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  Hatch ducks into the bathroom, reemerging with two beers in one hand and a set of car keys in the other. “Shotgun?” He pretends as if I even have the option of saying no.

  This time around I don’t even bother going through the motions. “Give it here.”

  Hatch hands me the beer. We each take turns cutting a quarter-sized hole in the bottom half of our cans with his dirty car key.

  Hatch drives a serious piece-of-shit Volkswagen Beetle that burns through a couple fan belts every month. His idea of a car stereo is me holding a boom box in my lap and making sure his fourth copy of Van Halen’s OU812 doesn’t get eaten by his ravenous tape player. Hatch and I have developed a growing affection for Sammy Hagar, much to the distaste of our diehard David Lee Roth friends. Although Van Halen’s self-titled ’78 debut has to be considered one of rock’s all-time great albums, lately I look to Roth less for his debatable musicianship and more for the gratuitous D-cups and G-strings in his music videos.

  Hatch asks if I’m ready. Grunting in reply, I put my mouth on the opening of the can, careful not to cut my lips on the jagged aluminum edges. I pop the tab on the other side of the can and suck the beer through the opening. One full beer down in maybe five seconds. I let out a relieved belch. Hatch leaves a good three or four swallows in his can as he crushes it and throws it on the floor.

  We work our way through three more beers. I point to the foam dripping out of his third can. “Fucking cheater.” I punctuate the accusation with a loud, wet belch.

  As is the natural order of a party in southern Indiana, Johnny Cougar’s Uh-huh finds its way to the front of the playlist. The opening guitar riff of “Pink Houses” commands a wave of dutiful shouts and catcalls in the house. Although most Ridgies choose to defer to the more sentimental “Jack and Diane” or the more obvious “Small Town,” for me and Hatch it doesn’t get any better than “Pink Houses.” This is our “New York, New York,” our “Yellow Rose of Texas,” our “Old Kentucky Home.”

  Hatch and I stand up. When “Pink Houses” plays, you’re required to stand up. We hold our beers high in the air, crooning to no one in particular.

  “Ahh, but ain’t that America, for you and me…”

  “Hank?”

  Hatch and I turn to the sound of the voice. It’s coming from the master bedroom. It’s Mary.

  “Yeah?”

  Mary steps out of the room, my shirt and pants in her right hand. “I think your clothes are dry. You want to come in and, uh, get dressed?”

  “You tired of me walking around half-naked or something?”

  Mary smiles and winks. “I’m hardly tired of that, Henry.” She turns and walks back into the bedroom.

  I stand up. Hatch stands up as well, shaking his head. “Henry?” He punches me in the shoulder, then sings, “Little pink houses, for my pal, Fitzy!”

  “Oh, shut up.” I pretend as if the girl who has just invited me into her room to get undressed has not been flirting with me all day.

  “Don’t forget this.” Hatch picks my Velcro Def Leppard Pyromania wallet off the table and throws it at me. “Try to be careful in there.”

  “Careful?” I feel the impression of the off-brand condom I bought out of a machine in a gas station bathroom. “It’s not like she’s going to eat me.”

  “She might only be sixteen, but she’s an East Coast girl,” Hatch says. “There’s no telling what she’ll do to you.”

  I enter the bedroom. Mary is sitting on the edge of the bed, smoking a cigarette. With her brunette hair she looks like a much younger, tanning bed version of Erin Gray—the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century Erin Gray as opposed to the Silver Spoons Erin Gray. I try to picture her in one of Erin Gray’s signature skintight bodysuits, although the elongated cigarette in Mary’s left hand and the bottle of Heineken in her right skews the fantasy.

  “Here,” Mary says, patting the bed with her left hand. “Have a seat.”

  I stumble forward. The alcohol in my system has made the outer edges of her face fuzzy. I manage to find my way to the bed and sit down beside her.

  “Smoke?” Mary hands me a long, peculiarly thin cigarette.

  “Sure.” I roll the cigarette between my fingers. I grab the pack off the bed and hold it up to the light. “Virginia Slims?”

  Mary nods toward the closet to her right. “My mom’s stash.”

  I can feel the butterflies in my stomach. I’m nervous. “My friends and I call these Vagina Slimes,” I say, chuckling.

