Growing Up Wired Read online

  She held her breath, looking into my eyes with suspicion. “Okay,” she said.

  I was numb, reflexive, counting the steps in the stairwell that separated us from the door of my secluded, cold room.

  As I led her up the stairwell, I gave in to the obnoxious compulsion to check a text from Rex and I could just imagine his angry thumbs punching the message: ‘It’s not cool to steal a pledge’s girlfriend.’ But she wasn’t anyone’s girlfriend and we had already talked about that.

  In a distant room, the bass of speakers thudded quickly as we climbed to the dark hallway with the coolness of the room’s air conditioners over-spilling to the hallway’s heat.

  I got her in there, inside my room, dimly lit from the fluorescent desk lights humming softly beneath the shelves and my unplugged computer monitor still facedown on the desktop. Leaning over the futon, talking nervously, I reached to the refrigerator, recessed within the closet, and opened the door, handing her a beer, grabbing one myself. A weakening of her defenses exposed itself in her face, in the raising of her hands to me as my heart struck in my chest, my mouth drying, and her eyes invited. I kissed her, met her body, then separated from her, dazed, clumsily grabbing our unopened beers and setting them on the desktop before rejoining her. We made out for a while, with me sitting on the futon and her kneeling with one knee between my legs. Her arms around me, brunette hair blotting out everything. Then we moved to lie down and the pillow was there for us. I embraced her. The fullness of her long, slender figure did something, dug in, energized a pathway of an unknown circuit with the imperative to take a woman in my arms. The closeness—undeniable femininity—blazing reverberation.

  Between kisses she said, sadly, to herself, “You’re the first guy I’ve kissed that hasn’t tried to touch my boobs.”

  “It’s what you deserve,” I said, drunk off her presence.

  She stuck her tongue in my ear and breathed. It was too much.

  My hands moved to her waist. “I feel like I’m going to let you down,” I said.

  “Don’t. Don’t let me down.”

  I touched her long legs and felt her short, hair bristles.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I need to shave.”

  The door flew open; I jumped off her and looked up.

  “Victor,” Budge said from the doorway. “Your car’s blocking someone in, in the parking lot.”

  “Fine,” I said, leaping to the desktop to snatch my keys and fling them at him in one fluid motion.

  He snickered at me, looking in at her. Then he closed the door. I got up and locked the door before rejoining her. We lay there and she said, “I bet you’ve slept with a million girls.”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Really? I doubt it. How many girls have you slept with?”

  “Well, actually, I haven’t slept with any.”

  “No way. I don’t believe it. No you are not. You are not a virgin.”

  “Yes, I am, seriously.”

  “Well…” She adjusted herself, moving inches away from me, “I’m a virgin. I’m a virgin, too.”

  “You are?” I didn’t believe her. Something about the way she said it sounded fake.

  “I am,” she said. “But I do everything else. That’s the only thing I don’t do. My father cheated on my mother when I was three, so, ever since then my mother hasn’t let us miss church.”

  “That’s weird. My father left my mother when I was three also.”

  “So then we’re the same,” she said.

  “I guess so.”

  “I knew there was a reason I liked you, Victor.”

  We lay there, talking and kissing.

  My hands went up her back as she lay beneath, my fingers fighting to unclasp her bra. I struggled, a woman does something with her shoulders making it impossible for her bra to be unlatched. Her face blushed as I looked into her eyes: dark pools for drowning, kissing her, fighting clasps. Two came undone, flying rive to expose warm back flesh. The last one held fast, mocking, “Ha! still a boy, not a man.” I lifted her up to me, biceps straining, fighting the clasp as she rose and it freed. I pushed the bra near her chin along with her shirt. I unzipped her white shorts. Her eyes lustful.

  She materialized a change in me. Troops were garrisoned and marshaled, fibers pulled taut, thrumming to elevated wonderful musical darkness as cells divided and divided their divisors and rose and glowed viciously and spun and swam, mustering toward the repair and replacement of all innumerable structures necessary for the capitulation of that one, necessary act, that deed with my body becoming such an illogical Disneyland where all the chubby, overgrown kids rushed all the rides, ignoring all the lines.

