Bloodthirsty

Chapter 9
A combination of factors led me to use the word cock in my seventh-period AP literature class.
I’d been at Pelham Public for a month and a half now. And, for all that time, in the back of my mind I’d been ruminating about how sexual vampires were. I mean, isn’t sex the reason the vampire trend has lasted so long? Back in the day, Dracula seduced all these pale, ruffly virgins. Now, Chauncey Castle’s pale face glowers from Bloodthirsty posters on walls all over the country, fixed on teenage girls in their beds. And the girls love it.
Beyond the attraction factor, vampires are supposed to be really good at sex. Hence all of the talk about “the only thing harder and more powerful than Chauncey Castle’s fangs.” And hence all the action that made Virginia White’s breasts “shiver,” “quiver,” and “tremble” in every damn chapter of that book.
Frankly, I didn’t know what it meant to be good at sex. I’d always assumed my first sexual experience would be kinda like my trip to the Touch Tunnel in the Museum of Science and Industry. I’d plunge in blindly. I’d feel my way around while more experienced personnel watched and laughed from an infrared camera. And I’d hope to emerge before I ran out of oxygen.
In fact, I felt really uncomfortable with the idea of sex. It didn’t help that, at St. Luke’s, guys had this game where they would concoct ridiculous and fictional sexual terms, claim they were real but obscure, and taunt each other with them. Actually, usually they would taunt me with them, as I was a target who didn’t have the balls to admit I didn’t know what something meant. For example, Johnny Frackas would call across study hall:
“Hey, Fagbar, I bet you don’t know what a pickle flip is.”
A pickle flip? No, I didn’t know. In my head I’d file furiously through every Maxim magazine I’d ever stolen, or try to picture pages of my anatomical encyclopedia. I’d rack my head generating possible moves and positions and perverse acts that could constitute a pickle flip.
Well, the verb to flip generally means to rearrange from facedown to faceup. Or vice versa. Or, used in a more gymnastic sense, flip could mean a full three hundred and sixty degree turn of the body. Like a somersault. Pickle was pretty obvious. Pretty alliterative. Pickle equaled, well, you know. But I couldn’t do a somersault with my…
“Hey, guys!” Johnny Frackas would call out, interrupting my lengthy pause. “Fagbar doesn’t know what a pickle flip is!”
My face would turn red, and I wouldn’t have anything to say in return. And why not? Because I assumed that every guy in the room knew something I didn’t.
That was how a bunch of Catholic schoolboys taught me an important lesson about sex. All you have to do to make people think you know about sex is talk about it a lot.
Although I planned to put this theory into action and bring sex into a conversation—the more people in the conversation the better—I hadn’t found the right opportunity yet. Whenever I was with a group of guys and girls from class and we broached that subject area, either some other guy made a dumb dirty joke and swiped my chance or I didn’t notice the opening to bring up sex until it was too late. To be fair, I had been busy lately, and distracted, mainly by physical exhaustion.
Luke’s training regimen was killing me. He woke me up every morning at 5:45 AM. Luke begins his own strength training by lifting 130 pounds—that is, by lifting 130 pounds of reluctant Finbar out of his warm bed. Then we both do cardio—running three friggin’ miles around our neighborhood when only people dumb enough to own dogs are awake. Then it’s back upstairs (and every step f*cking burns. Why do our stairs have so many damn steps?). Then it’s so much weight lifting you would think the two of us were filming a Total Gym infomercial in our bedroom. I’m not sure that my body is made for exercise. Since starting this whole thing with Luke, I’d suffered sunburn (yes, sometimes even before the sun rose. Life—and UV rays—are cruel), shin splints, a strained bicep, a twisted ankle, a sweat rash, and a groin pull. With that last injury, Luke tried to administer some first aid, and I think we accidentally violated some New York State incest laws.
I had also been getting busy because of Kate. No, not getting busy with Kate. Wrong preposition. But I had been getting a lot closer to her. We ate lunch together almost every day. She told me she wanted to start an investment club at our school.
“You can make money off these online stock market games!” Kate told me. “Well, if you beat those douche bags from the high school of economics.”
Well, I definitely wanted to beat those douche bags from the high school of economics. Mostly so I could impress Kate. So I wasn’t going to admit how bad I was at math. Math is supposed to be one of those things guys are good at. So I checked out A Kid’s Guide to Stock Market Investing from the library. I also asked Matt Katz for advice, because apparently his dad was a successful investor.
“Sure, I’ll ask Dad for some stock names,” Matt Katz told me. “He’s good. He earned so much last year he bought my stepmom a whole new face.”
While Kate got me interested in the investment club and even made math a little bit sexy, I recommended books for her to read and admitted to her that I like poetry.
“Really?” she smiled. “I never knew a guy who liked poems.”
Except for those homos from the Dead Faggots Society, I finished in my mind. That’s what Johnny Frackas had called me after my poem was published in the St. Luke’s Lit: “One of those homos from the Dead Faggots Society.”
“Which poets are good?” Kate asked. “You should tell me which ones to read. Remember I’m a beginner.”
“Yeats and Frank O’Hara are awesome,” I began. “And H.D., and Jeffrey McDaniel is really funny and stuff. But if you like more traditional kinda rhymey stuff, definitely do Shakespeare’s sonnets.”
