Some teenage girls walked by. They didn’t go to our high school. There was a big-boned girl with short curly hair to her ears and a skinny witchy girl with longer black hair. They stood in the gateway.
“What are you yelling at?” said the big-boned girl. She said it like she was older than she was. She must have been lonely if she was bothering with us.
A.J. answered her like he had been expecting them. “This faggot doesn’t know how to get any pussy, and drinks all my shit.”
The girls laughed a little.
“Really? He doesn’t know how to get any pussy?” said the big-boned girl.
“What an asshole,” said the witchy one. She was talking about A.J.
Then I spoke up. It was the first chance I’d had after the yelling.
“You’re the one who doesn’t know how to get girls,” I said to A.J.’s back. My words came out damp and wobbly.
A.J. whipped around for a second. Then he knew we were all against him. He was sensitive to that kind of thing. He whipped back to the girls.
“What the fuck do you bitches want?” A.J. said to the girls.
The big-boned girl had bangs and a nice smile and I liked her face. She had a fur-lined hooded jacket that I also liked, and I guessed maybe we would have been friends if we’d been somewhere else.
“We just wanted to see if you would give us a drink from your bottle,” said the big-boned girl. The witchy girl was looking at the black sky.
“You’re not getting any of this shit,” said A.J., holding the bottle to his chest.
“Okay, fine,” said the big-boned girl. There was one light on the back corner of the school building and some of it hit her mouth. I thought of a watermelon Jolly Rancher. Her lips were not a fat girl’s lips; they were thin, and very juicy pink-red. But she was smiling a little funny, only on one side, like she wasn’t sure if she should smile, and that was because A.J. was looking at her.
Then her lips were not in the light anymore because A.J. was moving toward the girls.
“Get the fuck out of here, bitches!” he said, waving the bottle. “We got some fine bitches coming, we don’t need fat-ass and skinny!”
“Fuck you, asshole,” said the big-boned one.
“Fuck you, you creepy little monkey,” said the witchy one. The girls kept yelling at A.J. as they backed away into the dark. Then it was quiet.
When A.J. came back, there was nothing to say. And nothing to do because he was holding the bottle. I was feeling okay; I’d had enough vodka.
This was the way the night had cashed in. Choices had been made and things happened, and here we were. It was sad and funny. My life was made of this. Stuff like this.
I thought about how Br’er Bear walked around with a nail sticking out of his club. When I was eleven, I hammered a nail into a baseball bat. It was very dangerous. I made other weapons. And when my camp went on a field trip to Chinatown, I bought a throwing star. I thought I needed all those weapons, and I hoarded them.
I used to throw the star at the fence in the backyard, and it would stick in. I threw it at the cat, Stoney.
When I was twelve I took karate at the YMCA. We learned katas and punches. I learned the katas really well. If you learned the katas, you got the higher belts. The order: white, yellow, orange, blue, green, brown, black. I was happy until I started fighting in school and the katas didn’t do shit for me.
A.J. was in such a bad mood compared to me, but I couldn’t help but laugh at him.
“Better shut up, clown,” he said.
“‘We don’t need fat-ass and skinny!’ Ha-ha, you’re fuckin’ funny, A.J.”
“Shut up, clown,” he said, and kicked some of the tanbark at me but it fell short. I was still laughing.
“Cocoa butter!” I yelled. “‘My shit tastes like cocoa butter!’” A.J. grabbed my fur collar and yanked it back and forth, like he was going to shake the laugh out of me, but I was still laughing.
“Shut the fuck up, Teddy, or I swear to God, I’m-a fuck you up.”
He yanked me up by the collar. “Get the fuck up,” he said, and I was on my feet, but my head was going everywhere. “We’re going to Ofra’s.”
“Ofra’s?” He was already walking away from me with the bottle. I followed him out the gate and back across the street toward his house. His green Karmann Ghia was parked on the street. We got in. Funny old-fashioned interior with hard plastic seats.
Then we were driving and I was laughing again. A.J. looked so serious I couldn’t stop for a long while. When he finally spoke he was very quiet.
“All the clowns in the car better shut up,” he said. He was still looking out the windshield. I had my feet up on the dash and no seat belt, and when he said that I laughed harder.
“This clown is shut up,” I said. “What about the other ones?” And I cracked myself up some more. A.J. was driving really fast now.
Ofra Isaac was a girl in our class and she was having a party that night. She had a huge house in the nicest part of town. The funny thing about the nicest part of town was that it was the closest to East Palo Alto. There were all these mansions and then right down the road it was really bad. Kids would go over there to buy liquor and drugs, but a lot of the time they got into fights or got mugged. East Palo Alto was primarily black and Pacific Islander.
Ofra had a lot of parties at her house. Her parents didn’t care. The problem was that Ofra didn’t like me anymore, mostly because I got drunk all the time. The last time I was at her house me and my friend Ivan got in a fight. We stepped all over her white couch with our shoes and somehow we knocked the mezuzah off the front doorpost. Eventually we stopped fighting in her driveway, but Ofra wouldn’t let us back in.
“You don’t want to go to Ofra’s,” I said to A.J.
He didn’t say anything. I looked around for the bottle, but he must have hid it in the back. Nothing was funny anymore.
“What do you think, A.J.?” I said. “That April is waiting for you at Ofra’s? That you’re going to hook up with that ass?” His jaw flexed. “April hates you, A.J. Everyone hates you.”
It was about eleven o’clock and the cool air from outside was coming in steady through the old Karmann Ghia hinges.
“Okay, A.J. A.J. dog. One question. That’s it, that’s all you got to answer, one question, and then you can be done with me. You can throw me out of this car if you want.” He said nothing, just drove very fast, which was scary around the corners. “Okay, here it is. So what do you think you’ll be doing in twenty years? No, make it easier, ten years. What will you be doing?”
It was like he didn’t hear me, but he did.
“Rapping?” I said. “Are you going to be a rapper?”
No answer.
“Writing graffiti? Married? Maybe have a bunch of kids? With April? You think you and April are gonna have a million kids like your parents?”
A.J. braked the car really fast. So fast that my knees hit the metal dash and the back of the car started sliding. Then we were stopped. He reached across me and opened the passenger door, and then he had his back braced against his door and he was kicking me out the door. I was laughing, except not too much because his kicks hurt and I was trying to stop because A.J. was crying.
“Get the fuck out, get out, get out!” Then my ass hit the ground and I was outside in some grass and the cold air. A.J. drove off. He stopped a few yards away, reached across the seat, and slammed the passenger door. The green hump of the Karmann Ghia got smaller and smaller and then he was gone.
A paint marker that A.J. used for graffiti had fallen out with me. It had a purple cap and a purple body and on the side it said SOLID MARKER. I sat in the long grass between the sidewalk and the street, and when I took the cap off I saw that the paint stick was two colors: yellow and purple. A.J. had cut the purple paint stick in half and fused it with half a yellow paint stick so that the colors would swirl together. I put the stick in my pants pocket.