“Hey you wanna watch a movie or something?” she asked.
“Sure. Got a ton of them out in the hallway. Some are melted though.”
“Melted?”
“Yeah. We’ll have to dig around for ones that aren’t.”
We went out into the kitchen and started going through some of Feral’s cardboard boxes. A sea of VHS. I’d hold up one…
“Ever see this?”
“No. I’ll watch anything though. I’m easy.”
I don’t even remember what movie we settled on. Feral had a small color TV out in the hallway. I scooped it up and brought it in my room. Then I stole Seth’s VCR too. He was passed out in his bed with the light off but with music playing. Glacial-speed shoegaze. Walls of reverb.
We hooked everything up back in my room. Before I knew what was going on, we were both sitting on my bed, shoulder to shoulder. Denise seemed to really like the movie. She kept leaning into me more and more, and soon we were lying down and watching the tape. Then she put her hands on my chest, kissed my neck a little. I certainly wasn’t stopping her.
Halfway through the movie, she had her hands on my belly. I’m getting hard and can’t help it and don’t care anyway.
“Oh, what’s this?” she asked while grabbing my dick through my shorts, biting my ear.
On the TV, something exploded. She took her shirt off. I unclipped her bra. Her left tit had a tattoo in Old English. A scroll. “Daddy’s Lil Angel.”
I thought about Mr. Santalucia with a gun to the back of my head as I sucked on her nipple. It got sharp like a little rock. She stopped me, pushing my mouth away.
“Hey, you got any?”
“Any what? Condoms?”
“You know … blow.”
“Blow? You mean coke? No.”
“Ah, fuck. Really?” She said, pulling back. “I thought you were into that. That’s what I heard.”
“You heard wrong,” I said. “Sorry.” Denise reached down then covered up her chest with her bra.
“I think you got me mixed up with my roommates,” I said. “Either or.”
Denise’s attitude changed. The warmth was gone. She just kept repeating, “Really?” It was a different ballgame now that I didn’t have any drugs. She said it was wrong for us to be screwing around anyway.
“I like you, so then it’s a bad idea, ya know?”
I tried to kiss her, but she pulled away. She got off of my bed, went out the door, said she was real sorry. She blew me a kiss, said, “I’m so embarrassed.” She’d turned awfully red.
I sighed, cursed my luck.
Denise walked down the hallway, went into Seth’s room, and closed the door behind her. She woke him up with kisses on the neck, her warm tongue, her hands all over. He told me all about it later — victor informing the loser.
In the morning, when I woke up, the light streaming through the blinds horribly, I unhooked Seth’s VCR and innocently stepped into his room after lightly knocking.
“Yo. Hey, buddy, you in there?”
I peeked in. The room was empty, but the bed was a mess. I went in and put the VCR back where it belonged.
Then I noticed Denise’s fluorescent purple panties, rolled up in a ball on the floor.
I stared at them for a second but let them be. I closed the door. Went away.
Swamp Bear
I’d never have foreseen it. Soon as I told Denise Santalucia I had no interest in being anywhere near a school, I got a call from a guy at the offices of the community college. The following morning. Synchronicity.
They needed work done on a pond in the center of campus: clean it out, drain the water, ditch the muck, rebuild the collapsing stone walls and waterfall.
As was usually the case, Feral was supposed to come to work with me, but he was nowhere to be found. I walked out of Lagoon House, the A-Team van gone from its usual spot. A pool of oil on the driveway.
I was alone on this one. Seth was up north meeting his brother Mark at Newark airport. Together, they were going to Aunt Kathy’s funeral in upstate New York. I loaded my pickup. Wheelbarrow. Shovels. Submersible pump. Then, I headed out, thinking about Denise and Seth.
Ethan deserved it. I couldn’t exactly pinpoint why. He just deserved it. Have you ever known somebody like that, someone who just deserved the raw end of the deal? They have a face that looks like it was made for punching. You could clearly visualize yourself strangling them.
That’d be a sight. The goofy fuck would turn purple from my choke hold, hitting the panic button on the keychain clicker of his BMW. I laughed, visualizing that while screwing with the radio. A good part of my life was spent screwing with the radio.
I kept scanning through the stations, I was never happy with what I heard. Nothing annoyed me more than listening to the DJs as they rattled on about nothing, played the same songs over and over again.
It was a foggy, strange morning, but the sun was threatening to come out. I drove through my hometown, drinking a large black coffee from a paper cup and squinting. I was always squinting.
I’m that guy without the common sense to buy sunglasses, just squinting through his hometown.
For the first time ever, I made a left onto College Ave. instead of going straight towards the bars, the boardwalk, the Atlantic Ocean. A row of oak trees hugged the road leading towards the grounds of the college. When the trees ended, the grounds revealed themselves as grass covered hills. I never would’ve guessed. The rest of town was flat, lined with scrub pine popping up out of acidic sugar sand. Somehow the community college campus was lush and green, set at random inviting elevations. Swooping. Rolling. Academic.
I couldn’t believe I’d never been there.
The year after high school, I hopped in my Buick and drove across the country to see America any way I could. I’d left Natalie behind, which was fine. She was screwing around behind my back with Charlie. I had no use for either of them after that.
I experienced America by roads west and south, till I hit the Pacific Ocean. Rivers and strange little towns. Mountains growing closer. Clouds spinning around overhead like madness. The surprising appearance of wilderness as the cities peeled away behind a wall of dream.
But I came back to New Jersey because of Seth. I called him from a pay phone in Santa Monica. He wanted me to play guitar in his new band. He sounded blitzed. I got a letter from Trish where she said he was getting pretty heavy into the wrong kinda shit. On the phone, he said, “Come back, I need you, man. Play guitar in my band. We won’t even do covers. I promise.”
I was wasted too. I told him I’d do it.
You can’t outrun where you’re from, anyway. Try all you want, it’s no use.
In the center of the community college campus, I found the concrete pond and parked my F-250 next to it. It was early into a wet and foggy morning, many hours before classes would begin. Every surface of this life was covered in a slimy layer of dew.
I unloaded my submersible pump, threw it in the pond, and started to drain the murky brown water down a steep hill into the woods next to the student parking lot. That lot was vacant, but it was only a matter of time. Kids were coming.
As the concrete pond drained, I thought about that. The embarrassment I’d soon endure. The kids would appear, and I’d be the main attraction at the zoo. Some of them, surely, I didn’t want to see, ones I’d gone through high school with. They continued. I bailed.
I didn’t drink at the bars because I didn’t want to see any of them again. But there I was. The water disappeared, leaving behind a soupy sludge reeking of decay. Putrefied leaves. Dead fish. Plastic Solo cups. A deflated beach ball. Frisbee with the logo of a local bank.
I’d have to go down there and get all the trash and sludge out of the pond. I knew, too, that would be exactly when my horrible peers would find me. I’d be down in the filth, and they’d wonder what’d happened to me. I’d have no good answers either.