Blue Boy Page 5
I walk into our house through the side door. Only recently have I been able to detect a slight but ever-present odor of Indian cooking permeating its walls. It gets stronger as I walk into the kitchen. For a long time, I assumed that my house was immune to such an odor. I know that the other Indians in our social circle have always had house odors so stifling that an asthmatic wheeze has attacked me upon entering their foyers from time to time, but I thought my house had always been different, Americanized, as cleanly scented as a Glade air freshener. But a few weeks ago when Cody came over to play, he dropped the bomb on me. “Dude, yer house smells like curry.”
“So, vhen do I get to meet your future vife?” my dad asks, entering the kitchen with a cat-sized camcorder held out in front of him. He looks at its small fold-out screen, then twists the screen around so that it faces me. I can see the bored yet uncomfortable look in my own eyes.
“Mom, when do we eat?” I ask nervously, trying to ignore the camcorder. We’ve just eaten prasad at temple, but it never satisfies our hunger. Prasad feels more like an obligation than a meal.
“Beta, it vill be another fifteen minutes. Vhy don’t you go change your clothes and then study until it’s ready? Here—drink this.”
“Okay,” I say, downing the murky concoction of vitamins that she gives me in a tall glass. I head for the foyer. My father follows. He has these stages when his affection for family life comes pouring forth. It’s nearly impossible to guess when this emotional display will occur, but when it does, it’s a full-on wave of giddiness. I can actually converse with him when he’s like this, even if it’s to berate him:
“Dad, please don’t film me while I change!”
“I’ll stop filming if you tell me your girlfriend’s name.” He laughs heartily, flipping the screen back to himself to look at my reaction, as if the screen is a better representation of my feelings than the flesh-and-blood Kiran before him.
“Her name is Stopfilming.”
“And her last name?”
“Singh, Dad. Her name is Stopfilming Singh.” I dash up the stairs, hearing my father call out, “Vell, at least she’s Punjabi…”
The Intrigue of a Tit
The next day, I sit down at our kitchen table and try to make a list of facts that I know about Krishna. If I’m going to reclaim Him, if I’m going to assert that the reason I feel so different from everyone is because I am in fact godly, I’m going to have to mold my current life after my past life. I’m going to have to mimic His behavior. Somehow, I know that this has something to do with the talent show, this reorganization of my character. I just don’t know exactly how yet.
I know that Krishna is blue-skinned, of course, so on my piece of looseleaf paper, I write
1. Blue skin
I also know that Krishna is one embodiment of Vishnu, the Preserver. You see, there are three main gods on the Hindu roster: Brahma the Creator, who was hatched out of an egg on a never-ending sea; Vishnu the Preserver, many-armed and often so light-skinned that He might just be a luxuriously jaundiced Indian; and Shiva the Destroyer, who sits cross-legged and bears that smiling cobra around His neck. Vishnu has the hardest job, I think. Brahma gets to create and let His creations go, like a doodling toddler. Shiva gets to raze everything, like Cody does while playing Contra, a Cold War–inspired Nintendo game that pits a pair of buff muscle men, machine gun bullets crossing their chests, against various enemies that appear on snow skis, on tanks, in underground pipes. But Vishnu has to take care of everything, like Mrs. Garrett took care of her girls on The Facts of Life, and this is probably why He has to split himself into so many incarnations. The fact that Krishna is such a recognizable and shining god is all the more impressive; as one of Vishnu’s many incarnations, He has to fight against other members of an elite crew, but He emerges as the most extravagant, and therefore most memorable, god.
So I write
2. Show-off
I also know that Krishna plays the flute. It is said that when He played His flute in the sylvan Indian pastures, animals would travel from near and far to hear Him play, so beautiful were the melodies He blew out.
“Mom, why are cows so sacred to us?” I once asked, echoing the question that so many of my classmates had asked me before. I had never known how to answer; I just scoffed and acted like it was something everyone should know, or something that was offensive to ask an Indian person.
“Beta, vhen you look at the pictures of Krishnaji at the temple, vhat do you see around him?” my mother replied, her fingers smushed into a bowlful of dough.
