“Man, why would you loan her money in the first place?” the guy asked the pay phone. “Yeah, so, you see what happens.” Thick green paint splotches splattered his jeans. He had super-broad shoulders and skin as dark as I’d seen skin get, and he looked exhausted. He looked past me, to two little boys slapping at each other.

“I gotta go,” he told his faraway friend. “My wash is almost done.” When he slammed the phone onto the hook the kids straightened up, but it was too late. He was crossing the room, he was yanking them apart, he was plopping them down on the bench on either side of him and whispering horrible promises of what would happen if they didn’t sit still. One boy caught me staring and made a face, so stuck in his own misery he couldn’t see my own.

I was sixteen, and I had no one to teach me how to drive. Mom worked every day that summer, and her hair was long and shaggy—if she didn’t have time for a trim, you can bet she wasn’t taking time off to give me lessons. Grandma had Alzheimer’s and dad was locked up near Coxsackie, and there was no one else, no family friends, no relatives, no neighbors with spare time and a spare car. Nothing had ever made me feel our poverty so hard, or our isolation. Every passing week deepened my disgrace.

“No fair,” I said, since, while I was staring at the exhausted man, Lisette had ripped off my arm and beaten me to death with it. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

“That’s no excuse,” she said. On the greasy screen of the arcade console, her character danced the cha-cha-cha over my character’s corpse. She held out four quarters and asked: “ready for a rematch?”

Lisette was so good at the game that I didn’t mind getting smashed to bits. Every day that summer we ended up in the laundromat. Kids would stand around us and watch her in awe. I never once managed to win.

This time, though, we had no audience. “Girl!” I said. “Where’d you get moves like that?” Her arm was warm and muscular against mine.

I kept looking back towards the two little boys. Remarkably well-behaved, now that their father was brooding beside them. I envied them the gift of a brother, but mostly I pitied them. Youth meant powerlessness to me. Elementary school in the desolate Caucasian Hudson Valley had been miserable. Mom said it was racism. I was glad she thought that. If they were racists, it meant it wasn’t my fault. Maybe they were racists, but they didn’t say racist things. Mom’s white and dad’s light-skinned, so it’s not like I’m something straight off the Somali plains. If the kids around me didn’t like black people, they kept it to themselves. The issue was: they ignored me, and I needed attention. Badly. I took extreme steps. I’d let lunch rot in my cubby, then stuff it into someone’s backpack. I’d steal jewelry from one girl and plant it on another. The teacher taped our drawings to the wall, and I’d write curse words on them.

Then I’d get into fights with kids who didn’t dig the things I smeared on their clothes, or the crazy lies I spread about them. One punch and I was on the ground, weeping, plotting assassination. I had no tolerance for physical pain, thanks to my mom, whose idea of punishment was locking up the Nintendo in the closet. My problem has always been: I don’t know how to respond to things that upset me.

The black guy was passed out in his seat, lulled by the rumble and throb of the dryers behind him. His sons sat perfectly still on either side of him. Lisette and I walked out into the blazing day.

“Ugh,” she said. “I hate summer.” Sitting on the sidewalk, we compared the contents of our pockets. There wasn’t enough change left for a single soda, not even the Shop-Rite brand.

“That’s Andreas.” I said, pointing to someone coming out of a new red Mazda. The man slammed his door shut, pocketed his keys. “Do you know him? His brother died, a couple years ago.”

“That’s so sad,” Lisette said. She was a recent arrival, and my small-town knowledge of people’s private lives gave me—paradoxically—a sense of worldliness and experience.

“Car accident,” I continued. “Hit by a drunk driver.”

All the older boys obsessed me, but I saw Andreas as a rock star. His grief had given him a new glamour, and everyone showed him the respect and kindness they never showed me. I prayed for a brother, so he could die.

Five minutes later he came out of the store and I started to cross the lot, driven towards his car by a courage I didn’t know I had. “Hey Andreas,” I said, since we got there at the same time.

“Gupp!” he said. “What you up to, little man?”

“Just hanging out, basically.” Nervousness made me blurt: “I’m pissed off because I just turned sixteen and I can’t get my driver’s license.”

“No car?”

“There’s that, but I don’t even have anyone to teach me.”

He leaned his back against the car, arms crossed over his stomach. “Your parents don’t know how to drive?”

“Sure, but my dad doesn’t live around here and my mom’s working 24-7.”

