I had my library pass and Arash made it a habit to skip English class so we could go to the abandoned junior high. It was always the same thing when we went. I made him come, but never came myself. I never took my own clothes off. I let him kiss me and touch my breasts while I stayed focused on our actions so I wouldn’t start to feel things. In school he pretended not to know me. He didn’t want his friends to know. I wasn’t allowed to say hello when he was with them, but I didn’t care. I took my outcast status out on Simon, the school’s reigning nerd: tall, bookish, and already hunchbacked at sixteen, with wide teeth and thick gums. I had observed him during my library hours. He spent time there, reading and practicing for Speech and Debate. He was the captain of the team and of any other school team that didn’t involve having to move your body. He was a year ahead of me and always carried around a huge book that looked like a brown brick. I asked him if I could look at it one day. It had thin pages. There was a painting of a beautiful woman in colorful clothes on the cover. It was an anthology of American literature. Simon spoke to me about his Advanced English class. That was the place to be if you wanted to go to a good college. He had done so well on his tests that he had applied to college early and had already been accepted to Harvard. I leafed through the pages of his book and fell in love with it. Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe. I loved Thoreau and the way he wrote about nature. I cried reading Harriet Jacobs, became obsessed with Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and wrote down every Gertrude Stein title I could find so I could get all her books. Simon talked about what life at a university would be like and made it sound nothing like the Valley. He used a language I had never heard anyone my age use. His nose was thin and long, his eyes focused. Soon I started noticing other kids in school walking around with that same anthology. They were like a nerd cult, but I felt I had something in common with them. They were calmer, almost invisible, a kind of substrata. I wanted that book. I wanted to be where that book was, but I was not willing to take my suit off yet. So I kept it on and followed my usual procedure. I invited myself over to Simon’s house, asking him to tutor me. I told him I wanted to move up from my regular window-spitting English class and join the league of Advanced English students like himself. He had no friends and neither did I. Plus he wore Birkenstock sandals with white socks. Nobody in socks and sandals could reject me.
I showed up at his house with a short, glittering dress and no underwear. His parents were at work. Their cocker spaniel, Leonard, minded his own business. Simon tried to explain to me how to answer the analogy questions on SAT tests, but I just looked him straight in the eyes until he blushed and turned away. His big toes wriggled inside the spongy white socks. I slid his hand under my dress and opened my legs, staring at his feet. Why would anyone wear socks with sandals? I kept thinking. It looked so bad that I promised myself I would never tell anyone about us. I’d just close my eyes and pretend like it never happened. A hard-on poked through his matted sweatpants. I got up, lifted my dress, and sat on his lap, letting the ugly polyester rub against my naked skin. Simon turned red. Leonard barked. Simon kicked him under the table while I pulled down his pants. He turned me around and kissed me with an uncertain jolt. We groped each other toward his bed and fell over. Then we were both naked and soon even he wasn’t a virgin anymore.
We had tutoring and sex sessions twice a week after school. We did everything together. I was unashamed and felt fine bossing him around. I warned him not to tell anyone about us, just like Arash warned me. On his birthday I put his penis on my ass and slid it inside. It felt too deep and I got scared because for a moment my rubber suit had come off and I felt my legs trembling. I breathed my way back into numbness and then went to the bathroom to shower off. The suit functioned within certain boundaries. It was important not to overstep them. My writing improved and so did my English. Finally Simon introduced me to Mrs. Perks, the Advanced English teacher. She asked me to give her some writing samples and said she’d consider me for the future.
During school I hooked up with Arash, after school I hooked up with Simon, and at home I started making out with Robert the Goth screenwriter. I finally got to him. He slipped notes inside my backpack and doodled in my schoolbooks. I lured him into the bathroom one day, kissed him hard against the shower curtain, and asked him to tell me about the crazy things he did and the drugs he had to take for his mental problems. I hoped showing interest in his dark side would make me intriguing in his eyes.
