Little Boy

by Anthony Prato

  ***

  I spoke to Megan a lot at school, in the library, and at lunch. But I’ve only seen her face twice off campus, once in Central Park today, and once last December, just before Christmas.

  Each December Hunter College hosts the Deck the Halls Ball. We’d only known each other for a few months, but Megan was the kind of girl who was happy going to a dance with a male friend. “It’ll give us a chance to get to know each other,” she said. Until that dance, I hadn’t been outside the house much since last June. “Come on A.J.,” she pleaded. There’s an ‘80s theme and you once told me you loved ‘80s music.”

  “I did?”

  “Yes, the first day of school, the day we met.”

  I smiled. “Okay, I’ll go.”

  The Deck the Halls Ball was held at the Plaza Hotel at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Central Park South, right in the heart of midtown. In front of the Plaza was a golden statue of a man on a horse covered with pigeon crap. The pigeon crap, of course, wasn’t part of the statue. I had stood beneath that statue countless times, kissing Maria passionately, embracing her.

  Across Fifth Avenue stood a skyscraper which housed, among other things, F. A. O. Schwartz, another place reminiscent of my past. Several blocks below stood St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Saks Fifth Avenue. Maria and I spent so much time in this part of the city—going into Saks to browse, hanging out in the park by the pond—that as soon as I exited the R train in midtown I was shell-shocked. I knew that would be the case; that’s why Megan had to twist my arm just to get me to go to the dance.

  But, in addition to Megan’s pleading and the open bar, there was one other reason that I was willing to go that night: I wanted to see the inside of the Plaza. Whenever Maria and I went to the city, we always talked about going inside just to sneak a peak. I know it sounds dumb because it’s just a hotel, so why we were so nervous I have no idea. But we never did get to go inside.

  The only way I could get through my first social experience after Maria was by drinking. Heavily. Thing is, I somehow had told Megan that I didn’t drink. I also smoked, but I told her I didn’t smoke, either. I guess I did it to give her the impression that I was a good and decent person, just like her. I knew that Megan had never smoked or even tasted more than a sip of beer in her lifetime; had she known about the real me, she surly wouldn’t have spoken to me, never mind ask me to a dance. The funny thing—now that I think about it—is that she never even asked me if I drank or smoked. I just somehow told her I didn’t.

  So there I was, approaching the end of my first semester of college with this nice Irish girl from Rutherford—daughter of a deacon, for God’s sake—and I had to sneak off by myself and down a beer while she wasn’t looking. I still remember asking around for a piece of gum on my way back to meet Megan on the dance floor because I didn’t want her to smell my breath.

  Eventually, I had more than a few beers—about five or six the last time I counted—and it started to show. Panting from the oppressive heat, my inebriated body practically slumped onto the dancers as I zigzagged my way back to Megan, beer in hand. My forehead was slick with sweat and my shirt was soaked. I was delirious. Somehow I got caught up on the dance floor in sort of a mosh pit, and I jumped around in a drunken stupor flailing my arms and screaming like a mother fucker with everybody there. Or nobody, depending on your perspective. The way I flagrantly disrespected my escort would’ve given even the saintliest woman a coronary. I feel so bad about it, now that I think about it.

  By the time the dance let out, Megan was noticeably pissed. It was pretty obvious to her that I was drunk off my ass. But that wasn’t the biggest misfortune of the night. Once outside the Plaza, as we waited for a few of her friends to show, some asshole approached Megan and kissed her on the cheek. “Good night, carrot top,” he said, sweetly. And then he strolled away. Megan didn’t seem to mind his farewell. But I did. I was her fucking date! He stepped over some blurry line I’d drawn in my sloshed head—and I was pissed.

  Jealously, I looked at Megan. Angrily, I turned my head toward the bastard as he walked away. I lunged after him through the crowd, pushing spectators aside as if I was in a field shoving ears of corn out of my way. All in one motion, I tapped him on the shoulder with my left hand and socked him in the gut with my right. Down he went. What happened after that I don’t recall. For all I know, he leaped up and beat me to a pulp in front of the most beautiful hotel in New York. From that point on, the scene is a blur; only the emotions I felt are crystal clear.

  Horrified, Megan didn’t speak much after that. As I walked her to the Port Authority bus terminal, I still remember asking, “You’re not mad at me are you?” She smiled, politely, and forced out a “No, of course not.” But I knew that she was. And it kind of pissed me off that she didn’t show it. I dropped her off. She grimaced and turned her back and walked to the bus, silently. We both knew that whatever relationship we had was over.

  We didn’t make eye contact for the next several months following that, never mind speak. Then, just a few days before St. Patrick’s Day this year, we wound up in the same place at the same time and struck up a conversation. She confessed that she really was mad at me the night of the Deck the Halls Dance. But, she said, it wasn’t that I had sneaked off and gotten wasted, and not even that I’d decked the hood. “You tried to make yourself out to be someone that that you weren’t. I’m not angry, I’m really just disappointed in you.” That day I learned a profound lesson: Whenever you make believe you’re something you’re not, don’t slack off on the impersonation. That’s when you run into trouble.

