I had to be the one to go into the adult video store. Charlie didn’t have a fake ID, and even if he did, it would be unlikely to fool anyone, since he was scrawny and then timid on top of that. We were sixteen, and it was as if puberty had forgotten him by the side of the road. Meanwhile, I’d started wearing a bra—a serious bra with a number-letter size, not just some limp stretch of cotton—before almost anybody else in our class.
So it made sense that I would go in and make the purchase while Charlie waited outside. Sophomore year, before I admitted I liked girls, I dated a senior who frequented clubs in Knoxville—that was his exact word, frequented—and he somehow obtained for me a fake ID so that I could go with him. When we broke up, I asked him if he wanted it back, and he laughed in my face and said, “What the hell would I do with it?” in front of his friends and God and everybody.
“Remind me what it is you wanted,” I said to Charlie. We were sitting at the counter in the ice cream shop next to the gas station and across the street from the adult video store, finalizing our plans before I went in. Usually after school our course of action was: hop onto bus 54, get off at the gas station, maybe go in and buy a Mountain Dew or something, walk the third of a mile to the Lake City Public Library, and hang out there until Charlie’s mom picked us up after her shift at the urgent care clinic.
“One of the DVDs,” Charlie said. He peeled dollar bills apart, counted them with his tongue between his teeth, and pushed one hand through his short hair, which was the color of sweet potatoes. “Anybody can look at dumb old magazines. This is all my cash—if there’s any left over, I’ll buy you a milkshake.”
“Hey, y’all,” said a girl from behind us, her voice kind of sticky-sounding, as if from chewing gum. “Are you going to get any ice cream? If not, my manager is probably going to kick you out before too long. We got limited tables.”
“It’s a free country,” I started, but Charlie was already folding his cash and standing up.
“We’ll go, sorry,” he said. Charlie was so averse to conflict he would apologize if he got hit by a car while crossing the street. This was why he needed me around: I was the fearless one, I was the one going into the adult video store so that he could watch porn on his family’s duct-taped TV and decide for sure whether he was gay while his mom was on vacation in Pigeon Forge, as if we were not already white trash enough, as if we would ever be anything else.
◆
In recent weeks, Charlie had started hanging out with these two girls in his culinary arts class, girls who got zebra-stripe pedicures at Sequoia Nails on a semiregular basis, and their hair done at Great Clips rather than the kitchen table.
They spoke about boys. I had sat with them a few times during lunch—Charlie and his girls—during which I worked on trigonometry homework and might as well have been invisible.
The girls were constantly delighted by Charlie’s good-natured sarcasm, the way he rolled his eyes whenever they mentioned having a crush on some guy and said shit like, “Oh, you think he’s cute? I saw him pick his nose while he was at the urinal the other day.” It seemed as though they only ever wanted to talk about boys—they lapped up Charlie’s input, laughed at almost everything he said, even when it wasn’t funny.
There was never much I could add to the conversation, and I knew I couldn’t tell Charlie I thought they were basically using him. He would just frown at me and tell me I always looked for the worst in people. Before the two girls entered the equation, we spent our lunches planning the comic book series we would make someday. We hadn’t worked on it now in over a month.
I did have this one thing going for me: my mother and Charlie’s mother were best friends at Pellisippi State Community College a million years ago, so we had been friends basically our entire lives. They⎯our mothers⎯used to dispense life advice to us and fantasize about our illustrious futures while we clambered around on the playground. Sometimes they quizzed us on history and trivia, as though they could transmit the apparent wisdom from their own associate’s degrees into our brains.
“Delilah,” my mother would call. “When and why was Lake City renamed after it had been Coal Creek for so long?”
“1936,” I said, rolling my eyes at Charlie. “Because of the lake created by Norris Dam.”
Mom was always telling me things that circled back around, without fail, to the fact that we lived in coal country, where our forefathers had toiled away digging shit out of the earth to their own physical and spiritual detriment, and now that the industry was dying, arguably had been dead for years, everyone in the old coal towns was suffering a despair both existential and economic in nature. If I wanted to get out, if I wanted to make something of myself, I needed to understand this whole miserable history.
Another time, on the playground years before, Charlie’s mom said to mine, “You realize they’re going to get married someday.”
And my mother: “Probably.”
Charlie and I kept taking turns pushing each other down the slide, which was scuffed metal and so hot under the summer sun we couldn’t stop, not even for a second, or it would burn the skin of our thighs.
◆
“Hi,” the cashier said without looking up. “ID, please.” He had a straggly half-hearted mustache and resembled one of my mom’s ex-boyfriends, and I felt a wave of revulsion.