“Um, a jungle. Lots of plants. Some mountains.”
“And cows, beta. Cows. Vhen Krishnaji played his flute in the fields, the cows from the farms vould gather around him, and so they are considered holy animals.”
I found this explanation somewhat baffling, as I don’t recall horses and other stable animals being called holy just because they gathered around Jesus when He was in the manger. But comparing Hinduism and Christianity can be like comparing apples and oranges. Or like comparing a blue-skinned flutist and a long-tressed carpenter, to be more precise.
So Krishna played His flute…3. Flutist…and He attracted cows. I put my pen to my lips and think. I somehow can’t see how I might bring cows into my life, especially cows that come across as holy. There are plenty of cows in Ohio, of course, but those cows do not resemble the cows that appear in the paintings at our temple. The cows in the paintings are clean and serene-looking, lulled by Krishna’s adept flute-playing. The cows in Ohio look sad, and they are usually covered with smears of mud from the filthy, fenced-off pens that line the road. Their sole purpose is not to be religious icons but to spurt out milk.
Then I remember: Krishna’s favorite food is butter. It is His only weakness. In the Bhagavad-Gita, which my mother used to read to me, Krishna appears wise and seemingly invincible; He gives advice to the warrior Arjuna in the middle of a battlefield, bookended by the opposing armies of the brothers Duryodhana and Dhritarashtra. Krishna is the fount of wisdom, and He represents everything calm and honest and impenetrable about God and man. And yet butter was His culinary kryptonite, His dairy downfall. When He was a child, the baby-blue Krishna would raid His mother’s pantry and steal a pot of butter, which He would set on the ground and wrap His plump little legs around before ingesting all of the creamy smoothness inside. Most portraits of Krishna as a baby show what looks like a little girl, her hair festooned with gold ribbons, a sun or a moon behind her head, and her little, red-palmed hands covered in yellow goo. On her face, there is the pleased look of a child who knows she’s done wrong, and yet there is a certain momentum contained within the picture, as if, right when you turn your back on it, the little girl will resume her sloppy eating right away.
I can encapsulate cows and milk at the same time, and so I write
4. Butter eater.
The last thing—which in many ways was the first thing in my mind—is Krishna’s status as the ultimate lover. In many pictures, He is pictured with Radha, His consort, a traditionally beautiful Indian girl who wears simple saris but still looks devastatingly beautiful. The two of them are usually sitting on a hillside, with Radha propped up on one arm and Krishna right behind her, sculpting His frame to fit the curves of her body. It is almost as if Radha is daydreaming but has a luxurious specter whispering things into her ear. Although Krishna wears flashy clothing and has pierced ears and has red lips, there is also something masculine about Him, a tautness in the bulge of His blue biceps and blue chest, a sense of dominance about His posture. He is the lover extraordinaire, aware of the power of his body and his sensuality. I will need to find a girl with whom I can feel entirely comfortable yet whose actions I might be able to control somewhat.
For my last item, I write
5. Girlfriend
I look at my list again.
1. Blue skin
2. Show-off
3. Flutist
4. Butter eater
5. Girlfriend
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I have already mastered the art of making myself blue thanks to Estée Lauder, and so I put a check mark next to number one.
I put a check next to number two: I know that I have already succeeded in many ways in making myself extravagant. Still, I will have to find new ways to keep myself continually renowned. This is where the talent show will factor in. I just know it.
Number three. I think for a while, wondering where I may get a flute. I am stumped. Maybe I will steal one from the school. I circle number three.
I come to number four and frown. Butter. Eating butter seems like something inextricable from the persona of Krishna; it is something I will have to do full-force. Being a god is not easy, I tell myself. Gods have to attend to the entire world; they have to listen to everyone’s prayers and preserve. I circle number four, knowing that I will have to create a stash of butter to sate my Krishna appetite.
I am just about to consider number five—Girlfriend—when my father comes into the kitchen with a copy of India Abroad and seats himself at the table.
“Vhat are you doing, beta,” he says, smoothing the newspaper in front of him like an archaeologist planning a dig.
