Lunchmeat Read online

  “What’s your favorite flower?” I asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Flowers? Like, roses, tulips, lilies, snapdragons…”

  “I know. I don’t have a favorite.”

  “Oh…” I looked around the bathroom for flowers, but there was only a glass dish of potpourri. I picked up one of the shriveled orange leaves that looked like a kettle-cooked sweet potato chip. “Here.”

  “Oh, uh, thanks. That’s actually sweet. Don’t change, Vic. Don’t turn into the other guys.”

  How could she not have a favorite flower? I pictured Andrius’s mom, back on her ice throne in Lithuania, wearing a crown of welded blue winter roses. I pictured the Black and White Knight kissing the heads of red roses and tossing them to young dames and damsels seated in his cheering section, almost spilling their dragon soup as they lunged for the flower. But all I had was potpourri.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll try not to.” Jenna walked over to me, seated back on the toilet, and planted a kiss on my cheek. “I like you, you know,” I said. “I’m not confused or anything like that.”

  Her lips were thin and pink and I couldn’t help but think—I almost started to giggle—how strange it was that we even used lips for kissing. And by the sixth grade I was expected to not just use lips, but incorporate my tongue, my filthy tongue, into this pinnacle of romantic expression. How primitive! I shouldn’t be ashamed of my thick coat of arm hair; I’m nothing but a beast.

  “I’ll see you outside, Vic.”

  She ran her hand over my shoulder, walked to the door, and left.

  I met Tank on the fringes of a group surrounding John. I figured he was probably displaying his seven-inch penis to garner that much attention, like Silas at his birthday party back in Glenwood. But they were just discussing the perfect shape of Stephanie Hinkle’s ass.

  I was tired of standing on the fringes and peeking over shoulders, or doing whatever it took to get as close to John Thompson as humanly possible—I swear Paxton would sit on John’s lap if he could. I just wanted to go back to West Road and play video games with Karl in the basement; I hadn’t seen my champion for eons. I aired my grievances to Tank, who, barely reaching five feet, was similarly tired of having to stand on his tippy-toes to get noticed.

  Tank’s mother was supposed to pick us up, or at least that’s what my mom thought, but I knew Ms. Canazzaro was in Fort Lauderdale with her boyfriend, Roger. So we called Carina to get one of her older friends to come pick us up. But before we could swim through the ever-expanding amorphous crowd of the Jew Crew speckled with WASPs to reach the stairs, Pierce Stone appeared in front of us as if he had found a secret passage hidden in the wall.

  “Hey Ferraro, are you a fag? It’s okay if you are. Mitch Farber’s dad is a fag.”

  “No, he isn’t,” shot Tank, speaking for me.

  Tank was short, but he was the strongest kid I knew and could’ve easily barreled right over Pierce Stone. But before I could defend my sexual orientation, the guys started to form the prestigious semicircle around me, as if I were displaying my seven-inch penis.

  I hated it. I didn’t feel like Caesar surrounded by the Senate, or a king and his lords. I felt like a monkey on a chain or a court jester, dodging clobbering questions and observations like they were heads of lettuce.

  “What, he can’t speak for himself?” asked Pierce Stone.

  “You know Vic isn’t a fag,” started Paxton. “He was just in the bathroom with Jenna.”

  “Yeah, I know, and he wouldn’t kiss her.” I looked at Jenna, who was watching the fiasco—it wasn’t my fault the Rosenblatts didn’t have a single rose in their mansion. “She even was going to let him get to second base and he wouldn’t do that either.”

  “Wait, really? Why not, Vic?” asked Tank.

  Et tu, Tank?

  I scanned the semicircle for any weak links, a break in the chain—no escape. I felt dizzy and wet, like I was trying to breathe underwater. What language is that? Their jabbering sounded muffled, as if I were trying to listen to a conversation on the other side of a motel wall. They were closing in—Glassman, Farber, Rosenblatt, Weischelbaum surrounded me and I feared they would seize the opportunity to seek vengeance on my ancestors’ siege of Masada. Perhaps this was Hell, where you suffocate slowly while the walls close in and you can’t understand a single thing the demons spit. Then they began to talk as if I weren’t there anymore—vanished, prayers answered, praise be to God.

