Boys of Life

by Paul Russell

  I keep imagining what would’ve happened if she’d gone on writing songs.

  It’s this sad melody, the kind of sappy thing that’ll drive you crazy if you listen to it enough—but I have to say, when I listen to it I remember Monica singing those sweet dumb songs to me in her dingy little apartment with the candles burning and boxes of take-out Chinese food, and I remember sitting there listening to them and thinking how this was somebody who was falling in love with me and what could I do?

  In a way, that’s how I think of my whole time with Monica—what could I do? Everything fell into some kind of place between us, one step at a time, and I kept knowing in some part of me how it was all completely wrong and I should get out. But I kept saying at every step, what can I do? I was tired of Carlos and his movies. I was exhausted by the bars. I kept hearing these scary things about some new disease that was starting to infect New York, and people like me—this is what they were saying—were its prime target. I didn’t know whether I believed all that stuff or not, but still it was worrying. It made me think about whether this might not be a pretty good time to jump ship. Nobody’d said it had to last forever, what I was doing. Maybe this was the time to make some kind of change.

  I guess I’d finally gotten to the point where I wanted somebody to be singing songs to me. I could hear Carlos saying, “Nowhere’s safe, Tony, there’s nothing safe,” but what I wanted, after all those years, was to try and be safe just for a little while.

  I MENTIONED THE ADONIS THEATER, WHERE CARLOS used to take me for his idea of a night on the town. I never thought about it at the time, but the only movies I ever saw Carlos watch were porn movies. I think that’s the only kind he really enjoyed, at least after a certain point. All the others just seemed like fancy wastes of time. I remember hearing him tell Seth, when Seth was going on about some new German movie he’d seen at a film festival: “Oh, I remember when I used to be interested in movies. Now it’s just life I’m interested in.” Which at the time struck me as sort of strange for a movie director to go around saying, but now I think I understand. All of it was life for Carlos. Everything that happened.

  WE’D KNOWN EACH OTHER ABOUT A MONTH before anything actually happened in the sex department. I remember we’d been out one night, first at the V Bar, then this place next door called The Blue and Gold, and then another bar called Radio Bar. Even though I wasn’t drinking much in those days, mostly only beer, we’d had a fair amount, and at the Radio Bar we even did these shots of bourbon with our beer. Bourbon’s something I’d always hated—but Monica, being from Tennessee and all, just loved it.

  I don’t know when it started, but I got to noticing how she kept touching me, and I kept touching her too. Brushing up against each other, holding onto each other’s arms when we were talking to each other. She was telling me some crazy story about shooting water moccasins at this lake in Mississippi where she went with her dad and brother fishing sometimes. Her dad got the idea they should clean the lake up, so they took a shotgun out in the boat and went along the bank where the water moccasins liked to hide in among the tangled-up tree roots.

  “So Gary spotted this cottonmouth gliding along toward the boat,” Monica said, “and he grabbed the gun and aimed right at it and pulled the trigger. And you know what happened?” Thinking about it made her laugh. She leaned her head against my shoulder.

  The way she’d been telling it, the story seemed incredibly funny—or maybe I was just drunk.

  “So what happened?” I asked her. She was trying to catch her breath, gasping from laughing so hard.

  “He pulled the trigger,” she said, “and the recoil knocked the whole boat over. Flipped all three of us right out into the water.”

  “Great,” I said. “Right in the middle of the moccasins.”

  “Right smack in the middle,” she said. “All three of us were yelling our heads off, we were each of us so convinced a cottonmouth was heading right toward us.”

  “But you survived?”

  “We survived,” she said. “But we gave up that notion about cleaning up the lake.”

  “And now you’re here,” I told her.

  “Now I’m here,” she said.

  “So it had a happy ending, you could say,” I told her.

  “You could say,” she said. She looked at me—this look that made me remember that her brother had died.

  “Let’s go,” I told her. “Let’s go back to your place for a nightcap.”

  I was drunker than I’d been in months. It was fun to be drinking again, it brought back old times.

  “I don’t have any beer back at my place,” Monica said.

  “Is that a problem?”

  “No problem,” she said and ordered two beers from the bar. “Here,” she told me. “Hide it under your shirt.” The bottle was ice-cold against my belly, but it was a good feeling. I remember concentrating on that feeling even after we were outside the bar and had pulled our beers out into the open. I could feel that patch of cold fading on my skin the whole time we were walking east along Seventh Street, taking swigs of Rolling Rock, and suddenly she put her arm through mine—just slid it through and all at once I knew definitely that we were going to have sex when we got back to her apartment. It was this cool wave passing through me even though it was early September and sticky hot even in the middle of the night. I remember saying to myself, “I’m finally going to get laid by a girl.” It was odd, after all this time and everything that’d happened—it made me think back to Owen, to Wallace and those girls we used to go out with. I thought—if I hadn’t met Carlos, maybe this is how my life would’ve gone. The only thing that’s happened, I’d tell myself, is that now at the ripe age of twenty-one I’m finally back on track.

