Whiskey & Charlie

by Annabel Smith

  He thought he understood the mechanics of it, the what-goes-where. But that, to Charlie, was not sex. Sex was what he had seen in the dirty magazines boys at school had pilfered from older brothers or stolen from newsstands. Or, at least, that was what Charlie had thought, until he read what was inside Grainger’s book.

  Delta of Venus. That was the title. Nobody knew what it meant exactly; no one could have used the words in a sentence, but they were passed from boy to boy, muttered and snickered over until they came to represent everything you needed to know about sex and didn’t know how to find out. Very few people had actually seen the book. Apparently, it had a very sexy cover: a picture of a naked woman, but not like a centerfold, more arty, so you couldn’t see her face. In fact, you couldn’t even be sure which part of her body you were looking at, though you had a pretty fair idea. After the first week, no one got to see the book at all, apart from Grainger’s close friends, Whiskey included, who confirmed for Charlie that the rumors about the cover were true.

  All the other boys ever saw were the photocopies. Grainger made the photocopies at his dad’s office on a Saturday morning, and at school on Monday, you could buy them for twenty pence a page. You couldn’t choose which parts you wanted; it was the luck of the draw. But according to Grainger, who claimed to have read the whole book, there wasn’t a page that wasn’t dirty, so it really didn’t matter which one you got.

  The first week, he made twenty copies, and he’d sold them all before lunchtime on Monday. The following Saturday, he made a hundred copies, and he put the price up to fifty pence. It didn’t matter if you’d paid twenty pence the week before; fifty pence was the new price, take it or leave it. You weren’t allowed to show them to anyone else or swap them, and anyone who tried to make their own copies wouldn’t be sold any more. Those were the rules. No one argued. Everybody wanted the photocopies, and Grainger was the only one who had them. They were shocking and disgusting, and he got rid of a hundred in two days. With the help of Whiskey and his friend Joel, he sold them before school and after school, between classes, at recess and at lunch, in the bathrooms and behind the bike shed and on the school bus. Even when he made one hundred fifty copies, there still weren’t enough to go around.

  Charlie did not have to pay for the photocopies, because Whiskey got them for free, as many as he wanted. Charlie had mixed feelings about this setup. On the one hand, he was relieved that he did not have to buy the copies himself. Once he had read a few, he knew there was something wrong about them, something that made him feel guilty and shameful. Charlie suspected he was not the only one who felt this way. He noticed that though everyone was talking about the photocopies, no one actually talked about what was in them. You bought them, put them in your bag, and took them home, and when you came to school the next day, you said “I got the baron and the little girls” or “I got the woman and the dog.” But you didn’t talk about the things you read.

  The story of the man who pulled the corpse of a naked woman out of a river and then had sex with her dead body was disgusting to Charlie, but when he read it, his penis got so hard it was almost painful. There were sentences he read over and over again until they got stuck in his mind and he couldn’t close them out. Charlie had rubbed himself raw over the story of the Cuban and the nymphomaniac, and for days afterward, one sentence went around and around inside his head. On the bus and in his math class and at the dinner table it would come to him unbidden—She was moist and trembling, opening her legs and trying to climb over him—and it took all of Charlie’s willpower and concentration to control his erections.

  There was nothing you could say about that. So you didn’t talk about the stories with your friends; you didn’t talk to anyone about them. Even when he got the copies from Whiskey, Charlie couldn’t meet his eye. The thought of buying them at school, like the other boys had to, was unbearable. He was sure that if he had to make that transaction, in front of other people, every one of them would know what he was thinking, what he did alone in bed at night once the light was off. So he was grateful to Whiskey for sparing him that humiliation.

