Play Me Backwards (9 page)

At the end of the night we dropped Dustin off first, leaving Jacqueline with us. All night long Dustin had tried to be charming, and she'd looked as though she wished she could just disappear.

Paige turned around to face her. “I'm really sorry,” she said.

“I don't know what to say,” said Jacqueline. “He's a sweet guy. He's just sort of trying too hard.”

“He means well,” I said.

“I know. But . . . you know.”

“Yeah,” I said.

She shrugged. “Hey, he didn't text me any pictures of his scrotum,
and when I wouldn't let him kiss me he took it well, so it wasn't the worst first date ever.”

“People do that?” I asked. “They send you pictures of their nards on the first date?”

Both Paige and Jacqueline nodded. I thought this over, and out of instinct I tried to rationalize it.

“Well, maybe they think they're living the golden rule,” I said. “They're doing unto you as they wish you would do unto them.”

“They want me to send a picture of
my
scrotum?” Jacqueline asked with a laugh. “Girls don't have scrotums.”

“You know what I mean.”

We all had a good chuckle, and Paige put a hand on my shoulder. “See?” she said. “Leon is hilarious. And he's never texted me anything gross.”

I was beginning to see what it was about me that Paige seemed to like. I might have been a loser, but I wasn't an
aggressive
loser, and I at least had enough sense not to start a date by texting her pictures of my scrotum or anything. Maybe I was a pretty good catch, by certain very low standards.

I had noticed over the course of the dinner that among this crowd, the one that circulated around the football team, Paige was sort of the shallow end of the pool. I mean that in the nicest possible way—not that she was shallow or a person of little consequence, but the other people in the crowd were just a bit
more
popular, a bit better-looking, and a bit better dressed than she was. She wasn't in over her head, exactly, but maybe she operated on the fringes of the group, the same way I did among
my
crowd. I fit right in with the burnouts and bums of the Ice Cave, but I wasn't
that
fucked up.
I didn't have a drug counselor or a parole officer. I didn't drink too much, and I hadn't committed any crimes. Not the kind you could get arrested for, at least.

Paige and I were both a bit out of our depths among our own crowds. Maybe together we could find a niche of our own.

After dropping Jacqueline off, I drove to Paige's house and we made out in my car for a bit. If we weren't in front of her house, we might have even moved to the backseat. But all the lights in the house were on, and she was fairly confident that her little sister was spying on us through binoculars.

The evening had gone well. For both of us. I'd been able to get a conversation about turds going, and she'd gone through a date without getting any pictures of balls sent to her.

Those may have been pretty low hurdles to clear, but at least we'd cleared them.

After I dropped Paige off, I headed to Stan's place. His parents had never gone through with selling the house, so it was the same house I'd been to all those years before, but he'd long since moved out of the room where we'd played video games that one time and into the walk-out basement. This made the back porch into a private entrance to Stan's place, so I was never actually in the house itself, just the basement. I don't think I ever saw his parents once; sometimes I wondered if he even
had
any. The upstairs occupants might have just been a group of demons who used the old bedroom as an office now. How else could you explain the fact that he got away with making so much noise? Like the hangover cures, it defied rational explanation.

Stan's basement room was not so much a bedroom as a suite. In addition to his bed there was a couch and an armchair—his “throne”—that had been spray-painted black. The cushions were always kind of sticky, but being able to tell yourself it was just the
paint was kind of reassuring. Adjacent to the main bedroom was a bathroom, a laundry room, and a storage room. It was, in many ways, a more spacious version of the back room of the Ice Cave. The wood-paneled walls were covered in posters for metal bands and newspapers from days when the headline was about some terrible disaster. There were stains on the walls and the ceiling that I never asked about. Here, we devoted our weekends to the pursuit of evil: playing video games, watching movies, and eating ungodly amounts of nachos.

When I arrived after the outing to Hurricane's, Stan was reclining in the chair, drinking one of his concoctions and playing a video game. The ashtray held a whole pile of cigarette butts.

“There you are,” he said, like he'd been expecting me. “How did it go?”

I pulled up a chair from the little table off the side where he ran Dungeons and Dragons games, and took a seat.

“It went well, actually,” I said.

He looked over at me. “Not so well that you got laid or anything, though, or you wouldn't be here.”

“Well, her parents were home, for one thing. It was a good first date. That's all.”

He focused on the game for a second, then nodded.

“How long has it been for you?” he asked.

“About a year.”

“Was Brenda your first?”

I nodded.

Brenda.

Brenda was a regular at the Cave and in the basement for a while.
A peculiar thing about her was that when she had sex, she made noises like a cow. We all knew this, because she was not overly particular about who she slept with and wasn't above doing it in the break room while people were working, or in Stan's laundry room during parties, even though there was no actual door, just a burlap curtain that didn't exactly make the room soundproof.

Brenda got along
great
in the back room of the Ice Cave. Now and then she and Jenny would try to outdo each other and see which of them could be the bigger freak and, even though Jenny was very much into doing things her parents didn't want her to, Brenda always won. Jenny still had a filter in her head telling her when enough was enough; she might take off her shirt in the break room now and then, but the bra stayed on, at least, and she didn't sleep with just any guy who happened to be around when she got bored. She never sucked a guy off for half a bottle of vodka. I didn't know for sure Brenda had done that, but I heard that she did, and knew her well enough to believe it.

Jenny
hated
Brenda.

I didn't like her all that much myself, but somewhere along the line Brenda decided she wanted to fool around with me, and I wasn't in much of a position to say no to much of anyone at the time. I didn't have had the nerve to, really. So I started making out with her now and then. After a few weeks at second and third base, she dragged me into the laundry room in Stan's basement, stripped naked as nonchalantly as you would to take a shower, and told me to get to work.

