“You seem pretty chummy with Cindy, don’t you?”
“What—well, she’s my frie—.”
“I’ve never heard you mention her before. When did you meet her?”
“What difference—?”
“And you didn’t even introduce me to her.”
“But I already apolo—”
I stared at her intently.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, “but I swear I talk about you all the time.
“When did you meet her?” I repeated, blandly.
“At a school dance, during my freshman year.”
“You danced with her?”
“No. I mean I was there with friends and they introduced me to her, and we became friendly.” Maria was perplexed. I wasn’t sure where I was going with my questions. But then the lightning struck: “Did you dance with any boys at the dance?”
“God, A.J., please don’t do this.”
“Answer the question, please. Did you dance with any boys at the dance?”
“A.J., this was like two years ago. Who remembers?”
“Please stop bullshitting me, Maria.”
“Okay, all right, I danced with a boy that night. Just a few times. Happy?”
“Who was he?” I could tell that Maria was exasperated with my line of questioning. I could also tell that she’d already given up, and was willing to toss any answers out there, hoping to shut me up with one of them at random.
“I don’t know. Some kid. He was in my eighth grade class.”
That she’d met this boy in elementary school, not even in high school, meant nothing to me. “Was he cute?”
She looked suddenly as if she’d found the answer she was looking for: Just praise him and he’ll stop. “I don’t know. Not as cute as you, baby,” she said, gently placing her fingertips on my cheek.
“But he was cute, right?”
“Can we please stop talking about him? Jesus Christ! I don’t even remember his name!”
“I bet you do. What was it?”
“I told you, I don’t remember!” she shouted, nervously. Passers-by, shopping bags in hand, slowed down to stare at us. At me.
“Think hard.”
Tapping her foot on the floor, she thought for a while, in desperation, and then said: “Donald.”
“So you do remember his name. You were lying before, weren’t you? Why did you lie to me?”
By this point in the argument, one watching from afar might have assumed that I was an attorney and Maria my hostile witness. The issue at hand was trivial, and yet I pursued it doggedly. The end justified the means. She could have been arguing her preference for catsup over mustard, or her passion for Shakespeare over Austin. But invariably, in the dark corners of my mind, I felt she was lying about whatever topic was at hand. And catsup v. mustard might seem like a silly comparison, but my distrust was just that juvenile. It was an eerie and bizarre suspicion of even the tiniest details.
Occasionally, I’d catch her in a lie. In all probability, she didn’t intend to lie in the first place, just like that day in the mall. But I guess sometimes she was so nervous when I questioned her that she forgot her own goddamn name. I was a pretty tough inquisitor. I could have been a great lawyer, I’m sure.
“Well!” I shouted. “Looks like we have a liar here, folks!” People looked at me.
Maria ran.
Through the mall’s tall revolving glass doors she dashed, out on to bustling Queens Boulevard. I gave chase in hot pursuit, my arms and legs chugging like a locomotive. Shoppers became spectators as I pushed the door open and searched for Maria outside. I quickly spotted her little puffy winter coat bouncing down the street in a whirlwind. Three blocks and one thousand pants later I finally caught up with her, clasped her shoulder, and whipped her around to face me.
“Let’s just end this, A.J.,” she said, with a hint of a tear in her eye. “I just can’t take you anymore.”
I yelled and yelled for a while, telling her that if she’d just have simply answered the questions, none of this shit would’ve happened. Eyeing a cop across the street, I quickly settled down. This isn’t worth going to jail for, I thought. A dire look blanketed her face, as though she didn’t have a friend in the world to run to.
I tried to console her. “Maria, we’re best friends, and whatever is bothering you is okay. You can tell me anything.” It was a bullshit tactic, as if she was responsible for this fiasco, not me. She didn’t say a word in response. Instead, she turned away and boarded the Q58 bus and went home. She didn’t even bother to ask me for a ride.
***
Thinking back on that period in my life, it’s hard to believe that such bullshit didn’t break us up much earlier. Things remained tumultuous between us for a while, then they settled down. That was our rut. Just like Mike’s parents, only they liked theirs. Just when I thought the wounds were beginning to heal, the suffering would start all over again.
In late March, Easter break rolled around. On Good Friday, the first day off for more than a week, Kyle, Mike, and Rick invited me out to a bar. I balked at first, wondering how I could possibly explain my choice to Maria. But a morbid sort of divine intervention extended its ugly hand and pulled me toward my fate that evening. “Yes,” I said. “I’ll go.”
Tears explode from my eyes as I recall this critical decision in my life. I remember the details because they’re here before me in living color.
