Her dad bursts in through the steamed up sliding glass doors and turns on the flood lights just as I’m about to fill up her up from behind.

“Look man, I’m probably not the guy who’s going to be marrying your daughter,” I say to her dad as he’s pushing me out the front door of the house. “So let’s not worry about me, okay?”

I’m soaking wet and my watch and cell phone are ruined. When he throws my sopping shorts at me they slap around the back of my neck and I turn around and can see her standing behind him next to the banister of the staircase, dripping all over the hardwood floors.

She looks kind of sorry, and when I see that I just start laughing.

“This whole thing is a fucking joke, you know that?” I say to her or her dad or maybe both, as he stands there with his tanned arms folded across his chest. Between his bald head and his polo shirt, his reading glasses and his penny loafers, I think this is just about as perfect as it can get when you’re being thrown out of a guy’s house for banging his daughter in their hot tub.

As soon I get to my car and throw my shorts and towel in the trunk, an empty beer bottle explodes on one of my hubcaps and sprays glass across my naked legs and feet. “Jesus Christ!”

I yell and yank the driver’s side door shut just as another one smashes against my side view mirror, knocking it off.

“You fucking little punk!” He’s yelling now, coming off the back porch and striding across the gravel toward my car with another Corona Light raised in the air. The only thing I remember thinking is I can’t believe it took him this long to find the empties stashed in the fake plants.

Just as I peel out and my tires leave a dust cloud between me and the old man, I can hear her little sister calling her a whore through an open bedroom window. But right after that it’s just the sound of the speakers popping on and whatever radio station I’d been listening to an hour earlier when I’d pulled up to the house that I figured would be empty.

I’d met Debbie at a wedding actually. We both worked for the catering service that was hosting it and it was only my third day on the job during my second summer home from college.

“God I need to get laid,” she said to me as we watched the new bride and groom kissing at the center table to the soundtrack of a thousand spoons clinking on wine glasses. I’m sure it’s not exactly the first thing she said to me, but for the sake of the story I’m going to go ahead and say it was.

Joking around I tell her “Well shit, I’d love to help.”

“Well, you’re going to need my number then aren’t you?” She asks and six hours later I’m undoing her bikini top in the swimming pool behind her house.

She’s 18 and going into her first year of college in the fall. I’m 21 and have been in college for two years already, but when she makes me meet her mom at the front door I lie and say I go to one of the bullshit schools around the area.

I can’t believe she took me to her house when her parents are home but I figure this is the sort of girl who does this sort of thing fairly regularly anyway. And besides, she said she listens to Techno. And her screen name is Raverchick69.

I’m hooking up with a girl whose screen name is Raverchick69.

I’m pretty sure I was thinking that exact same thing the moment her dad bursts in through the steamed up sliding glass doors and turns on the flood lights just as I’m about to fill up her up from behind.

Next thing I know I’m tearing out of the cul-de-sac with Radiohead singing a song called “Creep” at top volume. I know it sounds like it should be fitting, but give me a break.

I realize just now why it’s illegal to drive without shoes on. You try stepping on a brake pedal with pieces of glass stuck in your big toe and see if you don’t lose control. I reach down to pull it out and when I sit back up I can see two pissed off headlights in my rearview.

At first I think cops, but honestly it would really have been better that way. I remember almost praying for blue lights and I pushed the gas pedal down with the heel of my bleeding foot.

Just then the cell phone I figured should be waterlogged by now goes off with all the bells and whistles on the passenger seat and when I quickly look over at it I can see it’s Debbie’s number.

From behind, in the glow of the fast approaching headlights I bet I looked like Sonic the hedgehog with a car battery hooked up to his nut sack.

“Hello?”

“Just pull over,” she says and it sounds like she’s either scared or crying.

“Fuck no, are you in the car?” I ask turning around quickly and getting blinded. It looks like they’re two feet from my bumper. Instinctively I look to my busted side view that’s dangling on by a bunch of frayed wires and smacking against my door panel.

“Just pull over, please,” She says. “He just wants to talk to you.”

