I know the last entry was short, and this one and it should really comprise
a single chapter, but it was just too long, and this was the only possible
place to break it up into two more manageable chunks. Also, fear not, Benny
P, Fulton and Portman won't be indulging in any illicit substances for a
while after this chapter, but don't expect them to give up the weed any
time soon (I don't really consider it an illicit substance). I see it as a
very fitting adjunct to their personalities; plus they are 15, and I don't
know about you guys, but the greatest part of my 15th year was spent in a
cloud of smoke. I am from Vancouver, after all. No need to get your panties
in a bunch though, I guarantee their love is true and pure, and not the
result of any substance other then their own hearts. Wait and see.
Fulton's POV
When I knocked on Portman's door, his mother's boyfriend answered, wearing only a pair of boxer shorts, scratching the hair on his chest. He looked me up and down, and his lip noticeably curled before he stepped aside to let me in.
"Dean's in the shower," he grunted, then settled into his easy chair and went back to his football game.
I just headed straight for Portman's room to wait for him, but his mother poked her head out of her bedroom and called out cheerfully, "Fulton, darling! How are you? Can you come here a sec?"
I followed her back into the bedroom, but stopped dead when I saw she was clad in nothing but her underwear. I stared intently at the ground while she slipped on some nylons. Portman's mom sure makes me uncomfortable. I mean, she's real nice to me and everything, but she's always kissing my cheek and rubbing my hair and patting my arm and stuff. I guess it's just the way she is, she's always hanging off Aaron, or whoever she's involved with at the time (there's always somebody), sitting in his lap and stuff, and she often starts necking with him right in front of us. I feel bad for Portman, he's pretty embarrassed by it.
She had finished with her stockings, and when she saw me looking at the floor she laughed. "Don't be so shy, silly," she said leaning over and rubbing my shoulder. "Would you mind handing me my uniform? It's hanging on the doorknob."
She was a waitress at a local diner, and as she slipped on the uniform, a low-cut pink dress with a short skirt, she asked, "So, how's school? Is hockey going okay?"
"Um, pretty good," I mumbled, still feigning a great interest in my shoelaces. "We're 5 and 1 so far. Portman's doing great, he scored two goals last time."
"Well, isn't that just wonderful? Do you think you could zip me up, dear?" She turned around and pulled her long, curly blonde hair, which looked decidedly fried from being dyed too much, off her neck. I felt like a deer in headlights. I moved forward slowly, pulled up the zipper, then stepped quickly back, so quickly that I backed right into Portman, who was just emerging from the shower with a towel around his waist. He stumbled backwards and hit the wall opposite the door, dropping the towel in the process.
I spun around and saw him standing there, completely naked. I let out a little yelp and quickly turned back to the relative decency of his now fully-clothed mother.
I could hear Portman retreating to his room while Aaron laughed loudly in the background. He returned a few moments later, dressed and blushing furiously. "Come on," he said, not looking me in the face. "Let's get out of here."
Thank God, I wanted to say, but instead I just nodded. "Bye Ms. Portman," I muttered.
"Oh, are you boys going out? Would you mind picking up a few things for me at the grocery store? Of, let's see, we need eggs and coffee and umm..."
"Mom, I buy the groceries every time I come home. I know what we need."
"Of course you do, sweetheart. Oh dear, I don't seem to have enough cash. I'll write you a blank cheque, alright?"
Portman took the cheque and we started to leave. We were in the living room when his mother came running out, mascara in one hand, and a black high- heeled shoe in the other.
"Oh, Dean honey, could you pick me up a bottle of wine as well? Just a cheap red."
"Mom, I'm not old enough to--" Portman started, but I elbowed him and he finished, "uh, yeah, sure."
This time he actually had his hand on the doorknob when Aaron called out, "Just a minute there, cowboy. Aren't you forgetting something?"
Portman turned around slowly. He stared at Aaron for a minute before saying, "What are you talking about?"
I could tell he was struggling to keep his voice level. Portman really hated his mother's latest love interest, and I could see why. The guy was always playing little power games, trying to show Portman who was boss.
"Don't get wise with me, kiddo. You promised your momma you'd do the laundry next time you came home."
