Tampa Read online

  Outside I passed our neighbor Mr. Jeffries watering his plants, holding the hose flush with his groin like a bad practical joke. I waved and he looked up at me for a too-long ogle that resulted in the hose turning on the crotch of his pants and wetting his entire front. He pretended not to notice. “If you need any fire ant poison, I bought enough to send every one of those damn biters straight to hell,” he offered.

  “There are actually a few fire ant questions in the natural science section of the eighth-grade state proficiency exams,” I replied. Mr. Jeffries’s eyes squinted up as though I was a sign he was struggling to read. “Their queen lives for six or seven years,” I continued, “but the male drones only live four to five days. Their sole purpose in life is to mate with her and then die.” I couldn’t help but imagine an equally preferential scenario played out by several fourteen-year-old boys and myself. I wondered what percentage of the Jefferson Junior High students—if I came to them in the middle of the night, naked—would agree to have sex with me even if it meant they’d die forty-eight hours later. I guessed there would be at least a small few.

  Mr. Jeffries bit the inside of his cheek and turned the hose pressure down to a low, impotent trickle. Despite his fervent watering of the plant bed, the three shepherding garden gnomes at its centerpiece remained covered in bird shit. “That is an unholy arrangement,” he declared.

  I’d memorized the directions to Jack’s house; an old online listing divulged it was a one-story five-bedroom home with vaulted ceilings. The upper-middle-class purchase price from a few years ago was encouraging: I hoped for a set of working parents who didn’t have time to decode lies or do micromanagement parenting. An online map reported a 5.3-mile drive. Before starting my car, I was sure to reset the odometer to double-check the distance. Any fact or statistic related to Jack felt like progress.

  Due to a series of overprotective stoplights and explosive suburban growth, the short drive took fourteen minutes, which felt both too convenient and painfully distant all at once. I was able to park just across the street from Jack’s house at an angle that allowed a view of the sliver of backyard between his home and their sole abutting neighbor. My car and the AC had been off for no more than a minute when my skin began to slicken. But each bead of sweat that grew on my lip was a pleasant sensory experience; in high school, as I had to date increasingly awful boys for social reasons, I often preferred sex in a hot car for the ways the hermetic steam made me light-headed and added a pleasant shade of autoerotic asphyxiation to an otherwise lacking encounter. Tonight I’d wanted to drive to his house after dark so the heat wouldn’t be so violent, but I hadn’t been patient enough to wait. Close, though. The sun had dropped low in the sky; through the tinted windows it seemed formed of brass. I imagined Jack’s body made gigantic standing before me, the sun in the sky becoming the hot metal button of his jeans. If his enormous fingers reached down from the clouds and unbuttoned it, if his horizon-colored pants began to bunch and fall and his teenage sex of skyscraper proportions was freed, I would drive my car into his toe so he would kneel down to investigate and accidentally kill me when the sequoia-sized head of his penis came crashing through my windshield, all in the hopes that the last image seen before death is the backdrop to our eternity.

  Drips of perspiration soon covered my body; as they began to independently crawl across my skin I had the uncomfortable sensation of being covered in ants. Here I am, Jack, I thought, sitting through the heat of hell for you. I gazed longingly at the fence protecting the home’s backyard, complete with a screened-in pool. My stomach dropped with the familiar memory of how unfair life is: I couldn’t simply wait in the car until nighttime, then sneak into his backyard, go for a swim in a white bra and panties and then appear at his window, knocking on the glass gently until he woke from an erection-inducing dream and peeked through the blinds to see me there, soaked and dripping, and let me in. Wasn’t that exactly what every straight teenage boy wanted? It struck me as particularly selfish, the way the world was ignoring Jack’s need for pantied women to knock on his window at night. Restless, I reached for the gym bag I’d used to conceal my supplies: binoculars, a vibrator, a Polaroid camera, a towel and a water bottle.