  She doesn’t laugh, which makes me even more nervous. I fumble around with the cigarette, managing to get it in my mouth by sheer dumb luck.

  “Please, allow me.” Mary holds the lighter to my face. With a quick roll of her thumb, a small tongue of fire ticks the end of my cigarette. She never looks at the cigarette, staring into my eyes and then down to my lips—textbook flirting. I stare at the cigarette—textbook avoidance.

  Mary leans off the side of the bed. I hear the rattle of ice cubes. She produces another bottle of Heineken. The bottle is already open, like she was expecting me. “Beer?”

  “Of course.” I take a quick swig. The beer tastes like canned corn, like all Heineken does in my opinion, but I pretend to like it. “Pretty fancy beer. Part of the parents’ stash, too?”

  “Uh-huhhhh.” Her affirmative is more of a moan than a response. She sips her beer and then licks her lips. Her hand has somehow found its way onto my leg.

  “Look, Mary, I—”

  “You want to watch a movie?” Mary grabs my beer and sits it on the floor. She nods at the videos stacked on top of the television.

  “Sure.” I cross one arm over my bare chest, squeeze my shoulder in awkward modesty. “Whatever.”

  “Here you go.” Mary hands me my boxers and jeans but not my shirt.

  “Thanks.” I pull my boxers and jeans on with my towel still attached at the waist. I stuff my wallet in my back pocket.

  Mary is neither awkward nor modest in her intent. “Oh, you’re no fun.”

  Mary suggested Peggy Sue Got Married. I suggested Hoosiers. Somehow we decided Crocodile Dundee was a good compromise. We sit on the floor in front of the bed. A half hour into the film, Mary has wedged herself under my arm, wrapping her right leg around my left leg. We are at the part when Sue Charlton tells Mick Dundee she can make it in the Outback on her own. Mick lets her go, but hangs back out of sight. Sue gets tired, takes a break by a watering hole, and undoes her pants. She’s wearing a black one-piece swimsuit, but with a thong back that’s all but swallowed up by her beautiful rotund ass.

  As if that moment could have gotten any better, a crocodile lunges at Sue Charlton. Mary flinches, burying her face in my chest. She isn’t scared so much as looking for her opening. She runs her pursed lips up my chest, and then starts nibbling the side of my neck. She presses her chest against mine. I can feel Mary’s erect nipples beneath her shirt because she isn’t wearing a bra. Mary finds her way to my fly as Mick Dundee saves his lady-in-distress. She unbuttons one button, then two, then a third. She is inside my jeans and past the slit in my boxers before I even know what’s happening. We kiss, but just for a second or two before she goes back to work on my neck. She kisses my neck and then starts to move down my chest. She bites my nipples, licks my navel, then…

  “Wait a second, Mary.” I push her away with my forearm and tuck myself inside my boxers, all in the same motion. “We can’t do this.”

  “What?” Mary says.

  The blood coursing through my drunk, engorged erection is equally taken aback with my decision. But this is not going to happen.

  “I don’t know what to say.” I stand up, buttoning my fly. “I’m sorry.”

  Mary folds her arms in front of her chest. She seems more sad than angry. “Is it me? Did I do something wrong? I thought this is what you—”

  “Oh no, Mary, it’s not you a
t all.” I offer my hand to her. She takes it, standing. We sit face-to-face on the bed.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  I scratch my chin. I grab the pack of cigarettes off the bed and pull out a cigarette. I offer it to Mary and light it for her. She takes a long, frustrated drag.

  “My problem isn’t so much a what,” I say. “It’s a who.”

  “A who?” Mary blows her Vagina Slimes disgust in my face. I wave it off, eyes squinting.

  “Yeah, see, the thing is, I kind of have a girlfriend.”

  “Fuck you, Hank!”

  “Mary, wait. Can I just—”

  “Can you just what?”

  “Can I, umm, have my shirt?”

  Mary slams the door behind me as I walk out of the bedroom. I put on my clothes, scanning my general vicinity. No one is upstairs. Hatch has disappeared, which is a good thing. I’m not in the mood for him fucking with me, not to mention I still have an erection. I see the bathroom just to my right. I walk in, shut the door, and lock it.

