Toby's Lie Read online

  “K. said,” I said to Ian, who was sitting in a cubicle in a wing of the library nobody used, except for maybe naps or doing drugs or jacking off, “if I try to take a guy to the prom. I’ll be expelled.”

  “Expelled?” Ian wiped his weeping eye against his sleeve. “On what grounds?”

  “You know K. He didn’t get specific. Of course, there’s the Church’s stand on sexuality.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Thumbs down. We were meant to sleep with chicks. And to multiply, you know. It’s all there in Genesis.”

  “But half these priests are homos!” Ian whispered/shouted. “Fr. Clyde”—the swimming coach—“he sports a chronic flagpole!”

  “That’s a glandular problem.”

  “I’ve seen his fucking gland! Flashes it in the locker room often enough. ‘Hey, fellas, any takers?’ ”

  I laughed.

  “C’m’ere, Ian.”

  “Now, Toby—”

  “Come here ….”

  Ian smiled.

  “Ohh, okay… .”

  Ian rose, and felt his fly, and looked around, and sidled over. Genuflecting, he pressed his open mouth against mine. Our tongues found each other. When we finished, he was crying.

  “Toby, I love you.”

  “Don’t say that, Ian. It’s stupid. You know we’re both heading off for school.”

  “I love you. I do.”

  “I love you too, Ian.”

  “Kiss me please, Toby.”

  “Listen, kiddo …”

  “Toby, please ?”

  I leaned in. So did Ian. When we kissed, I split my lip.

  “Holy Christ! Someone’s coming!”

  We sat back and heard our hearts.

  Two gawky feet were plodding comically toward us, as if the Jolly Green Giant had come to check out books. They belonged to Bubba Fishback, a meathead on steroids who confided all of his sexual secrets to Ian, most of which consisted of videotaping jack-off sessions in a sort of sick and shaky Sony handheld Technicolor. I pressed my broken lip between the pages of a book.

  “Mouth’s bleedin’, Toby. Whatcha guys doin’? Sniffin’ the lint in your assholes, har har har!”

  A librarian, somewhere, shushed our commotion. Bubba pulled a chair up and camped beside Ian.

  “Really, guys, hope I’m not interruptin’ nothin’. You two, ya know, look mighty intense.”

  Ian was smoother at this shit than I was. He draped an arm around me and shifted into Jock Gear.

  “Just talkin’ poontang. That’s all, Bubba. Who we’re takin’ to the prom …”

  “Toby knows who he’s takin’!”

  Bubba’s plump fist shot out like a rocket and clocked me in the shoulder, which my dad had primed before.

  “Easy there, Bubba. Wanna keep my motor skills.”

  “Angelina!” Bubba said, and preened for all to see. “My sister, Angelina! That’s who he’s takin’!”

  It was true. Categorically. And it was news to Ian. At a weak moment, at a shopping mall, in an underwhelming outburst of phallo-Christian charity, I’d agreed to take Angelina to the senior prom. I liked her. She was smart. She was smarter than Bubba. She was bigger than him, too—and all that without steroids.

  “And of course we all know who you’re takin’, Studly More-crotch.” Bubba winked at Ian, dipping Red Man in his cheek. “Primest piece of pussy at the Holy Dames Academy! Courtney A. Ciccone! Sex on the Beach herself!”

  Courtney A. Ciccone was an edible cheerleader with tits like tidal waves and a blinding fake smile. She’d earned the sobriquet “Sex on the Beach” because of an escapade during spring break when a private detective freelancing for her parents photographed her groping half naked with a lifeguard in an observation tower on the Fort DeSoto shore.

  “Awesome, dude!” I congratulated Ian, laying it on and slugging him hard. “How’d ya land that one?”

  “My natural charm.”

  “And the size of his schlong!” Bubba chimed in, measuring a prize trout between his outspread hands.

  For one thing, Ian’s dick wasn’t that big. It was big, all right. But it wasn’t that big. A peculiar trait of heterosexual homoeroticism I’d bothered to notice was that guys put guy friends’ success with other women down to the exaggerated girth of their members. Ian did nothing to rebut his beefy legend, except to keep his legendary trouser snake trousered. Except for special viewings. Like mine … and Courtney C.’s?

  “ ‘Miles Long? Miles Long? Paging Miles Long for Ms. Courtney Ciccone?’ ” Bubba improvised across a phantom loudspeaker.

