What's Important Is Feeling: Stories

by Adam Wilson

  “Then I’m your grandson,” I said.

  “I don’t have a grandson.”

  I looked out the window, saw a branched bird trapped in sunbeam.

  “You’ll be dead soon,” I said, half to myself, still looking out the window.

  “Who are you?” Grandpa said again.

  “You’re old,” I said, and left the room.

  In my own room, I put on the Cuban station and lay in bed with the lights off. I shut the curtains but sun holograms came in from the sides. The DJ didn’t play slow ones, just the tick-tick shakers with their long vowels and drums that sounded like chattering teeth. I couldn’t decide if the songs were replacements for sex or preparations for it. I couldn’t sleep; all I wanted was sleep.

  Sleep is different for teenagers, more restorative. Now when I dream, my dreams are on the surface; when I wake I only rise inches. In sleep I can still feel the window breeze.

  My family had stopped eating as a family. Dad went out with clients, and mom drank health shakes or white wine. Jane had friends and ate with them in her room or at their houses. I had become partial to ramen noodles, and Grandpa liked them too. There wasn’t much to clean up. We sat on the couch watching basketball. I didn’t care about the game, but basketball placated Grandpa. Maybe he liked the muscular bodies. Maybe it was televised timelessness. Watching the game with dinner, he knew who I was, said, “Andrew,” “Thank you,” “Your mother was such a happy girl.” After our noodles I lay in his lap and he stroked my hair.

  Jane showed up sometime after eleven.

  “Stop staring at me,” she said.

  I gave her my fuck you eyes, the ones I’d been practicing in the mirror. She sat down next to me on the couch.

  “It’s bullshit,” I said.

  “Everything’s bullshit,” she said.

  “Grandpa’s asleep,” I said.

  “Mom,” Jane said.

  “And Dad,” I said.

  “Out,” Jane said.

  I wanted her to sit with me, let TV make us children. Instead I said, “Florida sucks my ass hair,” and Jane went upstairs.

  When Dad came home he was stumbling, but not too bad. His shirt was open to the third button. He’d recently acquired a thick gold chain with a Star of David the size of a throwing star. He wasn’t religious. I think he wore it the way gangsters wear crosses, with a mix of false humility and messiah complex. He passed me with a nod and headed to the fridge. He removed the leftover cake, shoved it in his mouth with his hands. I turned off the TV so I could watch him in the reflection of the blank screen.

  “You’re getting fat,” I said.

  “What?” His mouth was full. I stood up and walked into the kitchenette, stuck a finger in the cake, licked off the frosting.

  Dad swallowed. “Don’t you have homework?” he said.

  “I did it.”

  “Good kid,” he said.

  “Good cake?”

  “That’s what I said,” he said. “Good cake.”

  The next day at school I walked the halls with my head down.

  “Stop staring at me,” someone said.

  “Andrew Stronifer is staring at me,” someone else said.

  Class was no refuge. When Ms. Castillo said, “Andrew,” I banged my head against the table. When Mr. Trund said, “Come to the board and try this equation,” I stood hunched, chalk in hand, and wrote the number 666 next to the equals sign. They sent me to Father Gutierrez for counseling.

  His office was simple, adorned only with hanging rosary beads and a portrait of Mary cradling her young child. Soft jazz played in the background, a trumpet moving in short bursts, a clinking piano. I sat across from the priest. He nodded at me as though he understood, knew God’s world was a difficult one to navigate. I shut my eyes.

  “How are you?” Father Gutierrez said.

  “I’m Jewish,” I said.

  There was a different counselor for Jewish kids, a social worker named Javier whose office was lined with science-fiction books and posters from Star Trek conventions. He had shag carpet eyebrows and miniature hands, and instead of talking about my family he lent me books with intricately designed covers featuring slutty space-babes and men whose heads were half robot.

