ESSAYS
Gizzards, Jennifer Downes, and the First SemenIOWA CITY, IOWA 10 January 2009 |
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I.
With gleaming-white buckteeth, unharnessed by braces, Greg Downes had it rough. His wide brown eyes revealed every injustice he’d ever endured. Every time he’d been tricked, teased or made to eat grass, it was all there in his big wounded antelope eyes.
When Greg was angry, which was often, he’d sit on the curb in front of his house with his feet in the gutter and his shoulders hunched high about his ears. He thought it made him look like a high school football player and he told us so.
“I’m a football player,” he’d say. “So, fuck you.”
We teased him until he cracked. Which was the goal. We wanted the spectacle. When he’d snap he’d lose his mind and hold up both hands and give us all the double-finger: two long middle digits pointing to the sky, respective servants, pointer and index, kneeling prostrate at their sides.
“Fuck you,” he’d scream.
His crazy eyes wet, he’d hunch his shoulders into position and stomp dramatically to the curb. We’d laugh and he’d wait until we left him alone. Which we did pretty quickly. There was a limit to our cruelty. We rode our BMX bikes around the neighborhood or played football on someone’s front lawn. Nine or ten years old, food on the table, good parents at home who called us to dinner, we weren’t tough kids.
One afternoon someone put Greg’s bike in a tree and he went wild, running madly in the street like a puppy released from its cage.
“Fuck you,” he screamed waving his fuck-you fingers at us like pistols, “Fuck you.”
All the other kids slinked away to do their homework or practice the piano but I went to see Jane.
“Can I ask you something about Greg?”
I was standing in the kitchen drinking a glass of apple juice. His mother, a small exhausted woman with black wire hair, dark smudges beneath her eyes and a desert tan, was eternally frazzled.
“Sure,” she said. She had a cigarette in her mouth and was frying chicken gizzards on the stove.
“Umm, is there something wrong with Greg? I mean, is he retarded or something?”
“There’s nothing wrong with him at all,” she answered sharply, dumping the gizzards on a paper towel. There was a long silence while she blotted gizzard grease and I stood studying my empty cup.
Then her expression softened, she stubbed out her cigarette and invited me for dinner. “It’s nice of you to ask about Greg. You must really care about him. Why don’t you stay and eat with us?”
She was a smart lady, Jane Downes. She’d left me no way out.
“Yeah, ok,” I said feeling sorry for myself, “thanks.”
I started coming for dinner often. My mom never made gizzards and it turned out that I liked them. Greg was ok and I felt like I was doing something noble. I was proud of myself.
Besides, Greg had an older sister and she had breasts.
The combination of fried chicken gizzards, teenage girl, and an inflated sense of my own goodness made me a frequent guest in the Downes home.
II.
I was young when I began masturbating. Well before puberty. An erection would arrive, a thin roll of Certs pressed against my hairless thighs, held tight in the cotton hangar of my Hanes, and using the middle and index finger of my left hand, I’d push down, making small circles, until, eventually, I’d feel a wave of pleasure wash over me. There was nothing to clean up, nothing came out, and I’d fall gently to sleep.
At first, I didn’t think about anything in particular. It was like scratching an itch, or tickling my chest during a heat wave; it felt good so I did it. But by the time I tasted my first gizzard I’d already started thinking.
There were nights when Jennifer Downes ate with us and I’d sit quietly looking at her from behind my eyelashes. After dinner she talked on the phone, organized her sticker collection and painted her lips with strawberry gloss. Greg and I sat on the floor of the living room playing Atari and Jane went upstairs carrying a sweating tumbler of something garnished with a lime.
We were ten and she was twelve, a difference in age as vast and as wide as the world. She ignored me completely. But I watched her carefully. I studied her constant applications of Lip Smacker (a heady brand of flavored lip gloss the name of which, as testament to my fascination with Jennifer Downes, I still, twenty-five years later, remember). The way she twirled the rubber bracelets on her wrist, the way she kicked her feet free of her plastic shoes under the dinner table while she ate, I kept it all and took it home to bed where I began to see the glorious, horrible link between what I held in my hand and girls with glistening strawberry lips and purple jelly shoes.
When Jennifer was in her bedroom listening to Siouxsie and the Banshees with the door closed, I’d abandon Space Invaders for the bathroom, one door from her pink squeaky bed. I’d stand nervously in the hall, one hand on the knob of the bathroom door, listening for a quick giggle, the whine of her hairdryer, the thump of a textbook hitting the carpet, any sound to do with her.
