Little Boy

by Anthony Prato

  I knew a lot of guys at school had done it already, but not most of them for sure. I despised the bastards that would loaf around before class discussing the details of their latest score: Where’d you meet the girl? At a bar? A club? Was she buzzing? Drunk? Bullshit like this surrounded me daily throughout high school. What’s weird is that I loathed the guys who didn’t get laid—the losers, the nerds, the Pauls—almost as much as I hated the assholes who did. And yet, in a sense, I always sort of wished I could be like both. It was easy to be either of those two extremes, it seemed, and difficult as hell to find that elusive middle.

  ***

  Wait, I thought. No way in hell was I going to call Jeff’s sister. She’d have to call me. Oh sure, she didn’t have my number, but I didn’t give a shit about that. I knew that she liked me enough to somehow get it after I waited for a while. Sure enough, about five days later she called.

  Actually, it wasn’t her, but her friend, Lynn. It turned out that Lynn was silent yet present at the dance. She said she’d seen me in the stairwell, as Maria pointed to my crotch, but we hadn’t talked other than hello. When she described what she looked like—tall, greasy, tons of make-up—though she didn’t use those words—I vaguely remembered seeing her, too. So I spoke with Lynn at first, because Jeff’s sister was too nervous to talk to me. Frightened’s more like it.

  Lynn and I talked for about ten minutes. The usual B.S.: “What music do you listen to?” “Are you a Yankees or a Mets fan?” That sort of thing. And every once in a while, I’d hear cackles and gasps in the background as Jeff’s sister whispered to Lynn, trying desperately to conceal her nervous laughter and listen in. Finally, Jeff’s sister got on the phone and we talked for a while. Long story short, she bored the living shit out of me. I don’t remember if it was Lynn or Jeff’s sister, but one of them gathered the guts to invite me to Jeff’s party the following weekend. I said I would come and got the hell off the phone, confused. Hooray! Two girls called me! Fuck: I don’t want to go!

  What could be worse than dancing the night away with the Jeff and his pudgy sister at that high school dance? Dancing the night away with Jeff and his sister in Jeff’s basement, that’s what.

  That following week was hell. Each day Jeff would ask me if I liked his sister, if I wanted to date his sister, yada, yada, yada. I was dying to tell Jeff that the only difference between him and his sister was he had bigger tits and shorter hair.

  I didn’t know how to respond to Jeff’s persistence, so I pretty much ignored him. I was already contemplating the prospect of dating Lynn, believe it or not. Although I hardly remembered what she looked like, I knew that the laws of teenage friendship mandated that she be better-looking than Jeff’s sister. And one member of Jeff’s orbit of friends, I recalled, reminded me of a horse the night of the dance, if only for a brief moment during her laugh. Was Lynn the sexy, super-tall girl that hee-hawed when Maria embarrassed me? I hankered for answers to this and other questions. I thought about speaking to Jeff about Lynn. But he was so high on me dating his sister that I had to maintain his friendship to get closer to Lynn. Pissing him off was the last thing I needed to do.

  My inquiries could have aroused suspicion and Jeff might’ve uninvited me to his party, right? But that’s what I thought I wanted—until I became fixated with Lynn. And it wasn’t so much that I liked Lynn—hell, I hardly remember what she looked like—but I knew that she liked me, and that was all that mattered. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Lynn’s phone call was not a girly front for her fat friend but an implicitly flirtatious petition for my presence at the party. Lynn knew she was prettier than Jeff’s sister. And man, did she have me by the balls. It’s kind of sick to think about in retrospect, that for the entire week, as Jeff’s sister probably grew more enamored with me by the moment, I was simultaneously falling for Lynn, and her, probably, for me.

  Fast forward to the party the following weekend: Surprise, surprise, I wound up hooking up with Lynn. I couldn’t believe it. We played this game called Seven Minutes in the Closet, where somehow a guy and a girl wound up being put in this closet together, while everyone else waited outside, wondering if the chosen two were making out.

  First I got in the closet with Jeff’s sister. I didn’t do a goddamn thing but feel nauseous. “So, whaddaya wanna do?” she kept pestering me, with a nasaly voice that warranted no less than death by strangulation. Desperate to evade her paws, I jammed my finger up my nose in an effort to disgust and hopefully repel her. But she tried to kiss me anyway! “Bitch, I got my finger up my nose!” I said. Or at least I wanted to say that. Luckily, the seven minutes transpired quickly and the door flung open to a gasping crowd which included not only Jeff, but Lynn, too.

  Moments later, Lynn and I got in the closet and—bam!—we hooked up. It was astonishing. My hands grappled with her little tits as she squirmed and danced in sheer delight. Ecstatic about the sheer irony of the evening, I kept thinking: I’m at this party to get to know Jeff’s sister, and I’m fondling her better-looking best friend! Oh, what a feeling!

  That one hook-up spelled the end of my short-lived relationship with Jeff’s sister. That was pretty obvious at the next school dance a month later, where she ignored me like the fucking plague.