“Hm.” His big eyes scanned the edges of the lot. Planning his great escape from this shitty town where idiot black boys bugged him with their problems. What response had I been expecting? I waited for him to laugh in my face, or raise his fist to strike me. Would Lisette hear my humiliation?

“You want a Klondike bar, Gupp?” he asked.

“Sure!” I said, then bit back the eagerness in my voice. It was not cool to get excited about ice cream.

He held out two. “No prob. Take one for your girl. I was over at a buddy’s house, there were a bunch of us, and everybody got the munchies. I got picked to go to the store because I was the only one who could see straight.”

I practically shoved that thing into my mouth, shocked that something could be so cold on such a hot day. Through the soles of my All-Stars I felt the pavement, burning like the door to a room on fire.

“You need a driving tutor,” he said, once he’d watched me swallow.

“Pretty much,” I said.

“Want me to do it?”

“Are you serious?”

“As a heart attack.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’d be great.”

“I work nights,” he said, “six to midnight, washing dishes. So I have the whole day to myself. Tomorrow at noon?”

I gave him my address.

“Now you better bring your girl her Klondike bar before it melts.” He saluted me.

“Ok. Bye.” I ambled back, but I was breathing fast when I got there. “He remembered my name,” I said.

“Of course he remembers your name,” she said. “Because it’s retarded. Something you name a stuffed animal. Gupp. What the hell is that?”

He remembered me because at Hudson High you stood out if you weren’t blonde. “Let’s split,” I said. “I have to get ready for my driving lesson.”

Lisette’s smile was even broader than mine. When we kissed goodbye, she grabbed my behind in both hands. I passed her my gum. I had come a long way from the first grade. I didn’t need non-stop attention anymore. All I needed was to be in total control of any given situation.

Of course I couldn’t sleep that night. I lay on the floor of my tiny bedroom, listening to Mom sing along with the radio while she washed dishes. She sang “The Tracks of My Tears,” and then “It’s The Same Old Song,” and then “Where Did Our Love Go?” You could tell it was payday because she had bought two new plug-in air fresheners, and the whole trailer smelled like peach. My hamper, with its arsenal of supremely-funky socks and underwear, fought a losing battle to assert some shred of masculinity.

The next day I got up early and did push-ups and sit-ups for an hour on the narrow strip of lawn behind our place. Andreas showed up just before noon. Hearing him honk I realized: I should have told him to meet me at the Plaza. But I didn’t. So now he knew I was trailer trash.

“What up, Gupp,” he said when I got into the car. “How you be?”

People always talk ghetto to me. Most of the time I just nod my head and make a mental note to hate that person for the rest of my life, and to douse them in gasoline and set them on fire at the earliest opportunity. Coming from Andreas, though, I liked it. “I’m good,” I said. “Thanks again for doing this.”

“Nah, man, no problem. Somebody taught me, now I’m teaching you, someday you’ll teach someone else. It’s the circle of life.”

“Yeah.”

Inside, the Mazda smelled older than it looked from the outside. The upholstery was cracked, and someone had been smoking lots of cigarettes in there. Something, possibly beer, had been spilled in the backseat a long time ago and never cleaned up.

“A man needs a car,” he said. “It’s the only space that’s truly his.”

With his Aryan tinting and preppie clothes he looked like a living Abercrombie ad. Clear skin; a tan hiding the freckles. Red-blonde hair spilled out of the neck of his polo shirt. Above his waist, the plaid of a pair of boxer shorts peeped out. Which made me realize that I had been wearing briefs my whole life, because that’s what my mom always bought for me. I made a vow, never to wear briefs again.

He drove us out to the county highway and we switched seats. Driving, I mimicked Andreas’ blank face, his grip on the wheel. We spent hours parallel parking and practicing turns and passing slow cars and signaling before we got to stop signs. He was a wonderful teacher: stern and impatient, not above being nasty when necessary. When I stopped too short coming up on a red light, and his body strained forward against his seat belt, he punched me in the arm, hard, and said, “don’t ever fucking let that happen again.” On long stretches of flat road I would want to say something, some friendly man-to-man remark about school or girls or the future or the remake of an old horror movie that Lisette and I saw last week, but I didn’t want to snap us out of the groove we had going, where I was the obedient little boy and he was the mean taskmaster teaching me what I needed to know. So I was almost disappointed when he said:

“What do your folks do for a living, Gupp?”

“My mom’s a waitress,” I said. “And my dad’s not around. What about yours?”

“My mom’s a teacher and my dad works in a bank. Where’s your dad?”

