Disclaimer: I wanted to write porn. I really did. After all, this is Nifty. But you all know about the best-laid plans of mice and men. I guess Isabel blew the sex out with the electricity. So if you're looking for a quick fix to a hard problem, scroll on.
Still, I think it's pretty readable, and I'm pretty sure my more discerning readers will catch a whiff of sweat and squalor on these pages. I'm only finished if you tell me with your silence to shut up.
So e-mail me your thoughts. I like praise and I treasure objectivity. And flames are better than indifference
It's been a few years since I was fifteen, and wise young readers may notice this right away. The rest is as true as all fiction is.
Fifteen
I am fifteen.
Fifteen is nowhere.
I am nowhere.
Last period, Friday, and Ms. Ramey's teaching us logic. I'm killing time, mastering the art of the syllogism. "Silly jizm," I scribble, then quickly erase.
There's a party at Cassandra Mitchell's house tonight, and
everyone will be there.
I'm not going. I wasn't invited.
I am no one.
The bell rings and thirty sophomores pour out of Room 232. Ms. Ramey stacks her books and lets out what sounds like a sigh of love. It could be exhaustion. It could be gas. "Have a nice weekend, Aidan," she manages, locking the door behind her.
Aidan. That's me. Je suis. Soy yo. "See you Monday, Ms. Ramey."
Fifteen minutes later, I'm home. "Home," I think. "What a concept!"
Home is where the heart is.
I cannot find my heart.
Where am I?
Don't get the wrong idea. I live here, and it isn't bad at all. No tyrannical father, no manic mother, no uppity sister, no seditious little brother. The refrigerator is stocked and there's art on the walls. We've got Digital Cable, and a library, and from my bedroom on the third floor I can see across the backyards of a neighborhood where nothing at all could ever go wrong.
Nobody's home, which is just as well. I'm a fan of silence. I think sometimes that I can touch silence, smell it even, like leather or Auntie Colleen's body wash. Mother will appear in an hour, Dad an hour later. They'll sit down with Old Fashioned's to watch Jim Lehrer, then Mother will whip up something tasty, yet sensible. She'll call me down to dinner, and for half an hour I'll smile and beg off their reasonable questions. It's been like this for a while, now. I can see the hurt in her eyes, the confusion in his, but the smile seems to have enough reassurance in it to ward off tears or phone calls to shrinks, or even a friendly tap at my bedroom door.
I know what you're thinking: with millions starving in Botswana, how can this little shit complain? I mean, you're thinking: there's that deformed kid with the incurable genetic disease, and you don't hear him bitch and moan! He's all twisted with pain and he's got about a year to live, and he writes happy poems about hope and sunshine and sends them to Oprah, for God's sake.
Okay, okay. You're right. I'm insufferable. But I guess since nobody can suffer for me, I'll just have to do it myself.
II
I'm up in my room, the door locked despite the fact that I'm home alone. I'm staring at myself in this freestanding mirror my mother bought at an antiques fair - stationed in my room to torture me in style, I guess. I tilt my head, scrunch my brow, flash that toothy smile. I stick out my tongue, proud that it can tickle the end of my nose, my very long nose, my Modigliani nose. "He'll grow into it," I once heard Mother tell Grandma Bea. I'm not a patient guy, and I just wish it all had fit to begin with. My glasses are pretty slick, though, make my purple eyes look dangerous under that wayward shock of black hair.
Then it's off with my shirt. And my Dockers. And my Joe-Boxers. I'm naked. Just thinking the word gives me chills.
And what a spectacle I am, naked. No abs, no lats, no delts, no glutes, biceps, triceps. No six-pack - not even an empty can. I look like 120 pounds on a 5 ' 11" frame is supposed to look. I look like Jesus on Calvary. Like one of those hollow Jews in "Night and Fog." Not Cassandra Mitchell's type, I'm pretty sure. Not Joey DiMarco's or TyRon Vaughan's. If I were any skinnier, I'd be invisible. Check that: I am invisible.
Now this is not where some spider bites me in the ass and I get huge and telepathic and save the world. Nope, I passed on that screenplay. I can blink fifty times and the mirror never wavers in its conclusion: this boy puts the skin back in skinny.
I told you about my nose? Well, at the end of my matchstick legs with knobby, perpetually bruised knees, two enormous feet protrude. 16 EEE, baby. When the kids at school aren't busy ignoring me, they're disparaging my proboscis or tripping deliberately over my feet. I guess it's hard for them to ignore the obvious, all things considered.
But I digress. Or rather I avoid. What they haven't seen, what they cannot know because I've never let them, what would really freak them out is just now starting to unlimber itself between my legs. My penis. My cock. My dick. Shit, this story is as much about my dick as it is about anything. It frightens me. It screams to be set free. I am fifteen, nobody, nowhere, and my dick wants to run away. I can't let that happen.
Lighten up. All boys have them, you demur. True dat. I've skipped the locker room entirely since I first became aware of my dick, but it only takes a few strategic clicks on a search engine to validate the theory in the present. Mine is bigger. This mirror doesn't lie - at least it hasn't yet.
