by Kent, Julia
“No,” I said ferociously. “No. No, no, no, no, no,” I added, shaking my head. What the hell was I doing? Of course I lived there.
“I live here,” I said, turning, my hand smacking against the side of the shed, a little piece of rotten board falling off and clattering to the ground, failing to help me in my lie. We looked at each other, equally embarrassed. Except, we were both embarrassed for me.
“Oh, so…umm, a person in there, I wasn’t sure who the person was, but the person…” If he said the person one more time I would have no choice but to smack him. It was obvious he couldn’t tell whether Mama was a man or a woman. She got that a lot. Probably, it was the low smoker’s voice combined with her weight. That and the fact that she hadn’t done anything with herself since Daddy had died. Eighteen years is a long time for a woman to go without anything special.
No, not that. Get your mind out of the gutter. I mean no makeup, no nice clothes, nothing. She just ate and watched her stories on TV, and went on the Internet and entered sweepstakes contests and lotteries. If that seemed about as pathetic as it sounded, that’s because it was. On the other hand, we had more swag than you could ever imagine. Corporate logos on t-shirts and water bottles and little stuffed animals from all sorts of products – you need something like that, stop by the trailer and grab whatever you want, as long as Mama’s not looking. No one needs three hundred pop can cozies, right? Except Mama. All of it her winnings, as she called it, cluttering up the trailer but it gave her something to look forward to whenever the mail came.
“That’s my Mama,” I said quietly. His eyes widened. I would have read him the Communist Manifesto in the original German if I thought that there was a snowball’s chance in hell that I could just stare at him. The planes of his cheekbones were entrancing, the way the skin folded around his eyes, dark and sophisticated, an exquisiteness to the waves of his bluish-black hair. He had the bone structure of a model and the whole package of a man who was beauty personified.
Composing himself, the gears turning in that gorgeous head, he finally replied with: “OK, yeah, her. Well, so, Trevor’s supposed to be there.”
“No, he’s here with me.”
“This is your house? You’re Darla?” he asked.
I pulled the door shut quickly and then realized that my breasts were hanging right around my bellybutton. Dammit! I actually did need my bra. And shoes would help too. “Just a minute,” I said, my finger in his face buying me a second as I scurried back into my little home.
Fumbling to pull off my shirt, I looked down at Trevor. Should I wake him up? Tell him Joe’s here? This was going to be the end, and any second now he’d be gone. This couldn’t be the way that it ended. And yet, it had to end, didn’t it?
I felt kind of stupid, now extra stupid, for telling him what had happened with Mama and Daddy’s accident. There was really only one person I could talk to about that and she was out in Boston right now. Why was I thinking about Aunt Josie when I had the most incredible man I’d ever found by the side of the road – OK, the only man I’d ever found by the side of the road, but he was still pretty fucking incredible – in my bed, covered in my scent, my juices, our minglings still floating through the air. And then another guy, standing outside my little house, waiting for something.
Whatever it was, I needed to figure out how to give it because pretty soon people were going to start to really nose their way in to my business.
Socks. Shoes. Bra. A little deodorant and a quick brush through my hair and I stepped back outside, grinning wide. Again I was dumbstruck. It was like looking at someone not quite human. When Joe smiled politely, of course his teeth were perfectly straight and so even it was as if they’d been filed down. Dimples appeared as the smile deepened into a grin and he said, “Trevor’s passed out?”
“Yeah,” I said slowly, nodding.
“Did he get high again?” There was a resignation in Joe’s voice and I took the moment to search his body up and down; yellow Polo shirt, faded jeans, white sneakers – nothing special in the clothes department. He could have been any guy in Cleveland, or Columbus, or Pittsburgh, but the way he wore them, how the clothes hung on his angles, on his bulging muscles was…all of this was making me drool and sigh and turn into an insipid idiot.
So it was time to just be a regular idiot and say, “No, not high. He’s just tired.”
