The Book of Joe

by Jonathan Tropper

  I nod. “Sure. We went to the Central Park Zoo and then saw a movie.”

  “Back to the Future,” Wayne says, closing his eyes as he remembers. “We were the only ones in the theater.”

  I have a sudden, vivid flashback of Carly doing cartwheels down the empty theater aisle in the middle of the movie and then skipping back to our seats, her face flushed with excitement, as Wayne and I applauded. I'd forgotten about that, and, recalling it, I feel a hot lump in my throat. “We had Kentucky Fried Chicken afterward,” I say. “Brought a bucket of it on the train and stuffed our faces the whole way back.”

  Wayne nods, smiling. “All that shit with Sammy was going on then,” he says. “I was still in denial that I was actually gay. That was a tough year for me. I was scared and confused, and I had this big secret I didn't feel safe sharing with anyone. But that day we all had a great time, better than if we'd done it on a Saturday.” He turns away from the window and looks at me. “The three of us laughed a lot that day. That's what I remember most. And that for one day, I completely forgot about my secret and just enjoyed myself, for the first time in ages.”

  I nod, feeling my eyes becoming moist. Sitting there with Wayne, I can actually recall the way that day felt, the sensation of it, and what it felt like to be me then. The crisp autumn air, the noise of Manhattan, the delightful, conspiratorial sense of being somewhere we shouldn't have been, the flush on Carly's cheeks from the cool wind as we walked through the zoo.

  “That day mattered,” Wayne says emphatically. “There were plenty of other days that mattered too, but not nearly as many as there should have been. I've thought about it a lot. What makes a day like that matter so much, and why there are so many less of them as we get older.”

  “And what's the answer?” I ask.

  “It's simple, really. We were doing what we wanted to do, instead of what we expected ourselves to do.” He leans back in his pillows and takes a long, greedy drag on the joint, shaking off the ash into a cup by his bedside. “I'm here to tell you,” he says, his voice high and clenched from the herb, “that at the end of the day, which is where I currently reside, nothing else matters but the things that truly matter. This is nothing you didn't know before, but even though you know it, it doesn't mean you really know it. Because if you really knew it, you'd act on it, man. Shit, if I could go back now . . .”

  His voice trails off, and he's quiet for so long that I think for a moment that he's fallen asleep, but then he leans forward and takes a deep breath. “I am now going to invoke a cartoon character,” he announces solemnly.

  I indicate the joint. “What's in that thing?”

  “Don't fuck with me when I'm being wise, Joe.”

  “Sorry.”

  Wayne rolls onto his side to better face me. A smattering of gray ash falls from the tip of the joint and disappears into a fold in his comforter as he readjusts himself. “You remember the old Roadrunner cartoons, where the coyote would run off a cliff and keep going, until he looked down and happened to notice that he was running on nothing more than air?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well,” he says. “I always used to wonder what would have happened if he'd never looked down. Would the air have stayed solid under his feet until he reached the other side? I think it would have, and I think we're all like that. We start heading out across this canyon, looking straight ahead at the thing that matters, but something, some fear or insecurity, makes us look down. And we see we're walking on air, and we panic, and turn around and scramble like hell to get back to solid ground. And if we just wouldn't look down, we could make it to the other side. The place where things matter.”

  “I understand what you're saying,” I say. “But Carly and I were so long ago. People change.”

  “The things that matter don't change,” Wayne says, turning the joint around and expertly placing its glowing tip into his mouth, what we used to call glow-worming. “The distance between you and them just gets progressively bigger. There's obviously still something between you two.”

  “Is that what she said?”

  “I might be reading between the lines a little,” he admits, pinching out the joint and tossing it into the cup. “But really, Joe, what the hell do you have to lose?”

  We look at each other, and I can feel my eyes watering again, although it might be from the weed smoke, which by now has permeated every corner of the room, filling the air like sweet incense. “I saw her today,” I say. “At the hospital.”

