I followed them to Bugsy’s, a pretty hot nightclub on the east side of town where they stayed until 1 a.m. and then to a private home on the city’s west side near Highway 301. It was a two-story Tudor.
He pulled into a two car garage and closed it down behind the car. The lights came on in the living room, then in an upstairs room, probably a bedroom. After about 30 minutes the lights went off.
I sat in the darkness until 3 a.m. when I finally regained sanity. It felt like I had literally been out of my mind, not there, for hours. I tried to think back and remember what was going through my head, but there was only a blank there.
This was crazy, literally crazy. A girl I knew and had been hanging out with for a few months had gone out on a date, given some lucky, rich, talented bastard a blow job, and now was being pounded silly in his bed. It happened every night somewhere. She wasn’t my girlfriend, my wife, the love of my life. She wasn’t cheating.
No, she was just doing what any healthy, beautiful young woman her age should be doing on a Friday night and I was hiding in the dark, stalking her, spying on her like some jealous psycho. This wasn’t me. I’d never been like this about any woman.
I drove back to my apartment. It was 3:30 in the morning. Two of my roommates’ doors were closed, with the traditional tie around the doorknob. What were the odds both those bastards would get lucky while I was out playing Peeping Tom?
I’d stopped along the way and bought a bottle of Scotch. I sat in the dark, filled a shot glass and started sipping.
I felt the temptation to slip away into that warm and comfortable haze again but stopped myself. It felt like scratching at a scab over a bleeding wound. It hurt a little and made it possible to ignore the terrible pain just below the surface.
I had thought we were friends. We had joked and laughed together and once in awhile she had swatted at me, or punched me in the ribs when I was aggravating her. But she had never hugged me like that, never kissed me except in that ‘sisterly’ way, never held me THAT way.
She and Owen were friends, probably bed buddies. Debbie and I were...what? Nothing except a girl hanging out with a guy she felt gratitude toward and probably more than a little pity.
But I guess I must have known deep down. It was why I had never gotten up the courage to pat her ass, to try to kiss her, because ours was a mostly one-sided friendship, one-sided on my side.
The asshole who was in bed with Debbie was tall, athletic, rich and had a life ahead of him I couldn’t even come close to imitating. I’d never had a chance from the very beginning, not from the night at the frat house.
Why the hell had she come to see me? Why the hell had she played at being a friend, joking about blow jobs and masturbation and keeping me constantly revved up, knowing she’d never touch me the way she’d touched that black bastard.
Half the bottle of Scotch had vanished and Mark and one of my other roommates, Dave, were holding me down while two girls shouted in the background. My right hand hurt like hell and my head was hurting from all the yelling. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.
My tongue felt fat and heavy but I managed to mumble, “Mark, what....what...”
Mark had my right hand which throbbed with my heartbeat held down with the weight of his body.
“Bill, Bill, calm down. Stop fighting us. Just stop, man.”
“Mark...what....let me up....let me up...”
“I will, Bill, as soon as you relax. Stop fighting us. Can you relax?”
I lay back and realized I was on my bed. After a moment, Mark and then Dave eased up and somebody turned on the overhead light and I looked around numbly.
It looked like a tornado had swept through the room. The chairs were snapped and lay in pieces, the dresser had been overturned and the contents strewn around the room and there was a big, big damn hole in the wall next to the bed.
Mark and Dave warily got off the bed and left me lying there. Two girls in various states of nudity came up behind them to stare at me warily.
I realized my hand hurt so bad I wanted to scream. I looked down at it and it looked like I was wearing a red catcher’s mitt.
“What-“
“That’s what we’d like to know,” Mark said, kneeling down beside the bed. “We were...sleeping…and all of a sudden all hell broke loose in here. You had the door locked and were throwing stuff around. We had to kick the damned thing down. By the way, you’re going to have to pay for these repairs.”
I looked at the hole in the wall and at my hand.
“All you,” Mark said. You punched right through the sheet rock and I think you might have broken one or two of the two-by-four support beams. I think you broke your hand all to pieces as well.”
Memory flooded back into me.
“Get me to the emergency room, Mark. I’ll pay for all the repairs. I’m sorry.”
“What happened, Bill? What in the world happened?”
“Growing pains, Mark. I just grew up tonight. I’ll explain it to you someday.”
Despite all the booze I’d had during the night, I was feeling stone cold sober, mostly cold. I wanted to shiver, despite it being in the 70s. After a few tense minutes, Mark and Dave helped me up and I staggered with Mark to my Bug.
I spent five hours at the Shands Teaching Hospital emergency room where I was x-rayed and splinted and told if I was lucky, I might not have done any permanent damage to the bones, tendons and tissues of my right hand and wrist.
I insisted on driving Mark back to our apartment. It was 9 a.m., the sun was shining and Gainesville was green and beautiful. He got out and was getting ready to come around to my side when I said, “I’m not coming in, Mark. I’ll be back in a few days, but I think I’m going to go home.”
