5

Tank was a bit of an ornery old man, set in his ways. When we got back, all sunburned and wind beaten, he went to bed, and wouldn’t budge. We let him be and went swimming, swinging by the Exchange on the way.
There, Jon met a girl he knew from one of his gigs. Joe got excited, because Jon was still talking to her and making us wait.
_He seems like one of those guys who would ditch his friends over a girl._ he said.
Jon came out too cool for school in his brown aviators, saying he knew that girl from before and was meeting her for dinner tonight. _But I’m still going to hang out with you guys until then._ This seemed reasonable to me, but I had a feeling Joe felt negative about it.
At Chili’s, I asked Jon about how it worked being a Lutheran preacher’s son. I had asked him this before, but in passing. I had asked him how dating worked for him. He had told me he dated a lot, and missed talking to girls. He just liked being around them.
This time I wanted to know more. He was obviously good with girls, had the looks to manage just fine, but he came across to me as stunningly innocent.
Joe, of course, jumped in, and Jon blurted out to him, _You asking me if I’m a virgin, then yes I am. I‘m going to wait till after marriage._ He said it proudly, and Joe backed down.
I talked about how in my day being a teenage Christian was all the rage, it was beginning to be cool to be virgin. Now I can turn on the Grammys and there’s these young singers promoting their own abstinence.
_Yeah, I have friends at my FOB that are virgins. For some reason I attract the virgins._ I said, giving the last word some flair, which got me a laugh. _You know, I picked you out of an airport terminal. That one comes from love, I thought. I’m good at picking ‘em out. Then you told me you were a preacher’s boy and I thought -- bulls eye._
Luckily, Jon found that funny, instead of creepy.
Jon asked me something like what it was like to come from my parents. _Oh, I don’t -- I don’t come from parents._ Which got me a laugh. I then said I came from the whole social services thing.
_Oh, you were adopted?_ Joe asked.
_No,_
_Because I was._
_You must have been a good looking kid._
_Well, why didn’t you get adopted?_
_I don’t feel sore about it. I would’ve been a foster parent’s worst nightmare. I had already taken my life into my own hands and I was, like eight. I wasn’t going to relinquish that and be taken care of or raised._
_So what happened?_ Jon asked.
I took a deep breath. _Okay. If I’m going to tell this story I’ve got to go back to the beginning. I wasn’t in social services so much. Usually I tell people I have no family and they just leave it alone. If that doesn’t work I tell them I come from social services and they just leave it alone. But since you two are obviously completely oblivious to normal social etiquette--_ they laughed _--I’ll tell the story. It all -- begins -- with a blue mustang,_ I said, extravagantly. I tried to tell it in a light hearted way, moving from the attempted rape in the blue mustang, to Mom’s pointed abuse, to my sisters’ Darkness, to the isolation, to the long years of working in the fields and restaurants and stock rooms while everyone else was in school -- but Joe and Jon sat their gaping at me anyway.
I told about my sorry Aunt and Uncle. I told about my own Violence.

_But you’re so normal, _ Jon said. I bout fell out when he said that.
I said I had lived a tumultuous and volatile life so when I turned eighteen I was volatile and angry. I told about the numbness. I told what it was like to not have any human markers like if I would’ve been a good brother, a good son, a good friend, if I would’ve been in the chess club or the baseball team or both.
_So you were like beating people up in bars and sh-t?_ Joe asked.
_Something like that,_ I said. Really I was self-destructive, but people seem to assume I was the other kind of violence because my pec tended to be bigger than their head.
_How did you stop that, then. I mean how did you choose to not be angry anymore?_ Jon asked.
He said it in a way like my answer was going to be God gave me strength, or something. He said it like the anger was a bad thing, like its was the devil’s work.
_The anger was my best thing,_ I said. _It wasn’t about letting go of the anger, it was about being able to feel it without being destructive, without hurting anybody or hurting myself. It was about feeling that truth in my fingertips and not murdering anyone with it._ I wanted to go on, but what I had learned was too recent.
We moved on to the hot tub while Joe told his story. There were two other people there. I said something like _Yeah, when I was young I constantly had to watch out for rape,_ and the two people left.
Joe had been raised by his aunt and uncle as if they were his parents, when really his real mother was his aunt’s sister. The family secret was known by everyone but him, including his cousins who were years younger than him.
On his graduation day, his _parents_ and his Mom sat him down and told him the truth. The love of his real Mom’s life had been killed by a drunk driver. She had to go to a mental hospital out of grief and the aunt ended up taking the baby permanently, because there wasn’t much else to be done.
It was traumatic for him, all his family lying to him for sixteen years, not to mention his father was dead, so he simply got away from them for a long time.

Finally it went back to Jon, and he discussed his sex life, or lack thereof. He said he’d caved in once and had been given a hand job. _It had gotten so intense, I had to have a release,_ he said.
I was impressed by his handling of it. I knew that his father and upbringing had a lot to do with it, not to mention the times. But to not have to worry about sex made dealing with girls effortless.
Whenever I dealt with a girl I felt afraid that she might be a bad woman, that she might get pregnant and my story might happen to another boy.
The pressure was always on so that when I found myself attracted to someone it felt like I was falling off a cliff.
For Jon, there was no pressure, there was simply fun. It made dating seem effortless. Whenever I would watch Jon in action it made me want to take notes.
All you have to do is be Good, and the rest doesn’t matter. I would feel insecure in the face of K__ and his normal adolescence. But Jon was just as cool as K___, even though K___ is sexually experienced and Jon a virgin. Maybe I was just as cool, too.
Jon saw his date walk into Chili’s and had to go. His date had brought along another girl, a strikingly built brunette.
At first I thought that was a bad thing, but knowing Jon that was probably as good as it got for him.
For some reason Joe would not leave. He started throwing a football across the pool with the lifeguard and I swam laps.
I realized he wanted to be seen by the girls, since they were just inside the window. Meanwhile, he’s married to his high school sweetheart, so it shouldn’t have mattered to him.
I guess Jon picked up on it and encouraged the brunette, a loud and flirty character, to step out of the restaurant and push Joe into the pool.
I thought it was hilarious.