  Wayne stares at me. “You asshole. How long were you going to let me lie here laying on all that bullshit before you told me?”

  “You were on a roll.”

  “Fuck you,” he says with a grin. “How'd it go?”

  “I'm not sure. We said we'd get together.”

  He leans back in his pillows, looking pleased. “Excellent.”

  “It doesn't mean anything,” I say.

  “Of course not.”

  “Really.”

  “I know.”

  We smile at each other. “That was a great day, wasn't it?” I say.

  “The best.” He rolls onto his back, pulling up the blankets. “I need to get some rest,” he says. “Come and see me tomorrow if you can.”

  “You bet,” I say, getting up to leave as I consider the merits of what Wayne has just said. Maybe there is something to it, or maybe he's just stoned out of his gourd.

  “Joe,” he says. “Remember what happens to the coyote when he doesn't run off the cliff.”

  “What happens?”

  Wayne's smile is crooked and ever so slightly crazed. “A fucking piano falls on him.”

  Downstairs, I find Mrs. Hargrove waiting for me in the living room. “I want to show you something,” she says. I follow her through a set of French doors and into a den that is completely overrun with piled boxes, large and small, all unopened. A wide array of major Internet retailers is represented: The Sharper Image, Nordstrom, Amazon.com, Circuit City, Brooks Brothers, Sears, L.L. Bean, Gap, and a host of others. I turn to Mrs. Hargrove, who is peering suspiciously at the packages, her forehead lined with deep creases of consternation.

  “What is all of this?” I say.

  “He buys things,” she whispers to me as if revealing a dark family secret. “Day and night. He just orders things off that godforsaken computer.”

  “What for?”

  “How should I know?” she snaps, her voice edged with hysteria. “Every day I get packages. And when they come, he doesn't want to open them. Tells me to just put them in here.”

  I stare in puzzlement at the jumble of cartons. There are easily forty or fifty of them, scattered in haphazard piles around the room. “Have you asked him about it?” I say.

  “Of course I asked him,” she practically hisses. “He has no answer. I don't think he even remembers what he ordered.”

  “I think this might be a symptom,” I say. “Some form of dementia from the illness.”

  She gives me a frazzled look. “What am I supposed to do with all of this stuff?” She looks back at the boxes, haunted by them. “What in god's name am I supposed to do?”

  When I leave a few moments later, she's still standing there like that, staring desolately at the roomful of unopened packages.

  nineteen

  1987

  Bush Falls was named for a pair of medium-sized waterfalls that fed the Bush River in the woods just off Porter's Boulevard. There was a well-known urban legend surrounding these twin waterfalls, concerning a couple of high school kids who parked on the bluff overlooking the falls to make out. As things heated up, the girl, in a fit of passion, dared her date to prove his love by jumping over the falls, offering up her virginity as the prize. Naturally, he immediately threw himself into the swirling, frigid waters and was carried over the falls. Here the versions vary, with some claiming he accomplished this feat in the nude, and others saying he was fully dressed. Some accounts have him breaking his arm on one of the large stones that protrude from the
pool of water beneath the falls, and others have him emerging unscathed. These details, and others, have been argued through the generations with all the ardor of a Talmudic debate, but there is universal agreement as to the story's conclusion. He returned triumphantly to the car, drenched and shivering, where he found his girlfriend lying gloriously naked in the backseat, ready to fulfill her side of the bargain and warm him with the sweet, wet heat of her surrendered virginity.

  Not surprisingly, the woods immediately surrounding those waterfalls remained the most popular make-out spot in town. If you were a girl who didn't intend to put out, you avoided the falls, because agreeing to go was an unspoken covenant that you would be forthcoming with your favors. If you were a guy who didn't plan on getting some action, chances were pretty good that you didn't actually exist. Every once in a while, one of the more daring boys, in a hormonal frenzy, would brave the falls again, usually having secured a similar promise from his date. The occasional fatality served only to heighten the excitement, and the rule that evolved over time was that if you happened to be there with a date when someone went over the falls, you had a moral and historical obligation if not to actually have sex then at least to step up your usual routine significantly.

