Work Text:
It was just another afternoon, the kind with a disgusting heat that glued clothes to your skin, the kind where it didn’t matter how many fans you had—if there was no air conditioning, it felt like burning in the flames of hell.
Izzy was playing poker at Chris Weber’s parents’ house with him and two other guys, all of them gathered in a dark basement lit only by one of those cheap lightbulbs. Chris was a lucky bastard: he didn’t pay rent, and all he had to do for a hot meal was walk upstairs to the kitchen. The band sometimes teased him for being such a mama’s boy, but thanks to that, they had a place to rehearse. Hell, maybe they even envied him for it.
“Hey! Let’s play something else,” Chris said after losing three games in a row. “I’ve got Chinese checkers in the closet.”
Each of them survived however they could. John and Mike, for example, shared an apartment on Broadway in Venice. Both worked part-time jobs and owned a car that broke down on them regularly. Izzy, meanwhile, had his own apartment. Nothing worth bragging about—it had a cockroach infestation, barely more than a mattress and a toilet that constantly stopped working. There wasn’t even hot water for the shower. But none of it would’ve been possible without that not-so-legal job he had...
When the guys started watching Happy Days on TV, Izzy went upstairs to the kitchen looking for a lighter that actually worked. Chris’s parents weren’t home, and Mike had snapped two bass strings, so there’d be no more practice that day. Once he found the lighter, he pulled out a cigarette and grabbed a handful of Ritz crackers from the counter.
The second he went back down to the basement, Izzy ignored the others and sat on Chris’s bed while eating the crackers. He’d only had a piece of toast all day. To kill time, he picked up one of the magazines lying on the dusty nightstand beside the bed: a TV Guide, about five copies of Reader’s Digest, a National Geographic, and a few porn magazines hidden in the back. Most of them were Playboy, along with some less popular ones like Velvet and Cheri. Izzy grabbed the last two, since Chris had already “use” the Playboys. They smelled way too much like... Chris.
He opened Velvet first. It wasn’t disappointing, but it didn’t do much for him either. It had all the boobs a prepubescent kid could ever need for his first jerk-off session, but he got bored before even three minutes had passed flipping through it.
Then he opened Cheri without expecting much. On the cover was a girl posing with her back turned, wearing a plaid dress unbuttoned down to her waist and two red braids, shielding her face with a straw hat. Something about the image hit him.
Like some kind of pornographic Anne of Green Gables, he thought while chewing another cracker.
He sprawled out on Chris’s bed, skimming through the pages. What could this magazine possibly have that the last one didn’t? Smut was always good for curing boredom, but there was nothing new here either—just naked women with too much makeup and huge tits, some laughably bad sex stories, and a ton of ads for phone sex hotlines aimed at lonely men.
Near the end of the issue, he came across more photos of the same woman from the cover. At least she looked genuinely pretty.
Now she was facing the camera, though she still hid her face behind the straw hat. Her plaid dress hung completely open on one side, exposing one breast and its pink nipple. In another photo she wore tiny sheer panties. It was suggestive enough to make any high school kid lose his mind.
And it worked for him too.
On the next page she was lying completely naked on a chaise lounge, still hiding her face with the straw hat. She had a youthful, balanced body—she couldn’t have been older than twenty.
But the next picture froze him cold.
She was still naked, yes, but now she had her legs spread open across the mattress, revealing a thin strip of reddish pubic hair and pink lips. This time she wasn’t covering her face anymore. Under any other circumstance, that sight would’ve sent him straight to Chris’s bathroom.
But it didn’t.
Izzy held the magazine with trembling hands.
That face looked painfully familiar. Uneasy, he stared at the girl again. Maybe his eyes were playing tricks on him. Izzy swallowed hard. This had to be some kind of joke.
It was Brucy.
The same Brucy from the Pentecostal family who sang in the church choir. The Brucy the boys nicknamed Raggedy Ann. The same shy Brucy who shocked everyone in ninth grade when she started cursing out teachers like a sailor whenever they chased her down the school hallway.
The same Brucy who helped him roll weed joints to sell during lunch breaks.
Brucy, with her two braids, gold-rimmed glasses, ankle-length dresses, and long sleeves even in the middle of summer.
But it couldn’t be Brucy. The girl he knew had stayed behind in Lafayette taking care of her younger siblings. She never would’ve left them there—not with her stepfather around. The Brucy he knew had told him to go to hell when he suggested moving to California with him. Wilma Brucette Bailey was far too modest to even kiss with tongue. To her family, everything was a sin.
Izzy looked at the photographs again, especially the last one where her face was fully visible.
It was the May ’84 issue. Barely two months ago.
“What’re you looking at, huh?” Chris asked playfully as he walked over.
Izzy ignored him and slipped the magazine into his jacket, earning an immediate complaint from Chris.
“Hey, man, that’s mine! At least ask first.”
Izzy, who rarely let his rough side show around his friends, looked at Chris like he couldn’t care less, even if his words said otherwise.
“Yeah, yeah. Can I borrow it?”
“Sure. Just don’t give it back sticky.”
Izzy nodded and left so quickly he didn’t even bother saying goodbye to the other two.
On the drive back home, with barely enough gas to make it to his dump of an apartment, Izzy kept glancing sideways at the magazine sitting in the passenger seat every time he stopped at a red light.
It felt like just yesterday when he’d gone to Brucy’s grandmother’s house and the gramophone wouldn’t stop playing John Coltrane while rain poured outside. Brucy liked staying with her grandmother if it meant avoiding home and her stepfather.
Izzy, meanwhile, had been invited by both Brucy and her grandmother. It was Brucy’s sixteenth birthday, and the old woman had baked her a vanilla and peach cake. Since he was her only friend, it was expected that he’d show up on time for tea. Izzy—or rather Jeff, his real name, the one everyone still called him back then—had knocked on the door carrying a bottle of sherry his
mother had given him so he wouldn’t arrive empty-handed. In his other hand was a tiny box containing a necklace he’d made himself.
When Brucy opened the door, she was wearing a mint-colored dress her grandmother had bought for the occasion. The poor thing looked uncomfortable buried under all that crinoline and lace trim, but she had to please the only old woman who genuinely cared about her.
Jeff smiled shyly.
“Come in.” Brucy blushed when she noticed Jeff staring at her too much, stepping aside while taking the bottle of sherry from him. “Do you want something to eat?”
When he finally got back to his apartment, Izzy tossed the magazine onto the only chair he owned and went to take a shower. He sold some merchandise through his window and drank the last bit of milk left in a carton. Unfortunately, it had already gone sour.
He wanted to forget what he’d seen, but he couldn’t. He wanted to feel bad for her, but he didn’t feel any worse for her than he already felt for himself. And in the end, everything always came back to that.
He lay down on his mattress and picked up the magazine again, opening it directly to Brucy’s photos. Sliding one hand beneath the waistband of his boxers, he figured he was probably going to hell for this—but he didn’t believe in hell anyway.
He was already hard, and those three pages dedicated to her body wouldn’t let him think straight. He licked his lips while staring at her full breasts and pink nipples, then noticed a piercing on her left breast.
What the hell had Brucy gotten herself into?
That only turned him on more, and the movements of his hand grew faster. None of this was going to last long. With his free hand, he turned the page showing her face. Guilt crawled through him even as his grip around himself stayed firm. His eyes drifted lower, and that was when Jeff came undone.
In the span of seconds, he went from feeling good to feeling like absolute shit.