HAPPY BIRTHDAY

by
Zsolt Alapi

Call me Ishmael without his Ahab.

Kinch without a blade or a Buck Mulligan.

Call me the perennial Sid Sawyer.

I am, against my own will and desire, the Good, Good Boy, someone who parents show off with pride, someone who can recite all the books of the Bible (in order even!), the proverbial ‘nice guy’ who girls befriend, confide in, trust, but seldom desire.

Leslie Fiedler nailed it when he made me into a forgettable archetype. Sid, the pride of Aunt Polly. Sid, clean-behind-the-ears, who washes his bare feet after play. Sid, the paragon of moral virtue. Sick-of-Being-Sid. All of this while Tom is off at piracies, maybe even having it off with the ringletted, crinoline-wearing Becky Thatchers of this world. Not to mention Huck, smoking weird shit in a corncob pipe, naked on his raft, laughing at the crazy world drifting by, the Crown Prince of his own story, an existential, decidedly un-Royal-non-Such.

It is my eighteenth birthday and I have dared to disturb the universe. There is this girl, Eve Heinz, a goddess, who sits in my senior English class giving all the guys and even the teacher rocks. She is wearing a micro- mini, and Evie (as her friends call her) is all legs, high breasts, the model’s gait. Because of her, I have developed a new exercise for my eyes. They can appear to stare straight ahead, but in reality rotate on a complex axis, never losing sight of the gash where her thighs join. My finely tuned vision catches the imperceptible shudder of her puss-hairs under silk panties.

I have been paired with Evie for the past week. We have analyzed the metaphysical poets, Keats, and ‘Prufrock.’ I have regaled her with my brilliance. I am Orpheus of the Golden Voice. My talk mesmerizes her, my voice caresses her in all her secret places. Each night I lie awake, tortured, dreaming about her in my onanistic fantasies, she, La Belle Dame at My Mercy.

And so I have taken it upon myself, forcing the moment to its crisis, taken it upon myself to ask her to celebrate my eighteenth birthday with me. I wonder why she has said yes, why she is with me now looking bored in the Café Arena, listening to me blather on, my voice hoarse with intensity and from my tenth Gitanes, hyped up on espresso and cheap brandy from a pocket flask.

We have just seen the University Player’s revival production of Edward Albee’s ‘Box-Mao-Box,’ a minimalist example of the Theater of the Absurd—my idea of a good time. The actor who played Mao sat for two minutes in the aisle seat next to mine and spoke his first lines from his little Red Book:

‘A revolution is no dinner party.’

Evie was not amused by my knowing guffaw.

As we sit over coffee, Miles’ ‘Kind of Blue’ playing over the loudspeakers, me forcing the conversation, she staring across the crowd, Evie notices some friends who come over.

‘Hi….’

‘What are you doing here…..?’

‘We just came from the Aerosmith concert…’

‘Awesome…’

‘Steven Tyler is one ugly dude, but, man, can he sing….’

‘Those lips….he could be Mick’s brother…’

‘Were you at the concert, Evie?’

‘Where’s Malik tonight….who’s that you with…?’

I tell them about why Edward Albee is a genius. About his insight into the Human Condition, about Existential Authenticity, but they seem not to hear, and continue their own cryptic conversation, until Evie finally says:

‘I would have given anything to see Aerosmith. Instead, I sat through two and a half hours of the most boring bullshit I have ever heard with some chubby Chink reading from a small, red book. I can’t wait to get home.’

She doesn’t bother to introduce me to her friends, most of whom I have seen with her in school, but have never spoken to.

Then, we are in a taxi, slipping and sliding through the wet snow. It is March 26th, but there is a bona fide snowstorm under way. The jolt of the cab brings her closer to me so that our knees knock together.

Did I mention that it is my eighteenth birthday? Evie lives in the suburbs, more than forty- five minutes away in this weather. The snow is so thick that it is impossible to see the street signs, and soon there are no more lights, just trees, vast lawns, and then her driveway.

I pay the driver with my last twenty. I have exactly $2.75 left after the tip. I watch the cab disappear into the white evening, a lost speck of light. We walk to Evie’s door. I know this is my moment. After all, everyone gets laid on his eighteenth birthday, right? Besides, her parents, she has told me, are away for the weekend, I am seventeen miles from home, and there is a major blizzard happening.

Evie opens the door, then quickly turns to me.

‘Thanks for the evening. Happy Birthday.’

Then, she shuts (slams?) the door, and I can hear her slide the extra bolt and turn off the light by the entrance and the porch. There is nothing to be done but to turn back towards the highway, almost a half a mile away. It is seriously snowing now, and wet, heavy flakes mat my hair, sliding down my shirt collar under my coat.