  Soon enough, Megan and I started to become friendly again. Not friends, but friendly. The difference is difficult to explain. But I do know this: The number one thing that kept our relationship alive was my attraction to her. I have to admit, I probably wouldn’t have wanted to be friendly with her if she was ugly. But even with Megan’s good looks, I didn’t have the slightest desire to hang out with her outside of school. Mostly, I enjoyed being alone.

  ***

  After school let out last month, she started calling me at home, asking me to hang out. She had forgiven me. At first I resisted. But she continued to bother me.

  One night she called me and practically begged me to see her. I didn’t want to go, but she begged, and that was reason enough for me. It turned out that she was planning on going to law school, so I figured if we went out at least we’d have that to talk about. More importantly, I thought it would be a nice way to dovetail into more interesting conversation, on a more personal level. Even though I’d known Megan for a while, I’d never bothered to ask much about her life.

  It turned out to be an eventful afternoon. I got more than I bargained for. So did Megan.

  As I said, we were sitting there in Central Park during our “date” or “get-together” or whatever the hell it was—in what I think was Strawberry Fields—and I barely had the energy to continue speaking. I kept envisioning her stripping naked before me, just like I did when I was in class and she was sitting nearby. If she wasn’t going to get naked, I just wanted her to go back to New Jersey and let me go to sleep. What a mistake it was to see her! I thought. I would’ve loved to stay in my fucking room all day, nestled under the covers, air conditioner blowing hard. I was so bored that I knew it would be my last time out of the house for a long, long time.

  I started thinking: Maybe forever. I swear I only started contemplating suicide so I wouldn’t have to deal with her any longer. I could see the headline on the front page of the New York Post the next day: Man, Early Twenties, Strangles Self in Central Park.

  Finally—finally!—we started talking again—about her plans for the future, of all things. How fun. She rambled on and on about how she wanted to go to law school or something. Her goddamn plans annoyed me, so I tuned out.

  My eyes began to rove, and then I was bewitched by a girl I saw. An angel, actually. She was short—only about five-foot one or two. And what wonderful hair. It was the col
or of anthracite coal, shiny and black, whipping in the wind she created with her speed. She was walking briskly, like she had to get someplace in a hurry, on the right side of the pathway across from the side I was sitting, dodging the people marching toward her.

  And she had brown eyes, too. I could tell.

  Her breasts were large, but in perfect proportion to her petite, compact body. She was a sleek black Stealth Bomber, parading uninterrupted and unnoticed by all except me. She was a miniature but glamorous model dressed in tiny white shorts that barely covered her ass. She was the type of girl who could make any man grovel on his knees, begging for her love.

  I can’t adequately explain how I felt when I saw this girl. My mind began racing so fast. I remember breaking out into a cold sweat. All at once, I felt both love and hatred—both obsession and revulsion—for this girl I’d never even seen before. She was sexy, yet cute; confident, yet timid; mature, yet callow. She looked just like Maria. And she walked right by me as swiftly as she had arrived.

  Chapter 2

  Dancing in the Dark

  The thing about Maria is that I think about her all the time. Sounds like a load of shit, huh? Hell, lots of people think of lots of stuff “all the time,” right? But—and this must be made perfectly clear before I go on—I literally think about Maria all the time. No thought in my head is absent of Maria altogether.

  It’s hard not to, because she was my first and last love, my first and last real girlfriend. Sometimes I think about her for a second or two—like if I hear a song that we danced to or pass by a restaurant we ate in—and a moment later I’ll think about her in a different way. But usually, like that day in the park, tons of stuff pops and flashes and echoes through my mind, like fireworks blowing up at the bottom of the Grand Canyon at midnight. It’s like I’m on an acid trip until someone pinches me. Actually, it’s more like a bad movie that you just have to sit in the dark and watch until it’s finally finished—and then, just when you think it’s finished, it starts up again, and you have to watch it all over.

  It’s impossible to get Maria out of my mind when that happens. It’s almost as if I have to re-live my whole relationship with her, from beginning to end, before my mind finally moves on to something else. And that something else is always Maria.

  As cliché as it sounds, Maria changed my life. Had I not met her, I would’ve wound up a total geek or an alcoholic. Probably the latter.

  In high school, when all these losers were dating lots of girls and getting laid, I never saw myself as much of a player. I guess I was pretty good-looking. And I think I usually got along pretty well with girls initially because of that. But still, in the end it was usually the more socially attractive guys—the goddamn jocks and hoods, especially—that got the girls, and not me. It always seemed that the bigger the asshole the guy was, the more the girls liked him.

