Chapter 9

“You drunk asshole! Is that what it is now, you’re a drunk? A 15-year-old alcoholic? You friggin’ asshole! I’m telling your father to get his ass up here!”

            “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh…” Sobs.   

            A grimaced face, the universal expression of grief at, perhaps, the human condition itself. Though, like Shakyamuni Buddha, I had not yet been exposed to the full ravages of sickness, old age, and death. Are we all brothers and sisters in suffering, or did I suffer more than most? Others endured their own trials and travails of lack and grief, but at least most of them found themselves placed and ensconced in either a close familial unit or the larger community.

            I felt so alone (most of the time… at least Lewis and Trish and who the wha’ the…)

            “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh…” More sobs. Fuck it all anyway a la Nicholas Cage in “Leaving Las Vegas” (an unrealistic portrayal of alcoholism.)

            Then another sob followed by deeper belly sobs. Fat tears of inky, black psychic poison fell from overflowing eyes. I sat down on the toilet seat and held my head in my hands. My head. My hands. Me. How could such a handsome young guy suffer so?

            Alcohol, like other drugs, affects time perception (especially that of the inexperienced user.) I must have stupored out in my own blubbers because it seemed as if my dad had teleported from the downstairs fourth bedroom to the foot of the second-floor bathroom.

            “He’s just an asshole,” said my dad. “This is ridiculous! I have work in the morning. I have work in the morning. I have work in the morning. And I’m woken up by this shit? I’m woken up by this shit. Call 911 right now. Call 911 right now and get him an ambulance. We’ll put him in Rosa (our local psych ward) because there’s something wrong with him. He can be with the other alcoholics over in the psych ward.”

            “No, please,” I wailed. “I’m sorry.”

            I was sober enough to understand that I did not want to go to the emergency room, Rosa Pavilion, a rehab (this was my first and only time getting drunk, so I do not think I was quite rehab material), or anywhere else other than the relative (and, for me, quite relative) safety of my own bed and room.

            “No! Call the ambulance. I’m not dealing with this damn shit at three o’clock in the morning! All the stress I have at work and I have to deal with this shit at three o’clock in the morning. Call 911.”

            Dad’s sleep-red face quivered.

            Mother picked up the portable phone from her bedroom cradle and pushed the dial button.

            “No, please! I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry! Please don’t take me to the hospital. Please! Please don’t take me to the hospital! Please! I won’t drink anymore. I’m sorry. Please.”

            “Get your ass to bed!” screamed my father. “Get to bed! I have work in the damn morning! Enough damn stress and I have to deal with this damn bullshit!”

            I scurried to bed, grateful to not lose what I thought of as “freedom” (if the life I lived resembled “freedom”) at the hands of some intake psychiatrist (a humorless Indian or bureaucratic Jew plagued, grown-ups plagued by their own neuroses.)

            I closed my bedroom door. Mother yanked it open.

            “You leave your door open! No more privacy for you, Mr. Man. You just ruin everything.”

            “What’s going on?” murmured my sister from the next room.

            “Nothing. Just go to bed.”

            The ogress turned back to me.

            “At least I have one good child. You do nothing but ruin my happiness. You’re a happiness-ruiner! A happiness-ruiner! I was so excited… I was so looking forward to seeing you try out your tux that I rented for formal night. But you had to ruin that for me. You couldn’t even let me have that!”

            Mother whimpered a wounded cry, broke down in tears, and coughed out tear-laden huffs, an almost orgasmic pant of grief. I guess I really did ruin her “happiness.” Good. The bitch didn’t deserve happiness.

            “I’m sorry,” I said, weakly, swallowing my pride through a mix of drunkenness and mellow relief at not being admitted to a potentially dangerous psych ward.

She walked back to her room and left her door open so that I would have even less privacy. I wasn’t scared to be alone in my room that one night and that one night only. If only Praying Mantis-like aliens would transport me to the trillionth dimension (where I would see all past and future, including what was to come with Alisa.)

With my door open, I could only find safety, comfort, security, and privacy in the confines of my cranium. So, I hid there. That’s where I always hid. Until I became what some bureaucratic mental health professional (of the type that works at Rosa) would call a “maladaptive daydreamer.” Then I became a writer. The good ones are nothing more than maladaptive daydreamers who know how to turn a word left, right, and into the fourth (or trillionth) dimension.

So, I hid inside my own mind. Where everything was. Infinite universes. Most of them much better than the one my physical body inhabited. Even if my door was open and my body exposed to mom and dad, at least I would be safe inside myself. Not to be Gnostic or fall into the trap of Cartesian Dualism. Mind and body are, in a sense, the same and both are me (my head, my hands, my sotted brain.)