  Focusing the binoculars, I gleaned what I could through windows. Many of the blinds were closed, but the square of frosted glass on the home’s left side told me the location of a downstairs bathroom. The living room’s light was on, though its couch appeared unoccupied—perhaps Jack was home alone? I didn’t know him well enough yet to risk knocking on the door and saying hello; if he reacted badly or questions were raised the wrong way, it would blow everything—although he was the clear standout of his classmates, I reminded myself that he could still prove to be a dead end. It wasn’t worth it to do anything risky. There was a flash of light in one of the back windows and I focused in further, suddenly letting out a long sigh of gratitude at my luck: there he was sitting in front of a television, low to the ground in a beanbag chair—another bright flash confirmed it was him. His alert posture and proximity to the TV suggested he was playing a video game rather than watching a program. I tried to zoom in further, but the lenses were already at maximum view.

  Although a passerby would have had to press his nose fully against my car’s tinted window in order to see inside, masturbating in public with no cover seemed inelegant. I grabbed the towel, unfolding it across my lap as though I were about to eat a personal picnic, then slid down my running shorts beneath it. Unsticking my legs from the seat, I expertly opened them into position—since they would immediately bond with the hot leather of the car’s seat and fix themselves in place, it was important that my orgasm wouldn’t require any thigh movement. It took me just a moment to perfectly balance the binoculars in my left hand and steady the vibrator in my right. But just as I was about to begin, I heard voices; looking up from the binoculars I saw two power-walking women turn the corner, swinging hand weights.

  I looked back into the binoculars and waited for the women to pass Jack’s house, the blurry, magnified jersey fabric of their clothing momentarily eclipsing each lens. Once their footsteps faded, I turned on the vibrator and began.

  Occasionally Jack would lift the game controller up from his lap for a few seconds and I could see his clenched hands. He was wearing an undershirt, but I couldn’t make out the bottom half of his body. Perhaps that could be a treat for him sometime—I could have him play a video game in the beanbag chair while I removed his pants and lay prostrate on the carpet fellating him.

  Although I could hear the voices of the female walkers rounding the cul-de-sac and coming back closer toward the opposite side of my car, the thought of Jack’s engorged penis in my mouth made my tongue quicken across my lips. Even in the oven of my closed convertible, I thought of his sex organs in terms of heat. I didn’t doubt that some strain of magical thinking on my part would actually render this true when the time came—the flesh between his legs would likely feel warmer against my lips than anything I’d ever felt before.

  I still remembered the pleasant tactile aspect of my first teenage blow jobs, before they became a forced chore: the slickness it all took on after a few minutes always made me feel weightless—it seemed like my mouth produced a different saliva that seemed to shirk density and made my bones as hollow as a bird’s. When I thought of the bitter taste that would descend as Jack got closer to climax, the unmistakable earthy harbinger not so different from the air just before a rainstorm, my leg started to kick as though I was having my reflexes tested.

  “I swear,” a woman’s voice protested, “I made the whole thing in my Crock-Pot!” I flipped my vibrator off as the power-walkers neared the back of my car. I noted how the breadth of their thighs stretched the athletic logos on their spandex shorts out into fun-house-mirror enlargements. Their silhouettes eclipsed my binocular view and I looked up to watch them saunter off, elbows out, rowing through the air like impotent wings. Were there souls left inside these women? It seemed doubtful. The sou
l had always struck me as being a tricky thing to keep with the body: an easily bored aristocrat with the means to leave whenever it wished. What temptations, what vistas were their lives of folding socks and online diet-plan message boards offering? The goosey flesh of their limbs was not in rhythm. What facile cages for a spirit hell-bent on sneaking out, the bodies of these women.