“Ahh,” Joe’s eye’s twinkled. “You rode him hard.”
I pulled my face back a bit. “That’s awfully presumptuous of you.”
“What is?” he said languidly, a sharp contrast to the nervous man he’d been just moments ago.
“Assuming I slept with Trevor.”
“Not a commentary on you, Darla,” he said, protesting, holding one palm out. “I just know Trevor too well. There’s no way he would be picked up by a woman hitchhiking naked and not sleep with her.”
Joe
I’d spent the better part of the last two hours this morning being chewed out by Trevor’s mom, who kept asking where he was and demanding I put him on the phone as I catapulted myself as fast as possible through the lost journey down I-76 in the bowels of Pennsylvania and, now, Ohio. I had the set of clothes he’d abandoned in his basement, along with his iPhone and wallet. Idiot.
Of all the fuck-ups Trevor had been involved in, this was easily the biggest one and it tasted a little too much like one of those Hangover movies, which are very funny in a frat-boy way but that leave much to be desired when you’re the friend who has to rescue the main character. If this woman Darla had a Capuchin monkey in that little potting shed where Trevor was snoring behind her, then that was it. I was done.
Darla came out of the shed, closed the door and smiled at me like a crazy, wild woman. What the hell had Trevor gotten into? This place looked like something out of My Name Is Earl. This wasn’t funny anymore. Eleven hours of driving had been bad enough. Doing it alone, listening to all of the recorded lectures for my health care law class, which I had to get an A in, in order to secure my spot at BC Law, had been bad enough. But showing up here and being ocularly devoured by this curvy, bouncy chick who had just bagged Trevor was over the top.
Ruining one of my brand new shoes on her porch made me resent the trip even more. Most of all, though, I knew that Mrs. Connor was going to rip me a new asshole if I didn’t get Trevor home immediately. Of all the parents among my friends, the Connors were the most controlling. Trevor didn’t care, but that’s because most of us wanted what our parents wanted for us. He didn’t.
It was seamless and easy to just say, “Sure, OK, what do you want me to do?” But Trevor was different. Trevor was a wild, wild beast. The kind of guy I admired and wished I could be, but who scared me, too, because I couldn’t grasp how my best friend since kindergarten had turned into a complete stranger when it came to everything music. Once we started our band it was like a demon rose up from him and made everything irrelevant – unless it was music. Our music. Playing bass was an afterthought for me, something I squeezed in so I’d have an excuse to hang out with Trev. At first it was just us – he played guitar and sang, while I fumbled around and taught myself how to do some basic chords. We added Trev’s next-door neighbor, Liam, and a drummer from the debate team at the neighboring high school, Sam.
A band was born. Trevor drove everything, though, from the rehearsals to gigs to just being a fucking maniac about it. He was like Tucker Max on the prowl for pussy – except Trevor wanted sound. Harmony. Awesomeness through the chords and the lyrics and all of it, like a man possessed. Getting high after practice was the only way to get him to come down.
That he stole all my stolen peyote and ended up naked wearing only a guitar held some sort of symbolism, but right now I couldn’t dissect it. Literary essays weren’t high on my priority list.
She wouldn’t stop staring at me, this Darla chick, standing
in the sun with her mouth open a bit, lips glistening. I got that a lot. Women kept calling me all sorts of names like a young Patrick Dempsey, only cute, or ‘that Italian dude from Vogue’. My parents had pushed me into modeling but I didn’t like it. Too much attention – not my style. This whole mess with Trevor was too much attention, Darla now openly watching me, making me think she was a little unhinged.
I could see what Trevor saw in her, though, There was something kind of magnetic about her. She wasn’t particularly our type – as if we had a type. We didn’t really have much choice in the women that we interacted with – it was more whatever was there, like eating at a buffet and thinking that those were your only choices, ever. There were no women who looked like her at school and when she said, “How about we go get a cup of coffee?” I had a feeling she didn’t mean Starbucks.