  I ripped off my shirt the cool way I’d seen on TV and in movies, both hands to pull it off, not the slip-your-arms-inside boyish-method of childhood. I lay on top of her to let skins meet and blood leave my head. I stood up. As I had rehearsed it mentally, the futon would serve its purpose, transforming into a comfortable bed. I jerked on the handles beneath the couch. It rocked back on its hind legs, bouncing her naked body and her flashing expressions of helplessness and concern. I kissed her. I wouldn’t be sly. I wouldn’t seduce. It would be our clear-headed decision. I opened a drawer and pulled a white wrapped condom out of a box, setting it on the pillow above her shoulder.

  She scooted up on her elbows and picked up the wrapped condom, squinting at it. “What’s this?” she asked bluntly.

  “That’s, that’s a condom.”

  Her body tensed. She pulled her bra and shirt back down.

  My stomach shrank. The room locked into a prison cell.

  “I told you I was a virgin,” she said softly, focusing on things in the dark above her. “I thought you liked me.” She zipped up her shorts. Her face, her eyes grimaced. Tears welled. They rolled over her cheeks.

  “I, I do. I do like you.”

  Her tears moved out and over as something happened inside her. It felt like we were mirrors that were facing each other.

  I waited through silence, staring at her. I admitted I had to go to the bathroom. So did she. We went together. She used the dingy blue stall that had the toilet paper resting on the tiles beneath the swing-door.

  I went in the urinal in front of her. It was a rushing piss, the kind that will never end. I stared at white paint on the wall, listening to her sporadic peeing.

  She finished first, coming out of the stall, ducking her head in childish embarrassment as I turned over my shoulder to her. She left the bathroom without washing her hands. I finished up, heading back without washing either.

  We lay together. Her body felt different; foreign. Sensation left my skin with a slight vertigo accompanying my numbness. My mind was still stuck on her tears.

  “We can fool around a little bit,” she said. She took my hand and placed it under her shirt on one of her breasts. Then slipped her hand down my jeans, under my boxers but my lustiness had shattered with the pieces all lost and hidden from me. I removed my hand from under her shirt and she ran hers up my navel. We stayed there like that for a while.

  CHAPTER THREE

  HAIL, OH HAIL THEE ALPHAS

  Later that week I turned over my computer monitor on my desk and plugged in the Ethernet cable. The computer fit perfectly into the left corner of the desktop and my roommate still hadn’t shown up yet. Some people were saying that he’d transferred schools but I suspected that the house was having trouble filling its rooms just like all the other fraternities. I hadn’t had a private Internet connection before, hadn’t been able to lock myself away. I lived in a dorm my freshman year and before that my step brother’s computer was so slow that it was worthless.

  This Ethernet connection was fast—nitrous-oxide, watch out for the cops-fast. I opened ten windows for ten websites, simultaneously—each pathway tunneling for something new and different. My eyes strained, pulse quickening—power!

  The other guys were good about sharing what they’d found. This tall junior with spiky hair had spent his
free hours in high school brawling and bullying. For the past week, his temperament seemed mellowed with Prozac and he got his kicks sneaking into my room and bringing up dirty websites on my computer. He’d do it real quick, slipping onto my chair to type, planting ideas. Later he’d say, “Did you like that one, Victor Hastings?” I did. I liked them. Especially this site, Freepics, which was maintained by an army of invisible users. After I typed the name of this girl I wanted, it spit me back a list of links and I was one mouse-click from revealing skin, tan curves of motherhood, her willing eyes. A right-click gave me ownership of her curves and my heart beat with the thought of it when my phone chimned—

  ‘I was wondering,’ Erin texted, ‘Why did you tell me that people never think about what they’re doing when it comes to the new techy stuff from Best Buy?’

  —mine forever to dissect, enlarge, rotate and crop out the unworthy dude’s face. Microsoft Windows suggested a storage file: My Pictures. It had a slideshow option. I tried it. Naked, young flesh flashed in succession that I controlled or left to click-by at its own, tempting pace. Instead of one wife forever, a million beautiful wives for seconds, a growing, cyber-harem, I, its commander, I, its king and its recruiter.

