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inane annals
Car Tag, pt.1
by Neil Sholer | 04 May 2007, 0:00

Summer in Phoenix starts in late April and doesn't relent until November. By the end of May, when my friends and I graduated, the whole city was already a concrete oven.

Sweating, I opened the front door of Nathan's house and walked in. Compared to the intense sunlight outside, it felt dim and cave-like. Bobby and Will were in the living room, slouched in LazyBoy chairs and holding drinks.

"Neil!" Bobby smiled broadly. "Don't you love the summer? I mean love it?"

"Ask me again in a week. I can't tell yet." I found a stray wooden chair and pulled it into the living room.

"How was work?" Will asked.

"Wait, wait, wait," Bobby said. "We're not about to start talking like our parents."

Will stuck his tongue out.

"Where's Nathan?" I asked.

"Upstairs. In the shower I think." Will got up. "Want a rum and coke?"

He was already walking into the kitchen when I nodded.

I was listening to Will stir the ice when I heard a door open upstairs. I leaned back in my chair and looked up at the landing. Nathan appeared wearing only a towel, his long hair hanging damply on his shoulders.

"Yes! This is how it should be." He shouted.

"Here here!" I shouted back.

"What're you yelling about?" Will asked, winking, as he handed me my drink.

Nathan raised his arms in a letter V. "Life! The summer! Oh my friends, oh my droogs! Every day is going to be like this!"

*

Nathan filling a shot glass until vodka spills over the rim. Him drinking it like an old pro, no grimace in sight. His kitchen swelling into a riot of irrelevant faces, the bodies surge.

And now Will with his arm around Nathan and they're shouting but I can barely hear them. A voluptuous blonde girl walks by and Nathan gives her that look, and then Will laughing and clapping him on the back.

Nathan shouting "This, this, this—is what I'm talking about!"

Bobby materializing to my left, tequila bottle already in hand. Before he's even done with his swig I've got the bottle. The liquor spilling down my shirt, neck, throat as I laugh and tilt my head back.

"Oh shit!" Bobby shouting, his voice impossibly inflected, "we are going crazy with the tequila!"

Now we've all got our arms around Nathan and a song I know very well is playing but I'm fighting for the lyrics, and the title, somehow, eludes me.

Somebody jerks my head up because I'm falling asleep standing up and then Nathan shouting, his voice almost violent with ecstasy. "Yes, my friends, this is why we're not going to college!"

*

"We all need about a gallon of water," Will said, carrying four large plastic cups. He gave one to Nathan, Bobby and me, keeping the last one for himself.

We were all sitting on Nathan's balcony, overlooking the nearby golf course. Our lawn chairs were arranged in a loose circle. I couldn't remember why, but none of us had our shirts on anymore.

"This is such a beautiful thing," Nathan said, gesturing expansively at the faded violet sky. "The four of us. Best friends, enjoying that last sliver of night before the sun rises."

We all nodded, drinking our ice water. Somehow it didn't sound corny coming from him.

"You know, you're welcome here all the time. Come over at any hour, stay for a week, I don't give a fuck."

"Hell yeah!" Bobby said, raising his cup so fast that water splashed over the rim. "I'll be here like every night."

"I mean, maybe I'm just emotional from all the alcohol. But you guys are my family now." Nathan set his cup down and stood up, facing us.

Behind Nathan was a sun about to rise, and behind that was an emptiness outlined in absent parents and total unaccountability. His dad had been in work-release prison for the last month for some kind of embezzlement he took part in seven years ago. His mom, shell-shocked, asked for a separation and was now staying in Oregon with a relative.

Will broke the silence. "We're like brothers, all of us." There was something stately in his voice just then.

"Yes!" Nathan leaned forward, his hand articulating something his mouth couldn't. "I would kill for any of you, I'd give up my freedom. And I'd never rat any of you out."

"I know exactly how you feel, man." I stood up and put my arm around his shoulder. "I'd go to the gallows for you."

Nathan smiled and looked, for a moment, childlike. "What about you, Bobby? Give up your freedom?"

"You know it, boy." He stood up too, slapping Nathan on the back.

"And Will? Would you ever turn rat?"

Will took a large drink of water, swallowed. "You're my boy. Don't ask those kinds of questions."

"But would you?"

"I don't know." Will shifted in his lawn chair and looked down. "I mean, if it was genuinely the right thing to do, I might. Maybe."

"Alright, I'm just fucking with you. Get over here!"

Will stood up and joined the impromptu huddle.

I had a feeling, then, about the four of us and the half-expressed pact we'd made. We seemed outside of time, like we'd found a way of prolonging whatever it was that made us teenagers. Even the utter disintegration of Nathan's family couldn't rend our bubble. Instead, it seemed to endorse it.

*

I was alone in Mr. Alper's computer lab, working on a demo he was going to give to the school board next week. I worked on flashy projects for him, and in exchange, he paid me twice minimum wage and let me use the high school's state of the art lab.

The high school campus was a ghost town at this early stage of the summer. I heard a rapid knock on the side door, the one that opened into the outside world. I opened it and the dusk came in.

"Nathan, what's up?" His hair was sweaty, clumped to the sides of his face.

I put my hand out and he pulled me into the macho, Spanish-style hug that he sometimes employed. He smelled like wet carpet.

"Neilius Rex! Good to see you. I just felt like stopping by."

"But isn't your truck in the shop?" He lived three miles away.

"Yeah, but that's alright because I needed the walk. I couldn't stand being in that fucking house anymore."

