“I’m in,” said Alex. “But, look, pull over soon as you get off my street.”
Pete curbed the Olds and let it idle. Alex produced a film canister that held a thimble-sized portion of pot. “I found this in my drawer. It’s a little stale…”
“Gimme that shit,” said Billy, who took the canister, looked into it, and shook it. “We can’t even roll a J with this.”
Pete pushed the lighter in on the dash. When it popped back out, he pulled it and Billy immediately dumped the small amount of reefer onto the lighter’s orange coils. They took turns snorting the smoke that rose off the hot surface. It was only enough for a headache, but they liked the smell.
“Where we goin?” said Alex.
“Downtown,” said Pete, turning the car onto Colesville Road and driving south for the District line.
Billy pulled a Marlboro from a pack he had slipped behind the sun visor and fired it up. The windows were down and the warm night air flowed into the car, blowing back their hair. They all wore it long.
The car was a white-over-blue Cutlass Supreme. Because of the color scheme, and because it was not the 442, Billy often needled Pete about the vehicle, saying it was a car for “housewives and homos.”
“What,” said Billy, “did your mother pick this out while your father was at work?”
“Least we own it,” said Pete. Billy’s father, a Ford salesman at the Hill and Sanders showroom in Wheaton, brought home loaners. Pete’s father was an attorney for the UAW, a “professional,” which Pete never tired of mentioning to his friends. Pete got good grades and had recently scored well on the SATs. Billy and Alex were C students and had no special plans. They had gotten high and drunk the night before the test.
The boys argued over the choice of radio stations all the way down 16th Street. Alex wanted to listen to WGTB, the progressive FM station coming out of Georgetown U’s campus, but Billy blew that idea off.
“He’s hoping they play Vomit Rooster,” said Billy.
“ Atomic Rooster,” said Alex.
“Nights in White Satin” came on the radio, but Billy switched it because they weren’t stoned. He switched off another station that was playing that Lobo song about the dog and stayed with another one only long enough to change the words of the Roberta Flack hit to “The first time ever I sat on your face.” Billy found a station that was spinning music with guitars and let it ride. They listened to singles by T-Rex, Argent, and Alice Cooper, and when “Day After Day” came on, Billy turned it all the way up. They were down near Foggy Bottom by the time the song had finished. Pete found a place to park.
They walked to a nightclub owned by Blackie Auger. They weren’t old enough to drink, but all of them had draft cards they had bought from older guys in the neighborhood. The doorman had a look at them, saw three guys in jeans from the working-class side of the suburbs, and balked at letting them in. But Alex talked them through the door by saying he knew Blackie, the legendary Greek restaurateur and bar owner. Alex did not know Auger and neither did his parents. In fact, he was in an entirely different class of Greek American and had never come in contact with him. Alex’s family attended “the immigrant church” on 16th Street, while Auger and others of his standing were members of the “uptown” cathedral at 36th and Mass.
The doorman let them pass. The chance that the kid might be telling the truth was their ticket in.
They knew they were out of place as soon as they entered the club. The men were in their twenties and wore stacks and tight double-knit trousers, with rayon big-collared shirts opened to expose chest hair, medallions, crucifixes, and gold anchors. The women wore dresses and did not look their way. Those on the dance floor seemed to know the current steps. Alex, Billy, and Pete could do stuff they’d seen on the Soul Train dance line, but that was all. Their stay was cut short when a guy with a dollar sign for a belt buckle said something to Billy about being “in the wrong club,” and Billy, who was smoking a Marlboro at the time, said, “Yeah, I didn’t know this was a fag bar,” and flicked his live cigarette off the dude’s chest. The same doorman who had let them in told the boys to get out and “don’t never” come back.
“Don’t never,” said Pete, out on the sidewalk. “Dumbass used a double negative.”
