Chapter 6

VI

Cruising

It was sort of around then, I suppose, that I started to lose my mind. Not go crazy, but literally lose my mind. Most sixteen year olds, I think, were still learning stuff at that age. Not me. I think that I learned up until around that time—around my junior year in high school—and then, slowly and steadily, I stopped.

Thing is, my grades stayed about the same. As you know, I’ve always gotten straight A’s. I excel in History and English because I love to read and write and memorize interesting facts. My vocabulary has always exceeded my years, and that’s invariably helped me get terrific grades. Although I never liked school much, it was always easy to get A’s because I knew how to give teachers what they wanted. Until sixteen or seventeen, I was always a great student.

But it wasn’t just academics. Maybe a better way to describe what happened is this: I stopped gaining knowledge. The older I got, the less I wanted to learn. As a matter of fact, maybe I never wanted to learn at all, even when I was five or six. But by my mid-teen years I had experienced an emotion generally reserved for the middle aged and elderly. The word I liked to use at the time—and the word I can still use now, really—is jaded. I was jaded. I’d just about had enough with school and tests and learning and all that bullshit. Like that time I worked in the office over the summer. I was really excited to get the job, because it paid a lot, and it was near dad’s office downtown. But I remember the first thing I said to my dad as I walked through the door of my house after my first day at work: “This job sucks.”

And I really did hate it already, after only one day at work. When I got to work, my boss explained my responsibilities to me—some photo-copying, some collating, some phone calls, some errands, and what not. The usual office bullshit. I knew it would be a boring job, but I also knew that my father had gotten it for me, so it was kind of important that I impress the boss and my co-workers, and make my dad look good. I didn’t have to kiss their asses or anything, I just had to do as I was told. I couldn’t just go through the motions of working. I had to show them I cared about getting the job done right.

But I didn’t care. The moment I left the office on the first day, I knew that I’d loathe every day I spent at that place until it was all over. It wasn’t a matter of simply hating the work. It’s why I hated it—because I’d mastered all of it on the first day. I did some photo-copying, made a few phone calls, faxed some documents, wrote some memos. And then I was bored. I know how to do all this shit, I thought, so why bother coming in tomorrow? And my goddamn boss expected me to repeat these mundane tasks all summer long.

Christ, I can’t tell you how awful that summer was. I did everything to escape boredom. The office had an airy bathroom with a huge window in it. For some reason, it remained open throughout the summer, sucking an air conditioned draft right outside where it met the humid New York air. Occasionally, I’d race into the bathroom not to take a shit, but to elude the sheer boredom of the job. Staring out that window, gazing up at my dad’s building in lower Manhattan, I’d light a cigarette and blow the smoke into the hazy exhaust rising from the streets below. Occasionally, I’d spot a Concorde jet racing over the Manhattan skyline across the East River, en route to Europe, or some other faraway place. Dreaming of the excitement of sitting in that cockpit, longing to be a pilot with an exciting mission to conquer each new day, I’d smoke and smoke and smoke, wondering how the hell I’d ever survive at the Air Force Academy if I couldn’t even tolerate the most simplistic office tasks.

What the hell, I figured, I’m better than this job, I was born to fly. I’ll show Colorado springs a thing or two. I knew all I had to do was wait, wait for the end of the work day, the end of each summer, the end of high school, when I’d finally rediscover my mind and refresh it daily with the thrill of aviation.

Until then, however, I’d keep collecting paychecks, just like every other schmuck in the world. Why, I thought, do employers pay people to do grunt work—to staple and fax and file? It just proves that everyone out their is full of himself. The average Joe endures the toil of the most ho-hum work simply to feel better about placing it on his resume and feigning its importance to get a slightly higher paying, but equally menial, job. These are things I never realized before that summer job.

All this ties into me losing knowledge. Suddenly, nothing around me was interesting. Well, that’s not true, exactly. I liked TV. I was into girls. I’d occasionally read a good book. I loved cigarettes. But that was really it. Besides those things, not much really caught my eye, and not much was worth paying attention too.

It was like what’s in The Little Prince, one hell of a great book by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. It was inspiring, and it described me perfectly. In it, the little prince spends all of his time cruising around the galaxy on a rocket ship, ostensibly searching for fuel, but in actuality for the meaning of life. The little prince loathed grown-ups because everything to them was a “matter of consequence.” In other words, everything was so serious to the grown-ups that they never took the time out to use their imaginations. I remember that in the book, the little prince makes a compelling comparison. He says that, on the one hand, you could sit around doing complicated mathematical equations all day, making believe you were accomplishing something. On the other hand, you’re really not doing a damn thing unless you’re using your imagination. I guess what he was trying to say was, Why should anyone get praise or pay for doing something that requires no imagination, no emotional quotient? I always thought that was very profound.

