Angel ushers us in and we spend many minutes in the hallway telling her how “cute” she looks and how “fantastic” her new shoes are. I follow the two girls down into the basement where a bunch of teenagers sit on old Victorian sofas. The walls are bare and the ceiling is low. The TV is on and I stand there awkwardly staring at the screen, pretending to be absorbed. I squint my eyes and tilt my head. I hope this expression conveys approachability and deep introspection, a chance for someone to break the spell and say, Hey, what’s up? or Whatchya watching? But no one does. I don’t like the idea of sparking conversation. The whole practice is lost on me; my mother’s penchant for charm and wit skipped over me and settled on Eric, thirteen now, whom I hate, envy, and love in equal measure.
This is the popular crew, the kids I’ve been longing to know for as long as I can remember. Instead, I’ve managed to get by with a few “mid-level” friends. Not nerds, exactly, but not members of this higher echelon, either. I am reminded of this as Rachel introduces me to a handsome boy named Dave who looks at me curiously through a thick fringe of blond curls.
“Do you go to Wissahickon?” Dave asks. I’ve been in school with him since the second grade.
“I just moved here,” I say, shrugging.
Dave takes a drag of his joint and hands me the tattered end, then jumps up from the sofa to change the station on the radio. The cherry burns a dull orange and then goes out by the time I get it to my lips. I roll the remnants between my thumb and forefinger and drop it to the ground. A girl I do not recognize is pouring shots of vodka into a variety of mugs and passing them around. I take a mug from Rachel. It has a picture of two gigantic cartoon breasts, the nipples distended and glistening. Cream? it reads.
I stick close to Rachel the entire night. Occasionally, Angel’s mother yells for someone to turn down the fucking radio or take the cigarettes outside.
“Pot is okay,” I hear Angel explaining to Dave. “The smell doesn’t last so long.”
By midnight I am drunk and warm, the chaos distilled into an even hum. The boy named Jordan is sitting next to me watching a TV show about a hamster, a real, live hamster, and his adventures in an overgrown backyard. The creature wears a tiny red helmet that Jordan finds so freakin’ adorable. He laughs hysterically. Rachel laughs, too, but I can tell it is just an act. I don’t find it that funny, either, just ridiculous. Jordan improvises dialogue in a high, squeaky voice and a bunch of girls begin to giggle with him.
I think this boy is beautiful and effeminate, delicate and self-conscious. I have never spoken to him before but have always wondered what it would be like to be his friend. He is close with all the most popular girls in school. Rachel tells me they fawn over him and let him dress them up for parties. They tend to him like a sick child when he gets too drunk, which is often, and defend him in front of their boyfriends. The boyfriends are beautiful, too, but not as bright as Jordan; they are confused and feel threatened by his effeminacy and the gentle way he braids their girlfriends’ hair in our school hallways. These are girls Jordan’s known his whole life; he’s slept beside them at birthday parties, and at times when his parents needed him to go away. Their mothers have fed him, bathed him, and watched over him as their daughters dolled him up in their Sunday school dresses and matching pink sweaters.
For now, the party has died down and just the two of us remain on the basement floor. A girl named Sarah plops down beside us to tell me how her mother used to toss them in the same bathtub when they were young. She tells me that Jordan would shit every time the water was too warm, and so now she bathes only in cold water. She tells me how scared he became when the lights went out at night and how once, after they were a little older, she caught her brother masturbating beside the couch where Jordan slept, her brother’s pink prick hovering over the soles of Jordan’s bare feet.
“Did he jizz on you?” Sarah asks him. “Gross.”
We are silent as the car climbs the steep, cobbled hill in West Philadelphia where Jordan’s father was last seen. He takes hard drags on one of my cigarettes and picks at the black ringlets of hair on top of his head.
“Your head looks like an octopus,” I say, and he blows smoke in my face.
