that weekend (we’d sometimes sneak long-distance phone calls to each other), but she told me she was grounded. She asked me to send her $300 so she could get an abortion. I emptied out my bank account and scrounged up some more tip money and sent cash. A week later she called me and said she hadn’t gotten the money yet. I really need it, she said. She was crying. I told her I’d send it again, but this time it would be a money order. But first I went down to the post office and asked them if the letter had not been sent for some reason. I kicked myself for sending cash and my suspicious mind kept thinking that a crooked mailman probably stole the valuable letter. I could picture him sitting in his mail truck, holding it up to the light and glimpsing the hundred-dollar bills through the envelope.
The people at the post office couldn’t solve the mystery for me.
Two days later, with a rock of heavy embarrassment in my gut, I had to call Elvia and tell her that I could send her only $150. She seemed disappointed and cold and then told me that she was probably going to move after her upcoming high school graduation. What do you mean? I asked her. I’ll tell you later, she said.
Daphne and the other Hermiston Wavers were still coming up to the Tri-Cities on weekends, but Elvia wasn’t catching rides with them anymore. I heard from one of them that Elvia had moved away. I had this person snoop around and a couple of months later, I had a new phone number for Elvia. One in Yakima. Someone thought that she had moved there with a cousin. An older Mexican guy.
I called the number one night when Mom and Dad were gone. I was able to sneak long distance calls on our phone sometimes, even though Dad would get mad about it. Elvia answered. I said hello and her voice answered back, sounding shocked and sad, as if she had been caught stealing something. At first, she seemed regretful that she hadn’t spoken to me. I asked her why and she became vague and nervous. I told her that I loved her and that I wanted to come see her. Finally, she told me that she had moved to Yakima to live with a new boyfriend. An older guy I knew nothing about. I asked her all the selfish questions: Why did she do this to me? Were they having sex? Was the sex better? Did she ever love me? We both started to cry, but I was trying to stay calm.
Mom and Dad drove up the gravel driveway at that moment. I was using the phone in the kitchen, where they were about to enter, arms full of Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets. “Get off the phone. It’s time to eat,” said Dad. They sat down just ten feet away at the dining room table. I tried to stretch the phone cord into the hallway, but Dad got angry and told me not to pull it so hard. It was already crackly. “It’s time to eat!” Dad shouted. It was as if he and Mom had gotten into a fight on the way home. He was in a foul mood.
“Are you going to go to school somewhere there?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to have babies,” she said.
I thought she was saying this to hurt me, to make me give up. “You’re going to have babies
Then Dad walked over and pushed his finger on the hang-up button. “Did you hear me?” he said.
“I’m not hungry right now,” I said.
I went to my room and paced around, hoping the tension in the house would decrease. I went out to the kitchen again and told them I wasn’t feeling well, hoping that would calm things down. Dad bit into a piece of chicken and tore off a chunk of meat. He was the kind of eater who devoured everything to the bone.
As they ate their dinner, I snuck down the hall and into their bedroom, where the other phone was. I picked it up and called Elvia again. She answered after several rings and started crying. I felt like I was now in the position of comforter and I started telling her that things would be okay and that I loved her. I wanted to ask her what she meant when she said the baby thing, but she was too upset to go back to that.
After a few minutes, a man’s voice came on. Her new boyfriend. “Just leave her alone,” he said. “She doesn’t want to talk to you any more.”
“Yes, she does,” I said. I felt stupid, like I was challenging him to a fight from seventy miles away. “Who are you?” I asked.
“Look, man, it’s over. You’re upsetting her.” He said this like he was trying to be cool. “
In my head, I tried to imagine her, in this shitty little farm town, crying in the corner of some tiny one- bedroom house. I knew I’d probably never see her again.
I told myself that it wasn’t my fault.
Yvette
When I was nineteen, I briefly went out with a black girl from Pasco named Yvette. The first time I saw her, she was wearing a very sexy turquoise dress at a Pasco High School dance. When I introduced her to my brother Matt, I could tell he liked her too and I felt guilty about that.
I went to eat dinner at Yvette’s house and the food was totally different from what my family ever had. It was soul food. Her mom even called it that.
She was a virgin and we often talked about having sex and where we should do it.
My cousin Tana gave me a key to her apartment and I often stayed at her place when she was gone. Her fish needed to be fed.
Yvette and I eventually tried to have sex in Tana’s bed. It almost seemed too planned out and it was hard to get excited. Yvette said she wanted to do it, but we couldn’t make it work for some reason. I was nervous and started to have performance anxiety. Her vagina was slick but felt like a wall. Her hymen would not budge.
I didn’t see her for about a month after that. I knew it wasn’t working out without her having to tell me. But I saw her one last time at a party in East Pasco. It was at some DJ’s house—the kind with weeds and dirt in the front yard instead of grass. Some raw homemade-sounding hip-hop was blaring out of the living room stereo when I came in. Everyone looked at me suspiciously since I was the only white person there. Yvette led me to a dark bedroom and we went in. I couldn’t see a thing but I could hear her breathing hard. She reached into my pants and started jerking me off. My pants fell and I could sense her moving down my body as I stood there, surprised and unsure of what to do. I touched her head softly and felt her short blunt hair until I came.
Basement
Right before I moved out of my parents’ house to live with friends in Richland, I relegated my suitcase of porn to the basement, a narrow dirt-walled space that had been there since before the fire. I tried to bury it under some saggy boxes and moldy clothes, but my dad found it later. I claimed not to know anything about it. I said it probably belonged to Mark.
The Stilts
My first apartment was at the Stilts, the cheapest housing in the Tri-Cities, in uptown Richland. I lived there for two short months. The first month I was living with three other guys who had decided to move out right as I was moving in. I was the only one there for the second month. The one thing I remember about the Stilts was that it used to be an army barracks or something. There were six rooms in each apartment, with a small kitchen and bathroom. A lot of kids just out of high school lived there and there were always parties.
It was a period of time for me where I tried to exact revenge on the ghost of Pam. I still resented the fact that she was my first real girlfriend. Initially blinded by my pubescent desperation, I eventually realized she was simply a dullard. I regretted all the time I had invested in her, only to have her cheat on me. She instilled in me a precedent that I would constantly rehash—seducing people and then cheating on them. I was guilty of using bodies as I recorded sound bites in my brain—little quotes about how much of a nice guy I was, how cute I was—that I
