Karl was skinny now—he just stopped eating. He didn’t need braces; instead his eyes triple-aged and he needed glasses to see pretty much anything.
I was skinny too, but that’s because I had a growth spurt and couldn’t keep on any weight. Hovering close to six feet, I was cut and sinewy like an Egon Shiele portrait. No matter how much complete garbage I shoveled into my mouth, I wouldn’t gain a pound. I even went on a hobbit-like diet, with dinner at home around six, dinner around nine with the Geigers, and then a midnight snack, and still couldn’t break 175 pounds.
I played football, basketball, and lacrosse, at school and on travel teams, and attended sports camps throughout the summer. I got moved to quarterback, and my dad set up private lessons with this ex-NFL player who coached in Morristown. “Promising” was the word they usually used to describe my talents. And “he’ll grow into his frame,” to which my father would insist I show them my hands.
Eighth grade was a spiraling vortex of sports and sex—the former occupying my weekends and afternoons, the latter occupying my mind. I couldn’t make it through ten minutes of American History class without drifting off to a candlelit tower, naked and alone with Jessie Levinson; I was so desperate I fantasized about my girlfriend!
“Millburn and Livingston don’t have sex until at least sophomore year—that’s just how it’s always been,” she would say, as if the two suburbs had signed a chastity pact.
You could see the effects in the halls, where an oversized textbook was strategically held at the waist to hide one of the fifty random boners experienced that day. You wouldn’t call out the poor guy, as you implemented the same strategy, and instead simply gave a nod of solidarity, as if to say, “Godspeed, comrade.”
The girls were quite aware of our affliction and compounded our suffering when they would pile into the bathroom in Rosenblatt’s basement and practice giving blowjobs on condoms filled with water. “We’re practicing for next year,” they would say, as if Blowjobbing 101 were a freshman prerequisite for their eventual application to Vassar or Tufts. But that was just the order of things—the freshman girls blew the upperclassmen, and you just had to wait it out until your ascendance to the top of the fellatio chain.
Of course, this Elizabethan sexual morass was only applicable to this particular group of girls, the “popular” ones, to use a trite term that almost seemed comical now after the release of Mean Girls. Other groups of friends were fucking and sucking and blowing each other in bacchanalian orgies, like it was Woodstock. Lara Caponero would blow Ricky Matthews in the bathroom during fourth period every Thursday, and Mark Goldring had a threesome with Olena Lazarenko and her cousin visiting from Odessa (Ukraine, not Texas).
I wanted in on it. I wanted to take my grandfather’s katana and slice through the red tape sealing me off from my sexual liberation. So I jumped ship. No more roses or sonnets or debilitating concerns regarding chivalry. What a difference two years can make, I thought as Michaela Silves undid my belt and zipped down my fly.
We were at Tank’s house celebrating Carmine’s birthday. Carmine, Joey, and Sonny (DiRossi, Lampedusa, and Zito, respectively) were all cousins who lived down in the Little Italy section of Millburn—my father said he wanted to move down there but he couldn’t get a big enough backyard for me to practice my footwork or run sprints. Joey and Sonny were sophomores at the high school, but Sonny had his license already because he was old for his grade. To clarify, they weren’t really cousins. None of us were, but we all called each other cuz, cuzzo, or paisan (Translation: compatriot, comrade, brother-in-arms) in a type of Southern Italian solidarity that you really only saw with the Ukrainians living in Little Moscow, the apartment complex across from the high school—I suppose “Little Kiev” didn’t have the same ring to it. All of Essex County was inhabited by families of Avellino—from humble roots, I presume—so we figured we were related somewhere down the line.
Carmine had that olive complexion and brown eyes that made it easy to convince people his family was from Sicily—I had conducted extensive investigations of our family tree to see if my affinity for the island life came from Sicilian roots, but to no avail—we were strictly from the boot.
Knock, knock, knock, knock. Tank left the table covered in pizza boxes and Coors Light cans to answer the door.
“Oh, hey, Carina isn’t here yet,” said Tank. “Come inside and have a beer with us.”
Michaela Silves appeared in front of the group in high boots and a skirt that was as long as the width of my outstretched hand—yes, I’m aware I had big hands, but this was all that was covering the girl from waist to boots.
“Yo, you guys know Michaela, right? She’s friends with Carina.”
“Hi, Vic,” she said, pushing her hair behind her ear.
“Eyy, she called you by your ameriganz name!” shouted Carmine as he poured out a few shots of homemade limoncello he stole from his grandmother. “Here, here, take another one with me. Here, Vito, this one’s yours.”
I had embraced “Vito.” I introduced myself as Vito and even wrote it on my tests and essays for school. My mother hated it. “I didn’t name you that!” she would say; my father’d laugh and shout, “He’s embracing his roots!”
“I don’t think I can do another one of those. That shit burns,” said Joey.
“Hey Freddy, where is Carina, anyway?” asked Michaela.
“She’s coming back soon. I think she went to pick up some friends from West Orange.”
“She still hanging around with those mulignans?” (Translation, literal: eggplant; colloquial: black person, black African-American.)
“Yeah, they hang out sometimes,” said Tank.
“Eyy oh, why do mooglis have white palms? Ehh? Ehh? Because
