Bud Smith: F 250

One night, I had my record player going as I lay on the bare mattress on the floor, without a box-spring, and read In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan. There was a knock on my window. A visitor out there in the violet tremoring night.

I peeked out through the blinds. It was Denise. I opened the window. You’d have done the same thing. My window, specifically, was exactly the kind of window built to let a girl like Denise in.

“Hey, saw your light on,” she said all lit up in the moonlight, her eyes glowing. The diamond stud in her nose and the six earrings in her right ear caught the light. She was a wayward animal looking for a break from the wild life.

“Yeah, I’m up. For sure,” I said.

“I’m glad.” She stretched her little hands to climb in my window. I helped boost her in.

“You coulda just came in the front door,” I said after the fact.

She laughed. “It’s cooler this way. Like all stealth and shit.”

I didn’t have any other furniture in my room, so Denise sat down on the rug. She was wearing painted-on jeans and a shirt with a wolf on it — the fabric slashed away as if that wolf was trying to get at her body.

“Man, it looks like you live in a library, but that’s not a bad thing … ya know?”

“I used to go to the library all the time to try and meet girls when I was like twelve.”

“Did it work?” she asked out of the side of her mouth, all slick.

“No, they were all at the mall,” I admitted.

She laughed. “Yeah, ha, that’s where I was, for sure. Hanging by the fountain, watching people throw in nickels and quarters, chewing gum, blowing bubbles.”

I offered her a chair from the kitchen. She rocked in place on the carpet, bit her lip, said, “Nahhhh, I’m good on this hard floor. I like the floor.”

“Okay.”

“I like your house. My house is fucked up,” she said. “My parents are always fighting. You’re lucky to, like, have your own place.”

I knew her dad. Everyone knew who he was. He owned a waste removal service: Santalucia Disposal. I saw the trucks all over. Santalucia. Santalucia. The family was loaded. $$$. Trucks and crews of big dudes hanging on the backs of those garbage trucks in yellow neon shirts that read Santalucia.

“You’re welcome to hang here, no sweat,” I said, “as long as you want.”

“I miss my dorm.” Denise had a habit of sucking on her own silver tongue piercing. It was distracting. “Jesus, I can’t believe I’m saying that. When I was at school, I couldn’t wait to get home. Now that I’m home, I can’t wait for summer to be over so I can get back.”

“Yeah, huh?”

“It’s weird getting this freedom from your parents,” she said, “and then you come back and they treat you like a little kid again. I’m not a kid at all. They have no idea.”

“I bet they have more of an idea than you realize,” I said.

“Man, seriously, look at all these books! You must be smart as hell.”

“Oh, yeah. No.” I pointed all around. “See all these? Fiction. It’s all fake. There’s not a single fact in any of these books. It’s all make-believe.”

She laughed nervously. “What-ever. I can’t concentrate long enough to read anything.”

I studied her. She had nautical stars on the inside of both wrists. She said that was part of the problem with her parents: they didn’t like that she’d come home from Rutgers with three tattoos.

“I wanna get both my arms sleeved out,” she said, nodding excitedly.

“They’d flip, right?”

She shrugged. “Hard to say. I got three that they’ve seen. There’s more.”

She said one of her guy friends worked at a tattoo parlor in New Brunswick and that she could get all the work she wanted done for free.

“He doesn’t charge me jack. I pay him in trade.”

“How so?”

“Oh, I got sneaky talents, kid,” she stared at me, through me.

“Don’t worry about your parents. They’ll get used to you doing your own thing. This is just an adjustment period.”

She asked me why I wasn’t going to college. I told her I wouldn’t know what I’d even study if I went. If I had the money.

“I work for myself,” I said.

“That’s dope.”

“Yeah, I think it’s alright. I find jobs …”

“Doing what?”

“I got a job I’m starting soon. Gonna build a waterfall into someone’s swimming pool.”

“Oh, that’s so sick!”

“Yeah, the job is inside the pool. You know, I just stay in the pool and build it from the inside. Just floating. Somebody hands me rocks.”

“I want one! Build me one.”

“Anything you want. Just show me where you want it,” I said. I used to say stupid shit like that. I was just waiting for someone to break all my teeth out.

Denise kept staring at me. I felt like a creep. I was sitting there on the bed, and she was just sitting on the floor looking like she would start crawling on her hands and knees towards me at any moment.

Bad things would happen, but it’d feel good.

I’ve heard a rumor that repercussions are for later, maybe it’s true.

“College,” she led off, as an authority, “you’re better off not going. Nobody I go to school with has any clue why they’re there. It’s just a bunch of sluts, guys up on the sluts, parties … all kinds of bad stuff.” She fished her gold crucifix from between her breasts, placed it in her mouth, started sucking. “I love it,” she cooed.

“What’s the attraction to Ethan?”

“It’s stupid … he sang me some songs. He’s got a gun. I think that’s hot. Guns, really.”

“He does?”

“I saw him shoot a wolf from like a hundred yards away. We were in the sandpits. It was crazy.”

“There’s no wolves around here. Not in Jersey.”

Denise looked at me skeptically, “then what was it?”

“A dog probably,” I said.

She pouted, “Ahhhh, sad. It was coming at us, fast. Scary as hell. We were stoned.”

“Who knows then.”

She tilted her head as “Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat” came on the player. Her mouth hung open as she motioned toward the record player. “Who’s singing? Errr, well it’s not really singing, but …”

“Bob Dylan,” I said.

“The ‘Blowing in the Wind’ guy?”

“Yeah.”

“My mom’s Chihuahua can sing better than him.”

“Yeah, but even dogs got redeeming factors.”

“Right.”

Denise stood up off my rug, went over to one of the bookcases by the closet.

“You read all these?”

“No. Working on it though.”

“They’re making me read all kindsa crap books for school. I should just tell my professors that my dad’s all mobbed up. Then I wouldn’t have to read anything.”

“Is he?”

“What? In the mob? I dunno,” she said, giving me the side-eye.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said darkly.

“I did like Lord of the Flies. We read that in eleventh grade. And the one with the pigs and talking horses. That was good.”

“Animal Farm.”

She nodded, “The Scarlet Letter was the worst thing I ever suffered through, and Moby Dick was false advertising.”

We had a good laugh about that. She kept scanning through the bookshelf. I kept looking at her ass. It really was something to see. She bent down to the lower shelf, and I could see that she was wearing a purple thong.

“Hey you wanna watch a movie or something?” she asked.

“Sure. Got a ton of them out in the hallway. Some are melted though.”

“Melted?”

“Yeah. We’ll have to dig around for ones that aren’t.”

We went out into the kitchen and started going through some of Feral’s cardboard boxes. A sea of VHS. I’d hold up one…