“Oh, nothing,” I say, folding up my list quickly and clutching it at my side. “Math homework.”
“Good,” he says, already lost in the newspaper. He acknowledges my mother with a clearing of his throat when she appears, as if by magic, and takes her place at the stove.
I am a walking museum of oddities, and the thing I want the most is genuine sympathy from someone. Well, there’s Cody, but that’s not exactly a strong friendship, either.
Cody Ulrich is a beautiful boy except for one abnormality. He’s a pseudo-hunchback. He comes from a line of unflagging chain smokers—his father Earl’s license plate reads M EARL BORO—and that included the pregnant Mrs. Ulrich, who decided that lighting a ciggie up after her intrapartum feasts of pickles and strawberry jam would only be fair since she was perpetuating the species and all. The result was a baby born with one dead nerve running along his shoulders, one that pulls them forward.
We met last year in Mrs. Nolan’s class. I wish that I could give you some grand reason why we became friends, but the truth is that we were seated next to each other. Cody often forgot to bring a pencil to school, and I was always the person who had to give him one. The second week of class, I lent him one that had red and white stripes on it, like a candy cane, and he looked at me like I had just turned into a unicorn. I expected that he would never talk to me again, but later that day, he wandered over to my empty lunch table, slammed the pencil on the table in front of me, and said, “I guess yer all I got.” Thus a friendship was born.
As if to match the elderly slant of his body, Cody has developed the cynical drollness of a Vietnam vet, and I am usually the recipient of this disposition.
“Who gets a splinter in their ass?” he asks over lunch in the cafetorium—which should actually be called a gymnacafetorium, as it is the venue of not just lunch and pageants but games of dodgeball and pep rallies. I am eating my usual sack lunch of Capri-Sun fruit punch, three sticks of celery, a cup of apple-sauce, and two Ziplocked roti, the brown burn spots on them akin to the moles covering Lunchlady Packer’s skin. Cody is eating school food: a rectangular piece of pizza so undercooked in the cafeteria kitchen’s industrial-sized oven that I think I see ice crystals covering the cheese. “Seriously, Keern. Yer such a sissy.”
“‘In his ass.’ Not ‘their.’ And I am not a sissy,” I insist. Cody is the only person to whom I can say anything with any trace of insistence since no matter what he says, he’ll always be the token hunchback. “I’m not the one who did something wrong. They pushed me!”
“Well, what were ya thinkin’ hangin’ out with Sarah and Melissa anyway? They’re two of the prettiest girls in school. Why would they be friends with you?”
Oftentimes, it seems that Cody is simply a human embodiment of my shame. He always seems to say what my self-esteem has already told me.
“I am floundering,” I say, pensively.
“What?”
“‘Flounder.’ ‘To act clumsily.’ It’s one of my vocab words for the week. It’s also the name of Ariel’s sidekick in The Little Mermaid, remember?”
He laughs, his hunched shoulder fluttering like the wings of a captured moth. “And ya don’t think yer a sissy? Anyway, if yer not too busy watching The Little Mermaid for the millionth time, ya wanna come over today after school? My parents are visitin’ my grandparents in Louisville today.”
I know what this means. It means Cody wants to spend the afternoon looking at Playboy.
How to explain the universal intrigue of a tit?
There is something ever-calming about the roundness of a tit, its buoyancy, the peacefulness of the concentric circle in its middle, darker. The posturing of a tit can vary so greatly, and yet the allure of it never dissipates. Tilted forward, the iris of the eye looking at the ground, the rest of the flesh fatly stretching. Or facing upward, splayed across a chest, lolling around like a plate of Jell-O, the eye quavering. Or staring straight ahead, serene in its sternness. A tit reminds me of Madonna. It can be brash and wild when it wants to be, and yet there are those “Live to Tell” moments when it’s calm and collected.
And there are two of them. So all of this is doubled.
Cody keeps his stack of Playboy under the desk in his bedroom. “I figger my parents are goin’ to check all of the easy hidin’ places,” he says. “Under the mattress, in the closet. So why not pick the easiest place of all? They’ll never check there.”
