Disclaimer: Warning, this story takes place in New Jersey. Ocacasionally refrences to Aqua Net, Hair Gel and maybe, just maybe there might me some interracial loving here.
Please pardon any typos or other minor grammatical errors, I promise there's only one or two.
Because of all you guys wonderful emails, I am gonna extend this this story from its original 4 parts to ten, with each chapter after the fourth part being twice the size of the others
Don't you HATE it when your half assed with only 3 pages LOL....That's a joke.
E-mail your concerns to Madasonaysha@aol.com
Story recommendations : "Angst" by the wonderfully talented Jo Jo, "Tutoring Jerry" by Desert Mac, "The Ordinary Us" by Dom Luka, "Summer Of Change", by Virtual Insanity, "Perry and Jesse" by Underthehoodster, "War" by Jeff Wilson. Okay so there are a shit load of fantastic stories currently on Nifty, but those are a few I can think of right now so check them out all found in the High School section and updated some time within the last few months/weeks.
Oh yeah, I have two other stories on Nifty:
"Around My Way" last updated 3/1/05
"I Hate Anthony" last updated 2/10/05 in the H. S. and Interracial
"THE HANDSOME JEWISH YOUNG MAN"
BY MADISON A. DANTE
PART THREE: IN COMMON?
Oh, God! It was raining again the next morning. Monsoon season had less rain! I went through the routine that I would have to get used to for the rest of the summer. Hopped in the shower, washed my dark hair just to be reminded that I needed a hair cut and brushed my teeth. Aqua Fresh can be your best friend in the morning. It was hot as balls out...again! I threw on a plain t-shirt and khaki shorts, but I was still sweating like a fat woman in church...errr... make that a chubby woman in Temple. At least I wouldn't have to get on that God awful bus again. I really hated that thing. It was large, smelly and just filled with germs. I'm not one of those crazy people who has a fear of germs, but if I could avoid them then I would and sitting on a public bus was not a good way to avoid them. Dad decided to be nice and drop me off. I can't tell you how relieved I was to be riding in his air conditioned Maxima instead of the New Jersey Transit. I tried to catch a few more minutes of sleep, but dear old Dad just had to get on the highway and we arrived at the work site in less than fifteen minutes. Sometimes life just sucked!
Again, Victor and I started the tedious task of filing paper work which was a boring task in itself. Add the silence that ran between us and you could clearly see how entertained I was. God Damn! Today was going to be different. I was going to get to know him if it killed me. Shit, at least if we were talking then time wouldn't pass so fucking slowly! Every now and then when I was about to say something, he would shoot me a glare with one of his intense eyes to silence my unspoken words. After an hour of us playing the retarded game of "Try to talk and I'll glare at cha", I said to myself `fuck it' and went for it.
"So Vic, are you an only child?" I asked and he looked at me sideways cocking one thick eyebrow upwards in annoyance. I could see the defensives that he was building up against me. I guess he was still pissed off from the day before, but he answered me anyway. Albeit coldly, but he responded non the less. Hell, I would take it anyway he would give it! In more ways than one.
"I hate Vic. Call me Victor and yeah, but only to my mom. My dad has like eight kids back in Cuba." He replied.
"Cuba? Your dad's Cuban?" I asked. I would have assumed that he was just black, but I guess you can't just assume certain things. Someone once thought I was Italian once, but it was my best friends drunk Aunt Erma and she also kept calling me Raphael and trying to chase me with a stale mistletoe. That was a weird New Years party.
"Yeah, but I don't really talk to him all that much and I don't know any of his kids. What about you any brothers or sisters?" He inquired. I guess he realized that all the silence was only making time past slower and he wanted to keep us distracted with mindless conversations.
"A sister, she's thirteen and spending the summer away at camp. THANK GOD!" I said with a nervous chuckle and he actually smiled. He smiled! This was going all too well. He had this big white smile and a slight overbite that gave him a childish appearance that contrasted with the oldness of his face. He was barley seventeen, but the way he carried himself just made him seem so much older. His smile was surrounded by a set of dark pink fully rounded lips. If I wasn't so smart I could've kissed him right there.
"I know how that feels. My twelve year old cousin Marla use to live with us and she was so annoying. Who needs to spend an hour in the bathroom any way?" He laughed and so did I . Yeah this day was going well. I wanted to keep the conversation flowing so I asked the first thing that came to mind.
"So you like rap?" I asked and what ever repoire we were building stopped. `What did I say', I thought.
"What makes you say that?" He asked. He didn't seem pissed at me, just a little annoyed and I would be lying if I said I wasn't confused. Looking at the way he was dressed, he looked like a reject from a Jay Z video. `What the hell did I do now?' I wondered to myself.
"Well doesn't everybody from here listen to rap?" I asked. It wasn't a totally ignorant assumption...right? No it wasn't. What else was I suppose to think? He was from the ghetto, rappers were from the ghetto, so I naturally assumed that he would be listening to that. Besides he sort of dressed like one too with his baggy t-shirts and shorts. Yeah, I listened to rap and I wasn't from the `hood' or anything, but that was different. Everybody in Livingston listened to hip hop. Even at my best friend Jimmy's Barmitzpha ,we all rocked out to Fifty Cent and Naz. "Illmatic" is one great album by the way.
