wanted to get good at masturbating, but I could only do it about three or four times a week at most. I kept a pack of towlettes and Burger King napkins under my bed.
There would be nothing to clean up today, though. The skin felt a little raw, so I withdrew my hands and turned on my side, the centerfold calendar slipping off the bed.
A tiny rattling sound at the ledge by my window caught my attention. It was the radiometer, a solar toy I’d bought on my fourth-grade class field trip to Thomas Edison’s lab. Everything in the lab had been preserved exactly the way he’d left it when he died. A giant dried-out elephant ear hung from one of the lab’s walls. It looked like a fun place, one where you could make something new instead of just fixing broken things again and again. It didn’t look anything like my father’s basement workshop. The gift shop had been right next to the lab, and I’d used eight quarters I’d slipped from the soda machine’s change box to buy the radiometer.
The toy was made up of four diamond-shaped panels suspended on a wire and looked like a miniature weather vane sealed in a glass bulb. One side of each panel was painted white, and the other side was painted black. When sunlight hit it, the device spun because the light reflected off the white side of the panel and was absorbed by the black side. The black surface warmed up more than the white one, and since gas molecules recoil faster from the hot surface, the vane would spin. The brighter the light, the faster it would go. In the early mornings, the toy would turn slowly, shakily. By the early afternoon, it spun furiously, making tick-tick-tick sounds as the radial vector of the axis grew and the toy scraped against the insides of the glass bulb.
I’d wanted a radiometer ever since seeing a picture of one in my science textbook. I liked reading that book, which had a solar eclipse on the cover, because it explained things. Why amputated frog legs jumped when hooked up to a battery. How a prism broke up white light into colors. Best of all were the chapters on the planets. Looking at the picture of the earth rising from the moon in the glossy-pictures section made me want to shoot up into space. I wanted to be an astronaut so bad, I sent away for some freeze-dried ice cream so I would know what the food was like. I sent a $20 bill from the cash register to mail order five rations, but I never got anything.
I didn’t want to be anything else. Not a policeman, not a fireman. I wanted to go out into orbit. I figured that by the time I was old enough to join NASA, we’d probably already have space travel.
Being out there, it would always be night, there’d be beautiful lights all around, and I would know the peace and serenity of heaven. But my dreams of floating weightless were always interrupted by the BING! BING! BING! That little bell going off put your life on hold. You heard it and you hopped to it. It didn’t matter if you were eating, sleeping, reading, or shitting. “BING!” and you’d open that door and smile and say, “Can I help you?”
Then I realized that here I was thinking about what I was going to do when I was all grown-up, and I hadn’t even fucked anybody yet.
I was one of the smartest kids in school because I was forced to grow up in a business environment. I made change. I read the newspapers in the office, and when I finished those, there was nothing else to read but my science or my literature textbooks. I also handled credit-card transactions, which were a pain.
First, I had to look up the card number in a booklet issued monthly to make sure it wasn’t reported stolen or missing. The booklet was about a quarter of an inch thick with pages as thin as onion skins. Then I had to call in the card information and the transaction fee. The operator would read a 10-digit authorization number, which I had to write on the slip. I never had to deal with a stolen card, but a lot of cards were rejected for nonpayment. I had to tell people I couldn’t rent rooms to them as I tore the slips up in their faces. It was a good thing that I was a fairly big kid.
Other kids looked up to me because I could put on my front-desk demeanor and assert authority. Also, I was five feet eight inches and 120 pounds in seventh grade. I couldn’t stay after school for stuff like spelling bees or wrestling practice, though. My mother would be tired from watching the office the whole day, and I would have to take over for her. Anything else I wanted to do I had to get done during school hours.
I had friends in school, but a lot of kids were nice to me because they thought I could get them a room to party in. I’d get invited to go drinking in the woods, but there was no way I could go. I had to stay in on weekend nights to meet johns and clean their rooms after they checked out. Besides, my parents wouldn’t want me out drinking.
When I was really young, I went to a kid’s birthday party. His mother looked at me funny as I walked into their house. She decided to move the party to the porch outside, even though the wooden-plank furniture was still a little wet from the rain the day before. She was so nice to me, I was getting more attention than the birthday boy. She walked me to and from the bathroom. It made me feel real strange, and after the party, I never talked to that kid again.
Astronauts didn’t need friends or family, anyway. I liked to ride my Huffy around the hotel and pretend I was heading for deep space. A small stretch of asphalt connected the ends of the driveway near the highway on the inside of the U, completing an oval track. As I did lap after lap, I would try to run over every stray pebble, pretending they were asteroids I had to destroy. Clockwise and then counter-clockwise. Twenty-five laps one way, 25 the other. I would pedal faster and faster, trying to reach escape velocity so I could break out of the orbit of life at the hotel and into a better world. One with sex but with no BING! BING! BING! or Bennys or johns.
Just one week before the end of school, I found a note on my chair that said, “FUCKIN CHINKS GO BACK TO CHINA!” I smiled and sat down. Three boys — Ray Millar, Chris Cohen, and Robbie Malone — grinned and nodded to each other.
Ray was a bony kid with uneven sheaves of black hair. His frequent smiles showed filthy braces. Chris, who was called “Crispy” because of the fried, bubbly texture of his acne-ridden face, was on the fatter side of chubby and wore his hair in a crew cut because he thought bangs caused pimples. Robbie was skinny like Ray and looked meaner. Not in a menacing way, but like the underfed caged lab rat at the back of the classroom.
I felt around inside my desk for my ruler, the one with the metal rim from my father’s workshop. I slipped it into the sleeve of my shirt. As we filed out for gym class, I cupped my right hand to keep the ruler up my sleeve. I saw that orange cones and hard rubber balls had been set up in the gym as we walked to the girls’ and boys’ locker rooms. Dodge ball again.
I sat down on the scarred, splintered locker-room bench and watched Crispy. He was the biggest of the three. If I came at him, I knew Ray and Robbie would back off. I was right. As I came up to Crispy, hands at my sides, those skinny white boys slipped away like dogs at the sound of a newspaper rolling up. Crispy saw me but played it cool, working on his combination lock. He looked at me from the corner of his eye, spinning the dial to the right, six, seven, then eight times.
“That was a nice note you left on my desk,” I said quietly. Crispy turned his head, keeping his hand on the lock.
“What are you talking about?” he asked with a smile. I shook the ruler free from my sleeve and swung the metal edge down onto his hand. He screamed like a girl, delicately holding his limp, bleeding hand like a carefully arranged bouquet. I brought up my foot and planted my Puma into his stomach, aiming for lunch. When he dropped to his knees and puked, I saw that I’d hit breakfast, too.
On the last day of school, my seventh-grade teacher Miss Creach called me up to the front of the class. I’d gotten the top report card. She gave me a hug and a t-shirt printed with a picture of a German Shepherd. “Top Dog” was written on the back. Miss Creach was young, about 25, and had a really pretty face, eyes, and hair, like Agent 99 on “Get Smart.” She was kinda skinny with nice legs that she liked to unveil with a tug on her skirt when she sat down. Her ass seemed to have the right plumpness, too. But her tits were too small. That was the only thing wrong with her. That wouldn’t stop some guys, though. There were a lot of letters in the magazines from fans of that.
“And second place is Lee Anderson,” said Miss Creach. From my seat I stared at