  “So if you don’t want to kiss a girl that makes you a fag?”

  “What if you don’t find her attractive?”

  “But what if she is attractive?”

  “Attractive to whom?”

  “Is ‘whom’ used like that?”

  “That’s how my father uses it.”

  “Wait, what did you call my father?”

  I slowly backed away from the semicircle like osmosis and snuck up the stairs; Tank followed.

  We waited for his sister to pick us up with her friend from Union.

  “What, Vic? What’s going on? You just snapped out of nowhere.” I thought I had been more surreptitious.

  A black car with black rims that was unnaturally low to the ground screamed down the driveway and screeched to a halt. “Hey you two dumbasses, get in,” said Carina, hanging out the window, the music so loud I thought it would push me backward like a strong wind. I could see the horrified Rosenblatts peeking out the windows as we peeled out and up the driveway.

  We zig-zagged through the winding, dimly lit Short Hills streets. The music was pounding in Portuguese and I caught myself silently praying after the third time we blew through a stop sign: Our Father whoeth thou arteth in… Dammit! I thought I had nailed that down. I didn’t understand why we couldn’t have prayers like how we speak now.

  Despite my protestations to be dropped off at the Geigers’ so I could reunite with Karl and indulge in soda and video games, Tank insisted that we go back to his house and order Dominos.

  I ate a Philly cheesesteak pizza. Ameriganz? Sure, but they were so delicious I could eat a pie myself. I could follow that too with a half order of cinna-sticks, chased with the “jizz sauce” icing—at least that’s what Carina’s friend André called it. I asked Tank what “jizz” was anyway, and he said it’s what comes out when you “jerk off.” Further questioning revealed that “jerking off” was a crass way of saying the mellifluous “masturbating.” That’s not what my jizz looked like anyway, but I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want them to think I was sick or needed Jesus.

  Carina and André wouldn’t stop laughing as we tore into the pizza, cinna-sticks, and wings. I would understand if Tank was telling jokes or if there was something funny on TV, but when I turned around the TV was muted on the Weather Channel.

  “Will you guys shut up?” said Tank, becoming visibly nettled by the hissing of suppressed laughter.

  Her eyes were red as if she’d opened them in a pool.

  “Oh, you didn’t? Again, Carina? What the shit? That shit is so bad for you.” And he grabbed a pizza box and stormed off to his room in the basement. “Come on, Vic!” Tank tossed the pizza box onto the bed and started to spray himself with Axe. “I can’t get that damn smell out of my nose!”

  “Smell of what?”

  “You didn’t smell that? The pot? That’s why they’re laughing like jackals.”

  “Pot? Pot has a smell?”

  “What the shit are you talking about? Of course it does.” I had seen Cruel Intentions at the Geigers’ and remembered Sarah Michelle Gellar sticking white powder up her nose from a little pot she hung around her neck. If it smelled so bad, why would she shove it up her nose? “No, man, that’s not pot. That’s coke.” Like soda? “Ya know? Like cocaine? Blow? Snow?”

  “Sure.” I was finished with the conversation.

  We crushed the pizza on his
bed as we scanned the channels for Sex and the City reruns.

  “Hey! How come nobody turns off the lights in this house?! Do I own the electric company?” my father shouted as he thundered down the hallway into the kitchen wearing a t-shirt that said Proud to be Italian-American with a V-neck that reached his belly button. “We’re headed straight to the poor house!”

  “I think there’s a step between Short Hills and the poor house,” said my brother, struggling to cut his piece of eggplant parmesan. I gave up on the endeavor myself and bit into the full piece stuck on my fork like the beast I was.

  “Eyy, gavone (translation: pig, slob), how ’bout ya cut that?”