I wanted what was behind that door– a pulsing world of sex and angry music, breasts and hair and high school and everything, everything to come.
Then one day she caught me. I was standing in the hall, my hand on the knob, listening when she stepped out of her room. In one hand she balanced a glass on a plate, in the other she held a box of Girl Scout cookies. When she saw me she froze.
“Oh hi,” she said. “What are you, like, doing?”
“Going to the bathroom,” I told her terrified.
She laughed. “In the hall?”
“Not really,” I said lamely pretending to struggle with the doorknob. I leaned in and studied the handle as if it were a device I’d never seen before, or a safe I was trying to crack. “I think it’s broken,” I said.
She watched me continue my absurd performance. Then she laughed and asked me if I wanted help. At which point I simply turned the knob.
“Nope. Got it,” I said and walked into the bathroom closing the door behind me.
“Hey,” she said.
I reopened the door and looked at her. She cocked her head to the side. “You want a cookie?” She asked, smiling at me, “Thin Mints.”
I took one. “Thanks,” I said.
“You were totally spying on me.”
I didn’t say anything. I just looked at her like she was a lunatic and chewed my cookie.
“Have you ever played High School?” she asked me.
I shook my head.
“Maybe I’ll show you one time,” she said, smiling coyly, as if we had a new secret between us, and started to walk away.
“Umm,” I said.
She looked at me, her eyebrows raised.
“Me and Greg are going to the video store. If you, umm, want we could get you a movie. If you want.”
“That’s nice. Thanks. But I’ve got too much homework tonight. I’m in junior high now. It’s really hard,” she said proudly and then, “Hey, thanks for being nice to my brother. I know he’s kind of weird. I’m glad he’s got a friend now.”
“He’s nice,” I said, lying.
Greg and I didn’t have anything to say to one another. So when we weren’t playing Atari we went to Video West. That day as we were walking to town an older kid from up the street rode past on his bike.
“Retard!” He yelled at Greg.
“Fuck you, motherfucker!” Greg said half-heartedly flashing his fingers. He’d recently added “motherfucker” to his repertoire.
“He’s a jerk,” I said. “Forget it.”
“Ok,” he nodded, “Ok.”
Some time passed.
“Motherfucker,” Greg muttered to himself.
Not knowing how to respond, I asked, “Do you like your sister?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“She seems cool,” I said.
“What do you want to rent?” He asked me.
Inside Video West we cruised the shelves. I knew what I was looking for. While it couldn’t explicitly be about sex it had to contain as much sex as possible and be rated R. Movies about college were good; they masqueraded as benign comedies while delivering a maximum of gratuitous female nudity. I would have sold my arm to rent “10” but the cover, Bo Derek running up a Mexican beach in a flesh-colored translucent bathing suit, made it impossible. I didn’t have the courage to carry it to the counter.
And then I found “Joy Sticks,” a film, which purported to be about video arcades. I had a good feeling. While I wasn’t then sophisticated enough to recognize the title’s subtle double entendre I had, nonetheless, begun to develop an instinct for sniffing out movies with breasts hiding inside.
When we returned home an hour later we found Jennifer alone at the kitchen table studying her heavy junior high textbooks. She seemed happy to see us.
“You guys want to play high school? I’m sick of studying.”
“I don’t know,” Greg said. “What is it?”
“Yes,” I said.
“It’s easy. Come on.” We dropped our videos on the table and followed her into her room.
Jennifer Downes’ bedroom teetered between a frilly pink childhood and a dangerous adolescence. Stuffed animals bounced slightly to the Banshee’s base drum. On her closet door, tacked over a collage of teddy bear stickers, was a Psychedelic Furs poster. The faint smell of cigarettes mixed with her saccharine perfume. Somewhere, she’d hidden a stolen pack of her mother’s Kools.
She sat on the bed with her feet beneath her and a furry bear clutched to her breasts. Greg sat glumly in a rocking chair painted to look like a queen’s throne; the armrests sparkled with golden glitter paint. I stood in the middle of the room not knowing what to do with my hands.
“Sit here,” she told me patting the bed. I sat. “Ok. Like, in high school people go out on dates? Do you guys know what a date is?”
“Kind of,” I said.
“Not really,” Greg said.
“Ok, so, like the boy picks up the girl in his car and he like takes her to buy an ice cream at Baskin and Robbins or something and then they go and French each other.”
