"Mikey!"

At first I thought it might be someone I wanted to talk to. But it wasn't. At all. I drew my blinds and Thomas was standing there in front of Claire's station wagon. I couldn't see her but I knew the car, it was red and had a big canoe secured on top.

"Hi Thomas." I said. 

"What are you doing, Mikey?"

"I was sort of taking a nap." This is half true. I was smoking cigarettes laying down, watching television. I also might have had a cup of tang. Which I sat up to drink.

"We're coming up with a bottle of wine." He had this disgusting grin on his face. 

"I don't know guys." My left eye started throbbing. I closed it to get a better look at what was going on below. I am on the first floor but it's raised, it's above a garage. I always keep the window open. There is a screen, don't get any funny ideas. Don't get any of those.

"Well Clarice says you have to come down, right Clarice?" I thought about it for a second. I tried to remember my horoscope. I don't have school tomorrow until 1pm. I could just go down there and talk; I don't even need to bring a coat. 

"Alright. . .I'll be there in one second." I put the blinds back down and shook my head. This is probably not a good idea, regardless of if it's in the stars. I re-opened my eye, before I left I looked at it in the mirror and it was still blood red and half tadpole, squinting. I resisted itching.

When I walked down to the garage area Thomas was still standing out by the car, the light reflecting off his bald head. It was six o'clock. He told me to get in. I did. He got in after me; I didn't hear any grunts though like he was looking at my ass. Last time, the time I first met him, he was driving and asked me to get a coke out of the trunk for him. I didn't see any harm in it even though I decided I hated him after shaking his hand. When I half crawled to the trunk he adjusted the mirror so he could look at my ass, pushing his sunglasses down and all of that. I handed the prick a coke anyway. It was a three hour car ride to a venue, to see David Bowie, with my friend Debbie, Debbie's mother Claire and of course Thomas. Thomas, the forty-five-thirty-two-twenty-three year old family friend. Thomas the vulgar camp. Thomas the never-ending shitbox of disgustingly graphic remarks towards me and my stomach and my dick. The guy that asked me if I was allergic to rohypnol, if I liked furry skin, where I was sleeping that night about five minutes after I met him.

And still, I got in the car.

And still. 

"Clarice been serving me liquor all day, Mikey." She was also serving herself. We almost hit a parked car and instead drove completely over a median in the middle of the road. I hope to fuck we are not going on the freeway. I hope to fuck, I hope to fuck. It would be my fault anyway.

"Slow down Clarice for the pedestrians at the cross walk we don't want to hit anyone. You want me to be behind that wheel, hmm?"

I just sat back and answered the same questions over and over. Claire was trying to be cordial and at that point I had blocked out what Thomas was saying about my dick in my hands and something about duct tape because I was concentrating on living. I just clutched my seatbelt. I used the same voice I use with my mother in the same situation. Claire had some of the same bits and pieces oozing about her. It was comfortable even though we had just been cussed out by every passing car on the street. I started giggling because I was in this situation. It was forced. Or else I would be giggling all the time.

We got to Thomas' apartment complex. Claire parked in the middle of the street and we both got out while Thomas got in the driver's seat to park. Claire was swaying slightly back and forth, asking me about school. After sliding the car in to a spot Thomas got out holding a white plastic bag with a wine bottle in it and Claire's purse she had left behind. 

He walked straight up to me lifted up my shirt. It was yellow and had rips along the collar. You can see my collarbone. It had a faded picture of someone surfing, the back said "Connoisseurs of the Arts" in felt lettering. I swatted his hand and he gasped at the trail of hair on my belly. He kept gasping and asking Claire if she knew about how hairy I was, that the girls had told him I had a hairy ass but he didn't believe them. Until this! Jesus Christ Mikey! You have more hair than I do and I'm five years older than you are. Claire said he looked young for sixty and smacked him. She said to leave me alone, that tonight I'm one of her daughter's. That I am like Debbie. 

We walked through a small alley in to a glorious, glorious backyard. I swear to god I had never seen anything like it before and I certainly would not have guessed it would be behind the brick building I was just in front of. That someone as phony as Thomas would have something so real close to where he lived. There were all types of yellow trumpet flowers hanging with their heads down low, bright red curlicues and purple leaves stacked. Old dusty mirrors sitting on old dusty tables, gargoyle heads, rocks with things etched in them. Eroded black metal chairs with cushions nestled. There was a young couple sitting in a chair, a yuppie type in sandals, perfectly tan with chiseled features that were slightly baggy with approaching middle age. The woman looked younger, she was hiding behind black cat eye glasses and big money dyed blonde hair. I said hello to them, avoiding eye contact and keeping fixed on my hands rubbing petals between their fingers. There was also, of course, their beautiful dog that looked exactly like them slobbering dasani all over everything. I avoided eye contact because I was ashamed of who I came here with.