  ‘What did I do wrong?’ she texted. ‘What are you up to all the time? Why are you acting weird? Can I come over?’

  I was exploring something real. It was real, a reality of the unreal. The world slowly revealed to me hints of its elite, its perfection and I wanted more, chasing and revealing the perfection I knew from my inkling of impending manhood could someday be mine: video clips and pictures, college girls and professional women, sophisticated and glamorous, slutty and shy, rookie and experienced. Their faces held the history of their lives—the beliefs they held of the naked bodies they had—blends of pride, shame and obliviousness in glinting-wet eyes—

  ‘Don’t block me out,’ she texted.

  The Internet was so deep and seductive. The Internet was a safer bet. And as I sat in the squeaking chair, one hand on the mouse, the other searching, each droplet and pang of flashing images was just the relighting of something she’d gave.

  ‘When I cried because you wanted sex,’ she texted, ‘that wasn’t your fault.’

  * * * * * *

  It was 8:30 that same night. I headed downstairs, walked through the main floor hallway and took a right. I decided to hangout alone for a few minutes on the back porch before I joined the others.

  A brown Oldsmobile pulled into the parking lot’s front row. Our house mother, Ma Red, short for Redding, stepped out of her Oldsmobile, carefully placing her heeled shoes between the gravel. She wore a beige, double-breasted dinner coat and a knee-high beige skirt with a faint argyle print. A blue beret topped her wavy silver hair. “Excuse me, sir,” she said. “Could you please help me carry in some things to my room, I’ve just returned from visiting relatives and they keep insisting on giving me these silly gifts for my birthday.”

  “Sure.” I leaned into her car. It smelled like honey and sage with the red velvet of her driver seat worn from sitting. State road maps and pebbles cluttered her floorboards and a suction-cupped, spherical compass hung from her windshield below her rear-view mirror. I grabbed several small sacks from boutiques full of colorful crumpled tissue and a brown grocery sack full of dried goods and turned to Ma Redding, closing her door.

  “I’m seventy-one, as of last Wednesday. You were kind not to inquire.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Happy birthday.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Another year. This way, please.” We walked through the main floor hallway and through an oak doorframe. At the end of this hallway, past the women’s restroom, was Ma Red’s room. She fished in her jacket pocket for her keys and unlocked the door to her suite. Her room was strangely shaped and of unknown dimensions, maybe a pentagon or an ‘L’. On an intricately carved and well-oiled mahogany table, white snowflake doilies rested beneath china teacups. The walls were clustered with armoires packed with pristine glass trinkets. The armoires had strange multicultural wooden and clay idols of little known tribes and sculptures such as baby-blue and peach painted caricatures of little boys praying and little girls playing. Bronze plaques and photographs hung from blue-washed drywall while florid green and red wallpaper strips bordered her white Victorian ceiling moldings. I passed her the bags as she placed her keys and purse on her table and I glanced over the tile threshold to her immaculate emerald carpet. It was frigid in there. She’d run her air conditioner full blast for the several days she’d been away.

  “I recognize you from last year,” she said. “But I don’t believe we’ve officially met. I’m Miss Elizabeth Redding. The boys call me Ma Red as, of course, you’re also welcome to address me.”

  “Hello, Miss Redding.” We shook hands. “I’m Victor Hastings.”

  “Oh, Hastings. Such a hasty name. You’re not hasty, are you, Mr. Hastings?”

  I chuckled. “Uh, no Ma’am. I guess I’m not.”

  “Well, if you should say so, Mr. Hastings, then I suppose I’m obliged to believe you; aren’t I?” She touched the top of my wrist. “I’ve been the house mother here for about sixteen years. I began three years after the death of my son. The Lord gave him a mental handicap to test him and it was too much for the both of us to bear.”

  “Oh, I’m—I’m sorry, Mrs. Redding,” I said, fumbling her title.

  Her eyes grew wide. “Oh, no!” She smiled. “You mustn’t be sorry. How could you be responsible for something like that? No—the Lord, He tests us and He puts limits on us so we can better join His kingdom.”