Jordan needs money—for food or drugs, or his own goddamn cigarettes, that’s for sure. The tip regarding his father’s whereabouts came from his aunt, whom Jordan had stayed with briefly when he was fifteen and his mother had first kicked him out of her condo. It was a good thing, though, because management would evict Jordan’s mother just a few weeks later and, the aunt had told him, she was naked and high when the manager came to serve the notice. So high she threw a frozen hot dog at him. She left all of their stuff behind, including Jordan’s broken bed frame and the cat, Snickers. Jordan does not care to know where his mother went and assumes that she is staying with one of her drug dealers. For a while, we would sneak into the condo through a basement window to give the cat fresh food and water. Snickers hid every time we came in, which forced us to clamber over boxes of clothes and unused exercise equipment to find him. We tried to avoid eye contact with the mannequin heads, Styrofoam models his mother had once used to hold the wigs she styled for beauty school. The heads, white and stoic, lay helter-skelter on a metal shelf like dejected parts in a doll factory. After a few months, we stopped showing up and the condo sold. Nobody knows what became of its contents, or the cat.
When we find Jordan’s father he is in front of an open garage, slouched in an old metal wheelchair like a lifeless marionette, a dirty, white puff of a dog curling in and out of the rusty wheels. His pink scalp is chapped and flaking and he is fiddling with something on his lap. A few old men sit in folding metal chairs inside the garage. They smoke and pass around a bottle of brown liquor. They watch a television set that is rigged up in a corner on top of some cardboard boxes. A younger man, maybe in his fifties, stands against a wall and rubs his forehead back and forth, back and forth against the coarse concrete. I stay in the car while Jordan gets out and moves toward his father. I notice that his walk is stiff and awkward, a feigned masculinity. His father hands him a twenty-dollar bill that Jordan stuffs into his jeans pocket. He turns around and rushes to the car, gets into the passenger seat, and slams the door.
“Go,” he says, sliding another of my cigarettes from the pack.
How many nights have we spent in this basement? A hundred? More?
Angel’s mom is crazy. Everybody knows that. So is Angel, for that matter, all of five feet nothing, her tiny, olive feet jammed into shimmery stiletto heels, shoes built for a steadier gal—but here we are. Angel is like a wind-up toy, fueled by booze and prescription pills and countless joints, wholly reliant on boys who will pick her up from the floor and toss her little body over their shoulders. They take her to bed. Her black skirt slips high over her hips, delicate as wishbones. And her ass, compact in the requisite G-string, is warm against their cheeks.
We all use her, this sixteen-year-old girl, for her house and her drugs and the entertainment she provides. Her mother’s negligence is a boon, her father’s absence merely a convenience. Some say he died a couple of years ago. Others say he moved to Las Vegas and runs a casino. We don’t feel bad; few of us have fathers anymore. We like to watch as the self-awareness drains from her eyes. It is so tangible, that moment, composure puddling around her ankles like a silk slip. Jordan passes her the joint and she inhales greedily, desperately.
“Jesus, Angel,” he says, and snatches the television remote from her lap.
Her boyfriend, Rick, watches her and laughs, her pretty face scrunched in concentration, tossed back toward the ceiling. Her eyes are closed. She digs the thin heels of her shoes into the floor, drawing black lines through a collection of ash.
“All right, baby. Damn!” he scolds, pushing her into the couch cushions and stealing the joint. The gesture is neither affectionate nor aggressive. I know from experience that Angel can snap in an instant; she is prone to scream wildly when it is least expected. This is part
of the fun. Jordan looks at me conspiratorially.
“I love you, Peanut,” he mouths.
He disappears upstairs for a while. I hear him talking with Angel’s mom about pierogis, and then I hear her offer him a plate. He has a look that makes women want to feed him. Rick and Angel have settled into the corner of the sofa, his arms around her as she dozes on his shoulder, the strap of her dress dangling, revealing the edges of a deep-crimson bra. It surprises me to see them behaving so intimately; they look so young. Last night, a blonde from a neighboring school had shown up at Angel’s door looking for Rick. Before he could get to her, Angel had spit in the girl’s face and somehow torn the front of her shirt. The night ended with Angel yelling curses at the back of Rick’s rusted, yellow Volkswagen and Angel’s mother screaming from her bedroom window, “Shut the fuck up! Just shut the fuck up, Angel!” But now, Rick kisses her neck and she wiggles her small fingers into the pocket of his jeans.
