Falling Away

Eventually people began to move. Steve and his girl came to the car looking like hurricane survivors, and only then did Wen deign to budge. Nobody said much, and soon we were in the car and driving home. Dirty, tired, and full of regret, I watched the cars go by as Steve took his girl to her house. They kissed and whispered low and sad with love's breath and the bad breath of morning without ablution. Wen got out, too. Goodbye. Goodbye.

I climbed into the front seat with Steve glumly watching the traffic on the long road that would take us to my house, the morning light somehow hostile and alien as we drove by the Boy's Club.  I wanted to go to bed.

And then suddenly, horribly, we were passing my parent's car, my aunt and uncle and cousins inside, all their heads turned toward us like guppies in an aquarium waiting to be fed, waving and pointing and looking as if they had just noticed some hideous accident. I looked at Steve. "Shit," he spat and hit the gas. He wanted to get me home and drop me off before my parents got there. This looked bad. This looked like trouble.

Steve barely bothered stopping as I jumped out of the car and ducked inside. I just wanted to go to bed, but within seconds, I heard my parent's car pull up. This was awful, I thought. I was a good boy and never caused trouble. I had been in the bluebird reading group in elementary school and was one of the best spellers. I had been an all-star athlete and had heard the cheering of the crowd. Steve! It was Steve and Wayne and all the rest. I was not like them. I wasn't. Sure, I went along, I hung around, but I was an observer, I said to myself, not a participant. Before the door opened, I had repented of my ways.

They all walked in--Mom, Dad, my Aunt and Uncle and their son and daughter who were slightly younger than I. They all just stared at me, my cousins with a mixture of excitement and admiration.

"What'd you do last night?" my father queried.

"I stayed out with Steve." I didn't know what they knew or how much I could lie.

But my mother broke in.

"Steve's mother called here last night to check on him. She said he was spending the night here. When she found out, she started calling everybody. She called his girlfriend's house and her mother said she was staying over at a friend's house."

She was very excited, my father stern beside her, my relatives obviously enjoying the drama. I just stood there, my arms at my side, in a new place I had never been to before. All before me lay a strange land unlike the one I'd come from. I was in another country.

"A Japanese!?! You spent the night with a Japanese! She's twenty years old! Jesus Christ, I fought those bastards in the War and you're sleeping with them." He was mad, but I could tell they didn't really know what to do. It seemed they were in a new country, too.

"Get in there and get cleaned up," he said, gesturing to the bathroom. As I was closing the door, I heard him yell, "And wash that thing good before it drops off!"

It wasn't true, of course. There had only been the one kiss and my one minute of pathetic groping. But I felt empowered, somehow. My family thought I was capable of sleeping with grown women, exotic women at that. I could hear something other than anger in my father's voice. I hadn't any name for it, but I didn't feel inclined to object.

When I finished showering, I went straight to my room and got into my bed. I would sleep through the day like a sick man. It was Saturday. There were cartoons and movies that I would miss, Charlie Chan or Tarzan or some monster movie like "The Creature from the Black Lagoon." I could feel myself falling asleep as I listened to my family backing the car out of the driveway, falling away from all of that.