  We all giggle-grunted in that dumb gorilla guys’ way. That’s when my prodigious pal Juice sauntered over.

  “Bubba! Ian Lamb! Toby Sligh! Whassup!”

  Juice was jet black and just smotheringly cool. He wore Italian clothes and sported thighs the size of juggernauts. Juice also dealt to all the other football players and made better money than my mom and dad combined. His real name was Leonard Compton, he glided like Blake’s Tyger , and he hung out with me for reasons I could never figure: maybe because I didn’t do drugs, maybe because I wouldn’t give him my money, maybe because I reminded him of someone. And Juice liked me a lot more than he liked Ian: he was straighter than a laser, but his eyes gleamed for me.

  “What shit you all laying down in the ’brary?”

  Juice took some Skoal laced with cocaine and lipped it.

  “Gimme some, Juice,’’ Bubba begged.

  “Gimme money.”

  They dealt. Juice offered us some. We declined.

  Juice teeter-tottered on the chair that barely held him.

  “Joo see that priest, Lr. Scarecrow, this mornin’? Damn that man skinny! I think he got AIDS!”

  Bubba laughed at Juice and pinched another taste of Skoal. I stole a glance at Ian. He was staring at the floor.

  “You okay, Lamb?” Juice said to Ian. “You look like somebody run over yo’ penis.”

  “Just tired. Juice.”

  “I got somethin’ for that… . His name is Benny.” Juice produced amphetamines. “An’ how much you want?”

  Bubba said, “He ain’t buying.”

  “I forgot—Lamb’s clean,” Juice said. “And Tobias?”

  I looked at Juice’s hand, then I swiped the bottle from it. I shook out a couple pills and just considered them awhile. This disturbed Juice: it was really rotten karma. My role was to refuse; I wasn’t supposed to think about it. Juice’s breathing grew audibly fitful and labored. I imagined I could hear the sad percussion of his heart.

  “Whatchoo gonna do, Tobe, study it or taste it?”

  I put the pills back.

  Bubba said, “Sligh’s a pussy.”

  “Sligh ain’t no pussy,” Juice sighed, and smacked Bubba. “He just don’t wanna go fuck hisself up. He ain’t got no money to waste like you rich boys. He’s a proletariat homie, like me. Ain’t I right?”

  “You’re not a prole, Juice. You’re petit bourgeois.”

  We shared the same desk in Political Science.

  “Petit bourgeois? Fuck that shit, Tobias! I’m major bourgeois! I’m Captain America!”

  We did a high-five; with Juice, it was different. It was like punctuating a really clever sentence, not the awkward body language of two guys afraid to touch.

  “I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” Bubba complained, and Juice smacked him again.

  “You wouldn’t understand, you stupid-ass fucker! You about as dumb as that man this mornin’ skinny!”

  “You think he’s got AIDS?” Bubba said, and nursed his jaw.

  “See that priest’s body?” Juice said. “He’s a goner! Seen guys like that, crosstown in the projects, when I visit my daddy—me and Mama got out. They starvin’ like Marvin? I mean i’ss like ‘Seee ya!’ That boy be so skinny you could fax him to his grave.”

  “I liked what he said about God,” I interjected.

  “Yeah, you into that deep shit, Sligh. You always go
t yo’ mind on some deep shit or other. You gotta start thinkin’ mo’ deep with yo’ dick.” Juice grabbed my crotch and bolted, wailing like a banshee. I chased him and he wasted me. A librarian hollered and Juice let me up. “Still, I smoked you last Poli Sci test! I smoked you, Sligh, ’mit it! What’d I get?”

  “96,” I said. I decided to tease him. Juice was like my father: he needed to be teased. “But that’s only because you were sitting next to me.”

  “You faggot,” Juice said.

  We were all very quiet.

  “Tobe’s a faggot,” Juice said. “Uh-huh, I know he is …”

  Outside, in the quad, somebody was whistling. It was just about lunchtime. We were all just sitting there.

  “What was it Fr. Scarecrow said about God?” Bubba asked, with a cough now, and coming to our rescue.

  “He said,” Juice said, “God’s a lonely motherfucker, like you gonna be, G., ’less you find some for the prom.”

  “Who’re you taking, Juice?” Ian said, coming around.

  “My cousin Anquanna. And mmm-mmm-mmm. Girl’s got more back than Canadian bacon! Who you takin’, Ian?”

  “Courtney Ciccone.”

