Carol Joy called and invited Mama and me over to her apartment for spaghetti dinner one Saturday night with her and her rotten kids. I didn’t want to go. I’d never liked any of the Joys. Even Chris had never been much of a friend to me. Mama told me to shut up and be thankful for the free meal. Carol drove her noisy, rusted-out clunker over from the other side of Burbank, where she lived, and picked us up as the sun was going down. We stopped at a Safeway on the way back to pick up some hamburger and spaghetti noodles and stuff for salad.
In the store, Carol took a good look at me and said she couldn’t get over how big I was. “And so handsome,” she said. “Look at those pretty green eyes, those legs, and that black butt.” She winked at Mama. “He’ll have to beat the girls off with a stick. Ummmm.”
I felt my face go red.
Mama raised her eyebrows and nodded, an awkward grin on her face. “He is getting big, isn’t he?” she said.
I wasn’t too happy being thought of as having a black butt or pretty eyes or shapely legs. And I’d never thought it a good thing to be complimented on my looks by a woman old enough to be my mother. I didn’t want to look good to anyone that old. But I figured as long as we were in a place where no one could hear her, there was no real harm.
Carol stowed the groceries in her trunk. Then, while we drove the rest of the way to her apartment, she smoked a cigarette and filled us in on the latest goings-on with her kids. The only one she talked about was fifteen-year-old Carla. Carla was smoking pot. Carla was stealing Carol’s jewelry and selling it to her friends at school. Carla was having sex with just about every boy in the greater Los Angeles area, including most of the UCLA football team. She said that Carla had run away from home twice in the past year, had been picked up by the Highway Patrol trying to hitchhike to Maine, of all places. Mama asked if there was someone Carla knew in Maine, and Carol said, No, no one that she was aware of, though anything was possible. With the number of boys Carla had been screwing, she said, there had to be at least one from Maine.
Carol’s upstairs apartment was buried somewhere in the middle of a huge complex of hundreds of identical units, spread out over several city blocks. I couldn’t figure out how she knew which one was hers. When she opened the door, the smell of fresh paint and caulking, mixed with some other nasty odor, hung in the air.
“Sorry about the smell,” Carol said, holding the door open for us. “The maintenance guys were just through the whole building with paint and pesticide. You’ll get used to it in a few minutes. Did I tell you about the roaches we’ve been seeing around here lately? They’re huge.”
Chris and Cathy, whom I still recognized after more than three years, were both lying on the living room floor in front of the TV. Neither of them looked up. They were watching some sort of horror film. “Where’s your sister?” Carol said to them. They both raised an arm and pointed toward a closed bedroom door at the end a short, dark hallway. “God damn it!” Carol snapped, shaking her head. She dumped her bags on the dining table and stormed across the room, stepping over Chris and Cathy’s bodies. When she got to the end of the hallway, she flung open the bedroom door.
I could just see Carla’s freckled legs on the bed. There was a brief scuffle, then the sound of a phone receiver being slammed down on the cradle. “What the fuck did you do that for?” Carla screamed at her. “I was talking to Brian!”
“You’re on restriction,” Carol said calmly. “That means no phone. You know that. Now get out of my room.”
“You bitch!” Carla sobbed. “I fucking hate you!”
“Keep talking like that, Carla,” Carol said tiredly, coming into the hallway, “and you’ll be on restriction for another six months!”
Carol strode back to the dining table, kicking Chris’ foot on her way. “Aren’t you going to say hello to Billy?” she asked. Chris shrugged. Carol looked at me and then at Mama. “Christ, Barbara, you’d think it’d only been yesterday since they last saw each other, instead of almost four years ago.” Chris rolled over just enough to catch sight of me. He smiled briefly and waved, then turned back to the TV. I sat down on the couch and watched the movie with them. An alien had just fried a door-to-door vacuum salesman’s brain, and was getting ready to drain the blood from his body. Carla stomped out of her mother’s room and slammed the door shut, then stomped into another room and slammed that door shut too. Mama helped Carol take the groceries into the kitchen. “I swear,” Carol said, “some days you just want to murder ’em and be done with ’em. Even prison would be better than this.”
Mama said, “Oh, yeah.”
Dinner was actually pretty good. Carol was a hoot, and her spaghetti was a lot better than I remembered Mama’s being. She had red wine with her spaghetti, and took large gulps of it between bites. She offered some to Mama, but Mama had never liked wine all that much, and told Carol, thanks, but no. Carla wouldn’t eat with us. She was still sulking in her room when we sat down at the table. Carol went back and yelled into the hallway that she wasn’t Carla’s goddamn maid; if she wanted to eat, she was going to have to come out and get it herself. She ignored Carla’s shrill fuck you! and smiled wide as she sat back down at the table. “Well, I guess that just means more for the rest of us,” she said.
Chris didn’t say much. He looked down at his plate most of the time with an unhappy sort of grin —a wince, really—on his face. Chris had always been moody, as I recalled, and restless, as if he was always waiting impatiently for something just over the horizon. And his quiet manner gave you the impression he was being secretive, even sneaky, about what that something was, about where he was going, what he was doing.