“Crazy bitch,” Rick whispers tenderly.
I get up to retrieve my school bag from the corner of the room where I’d dropped it hours ago. I don’t have any boyfriends and I am beginning to worry that I never will. I still scribble the names of my crushes inside school notebooks and ignore them in person as a matter of course. I know my aloofness to be a symptom of shyness, but secretly I hope that it conveys some measure of mystery and seduction. So far, it hasn’t.
Rick carries Angel upstairs. I sit and wait for Jordan to return, sipping on bad red wine and finishing up some homework. My mother thinks that I am here to tutor Angel, and sometimes I stay overnight. She doesn’t actually believe it, but we play the game anyway. It’s a precarious arrangement that works for now. She’s spent so many years dealing with a drunk husband, she hasn’t the energy to worry over me. I’m the good egg, and that’s that. In the meantime, Eric has been diagnosed with ADHD and is getting in trouble at school. Homework is a nightly battle. He smokes pot all day, every day. She works constantly, selling real estate alongside her mother, and she does well. We get by. I keep my shit together, and that seems to be enough for now.
When we are not at Angel’s, Jordan and I are at my house. He rarely goes home anymore. We sleep side by side in my bed, and by the time we get there we are too stoned to talk properly, preferring to tell each other fairytales involving young Robert Plant and a desert at night. Campfires blooming in the dirt. A fifth of whiskey. In our dreams, we sing like Stevie Nicks. We dance wildly like Janis Joplin. Once, in the middle of the night, I stuck my hand up the back of his T-shirt and felt the cold knobs of his spine. He wasn’t asleep like I’d thought and he rolled away slowly and sighed.
Jordan comes downstairs with a second helping of pierogis in a glass bowl. He places three blue Ritalin in front of me on the coffee table, though I know there are more in his pocket. He is an unabashed thief. He licks the gravy from his spoon, dries it on his jeans, and begins to crush one pill into a fine powder. “Wait!” I say. “Take your time.” He ignores me now, because he knows I am as addicted to the process as to the drug itself. I am hooked on the anticipation, the crunch of the pill, the swirl of blue sand, and the careful way Jordan builds the lines, like distant desert mountains. We take turns with a rolled-up dollar bill. The smell of money, that particular synthetic burn, will years later still elicit a Pavlovian shudder and a cold ache in my jaw.
We swig back glasses of wine and light cigarettes. “Let’s take a walk,” I say.
“I can’t move,” says Jordan. “I mean, I just want to be right here, with you.”
We sit quietly, smoking, and I feel my thoughts begin to trip over one another, my heart racing. I watch the old flip clock clicking through those arbitrary numbers, and it seems so loud, that clicking, like Ms. Gregori’s heavy black heels echoing down the hallway. She was our ninth-grade English teacher who smoked incessantly and wore the same clunky black heels every day, even in the heat of late spring.
“Doesn’t that clock sound like Ms. Gregori stomping down the hallway? Like when it’s empty, you know, when everyone’s in class and you’re going to the bathroom or something? And then she’s just there, all of a sudden. You know how she’s always just there, everywhere, all at once, with that notebook and all that red hair? I think she might be psychic, or like a witch or something. Do you know what I mean?” I ask. “How she’s always there, wherever you are.”
Jordan reaches over and covers the clock with a blanket. It goes silent, which we soon realize is not the same as stopping time.
“I love her,” I say.
“She hates me,” says Jordan. “They all hate me.” He takes another gulp of his wine, and then refills our mugs from the giant bottle of Carlo Rossi, the one with the glass handle that Angel’s mom bought for us earlier that day.