And it’s a miracle they haven’t yet. The bounty is easily visible under the desk, but it could be mistaken for a stack of comic books or baseball card catalogs. When we get to Cody’s room—me batting away the spaghetti western–style cigarette smoke around us—Cody closes the door, his back extra-hunched with secrecy. He tiptoes over to the stack, his stance becoming more of a wobble, for obvious genital-augmenting reasons. He slides the entire stack out. Not a speck of dust covers the top of it, which makes me immediately aware of just how often Cody looks at smut.
There must be at least twenty issues in the stack, and the two of us devour their contents the way the greedy twits devour candy in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This action is a mélange of shiny paper and glistening body parts. It is, literally, a dazzling experience. The tits abound like fruits on a tree, connected by a series of sleek, branch-like appendages, the sap-like stretch of a chiseled belly. Cody and I sit on opposite ends of the bed, parallel to the headboard. He lies across the pillows from left to right, while I lie across the foot of the bed from right to left. We are not all that aware of each other; our minds are no longer in Cody’s bedroom but, rather, in the flesh before us. The intrigue of a tit is like a miniature fog, a sensual mist, and when there is an innumerable quantity of tit before you, you are lost in the murkiness.
Most of the time, we see only the naked bodies on the page, forgetting all else. But then, as if our bodies have conditioned themselves to have the same sexual rhythm, we rock ourselves back and forth, pushing the weight onto our chests as we make room for our boners.
I have to say this: at this point, I don’t really know how sex works. I know that it’s the joining of the penis and the vagina (to speak scientifically, which, it seems, is the way to express one’s sexual thoughts with the least amount of censure). But I’m not really sure how sex works. Sex, for me, is looking at tits and the finely pruned hedges below them. Looking at these magazines, in fact, is as aesthetic a process as anything else in my life. But, all too unfortunately, it is only visual. These women are not in front of me, caressing me or letting me smell their perfume. They are contained to the page, as static as a comic strip. And what is worse: they afford me a look at their bodies but do not engage in action.
I blame this on Playboy. If only it gave me some sort of sex visual. It doesn’t show people Doing It. This rankles me, and I tell Cody this, snapping him out of h
is carnal reverie.
“Well, duh. Playboy doesn’t show people doing it. Penthouse does that.”
“Why don’t you buy Penthouse, then?”
“Because my dad doesn’t have a subscription to Penthouse. Only to Playboy. My mom likes the articles in Playboy, so she lets him buy it. They’ve got hund’erds of ’em.”
I pick myself up from the bed, disgusted both by my lack of coital knowledge and by the mental picture of Mr. and Mrs. Ulrich “reading” Playboy together. Taking into account Mrs. Ulrich’s sagging chest, perhaps I should revise my thoughts about tits. Not all of them are inviting.
Krishna is the god of love. He must know all the ins and outs of lovemaking. Of girlfriends. Of sex.
To that end, I have decided to buy a copy of Penthouse.
I need to know how people Do It, but I can’t ask Cody. The last thing I want to do is give him another opportunity to show me how much I don’t know.
I know that I should be working on my act for the talent show, but the tits have grabbed hold of me. I plumb my brain to figure out where I have seen copies of Penthouse. I can think of two places—mall bookstores and Dairy Market, the local chain of convenience stores. Dairy Market is out of the question; anytime I’m in there, my parents are with me, my dad buying gas or my mother picking up milk so that she can make homemade yogurt. I decide, then, to start with the mall bookstores, considering that my mother spends at least three nights a week “getting some exercise” at the mall, and I’ll be able to move freely while she does so. I have used this method before when buying dolls, which I have purchased in the past by emptying out the contents of my piggy bank. I wanted to ask my mother for the money to buy them, but I knew that even she would not allow me to buy such girly toys. I have been able to hide my purchases from her by making sure she focuses on her shopping, her shopping bags, and when I get home, I hide my dolls in a toy suitcase beneath my bed. Now, with the magazine, it is time for me to up the ante. And I have my opportunity soon enough.