I remember Jennifer Briggs’ first day at school like it was yesterday: The year was 1971, and she and I were in the eighth grade. The school bus stopped at my mom and dad’s bait and tackle shop on Pea Vine Road to pick up a half dozen of us kids whose families also made a living on the Current River. It was an early September day, hot and dry with the last purple flowers withering, and Jennifer showed up at the shop with an army-green knapsack, her ponytail tied up with a yellow ribbon, and a tie-dyed tee shirt with a peace symbol on it. None of us Ozarks kids ever wore a peace symbol. Our preacher said it was an upside down cross with the arms broken, and I told Jennifer what he said. She said that was ridiculous, and everybody in St. Louis wears peace symbols, and what could be more Christian than peace anyhow? She never stopped talking after that. She said her dad was a big time architect in Kirkwood, but he got sick of living in the city and wanted to “get back to nature,” so they bought a resort on the river, and he was designing a big lodge, and her family is Catholic, and they go to church in Van Buren and what’s my name?
I said, “Clifford,” and asked her what her name was, and she said, “Jennifer,” and before I had time to think, she said we both had an “if” in our names.
“From now on,” she said, “you’ll be ‘Cliff-if,’ and I’ll be ‘Jenn-if.’”
I said, “Okay, I guess,” and she stuck out her hand and said, “Nice to meet ya, Cliff-if!”
When winter came and the hills sparkled with frost, we waited inside the shop for the bus and drank hot cocoa, and I would listen to her talk. Morning was my favorite part of the day. Jenn-if was the happiest person I’d ever met. She would prattle on about nothing, telling stories that had no point and jokes that had no punchlines. Once a purple rubber fishing worm caught her eye, and she said, “That’s so much nicer than using real worms, isn’t it? I always feel sorry for the poor worms! How would we like it if someone stuck a fishhook in our booty holes and forced it through our stomachs and out through our mouths and then threw us in the water, so a fish could eat us? Ugh! It’s awful! I don’t feel as sorry for the fish because people eat the fish, and we have to eat something, don’t we? I mean we can’t stop eating just because we have to kill things to eat them, right? And besides, my dad says that fish don’t have nerves around their mouths, just cartilage…have you ever heard that? The people who come to our resort love to fish, so I’m sure it’s okay. I think fishing is boring, so I always wear a swimsuit, so I can jump in the river when I get hot. But only if no one else is fishing close by because I don’t want to scare away the fish. Do you like to fish?”
I said, “No”—my sole contribution to the conversation—and Jenn-if was off again, telling me about the man who came to her family’s resort “all the way from Los Angeles because his grandparents used to live in Eminence—his grandpa and grandma are dead now—and they brought him here when he was a little boy. It’s funny to think we won’t always be the age we are now, isn’t it? I mean, I guess we’ll kind of be the same. But we’ll be different, too.”
* * *
Turns out, Jenn-if was half right: In a matter of a couple of years, time changed her from my best friend on the bus into a pretty girl on the cheerleading squad. For my part, I didn’t change enough. Mom was so concerned about my dilatory entrance into puberty that she took me to the doctor. He looked at my testes, such as they were, and said, “Well, Mrs. Perkins, it looks like Cliff’s going to be a late bloomer.” I could have told him that, but still, that is one shitty diagnosis. All the other guys—guys my age I had known my whole life and who had been about the same size as me—had begun “shooting up.” That’s the way adults always said it. “Oh, my! You’ve shot up!” like whoever they were talking to actually accomplished something and wasn’t simply the lucky beneficiary of good genes and timely hormones. I didn’t shoot up. I was the runt of the litter.
A shitty diagnosis, for sure.
Then to compound the problem, one afternoon I was carrying some boxes from the store to the dumpster, and one of boxes fell from the stack and broke open. Out spilled Playboy magazines and Penthouse and Club and Oui. I didn’t know it, but the shop had been receiving complimentary magazines for Dad to sell—the cover letter in the box said, “Profits from the burgeoning men’s market are expected to exceed 200%” (nobody called it “porn” back then), but Dad had been throwing away the magazines, so I wouldn’t see them. Well, I saw them, and boy, was that life changing.
Needless to say, I did not throw the magazines away but squirreled them under my bed to be studied, drooled over, and fantasized about every chance I got. So now my delayed adolescence was made even more torturous by the most desperate desire imaginable, with the word “imaginable” being key because I retreated almost entirely into an imaginary world of pretty girls quick to shuck their clothes and spread their legs.
So, Jenn-if kept getting prettier and prettier while I got hornier and hornier. By our junior year in high school, my desire for her was palpable, overwhelming, suffused through all my members. I was nothing but desire. We stilled talked before school, but I found it harder to find the right words. She was as voluble as ever, however, and I was happy to listen to her talk.
Then, tragedy struck. Enter the person of Benjamin Brute, a fellow so handsome and accomplished, he could have been a cliché from a movie. Benjamin played football and had a Camaro, and was elected junior class president. He drove in from town to pick Jenny up from her house and take her to school. There went the hot cocoa among the fishing poles while she and I waited for the bus. When school let out, she and the cheerleading squad would practice routines on the sidelines while the football players ran around on the field. When practice was over, she would run up to him and throw her arms around his neck, and he would take off his helmet and toss his sweaty hair in a gesture both dramatic and disgusting. She began inviting “Jammin’”—that was the cutesy nickname she extracted from “Benjamin”—inside her home to listen to music, or so she said when I asked her what they were doing. (She also said that it was none of my business). I suspected they were doing more than singing along to John Denver, a suspicion that drove me crazy with jealousy. Then one Saturday she came to the store wearing his letter jacket, which made her look prettier and smaller at the same time. She had two hickeys on her neck. I asked her how she was doing, and she said, “I’m fine, Cliff, really good.” (No longer was I “Cliff-if”; I had been diminished to just Cliff.)
“Is it nice riding to school in a new car?”
“Better than a smelly school bus.” She put a Coke and a bag of Cheetos on the counter. “For what it’s worth, I miss talking to you.”
That gave me a glimmer of hope, and I said, “I miss you, too.” I was surprised to see her eyes go watery.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s good.” Then, we said at the same time, “Really good.”
“Don’t be a smart ass,” she said.
“We’ve been friends too long for you to bullshit me and get away with it. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“I can’t. Not now.”
“Is it him?” I couldn’t bring myself to say his name.
“I said I don’t want to talk about it.”
I’ll admit that I pouted. “We used to be friends.”
“We are still friends. But, you know, circumstances change, people change.”
“I’d say. Well, whenever you’re ready to talk, I’ll be here.” I rang up the Coke and Cheetos. “That’ll be a buck and a quarter.”
She pulled her sleeve up to fish some money out of her purse, and I saw she had red marks and chafing around her wrists.
“What’d you do to your wrists?”
I was being nosy again, and she puffed up. “It’s none of your business! Okay? You live your life, and I’ll live mine.”
“All right, all right. Don’t get sore. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
She put some money on the counter, and said, “Keep the change,” and all but ran from the store. I thought her reaction was overly dramatic, but I didn’t know what to make of it.
What was that about?
Then one day I was looking through an issue of Hustler, and there was a picture of a pretty girl whose wrists were bound and tied to the rods of a brass bed, and a guy was sitting on top of her.
No! Surely not, I thought. She would never…
Maybe she would . . .
Oh, my God.
I had turgid dreams about Jenn-if that night that almost drove me crazy. I woke up in the middle of the night, and my hair was wet with sweat, and my pajamas were sticky, and I knew what I had to do.
First, I would burn all the magazines.
Then, I would destroy Benjamin Brute once and for all.