Trevor snorted awake just as she said the words and then sat up, his rock hard dick poking out from under the thin blanket. He looked just like he’d looked the night of his party, completely naked, a smattering of hair down his chest thickening where it thickened on all of us. The fucker had that perfect athlete’s body completely effortlessly, never needing to work out like I did. He just could jump on a bike and go for a hundred mile ride or take a kayak out for a ten mile journey without conditioning his body in between. It filled me with instant rage to think how effortlessly everything came to Trevor – even wild women.
“Hey, Trev, fancy meeting you here,” I said. Darla snickered.
“Oh, God, Joe, you’re here.” If that was supposed to be a tone of gratitude it wasn’t even close.
“Yeah, about that,” I said, pulling out my phone. “Your mom is psycho right now.”
“Fuuuuuuuck,” he groaned, holding his head in his hands.
Darla walked back into her…whatever you call this shack, and motioned for me to come in. I walked in. Cool little place she built, actually. Did she live here? Is this how it worked in trailer land? A chicken half-flew past, some kind of guinea hen that looked starved. A kitten followed it. It was missing one leg and had a pink bow around its fluffy white neck, like a quality control reject from the Hello Kitty factory.
Darla stood with her back to us, off to my right, while Trevor leaned back and plunked his head on the pillow, grinning madly at me. I rolled my eyes and looked for a place to sit down. There wasn’t any so I just grabbed a spot on the floor, on a carpet square that reminded me of kindergarten. She had a bunch of them strewn in neat little patterns around the floor. I guessed this shed was about what? 8’X8’? Something like that – no bigger than the one we used to store our tractor mower in at home. If this was her home then Trevor and I were worlds away from Sudborough.
She opened a can, the snick of a seal being broken, and then I watched her do something with a manual can opener. They still make those? I heard the sound of water pouring and then the slow gurgle, a sound I knew from my Grandma’s house. It was a coffee maker, the kind that used a basket filter and had a pot. Not like the one at home – we used the Keurigs now or Mom pulled out the espresso machine.
Trevor looked at me and said, “What the hell happened to me?”
“I don’t know, man,” I said. What the hell did happen to you? I thought. “Like I told you, you took all that peyote.”
“You’re the one who got it,” Trevor protested.
“I got it out of the evidence room. I didn’t think you’d sit down and eat all of it.”
“All of it? I really ate all of it? I thought I must be remembering that wrong.”
Darla turned around, her eyes wide with surprise. “You ate all of it?” she asked Trevor. He just shrugged. Whipping around to me, she asked, “How much was there?”
“I don’t know.” I held my hands up to try to indicate the size of the bag and Darla started choking with laughter.
“Holy shit, Trevor! No wonder you were high as a fucking kite when I found you and that was…how long? Twelve hours? More than that? After you went missing. You’re crazy.”
The look he shot her was more intimate than anything I’d ever seen him give anyone, including me, his best friend. “It got me here, didn’t it?” he said.
She softened and smiled back, matching his affection. “I hope,” she said, “it won’t take another giant bag of peyote to get you to come back.”
Trevor
I had never been so happy to see Joe in my entire life – and that included the time someone at school had stolen my shirt from my gym bag during gym class and replaced it with a Yankees t-shirt on opening day. He’d saved me from having the shit kicked out of me in our Boston suburb. That had been super lame compared to this. What kind of friend drives eleven hours to rescue you, goes into a trailer park that might as well have been the streets of New Delhi compared to Sudborough, and rescues you?
If I was so grateful to see him, why was I also so sad that he was here? Making love with Darla last night had been unbelievable, wild and carefree, tender and powerful. She instilled in me a sense of what it must feel like to break every rule in your life, to reject the pre-programmed set of guidelines that made everything function on autopilot. I wanted to run away from everything, ignore final exams, set aside my law school acceptance letters, reject my parents’ notion that I needed to become a lawyer – tell them all to fuck off and just go out on the road and sing my fucking heart out.