  I saw Javier after school on Tuesdays. Afterwards, instead of being picked up by Luis, who had already driven Jane home, I caught the number seven bus in town, riding it out of the Grove and back to Coral Gables. I liked the smell of the bus, and I liked the people on it who didn’t look up. My parents would have flipped if they knew I was taking the bus, but they weren’t paying attention to me. They hadn’t mentioned the increasing length of my hair, or the way I talked back in mumbles.

  Summer became summer which became summer. There were no seasons, just heat and air-conditioning. Technically, it was almost Christmas.

  One day while I waited for the bus with crossed arms to cover my armpit stains, someone called me from behind a tree.

  “Hey, Triple Six,” the voice said. I kept my head down.

  “Don’t worry, Triple Six, it’s cool.” There were two of them, lanky and pube-faced, peeking out. I walked over.

  “Quick, hit this,” one of them said, and handed me the remnants of a joint. I’d never smoked pot before, but only because I’d never been offered it. I took the joint and held it to my mouth.

  “You gotta inhale,” the other said. He was taller and pockmarked. I’d seen him around school, squirreling down the halls. I tried to push the smoke down and coughed.

  “Quiet,” Squirrel Boy said. “We’ll get busted.” I passed the joint to the other guy, who I’d never seen before. His uniform shirt was unbuttoned to reveal a white T-shirt with Charles Manson’s face on it.

  “Celia Escarole is a cunt fork,” he said. He had a man’s voice, almost Russian sounding it was so deep.

  “What’s a cunt fork?” I said.

  “You know,” Squirrel said. “A johnson scraper.”

  “A toothed twat,” Deep Voice said.

  “Oh,” I said. I was trying to figure out if I could feel the weed. We each took another puff and then Squirrel put out the joint with his foot.

  “Squirrel Boy,” I said.

  “Who’s Squirrel Boy?”

  “You,” I said. “You’re Squirrel Boy.”

  “Triple Six is totally lit.”

  “Am I?”

  We walked across the bridge. A jogging bodybuilder almost knocked me over.

  “What a pec-tard,” Squirrel said. These were my people, I thought. They had words for things I’d wanted to name.

  Back home, I lay on the couch. Jane and her friend Cressida were doing homework at the table. Cressida had wire-rimmed specs and braces, but she was pretty.

  I was staring at her. Cressida didn’t notice, but Jane did.

  “Go check on Grandpa,” she said to me.

  “He’s fine,” I said. Jane raised her eyebrows, and I went upstairs.

  Grandpa lay in bed shirtless, over the blankets, crying. His room smelled like urine, and his pajama pants were soaked through. He kept saying “I,” repeating it, as if attempting to resume agency over his body.

  “It’s okay,” I said. I took a hand—I didn’t want to get too close, to invade his space—and held it the way an infant reaches out and acquaints herself with an extended finger. I removed his pants slowly, careful not to touch, to impose on his vulnerability. I took a towel from his bathroom and wiped the damp skin on his legs and on his penis.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s just Sam. Everything will be okay.”

  I gave him a fresh set of underwear, covered him with a blanket, crawled in next to him. I wiped the tears from his cheek with my thumb, kissed his unshaven face, ran a finger through his hair.

  He looked at me like he didn’t know me but knew he needed my help.

  “It’s just Sam,” I said. Grandpa moved toward me and kissed my lips. He didn’t kiss aggressively, assuredly. More like someone going in for a first kiss, without expe
cted result.

  I didn’t kiss back. His lips were dry. “Sam,” he said. He rubbed my shoulders, wrapped his arms around my body. He rested his chin on my shoulder, calm now. He put his fingers below the waistband of my boxers. He didn’t rub my penis, just held it in his hand, not for long, just for a moment, as if, by holding it, he were transferring some kind of energy, some kind of thank-you.

  Then it was Chanukah. We had a menorah, but no one bothered to plug it in. I was rolling with Squirrel and Deep, sucking down jays, wearing sunglasses. Squirrel played the guitar. He didn’t know how to tune it, but he could make loud fuzz and hold a cigarette between the strings. Mostly they came to my house. We’d hang on the porch and talk shit about the shitheads at school. Jane and Cress were sometimes there. I’d started calling her Cress in my head because I liked the way it sounded, like watercress. Squirrel liked her big lips because they were good for sucking dick.