I drifted off into a still-drunken sleep. Some Higher Being (perhaps even God) sent me the dream I needed:

I lay in a bed with Danielle, Amanda, Joe’s Daughter, and Jesenia (but no Amber, that Methodist cracker.) We were all clothed. They all appeared in the different ways I had seen them look and dress throughout our encounters (significant to me but probably forgettable to them) in the everyday world.

I rested my head on the lap of Joe’s daughter and kissed the inside of her blue jeans. Danielle, perhaps the most lascivious of them, slid her tongue in my mouth. Amanda, the coldest, lay on her back and laughed – perhaps even made sarcastic comments – over anything the rest of us might have said or done.

Jesenia, the most accessible of all of them, cuddled me. Put her head on my chest. She wore her Hilfiger jeans and sweater. There was no reason to remove any of her clothes. Not even her tiny Adidas sneaks. She just loved and cuddled me. They all did – in their own way. And I loved each and every one of them with equal intensity. There are no favorites in this sort of love (though Jesenia, even in the dream, seemed more accessible than the others.) We kissed, hugged, huddled, cuddled, hugged, and then kissed some more.

Bliss. Is this what Heaven is like? If I knew for sure, why would I remain in this vale of tears? But at that time, I did not know for sure what waited for me in that “undiscovered country,” if anything (shame on me for my lack of faith; something is there, but it is beyond the ken of mortal man.)

I just wanted to be with my girls forever. Lying on a bed in our jeans.

I think it was Peter Sloterdijk who summed up what the best of life really is: “Doing ideal things with ideal people” (I’m sure I’m misquoting him here.) Like being the only guy to go to Great Adventure with a Latina sorority. Simple: doing what you want to do with the people you would most want to do those things with (i.e. the “Hermanas” of Lambda Pi Upsilon.)

Imagine that. Riding the rides with them all day. Going down the log flume with them. Gulping down my fear and riding the scariest rides – even Kingda Ka – just for them. It wouldn’t matter if my harness failed and I was ejected from my seat. At least I would die next to one of my beloved girls. They would watch me crack my head against a rail and splatter to the ground (and then, I’m sure, my mother would claim a relationship with me just to sue Warner Brothers, the Six Flags parent corporation.)

But I wouldn’t die. We would leave the park before closing. Then drink and hook up all night. As some wise Millenial said (“wise Millenial” is almost an oxymoron): “The night doesn’t grow old – we do.”

I woke up to an open door, a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels (the other half ended up in the toilet and on mother’s barren breasts) and my parents. I wanted to stay in that place with Danielle, Amanda, Joe’s Daughter, and Jesenia. Forever. If only.

I did not need to be a priest, wizard, guru, sadhu, master, or wise man. Who wanted to be like Ram Dass and reach the highest yet driest peaks of spiritual attainment?

I just needed my girls and their love.

***

            No hangover. Maybe because I had thrown up. Or maybe because I had a natural tolerance for large amounts of alcohol (half a bottle of Jack Daniels would have killed some 15-year-old first-timers.)

            Dad sat on the recliner end of the couch, footstool open and out. He sipped his coffee and flipped through his beloved Asbury Park Press. He went to work an hour later than usual on Saturdays, which gave him the time to start the day with one less “huh” to his usual “huh-huh-huhs.”

            “You’re lucky you threw up or you’d be hungover right now.”

            He studied an ad and jotted down a phone number on the back of his business card.

            My dad, like Fred Trump when he sent Donald to military school, was looking for a way to keep me out of trouble. Not that drinking by myself in my lonely room was the good kind of trouble. The good kind of trouble would have been mother catching me getting a blowjob in the garage or something like that. From Jesenia maybe? The most accessible (if she wasn’t dating Tommy) of my loves?

            Dad, at least, loved me (of that I was sure.) Did mother?

***

            The airplane – carrying the precious tuxedo – landed at San Juan International Airport.  The Monarch of the Seas cruise would depart from the port of the “Rich Port” (if only I had docked in my future girlfriend Alisa’s “Rich Port.”)

            Mommy, sister, and me. After a particularly unpleasant trip to Hawaii (many native Hawaiians, in fact, bear a resemblance to Alisa), my mother had banned my dad from all future vacations. She claimed he was miserable while on vacation, a grouch who ruined her good time. He either paid for the vacations or won them from GM and my mother took them.

            A parade in Old San Juan. 50% of Jesenia’s mixed DNA came from La Isla del Encanto. Did that mean as much to Tommy? It must have. I Facebook-stalked him recently and he is still messing with Ricans (as the tee-shirt on the Atlantic City Boardwalk says: “Once You Go Rican You Never Go Seekin’.”)