Kyle brought us to Kearney’s Pub, an old Irish pub that hadn’t seen an Irishman in years. A real dive-bar I’d passed a million times on Queens Boulevard. Every Monday in class, The Family overheard hoods and Guidos bullshitting about their weekend at Kearney’s. Stormin’ Forman, Christian Matzelle…all those guys used to high-five each other, talking about all the shots they’d done and girls they’d hooked up with. Kyle and the rest were hardly offended by such conversations, but I was. Even though I’d gotten drunk at Rick’s over the summer, and several times since then, I swore I would never disrespect myself by going to a shitty bar frequented by hoods.
Nevertheless, I found myself inside. When I first walked inside, I remember smelling an odd combination of oak, beer, and cigarette smoke. Our sneakers went squick, squick, squick, and got stuck to the floor like it was a movie theater. There were no seats in the bar, save a few bar stools with red, torn-up cushions. And there were mirrors across from them, behind the bottles of liquor, so you could watch yourself slowly get buzzed, and then drunk.
It was almost ten o’clock, but hardly anyone was around. Kyle said he’d heard that girls from Stella Maris High School hung out there. Actually he said Stella Mattress. That was the school’s nickname because the girls were known to screw around a lot. “Where are they?” I asked, hankering to meet a bunch of drunk Catholic school girl sluts. Kyle brushed his cheek Marlon Brando-style and said, “trust me, Gahdfaddah, they’ll be here.” Rick, Mike, and I looked at each other out of the corner of our eyes, as if to say, “Kyle had better be right about this place.” So we drank beers out of little plastic cups and waited.
When I’d first entered Kearney’s I felt as if Maria was somehow forcing me to be there. But as I gulped one beer after the other, that feeling of coercion dissipated and was replaced by culpability. I have no one to blame but myself, I thought. Kyle, always the most perceptive of The Family, and like a solid consigliere, pulled his stool beside mine and consoled me.
“What’s wrong, Captain A.J. ? he asked. “Maria been treatin’ ya bad? Want me to break her legs for ya?”
He was only kidding, of course. But he was my consigliere, my advisor, so he was supposed to lift my spirits like that. And I could tell by the look in his eyes that he was genuinely interested in my reason for being at Kearney’s. He knew how much I hated bars. I responded with an incredulous glance. I placed my hand on his shoulder. “Kyle, my plan is simple: I want to meet a girl tonight, fuck her, and forget all about Maria. We’ve been fighting so much lately, that whatever happens tonight can only make it be
tter.” I gulped the backwash at the bottom of my cup, the remnants of my fourth beer in just under forty minutes.
“You sure that’s a good idea, Boss?” he asked. “I mean, what about what happened in Virginia? Did that help ya any?” He had a point: I was more paranoid than ever since Virginia. But the beer made it all seem so logical.
“I don’t know, consigliere,” I said. “If I were to fuck a girl tonight, man, nothing that bothers me about Maria would ever bother me again.”
Kyle rubbed his chin in doubt. At the time, I had a good reason for wanting to meet a girl. But good is a relative term, isn’t it? The more I thought about Maria and her past and her lying, the more I figured that a one night stand would make up for it all. I reasoned I could replace my sinister opinion of Maria with passionately pleasant thoughts of some other girl. Only then would I stop worrying about Maria. Sounds like a load of shit, huh? Well, it really made sense at the time. “If I could just get a back-up girlfriend again,” I said, “then all would be well.”
Kyle sat in silence, mulling my statement over. I ordered another beer.
“I don’t know,” he said, “maybe you should just try to forget about this shit without cheating. I mean, you’re going to the Academy next year, Maria loves ya, what more could ya want?”
At that moment, three girls, two Asian, one Hispanic, skipped into Kearney’s. I chugged my fifth beer and pointed them out to Kyle. Like hunters eyeing three deer in the woods, Kyle and I, without uttering a word, descended upon them.
Not two feet from these chicks, with a clear mission to accomplish, my mind drew a blank. What the fuck am I doing? How can I possibly get a girl to fuck me tonight? As quickly as these thought entered my jittery head, they were vanquished by Kyle’s smooth operation.
“Can we buy you a drink?” Kyle asked them. “Sure,” responded one of the Asian girls. All three giggled. Hook, line, and sinker, I thought.
The music in Kearney’s pounded continuously, so we could hardly hear their names. The one I liked, though, was Maggie. Maggie Rodriguez, a stunning Latina with cinnamon skin and exhilarating green eyes. Her thick hair draped her shoulders like a blanket. It was the color of a crow.
Goddamnit it, she’s hot, I thought. Do you think I’m cute? I asked Maggie with the flicker of my eyes.
Yes, she answered, with a glint of a smile.
