"Fuck you. Show some amazement. They have peach-flavored rubbers. And kids come here to socialize, to hang around and see what's doing. I'm waiting to hear Al Hibbler sing 'Unchained Melody' "
"Al Hibbler was good."
"Good? Fuck you good. He was amazing. You think Ray Charles is blind? Al Hibbler, that was blind. Show some response."
He led me down an aisle. My response was, Look at all these condoms. Studded, snug, ribbed, bareback. We used to say, Don't go in bareback. Meaning wear a rubber or you'll knock her up. Now there were rubbers called barebacks, electronically tested for sheerness and sensitivity.
"These will replace running shoes," Brian said. "Kids will shoot each other for expensive lambskin condoms."
There were loose condoms sold in bowls, in candy jars-grab a handful. A woman looked at a display model of a polyurethane sheath with flexible rings at either end. Brian knew her from the automated teller machine at his bank-hello, how are you, hi, hello. There were finger condoms and full-body condoms, oral condoms with a minty savor. There were condom cases, pocket-sized, and a condom you could wear as a hat.
Brian said, "My brother carried a rubber in his wallet all through adolescence. He showed it to me once, I think I was twelve. Flipped open his wallet and showed me this little wizened thing like a deflated penis and I don't think I ever recovered. This was a world I wasn't ready to enter. I could understand sex on the animal level. This was something else entirely. Something about the material, the plasticky sort of rubber, the look and touch, he made me touch it, and the whole nature and function of the thing, I don't know, it was alien and unsettling. Sex alone was tough enough to encounter. This was technology they wanted to wrap around my dick. This was mass-produced latex they used to paint battleships."
"You were a sensitive boy."
"I was scrawny and mute, barely human. You were a strapping kid who beat the crap out of kids like me."
"We didn't have any kids like you," I told him.
"You carried a rubber?"
"In the little slit pocket in my dungarees."
"By the time I was sixteen they weren't doing that anymore."
"They're doing it now," I said.
"I don't think my brother ever used the condom in his wallet. When he got a car he put it in the car. He put it in the glove compartment. That's when I think he finally got to use it."
A man was singing softly along, crooning the lyrics on the sound system. He moved haltingly toward us pushing a cylinder of oxygen on wheels, a gray-haired guy, with tubes from the tank running all the way up into his nose. The tank was the size of a dachshund in a custom case. And he sang, he crooned in a rasping voice-he had the phrasing, the timing just right, the lazy line endings, some insipid lyric about a farewell letter, only altered in his gnawed voice to a life's own shape, felt in the deepest skin.
We moved out of the way to let him pass.
Behind the products and their uses we glimpsed the industry of vivid description. Dermasilk and astroglide and reservoir-tipped. There were condoms packaged as Roman coins and condoms in matchbook folders. Brian read aloud from the copy on the boxes. We had natural animal membranes and bubblegum scenting. We had condoms that glowed in the dark and foreplay condoms and condoms marked with graffiti that stretched to your erection, a letter becoming a word, a word that expands to a phrase. He did a little Churchill-We shall wear them on the beaches. We had lollipop condoms, we had boxer shorts printed with cartoon characters shaped like condoms standing on end, sort of floaty and nipple-headed, who spoke a language called Spermian.
A young woman stood near the door, a Ramses logo tattooed on her earlobe.
"My kid's got one of those," Brian said. "Only it says Pepsi, Should I be grateful?"
"Which kid?"
"Which kid. What's the difference?"
Brian was wary of his family. He adopted the put-upon pose df the father complaining routinely about kids who are careless with money and forgetful of every caution, we all have this act we perform, it amounts to a second language, the dad's easy-to-master lament, and Brian did scornful solos of high animation, but he also harbored something deeper and sadder, a sense that these were his enemies, forces loose in his own house prepared to drain him of self-worth, a stepdaughter, a daughter and a son, all in high school, and a wife, he said, who was a couple of bubbles off center.
"That's not the only thing she's got planted on her body."
"Which kid?" I said.
"Brittany."
"I like Brittany Be nice to her."
"Be nice to her. Listen to this, she wears an armband, you won't believe this-they had Apartheid Simulation Day at her school."
"What's that?"
"What it says. They attempt to simulate the culture of apartheid. A lesson for the kids. They all wore armbands. You wore gold if you were the oppressed class and I think red if you were the military and green if you were the elite. Brittany volunteered for the oppressed class and now she won't take her armband off. The official simulation lasted one day but she's been doing this for weeks now. Nobody else is doing this but her. She restricts her access to the lunchroom, ten minutes a day She only rides certain buses at certain times. She sits in a specified area of the classroom."
"How do the other kids react?"
"She gets spat upon and shunned."
He made a TV screen with his hands, thumbs horizontal, index fingers upright, and he looked out at me from inside the frame, eyes crossed, tongue lolling in his head.
We took a final turn around the room. A boy and girl in one of the murals sat in a booth with ice-cream sundaes and frosty glasses of water and long-handled spoons for the sundaes and the scene was not contrived to be charming but was close to documentary in tone and the whole place was a little museumlike, I thought, with time compressed and objects arrayed of evolutionary interest. And a woman sang a ballad about a chapel in the moonlight, vaguely familiar to me, and I turned to see if the man with the oxygen tank was still singing along.
Brian bought a package of condoms to give to his son David, a buddy-buddy thing, a token of communication and accord. We went outside and stood in the empty plaza and he opened the box and removed a single sheath in its foil wrap. He looked at it. He had a sputter-laugh he saved for certain occasions, like a semidrowned man bitter about being rescued, and he looked at the thing and laughed.
"Everybody talked about VD then. The clap was a term with a very decisive ring to it. The clap."
"The siff."
"All those terms, one worse than the other. But I couldn't detect a saving element in a condom. Maybe because it brought to mind another term."
"Scumbag."
"And in my little retard sort of twelve-year-old brain, maybe I sensed a secret life in this object in my brother's wallet, this scumbag-how could a thing called a scumbag be safe to use?"
"We're waste managers," I told him. "Scumbags are things we deal with."
"But think of the contempt we invest in this word. It's an ugly word. Full of self-loathing."
"Never mind the words. You bought a rubber for your kid because it's important for him to use it. I hate to be sensible. I know it's thankless to be sensible in the face of someone's primitive distrust."
"You're right."
"People have to use these things."
"You're right," he said. "It's thankless."
He unwrapped the condom and shook it out until the nipple end swung lightly in the breeze. Then he crumpled the thing in his fist and held it to his nose.
He said, "What does it smell like? Is it shower curtains? Is it car upholstery or lampshade liner? Is it those big blocky garment bags where you store the clothes you never wear?"