Colonial verandas twisted up and around serpentine streets and alleys unsuited for a post-Henry-Ford age. Wrought, chipped balconies almost as fair (and more so for the peels of faded paint) as any senorita who would stand on them, songbirds on a perch. Not to objectify them (though it may be too late for that at this point in the novel!)

            100% of Alisa’s blood coalesced in this multiracial melting pot (the Catholics, apparently, had no problem with everybody marrying everybody – good on them!)

            Verandas like this… Uncanny or no? Canny? Uncanny? Canny? Uncanny?

            Jesenia… Jesenia…

            Boom!

            No words, hands, name, address, phone number, and no idea who I was, where I was, who I was with, and what I was doing. Blank! Tabula Rasa.

            Panic. I fumbled – like a blind man fishing for a cigarette – for a construct, a conceptual Rock of Gibraltar (a goodly portion of Jesenia and Alisa’s blood must have come from Spain or Morocco), something solid to grasp.

The parade hopped down the alley. Nearly-nude dancers stomped and twirled in traditional Taino dress (Tainos who mixed – to varying degrees - with a bunch of Moors and Spaniards.)

            Whoa, this was like a bad trip (and I had never and have never used psychedelics.)

            Native Americans stomped the asphalt. Hot Latinas jiggled. Hot Latinas… They would be terra firma until I regained my wits about me.

            My wits about me… My wits about me… Hot Latinas… Hot Latinas… Hot Latinas…

            My first ever panic attack. Yay! Many more would follow!

            Jesenia…

            Or any Latina who will love me…

            “Mom, I’m feeling really weird.”

            A veneer of spacy, gauzy “unreality” permeated my surroundings like molecules of mist on an Arecibo clothesline, the moisture-laden air dampening the bedsheet of a local SETI astronomer, the nocturnal dressing as balmy as a towel passed out by a flight attendant (how far was that radio dish out in the woods, from this brown and pastel concrete-colonial jungle?)

            Some local boxing champion waved to the crowd from the flower-and-ribbon-bedecked platform of a gaudy float.

            “You’re just jet-lagged.”

            “No, I feel really scared for some reason. I don’t know what it is. I’m just really nervous.”

            “You’re not going back to the room. I’m watching this parade.”

            “I don’t know what it is, but I’m really scared.”

            “You’re just like your father! Miserable on vacation. You don’t have to come with us on vacation again either. Kayla and I will be happy without you.”

            Jesenia…

            Or any Latina who will love me…

            Did Puerto Rico – the most tropical of environments – become “uncanny”? Did that somehow add to the romance – like a psychical shirt steeped in associative dyes - of the place and the women who were from such a paradoxically cheerful-morbid place? Where people live in the sun all day and die in booze all night?

I thought of the Senorita mentioned in the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” the one who led the weary desert traveler (Don Henley) through the entrance of the Hacienda and into both rest (resting his weary cowboy bones) and unknown pleasures. Yet weren’t my thoughts of that song and the images I attached to it always “canny” (like Puerto Ricans once they landed on the hot stoops of the Lower East Side?) Who didn’t want to be an outlaw goin’ to “South of the Border,” especially if it was “South of the Border” in Dillon, South Carolina where many Puerto Rican couples (maybe even a few from the claustrophobic Bronx – I-95 runs through Co-Op City) stop for the night on their way to visit relatives in Orlando (and spend a day or two in the Magic Kingdom.) Wouldn’t it be cheerier to live in Orlando than Co-Op City? Co-Op City is only an express bus ride away from the treasures of antiquity at the Met, though you would never know it (they even closed the Co-Op City Barnes & Noble.) But that I-95 leads – in the words of Glenn Frey’s “In the City” - out beyond the neon lights to a paradise at the end of the horizon (the Miami-Dade capital of Latin America that falls off to the Caribbean Sea, a short flight to canny/uncanny P.R.?)         

            I didn’t know. I just wanted to go back to the hotel room, the closest home and touchstone of safety I could find.

            The next day we visited the Catedral de San Juan and saw the skull of San Pio, a relic, a gift from Rome. Someday we would all be like San Pio, even the hot and not-hot Boricuas (though there aren’t too many not-hot Puerto Ricans) walking on the sidewalk outside the key lime “Gothic” (Gothic according to Wikipedia, but not to a horror aficionado) façade of the second oldest cathedral of the Americas.

            How could someone who dressed in Adidas and Tommy Hilfiger come from such an “Old World” place (though I’m sure both Jesenia and Alisa were born at Jersey Shore Medical Center in Neptune, NJ, just as I was.)