I asked her where she was from, about her classes, and told her she was beautiful about a thousand times. “I’m a senior,” I repeated more than once. She seemed to like hearing that. I was so confident
Whenever I had a girlfriend, my confidence level went through the roof. Hell, even if I was rejected, I’d still have someone to go back to. The fact that these chicks were freshman furnished me with a remarkable hubris unlike any that I’d felt before. The more Maggie spoke to me, the faster her lashes flapped like a butterfly’s wings, repeating, with each flap, Yes, yes, yes! I want you, A.J.! Her white mini-skirt and red top allowed her to glow like no Colombian girl I’d ever seen before. As I stood there yessing her to death, Kyle, loyal consigliere that he was, kept his distance entertaining her Asian friends. Maggie and I went through the obligatory teenage bullshit: “Where are you from?” “What’s your favorite movie?” “What kind of music do you like?” “How old are you?” But I was hardly listening. I ached to stuff my face between her big brown tits and inhale her cleavage.
I don’t remember much about her, but I do remember that Maggie was fifteen, and lived in Elmhurst, a few blocks from the bar. I think the schools in Elmhurst are like ninety percent immigrant. To her neighbors, she was just another non-white girl amidst the Indian restaurants and Chinese take-out places. To me she was exotic. As different as Maria was from me, Maggie was my diametrical opposite. Her nights, she told me, were spent hanging out on her stoop, meringue blaring from boom boxes down the block, smoking pot and sipping cheap wine, trying to keep the ugliest of the hoods from groping her body, flirting with the best-looking ones. Saturday night at Kearney’s was the highlight of each week, worth sporting her best clothing and donning a layer of makeup. She was pretty but poor. I’m gonna be her knight in shining armor, I thought.
Maggie was roughly Maria’s height and weight, but thinner and bustier. Had I not been so drunk by that point, and so close to passing out, I would’ve nestled my face into her bosom and suckled her chocolate nipples. But I didn’t. I played it cool. And as Kyle talked with her friends, Maggie and I walked outside to smoke a cigarette. It was pretty cold outside, and smoking, of course, was allowed in the bar. But, for some reason, we felt compelled to listen to each other in private, almost as if some brand of unique fate had brought us together, and we wanted to let it play out.
We hit it off at first. Maggie found everything I said funny and I enjoyed her conversation. She was Puerto Rican, with two brothers and three sisters. She said the only reason she went to Stella Maris was because she got some sort of music scholarship. Her father ran off when she was five.
Shockingly, I discovered all of that information within the first ten minutes or so. I couldn’t believe it. For some odd reason, Maggie was baring her soul to me, in front of a run-down bar on Queens Boulevard. She said she’d never had a serious boyfriend because she didn’t trust most guys enough to like them. “All of my boyfriends have been hoods,” she said, stressing the last word as one might say cancer. I said that might be because her father had run off when she was a kid, imprinting her mind with a negative idea of men. She agreed whole-heartedly, and, I thought, fell in love with me at that moment.
To give you an idea about the state of my mind that night, when Maggie mentioned that she’d had “plenty of sex,” and, in the same breath, that she’d once “fucked two guys at once,” I didn’t think twice about it. Looking back on it now—I mean, think about it—she was fifteen years old, and yet she’d had “plenty” of sex!—I could’ve caught syphilis or AIDS or God-knows-what. But I didn’t give a shit, I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was carry out my plan.
After talking for what seemed like hours, we stood, silently, holding hands and smiling. Maggie shivered in the frigid night, not minding the silence a bit. Her nipples pierced her silky blouse; whether she was cold or excited or both I didn’t know. Her long eyelashes went blink, blink, blink as the cold breeze whipped its way down Queens Boulevard, carrying with it stray garbage. I sensed it was my duty to help her. Clearly, she was too sexually promiscuous for a fifteen year old. I was shocked by everything she had said. In fact, I was a little jealous. Then I wondered: Is she telling the truth? Is she really bashful about fucking so many guys? Is she a nice kid from a rough neighborhood—or is she just a slut? With each shiver I questioned her motives. But she looked so cute and sexy. The longer the silence grew, however, the more curious about her and attracted to her I became.
But what the hell did I care? All I wanted to do was impress her, and fuck her. I interrupted the serenity and told her that I wanted to be a pilot in the Air Force, that I was probably going to the Academy in Colorado the next fall. Unimpressed by my confident plans, she answered with an oh-so-elusive look that I’d been watching for all night. It said: Who cares? Just fuck me.
“So, what’s your whole name? Margaret?”
“Actually, it’s Magdalena. But I don’t like that name, so I tell people to call me Maggie. Magdalena sounds so stupid.”
“I think it’s a beautiful name.” I really did like it. “What do you do for fun? You said you come to Kearney’s each weekend?”
“Pretty much. All I ever do is come to Kearney’s,” she said, as she curled her fingers toward her face and glanced at her red polished nails. “It’s the only bar around here that doesn’t card.”
“Well, maybe you should get a boy to bring you somewhere nice, like a museum. Or Central Park. That’s where I like to go with my girlfriends.”
Little Boy Page 28
