Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

K: Yeah. Anyhow, he reads some more. Like where I ask her if she’s a virgin and everything. And where I suggest watching porn and tell her I’ll bring condoms.

P: You wrote that down? And now this man has the printed transcript?

K: I didn’t know brandi18 was like a real person. I mean, we were just e-mailing. Of course it turns out she wasn’t a real person anyhow.

P: What do you mean?

K: I mean she was like one person online and another person that night in her mother’s house when I went out there thinking we were gonna hook up. It’s complicated. Anyhow, I ask the guy if he’s her father or is he like her boyfriend, since I’m remembering that brandi18 told me her ex-boyfriend was older but I didn’t think this much older. The guy reminds me of the dude on a TV show called To Catch a Predator on MSNBC that I sort of watched a couple of times, and I suddenly think maybe I’m on the show and I’m like this week’s contestant. I always thought they had like a script and the sleazoids they trick online into trying to have sex with underage girls were all actors ’cause some of them were really old, and this one guy was even a rabbi and another was an ex-cop and a couple of them had teenage daughters of their own. I thought it was like a situation comedy reality TV series only not funny. I never knew it was reality. So I’m getting ready for a TV cameraman and another guy with a mike on a boom to come out of the laundry room like they do on the show, when the old dude says he’s Brandi’s father. I go, Whoa! I thought this was Brandi’s mother’s house and shit, and he says it is and he thanks God that Brandi called him to come over when she learned I was coming here to the house tonight.

P: Wait a minute. Brandi called him? And gave him the printout of your chats and e-mails?

K: Yeah. Which is pretty fucked up, if you ask me. Totally fucked up. Anyhow, the guy asks me, How old are you? I tell him twenty-one, and he asks was I in the army like I said to his daughter Brandi, which is how I’m thinking of her now instead of brandi18, and I go, Yeah but I’m not now. And you were in Afghanistan? he says. And I go, No. I was only like talking that way, the way you do when you’re online. He looks really happy to be disgusted. He wants to know what else I’ve got in my backpack besides the Bud Light and can he have a look? I just shrug why not. Whatever happens happens, I’m thinking. So he goes into my pack and pulls out the condoms and holds the package up. Condoms? he asks. Yeah. Were you planning to use these with a fourteen-year-old girl? he wants to know. Actually, he already knows. He just wants me to confess it. Not really, I say. I wasn’t planning on anything. This is true, because I was mostly hoping, not planning. He goes back into my pack and pulls out the DVD and reads the title out loud, Willow’s Day Off , and notes that it’s quadruple-x-rated. Not exactly appropriate for a fourteen-year-old girl to be watching with a twenty-one-year-old man, is it? he says. I shrug again and say it was all I had, which is pretty lame, I know, but also happens to be true. He pulls out the tube of K-Y jelly and says what’s this? I tell him it’s a lubricant. That really gets him off into happy deep disgust. A loo-bricant! he says. He repeats it a couple more times with his voice going lower each time like any minute he’s going to come just from saying loo-bricant! Finally his eyes clear again and he asks if I’m married, and I say no, and he wants to know where I live, and I tell him North Calusa. Long ways out here, he says. Did I drive? No, I took the bus. So it took some effort and planning to get out here to meet up with a fourteen-year-old girl, he says. Yeah, it did. Pretty late to come calling on a fourteen-year-old girl, wouldn’t you say? It’s not a school night, I point out, meaning to joke but he doesn’t get it. It’s like he’s not just her father, he’s also a cop or he thinks he’s a cop because that’s how he’s treating me. It’s like all of America has turned into a cop whose main job is to protect their fourteen-year-old virgins from creeps like me. He asks me who I live with, and I had to say I live with my mother, which let him ask me what would my mother think if she knew I was arranging to meet a fourteen-year-old girl alone late at night apparently for sex and brought beer and pornography and condoms and a loo-bricant with me.

P: How’d you answer that one?

K: I told the truth. I said my mother’d probably think it was kind of weird. But not weird the way he thought I meant. Weird because my mother hasn’t a clue about who I really am, especially when it comes to my sex life, which wasn’t really a sex life anyhow until that night. And even that was only happening in my head so I might as well have been online the whole time or watching porn and jacking off, except that now my sex life such as it was had turned out to be illegal. I asked Brandi’s father if he was going to arrest me. He said no, he had no power to arrest me. I was free to leave, he said. I stood up and put Willow’s Day Off and the condoms and lubricant back in my pack with the beer. Then I looked at Brandi’s father and said, Listen, Mr. Dillinger, this was a big mistake, coming out here tonight. I’m really sorry. It was stupid, and I promise I’ll never do it again. I’m really glad that you were here to catch me and nothing happened. Then I picked up my backpack and headed for the door.

P: And that was it?

K: No. I get outside and I’m really feeling like cheese but also relieved to be away from Brandi and her father. Only I’m not, okay? Because suddenly there’s lights all over the yard, and five Calusa cops rush me from both sides and do like a SWAT team takedown and shove my face into the pavement front walk and yank my hands behind my back and throw cuffs on me, all the time screaming, Get down get down get down! Like I had any choice. This one cop takes out a little book then and reads me my rights and says I’m under arrest for soliciting sex with a minor. I go, Yeah yeah yeah, whatever, and they toss me into the back of a cruiser and take me to the West Calusa Gardens cop station where they interrogate me and book me and lock me in jail. And that’s the end of my big night with brandi18. I never saw her again. Not even at my trial where her father testified about everything I told him and the DA read the whole transcript of my chats and e-mails with brandi18 out loud, leaving out of course the parts she wrote that got me to write the other parts. Actually I never saw her at all. Unless you count through the kitchen window when she was putting out the Oreos and pouring lemonade. But that wasn’t really brandi18 anyhow. Was it? That was Brandi, Mr. Dillinger’s daughter.

THE TEENAGE CLERK AT PAWS ’N’ CLAWS refuses to sell the Kid and the Professor a tube of selamectin for Annie’s scabies infestation. Tall and boney, wearing heavy-rimmed eyeglasses, mud-colored hair in a Prince Valiant cut, he’s got skin problems of his own. You’re gonna need a vet’s prescription for that, the clerk declares.

They’re standing in front of a wall of medications for dogs and cats. Pet owners stroll up and down the aisles of the huge warehouse outlet with their dogs in tow, cats in cushy carriers, birds, turtles, miscellaneous reptiles, and small ratlike mammals in cages, brought by their owners to the box store like children by their parents to a candy store. The Kid and the Professor have Annie and Einstein beside them, Annie at the end of a piece of clothesline rope, Einstein in his cage. Outside in the parking lot when he saw everyone else doing it, the Kid insisted on bringing them into the store. It’s like they just got outa the can, man. Let them enjoy their newfound freedom. You don’t know how they feel, maybe, but I can relate, man.