            I paid my respects to San Pio, his skull a Hamlet-like reminder of mortality (like I needed to think of death any more than I did.)

            And then we boarded the Monarch of the Seas.

***

            “Oh, look at this gold! It’s beautiful! Oh, it’s so beautiful. May I see that one?”

            Mother gestured to the Caribbean mulatta behind the counter. The Mulatta’s cappuccino-colored hand reached under the glass, pinched the tag of a gold cross pendant, and placed the item on the cotton padding of a small cardboard jewelry box.

            “Would you like this gold cross, Will? I think it would look great on you! And the gold is so cheap here. Oh, it’s so beautiful.”

            Mother gushed over the shiny element. Though a gentile and a Jew-hater, mother acted the part of a Jewish stereotype, an anti-Semitic caricature, a Shylock parody of lucre lust.

            Did she – did any part of her – love me? Was this her way of showing love?

            Mother turned to the Caribbean mulatta, one of several salespersons in an air-conditioned store, as sterile and plastic as the jewelry counter of any stateside J.C. Penney’s.

            “You’re so lucky. Getting to work around all this beautiful gold every day.”

            The Caribbean mulatta half-smiled. She probably lived in a hillside shack; a hut destroyed by hurricanes every few years.

            “Oh, look at this one! So pretty!”

            In “Social Studies” class (the P.C. version of History), the teachers had already told me of the colonial Spanish governor who had been executed by the Jivaro tribe of present-day Ecuador. Fed up with the white man’s greed, they poured molten gold down the governor’s throat until the steam alone exploded his bowels and the rest of his innards.

            This Caribbean mulatta probably fantasized doing the same to my mother and people like her. Or not. Maybe she was better than that. Most people are.

            Not me. Or not all the time.

            When I dated Alisa, I fantasized about her – dressed as a Mayan princess – pouring molten Au (the periodic table symbol for gold) down my mother’s fat throat: 

            Oh, imagine Alisa dressed like that and acting out such a justified punishment.     

            Oh, Alisa. For the first two months of our relationship the “A” in Alisa stood for “Ally.”

            My ally against mother.

            Did I ever love my mother? Did she ever love me?

            “How did you enjoy your trip?” my dad asked as soon as we arrived home from the airport. “Another family vacation that I didn’t get to take.”

***

            My dad, even by my idiosyncratic standards, was a better father, husband, and overall human being than Mr. Stinson.

            I walked across a grass field. That grass field is now home to a nail salon, a gourmet coffee shop, and a coal-fired cauliflower pizza restaurant (boy, did our country and region become sterile from 2000-2016.)

            Lewis Stinson’s “house” (more an industrial mini-mini-loft – though Lewis had never been to NYC) sat like a squat, boxy layer-cake at the end of the tick-infested field. This outpost at the edge of a grassy mini-prairie lurched like a loose, gray charm at the nape of a tarnished necklace – a string of businesses, car dealerships, fast food restaurants, a family-owned steakhouse, a Wawa, and a gas station. The disused and unincorporated sections of a town are always the most industrially used and incorporated.

            I had taken the school’s “late bus” (the bus that left an hour after school for the kids who had detention) to get to Lewis’ neighborhood. His regular driver knew all the kids on her route and would have probably thrown me off the bus. Then I would have been stuck at school and forced to take the late bus anyway. So, I just hung out in front of the gym and fantasized about women until the late bus arrived. 

            Lewis lived on the second story of a linoleum factory. A staircase constructed of rotting two-by-fours twisted and turned to the landing and front door. I walked up the perilous planks and knocked on Lewis' door.

            One never knew what to expect. Sometimes the various Stinsons were warm and welcoming. Other times, they were drunk, high, violent and threatening.

            His brother Timmy – a Navy SEAL who for some scandalous reason was no longer a Navy SEAL – opened the door.

            Timmy looked like Phil Anselmo from “Pantera”:

       

              But, unlike Phil, our government had taught him how to kill people quickly, efficiently, and with his bare hands.

            “Who the fuck are you?” he asked.

            “I’m Will, one of Lewis’ friends.”

            “Hey Lewis! One of your little fucking friends is here.”

            I walked through the door and into the immediate kitchen area.

            Tessie, the Stinson’s Rottweiler, jumped on me.

            “Bite him! Bite him!” said Timmy.

            From the corner of my eye I saw the living room to the upper left of the kitchen. Mr. Stinson lay on one of the two couches, the one pressed against the beams at the head of the room. A copper pipe covered in black Styrofoam (remember, there were no walls in this house) hissed and popped over his drunk and deflated body. He wore nothing but a pair of white Fruit of the Loom briefs. Coors Gold cans littered the rectangular, 70s-era coffee table next to his tan, oily, threadbare couch.