"What do you mean? I never said--"
"You calling me a liar, boy?" Aaron said in what I'm sure he thought was a dangerous voice, rising out of his easy chair.
Portman crossed his arms and opened his mouth to say something, but his mother stepped between them and smiled at Portman.
"Would you mind, dear? I'm pulling a double shift today, and it would really help me out." She held out a couple of crumpled dollar bills and smiled sweetly.
"Fine, whatever," Portman muttered, taking the money while I ran and stuffed the laundry from the hamper into a large duffel bag.
"Thanks a bunch, sweetie," she said, then turned to me and kissed me on the cheek, then ran her fingers through my hair. "Nice to see you again, Fulton dear. My, your hair is lovely. It's so long and soft. I keep telling Dean to start growing his out, but he just won't listen."
She was still fingering my hair when Portman grabbed my arm and pulled me out the door. I couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief as we left the building.
"Sorry about that, dude," Portman said, jamming his hands in his pockets as we walked down the street.
"Hey, no worries, I'm just glad you and that Aaron guy didn't go at it."
"Yeah, I hate that guy, he's such a prick. I mean, most of my mom's boyfriends just want to pretend I'm not there. What's his problem anyways?"
"Forget about him," I said as we reached the laundromat and went inside. "We head back to school tomorrow, and the next time we come home, ten to one your mom's broken up with him or something."
"Yeah," Portman said, stuffing the white clothes in a washing machine while I stuck the coloureds in the one adjacent. "She gets bored real easy." He went to get change for the machines while I looked around.
You always see the most interesting people at the laundromat. There was an old woman in a ratty pink bathrobe and slippers with flyaway grey hair, yelling about stolen fabric softener. Beside her was the likely perpetrator of the crime, a rail-thin, greasy-haired guy in his twenties with no shoes, who was busy stuffing a bottle of no-name fabric softener into his basket and covering it with clothes. Across the aisle was a woman with a missing front tooth, who looked forty-five at first glance, but was probably at least ten years younger. She was taking a pull from a bottle in a brown paper bag while her two young children chased each other back and forth in front of her, chocolate smeared all over their faces and down the front of their clothes. She took no notice of them. She had bleach-blonde hair with dark roots, and her lips were blurry and red. There were mascara streaks on her face and I saw that she was crying silently as she took another drink.
Portman returned then with a handful of quarters and handed some to me, putting an end to my observations. I looked over at him as I plugged 50 cents into my machine. He wasn't saying anything, a real rarity for him, and his lips were pressed tightly together. I could tell he was pretty upset. I racked my brains for something to say. I didn't know if I should change the subject or try to get him to talk about it. If it was me, I'd just want to forget it and move on, but Portman might feel differently. I decided to opt for the casual, straightforward approach.
I pulled myself up onto the washing machine. "So I guess we should stay here till the clothes are done, then we can hit the supermarket while they're in the dryer." Fulton, you moron, is that the best you can do?
"Okay." He hopped up onto the machine beside me.
"Look, I know you're upset about Aaron and stuff. You want to talk about it or..." I said, hoping I walked the line between caring and casual.
"Nah, I'm cool, I just..."
I waited for him to continue. I knew he would, for while you wouldn't know it from looking at him, Portman's a very open, honest guy, quite different from me that way. He's a terrible liar; he sort of wears his heart on his sleeve, and while it kind of freaks me out because I don't understand it, it's pretty damn cute as well. It's one of his most endearing qualities that for all his size and bravado, Portman doesn't know how to hide the good inside of him.
"Why does she have to live with that asshole? Why does she always need to be screwing some pig?" He slammed his fist down on the washing machine, leaving a slight dent in the metal. "I just wish she wasn't so...you know."
I nodded. "I know."
"The way she's always coming onto you...What were you doing in her room, anyways?"
"Um, she, uh, needed help getting on her dress."
He grinned bitterly. "Yeah, right. Sorry about that, man." I hated seeing him so upset, I just wished there were something I could do.
"Hey, it's not your fault."
"Oh, this is stupid. Let's just forget about her. Aaron too. To hell with them."
