Chapter 17

XVII

Magdalena

Four days into the new year, my body still tingling from New Year’s morning’s encounter, Maria’s father offered to write me a recommendation for the Air Force Academy. Finally, I had the surefire future, the beautiful girl, and the support of her family. I had it all.

But if that’s true then why was I such an angry and bitter young man? Why did a little devil sit atop my shoulder, incessantly coaxing me into doubting Maria? And why did I suddenly feel as though Maria wasn’t good enough for me?

Probably because the more obsessed I became with Maria’s drinking binge Upstate, the more I felt she lacked the control essential to be a good person. Oh, sure, when I got sloshed it was okay. Hell, I chose to drink. I wanted to experiment. But Maria had lost control of herself in a time of crisis. Was that the kind of girlfriend I wanted?

Each and every night Maria and I spoke for hours on the phone. In each conversation the following emotions manifested themselves: reluctant good-will, bliss, melancholy, depression, fear, and love—usually in that order. Although love ostensibly prevailed each time, the truth is that as I placed the receiver down on the phone every night at one or two a.m., there was one prevalent thought inside of my mind: Maria’s perfect. Too perfect. She must be lying to me.

About what I had no idea. Everything, I guess. If she said she went to K-Mart with her sister after school, I wondered who she really went with—a friend, a classmate, another boyfriend—and if she really went to K-Mart, or to catch a movie. When she said she stayed after school to get extra help from her biology teacher, I questioned her true whereabouts. Was she making out with another boy in her fluffy bed, or perhaps smoking pot on a street corner with her old hood friends? One night, when Maria said she liked vanilla ice cream, I thought: She probably likes chocolate.

If questioning her actions when I wasn’t present was a sin, suspicion of her thoughts in person was a crime. And goddamn, I was guilty of that crime on each and every date, no matter how smoothly the date was going.

One day in February, for example, we had a playful snowball fight in front of her house. When she went inside to answer the phone, I built a snow fort. When she came back outside, I nailed her in the tits with a hunk of ice and snow. Without flinching, she dove to the ground and was camouflaged by her white puffy jacket. I peeped over my fort but couldn’t see her. Only her silent giggles indicated that she was a few yards somewhere in front of me. Just when I thought it was safe to stand up and begin searching for her body, she stood on her knees and smacked a well-packed snowball right in my kisser.

I hopped over my wall and tackled her. We wrestled in the snow for a good five minutes. Finally, both panting heavily from the scuffle, we ceased simultaneously and kissed passionately. Her tongue quickly melted into a wet, warm gummy bear.

Our mouths unlocked and we gazed at one another blissfully. Maybe, I thought, this is a new beginning for us. I love her and she loves me. What more could a guy want?

“I love you, Joel.” she said. “The more time I spend with you, the more I realize how, deep down inside, you’re perfect.” I’ll never forget her calling me perfect. It was the greatest compliment of my life. And, had I been smart, I would’ve accepted Maria’s sincerity and beauty, and kept the promise I made that day, and started fresh.

“I love you, too. You’re not so bad yourself.” I winked. “Let’s go in the house and make love under the covers.”

She smiled. “Good idea. Let’s go.”

We rose and shook the snow off our bodies. I brushed icicles out of her hair as she wiped snowflakes out of my eyelashes.

We were just about to walk toward the door when some kid, a guy that must have been three or four years younger than me, hobbled down the street struggling with a giant red snow shovel. He walked over to Maria’s front gate and asked if Mrs. Della Verita was home. Maria said that she was, but no thank you, she didn’t want her sidewalk shoveled that day. The kid said okay and walked to the house next door. Maria didn’t say his name, but it looked like they knew each other.

“Who was that kid?” I asked.

“He’s, um, Louie.” She seemed perplexed by my question.

“Louie who?”

“Louie Gick. Who cares? He’s lives up the block.”

“Do you think he’s cute?”

“He’s fourteen years old!”

“I didn’t ask his age. I asked if you think he’s cute or not.” My voice was penetrating and monotonous.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Actually, What da hellaya tawkin’ about? Maria’s New York accent always surfaced when she was angry.

“I saw the way you looked at him. You think he’s cute, don’t you?”

Maria picked up a hunk of ice and smashed it in my face. Blood trickled from my nostrils, past my lips, and down my chin, all the way to the bronze interlocking teeth of the zipper on my bomber jacket.

“I’m sick of this shit!” she bellowed. “Just go the fuck home!” Her voice echoed down the quiet white street.

“Wait, what did I do?”

“Please, Joel, just please go home.” She started walking inside, but I ran up the icy stairs and yanked her by the shoulder. She fell on her ass.