I looked at my shoes sticking out over the edge of the bed.
“What’s French?” Greg looked worriedly at his sister bringing his thick little eyebrows together.
“Kiss, but with like, tongues.”
“I’m not going to kiss you,” he told her shaking his head dramatically. “Are you crazy?”
“A doy hickey, Greg,” she said sticking her finger into her cheek and rolling her eyes (“a doy hickey” or the abbreviated “no doy” were then commonly used phrases meaning, more or less, “no shit, idiot.”) Jennifer hopped off the bed, brushing my leg with hers, opened her closet and pulled a blue LA Dodgers cap from the top shelf. She handed it to Greg.
“You work at Baskin and Robbins. Put the hat on and stand over there,” she commanded pointing to the far corner of the room. To my surprise he did what he was told. Then she turned to me, “You go out of the room. Then come back and pick me up.”
“Ok,” I said and left. I knocked on the door. She answered.
“Hi,” she purred. “You’re late. You should have called.” She looked like she was really happy to see me.
“Sorry,” I said meaning it.
“Tell me I look pretty,” she whispered, “you forgot to tell me I look pretty.”
“You look pretty,” I mumbled.
“Oh my god thanks.” She giggled and batted her eyelashes at me.
I stood there uncomfortably, looking at the carpet, not knowing what to do.
“Want to go for some ice cream?”
“Ok,” I said.
She smiled, slipped her arm around mine and slowly led me across the room where Greg was standing with the Dodgers hat pulled so low we couldn’t see his eyes.
“Hello,” she said to Greg.
“Hi,” he said.
“Welcome to Baskin and Robbins,” she whispered.
“Welcome to Baskin and Robbins,” Greg said miserably.
“I’d like a double scoop of Burgundy Cherry,” she told him.
He looked at me from beneath his hat, waiting for my order.
“A scoop of Rocky Road,” I said. He nodded gravely and began scooping.
We waited until he pretended to hand us our pretend ice cream. And then we left the store and went for a walk around the room where we took exaggerated licks from one another’s cones.
We didn’t say much. Jennifer giggled when some of her Burgundy Cherry got on my nose and she had to wipe it off with a pretend napkin. But otherwise we just enjoyed the autumn air and each other’s company. Greg watched us from his post, his mouth half-open. Eventually we arrived home.
“Well,” she said, her eyes sparkling, “I had, like, a really great time.”
“Me too.”
“Well, I guess this is it.”
“Yeah.”
“Is there anything you want to ask me?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.” I wanted so badly to take her out again but I couldn’t find the courage.
“Would you like to see my room?”
“Ok,” I said.
We turned around and she pointed to her closet. I stepped inside. She closed the sliding door behind us. We stood in the dark among her clothes hanging wraithlike from wire hangars. I was consumed by her, surrounded; her sugary scent was everywhere and in the cool dark she bent down and kissed my mouth with hers – moist and warm, tasting of cigarette smoke and Thin Mints.
And then she stood up, slid open the door and took us out into the bright room. She ran to her bed, jumped and landed with a squeak on her pink bedspread.
“So that’s, like, pretty much the game. We can play again sometime but, like, right now I have to study.”
Greg walked out of the room. I looked at her, my heart beating, my erection straining against my underwear, and waited for her to ask me to stay. But she said nothing and pretended to be engrossed by The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. So I turned around and left.
I found Greg in the living room. He’d already started Joy Sticks.
We watched in silence as girls from the local high school, driven to passion by Pole Position and Pac Man, flung their clothes aside to join the madness at a local video arcade. Soon Greg left the room. “It’s a stupid movie,” he told me.
When I heard his door slam, I slid my left hand into my pants. Jane was due home any minute, Jennifer could’ve walked in, but I was alone, finally, with the taste of her tongue in my mouth, the memory of my first date, and a television full of amorous high school girls.
I watched without blinking. I rubbed intently. And then, quickly, there was that familiar and intense sweep of pleasure, a relief from pain, and in my hand, to my surprise, a warm, viscous fluid.
I walked quickly to the bathroom and locked the door. I looked at my palm. What was this pungent new substance my body had made? What did it mean? I was frightened. And then I was relieved, joyful. It was the beginning, a step away from boyhood. I was older than Jennifer Downes could imagine. Soon I’d be tall and strong. Soon I’d be in high school. Soon, I’d buy someone a real ice cream from a real store and never forget to tell her she was pretty.
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