I could imagine his house, squatting large and irrelevant in the burnt out sunset. No parents, no sound. "Cool. Well, I have to finish some animations for Mr. Alper by tomorrow, so—"

"That's cool. I'll just keep you company. Come on, come outside. Have a cigarette with me." He knew I didn't smoke anymore.

I put a rock in the door to hold it open, then stepped outside onto the small porch facing the road. Air, hot and humid from the sprinklers, jolted me out of the air conditioned cocoon.

He began to light his cigarette and I sighed. "You know, I'm going to be here for another hour. At least. Do you want to call Bobby or Will? They can probably—"

"No, listen." Nathan leaned against the cinder block wall and took a long drag. "Say I got lost in the tundra or something. If I could choose to have only one person with me, I'd choose you."

The smoke from his cigarette made my head reel. I hadn't eaten in nine hours.

He continued. "I love all the guys. You're all like my brothers. But Bobby, Will, they're different from us."

The smell of a barbeque wafted from across the street. My stomach felt like a knot. "How?"

"Well, it's basic. They're from divorced homes and we're not."

He tapped the ash off his cigarette and stared right into my eyes, squinting.

He continued. "What it comes down to is that their mothers are fucking men who aren't their fathers. Tell me that doesn't do something to a kid."

I shrugged. "I don't know. Bobby and Will came out alright."

Nathan exhaled. "Just imagine it. Another man sleeping over. Another man putting his cock in your mom. That's enemy cock."

Somehow, inappropriately, I felt like laughing.

"Look, I mean, your parents are just separated. They still might get back together."

"Don't think so." Nathan shook his head slowly, his chin trembling. "She's... she's not in Oregon to stay with a relative. She's living there with her new boyfriend. I know I'm old enough that it shouldn't bother me. But it still does. It still fucking does."

Nathan started crying. I didn't know what to do.

He continued, speech slurred from the mask of betrayal that his mouth had become. "What the hell are we doing to ourselves? Look at our society, look at it! It's a fucking step-father factory."

I knew that if I didn't do something immediately that I would start crying, too. "Hey, man, why don't you come inside. You can hang out in the back."

Nathan nodded, not looking at me, and put out his cigarette.

I held the door open for him, wondering if a gesture that simple could endow him with a sense of belonging. His life, to me, seemed monstrous and arbitrary. And, maybe, contagious.

*

Stunning redhead twin sisters doing body shots in the family room and nobody cares when the tequila spills on the carpet. The room filling with lust, with teenagers, with the desire to discard everything for the next five minutes.

Nathan and that same voluptuous blonde girl writhing on the downstairs couch. They'd be having sex if not for their clothes still being on.

Bobby walking by, pointing at her ass, his voice growing extravagant, "she's only sixteen!"

I'm taking a piss and suddenly there's a stranger in the bathroom with me because I must've forgotten to lock the door. Him watching, then stroking the back of my neck as I start to wash my hands. Me laughing and stumbling out, hands dripping everywhere and "whoa, I'm not like that."

Back in the kitchen and Will suddenly pocketing his car keys, trying to leave. Him looking down and away. "I have to go, I'm getting a wicked headache."

"Impossible! It's not even two o' clock yet." The tequila making Bobby incredulous. Then he's passing it to Will.

Will declining the bottle, declining us. "Look, I have to work tomorrow."

"What the hell? On a Saturday? What is this new job, anyway?"

Will walking out of the kitchen, passing through the crowd and then somewhere else entirely as I take the bottle from Bobby.

*

The Fourth of July fireworks had ended a few hours ago and the sky still had a faint, smoky quality.

"Don't you guys ever crave something more?" Nathan asked.

The four of us were lying on the pool deck with our legs in the water. Even though it was past midnight, the beveled concrete was warm. All of Phoenix was an immense slab of trapped sunlight.

"Sure. I crave a Ferrari and a girlfriend who swallows." Bobby laughed to himself.

"I'm being serious, man." Nathan sat up from the pool deck. "Sometimes when I look at the stars, I just see stars. Other times I can see space, like, receding. And then it's like I'm falling. We're just one planet in one solar system in one spiral arm of a galaxy. And there are... there are billions of other galaxies. I mean, how the hell should I feel about that?"

"You just have too much time on your hands, man." Will said softly.

"When I think of all that emptiness, it is," Nathan said, "fucking terrifying."

"What you need is a hobby," I said.

"What we need," Nathan said, taking another drink from a red party cup, "is our own game."

I swished the cranberry juice and vodka in my cup. "What do you have in mind?"

"Something new. Something that defines us and defines the summer. Like how we all used to play Magic the Gathering back in middle school. Only not so... PG."

"Hell yeah!" Bobby laughed and sat up. "I can't even think about that summer without thinking about Magic cards."

"That must've been before my time," Will said.

"Oh, that's right." Nathan took a large drink. "You didn't move here until freshman year. But for some reason I feel like you were there, too."

Will chuckled. "Sounds like I missed out."

"I don't know," I said, taking a drink that was mostly vodka. "As much as I liked that game, it caused so many goddam fights."

"Yeah, Nathan, you were such a bitch to play against!" Bobby said.

Nathan set his cup down. "That's the beauty of it, man. The competition, the intensity. A little rivalry between brothers."

I suddenly remembered an epic match between Bobby and Nathan. It lasted three hours, degenerating into torn cards and red stains on the carpet. It got so brutal it didn't matter who won.

"OK, I'm game." Bobby said.

I knew in a giddy, detached way that a new kind of urgency had been dropped into the summer. Night was putting on a new face, was being re-aligned. Nathan was the prospector but all four of us were going to find something elemental, out there, and casually stir it around. We needed a noble contest for noble friends, whatever the consequences.

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