Palo Alto Stories

“. . . then bring your sister andEmily too.”

I was warm and drunk. Inside, I felt things flow through me and I thought about cartoon rabbits and about William Faulkner and how he drank all the time. I thought that someday I would be him.

When I was a baby, my mom read to me from Uncle Remus. I thought about the Tar Baby, his body steaming, just after Br’er Fox pulled him out of the cooking pot. A raw, coal-dark coagulum that Br’er Fox shaped into a slick black, shining, seal-like thing. A little black podling. No face until Br’er Fox pulled off Br’er Bear’s two jacket buttons and stuck them on the black baby and those were the eyes.

Button eyes are a crazy man’s eyes.

Bu ggedybu ggedybu ggedy boo,

I have crazy eyes, how about you?

A.J. looked away and listened. I couldn’t believe April was talking to A.J.

“No, Teddy is here. Yes, Teddy,” said A.J. into the phone. Then he turned to me. “She says hi.”

“Hi, April,” I said, but he didn’t relay the message. He was facing the wall again.

“Yeah, he’s all drunk,” he said. “He can hang out with Emily.”

“Emily” was Emily Kraft, a big slut. She was a year older than us.

A.J. said, “Come on,” five times in five different ways, like she was teetering on an edge and he was gently trying to blow her over. Finally he said, “At Addison,” and his voice went a little higher. Addison was an elementary school down the street from his house.

“We’ll be on the jungle gym,” he said to the phone. He was smiling but not at me. The little guy had actually convinced them to come over. “. . . yeah, we got d’vodka… cool, see ya in the school yard, peace.” He said “school yard” like he was singing a song.

After he hung up he stopped smiling and didn’t share any of the joy. “They down,” he said, real serious.

“‘ D’vodka’?” I said.

“Yeah, we got d’vodka,motherfucker, you got a problem wit that?”

“No,” I said. “I’m glad we got it.”

He was putting his jacket on. It was a Carhartt jacket, real plain. I had a brown corduroy one with a fur collar from J.Crew. I took it off the back of the chair. Some guy on a TV show had one too.

A.J. reached across me and took the bottle and screwed the cap on.

“You’ve been drinking this like a motherfucker,” he said.

He tucked the large bottle under his jacket and it bulged.

“Let’s go, bitch,” he said.

A few of the brothers were shifting around in shadowy corners of the basement level, and when we walked upstairs there were some more sitting and lying on the floor in front of the TV. They were watching Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.I saw a little grape juice, deep purple and luminescent, at the bottom of a plastic glass.

Outside, it was a little cold, and the sound vacuumed out to quiet, nothing but a few cars passing in the distance along Middlefield Road. We went through the chain-link gate into the dark school yard. I sat on the end of the slide and the metal was cold under my ass. A.J. stood in the tanbark and paced a little; the bulge was still under his arm. Then we waited.

After five minutes I said, “Lemme get some of d’vodka.” I was surprised but he reached under his jacket and handed the bottle to me. He put his hands in his jacket pockets and looked all around, alert but cool.

I unscrewed the red cap and tilted the bottle to my lips. The stuff went down and I pictured the clear liquid with a magical pink i

“Save some of that shit,” A.J. said. A few cars passed but not the girls. I drank from the bottle again and it was a scary plunge because I always wanted to take too much. It hurt, but it was also impressive, like being in the hands of a bigger force. And because of that, a relief. A.J. still wasn’t looking at me so I took another sip and my throat burned sharp and my brain swam in cold water.

A long silver-blue Cadillac passed, going very slowly. How we must look to adults: shitty teenagers in brown jackets, hanging around the school yard in the dark.

I thought again about the Tar Baby from Uncle Remus. The Tar Baby and the briar patch and Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Bear and Br’er Fox. I could probably get A.J. to fuck the Tar Baby if I made it look like a girl. Get his dick stuck in the tar. A.J. was so lonely and angry, and all his feelings got computed in strange ways. He said he had had a girlfriend in LA, a black girl. She must have hated herself. April was white, but A.J. really liked her.

After thirty minutes April and the girls weren’t there. It was just us, cold in the cold.

A.J. had walked out of the tanbark onto the blacktop, and I was alone with the vodka for a while, but then he came back and started yelling.

“Save that shit for the girls, motherfuck!” he said, grabbing the bottle. He saw how much was left and yelled some more. I just sat there. He said, “You faggot ass, you shit-kissing motherfucker, you dumb fucking nigger, you shitfaced faggot, I oughtta kill you. . . .” Other stuff poured out, like he was talking to himself.

Some teenage girls walked by. They didn’t go to our high school. There was a big-boned girl with short curly hair to her ears and a ski

“What are you yelling at?” said the big-boned girl. She said it like she was older than she was. She must have been lonely if she was bothering with us.

A.J. answered her like he had been expecting them. “This faggot doesn’t know how to get any pussy, and drinks all my shit.”

The girls laughed a little.

“Really? He doesn’t know how to get any pussy?” said the big-boned girl.

“What an asshole,” said the witchy one. She was talking about A.J.

Then I spoke up. It was the first chance I’d had after the yelling.

“You’re the one who doesn’t know how to get girls,” I said to A.J.’s back. My words came out damp and wobbly.

A.J. whipped around for a second. Then he knew we were all against him. He was sensitive to that kind of thing. He whipped back to the girls.

“What the fuck do you bitches want?” A.J. said to the girls.

The big-boned girl had bangs and a nice smile and I liked her face. She had a fur-lined hooded jacket that I also liked, and I guessed maybe we would have been friends if we’d been somewhere else.

“We just wanted to see if you would give us a drink from your bottle,” said the big-boned girl. The witchy girl was looking at the black sky.

“You’re not getting any of this shit,” said A.J., holding the bottle to his chest.

“Okay, fine,” said the big-boned girl. There was one light on the back corner of the school building and some of it hit her mouth. I thought of a watermelon Jolly Rancher. Her lips were not a fat girl’s lips; they were thin, and very juicy pink-red. But she was smiling a little fu

Then her lips were not in the light anymore because A.J. was moving toward the girls.

“Get the fuck out of here, bitches!” he said, waving the bottle. “We got some finebitches coming, we don’t need fat-ass and ski

“Fuck you, asshole,” said the big-boned one.

“Fuck you, you creepy little monkey,” said the witchy one. The girls kept yelling at A.J. as they backed away into the dark. Then it was quiet.

When A.J. came back, there was nothing to say. And nothing to do because he was holding the bottle. I was feeling okay; I’d had enough vodka.

This was the way the night had cashed in. Choices had been made and things happened, and here we were. It was sad and fu

I thought about how Br’er Bear walked around with a nail sticking out of his club. When I was eleven, I hammered a nail into a baseball bat. It was very dangerous. I made other weapons. And when my camp went on a field trip to Chinatown, I bought a throwing star. I thought I needed all those weapons, and I hoarded them.