  “Mercy!” Juice said. “Wear ten bags with that honey! She got every virus known to womankind!”

  Bubba started laughing: “Fr. Scarecrow prob’ly fucked her!”

  “Shut up,” Ian said.

  Bubba double-taked Ian.

  “Wha’d you say, Ian?”

  “I said shut the fuck up.”

  “You shut the fuck up!” Bubba bristled, devastated.

  “No. No, Bubba. You shut the fuck up.”

  We all looked at Ian. He was looking at Bubba. Bubba’s mouth was dangling open. Bubba shut the fuck up.

  Juice, who had surveyed the damage, popped his knuckles.

  “Damn, Lamb. Ain’t you’n a sweet mood today? Someone not suckin’ your dick right or somethin’?”

  Ian looked at Bubba, and then he looked at Juice.

  “I just get sick of hearin’ Fishback talkin’ bullshit.”

  “Like you don’t!” Bubba blustered, really bleeding now. “C’mon, now, Ian,” I said to him finally.

  “No,” Ian said, looking straight into me. “I’m not gonna c’mon. Not this time, Toby!”

  And then he charged out, smashing into a librarian who spilled a stack of books and banned us all from the library. Juice fetched the books and handed them to me and Bubba. We shelved them and left.

  “Atom bomb,” Juice said to me.

  Juice drove me home in his convertible Porsche. It was as purple and as lethal as a kiss. We hadn’t talked to Ian the rest of that day, and Juice was concerned: or at least he was intrigued. He kept inventing theories to explain Ian’s outburst. It became his new obsession, like John F. Kennedy’s murder, which, Juice would argue, had been plotted by Cubans.

  “You don’t shout ‘Cuba libre!’ to a buncha fuckin’ Cubans unless you intend to make good on yo’ promise!”

  Juice was a wiz at political theory. He really knew his shit. He’d be President someday.

  “You think they’re the ones who killed Marilyn, too?”

  “ Boyeee , J. was fuckin’ a mafioso’s bitch! Norma Jean Baker got caught in the crossfire! You listen to Juice, Tobe—he’s down on the Ken’dys. You never seen a bunch uh G.’s so hard on their women !” We stopped at a crosswalk and dealt with a policeman. Juice pocketed a fifty and threw on some L.L. Cool J. “Marilyn Monroe , Chappaquiddick, that William Kennedy rape bullshit? Tyson been a pretty white Kennedy, word, he’d a got off, e’en though that boy be guilty!” Juice took his shirt off and fiddled with his nipples. He had the sort of pecs, like, cardiac arrest. “I mean, Jesus! What you Cath’lics got against sisters? Ken’dy boys, they got dicks like hurricanes, leave a path of bitches in their motherfuckin’ wake! It’s like, damn—you beadbusters worship the Madonna, kick the shit outta any honey falls short!”

  “I like women,” I said, not entirely convincingly.

  “Uh-huh.” Juice pumped up the bass real loud. “Yeah, Tobe. Yeah. I know you do, G.”

  We drove along awhile, not saying nothing.

  At a traffic light a schoolgirl left her Audi running and bobbled over to us, and Juice sold her some X. “Everything begins with an ‘E?” she whispered to me as she leaned across the carseat, smelling of Chanel. When she kissed Juice’s forehead he gave her some Acid, L.L. Cool J boom-boom-booming on the system:

  Standing at the bus stop,

  Suckin’ on a lollipop —

  When she gets pumpin’

  Its hard to make the hotty stop …

  At the green, Juice scoped me out of the corner of his eye and turned down the volume and cleared his throat a little.

  “You like women, Tobe?”

  I sat up.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Whatchoo like about ’em?”

  I unbuttoned my collar.

  “What do I like?”

  “Yeah. Uh-huh. ’At’s what I axed, didn’t I?”

  I stalled a little.

  “You mean, like, physically?”

  Juice started laughing.

  “Yeah, uh-huh, physically!”

  I sat there awhile. I was trying to think. I liked women, but not like I liked, you know, guys. I didn’t like their bodies. I liked their attitudes. I liked the way you could say things to women and they wouldn’t back off. I liked the way they took the truth.

  “I like their … asses.”

  “Uh-huh. What about ’em?’’

  “How … uh.” I scratched my head. “How, you know … how round they are.”

  Juice was chewing on a cinnamon stick. We drove for a while, Juice singing along:

  If the Mona Lisa’s name was Theresa,

  I’d get a piece a

  The Mona Lisa …

  “An’ their tits?”