  I resumed my view. Jack had entered a segment of greater difficulty—his brow had creased with focus; two strong, white teeth now pinned down his lower lip. This detail of self-domination made me come easily, far more quickly than I wanted. To reset my thoughts, I tried beating my head against the steering wheel a few times before halfheartedly starting to masturbate again, but soon sweat from the binoculars’ seal began to rub into my eyes and made them sting. Taking my hand off the vibrator, I let it buzz numbly in place as I wiped my face off with the lap towel. The pitch of heat in the car suddenly seemed dangerous. I turned the car on so the air-conditioning could blow its well-intentioned breaths that wouldn’t be truly cold for several more minutes, but I didn’t like to stay too long inside a vehicle with its engine on if I wasn’t driving. I’d heard—probably urban legends, but frightening ones—about people who’d died of carbon monoxide poisoning even though their car was out in the open air; it was some unlucky accident eventually blamed on a mechanical error laypersons couldn’t understand. I realized that it wouldn’t be the worst exit ever to die young and beautiful with my pants down inside a Corvette, even if I was parked alone on the side of the road with a sex toy. Still, better to avoid it if possible.

  A sluggish couple walking a basset hound turned the corner to come down the road and circle back. They moved at a pace their bodies would have been unable to discern from rest. I felt like a child when I saw middle-aged partners and remembered they had sex together—there was still that initial sense of horror and denial. What aspect of either one of them could be pleasant to touch or to see, even in the darkest room? Sex struck me as a seafood with the shortest imaginable shelf life, needing to be peeled and eaten the moment the urge ripened. Even by sixteen, seventeen, it seemed that people became too comfortable with their desires to have any objectivity over their vulgar moments. They closed their eyes to avoid awkward orgasm faces, slipped lingerie made for models and mannequins onto wholly imperfect bodies. Who was that queen who tried to keep her youth by bathing in the blood of virgins? She should’ve had sex with them instead, or at least had sex with them before killing them. Many might label this a contradiction, but I felt it to be a simple irony: in my view, having sex with teenagers was the only way to keep the act wholesome. They’re observant; they catalog every detail to obsess upon. They’re obsessive by nature. Should there be any other way to experience sex? I remember taking my shirt off for a friend’s younger brother in college. The way his eyes lit up like he was seeing snow for the first time.

  Suddenly a gray Buick pulled into Jack’s driveway and the garage opened to a jumbled arrangement of home-improvement tools and sporting gear. A man of banal stature emerged from the garage’s shadow; his belted dress pants sat slightly too high on his waist and his square plaid dress shirt, impervious to time, could’ve been from any one of the past three decades. He was an obvious multitasker. One hand held a phone to his ear; the other wheeled an oversized green trash bin behind him casually, like a suitcase—he could just as easily have been walking through the airport terminal. There was something repulsive (and revealing) about talking on a cell phone while handling garbage. Why did anyone pretend human relationships had value?

  Seconds after he parked the bin on the corner, I turned and spied two joggers, each one coming from an opposite direction in a way that seemed synchronized, round the corner and advance down the street. Moments later a third appeared. It was as though they were racing toward the garbage, had been waiting all day, raccoon-like, for it to be set out. For a moment I imagined the bin filled with nothing but weightless, wadded-up puffs of Kleenex: the week’s toll of Jack’s feverish masturbating. There could, I reasoned, actually be such a treasure inside the trash—one tied, recycled plastic shopping bag of waste from Jack’s bedroom: candy wrappers, pencil shavings, awkward starts to homework assignments that were crumpled up in frustration, and then, perhaps, a sweet ball of tissue or paper towel, crisped at the center, smelling of metallic salt. I’d happily have dug through rancid coffee grounds and tufts of middle-aged hair extracted from brushes in order to find it if the hour had been later, the street more isolated.

