Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

So the jackoff's plan might actually happen, while on the other hand, Ponyboy never failed to have plans blow up in his grille.

In the movie of Ponyboy's life, the comic book guy may have been obese, slovenly, and physically inferior to Ponyboy, but he was superior to Ponyboy in every other way. And he was outside the Slinky Fox, picking up whatever had fallen out of Cheri's workout bag. He was catching up with Cheri, handing her that stupid thing.

And here, in a trick borrowed from ye olden days of filmmaking, Vaseline would get dabbed around the camera lens. Blurring would occur, the scene slowly dissolving.

No longer Ponyboy's movie of Cheri's life, but now a flashback.

Fringed and overstuffed pillows abounding. The teasing sounds of laughter like the best kind of music.

Cheri had done laundry, and was wearing one of Ponyboy's freshly clean concert T's as a bed shirt, its faded cloth hanging comfortably to the middle of her thighs. She was lying on her canopy bed and her legs were jutting out from beyond the end of the shirt, appearing as smooth and golden as anything that had ever existed.

In the flashback, Cheri knew how good she looked, and she was a little frisky, and laughed, playfully slapping Ponyboy's shoulder, telling him to be serious.

He held up three videotapes. The green tape was directed by a former box cover starlet — Ponyboy said it was from a series that catered to a couple's sensual needs. “Might be good for syncopation or, you know, whatever.”

She said she had not gone seven straight days without sex since, shit…

The yellow one, Ponyboy continued, was from a “best of” series — maybe there were moves he and Cheri could steal.

And the thought of Ponyboy being Mr. Abstinence was even more absurd, Cheri said. No way he was going to make it through a week without some of her home cooking, she said.

She thrust her boobs underneath his nose. Look at these. Her voice went intentionally high, played for comic effect: Tell me Papi no like.

“As for the red… Well, forget about that one.”

“Pony.”

“If we wait, we'll get more into it. We'll have all these techniques and pent-up energy.”

Ponyboy had note cards. He already had some thoughts about stuff she should remember for the camera.

“Gee, Professor Hard-on, I didn't know there was going to be a test. Too bad it's not going to be a hands-on exam.”

She razzed and teased and Ponyboy jammed the yellow tape into the VCR and halfway through scene one, abstinence be damned. That easily, the week that was supposed to be devoted to preparation turned into a continuous bout of on-the-job training. Brute and primal at moments, their sex leapt beyond the parameters of simple physicality, combusting into something ludicrous and funny, like the time they went into Cheri's walk-in closet and tried to use the metal clothes rack to replicate something on a trapeze, and Ponyboy kept checking to see what was happening on the television, and finally Cheri was laughing so hard she lost her grip on the bar and the two of them went crashing down. Just as easily their sex would turn tender and wonderful — they'd be covered with sweat and tired and at the same time wired like General Electric, screwing like maniacs, and shabazz, for no real reason, she would stare into Ponyboy's eyes, and he would stare back, and then they were together in their own private universe. And if Cheri never quite understood why it was so important that she be the one to remember all the technical jazz ( You have to remember, Ponyboy'd say, getting weird), if every few hours or so, Ponyboy called and updated her on how the contracts were progressing ( All systems full ahead ), or reported nothing but his own excitement ( I love you so much, baby ), the weird thing was, not for a fraction of a millisecond did she actually believe it was going to take place. In six days, in four days, in three hours, she'd be copulating in front of a room full of people, and the preparations and the progression and, yes, the event to which all this was leading, the whole caboodle seemed unreal to her. Sure, duh, Cheri understood that a camera was going to tape her getting nailed, that these images were going to be reproduced and mass-produced, that lonely men would be in their lonely little homes jacking off to a taped clip of her. She understood that if her mom and grandma and kindergarten teacher knew about her stripping career, they would have declared her damned, so, boy howdy, would she be going to hell for this. It was sleazy. Was slutty. While doing her daily routine of stomach crunches, Cheri would be taking care to keep her legs elevated and together, and she'd momentarily think about just how slutty it was, and she'd lose count of reps. And yet Cheri would recover and continue with her crunches, getting back to the business at hand. Because, in the parlance of her boyfriend, when the grease left the grill and the burger hit the bun, only one part of this little scheme impacted her immediate and daily life, only one part of it felt real. This was corny, Cheri admitted it was. As much as she wanted to shout her news down onto the valley, what she wanted to scream was too cheesy for words; she could never have possibly explained it.

