Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [24]
I took a sip and hated the sweet burn going down my throat. I smoked pot, too. I drew in the smoke like everyone else, held it till my chest hurt, then blew it out, and I hated what happened next, how a part of me slipped inside another part of me to watch me go so dully through the morning. But I couldn’t say no, couldn’t draw attention to myself and maybe get insulted and have to fight. Only a year or so on this side of town, and I’d begun to wear my hair tied back in a ponytail, and every day I wore my one pair of jeans, my Dingo boots, a T-shirt, and the brown leather jacket with the zippered sleeves my mother couldn’t afford but ended up buying for me anyway. A man driving down Main Street to work at seven any weekday morning would see just another delinquent drinking and smoking on the steps of Pleasant Spa, just another kid like Nicky G. with his long hair, black as an Apache’s, his sideburns like Greg Allman’s, his hard chest from the bench presses he did in his garage, the fact he’d fucked every girl in that neighborhood at least once, including my fourteen-year-old sister, and then he was off after some other girl and Suzanne cried for a week in her room and I despised him, tried not to talk to him or look at him or smile at any of his jokes, but if he passed me a joint or Glenn P.’s Southern Comfort, I took it and said nothing.
The long yellow bus would pull up and I’d sit in the back with Suzanne and the Heads from the avenues. Sometimes Glenn P. would pass his bottle, sometimes he’d keep it to himself for later. We’d ride down through the streets, the driver stopping every few blocks to pick up more kids, the girls dressed like Anne Marie and Dawn and my sister; they wore tight hip-huggers that went so low you could see two dimples just above their butt cracks, and the Italian or Puerto Rican girls had that brown line in the skin that ran from the belly button straight down past the pink and yellow rim of panties. They wore tight tube tops and no bras, their nipples erect in the winter behind short leather jackets dyed green or red or purple. Their hair was wild or braided, and the eyeliner around their eyes was thick and black, their lip gloss glistening.
As the bus pulled up in front of them, they’d take one last drag off a cigarette and flick it into the street. They’d climb onto the bus and make their way past the kids with lunch boxes and books and homework they’d actually done, to the back where the rest of us were.
“Mornin’, Tina.”
“Fuck you, Glenn. Where’s the fin you owe me?”
“Blow me.”
“In your dreams, faggot.”
There’d be laughter and more swearing at one another, talk of a fight that was coming, of some Acapulco gold or Angel Dust due soon, who had just fucked whom and who was knocked up and who got rid of it and who wiped out his bike down to the beach and might lose a leg.
We passed the junkyard and a Catholic church, we rode down under the railroad trestle for Lafayette Square and all its barrooms around the rotary, then the package store and car dealership that year-round had Christmas lights lit up over its used and repossessed cars. We rode up Broadway past a funeral home and St. Joseph’s Church and then we were out near the highway, the bus turning into the lane for the high school, a rambling one-story complex of cinderblock and glass, a statue of Michelangelo’s Lorenzo de’ Medici sitting out front, though whenever I saw it, the form of the man with his elbow on his knee looked to me like a man on a toilet.
The bus pulled around to the back lot where seniors parked their Monte Carlos and Camaros and Dusters and Trans Ams, a few motorcycles too. Facing the lot was the entrance between the M and L wings. The kids in the front of the bus, the jocks or the studious ones no one had a name for, they went inside to make it to their lockers and desks before the