I think that around that time—right around when I went out with Maria, even before I broke up with Lynn—was when I started becoming caught between the two extremes, like a fly trapped in a web. I was growing up, I guess, so I had to start acting serious, to appreciate “matters of consequence,” however inconsequential they were. Dad, you wanted me to do well at that summer job, and mom, you wanted me to quit smoking. All ‘matters of consequence,’ if you ask me. But, at the same time, I didn’t want to act serious. That’s why I say I just stopped gaining knowledge. Because the more I learned, it seemed, the more serious I had to be—the less TV I could watch, the less bullshitting I could do. So somehow—and I don’t really know if it was conscious or not—I just tuned out. I really didn’t want any responsibilities. I was trying so hard not to be like the grown-up in The Little Prince. The serious adult I was supposed to become constantly wrestled with what was left of the child. I tried so hard to hold on to that little prince within me that, I don’t know, I somehow wound up being different than both. A lot different.

***

I really missed Maria after a while. I thought about her constantly—about her voice when I wasn’t speaking to her, about her body when I wasn’t holding her. Sometimes, I even helped myself fall asleep imagining her cuddled in my arms, her perfumed hair draped across my chest like a security blanket. I couldn’t wait to see her again. We continued talking on the phone for a while, and she kept asking me to go out again. But I had to break up with Lynn first.

It was about a month since I’d first gone out with Maria, and I’d pretty much given up on calling Lynn completely. Like most guys my age, I never broke up with girls. I just sort of let them fade away. Sometimes, Lynn would call and I’d rush her off the phone. Other times, I told my parents to tell her that I was busy or not home. This strategy forced Jeff, a Lynn loyalist, to give me cold glances at school. He and his fat sister were always wondering what was going on with me and Maria. Jeff probably was wondering why I was still dating Lynn when I’d gone on a date with Maria—I know he knew about me and Maria, because she had a big mouth. I stopped speaking to Jeff after a while. He was such a nosy goddamn bastard, anyway, and so was his sister.

One day, Lynn just stopped calling me. I was so pissed off. Until that point, even though she knew something was up, she’d still call me and act nice. I couldn’t believe she had the nerve to break off all communication with me. The least she could do was formally break it off. I didn’t know what to do. I thought about asking Jeff or his sister for help, but I knew they didn’t give a shit by that point.

About a week went by and I didn’t hear from her at all. Just to fuck with her, I decided to surprise her after school with some flowers. Lynn and I were supposed to be celebrating our four-month anniversary—I think it was four at that point—so I knew she’d be real happy to see me. And I knew that all her friends would be there, too, as she walked out of class that day. So when Lynn came out at around three o’clock or so, I hoisted the flowers above my head as she was walking down the hill to the subway stop. She almost wet her pants, she was so happy. I recoil at the thought of her sappy announcement. “You remembered!” she kept saying, with a smile on her face as wide as her head. All her stupid friends giggled around us, saying “awww” and “how sweeeeet.” But Lynn was happiest, and I knew that for just a few moments, she’d forgotten all about Maria.

I escorted Lynn onto the subway, with all of her stupid friends giggling and smelling the flowers and saying how beautiful they were. We didn’t get off at her stop, though. Instead, we went to the Queens Center Mall, where every hood and his girlfriend loitered for hours after school each day. Lynn and I walked around for a good hour or so. She was shopping for a bathing suit, as I contemptuously eyed every hood that walked buy, each dressed typically with a pair of mile-wide jeans and a backwards baseball cap.

We didn’t hold hands or make any other sort of physical contact. But the more I looked at Lynn, the more turned on I got. Suddenly, I started to become really horny. God, there she was in that little plaid skirt—she still had her uniform on—and a blue blouse unbuttoned twice at the top. It’s amazing how all the girls at her school wore the same blue and yellow plaid skirt, but when you looked really close, each one looked so hot in her own way. Some were big, some were small, some short, some tall. Just thinking about it now drives me nuts.

And Lynn was a really beautiful girl. I always liked petite girls, like Maria, but something about Lynn was so sexy. She was actually taller than me. She had wavy, silky brown hair that fell just short of her shoulders. Her eyes were narrow and squinty—not Asian squinty, but still more squinty than a regular person’s. Her skin was always just a bit tanner than mine, even during the winter. Lynn was terribly flat-chested, but her slim, athletic body more than compensated for that flaw. She looked like a Baywatch lifeguard as she tried on bikinis, one after the other.

Kyle and I used to make fun of her breasts. And after he first saw her, we started calling her a horse because she was so goddamn tall. And her breasts were simply too small to match her big body. But even though they were tiny, I’d always wondered what they looked like. Lynn was sixteen or so, I guess, but she’d never shown a guy her tits. Ever since Seven Minutes in the Closet, I’d been dying to see them.