“He’s locked up,” I said, after a three-second agony of What-to-Say. The bad-ass appeal of a dad in prison won out over the stigma attached. And Andreas didn’t come back with “what’d he do?” like most people.

Andreas dropped me off at home. He said, “later, bro,” and stuck out his hand. I shook it, and turned to go, but he held me fast. “Always look a guy in the eyes when you shake his hand,” he said.

“Gotcha,” I said, but he held on.

“Do you know why men shake hands?”

“Um… no.”

“Back in caveman days, or whatever, when two men met each other, in the forest or something, there was a very good chance one might kill the other, and eat him, or something. So shaking hands was a way to show the other guy that you weren’t holding some kind of weapon.”

“O…kay...”

He let go. “And that’s still what shaking hands is about. Convincing the other guy that you aren’t going to eat him, even if you really are.”

“Wow,” I said, because what else can you say to that?

“You’re practically a pro,” Andreas said when I got in his car the next day. “You’ve got the basic mechanics. Now it’s just a matter of getting used to it. The test itself is mostly psychological. You gotta show the guy you’re comfortable driving. He’ll forgive a few mistakes in a confident driver, but if you do everything perfectly and are sweating balls because you’re so nervous, you’re never gonna pass.”

“Never thought of that.” Like him, I stared ahead when I spoke. But after a sentence I couldn’t help turning my head to see how he reacted. Did he nod, did he roll his eyes, was he completely tuning me out?

“So today what we do is just drive until it’s second nature. Okay? Until you could do it in your sleep. That’s how I learned. My brother’s friend forced me to drive for like two hours, until I was a pro.”

I didn’t like this friendly tone. I wanted the bossy warden, the strict stare, and I was relieved, two hours later, at his hint of gruffness when he said:

“Pull off up here.” He steered me onto a wide patch of wild grass. “Drive up a bit,” he said, and I saw it was the driveway of an old farmhouse. The front door was gone and the roof was sagging in three different spots. A heap of pipes was on the porch.

“Good job,” he said, snatching the keys out of their slot. “Let’s have a cigarette.”

“Okay,” I said, dreading it. Dad smoked, and every so often I’d try. And puke. Cigarettes turned me into a sick little kid, instead of a cool confident man. After lighting his own, Andreas held the match across for me. I cupped my hands around it and sucked fire up into my cigarette.

“What’s your girlfriend’s name, Gupp?” he asked.

“Her name’s Lisette.” I blew smoke in his direction.

“Is she hot? At the shopping center I was too far away to see.” He rolled his window down. I rolled mine down too.

“Very.”

Three puffs in, to my surprise, I still felt fine. No churning stomach, no spinning head. A tingly warmth filled my limbs, and it felt sort of nice. Maybe there was hope for me.

“You fuck her yet?”

“We’ve done some stuff.”

Andreas spent a while looking out. I hadn’t realized how late it was. Setting, the sun was a deep bright orange, and it lit up the windows of the abandoned house like fire. He was staring at an old car, rusted through and through, windows and wheels all gone.

“When it comes to sex, cars are the best,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “Why do you think I’m so stressed out about not having one?”

“It’s crazy how different everything is when you get a car.” He smiled, and turned to take in the scene inside his Mazda: the papers on the floor, the stale air smell, the decal on the back window with the name of the college he’d be going to in a month. But after a few minutes he was just watching me, his lips sort of smiling.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said, but kept looking at me.

“What?” I asked again.

“I want you to suck my cock,” he said flatly.

“Excuse me? You’re nuts.” I moved to start the car but the keys were in his pocket. “Let’s go,” I said.

“You think I can’t beat your ass?”

Long, dead-silent pause.

“You think I wouldn’t leave you way the hell out here by the side of the road? You’d be a bloody mess, and I’d take your clothes for good measure. Say I couldn’t.”

He could. Bullies steered clear of me and coaches courted me, figuring that every black boy had a savage inside him aching to get out, but I was a little punk with no muscle mass and no capacity for self-defense. Andreas knew it.

“Long walk home for a kid with a bloody nose and two broken ribs and no damn clothes,” he said, unzipping, unbuckling, scooting down his pants until his pale knees showed. His hand clamped on my upper arm and he jerked me over, into range, so he could get a hand at the back of my neck and pull me the rest of the way.

“Don’t come in my mouth,” I said, when it was inches from my face and I was ninety-nine percent sure I was going to puke.