            He looked like an older version of Randall Flagg, the Anti-Christ character from Stephen King’s “The Stand” miniseries: 

            At a lower right angle to Mr. Stinson’s recumbent head was the edge of a second small couch, the back, sides, and cushions wooly and knitted in a weave pattern. A “Home Sweet Home” throw pillow mocked decency from the upper left corner; a homemade Afghan covered the back of the couch lest a guest find themselves scratched by the woolen material. The (admittedly) comfortable-looking couch seemed too cozy for the stripped flat. The incongruity of a warm couch in an uninsulated space (somehow the Stinsons had ripped the insulation out of the walls too) made for an unintentional conceptual art project. The living room seemed as homey as a sitcom set arranged on the floor of a UPS shipping dock, a pretentious art school grad’s critique of the fuzzy distinction between our work and home lives.

            But Jesenia – of all people – sat on the couch! Next to Lewis. Though Jesenia was a half-Puerto Rican wiggeress, the Queen of fuckin’ England might have just as well been sitting there.

            What the… Jesenia! She hung out over here? Next to a near-nude Mr. Stinson? A beautiful (Lori Petty with an effervescent personality) Irish-Boricua girl in this environment? One of my muses sat in the middle of an apartment that looked like it sprouted from the mind of H.R. Geiger; nothing but exposed pipes, wiring, and curly-cue hoses that ferried tap water from here to there.

            Jesenia sitting in an “H.R. Geiger meets ‘Three’s Company’”-looking place?

How about that!

            “Hey! That’s Will from English class!”

            “Uh, hey Jesenia.”

            She wore the same loose, baggy Hilnigger jeans and sweater, the one she wore on a near-daily basis. Did she wash her clothes? Hopefully not! Not everyone can shower, rub lotion on their extremities, and douse themselves in subtle perfumes a la Danielle, Amanda Goldstein or even cracker Amber.

            Though I sat behind Jesenia in First Period English, my sensitive nose did not detect a strong and obvious malodor as it would go on to do with Alisa’s pungent and almost overpowering olfactory “sabor.” Alisa stunk through a willful neglect of hygiene, but Jesenia (from the little I knew of her) likely made a daily effort to brush her teeth, comb her hair, and at least wash her body if not her wiggery clothes. Jesenia seemed the type, in fact, who would have criticized someone else for a lack of “toilette.”

            And may I emphasize again, as I did in Chapter 1, that women should smell bad by the sterile standards of unimaginative minds. For instance, one of my favorite odors on a sexy mid-90s Puerto Rican slut (a love interest who came after Alisa) was a foggy amalgamation of mothballs, damp leaves, kitty litter, secondhand Newport smoke, and an ass so (thankfully) unwashed that the smell of sweat and shit pierced through her tight, dirt-stained jeans and assaulted my nose with the smell of a fresh provolone cheese (but if the smell of that provolone cheese had been somehow artificially amplified by a world-renowned cheesemaker; and forget a $1,000 vintage or some shit like that! Such a smell would have paired better with a bottle of O.E. and a Newport regular.)

            It should be illegal for attractive women to bathe. Only ugly women should scrub their private parts. No lesser men than Mozart, Napoleon, and James Joyce shared my opinion on these matters. Jesenia broke my law by (likely) wiping her culo and expecting others to do the same (in the spirit of the late African-American comic Redd Foxx’s unimaginative comedy bit on the importance of anal cleanliness.)

            But no one is perfect. Jesenia more than made up for the fondness she held for soap and water. She – and this would be an understatement – did not think to put on airs (more like Bath & Body Works spray) in the manner of a Danielle, Amanda, or cracker Amber.

            After all, she sat next to Lewis and diagonal to the drunk and almost-nude Mr. Stinson – a man laid out in crusty, yellowish Fruit of the Loom briefs.

            Wouldst thou imagine Danielle, Amanda Goldstein, or even cracker Amber in such a seamy setting? Inside the Stinson’s walls was a man, a family, and a home destroyed by alcoholism and lower-class ignorance and dysfunction.

            Jesenia didn’t judge.

            “Will’s awesome! I love Will!”

            Oh! Somebody loved me! Jesenia no less! If not the one and only “girl of my dreams,” Jesenia at least appeared in my dreams and frequently so. Who cared if she was still dating Tommy? (Though I would, of course, respect her and her relationship.) She loved me or at least thought enough of me to use that word in regard to me.

            “Will’s my best fucking friend,” said Lewis. “He’s rich but he doesn’t act rich.”

