Ed and I had had him for a counselor the first time, when we were eight. That was for a different camp in a different set of woods, but Hulk was the same then.
Howard was Jewish and I was Jewish because my mom was Jewish. I never went to Hebrew school but I was circumcised.
When I was a kid my friend Nick and I made a potion together. Nick was French; his dad had a pointy beard and spoke with an accent. We got a big rectangular plastic tub and put snails in it and red pyracantha berries, which were poisonous and made the blackbirds drunk so they flew into the windows and died. And we took cat poo from the sandbox with a plastic shovel and put it in the soup. At the end we peed in it. My penis was like a mushroom and my French friends was draped in skin, like a monks cowl.
We tried to get my little brother to drink it but he wouldnt. We left our potion in the backyard in the rectangular tub. One day I found a dead rat next to it.
In fourth grade Mr. DeFelice was my teacher. He was younger than all the other teachers.
He said his name meant he was always happy. He told us he ate pizza and drank beer at Luigis in Mountain View. That was the next city over, but far for me. He said he was good at Top Gun on Nintendo. He could get to the space level. A jet in space doesnt make sense.
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In ninth grade we watched a lot of Holocaust stuff. We saw pictures and then a film of the naked bodies being bulldozed. Penises on the men and vaginas and breasts on the women. They didnt seem like real penises. I looked close. Some were big.
I had a cat named Toby. He was put to sleep at the vets. Gassed? Buried? Incinerated. Way of all flesh and fur.
Ed was at my very first Y camp when we were eight. He was half Korean from his mom, and his dad was a big, white, bald dork. One morning Hulk took us to the lake. It was so cold. We had our towels around our shoulders. Mine was The Incredible Hulk, Ed had The Dukes of Hazard. There was a Confederate flag on the side of their car.
Hulk said we were all in the Polar Bear Club. He was the whale of the club.
We took our shirts off. Nobody had muscles. Hulk said he would give a Coke to whoever went in the lake naked.
One night in ninth grade we were drunk and wandering around the neighborhoods in a pack. There were some girls with us too. There was nowhere to go and no more alcohol.
We walked through Mid-Peninsula, the school for bad kids who got kicked out of other schools. They were allowed to smoke cigarettes during their brunch break. They were mostly white and they wore a lot of black. One year a kid brought a gun to school and shot his ex-girlfriend at brunch because she had a new boyfriend. Then he shot the new boyfriend. Then he shot himself. The girl didnt live, but the new boyfriend lived.
We never had any black friends. Not before high school and not in high school. But we liked black rappers. Dr. Dre, 2Pac, DJ Quik, Too $hort, and the Geto Boys.
At water-ski camp there was a black girl, Angela. She had no friends at camp because she was weird. She would talk about aliens. She said she and her brothers saw aliens, but it sounded like her brothers were her only friends and that her brothers were the ones who came up with the alien idea.
We dared Howard to make out with her in the back of the bus. He did one night. On the way back to the campsite he kissed her, but it was messy, like two lizards. We were in the seat in front of them and we saw him feel her small breasts, and under the towel he felt her vagina. We looked back and saw it all. It was a purple towel with nothing on it. He was the first of us to do all that, but it was with the black alien girl.
I had my first girlfriend in fourth grade, in Mr. DeFelices class. Her name was Simone. She was pretty and blond like Madonna. After she broke up with me I would watch Whos That Girl? to remind myself of her. Once Simone said Mr. DeFelice asked if he could take pictures of her at his house, but her mom wouldnt let her go.
Utes name was the name of an Indian tribe. He was Italian but his parents were hippies and accountants at Whole Foods. His older brother was named Rain, he was two years older than us. Rain had the biggest dick of all his friends. He would walk around naked and show it, all his friends talked about it. They called him Calcium.
Calcium broke all the basketball records in high school and had sex with tons of ugly girls.
Later, in high school, Ute had sex first out of all of us. It was with a black girl, Venus.
I had sex last. I was drunk at a party at my friend Barrys house. We did it in a bedroom, Susan and me, and then stayed the night. In the morning, I waited till she left, and then I walked home alone.
At water-ski camp we told everyone about Howard and the black girl on the bus. There was a handsome guy, Chad. He got into a fight with Howard and punched him in the eye. Chad didnt get in trouble because he told the counselors about what Howard did to Angela.
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After I had sex once I had sex a lot. The second time was in Susans bed. I was about to come and I pressed my foot against the footboard. My long toenails scraped against the board like cockroaches. After, when we pulled away, it was sticky and frothy. Buttery, like pulling apart a Baby Ruth.