  But that next dance was where I really met Maria. Lynn and I had been dating for about four weeks by that point. I’d heard her mention Maria on the phone occasionally, but it wasn’t until the dance that I realized Lynn and Maria were good friends. Inseparable! And all I kept thinking was: How could Lynn like this bitch, this cunt who made fun of me at the last dance? I wanted to punch Maria for doing that to me; but, beginning that night, I wanted to kiss her even more. As crazy as it sounds, I liked her because she thought I was an asshole!

  During the dance, Lynn wandered onto the gymnasium floor with Jeff and his sister. I didn’t feel like dancing at all, so I loitered all alone in the hallway. All of a sudden I was depressed. Guidos and hoods and preppies shucked and jived by with girls on their arms as I moped around in the hallway, staring at the beige and black-tiled walls surrounding me. Everyone was staring at me. Fright hit me like a bucket of cold water as I shivered with loneliness. I wanted to walk the hell out of that dance. I kept thinking: Maybe I’ll take the subway home and get mugged, and then Lynn’ll feel bad about abandoning me.

  There was a person trailing me, a hunter. I felt him. At first in a brisk walk, I quickly picked up speed. I was being chased around my own school! Who the hell is it? I wondered. I ran up the stairs toward the coat check. I figured: If I get up the stairs quick enough, I’ll escape from this guy.

  But as I reached the top of the stairs, I saw only my shadow.

  I was scared for a just second more, and then the fear went away. Without warning, I was alone once again. Now less frightened, I sensed a presence. Of what, exactly, I didn’t know.

  All I remember after that point is walking up and down the halls, doing nothing except looking behind me now and then. Talking to myself, wondering what to do now that Lynn was gone for a while, I thought about dancing with some other girl, just for the hell of it. But I really hated dancing. And besides, I had no idea how to ask a girl to dance. I always just somehow wound up doing it.

  So I walked over to Zachary, the janitor at my school. Zachary was an Iranian immigrant. He’d see me after school, hanging out with my friends in the cafeteria or something, and he’d come over and ask us if we wanted some sloppy joes left over from lunch time. They served sloppy joes pretty much every day in high school.

  So we’d eat the sloppy joes and all, even though they tasted like crap and caused diarrhea like a son of a bitch. We loved them, though. How often does somebody give you something for free, right? We all had a lot of respect for Zachary because of that. The poor guy, he didn’t have to give a shit about the kids that caused the messes he spent all day cleaning up. But he did. What a guy.

  I approached Zachary in the hallway right in front of the girl’s bathroom. T
he school usually turned one of the boy’s bathrooms into a girl’s bathroom during the dances. He said to me something like: “Do you want me to open up the gym storage room so you can bring a girl in there?” I had no idea what he was talking about, so I asked him what he meant. He said that the gym storage room had all these soft mats inside, the kind we used when we worked out during Phys. Ed. I thought that was so cool. I mean, here was this lonesome immigrant janitor trying to help me get laid at the dance. As I said: What a guy!

  Then, suddenly: Fate.

  Just as I was about to tell him that my girlfriend was M.I.A., I spotted Maria coming out of the bathroom. She was so beautiful, I almost cried. I remember thinking: even better-looking than Rachel, the girl who whacked me off just down the hall. Mounds of sleek black hair draped over her bosom and down her back. Don’t ask me why, but I felt compelled to make her like me. Rachel and Lynn and Jeff’s fat sister and all these other girls had fallen all over me left and right, but here was this one girl who hardly paid attention to me. The night we first met, all she’d noticed was my open fly.

  One month later, Maria didn’t even see me as she exited the bathroom. As sick as it sounds, that drove me wild.

  Disregarding Zachary’s suggestion, I grabbed Maria by the shoulder with my sweaty fingers. She yelped out—“Uh!”—like I was assaulting her. At that moment, I guess, all I wanted to do was make Zachary think she was my girlfriend. In the back of my mind, however, something else was transpiring: I was making Maria mine.

  I let go of her and she looked at me, startled as all hell. Even though we were a few feet apart I could feel her heart pounding. A vein in my temple beat like a drum. Before she had a chance to speak, I placed my arm around her shoulder as if she was my lover. I admit it: I was really turned on after all the commotion. She was so hot and startled that I wanted to kiss her right then and there in the goddamn hallway in front of the janitor.

  Zachary winked at me and nodded as if to say “good for you,” and went back to mopping the floor. But he managed to catch a glimpse of her cleavage, the horny bastard.

  Maria was wearing a low-cut scoop-neck blouse—a black one, I remember. God, her tits were enormous. How she managed to walk upright with those things hanging off her I’ll never know. I loved standing there with her in my arm for that brief second, like she really was my girlfriend. I almost started to bawl, however, when I realized that she wasn’t really mine, that she, in fact, hated me.

  I pulled her near the wall and began explaining that I was only trying to impress the janitor. I said: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Let me just explain!”

  Maria was still panting, scared and out of breath. Each time she inhaled, I felt as if her soft breasts were getting closer to my face. But they weren’t. At least I have her attention, I thought, at least she’s not running away.