But I was already this far—I’d halfway expected a bouncer at the door, some brick of a guy, to grab my arm and say, Not so fast, sweetheart. I pulled my wallet from my back pocket and slid the fake onto the counter. The guy’s nametag said Leonardo, which didn’t sound real. I guess I had no place to judge in that regard. My fake, which Leonardo was currently inspecting, bore the alias Anita Whitehead, a name that somehow felt a little insulting.
He slid it back across the counter to me. Under his fingernail was a thin purplish line of indeterminate grime. “Here you go, Anita.”
He said the name with such scorn that I knew, with stomach-churning certainty, he could tell it was fake. But then—why wouldn’t he say anything? I stared him right into his squinty eyes as I pocketed the ID. “Thank you, Leonardo.”
I wasn’t entirely convinced that they would have gay porn here. Sure, it was 2003, but we were still in East Tennessee, where you only ever heard about these things from the pulpit. The fact that Charlie and I had both turned out possibly gay in this environment sometimes seemed like a minor miracle in itself.
Actually, a lot of it went back to the previous year’s honors English class, when we read The Great Gatsby and some smartass asked about the elliptical gay sex scene at the end of the first chapter. Charlie wasn’t in the class—freshman year we’d started to diverge significantly in schedule—but I had told him about it afterward.
After school, we discovered that gay, homosexual and queer were all on the list of banned words on the public library’s computer search engines, but even so, we managed to find a copy of Gatsby on the shelves and huddled over the pages together, me explaining in a library-appropriate whisper what was happening: Nick is staring at this guy’s shaving cream on his face, right, and then they leave together, and suddenly they’re at the guy’s bed, and Nick’s in his underwear, see? See?
I had already had my sexual awakening (in which Jodie Foster played a crucial role), cut all my hair off (it seemed required) and broken up with the senior who went to clubs (keeping the fake ID), but Charlie—Charlie was wide-eyed reading the passage, as if he were learning something for the first time.
◆
The DVDs sat in the back corner of the store, their cases black and carefully blank except for titles printed on the sides. This struck me as hilariously prudish, seeing as I had to walk past aisles of sex toys to get there: dildos, obviously, but also weird feathery contraptions and thongs the width of a rubber band and shit like that. One of the dildos was camouflage, and the tag said Davy Cockett, the first syllable of the last name underlined as though no one otherwise would get the joke. It had been made in China.
The store’s carpet was flat blue and suspiciously stiff in places, and a welcome mat sat atop it in front of the videos. I stood on it and tilted my head to read titles. The movies were in alphabetical order, so I would have to infer which ones were gay.
It wasn’t difficult.
I was contemplating the potential merits of Twin Twinks—I had a vague idea of a twink as a skinny guy, and wasn’t sure whether Charlie would want to see himself mirrored in his porn—when I heard the scuff of shoes on carpet and turned just as Leonardo put two cool, rough fingertips on the back of my neck.
“We have a binder with descriptions and length and stuff,” he said after a sharp second of silence. “If you want to see. I can grab it for you.”
Charlie, I decided, would owe me milkshakes for the rest of our lives. I nodded in an exaggerated way that shrugged Leonardo’s hand off of me. “Yeah, that would be great.”
He smirked and loped away, disappearing into a room at the back of the store with a pink construction paper sign labeled Employs Only.
I plucked one of the gay-sounding videos (“Locker Room Blowjobs,” no puns, all business) off the shelf and flipped it over. A handwritten yellow price sticker read $24.99. Jesus Lord. I put it back and checked some other titles—same thing. I pulled out the crumpled wad of cash in my pocket and counted: Charlie had sent me in with nineteen dollars.
I considered my options. I could leave with nothing and basically invite Charlie to ditch me for his girly friends forever. I could strike some kind of deal with Leonardo, get him to sniff my hair and touch my neck again in exchange for a discount. Christ, why couldn’t Charlie just use his imagination? Or let him come in here and have his neck touched. Just let him. Maybe he’d even like it, and then he’d know.
The thing was, none of the girls wanted to be my friend after I cut my hair off and so on, and an attraction to girls wasn’t enough to get me in with the boys, who always seemed scared I would shiv them in a lesbian rite of passage or something. The other honors and AP kids generally didn’t hang out with me either, saying shit like, “Delilah, we’re going to Taco Bell to finish the APUSH packet if you want to come”—knowing full well that I didn’t have a car and not one of them was going to drive me.
Not that I needed any of them in order to do well on the ACT and graduate and go to a decent in-state college—per the plan the guidance counselor and I had determined—but it would be extremely depressing to sit alone at lunch or on the bus, which I felt was the logical conclusion of Charlie’s new friendship with the culinary arts girls. He was the only really good-hearted person I knew. Everyone, including and maybe especially me, was sharp-cornered and brittle with the knowledge that we would never leave here, but Charlie had somehow managed not to harden against everything about our lives. This made him either smarter than me or more naïve.