“Shakespeare?” Kate tilted her head with mock thoughtfulness. “Never heard of him.”
“He’s a pretty good writer.” I grinned. “Doesn’t get the respect he deserves.”
And, actually, it was poetry that provided me with my sexual opening (haha). Mrs. Rove’s introduction to our poetry unit gave me the opportunity to dirty-talk the pants off my seventh-period literature class.
On a dull rainy Tuesday in mid-October, our AP literature teacher announced, “This is Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress.’ ” Mrs. Rove kind of looked like Hillary Clinton, but she had this huge Escalade in the teachers’ parking lot, so she must have had a secret gangsta side. Or a stockbroker husband.
My classmates turned their heads from the drug deal going down in the parking lot and groaned in remarkable unison. Even AP students hated the poetry unit. But me, I stopped doodling fangs in the margins of my looseleaf and looked up expectantly. This was my chance to dominate English class and flaunt my vampire intelligence and confidence. “To His Coy Mistress” was one of my favorite poems! Actually, it was part of my favorite genre of poems, which could be called Poems Guys Write to Get Girls to Sleep with Them. Maybe I like poetry for the same reason I like really clever rappers, like Nas and Talib Kweli and A Tribe Called Quest: because I secretly hope I can develop the verbal skills to seduce a woman. Sure, right now I can barely remember my name around hot girls like Kate, but I’m more likely to develop verbal skills than biceps.
“Mr. Kirkland, please pass on those poems,” she called out. “Mr. Kirkland!”
Mr. Kirkland, aka Nate the Nosepicker, woke up and then passed the pile. He forgot to give himself a copy.
“Now that you’ve had a few minutes to read this over for a first impression,” Mrs. Rove said, “can anyone tell me what this poem is about?”
Ashley Milano thrust her hand upward.
“Time’s wing-udd chariot,” Ashley Milano pronounced carefully. “That’s a symbol! It stands for… like, how everyone’s getting old really fast.”
Ashley Milano knew symbols. Her intelligence stopped there, but she knew symbols.
“Great, Ashley. We’ll definitely be discussing symbols later on,” Mrs. Rove said. “But can anyone give me the general synopsis of the poem? What is the narrator saying? Why did he write this?”
Matt Katz gave a huge snore that pulled his head off his chest. It was so loud he woke himself up. Kayla Bateman was sighing loudly to advertise her frustration at not being able to button her cardigan over her chest. Jason Burke scratched a tic-tac-toe board onto the corner of his poem. Only Ashley displayed any interest—she was hunting down and viciously stabbing at symbols and metaphors with a red pen.
“What is the goal of this poem?” Mrs. Rove asked again.
Silence. I took a final survey of the room. No one was going to speak up.
So I spoke up, without even raising my hand.
“Sex,” I said clearly.
Matt Katz’s snore turned into a choking cough. Jason Burke reached over to clap him on the back. Two girls in the corner painting their nails with Wite-Out widened their eyes at each other and giggled. Ashley Milano’s mouth dropped open. I’d never heard her be quiet for so long.
“Mr. Frame?” Mrs. Rove said.
She sounded stern, but I heard interest in her voice, too. She gestured for me to go on.
“The speaker of this poem wants to have sex,” I explained.
“Whaatttt,” Jason Burke drawled in disbelief.
“The speaker tells this woman that if they were both going to live forever, he’d take a lot of time and be romantic,” I explained patiently. “But they’re not, so he won’t. He wants to have sex right away.”
All through the room you could hear stifled laughter, a mild background sound, a buzzing, an indicator of excitement.
“All right, Mr. Frame,” Mrs. Rove said.
She walked out in front of her desk and crossed her arms, like a challenge to me. She asked, “Can you back this theory up with some evidence from our poem here?”
I held the paper in front of my face and examined it critically, although I practically knew the thing by heart. “To His Coy Mistress” was in the seventeen-pound Norton poetry anthology I’d requested for my eighth birthday. I’d read it then, and after puberty I’d read the poem again and saw new meaning in it.
“The speaker asks for sex directly in the last paragraph. He says, ‘let us sport us while we may.’ Basically, ‘let us do it.’ And in the second stanza, he tries to scare her by saying that if they don’t do it now, worms will get at her ‘long preserved virginity.’ The speaker thinks the girl has been a virgin for way too long.
“Further,” I continued, “in the first stanza, the growing ‘vegetable love’ is actually the guy’s erection.”
All over the classroom, students sat straight up.
“Which,” I added, grinning, “means the phrase ‘vaster than empires’ is pretty arrogant on his part.”
Mrs. Rove removed her glasses. When she sat down behind her desk, she seemed to relinquish to me the run of the class.
“What about the title, Mr. Frame?” Mrs. Rove asked. “I’m sure you have something to say about that.”
I cleared my throat, aware that everyone was watching me, and, for once, liking it.
“They said ‘coy’ back then,” I said. “But today, we would call her… a cock-tease.”
Nate Kirkland stopped midpick. Matt Katz had not only woken up, but started taking notes. Later I would see “get a vegetable boner” as that day’s homework in his agenda. Jason Burke had surrendered to himself in the game of tic-tac-toe. And the girls in the class? The way the girls were looking at me, you would think that not only did I know what a pickle flip was, I could also do it damn well.