She didn't really make it seem like I had an option, so I did as I was told.

I wasn't a very good worker, though.

For one thing, it took me forever to get it up. At home, in bed, just thinking about naked girls was enough to get me hard, but here was one in person, and it was like all the nerves and veins leading to that part of me had been cut off.

She should have cut me some slack. Given that I was only inches away from several pairs of Stan's dirty underwear, not to mention a litter box that hadn't been cleaned out in a while, it wasn't the easiest place to get in the mood. There are probably less erotic places to do it in the world, but I really, really don't want to do it in any of them. But rather than encouraging me or helping out, she rolled her eyes, reached out, took a hold of me, and tried a few tricks with all the enthusiasm of a repairman working on the engine of a car. I half expected her to give my nuts a quarter-turn and say, “Here's you're problem, right here. You should be having these rotated every six months.”

I should have just put my pants on and left, but what would she tell everyone if I did? There wasn't much to do but close my eyes and try to focus and think about someone else.

Even after I finally got hard enough to get the condom on, it took way more effort than I would have imagined trying to get inside of her. I kept trying to, like,
slip
it in, and she kept saying, “Just
push
.” And then I'd push at the wrong place and feel like an idiot. When I finally got it in, I couldn't imagine she was enjoying herself too much. I sure wasn't.

After about five minutes I went “Uhhhh” and shook around a bit, effectively faking my own orgasm before pulling out. Brenda either believed it or just didn't care—either way, it made me feel like an even bigger loser than usual. It was sort of a relief to me when she
dropped out of school and moved to Council Bluffs with some thirty-year-old guy a few months later.

So that was my first time. My second wasn't any better.

For part of junior year I went out with Mindy, a girl I actually sort of liked—or, anyway, didn't actively
dis
like, at least at first. Some girls seem great when you're not going out with them, but as soon as they start kissing you, they turn really, really mean.

Mindy, for instance, was nice and occasionally funny when we were just hanging out as friends in the break room, but once we started going out, she started constantly telling me how big her ex-boyfriend Darren's dick was. Every time we were near a large, cylindrical object, like a water bottle, a tube of cookie dough, or a roll of paper towels, she would point it out and compare it to him. He was usually said to be bigger. Over time Darren's member began to take on nearly inhuman proportions in Mindy's stories. If they were to be believed, the guy must have needed underwear specially designed by a team of engineers just to walk down the street without getting curvature of the spine. He would have had to commission John Deere to make him a special wheelbarrow he could lug his nards around in. If he wanted to text someone a picture of his scrotum, he would've needed to set the camera up on auto-timer and then hike half a block away to get them to fit in the frame.

Needless to say, I did not measure up.

When she saw me with my pants down for the first time, she shrugged and said, “You'd probably be fine for most girls. I just kind of got spoiled by Darren.”

Maybe I shouldn't have been so offended. It's not like I wasn't thinking to myself that her face wasn't as cute as Anna's, or that her
hair didn't glow the same way, or that she wasn't as smart, or anything like that. I was spoiled too, having my first girlfriend be the girl of my dreams. But at least I had the sense not tell Mindy
out loud
that she didn't measure up.

By the time we actually had sex, instead of just fooling around, I had gotten to where I really didn't like her very much at all anymore. The first time we did it she rolled off me after a while and said, “Well, it's not what I'm used to. I couldn't really feel that much. But it's not your fault.” I guess this was her being nice.

After that I just couldn't get it up around her at all anymore. Every attempt to do it was embarrassing and ended in failure.

This is something they don't put into brochures about why having teen sex is a bad idea: If you turn out not to be very good at it, you'll feel like shit. And if you're dating someone like Mindy, she might suggest that you should let her sleep with her ex, too, which won't make you feel particularly super. This gave me a whole new set of hangups that I'd avoided thinking about: What if Anna came back, wanted to go further now that we were older, and I couldn't do it?

Now I had to worry about it with Paige, too.

I sat and thought of all this while Stan drank and killed zombie Nazis, just a few feet away from the laundry room that had been the scene of my first great failure.

“You and Brenda weren't a good match, anyway,” he said.

“Definitely not.”

“Mindy, too. That wasn't any good.”

“No. I think I might like Paige better than I liked them, but I haven't really gotten over how bad those last two were, you know?”

Obviously, I wasn't about to tell him I had performance anxiety
issues, but you can't hide things from the dark lord. He probably already knew.

“So, you're worried that since you two may not have that much in common, you won't have anything to do with her besides make out, and if that's all you do, it'll end up like being with Mindy all over again.”

“Exactly,” I said. “That's exactly it.”

The dark lord nodded.

“I'm going to give you guys something to do together,” he said. “A mission.”

“What do you have in mind?” I asked.

“Slushees,” said Stan. “I want the two of you to find out every flavor of Slushee, Slurpee, and Icee you can get in the Des Moines metro area. Every kind of novelty shaved-ice drink they make.”

“Uh . . . okay?” I said.

He paused the video game, lit a cigarette, stood up, and started pacing around the room. Wispy nicotine fumes trailed behind him and then surrounded him. I almost thought I saw Anna's face in the smoke, but it had to be my imagination.

“Most gas stations have three or four flavors,” he said. “Mostly cherry and a couple of soft-drink flavors, like Coke or Mountain Dew or Dr Pepper. Sometimes you see blue raspberry. Piña colada comes up now and then. You should probably try them all, but I really want you to find this one flavor I saw once called white grape.”

“So that's it?” I asked. “You want us to find the Great White Grape Slushee?”

“Every other flavor too. But mostly that one. White grape. Find it and bring me one.”

“So, is that why I'm supposed to be listening to
Moby-Dick
?” I asked.