Tom Mendicino - Probation

“Mandy’s thinking of going to nursing school,” JR interjects.

It’s impossible to imagine this harsh, brittle creature in the healing professions. Then I think back to all the snide and abrupt registered nurses I’ve encountered in the past few months and decide she’ll probably graduate first in her class. She doesn’t bother to thank me for picking up the check and her good-bye smile has a sarcastic undertone. JR thanks me profusely and promises me we’ll catch up later.

I buy a bag of licorice whips. I try to kill time in the record store but the aisles of Nashville hitmakers depress me. The toilet is off-limits now. To go back would make me feel dirty, diseased, a polluter desecrating public places where nice, trusting kids like Bobby’s son go to empty their bladders. I have nowhere to go but back to the farm. I hand over the candy and ask Bobby’s wife where she wants me to bunk. She says she hasn’t given it much thought. She’s got a full house this weekend. Would I mind sharing? JR’s got a double mattress and hasn’t wet the bed in ten years, she laughs. It’s either that or the couch.

That’s fine, I say, and excuse myself to take a nap. I want to sleep until dinner, through dinner if I can get away with it.

The nap doesn’t refresh me. After dinner, I collapse, staring at the television as the Braves lose to the Phillies in an early season series while Bobby snores in his lounge chair. I can barely keep my eyes open. It’s all of ten o’clock and I’m exhausted. I head off to bed.

I strip to my underwear and crawl between the sheets. Bobby’s wife hasn’t bothered with fresh linen. I worry I’m sleeping on his side of the bed. He’s in for a big surprise when he comes home, maybe a little tipsy, Mandy on his fingertips, if, in fact, he comes home at all. I haven’t slept in this room, a stuffy dormer, right below the roof beams, for twenty-five years. The old mattress is full of peaks and valleys. It’s probably the same bed where I slept as a boy. Bobby always had a double, even as a kid, a place for my aunt to exile Uncle Buster when he drank too much beer and farted in bed and tried to take a poke at her. Maybe that explains why she never liked me. When I was here, she had nowhere to send him and had to endure his dick.

The door opens and JR lowers himself on the bed. One shoe drops, then the other. The bed shifts as he shucks off his jeans and pulls off his socks. My muscles stiffen, resisting gravity when the bed sags as he lies down. He smells like soap and pizza, no trace of beer or Mandy. He yawns and his elbow grazes my back when he reaches up to scratch his head. Then he flops to his side, shaking the bed, and is asleep in a minute.

I grip the edge of the mattress, determined no part of my body will touch any part of his. But, in his sleep, he drops his hand on my waist. What next? Is he going to start stroking my ribs while he dreams of Mandy? It takes me hours to fall asleep.

He’s up and gone before I wake. It’s nearly eleven, an unconscionable time to rise on a farm. I pull on my pants and shoes and guiltily make my way to the kitchen, hoping to find some dregs in the coffeepot.

My mother is working at the kitchen table. Her perky wig contrasts with her exhausted face. She soldiers on cheerfully, rolling the dough and cutting it into perfect squares. My aunt stands behind her, hovering, playing backfield, ready to catch her if she collapses. She thinks she is being discreet and my mother is careful not to let her irritation show. My mother and I know a tornado couldn’t bring her down, let alone a little chronic fatigue. She’s been up since dawn. The tomatoes on the stove have already cooked down to a thick sauce. The Calhouns will have one more Ravioli Easter. It’s my mother’s contribution to the family reunion. Up here in the hills, pizza chains with guaranteed thirty-minute delivery and Al Pacino in The Godfather are the sum and substance of things Italian. The Calhouns wait each year for their homemade pasta.

My mother insists on brewing a fresh pot of coffee for me. My aunt grudgingly pulls the can of Maxwell House from the refrigerator and carefully spoons out just enough for a two-cup pot. I’ve won a small victory and don’t bother to suppress a smug smile. My mother stuffs and folds and pinches the corners of her ravioli while the coffee perks in the background. She looks up and sees me staring at her. She smiles, letting me know she appreciates what drudgery this weekend is for me, promising that, in a day, it will be over. Her smile is an apology, not asked for, unearned. Why she loves me so much I will never understand. If I don’t leave the kitchen I might start to cry.

I want to go back to sleep, to crawl back into bed and not leave the room until Sunday evening. The day ahead, or what’s left of it, stretches and yawns, mocking me with its leisurely pace. The coffee does the job. I have to shit. It’s inevitable.

I’d hoped to get through the weekend without the need to take a crap in this tiny bathroom. It’s an add-on, its walls nothing more than drywall partitions. The family still goes to the outhouse for privacy when the weather is warm. There’s one advantage to sleeping late. At least I’m not spurting while foot traffic passes outside the door. While I’m at it, I might as well shower and shave. The water is tepid and keeps me from lingering. I wrap a towel around my waist and walk back to the bedroom, surprising JR. He slaps shut the book he’s holding between his legs and self-consciously covers the title with his broad hand.

He smiles and tries to act nonchalant, telling me I can have the room to myself, now that he’s found what he was looking for. Mildly intrigued by the kid’s odd behavior, I scan the paperbacks on the shelf by the bed. Nothing out the ordinary for a seventeen-year-old boy, certainly not anything that raises any red flags. Franny and Zooey. Stranger in a Strange Land and Dune. Silas Marner and The Mayor of Casterbridge (neither spine creased, required reading, no doubt), the mandatory Tolkien and Orwell. A bottom-of-the-line Taylor acoustic is propped in the corner. There’s a chord book with leaves of loose sheet music. Some pretty hip stuff. Old Velvet Underground songs-“Sweet Jane,” “Head Held High.” A stack of printed e-mail messages slips out of the book.

Jesus H. Christ! Holy shit!

I’ve stumbled across the mother lode. I read them once, then again, letting it sink in. It’s hard, no, impossible, to believe the clean-cut kid I just shared a bed with has a secret identity as WrestlerJoc2071. Bobby’s son is maintaining a heavy correspondence with some unsavory characters. Mongoloids, probably, who can’t string a coherent English sentence together, but who demonstrate a definite affinity for constructing pithy screen names trumpeting physical attributes and sexual predilections.

Leantight8.

NCbtm4U.

JOBuddy.

NCtop4U.

Sukitall.

Once I get over the shock, I feel almost giddy discovering another aberration in the family tree. A little twinge of guilt for invading his privacy doesn’t keep me from reading his e-mails. WrestlerJoc2071 tries hard to go mano a mano with the hardcore sexualists, peppering his talk with descriptions of throbbing cocks and quivering assholes. But his phrases have a tentative cadence that reveals his tender, young heart. He’s naïve enough to believe the love and acceptance he’s seeking can be found in this miasma of pornography pecked onto a screen by sticky, dirty fingers. The object of his affection calls himself OnMiKnees4U. They’re embarking on a romance, one so deep and real and full of promise and undying devotion they actually share their names, their first ones at least.

Dear Cary,

Thanks for the pic. I hope you aren’t too disappointed by mine. Some people tell me I’m handsome, but I don’t believe it. If I had seen your pic first, I wouldn’t have had the nerve to send mine. I hope you will still write back now that you know what I look like.