            Lewis’ tone of peer confidence with Jesenia regarding my socioeconomic status suggested that she too was poor and could relate somewhat – even if her family (presumably) was untouched by severe alcoholism – to his impoverished life (poor by relative first world standards and destitute to the bourgier end of Wall Township.)

            Trisha entered the room.

            “Hi, Will.”

            “Hi Trisha.”

            She turned to Lewis.

            “Let’s go to Kate’s. She said she’s gonna smoke us out.”

            Did Jesenia smoke? Was my icy-blue-eyed belle of La Isla Bonita – a Maribel or Maribela named Jesenia – a pothead? A decadent beyond the threads of our Bustah Rhymes culture? Yah… Yah.. Yah… Yah! Yah!

            Pot scared me as it did and does and as it should (though I had not yet even tried it – I hoped Jesenia was at least pure enough to abstain from marijuana.)

            “A-ight!”

            Lewis said a-ight no different than the character Ronnie aka Strike (played by Mekhi Phifer) from the then-current-on-pay-per-view Spike Lee classic “Clockers,” a film that made living in the projects of Crooklyn seem exhilarating and nerve-wracking at the same time. The lucky blacks and Puerto Ricans who were fortunate enough to live in such a uniquely New York “ish” (though back then “ish” was not yet slang) place and time. Mekhi Phifer is now too old and fat to sling rocks from a bench.

            The four of us walked across the barren field next to Lewis’ “house.” That field (which was just sitting there as a field and not bothering anyone) is now home to a nail salon, a Pier 1 imports, a gourmet coffee shop, and a coal-fired cauliflower pizza restaurant. Grim. How grim. Just grim. Oh, to miss (somewhat) those mid-90s days of yore. Lewis would have burglarized every one of those businesses and mugged the soccer mom customers. He would have, at minimum, been a great cause of upsetment to those businesses as well as their bourgeois patrons. Each individual brick and mortar testament to the quiet desperation of aughtish sterility would have – and I’m not exaggerating – filed a restraining order against Lewis and probably at least one or two other members of his family. To paraphrase a line from the prophetic film “Demolition Man”: “In a bad time, the Stinsons were the worst.”

            But Trashy kids like Lewis deserve undisturbed fields next to their houses too. 

We passed the future home of the worst kind of late capitalist despair (a fucking cauliflower pizza spot – are you serious?), crossed Church Street, and stepped foot on the delinquent-hallowed ground of the infamous Orchard Park.

The bad kids hung out at Orchard Park (and they still do, though now they listen to Cardi B instead of The Fugees.)

Orchard now has a dog park overlooking the formerly-graffitied and now-graffiti-cleansed handball court. The town scrubbed the court of the colorful “FUCKS,” the “shits,” the sloppy chalk penises, the unmanicured spray-on pubes of crudely-rendered pussies, the vivid marijuana leaf sprayed with a can of pine evergreen as spruce as the pines outside Suck-Ass Seattle, and the giant “420” (which in those pre-Columbine days was just a celebration of pothead culture and the birthday of some dictator from Austria.)

They should have preserved the collaborative mish-mosh of smut as a historical landmark, an archaeological site, a monument to the unique decadence of “Young Gen-X” vandals. But the white people in town chose to literally white-wash it instead, the whiteys.

And then they built a fuckin’ dog park. Talk about gentrification. Not that I don’t love dogs – I do. I love all animals, wild and domesticated. But back then the kids would have probably been bad enough to harass the dogs; some Satan-worshipping kid would have probably stolen one and sacrificed it while listening to Deicide and Cannibal Corpse. Not that any of that would have been okay with me (very, very, very far from it), but the “point of the matter” (as I heard many years later from the mouth of a drunk Dominican Benny slut) is that people were better and worse back then but wholly more authentic than many of the washed-out specimens of humanity we have nowadays.

Drinkin’ their fuckin’ cold-brewed coffee as Rover cavorts with Spot.

Not that I don’t love dogs. I do.

But let’s stay in 1996, the second half of my Freshman year. The cauliflower restaurateurs had not yet deprived us of our collective dignity. Yes, our individual pride and glory was trampled on a million times a day (think of that wad of gum in my hair), but they had not yet built a vegan bakery on the burial mound of Ol’ Dirty Bastard.

Jesenia walked through the field like the rest of us. Her mortal eyes saw what the eyes of lesser mortals beheld: Mark Ulster’s house straight ahead, the back of his fence a mere inch from the weed-clotted edge of the Orchard Park jogging trail (people did jog in those unsterile times, but not quite as much.) Mark Ulster was poor (compared to us), but one of the most popular kids in our school - and my dad thought money alone would afford me the fun and frivolity of youth that he claimed to have missed out on (because so much of his youth was spent working.)

