The Yes Rule
Probably my most twisted and taboo tale of young love gone very very wrong.
When I was younger and less concerned with appearances, I spent a summer that should have landed me in jail. As I think back to it, I often expect to feel a rising sense of regret, and yet as each year passes I mostly recall it with a fondness that it doesn’t deserve. You may cheer for me now and say how wonderful it must be to regret nothing, but you would be wrong. Often in life we do things of which we are overly critical and we struggle against the most mundane of sins. But for some of us, thinking back with kindness on our former selves is less a sign of wisdom and more an indication that there truly are monsters living among us.
The truth, I’m sure, is more complicated that my simple analysis, and to be honest, it’s not something I’ve ever concerned myself with. Many people desire the truth with a burning passion, but for me it was always more of a distraction than anything else. As far as I can tell, the truth does not in fact set us free. It tends to rather drastically limit us, and our ridiculous focus on it causes us to live small lives devoid of anything that might come even close to passion.
When I think about writing it down, it’s hard not to imagine it all at once, and even now my cock grows hard and my heart beats faster. I flash through scenes like an endless slideshow, each frame holding for less than a second and lasting forever. I see Jane covered in cum, covered in blood, and covered in sweat, and each picture brings a smile to my face. We raced through the city without stopping, and we left destruction wherever we went. She was my love and my heart. She was my balls and my spit, and she was the night sky I let myself get lost in over and over again. Jane was a child and grandmother, and she devoured creation with a glee and a fury I have never seen again.
I graduated college a little later than most, but not so much later that it was considered strange. I was twenty-three years old when I returned to New York City, and my head was a jumble of postmodern philosophers and naked anthropology. I was completely without direction, and the idea of finding a career felt absurd.
My parents drove me home from school on a Friday, but by Monday morning they had packed the car again and headed up to Cape Cod to have a quiet summer in the beach house. For a moment I thought they might ask me to join them, but it passed quickly, and my mother simply kissed my cheek before getting into the old Saab as she told me she was so very proud.
I spent a few days mostly lying in bed. I slept until two or three in the afternoon, I masturbated furiously, and I slept some more. I wandered down to the bodega for breakfast sandwiches, but I mostly stuck to the apartment and my parents massive liquor collection. I had discovered the key back in high school, and for years they either didn’t notice when bottles went missing or they simply didn’t care. The bar was restocked almost every week, and even while they were away, regular deliveries came to the house.
I finally got a call from an old friend a week into my first summer of freedom, and I agreed to meet him at the Waverly Diner for coffee late one evening. He had just returned from Boston and was moving through school even slower than I was. He still had another semester to go, but for now he was as free and bored as I was. It was a warm night in June when I walked out the door, and I had no idea at the time that my life was about to change drastically. I had on an old faded t-shirt and my black Converse sneakers. My jeans had holes in the knee that I had earned through years of use.
Marc stood outside of the diner smoking a Camel, and I bummed one from him before we walked inside. In those days each table in the Waverly had at least two ashtrays on it, and the diner was so full of smoke you had to cut your way through it. We sat down, ordered a coffee, and then quickly looked around to see if we knew anyone. We always knew the waiter, and a few of the busboys, but on most evenings there were a few other kids we recognized from one place or another. As we got older most of our friends moved to bar stools, but we were in the mood to drown ourselves in nostalgia, and there was no better place to do it than the Waverly.
“Did you parents go up to the Cape already?” he asked when we sat down. I nodded my head as I continued to look around the room.
“What the fuck are we going to do this summer?” I asked him, my ennui in full force. I won’t say I was lost. But possibly I was seeking something I didn’t know existed.
“I don’t know man. I think I need to get a job. I can’t stay living at home much longer. My mother is going to drive me crazy and my step-dad is a fucking dick. If I have to listen to him talk about Jesus one more time I’m going to tape him to the wall and throw his own fucking darts at him. Also I’m going to piss on his cat. Filthy little fucker.”
“Did you just say you were going to piss on a cat?” I turned and looked behind me at the voice from the next table. The girl was leaning against the wall with her feet on the bench, and she was smoking a menthol cigarette and drinking a strawberry milkshake. Her hair was long and light brown, and it flowed in thick ringlets down over her shoulders.
“Do you have a problem with that?” Marc asked her.
