The Virginity of Famous Men

by Christine Sneed

  “Hold on, Josie. Is he all right? You didn’t leave him in a state, did you?”

  “No, I did not leave him in a state. Ellen left him in a state, and he didn’t want me in any part of it.”

  “Did she break up with him?”

  I feel like I shouldn’t tell on him, but I don’t want to lie. It’s not something I usually do, even if I’m guilty of doing other boneheaded things sometimes. “I guess so.”

  “You guess so?”

  “I’m not sure. He didn’t lie down on the couch and ask me to get out my notepad so he could bare his soul to me.”

  “You’re not so grown up that I won’t slap your face if you keep talking smart to me.”

  I look at her. Her lipstick is chewed to a thin ring and her eyeliner is a smear under her lower lashes, but she is still pretty, prettier than I am, and we both know it.

  I sigh noisily. “Sorry.”

  “I’m not convinced you mean it.”

  “Sorry, Mom. Really.”

  The thing I’m not going to tell her is that Mr. Rasmussen looked like he was crying when I left. I didn’t hear the lock turn in the front door either, not like I usually do when I leave because he knows that a blind guy is not exactly the hardest person to rob, and plenty of people in town, the rejects and the morons included, know about him, how he lives alone because his parents are both dead and his son is dead too. He has one brother who lives in Wyoming or somewhere way out west who I guess once asked him to come live with him, but Mr. Rasmussen didn’t want to leave Tulip Lake because it’s where he’s lived for the past thirty years. No matter that he can’t see it anymore—it’s still his home. “It has its own smell,” he said once, “and that’s one of the things I know I couldn’t live without.”

  “What does it smell like?” I had to ask him. There have never been any good smells here, except in the spring with the flowers blooming everywhere, like the lilacs are right now. Usually it’s just a dead-fish stench from the lake and exhaust fumes from the diesel trucks that load up at the industrial bakery a block from my house every night around eleven o’clock.

  “Sometimes it’s a cold smell like snow; other times it’s hot green plants. Once in a while, it’s like a mountain—all minerals and wild grass.”

  I have never smelled a mountain in Tulip Lake. It’s pretty flat around here. And whatever kind of grass he meant, I can only guess. He doesn’t act like a hippie, but maybe he and Ellen smoke together. She could have been his girlfriend and his pot dealer for all I know.

  That night after dinner, Mom comes in and tells me it looks to her like I’ve lost a few pounds and she’s proud of me and if I keep at it, before I know it, I’ll probably be prom queen. I roll my eyes, but she can’t see it because my face is behind a dirty romance novel, The Pirate Lord’s Mistress, a book that’s hiding inside my world history textbook. “I haven’t lost any weight, Mom. Nice try.”

  “Josie,” she says.

  “What.”

  “Put that book down when I’m talking to you.”

  I stuff the books under the comforter. I probably don’t have to hide the trashy one, but it seems best not to give her another reason to be pissed at me.

  “Do you think I should go over and check on Forest?” she asks.

  “Forest?”

  “Mr. Rasmussen.”

  “I know who you mean. No, I don’t think so. He’s probably fine. Maybe he’s even back together with Ellen by now.”

  “What’s so sad is that he can’t get in a car and drive himself up to Minneapolis. He’d have to hire a cab and that would cost him a fortune. Maybe you could drive him up there after school tomorrow if I offer to have you take him?”

  This is basically the last way, aside from cleaning out every litter box in town, that I want to spend my Friday night. Mr. Rasmussen is fine for a few hours a week, but it wouldn’t be my idea of a good time to drive him up to his skanky girlfriend’s house and try not to watch him beg her to take him back and then have to wait if she invited him inside for one last boink before dumping him again. “Why don’t you offer to drive him?” I say. “Why do I have to do it? He could take the bus.”

  “I have another obligation tomorrow night. We’re not putting him on a bus either.”

  “You mean you have a date with Ron.”

  She just barely blinks, which is enough for me to know I’ve hit the right nerve. “Yes, I have a date with Ron.”

  “Oh great, that dickweed.”