“No?” he asked. “What, you’re on a diet?”

“No, asshole, I just don’t want to fucking get AIDS.”

He laughed. My snottiness amused him. I was no threat. “What do I look like?” he asked. “A faggot?”

I had a perfect retort, but suddenly I was comprehensively inarticulate.

All that registered was the taste: salty and curdled and bad, like a food you’re never supposed to eat, something profane, something savage tribes eat. Once in a while a car rumbled by on the far-off road. My eyes stayed shut. A breeze came up, blew in one window and out the other. The weatherman had promised rain, a thunderstorm that would start at sunset and last til long after midnight. Mom didn’t put the wash out on the line that morning—instead, she strung some twine from one end of the living room to the other, and back, four times, and hung the clothes there.

“That calls for a cigarette,” Andreas said, tossing one onto my lap. Like a fool, and mostly just to get the taste out of my mouth, I smoked it.

Here’s why Dad went to jail—here, anyway, is the story behind one of dad’s trips to jail. He told it to me when I was ten, and he spent a weekend with us on his way to Utica.

When he lived in Hudson Dad did day labor. Mostly plumbing. Gross rusty pipes jutting out of basement floors. He spent one whole summer restructuring the sewage system in a historic house on the Hudson River. At the very least, he said, it was cool in that old basement, while the poor fucks refinishing the authentic tin roof sweated themselves into dehydration.

Dad’s boss liked to drink, and always took his men out for beer after work. That’s what rich people do, Dad said, when they have no friends. They buy the company of others. One Friday night the boss got drunk and started making fun of my father—nasty stuff, borderline racist. Dad told him to shut the fuck up, the guy kept ranting, Dad started ranting back. The guy slapped my dad.

What did Dad do? Nodded his head and drank another beer. Showed up at work on Monday with a smile on his face. Weeks went by. Dad is not a homicidal-rage sort of person. Dad waits until you think he’s forgotten, and then he fucks you up. One night they were all drinking after work and the boss got too drunk to drive, so Dad offered him a lift. Drove him back out to the old house they were working on. The power still hadn’t been turned on. The property was black and quiet. He said to his boss, I’m not going to humiliate you in front of everyone. I’m not ever going to tell anyone about this. The issue is not what other people think of me. The issue is what I think of me. I’m not trying to win back my honor in the eyes of everyone else. But I am going to come damn close to killing you.

And Dad beat his putzy white boss to a pulp. With a pipe.

I passed my test on the first try. Cucumber-cool, totally confident: while parallel parking I nudged the car behind me, and the tester didn’t say a word.

Lisette squealed the first time I drove up in front of her house.

“Oh my god!” she said, and slid across the passenger seat to grab my head in both hands and gnaw at it. “This is so exciting!”

“Where to, Miss Daisy?”

Since all we listened to that summer was the oldies station, Lisette sang: “Destination Anywhere/ East or West, I don’t care.” She had on baggy black jeans and a red hooded sweatshirt; her hair was cut short like a boy’s.

Later on, running my fingers through it as her head bobbed over my crotch, I softened after a mere thirty seconds.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah yeah,” I said. Quick as shame I had her by the shoulders, hoisted her up, slid down under her, plopped her back down on my face. My hands were a blur over her upper body, overwhelming us with sensory stimulation so we would not wonder what my new fellatiophobia meant about me, or her, or us.

With my driver’s license, I lived a nocturnal life. Mom took the car to work every day, and at night I took it out. I looked for work, but not very hard. My friends, all richer than me, paid for the gas.

“You owe it all to that Andreas guy,” Lisette said one night.

“Yeah,” I said.

In the last two weeks of summer, the weather only got worse. The air was so hot and dry that my mom kept getting nosebleeds, and Columbia County had three separate brown-outs. Old people with no air conditioning died, and people stayed out late in parking lots and on porches.

One night we went to a party out past Stottville, near the river, in a field on someone’s farm. When I picked Lisette up she was on her porch with a cigarette. Was she wearing heels? Extra eye shadow? I felt like I had never seen her before. “Hi babe,” I said, and kissed her smoke-smelling lips. “Give me a drag,” I said. We smoked all the way there.

Parking was a jumble of cars and trucks on a steep hill, with the Hudson River glimmering at the bottom. Low tide, mud showing through in patches. The breeze had a mucky intimate edge to it, like rotting fish. On our walk up the hill from where we parked, we found Andreas on the ground with a bloated drunken look to his face. “Hey,” I said.