“Put him on the phone then, fuck this shit, this is crazy. Craaaaa-zy,” I say and rip the wheel to the right at the next intersection. There are no cars on the road this late at night and the neighborhood they live in could be any of those little neighborhoods where every house looks like the same house next to every yard that looks like the same yard. Vinyl white siding and Lego landscaping. Circular driveways and stupid welcome signs.

She WOULD live in a place like this.

I start to wonder what her dad does for living just as he bumps me for the first time sending me knocking into the steering wheel.

“He fucking hit me!” I scream into the phone as I try desperately to put on my seatbelt before he can do it again. Somewhere on the other end of the phone I hear her say “Dad, stop,” before I snap it closed and throw it back on the seat.

At sixty miles an hour the little hedge brushes of suburbia look like the great wall of China and the mailboxes seem like little white gloved hands reaching out as if to say “Hey, whoa, slow it down,” like all those yard raking yups on any cookie cutter street.

All the roads are named after things they’ve long since replaced. Brookside, Green Grove, Garden Circle. With my windows down and the air smelling like cut grass and those flowers I can never remember the name of, I try to get as much distance between my Honda and the psychotic in the sedan behind me as I can.

On the floorboard now, my phone is vibrating and lighting up. I press the accelerator and grind my teeth. Across a small bridge and through what looks like an apple orchard, the houses on the sides of the road start getting further and further apart. I have no idea where we are anymore and I’m only on a quarter tank of gas. Behind me they’re getting closer and closer and I have to jerk into the opposite lane every time I think he’s going to go for another tap-tap.

If this were a movie this would be the part where my tire blows out and I go spinning off into a ditch. Instead it’s not the tire it’s the alternator belt that I should have replaced three weeks ago.

And I don’t go spinning off into a ditch, instead I just lose power and the seatbelt locks up, the steering column goes stiff and my lights shut off.

Believe me, when the car stopped rolling and sputtered out on the side of the road just under a big blue water tower with some town’s name on it that I’ve never been to, I did think of running.

But what the fuck, right?

Instead I just sat there in the driver’s seat, hair still wet, my shirt off and in a pair of wet gym shorts with blood caked all over my toenails.

Later on I’d tell everybody I sat there with a smile on my face and said, “Is there a problem officer?” When her bald dad stepped up to the open window and yanked my door open. The funny thing is I didn’t say a word.

Even as he tried to pull me out of the car, the seatbelt was still locked up and holding me tight against the seat while he grunted and bathed my face in hot spit.

By the time Debbie reached the car he’d already stopped and was sitting down on the pavement with his hands pressed against his head and kind of rocking back and forth.

Debbie had on a gray long sleeve shirt that was way too big for her and as she came up to the car she said “Dad?” I still didn’t say a thing.

“What the fuck is wrong with me?” Her father said and looked at me and then at her. “What the fuck is wrong with me?”

The man looked honestly like a deflated inner tube. When I’d last saw him in the doorway or running after me with the beer bottles I’d thought he looked like a fit muscular kind of guy. A guy who might be able to belt the shit out of some little fucker he caught playing roll the bat with his daughter in their Jacuzzi. Now it seemed like he was just a pile of clothes.

I decided it was my cue to get out of the car when he first started crying.

I’d like to say I just stepped over him, walked passed Debbie without looking at her and went around to the back of my car to inspect the damage. What I really did was just get out and say “Um…. sir?” like a dip shit.

“I told you he just wanted to talk to you,” Debbie said pulling one of her massive sleeves up to her mouth and chewing on it. I stood there dripping onto the hot summer asphalt.

I looked at his sedan, the steam from the engine rising though the headlights. I looked up and down the empty road, nothing but white reflector paint rolling for what seemed like miles. The water tower with the town name stenciled on it, untouched by the adolescence of graffiti. The man sat there on the ground with his head in his hands, his sun burned neck throbbing a bit, veins getting all thick in places as he kind of choked out a couple covered up sobs.

And in the middle of this Debbie was looking at me like it was my fault.

Her father took his hands from his face and looked up at me standing near my open door. For some reason I checked to see if maybe I had a hard on, it’s just kind of instinct when you’re wearing nothing but gym shorts. I’d like to say I did, it sure would have been a sight, standing over him like that, my raised up mesh shorts poking out at perfect attention, sticking a bone right at his nose.

