“Saw you reading my stuff, you must have read the whole thing since you got here,” I tell her. Good, non-flirtatious chatter. Her grandfather has his wrinkled hand tightly on her shoulder, forcing her forward. “Whom do I make it out to?” I ask her.
“No one. Do you remember Cindy Karp?” she asks me.
“Do you spell that with a c or a k? I never know,” I tell her, and take her copy, looking for the title page.
“No. Do you remember, eighteen years ago, a girl named Cindy Karp? Did you ever date a girl by that name?” she asks me again, and yanks my pen right out of my hand before it hits the page. I don’t know who she’s talking about, but I no longer feel like I’m falling. I feel like I’m landing, on something hard. The crackhead in my father’s foyer last night, staring up the stairs, flashes in my memory for no reason. Only when I look back up at the old man’s face over the teenager’s shoulder do things once again become lucid.
“Do you remember Cindy Karp. Who you slept with?” comes out of the young woman’s mouth. I look at her, and I do remember Cindy, oh God I do, and it’s like this girl is one of Cindy’s classmates, not a year accumulated, frozen, waiting in Philly to damn me. But the girl’s tone is not accusatory. It is scared. Desperation vibrates her vocal cords.
I grab the hand with the pen, and I look up at her. I look in her face, I really look in it. I do not see Cindy Karp, except in the little pimples around her hairline that all teens must have. I don’t see Cindy Karp, but I am no expert, because I don’t even remember what Cindy Karp looked like. What I do see, though, I recognize. I see my dad. I keep looking at her face. She lets me, connects her eyes with mine this time and lets me hold the gaze. And then I see my mom. I really see her, for the first time in twenty-four years. And then I start to cry. Just a little teary in the eye, it happens before I can put words to why. And I grip the girl’s hand firmer. I see my mother, and her mother, Gramma Jones, and Aunt Katie. Faces I thought were gone from existence, they are right in front of me. Jumbled all together in this tan Jewish girl in dirty jean shorts ripped at the thighs. A whole collage of high-yellow matriarch is staring back at me like the aged photos at the bottom of my dresser drawer.
3
I HAD POISON in my cock and I had to get it out. From age eleven until about seventeen, I could feel it in there, threatening to burst my testicles, pulsing my vas deferens. I tried to take care of this on my own, to remove the compound manually, nightly draining the malignant fluid under my blanket in my bed. And this did provide relief, but only for a few minutes, maybe an hour.
And over time the procedure became less effective. After a month, I could no longer go to sleep without performing the exorcism at least twice. It wasn’t long until mornings became the same way. And if I didn’t, the consequences were horrific. Not only would urges plague my mind throughout the school day, but uncontrollable erections, brazen and adamantium, would haunt me as well. Not even the fear of social humiliation could deflate my phallus.
Returning home meant a race to the bedroom to release the mental succubi eight hours in the School District of Philadelphia provided. Once every ninety minutes, for the rest of the night, the act was repeated. But it was release without liberation. Self-pleasure was a meager panacea in lieu of the exorcism of true intercourse. I knew what I needed. A girl. Any girl; I didn’t care about the specifics. Someone else to take my burden. I was desperate for the cure.
I didn’t care who removed the poison. I didn’t understand love or consequences. The only feelings I was concerned with emanated from my groin. I found a drunk girl at a house party in West Philly who was willing, after a twenty-minute introduction, to partner in intercourse in an upstairs study, but my strenuous masturbatory exercises left me numb to the real act, the latex condom I wore for her protection only making matters worse. Two weeks later, a casual encounter with a white girl at a hotel party downtown led to a week of phone conversations and then a meet up at a sweet sixteen at Society Hill Country Club. Intercourse was achieved, again drunkenly, in the laundry room, on a foldout table. One of the women working there, an older teen, maybe college-age, walked in on us and I leaped off, my shame hanging before me. The girl I’d found was amazed I’d disengaged so quickly, but in my fear and drunken stupor, my flaccid penis was no miracle.
The girl was Cindy, the last name was Jewish; that’s all I retained of her. Of her face I remember a field of small pink pimples on her chin and along the line of her brown hair, the talcum smell of pancake makeup. I don’t know when I found out she was fourteen, that she was just in eighth grade at a private elementary school. I was sixteen and in tenth grade, high school, and it was shameful and wrong. But I had been under this penile burden for years.
She said she was sick with a sore throat, home from school. I played hooky and came over. Her parents had money, a high-rise condo downtown, even if they only lived on the third floor. I don’t remember any conversation when I arrived. There must have been one; there must have been a pause. What I do remember: a car caught fire on the street below, not far from her bedroom window. I watched the smoke build on the hood until you could see the building inferno blacken its paint. The windows, rolled up, burst from the heat mounting inside the car. There was no explosion, just casual ruin. The car parked in front of it was charred all the way to the driver’s door. The car past that was still close enough that its wheels melted like in a Dalí painting. Even a parked car can be a disaster. From where we were, you couldn’t even touch the windowpanes we looked through. So we must of talked.
But I just remember lying on the mattress on the floor of her room. She took my penis in her mouth and when she lifted her head back up a line of saliva as thick as glue connected us, and I realized she really did have a cold. And then I was on top of her, feeling nothing once more but pumping away to find the pleasure I knew eluded me. The chance of an orgasm was an act of faith, until her wetness suddenly surrounded me, and I could feel my objective within reach. It was as if I was wandering blindly up a hill then stumbled upon its blissful peak. I arrived at the greatest three seconds of my young existence. And there was elation, until I rolled over and saw that my increased pleasure was caused by the fact that the condom had broken and rolled back over my cock like a rubber wedding ring.