Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

“Why don't you take it off?”

In future years, when they told this story the adult Kennys would remember another spasm of life from the boy.

They would recall increasing the pace. Pressing back on the boy. Saying: “If you're not a butt pirate, why don't you stop me?”

The adult Kennys would fixate on their next question: “Do you want me to stop?”

They would recount the silence of the next seconds and the palpable terror, the feeling that the heads of their Kenny penises were going to burst. And also, they would recall a sense of calm, this placid sensation that lay underneath all the obvious errata; this thing each had discovered about himself.

For Kenny it amounted to a feeling of liberation.

But the emergence of his sexuality, the initiation of his first sexual act with another real live person, by necessity, this would forever be linked with the boy's disappearance.

And there was no language to explain how this would affect him. His adult selves could not even begin to try.

And so the Kennys would leave this story now, they'd head back to their lives, their lovers, the rest of that distant evening becoming extraneous to their purposes.

But Newell sat up. He turned in the bucket seat. More accurately, he moved away from Kenny's hand.

The boy rolled down his side window, allowing summer inside the compartment, a flooding mess of heat and noise. On the sidewalk, not too far away, a disposable camera flashed.

Purposefully avoiding Kenny's eyes, Newell chucked a nickel into the night, his sleepiness now replaced by certainty, his befuddlement by will.

“Maybe you should take me home.”

5.1

The shirt was ragged, faded to the gray of an oncoming thunderstorm. Its trademark lightning bolts no longer jutted proudly from the first and last letters of the band's name, but had flaked and faded into a couple of scratchy lines, and the insignia itself was a ghost, just a trace of an imprint across the chest. The shirt's collar and sleeves had been cut off with a rusty pocketknife, and ventilation gashes ran down the sides in a style common to musicians who sweat a lot while they performed. A mess, all in all, bearing little resemblance to the bootleg T that Ponyboy had purchased when he was sixteen and raging with the testosterone of a changing body; when, little brother in tow, he'd attended his first ever Metallica concert. Metallica may have gone soft and corporate, and that old shirt may have been messed up to the nines and back; even so, if Ponyboy felt like hauling it to a vintage store or posting it on some online auction, it would have brought him fifty bucks, easy. Vintage stores and online auctions weren't Ponyboy's style, though. He didn't make a habit of thinking about that long-ago concert, nor the demise of a once-great band, especially not about his dearly departed little bro-bro — all the tubes and wires that Ponyboy never even got to see connected to the poor kid. Fuck that. Ponyboy's style was hauling ass, blazing through smoldering afternoons, pedaling like hell over blacktop that had steam rising in waves from it. On a mountain bike whose lock he'd snapped outside the comic place where all the dorks hung out, Ponyboy's style was to arrive in different low-rent industrial neighborhoods, deliver small brown packages at different adult video stores. His style was to pick up a payment strongbox for every package he delivered. Although that wasn't style, when you got down to it. That was orders. Jabba's orders.

The sun set late in the summer, so even at seven-thirty, it was like a hundred and eight out there and, usually, by the time Ponyboy made it onto Industrial, that old concert shirt would be soaked and sticking to him like a second skin; Ponyboy's biceps and triceps and pecs would be glistening, and he'd smell like the wet cunt of this skank he used to bang back in the Tenderloin. Ponyboy kept a plastic gallon jug strung through his backpack's shoulder strap, but he wasn't so great at stopping at gas stations, refilling the thing on the free water faucet, and usually, by the end of the afternoon, if any aqua was in that jug, it was all warm and nasty. By the time he'd enter the last store, Ponyboy'd need a break.