“Leave me alone!” Maria shrieked, as she plopped down not one, not two, but three stairs to the frozen concrete at the bottom. She struggled to stand and then I grabbed her mitten-covered hand and yanked her to her feet.

Looking straight in her face, I said: “I know you think he’s cute. I saw you looking at him. Just admit it.”

“You’re nuts,” she replied, huffing and puffing from her brief but vigorous fall.

“Damn it, Maria. Do you think he’s cute or not?” Rather than answer, she watched me intently as an expression of self-doubt came over my face.

I turned my head to either side, first the right, then the left, still clasping her hand with my glove. I heard our voices echo down the serene, snow-covered street as a yodel does off a cliff side. The only thing moving was the frozen air roaring in and out of our noses and mouths. We were both shaking; whether it was the product of nerves or fright or frigid air, I don’t know. The air was like a wall between us. Silence shouted between our bodies.

It was at that moment that I felt lower than I had in months. It was the first time in a while that I’d actually voiced my innermost worries. Until that instant, I’d tried like hell to hold them all in. Until that moment I’d wondered many things, but seldom wondered them out loud. But my cover was blown. The jig was up. My most intimate and frightening jealousies had been revealed; I no longer could control my thoughts or my words. I was enslaved by my fears. I was a fool, a wimp, a pussy. I was a charlatan mind-reader who, when his E. S. P. was proven a sham, tried to coerce the desired answer from his client. I was a little boy fleeing from his own shadow, only to discover it behind him once again each time he glanced back—because you can’t get rid of your shadow.

But, the thing is, if Maria had waited just a minute longer to answer that question—if I’d had the time to thoroughly taste the bile of shame swelling within my gut—I still would’ve said what I wound up saying anyway. I couldn’t help it.

“Please just tell me if you think he’s cute.”

“No,” she answered, lifelessly.

***

January is the worst of all the month of the year. Not only does it begin after a two week Christmas vacation which makes school all the more difficult to get used to, but it’s also fucking freezing. The January of my senior year was especially bad because of all the goddamn snow we got in New York. A few inches would’ve been acceptable, we got twenty inches in January alone. It was so bad that for a three-day stretch end of the month, all the schools in the city had off.

Everyone in my family was home those days. The snow began on a Tuesday evening. Spending the next five days in a cozy-warm house watching rented movies and TV provided a welcome relief to frigid air outside.

I’d always liked blizzards. Not being in them, but watching them. Slowly, but deliberately, each square inch of terrain gets covered with these mysterious white particles called snowflakes. Watching those snowflakes fall, I thought of good old Mr. Dick. Attempting to jolt some interest into his ordinarily mundane class, Mr. Dick used to wave his arms and say that we were pummeled daily with “billions and billions” of different wavelengths of all sorts, from ultraviolet to cosmic waves. He squealed it, in a high-pitched voice. Mike and I used to laugh about it during class. As I walked home from the grocery store, I kept thinking about the billions and billions of snowflakes that fell to earth and covered up everything that was familiar to me. All of the dirt and shit on the streets was gone. Old and new cars, Cadillacs and Fords, were identical beneath sheets of snowdrift. Children on my block burrowed through snow dunes and raced down their front lawns in garbage can covers.

A part of me hated those children for upsetting the equality and peacefulness that immediately followed the blizzard. When my father asked me to clear the driveway and sidewalk, I balked at first not because I hated shoveling, but because, somehow, the snow looked like it belonged there, at least for a while. It concealed the city’s stains, and I liked that. Removing it would’ve been like waking a little baby when he’s asleep.

After a snowstorm, the sun is always so bright white and the sky so azure. I guess I just felt that the snow should naturally melt away as the sun glistened through the great blue sky and melted it, snowflake by snowflake. And then, within a few weeks, barring further snowfall, the neighborhood would return to its old self again. You always knew that sooner or later you’d see again what you’d seen before.

I thought of all this as I shoveled the sidewalk and steps in front of my house. As I did that, the mailman trudged up the street toward my stoop with a fistful of envelopes. I wondered why he was forced to go to work on a day when everyone else off. And I sort of felt bad for the guy.

***

To every guy in Queens, and all across America, February 14, 1993 was Friday. For women, however, it was St. Valentine’s Day, the most meaningful day of the year.

In light of this, I was determined to give Maria my best and most unexpected present yet. I would cook her dinner that night, that much was sure. But I had to do more than that.

