You Deserve Nothing - Alexander Maksik [55]
“It is brave. The way you’re doing it. Going it alone. That’s a hard fucking life though, man. What about girls? You have a girlfriend?” He looked at me and then said, “You’re into girls, right? You don’t have a fucking boyfriend, right mate?”
“No,” I told him. “No boyfriend.”
“And?”
“No girlfriend,” I said.
“Fucked up, man. I know there are chicks at school who’d fuck you. You’re that mysterious kid. They love that shit. Even if you have some of that Columbine thing, man, chicks fucking love mystery.”
I laughed.
“So what’s up?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know, really. I’m just. I don’t know.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. I just want to do something else. I’m tired. Like I’m a hundred years old. Like I was born bored. Bored of people anyway. I don’t know. I’d like to meet someone wild. Interesting.”
Which was half true. But despite my desperate, painful, adolescent sexual desire, I never had anything to say to the girls who smiled at me. I was in a constant state of longing. My body hummed with need and all of that yearning, that stifled desire—to fuck, to tear the apartment to pieces, to escape, to break my father’s jaw—the only relief came while I was lying in bed at night. There, with my eyes closed, I’d draw an image from my memory—one of those ISF girls running to class, or lying in the sun, or raising her hand—and I’d masturbate angrily until I fell asleep. Often it was Ariel, late in the afternoon, the school empty. I’d bend her over Silver’s desk and fuck her violently from behind. Or little giggling blond Julia, always talking with Silver out on the field, she’d be on her knees in front of me in the bathroom, her hair in my fist, or Marie de Cléry with her famous breasts heavy in my hands. There was an invariable violence to those fantasies and with every ejaculation came the slight release of rage, the faintest relief from anger. In my bed, in the shower, even once in a bathroom stall at ISF, I’d grit my teeth and masturbate until the skin was raw and still the erections would return again and again.
“Silver’s fucking alive. I’ll bet that guy is crazy wild,” Colin said.
I nodded. “He’s the first person for a long long time that’s really got to me, you know? He’s always in my head.”
“He’s the only reason I’m here today. No offense, but last year, I wouldn’t have been here. On a Saturday? Sorry but fuck that. I’d still be asleep.”
As we arrived on the place, a massive crowd was moving slowly up the Boulevard du Temple. All along were cheering spectators. We pushed in and stood at the edge of the sidewalk where we watched as wave after wave of protesters came up the boulevard. Various groups marched behind their banners—socialists, Union des étudiants juifs de France, other student unions, Democrats Abroad, Marxists, communists, Christians for Peace, Iraqi refugee groups, Hezbollah, Americans Against the War. There were girls wrapped in rainbow peace flags who danced unaffiliated. They held speakers above their heads and sang “Imagine.”
I watched stern-faced men and women marching behind bright-yellow Hezbollah banners decorated with green fists clutching AK-47s. Bouncing university hippies flashing peace signs followed behind and I felt I was in the midst of something important, but I was chilled when I saw those yellow flags, having been taught early in life to fear Hezbollah, and to hate it. Standing so close, I felt immersed in a dangerous and exotic world. I was part of a true rebellion. All of us were together there in the greatest city in the world, all of us from everywhere, raging against the world’s bullies. Raging, engaged, participating in something. We were there. Present. Alive. I knew he’d be proud of me. For chanting “Non à la guerre, non à la guerre,” my fist in the air. And my parents? If they’d known I was cheering as Hezbollah marched past, they’d have been furious. American