  Honestly, beyond my initial attraction, after a few minutes of conversation most chicks began to bore me. Nervously, I’d start cracking jokes about their hair or clothing, fearful that there was nothing else worth talking about. They weren’t always funny jokes, though. Having a sense of humor is a good thing, and that always helped me get girls to pay attention to me, on top of my looks. But what I mean is that more often than not my joking would become demeaning, as if I was blaming the girl for my boredom. I’m not sure if I noticed it before I met Maria, but I certainly noticed it today.

  Marriage was a frightening thought, always. If I ever fell in love with a girl, how the hell would we manage to stay interested in each other for maybe thirty, forty, or fifty years? My friend Mike tells me that his parents, married over thirty years now, have developed a rut. Basically, they’ve had the same jobs since they were married; they go on vacation the same time each year to the same place; and they spend every possible weekend at his trailer in Upstate New York.

  But Mike speaks of this rut fondly, as if it’s okay to have a predictable relationship with the only changes being his Mom’s ass swelling and Dad’s hairline receding more and more each year. Frankly, the thought of getting to know a chick so well that you could detect her fart a mile away was pathetic. It made me want to vomit.

  With such fears embedded in my mind, I always found it hard to justify being civil to a girl for more than five minutes after I met her. Occasionally, I’d date a girl just to have a girlfriend, because that was the cool thing to do. But I knew that after a few months of relentless conversation and ho-hum dates, a rut would develop and one of us would decide to break it off.

  I guess what I’m trying to say is that before Maria, I never believed in love.

  ***

  I met Maria at the first high school dance of the new year, on February 2, 1992, with about four months left to go in my junior year. Back then, everybody went to the dances. Once a month, that was the place to be.

  After getting dropped off by our parents, every month we’d spend three hours stuffed in a muggy gymnasium, all hoping to leave later that night with a phone number. Singing “I got her number, I got her number,” hoods would skip out of the dance at eleven, showing off to their buddies. How I longed to be one of those guys.

  With their sloppy hair and wide, baggy jeans that generally hung low enough to show a little ass crack, they were neither admired like jocks nor dissed like nerds. It was as if the Guidos of the late ‘80s had morphed into a similar animal of a different species. Pot- and cigarette-smoking, hip-hop-dancing losers, they wore colorful baseball caps, always backwards, of teams they’d never heard of, and drank forties of bitter malt liquor on street corners all over Queens. And they always seemed to walk hunkered over, like hunch backs, like hound dogs following a scent on the pavement. With their dark, floppy clothing and multicolored caps, hoods resembled homeless circus clowns to those who despised them. Nobody ever put these guys in charge of St. Ann’s, or any other high school for that matter, and yet somehow they ran the place. Everybody stood in awe of the hoods. No—we feared them. And we scorned them if only because they couldn’t be them.

  Rebels without clues, my small circle of friends and I refused to join the ranks of the faddish hoods, opting instead to maintain the Guido style of the late-80s. Donning my Cavaricci jeans and a white turtleneck, I sat amongst my pals in the cafeteria dance after dance during my first three years of high school. Sipping Cokes and sweating to death, I’d think: Damn, why did I where a turtleneck? And then: Because it looks good, that’s why. The sweat would dribble off my brow and create a puddle between my chalk white Nike sneakers. I remember seeing that puddle many times.

  Occasionally, I’d hang out with a girl at a dance, pretty much ignoring my friends except to stop by and show off my latest catch. My friends were always cool about that, and they would’ve done the same thing if they had girlfriends.

  Most nights, though, my friends and I remained in the cafeteria, part by choice, part by fate. The dance floor was so dark and stuffy that there was hardly a chance to hear a girl say her name, never mind have a conversation. Some guys grabbed complete strangers off the floor and jumped around like a bunch of monkeys. They’d dance all night, most of the time with people they knew all of two seconds beforehand, or didn’t know at all. Not me and my friends, though. We’d sit there all night and hang out, striving to block out the hip-hop music emanating from within the gym, quietly ranking out the jerks and their chicks as they passed by.

  Late September of last year, while sitting in the cafeteria jabbering about the oppressive heat, the awful music, or some other bullshit, I was introduced to Maria. I’m trying desperately to recall the name of the guy who introduced me to her. I recollect his greasy blonde hair and chubby face so well, but his name: Jeff Something…Jeff Rifkin…?

  …Ripken! Jeff Ripken! Christ, does that name conjure up some memories!

  I sort of knew Jeff before the dance; he’d sat next to me in Physics class that year. But it wasn’t until this dance that I really started to talk to him. I’ll never forget him approaching me by the s
oda machine in the corner and saying, “Hey, guess what? My sister thinks you’re cute.”

  It’s funny how a minor event, the smallest detail, can shatter lives. My sister thinks you’re cute. That single innocuous sentence moved my world. What if I had been in the bathroom taking a piss when Jeff brought his sister around? Would Rick or Mike or Paul or Kyle be sitting in their rooms right now, writing what I am writing, doing what I’m about to do?