  This ritual and its contemporary bylaws were surprisingly well respected by teens of both sexes, enforced by an unspoken collective conscience, a social contract between teenagers more binding than any rules imposed on them by the authorities. Like playing spin the bottle in the fifth grade, it somehow lent an air of validation and provided a forum for communication in the otherwise awkward business of incrementally increasing the output in budding sexual relationships. Sex in the back of a car might be regretted later as something tawdry and a poor setting for the surrender of innocence. This was something the girls worried about much more than the boys, who would have been happy to have sex bent over in a stinking dumpster. But if it happened at the falls, you were a part of a sacred tradition, the next generation in a revered and enchanted history. There was a sense of destiny to it, as if the place was part of some romantic heritage, a sexual legacy for the teenagers of Bush Falls.

  Carly and I lost our virginity there in the backseat of my dad's Pontiac on a cold January night, with the snow falling like a curtain over the fogged-up car windows and George Michael singing “Careless Whisper” on the car stereo. To this day, the opening bars of the sax solo instantly take me back to that night. Say what you will about car sex, but thirty million horny teenagers can't be wrong. Wait, can you lift this leg a second? Put your arm over here. Is that okay? Wait, that's not it. Move it up a little. Oops, sorry. Wait, now it's good. There was a good deal of awkward fumbling before we managed to achieve penetration, and just as I began getting into the rhythm, Lucy appeared unbidden, stretched out magnificently across my consciousness in her bikini, and I went off inside Carly like a volcano.

  “I'm sorry,” I said, blushing. “That couldn't have been too much fun for you.”

  Carly waved away my embarrassed apologies with a happy grin and kissed me warmly. “We did it,” she said triumphantly.

  “Did it hurt?” I asked.

  “Not as much as they say,” she said. “I always suspected that was just propaganda to keep us virgins longer.”

  I laughed and told her I loved her. She said it back, and before long we were at it again. This time I was able to last, bringing her to a loud, unrestrained orgasm.

  “Mm,” she said afterward, purring into my chest. “Much, much better.”

  “We aim to please,” I said, feeling like a major stud even as I felt myself shriveling up like a prune inside her.

  “You know,” Carly said, curling up in my arms, “we're going to have to do this all the time now.”

  Kids starting in with sex are like Columbus landing on the shores of the New World; even though there are millions of natives running around in full view, they still think they discovered the damn thing. We did it everywhere: in my father's car, her parents' Jacuzzi, my bed while my father was still at work, and once in a ladies' room stall at the Megaplex, which I don't necessarily recommend. There was no stopping us. For a while, everything was either foreplay or the afterglow, and life was beautiful. Then Wayne and Sammy made up, and everything went to shit.

  Apparently, Carly and I did not have the market cornered on unbridled teen sex. Unbeknownst to us, Sammy and Wayne were heavily engaged in their own sexual coming of age, albeit a necessarily secretive one. They hadn't even told me they were speaking again. I found out like everyone else did, when Wayne's unsuspecting born-again mother stepped into his bedroom one night and interrupted him and Sammy in the steaming throes of naked passion. I never got the details on the ugly scene that followed, but it ended with Wayne's being kicked out of his house. He crashed at Sammy's for a few days, but when Mrs. Hargrove learned that he was living with Sammy, she stormed the Habers' house, demanding that her son leave with her at once and immediately accompany her to see her priest. Wayne refused to see his mother, and Lucy was ultimately forced to slam and bolt the door when Mrs. Hargrove's rage threatened to turn violent.

