Lucky
BY DOUGLAS W. MILLIKEN
Even before Coach cashed in on his chance to teach us, Paulie and I were already figuring out what good hands and mouths were for. Take this one time—it must’ve been the summer between 8th grade and high school, on account of it seemed we still thought we could be some kind of male ideal—when Paulie’s folks threw a party. This was something they enjoyed doing fairly often (your folks and you might’ve come a couple times for all I know) but their parties weren’t the same as those my parents introduced me to or the ones Paulie and I would sometimes try to crash out by the railroad tracks or along the riverbanks, you know, clandestine kids’ parties. People would show up to Paulie’s all done up with ties and jewelry and shit. They’d shake hands with everyone as soon as they walked in the door. Punching someone in the shoulder was not an accepted means of saying hello. If they were drinking wine or liquor, they drank it out of the right kind of glass, not a jelly jar or plastic cup. Ice could be found in a bucket, not a bag. The bucket had a lid. You get what I’m trying to say.
But parties are parties. Things might’ve started off each time at Paulie’s like a sitcom-version of what a good time should be, but after a few hours, everyone was hammered and talking too loud and making out with the wrong person, husbands sneaking off with women who weren’t their wives, that sort of thing. The eventual shouting match in the living room or front yard. The inevitable rhododendron graffitied in an aerosol of puke. Because all parties are, in the end, the same exact party. It doesn’t matter if you’re an owner or a laborer. By the night’s end, if you’re inclined to prove it, it’s obvious you’re all the same drunk douche bag. And man did I love watching this truth get revealed, over and over again.
This particular party I’m thinking of, Paulie’s mom and stepdad said I could come over and spend the night, keep Paulie company while his home became a zoo. This also wasn’t anything new. The rule was, one friend was allowed over just as long as they, firstly, brought nice clothes, and secondly, also completed some major chore in advance of the night’s devolution. (Paulie’s asshole brother, I should add, never took his parents up on this offer, electing instead to partake in some drunken antics of his own, usually involving a ring of pickups parked in a field, all the radios blasting the same Quebecois shitkicker station while he and his buddies got housed on Moosehead and crank, hooting and hollering and, on this specific occasion as it was later alleged, taking turns helping conceive with an overweight Down’s girl who no one exactly could figure how or with whom she’d even arrived in that particular field of drunken kids, though at the time, no one was complaining.) As far as I know, I was always Paulie’s pick. More often than not—and this time was no different—our select task was to mow the yards front, back, and sides, which was a tougher task than one might imagine on account of the majority of their property being a long swath of untended meadow stretching east toward the far property-line (the remainder of their land abutted the field’s northern edge as a network of confused deer trails twisting among spruce and poplar and, for a single bordering stretch, an ancient orchard grown maniacal with neglect). So, you know: where did the yards end? Where did the meadow begin? Well, wherever Paulie’s stepdad said so. Paulie and I would march back and forth behind identical newish Husqvarna push-mowers (the spanking-new red Toro lawn tractor in the garage was strictly off-limits) hemming back the wildflowers and what looked like miniature cornstalks while every now and then, his stepdad—in decreasing states of undress, from bathrobe to blazer, like some perverse inversion of a striptease—would step out onto the wraparound deck and shake his head, shake his head, until finally, lips pooched in reluctant satisfaction, he’d nod his affirmation, clip on his cufflinks and swagger back inside. And that’s how we knew where the yards ended and meadow began. Since on the night in question we planned on camping out, Paulie and I carved an extra little trail behind the house into the tall grass and dipping daisies, mowed a nice private cul-de-sac for us to pitch our tent, figuring this way, no one would come puke on us in the night. Then we put away the mowers, set up the tent, and took a “shower” in the side yard with the garden hose and a bar of Old Spice.