Billy and Alex didn’t know what Pete meant, but they figured it was something about Pete being smarter than the bouncer. Being tossed had been momentarily embarrassing, but none of them felt bad about it for long. It had been fun watching the sparks fly off that dude’s chest, hearing Billy’s cackle of a laugh as the guy balled his fists but didn’t step forward, Billy not giving a good fuck about anything, which was his way.
They drove around some more and drank beer. They thought about going to the Silver Slipper, but the club had a drink minimum and enforced it, and anyway, the Slipper featured burlesque dancers, and burlesque to them meant the ladies didn’t show snatch and took their time about showing bare tit. They ended up buying tickets to a movie called The Teachers, down at 9th and F, at a theater called the Art, which was the wrong name for the place because it was just a stroke house. In the auditorium, which smelled of tobacco, perspiration, and damp newspapers, they sat apart from one another so no one would think they were like that and watched the movie and the older guys in the audience who moaned while they jacked off. Alex got an erection but nothing like the strong one he got while making out with Karen, and thinking of her made him lonely and sad to be where he was. The other guys must have been feeling something like that, too, since they mutually decided to leave before the end of the film. On the way to the car they joked about the fact that all the girl characters were named Uta.
They drove over to Shaw. The beer was warm now, but they continued to drink it. At 14th and S they talked about the time they had bought a whore on that corner for Pete’s sixteenth birthday, a rite of passage for boys in the D.C. area, and joked with Pete about how he had shot off the second he got inside her. In fact, he had blown his load on the dirty sheets of the bed in a tiny third-floor row house room before he had the opportunity to insert his pecker, but he hadn’t related this to his friends. It was bad enough that he had lost his cherry to a black hooker named Shyleen. These guys were the only ones who knew that he had done this thing, and the story would die with their friendship. He would be gone in a year, off to college and a new life. It couldn’t come fast enough.
“Remember when we gave her the fifteen dollars?” said Billy. “Right out on the street? She said, ‘Put that money away; you tryin to get me ’rested?’ ”
Alex had been there. The girl had said “arrested,” not “ ’rested.”
“What do you expect from a boofer?” said Billy.
“Don’t talk about your mama like that,” said Pete.
At U Street, they started up the long hill, going north. From U up to Park Road, the commercial and residential district had been burned and virtually destroyed in the riots. What was left was boarded and charred. Many businesses that had managed to remain standing had closed and moved on.
“Man, did they fuck this up,” said Pete.
“Wonder where the people who lived here went,” said Alex.
“They all out in Nee-grow Heights,” said Billy.
“How do you know, you been out there?” said Pete.
“Your daddy has,” said Billy.
“’Cause you’re always talking about it,” said Pete. “When you gonna stop talking and do it?”
Billy, Pete, and Alex lived a few miles from Heathrow Heights, but they knew of it only by reputation and had not come into contact with its residents. The black kids who lived there were bused to a high school in the wealthier section of Montgomery County whose white students were bound for college, while the boys who went to the high school in down-county Silver Spring were known to be an unpolished mixture of stoners, greasers, and jocks, with a few closet academics in the mix.
“What, you think I’m afraid to go there?” said Billy. “ I’m not afraid.”
Billy was afraid. Of this Alex was certain. Like Billy’s old man, who told nigger jokes on the steps of their church, where everyone gathered after the liturgy. Mr. Cachoris was afraid of black people, too. That’s all it was: fear turned into hate. Billy wasn’t a bad guy, not really. His father had taught him to be ignorant. With Pete it was something different. He always had to look down on someone. Alex wasn’t very book smart, but these were things he knew.
“I just wanna go home.”
“Alex got himself a nig girlfriend down at his father’s coffee shop,” said Billy. “He doesn’t like it when I talk bad about his peoples.”
Billy and Pete gave each other skin and laughed. Alex got small in his seat. Wondering, as he often did when he was coming down at the end of the night, why he hung with these guys.
“I’m tired,” said Alex.
“Pappas wanna go night-night,” said Pete.
