Little Boy

by Anthony Prato

  Maria felt much the same way; however, I think it was harder for her to come by considering her tough life. For me, once I met Maria, it was an immediate and logical discovery. For her, it took time, effort, and, most importantly, trust. But we agreed just the same. We just wanted to be happy. We didn’t want to bother anyone. It was pretty simple, really. But if we’d told anyone but each other about our passions, we’d be accused of being crazy.

  Parents should tell their kids: “Listen, the two most important things in this world are, first, be happy, and second, avoid hurting others in the process.” That’s it. Why bother screwing with kids’ heads about getting the best job, or the best grades, or worshipping a phony baloney God. Think about it: Does it really make any sense to tell a child otherwise? I think a lot of kids grow up hurting people—sometimes physically, sometimes emotionally—because they are concentrating so intently on their plans for success that they forget simply to be happy. People should stop and look around once in a while and realize that life is very short. Even seventy or eighty years of life on Earth is a terribly short time, when compared to rest of history. So why bother hurting yourself, or anyone else? Why bother killing yourself through an insane amount of work? Why bother?

  Maria put it best the day we first made love. Afterward, she turned to me and said: “I want to find someone to grow old with.” What a wonderful concept. In that one sentence, Maria summarized my entire philosophy, only I didn’t call it that, because I didn’t realize how special that feeling was, how worthy it was of being called a philosophy.

  Maria and I understood that life on Earth is short, and often sinister, so you might as well find someone to help you along, to make you happy. I remember trying to explain this philosophy to you, Mom. You accused me of being high on drugs, so I kicked a table in the kitchen, hurt my foot, and stormed out of the room. At least you never accused me of being on drugs again.

  And you never understood, either, and that’s why you were always so depressed and angry. Like the rest of this crazy world, you were waiting for a miracle to come, never realizing that the world and life itself were a miracle. The only important thing is here and now.

  Maria and I thought that organized religion was stupid, and it is. For some reason or another, a group of people occasionally assumes spiritual power over others, convincing the others—sometimes millions, other times just a few dozen—that they know a little more about the meaning of life than the rest. And with that, those in power get everyone to feel bad when they make mistakes. But what is religion if not a fiat organized by just a few people with the skill to sway the masses?

  I think it’s evil for anyone to say they know what God said or did, just because they read a bunch of old books. If we’re all sinners like they claim, if we’re all imperfect, then who’s to say they know for sure what a particular passage in the Koran or Bible means?

  And it’s all part of the smokescreen created by parents and teachers and priests and ministers and rabbis—the smokescreen that hides the truth and makes people think that there’s more to life than simply being happy. Because once a person thinks there’s more to life than being happy—not making tons of money, not being a “success,” not being a good Catholic or Jew or Muslim—then he’ll seek a path toward an imaginary ideal. And it’s when you seek such an ideal that other people, the people who claim to have already reached it, begin to control you. It’s a tragedy, really. And yet it persists.

  ***

  With those thoughts in my heart, I was determined to never let Maria go. I remember thinking after we made love, I’ve found my religion. It’s Maria. And Maria’s WEFT. That’s how I knew I loved her. Because I’d shunned religion and my family for my whole love, but in Maria there was something I could believe in.

  But even though I loved her dearly, I couldn’t help but get a little jealous now and then.

  It’s amazing, you know, how you can want something so badly, and even visualize it or whatever, but still act so differently than you need to. What I mean is, I knew that my jealousy was against my desire to live in the here and now. After all, what is jealousy besides obsessing over what has happened, or what could happen, rather than what is?

  It was so weird that I don’t know how to describe it. See, I wanted Maria all to myself. The way I saw it, her father and friends had screwed up her past, and she had no future to speak of when I met here. So she was mine.

  It started so innocently. Maria would tell me that she was going to her grandmother’s house, for example, and I would feel left out. Or sometimes a guy would call her house—usually a guy that wanted to talk to her sister—and I would ask Maria, “Did you speak to him? Did he flirt with you?” This would make her very angry.

  One night, I remember, we were talking on the phone for three and a half hours, and finally, at midnight, she said, “I gotta go do my math homework.” I looked at the clock. It was 12:01, and we both had to be up by six. But I didn’t care. I was actually jealous of her homework.

  And this feeling only got worse. One day she told me that her and her mom talked about a problem she had in school. I went ballistic. “Why were you talking to your mom about school?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I thought you confided in me about that stuff.”

  “A.J., I tell my mom things, too.”

  “Yeah, but who’s your best friend?”

  “My best friend? I don’t know. My mother is, I guess”

  “What do you mean? I think you’re my best friend. Not my mother. I’d take you over my mother any day. So, am I your best friend, or what?”

