39.
“A boy and his skin”
On this night I want to tell you about, once Christopher left George’s store, he walked around the park for awhile, following a path lined by benches. On one bench there was a young couple in black leather jackets huddled together, and on the bench next to them a young woman spilling her heart out to her dad about a fight she had at school with her best friend over a boy they both liked who was “very materialistic, Daddy.” At the row of benches across from them was a young man, smoking a cigarette, sitting by himself with his tape player on the bench next to him and a rap song loudly playing on it, and two benches away from him a hobo in a grimy green cable knit sweater held his sweating head in his hands and mumbled to himself that he was in hell and that hell was earth and the devils are the other people, an urgent paraphrasing of a play most kids have to read in college. Christopher came to the center of the park, and then walked down its other pathway, where at one bench sat a tired looking woman with freckles, eating something with chopsticks out of a white box on her lap. She had an Indian print scarf wrapped around her head like a turban and a purple shawl around her shoulders, and occasionally she put down a chopstick to write something in a leather-bound journal. Across the walkway from her sat a young girl, high school age with messy hair and pretty blue eyes sniffling and reading a novel and a tawny squirrel on the bench next to her, and on the bench next to the squirrel, another girl with messy hair; another upper middle class girl who’d gravitated toward messiness, writing a sex poem in the bare spaces of an illustration in a children’s storybook. And then two men walked in the opposite direction of Christopher and one was tan and drunk and dirty and had wild curly hair and was saying to the other man, a short drunk Asian college student, “The thing about the park is everyone goes here at night and reads and shit because they’re so fucking bored,” and one of the girls looked up at them bemusedly and with a little fear.
Christopher was walking to a bar very similar to the bar his mother had spent her young life dreaming of. Once inside the bar, he noticed, instantly disappointed, that the place had been discovered by a whole pride of people his own age. About to gesture to him was Mandy, this one girl he’d gone home with one night, her room mate sitting in the background somewhere on a bar stool, telling a business man consolingly that she bet his kids thought he was cool, that she would have thought it was cool, growing up, if her parents drank the way he did. Christopher didn’t remember the room mate being this nice. The night he ended up at their apartment, on a block that was so populated with college students that they didn’t fear the derelicts who also resided there because they were so outnumbered, the room mate had sat with her back towards him and the girl, watching a program on public television about the suffragists. When the program was over she had turned off the TV and, retreating to her room, said “Don’t make too much noise. I have to wake up early tomorrow.” The girl Christopher had gone home with had a gray front tooth. She was funny at first, with her stories about the neurotic essays she read out loud in class and the questions the other kids in class asked her afterwards. She also had this funny story about a cousin she had in the Marines who talked to her about Oscar Wilde, but who always yelled out the window at strangers, “Yeah! Nice tits!” when he was with his friends. Her face got pinker the more she drank, though, and she started acting as though it were Christopher who were pursuing her and not the other was around, as though that pink, bloated body of hers were a tool to barter with. She rubbed his crotch and told him, “I’m going to fuck you so good.” He felt embarrassed for her and wondered what she was thinking when she said that, because he wasn’t even hard. A lot of girls seemed to mistake a boy’s body for something else, he’d noticed. They mistake an orgasm as a beginning of something, instead of its end, pushing their own body finally forward once the other body retreated.
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