  My mother rushed into the kitchen, bottom lip quivering on the verge of tears. She fumbled with the remote as she tried to turn on the small TV mounted on the wall.

  “What? Honey, what is it?” my father started. “Hey, what about no television during dinner? This is family time. I forgot about high-lows. Tony, you want to go first?”

  “My high was hockey practice and my low is this conversation.”

  “Hey! Why you gotta be such a pain in the you-know-what? And hun, I thought we said no TV during…”

  “Stop, Tony.” She didn’t take her eyes off the screen.

  “For Pete’s sake, you’re shaking.”

  Pictures of boys in maroon-and-yellow varsity jackets appeared and then faded on the screen. Each one was wide-jawed and handsome, with chestnut hair that came down to their eyebrows. I thought about growing my hair out like that, but Dad said real men kept their hair short.

  “The ‘Summit Seven’ have been arrested and charged with raping…”

  “Okay! Okay! Enough—what are we watching here?” My father stood up from his seat.

  “Britney, honey, if you’re all finished you can go watch TV downstairs,” said my mother.

  My parents watched in horror as the anchorwoman detailed the case: “Seven young men, all of them players on the high school football team in Summit, New Jersey, have been arrested for the rape of a fifteen-year-old minor with autism.”

  “I’ve gotta call Pat,” said my father—Pat Kershaw was the athletic director at Summit High School.

  Short Hills shares a border with Summit, and if we lived just on the other side of Route 24—the highway I could hear from my bedroom—we’d be Summitites…? Summiters? Summitians?

  “Those motherfuckers,” my mother said under her breath. Tony and I looked at each other and receded into our eggplant. Sure, Mom cursed, but it was usually relegated to “bullshit” or “son of a bitch.” She stared at the screen, mumbling to herself as if we weren’t in the room.

  The anchor continued: “Further details about the alleged rape—and be advised that this is graphic—include sodomy with a lacrosse stick and group sexual activities, and it has been reported that photographs were taken of the acts. One such photograph was circling around the high school, which led to the boys’ arrests.”

  My mother put her chin to the ceiling to hold back tears, “If that was my daughter, I’d unleash Hell on those bastards.” Does Mom… have access to the gates of Hell? “I swear, I would set my two boys on them.”

  Tony and I again met eyes like we had just been drafted into some sort of berserking spec-ops fighting force. I pictured all the weapons I could use, and I wouldn’t even have to hide them because I had my mother’s blessing. We had a couple of hatchets in the shed we’d brought home from the lake house—one for me and one for Tony—that could get the job done.

  “Just got off the phone with Pat Kershaw. This is bad. There was a picture circling…”

  “Yeah, they just said that.”

  “The entire school is pandemonium. You know two of those boys were captains? Their lives are ruined.”

  “You know pandemonium is where demons and…” I started.

  “The fucking football players?!”

  “Eyy! Ohh!”

  “You care about those damn, disgusting football players’ lives? What about the victim?! Jesus Christ, Tony!”

  “That’s not what I meant!”

  “I’m so out of here.” And she stormed off down the hall and into their room.

  My father shoveled his eggplant into his mouth and washed it down with a glass of Italian Water. Tony and I waited for my father to explain what in the heck was even going on, but he didn’t say anything about it.

  He never liked to talk about anything controversial or dramatic or serious. My mother accused him of always making her the “bad guy” because she would be “forced to tell us how the world actually works.”

  “Hate those Sccccummit Hilltoppers, right, Vito?” said my father.

  “Yeah.”

  “What was the score of that game this year? Eighteen-twelve?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’d you have, two touchdowns?”

  I hated when they called it the “2003 Tostitos Fiesta Bowl” when the entire season took place in 2002 but the championship game was in January.

  Mr. and Mrs. Geiger, both Ohio natives and graduates of Ohio State Law School, were fully decked out in crimson and silver Buckeye regalia. In fact, they were so excited that their alma mater was in the national championship that they bought my entire family jerseys for the event.