I grinned. That was another thing I loved about Portman, and something we shared. An unwillingness in his case, and an inability in mine, to dwell on life's less pleasant aspects. I remembered the contents of my pocket.
"Want some help getting them out of your mind?"
"Naturally. Do you have something to aid me in my endeavour?"
I showed him the pills I'd taken earlier. "Amphetamines. Courtesy of my mother, the walking pharmacy. If these don't take your mind off your troubles, nothing will."
Portman grinned, and popped one of the pills in his mouth while I downed the other one.
"You know, he said, we're like a psychiatrist's worst nightmare."
"Yeah, but what do they know? I mean, people don't all work the same way; therapy doesn't make everyone feel better. I'm not secretly traumatised or repressed or anything, I just think life's too short to be unhappy all the time, and I'm not averse to giving happiness a jump start when things aren't going well."
"Yeah, me too. Who needs angst? I'd rather have fun."
"Besides, you know I'm like, always here for you if you need to talk, right?" I said awkwardly.
"Sure I do, you big suck. I'd say the same, but I know that's the last thing you want."
"You know me too well."
We looked at each other, and all of a sudden I realised I could read Portman's mind, and not in the traditional sense, either. Words were literally coming out of his head like they'd slipped off the pages of a book or something. 'I want your body' floated slowly toward me. I reached up to see if I could touch the words, but they kept dancing just out of reach. I tried to send a 'come and take it' thought to Portman but what came out instead was 'King Tutenkhamen rides a crippled antelope.' Strange. I could hear a voice in the background, but it was unimportant. What mattered was this newfound method of communication. Portman was staring intently at my forehead, and 'you have yoghurt in your socks,' drifted out of his left ear.
A hand grabbed my shoulder, making the thought-words disappear and bringing me back to reality with an almost painful lurch.
"You boys deaf or something? I said don't sit on the machines! Christ!"
It was the owner of the laundromat, a middle-aged man with a bulging stomach protruding from under his sweat-stained wife beater, his thin brown hair parted in a wispy comb-over. I got down and he walked away, muttering to himself about young punks. Portman was still staring hard at my forehead, so I shook he arm gently. He jumped about a mile, then his eyes seemed to register and he smiled.
"Woah," we said simultaneously.
We spent the next ten or fifteen minutes playing pinball, the perfect game for our altered states, as the lights, noises and colours were simply dazzling. Now that we were aware that the drugs had taken hold, we were more in control, but it was still a hell of a ride. I found out later that Portman had thought I was turning into a demon. My face had gone red and my eyes had turned black. He had been staring at a pair of horns growing from my forehead when the laundromat owner interrupted us.
Portman kicked my ass in every pinball game, just as he always did with things like that. He has extraordinarily nimble fingers. After that we moved the wet clothes into the dryers and set off for the grocery store.
Everything seemed so bright and colourful, we were trying to look everywhere at once. Inside the store we had the time of out lives, tripping out over the endless selection of products. Portman juggled apples, and I put a pineapple on my head and danced a little jig. We raced up and down the aisles with the shopping cart, sneaked mouthfuls of whipped cream from those spray cans, and stole a couple of bottles of nail polish because the colours were so pretty.
After that we went to the liquor store where I bought up the wine, then we picked up the laundry and pushed everything back to Portman's in the shopping cart to drop it off before retiring to the vacant lot nearby. All this seemed to take no time at all. We sat down on the curb and put blue and green and purple nail polish on each other, but I was really bad at it. I got the stuff all over Portman's cuticles, and he laughed at me, though secretly I thought it was funnier that he was really good at it. We sat there awhile while it dried. The colours were unlike anything I had ever seen.
"Jesus, Fult, does your mom take this stuff a lot?"
"Yeah, this and a lot of other shit."
"Man, where does she get it all?"
"Some of it, like tranquilizers and diet pills, she gets from doctors, but the rest she gets from this guy who deals out of his apartment on Oak street. I think these are from him, but she's got prescription amphies too."
"What do diet pills do for you?"
"They're uppers, legal meth."
"Woah. Hey, you wanna go play with the shopping cart?"
"Hell, yeah!"