  “I’d never thought of that before.”

  “Well, you certainly should. Let me tell you something, Mr. Hastings. I’ve become something of an expert on boys. When I was a war correspondent in Vietnam I saw what the horribleness created within.” She pointed to a brass framed photograph just to the left of my view through the doorframe. I stepped onto her emerald carpet. “Please.” She raised a halting palm to me and pointed at my foot. “It’s nothing personal, dear; I cannot invite you inside.”

  I stepped back. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said as she made me feel like a vampire.

  “No, don’t think a thing of it, my dear. I’ve simply found over the years that this delineation is necessary.” She moved to the right. “Here, move this way and you can see it in the back there.” She pointed.

  I saw Ma Red holding a bulbous orange microphone near the lips of an eighteen-year-old man with a camouflage helmet hung low near his eyebrows and an empty field ration can was grasped by fingers flecked with period-sized specs of blood. Something, perhaps a helicopter, had sent Ma Red’s braided, blonde ponytail blowing back like the tail of a kite.

  “Can you see his eyes?” she asked.

  “Not quite. I lost it in the glare. It’s the angle.”

  “Hmm.” She shifted her weight to her right leg, which was adorned in a white-nylon stocking. “I’ve often thought that the look in a young man’s eyes changes from generation to generation. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. Humans have been around for a long time, hundreds of thousands of years—you know?”

  “Not so long, really.” She grinned. “Good night, Mr. Hastings.”

  “Good night.”

  She closed the door to her suite.

  The quick bass of some rap song crept out of the cement-walled basement’s Pit and rattled the hallway tiles and drywall. I walked down there to face my duty. It was dark. It smelled like spilled beer and sounded like anger. In the Pit’s dank back corner, a small fluorescent light rested beneath the inside lip of the old wooden bar, lighting faces of several members who were fiddling with stereo equipment. A black plastic disco light of two balls covered in primary-colored lenses was duct taped to an I-beam above and it rotated and orbited on a turntable, squeaking their jerky movements and lighting the pockmarked and beer glistening cement floor with intermeshing kaleidoscope patterns. The keg was positioned between the bar and the open
door of the TV room. Members and pledges had chosen to either talk in groups of three or join a semicircle around the keg.

  “Where’s your mug?” Rex said, pumping the keg and filling a blue plastic cup for a pledge.

  I looked around. All the Actives had brought down their orange plastic mugs from a Halloween house-party we’d had the past fall at an off-campus bar. “Looks like I forgot.”

  “That’s all right,” Rex said. He handed me a plastic cup. “You can have a cup like the pledges, tonight. You’re late.”

  “I know. I got a little caught up in my homework.”

  “Ri—ight,” Rex said.

  Wilfred walked over. He wore a white undershirt with a fresh, yellow beer stain covering most of his back. His long blonde hair was slicked back like some 1930’s gangster and his forehead dripped sweat. “Victor!” He slapped me on the back and foamy yellow brew sloshed in his plastic mug. “How you been man? All finished?”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means we needed you stereo, man,” Wilfred said.

  “Wilfred, how long have you been drinking?” I said.

  Wilfred, hiccupped. “Since ten this morning. Don’t change the subject, buddy. We needed you stereo. It was your turn. We had to unlock Jason’s room and steal his stereo because he’s not here. That took some doing and some waiting.” He pointed a wavering finger. “When there could’ve been some a-drinking.”

  “You let your brothers down,” Rex said.

  “I did? I’m sorry. I’ll have to be more on the ball next time.”

  “Perhaps a little less,” Drake said, fishing a long brown hair out of his plastic mug. They laughed. He had a pretty big mouth for someone so small and scrawny. His red hair was just starting to grow back after the radiation therapy and he was already talking shit.

  Rex finished filling the plastic mug and handed it to the pledge. “Victor, have you met our newest pledge yet?”

  “No, I haven’t,” I said, looking at the pledge. “What’s his name?”

  “Stanley Jordan. He’s from St. Louis. He’s a black belt in Tai Kwon Do. He could kick your ass, Victor.”