  “A.J., what’s your problem?”

  “I’m just saying that a girl can’t be best friends with her mother. I mean, your mother has to be your best friend, because she’s your mother.”

  “Huh? You’re acting really weird, A.J. What’s wrong with you?”

  What’s wrong with you? As those words echo in my mind, it’s hard to believe that they came from Maria’s lips, long before the shit hit the fan. She asked me that a lot, now that I think about it. I never bothered answering. I felt bad that I was barraging Maria with my questions. I really did. At the same time, it was almost as though she didn’t remember what had happened between us, and how much we’d shared. Maybe she did and I just didn’t notice it. I don’t know. I just changed the subject, hoping the feelings I had within me would just go away.

  Chapter 11

  Venial Sins

  As always, for Labor Day Weekend, my parents and I drove down to my grandmother’s timeshare in Virginia. It was sort of my family’s house, meaning that my grandmother and my parents and sister, as well as my father’s entire family, all shared the place year-round. One time we went down there for Christmas, but we couldn’t go in the water because it was too damn cold. It was cool, though, to look out the window and see the waves crashing ashore as we sat around the fireplace.

  But that summer we went down to the shore right before school began. I begged my parents to let me stay home, but they said no. Unlike previous summers, they’d decided to stay in a hotel room to avoid causing my grandmother too much trouble.

  We left New York early Friday morning and drove straight down. We arrived in Virginia at about two p.m. I sat in the back seat of the car, staring at a book, Romeo and Juliet, which Maria had given me before I left. She said it was her favorite Shakespeare play. I know the basic story—a young couple’s in love and they kill themselves at the end—so I thought it would be easy to read. But all that old English was pretty tough to digest. It was so difficult, in fact, that I stopped reading it at about the seventh page. Instead, I just listened to my CD player.

  I’d brought The Long and Winding Road with me, and I’d planned on listening to it on the balcony of our hotel room. I figured it would be a boring vacation, and I’d probably be sitting there sucking down butts the whole week. The previous summer my family and I had gone to Virginia, too. That summer I didn’t have a girl
friend or anything. I met a few girls down the shore, but I didn’t hook up with anyone. It was sort of pathetic, actually. Because once I got home, I realized that I probably could of hooked up if I really wanted to. The problem was that I didn’t have the confidence to do it.

  Before we even got out of the car, I spotted seven or eight girls around my age, giggling and walking from the clubhouse to the pool. They were gorgeous; but, then again, all thin girls look sexy in bikinis. They weren’t like the girls in New York. Most of the girls in the city that I knew had black or brown hair, but all the beach chicks were blondes or redheads.

  The first few night in Virginia was pretty dull. But on Sunday, two days before we left, Tracey made friends with some kids from Missouri. One of them was a girl named Lee Anne, a blonde bombshell from St. Louis. I usually didn’t care for that type, but for some reason I was attracted to Lee Anne.

  Until I met Lee Anne, I never understood the term “jailbait.” I didn’t get how older men could lust after teenage girls. She was only fifteen, but Lee Anne could have easily passed for twenty-one or older. She must have been at least my height, with straight golden hair and a bronzed body. With tits like cantaloupes, and long slender legs, there was nothing adolescent about her. Like a Baywatch babe, she trotted along the beach in a red bikini, sun tan oil dripped off her arms and thighs, smelling like coconuts. She wore a pair of blue mirrory sunglasses that blinded me when I looked at them. They gave Lee Anne a mysterious air. I felt challenged to hook up with her.

  Behind those sunglasses Lee Anne was a ditz, a stupid hick who probably had never read a book in her life. I was bored with her personality five minutes after meeting her. But she was someone to hang out with, to pass the time with, to smoke with as the summer days dwindled away. We splashed each other in the ocean all day Sunday and Monday, and went for walks on the beach as the sun set. Whenever a sea plane passed overhead, I’d tell her about it, and about my love of planes and jets. She didn’t seem to give a shit, but at least she didn’t interrupt.

  Late Monday night, the night before we drove back to Queens, Lee Anne and I were talking and smoking in a stairwell. She clasped her cigarette unlike anyone else I knew, between her thumb and forefinger, daintily, almost as if she was trying to avoid burning herself. She took long drags, and didn’t open her mouth all of the way to release the smoke, but instead blew it out of the corner of her mouth in a thick stream. I was disgusted by it, and yet I ached to rip her top off and suckle her white breasts.

  After ten silent minutes, she casually dropped her cigarette on the cold concrete floor of the stairwell, stomping it out with the heel of her sandals. Again: stupid, but sexy.

  “Hey, look,” I said, “it’s us.” I was referring to our reflection in the chrome of the fire extinguisher behind the closed stairwell door, right next to her. That was about the most stimulating piece of conversation I’d had with her until that point. She disregarded my observation and gazed wearily at the fluorescent light above.