“She’s not just some slut,” he said.

“Okay.”

Debbie spun around and started walking in a circle. “Dad…” she started to say and he waved her off and started to stand up. I backed up a bit, I admit it. I tightened my grip on my keys, sure I did.

He was taller than me and I felt uncomfortable there, wet, half naked and no hair gel.

“You can’t just…She’s my fucking daughter,” he said and looked off down the road into nothing. I looked with him and didn’t see the blazing comet trails or the fireflies that should have been there. It was just dark mid summer, barley a breeze. I’d be lying if I said I even remembered hearing crickets.

Debbie walked around to her dad’s car and got in. I didn’t look but could hear the door slam and see her shadow in the headlights. It’s probably safe to say I was the only one not crying there at three o’clock in the morning in the middle of nowhere. It’s probably safe to say I didn’t feel all that good about it either, but seriously what the hell.

It seemed like hours until he finally spoke again.

“My name’s Dan,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand and sticking the other out toward me. He was still looking off down the road at the small little twinkling dots of houses way off in the hilly distance.

I looked at the hand stretched out to meet mine. The wedding band, the wrist watch. I looked at my own and wondered when it is that you can look down at your hand and say it looks like an adult’s. I still feel like I have kid hands and I almost feel guilty when I let him take it in his and we both grip and shake. One pump and it’s over. He wipes his hand on the thigh of his khakis.

“Sorry,” I say.
“Ya.”
“Boston?”
“Pardon?”
“My dad, he’s from Boston, he…Never mind.”
“No, I’m actually from right outside Boston actually, where did he go to school?”
“Salem State.”
“Ahh…” he said and looked at me I think for the first time. I mean really looked at me not just as a target for a Corona bottle or a bumper car.


“MIT,” he said and smiled.


“Nice,” I said, but I would have pegged him for some place else, I don’t know why.


The smile didn’t last long, half a second maybe, and now I wonder if it was really there at all or if I made it up. Neither of us said anything else. He ground his loafers into the small pebbles in the side of the road and twisted his neck around in a circle like he was stretching. Even though it was August I swear I felt cold. I shook my hair with my hand and tried to pick the dried blood off my foot with my other toe. I caught him looking.


“I’m uh, I’m sorry too,” he said still looking down at the dark flecks on my white, white toes.


“No,” I started to say and then we both started talking at once. “I was -- ”


“No, nope, look, don’t -- ”


“I--”

“Aaaaggghh…” he said and put both fingers in his ears and shook his head. “Enough. Enough.”


“Stay right there,” he said and I watched him disappear through the headlights and go in his car. When he does I can hear Debbie say something and him say something and they sound like their arguing but in whispers. I really do feel cold and I almost think of just jumping back in the car until I remember that it’s fucked.



When David comes back he’s got a big tan sweater. “Put this on, will ya.”


It’s going to hang down to about my knees but I do it. He points to the hood where there’s little trails of white smoke still puffing up in anticlimactic strings.


“Alternator,” I say. He nods.



“We should probably get you home,” he says but doesn’t look at me. I pray for a UFO to land on the nearest telephone pole and get me the fuck out of here, but I just reach in and grab my cell phone off the floor of the Honda and shut the door.


“I’ll have it towed to the house,” Dan says and for some reason I feel like I better not say thank you.


In the car Debbie is sitting in the back so I’m forced to sit up front. The whole ride no one talks, and it’s just the soft volume of a Lite Rock radio station and the tires on the smooth summer road.


I stare at the rear view mirror until I catch her eye and when I do I hold onto it. It could have been miles of us just looking at each other with the emotion of the Dead Sea. When her dad notices he just turns up the radio and stares at the road.


When we pull into the driveway her mother and her little sister are sitting on the frost steps and both get up and the mother grabs the sister’s arm.


Underneath the car is the sound of tires crushing glass against gravel and when I hear it I swear that’s when I see just the smallest smile on her face in the mirror. I won’t say it was there, but I’ll say I think I really did see it.


And when I look at the old man, I swear I see something just as close.

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