  But Ohio State was playing Miami—the cool team—and everyone at school was pulling for the Hurricanes. I thought we’d be rooting for Miami too, because my Uncle Shorty played football and baseball there, but my father so reviled “jerks” that he was dressed in silver and crimson.

  Tony, Karl, George, and I piled into the Geigers’ basement and I sucked down sodas while wedged into the couch cushions—these sodas were permitted because it was a “party.” But as soon as the game started, the phone in the basement began to ring: “Vic! It’s for you!” Mrs. Geiger called down the stairs.

  “What?”

  “Who the crap would be calling you here?” said George.

  I popped out of the couch and rushed to the phone so I wouldn’t miss the opening drive. “Um… hello?”

  “Vic, it’s Paxton.”

  “What is it, Paxton?”

  “Vic, I have some news. Hey, why didn’t you come to Mitch’s, anyway?”

  “What is it, Paxton? What is the… the damn news?” I said, covering the bottom half of the phone so they couldn’t hear me upstairs.

  “Okay, Vic, so Julie wants to be your girlfriend.”

  “Julie Fischer?”

  “Yes! Julie Fischer. What other Julie would I be talking about?”

  “Julie Greenberg, Julie Lowenthal, Julie Esposito…”

  “Alright! I got it. No, it’s Julie Fischer.”

  I could hear the Greek chorus chattering in the background: “buzz buzz buzz Vic bizz bizz bizz bizz Julie Fischer.”

  “But isn’t she with Glassman?” It only made sense—they were the number ones on their respective hot lists.

  “She likes you. She’s here now. I don’t know why you’re not here.” Yelps and screams filtered down from upstairs.

  “Vic, it’s John. Hey man, you watching this game? Yo, so Julie Fischer likes you. Don’t worry about Glassman. Yeah, he’s here too, but he doesn’t hate you or anything. It’s cool. We were thinking you go out with Julie and he will go out with Jenna.”

  “Like a trade?”

  “Yeah, man. No. I mean, I guess like a trade. Jenna’s cool with it. She’s here too.”

  I felt like I had been left out of an important meeting, as if Paxton had invited all of the knights to the round table and then took my seat.

  “Vic? It’s Paxton. Okay, so…”

  “Hey, I gotta go, Paxton,” I said and hung up the phone.

  I wedged myself back in the couch right as Miami went up 7-0.

  “Hey Tony, can I have some of your Pepsi?”

/>   “Yeah, fine, but don’t backwash.”

  “Hey, so I might trade girlfriends.”

  “Trade girlfriends?!” shouted George. “What the shit are they running at that school? And look at this shit! These idiots can’t even tackle.”

  “You upgrading?” said Tony.

  “Yeah, well, Julie Fischer is number one and she wears these black pants. All the girls do, they’re called ‘So Lows,’ and Jenna wears them too. But she’s mad at me, I think, because I wouldn’t touch her in the bathroom. I think she’s hot too. I just didn’t have a rose.”

  “What the shit are you talking about?” asked George.

  “Hey Karl, you catching any of this?” asked Tony.

  Karl was, as always, shirtless at the computer playing Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos. His reputation for being a video game whiz kid had grown to the point where classmates had started calling him Qwerty.

  The phone rang again: “Vic! It’s for you!” Mrs. Geiger called down the stairs.

  I unwedged myself from the couch once more and rushed to the phone in the other room. “What is it, Paxton!”

  “Vic, it’s Josh… Glassman.”

  “Oh, hey, Josh.”

  “Hey, you watching this game? So what do you think?”

  “I think they need to blitz Dorsey more.”

  “No, I mean about Julie and Jenna. Do you… do you like Julie?”

  Like her? I didn’t think I was allowed to like her until I moved up the hot list into the single digits. “I mean, I’m with Jenna?”

  “Yeah, but you wouldn’t even touch her at Rosenblatt’s.” How many times would I have to explain chivalry and the rose? I could hear George yelling at the TV and I wanted to get back to the game.