“Well, you know what I mean. They’re pissing through a boner. They’re pissing through a boner, and that’s not why they have one.”
“ ‘They’re pissing through a boner, and that’s not why they have one!’ Aphoristic wisdom from our own Jonny ‘Jonboat,’ scion of the Pellmores and Jasons the both. Kids these days. So tell me, Jonboat. Rumor has it Papa Jon-Jon’s about to buy—”
I shut off the radio.
“Hey,” said my father.
“He stole that from me. Pissing through a boner. I invented that. It’s mine.”
“Relax,” said my father. “Stop with the crying. Stop kicking the glovebox.”
“Stop kicking the glovebox? He stole my line. I made it up myself. I was sad when I thought of it. It meant something specific, and he changed the meaning so that now it’s too broad, and then he added a clause to explain it all to dummies. ‘And that’s not why they have one!’ No kidding, huh? Boners aren’t meant for pissing through, dude? I had no idea. I really didn’t. Thanks for the clarification, Jonboat. He ruined it completely. First he stole it, then he destroyed it.”
“Billy, listen—” said my father.
“That’s not my fucking name.”
* * *
The next day at school, I rushed up on Jonboat, flailing my arms and squealing away about theft and betrayal. He threw me at a locker, the rebound from which bounced me venting-first at a Pellmore-Jason palm-strike that knocked me out cold.
When I regained consciousness a couple seconds later, he was kneeling beside me, holding my glasses, straightening out the arm he’d bent. “Sorry,” he said, and slipped them back on my face. “That was all just reflex.”
“Pissing through a boner,” I said. “You stole it.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Belt. I didn’t know,” he said. “I thought you were giving it to me, like with piehole-cakeface. Did I get that wrong? I guess I got it wrong. Listen. Let me buy you some stuff after school. Maybe some clothes. Your clothes are really wanting, man. That’s why no pussy. We’ll go to the mall, alright? Then get pussy.”
“You want,” I said, “to take me to the mall?”
“Of course I want to take you to the mall,” said Jonboat. “I don’t see any reason we can’t still be pals. We just had our physical confrontation, right? That’s an important developmental stage in the friendships of boys. That’s what they say. At least that’s what my dad says. He’s beaten up all his friends at one point or another. And Jon-Jon Jason—you know as well as I do—Jon-Jon Jason’s got a lot of friends.”
“Alright,” I said.
“Friends then. Good. And listen here: pissing through a boner. I’m not gonna use it ever again, unless you want me to.”
“You can use it,” I said. “You already used it. But just, look, leave off and that’s not why they have one. It’s really redundant. It kills all the subtlety.”
“Deal,” Jonboat said. “Let’s get you to the nurse, now. We’ll tell her you tripped and banged your face on a locker. After school, I’ll ditch practice and meet you in the back of my Phantom, by the bike rack.”
I agreed to the plan. But then it turned out I might have had a concussion, and the nurse called my father, who took me to the hospital, where the doctor confirmed I might have had a concussion.
I missed the mall.
I told my father the locker tale. He told me I needed to watch where I was going.
* * *
Jonboat brought me clothes at lunch the next day. One bag from Guess? and one from Z. Cavaricci. Also a hairbrush with an air-powered gel compartment built into the handle. The clothes didn’t fit and, even when wet, my hair was too wavy to pull a brush through, but the thought was what counted. I didn’t complain. I pasted up bangs and tucked in the shirts, cinched the waists of the pants with silver-tipped belts and pegged the cuffs thick on my shins like a pirate.
Jonboat said I looked great and introduced me to girls, a couple of whom took my calls when I phoned the first couple times. It wasn’t as though we had become bosom buddies, but throughout all the rest of junior high, and then high school, I always had the sense he was protecting me a little—that had it not been for the occasional light he shone upon me in public (the hellos in the hallways, the cafeteria line-cuts), I’d have been just as bullied as any other greasy and motherless weirdo. The conversations we had, however brief and infrequent, didn’t feel like charity the way my conversations with other kids did. I could get him to laugh, to slap me on the back, to admiringly echo things I’d just said. Correctly or not, I thought of Jonboat as a friend.
After graduation, he went to Annapolis. I wrote him three times in as many months, but received no response. Yet there were no hard feelings. At least not on my end. For a while I felt forgotten, but I never felt ditched. Well, not never, but not often. He was different from the rest of us. He always would be. He’d bow-hunted grizzlies since the age of thirteen. Flown jets at sixteen and dined at Camp David. At Kensington Palace. He would marry at the Hermitage. Buy and sell airlines. Push legislation. Make and break currencies. Underwrite charities. Explore outer space. As he had turned down Oxford and Yale senior year, he’d eventually (at least according to rumor) turn down vital ambassadorships—to Russia, to China, Israel, and France. Everyone wanted a piece of the guy, and I knew it back then as all the world knows it now. Within weeks of sending that third, unanswered letter, I’d come to accept that the piece I wanted was worth far more than I could offer in return, that he didn’t have time for me, was just too busy, and I took satisfaction—took pride, in fact—in swearing him off.
Not swearing him off, but determining, rather, to do the decent thing and leave him alone.
When the press began to turn on him during his divorce, I’d fail to change the channel—in the end I’m only human—but I wasn’t ever happy to see him attacked. I always hoped Jonboat would be alright.
TWO HUNDRED-SOME QUILLS
THEN A BIRTHDAY AGO, while drinking from a tumbler of water in the kitchen, I saw the front page of that Sunday’s Daily Herald wrapping the present my father had left for me next to the sink. A Post-it note crookedly stuck to the banner read, “38YO! Well that’s just nutso. A Happy and a Healthy to YOU, Young Master! Sorry not to be here to say that in person. —from Clyde the Dad.” Under the note was the following headline:
RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL PRODIGY CONFIRMED
PELLMORE-JASONS LIVING IN WHEELATINE