So that's what we did for the next little while. We took turns pushing each other around, running as fast as we could, then letting go, so the other person went sailing, eventually slamming into the brick wall at the far end of the lot. You had to hold on tight so you didn't go flying out. It was a lot of fun, the sort of fun that makes you wonder what the hell you were thinking the next morning. My favourite kind.
Fulton's POV
When I knocked on Portman's door, his mother's boyfriend answered, wearing only a pair of boxer shorts, scratching the hair on his chest. He looked me up and down, and his lip noticeably curled before he stepped aside to let me in.
"Dean's in the shower," he grunted, then settled into his easy chair and went back to his football game.
I just headed straight for Portman's room to wait for him, but his mother poked her head out of her bedroom and called out cheerfully, "Fulton, darling! How are you? Can you come here a sec?"
I followed her back into the bedroom, but stopped dead when I saw she was clad in nothing but her underwear. I stared intently at the ground while she slipped on some nylons. Portman's mom sure makes me uncomfortable. I mean, she's real nice to me and everything, but she's always kissing my cheek and rubbing my hair and patting my arm and stuff. I guess it's just the way she is, she's always hanging off Aaron, or whoever she's involved with at the time (there's always somebody), sitting in his lap and stuff, and she often starts necking with him right in front of us. I feel bad for Portman, he's pretty embarrassed by it.
She had finished with her stockings, and when she saw me looking at the floor she laughed. "Don't be so shy, silly," she said leaning over and rubbing my shoulder. "Would you mind handing me my uniform? It's hanging on the doorknob."
She was a waitress at a local diner, and as she slipped on the uniform, a low-cut pink dress with a short skirt, she asked, "So, how's school? Is hockey going okay?"
"Um, pretty good," I mumbled, still feigning a great interest in my shoelaces. "We're 5 and 1 so far. Portman's doing great, he scored two goals last time."
"Well, isn't that just wonderful? Do you think you could zip me up, dear?" She turned around and pulled her long, curly blonde hair, which looked decidedly fried from being dyed too much, off her neck. I felt like a deer in headlights. I moved forward slowly, pulled up the zipper, then stepped quickly back, so quickly that I backed right into Portman, who was just emerging from the shower with a towel around his waist. He stumbled backwards and hit the wall opposite the door, dropping the towel in the process.
I spun around and saw him standing there, completely naked. I let out a little yelp and quickly turned back to the relative decency of his now fully-clothed mother.
I could hear Portman retreating to his room while Aaron laughed loudly in the background. He returned a few moments later, dressed and blushing furiously. "Come on," he said, not looking me in the face. "Let's get out of here."
Thank God, I wanted to say, but instead I just nodded. "Bye Ms. Portman," I muttered.
"Oh, are you boys going out? Would you mind picking up a few things for me at the grocery store? Of, let's see, we need eggs and coffee and umm..."
"Mom, I buy the groceries every time I come home. I know what we need."
"Of course you do, sweetheart. Oh dear, I don't seem to have enough cash. I'll write you a blank cheque, alright?"
Portman took the cheque and we started to leave. We were in the living room when his mother came running out, mascara in one hand, and a black high- heeled shoe in the other.
"Oh, Dean honey, could you pick me up a bottle of wine as well? Just a cheap red."
"Mom, I'm not old enough to--" Portman started, but I elbowed him and he finished, "uh, yeah, sure."
This time he actually had his hand on the doorknob when Aaron called out, "Just a minute there, cowboy. Aren't you forgetting something?"
Portman turned around slowly. He stared at Aaron for a minute before saying, "What are you talking about?"
I could tell he was struggling to keep his voice level. Portman really hated his mother's latest love interest, and I could see why. The guy was always playing little power games, trying to show Portman who was boss.
"Don't get wise with me, kiddo. You promised your momma you'd do the laundry next time you came home."
"What do you mean? I never said--"
"You calling me a liar, boy?" Aaron said in what I'm sure he thought was a dangerous voice, rising out of his easy chair.
Portman crossed his arms and opened his mouth to say something, but his mother stepped between them and smiled at Portman.
