Lawn Boy(7)

“That’s cool. It was an accident.”

She scanned me up and down with her unsteady gaze, from my fake Adidas Superstars (one too many stripes), up past my off-brand, faded jeans, to my ragged gray sweatshirt, and finally to my face: slightly greasy, with the faintest beginning of a molester mustache. I think she must have seen something pitiable in my brown eyes.

“You’re actually kind of cute,” she said.

“Uh, thanks.”

“C’mon,” she said, without taking my hand.

And that was pretty much the extent of our courtship. It was more like a transaction. Gina led me businesslike up the gravel road past a half-dozen parked cars. I did my best to be charming as we crunched along.

“Wow, it’s dark,” I said.

“Yep,” she said.

“Really dark.”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

My thoughts were racing. My frustrated sexuality was on the cusp of relief. I could feel something big about to happen, though Gina seemed pretty matter of fact about it.

“Watch the ditch,” she said when we finally arrived at her white Malibu, and I circled around to the passenger’s side, nearly falling in the ditch.

Once we were in the cramped environs of the car, Gina was mostly business.

“Relax,” she said. Reaching over me, she groped around for the lever, reclining the passenger’s seat. “How’s that?”

“Uh, good,” I said, looking up at her in the dark.

Placing her knee between my legs, she wrestled off her sweater and unbuttoned her blouse and pulled off her panties, and she climbed on top of me before I even had a chance to savor the moment. I’m not saying I wasn’t grateful. To this day, I remain grateful to Gina Costerello and whatever whim, or combination of alcohol and restlessness, prompted her to unbutton my jeans and straddle me in the passenger’s seat of that Malibu. And don’t get the idea that it didn’t feel good, either. It was a revelation, a delirious paroxysm like I’d never known, a welling of rapture from my heels to my temples. The experience literally emptied me.

For ninety seconds after Gina climbed off me, roughly the time it took to get her clothes back on, I felt shucked like an oyster as I gathered my breath.

“Don’t tell Rob about this,” Gina said, buttoning her blouse.

“I won’t. He doesn’t talk to me.”

“And crack that window, so it doesn’t smell like mushrooms in here.”

Cracking the window, I pulled up my pants, still wondering what had just happened to me. I spilled out of the car into the ditch, righting myself as gracefully as possible. I followed Gina dazedly back down the gravel road to the party.

“You’re cute,” she said. “Don’t sulk so much.”

Then she squeezed my hand once and headed directly for the keg before I could interpret whether or not I was supposed to follow her. I got the feeling she didn’t exactly want me to, but then maybe I was sulking again. Anyway, that’s where my romance with Gina Costerello ended as abruptly as it had begun twenty-five minutes earlier.

Gina Costerello was always nice to me after that, up until the time she graduated two months later. There was the time Joe Club stuffed me into my locker, and Gina managed to verbally persuade him not to lock me in there. And there was the time she actually signed my yearbook and told me to “take it easy.”

But it was always painfully obvious to me that there would never be a repeat performance with Gina.

That never really seemed fair. Or maybe I’m just sulking again.





A Place to Land




Not to belabor the point, but I had good reason to be a nervous kid. A few weeks after that picture was taken in front of the fire station, we lost our house on the res when the landlord jacked our rent without warning. We kept what we could carry and left behind the rest of our worldly possessions, which didn’t really amount to much beyond some tired furniture.

For nearly a month, Nate, Mom, and I lived in our 1987 monkey-shit-brown Astro van, eating cold SpaghettiOs out of the can, reading by flashlight through the fog of our own breath, and showering weekly at the state park. I wish I could tell you it was an adventure, at least for the first few days, but it wasn’t. The experience was terrifying from the start.

We parked on the streets most nights, under the sodium glare of a streetlamp if we were lucky, where the shadows played tricks on my uneasy imagination as I lay awake. Other nights, we parked at the end of a dirt road, where I was equally terrorized by the crunch of footsteps over gravel and the clashing of limbs in the wind somewhere in the darkness. Invariably, we awoke damp and chilled to the bone, still wearing our clothes.

Weekends were the worst, because there was no school. School was warm and dry, and a green ticket meant a free hot lunch. Thank God the library was open on Saturday and there was church on Sundays, so we got some relief. Let’s just say I’ve never been much of a camper. Been there, done that.

Eventually, we moved in with my diabetic aunt Genie in South Kingston, a situation that was less than ideal since Aunt Genie lived in a single-wide trailer in a motor court with strict guest regulations. Not to mention that she and my mom never got along.

The first thing Aunt Genie said when we showed up on her doorstep with our damp blankets and dirty laundry was, “This is what you get for marrying a Mexican.”