  I remember being really impatient at the door to Monica’s apartment while she fiddled with all the locks. I wanted to be inside that apartment and know what was going to happen next—so I leaned over and kissed the back of her neck, through her hair.

  “Hey,” she said, and put her hand to the back of her neck, and I kissed her fingers. That made her sort of giggle, and I knew everything was going to be okay, that we really were on the same wavelength with each other and so I could relax while she undid the rest of the locks.

  Once we got inside we didn’t say a word—we went right to her bed and undressed, and since it was so hot we just lay down on top of the sheets. Only then did we both start touching each other and kissing all over, like it was something we’d wanted to do for weeks but we weren’t sure the other person wanted it. I touched her breasts, which brought back Cindy and the back seat of Wallace’s car in Owen, and how I used to get so excited when I’d manage to slip a hand up her blouse—it was great to be squeezing a girl’s breasts again, it was great to feel how they just filled up your palm when you cupped your hand around them. I remember thinking, Why doesn’t everybody have these, they’re so much fun?

  Otherwise it was pretty much like touching anybody’s body that didn’t have much hair on it—till I made what I guess was the big mistake of running my hand down her stomach and between her legs. Suddenly it was the most depressing thing. There wasn’t any dick down there, and I thought with this kind of panic, What’m I supposed to do? There’s nothing to do anything with. I felt so empty—I should’ve known right then how we were never going to be meeting each other on equal terms. I should’ve gotten out of it right then and there before the damage was done. But you never know these things till later. I kept feeling around down there trying to find something to do something with. Finally she grabbed my dick and said, “Go ahead, go ahead and put your johnson up me.”

  She always had these other words for things.

  “My what?” I said.

  “This thing.” And she helped me stuff my dick up inside her.

  Since that first time with Scott three years before, I’d gotten pretty used to putting my dick up lots of assholes—but I’d never been inside a cunt before. And it wasn’t exactly what I’d expected it to b
e. She was so loose I felt totally lost up there, I felt like it was going to slip right out. Plus I kept getting limp inside her because there wasn’t anything to hold me to being hard. When that happened, my dick did go on and slip out of her. But she just took it in her hand, which made it get hard again, and then she slipped it back into her.

  The whole time we kept kissing and breathing right into each other’s faces, which was kind of great.

  “Yeah,” she said when I finally got it in and managed to keep hard for a while. I was moving around inside her but I couldn’t feel a thing, just at the base of my dick where the muscles at the opening to her cunt were clamped around it. For the rest, I might as well have been floating in space.

  But she seemed to be enjoying it. She kept tossing her head back and forth and moaning, and then I started to go soft again. I pulled out and turned her over so I could put it up her asshole, where I was used to and knew it’d keep me hard.

  “Hey,” she said, “pervert.” And she sort of slapped me away.

  So we lay there a while panting, and kissing now and then, and I thought, well, so that’s that. It wasn’t going to do any good trying to put it back in her cunt—I was totally limp.

  I wanted to cry, I felt so alone right then. But she did the sweetest thing—she took my soft dick and went down on it with her mouth, and in about a minute and a half she had me coming in this way that felt really good.

  I slept there in her apartment that night—if you can call it sleep, since the guy who lived above her practiced his saxophone the whole night long. He’d been playing when we came in, this loud raucous stuff that was all honks and squeaks—but of course I was too excited by other things to pay much attention. But once we’d settled down to go to sleep—I guess in all sex took about ten minutes between us, though by then we were both completely drenched in sweat—you could hear his sax coming loud and clear down through the ceiling.

  Monica was sound asleep almost immediately, but all I could do was lie there and try to follow the ups and downs of that sax, try to figure out where the melody was in there with all those other notes. It wasn’t so different, I guess, from watching one of Carlos’s movies, though that only occurs to me now. At the time I wasn’t thinking of Carlos one bit.

  Next morning, when morning finally came, I asked Monica how she could stand it.

  “Stand what?” I guess I’d drifted off to sleep sometime, because she was already up and standing in the shower. Only a little trickle of water was coming down—it hardly seemed worth it.

  “The noise!” I yelled.

  “Oh, Dominic. Yeah, well, you forget about it. He’s really famous, you know. He’s a smack addict, he washes dishes at this restaurant, and then he plays all night.”

  “So what’s famous about that?” I asked.

  “Just listen to me,” Monica told me. She was in a bad mood, the way I guess you’re always in a bad mood after you have sex with somebody you’re already known before, and you’re trying to figure out how things are going to be different from now on with them. “He gives this one single concert every year,” she said. “People come from all over to hear him.”

  I could tell she felt that having that guy practicing upstairs was part of her apartment, like furniture.

  While she was finishing her shower, I found a couple of bagels in the refrigerator, and since she didn’t have a toaster I fried them in some margarine. She must’ve thought that was fine. We drank coffee and ate those bagels, and stuff was okay between us—the sex hadn’t upset anything between us at all.