"Would you mind, dear? I'm pulling a double shift today, and it would really help me out." She held out a couple of crumpled dollar bills and smiled sweetly.
"Fine, whatever," Portman muttered, taking the money while I ran and stuffed the laundry from the hamper into a large duffel bag.
"Thanks a bunch, sweetie," she said, then turned to me and kissed me on the cheek, then ran her fingers through my hair. "Nice to see you again, Fulton dear. My, your hair is lovely. It's so long and soft. I keep telling Dean to start growing his out, but he just won't listen."
She was still fingering my hair when Portman grabbed my arm and pulled me out the door. I couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief as we left the building.
"Sorry about that, dude," Portman said, jamming his hands in his pockets as we walked down the street.
"Hey, no worries, I'm just glad you and that Aaron guy didn't go at it."
"Yeah, I hate that guy, he's such a prick. I mean, most of my mom's boyfriends just want to pretend I'm not there. What's his problem anyways?"
"Forget about him," I said as we reached the laundromat and went inside. "We head back to school tomorrow, and the next time we come home, ten to one your mom's broken up with him or something."
"Yeah," Portman said, stuffing the white clothes in a washing machine while I stuck the coloureds in the one adjacent. "She gets bored real easy." He went to get change for the machines while I looked around.
You always see the most interesting people at the laundromat. There was an old woman in a ratty pink bathrobe and slippers with flyaway grey hair, yelling about stolen fabric softener. Beside her was the likely perpetrator of the crime, a rail-thin, greasy-haired guy in his twenties with no shoes, who was busy stuffing a bottle of no-name fabric softener into his basket and covering it with clothes. Across the aisle was a woman with a missing front tooth, who looked forty-five at first glance, but was probably at least ten years younger. She was taking a pull from a bottle in a brown paper bag while her two young children chased each other back and forth in front of her, chocolate smeared all over their faces and down the front of their clothes. She took no notice of them. She had bleach-blonde hair with dark roots, and her lips were blurry and red. There were mascara streaks on her face and I saw that she was crying silently as she took another drink.
Portman returned then with a handful of quarters and handed some to me, putting an end to my observations. I looked over at him as I plugged 50 cents into my machine. He wasn't saying anything, a real rarity for him, and his lips were pressed tightly together. I could tell he was pretty upset. I racked my brains for something to say. I didn't know if I should change the subject or try to get him to talk about it. If it was me, I'd just want to forget it and move on, but Portman might feel differently. I decided to opt for the casual, straightforward approach.
I pulled myself up onto the washing machine. "So I guess we should stay here till the clothes are done, then we can hit the supermarket while they're in the dryer." Fulton, you moron, is that the best you can do?
"Okay." He hopped up onto the machine beside me.
"Look, I know you're upset about Aaron and stuff. You want to talk about it or..." I said, hoping I walked the line between caring and casual.
"Nah, I'm cool, I just..."
I waited for him to continue. I knew he would, for while you wouldn't know it from looking at him, Portman's a very open, honest guy, quite different from me that way. He's a terrible liar; he sort of wears his heart on his sleeve, and while it kind of freaks me out because I don't understand it, it's pretty damn cute as well. It's one of his most endearing qualities that for all his size and bravado, Portman doesn't know how to hide the good inside of him.
"Why does she have to live with that asshole? Why does she always need to be screwing some pig?" He slammed his fist down on the washing machine, leaving a slight dent in the metal. "I just wish she wasn't so...you know."
I nodded. "I know."
"The way she's always coming onto you...What were you doing in her room, anyways?"
"Um, she, uh, needed help getting on her dress."
He grinned bitterly. "Yeah, right. Sorry about that, man." I hated seeing him so upset, I just wished there were something I could do.
"Hey, it's not your fault."
"Oh, this is stupid. Let's just forget about her. Aaron too. To hell with them."
I grinned. That was another thing I loved about Portman, and something we shared. An unwillingness in his case, and an inability in mine, to dwell on life's less pleasant aspects. I remembered the contents of my pocket.
"Want some help getting them out of your mind?"
"Naturally. Do you have something to aid me in my endeavour?"
