World Gone Water (2 page)

As the result of a bet I lost concerning how long I could pleasure Jane in bed (although I was just seven minutes shy of the promised thirty minutes, which, Jane assured me, was only average), I have to go to church with her every Sunday this month.

“If you can prove you're omnipotent, you don't have to go,” she teased. But, of course, I am not.

Jane being the Catholic she is, we sit in one of the back pews, like I used to at mandatory Mass at Randolph Prep, in the Gallery of Heathens. When Mr. Chandler, my guardian's neighbor, used his pull as an alum to help me transfer to Randolph, he didn't mention that it was an all-boys Catholic school, though it hardly mattered. I was all but finished at the public school where his foster daughter Talie went.

The priests march in an impressive parade, dressed in black and red garb, holding long staffs with banners that could have been made during the Crusades, and the head priest—the Pontifex Maximus, the one leading the way—bows prayerfully from side to side.

The entourage halts in front of the congregation, and the priests assemble in an indeterminate order behind a long counter on a stage.
I look over at Jane, who knows I am about to say something snide and ignores me.

The magic act begins with a bowl on the table belching white powder, and I crane my neck to get a better glimpse. One of the elderly priests on the left of the Pontifex Maximus, dangling a charm on the end of a gold chain, begins swinging the chain back and forth, the audience mesmerized. Some sort of liquid is poured into the bowl and now suddenly all of the priests are busy with their hands, and in my mind I superimpose the title
Cooking with Catholics
over the whole scene. I lean over to share this with Jane, but she leans away from me.

After an inordinate amount of standing and sitting, singing and muttering, standing and sitting, I feel the end is near. Anxiety washes over me as I anticipate the benediction, like the anxiety a smoker in a business meeting feels when he senses he will finally get to step outside for a cigarette. There is an unquiet silence and those in the very front pew stand. I groan to myself and fold my hands on the pew in front of me and rest my head in the empty triangle they form. The shuffle of feet and the murmuring of the Eucharist become a drone in my ears as I close my eyes, wondering what I would pray about if I prayed.

I imagine Jane on her knees, at the foot of her bed. Is she praying that we'll get married? Or is she praying for things only for herself—her family's wellness, or for the right decision about California?

Without warning, an image of Jane and her next boyfriend praying together, heads down, hands together, appears in my mind. The suddenness of seeing them quickens my pulse and a bitter irritability creeps through me. The image is static and overpowering, like a giant poster plastered on the wall of my brain, and the thought occurs to me that Jane probably
will
pray for me, given her good,
religious nature. Privately she asks the Lord to watch over me and protect me from evil. This thought stays with me until we are out in the parking lot, and as we climb into Jane's car, I say, “Fuck church.”

“You're the devil,” Jane says.

Before I was anything, I was an Elrod Bullet.

Ms. Saltonstall, my second-grade teacher at Elrod, told me I was her favorite. I was her helper because I held the spoon full of sugar while she held the flame under it during science, because I read longer passages than anyone else during English, because in math I didn't have to go to the board, since Ms. Saltonstall knew I hated it. The girls in my class noticed this and began to believe that I was special too. Whatever I didn't know then, I felt some sort of special force working in my favor—to the exclusion of all the other boys in my class, and it made me a king.

My main group of friends—Wendy, Ronda, Cheryl, and Sally Ann—and I were always together. We would hang off the monkey bars and squeal, or see who could swing higher on the swing set. These girls liked to match whatever I did. If I jumped out of the swing, they'd try to jump farther.

Sometimes Wendy and Ronda went to Cheryl's house, or Cheryl and Wendy would go to Ronda's house, or Cheryl and Ronda went to Wendy's house, or they would all go to Sally Ann's, but I never went to any of their houses. They would invite me, but my grandmother wouldn't let me go. I invited them over once, but
when my grandmother found the five of us in my room playing a game of Sorry! in our bathing suits, she called their mothers, who said they'd assumed my mother was home when they granted permission for the girls to join me for afternoon snacks. I taught the girls a new phrase, “Never assume. It makes an ass out of you and me,” and we laughed about that until Wendy and Ronda and Cheryl and Sally Ann said they didn't want to play with me anymore.