  MONICA WAS ALWAYS GETTING SCHEMES IN HER head. She’d decide there was some band in Hoboken we had to catch, and so off we’d go. Or some deli in Brooklyn somebody told her about. It was her way of organizing her life. I was always happy to go along—it reminded me of my early days in the city when I used to go everywhere. There was something okay about showing up with Monica in these different parts of the city I hadn’t been in for years—places I couldn’t have found again for the life of me, but when I got there I recognized I’d been there before.

  I was still doing work for The Company, but I was showing up less and less. Since Carlos was right in the middle of editing Atomic Pictographs, that was fine: from here on out, the movie was up to him and Seth alone. So I don’t think he even missed me in those months. And he was used to me not sleeping over in the apartment; it’d been years since I stayed there regularly. These days I slept at Verbena’s more than I slept at Carlos’s.

  Verbena was the one person in The Company I didn’t have any problem introducing Monica to. “The only thing is,’’ I told her before I brought Monica by the first time, “Monica’s not Company material, if you know what I mean.”

  Verbena looked at me—this quick look that showed me she knew what I was talking about.

  “There isn’t any Company,” I told Verbena. “You’re an old drug connection, from before I went straight. Got that?”

  “I always get the glamor parts,” she said. But she went along. I think it probably wasn’t the first time she’d gone along with something like that. And she and Monica got along great. I was a little worried at first, that my only friend in the whole city was this huge black woman, but Monica took Verbena totally in stride. “She reminds me of this maid, Louise, we used to have when I was little,” she told me. “Louise used to steal spare change from the dresser, so we had to let her go.”

  One day Monica heard about a car lot in Jersey City from some friend of hers who had a friend who bought a car there cheap. She decided that what we should do with our Saturday was grab Verbena and go car shopping in New Jersey.

  She’d gotten these complicated directions to the lot: once we got off the PATH train we had to take a bus, and then in the middle of nowhere change from that bus to another bus. It took us an hour and a half at least just to get there.

  The whole time I kept thinking back to when my mom used to take us to the shopping center in Paducah on Saturday afternoons, just for something to do, and Ted and me’d spend a couple hours wandering around the Woolworth’s trying to see who could pocket the most candy.

  Car Country, the place in Jersey City was called. It was one of about ten used-car lots on this one street, all looking more or less the same, with an American flag flying over each one, only Car Country had the biggest flag. About the size of a football field.

  It was incredibly windy that day. The flags were all snapping on their flagpoles like no tomorrow.

  Our salesman was this guy with this name that sounded like Estachio—I never did hear it right. He was one of those people who I think actually likes being a used-car salesman. He’d sold to so many people who didn’t have enough money to buy a real car that he didn’t think the cars he was selling were junk. In fact, it seemed like the junkier they were, the more he liked them.

  He was totally bald, but he had this huge mustache that looked like somebody’d gone and glued a hairbrush to his face.

  The first car he showed us he said was his definite favorite—this shiny black Edsel he just got last week from some old man in Paramus who kept this car parked in his garage for twenty-five years. We could check the odometer, he said—less than ten thousand miles.

  “They can turn those things back,” Monica said.

  “Not on your life,” Estachio said. “Ten thousand miles—guaranteed.”

  Monica walked around the car, looking it up and down. “An Edsel,” she said. “What do you know?” She ran her hand along the hood. “So how much’re you asking?” I thought it was pretty hilarious; Monica acting like she knew what she was talking about. But then it occurred to me—maybe she really does know about cars. I think I liked it that just about everything I thought about her at first turned out to be wrong in one way or another later on. Usually in little ways, but just enough to keep me guessing.

  The salesman thought about it. “Six hundred bucks,” he said. “Prime condition. And after all, it’s an Edsel. What more can you want?”

&
nbsp; I didn’t get what all the fuss was about—it just looked like a boxy old car to me. But Monica knew all about it.

  “That’s just great,” she said. “An Edsel. You know,” she told me and Verbena, “they named it for Henry Ford’s son, and it was supposed to be the car of the future. They designed everything special, just for it. But then nobody bought it, it was too far ahead of its time, so they stopped making it after only a year. But now they wish they’d kept on making them.”

  Verbena said she thought it was the perfect car for us. “The car of the future,” she said.

  I wasn’t so sure. I kicked the front tire.

  “Why’re you doing that?” Monica asked me.

  I shrugged. I thought it was what you were supposed to do.

  “They only do that in the movies,” Monica told me.

  “That’s where he learned it,” Verbena said, “was in the movies.”

  I looked at her—this quick look. But it was a look I didn’t even need to give her. As soon as she said what she said, she realized it was thin ice. What I liked about Verbena was, you could depend on her not to make mistakes, which was why I trusted her to hang around with.

  Monica of course didn’t notice a thing. She was busy climbing into the car to sit behind the steering wheel. Estachio leaned in on top of her, pointing to the odometer he was so proud about.

  “It’s a really ugly car,” I told Verbena.

  “Honey, it’s historic,” she said. “Like me. You can put up with a little ugliness for the sake of the historical.”

  “I think you’re this piece of beautiful history,” I told Verbena, and she swatted at me. It wasn’t something she ever did when Monica was watching, I noticed.