  “Hello, ladies,” Squirrel said. “Care to join us?”

  Jane fingered her protractor, turned the page. “Fuck off,” she said. Cress smiled.

  It was still warm outside. My mother never came home and busted us. Christmas break was in a week, but first there was the Christmas dance. Squirrel, Deep, and I weren’t going, or we were going to egg it, or we were going to steal vodka from Squirrel’s dad’s liquor cabinet and show up plastered and vomit on jocks. We’d get thrown out of school and sent to public school to be with real people, ones who understood us, girls who liked good music.

  Jane was going to the dance. Richie Cohen had asked her. I wasn’t going to act all protective brother. I’d seen him in the halls; his ears were bigger than his face.

  “He’s a nice guy” was all Jane said. I’m sure he was a nice guy.

  “You going?” Jane asked. It was late night; we were watching The Late Show. I wasn’t stoned for the first time in a while, and I was lying there thinking about how much better it was being stoned.

  “Whatever,” I said.

  “You should go.”

  “I said whatever.”

  “I know someone who would go with you.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Though I don’t know why she’d want to, considering how lame you are.”

  “I wouldn’t go with any of your friends.”

  “Not even Cressida?”

  “Whatever,” I said.

  Squirrel asked Cressida and she said yes. He borrowed his brother’s Camaro, even though he didn’t have a license. The car barely had a backseat, but four of us managed to squeeze in. Cress was in shotgun, and Deep and I were in back next to Richie Cohen and Jane, who were lap-sitting.

  Squirrel sort of knew how to drive. He only stalled at lights, or when it was his turn to hit the joint. Richie held my sister across the waist, and I knew she liked it even though she was terrified.

  Jane still talks about that ride like it’s the most dangerous thing she’s ever done. “Fifteen with open containers and narcotics. We’re lucky we didn’t die.” She sounds like an after-school special.

  For Jane it was a one-timer: reckless youth, laughed over now. I won’t say it’s because Grandpa never touched her that she turned out normal and I didn’t. That’s what my therapist says, but she’s wrong.

  I think, mostly, the problem was my parents and their shitty DNA. Sometimes, people with absent parents are forced to grow up too fast. I was the opposite; I stayed a child. Jane grew up for me; that’s what twins are for.

  In that backseat we were reunited. Jane hit a joint for the first time, and Squirrel ran over a squirrel.

  The dance was in the cafeteria, which had been made to look like the future. Everything was silver foil, and the nerds were dressed in expensive-looking Star Trek costumes. The DJ played cheesy techno, and Squirrel kissed Cress from the get-go, off in the corner, hands clutching her butt. Deep and I walked circles complaining about the music. Sis and Richie danced slow, arms extended and parallel.

  At the center of the dance floor was Celia, alight in gold tights and Princess Leia double-buns. She danced the way she interacted with her friends—not with, but about—orbiting, distracted, rhythmically aligned to the offbeat, the drummer’s spaces. The rat-a-tat-tat-ness came from inside her, as if her body’s movements controlled the music and not the other way around.

  I watched from a distance, standing still, forgetting the other people, and that I was no longer allowed to stare. She danced alone, no boys in sight. I watched her dip between people, spinning like a slo-mo top, pirouette perfect as a windup doll’s. “Stop staring at her,” Deep said.

  There was a party after. We weren’t supposed to know about it, but someone told someone and Squirrel had a car. Jose’s parents were out of town.

  There was a white felt pool table in the living room. Out back it was like every movie about high school. Girls swam in bras, splashing, giggling. Deep and I played our roles. We sat in the corner with a small plastic bong. Squirrel and Cress had gone upstairs. There were empty rooms upstairs: guest rooms, the maid’s room. I wondered where Celia was. I hoped she wasn’t upstairs. I imagined her upstairs.

  Richie had walked Jane to the door of our house, and we’d made smooching sounds and laughed.