  At the same time, he resented him for once again being at the center of something that Charlie was on the outside of. For although it was Grainger’s book, Grainger was part of Whiskey’s gang, which meant that in the eyes of everyone at school, Whiskey was as much a part of it as Grainger himself. Whiskey had seen the book, knew the story about where it had come from, was helping Grainger to sell the copies—it might as well have been his own book. Whereas Charlie, as always, was on the sidelines, hadn’t so much as glimpsed the book, didn’t even have the gumption to buy his own copies, but had to get them secondhand from his brother, and for that, Charlie hated him. For he knew this book was just the beginning, that in sex, as in sport, Whiskey would be Charlie’s superior: he would go further faster, and Charlie would be left behind, as he had always been since the day they were born.

  x x x

  Delta of Venus dominated Charlie’s life, all their lives, for a little more than four weeks. In the fifth week, Whiskey, Grainger, and Joel were caught selling the copies in the science-block bathroom, and the jig was up. The book was confiscated, presumed destroyed; the boys were hit with a cane and suspended, and the proceeds of their sales, which totaled almost two hundred pounds, were donated to the Salvation Army. The situation was evidently too scandalous to be handled by a woman—the special assembly, for the boys only, was addressed not by their headmistress, Mrs. Aster, but by the deputy headmaster, who also happened to be the head of religious education. There was barely a boy in the school who wasn’t implicated, and the hall had never been so still or silent, two hundred fifty pairs of eyes trained resolutely on the ancient woodblock floor as Mr. Daniels spoke of his shock and disgust over the confiscated materials and his disappointment at the lack of moral fiber evidenced by this incident.

  The assembly lasted less than ten minutes, long enough for Whiskey, Grainger, and Joel to be made an example of, long enough for the same fate to be threatened to any boy caught in possession of such filth.

  “The shit’s going to hit the fan,” Whiskey joked to Charlie on the way home, but Charlie knew that Whiskey feared their mother’s reaction more than any punishment meted out at school. To be caned was not a humiliation but a badge of honor, a sign that you’d been outrageously rebellious, and, as such, earned you the respect of the other boys. As for the suspension, Whiskey looked upon it more as a reward than a punishment.

  Though the boys knew their mother must have had a telephone call from the school, she was ominously silent when they arrived home. They slunk off to their rooms, assuming she was waiting for their dad to come in from work before she made her move. But at dinnertime, she still said nothing, only glared at Whiskey, and at Charlie as well, as though he too was implicated, though she could not have had evidence of that. Or could she? Charlie prayed that she hadn’t found his photocopies wedged beneath his mattress.

  It wasn’t until Whiskey attempted to excuse himself that she finally spoke.

  “Sit down, William,” she said in a low voice. “What have you got to say for yourself?”

  Whiskey shrugged, keeping his eyes on the table.

  “Look at me when I’m speaking to you.”

  Whiskey looked up but said nothing, knowing from experience that whatever he said would only make matters worse.

  She looked at their father. “Bill, do you have something to say to your son?”

  This surprised Charlie. Their mother was the disciplinarian; that was the accepted order of things. These were obviously deemed to be special circumstances, as they had been at school: a man-to-man matter. But Charlie could see that his father was unprepared, stuck for words.

  “Not one of your better ideas, Whiskey boy,” he said eventually.

  Their mother stared at him expectantly, waiting for him to go on. He let out a sigh, appeared to be thinking hard, and then he beg
an nodding his head; something had come to him.

  “Certainly very entrepreneurial though, I’ll give you that.”

  Charlie cringed.

  His mother exploded.

  “That’s right, Bill, encourage him; that’s the idea! Your fifteen-year-old son is producing and distributing pornography, and you tell him he’s entrepreneurial! For pity’s sake, is there anything at all between your ears?”

  “All right, Elaine, calm down. I was just trying to have a joke. Whiskey knows he’s done the wrong thing; I don’t think we need to labor the point.”

  “Labor the point?” She laughed then, a sharp, abrupt sound like the bark of a dog that has been unexpectedly shut outside. “No, you’re right, of course. We shouldn’t labor the point. Better to make a joke of it, give him a pat on the back, and with any luck, he’ll leave school at sixteen to become a pimp. Is that what you want?”