I sat at my bedroom desk a few days before Valentine’s Day with one thought in mind: I won’t leave this back-breaking chair until I have penned an narrative poem about Maria. Three hours and a hand cramp later, I’d churned out the most truthful, accurate poem of my life:

Once upon a time, a time more dark than now

You were a little girl, but more than you know how.

You had your energy, and those same brown eyes

Your voice sounded the same, but your head told lies.

You didn’t lie to friends, or people that you knew

Your lie was even worse. You told a lie to you.

Cloaked by a trick mask, where you did not belong

You knew it felt so wrong, but you went right along.

In this land of tears, from which you could not part

You had but one bright light, and it was your heart.

For in your heart you knew of your deadly sin

And one more day of lies was sure to do you in.

So all that you did, after all that while

Was listen to your heart, and give yourself a smile.

It looked the same to them, your audience of friends

But it was not an act. You’re part came to an end.

Your past can’t be destroyed—Be that as it may

A lesson still remains to this very day.

Don’t compromise your smile to please someone else

For it is tough enough just to be yourself.

I didn’t read this poem to Maria. I didn’t give it to her in a typical off-white envelope. Instead, I had it published in New York Newsday. Each February 14^th, Newsday published a special classified section devoted not to used cars and help wanted ads, but to romantic blurbs sent in by readers, one buck per line.

So, after cooking Maria breaded veal cutlets, curry rice, and fresh cauliflower, I gazed across the twin candles on the table and into her fiery eyes.

“I have another present for you,” I said, smiling.

“Joel, you don’t have to give me anything. What you’ve done for me tonight is more than I expected. In fact, it’s wonderful.” She walked over to my chair, grabbed my hand, and led me downstairs to her bedroom.

Standing beside her bed, she spoke softly, as if she had just made an important but pleasant position. “I want to thank you for your gift, and show you how much I love you.” She unbuttoned her blouse, exposing a transparent, lacy pink bra. She began to unzip her jeans when I stopped her.

I was horny as hell. But I had to stick to the plan. “Wait a second. I have another present for you.”

“You’re amazing, Joel. You really are. Whatever it is, I don’t deserve it.” She was half-naked and looked so goddamn hot.

“Yes you do.” My voice trembled with nerves and hormones. But before we do anything physical, I want you to open my last gift.” With that, I handed her a copy of the morning edition of Newsday.

Confused, she smiled, politely. “Is there an editorial in here that you want me to read?”

“Actually, yes there is. It’s on page C-23, in the upper left hand corner.”

She opened the paper up to C-23 and began to read the poem. She mouthed each word as if she was in church reciting prayer. Then she placed the paper on her bed and jumped into my arms, legs and all.

“Oh, Joel!” she exclaimed. “How did you know all of this, how did you know?” She was thrilled beyond my wildest expectations, wrought with rapture and nostalgic reflection.

“So, I guess what I wrote is true?”

She started to cry. “Absolutely. And, without you, I would’ve never found my real smile, or the real me. Thank you so much, hopeful. I love you so much.”

I heard a door slam upstairs. Her parents had just returned from an AA meeting.

“Do you mind if I show my parents this poem?” she asked. “It would help me explain so much to them.”

“Sure, go ahead.”

She galloped up the stairs and I sat, satisfied with my triumph, anticipating the passionate sex to come. Not that I’d written the poem to get great sex. I wrote it because I loved her and believed my words to be authentic. But hell, if hot sex was a consequence, who was I to complain?

I couldn’t hear their exact words through the floor, but the happy sounds indicated Maria was making a hubbub of my poem.

I sat on her bed, silently awaiting the bliss to come. I was, for that moment, happy. Even doubts about her past could not penetrate my concentration. Smiling, I looked around her room. On the wall across from her bed I noticed something I’d never noticed before: a window frame. It wasn’t a window opened up to the outside. In fact, Maria’s little basement hideout had no real windows whatsoever. The window I noticed that night was a simple, glassless, mahogany frame adorned with a pair of silky yellow drapes which opened up to the cinder block wall.

Before I had another second to ponder my discovery, Maria fluttered back down the stairs, poem in hand.

“So, did they like it?” I asked.

Maria beamed. Tears rolled down her eyes as we embraced.

“Maria, I was just wondering what that was,” I said, pointing to the non-window.

“Oh, I guess you never noticed that before, huh? Well, in case you didn’t realize, I don’t have any real windows down here. Long story short, there’s a second-floor apartment upstairs above my parents’ place. When I was a little girl, I used to live there. Back then, I had two real windows in my room and both allowed the sunlight to stream in all day. But when my father lost his job and my family was short on money, we had to rent out that floor. So me and my sister moved down here, to the basement.”