I stop on her vast lawn in the dark, realizing I have to piss terribly. I have been nursing a hard-on for over an hour, all the way to her house in the cab. This was the hard-on that I knew would be vindicated, my adult hard-on, the hard-on that would make me a man at eighteen.

I pull it out, and immediately great gusts of snow fall on it, shrinking it, so that I shiver and make a fast job of it, a calling card on her front lawn. I leave behind a yellow circle—the perfect 0 of my existence—but already the snow is covering it, perhaps the same snow that had once fallen outside as Gabriel in Joyce’s masterpiece had looked down upon the graveyard through the eyes of his wife, understanding, clarifying, the clouds of his own desire.

***

When I finally get to the highway leading back into town, I am soaked through and shivering uncontrollably. A few trucks roar by in the far lane, and I am waiting for what seems like forever in the ever-thickening snowfall. And then, a car pulls over, sliding and spinning dirt onto the soft shoulder. The door opens.

‘Where you headed?’

‘Downtown,’ I reply. My teeth are chattering and I somehow feel like crying.

‘Get in.’

We drive in silence for some time. The car is deliciously warm, there is even some music, a station playing the ‘Oldies,’ with some soft soul, and I sink back into the leather expanse of the Buick’s front seats. My teeth finally stop their chattering and I am almost off into the narcotic haze of sleep.

The driver offers me a cigarette and I fumble with the lighter, my fingers still numb and red from the cold. He glances at me from time to time as we smoke. The Platters are on the radio crooning ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.’ Very romantic. I am half asleep, almost smiling by now, dreaming, my eyes closed.

Suddenly, I hear a voice, rising to a yell:

‘I’m going to pull over and then I want you to SUCK MY DICK.’

My eyes pop open. My driver has slowed to a crawl; he is holding a knife in his right fist that looks big enough to skin a bear. Or an eighteen year old male virgin.

He is holding the knife near his lap. His pants are unzipped and the head of his cock is poking out from his jeans. All I can think of is that it looks much smaller than the knife. He looks at me, waving the knife, seeing the terror on my face.

‘I’m getting off at the next exit and then you’re gonna give me a blow job. You’re some kind of fairy with that long hair.’

I feel for the handle of the car’s door, feel the door opening gently to my touch. We have almost come to a full stop now, and there is no one on the highway. It is my time to act—either that or become a headline in the morning news:

BIRTHDAY, BLOWJOB, AND BLOOD

It is now or never.

But then I think, ‘What if….?’ and we are probably still some ten miles from town. Better to be found dead in the snow? My driver (shall I call him my rapist-to-be?) sees me hesitating:

‘Come on, fairy boy, let’s do it. NOW.’

And then it pours out of me, my story. The story of my birthday, all the books I have read, all the sad, sad disappointments of being eighteen. I talk as I have never talked before. My driver is mesmerized by the power of my words. Each phrase I utter, each new story I begin draws us ever closer to the city, to lights, to safety! I say anything that comes to mind. I even recite poetry: ‘The Cremation of Sam McGhee,’ ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ (why do I only remember disasters?), finishing with Yeats’ ‘Song of the Wandering Aengus’ (my favorite!). I even sing some ditties. I recite the books of the Bible in order. I gibber in three languages. My tongue is the odometer that measures the miles.

My driver puts the knife down under his seat (how had I not seen it there?).

His cock, though, is still poking out of his pants, albeit limp now. So much for literature.

‘You know, kid, getting laid isn’t all its cut out. The first time it happened to me, this broad I knew was so worried about me knockin’ her up that she put in a diaphragm and made me wear two rubbers. And finally, when I was ready to pop, she made me pull it out.’

We are now entering the outskirts of the city. There are lights and a few more cars along the road. Even the snow is starting to let up.

‘So, how about it,’ he asks, ‘No blowjob?’

‘No, I really don’t think so.’

‘Ain’t love a bitch. Where do you live, kid?’

By now, we are near Main and Utica. ‘Just down there a ways.’

‘You got one hell of a way with words, you know that? You’ll be ok. There will always be other broads.’

‘Maybe. And what about you? Why the knife?’

‘Ah, I probably wouldn’t have used it. Too fuckin’ cold out tonight.’ He cackles, though it sounds like all the sadness of the world. ‘Here’s your stop.’

I open the door and step out into the cold and the blowing gusts of white. Somehow I feel old, more tired than I have ever felt. I look back at my driver, managing a smile.

‘Thanks for the ride. I don’t know if I would have made it.’

The big Buick does a u-turn on the empty street and then stops next to me. The driver rolls down his window and looks at me with those sad eyes.

‘Hey, kid…..Happy Birthday!’

He’s even decent enough to zip his cock back inside his pants before he drives off into the night.

© Zsolt Alapi
Reproduced with permission

---