THE S CLUB

“Hey Four Eyes,” cried Neil, ”Come here.”

Neil beckoned me from the sliding glass doors that led to the den.

“What?” I said in an irked tone. My shirt was bloody and I wanted to go home. I wanted to take a shower and read Butterfield Eight until dinner.

I stepped closer. He exhaled. “You are weird.” He muttered as he made a square shape with his index finger in the air.

That was no news to me.

“So,” I said.

If you ask me, I think Neil is just as weird as I am. Except different. He liked 3-D movies and dreams of driving red Porsches and I don’t. He had a bee-bee gun and practiced martial arts. He never had to go to church while I had been forced to go on Sundays. I drew pictures of The Crucifixion as I began to doubt my faith. . He doodled pictures of nude girls with great enthusiasm. We had very little in common.

Once Neil was feeling so lonely he asked me to be his “best friend.” It was incredulous. He didn’t even like me. It was just that there no one else around.

We lived on a tract of land where a developer had bought and built seven houses on. Previously the land was a potato field with an adjacent pond and now it was still in the middle of nowhere. On summer evenings, the land was insidiously buggy. We were far from the town and the kids you see in school.

All the houses were ranch style and white. All the houses had the exact same all electric kitchen as well as the same heating, leakage and plumbing problems.

The prospect of being Neil’s best friend, terrified me. I saw it as a closed-in and hen-pecked regime. Neil liked Leader of the Pack and I preferred West Side Story. I did my homework and he didn’t. He liked bullying people and I liked being left alone. My lungs thickened like an asthma attack as I kept thinking about being his “best friend.” ”No,” I said,” No thanks.” His eyes tensed into triangles and seemed forever gloomy. “But we can still be friends,” I added guiltily.

“What?” I said.

“You will see,” he smirked. He grinned. He had Boom Boom’s eyes nose and hair. ”I will make a man out of you yet.” Neil was a head taller than me. Even though he arms and legs possessed a mean strength, he had two flabby egg plant-shaped buttocks. Neil prided himself at his ability to “cut cheese” the way some actors can summon tears.

I stepped into the den, Neil had been drinking a Root Beer float and watching ”My Mother, The Car.“ Neil eyed me with his usual mock hostility.

“You look terrible. What’s on your shirt?”

“Frog’s blood.”

“They blew up frogs without me!” exploded Neil. “That Chris must have gone into my stash!” His fist hit into his palm. “Wait till those critters get home,” he said in cowboy style. ”Am I gonna have a time!” He strutted around the coffee table in his black and smelly boots. His black pants hugged his thighs. Neil worked his bulge. He wore no shirt and you could that he had drawn in chest hairs with a ballpoint pen.

“My sister makes me sick,” lamented Neil.

“They are supposed to,” I said cajoling him.

“What?” he said.

It was even impossible to agree with Neil.

“Nothing,” I said.

Neil collapsed on the couch. ”Man, Am I bored!”

“Well,” I said, ”who isn’t?”

“There must be people who aren’t bored,” he surmised. He kicked the ottoman. ”I want something.”

“What?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he replied. ”You know something tuff, cool or boss. I mean I have “safes”.” He paused. “I d love to go down to Mid Island Shopping Center and find me some chick who would put out.” He clenched his fist. “I am really ready for it. You know, I got “safes.”

Easily this had been the thirty millionth time, I had heard about him and his “safes”. Neil had paid an eighteen year old ten dollars to go to the drug store and purchase him a pack of Trojans. Like the future, sex was everywhere.

“I mean, what am I going to do? Get on my bicycle, ride ten fucking miles to the mall, cruise the bowling alleys, find a tramp and fuck her where?” he shrugged. “On my bicycle’s handle bars!”

I didn’t know either.

He burped.

“I think I will look at this month’s “Playboy,” he said with a quasi nonchalance as if he decided for a Pepsi over a Coke. “Ever see a Playboy?”

“Sort of,” I said. I had seen even though “Playboy” covers in the newsstands. I also, had seen enough Renoirs. And once when I was seven, I walked into on my mother who was coming out of the shower.

“Well take a gander,” he said. The centerfold unfurled like the American flag. The huge bronzed woman had two oppressively huge breasts. They were two white eggplants with two huge crimson nipples. She had a jawbone like Washington’s on Mount Rushmore. She had a steady reptilian gaze underneath her Doris Day blond bouffant.

“Well what do you think?”

“Wow! Great!” I said mesmerized by the extraordinary air brushed quality of her tan skin. If this must be what it is, I remarked to myself, this must be great. Otherwise what is everybody talking about all the time?

“Brother, would I love to have her phone number.” His eyes stretched into slits. ”Want to go behind the pool with these pictures?” he suggested.

“For what?” I said.

He motioned around his crotch.

“What?” I said having no idea what he was gesturing about.

“Nothing” he said dismissing me.

Madam Boom Boom swerved into the driveway. The gravel popped like cereal and milk. Her black Impala’s slant eye taillight lit to a red halt.