  Charlie was shocked to hear his mother use the word pimp. He sneaked a look at Whiskey, but Whiskey wouldn’t meet his eye.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Elaine, you’re overreacting.”

  “Overreacting? Do you have any idea how many times I’ve had William’s headmistress on the phone this term? He can’t stay out of trouble for five minutes. I’m at the end of my rope!”

  Bill coughed. “Well, perhaps you’re right. But the boy’s already been punished. I don’t think there’s any need for us to get heavy-handed as well.”

  Their mother snorted. “One week off school! You call that a punishment?” She turned her attention to Whiskey. Charlie did not often feel sorry for his brother, but he felt sorry for him then.

  “There’ll be no bike riding, no skateboarding, no television, no Atari. No phone calls, no hanging around at the shopping center, no listening to your records. And you won’t be seeing your partners in crime, that’s a certainty.”

  Whiskey was flattened. “What am I supposed to do then?”

  “There are plenty of ways you can make yourself useful around the house. I can give you a list so long you won’t have time to scratch yourself. And woe betide you if you defy me, William, because I’ll find out, believe me, and then you’ll really know the meaning of the word ‘punishment.’”

  x x x

  By the time Whiskey got back to school, the whole thing had blown over. Once the book was gone, the source cut off, the fever subsided. When people stopped talking about them, the photocopies lost their currency; Charlie gave up reading them, left them for weeks under his mattress, eventually threw them away.

  Sex became once again about the girls you knew and how far you could go with them. As in the American movies they watched, progress was measured in bases. Since they had never played baseball, and no one knew the rules, there was some confusion about exactly what happened at each base. First base was kissing, that much was generally agreed. But to Charlie, even first base was a gray area. Because as everybody knew, there were two kinds of kissing.

  There was the kind of kissing that took place during a game of spin the bottle, in which you were shut in a darkened cupboard with a girl you may or may not fancy (and who may or may not fancy you, although this was considered largely irrelevant) and you had thirty seconds to locate her mouth and work your tongue inside it. To Charlie’s mind, this kind of kissing had more in common with pin the tail on the donkey than with baseball, and he did not know if it counted as first base.

  He suspected that first base meant the kind of kissing that happened at junior high parties, where no one played spin the bottle anymore, but people somehow paired off anyway, the kind of kissing where you locked lips with a girl and didn’t come up for air until you had attempted to touch every square inch of her body with your roaming hands. The second kind of kissing Charlie had seen plenty of but had never participated in himself, which meant, depending on one’s definition, he had never even gotten to first base.

  Second base had to do with breasts, tits, jugs, knockers, baps, or whatever else you might call them. A lot of the girls in Charlie’s grade didn’t seem to have much to offer in that department, at least not compared to the women in the magazines Charlie had seen. But if he had to touch a girl’s breasts to progress to the next base, he was prepared to do so, even if the girl in question was as flat as a pancake.

  By the end of junior high second base seemed to have been so widely achieved that it wasn’t worth discussing anymore. A lot of boys claimed to have gotten to third base, some even farther, while Charlie was still stuck on first. According to reports, there were plenty of girls who’d let you touch their breasts or even slide your hand up their skirt. But Charlie always seemed to end up with the frigid girls, girls like Alice Brown, who had kept her lips clamped shut when he kissed her, so he couldn’t get his tongue in her mouth, or Susan Wilkes, who had gripped his wrists while they kissed, so he couldn’t touch her body at all.

  Whiskey, of course, had already made it to third base. He had made out with Louise Barker at a party, and then gone out with her for about three weeks, before dropping her because she wouldn’t “go all the way.” What he failed to take into account was that when you dropped a girl because she wouldn’t go far enough, she would want to get back at you. And the best way to do that was to make out with someone you knew and go much farther with that person, maybe even all the way, and then to make sure you found out about it. If she really wanted to get back at you, she’d make out with one of your best friends or, better still, your twin brother. Which is how Charlie, in a surprise twist of fate, managed to cover three bases in one night.