“Do me a favor,” she had said to Jordan. “Don’t steal Angel’s Ritalin tonight. I can’t afford to keep refilling that girl’s prescription.”
“Mrs. Farley,” he said from the front seat of her car, “it was an experiment, that one time. I’m sorry it happened,” he said, as if it were something beyond his control.
I said nothing, the mute accomplice, the silent partner. Nobody expects anything bad from me. My own mother, least of all. Then Jordan had leaned over and gently kissed Angel’s mom on the cheek, and pulled her pale hair from the rubber band that had held it away from her face.
“There,” he had said. “You are so beautiful.”
Around 2:30 AM, we hear footsteps on the kitchen floor above us. We hide our notebooks under the sofa and feign sleep, clumped together on the floor, our feet tangled under a yellow blanket. The heater clicks on and then there is the rush of water pouring through old pipes. I turn off the lamp. I yawn despite the pounding in my chest, despite the water crashing through a terrible quiet and the cold tears on my arm that make me shiver.
“Why are you crying?” I whisper to Jordan.
“Shut up,” he says, as Angel storms across the room and tears away our blanket.
“What the fuck?” she yells. “Are you guys, like, making out?”
She turns on the lamp. The room spins into focus. Our mugs of wine sit next to us on the floor. She looks like a lion, her skin yellow in the artificial light, all that curly hair sticking straight up in the air. She is wearing a Boyz II Men T-shirt and that stupid purple thong. Jordan starts to laugh. We were not, of course, making out, but instead writing poems in our spiral notebooks—serious poems that we imagine ironic and witty, but are really just sarcastic.
“Angel!” he says. “Your hair is trying to escape from your head!”
“Where’s Rick?” she says. “Where’d he go?” She turns around and surveys the room as if he might be hiding in a corner, or crouched behind the giant television set.
“Lost him again, have you?” says Jordan, but by now she is gone, turning off our light with the main switch by the staircase, all the way over there.
“All the way over there,” I say.
“What?”
“All the way over there. The light. It’s all the way over there.” Jordan sighs and wipes at his face.
“I think I can do it,” he says gravely, “if you set up another line.”
“This is not good,” I say, because that’s what I always say. Jordan gets up and heads toward the stairs.
“Pean, it’s fine,” he says, because that’s what he always says. “Read me the last stanza.”
We read our shitty poems and drink our shitty wine. We talk about our parents and how awful their drug problems are, and yet, how much we love them still, and we try to make sense of it all because now would be the time to do that. We think aloud, Now would be the time to do that one thing.
“Let’s take a walk,” I say.
“Pean,” he says, crying again. “I like girls and boys.”
This crying is really getting to me. Here I am, and that sun, which isn’t here yet, could show up at any moment unannounced, as it tends to do. The world will start up its endless, painstaking rota
tions, and all the people will get out of bed. Rested and cogent, they will slip into their hot showers and later drink coffee with cream and head out into their driveways to start the car, to go to work or school, and here I haven’t even managed to finish my homework. I can’t even finish my homework and the night has come to an end. Or it will end. And then there’s everything else to contend with.
“Pean,” I say, because we are both “Pean,” short for “Peanut,” short for brevity’s sake, for the sake of time. “Pean, is that the sun? Please tell me that’s not the sun.”
“That’s not the sun, Pean.” Jordan covers us with the blanket again. I throw my sock at the wall, which is covered in planks of synthetic wood. “Pean, did you hear what I said? Did you hear me, Pean?”
“If you would just stop crying,” I say, “we could have a rational conversation for once.”
I am panicking. The television suddenly flickers and black lines begin to fall down the face of the screen before it all turns to fuzz. It’s muted, but still.
“Oh my God,” I say. “Do you know what that means? It means it’s late, really late, and soon the sun will come up. I can’t bear to see the sun. God, I hate that fucking sun.”
Jordan constructs another line on the table top.
If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir Page 4