By the time the first guests arrived, we were gussied up in our game-day clothes and playing a lazy match of one-on-one in the driveway, each of us restricted to left-handed set-shots on account of we’d only just learned about the legendary Dolph Schayes and figured his example of ambidexterity was one to live up to. Most folks parked along the shoulder of the road or in the front yard where Paulie’s folks instructively had put their matching Lincolns for the night. But then this one Landrover pulled fast and crooked into the driveway, braking hard and actually nudging my hip with the bumper just as I was shooting for three (I made it!) and when the driver and his wife stepped out from the car, neither one of them acknowledged they’d hit me. They didn’t acknowledge Paulie and me at all. Which I guess proved what Paulie and I suspected anyway: that in certain adults’ eyes, we were invisible and maybe without substance. In separate ways, this was depressing and liberating all at once. Inside the house, bottles were opening and hands were shaking. Red streams pouring and ice cubes rattling glass. Paulie gathered the rebound and bowled his Spaulding under the half-open garage door, where it burped against some metallic thing and drew still. Our game, obviously, was over.
This must’ve been sometime in July because the daylight went on forever. Everybody milled laughing and blathering on the wraparound deck with their drinks and their cigarettes, soaking up the last light of the day until there wasn’t any day left to soak. Then they all flocked inside like moths toward the wet bar’s yellow glow. So how was this different from any teenage house party? No different. Just nicer shoes. There was a handful of kids bounding like jackals in the yard, playing tag and chasing fireflies, but by and large, they were too young for Paulie and me to give two shits about. Yet sometime after the sun had set but before full dark was upon us (I can still see how the sky was bright while everything below, the house and trees and every face I saw, was dim and ghostly and only partly visible, partly there) two girls who looked about our age revealed themselves in the dusk. In all honesty, I can’t remember or maybe never found out if they were sisters who’d come together or friends who’d arrived apart. Either way, they must’ve gone to some other school than us. Paulie and I didn’t know them. But they sure seemed to know us. While we stood there in the grass at the foot of the deck, the two girls approached us and touched us each on the arm and said how happy they were that we were there. I remember, the words they used were young bucks. Their eyes were the confident bedroom eyes I’ve only ever seen since in adult women and very few men. Now, I could ascribe any number of motives for their acting like that, but why bother? What other choice did we have but to agree: we were happy they were there, too.
So the way this usually worked was, Paulie and I would split up and spend the first hour or two of his parents’ parties working over the crowd, letting the adults (or anyway, the adults that’d acknowledge us) think they were humoring us when in fact, it was us who was humoring them. We talked about school. We talked about the Celtics. We’d casually mention something about our savings or Five-Year Plans. We acted as though we were faking being adults, and the adults pretended we were passing. And whenever someone took out their pack to light up a smoke—and this was where our game really kicked in—we made a real production out of looking super cautious, actually peering over each shoulder like a fucking cartoon before leaning in and asking in confidence if we could have one, too. Nine times out of ten, we got what we came for. Some folks—usually solo men—would even offer us a cigarette unprompted. Either way, we’d always slip the smoke into our breast pocket and wink real obvious-like. Concurrently, we’d be sneaking beers down our pants pockets or sometimes, brazen, fill a tumbler with a couple ice cubes and a lot of whiskey or spiced rum, whatever was handy and dark and could be easily mistaken at a glance as a Coke. All this contraband, we’d stockpile for later. And on this particular summer night, we’d together collected more than a full pack of smokes, maybe nine beers, and an unopened bottle of Crown Royal Reserve that someone had brought as a gift, pouched in beige velvet and forgotten among the wet bar’s ranks. So when these strange girls approached us—whose names, even now, I would not dare venture to guess—man, we were ready. Smiling like the finest kind of young gentleman, Paulie and I took the girls’ arms and escorted them away from the braying adults and their stilted babble and piano jazz. Across the manicured lawn behind the house. Down our private pathway to our secret cul-de-sac in the grass.
Looking back on it now, honestly, I can’t understand how Paulie and I were able to pull any of this off. I mean, I did okay with my school work, but Paulie was a certifiable moron. You know how you can hypnotize a chicken by laying its head on the ground then drawing a straight line in the dirt before its beak? That was Paulie in math class. That was Paulie in science lab. Absolutely dumbfounded by knowledge. And too, we were always getting in trouble in school. We could get away with exactly nothing. It’s like our teachers had marked us at a young age as a couple of fuckups, kept their eyes open and apprised of our whereabouts and goings-on. And for our part, we did nothing to acquit ourselves. Our teachers suspected we were idiot delinquents because that’s exactly what we were. We sucked at being the bad boys. Getting caught every time—huffing glue in the back of an empty school bus, hiding out with the girls’ team in their locker room—never taught us to be smarter, to be sneakier, to maybe even consider being good. Each time, we were convinced: we will not get caught. If we weren’t such inconceivable geniuses on the basketball court—and, most surprising of all, the only reason our school was able to not only compete but place in the state’s par coeur league—we’d likely’ve been expelled long ago.