I showed him the pills I'd taken earlier. "Amphetamines. Courtesy of my mother, the walking pharmacy. If these don't take your mind off your troubles, nothing will."
Portman grinned, and popped one of the pills in his mouth while I downed the other one.
"You know, he said, we're like a psychiatrist's worst nightmare."
"Yeah, but what do they know? I mean, people don't all work the same way; therapy doesn't make everyone feel better. I'm not secretly traumatised or repressed or anything, I just think life's too short to be unhappy all the time, and I'm not averse to giving happiness a jump start when things aren't going well."
"Yeah, me too. Who needs angst? I'd rather have fun."
"Besides, you know I'm like, always here for you if you need to talk, right?" I said awkwardly.
"Sure I do, you big suck. I'd say the same, but I know that's the last thing you want."
"You know me too well."
We looked at each other, and all of a sudden I realised I could read Portman's mind, and not in the traditional sense, either. Words were literally coming out of his head like they'd slipped off the pages of a book or something. 'I want your body' floated slowly toward me. I reached up to see if I could touch the words, but they kept dancing just out of reach. I tried to send a 'come and take it' thought to Portman but what came out instead was 'King Tutenkhamen rides a crippled antelope.' Strange. I could hear a voice in the background, but it was unimportant. What mattered was this newfound method of communication. Portman was staring intently at my forehead, and 'you have yoghurt in your socks,' drifted out of his left ear.
A hand grabbed my shoulder, making the thought-words disappear and bringing me back to reality with an almost painful lurch.
"You boys deaf or something? I said don't sit on the machines! Christ!"
It was the owner of the laundromat, a middle-aged man with a bulging stomach protruding from under his sweat-stained wife beater, his thin brown hair parted in a wispy comb-over. I got down and he walked away, muttering to himself about young punks. Portman was still staring hard at my forehead, so I shook he arm gently. He jumped about a mile, then his eyes seemed to register and he smiled.
"Woah," we said simultaneously.
We spent the next ten or fifteen minutes playing pinball, the perfect game for our altered states, as the lights, noises and colours were simply dazzling. Now that we were aware that the drugs had taken hold, we were more in control, but it was still a hell of a ride. I found out later that Portman had thought I was turning into a demon. My face had gone red and my eyes had turned black. He had been staring at a pair of horns growing from my forehead when the laundromat owner interrupted us.
Portman kicked my ass in every pinball game, just as he always did with things like that. He has extraordinarily nimble fingers. After that we moved the wet clothes into the dryers and set off for the grocery store.
Everything seemed so bright and colourful, we were trying to look everywhere at once. Inside the store we had the time of out lives, tripping out over the endless selection of products. Portman juggled apples, and I put a pineapple on my head and danced a little jig. We raced up and down the aisles with the shopping cart, sneaked mouthfuls of whipped cream from those spray cans, and stole a couple of bottles of nail polish because the colours were so pretty.
After that we went to the liquor store where I bought up the wine, then we picked up the laundry and pushed everything back to Portman's in the shopping cart to drop it off before retiring to the vacant lot nearby. All this seemed to take no time at all. We sat down on the curb and put blue and green and purple nail polish on each other, but I was really bad at it. I got the stuff all over Portman's cuticles, and he laughed at me, though secretly I thought it was funnier that he was really good at it. We sat there awhile while it dried. The colours were unlike anything I had ever seen.
"Jesus, Fult, does your mom take this stuff a lot?"
"Yeah, this and a lot of other shit."
"Man, where does she get it all?"
"Some of it, like tranquilizers and diet pills, she gets from doctors, but the rest she gets from this guy who deals out of his apartment on Oak street. I think these are from him, but she's got prescription amphies too."
"What do diet pills do for you?"
"They're uppers, legal meth."
"Woah. Hey, you wanna go play with the shopping cart?"
"Hell, yeah!"
So that's what we did for the next little while. We took turns pushing each other around, running as fast as we could, then letting go, so the other person went sailing, eventually slamming into the brick wall at the far end of the lot. You had to hold on tight so you didn't go flying out. It was a lot of fun, the sort of fun that makes you wonder what the hell you were thinking the next morning. My favourite kind.