kind who whizzed right by. All of them were a relief from the sameness of Greenlawn, from the hierarchy of high school, from the sadness that had overtaken his family.
Stationary for hours that afternoon, he discovered that strangers wanted to gab with him, usually bums who asked questions but then interrupted the answer with non sequiturs, and also shifty-eyed men, who wanted to sell him drugs and were sometimes hard to shake. One old white lady jabbed her cane at him, snarling, “Get your feet off the bench! People sit there!” He wished he could tell his mother about these people; she would relish the details, like the way the old lady’s cane had a gold handle in the shape of a mushroom. But of course he couldn’t tell her, because he was breaking her rules by being here, alone, without permission. That day, he didn’t care. Jackson was dead. Scott didn’t love him. What was left to lose? As long as he remained in public, he felt safe from harm, and in any case he felt strong enough to handle whatever was heading his way.
He remembers the four dark-haired Italian girls who approached his bench that afternoon. They wore Catholic-school skirts and black tights, and they surrounded him in a loose circle. He had noticed them eyeing him and gossiping with collective curiosity; now they taunted him about the sweat jacket hood he had tugged over his blue eyes. “We want to see your face,” one of them said, and when he pushed back the hood they all giggled. He pulled the hood back up; one of them pushed it down again. Up again, and then back down. It was their little game, and he gave in, like a puppy agreeing to heel and accept a vigorous petting. They giggled again when he told them his name, again when he said he was from New Jersey. They went to Saint-someone high school in a Brooklyn neighborhood he’d never heard of. He tagged along with them to a diner, where they squeezed into a red vinyl both, pressing him against the wall, knocking knees with him under the table.
The oldest one, Lila, fired off questions: “Do you have a girlfriend? Do you like disco? Are you popular? Do you take a shower every day?”
He answered some truthfully, some not, creating a version of himself in bits and pieces, understanding quickly that a little bit of mystery would appeal to these boy-crazy girls. Finally, the waitress, sick of the noise they were making, told them to leave. Lila pulled a LeSportsac purse from her school book bag, and he let her pay for his éclair and coffee. She wrote her phone number down for him.
After he said good-bye to the girls at the top of a subway entrance, he turned toward Christopher Street. He had no plan for the day, but these few blocks drew him in deeper, because of all the men hanging out, even in winter. Hood up, peering into shop windows, some filled with leather clothes, some with objects that at age fourteen he couldn’t identify, but which seemed to be for sex, he found himself thinking of Scott, back in New Jersey, which seemed now like the other side of the world.
“Yo! Blue eyes, come on over,” called a voice from a stoop. Two guys were waving at him, older teenagers, maybe as old as twenty, and they had the kind of dark features his mother referred to as ethnic. He stood near them and accepted a cigarette. They laughed at him when he tried to pass himself off as eighteen. Colder now that the afternoon was turning to evening, he went along with them to a place called Julius; he’d expected an Orange Julius, the fast food chain, but it was a bar, a gay bar populated with a dozen men. He hesitated at the door, then told himself he’d just look and leave. No harm in checking it out.
He had never been in a bar of any kind and was surprised how dark it was and how smoky. Guys sitting in pairs drank beer and conversed; others stood by themselves along the walls, as if waiting for someone. He had the revelation that anyone might sit here for hours and no one would mind. That’s
Stationary for hours that afternoon, he discovered that strangers wanted to gab with him, usually bums who asked questions but then interrupted the answer with non sequiturs, and also shifty-eyed men, who wanted to sell him drugs and were sometimes hard to shake. One old white lady jabbed her cane at him, snarling, “Get your feet off the bench! People sit there!” He wished he could tell his mother about these people; she would relish the details, like the way the old lady’s cane had a gold handle in the shape of a mushroom. But of course he couldn’t tell her, because he was breaking her rules by being here, alone, without permission. That day, he didn’t care. Jackson was dead. Scott didn’t love him. What was left to lose? As long as he remained in public, he felt safe from harm, and in any case he felt strong enough to handle whatever was heading his way.
He remembers the four dark-haired Italian girls who approached his bench that afternoon. They wore Catholic-school skirts and black tights, and they surrounded him in a loose circle. He had noticed them eyeing him and gossiping with collective curiosity; now they taunted him about the sweat jacket hood he had tugged over his blue eyes. “We want to see your face,” one of them said, and when he pushed back the hood they all giggled. He pulled the hood back up; one of them pushed it down again. Up again, and then back down. It was their little game, and he gave in, like a puppy agreeing to heel and accept a vigorous petting. They giggled again when he told them his name, again when he said he was from New Jersey. They went to Saint-someone high school in a Brooklyn neighborhood he’d never heard of. He tagged along with them to a diner, where they squeezed into a red vinyl both, pressing him against the wall, knocking knees with him under the table.
The oldest one, Lila, fired off questions: “Do you have a girlfriend? Do you like disco? Are you popular? Do you take a shower every day?”
He answered some truthfully, some not, creating a version of himself in bits and pieces, understanding quickly that a little bit of mystery would appeal to these boy-crazy girls. Finally, the waitress, sick of the noise they were making, told them to leave. Lila pulled a LeSportsac purse from her school book bag, and he let her pay for his éclair and coffee. She wrote her phone number down for him.
After he said good-bye to the girls at the top of a subway entrance, he turned toward Christopher Street. He had no plan for the day, but these few blocks drew him in deeper, because of all the men hanging out, even in winter. Hood up, peering into shop windows, some filled with leather clothes, some with objects that at age fourteen he couldn’t identify, but which seemed to be for sex, he found himself thinking of Scott, back in New Jersey, which seemed now like the other side of the world.
“Yo! Blue eyes, come on over,” called a voice from a stoop. Two guys were waving at him, older teenagers, maybe as old as twenty, and they had the kind of dark features his mother referred to as ethnic. He stood near them and accepted a cigarette. They laughed at him when he tried to pass himself off as eighteen. Colder now that the afternoon was turning to evening, he went along with them to a place called Julius; he’d expected an Orange Julius, the fast food chain, but it was a bar, a gay bar populated with a dozen men. He hesitated at the door, then told himself he’d just look and leave. No harm in checking it out.
He had never been in a bar of any kind and was surprised how dark it was and how smoky. Guys sitting in pairs drank beer and conversed; others stood by themselves along the walls, as if waiting for someone. He had the revelation that anyone might sit here for hours and no one would mind. That’s
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