“What up, Gupp?” he asked, barely able to see me. “How you be?”

“Chillin’, mah nigga,” I said, with so much irony only an idiot could miss it, and Andreas missed it.

“I heard you passed your drivers test. That’s great. I’m really happy for you.” He was sprawled on his back, his T-shirt pulled up to show his stomach, and the Batman tattoo above his belly button—something cheap and amateurish, like something you get in jail, but Andreas would never have to worry about jail. Jails aren’t built for college-bound blond boys. The sun was behind me, so he avoided looking up at us.

“Later, homey,” I said, arm around Lisette, hustling her away, hoping Andreas spent the whole night flopped on the ground. Would he tell anyone? Would they believe him?

I hate to drink, but for form’s sake I got us each a beer from the cooler by the fire. Some older guy asked, “you got any pot?”

I leveled a hard-ass stare at him. “No. Why would I?”

“Just asking,” he said, scurrying off.

No one snubbed us when we spoke to people and the radio was cranked up high and everyone was dancing and we danced too, and Lisette drank a lot and slipped into this blissed-out trance, like we had gotten into the most exclusive club in town.

We stayed late. Twice we slipped away to fuck in the field. No one noticed, although I hoped they would. She was on her back the first time, and complained the whole time about how cold the ground was, so next time she was on top. The ground was cold as the bottles in the cooler next to the fire. After that hot day, and that whole hot summer, I figured the ground would have soaked up all that heat and kept it, like hate, simmering just below the thick grass. When we were done, and I sat up, my back was numb.

The second time we returned to the circle of firelight, field was empty.

“Christ,” she said, looking at her watch. “How long were we back there?”

“No idea,” I said.

“Did we fall asleep?”

I shrugged. They had left the fire burning. At this point it was just hot embers and a few flaming twigs. The cooler still sat there, a cheap styrofoam thing full of melted ice, and I dumped it out over the fire, and then stomped until my boots were caked in muddy ash.

Walking back to where we parked, we passed Andreas’ Mazda. The driver’s-side door was open and his leg hung out. The only other car on the hill, besides my mom’s, was an old pick-up truck whose owner got too drunk and was dragged home by friends. The nearest houses were three miles in any direction, and the night was black as anything I’d ever seen.

“Ugh,” Lisette said, on the drive back to her house. “I hate the end of summer.” She had her window all the way down and her hand trailing in the wind. When she spoke her voice was sullen and slurred. “I can’t believe school starts next week. Fucking Christ.”

At her house, she got out and came around to my side. “Get home safe, okay?” she asked, like I was the drunk one. Her hands touched the sides of my face.

“Sure thing babe,” I said, and we kissed, but I wasn’t heading straight home.

Back in the field, I was startled by how silent it was. Somehow I’d been expecting leftover noise from the party. I parked a ways away, although I knew no noisy engine would startle Andreas out of his sleep. I walked to his car like a ninja, stepping lightly, breaking no sticks. His leg still jutted out the door, which I opened all the way.

The keys weren’t in the ignition, so I went for his pocket. Reaching across him, my ear brushed his mouth. A rich yeasty beer smell rose from him. Puke flecked the collar of his shirt, a plaid flannel thing that fit him well. I could feel the warmth of his leg, and a pair of condoms he had in his pocket alongside the keys.

Bad TV has taught these tricks to all of us: how to keep the emergency brake on, press down on the gas pedal ‘til the engine shrieks, slam down the brake, jump back. The car went fast at first, then slowed, then sped up as it traveled the steep incline. In my head, in cinematic widescreen, the car exploded on impact, reducing Andreas to ash. Or it missed the trees and rolled onto the tracks, where a speeding passenger train hit it, reducing Andreas to ash.

In the real world it wasn’t spectacular at all. The car hit a tree and crumpled, like a piece of paper in your fist. Half the windows didn’t even break. But I knew Andreas was not okay. I heard him screaming. I stayed a few minutes, waiting to see if he’d stop, or crawl out of the car, but he didn’t. The screams only got louder.

On the drive home I flipped through the stations, searching for a news bulletin. AREA TEEN PARALYZED IN CAR ACCIDENT or AREA TEEN A VEGETABLE AFTER DRUNK DRIVING MISHAP. Of course there was nothing, since ten minutes hadn’t passed since I put his car in drive. In the end I settled on the oldies station. Smokey Robinson came on, his voice high and sad, asking everyone take a good look at my face. I started to sing along, then stopped.

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