“You don’t got a relationship,” Jay said.
“But we could have,” I said. “If you didn’t stick your fat lies into it.”
“At least I got something fat for the sticking.”
I fell into a seething silence, and the others didn’t talk, either. In the quiet, there was nothing, no giggles, no faint whiff of candy perfume. Dark had taken over by now; everything felt still and shut down.
“I have an idea,” Jay said. “We don’t need these stupid girls. Virgins, ain’t they? They don’t know how to do it.”
None of us brought up the fact that we were virgins, too.
“What if we get a real woman? I mean, one who does this for a living? Women sell their bodies all the time, if you go to the right place. We just need to get over there.”
“We don’t have any money,” Toshi said. “How much would she want? For us to… how much does that cost, anyway? It has to be a lot.”
“I don’t have any money,” I said. “Maybe… ten dollars is all.” I was still hoarding the bill my father had given me.
“Oh, god. Oh, Jesus. You two are idiots. Think about how it works: she has sex with you, then she gets paid. If there’s no money, there’s no money. You’ve already got the goods. Get it?”
Something about the clear, dark night, the horniness of waiting for a girl who never came—even though I knew that Jessica, Charlene, and Danni were just about as likely to show up as Stella or that TV actress with huge tits I jerked off to sometimes—and the way Jay always sounded like an expert, made his idea seem pretty smart. Besides, since the fight with my dad, I was feeling desperate for something good. I was ready to try anything: I deserved this. We had worked all summer on New Veronia, and so I deserved this now.
“Okay,” I said. “But where are these women? And how do we get to them?”
“We only need to get to one of them,” Jay said, “because one will do all of us.”
My eyes were opened as wide as they could go in the dark, but still I couldn’t see any better.
“We’ll take my dad’s truck. Okay? He’ll never notice that it’s gone. They’re going to go to sleep soon, anyhow; we’ll wait until then.”
“But,” Toshi said, “aren’t you worried that your dad will find out about you always taking his truck?”
“No way, I mean, he already found out. He knows about the truck. He’s there for me; he understands sometimes I got to do what I got to do. He knows I take it when I really need it.”
“Huh.” Toshi looked down at his feet with a sort of disappointed expression, and I wondered if he was realizing the same thing I was: we had nothing on Jay; we’d never have anything to hold over Jay’s head. The guy was basically invincible, and I admired him for that.
We all piled into Jay’s portion of the triplex to finesse our plan. He turned on the camping lantern he’d brought from his garage and pulled out some paper and a pencil. He had a lot of stuff in his New Veronia room, much more than Toshi or me; it was as if he’d slowly been transferring his bedroom out of his parents’ house.
“First,” Jay said, his pencil poised over the paper, “let’s try to visualize this bitch.” He drew a circle for her head with long strands of hair coming down on either side. Her eyes were two more circles with spidery lashes and her mouth was an empty O. Each of her Venn diagram breasts were bigger than her head, and they had little stick arms and legs coming off of them.
“Hm,” I said. “Appealing.” I meant to sound funny, but the blank face creeped me out.
“That’s a sexy woman.” Jay punctuated this sentence with a stab of the pencil point between her eyes.
Finally, it was late enough. Outside, the night air felt warm as a bath, and excitement had caffeine-frizzled my nerves. “Do you know where we’re going?” I asked Jay as he had us pile into the pickup truck.
“Absofuckinglutely. I been there before.”
Toshi shifted in the middle bench seat. “Oh yeah? When?”
“My dad, he’s driven me by the red light district. Not like we did anything. We yelled at the whores, is all, called them sluts and whatever. Once you have a wife, they don’t matter for nothing, but until then, I guess they’re a pretty doable option.”
On the drive there, the swaying cab grew overfull with the smells of sweat and cologne. I asked Jay if we should have brushed our teeth, if we should stop and rinse out our mouths, but he said, “It doesn’t matter what she thinks. That’s the brilliant thing: I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. It doesn’t matter what she wants; only what we want.”
“Well,” Toshi said, “I don’t want to get any kind of disease.”
“Think of her as a warm-up.” Jay braked too hard at a stop sign. “We’re just going to practice on her. Later, we’ll get some girls from the high school. Okay? I promise.” Jay pulled to the side of the road. “Be right back; I got to piss.”
“Maybe this will cheer him up,” Toshi said after Jay got out. “Did you hear that his dad was just canned? That means he’s around the house all the time, angry. Jay is staying out of his way.”
I didn’t have a chance to say anything before Jay jumped back inside the cab.
When we got to the street that Jay called the red light district, I saw that there weren’t any red lights at all. It was a trash-strewn, narrow road behind the WalMart.
“Here it is,” Jay said, revolving his hands on the wheel. I knew that his palms were sweating because of the way they squeaked against the rubber.
“Where are the girls?” Toshi said. All that shone in the headlights was a clogged gutter and a broken-up sidewalk.
“Give them a minute to get off their asses,” Jay said, “and then we’ll drive through, nice and slow. Keep your eye out for the one you want. A white one; big tits.”
I felt like I was in a movie: important, rich, playing someone else. We’d find a woman as voluptuous and sex-crazed as those from the magazine underneath the bible in Jay’s parents’ room, and then she’d get in the car with all three of us, and we’d have turns at wild sex with her. Finally, instead of pay, we’d zoom away, our jizz the only thing she’d get out of the encounter. She’d yell some dirty words after our retreating tail lights, but she’d never be able to find us again. Forever after, she’d play a role in my wet dreams.
“My dad showed me this porno once,” Jay said, “so that I could see the differences. There are real differences between the white ones and the black ones.”
“Your dad watched porn with you?” Toshi said.
“It was educationaclass="underline" the black ones want it all the time and so there’s more of a chance you might catch something from them. Plus, their asses are like, denser.”
“Huh,” Toshi said. I stayed silent, feeling buzzed about what we were going to do. Jay gently stepped on the gas and the truck began its rumbling path down the road.
A few bodies had stepped out from the shadows, or maybe they had been there, and only now were the headlights picking them up. There were legs in sheer black stockings, skinny legs, mostly, one pair of plump legs; long hair gleaming unnaturally, as if it held light within it; eyes done up so that they were black circles in the face. These were not exactly the prostitutes of television; I don’t know why I kept expecting the world to be like television: any resemblance had been disproven often enough.
“That one has huge tits,” Jay said.
“But maybe they would smother you.” Toshi rounded both his hands in front of his face. “Too much, you know?”