named desert boots. They are perfect: tough tan leather, ankle high, laced in four holes on the arch to prevent hot sand and stones from falling inside, flexible thick gum soles. The boy loves those desert boots. The boots are almost the answer to our question.
Eddie feels trapped in the culture of Southern California. He is tired of the billboards offering him his own masculinity through tobaccco products. He hates the promises of confirmation of his sexuality and desirability from sports car ads on T.V. He is insulted by the assurance that he earns power and validity through the possession of this product or that, by the distorted and grotesque subliminal images promising him manhood, sex, heroism. He mistrusts the easy rites of passage supplied by his culture. He knows the commercial influences are wrong, threatening something akin to what used to be sacred.
He couldn’t have put any of this into words. He feels it, with the unique clarity and purest wisdom of adolescence. He had begun to think there was nothing he could do about it. The cultural bombardment was sneaky, constant, unavoidable. It took a gradual and relentless toll on his spirit.
Months earlier he had heard some embarrassed, uneasy laughter from his friends, and a faint voice calling him back to the school yard. “Eddie, Eddie. What the fuck, Eddie. What are ya starin’ at?” He was focused on his feet, and the feet of seven of his friends all standing in a circle. Five of those friends, including Eddie, were wearing desert boots. These boots were not used in the desert, and they suddenly seemed to him part of a uniform for pretenders. If he could have taken them off his feet and thrown them into the bushes surrounding the quad he would have. Instead he stared, stunned.
He felt like a complete fraud. A fraud who hung around with other frauds, being fraudulent. He thought of a lyric from a new song by one of his favorite bands . . . “and he can’t be a man ’cause he doesn’t smoke the same cigarette as me.”
The bell for class rang, scattering his friends in four directions. He lagged behind, sleepwalking his way to his math class, feeling contaminated by what a few minutes earlier had seemed like just a kids’ collective sense of style. He wandered to his seat late, his face blank, unconcerned as Mrs. Fields eyed him over her glasses while marking him tardy again. His heart began pounding wildly. He understood clearly, as each thought possessed him, that he was already on his way to the desert. He stuck his feet out in the aisle and smiled.
The next weekend via Greyhound and his thumb, he was out there. He loved it. He loved it so much he kept it a secret. Once every month for the next six months, right into the teeth of summer his boots became Desert Boots. Capital D, capital B. He progressed from walking out and back in an hour or two, to elaborate treks often to fourteen hours, each time feeling his spirit gaining strength as he lost sight of civilization. In the last two months he started out in the dark before dawn, heading out for a point to be reached before nightfall.
The sense of accomplishment upon reaching his destination was extended and reflected upon during the ride in the Greyhound back to San Diego, prolonged during his silent, noncommittal rides as a hitchhiker from the downtown bus terminal to the eastern section of town. Waving thanks and closing the door on the stranger driving, he’d cut across orangegroved back yards and along the floors of domesticated canyons, making his way up to his front steps. He’d swing open the screen door saying, “Hi Ma, ’say Dad,” and head for his bedroom.
Surging with secret pride at his accomplishment, and relishing the exhausting toll it exacted, he’d examine the dust on his boots, the sunburned skin, the burnt-straw shock of hair, the salt-caked clothes. He’d open his bedroom window, take off his shorts, pull off the T-shirt and slip off those scarred, durable boots. Yanking the cool sheets back on his bed, he lay in the darkened room looking out into a world which now had boundaries no one who knew him could imagine.
He’d see the tops of the apartments sitting in the canyon that bordered his back yard. He’d listen with amused contempt to the faint calling and laughing from the miniature golf course which sat — phony and fake, unreal and gaudy — at the end of his street. The yelps and hollers would grow fainter. The sounds of the people playing and flirting on the plastic grass and trick fairways would subside entirely. His breathing would change into a slow shallow rhythm, dropping like a stone down a well into deep sleep, splashing slowly into the sweet carnal dreams of early manhood.
After these weekends he relished coming back to school, standing with his buddies in the circle, looking down at these boots and the boots of his friends and saying nothing.
There he is, a tiny dot making his seventh desert excursion, swinging along in a comfortable walking rhythm, confident that he will reach his destination. He stops, fumbles with the strap attached to the canteens, twists the top off one, and takes a long swallow. He turns an about-face in the direction from which he’s come. The expanse of desert stretches flat, rippling in the growing heat. The peaks jutting in the far distance seem to Eddie as close as they appeared six hours ago. A gust of furnace wind blows over his face.
As though this were a silent signal, he turns and begins walking again. He has broken his rhythm during this forty-second stop. He will struggle out of harmony. The heat will bear down on him for several long minutes before his stride becomes the metronome that permits his mantric mindless peace. His heart palpitates at the restart. His skin flushes unbearably hot. Sweat gushes off his face. Khaki shorts find a new way to bind and hold his balls, rubbing a deeper blister between his legs.
Still in stride, he reaches into his front pocket and takes out a small sandwich bag. His fingers wiggle in the plastic and remove a melted glob of Vaseline. His hand slips under his waistband. He stops, spreads his legs, and smears the goo around his crotch. The boots crunch along once again, searching for the harmonic drum of his steps on the desert floor. The heat has swollen his penis. He feels awkward as it flexes and flops until it finds its spot, riding the rhythm between the hot wet shorts and his bare Vaselined leg.
He begins to think of his best friend’s mother down the street. Beautiful, warm disposition, a light, insightful sense of humor. He imagines her flat-roofed stucco tract home. He sees her on her couch. Lying on her side in the dark with the curtains pulled against the afternoon sun. He sees her ankles crossed and her body stretched out. Her palm is resting behind her sweating neck, revealing a black patch of armpit next to her face. Her breasts are outlined in the transparent, sweat-soaked, white cotton blouse. She slowly lifts her hips and shifts her weight toward the outside of the couch. Her eyes are closed. She’s nearly asleep, wide-hipped, heavy-breasted, peaceful.
The fan, which always sits on the parquet floor during hot weather, buzzes left to right, an admiring machine repeating its once-over from head to toe. Repeating toe to head, head to toe, over and over. The breeze hits her thighs, flowing up the stream of her loose dress, following the indented line to the V under her stomach, fluttering her dress, trembling in the V, and continuing. It buzzes over the stomach, up along her breasts, giving her nipples a pulsation of cool against the white wet cloth, causing a slight blush and tightness.
The fan continues up the curves of her thin muscular neck and stops on her face to reverse direction. A few sweat-joined strands of jet-black hair reverberate along her cheek for a second. Asleep. Her face turns like a dark flower to the cool moon of the fan’s breeze. Her lips kiss the fan’s invisible pressure, her tongue sliding slowly along her upper lip, pulling cool drops of sweat into her mouth. The fan’s buzz changes to a deeper tone and travels down her body.
Eddie stumbles, unconscious of the variation of his cadence, on and on, over and around the knee-high brush, zigzagging along the frying desert floor. “Where am I? I’m here and I’m OK . . . still have a canteen and a half of water . . . about four or five hours to the gas station . . . it’s only . . . four-thirty . . . shit . . . but . . . hell, the headlights on the road work pretty good . . . like last time . . . full moon up at eight . . . plenty of time . . . I’m not scared, am I?” His heart pounds slightly. He swallows and waits for panic.
