest about whether homosexuals should be permitted in the military—a topic not to touch with a ten-foot pole, let alone a ten-inch one, on previous occasions. Knowing that only a majority of hard-ons could set anybody from the opposition straight, I buttoned my lip and swallowed a chill pill and imagined the entire class arguing nude. It was Juice who interrupted my fantasy in flesh, just as the school quarterback—a closet queen if e’er there was one— retreated to his seat from my mental undressing none the worse for wear and calling for the deaths of fags. “I got something to say, Dr. Zipser!” Juice proclaimed, and rose with a Magnum-sized belch from his chair.
Zipser was a Sartre-eyed former Scholastic addicted to coffee and the conservative press. On his desk he kept a picture of William F. Buckley only slightly less offensive than the connect-the-dots portrait of the Assumption of Mary he’d propped up beside it. In this particular connect-the-dots portrait, Dr. Zipser’s niece or nephew had mixed up a couple of dots, so the Blessed Virgin looked like a trapeze artist plunging to her death with Bill Buckley looking on. “Egad!” Buckley seemed to be saying from his armchair. “Let us hope she who’s born without sin has a net!” On Zipser’s file cabinet an imported coffeemaker brewed an endless succession of double espressos, which Zipser knocked back like Juan Valdéz on a bender. In his chronic hypertension Dr. Zipser couldn’t process any talking head any less wired than he, so Juice’s slurred musings, outrageous as they were, became 33s set at 78 rpm, and didn’t really play on Zipser’s zippy turntable.
“I can’t speak for the rest of the fellas,” Juice was saying, fingering his nipples to erection through his shirt, “but, umm, I kinda dig it when somebody check me out. I mean girl, guy, Hindu lady in a shower cap—Word, I ain’t playin’ you, gives me a thrill. So this shit, you know, about showerin’ together … You fellas be lyin’, ’cuz you know you dig it, too.”
If Juice hadn’t been so massive, and so dangerously cool, and so sexy in a way even straight guys could admire, he would have paid for that comment in the parking lot at night. As it was, and as Juice was most these guys’ dealer, the whole class hooted and pounded on their desks, versed as they were in that school of boosterism promulgated by Hitler and Arsenio Hall—and taking the sting out of what Juice had said with a chorus of the Juicy Fruit chewing gum theme:
Take a whiff!
Pull it out!
The taste is gonna move ya
When you pop it in your mouth!
The more time I spent at Sacred Heart High, the more I realized it really was the place to be gay. Except for the intolerance demonstrated by the students, and the indifference demonstrated by the majority of the faculty, and the hypocrisy of Jesuits who kept their legs crossed as if their penises were Christ’s own portable cross, and apart from the horseplay that bordered on foreplay, and the obsession with athletics that was almost obscene, and the banishment of women from the Kingdom of the Cock—a kingdom Christ himself would have had no earthly part of—it was nice to be with guys, I had to admit it: students, teachers, young guys, old guys, middle-aged guys who wished they were young guys, elderly guys who longed for middle age. Everybody had a real male affection for one another that went way beyond all the gay-straight posing. We were “Men for Others”—that was our motto. We were “Men for Each Other”: we were really all we had. Sacred Heart was set in a testosterone ocean; the secretaries, the cafeteria workers, the former female teachers who had shattered their fair share of hetero-hearts were like creatures on loan from some exotic girl zoo, endangered species on display in our masculine menagerie. Because there were no mothers, no sisters, no girlfriends, no future wives or daughters to coddle us along, you would have thought we might’ve learned to take better care of ourselves. But we didn’t; we retreated behind our Y chromosomes and waged a private war that was in fact a war of love. No wonder gay guys came out of Sacred Heart flaming and straight guys came out of it defensive and confused. It was like the military: we were showering together. But the lines had been drawn, the trenches had been dug, the enemy was us: we didn’t dare enjoy each other! In saying what he said. Juice had stumbled on a landmine, and glad it wasn’t them, the class awaited detonation.
“A healthy self-image is a wonderful thing,” Zipser condescended, shotgunning an espresso. “But should the army compromise preparedness for ego?”
“Ain’t that what the Cold War was all about, Zipser?” Juice persisted
, sounding like Kissinger guest-hosting Soul Train. “Show me yo’ missile, I show you my mine? Maybe we both take a peek at our pee-pees the worl’ won’t explode, an’ all that Strangelove bullshit?”
The class greeted this with a megablast of laughter. Zipser licked his coffee cup and fixed his eyes on Juice.
“Mr. Compton, are you kidding me? A big strong—”
“ ‘Buck-naked nigger like you!’ I know!” Juice shouted, completing Zipser’s sentence to a horrifying, bonafide, Ground Zero hush. “It’s the same kinda prejudice makes QB Butch say ‘faggot,’ the same kinda shit you teachers never ever jump on, leas’ not ’less you have to, leas’ not till it’s too late!” Juice drew a breath, luxuriating in the fallout; then he glanced around fiercely, catching everybody’s eye. “You fellas, I mean it, you better check yo’ heads! And you too, Zipser, especially you! I’ss Millennium #3 comin’, you ready? We gotta throw all that ol’ shit out the window.”
Juice took his seat and snuck some cocaine from his pocket. Faking the sniffles, he snorted half a line.
“What do you say, Toby Sligh?” Zipser segued, focusing on me for reasons I could live without.
Everybody in the class had turned silently to me. I felt like the Resident Expert on Fags.
I stood up and said, “I think Compton’s full of bullshit,” and sat back down, and wouldn’t meet Juice’s eye.
“Thank you, Mr. Sligh,” Dr. Zipser responded.
Juice was staring at me.
Yeah, I know: he’d been betrayed.
Though I never understood what inspired his forgiveness, halfway through Latin Juice sent me a note via several random hands, written in a dead language: “Conticere est concidere.” I sent it back to him with the message crossed out and another underneath it: “Iam negate.” Juice smiled at me. Then he put the paper in his mouth and swallowed it.
Toby's Lie Page 10