  “He is not a dickweed. And I don’t want to hear you use that word ever again in this house.”

  “Who’s going to pay for gas? For my time? For the wear and tear on the car?”

  This last bit is her favorite excuse whenever I ask to borrow the car and she doesn’t want me to. I’ve only had my license for seven months and she barely lets me drive down the street, let alone to another state. But I know what she’s up to—she wants to have Ron over and have sex with him in her bed, instead of in his nasty waterbed that upsets her stomach if she does too much sloshing around on it with him. She has never said why she gets upset stomachs after seeing him, but I think that must be the reason. I’ve been on a waterbed myself, with Brent Boliona, who is not my boyfriend, but for two weeks right before tenth grade, when I was twelve pounds skinnier and had used a lot of Sun-In on my hair that summer, he sort of was.

  “This would be a good deed,” she says. “I’m not worried about the expense.”

  What I could say is, You just want me out of the house so you can get laid by that slimeball Ron Dilworth, who would screw a knothole in a tree if it were greased up enough.

  But all I say is, “He’ll be mad if you ask him because he’ll know you know about Ellen.”

  “Then you ask him. Tell him you’ll check with me but you think it’ll be fine. Once you offer, I’m sure he’ll want to do it.”

  “He’ll think I’m nosy. I can’t call him and say I know his girlfriend dumped him.”

  “Yes, you can. Because I know this is the right thing to do.”

  She’s using the voice that means I have to do whatever she says or she’ll pout all weekend and not talk to me and not let me borrow the car to go out to the movies or wherever with Gina. It’s the voice that probably drove Dad out of the house when I was ten and now he only sets foot in it once a year because he lives in Arizona with a different wife. He calls me once a month, on the last Sunday night, and sends me emails sometimes, but mostly they are lame forwards with prayers that I delete without reading. He is religious because of his second wife, Shari, who is a born-again dipshit, and basically Dad is so far away now that it’s almost like he’s dead. Mom won’t let me go down to Arizona to visit him either; she says it’s too far for me to travel by myself, especially on a plane. She’ll let me drive up to Minneapolis with a blind guy, but no way will she let me fly to Arizona to see my own damn father.

  I don’t hate her though. I never have. I’ve seen her cry too many times, her eyes so swollen and red that I can’t help feeling sorry for her. I do hate Ron Dilworth, but to be honest, she has dated worse guys. Five years ago, it was the government teacher from the high school, Mr. White, who didn’t even try to talk to me because I know he thought I was ugly. Then there was Phil Sarcobi, who owns the pizza parlor on Tripp Avenue and used to sit in the living room and stare at the TV and crack his knuckles while he waited for Mom to come out in her tight blouses and huge, pathetic smiles that I couldn’t look at without feeling sick to my stomach. Then for a year or so, there was no guy at all, and I thought I’d like this much better, but every weekend she would sit in front of the TV with a big jar of dill gherkins and a smaller jar of green olives and a bag of Ruffles and eat them slowly in the same order—first a pickle, then an olive, then a potato chip. She would drink a two-liter bottle of Diet Dr Pepper and get up to pee every hour because she drank so much; she was trying not to get bloated from all the salt in this disgusting crap.

  Despite the crap she eats and keeps in the house,
she probably isn’t the reason I’m not skinny. I’ve always been kind of big. Dad is big, six foot three and two-hundred-some pounds, and I got his bones, so he’s the one I blame. There are bigger girls at school, and I’m not really that ugly, even if I feel like it sometimes. Gina tells me once in a while that I have the prettiest face and if I could get from a size 14 down to a 4, I could have any guy I wanted. Yeah right, but I doubt I’ll ever find out. I’m not going to puke, and I’m not even close to understanding how some girls can turn anorexic. Food, air, and water—there’s a reason why they say you can’t live without these things.

  It’s a little after nine o’clock when I call Mr. Rasmussen, after Mom has stopped nagging me and gone back to the living room. He answers before the second ring. But it’s a little hard for me to spit out why I’ll take him up to Ellen’s without first making it clear that I know he got dumped. After he hears me say we can go to Minneapolis if he wants, there’s only silence. I wonder if he’s hung up on me, but then I hear him breathe out and it’s a sound like a balloon going dead.