Carol took another drink of her wine and said to me, “So? You lived with a policeman for three years? I bet that was exciting. Was he nice? Did he, you know, treat you okay?” Mama looked at her and sort of blinked her eyes. Carol looked defensive and said to her, “Well, I’m just asking, Barbara.”
I didn’t understand what exactly was passing between them. “Yeah,” I said. “He was nice. He taught me how to shoot a gun, how to play different sports.” I shrugged. I didn’t know what else to say.
Carol nodded interestedly. “Well, I imagine you must miss him? Hmmmm?”
Mama shot another look at Carol, but kept her mouth shut. Carol ignored the look. She was wearing that same strange grin on her face, around her eyes, as Chris. I couldn’t help thinking there was something weird going on. I shrugged again. “Yeah,” I said, “I guess so.”
Carol nodded again, smiled, and took another gulp of her wine.
The rest of the meal was small talk. Chris managed to say that Luther Burbank Junior High sucked, and told me I was going to like Muir so much more: Muir was a newer school, it was where all the best-looking chicks went, and the teachers there weren’t a bunch of assholes and narks, the way they were at Luther Burbank. Carol smiled at Mama and said something about Chris’s teachers apparently not appreciating his cutting their classes and gaffing off their homework assignments and being caught smoking in the boy’s room—several times. “No doubt,” she said, winking, “Chris has heard from a reliable source that the teachers at Muir aren’t nearly so unreasonable.” Chris looked at her with those gray shark-eyes, and it wasn’t hard for me to imagine him thinking seriously of going to her bedroom some late night with an axe in his hand.
After dinner, Chris asked me if I wanted to mess around in his room for awhile, maybe play with his guinea pig and listen to some music.
“You have a guinea pig?” I asked him. “Cool!”
Chris had his own room. Carla and Cathy had to share a room, although Carla had it decorated with mostly her stuff. Her lava lamp. Her posters on the wall: the Beatles, the Stones, the Dave Clark Five, Paul Revere and the Raiders. She was really into the rock groups. So was Chris, I discovered. He had his own record player that he’d got for Christmas from his dad, and this huge collection of 45’s and even some 33’s: everything put out by the Beatles so far, plus the Mamas and the Papas, Simon and Garfunkel, Sam the Sham, the Yardbirds, plus a bunch of other groups I’d never heard of, like Crispian St. Peter, and Roy Head and the Traits. He put on a Roy Orbison record and turned it up to make it easier to ignore Carla banging on the wall in the next bedroom.
I found out Chris had his own guitar, too, which his dad had given him the Christmas before last.
“Your dad gives you cool gifts,” I said.
“Yeah, my dad really likes music.” He took the guitar out of its cloth case and told me I could hold it if I was real careful. He let me pluck at it. “Here,” he said, “let me show you a couple of chords.” He put my fingers on the frets and strings and made a D, then a G, then an A. “You know, you can play half the songs on the radio with just those three chords,” he said.
Sure enough, in a couple of minutes I was strumming something that might have passed for early Peter, Paul, and Mary, before they learned how to fingerpick. Already I was thinking this could be opening up a whole new world for me.
After awhile, Mama and Carol came in and said it was time for Carol to take us home. Chris said to her, “Hey, can’t Billy just spend the night?” He looked at me. “I’ve got a sleeping bag. You can sleep on the floor here. It’ll be fun.”
Mama hesitated, but finally agreed when Carol said she didn’t mind bringing me home the next day. “I have to be going in that direction anyway,” she said. She and her brother were going over to their mother’s house the next day to clean out her garage. She didn’t really want to, but it had become a fire hazard, and the old biddy was using a walker to get around and couldn’t do it herself.
Mama and Carol left. Almost immediately, Carla came out of her room. A second later we heard Carol’s door slam closed, and through the walls the phone being dialed. Chris rolled his eyes, and said his Mom was going to kill her. He got out his sleeping bag for me from the closet and unrolled it. Then we went back into the living room and, after burning some Jiffy Pop popcorn, settled down to watch Saturday Night at the Movies. Tonight it was Frank Sinatra in Robin and the Seven Hoods.
We got to bed around one, after finishing the movie and listening to Carol fight with Carla some more over the phone, then messing around with Chris’s guitar some more and poking hunks of lettuce at his guinea pig, which didn’t seem to want to do anything but sit there in its cage and look at us. I didn’t have pajamas, and Chris told me he always slept in his shorts, so he didn’t have any to loan me. I’d always felt a little weird getting into someone else’s sleeping bag without pajamas on, but right then I was too tired to think much about it. After I’d got in I realized it wasn’t that big a deal. Chris got into his own bed and turned off the light.
The adjoining apartments were noisy, even at one in the morning. I heard music from two different places bleeding into the room from outside, as well as Carla’s radio from her room. And then Chris wanted to talk.