It felt good to be alone and on the road from Gainesville back to Jacksonville, driving through the small towns and rural countryside of Alachua County. Then I was back on Jacksonville’s west side and pulling into the driveway of the small, two bedroom house that had been my home for more than a decade.
I was turning the key in the front door when it opened and my mother took one look at me and gasped, then wrapped her arms around me. She was a small woman, but she seemed to envelop me.
“Oh, Bill....”
“It’s OK, Mom. I just want to sleep.”
She followed me to my old bedroom, which she’d kept untouched as if I’d never left. I didn’t even pull back the sheets. I lay down on my old bed and collapsed into the soothing darkness.
I was disoriented when I woke up. The sun was shining through my bedroom window. Had it been only a few minutes?
My mother was sitting on the bed next to me.
“How long.....?”
“It’s Sunday morning, Bill. You slept more than 24 hours.”
I rolled on my back and held my hand in its cast up to see if it was still throbbing.
“Why don’t you ever listen to your mother, Bill?”
I just gave her a curious look.
“I was trying to spare you. I knew she was going to hurt you, to hurt you bad, and she has. She will again if you go back to her.”
I just looked at her.
“You kept calling out her name. I knew you were seeing her and I knew this was coming. She is beautiful and you’re a man and I knew you were going to want her, but she is no good.”
I lay back and took a deep breath. My heart was beating and so I was still alive. I’d survived the worst night of my life. I hoped it would be the worst night I’d ever know.
“We’re done, Mom. No need for more warnings.”
I stayed in Jacksonville for two days and went back to my apartment. It was awkward wiping my ass with my left hand, I couldn’t write worth a damn and driving was a pain but it was okay. Then she called.
Mark poked his head in my door the following Friday and said, “Debbie’s on the phone.”
“Tell her I’m not in. You haven’t seen me today. No, tell her I’m visiting my mom in Jacksonville.”
“Tell her, Mark.”
Saturday I stayed at the campus library till past 9 p.m. when they threw me out, hit a McDonald’s for a late supper and saw a movie at the Campus Union, making myself as invisible as possible. I didn’t get home until nearly 2 a.m.
Mark had a tie on his door knob but when I walked in he opened it, stuck his head out because he was obviously not wearing anything and said, “She came by about 9 p.m. and again at midnight. What is wrong with you, man?”
“Leave it alone, Mark.”
I avoided her the rest of the week, once sitting quietly in my locked room while Mark apologized saying that I had been playing the mystery man for more than a week and they hadn’t seen me much. Mark knocked a few times and finally told me through the door, “It’s alright. She walked out and drove off.”
He stepped inside my room and said, “I’m your friend and roommate, Bill. Explain to me how any sane, straight male could send that away over and over.”
“Someday. Not now.”
He shook his head.
“Who the hell would have thought it would happen to you, of all people. You know this is hopeless, right? You can’t hide from her forever.”
“I can try.”
Forever lasted until the following Monday. I was walking into my sociology class when she stepped out in front of me. I had to put on brakes to avoid bouncing into her and I didn’t want, above all, couldn’t handle hitting those tits.
“If I didn’t know better I might almost think you’re avoiding me.”
I didn’t look her in the eye, just stared beyond her to the doorway leading into the lecture hall and said, “Sorry, Deb, but I have to get in there. I can’t afford to be late.”
As I tried to slip around her she moved to block me and I had to raise my eyes to meet hers. There was a hint, but not quite, of a smile on her lips.
“Yeah, I know. They’ll throw you out of school if you’re late to a sociology class during the summer session. They’re really strict this time of year.”
I had done everything I could do to avoid this, but it was here.
“Look, Debbie. I really do have to get to class. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ve got things I’ve got to get done and I don’t have the time to sit around and talk.”
“You really are avoiding me, aren’t you?”
I met her gaze straight on.
“Yeah. We, uh...I just decided that there’s no point....no point in our spending time together anymore.”
“So hanging with me for a pizza or talking in your room or seeing a movie once in awhile is just too much of a strain on your over-booked social schedule?”
Then she noticed my right hand for the first time and her eyes widened.
“What happened? Did-“
“No, this wasn’t Ramone or any of your legions of boyfriends warning me off, just an accident. Anyway, Debbie, I appreciate your taking the time to take in movies with me and talk, but it’s not going anywhere and it never will. You need to go back to your kind of friends, and I’ll go back to my life. It’s been fun, but...”
“Just like that?”
“No, I thought about this a lot. We’re two entirely different kinds of people. Two different lives. It makes no sense whatsoever for us to hang out. Thank you, but let’s call it quits.”
“You didn’t think about talking with me about this?”
“About what, Deb? We’re friends. We hang out. I like you, you like me, but we’re just friends and our lives and our interests would have split us apart sooner or later. We’re not ‘breaking up.’ You have to have been together to break up. We were never together. I’m not going to run away when I see you, but I have my own friends, things I do and they’re not things I would do with you. Maybe we’ll see each other around. We probably will. I hope you don’t take this the wrong way.”