The asphalt trail moved from right to left and east to west. To the east/right it came to an end in downtown Manasquan. To the left it went onward toward Howell and infinity (as far as I know, since infinity cannot be measured.)

But long before a linear journey to the space-time curvature at the end of the Universe or the Howell borough of Farmingdale, lay Peddler’s Village, an already-dated and half-defunct mini-mall. If not for a Hugo Boss outlet favored by that Austrian dictator (most Neo-Nazis were converted through images of those snappy uniforms) and privileged wiggers, the L-shaped complex of stores would have already fallen into disrepair.

A sloping dirt path (hacked and cleared of bushes and brambles by teens) led down a steep hill from the jogging trail to the back lot of Peddler’s village. We walked in a single-file line and negotiated the slippery slope. Jesenia, as a more dominant personality, walked in front of me, but what if she fell and I had to catch her – my paws would have been all over Tommy’s woman and, yes, that could mean trouble. Oh, come on! I would have just been catching her; completely innocent, like in “Pulp Fiction” when Vincent Vega took Mia Wallace out to a 50s restaurant. The white Marcellus Wallace of Wall High wouldn’t throw me off a roof for helping his girl down a hill.

The franchisees (or whatever they were) of these chain businesses were hearty enough to tolerate obscene graffiti on the loading docks of their stores (the usual: cocks, pussies, a marijuana leaf, and a few words of wisdom: “Eat Ass, Smoke Grass, and Sled Fast.” Well, I never fell into the grass trap (pot always made me paranoid) and I’m not a fan of cold weather sports, but “Eat Ass” could probably sum up a sizeable portion of my life philosophy. And I’ve passed through all the classic, modern, and postmodern philosophers. Oh, the boring and tiresome Descartes (you were and you were fucking boring, though you might still “be” in a spirit realm.) The barely penetrable but penetrable (if you’re willing to stretch your brain and give up a year of your life) Kant. The easy (to a schizotypal autist like me) Hegel. The incel Nietzsche. The ecstatic Nazi Heidegger (who lifts you out of your body by putting you back inside it.) The manic Deleuze. And then I munched through Derrida and deconstruction – he lifted every plank from under my feet and ripped every railing from my tenuous grip until I found myself suspended in the abyss (which triggered a nervous-breakdown that turned me into a Klonopin-craving fiend!)

Chewing through most of the great minds of the Western Tradition is nowhere near as enjoyable as eating ass. Troth be told, rigorous autodidacticism and thinking about thinking serves only one purpose: to procure opportunities for eating ass and/or to heighten the experience of it. Shakespeare was right: the sole purpose of learning is to love and glorify the muse – women.

So, I quit philosophy. I broke my wizard’s wand and threw it in the fire. If it gives me a nervous breakdown or sullies my enjoyment of life, it has outlived its purpose: the heightening of the love and glorification of the fairer sex.

But back in 1996 I had not yet read a word of philosophy. Like Kubrick, I would have to wait until the advanced age of 19 to read a “serious” book for fun.

Would I have eaten Jesenia’s ass? Without any doubt. Though, unlike the yet-to-arrive-on-the-scene Alisa, Jesenia likely kept herself as clean as could be (oh, Alisa could have cared a wit for personal hygiene.) Jesenia, as a mid-90s half-Rican wiggeress, likely had the same attitude as Boogie Down Bronx thugs who make fun of crackheads on a late night 4 train: “Aw, you stink nigga! You fuckin’ stink, nigga! Take a bath, nigga! You dirty bastard!” And then they throw an icy McDonald’s soda on his homeless ass so that he will feel even colder when he eventually steps out into the frigid air. Such scrubbed and cologned thugs might mug hardworking Bronxites for the chump change in their wallets, but they shower every day! Jesenia, though not as cruel as du-rag-wearing BX thugs, had their attitude: you can be “ghetto” and still shower every day. Even twice a day.

Dirty and clean, I would have eaten her tiny, tiny ass. Her ass, tiny and petite like the rest of her. And she was not even, physically, my type. I would have eaten her ass on the strength of her personality alone.

Not that she wasn’t beautiful in that oddish Lori Petty way.

She was.

James Joyce’s verbose oeuvre flung letters from Jesenia’s icy blue eyes as she too saw and read the filth – more profound than anything taught to us in our First Period English Class – that adorned the back of the Hugo Boss store. The arche-writing of the Taino Indians jutted out from her curly, kinky hair, as if psilocybin had enhanced my perception (though I’ve never been decadent enough to even see a pack of ‘shrooms let alone try them – maybe someday.)

I blushed that Jesenia and I read the same scrawled message about eating hineys.