On the last day of school there was a field trip to the Denver Observatory. Even though it was daytime, we were staring at stars through a giant telescope. “How can there be stars?” Wendy asked. None of us understood it, or heard an answer.

If I ever see Wendy or Ronda or Cheryl or Sally Ann—which seems doubtful now; they appear not real but as ghosts in my mind—I'll tell them what I know: that if you really look, you can see what others can't.

My then-best-friend-now-ex-best-friend Jason handles it real cool. He was our high school's master thespian.

“How much each?” he negotiates with the one in the faded Michael Jackson
Thriller
T-shirt.

“Are you cops?” she asks, reaching inside the passenger window. She gives my soft crotch a squeeze.

“We're not cops,” I say. I was against this at first, on principle, but Thriller's touch is warm and I can feel the wheels in motion. Suddenly I'm gung ho.

“I get thirty dollars,” she says. That leaves me with the pregnant one, who turns out to be more expensive, fifty bucks.

Thriller tells us to circle the block, and we take out all our money, counting out what we need, putting the rest in the glove box. When we get them in our headlights again, the pregnant one is pointing toward the alley.

“Just stay relaxed,” the master thespian says. “But keep your eyes open.”

Jason's car reeks of his girlfriend's perfume, even though it's been more than an hour since we dropped Sara off, right after we dropped off Jane. Jason and I have sought out common ground with
these hookers; it's where we left off, what we used to do when we were both transfer students at Randolph Prep, outsiders in an exclusive club. Bumping into Jason in the cereal aisle at an Albertsons, it was like yesterday we threw that cup of warm piss on that guy riding his bike home late, or the time we climbed in the fountain at City Hall, stripping and shitting until we had good-size pieces we could pitch. “Hey, batter, batter. He can't hit, he can't hit, he can't hit,
swing
batter.”

Sure, I felt the old stuff, too. Our jealous rivalry, kept alive in high school more by him than by me, a rivalry that faded the summer of our junior year, when I was selected for a prestigious summer fellowship and he wasn't. The way he produced Sara as evidence that he had the perfect relationship. I introduced him to Jane too, and I could see in his eyes that he was anxious to size me up, see who's who.

Thriller and Preggers wave for us to pull in, dancing impatiently in the headlights.

“What should we do?” I ask.

Jason is watching the two hookers, studying them. In situations like these, his mind is a steel trap. “I'm going to give them a scare.”

He flips the headlights out. Thriller and Preggers disappear into the dark and Jason rolls down his window, yelling “Fucking whores” as he pushes the accelerator to the floor, plunging toward the streetlight at the end of the alley.

Jason knows about what happened to me, and I appreciate the way he treats me like it was just yesterday we were two transfer students at Randolph, him from New York and me from nowhere. It's a good friend who will overlook what other people think about you.

Jason's bar, Aztecka, is packed, the strobes lighting the massive movement of people on the dance floor. I cross Camelback Road and walk up to the door. An ultra-yuppie couple appears, their noses turned up at the industrialites crowding the dance floor, desecrating their mahogany and green plush carpet. “All I wanted was a kiwi margarita,” the woman says.

It isn't really Jason's bar. He's the manager, and since I've been back, I've been helping him out on the busy nights.

I've always thought the best part of working in a bar, obviously enough, would be meeting women.

The worst part is seeing what people do to each other. A bar is the perfect environment to do real harm to someone you don't really know.

Miles, the relief bartender, hands me an apron and we face the throng at the bar, two deep. It still takes me a minute to orient myself, but once I do, I feel like I never left La Onda, the bar I tended in Boca Raton, where I went to escape memories of Jenny and ended up finding Karine.