It's hard in my hand now. I point the shiny red head, unsheathed, at the window, at my computer, at the face laughing in the mirror. I make machine gun noises. I shoot at the world like some trenchcoat mafia flasher, then twirl it with my right hand, then bend over to kiss it with the very tip of my tongue. I'm seriously pumping now, teasing, then squeezing, breathing for two, joyous and desperate. They're in my room now, Cassandra and Joey and TyRon, urging me on, swaying to my mad little sonata. "God, Aidan, you're so fucking hot.fill me up, Aidan.give it all to me." Then I'm being kissed, and it's not Cassandra, but Joey, and I don't care at all, because I'm not about Cassandra anyway, she's just there for show, I'm about all the Joey's in the world, and this one wants my humongous dick more than her tight pussy, and, whoa Daddy, just stay on it, suck it hard, oh yeah, and after I cum, I'll deal with the fact that I'm miserable, fifteen, and gay. Pearls run down the mirror. Tears run down my face. I always cry when I cum.
III
Mother's home. I've cleaned up the mess and washed my face. I feel okay, and the mirror doesn't look back when I pass it.
"Hi Mother." She's putting away groceries. I make a move to help.
"Are you feeling okay, honey? Your eyes look puffy."
"I just woke up. Took a nap. I feel fine." Now she'll ask about school.
"Did you get that composition back? The one on The Crucible?"
"Yes."
"And?"
"And I did fine. Mr. Barrows says I'm a rhetorical prodigy."
"I wish you'd let me read some of these papers. But I'm not going to beg." Actually she's being sweet here, not pushy at all. She majored in English, and I guess she'd like to know if any of it rubbed off on me. "Okay, so maybe I will beg."
"Please, Mother. I can't stand to see a grown woman grovel."
"Aidan Michael Maguire. I don't know what to do with you."
"Just keep doing what you're doing. I'm not complaining."
As my Dad launches into his monologue, I realize that I've never seen him naked, or at least, not since something like that would have registered. He's talking about a senior partner at the firm being diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and suddenly I start to giggle. He shoots me one of his patented "how dare you" looks, and I mumble, "sorry, I was thinking of something else." I tell myself I'll find a way to check him out, even if it means hopping in the shower with him. Who knows, maybe I'm adopted. Or maybe this potbellied windbag who gave me my surname is hung like a water buffalo with balls the size of honeydews. And I can't help it: honeydews crack me up, and I'm overcome once again by mirth.
"Son. I wish I knew what was so hilarious."
"No you don't, Dad."
"I don't understand you at all, Aidan. I don't understand you at all." The exaggerated repetition is supposed to be my cue to cut my losses.
"No you don't, Dad." Mocking.
"Well, I do understand one thing, young man: why you don't have any friends."
"Byron! That's quite enough." Good old Mom.
He's finished. And you know, he's right. "The trout was delicious. May I be excused?" They both nod and look away.
IV
Sometimes I slip out late, after the folks are down for the count. Don't get your hopes up: I never stray too far from the manicured byways of the Glade. Mostly, I just like the night air, the way it hides me from myself. If this were a movie, I'd probably break out a flask of Vodka, light a butt, and strike a lonely poet pose, but the only thing I've ever drunk is Peach Schnapps, and I'm not sure nicotine would be good for my asthma. And then, Reese Witherspoon would materialize from the shadows, and she'd know by my pout that I was miserable and by my silence that I was a tough one. She'd start to say something, and I'd put my fingers to my lips and tell her,
"Don't frighten the night."
She'd come closer, and the camera would pan to her face awash in moonlight, then to mine, looking out beyond the stars. After a few pregnant seconds, she'd whisper my name:
"Aidan? What the fuck are you doing here?" I nearly fall off the picnic table. "It's 2:30 in the morning."
Once I get my breath back, I manage to counter with the obvious: "I guess I could ask you the same thing, Billy." Billy Rowland, my neighbor and classmate. I've never been inside his house; he's never been inside mine. Once, during freshman year, he asked to see my notes on Athens and Sparta. I obliged. He returned them promptly, told me they were awesome, then ignored me for 18 months.
"I was at Cassandra's, you know. The party."
"Oh. How was it?"
"Dude, it rocked. Her folks were nowhere. They had two kegs on the deck and another in the rec room."
"Still going on?"
"Nah. Neighbors called the cops, yada, yada. I heard Joey DiMarco passed out in Mrs. Mitchell's bed. Dropped a lit joint and set the bedspread on fire."
"Wow. Sounds great. So why are you here, I mean? By the creek."
"I don't know, Aidan. I was supposed to hook up with that junior Meghan chick, but, like, when the party got busted, all bets were off. But anyway, I asked first."
"I have a rendezvous with destiny."
"What?"
"I like it here."
"Aidan, you don't party much, do you?"
"Not with Cassandra, I don't. Wouldn't want to ruin my reputation."
"Fuck you. You think you're so cold."
"I'll have to take that as a compliment."
He gives me the same look I got from my father at dinner, only this time - maybe it's the auroral chill or maybe it's just the strangeness of it all, me and Billy talking - it gets to me.
"I'm sorry, Billy. I guess you know I'm not so hot with the small talk."
"Whatever. I just wanted to check out the path by the creek. I didn't know I'd run into you. I'll be on my way."
He takes a few steps down the slope and into the shadows.
I call after him. There's a catch in my voice. "Come on, Billy. Stick around. I'll shut up, I swear."
He stops, waits a few seconds to turn back.
"All right. You're fucking nuts, you know."
Let me know if you think this story should live to see another day. pijito52@aol.com