Palo Alto Stories

“Yeah.”

“I wish we could go back to that night.”

“Ivan and I cut it down.”

“The tree?” I said. He nodded in the reflection and smoked. “You cut down the whole tree? It was huge.”

“I know. One night last year we used his stepdad’s saw. Just me and him. It took a long time. That thing was probably there since the Civil War. Now it’s gone.”

Sitting there with Teddy, I knew I was making a decision, but I didn’t know what.

We smoked. The Camels weren’t my brand but they were okay in the night air.

After that I stopped seeing Mr. B as often. He said I was being a baby. I told him I needed to spend more time with people my age, but when I wasn’t with him I just ended up sitting in my room at home. Tiff wasn’t even around. One night Mr. B asked me to babysit Michael because he had something important to do. I told him no.

“ Please. He likes you, April.”

“No he doesn’t.”

“Yes he does.If you don’t do it for me, do it for him. He’s used to having you around.”

“Are you really going out?”

“Yes. I’d rather spend time with you, but I guess you won’t let me.”

I didn’t even kiss Mr. B when he left. Michael was seven now. He may have been used to me, but he still didn’t talk to me. He was in his regular position on the floor playing a game called Street Fighter. I sat on the couch and smoked.

“You’re not supposed to smoke in here.” I didn’t answer. I ashed in my Diet Coke can and watched him fight different characters. After my cigarette I told him that I wanted to play. I sat on the floor next to him and picked up the other controller.

“You have to pick. Who do you want to be?”

“I want to be the girl.”

“Chun Li? She sucks.”

“I don’t care, I want to be Chun Li.” He told me what to press. “Now how do I fight you?”

“You press the buttons,” he said. He was this Chinese guy and he beat the shit out of me. I pressed the buttons and my girl punched and kicked but it didn’t do any good. He killed me twice and the game was over. “Two cookies,” he said.

“What?”

“I get two cookies, I won.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That’s the rules.”

“No it’s not. Your dad said you get four cookies and you already had them.”

“Cindy lets me.”

“Who?”

“My other babysitter.”

“Who is she?”

“She’s my other babysitter. She lets me have cookies.”

I stood up and walked to the kitchen. He was telling me he wanted one Oreo and one chocolate chip when I walked out the back door.

I didn’t know where to go. I drove. Nirvana was in the CD player and I turned it off. I just drove and smoked. I didn’t want to go home. I smoked four cigarettes. I had only one more left so I drove to 7-Eleven. I bought some more Reds with my sister’s ID and a Diet Coke. Outside, I used the pay phone. First I called my sister, but she wasn’t there. I called Shauna and then I called Alice. Alice said there was a party and gave me the address. I got in the car but I didn’t turn the key. The lights inside the 7-Eleven made everything look yellow. The light fractured when I started crying.

After a while I started the car and drove slowly back toward Mr. B’s. I had one more cigarette in the old pack. I had turned it upside down so I could make a wish. I put it in my mouth and lit it and made a desperate wish.

Tar Baby

This guy, A. J. Sims, and I, we got a bottle and drank it in his bedroom in the basement of his house. Vodka, clear and burning. We drank it straight from the big glass bottle.

A.J. had seven brothers, older and younger, so there were clothes, cups, and trash all over the house and some of the walls were flaking paint. There wasn’t much space, and all A.J. had for privacy was this shitty little underground room with a bed two inches off the floor, and his boom box and his hip-hop mix tapes.

I was pretty drunk that night. We were listening to the Pharcyde. I was drinking much more than he was. I sat in the one chair by the desk and he sat on the bed.

A bubble came up from my stomach and burned my throat. It came out rank and when I swallowed it tasted like acid.

Just then, I don’t know why, I said, “Oh, crap, A.J., fuck you.” I laughed and my esophagus was burning.

A.J. looked up from his deep thoughts on the bed.

“Don’t say that shit, bitch,” he said, and he was not laughing.

“What shit?” I said.

“Fuck you, Teddy. Don’t be sitting over there like a gri

“Okay,” I said, and drank some more from the bottle. It was a great bottle, really smooth. Smirnoff. I took a sip of tap water from a little orange plastic cup.

Then A.J. was up and pacing around the room. Three big steps in one direction, three steps back, over and over again. He was hunched over in a white T-shirt that was grayed from washing, and his wiry forearms were flexing and unflexing.

He had moved to Palo Alto from LA the year before, so he thought he had a reputation to maintain. He was just a ski

Three months after his arrival, he was a joke. Everyone saw he was actually psycho. As soon as he got drunk he would do stupid things like put cigarettes out on his arms or ride his scooter into a wall. And he would talk even bigger when he was drunk. He’d say, “Nigger.” One night he said the wrong thing to some of the black guys and got beat up. He wasn’t so tough after that. He was alone a lot. That’s when he started doing weird things even when he wasn’t drunk, like doing the cigarette burns at school. He really had no friends. Except me. He was a little bald weirdo, with burns up his forearm like leopard spots.

It was ten o’clock and I was staring at the tape turning in the boom box. Little gears rotating. The Geto Boys were talking about dick sucking, and licking scrotums and assholes. A.J. was back on the low bed with the ratty blue blanket and he was making a call.

“Yo, shut up for a minute, I’m calling April,” he said. “Turn that shit down.”

I turned the music off. We sat there while he waited. A long depressing quiet as the phone rang.

April was in our class, but she was better than us, mature and experienced. She had an older sister, and she’d introduced her to a lot. When April showed up in our town from Arizona at age thirteen with her tan and muscular legs, she had already fucked. She knew about dicks and talked about them to us in whispers. She knew that some bent in fu

I had a crush on April right away. In eighth grade I called her once and tried to act cool. At least she was nice. She lived near me and sometimes we would go to the park near her house and sit on the swings and smoke pot out of her little pink pipe. After we got into high school she started fucking older guys. This guy De

Then A.J. was on the phone with her. He was smiling. I sat in the chair and cursed him in my mind.

“You should meet us,” A.J. said into the white phone. Then he was listening very intensely. He wasn’t such a gangster then; he was just a sweetie.

“. . . well bring your sister with you. It will be cool,” he said. He was looking at me like he was making sure I wasn’t laughing at him. She was saying something because I could hear the little buzz in the phone.