  Jack’s father walked back inside the garage, a trailing burst of laughter seeming to activate the sprinklers on his lawn as the automatic door protectively lowered. One jogger, a thirtysomething woman whose exertions of breath were thundering, stomped by. She had the haunted look of someone who’d come from a dire place and was on her way to an even worse destination to deliver awful news. This expression contrasted sharply with her caffeinated ponytail, which was perched in the top center of her skull like a plume on the hat of a Napoleonic infantryman. There was no way for women, for anyone, to gracefully age. After a certain point, any detail, like the woman’s cheerleader hairstyle, that implied youth simply looked ridiculous. Despite her athletic prowess, the jogger’s cratered thighs seemed more like something that would die one day than something that would not. I didn’t know how long I had before this window slammed down on my fingers as well—with diligence, and avoiding children, perhaps a decade. The older I became, the harder it would be to get what I wanted, but that was probably true of everyone with everything.

  Another jogger lapped my convertible, his face the color of sunburned meat. His chest was sweating the way a fatally wounded stab victim might bleed. A wave of desperation coursed through me that nearly made me jump from the car and run—shorts still around my ankles, buzzing vibrator dropping onto the asphalt from between my legs—to Jack’s window, to rap on it loudly with my fist, then press my buttocks against the glass and turn behind to look at him with one panicked fish eye on the side of my face and offer no command or explanation beyond, Take me right now, through this window. You’re too young to realize we don’t have much time.

  I stared back into the binoculars, but Jack was no longer in the room—summoned by Father, apparently. I scanned all the front rooms I could see into for activity, but Jack wasn’t visible. With a sigh I removed the vibrator, placed it into the car’s center cup holder and let its droning buzz fill the vehicle. It was time to flip down the driver’s-side visor and perform a quick check in the mirror. I looked deceptively satisfied—sweating, flushed, rosy-cheeked. “Patience,” I said out loud, “is a virtue.” It was so funny I started cackling. A very unattractive, near-snort of a laugh, to be honest. I found that sometimes it was a relief to do something unattractive in private, to confirm that I’m deeply flawed when so many others imagine me to be perfect. People are often startled by my handwriting; because I’m pretty, they assume everything I do is pretty. It’s odd to them that I write like I have a hook for an arm, just as Ford would be startled to learn I have a hook for a heart. Shitting is good this way as well. Occasionally in college, my roommate would enter the bathroom right after I’d done some business and scream out at the lingering smell with a sense of shock that left me deeply gratified. With her square, Germanic jaw and wide-set shoulders, it was easy for me to picture her hearty dumps—I pictured them to be somewhat orthogonal, favoring the rectangular. But I had a face that denied excretion.

  “Good-bye for now, Jack,” I called. One good thing about returning to the house in sweaty aerobic gear was that Ford had to believe me when I claimed to be too tired. The concession was always that I’d lie down on my side for him and he’d get to lower my spandex shorts to reveal my buttocks, pull down my sports bra so a profile of nipple was showing as well, and masturbate standing above me while I closed my eyes and pretended to have fallen asleep.

  chapter three

  Seeing the students’ actualized youth up close made me double down on my age-preventative sp
a visits and my purchase of vigilant creams and potions. I cycled through the weeks of the month with oxygenating facials, DNA-repair enzyme facials, caviar illuminating facials, precautionary Botox, microdermabrasion, LED light therapy. To unite body and mind for the best results possible, I always tried to envision myself literally getting younger during the treatments: I pictured my fourteen-year-old self standing off in the distance, waiting for me to come repossess her body; each one of these sessions allowed me to take one step further toward reaching her by turning back the clock a few months. Though often, well-intentioned compliments on behalf of the aestheticians would derail me from such vision quests.

  It was not uncommon while I was receiving a glycolic peel (I don’t find its biting sting unwelcome—in general with beauty treatments, pain feels like an assurance of progress to me) for the aesthetician to gush, “You know? You really could be a model.”

  “I’m too short,” I’d quip. “Five foot seven.” Though I’d flirted with doing print ads for a small time during college, I couldn’t stand taking direction. I also had the fear that with the right photographer, the real me might accidentally be captured—that in looking at the photo, suddenly everyone’s eyes would widen and they’d actually see me for the very first time: Oh my God—you’re a soulless pervert!