When Eric was younger, Mike had worried about his son’s habit. But Omar’s boy, Ralphy, did it, too — and when they’d stayed in Texas, Mike and Omar had talked about it a few times when the kids were in bed. Man, you don’ gotta worry about shit like dat. His fren’s gonna shame ’im out of it — or he ain’t gonna have no fren’s.
Yeah, but Ralphy’s six, Mike explained. Eric’s eleven.
I’ll tell you. You catch ’im directly, go on — tell ’im right there, cut it out. Believe me, though, his fren’s’ll take care of it. Ralphies’ done already started. So that’s what Mike did; and wondered if that had anything to do with why Eric had as few friends as he did. And what about when you didn’t catch him directly but he was looking away from you in the car; still, from his arm and shoulder movements, you knew.
Well, you had to let the kid live.
At that moment, actually, Mike was not thinking about Eric, but about how well Doneesha cooked — not that he was worried. And Kelly-Ann had a curious nature…and a movie-star perfect ass — as, something of a doofus, Jake had whispered to him more than a dozen times. Still, Doneesha’s was fuller, firmer, and closer to Mike’s own ideal. She was more relaxed about letting you do what you wanted with it, too. Yeah, after a couple of weeks with Kelly-Ann…
At that moment, actually, as he sat beside his step dad, again looking out the windshield, Eric was wondering what the coming months held for sex — not that he was worried. He’d tripped over it in Maryland and bedded down with it in East Texas: three houses away, Omar’s sister (Mike’s half sister) Lurlene, had a dark, all-but-silent, stunningly good-looking ten-year-old, Hareem. (Harry looked enough like Mike to make some folks in the neighborhood wonder.) Whenever eleven-year-old Eric stayed over, she’d put both boys in the bed in the back room with each other. They’d lain there three long minutes, till Harry had made the first move. His way of dealing with it socially, though, next morning (which, with intense whispers, Harry had made clear to his visiting white cousin), was that — during the day — You Didn’t Talk About It None. Never. At All: Hareem would hardly speak to Eric during daylight, though that night they were all over each other the moment the door closed.
As for the nose picking, back then Eric had been trying harder to keep it private than he was now, so that, during their separate games on their separate sides of the sidewalkless East Texas road, Eric was — relatively — successful.
During the three months he’d stayed with Barbara at her own mother’s in Hugantown once they gave up their own place, Eric (then twelve) had found another sexual outlet. Around the corner, at the back of an overgrown lot, through a crack in a bathroom window of an isolated cabin, he could peer in and jerk off while watching a twenty-seven-year-old Greek plumber’s assistant, who was mostly doing the same. On the first day, where the frosted glass had pulled from maybe four inches along the frame, Eric had looked through into the shadowy john and seen that Costas — who, with his boss, Yoti, had once done a job for his grandmother, which is how Eric knew their names — had papered it all, even the ceiling, with pictures of nude or negligeed women cut or torn from porn magazines. The second time Eric had wandered back there, attracted by the grunts and whispers, he’d looked through and seen, in only a ripped T-shirt, black body hair pushing through the holes under the neck, with no shoes and gaping workpants, toes coming out the hole in one tube sock, Costas, leaning against the sink, pumping and muttering, Mallakas…! Cock-suckin’ bitch…! Mallakas…! till he staggered forward to feed his semen onto one or another pair of bright lips yearning from the wall.
Outside, standing on leaves, pieces of a broken chair, old boards, Eric gripped the sill. Both breathing heavily, he watched Costas move back, sit on the commode’s edge, and push his work pants down to strip out of them entirely, leaving them on the concrete floor.
Costas started in again.
Then he did it again.
Then again…
Sometimes, at his climax, gasping, quivering, Costas — naked, now, except for one sock — fell to his knees on the bathmat, near black with dirt, to spatter a cold, scarlet smile.
As low as Costas’s scaly ankle and as high as his hairy ribs, the pictures on three walls and part of a fourth were as clotted and coated, much of it gone orange, as the dinner plate medallion in Mr. Condotti’s garage, or inside the top-floor Atlanta school john door.
(There was so much, Eric had been looking almost an hour when it struck him what it was. Costas had lived there four years: that’s how Eric recognized it two years later in the Atlanta high school boys’ room.)
A creature of habit, Costas confined it to the bathroom — unless he slipped off to spill a few when he was out with cigar smoking Yoti at his job. Costas had a four- or five-load session in the hour-and-a-half before going into work, another couple right after coming home. Then he came in to drop a few more before turning in around ten. Staying up to watch those last got Eric yelled at by both his mother and his grandmother.
But the back wall of Costas’ cabin, below the bathroom window, now carried Eric’s own growing stain.
Saturdays and Sundays, Costas did it non-stop, leaving the john only to eat — or, more often, bringing in a sandwich wrapped with wax paper, a cardboard boat of French fries, and a king-sized Bud, which he parked on the tub’s enameled edge, while, with stubble-blackened cheek and neck, tufted knuckles, sable chest hair, and hirsute arms bespattered, he labored to loose another load. Once fallen on thigh, belly, wrist, arm — or shiny photo — it stayed. As far as Eric could tell, three weeks without a shower and only a hand washing every couple of days was Costas’ norm.
Till then Eric had thought he himself held the record.
But it was no contest.
That Memorial Day, in back of the creosoted wall, Eric got there before sunrise. He tried to keep up, but stopped after two hours — though he wouldn’t leave except to return to his grandmother’s for lunch and dinner. Between six in the morning and ten twenty-seven that night, Costas busted his nut twenty-two times that Eric counted, all over himself or his stained ladies. (Unlike Eric, Costas never ate his spunk, though he’d rub the remains around balls, belly, and gut.) Feeling a lot better about his — back then — five-to-six-times a day, Eric had left Hugantown to live with Mike.
If Costas was an indicator, half a dozen a day was nothing to worry about…
There would be something to do in Diamond Harbor.
To the highway’s right a blue and white sign said TRUCK STOP ½ MILE. “We gotta pull in there.”
“What in the world for?”
“’Cause I gotta shit — that’s why.”
“Oh…You know, Diamond Harbor’s only a few more miles.” Mike slowed the Chevy. “You’d think you could hold it fifteen minutes till we got to Barb’s — ”
“You wanna hold it for me?” Eric grinned. “Cup your hands. Look, I won’t be long.” (There couldn’t be two truck stops so close…)
“I think you’re more comfortable goin’ in a public john than in your own home. Me, I can piss anywhere. But I cannot shit in no road-side can.”
“Well,” Eric said, “that don’t bother me.”