So the fact that Paulie and I were able to whisk away these two strange girls to an appealing grotto in the night and ply them with whiskey and beer is fucking unfathomable. Even I kinda doubt we ever made it happen. And if I’d known then that this would be my last consensual coeducational throughout what remained of my youth, fuck man, I might have taken better notes so as to learn how to behave like anything other than a loser.
But of course, I could not know that then. So the four of us first sat outside the tent for a while, each of us with a smoke and a can of beer and the bottle of Crown passing amongst us, and we must’ve talked while we sat there with the fireflies winking all around us but I seriously can’t imagine what we possibly could’ve talked about since these girls were way smarter than us and clearly from some whole other world. I guess whatever conversation we offered, though, was sufficient, on account of after a while, we all went inside the tent and paired off and made out, drinking sips of Crown from one another’s mouths while our hands explored what they could with clothes still in the way. And somewhere amid this the girls traded places, swapped me for Paulie and vice versa, but even then, I wasn’t sure how or when this exchange took place or even if this only happened the once. Which isn’t to imply that the girls were interchangeable. Only that they were alike. (And too, we’d only just met.) Both had tight ringlets gathered around their ears and they each wore white dresses like really nice doilies—Sunday dresses, I remember thinking—and in the dark they looked very similar, sharp chins and huge eyes, and acted similarly, too, always sarcastic and very grown up. They knew exactly what they were doing. And though this was certainly a first time for me and very likely for Paulie too (the girls that one time in the locker room were fun and giggly and even though they’d open their towels to flash us, they always had on underwear underneath) somehow, Paulie and I passed the test. Until it was time to go home, the girls stayed with us in the tent. They taught us—with their hands and with hot whispery instructions—right where our fingers and mouths should go. Who could ask for a better trainer? For their part, they never once needed to be told.
But as much as I may wish it otherwise, my and Paulie’s useless virginities remained intact. Our clothes stayed on. It was exquisite—caressing their wet panties, the soft dingbats of their nipples, the clefts of their teenage asses—how incredibly my balls ached and throbbed.
That said, for a pair of fourteen-year-olds, Paulie and I were lucky. There was no way we could play it otherwise. We didn’t deserve what we were getting. But we’d accept it gladly nonetheless.
Regardless. The girls must’ve left before midnight because the party wasn’t crazy yet and guests with kids always left before the crazy began. Two male voices called out in the night, and the girls said they had to go. I remember, blueballed and bonered, there was a fumbly goodbye outside the tent. As in, Paulie and I were fumbly. We were drunk on Crown and hormones. The girls, somehow, were not. After the hot human bouquet in the tent, the outside air was fresh and cool. We uh’d and duh’d our valediction, then watched the girls gracefully ascend the path from the meadow toward the house, the back and forth of their hips and the white ghosts of their dresses dissolving into the dark and out of our lives.
No surprise, Paulie and I didn’t say a whole lot after that. I don’t think we knew what to say. Or maybe we knew there wasn’t a thing now to say. After a bit, we wandered out into the backyard and sat hunkered down in the grass, boldly smoking and sipping our last beers while watching the bright ember of the party flicker and swell, and at some point while we watched, Paulie’s stepdad stepped out onto the back deck and undid his pants to let loose a long hot arc of piss between the railing’s slats onto the freshly trimmed grass, completely unaware that two teenage boys were his captive audience just yards away. And I remember how the light from the house fell across his pissing cock, how the head kinda shined but the shaft diffused the light a little so that it looked soft and warm like the cheeks of the fast girls who’d made our evening a night. I could actually imagine that masculine softness nuzzling my own cheek, prodding me like an animal, and I remember, it did not freak me out, imagining Paulie’s stepdad’s cock laid along my face. So maybe I always knew that about myself. Paulie’s stepdad zipped up and made the same face he did when we were done mowing—head nodding yes, lips pooched and satisfied—then went back inside the house, so Paulie and I finished our beers and smokes then returned to the tent, and with the excuse of the booze and the excitement of the girls, Paulie and I stretched ourselves out on our sleeping bags and touched ourselves unselfconsciously for a while, and then in a minute rolled over and touched each other, kissing on the lips the way the girls had taught us while we each worked the other’s softness, his ache, his heat.