  I test the door, making sure the lock is secure. I pull my wallet out of my pants pocket. Inside is a picture of a headless belly dancer.

  I was casually introduced to the record album Exotic Music of the Belly Dancer in the nineteen-seventies, back when my mom took belly dancing lessons in Kokomo. Soon thereafter, the album went into exile until Dad invested an obscene amount of money in a new stereo system and pulled his dusty old record collection out of the attic to justify his new investment.

  The year was 1983. I had just finished listening to the Urban Cowboy movie soundtrack, an album I played on a regular basis from when I was nine years old until the LP disintegrated sometime in the mid-eighties. I loved the album because it had the unedited version of the Charlie Daniels Band’s “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” and my parents let me get away with screaming “son of a bitch” during the song. Granted, it isn’t quite the glorious, profane karaoke experience of the Grease soundtrack and its signature song, “Greased Lightning,” which since 1978 has afforded me the opportunity to shout, without so much as a head-shaking reprisal, things like “you know that ain’t no shit we’ll be getting lots of tit,” “you are supreme the chicks’ll cream,” and “you know that I ain’t bragging she’s a real pussy wagon.”

  For whatever reason that April day, only a few days after my twelfth birthday, I decided to stick Urban Cowboy toward the back of the collection rather than its usual place near the front with my parents’ favorites: Kenny Rogers Greatest Hits, Barry Manilow Live, Larry Gatlin & The Gatlin Brothers Greatest Hits, Helen Reddy’s Greatest Hits (And More), the original Broadway cast recording of Annie, and of course Dad’s prized Chuck Mangione albums. Aside from Urban Cowboy and Grease, some Jim Croce, the soundtracks to Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar, a few Eagles albums, and exactly one Beatles album—A Hard Day’s Night—my parents’ taste in music sucks balls. When I slid my hand between the albums to make room for John Travolta in a black cowboy hat, a sexy headless belly dancer invited me into her world.

  Even the album’s title was fucking sexy: Exotic Music of the Belly Dancer by Mohammed El-Bakkar and His Oriental Ensemble. A voluptuous belly dancer shimmied up the left side of the album cover, her hands raised above her head and her right hip thrusting out. The album’s title bar cut off the belly dancer’s face at the chin and her raised arms just above the elbows, giving her an air of mystery. A shadow covered half of the belly dancer’s body like a question mark, bisecting her creamy-white skin at the navel, running up from her waist, around the bottom of her left breast and then across her underarms and chin. Below her navel, she wore a multi-layered silk skirt fastened low on her hips with a pearl-encrusted belt, all of the ensemble in various shades of gold to match her pasties. The pasties themselves were pointed teacups. Shiny, metallic moons ending in gold tassels that crowned the smoothest, most perfectly rounded breasts I’d ever seen. They became the standard by which all breasts were compared for the rest of my life.

  I took the belly dancer to my bedroom and had my way with her.

  When Dad told me he was phasing out his vinyls to make way for a cassette collection—a collection that, in continuing the Fitzpatrick musical tradition of sucking balls, would be dominated by compilations of movie and television theme songs—I took a box cutter to the front sleeve of Exotic Music of the Belly Dancer. I was very careful to separate the image from the cardboard corrugation. For being folded and refolded into my wallet on multiple occasions over the last five years, my girl has held up pretty well. I hold on to her for emergency situations, like today.

  The sink and toilet are to my left, a washer and dryer tucked in a closet to my right. Bright white crown moldings and baseboards trim walls of barn red. I reach for some toilet paper and undo my pants. Taking my erection in my hands, I look at my belly dancer.

  Thanks to Mary, I’m pretty well primed, but I try to hold on as long as I can. I hover over the toilet, my pelvis thrusting, my pants pulled down to my knees. I close my eyes right when it starts.

  I tuck the belly dancer snuggly back into my wallet. I have to piss so bad I can almost feel it coming out my ocular cavities, but I’m still hard as a rock. I try to push my erection down so I can piss on the back of the toilet seat. A few drops trickle out, but I can’t piss unless my penis is bent well below perpendicular to my body. And I know if I hazard an attempt at anything close to perpendicular, my urine is destined for multiple and varied locales maybe or maybe not in the general vicinity of the toilet.