“You ever made it with a girl?” he asked. “All the way?”
The question surprised me. We hadn’t exactly been talking much about girls. “No,” I told him. The truth was, I’d never really thought much about ‘making it’ with a girl. Kissing, maybe, and holding hands. But full-on sex—? Then I remembered the times I’d heard Mama’s croaking voice from her room, ‘making it’ with her various men. I wanted to change the subject—or, at least, get the subject off of me. “Why?” I asked him. “Have you?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said casually, as if we were talking about something routine for a thirteen-year-old boy. He said then that it wasn’t at all what it was cracked up to be. I thought I caught something almost wistful and sad in his voice. I imagined him fumbling around in the dark with a girl, maybe in the back seat of a car at the drive-in movies, an older couple going at it in the front seat, and Chris wanting to do this so badly, nervous, impatient, and finally failing. I saw the girl, disappointed, beneath him. Sad.
Again, the thought of Mama intruded. I didn’t want to think about that anymore.
Thankfully, Chris kept quiet. Pretty soon I heard his breathing grow deep and regular. I relaxed then, myself, and slept.
I was awakened by a warm hand on my stomach: Chris’s. I couldn’t tell what time it was. It was still dark out, but the noise from the other apartments had died down. Even Carla had turned off her radio. Chris’s dark form lay on the floor perpendicular to me, with his head slightly raised near my abdomen. He’d apparently pulled the sleeping bag zipper down, and now he had his hand inside the bag, feeling along my tensed-up stomach, groping, sliding downward, now with fingers digging into my underwear and grabbing hold of my dick. Instantly, the sinking realization of what was coming next washed over me, a nauseating déjà vu, mixed now with the paralyzing ache of self-hatred. Why is this happening? What the fuck is wrong with me?!
Chris didn’t say anything while he worked, pretending, I figured—just as I was—that I was still asleep. He slid the top layer of the sleeping bag gently off to the side and slowly pulled the front of my shorts down. He got up onto his knees, then lowered his head down and sucked my limp dick up into his mouth like a fat spaghetti noodle. The damned thing started getting hard immediately, and a fresh wave of self-loathing washed over me. Chris bobbed his head up and down over me for the next several minutes, making little slurping noises. I heard my voice screaming at Chris, Get the fuck off me! But the words were just bouncing around inside my head, going nowhere; I couldn’t seem to get anything to come out of my mouth. Why? Why am I so fucking weak? But there was no answer. I lay there with my eyes closed trying with all my might to breathe as if nothing was happening. I lay there doing nothing, saying nothing, and hating myself. I wished I could just go somewhere and die.
At last, he quit and pulled the front of my underwear back up over my wet dick. He slid the top of the sleeping bag over me. Then he got up from the floor and lay down on his own bed. But he didn’t quite settle down there: he had something going on under his own covers. I figured he was probably pulling on his own dick, the sick fuck, and then he got more violent with it, his whole bed was shaking, until he finally let out a half-stifled gasping noise which lasted for a few seconds. After that, he seemed to relax. He was asleep a couple of minutes later, snoring lightly.
I lay there in the sleeping bag, sick and awake, staring at the gathering light in the bedroom window.
When I heard Carol moving around out in the kitchen, I got out of the sleeping bag quietly, so as not to awaken Chris, and got dressed. I opened the door and slipped through it into the hallway and gently pulled the door shut.
“Oh, you’re up!” Carol said when she saw me. “Christ, you two were up so late last night, I thought you’d be sleeping until noon.” She took a bowl from the cupboard and poured some Cheerios into it and set it in front of me on the table. Then she brought out a carton of milk, and some sugar.
I told her I was really glad for the fresh milk. “Mama’s on welfare”, I said, “and we have to drink powdered milk.”
Carol looked uneasily at me. “Your mama’s having a hard time right now,” she said.
After eating, I sat on the sofa and watched TV and waited for Carol to take me home. Carla and Cathy variously came staggering out of their room and sat at the table and ate their cereal. Carla looked at a teen magazine. Cathy read from the back of the cereal box. No one said anything to me.
Finally, at about twelve-thirty, Carol knocked on Chris’s door and went in. I heard her say to him she was going to be leaving soon and taking me with her, and if he was going to say goodbye, he’d better do it now. I heard his voice, though I couldn’t understand what he said. She listened for a few seconds, and then said, “Well, okay, I can’t make you get up. But I think you’re being rude to your guest.” Then I heard Chris say to her, clearly, “Well, I wasn’t the one who invited him!” Carol shushed him and said, yes, he certainly was, though when she turned around and saw me I figured she knew I’d probably heard. She looked away. “Well, whatever,” she said. She came out the room and closed the door. Then she came back into the living room and started gathering the bag of laundry she was taking over to her mother’s house. “Chris is tired,” she said, struggling to smile. “And he told me to tell you, goodbye, and it was fun having you visit.” She looked at me for a second and smiled. “We’ll have to have you over again, real soon,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”