  Elaine Hargrove stood outside in the bitter cold of that winter night for the better part of an hour, wailing insanely for her son and cursing Lucy and Sammy at full volume, until one of the neighbors finally called Sheriff Muser. He arrived ten minutes later and, after some heated negotiations, finally managed to coax the hysterical woman into the back of his car. He then knocked on Lucy's door and insisted on speaking to Wayne, who verified that contrary to his mother's claims, he was not being held there against his will. Muser drove Wayne's mother home, undoubtedly getting an earful from the distraught woman the whole way back, and recommended that Mr. Hargrove call the family doctor for a sedative. That evening the good sheriff advised his son, Mouse, that he didn't want him showering after games and practices with a homosexual. Mouse probably had the phone in his hand before his father had left the room, and by morning every kid in Bush Falls High knew about Sammy and Wayne.

  When Carly called that night to tell me she'd heard the news from one of her girlfriends, I was stunned—and I already knew they were gay, which just goes to show how adept I'd become at the whole denial thing. My dad was still at work with the car, so I took my bike and pedaled frantically up the hill to Sammy's house, a sense of dread beating steadily in my intestines like the lowest keys on a grand piano. Sammy and Wayne were camped out in the den, watching Cheers, when Lucy let me in. She took one look at my sweaty, panicked expression, and her smile vanished. “Oh, no,” she said, closing her eyes. For a minute it looked like she might faint, and I reached out to steady her. “He can't go through this again,” she said, fighting back tears, and I thought, Again?

  Since neither Wayne nor Sammy had seen fit to tell me that they were even friends again, they pretty much knew something was up when I didn't seem surprised to find them together. “What's up, Joe?” Wayne said awkwardly while Sammy stared at me apprehensively.

  “They know,” I said, still panting slightly from my frantic bike ride. “Everybody knows.”

  “Everybody knows what?” Wayne said, but I could tell he understood. No one said anything for a full minute, and then Sammy said, “Fucking Muser,” and sat back, a look of abject misery on his face. On television, Diane kissed Sam and then slapped him across the face and the laugh track laughed.

  “I just wanted to warn you,” I said. “You know, before you showed up at school tomorrow.”

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” Wayne said in a hushed voice, his face devoid of any expression.

  “Wayne,” Sammy said.

  “Fuck!” Wayne shouted, getting to his feet. “I have to get out of here.”

  “I'll come with you,” Sammy said, starting to get up.

  “No,” Wayne said. “I want to be alone.” He grabbed his jacket from a chair in the kitchen and ran out the front door.

  Sammy's eyes filled with tears. “You'd better go after him,” he said to me. “This is goi
ng to kill him.”

  “What about you?” I said.

  Sammy turned to me, the tears running unchecked down his cheeks, and gave me the most pathetic look I'd ever seen. “Everyone knew I was a faggot anyway,” he said softly, and for a fraction of a second I felt a powerful urge to reach out and strangle him. Instead, I turned and ran for the front door, muttering a jumbled farewell to Lucy, who hadn't budged from where she stood in the front hallway, staring at the wall, a stricken expression frozen on her face.

  When I got outside, Wayne was gone and so was my bike.

  It took me a half hour to walk home, and when I got there, I was surprised to find my father waiting for me in the kitchen, with a frown on his face. It wasn't the frown that surprised me; it was the part about his waiting for me.

  “I just got off the phone with Coach Dugan,” he said slowly, absently clasping his massive fingers as he cracked his knuckles.

  “Yeah?”

  “He said Wayne Hargrove is a homosexual. Him and that kid who worked the press last summer.”

  “Why the hell would he call you with something like that?” I said.

  “He's looking to verify it.”

  “Is the coach looking for a date?”

  “You watch your mouth, Joe,” my father said sternly. “The coach has a whole team of boys to think of. This is serious business.”

  “This is no one's fucking business,” I said.

  He gave me a sharp look and then tilted his head slightly, as if a new thought had suddenly occurred to him. “Are you a homosexual?” he said, squinting at me.

  “What's with the sudden interest in my sex life, Dad?”

  “Just answer the goddamn question!” he yelled at me, pounding the table with his fist.

  I leaned against the doorway and sighed. “Dad,” I said softly. “I have a girlfriend.”

  He squinted at me in surprise. “You do?” he said a little too skeptically for my taste.