“Where’s your sister’s room?” I asked.

“It’s back there,” she said, pointing to a splintery wooden door leading to what I thought was the boiler room. “But she’s never home. She’s always at her boyfriend’s house around the corner. She sleeps there all the time. So I have this little basement all to myself. And we have it to ourselves.”

“But what about the window?” I asked.

“Oh yea, the window. Anyway, when I was about nine years old, I begged my mother to let me move back upstairs. I didn’t understand why we had to give up the second floor. I told her, ‘Mommy, I want to look out my window again.’ Sympathetically, she said I couldn’t have my old room and old window back, but she’d give me the next best thing: my very own special window, one that I could look through and see whatever I wanted, not just Ridgewood.” She chuckled and then continued. “My mother always promised that someday I’d have a real window to look through. But it’s been seven years and, well, you know the rest.”

“Maria, that’s the most touching story I’ve ever heard. If I could buy you a house with a big bay window I would. Maybe next Valentine’s Day.” I smiled.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “I don’t need a real window anymore. Until tonight, I’d never realized just how much you understood me or my life. Your poem has opened up a window to my heart tonight. And only you and I have the privilege to gaze through it, to see what’s inside.

“I love you, Joel.”

“I love you, too, baby.”

***

I should have made every day thereafter like Valentine’s Day.

Instead, weeks passed, more snowfall came, and I couldn’t stop worrying. Don’t you know, I asked the snow one day while shoveling, that Maria is lying to me? But the snow didn’t respond. It just melted, slowly, day after day, ultimately revealing the old neighborhood once again. Shoveling the snow each week, I thought of a zillion creative ways that Maria could lie to me. It’s all I could think about.

Images of her laughing and joking with her old friends and boyfriends struck me like lightening each moment I was awake. As I lay in bed each night, aching to fall asleep in peace, elaborate conspiracy theories involving Maria bounced like racquetballs within my head.

Each morning I woke charged with jealousy. Wicked thoughts began to dance and play within my mind before my first cigarette, teasing and taunting me like little children with BB guns. The thoughts knew who was boss. I could fight like hell each day, and occasionally win a battle against my own shame, but it would eventually win the war. Burglars can’t help but rob a home when the door is left wide open with nobody home.

My days went something like this: One moment I’d be in school, doing math or history, and then—wham!—a thought would whack me with a punch in the jaw. With each thought, the swelling and stinging intensified in the form of more thoughts; the pain and thoughts grew exponentially. More images of Maria kissing some faceless boy I’d never met; more pictures of her smiling little face laughing at another guy’s joke; more fear and hatred for people long gone from her mind.

Sick thoughts. Crazy thoughts.

These thoughts were more intense when I was with her. When I gazed into her eyes, memories of times of which I wasn’t part of multiplied like amoeba, first two, then four, then eight. And then, within minutes, a thousand crazy thoughts would permeate my mind, forcing me to stop whatever I was doing and obey their lead. After being bombarded by these thoughts, my heart would feel empty and weak, and soon be overcome by resentment.

No, not resentment. Hatred.

I hated Maria for her past. Not because her past was particularly despicable, but because she had a past, period. There was a time before me, Joel Joseph L’Enfant, and I couldn’t bear to think of it. And yet I thought about it all the time.

Laying nude on Maria’s bed, wrapped in her soft arms, it would begin oh-so-innocently. Amidst a beautiful conversation with Maria following sex, or a snowball fight, or whatever, that little devil would appear on my shoulder and whisper, “Ask her, Joel. Ask her.” The devil knew precisely what particular worry was rupturing my head at the moment: ex-boyfriends, alcohol, whatever. Seldom did I subtly introduce my fears to her as a best friend should feel comfortable doing. Usually, I’d accuse her, out of the blue, of drinking again. She’d always deny it, of course. But I’d persist. I wouldn’t—no, I couldn’t—let her forget about what she did with her cousin Upstate the previous summer. It was tattooed on my brain. Occasionally, during one of Maria’s moments of rebellion, she’d say something like, “Yea, well you drank, too.” Then she’d fold her arms and smirk, seemingly victorious. But the little devil would remind me to remind her that I drank primarily because of her, because she’d upset me so much, even though that was the furthest thing from the truth.

One day—I think it was in mid-March, right before Easter—Maria and I went shopping at Queens Center Mall. What followed was a typical scenario from that period in my life. We were in Stern’s looking for an Easter dress, but Maria couldn’t find anything she liked. I admit I was getting a little frustrated, because she’d already tried on a dozen dresses and I just wanted to go back to her place and relax. “Let’s try The Limited,” I suggested. As we entered the store, a fat guidette tapped her on the shoulder and started screaming happily.

