“They all say that,” Frankie said. “It’s the first thing they think of to say, a lot of them. I dunno why they do it. They probably, they went to Catholic school or something. It don’t matter. I was going with this girl, I used to go with? Friend of Sandy’s. Had her pants glued on, for Christ sake. Not a bad-looking kid. She had kind of buck teeth. Nice ass. She wanted to get married. I didn’t know anything, for Christ sake. I wanted to get laid. Get married, go to jail, cut your foot off: I would’ve done it. I was so fuckin’ horny I would’ve done anything to get laid. I remember, I used to go, can you believe this? I used to go fuckin’ parking with this broad. I used to take my old man’s beat-up car and drive and drive and drive, get some place where she didn’t think maybe somebody knew her father’d see us. Used to go down Chickatawbut, the reservoir? I was almost twenny years old and this kid was, what, I dunno, seventeen, probably, and I used to spend fuckin’ hours tryin’ to get my fuckin’ bare hand on her fuckin’ bare tit. I think it took me almost a year. I took her to drive-ins, I took her to dances, I fed her booze, I breathed in her fuckin’ ear, and all I could do, I could feel her up from the outside. Through the sweater, through the blouse, if she was really drunk I could get my hand inside and feel her up through the bra. For Christ sake. The night, I finally got my hand inside the bra. Inside. I didn’t have it unhitched or nothing, just, I got my hand in there. I came in my pants.”
Russell began to laugh.
“I did,” Frankie said. “And I hadda drive home that way, all stuck together for Christ sake. The guys, I used to hang around down the Howdy. And I’d hear the guys, there’s all these broads that put out. And I believed them. And they gimme names. The actual names. And I didn’t do nothing. I used to think, this was when I was working the oil company, I was gonna be a repairman, they give you your own little truck and you make about ten grand a year, now, and you always got to go out in a fuckin’ blizzard about three o’clock inna morning, oh, it’s a great fuckin’ life, and I used to think, well, what I thought was, I got to have a girl I can respect. I don’t want none of them whores. You imagine that? True love. True fuckin’ love. I don’t want no girl that just wants to fuck. I want a girl that just wants to fuck me, and you know what we’re gonna do? We’re gonna get married and we’re gonna live happily ever after. That’s what we’re gonna do.”
“With about nine hundred screamin’ kids and a fuckin’ house and all that shit,” Russell said.
“Right,” Frankie said. “So, inna meantime, I dunno, her father wouldn’t let her go out with me more’n twice a week. Fridays and Saturdays. I could visit her Wednesdays, but there’s always somebody else there and I hadda be out of there by ten, because she hadda go to school the next day.”
“High school?” Russell said.
“High school,” Frankie said. “I’m twenty years old and here’s this broad I’m absolutely out of my mind over, and she’s in high school.”
“Some time, I hope,” Russell said, “you got over being an asshole.”
“I’m not sure,” Frankie said. “I remember one night I get her home, she hadda be home by eleven-thirty, Friday nights, on Saturdays she can stay out till midnight. I got her home about two in the morning. I dunno if it was a Friday night or a Saturday night. We used to go down the Blue Hills Drive In and she’d French-kiss me and, probably at least one other couple inna car, and it’d drive me fuckin’ nuts. Blue fuckin’ balls. Three times a week. And I get her home and the old man’s up, and he’s raring to go. ‘Did you do it?’ he screams at me. I played dumb. ‘Do what?’ You should’ve seen his face. It’s a wonder he didn’t have some kind of attack or something. She was standing right there. ‘Did you fuck her, you rotten little bastard?’ I was fuckin’ stunned. I got my mouth open, I couldn’t say nothing. I think I came in my pants that night, too, and I didn’t dare look, see if it came through, because once I did, he’d know, and he’s still screaming at me. ‘You think I don’t know what you’re trying to do, you little prick? You little fucking bastard? You think I don’t know?’ I thought he was gonna fuckin’ kill me. And she, that little bitch, she was just as rough on him as she was on me. ‘Daddy’ she says, ‘your language is filthy.’ And she stomps upstairs and there’re the two of us, looking at each other. He slammed the fuckin’ door.
