City of Boys Read Free Page A

he’s got wedged somewhere in the depths of his jaw, and runs his finger over the slick plastic of the steering wheel. I can tell by his refusal to ask that he wants me to come. This, I suppose, is how to get to the center of boys, to go to their club. Boys are like pack creatures, and they always form clubs; it’s as though they cannot help themselves. It’s the single law of human nature that I have observed in my limited exposure to the world, that plays and plays and replays itself out with simple mindless consistency: where there are boys, there are clubs, and anywhere there is a club, it is bound to be full of boys, looking for the good times to be had just by being boys.
    —Can I join? I ask. This is what I will take back to her, cigarettes and a boy’s club. This will keep her for me forever: that I have gone to the center of boys and have come back to her.
    —Well, they say, and smirk and grin and scratch at themselves. —Well, there’s an initiation.
    The oldest of the boys is younger than I, and yet, like boys everywhere, they all think that I don’t know nearly so much as they do, as if being a woman somehow short-circuits my capacity for input. They have a language that they think only boys can understand, but understanding their language is the key to my success, so I smile and say: —I will not fuck you all, separately or together.
    My boy looks over at me and permits himself a cool half-smile, and I am irritated that he now holds me in higher regard because I can speak a language that any idiot could learn.
    Between us there are no small moments; we do not speak at all or we speak everything. Heat bills and toothpaste anddinner and all the dailiness of living are given no language in our time together. I realize that this kind of intensity cannot be sustained over a long period of time and that every small absence in our days signals an end between us. She tells me that I must never leave her, but what I know is that someday she will leave me with a fistful of marriage money to pay the rent as long as rent control lasts in New York, and I will see her wandering down the streets, see her in the arms of another, and I say to her sometimes late at night when she blows smoke rings at my breasts: Don’t leave me. Don’t ever ever leave me.
    —Life, she always says to me, —is one long leave-taking. Don’t kid yourself, she says. —Kid, and laughs. —Anyways, you are my little sweetheart, and how could I ever leave you, and how could I leave this–soft touch on my skin–and this, and this.
    She knows this kills me every time.
    Their clubhouse is dirty and disorganized and everywhere there are mattresses and empty beer bottles and bags from McDonald’s, and skittering through all of this mess are more roaches than I thought could exist in a single place, more roaches than there are boys in this city, more roaches than there are moments of love in this world.
    The boys walk importantly in. This is their club; they are New York City boys and they take drugs and they have a club, and I watch as they scatter around and sit on mattresses and flip on the television. I hang back in the doorway and reach out to snag the corner of the jacket my boy is wearing. He turns to me without interest.
    —How about some air? I say.
    —Let me just get high first, he says, and he walks over to a chair and sits down and pulls out his works and cooks up his dope and ties up his arm and spends a good two minutessearching out a vein to pop. All over his hands and arms and probably his legs and feet and stomach are signs of collapse and ruin, as if his body has been created for a single purpose, and he has spent a busy and productive life systematically mining it for good places to fix.
    I watch him do this while the other boys do their dope or roll their joints or pop their pills, and he offers me some. I say no, I’d rather keep a clear head, and how about some air? I don’t want him to hit a nod before any of it’s