We walked around to all of the stores, starting with the bottom floor and ending with the top one. When we reached the top we decided to take the elevator back down to the first floor and go home. Lynn was now clutching the flowers in her right hand, and holding my arm with her left. I started liking her again, just for a second. I don’t know, she was just so pretty. And she liked me so much that day. I get chills just thinking about how cute she looked.

The elevator bank was in a little shadowy cove near the mall’s parking lot, a good hike from the shopping area. It had a noxious smell, and looked like a regular elevator bank, with one of those mirrors in the ceiling corner across from the three sliding doors, the kind that you glance at before you get out of the elevator to make sure nobody’s there waiting to mug you.

Before we got on the elevator, Lynn hugged me, placed her head on my shoulder, and thanked me for the nice surprise. I don’t know if she intended to kiss me but, somehow, we started making out.

I just couldn’t resist, she looked so damn good. Soon we were really going at it. I wrestled her against the elevator door where she remained pinned as we necked passionately. I spread her arms out as if I were a cop ready to frisk a suspect. Her left hand swung toward a silver fire extinguisher hanging off the wall, and the sound of her ring against it made a huge gong. We stopped for a second, wondering if anyone had heard the noise. Nobody was there. The elevators seemed to have stopped dead. I buried my head into her neck and sniffed and kissed while grabbing her ass. We were two animals in heat, ready, willing, and able to play around as much as the mall’s dubious privacy allowed. She put her hand under my chin and forced her tongue into my mouth. Lynn was so big and strong. I remember Kyle joking, ‘If you ever fuck her she’ll make you her bitch.’ I chuckled to myself as I licked her chest bone like a dog. Kyle was so right, and I couldn’t wait to tell him about it in school.

The next thing I knew, my hands were kneading her little breasts like pizza dough. I rolled the point of her left nipple gently between my left thumb and forefinger, right through her blouse; for small breasts she seemed to have huge nipples. They were much bigger than I thought they’d be. I crammed my other hand down into her pants, pressed my palm against her belly. I curved my fingers inward. She was wet.

Turning Lynn around so that her back was pressed against my chest, I continued to pull her blouse up, carefully unbuttoning it along the way.

Soon, her lacy pink bra was exposed, and I could see my face being contorted in the metallic surface of the fire extinguisher in front of us. My erection was stiff against her ass cheeks; she began to moan as I forced the tips of my fingers in-between the outer edge of her bra and her breast. The lower half of the bra was hard wire covered with spandex, designed, probably, to help push up her breasts and make them appear bigger. Soon enough, the wire was out of the way. I pulled my hand from her pants and rubbed both breasts simultaneously with my hands—squeezing soft, then hard—as I inhaled her scent, allowing it to fill my lungs. I was floating.

Almost as if she were obeying the command of my thoughts, Lynn turned to face me and I began circling my tongue around her dark brown nipples—first her right one, then her left. The peaks of her nipples were wet thimbles. I’ve heard that the perfect breasts can fit inside two tea cups. Well, Lynn’s were barely tea spoons, but they were still so soft and perfect. Moaning, clutching my body, she was so hot for me.

I contemplated putting my hands down her panties again but decided against it; we’d already been fortunate enough to have not been disturbed by anyone, and I didn’t want to push our luck. So I backed away from her, panting heavily, and said: “We’d better stop, or this’ll become much too serious.” And I meant it—I could have had sex with her right then and there. We were both sweating and panting, and I knew I could’ve had sex with her right then and there. I really didn’t know what to do at that point. Without a second thought I gave her a small hug and a kiss on the cheek, and then held her hand. We decided to get on the elevator and take it down to the first floor, where she’d catch her bus home. Lynn was still half-dressed. I noticed the security camera peering down on us as we got in the elevator and chuckled.

“Why don’t you come back home with me tonight? My mother’s cooking dinner soon,” she said.

“Nah, I can’t really. I have to get home and study for a test tomorrow.”

“Maybe some other time?”

“Sure, sweety.”

“I’m so happy that we’re not fighting anymore,” she said with a big, sappy grin. I didn’t realize that not calling her meant we were fighting, but apparently that’s what she thought.

“No, Lynn,” I replied. “We’re not.”

The bus pulled up and she was about to get on. Right before she did, I grabbed her arm and whispered, “You’ve never done that before, right?”

“Done what?”

“You know—let a guy touch you there.”

She was a little confused. “Oh, no, no! Never! But I liked it!” And she smiled like the big tall idiot that she was.

“Okay,” I said, “just checking. See ya.”

With that Lynn boarded the bus and went home. She must have glowed the entire ride back. I was glowing, too, but for a different reason.