She stepped back.
“Oh. When you put it that way, I won’t.”
She gave me a look I couldn’t read, but that happened a lot with her.
“See you around....friend.”
She walked away without looking back. When she was gone I sagged against a wall, feeling like I’d been gut punched.
I didn’t see her, or at least talk to her, for two weeks. I saw her a few times, but she just nodded at me as she walked the campus with friends. A few times I saw her friends huddle around her as we passed, but they never said anything to me. I thought it would get better with time, but I was wrong.
It was near midnight on a Thursday two weeks later. I was lying on my bed reading a beaten-up paperback version of a late 1960s alternate history science fiction novel called “Pavane,” particularly the section titled “The Signaller.” It was the saddest damned thing I’d ever read, the story of lost love and what it means to live forever without love.
I’d been reading it when I was 15 years old and Sarah Newman, whom I’d loved deeply and without measure as only a high school sophomore could love, had told me she’d fallen in love with the 6-foot-4 right guard of the Lee High Commodore football team. It had taken me a summer to bounce back and I’d read “The Signaller” probably a hundred times.
For some reason it had become my emotional touchstone whenever my heart was broken. Since I was alone, and would be alone forever, reading about somebody even worse off than me had a therapeutic effect.
I envisioned my lonely life through my twenties and thirties and forties and beyond. I would have affairs and there would be women. As a successful and dashing attorney there would be women, but there would be an unyielding mass of ice where my heart had been that would never thaw.
I realized objectively how silly I was being, but I hurt too badly. I wished a thousand times I had never taken that frat house job and never got mixed up in Debbie Bascomb’s life. Then realized that no matter what happened, I was glad I was there for her that night.
The door to my room swung open and she was standing in the doorway. I absentmindedly noted the low-cut blouse that showed the swells of those DD-cups, the tight white slacks that hugged her curves. But it was her eyes that drew me in. Her lips seemed thinner and her cheekbones more pronounced. We just stared at each other for a couple of minutes and I wondered if I’d fallen asleep and was dreaming.
“How did you...”
“I had a key made,” she said, showing it to me.
“What....what are you doing here?”
“I talked to Dave the other day. He told me how you hurt your hand.”
When I didn’t say anything, she stepped into the room, knelt beside the bed and took my cast hand in her two hands.
“What happened Friday night, Bill? That Friday night.”
I remained silent.
“Everything changed that night. What happened? Why did you smash up your room and run home to Momma and decide you didn’t want to be around me anymore?”
I still couldn’t talk.
“Did you see us, Bill? Is that what this is all about. I didn’t see you. Were you at the restaurant, or the nightclub?”
“I didn’t see anything except your black boyfriend that night.”
I didn’t recognize my voice.
“And his cock. When you were sucking him off in his Caddy.”
“You were spying on us? Why?”
“I decided for once I was going to surprise you. Got dressed and went to pick you up, but after I saw you loving on your friend I realized you were never going to have any room in your life for a stupid asshole like me.”
“You followed us.”
“You do have a head on your shoulders. Yeah, I followed you to Merriweather’s and saw that blowjob, and to Bugsy’s, and then to – that was his house, right? I thought maybe you’d gone there to talk UF basketball with him. But by about 3 a.m. I figured you were in for the night and just gave it up.”
“Did you come up a
nd peep in the window? Did you see him fucking me? Did you see him hammering that big black dick of his in my pussy. Did you jerk off watching us? Isn’t that what peeping toms and voyeurs and perverts do?”
“No, sorry to disappoint you. I just sat out there in the darkness while you were fucking him and finally figured out there was no you and me and there never would be. I’m slow. It took me months to figure it out. You threw me with those conflicting signals. But I finally got the message.”
“You’re slower than molasses, Bill. Slower than snails. And perceptive as a rock. The first month or so after we met, I did go out with other guys, and I fucked them. But...”
She straightened up and did something that made those phenomenal breasts quiver deliciously. I was enjoying the show. I doubted I’d ever get as good a view again.
“I started enjoying the time I spent with you. You’re a smart, funny guy. You treated me with respect and I could tell you...had feelings for me, even if you never said anything. I enjoyed being with you and – I just stopped seeing other guys. I figured, sooner or later.... That’s what CC was talking about. They couldn’t believe it.
“It got to be a month, and two months and three months that we’d been hanging out, dating without calling it dating. I was wondering if you might be gay, until I saw you with Amy. Then I realized you were just stupid, and last Friday Owen called me. We’ve known each other since I was 15. We both went to Forrest.”
She stared at me defiantly.
“I like fucking him. He is good. Of course his dick’s a little small. He says he’s the only black guy he knows with a white man’s dick, but he knows how to use it, and, I like him. I was also getting very, very horny. I’ve never gone three months without some action, not since I was 13. So since you’ve NEVER asked me out on a date and you hadn’t called me, I went out with him. I sucked him off and I spent the night in bed with him.”
Her voice trailed off.
The Long Fall Page 32