“No, I was just curious. Are you going to hold it down and do it, or maybe put it in a cage or something? I don’t imagine the cat would just say still while you take aim,” she said.
“She’s got a good point,” I said. “I’d offer to help, but I don’t want you pissing on my hands either. Maybe you can put it in it’s carrying case and piss through the windows.”
“That would splatter a lot. You clearly haven’t thought this through,” she said. It was then that I noticed her friend sitting across from her. She was a cute girl with a half shaven head and the other half dyed green. She was wearing a leather jacket that was clearly her father’s, and her makeup was extreme to say the least. She was drinking a Bud Light and playing with her french fries which she had piled up on her plate and covered in ketchup.
“Do you two want to join us?” I asked.
“Sure,” the brunette said, climbing over the back of the bench and onto the seat next to me. Her friend got up grudgingly and sat down next to Marc with a wary glance.
“I’m Jack and this is Marc,” I said.
“Jane and Rachel,” the girl sitting next to me said, crushing her cigarette out in my ashtray. “Do you have a real cigarette? I fucking hate menthols.”
I nodded to Marc and he threw her a Camel. She picked it up off the table, pulled out a silver Zippo from her pocket and took a long drag before leaning back against the naugahyde booth. She was a tiny girl, and she shook ever so slightly each time she brought the smoke up to her mouth. Her neck was long and her chin jutted out. It wasn’t until she was next to me that I noticed her nose was covered in tiny, adorable freckles.
“What the fuck are you looking at?” she asked.
“Your freckles,” I said. “Also, your nose and your chin, and I fucking swear I know you. Did you used to dance at Billy’s?”
“She wishes. Like her mom would let her out of the house, let alone work at a bar like that. She’s going to be a fancy lawyer someday, and we can’t have her getting mixed up in that shit.”
“Fuck you Rach,” she said with a grin. “At least my mom doesn’t yell at me for eating a fucking cheeseburger on a Saturday.”
“Is your mom a religious nut?” Marc asked with hope in his eyes. “My step-dad is a Goddamn Jesus fucker, and it drives me crazy. I swear, one of these days I’m going to…”
“Piss on his cat?” Jane finished for him.
I kept staring at her, trying to work out where I knew her from, and I hardly noticed the others as they sat there talking and yelling. We ordered more cheese fries, coffee, and cake, and I finally had to go up to the counter to buy another pack of Camels. When I got back Jane was sitting up straight and it came to me in a flash.
“Were you a girl scout?” I asked. She looked at me with squinted eyes and then suddenly before I could move, she threw her arms around me and kissed me on the lips.
“Boat-boy! Holy shit,” she said. “You came to Central Park. You took us out in the rowboats for some summer skill-building bullshit. I had to trade with another girl to be in your boat, and oh my God I can’t believe that was you.”
“You traded to be in my boat?” I asked skeptically.
“Of course. I was going to marry you.
“What, were you like twelve?” I asked.
“I was thirteen, you asshole. We spent the whole afternoon in the pond, and you talked about writing and philosophy, and you were the coolest person ever.”
“You asked me about Nabokov and D.H. Lawrence, and when I finally to let you row, we spent an hour going around in circles.”
“Jesus, you’re that guy?” Rachel asked. “She used to cream her panties telling me about you. There was a whole month where all she talked about was Boat-boy and how she was going to marry you and then fuck your brains out.”
“Rachel!”
I grinned at her and lit a cigarette. Jane turned back to the table and there was a slight flush to her cheeks that I found adorable as well as sexy as hell.
“There are worse things than being the fantasy of teenage girl masturbation frenzies.”
“I never said I got off on it. Just that I was going to marry you.” Across the table Rachel snorted, and Marc looked as us both with amusement.
“Whatever,” I said. “It’s good to see you again. You were way too smart for your own good, and probably too pretty as well.”
It was my turn to blush, but by then it didn’t matter. We sat and we laughed for hours, and it was clear that the summer had already taken a turn for the better. The girls were absurd, brilliant, and hot, and Marc was as distracted as I was. We smoked and ordered beers, and we watched as the other booths filled and emptied while for us time stood perfectly still. I have a photo somewhere that the waiter took, and I pull it out on occasion to remember what it was like that very first night. It makes me smile and then it makes me cry. I feel a twitch below the waist, but more than anything at all I feel a warmth in my body that I hope never goes away.
I feel love.