When I went out with him I told my parents I was going bowling in the Valley with friends from school. They were too happy to hear the word friends to not let me go.
Robert and I drove an hour to get to an animation festival in Pomona. On our way I asked him if I could smoke a cigarette and he said he hated smokers.
“You guys always open a crack in the window like it’s going to make the car less smoky. That’s bullshit. Cracks don’t help. Just smoke, okay? But leave the window closed.”
The theater was filled with drunk college students.
Robert offered me the Valium his doctors prescribed for his mood swings. I washed the pill down with vodka from his flask. When the lights went down I began to feel heavy. It was one of those festivals where audience participation was required and everybody screamed at the screen. A bird molested a cat on top of a tree. Robert, elated, launched his flask at him and yelled, “Fuck you.”
The rest of the audience joined him and started throwing random objects at the screen. Tomatoes were involved. When it was over, Robert burped and said he didn’t really know any other date-y type places. I was on my first American date, it occurred to me—the kind where you wore cardigans and drove to lookout spots. A date where I was supposed to wear a bra he could clumsily undo, but I knew it was too late to have romantic expectations about this city. My weeks with Arash and Simon said things would not happen that way for me.
I asked Robert to take me to his favorite place and he drove me to an old sewer tunnel beneath the Pomona freeway where a small gathering of homeless people slept on blankets on the ground. I stumbled over one of them, but he was too drunk to notice. There were murals and graffiti on the walls, remnants of the LA riots: “Riots Not Diets!” “Crips, Bloods, Mexicans Together. Fuck LAPD.” The sound of water trickling through the tunnel made it hard to tell if there was anything to be scared of. Robert and I walked into darkness and sat in a dry area at the end of the path. He finally kissed me and rolled down my tights and underwear. I was so cold I barely recognized his small tongue coming at me, insidious and ineffective. All I could feel was the freezing air scratching my naked thighs. I turned over and tried to give him a blow job. He was so cold that his penis had shriveled into a stub, and though I breathed my inner vapors onto it, it stayed flaccid. Robert mumbled something about how cold it was and how the Valium did something. We decided to just make out. He gave me a hickey and laughed.
“I fucked up your neck,” he said.
I remembered an episode of Happy Days when everybody gathered around Ralph Malph at Arnold’s so he could show off his new hickey to his friends. Wasn’t it supposed to be romantic and exciting to receive hickeys?
Our date was not working out, so Robert proposed we go to his house. He lived in a place called Soledad Canyon. The landscape was so barren and lunar that many Star Trek episodes had been shot there. His house was in a cul-de-sac in the middle of nowhere. The place was pristine and cold, the furniture preserved in shiny protective plastic covers. His father, a downtown LAPD detective, snored in front of the TV next to a pair of crutches that leaned by him on the couch. He woke up when he heard us and gurgled something about Robert having to warn him when he left home.
Robert ignored him and headed straight for his bedroom. I nodded hello, but the man growled at me and closed his eyes again, curling up in a fetal position, squeaking against the cushions of the plastic-covered sofa.
—
“Can you work as a cop when you have crutches?” I asked Robert when we stepped in his room.
“He’s on leave. He was on duty during the riots and got fucked up by the assholes who were looting.”
“Wow, I can’t believe he was there. He was part of it.”
Over the bed was a framed Nekromantik poster showing a skeleton clutching a woman’s breast. Robert opened a drawer and pulled out a switchblade.
“Yeah, I wish they’d killed him.”
“Why?”
“I’m just kidding,” he mumbled. “You don’t get my sense of humor, huh?”
I tried to laugh. I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t tough enough.
“Anyway, he hit a couple of bastards with the butt of his gun They hit him back. It was crazy.”
“Why the hell did he hit them? Don’t you think the police have done enough hitting?”
“There’s never enough hitting.” Robert smirked and passed me the knife. It was the original one from Nekromantik. Worth money, he said, and gave it to me as a gift.