Dirty Little Altar Boy An excerpt from the novel 'Dirty Little Altar Boy': It was a decent service at mass—a good turn-out by all accounts. Monsignor had his shit together and dished out one hell of a sermon to the parishioners. These Sunday brunchers were always a first-rate crowd; half of them left right after communion, and the other half disappeared a handful of minutes later without much chit chat by the doors. Their hasty exit allowed my fellow altar boy Marshall and me to extinguish all the candles, secure the chalices, and say our adieus in a timely manner, then we could get the hell out of there and assemble our plan for the big night—Big Friday, as we then referred to it. The big day at the end of the week would be my first real date as a man. I was well into being thirteen, and I knew the score; I knew what to expect. I was a teenager now, and these sorts of things came a little more naturally to me than they did last year. It was like a Vietnam veteran who never forgets what he learned in the jungle, even 20 years later; it was a survival mechanism. It was part of the cosmic fabric that defined us as males: hunt, protect, and date well. Big Friday was going to be perfect; I had been planning for this since Marshall told me about it three days ago. I had already begun my research on dating and the way of the female. I learned from my older brother how to make a girl laugh. He said that was a sure-fire way to get into their pants. I felt I was perhaps a little too sophisticated to want to get into a girl’s pants right away, but it would be neat to make them laugh a lot. I learned to eat vagina pretty well from Marshall, although it’s hard to know how much you’ve progressed when the closest thing you’ve got to a real beaver is the folded-over bread of a salami sandwich. All in all, I felt that with my two skills I had a pretty well-rounded view of what to expect. “The first date is pretty much good for going to first base, isn’t it?” I asked Marshall as we put out the last of the candles on the altar. “Nobody calls it ‘first base’ anymore, dude,” he replied, already pulling the black gown over his head. “But yeah, you’ll totally be making out with her. That’s why we’re going to the movies, so we can just make out all night if they want to, but don’t push it. You gotta be cool, you know?” “Oh yeah, I’ll be cool,” I answered robotically. “I once had a chick ask me to eat her vagina in a movie,” Marshall said, and he used the rapid hand gestures that made me go ahead and assume he was telling a lie. It was that obvious with him—a story illustrated with lots of hands moving and fingers pointing: a big lie. “I forgot what movie it was, but I was totally gnawing away on her, and she was screaming in that theater and no one even bothered us. I used that same move that I showed you. I called her a few times this summer, but I just didn’t want to be tied down. She was a model, too.” “What was her name?” “Mmm, so long ago…” Marshall tapped his chin with his index finger. “Brunetta. She was Persian, I believe.” “Did you do it with her?” “Oh, totally! Vagina all the time, day and night! BJs whenever I wanted.” “I don’t know if we should be talking about this in church,” I began to feel under suspicion and replied. “Mass is over,” he retorted with an expression that implied, Think, would you! “God doesn’t hang around after mass; he can’t hear us now!” “It just feels weird.” “God did it!” Marshall quickly replied. “He fucked that Mary Malena. He fucked her in her sleep or something, because Jesus sure didn’t know a damn thing about it…sleeping in that barn with pigs and shit. God gave us peckers so we could use them, dude.” “Yeah, I know, but—” “Look, Brandon, I asked you to double-date with me Friday, and I scored you this chick because I thought you could handle the situation. Had I known you would be this wishy-washy about humping a girl I would have asked Javier to go with me.” “I don’t think you would have.” “I know, but just cheer up, would you!” Marshall clutched my shoulder and shook it. “You’re going out with this babe Connie in a few days, and we’re going to see American Ninja! It comes out the same day as our double-date…it’s like fate or something. That Michael Dudikoff is just awesome. He’s the next Chuck Norris I heard.” “What’s Connie like?” I asked. “I really don’t know.” “What’s she look like?” “I’m not too sure.” “How is this all being arranged? Isn’t there some type of back story, some information you can give me? You must have known her well enough to pull this date together?” “My neighbor Georgina knows her. She’s the babe I’m taking out Friday. Connie is her friend that just moved down here from Maryland, and she said she doesn’t have any friends here, so this is perfect for you…for us, really. My mom said you could stay over at my place Friday night, so if things go really well we’ll have my killer bedroom to entertain them in—you’ll get the floor, though.” “You still want to do some Tempest when we get out of here,” I asked him. “Shit yeah! I bet my high score is still up there.” “I wouldn’t hold your breath.” We parted ways that afternoon after some $6 was spent apiece playing arcade games. Marshall’s high score had been demoted to fourth place, and my ninth place initials were nowhere to be seen—some son of a bitch named CHUK was now all over the top ten. Before his mom picked him up we split some 7-11 nachos, and Marshall showed me how to properly finger-bang a woman by illustrating the technique with the excess chili and cheese when the chips were all gone. I was still unsure how it was supposed to work after I got back home, but if a woman’s privates were as greasy brown and pukey orange as the chili and cheese he had all over his fingers, then I wasn’t going to put my hand anywhere near there. I’d make her laugh and that was it! I’d be fine with that. It was good to have a friend like Marshall; everybody needed someone to teach them the ropes. Odds were, he was making up most of what he taught me, but his sexual fiction was still more information than I’d ever had. I mean, who would have ever known that with all the wonderful things a vagina could do, it could also pee? It was good to have a friend like Marshall—that vagina information was the kind of trivia that would come in handy when you least expected it. It would definitely be useful to know come Big Friday. School on Monday went by swimmingly. Marshall and I discussed every possible scenario that could happen on the date—from both of us losing our virginities under the watchful electric eyes of theater management to a martial arts showdown to protect the honor of our special ladies. We constructed multi-tiered plans for every circumstance that might arise on our extraordinary night: if Marshall was getting lucky and I wasn’t, I would feign illness and walk Connie home—same for him if conditions were reversed; if one of the girls had a pecker, which was highly unlikely but still a possibility, we would pretend not to notice until the other of us had scored; if Marshall’s mom happened to walk into the bedroom while we were having the sex with our ladies, I would pause my doing-it with Connie and seduce Mrs. Lamberto and ask her to join my special lady and me in the sleeping bag. Marshall was very unaware of this last precautionary measure. We had covered all of our bases—from what to do if a nuclear disaster occurred to using a sandwich bag as a make-do condom—except one; one condition was definitely not covered in our rules of engagement, and that condition had mom written all over it. “Um, mom,” I asked during dinner that night, “what exactly is an orthodontist and, better question, why do I need to go to one?” “Honey, you’re 13 now,” she replied. “Your brother went when he was 13…you need to fix your teeth now before they set in place forever. Do you want to have buck teeth when you’re 20?” “I have buck teeth?” I asked blankly. “Yes, you do. Do you want people to laugh at you in high school? You need braces now so they won’t.” “Braces?” I shrieked in my chair, and my mouthful of porkchop fell back onto the plate. “Oh, sweet Lord, no! You never said anything about braces, mom! You never said anything about braces!” “Don’t argue with your mother, flakes!” Dad chimed in. “I bet your mother wishes her mother had offered her braces when she was your age.” My mom didn’t quite know how to respond to that remark. She studied it for a few seconds before running her tongue across her front teeth under the guise of her lip, and then she said, “You’re getting them. You’ll thank me in 20 years.”
Copyright © 2007 Brandon D Christopher |