I'm making four or five drinks at once while having two or three more orders shouted at me, and suddenly I hear a
whack
and then
it seems like everyone freezes and I see this guy and this girl and the girl is holding the side of her face and she's begging him not to leave her there and that's when I notice another girl waiting off to the side, impatiently, and the first girl is in tears, blubbering. I hear the guy say, “If
you
won't do it,
she
will.” I look over at the girl to see if she really will, and our gazes lock and I can't make myself look away. The first girl's pleading becomes pathetic and she starts convulsing; her voice crescendoes and everyone is listening but the guy doesn't realize it and he smacks her across the face again. I start in the direction of the guy and he faces me, scowling. The showdown. I reach under the bar, go for an invisible bat, and he sees this and grabs the girl-in-waiting and cuts through the crowd to the door.

There's a hum and then the bar is at 140 decibels, the noise swallowing the girlfriend who is left standing in the corner, holding her face. People are screaming for their drinks, but I ignore them and call out to the girl. I wave a drunk guy off his stool and motion for her to sit.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

Clearly embarrassed, she just nods.

“What was that all about?” I ask.

“Can I have a drink?” she asks.

“Sure. What do you want?”

“Just water.”

I hand her a glass of water and she takes a sip and sets it back down on the bar.

“Want to talk about it?” I ask, feeling like I can really help her, but she just shakes her head and asks me to call her a cab.

When the cab arrives, I search the bar for her, and just as I'm about to shrug at the cabdriver waiting in the doorway, the girl emerges from the bathroom. I wave, trying to get her attention,
but she isn't looking at me. Instead she turns away and heads to the pool room in the back. I signal the cabdriver to stay where he is, and go after her.

I find the girl leaning against one of the pool tables, and when I walk up to her, she gets a strange look on her face like she wonders who I am. Her boyfriend is back and he comes up to me. “What do you want?” he asks, sneering.

“Your cab is here,” I say to the girl.

“I don't need it,” she says, turning away.

“The driver's waiting out front,” I tell her, trying to persuade her to go home, where she'll be safe.

“Look, I already said I didn't want it. Are you deaf?” She scowls at me, and now her boyfriend moves in closer and I consider throwing him out, but I begin to feel a shift in loyalties on the girl's part and I turn and start to walk away. A hand grabs my arm and I whirl around, ready to deck the asshole, but it's the girl and she asks me: “Do you know where we can score some smack?”

I'm still hearing the girl's question when I'm back behind the bar, not so much the words, but how she asked it. Sometimes you can mistake unhappiness for despair.

Jane gets me into helping people and it turns out I'm a natural.

The first deal didn't turn out so well: I guess I'm not great with children.

I had been volunteering with Jane at the crisis nursery for only about a week when I hurt someone (it was an accident). I was playing along fine with the kids, running around and screaming, in and out of the miniature wood house, an old set piece from some play, donated by a local theater company. I had chased some kids into the house, ducking into the tiny front room, where the kids were pressed one on top of the other in the corner. I pretended like I was going to really get them, and this little Mexican kid started kicking me in the leg. I yelled at him to stop, which made the kids laugh, and this little Mexican kid kept doing it until I put my hand on his head and pushed him back against the wall.

Of course there was a big stink about who did what. The little Mexican kid accused me of hitting him. I said the little Mexican kid fell. I said I was sorry about it. I said I felt bad. I think they believed me, but I didn't get to help out at the nursery anymore.

I told Jane this story (minus what I did to the Mexican kid), and she suggested I volunteer for the March of Dimes Bowl-A-Rama, which turned out to be a right-on suggestion.

“Thanks for coming,” Katherine said.

“Glad to help out,” I said grandly.

“We've got several volunteers for today,” Katherine said. “If you like it, maybe you'll think about staying on.”

“Sure,” I said. “We'll see.”

I was assigned to a girl named Janice. Janice couldn't talk very well and walked like she might pitch forward or backward, depending on how you looked at her. And she couldn't stop smiling.

Janice seemed to like me right away, and I helped her with her bowling. The March of Dimes had these special ramps set up in front of the lanes that looked like slides at the water park.