Ghosts of Tom Joad by Peter Van Buren Page A

boys and patience do not fit. Looking back, I think the first time I ever had sex inside, not counting cars and vans, I was already twenty-five years old. Our version of an STD was poison ivy. I ended up with a lot of terrible songs burned into the part of my brain that memorizedeverything around some big event, so the opening chords of “Smoke on the Water” and Debbie Radnick’s tube top are forever paired, God bless them both.
    One time I forgot to throw out the rubber, the old kind too, the ones that smelled like a new shower curtain, and my dad found it the next day on the car floor like a skin some snake shed. “Don’t get no one pregnant or you’ll have to get married,” he told me, ignoring the obvious thing that I’d used a condom. Me and those girls were certainly never in love, but there was always a little affection as we snorted and rutted, a kinda desperate fun at worst, me laying on ’em like I was protecting them from flying shrapnel, so full of teenage hard up some days I’m embarrassed to say I would’ve fucked mud, and I kissed a lot of girls.
    With Angie it was different. Hell, it was always different. We did a lot of what the health education books in gym class called “heavy petting.” This was sincere lust, but it was also a kind of testing. With other girls the testing was more like taking her temperature, seeing if she was willing, trying first base not because it felt like melted chocolate electricity to tongue kiss but mostly to see if you thought she’d let you get under her Peter Frampton t-shirt later. The girls knew it, knew their role in the game, and must’ve talked among themselves about who to let do what when, ’cause when we boys talked amongst ourselves it all seemed that what we was getting was the same as everyone else. Except James, who was going steady with Evelyn I think since when we still took naps in school. Evelyn unsnapped her bra just to change her mind, and James got her pregnant junior year andhis dad had to pay for them to get an apartment and then find him a job at the factory.
    But with Angie it was all fun; lust born from love instead of the opposite. She always seemed to indicate she’d go all the way right then and there, but wouldn’t it be more fun to look around some. I never felt dirty, never felt that I was taking something or being given something like with them other girls. Even when another girl would signal it was okay, she’d still offer up a hand job so she could appear, you know, reluctant and not seem like some tramp. I never saw the way things could be something other than some kinda job until much later.
    So with Angie it felt natural and good and warm when we went to a place in the woods together. I had known the place since I was a kid, a worn spot next to a field, surrounded by blackberry bushes except for one small space you could crawl through like a tunnel. Blackberry bushes have tiny thorns, but lots of them, and pull at clothes and pinch your skin, so you don’t want to try and bull through them. When I was littler we caught grasshoppers there in the field, holding them in our cupped hands ’til they spit what we called tobacco juice, all brown and sticky and we had to let them go.
    The ground was hard underneath us, Ohio clay baked into rock through a dry June, mingling just a little dust with our sweat into an odor I can summon up on this bus and make myself smile. Heat piled up in that time in Ohio like snow accumulated in December. As kids I played soldiers in there, looked at Tim’s dad’s Playboys in there and on a lot of nights I took Angie there. I remember every kiss, every time I touched her, the way her hairsmelled up close in the sun when I pressed my nose into it, the way her tongue was bright orange from the Cheetos we ate.
    Bras in my youth were complex, heavy elastic and nylon evil things with hooks and clasps and wires to struggle against