  The party was boring because no one talked to Deep and me, and we acted like we didn’t want anyone to talk to us. We stole graham crackers and set up shop in the treehouse, smoking cigarettes and taking slugs from the unboxed silver foil bag of red wine that Squirrel’s brother had given us with the advice, “If you give her enough of this shit, she’ll at least let you finger her.”

  Deep wasn’t much of a talker. “Fuck this shit,” he said, and I said, “Yeah, fuck this shit,” and we continued saying things like that, or variations: I’d fuck the shit out of these bitches, if these bitches want to fuck with me I’ll fuck them up, maybe that fuckin’ bitch will want to lick my shit and then fuck that shit, fuckin’ A, fuck double fuck.

  The sun came up. Celia woke in a deck chair. She stood and stretched, unaware of being watched. She reached for a pack of cigarettes on the table and pulled one to her lip. She fumbled for a lighter, looked around, and saw me.

  I reached into my pocket, held up my lighter. Celia nodded.

  I walked toward her, dancing off-balance around the empty beers and sleeping bodies. Celia shivered and wrapped her arms around her chest. I lit her cigarette and lit one for myself.

  We didn’t say anything, just watched the sunlight move across the yard, illuminating the sleeping bodies as if they were casualties of war, sinking into the dew. I thought of my grandfather, of his body, its spots and abscesses, its whiteness.

  Celia exhaled. The smoke was so visible in the wet air that it looked like a cartoon speech-bubble coming from her mouth. I wanted to fill it with words.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Are you okay?” she said in a timid voice, as if she didn’t want to disrupt the morning’s calm.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “About . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  I knew that if there was ever a moment to kiss her, it was now. I also knew that now was not the moment to kiss her, and that there never would be one.

  Grandpa died that summer. First he shat himself often, forgot I was Sam or that anyone was anyone, became incoherent, repeated phrases like “No one’s waiting” and “This body is not this body.”

  December Boys Got It Bad

  Lawrence and I have lost our jobs. We walk the bridge toward Brooklyn, where it’s cool to be poor. We don’t call our mothers. It’s warm for September, and we strip in the sunlight. Lawrence tosses his sport coat over the rail. The wind doesn’t take it; no fluttering kitelike, symbolic and cinematic. It sinks into traffic, under tires, another piece of highway trash. I hesitate before tossing mine.

  “Blow winds and crack your cheek!” Lawrence cries. “Rage! Blow! Spout ’til you have wet my codpiece! I give my garments of oppression to the open sea!”

  A man standing near us says, “That
nigga’s crazy.”

  He’s about five two, with a port-wine stain that covers most of his face and neck. Teeth misaligned and T-shirt too small—tight over ribs, holes under armpits.

  “He saw Lear in the park,” I say.

  “That must make you the Fool,” the man says, and laughs a mucus-loosening laugh.

  Lawrence is shirtless now, showing off the tattoo he got one two a.m. in the East Village while half blacked out and impressing a girl. It’s a Native American dream catcher, in rainbow colors, wrapped around his rib cage.

  “Fellow proletarian,” Lawrence addresses the man, “we are brothers, huddled on this bridge among the masses of the unemployed. We’re America’s castoffs. They said bring us your hungry, and they lied. They meant bring them to Brooklyn, let them suffer in slums. We’re nature’s toilets now.”

  “You live in a townhouse,” I say, but Lawrence isn’t listening.

  Our new friend, however, is.

  “What you call me, white boy? I ain’t your brother, motherfucker. I ain’t no proletarian.”

  “Do you wear Brooks Brothers?” I say, and hand the man my garment of oppression.

  It’s four sizes too big. In it, he’s a child, someone’s younger brother. He rolls up the cuffs and pretends there’s a mirror.

  “Not typically my style,” the man says.

  “You can get it tailored,” I say, and push Lawrence forward.

  We’re accosted by a roaming documentarian. He waves a smartphone in our faces, narrates: “Here we have the junior investment banker, Latin name Douchebagius ecco homophobe. An endangered species and a rare sight en route to the outer boroughs.”