  It happened like this. There was a party at Tom Costello’s house in the first week of the summer holidays. Because Tom’s brother was sixteen, there was beer at the party, which meant that by nine o’clock, everyone was making out with someone. Charlie was in the kitchen, swigging his beer as though he loved the taste of it, when Louise’s friend Claire came over.

  “Charlie! Where’ve you been? I’ve been looking for you!” She said this playfully, as if they were good friends having a joke together, which confused Charlie, because although he knew Claire by name, he had never actually spoken to her before.

  “Louise wants you,” she said conspiratorially.

  “Louise Barker?”

  Claire rolled her eyes. “Of course Louise Barker. Who else would it be? You know she’s mad on you.”

  Charlie couldn’t make sense of this conversation. He thought he must be drunk. “But Louise went out with Whiskey.”

  “Whiskey!” Claire scoffed. “Louise hates Whiskey. You’re the one she likes. That’s why she asked me to come and find you. She wants to talk to you.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s upstairs,” Claire said, “in the first bedroom on the left. She’s waiting for you.” And then she took the beer can out of Charlie’s hand and gave him a little push toward the stairs.

  Charlie went upstairs slowly, trying to work things out in his head. It couldn’t be true that Louise liked him, when only a week ago she’d been so into Whiskey. Probably she wanted to talk to him about Whiskey, see if there was any chance of them getting back together, ask Charlie to put in a word for her. But if that was all, why did she have to send Claire to find him? Why couldn’t she come and talk to him herself? Perhaps Claire was setting Charlie up; perhaps Louise was upstairs with some other boy, or she wasn’t upstairs at all and the whole thing was a wild-goose chase designed to expose Charlie’s desperation. But what if Claire was telling the truth and this was Charlie’s big chance to make some progress on the bases? Charlie knew it was a long shot, but it was this last thought that propelled him up the stairs and into the first bedroom on the left.

  The room must have belonged to Tom’s little sister; everything in sight was pink, except for Louise, who was sitting on the bed on top of a Flower Fairies duvet cover.

  “Hello, Charlie,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”


  So that much at least was true. Charlie smiled, or perhaps grimaced, unsure of how to proceed.

  “You’d better shut the door,” she said and patted the bed enticingly.

  Charlie sat down.

  “You look exactly like him,” Louise said, staring at Charlie in a way that made him feel even more uncomfortable.

  “We’re identical,” Charlie said awkwardly. He hated it when people commented on how alike he and Whiskey were. He especially didn’t want to talk about it with Louise. But Louise continued to study him.

  “I think Whiskey’s a little taller,” she said thoughtfully.

  It was true, but Charlie was hardly about to admit it. He wanted to get off the topic of Whiskey altogether.

  “Claire said you wanted to talk about something.”

  “Well, we can talk anytime. Wouldn’t you rather kiss me?” Louise said. And then she leaned forward unexpectedly and pressed her mouth against his. Charlie had a moment’s hesitation. It didn’t seem right to start kissing without a little more chitchat. And given that Louise had just broken up with Whiskey, Charlie probably shouldn’t be kissing her at all. But she smelt like fruit salad, and her mouth was so warm and soft that Charlie couldn’t help himself. He leaned in closer to her, but she pulled away to look at him again.

  “It’s so weird kissing you,” she said. “I feel like I’m still kissing Whiskey.”

  There they were, back to Whiskey already. But then Louise pulled his face into hers as though nothing else mattered, and side by side in that pink and sparkly room, they kissed until Charlie couldn’t tell where his mouth ended and Louise’s began. Without knowing how they got there, Charlie found that they were lying down on the bed, and getting to second base happened so quickly he barely had time to take it in. Even the fact that he couldn’t undo Louise’s bra didn’t slow them; she sat up and took it off herself, and though she had hardly any breasts to speak of, her perfect pink nipples were as soft as her mouth, and Charlie found that her breast size didn’t matter at all. They were pressed thigh to thigh, hip to hip, and Charlie had the biggest erection of his life.