  “Are you sure you’re willing to do that? Will your mom let you? You realize that it’ll probably take us about five hours to get up there.”

  “I know. That’s okay. I’m sure my mom will say it’s fine.”

  “If you really are sure, I could pay for you to stay in your own motel room for the night. Driving there and back in the same day is too much for anyone.”

  A motel room all to myself. I’ve never slept anywhere alone before, and it actually sounds kind of exciting, but if Mom lets me, she’s more of a wackjob than usual to think this trip is a good idea. “Are you going to stay with Ellen?”

  “I hope to, but with my luck, she might not even be there when we arrive.”

  Great, I think. Just great. Almost six hundred miles round-trip with a sad blind man, for nothing, just some crappy highway food no one in their right mind should ever eat. I have no idea if Mom realized that I’d probably have to stay the night up there. I suppose she must have and is already planning to have Ron sleep over without me on the other side of the bedroom wall trying not to hear their nauseating sex moans.

  “We can give it a shot if you want to,” I say, so compassionate I’d probably make Gandhi throw up if he were still alive.

  “I’d really appreciate it. Before you called, I was thinking of getting on a bus.”

  Why do you like that ho? I want to ask. Is it because she’s the only woman who’s bothered since you went blind? This isn’t the first time I’ve thought of questions like these. I once made the mistake of asking Mom why she was going out with potbellied, knuckle-cracking Phil Sarcobi, and she slapped my face.

  I tell him I’ll stop by at three thirty tomorrow and his voice is already happier. He suggests that, to save time, I fill up the car before picking him up and he’ll pay me back. If I do the driving, he’ll cover all of the expenses.

  He says one other thing before I hang up: “You can probably imagine that this is a little embarrassing for me. Normally I wouldn’t dream of making you drive me up there, but the two friends here who could do it wouldn’t want to, for reasons I won’t go into.”

  I want to ask him to tell me why, but I don’t. I bet it’s because they aren’t big fans of Ellen’s. “It’s okay, Mr. Rasmussen. At least you have someone to chase after. I’m not even blind and I still can’t get someone to go out with me.”

  Shit. Stupid comment of the year.

  But he doesn’t seem mad. “Boys your age are usually idiots. Give them a little more time. Things will improve soon enough, and then you’ll have the rest of your life to wish you were still single.”

  Sure, I almost say. As if that will ever happen!

  Even so, a sneaky little part of me wants to believe him.

  At school the next day, Gina can’t believe I’m taking Mr. Rasmussen on a booty call. “That’s what you’re doing,” she practically screams. “You realize that, don’t you? Can I come?”

  It would probably take the pressure off if she did come. It’s not like Mr. Rasmussen and I are going to tell jokes and play slug-bug or I Spy the whole time. “Okay, but I’ll have to check with him first.”

  “You have to ask him? Can’t you just tell him? Say your mom wants me to go in case you need someone to help with the driving.”

  “I don’t think you’re the one she’d pick if she did.” Gina has only had her license a month longer than me, and she’s already gotten into an accident because she hit a patch of ice and drove into a parked car.

  She scrunches up her face. “Wait, I can’t go anyway. I have to babysit Sean. My parents are going to a party tonight and there’s no way they’ll hire a sitter.”

  “I suppose I wouldn’t want to pay someone either if I were them, but that sucks.”

  She rolls her big brown eyes at me. She’s wearing fake eyelashes and they look a little like spider legs, but she’s still cute. I tried to wear them once but screwed up the glue and ripped out half my lashes and it took a month for them to grow back. “Yeah, they have me, their slave. You’re so lucky you’re an only child.”