Within a year, of course, we’d both be way better at all of this. Coach will have taken us under his wing. Taught us technique. How to press and how to surprise. Pick and roll, as he liked to say. But for our first time out, I think we did alright for ourselves. We got the job done. First it was a fever, and then it was a gasp. Then we rolled apart and passed kindly into sleep.
Now you and I both know I’ve had plenty of wilder nights since. First lots of boys, then lots of girls, then some eventual thing in between. But this was something else. More impossible and so also more sweet. And I can’t help but wonder, had we known to stay quieter, could we have somehow made it last? If we hadn’t been such dummies: how long could we have sustained that sweet impossibility? Though I suppose really there was no hiding what we were. We were obvious and only grew more obvious with age. And there are no secrets kept in a town as small as ours. I would have to leave this farmland world altogether before a woman would ever clutch and gasp frenzied with me again. Until the day we achieved escape velocity, for Paulie and for me—and for Coach most of all—we’d have to make do with the sweaty company of boys.
It was still blue and glowy with dawn when I woke up the next morning. My eyes felt swollen but my head was real fuzzy, real light. Beside me, Paulie snored a little in his sleep, soft like the way a tired dog does when it’s dreaming of being tired. We’d both passed out in our game-day clothes but somehow Paulie’s pants had disappeared in the night. I remember, his flaccid dink and balls were wispy with pale hairs and slicked still in the glossy evidence of himself. He looked so pitiful, messy as he was. He didn’t even know he was a mess. I lowered my head over him and cleaned him up and when I lifted my head, he looked way better. Spick and span. No one can accuse me of being a bad friend. I opened the tent flaps and wobbled out into the morning.
A real heavy mist clung to the meadow and house and the setback trees to the north, and even then I remember thinking how the world looked like a Polaroid, the colors and the light so dreamy, so wooly unreal. In the side yard there was a man and a woman asleep on their bellies in the grass, and the man’s pants were down around his ankles and the woman’s skirt was bunched up above her waist. No trace of her panties in sight. I remember, the man slept with one hand open on her back, like he was consoling her, there there. But with both their butts exposed to the dawn, I’d have to say, he was the one needing consoling. I looked at the lady’s full bare ass for a while and thought of where my mouth had been and where else my mouth could go, but in the end decided to leave her alone. I hadn’t been invited to this particular coupling. I walked around the outside of the house but there was no one else out there, though I did find an unopened Silver Bullet forgotten in the grass, so I opened that and lit one of my pilfered smokes and already, I was feeling much more involved in the goings-on of my body. I hadn’t ever had a hangover before. I didn’t have one then, either. I was still drunk. I didn’t know then that you could do that, drink all night and pass out and wake up still drunk. I didn’t know you could delay your hangover by drinking even more. But I was learning.
Inside the house, I walked around with my cigarette and my beer, inspecting the scene. There were glasses and bottles and cans clustered on every surface and overflowing ashtrays and a floor lamp tipped over across the arm of one couch, but no other sleeping people with their dewy butts exposed. I did find Paulie’s folks, though. They were awake and underclothed in the bathroom, Paulie’s stepdad sitting on the toilet with his head tipped back and white stuff painted all over his mouth and jaw. Paulie’s mom stood beside him, running a razor the length his neck. She was shaving him. In the crepuscular aftermath of their summertime party. She was shaving her husband on the toilet.