◆
Leonardo emerged from the back room holding, sure enough, a red binder, still smirking as though he knew I hadn’t quite believed him.
“There we go,” he said, and stood right beside me with the binder balanced on his palm. “All the films are in here.”
Films, as if they were critically acclaimed.
Up close I could smell cologne on him, the spray kind that Walgreens sold on rotating plastic shelves, always named things like Grizzly Spirit or Lumber or Riptide. I took the binder and held it as loosely as I could, trying to will Leonardo back to the front of the store so I could read porn descriptions in peace.
“Here,” he said, “let me help you.” He put his fingers on my shoulders.
“Help me with what?” I was white-knuckling the binder now, thinking, this sorry son of a bitch⎯forty years ago he would have been in the coal mines blanketing his lungs in black dust and this is where he is now, the adult video store. Not much of a step up. “I know how to read.”
“Suit yourself. You know where I’ll be if you change your mind.” I wasn’t sure if I was imagining an edge of bitterness in his voice as the press of his fingers disappeared.
I could steal a video. It wouldn’t be difficult: as far as I could tell there were no cameras in here, no alarm systems. Leonardo had, thank God, returned to his place behind the counter, and was flipping idly through some magazine. I set the binder down on top of the shelf and slid out one of the gay DVDs—the locker room one.
I seriously doubted that Charlie’s culinary arts friends would have the guts to steal something from the adult video store. This was what I told myself: Charlie’s going to have to learn sooner or later about the state of things, the true gritty world, and if I wasn’t going to teach him, then who?
“Didn’t find anything,” I told Leonardo a few moments later, walking toward the tinted door at such an angle that the DVD was invisible to him, where I held it pressed against my thigh.
“That’s too bad,” he said. He didn’t even look up from his magazine.
I walked out of the store like I was coming off a shift, like this was somewhere I went every day, even though my heart was beating fast.
Charlie was sitting across the street on a bench outside the Weigel’s, both of our ratty backpacks in his lap. When the wind picked up, his hair lifted practically off his head, and it suddenly seemed that he might be carried away.
I brought the DVD to my chest and folded my arms around it, waiting for the light to turn red. Somebody beeped their horn and I almost tripped. Fuck. Had I been seen; was I being called out? I saw that future unfurling in front of me as I crossed the street—getting arrested, my fake ID discovered, the guidance counselor frowning at me in the county courtroom as I got expelled from school. I would go to jail instead of college, and my mother would cry, and Charlie would come visit me with the culinary arts girls, sitting on the other side of the glass, laughing.
But no one stopped me. I skirted around a loose gas pump swaying in the wind and clattered the case onto the bench beside Charlie.
“We gotta go, we gotta go,” I said. “I may have acquired this by unsavory means.”
He blinked up at me. “What? What do you—”
“I stole it, all right, you didn’t give me enough money.”
“You stole—” He cut himself off and shook his head, his mouth open. I wanted him to say: what a hero, thank you, I never would have had the courage myself. Instead he took the cash from me silently and folded it back into a crisp stack. The wind kept whipping his hair around.
“You’re welcome,” I said. I accepted my backpack from Charlie as he swung his own onto his shoulders.
We started down the sidewalk in the direction of the library, Charlie half a step ahead of me. I was struck by a rush of desperate affection for him, his skinny hands and the freckled back of his neck, his too-big Star Wars t-shirt flapping in the whoosh of cars speeding past. I thought, I know everything about him. I know he bought that shirt at the Goodwill, I know where he got the scar above his left eyebrow, how he was once grounded for a week when we tried to pierce each other’s ears with sewing needles.
Then there was a cracking sound as he opened the case, and he stopped, almost making me run into him.
“What is it?” I peered over his shoulder.
The case was empty.
Charlie sighed in a long-suffering kind of way, closed the case, and tossed it into the gutter, like it was nothing at all.
“At least you didn’t lose any money on it.” My voice sounded small to me, even timid, as we started walking again.
We were silent for several minutes. Then, as we approached the library, Charlie turned and asked, “Was the stuff in there sexy?”
And I knew it was mean of me⎯a last-ditch attempt to make him feel that we had to stay close, that I was essential to his life in some way no one else could replace or exceed—but I lied nonetheless.
“So sexy, Charlie,” I said, watching his eyebrows lift in what I imagined to be jealousy and admiration that I had ventured into a strange world and returned knowledgeable. “Like you wouldn’t believe.”