  I finally decide to sit on the toilet seat backwards. I straddle the seat with my legs while leaning over the back of the toilet. My penis is still hard, touching the inside of the toilet bowl. The cold toilet water gets things going. The clear liquid comes out in multiple streams, like a sprinkler. It burns. It feels toxic, punitive. The bleachy odor of ejaculate hovers in the bathroom. An unmistakable odor of adolescence. Like sweaty polyester athletic uniforms, dirty ashtrays, cheap beer, vomit, and too much Drakkar Noir cologne. Like the inside of a girl.

  I gather myself. With a hand towel I wipe the sweat off my face. Pausing one last time to wipe some errant sperm off the wall above the toilet, I exit the bathroom and head downstairs.

  Hatch is sitting on the family room couch watching a movie on the big screen projection television. Most of the crowd has cleared out. I try to sneak by him into the kitchen.

  “Where the hell you think you’re going?” Hatch asks.

  “Me?” I veer toward the couch, pretending as if this were my intention all along. I sit down. “Just looking for you.”

  Hatch hands me a lukewarm, already opened Natty Light. I force down a swallow of it. I wipe my mouth, looking at the animated image on the projection television. “What are you watching?”

  “Some kind of cartoon.”

  “That’s no ordinary cartoon. That’s Fritz the Cat.”

  “Fritz the what?”

  “Fritz the Cat. It was the first ever X-rated animated film.”

  Hatch scratches his head. “Well, that explains a lot. I thought the dope was just making me see things. So this cartoon has a lot of psychedelic colors?”

  “Yep.”

  “And the occasional cow, pig, cat, or crow with enormous tits getting fucked by, what’s his name again?”

  “Yep, a lot of big-breasted farm animals getting fucked by Fritz.”

  “And a lot of them smoking weed?”

  “Lots of weed smoking.”

  “Okay, then…” Hatch pauses. He stares at the television. An effeminate crow shouts an expletive onscreen. Hatch sips his beer, sits it down on the coffee table. “But it still freaks me out.”

  I force out one of those fake laughs, the kind you do when you’re thankful full frontal nudity, even the animated feline kind, can distract your buddy enough that he doesn’t remember to ask you—

  “How’d it go
with Mary, stud man?”

  I play dumb. “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t be a jackass.” Hatch punches me in the shoulder. “How was she?”

  “Relax, dude.” I pull a long white cigarette out of my back pocket. I light it with the still-burning ember of a butt nesting in an ashtray on the coffee table. “We just watched a movie.”

  Hatch opens his mouth, speechless, but not for long, I suspect. He stands with his hands on his hips. “You’ve gotta be fist fucking me!”

  “Nope.” I hold in a long drag of smoke. Man, I was one lame piece of shit.

  Hatch points at me. “Man, you’re one lame piece of shit.”

  “She’s just not my type.”

  “Since when is drunk, hot, and naked not your type?”

  He has a point. “I don’t know. I guess since…well, I don’t know.”

  “Since Laura maybe?”

  Her name breaks the tenuous peace. “Listen, shithead.” I lurch up from the couch, so sudden and awkward the top of my head smacks the bottom of Hatch’s chin on the way up. “Leave her out of this!”

  Hatch staggers back onto the couch. I hover over him, fists clenched, face reddening. He rubs his chin. “Jesus Christ, Fitzy. I’m just fucking with you.”

  I relax my shoulders, the color already fading from my face. As always, this is the extent to which we argue, never beyond this point. I extend my hand to help him up. Hatch accepts the gesture.

  “Sorry, buddy.” I pat him on the back. “Got any of that pot left?”

  Hatch straightens his shirt. “Hello, remember me? I’m your best friend, Hatch, son of an alcoholic marine who’d whip my fucking ass if he ever found that shit on me.”

  “So you’re not high right now?”

  “I didn’t say that, did I? Yours truly is fucked up as a football bat.” Hatch motions to the backdoor. “Hockey team is out back lighting up.”

  For whatever reason, our hockey team always has the best pot. I step aside, offering Hatch a path to the backdoor. “Ladies first, then.”