Bone in the Throat by Anthony Bourdain

Tommy. . .
    This was the man who supported his mother, Tommy reminded himself. Who'd supported him through high school, who'd got him his first job in a restaurant, got him the job he had now. Who put a fifty-dollar bill in his stocking every Christmas, brought carloads of frozen shrimp to his house, and African lobster tails, wheels of Parmesan, Parma hams, boxes of steaks, and Tommy's first television set. His first bicycle, (Tommy's father had been in prison when he took off the training wheels), his first baseball glove, sneakers—Tommy had asked him for a pair and Sally had shown up with twelve pairs of Adidas, in twelve different colors, still in the box.
    And of course, Sally had introduced him around. To big, loud men who surrounded themselves with other big men, quieter ones, who always lurked within reach. Sally would beam with pride as they'd muss Tommy's hair, pinch his cheeks, slip twenty-dollar bills in his pockets.
    He was not completely comfortable with all this. His neighborhood friends, were, of course, delighted to be running back and forth, picking up shirts from the dry cleaners for the local hoods. They'd wash their cars, court their daughters, go to their barbecues, and they'd brag about it later in the school yard. Tommy was not so pleased with himself. He wanted to see himself as a hero, and running around doing errands for Sally didn't seem like something any hero of his would ever do.
    Then he met Diane. She lived in the Village, off Washington Square Park, in a high-rise building with a doorman. Her father was some kind of college professor at NYU, and her mother, a well-respected gynecologist. Diane arrived at school each morning in a beat-up Checker Marathon, jet black, her mother, an elegantly dressed woman in her forties, at the wheel.
    Diane looked different. She listened to different music. She dressed like a boy, wore her hair straight and unteased, and favored ripped Levi's and black leather motorcycle jackets. When she made love, it was with a genuine enthusiasm that Tommy found startling and delightful. In her room off Washington Square, lined with posters of the Clash, the Sex Pistols, and the Ramones, she'd take Tommy's prick in her mouth with a good-humored nonchalance that Tommy found intoxicating. Even the neighborhood bad girls, the ones his friends referred to as putannas, had sex with a mechanical precision, a solemnity, that Tommy found oppressive by comparison.
    With her parents sitting right in the next room watching television, Diane and he would make love, rutting like a pair of musk oxen, right there on the bedroom floor. Sometimes he'd even spend the night; her parents didn't mind. Once, at the breakfast table, Diane's mother had sat down next to him, served him his coffee, Diane still in the shower. She'd said to Tommy, "Better she does it at home."
    Diane smoked pot in the house, to Tommy's amazement. Her father would even join them for a hit, reminiscing about the sixties, how he'd tried to levitate the Pentagon with a few thousand other stoned Yippies.
    Weekends, Tommy and Diane would sneak into nightclubs; she'd lend him books and insist that he read them . . . Tommy, too frightened of falling out of favor, read them carefully, afraid he might be quizzed. They'd go to the movies in small art houses, and over dinner with her parents, they'd talk about them.
    She took Tommy to get his ear pierced at a jewelry store on Seventh Avenue that advertised piercing "With or Without Pain." She bought him an earring, a little sterling silver skull to match her own.
    Diane was amused by Tommy's friends from the neighborhood; the young wannabe gangsters in his classes, his childhood pals. And of course, her disdain for their hair, their clothes, their narrow priorities, made Tommy feel even more uncomfortable. When Tommy's best friend, Richie Gianelli, showed up at school one day, newly enriched by his night's work as a lookout in a robbery, she snickered at the chunky digital