  I’m ten minutes late picking him up because, halfway to his house, I had to turn around and go back for my inhaler in case my asthma acts up, which it hasn’t done in a long time, but I don’t want to risk it. It’s three forty when I get to his house and he’s standing outside the front door, a red duffel bag in one hand. He looks like a great big advertisement for the burglars in the neighborhood: Guess what! Now it’ll be even easier to rob me! I’ve wondered how he would know what was missing if he ever did get robbed. He’s very good at finding things with his hands, because I’ve watched him take the cereal out of the cupboard and the milk out of the fridge and pour a bowl without a splash hitting the counter, but how would he know if someone sneaked in and stole some of his CDs or a few of the shirts in the back of his closet? If the burglar didn’t get too greedy, it could be months before Mr. Rasmussen figured out anything was missing. It might seem like I’ve spent a little too much time thinking about this—maybe it seems like I want to rob him myself, but it’s just a puzzle for me, one I doubt I’ll ever make sense of. When I try to keep my eyes shut for two minutes to see what it’s like for him, I can’t do it. After thirty seconds, I’m already cheating, afraid of whacking my shins on the edge of the coffee table or knocking some of Mom’s ceramic raccoons and giraffes off the bookshelf. How he puts up with it all after being able to see for the first forty-five or so years of his life, I can’t even imagine. It makes me want to yell or maybe cry.

  “I was wondering if you’d changed your mind,” he says as soon as I’ve got him settled in the front seat.

  I tell him about the inhaler. “I did get gas, though.”

  “Good.” He reaches into a green cloth bag he pulled out of the duffel before I put it in the backseat. Out comes a handful of CDs, ones so old their jewel cases are cracked. My heart takes a dive. “I brought some of my favorites,” he says. “If you don’t object, we could switch off. You play one of yours, then I’ll play one of mine.”

  Maybe he needs to get pumped up for the big confrontation, but it’s still a pain in the ass to have to listen to his music. I look over to see what he’s got and it’s not as bad as I thought—two Rolling Stones, one Pink Floyd, two Bob Dylans. He can keep them straight because they have little braille sticky tags on them, which is something he learned to read when he was going blind. He took classes from a guy at the community college in Whitefield so he would know braille after he realized the doctors weren’t going to find a way to make him see again. He has a bunch of huge books on his bookcase now. I hadn’t realized before I met him that books for blind people were so thick because the pages have all those little raised dots on them.

  After I put Sticky Fingers in the CD player, he fumbles something else out of the bag—a little white box that turns out to be the home of a soap turtle so insanely cute that I want it for myself. I can tell by the scent that he’s carved it out o
f Irish Spring, my favorite guy soap.

  “It’s for Ellen,” he says. “He’s my newest little critter. Do you think she’ll like him?”

  “If she doesn’t, then she doesn’t deserve him.”

  “You’re right,” he says. “You’re absolutely right.” He turns toward me and looks almost happy, as if he really thinks I know what I’m talking about. His face is clean-shaven except for some whiskers in the chin crease, which is pretty normal for him, but I’m surprised he hasn’t done anything about them this time.

  “Haven’t you given her any of your other animals?”

  “No. This will be the first. I’m not really sure if she likes them. She says she does but they’re probably not her style.”

  “If she has half a heart, she’ll love him.”

  He laughs a little but says nothing. His face is turned toward the window and I hope he’s not getting weepy. It’s good that I have to keep my eyes on the road because I really don’t want to know.

  I drive us to the highway and he hums along with “Brown Sugar,” and then the next song, which I don’t recognize but it’s mellow and sounds pretty good. I mapped out the route from Tulip Lake to Shoreview, the suburb where Ellen lives, with Gina helping me during lunch because I knew I couldn’t ask Mr. Rasmussen to navigate. This is the first time I’ve gone on such a long drive as something other than a passenger. It makes me wonder what kind of perverted shit Mom is up to with Ron if she’s letting me take her precious VW Golf to Minnesota. It makes my stomach turn to think about it.

  When we get on 94, I ask, “How did you meet Ellen?” Before now, we’ve never talked about anything too personal, at least not on his side.

  “Her mother was my piano teacher. She died two years ago, and I met Ellen when she came down for the funeral.”

  “You’ve been dating her for that long?”