“Neil, Chris, Farley,” she screamed. Everyone in the neighborhood heard her. ”Neil, Chris, Farley, come help me.” Dogs started barking and parents mixed their drinks and chuckled. The sun lowered like a pizza.

“Neil, Chris, Farley,” Boom had bags and bags of groceries. ”Children!” Neil yawned and sank deeper into his chair and stubbornly watched “My Mother, The Car.”

When people scream you inevitably hear everything about them. Their whole life echoes. You hear the girth of their spirit and anxiety. When you hear people scream you want to run or turn it off.

“Neil,” screamed Boom. She opened the screen door.

“What Ma?” he said.

“Help me,” she bellowed.

“What?” he yelled back. ”I can’t hear you.”

“I have eight bags of groceries that have to be bought in.” Her diaphragm was strong (from years of voice lessons) and her voice surged throughout the house.

“I will at the commercial,” replied Neil distantly.

“Things will melt,” she pleaded.” Please.”

At thirteen, Neil was “uncontrollable.” Not only was he obstinate but also he weighed forty pounds more and was a head taller that his mother.

“Oh son,” Boom said surrendering to the situation.

Never in her life had she regretted her children. Their baby pictures in silver frames adorned her baby grand in her white on white living room. Boom loved her babies. Her children were so undeniable and cute when they were puppies. “Oh God, she would sigh, she would do anything for them. With a biased Mother’s love, she swore they were the most remarkable creatures alive. She loved dressing them up in navy blue flannel and then bundle them up in their camel hair overcoats and whisk them off to the City. There she would take them to the photographer (who she knew from the business) and have the children photographed in his classy but small studio on Fifty Ninth Street.

Then the children would coerce her to take them F.A.O. Schwartz and then she would drag them to Bonwit Teller’s. Eventually they would take in a movie (after all “Snow White and the Three Stooges” was playing right around the corner) At midnight, Boom and the children would return home Like a sprite, Boom would kiss her then husband-Harvey Quail on the cheek. Harvey was livid. He was ten minutes away from calling the police.

“Why didn’t you call? ” he said.

Boom could only smile because that was precisely the point. Have Harvey think anything he wants.

“The children wanted to see “Snow White and the Three Stooges,” she answered.

Often times, I have heard Boom cry to my mother, “Oh God, you don’t know how I protected my children.” Her eyes were red. And sad at the thought of the filth that goes on in the world today.

“Neil,” she pleaded,“please.”

“I am busy, he answered in the same intonation that Boom uses when she says that she is busy.

A yearn of helplessness emanated from the kitchen.

“I’ll help you,” I said. I was willing to do anything to be with Boom Boom alone. Anything. Even taking in the groceries.

I rounded the corner into the kitchen. Her perfume infused the room like a battalion of roses.

Her hair was clipped to a “Pixie” cut. She wore a sailor shirt complete with a flapping collar and blue sash. Her white rayon pants clung to her thighs like a second skin. Mother of Pearl toenails peeked out the front of her high heel sandals. Madam Boom Boom was the closest thing to Joey Heatherton I had ever known.

“Merci Monsieur,” she said.

For some unknown reason, Boom had taken it upon herself to give me French lessons. Boom had been to Paris herself and perhaps she was me living one day, there in a garret with the next Picasso or Proust. Boom stayed at the Ritz and walked everywhere fascinated by the sooty yet quaint architecture. She loved the pastries and she really loved shopping at Galleries Lafayette. It was the most magical and expensive shopping spree she had ever been on. She loved the funny-looking traffic and the Pernod ashtrays and umbrellas that characterized so many sidewalk cafes. Everything about Paris was art. Boom loved the language; she was in tune to the male, female, neuter gender of things.

I had always thought of things (per say things) always in the neuter sense. Once I asked Boom why the French made things feminine and masculine.

“Oh,” she said dabbing sun lotion on her shoulders,” it’s the goddamn French. They are always thinking of sex and they are just so existential.”

“So what?”

“Existential, it was the rage after the war,” she said.

“What happens in it?”

“Oh hell’s bells,” she said searching the sky for the truth. ”It’s like live for today. Tomorrow we may blow up. This is our one time on earth. There is no exit and we are plagued.” She shook her head. ”I really have forgotten.”

She stopped and then purred. ”Paris is such a beautiful place to fall in love.”

“Falling in love only takes place in songs,” I said.

“Oh you will see,” she said.

“Come on talley vous,” I asked picking up her groceries.

“Mal,” she said sick of her situation with Neil. “Not mal,” she said correcting herself for a better word choice. “Mort,” she said.

“Per chaw?”

“Neil,” she exploded and thus ending the lesson. “I don’t know what to do about him! She opened the door for me. “Where are my other children?” she asked.

“At the pond,” I replied

“Doing what?”

“I don’t know,” I lied.

A cherry bomb suddenly cracked in the twilight. Shrill shrieks followed.

Sadly Boom shook her head. Everything was going to get worse again. Her lips pinched in and she looked old. No one can say, I haven’t tried. ”What am I going to do?” she asked me as if I were an adult.