Three months after his arrival, he was a joke. Everyone saw he was actually psycho. As soon as he got drunk he would do stupid things like put cigarettes out on his arms or ride his scooter into a wall. And he would talk even bigger when he was drunk. He’d say, “Nigger.” One night he said the wrong thing to some of the black guys and got beat up. He wasn’t so tough after that. He was alone a lot. That’s when he started doing weird things even when he wasn’t drunk, like doing the cigarette burns at school. He really had no friends. Except me. He was a little bald weirdo, with burns up his forearm like leopard spots.
It was ten o’clock and I was staring at the tape turning in the boom box. Little gears rotating. The Geto Boys were talking about dick sucking, and licking scrotums and assholes. A.J. was back on the low bed with the ratty blue blanket and he was making a call.
“Yo, shut up for a minute, I’m calling April,” he said. “Turn that shit down.”
I turned the music off. We sat there while he waited. A long depressing quiet as the phone rang.
April was in our class, but she was better than us, mature and experienced. She had an older sister, and she’d introduced her to a lot. When April showed up in our town from Arizona at age thirteen with her tan and muscular legs, she had already fucked. She knew about dicks and talked about them to us in whispers. She knew that some bent in funny ways.
I had a crush on April right away. In eighth grade I called her once and tried to act cool. At least she was nice. She lived near me and sometimes we would go to the park near her house and sit on the swings and smoke pot out of her little pink pipe. After we got into high school she started fucking older guys. This guy Denny Johnson and this guy Adam Cohen. They played water polo, and were really tall. Also my friend Barry.
Then A.J. was on the phone with her. He was smiling. I sat in the chair and cursed him in my mind.
“You should meet us,” A.J. said into the white phone. Then he was listening very intensely. He wasn’t such a gangster then; he was just a sweetie.
“. . . well bring your sister with you. It will be cool,” he said. He was looking at me like he was making sure I wasn’t laughing at him. She was saying something because I could hear the little buzz in the phone.
“. . . then bring your sister and Emily too.”
I was warm and drunk. Inside, I felt things flow through me and I thought about cartoon rabbits and about William Faulkner and how he drank all the time. I thought that someday I would be him.
When I was a baby, my mom read to me from Uncle Remus. I thought about the Tar Baby, his body steaming, just after Br’er Fox pulled him out of the cooking pot. A raw, coal-dark coagulum that Br’er Fox shaped into a slick black, shining, seal-like thing. A little black podling. No face until Br’er Fox pulled off Br’er Bear’s two jacket buttons and stuck them on the black baby and those were the eyes.
Button eyes are a crazy man’s eyes.
Buggedy bu ggedy bu ggedy boo,
I have crazy eyes, how about you?
A.J. looked away and listened. I couldn’t believe April was talking to A.J.
“No, Teddy is here. Yes, Teddy,” said A.J. into the phone. Then he turned to me. “She says hi.”
“Hi, April,” I said, but he didn’t relay the message. He was facing the wall again.
“Yeah, he’s all drunk,” he said. “He can hang out with Emily.”
“Emily” was Emily Kraft, a big slut. She was a year older than us.
A.J. said, “Come on,” five times in five different ways, like she was teetering on an edge and he was gently trying to blow her over. Finally he said, “At Addison,” and his voice went a little higher. Addison was an elementary school down the street from his house.
“We’ll be on the jungle gym,” he said to the phone. He was smiling but not at me. The little guy had actually convinced them to come over. “. . . yeah, we got d’vodka… cool, see ya in the school yard, peace.” He said “school yard” like he was singing a song.
After he hung up he stopped smiling and didn’t share any of the joy. “They down,” he said, real serious.
“‘D’ vodka’?” I said.
“Yeah, we got d’vodka, motherfucker, you got a problem wit that?”
“No,” I said. “I’m glad we got it.”
He was putting his jacket on. It was a Carhartt jacket, real plain. I had a brown corduroy one with a fur collar from J.Crew. I took it off the back of the chair. Some guy on a TV show had one too.
A.J. reached across me and took the bottle and screwed the cap on.
“You’ve been drinking this like a motherfucker,” he said.
He tucked the large bottle under his jacket and it bulged.
“Let’s go, bitch,” he said.
A few of the brothers were shifting around in shadowy corners of the basement level, and when we walked upstairs there were some more sitting and lying on the floor in front of the TV. They were watching Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. I saw a little grape juice, deep purple and luminescent, at the bottom of a plastic glass.
Outside, it was a little cold, and the sound vacuumed out to quiet, nothing but a few cars passing in the distance along Middlefield Road. We went through the chain-link gate into the dark school yard. I sat on the end of the slide and the metal was cold under my ass. A.J. stood in the tanbark and paced a little; the bulge was still under his arm. Then we waited.
After five minutes I said, “Lemme get some of d’vodka.” I was surprised but he reached under his jacket and handed the bottle to me. He put his hands in his jacket pockets and looked all around, alert but cool.
I unscrewed the red cap and tilted the bottle to my lips. The stuff went down and I pictured the clear liquid with a magical pink inner glow.
“Save some of that shit,” A.J. said. A few cars passed but not the girls. I drank from the bottle again and it was a scary plunge because I always wanted to take too much. It hurt, but it was also impressive, like being in the hands of a bigger force. And because of that, a relief. A.J. still wasn’t looking at me so I took another sip and my throat burned sharp and my brain swam in cold water.
A long silver-blue Cadillac passed, going very slowly. How we must look to adults: shitty teenagers in brown jackets, hanging around the school yard in the dark.
I thought again about the Tar Baby from Uncle Remus. The Tar Baby and the briar patch and Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Bear and Br’er Fox. I could probably get A.J. to fuck the Tar Baby if I made it look like a girl. Get his dick stuck in the tar. A.J. was so lonely and angry, and all his feelings got computed in strange ways. He said he had had a girlfriend in LA, a black girl. She must have hated herself. April was white, but A.J. really liked her.
After thirty minutes April and the girls weren’t there. It was just us, cold in the cold.
A.J. had walked out of the tanbark onto the blacktop, and I was alone with the vodka for a while, but then he came back and started yelling.
“Save that shit for the girls, motherfuck!” he said, grabbing the bottle. He saw how much was left and yelled some more. I just sat there. He said, “You faggot ass, you shit-kissing motherfucker, you dumb fucking nigger, you shitfaced faggot, I oughtta kill you. . . .” Other stuff poured out, like he was talking to himself.