in it.
Still: once upon a time he, Oscar, had been a stoner, sort of upwardly mobile from pot to hash and XTC and heroin, but it was just an excursion for him, Oscar being ambitious in other directions. He got fascinated by oblivion but discovered its secret, which is that it’s boring. But on some days you could look at him standing and eating a cheeseburger and see from his eyes that he had been ruined for a spell. He had been briefly tragic.
He told me once that in a drug dream he’d seen the famous African whispering monkey. The whispering monkey told him awful things about his possible future, bleeding scabby death in garbage alleyways, and that was what sent him into rehab.
After his substance-abuse experiences he became advanced, a reformed boy outlaw. Plus, we were, as I said, both real lively between the sheets. We were swoon machines.
WE MET AT THIS fast-food place, Dr. Enchilada’s. They’d just hired him, Oscar, he was new. He had to wear the little paper hat over his semiblond hair. It’s the law in this state, for hygiene. He came in and he looked at the hat, turning it in his hands. When he finally put it on, he wore it an angle, like he was not wearing it. He had an attitude about the hat, which made it okay and unopinionated. He was above the hat, the hat wasn’t above him. That day, they gave him five or ten minutes of training, and then he was working the register, Mr. Can-I-Help-You, but looking bad and cool and totally unhelpful, and I was on the taco assembly line gooping on the guacamole. I was only looking at him occasionally, in secret, him being the new boy. It isn’t really guacamole, by the way. They call it guacamole to keep up appearances at Dr. Enchilada’s, which is owned by Citibank or somebody.
Anyway, we took a break together. We went outside to the parking lot for a smoke. He was still wearing the hat. To make conversation, he pointed at my ear and said, “Your name’s Chloé? That’s cool. Well, hey, Chloé, you’re pretty but you’re way underpierced.”
So I kicked the dead caterpillars in the driveway and said, Fuck you but, you know, giving it a friendly girlish inflection, a smile, an invitation, just the right tone to start flipping him out.
He said, smiling back, “No, no, really, just one isn’t enough.” And he raised his finger to my earlobe. His hand motion was halfway on its journey to being a caress. It was then I noticed how nice-looking he was. The blond hair, the snaggle-toothed smile, the bomb-shelter eyes. A cute guy who can look at a woman such as me directly and not turn away has the courage of a mountain climber. Sometimes they get scared off by the eyeliner and the mint-green glint in my cornea, and they worry that they won’t be up to the challenge. But boys in recovery have that reentry calmed-down zombie look, which you can’t buy in stores, and they do sometimes turn it to their advantage if they aren’t scared of girls. Oscar looked burned away and rebuilt, like a housing project. Survivors are sexy, sort of the way secondhand clothes are sexy because they hang right, you don’t have to break them in or get the sizing out.
When he looked at me, he was sending me a signal that extended into the future and made my teeth rattle. He said he was pierced all over the place. And he told me about where he was pierced, including his tongue stud, and also the secret tattoo he had, of the skull, which said “Die.”
I was deeply impressed. Also he had nice shoulders, despite everything he’d been through. He had been an athlete once, before indifference took him over and he absolutely no longer cared who won anything. I felt no lust toward him at that moment but knew that I would within a few brief hours, the itch starting in my heart and moving downward into my hands.
We went back to work. That afternoon it was kind of electrical as I watched him take orders and fuck up when he gave change.
That night when I told my best friend, the Vulture, about it, the Vulture said Oscar and I would happen, that we were inescapable and inevitable. She’s never wrong about things like that, the Vulture isn’t.
HE GOT MY PHONE NUMBER, in that house where I was living with about sixteen other people. They were all from high school, and we were existing genetically and domestically together before we found serious jobs and apartments and lives that we could claim as our own. Some of them were working at this coffee franchise, Jitters. For this guy Bradley. I ended up working there. I guess you know him, obviously.
At home there was this constant desperate party going on day and night, which can be depressing and effortful. You get tired of the burns in the furniture and how the bathroom is always locked, or, when you get in, there are potato chips floating in the toilet. Anyway, Oscar’d call and say, I want Chloé. Not, Can I speak to Chloé? Or: Is Chloé there? But every time: I want Chloé. I liked that, especially the “want” part. My roommates taught him to say Please. They’d imitate him, these girls. Give me Chloé I want Chloé, was their envious little whine. The Spice Girls I lived with—Dopey and Sneezy and Slutty and Bookish—they were so urbane that they pretended not to eat or to cook or anything—they subsisted on air and bulimia. So Oscar took me to some movies and we ate popcorn out of the same bag. As a gift, he gave me his syringe and his spoon and his rubber tubing thing. He put them in a box with a sort of rubber band around it. He told me never to give them back, that I was the new event in his life, the new car in his driveway. The old events were passé. Things developed between us. I’m summarizing here.
He told me that he was burning for me, and he meant it. When he was around me, he gave off a smell of young man musk, mixed of salt and leather and grass. He’d stare at me desperately, smoldering his life away.
To be more romantic than we were, you’d have to kill yourself in the middle of the street and then write about it. Shakespeare did that.
He took me out to dinner at the Happy Chef, for example. The Happy Chef himself is outside the restaurant on a concrete pedestal. He’s ten feet tall and made out of plastic and wood and glue. He’s the symbol of everything that happens inside. Oscar let me press the button at the side of the Chef that makes the Chef talk, from a recording. “Hello. While you’re at the Happy Chef, you may notice that some of the water glasses have no ice in them. This is not because we forgot to put ice in the glasses—all of our water comes with ice in it—but because the water got hungry, and ate the ice.” Like that. We laughed sadly at the lame-o humor, then went inside for hamburgers. Oscar put his foot between my legs, and he touched the inside of my wrist with his fingers. I loved it, how high he carried a torch for me. It was romantic, at least as romantic as my life ever gets.
But! He still lived with his father in Ypsilanti. He took me over there and showed me his knife collection stashed under the bed in this velvet-lined box. He wouldn’t let me touch his knives. Because I would hurt their aura. He said. As if I could blunt a knife! Also I got shown his stamps, that he had collected in fourth grade. Those I could touch. He still had his track team medals up, and his track shoes on his windowsill, all this boy-holy shit. He had run the relays. That was the last thing he did before he tried out syringes filled with mind-soak for a little while. But what really got to me? Was that he still slept with his Bert. Or maybe it was Ernie. It was the one that looked like President Bush, with the pinhead, whichever. Oscar gave it to me when I asked for it because it smelled like him, grass and vinegar and musk. It had Oscar-aroma.
His father dynamited tree stumps for a living, then hauled them away. That’s what Oscar said he did, though even Oscar wasn’t sure about his dad’s total occupation. Early on, I saw Oscar’s dad a few times, through the window, coming home in his truck. He didn’t come inside back then. I believed it: about the dynamite. Oscar’s dad had the strangest name I ever heard of on a man: Batholdt. And that was only his first name. Everybody called him the Bat. Oscar had to hide the fact that he slept with Bert from the Bat. The Bat was scary. The Bat is scary. Oh, you who are reading this book, brothers and sisters, look over your shoulder, for the Bat crouches behind you.
OSCAR SAID, You won’t believe this, but I think of sex all day long. I didn’t while I was temporarily a teen junkie but now I do again. Sex has made me totally pointless in the human realm. I would know stuff like the capital of Mormonism if I wasn’t Mr. Obsessed. My mind is a pornographic event. I’m an onionhead. Oh, Chloé, you set me on fire.
But