Thomas walked in behind us and stood right by the dog, who didn't acknowledge him. 

"Jesus Christopher, I hate your bloody dog now. It hasn't sniffed my crotch in near two months!" 

Christopher, the tan guy, just smiled. Said hello to Thomas.

"Yeah Thomas has been taping ground beef to himself the last few weeks and still nothing" Claire started cackling and I did as well. I walked around the garden some more, noticed my red eye in the mirror again. My bad voodoo eye staring at me, throbbing reminders. I closed it and winked the other one. 

Claire said that we needed to go inside for a half hour. That the couple was filming something. I saw him practicing lines in a lawn chair, muttering them under his breath. The blonde was setting up a camera or a microphone or something. We walked up the stairs, it was on the second floor and went inside Thomas' apartment. He was nowhere to be seen so Claire and I sat on a floral print couch. Everything was grandma style, except for the penis collection on the bookshelf. One of the couches only had half a back, it sloped down. Thomas came out of the kitchen with three glasses, I took one out of his hand immediately and I was the first to have it filled with wine. I gulped it down before I sat next to Claire.

"So, Mikey how old were you the first time you measured your dick?" I flicked him off. "Well I must have been about five," he said and had a sip of wine. He asked me how I liked his old lady apartment. I said it was very nice. It was the honest truth, it was a very nice apartment. He asked me if I wanted him to turn on his new tiffany lamp. I said he should. I really didn't give a fuck. The lamp, it was just ok. Thomas was holding a necklace made of oblong shaped wood beads. 

"Ever measured your testicles, Mikey?" Claire smacked him on the arm. She is one of my daughter's tonight, remember Thomas. Throughout the night they would routinely accidentally call me a her or a she. They would fix it to the proper gender then laugh at their mistake. The necklace, Thomas had stolen these ball measuring beads from his work. They worked at a hotel. There was some kind of conference.

"What the hell kind of conference were you guys having with ball measuring items?"

"Testicular!" Claire cackled and had a sip.

The girls are Claire's daughters, Debbie and Liz. I took both of them to prom, two years apart from one another. They both got trashed in different ways. Liz, the older one, the first date, smuggled tiny bottles in her purse. We also had sake at a sushi restaurant, a party opened the screen door next to ours and a couple came in with a warm white thermos. Debbie and I drank vodka out of a water bottle after getting meatloaf at a Café. Liz was glazed, she was calm but bitchy and cussed some people out quietly. Debbie spiked the frothy punch with a Band-Aid from her toe and freakdanced the camera that projected the dancefloor of shiny tuxed teenagers except it was just her crotch grinding on the huge screen. On one date I was locked out so they could have sex and on the other I cleaned massive chunks of puke out of someone's hair in the shower.

I don't think they can even tell how awkward I feel. They mistake my mostly silence for being like a baby. They think of me like a baby. They are trying to grow me up. They smack me if I don't know about good wine. The only thing I learn from them is to stick harder to what I know. If I yelled at them I would yell "I am not unrealistic! You aren't even dead you are the reverse of life!" Which makes total sense. While I am busy thinking, while they are busy drinking, I hear a loud cough from a room down the hall. A boy around my age stumbles out wearing a long underwear shirt that goes almost to his knees. He is sweating and he walks in ticks. 

"It's alive." Claire says. I start laughing. As much as I don't appreciate this at all she is still a funny lady. He wanders in to the kitchen, opening each cupboard with a scratchy whoop.

"Who is that?" I whisper. I put a cigarette in my mouth and let Thomas light it.

"Some creature Thomas is sheltering. Stay away from him." Claire said in a voice more than twelve inches. I put my pack of camel lights on the coffee table instead of in my pocket, which signals a long stay. I shudder. I notice a patch of chest hair crawling up to Thomas' neck. It looks immaculately trimmed, in short swirls instead of bushy curls. I wonder how vain I will be at his age. I wonder how much wicker will be in my apartment. A few weeks earlier I had seen Thomas at a grocery store. He had picked me up and swung me around, a different young man at his side seething at me as my feet left the ground. Debbie said Thomas regularly takes boys my age out to lunch, he calls them his daughters. This particular daughter was silent and jealous in aisle four. Thomas had asked me why the long face, I told him I realized I didn't have enough money for cigarettes. That I was contemplating writing a bad check. He slipped two dollars in to my front pocket and I followed him to the 8 items or less line. I followed him out of the store and he handed me a fresh pack "You look lost honey." He had said. "You look a million miles away from home." 