“After that,” Frankie said, “after that I can’t see her no more on Wednesdays. Only weekends, and Jesus, every time I go there I expect they’re gonna put the old man in the car with us, we go out. So, I start hanging around with the wrong type of guys. And I meet a couple guys, and one of them knows Johnny, and I meet Johnny, and I start doing a few things for John. And you know something? I was still in love with that crazy kid. I probably would’ve married her. I dunno if her old man would’ve let me fuck her, I was married to her. Maybe Fridays and Saturdays. Long’s I got her home by midnight. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. Then I got hooked and they try me, I was in the can the whole time, and they all come to the trial, him too, now and then, and I got the time, there. Sandy and my mother and Janice and everything. Ten years. What’s ten years? I didn’t know what the fuck was going on. I was, I wasn’t even twenty-one years old. Somebody says ten years to me. What’s that mean? That judge, you know what he said? If you continue in this path, young man, you’ll be in serious trouble before you’re through.’ Then he gives me ten years. Serious trouble. That’s probably when they cut your nuts off and make you eat them.
“So they’re taking me away, fuckin’ old deputy, his uniform’s got soup all over it, and they’re all crying, my mother’s crying, Sandy’s crying, Janice’s crying, she’s havin’ fuckin’ hysterics. I should’ve told her, go out and throw the bumper around, always helped me when you wouldn’t come across and I sure can’t help you now. And the deputy, he wouldn’t let them talk to me and I was still punchy, I was on his side. I just got ten and I never even got a hand-job off this broad and now I got to go through this? Pissed me off. I said to him: ‘Get me out of here.’ And she’s gonna do this, she’s gonna do that, it was awful. So, I was in about three months, Sandy comes to see me. Janice’s married. It don’t mean anything.”
“Broads’re different now,” Russell said. “You been in too long. This broad, this broad means it. You can tell. She’s gonna do it, and then the guy that’s with her when she does it, he’s gonna have to explain a lot of things, and that I can’t do. You can’t do it either. She needs a good leaving-alone.”
“I can make up my own mind,” Frankie said.
“She wouldn’t give me a chance, for God’s sake,” Russell said. “ ‘We gonna do it again?’ Absolutely. Just gimme a minute or so, get it up again. ‘I can do that,’ she says, and she blows me. Well, you know, I haven’t been out that long. I’m still pretty eager. And, I knew what was gonna happen. But I didn’t tell her, and she got herself a pretty good mouthful. Which she kind of gags on, naturally, and she sits up and wipes her mouth off and she looks at me and she says: ‘Thanks a lot, you bastard.’ I say, I said, ‘Look, I didn’t know. I mean, you act like you know what you’re doing.’ ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Yeah, you probably think I like the taste of come.’
“So I told her,” Russell said, “Goat-ass always did. Fuckin’ guy couldn’t get enough of the stuff. Said it kept him young. ‘I never liked it myself,’ I tell her, ‘but he did, and I don’t know.’ So she says: ‘You turd. You’re all turds aren’t you, you turd. There isn’t one of you that’s not a turd.’ And there’s this big song and dance. We’re lying there and, it’s a really nice apartment, got all these African masks on the wall and everything, and she’s bitching and moaning, the first time wasn’t any good either, it’s never any good, she keeps on hoping, and it turns out, it’s not even her place we’re in. I thought it was her place. It belongs to this guy she’s going with, the stereo, all the rest of it, it’s all his. He’s in school. He’s gonna get himself some kind of thing and then he’s gonna do something and it’s all gonna take him about a million years or something and she don’t get nothing from him, so she calls up guys, put ads in the Phoenix, ‘Ex-con, long dong, love and affection.’ I mean, she don’t say that. But that’s what it is. So I say to her: ‘Cut the shit, all right? You wanna get laid? I come here, get laid. Never mind all this other shit.’ And she’s rubbing me up. And she says: ‘Well, he thinks he knows everything. And he doesn’t think I know anything. So he can treat me any way he wants. But he can’t.’ And then she says, she says she’s gonna kill herself. So I look at her, and this girl really means it. Remember the way Greenan looked there, it was all over the place, they’re gonna kill him and he was walking around with a board under his shirt, remember the way he looked?”