Yo Kunjib, he'd say, pounding fists with the towelhead behind the front counter, how's it hanging? Heading down the aisle of transsexual videos, starting toward the stalls, Ponyboy would ask, Asaaf, my brother, why you always gotta be mopping that spooge? A laugh, another fist pound, then it was time to chill, flip through the channels, maybe help Asaaf with his American (“repeat after me: Live. Long. Prosper. ”). Asaaf knew Ponyboy had shoplifted a few handcuffs (his girlfriend used the fur-lined ones in her act). Asaaf also had turned the other way when Ponyboy had lifted a pack of them vibrating brass ball things. (Cheri's exact words: “You like them so much, stick them up your ass.”) Seeing how Asaaf was constantly on spooge mopping detail, Ponyboy had to believe the little camel fucker was secretly happy he ripped off the place. He and Asaaf shot the shit about the various boob jobs belonging to women on the videos; they talked about the state of the National League East. When Ponyboy got bored, he tromped to the register, checked out the mad scientist lab behind the front counter, the shelves of televisions hooked up to mad crazy videotape machines, the images speeding through the screens at triple time: chicks sucking pole; dudes daisy-chaining some little spade; whatever tapes and DVDs were being duplicated right then. Kunjib — he worked up front — also kept a miniature television behind the counter, away from the duplicating equipment, and sometimes he and Ponyboy would watch part of a ball game. Ponyboy had hung out enough to know that the spooge mopper habitually used the New York Mets as the linchpin of five-team parlay bets. He'd also discovered that Kunjib was infatuated with hip-hop groups made up of preadolescent white boys. Every red-blooded American worth his dick wanted to blast himself an immigrant right about then, and Ponyboy had figured out that Asaaf and Kunjib were more than thankful to have someone acknowledge their existence as something besides the Enemy. Yeah, Ponyboy had gotten his master's from the school of hard knocks. He recognized that despite all the suits and weirdos who came in here, those two diaperheads were touched and moved and damn near overjoyed to have some dirty-ass white boy — some punk with spiky hair and all kinds of tatts and loads of steel — to have this be the sumbitch that treated them like real live human beings. Yes sir ree, Ponyboy knew all about looking in from the outside, he totally understood that Asaaf and Kunjib were omnivorous consumers of American culture. Fuckin’ ay he saw why those two lapped up his tales of homelessness and degradation, his tattoo origins and piercing anecdotes. They ate that shit up. Like high school virgins who didn't know they wanted their cherries popped.

He couldn't hang for too long, though. The adult bookstore may have been taking it easy on its utility bills, but it still had its share of air-conditioning. Which was a relief to Ponyboy, age twenty, but also a hassle. A/C was partly why most bike messengers wore two T-shirts: your ratty and beloved concert T absorbed all the body's sweat and perspiration, while your second, more regular shirt acted as a sort of force field, keeping the gusting chill of ten thousand BTUs off your skin. Ponyboy, though, sometimes he didn't wear the second T because he liked his shoulders to get tan when he biked. Sometimes he didn't wear it because pimped out Jedi knights with the kung fu grip did not get colds. Sometimes he did not wear a second shirt because he did not have any clean second shirts and sometimes because he did not have any second shirts, and because did he mention second shirts were utterly and completely gay? Sometimes Ponyboy plain fucking forgot and other times his girlfriend started on him, Cheri and her shit about him being closed, being blocked, Cheri taking every opportunity she could to spew about the connections to Ponyboy's former life being as buried as his Metallica shirt, hidden underneath a protective layer, Cheri starting her crap and Ponyboy not wanting to hear. Shows what you know, he'd answer, I don't even wear a second shirt on top of the Metallica — so there. To which Cheri'd say, I was being figurative. To which, Ponyboy always answered with his middle figurative. But back at the start of the summer — June or so, right when the temperatures were really kicking in — at seven forty-five on this particular evening, the only things that mattered had been getting the payment strongbox, getting his docket signed, and getting back on the road. A motherfucker couldn't afford to hang around a place so much that its air-conditioning cooled his muscles. If his muscles cooled, then his body stopped sweating and then, when he got back onto his ride, he might pull something. So Ponyboy was standing around the adult bookstore, ready to hit the bricks, and he was getting antsy, wanting to get that goddamn strongbox, and meanwhile, wouldn't you know, some suit's at the front counter, waiting for his filth. Fucking Kunjib's running his turbaned ass from the register to the storage closet, all caught up in checking the number on the video box cover, then looking for the stack of black videos with the corresponding digits.