It was almost ten o’clock, but hardly anyone was around. Kyle said he’d heard that girls from Stella Maris High School hung out there. Actually he said Stella Mattress. That was the school’s nickname because the girls were known to screw around a lot. “Where are they?” I asked, hankering to meet a bunch of drunk Catholic school girl sluts. Kyle brushed his cheek Marlon Brando-style and said, “trust me, Gahdfaddah, they’ll be here.” Rick, Mike, and I looked at each other out of the corner of our eyes, as if to say, “Kyle had better be right about this place.” So we drank beers out of little plastic cups and waited.
When I’d first entered Kearney’s I felt as if Maria was somehow forcing me to be there. But as I gulped one beer after the other, that feeling of coercion dissipated and was replaced by culpability. I have no one to blame but myself, I thought. Kyle, always the most perceptive of The Family, and like a solid consigliere, pulled his stool beside mine and consoled me.
“What’s wrong, Captain A.J. ? he asked. “Maria been treatin’ ya bad? Want me to break her legs for ya?”
He was only kidding, of course. But he was my consigliere, my advisor, so he was supposed to lift my spirits like that. And I could tell by the look in his eyes that he was genuinely interested in my reason for being at Kearney’s. He knew how much I hated bars. I responded with an incredulous glance. I placed my hand on his shoulder. “Kyle, my plan is simple: I want to meet a girl tonight, fuck her, and forget all about Maria. We’ve been fighting so much lately, that whatever happens tonight can only make it better.” I gulped the backwash at the bottom of my cup, the remnants of my fourth beer in just under forty minutes.
“You sure that’s a good idea, Boss?” he asked. “I mean, what about what happened in Virginia? Did that help ya any?” He had a point: I was more paranoid than ever since Virginia. But the beer made it all seem so logical.
“I don’t know, consigliere,” I said. “If I were to fuck a girl tonight, man, nothing that bothers me about Maria would ever bother me again.”
Kyle rubbed his chin in doubt. At the time, I had a good reason for wanting to meet a girl. But good is a relative term, isn’t it? The more I thought about Maria and her past and her lying, the more I figured that a one night stand would make up for it all. I reasoned I could replace my sinister opinion of Maria with passionately pleasant thoughts of some other girl. Only then would I stop worrying about Maria. Sounds like a load of shit, huh? Well, it really made sense at the time. “If I could just get a back-up girlfriend again,” I said, “then all would be well.”
Kyle sat in silence, mulling my statement over. I ordered another beer.
“I don’t know,” he said, “maybe you should just try to forget about this shit without cheating. I mean, you’re going to the Academy next year, Maria loves ya, what more could ya want?”
At that moment, three girls, two Asian, one Hispanic, skipped into Kearney’s. I chugged my fifth beer and pointed them out to Kyle. Like hunters eyeing three deer in the woods, Kyle and I, without uttering a word, descended upon them.
Not two feet from these chicks, with a clear mission to accomplish, my mind drew a blank. What the fuck am I doing? How can I possibly get a girl to fuck me tonight? As quickly as these thought entered my jittery head, they were vanquished by Kyle’s smooth operation.
“Can we buy you a drink?” Kyle asked them. “Sure,” responded one of the Asian girls. All three giggled. Hook, line, and sinker, I thought.
The music in Kearney’s pounded continuously, so we could hardly hear their names. The one I liked, though, was Maggie. Maggie Rodriguez, a stunning Latina with cinnamon skin and exhilarating green eyes. Her thick hair draped her shoulders like a blanket. It was the color of a crow.
Goddamnit it, she’s hot, I thought. Do you think I’m cute? I asked Maggie with the flicker of my eyes.
Yes, she answered, with a glint of a smile.
I asked her where she was from, about her classes, and told her she was beautiful about a thousand times. “I’m a senior,” I repeated more than once. She seemed to like hearing that. I was so confident
Whenever I had a girlfriend, my confidence level went through the roof. Hell, even if I was rejected, I’d still have someone to go back to. The fact that these chicks were freshman furnished me with a remarkable hubris unlike any that I’d felt before. The more Maggie spoke to me, the faster her lashes flapped like a butterfly’s wings, repeating, with each flap, Yes, yes, yes! I want you, A.J.! Her white mini-skirt and red top allowed her to glow like no Colombian girl I’d ever seen before. As I stood there yessing her to death, Kyle, loyal consigliere that he was, kept his distance entertaining her Asian friends. Maggie and I went through the obligatory teenage bullshit: “Where are you from?” “What’s your favorite movie?” “What kind of music do you like?” “How old are you?” But I was hardly listening. I ached to stuff my face between her big brown tits and inhale her cleavage.
I don’t remember much about her, but I do remember that Maggie was fifteen, and lived in Elmhurst, a few blocks from the bar. I think the schools in Elmhurst are like ninety percent immigrant. To her neighbors, she was just another non-white girl amidst the Indian restaurants and Chinese take-out places. To me she was exotic. As different as Maria was from me, Maggie was my diametrical opposite. Her nights, she told me, were spent hanging out on her stoop, meringue blaring from boom boxes down the block, smoking pot and sipping cheap wine, trying to keep the ugliest of the hoods from groping her body, flirting with the best-looking ones. Saturday night at Kearney’s was the highlight of each week, worth sporting her best clothing and donning a layer of makeup. She was pretty but poor. I’m gonna be her knight in shining armor, I thought.
Maggie was roughly Maria’s height and weight, but thinner and bustier. Had I not been so drunk by that point, and so close to passing out, I would’ve nestled my face into her bosom and suckled her chocolate nipples. But I didn’t. I played it cool. And as Kyle talked with her friends, Maggie and I walked outside to smoke a cigarette. It was pretty cold outside, and smoking, of course, was allowed in the bar. But, for some reason, we felt compelled to listen to each other in private, almost as if some brand of unique fate had brought us together, and we wanted to let it play out.
We hit it off at first. Maggie found everything I said funny and I enjoyed her conversation. She was Puerto Rican, with two brothers and three sisters. She said the only reason she went to Stella Maris was because she got some sort of music scholarship. Her father ran off when she was five.
Shockingly, I discovered all of that information within the first ten minutes or so. I couldn’t believe it. For some odd reason, Maggie was baring her soul to me, in front of a run-down bar on Queens Boulevard. She said she’d never had a serious boyfriend because she didn’t trust most guys enough to like them. “All of my boyfriends have been hoods,” she said, stressing the last word as one might say cancer. I said that might be because her father had run off when she was a kid, imprinting her mind with a negative idea of men. She agreed whole-heartedly, and, I thought, fell in love with me at that moment.
To give you an idea about the state of my mind that night, when Maggie mentioned that she’d had “plenty of sex,” and, in the same breath, that she’d once “fucked two guys at once,” I didn’t think twice about it. Looking back on it now—I mean, think about it—she was fifteen years old, and yet she’d had “plenty” of sex!—I could’ve caught syphilis or AIDS or God-knows-what. But I didn’t give a shit, I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was carry out my plan.