When I arrived home I nestled into the sofa in my den and watched TV for a few hours. I thought about calling Maria, but I was just too damn tired to talk. Being among the hoods at the mall made me exhausted. The mall’s like a big high school dance, only everyone’s shopping instead of dancing. And, like a dance, I’m always tired after I go there, probably because it takes up so much energy to tolerate the people inside.

Late that night, after dinner, I called up Lynn for the first time in weeks—and dumped her.

***

I couldn’t wait to go out with Maria again. When I called her up, she’d already heard about me and Lynn breaking up—and she was pissed.

“Why didn’t you tell me that you were going to do that?” she asked.

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to make her mad, but I didn’t want to look like a jerk, either.

“I’m sorry. It all happened so quickly. I just wanted to go out with you, really.”

“What the hell did you do with her by the elevators?” she asked.

Shit! I didn’t know what to say.

“Well, nothing, we just fooled around a little bit. That’s all!”

“She told me you did a lot more than that! What kind of person are you?” she screeched. That question sunk like a dagger into my heart. I thought: Good question. What kind of person am I?

“No, really, we just kissed a little bit. She really wanted to kiss me, so I kissed her. That’s all! I wanted to let her down easy. I don’t want to ever kiss her again, Maria. I only want to kiss you.”

She paused for a moment. I’m sure she was happy with what I said, but doubts lingered. “So, if we start dating, and you decide to break up with me, what are ya gonna do? Fuck me right before you dump me?” She had a point.

“Listen,” I continued, “just don’t worry about it. Nothing happened. It meant nothing, really. I just didn’t know what to do. I felt bad about breaking up with her, I wanted to make her feel better. Maria, I want to go out with you and you only. Please, let’s stop talking about this crap.”

She paused again. “Fine.”

“That’s it?” Her capacity to end such a heated discussion so quickly and maturely was startling.

“Yeah. Fine. Okay. But I don’t know if Lynn will want to be my friend if we start dating.” She was really worried about her stupid friendship with Lynn.

“Listen, Lynn wasn’t exactly your best friend. If you only knew what she said about you...”

“What did she say?” Maria demanded.

“It’s not so much what she said, really. But I think she wanted to fool around with me to get me to keep going out with her, and avoid dating you.” Was this true? Probably. Partially. But I had no right to say it. I had Maria so confused. I just wanted her to forget about Lynn. I didn’t want her to even see Lynn again. I wanted that part of her life, and mine, to be over with.

“Don’t worry, all that matters is that now we can go out whenever we want to! I really like you, Maria. Please don’t ruin this for us. Just forget about it.”

“Please don’t ruin this for us?” She was so angry and perplexed she sort of stressed every word in that sentence. There was a long pause. But then she gathered her thoughts and calmed down. “All right,” she said. “All right.”

I didn’t let a second go by before I asked her out. I can’t explain how badly I wanted to see her again. It’d been so long since I’d last inhaled her luscious aroma and touched her tiny hand. We’d had only one date in Central Park, that’s it. There was so much more to do.

I thought about how beautiful she was that day in the park, and how she clasped her hand to mine so tightly. I wanted to hold her hand again. I wanted to hold it and never let go. I told her so on the phone. I divulged all of the high hopes I had for us. And I told her that I had a surprise for her when we went out the next time. And I did. I wanted to carve our names into the tree near the pond where we’d sat for hours talking.

“What’s the surprise?” she said.

“Say you’ll go out with me this Saturday, and then you’ll find out. Please.”

“I want to see you again, too, Joel. But, I don’t know, something just doesn’t seem right.”

“What do you mean? You’re just worried about Lynn!” I was exasperated. But don’t worry—that’s all in the past now. We can do more than talk on the phone now. We can see each other as often as we want.”

She seemed a little confused, but I knew I’d gotten through to her.

“You’re right, Joel.” She paused again. She was always pausing. “Where do you want to go this weekend?”

“Same place as last date. Same time.”

I felt her smile over the phone. “Okay—the mall at eleven, right?”

“Let’s make it twelve. I should be done with my test by then.” God, was I thrilled that she wanted to see me again.

“Oh, that’s right. You’ve got your SATs on Saturday! Good luck, Joel!” Her upbeat voice would propel me through the SATs successfully, and right into the Air Force Academy. I just knew it.

“Thank you,” I said. “I know I’ll do well now that I’m with you.”

“And I know it, too. Good night, hopeful.”

“Goodnight, hopeful?”

“Yes, because that’s what you are—you’re hopeful—to me. You’re the only person who gives me any hope. Just don’t disappoint me, okay?”

I wanted to say I love you. I wanted to ask her to marry me right then and there. I wanted to go over to her house and see her, only I couldn’t drive yet. So I just said: “Thank you, Maria. Thank you so much for saying that. Goodnight.”