  “You’re kind of cute,” she said, looking in my direction but not at me, with a twangy accent that she probably didn’t even realize she had.

  “Well, thank you. You aren’t so bad yourself.”

  Suddenly, I had the feeling that I could fuck her right then and there if I chose. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to even kiss her, though. I don’t know, it was sort of weird. I wanted to fuck her, but at the same time, I didn’t want to say another goddamn word to her. And even though I smoked too, just the thought of tasting her menthol cigarettes on my tongue nauseated me.

  But Lee Anne was so hot, unlike any girl I’d ever hooked up with in New York. Her hair was the color of a lemon. She had hairless arms and milky white teeth. There were so many stylish thready holes on her shorts that they revealed more than they hid. For a moment, I could have sworn I saw pink panties through one of the openings. Rock hard, I extended my arm toward that hair and decided, I’m gonna find out if she’s a real blonde.

  I was just about to kiss her when she asked, “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  I didn’t answer immediately. I thought about it for a moment. I loved Maria. I really did. But at the same time, I was jealous of all those boys she kissed. She was a year younger than I was, yet she’d kissed more people than me. I detested the thought. I also hated her friend, Guido. I kept thinking about Maria cruising around in his goddamn car, laughing and joking with her friends, her tits bobbling in her tight bikini top, and Guido catching a peak of her cleavage in the rear-view mirror. I couldn’t escape these memories of a time so long ago, a summer I wasn’t part of. Her past was my present and there was no changing that.

  I love her, I kept saying to myself, silently. But maybe, I thought, if I kiss Lee Anne, Maria’s past won’t hurt as much. I’ll just be replacing Maria’s past with my own present. Nothing is wrong with just kissing one more girl, a girl I knew I’ll never see again.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t have one.” And, without thinking a second thought, my tongue was twirling around in her warm mouth, hers in mine. I yanked her bikini top off, and exposed her perfect breasts. They were huge—even bigger than Maria’s—and immaculate and chalky white, in contrast to her tan body.

  Like a piglet fighting his siblings for his mother’s teat, I pressed my head into her bosom and sucked her breasts not knowing where to begin or end. Leaning over, grunting and groaning, I licked her stomach and poked her belly button ring with my tongue. Desperate to impress her, but clueless as to why, I slid my tongue up the middle of her belly, between her tits, and ended by nibbling her chin.

  As quickly as we’d begun, we stopped. I figured that having sex with her in the stairwell was a crazy idea. I’d already accomplished what I’d set out to accomplish. I wiped her slimy red lip gloss from my face with the back of my hand, kissed her on the cheek, and said good night. “Good night,” she said with a smile. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  ***

  “What’s wrong, A.J.?”

  That’s how Maria began our first phone call after I returned from Virginia. Those words still echo in my mind. I hadn’t even said anything yet, but she suspected something was up. Of course, I was determined to conceal what had happened. I hooked up with two more girls in the very next day, one in the afternoon, one in the evening. Each was a member of a different group of people hanging out there, so they didn’t know about Lee Anne.

  Vicki, a French-Canadian girl visiting the beach all the way from Ottawa, was even sexier than Lee Anne. She was also tall, almost my height, but with brown hair and blonde highlights. But unlike Lee Anne, she was intelligent. I think she said she wanted to be a doctor or something, I really can’t remember.

  The other girl’s name I forget. I think it was something like Linda, or Melinda. Or it could have been Cindy, I’m really not sure. She wasn’t too attractive, anyway. I’m not into fat girls so I didn’t hook up with her for long. But it was long enough to count.

  So, by the time I’d returned to New York on Tuesday evening, Maria and I had both kissed the same number of people, and that was all that mattered. It was only a little white lie. A venial sin. She didn’t need to know—not about the first three, at least. In fact, I promised myself that if I ever cheated on her again, then maybe I would tell her. Evening the score would make me feel a lot better in the long run, I thought, especially when I became jealous of her past. Whenever an image of Guido popped into my head, or I thought about any of the guys she’d hooked up with, I would just think of Lee Anne or Vicki, and forget all about being jealous. I thought it was a pretty good plan.

  In my mind, I was doing what I had to do. I remember thinking: I’ve actually matured. It’s not like I have a back-up anymore. See, before I met Maria, whenever I dated a girl, I’d always have a back-up. Basically, I’d talk on the phone with a girl that I knew liked me while I was dating somebody else. That way, in case my girlfriend ever broke up with me, I could just call up the other girl and ask her out. I can’t even remember actually using a
back-up. But I always had one, anyway. The last time, of course, was when I was dating Lynn but working on Maria.