  “Oh, yeah! I really like their tits!”

  “How roun’they is, right?”

  Juice was laughing all over.

  “You a trip, Toby Sligh! You a absolute trip!”

  We pulled onto the interstate, a siren screaming past us.

  Half way home, Juice took an exit. We were in the projects. Folks were waving at us. We drove up to a yellow flat of crumbling apartments. A baby was chewing on a football in a gutter. Juice leaned over and wrapped an arm around me.

  “That’s where my daddy lives,” Juice said, pointing. “He a crackhead now. He on his way out.”

  We pulled away then, and somebody hollered, “Leon!”

  “All right,” Juice spoke to them, softly, through the window.

  Juice dropped me off at my mother’s place and asked, “Tobe, what the fuck you doin’ this neighborhood?”

  “Somebody I know.”

  “You fulla secrets, Sligh.”

  “And you know half of ’em.”

  Juice laughed. “Seee ya!’

  Walking up the drive to Mom’s drug dealer pad, I remembered something Juice and I’d seen while cruising past the Jesuit Residence that day.

  In the little sandy garden at the rear of the building an ambulance had parked between two rows of peeling punk trees. Its taillights were on, so it must have been idling, and the driver just sat there, staring at his knuckles. This was usually a sign that somebody had died, that one of the older and more desiccated Jesuits had progressed to less strenuous Spiritual Exercises in the sky. I looked at Juice, who was looking at me, and then we passed Ian, who was walking to the Residence.

  He didn’t even see us; his chin was set and rigid. He walked with the steady, unencumbered stride of a George Romero zombie on the scent of fresh flesh. And I noticed Ian carrying my flower in his hand, which he turned in nervous circles, so the petals made a pinwheel.

  Juice tapped his horn, but Ian didn’t hear it. We turned around and saw him disappear inside the Residence. And though I know now, I could not have known then exactly why I half expected to see Ian’s face plastered up against
the glass of a crying ambulance when it passed us on the interstate just fifteen minutes later.

  Mom as lying naked on a paralytic lawnchair in the claustrophobic backyard of her new drug dealer pad. She shared the tiny weed-eaten lot with a bright blue dilapidated Chevy Corvair, its shattered eyes shining, its body up on blocks. Something in a junked car is like a crucifixion: abandoned, proud of it, and gloriously hopeless, its pose is no different than Christ crucified.

  In her careless fashion Mom had left the frontdoor open, so anyone—a thief or a son—might walk in. The place had been stripped bare of furniture and carpet, and the walls were ripe with paint that smelled wet and fresh and woozy. A bottle of wine lay empty in a corner, with a pair of man’s pants, stiff with paint, wrapped around it. Something was sighing, like a snake or a pipe, so I gave the apartment a precautionary tour. I sort of expected to discover some guy things, like the trousers of the lover she had chosen over Dad. Then I checked out the pants and realized they were Dad’s—Mom had only worn them to protect her while she painted.

  Somewhere underneath the delicious smell of Lucite hovered something more delicious—the smell of homemade pasta. In the kitchen I knelt and glanced inside a glowing oven. A pan of manicotti was bubbling cheesy lava. Because Mom was drunk, and delirious in sunshine, and drifting somewhere on that calm selfish island to which Dad and I were uninvited castaways, she didn’t even see me staring at her through the window, her nipples flecked with paint, her tummy glinting in the sunlight. At last Mom had gotten outside herself completely; though anchored to the earth, her body all but levitated. And although I had never seen my mom so nude before—except for those pictures of her and Dad together Dad kept locked up in a strongbox in his cabinet at work—I found her body beautiful and new and fascinating: the dimple of her navel, her lush pubic mound, the way her pretty breasts sloped down to brush her midriff. I felt something rouse itself alive inside my trousers—but to my great relief, it surrendered just as quickly. I didn’t want to claim the somewhat dubious distinction of being one of a select corps of young gay males whose only remotely heterosexual urgings were stirred by the prostrate, naked bodies of their mothers: it was all a little bit too textbook Oedipal for me. So when my mother’s hands began to quietly meander from the region of her hips to more erogenous regions, and when her mute lips unfolded with the same mute abandon of even muter lips in more erogenous zones, you can understand why I left as quickly as I came, and why I even bothered to lock the door behind me, so Mom might be entitled (so to speak) to her peace.