Maybe I could convince Joe to join me. A laugh escaped me and Joe and Darla looked at me again as if I were a little unhinged, a little dangerous. And they were right – I was. There is nothing more dangerous than someone who comes to realize that the reality they’ve been force-fed isn’t the only option.
“You know, your dick is pretty amazing, dude, but put something on and cover it up,” Joe said.
I threw a balled up sock at him and he threw one back so I slipped the sock over it, then stood up.
“We’re Random Acts of Crazy, not the Red Hot Chili Peppers,” Joe chided.
The coffee maker sent out the most delicious scent of java. It was probably just some cheap brand of coffee, and not the espresso I’d become accustomed to, but I didn’t care. Anything would help right now to give me some focus, take away my caffeine withdrawal and make all of this last a little longer. I was going to leave Darla any minute now, go back to my life – and it felt like having something ripped from me fiber by fiber, bone crunching against bone.
Darla frowned, then took a really good look at Joe, at me, my erection, and back to Joe. “Oh my God, you’re Joe Ross, aren’t you?” She gawked at him, triggering some twisted bit of jealously in me. Women looked at Joe like he was some kind of museum man, an animated sculpture from Roman or Greek times. Any other woman and I wouldn’t have cared.
Darla? For some reason, I cared.
He shrugged. “Yeah.”
“You’re the bass player for Random Acts.”
“Yeah,” he said, scuffling his foot on the floor and looking down. Of the four of us, Joe was the most humble, the guy who thought he was along for the ride just because he was my best friend. He was also the least committed to the idea that we could break out as a rock band. I don’t think, though, that it was because he didn’t think he had what it took, or that he didn’t think that we had what it would take to make it big. It’s more that Joe was the one who was the biggest conformist, the guy who did live that pre-programmed life because it was what was expected of him.
Stolen peyote excepted. That was a crazy outlier moment for him, the first time I’d ever known him to be so bold. He’d shrugged it off as no big deal, but it made me wonder.
“So you’re telling me I have two out of four members of one of my favorite bands sitting in here in my little purple passion place – ” Joe made a snorting sound, a choked noise of shock, “ – and we’re about to enjoy a cup of coffee like polite strangers?”
I took two steps toward Darla and cozied my sock covered dick up against her hip, leaning down, breathing quietly into her ear. “It’s your pink passion place that I like most. And we’re not strangers anymore,” I hissed.
She pressed against me and I heard Joe clear his throat. “Ahem…Get a room, guys,” he said.
“You’re in it,” Darla announced and grabbed my balls, gave them a gentle, playful squeeze.
Darla
If you had told me a week ago that I would have Trevor Connor and Joe Ross from Random Acts sitting in my little purple passion place I would have told you you were crazy. There are a lot of things you could have told me that would have made me tell you you were nuts.
Most of them had happened to me in the past twelve hours.
But this one? The two hottest guys from my favorite band? Un-fucking-real. It was like the time space continuum had ripped into shreds and poured out all the hope and joy in the universe into the armpit of Ohio and added a huge jar of Nutella to it. It seemed so domestic, so June Cleaver of me, to pour a cup of coffee for each man. I only had two mugs in my place because why have more than two when no one ever came here? Just me. What was I going to do, have a third mug for the stray cat or for the neighbor’s chicken that roamed all over the place?
The two men, Joe on the floor, Trevor sitting reclined on my bed, my uncle’s tube sock still covering his now limp penis, made for quite a picture. If I were the type to go on Facebook and record every fart, sigh, and perceived insult, who photographed, non-stop, every moment of my life as if the only way to remember it was to capture it in an image like someone who was brain impaired and needed that chronicling, then I’d have been snapping pictures like crazy. It was unfortunate that I didn’t do that, really, and that anyway, my cheap little flip phone didn’t have that feature, because this would be one hell of a picture.
