Christopher Prato - Little Boy or, Enola Gay

I yelled and yelled for a while, telling her that if she’d just have simply answered the questions, none of this shit would’ve happened. Eyeing a cop across the street, I quickly settled down. This isn’t worth going to jail for , I thought. A dire look blanketed her face, as though she didn’t have a friend in the world to run to.

I tried to console her. “Maria, we’re best friends, and whatever is bothering you is okay. You can tell me anything.” It was a bullshit tactic, as if she was responsible for this fiasco, not me. She didn’t say a word in response. Instead, she turned away and boarded the Q58 bus and went home. She didn’t even bother to ask me for a ride.

Thinking back on that period in my life, it’s hard to believe that such bullshit didn’t break us up much earlier. Things remained tumultuous between us for a while, then they settled down. That was our rut. Just like Mike’s parents, only they liked theirs. Just when I thought the wounds were beginning to heal, the suffering would start all over again.

In late March, Easter break rolled around. On Good Friday, the first day off for more than a week, Kyle, Mike, and Rick invited me out to a bar. I balked at first, wondering how I could possibly explain my choice to Maria. But a morbid sort of divine intervention extended its ugly hand and pulled me toward my fate that evening. “Yes,” I said. “I’ll go.”

Tears explode from my eyes as I recall this critical decision in my life. I remember the details because they’re here before me in living color.

Kyle brought us to Kearney’s Pub, an old Irish pub that hadn’t seen an Irishman in years. A real dive-bar I’d passed a million times on Queens Boulevard. Every Monday in class, The Family overheard hoods and Guidos bullshitting about their weekend at Kearney’s. Stormin’ Forman, Christian Matzelle… all those guys used to high-five each other, talking about all the shots they’d done and girls they’d hooked up with. Kyle and the rest were hardly offended by such conversations, but I was. Even though I’d gotten drunk at Rick’s over the summer, and several times since then, I swore I would never disrespect myself by going to a shitty bar frequented by hoods.

Nevertheless, I found myself inside. When I first walked inside, I remember smelling an odd combination of oak, beer, and cigarette smoke. Our sneakers went squick, squick, squick, and got stuck to the floor like it was a movie theater. There were no seats in the bar, save a few bar stools with red, torn-up cushions. And there were mirrors across from them, behind the bottles of liquor, so you could watch yourself slowly get buzzed, and then drunk.

It was almost ten o’clock, but hardly anyone was around. Kyle said he’d heard that girls from Stella Maris High School hung out there. Actually he said Stella Mattress . That was the school’s nickname because the girls were known to screw around a lot. “Where are they?” I asked, hankering to meet a bunch of drunk Catholic school girl sluts. Kyle brushed his cheek Marlon Brando-style and said, “trust me, Gahdfaddah, they’ll be here.” Rick, Mike, and I looked at each other out of the corner of our eyes, as if to say, “Kyle had better be right about this place.” So we drank beers out of little plastic cups and waited.

When I’d first entered Kearney’s I felt as if Maria was somehow forcing me to be there. But as I gulped one beer after the other, that feeling of coercion dissipated and was replaced by culpability. I have no one to blame but myself, I thought. Kyle, always the most perceptive of The Family, and like a solid consigliere , pulled his stool beside mine and consoled me.

“What’s wrong, Captain A.J. ? he asked. “Maria been treatin’ ya bad? Want me to break her legs for ya?”

He was only kidding, of course. But he was my consigliere , my advisor, so he was supposed to lift my spirits like that. And I could tell by the look in his eyes that he was genuinely interested in my reason for being at Kearney’s. He knew how much I hated bars. I responded with an incredulous glance. I placed my hand on his shoulder. “Kyle, my plan is simple: I want to meet a girl tonight, fuck her, and forget all about Maria. We’ve been fighting so much lately, that whatever happens tonight can only make it better.” I gulped the backwash at the bottom of my cup, the remnants of my fourth beer in just under forty minutes.

“You sure that’s a good idea, Boss?” he asked. “I mean, what about what happened in Virginia? Did that help ya any?” He had a point: I was more paranoid than ever since Virginia. But the beer made it all seem so logical.

“I don’t know, consigliere ,” I said. “If I were to fuck a girl tonight, man, nothing that bothers me about Maria would ever bother me again.”

Kyle rubbed his chin in doubt. At the time, I had a good reason for wanting to meet a girl. But good is a relative term, isn’t it? The more I thought about Maria and her past and her lying, the more I figured that a one night stand would make up for it all. I reasoned I could replace my sinister opinion of Maria with passionately pleasant thoughts of some other girl. Only then would I stop worrying about Maria. Sounds like a load of shit, huh? Well, it really made sense at the time. “If I could just get a back-up girlfriend again,” I said, “then all would be well.”

Kyle sat in silence, mulling my statement over. I ordered another beer.

“I don’t know,” he said, “maybe you should just try to forget about this shit without cheating. I mean, you’re going to the Academy next year, Maria loves ya, what more could ya want?”

At that moment, three girls, two Asian, one Hispanic, skipped into Kearney’s. I chugged my fifth beer and pointed them out to Kyle. Like hunters eyeing three deer in the woods, Kyle and I, without uttering a word, descended upon them.

Not two feet from these chicks, with a clear mission to accomplish, my mind drew a blank. What the fuck am I doing? How can I possibly get a girl to fuck me tonight? As quickly as these thought entered my jittery head, they were vanquished by Kyle’s smooth operation.

“Can we buy you a drink?” Kyle asked them. “Sure,” responded one of the Asian girls. All three giggled. Hook, line, and sinker , I thought.

The music in Kearney’s pounded continuously, so we could hardly hear their names. The one I liked, though, was Maggie. Maggie Rodriguez, a stunning Latina with cinnamon skin and exhilarating green eyes. Her thick hair draped her shoulders like a blanket. It was the color of a crow.

Goddamnit it, she’s hot , I thought. Do you think I’m cute? I asked Maggie with the flicker of my eyes.

Yes , she answered, with a glint of a smile.

I asked her where she was from, about her classes, and told her she was beautiful about a thousand times. “I’m a senior,” I repeated more than once. She seemed to like hearing that. I was so confident

Whenever I had a girlfriend, my confidence level went through the roof. Hell, even if I was rejected, I’d still have someone to go back to. The fact that these chicks were freshman furnished me with a remarkable hubris unlike any that I’d felt before. The more Maggie spoke to me, the faster her lashes flapped like a butterfly’s wings, repeating, with each flap, Yes, yes, yes! I want you, A.J.! Her white mini-skirt and red top allowed her to glow like no Colombian girl I’d ever seen before. As I stood there yessing her to death, Kyle, loyal consigliere that he was, kept his distance entertaining her Asian friends. Maggie and I went through the obligatory teenage bullshit: “Where are you from?” “What’s your favorite movie?” “What kind of music do you like?” “How old are you?” But I was hardly listening. I ached to stuff my face between her big brown tits and inhale her cleavage.