  I explained to her, repeatedly and with bated breath, why I grabbed her, because she didn’t seem to get it. We shared a long, quiet, private moment. As I gazed into her eyes, I inhaled her beauty. She’s so lovely, I thought. Maria had the kind of eyes that sparkled in pitch darkness. She had soulful eyes that were searching—for a friend, for a confidant, for something—but to no avail. They reminded me of the eyes of this cartoon dog I used to watch when I was a kid, the way they drooped.

  On the surface, she was just another slutty Guidette at the dance. But despite her tight, stylish clothing, she looked somewhat conservative that night. Any clothes covering Maria’s fabulous body at all made her look like a virtuous lady rather than a bimbo, just as a snow-white wedding dress turns a whore into a princess.

  After she relaxed a bit, when she finally understood what I was saying about Zachary, Maria gazed up at me with her tremendous eyes like a little girl lost in a big mall who had just located her daddy. She pulled away from me briskly, and, in a frighteningly monotonous voice, said:

  “Christ, you’re a maniac.”

  ***

  I remember the exact thought penetrating my cranium as Maria said that to me: jet airplanes piercing the night sky. When I get excited to the point of bliss I always think about jets. Not commercial airliners like Boeing 747s. I mean real jets, the kind used in war.

  I’ve always loved jets, probably because you, Dad, were an awesome pilot in Vietnam. You got me into aircraft when I was very young. I still remember everything you told me about your career. You flew the B-52D Stratofortress. It was used to bomb Communist strongholds in Southeast Asia and enemy supply lines. It had only four small tail guns but could go almost as fast as the speed of sound, about 600 miles-per-hour, and could fly halfway around the world non-stop at an altitude of 30,000 feet. Its ability to avoid the enemy at such speeds and altitudes made it an invaluable weapon in the war.

  I used to write away to NASA and the Department of Defense when I was a kid asking for photographs of the B-52D Stratofortress and all the modern jets. I wrote to all the space centers, like Kennedy in Florida, LBJ in Texas, and the Jet Propulsion Lab in California. I also wrote to the Air Force, and they always sent me tons of pictures and aerial maps and other intelligence. Well, okay, “intelligence” is a bit of an exaggeration. But whatever they sent me, it was all so cool. And there were a lot more air bases and space centers I wrote to, a lot that most people haven’t even heard of.

  As a kid, every few weeks I received a package in the mail, filled with colorful photos of all these jets. I loved naming them after people I knew. Different people reminded me of different aircraft. Dad, you never reminded me of the B-52 at all. You’re more like the B-1 bomber, which, you told me, replaced the B-52. The B-1 can carry more armament than any other combat aircraft. It has a variable wing, which means it can be pushed forward for subsonic flight and pushed back for supersonic flight. Remember when you told me that?

  You don’t look like the B-1; you resemble it in more significant ways. What I mean is that all the B-1’s subsystems are duplicated. If a subsystem has one failure, the mission can be completed by using the back-up. And if the back-up fails, then the mission can still be safely aborted with the bomber returning to base. You’re just like that, only you have an endless back-up system. It’s almost like you have an infinite number, because no matter what happens to you, you always makes it through.

  But when I was first alone with Maria, the jet I thought of that night was the Curtiss P-40B, the first American monoplane fighter. It was used by the Flying Tigers, the American volunteer group that helped China defend its Burma Road supply line against the Japanese from 1941 to 1942. Most people have seen the P-40B, even though they probably didn’t know it at the time. It’s a small plane that always has mean-looking shark’s teeth painted on the front. I don’t know why they painted those teeth on there, but it looked really cool. Since I was young, I’ve fallen in love with a lot of jets and planes. But that P-40B is still my favorite.

  Maria didn’t exactly growl like a P-40B that night, but she did have a look on her face like she could have chewed me up and spit me out if she wanted to. She appeared both ferocious and cuddly, like an attack bunny. I didn’t want to lose that look. I didn’t want her to walk away. Had she marched away that night, I don’t know what I would have done.

  “Hey, Maria,” I called out. “Just chill out! I didn’t mean to scare you or anything.”

  “Yeah, right,” she said. “What the hell do you want, anyway?”

  The chip on her shoulder was larger than the situation demanded. She’s such a Guidette, I moaned to myself.

  “I’m sorry, but like I said...” and then I just trailed off, because I could see she wasn’t getting the point and wasn’t about to either. “Let’s just talk for a while,” I told her. “Okay,” she said.

  We sauntered over to the bottom of the stairwell. Nobody was around because the dance still had almost an hour left to go, and most people didn’t start running up the stairs to get their coats until after the last song of the night. We were all alone. It was time to make my move.

  “What’s up?�
�� I asked her. How original, I thought. It was a pretty lame thing to say because every hood at the dance greeted every other hood with that phrase. Actually, it sounded more like this: “‘Sup?” It seems like no matter where I walked in my high school I heard one greeting ad nauseum: ‘Sup? Sup, sup, sup—a thousand times over, all day long. And, of course, if you’re really happy to see someone, you drag it out: “Suuuuuuuuuuuuup?” How fucking stupid. I’m still pissed at myself for beginning my conversation with Maria that way.