It took me a minute to understand what I was seeing. The barbers in our town didn’t do that sort of thing, and really, the only other time I’d seen one person shave another was when my dad would take me over to visit the man he said was my uncle but who clearly wasn’t my uncle, was just some guy my dad liked a lot. This false-uncle had a red-vinyl-and-chrome barber’s chair in his trailer right where his kitchen table should’ve been, and my dad would shave his supposed brother with a tenderness he otherwise reserved only for my mother and even then, only sparingly. Then the man they called my uncle would take the same razor and gently shave my dad. I’d watch all of his from a stool on the far-side of the bar dividing the living room from the kitchen. I remember my dad saying: Sit here, Coleman. Sit still and pay attention. And when they were done, somehow now all a-shimmer with excitement, my false-uncle would ask if I wanted to go outside and play for a while. But he wasn’t really asking. So I’d go outside and kick around in the driveway and poke at the ants toiling in the dirt and maybe an hour or so later, my dad would come bounding down the trailer steps, flushed and freshly showered and walking real loose like all his bolts had come untight, and he’d clap his hands like that meant anything at all and only then were we allowed to go home.
And I can’t really say it was all that different, watching Paulie’s mom shave his stepdad: a tenderness as preamble to more, private tenderness. The only difference was, they didn’t care that I was there. They did not need my audience for this particular intimacy. I know that sounds like my dad and his friend got off on me watching, but that’s not it. That’s not how it felt to me. It was more like they wanted me to see that men can be kind to one another, can be gentle. Yes, we can be hard and we can be stoic. But in our own company, we can be sweet, too. It was important to them that I know. To Paulie’s parents, though, I was immaterial. I wasn’t even there.
When she was done, Paulie’s mom wiped her husband’s face lightly with a towel. But she left a cloud of foam riding the tip of his nose. She took the towel from his face and smiled and he smiled right back at her, knowing how ridiculous he looked or not, I can’t say. Then she bent to kiss him and it was a long, good kiss there on the toilet, and when she was done, the foam was on her nose now, too.
Only after they were done did I feel like I could leave. As I said, it was clear they did not need me to see what they were up to. But I needed to see. I’m still not entirely sure why. I finished my beer and poked my dead cigarette into the can while I walked around from room to room, looking for something but I couldn’t know what, and I almost didn’t see Paulie standing there in the middle of the living room, weaving and balling his fists into his sockets like a cranky baby, perhaps not even entirely awake. When his hands fell away from his face, his wide-set eyes looked wider than usual, one side of his face squished and lined from his pillow. He still wasn’t wearing any pants. Just an Oxford and blue tie and the velvet Crown sack draw-stringed around his scrotum and dong. Paulie said my name and asked what I was doing and he twirled a curl of pubic hair while he asked me, and then and now, I still can’t tell, did he know he was doing that or not?
“I was thinking I might go for a walk,” I said. But that was news to me. I hadn’t been thinking about walking at all. All at once, though, it made a lot of sense. To feel road beneath my feet. To watch the world pass slowly on either side, on all sides, the whole world passing me by.
“Are you coming back?” he asked with real concern all over his fucked-up face, and you know, it was only then that it occurred to me that that’s what I’d always thought “going for a walk” meant. I’m not leaving. I’m coming right back. I hadn’t yet come to realize: it can mean its opposite, too.
But “Yes” I told Paulie. “Yes, I’m coming back.” I stood watching him swaying half-naked in his living room. I watched his puffy eyes slowly blink, and still I could taste the salty paste-and-sardines of him in my mouth. “Of course,” I said, then said it again: “Of course.”
The mist was dissolving into long ribbons of sunlight streaming through the windows, casting bright rivers across the floor and the empty bottles and the ashtrays overflowing, across my best friend and me, and more than ever, I wanted to leave. Not to go anywhere. To go nowhere, with force, and to love being gone. But I didn’t. I didn’t go for a walk like I’d said. I didn’t leave Paulie alone. We both knew what we’d done and it was weird but it was okay. As long as I stayed, it was okay. I touched Paulie’s shoulder and he leaned hard into my touch, and I led him back outside in a half-embrace to our tent in the tall grass and summer flowers. To lay down again in the mess of our bedding. To relax our bodies into the form of the ground, let the whole earth cradle us like a hand, like a tit. If just for a minute. Just a few more hours of sleep. We weren’t pariahs yet. We were only fortunate goons. A couple young bucks. We closed our eyes, and for a little while longer, we were granted leave to hold the whole world at bay.