We all sip our drinks and watch the junkie sideshow try to find food in the freezer. Phlegm hits the cupboards, the refrigerator door. I sink farther in my seat with every cough and every bead of sweat, staying away. He doesn't find any food and wanders in to the living room to complain.

"Want to sit on my lap Aaron?" 

"Fuck off Thomas! You fucking freak."

"Show us your huge horse dick Aaron."

"No way. Shut up. Shut up hey there isn't any food. You guys have another bottle of wine or something? Thomas."

We are introduced without shaking hands. Aaron goes back in to his room. We go in to the garden. The wine has made me lighter; going through air and down steps is easier. The transition to all the plants and pretty old things is simple and almost seamless until I see the back of Thomas' shaved head. Which in the dusk and with the drunk almost seems simple. But it isn't. When we sit down at a table and I watch him light candles I am reminded of the complexity of the situation. And all the intricate defenses I have to keep going, all the sharp comebacks I need to keep ready. But I have a teammate in Claire. Who will mother the conversation for me and litter it with vulgar jokes to take the pressure off. Who will rock mindlessly side to side in her seat, her eyes glazed over on a gargoyle perching in the grass.

When I would go over to her house to visit her daughters, her genuine daughters, our relationship seemed to be a regular one. We would talk about school or my own parents. I would keep it down. I would wait respectfully as Liz or Debbie vacuumed the carpets, lifting my feet up. She would give me a ride home or loan me her husband's bike. Which she would come get in the morning and one of her daughters would ring my doorbell wearing a handkerchief on her head. But we were never alone, I was never in the front seat on the ride home and the glasses of wine were always around a crowded dinner table and I made sure to drink them casually. 

We start talking about Liz. 

"Cuddling up to her would be like cuddling up to broken glass." Thomas says and we all cackle. I can't help it. It would be. I'm sure her mother is shamefully laughing for the same reason. 
"I don't think she's as cold as she acts." I say.

"No. She is." Claire looks straight ahead. For a while I talk freely and unguarded. I even make a few crude comments myself. Since my bad eye is too raw to have a contact in it half of my vision is blurry. Everything is in a soft focus. It is getting darker and everything around me is a haze and the smoke from three cigarettes floats around like it is on vacation. My smoke looks happy to be away from the crusty burger beer pile of my apartment, it dances outside to windchimes clinking. 

"Mikey what happened to your eye?" Thomas makes an effort to show genuine concern. He makes an effort to have that last sentence not be swimming around in sarcastic filth.

"Um. Well, last Saturday this guy spit a shot of whiskey in it."

"Why?"

"Because I spit some at him first." He had been too close to me. Which was exactly what I thought I wanted. But in the end, I didn't.

There is a collective Oh. 

"We want to take you out for your twenty first birthday." Claire lights a Benson & Hedges.

"Yeah, alright." I lie. "Well I am going out with a couple of friends the night of, they all turn 21 this month too. I actually am supposed to meet up with them tonight." I lie again. We figure out the exact weekday the twenty-fifth will be on. I am surprised they are actually serious enough to figure this out. I feel like a small project to them. I feel like their mentoring is one sided, that the advice they give me is for their benefit. That they don't actually want to "save" someone. They want to feel like they tried to. It's on a Wednesday and our fake plans are for some day the following weekend. 

"When you go out to bars they are going to eat you alive." 

They take turns coaching me.

"You are probably going to want to go to Bleu."

"I have five gays keeping their eyes out for you, if they see you giving someone a blowjob in a dark corner you are going to get punched in the face."

"Listen to us, because we know, we've been in this scene for a long time now."

"Don't trust any of them. They don't love you."

"Use protection. If you get AIDS I'm going to kill you."

"No one in this city is ever going to fall in love with you."

"No one in this city is going to love you for more than fifteen minutes."

"No one is going to fall in love with you. Look at me. I know."

"No one is going to love you."

"No one."

Honestly those last few comments are repeated so much that I almost start to cry. I cover it up with multiple sips of absolut. Which they notice and ignore politely. Which they notice and participate in. I remain silent until they change the subject. 

"Mikey how old were you when you first did it?" Thomas says excitedly, like he just remembered his fucking birthday.

"I haven't," I said. 

"Are you serious? Claire is he serious?"

"I told you he's a baby."