“Is this the infamous Joel?” she asked. “The greatest boy alive you’re always talking about?”

Maria smiled. “Yep,” she said, locking her right arm around my left. “This is my lover boy.” She gently brushed the back of her hand against my forehead and pushed the hair out of my eyes, just like mommy used to do.

“Maria’s always talking about you,” the girl said. “It’s always ‘Joel this and Joel that.’ I never hear anything else! You’re one lucky guy to have a girlfriend like Maria. She’s so proud of you going into the Air Force and everything. She says you’re going to take her up in a jet and make out with her in the sky.” She giggled and looked for Maria’s approval.

“We’re going to do more than make out up there,” she said, giggling back at her friend, tugging me closer. My face turned tomato-red. I’d never heard Maria talk that way to a friend before. True, I hadn’t realized how much she really admired and loved me. But I also had never heard Maria talk to anyone that way before.

Sensing my discomfort, Maria quickly changed the subject. The girl left five minutes later. As if to say, Relax, Joel, Maria pinched my butt and smiled up at me. “Sorry you had to hear her talk,” she said. “But you see, you don’t have to worry, because I talk about you with my friends all the time.”

I ignored her compliment. “Who was that?” I asked.

“That was Cindy. She’s in my history class.” Wide-eyed, Maria cupped her hands over her mouth in embarrassment. “Oh my God, I didn’t introduce you, I’m so sorry.” She said it strangely, as if she was muffling a chuckling, but not a humorous chuckle, more of a nervous one, a reaction to fear. She seemed afraid of me.

Looking back on it now, it’s pretty obvious that I should’ve put my arm around Maria, smelled her luxuriant hair, and not said a thing. But in that mall on that day for whatever reason I chose manipulation. It was business as usual. I hadn’t realized that she didn’t introduce me to her friend. So now I had two things to be pissed about.

“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 lightening struck: “Did you dance with any boys at the dance?”

“God, Joel, please don’t do this.”

“Answer the question, please. Did you dance with any boys at the dance?”

“Joel, 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, Joel,” 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 tired 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 J. 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 better.” 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, Joel! 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 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 wait, 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 no brothers or 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, asshole? 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.

“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.”

“Oh, do you have a girlfriend?”

Quick as lightening: “No!” Down, boy, down. “I mean no, no I don’t.”

“Wow. Central Park! I’ve never been there on a date or anything.”

“I’ll take you, Maggie. Just name the day and I’ll take you.” She was all smiles. I felt better than I had in months. I really felt like I could show her a whole new world out there.

“You live fifteen minutes away, and you’ve never been there?”

“No,” she said. “But I can’t wait to go with you.” She looked up at me and smiled.

“And you’ve never been there, right?”

“No, papi, I’m tellin’ you,” she insisted. I loved her accent! She was so fucking hot.

Maggie seemed interested in my conversation as well as my looks. Her little eyelashes flapped. Her smile revealed a string of pearls. Her face beamed. She probably wouldn’t have minded if I’d bent her over the trash can and fucked her right there on the boulevard. Sounds dirty, huh? But trust me—those are the kinds of looks she was giving me. Even though I knew I could make a move anytime, I just stood there, talking and laughing. I don’t know why, but I continued to ramble on, waiting for the right moment. “You remind me of this plane used in World War II, the Consolidated B-24 Liberator.”

“Huh?”

“I told you, I’m really into jets and planes.”

“You did? Oh yea,” she giggled.

“And some people,” I said, only people I like, remind me of different aircraft. The Liberator was a neat and compact jet. Just like you.”

“What did the Liberator do?” I was so pleased to hear her ask that question. Other girls had asked it. But not in that accent!

“It was the primary long-range bomber aircraft of the U. S. Army Air Force during the second world war. It was mass-produced. They made over eighteen-thousand of them.” She didn’t give a rat’s ass about my love of planes, but at least she faked some interest, and that’s what felt so marvelous.

“Cool,” she responded. “I can learn a lot from you. You’re real smart.”

I thought: There’s a lot more besides planes that you can learn from me. I said: “I’m real smart?”

“Si, estas muy inteligente.”

“Soy muy inteligente,” I said, proudly.

“No,” she corrected me. “Estoy…”

“Estoy muy inteligente,” I said.

“Si, muy bueno,” she approved.

Magdalena looked up at the stars and blew a ring of smoke.

The train rumbled below and shook the sidewalk. I placed my arm around Magdalena and kissed her.