The one thing about this scheme that felt real to Cheri, the single thing she could literally roll around in her mouth as if it were a marble, was her belief in her man. Sure he didn't brush his teeth more than once every four days, and when he did, he scrubbed so hard that white drool ended up on the bathroom walls, in his hair, and, yes, once or twice, on his ass. How you brushed your teeth and got toothpaste on your ass, Cheri never could figure, but her man did it. And okay it was true, he used her purse as his personal ATM. And whenever she took him to the movies, he crunched food through all the previews. And one time when the preview came on for the animated movie about a horse that could never be tamed, at the part where the sunset was glowing and the little girl was hugging her horsie around its neck, and the cute animated child said, Spirit, you'll always be in my heart, admittedly, Ponyboy had cupped his hands around his mouth and screamed BOOOOO. Her boyfriend was indeed The Smelly Musclebound Asshole Who Heckled Little Girls and Their Cartoon Horsies. The man she loved had spent a full, uninterrupted month trying to embed cordless phones into vibrators, to this day insisting that, done correctly, Hands On Phone Sex was a surefire gold mine. Ponyboy was constantly dumping his shit all over the floor, peeing on the toilet seat, blasting the abomination he called music at a volume that caused the neighbor's plants to wither and go brown. He was preternaturally absent whenever it came time to pay his share of the utilities, prepare a meal, or wash one goddamn dish, although if Jasmine, Rain, or any of Cheri's other friends from work were over, wasn't it something how Ponyboy just happened to be hanging out? Too many times Cheri had caught him staring at Jasmine's big round caboose, and whenever she called him on it, he got angry— What, how'm I not going to look at that? — like it was her fault for catching him. Cheri would bet her tits that Pony-boy had cheated on her, at least three specific women she could think of, and she had suspicions about more. This was off the top of her head. Without even getting into the breast implant thing, her boyfriend's desire to have her do hard-core porn notwithstanding, it wasn't real hard to see the scales of justice tilting heavily on one side. In the hard cold light of truth Cheri definitely could see the verdict, she could ask herself, just what the hell she was doing with Ponyboy.

But what was funny was how easily the light of truth could change, how the correct verdict wasn't necessarily the obvious one. Some boyfriends, you came to them with your problem and they said, What have you done now. Some said, Don't worry, it will be all right. Legend had it, there were boyfriends who responded: What can I do to help? But with Ponyboy, you shared your problem and, right off the bat, he laughed. Then he said your problem wasn't even a problem, you should hear what's happening to his friend, this guy who had a f’in BATTERY shoved through his nose. Ponyboy would get to talking, and while he talked, he'd raid your fridge, because he'd been smoking your dope all night, he had the munchies, and so now, while he was playing down your troubles and topping them, he also was spitting chunks of your food all over, going on and on about the guy with a battery in his nose, and maybe you hadn't been listening correctly, because somehow the story had morphed, it had turned into something involving Ponyboy being camped out in this drainage pipe, Ponyboy trying to sleep while just down the way from him, this fucking space alien was boning some chick. A story about rain coming down and tons of water flowing through the drainage pipe and the space alien didn't have a penis, it had like these big long tentacles, so boning maybe wasn't the right word, and it's raining so bad that Ponyboy couldn't stay in the pipe, but at the same time, he's got to stay in there, cuz how many times do you get to see a space alien bang some chick? And Cheri, in her kitchen, listening to this, Cheri would find the scales of justice tipping even further, because none of her problems were being solved. In fact, thinking about it, she had all her old problems, plus her fridge was empty, and her stash was gone, and now, in addition to being filthy and obnoxious, in addition to lying, mooching, and philandering, in addition to being an opportunist and an egomaniac and just a fucking dick, there was the very real and disturbing possibility that Ponyboy was a full-on, batteries included, no assembly required, MORON.