They were standing by the car in the direct sun. The heat was coming up in waves off the sidewalk. Billy held the bag of beer and cherry pies under his arm.
“Drink this brew before it gets too hot to drink it,” said Billy.
“Who don’t know that?” said Alex.
Pete watched Billy smoke. Pete didn’t use cigarettes himself. His father said his friends came from uneducated people and that was why they had stupid habits. Pete took mild offense at this and expressed it vocally, but he felt in his heart that his father was right.
“Y’all ready to get torched?” said Billy.
Alex shrugged a Why not? There was nothing to do on this Saturday afternoon but get higher than they were now.
Billy finished smoking. He flicked his cigarette out into the parking lot with practiced nonchalance.
“Let’s roll, Clitoris,” said Pete to Billy Cachoris.
They got back into the Ford.
They drank six more beers and smoked another joint of Colombian, scored that morning, and got stoned and reckless behind the alcohol they had been pouring on empty stomachs. “Tumbling Dice” was finishing up on the radio, and Pete had cranked it up. In front, Billy and Pete were heatedly discussing the Fourth of July Stones concert, which had included good bud, a party ball of sour mash whiskey, and a girl in a halter top.
“God made halters,” said Billy, “so blind guys can grab tit.”
“Jenny Maloney,” said Pete, naming the pom-pom girl at their high school whom the boys called the Hole. “She’s got this one halter top, boy…”
Alex remembered the girl in the halter top and Peanut jeans who had danced in front of him during the concert. He could recall the details of the entire day. He, Billy, and Pete had gone down to RFK Stadium on the morning of the Fourth in the Whitten family Oldsmobile and parked in the main lot, where the Dead and the Who were blasting from the open windows of cars and vans. They had brought sandwiches, packed by Alex’s mom, and a dude in a wheelchair traded them a small piece of hash for a ham-and-Swiss. They smoked it, got up immediately, and went to join the crowds moving toward the venue. When the gates opened, the expected chaotic surge ensued, caused by the festival seating policy, which had thousands trying to enter the stadium at once. Coolers holding bottles of beer and liquor were being smashed by security guards, and at one point Alex was pinned against a chain-link fence, only to be rescued by Billy, who yelled, “Jerry Kramer!” with joy as he body-blocked a big man to the ground and set Alex free. Alex, Billy, and Pete found seats behind the dugout, where Alex had sat with his father at baseball games before the Nats left town, and commenced smoking one of the many joints they had rolled that morning with Top papers. Martha Reeves and the Vandellas came on first, played “Dancing in the Street,” and when they sang the phrase “Baltimore and D.C.,” the audience lit up. The girl in the halter top danced before them, her hips alive, and the boys imagined her in the act, all of them transfixed. Stevie Wonder appeared next, oddly opening with “Rockin’ Robin,” a hit for Michael Jackson earlier that year, and then got the throngs going when he moved into his own material. During “Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours),” a handler came out and turned Stevie around, as he was inadvertently singing to the empty, obstructed-view portion of the stands. After a dead period during which people got more inebriated, more unruly, and more high, the Stones walked onto the stage, and Mick Jagger, cocaine skinny in a white jumpsuit and red silk scarf, shouted, “Hello, campers!” launching the band into “Brown Sugar.” Forty thousand were up on their feet, fueled by alcohol, speed, acid, pot, and youth. A police officer twirled his nightstick in unison with the rhythm section. The band played cuts from Exile on Main Street, which had recently been released. Mick Taylor’s guitar solo on “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” was epic. Jagger pranced, pirouetted, and whipped the stage with a leather belt during “Midnight Rambler.” Jagger toasted the crowd with a bottle of Jack, saying, “I drink to your independence.” Tear gas drifted in from police action outside the stadium. The boys’ eyes burned, but they didn’t care. Girls who tried to climb onstage were thrown off or hauled away by security and had their hands cut by nails driven up through the stage’s edge. Near the end of the concert, during a violent “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” the houselights were turned on, and the smoke in the air was industrial as it moved up into the night sky. Alex could not remember being happier. He had never experienced anything like this and doubted that anything in his life would ever top it.
“The Hole must wear a halter top down there, too,” said Billy. “ ’Cause she likes to allow that easy access.”
“For real,” said Pete.
Billy and Pete were still talking about Jenny Maloney. Alex wondered how long they had been discussing her. He wondered if he had blacked out.
“I know you had your fingers in it,” said Billy, setting Pete up.
“I had my arm in it, man,” said Pete. “In the stairwell up at the HoJo hotel? Her parents were giving her a sweet sixteen party and shit. While they were passing out party favors, me and Jenny were up there on the landing, making out, and she put one foot up on this step and took my hand and kinda guided it up there. I didn’t need no petroleum jelly, either, no lie…”
As Pete went on, Alex Pappas tuned him out. Billy and Pete always sat together up front, and at some point when they were partying, they forgot he was in the car. He didn’t mind. The things they said when they were high, he had heard them all before. Pete, elbow deep in Jenny Maloney’s pussy at her sweet sixteen party, in the stairwell of the HoJo hotel up in Wheaton while her parents passed out birthday hats in the rented room… no shit, he knew it by heart.
Alex looked out the window. The world outside was tilted a bit and moving, and he blinked to stop the spin. He could feel the sweat dripping down his chest under his T. They were at the red light at the Boulevard. They were in the middle lane, which meant straight only. He had never been “over there” to Heathrow Heights, and as far as he knew, neither had his friends. He vaguely wondered why Billy was in this lane. He remembered the conversation between Billy and Pete the night before, and he thought: Now Billy is going to show us that he is not afraid.
PGC was playing “Rocket Man.” The song reminded Alex of his girlfriend, Karen. Karen lived on a street called Lovejoy. Billy called the street “Lovejew” because the neighborhood was heavy with the Tribe. In the spring, Alex and Karen had cut school and gone out to Great Falls in Karen’s eggplant-colored Valiant. They swam in a natural pool and drank warm Buds, sunning themselves on the rocks. On the way home, Karen let Alex drive her car. “Rocket Man” was on the radio, and Karen sat beside him smoking a cigarette, shivering in her bikini top and damp jeans, tapping ash into the tray as she sang along to the song and sometimes smiled at him with strands of black hair stuck to her face. Karen’s cold father and hateful stepmother made him want to protect her. He pondered if this was what it meant to love someone and he guessed that he did love Karen. He thought, I should be with her right now.
“What are we gonna do when we get in there?” said Pete.
“Just fuck with ’em,” said Billy. “Raise a little hell.”
Alex wanted to say, “Let me out here.” But his friends would call him a pussy and a faggot if he did.
Alex looked through the windshield as Billy caught the green.
They were crossing the Boulevard and then they were across it, going down an incline along the railroad tracks and past a bridge that spanned the tracks and then down into a neighborhood of ramshackle homes and cars that said poor. There were three young black guys grouped on the sidewalk ahead, in front of what looked like a country store. Two of the guys were shirtless and one of them wore a white T-shirt that had numbers written on it in Magic Marker. Alex noticed that one of the shirtless ones had a scar on his face. Pete and Billy were rolling down their windows.