Everyone, for the sake of comfort, pretended not to read the philosophy of analingus (much more profound than the dystopic “Amy Schumer and Philosophy” book on sale at the Eatontown Barnes & Noble for $12.95.) And Lewis loved women and their beautiful asses as least as much as I did. If the girls hadn’t been there, Lewis and I would have engaged in a long conversation, with even pothead Lewis acknowledging the superiority of a shapely woman to pot, his favorite drug.

The Atlantic Manor apartments appeared on the other side of a threadbare line of trees, a mucky pseudo-forest. A female figure walked toward a second path that led from the Peddler’s Village backlot to one of the parking lots of the Atlantic Manor apartments.

It was Lauren Robbins, a sluttish white-trash black-guy-fucker; an N-word-lover just like Trisha but not as approachable or likeable – a decadent, in other words; a skank with a nose ring and long, stringy blonde hair; a tramp who lived in the southernmost building of the complex.

“Hi Lauren Robbins,” said Trisha, loud enough for Lori Robbins to hear. “Do you know she was talking shit about Jesenia, calling her a little Puerto Rican slut?”

“Yeah, I’m the slut,” said Jesenia, disgusted by the irony (she, as far as I knew, only fucked gangster Tommy.)

“It’s okay, she sucked my dick,” said Lewis, in front of both Jesenia and his sister (which was true: Lewis, underprivileged as he was, started his experimentations with sex long before I did.) Dick-sucking was not as intimate as eating ass (and so easier to talk about.)

Trisha spotted an empty 40oz bottle of O.E. (Olde English for anyone who is too much of a total faggot and pussy to have never heard of it), picked it up, and threw it across the parking lot and in the general direction of Lauren’s head.

PISH… The glass shattered against the asphalt.

“Beeeee-aaaaaaaa-tttttcccccchhhhhhh!”

Though East Coast Hip-Hop had already made a complete comeback, Snoop Dogg’s way of saying “Biatch” was still popular among all hoodlumish kids.

Lauren ran through the trail and, presumably, back to the one-bedroom apartment she shared with her single mother.

            Atlantic Manor, the epicenter of Wall Township decadence. The parents there gave their kids liquor, drugs, and cigarettes as gifts (think of that scene in “The Breakfast Club” when Judd Nelson talks about his dad giving him a carton of cigarettes for Christmas.)

            Poor whites still live in Atlantic Manor, but they are slowly (or rapidly) being displaced by East Indians; the smell of curry supplants the cafeteria-like smell of t.v. dinners. Indians, unlike the whites before them, are not decadent people. Not even the frat douchebags in their midst. Unless long hours of study and working at the local Dunkin’ Donuts is considered decadent.

            Kate, Lewis, and Trisha smoked up Kate’s one-bedroom apartment that she – also – shared with a welfare-dependent single mother.

Jesenia and I did not smoke (I had not smoked weed yet and after the Jack Daniels episode, what would the ogress do to me if she thought I was high?) I stood to the back of the apartment. I didn’t want to smell like weed smoke and get sent to Rosa (unless, of course, Rosa was the name of a beautiful Latina.)

            Did Jesenia’s parents care if she smelled like weed smoke? She had her reasons for not smoking, but no one pressed her on it. Those 80s anti-drug commercials were corny misfires – I had never witnessed someone peer-pressured to use drugs.

Brothers and sisters smoking weed together (as Lewis and Trisha did every day) is so much more decadent than “stick this heroin needle in your arm or you’re a dork, man!”

            Maybe smoking weed at all is decadent.

            Were Jesenia and I both non-decadent?

            But didn’t she date the gangster, Tommy?

            Just being in the same room with her was awe(as-in-filled-me-with-awe)some in itself.

            Even if she was in a “serious relationship” (or what passed for one at the age of 15) with Tommy.

***

            “Hey Will.”

            My dad called me over to the L-shaped couch. He pulled the recliner lever and opened his foot rest. He grabbed his beloved Asbury Park Press and opened to an ad somewhere in the A section (which meant it was a respectable ad.)

“I saw this ad in the paper for this place called Team Model. They’re having an open call this Saturday. I think you should go. You said you want to be an actor, right?”

            “Yeah!”

            “Okay, so I’ll take you to the agency on Saturday. But I don’t want you to be disappointed if it doesn’t work out.”

            “Okay! Yeah!”

            Dad. He sometimes knew how to be a good parent, which is often little more than constructive engagement with one’s children. Think of the experiments in which one group treated a potted plant with love and the other group shouted abusive words at its root structure. Even a mistreated plant blooms again with one kind word and a sprinkle of Miracle Gro.

            I loved dad. Did I love mother?

            “The Turn” begins.