"Yeah but… well you've done other stuff though." Thomas says, hoping for something to work with. After the concert we had all attended I had gotten lost on the campgrounds and met someone by a cluster of port-a-potties. It would be a very brief and ultimately disgusting addition to my small amount of sexual experience. He had suggested we hitchhike home. Even though driving home with Thomas' hangover and everyone else's would be grating, the thought of riding in a truck driven by someone I didn't know and sitting next to someone I didn't know sounded like a worse idea. I had told him I just didn't have a sharpie for a "Seattle" sign. I had told him I just had to find my friend. I wandered around the campgrounds until I found the car with the canoe on top and the surrounding tents with the sleeping Perkins family plus Thomas. I crawled in and locked the doors to lay in a pathetic fetal position until I fell asleep. I would wake up to Claire banging her ring on the window. Later she would buy me a steak for lunch. 

"Yeah. I've done other things." 

"Are you a top or a bottom? Well I guess you wouldn't know. I'm a---- " honestly I blocked this out. We all know the answer anyway. We all can guess the joke, we can all guess something he said to try and make me uncomfortable. Thomas had brought out some Vodka for me, my own bottle. I had held it close like a glass baby. I told them that I had done "other things" actually the night I last saw both of them. At the concert. Claire smacked me in the arm hard. I don't know why I told them. I don't know why I felt like I had to impress them somehow, had to show them that I wasn't as innocent as I seemed to them. I regretted saying it almost as much as I regretted that night. I decided to fuck it. I decided to uncharacteristically tell them every vulgar detail, to play their game. To give them something to wreck me about in a funny way. I almost threw up when I realized it could turn in to an inside joke. I didn't want an inside joke with them. But I was too drunk; my glass baby attached to me in a trickling papoose above my mouth.

"Well who gave the blowjob?"
"He did."
"Was it good."
"No."
"Was he good looking?"
"No." 
"Did you come?"
"No."
"Why not?"

I have another shot and start laughing really hard when I tell them I thought he was probably homeless. This even shuts both of them up. I keep going and tell them he was on drugs and had sold them to get the money for the concert, that he had bribed the security officers with pills to get his first aid box in to the arena. That he wanted to hitchhike home, that he had scars all over his back. That at 8 in the morning when it was light out I realized he was about forty years older looking than he probably was. That he had deep, deep lines in his face that you could see miles away. That he called me daddy the entire time, that he wouldn't stop calling me daddy. That I don't think he had a penis, which sends me in to hysterical laughter and I tell them all I felt was a fleshy solid square. I laugh louder than the volume of anything I have ever said to either of them accumulated. Shot out of my mouth like a motherfucking knife. I spit the sentences out on their faces, I throw them up. I keep my hand on the vodka toddler, press it hard down on the table as I make my hysterical point. That I am already in the process of becoming as bitter as them. That my lines are turning sharp and jagged. I'm following in footsteps that I thump on the ground like an earthquake. 

I excuse myself and walk up the stairs to the apartment. I take a shot of something with Aaron. He tells me that I look fucked up. He tells me that it's hard to get fucked up on the brandy Thomas has in the freezer. I tell him there is a bottle of vodka on the table outside. He says "No shit?" and goes to take my place at the table. My place at the table. His place at the table. His toilet isn't clean. I look at myself in the mirror, my eyes water and I wipe them on my shoulder. For a couple minutes until I fall to the side and yell at some deodorant. I hide it in the toilet with the cap off. I look so pathetic that I laugh at myself to my face, in the mirror, standing up. I pull the phone out of my pants and call Bettina. 

"Bettiiiiinaa?"

"Yeah. Are you okay Mikey?"

"Yeah. Yeah I'm ok. What are you guys doing."

"Me and Ingrid are just drinking beer and watching Degrassi, you want to come over?"

"Yeah ok. I'm going to run there ok? I'm going to run all the way there."

"Where are you. You don't sound ok."

"I'm at Thomas' house. You know that guy?"

"Mike get the fuck out of there right now."

"Ok I'm going to run all the way there ok?" I hang up the phone and flush the toilet for show. 

I walk out of the bathroom to the sounds of porn coming from Aaron's room. He hadn't bothered to turn it off before he went downstairs. He hadn't bothered at all. I put myself together with my fingers and use my hands as brushes that dust things off, like the stomach of my shirt. I use the same brush to pat the sides of my hair in place. I walk down the stairs to snickering and an airplane flying low overhead. Thomas is going off about black pussy. I interrupt him, tell everyone I have to go. I shake their hands, I pat Claire on the shoulder, I walk backwards and bow to them with my fingers crossed behind me. I will be fine, I say, my friend only lives a couple blocks away. I will be fine, thanks. I put the pack of cigarettes Thomas bought for me about an hour earlier in my pocket. And then I leave.

I run those few blocks to Bettina's.

I run those few blocks in the time it takes, in this city, for someone to fall in and out of love.