"You are one weird white boy, but yeah I love rap ,but I also LOVE Linkin Park. You have a habit of just assuming things about people don't you?" He asked shaking his head back and forth like he pitied me. All I heard was him say that he loved Linkin Park and I lost it. All of my friends hated that band and I never actually met another fan. Everyone assumed that Linkin Park was a band full of posers trying to market themselves as a rap/rock group, but they were so much more than that to me. There music was deep and I could honestly say that I have never been able to connect to music by anyone else like I could with Linkin Park. Chester Bennington and Mike Shanoda's vocal capabilities amazed me.
"FUCKING-A! You like Linkin Park? They are like my all time favorite band... EVER!" I said excitedly as I put down the papers that I was in the middle of alphabetizing and walked across the room to him. He smiled and said that it was his too and we sat down and had what had to be one of the best conversations that I'd had in a long time. We got yelled at to keep working by Mr. Saldono a few times, but that didn't matter to me. I was actually having a conversation our favorite songs by them and he told me that he was seeing them in concert at the end of the month which I was more than a little jealous over. I hadn't seen them live yet and mom wouldn't buy me the tickets, but he had said he'd them five times and this would be his sixth show. God! I was SOOO jealous! He told me they always gave great, or as he put it, "Da bomb ass shows!".
As the weeks passed I learned more and more about him and we started to become, dare I say it, friends? We had more in common than I thought we would have. If it wasn't for the fact that he was a Black/Cuban Baptist and I was a white boy Jew, we could have been twins. I mean seriously, we loved the same rock bands and rappers, he loved to skate just like I did which surprised the hell out of me. I so would not have pegged him as a skateboard freak, but his skills on a board far surpassed my basic abilities. The biggest thing that we had in common was that he didn't have a girlfriend either. Unfortunately he didn't give off a "gay vibe", which sucked for me, but at least I didn't have to hear him go on and on about some girlfriend. Now I didn't hate girls, in fact I thought that some of them were pretty and had a few as friends, but I just wasn't attracted to them and I certainly didn't want to hear Victor talk about one in front of me. I would take his friendship, since that was the only thing that was offered.
Victor and I had been working together for the better part of a month and as the days past, we grew closer and closer. I sort of realized that maybe I was a little judgmental and the two of us had a talk about it one day while doing, you guessed it, standing around filing papers. He told me that not everybody would be as patient with me as he was and it amazed him that he didn't end up smacking me that first day. He said that if I had said some of the things that I did to "a different brotha" other than him, my face probably wouldn't look so pretty. A huge grin broke out on my face when he said that I was pretty. Okay, so I knew he was just trying to make a point, but was I still excited. I mean he was all too cute and he called my face, "pretty"....my face! He asked what I was smiling at and I told him nothing and bumped his shoulder with mine. He was a few inches taller than me so it didn't quite connect, but the point was made. He called me crazy through his grin and did the same as we continued to file. We worked out a system where he would alphabetize and then hand the organized papers to me so I could file them. I'll admit it, it was my idea and I used it as an excuse to be closer to him. You would have done the same thing too if you saw how cute he was so don't judge me!
I saw first hand how ignorant that I must have been on one late July afternoon. As usual it was hot and muggy out just like it had been that whole summer. No, seriously it was so hot and steamy out that even I had an afro! I had invited Victor over to my house one to play video games. I had just got Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Chaos Bleeds. He was a Buffy dork too! One of the many things we had in common. It was his first time at my house and he met my best friend Jimmy. Jimmy is a cool enough guy. He's kind of chubby, but he got more pussy then a vet. Okay, that's what he would say to you, but he was quite the ladies man. I guess girls must have liked the little sleaze's personality. He was funny when he wanted to be, but for the most part he was just a hound dog, always in heat. Things were fine for the first hour or two, but then Jimmy started asking all these retarded questions. Some of the dumb things he asked were how did collard greens taste and if Victor had ever seen a cock fight (not that kind of cock!) and he was serious when he asked them!
It was then that I realized that I must have seemed so ignorant and rude those first few days that we were getting to know each other. Victor was a good sport about it though and said that we were all victims of living in a lily white town. He said that he couldn't hold it against us for some to the assumptions that we made about him because honestly he had his own about us. He said that at first glance he would have written us off as racist little rich kids. He was directing that towards Jimmy, but I knew a little bit of that was for my benefit too. I was just glad that I got to know him for the person that he was and not for what I assumed him to be and vice-versa.
I tried my best not to like him, I really, really did, but I couldn't help it. He had this rough exterior, but once you started to talk to him, you could tell that he really was a nice guy. Even sort of soft spoken when he was deep in a conversation with you. He had this way of making everything else around you disappear when you talked to him. It was like you were the most important person in the world and all of his attention was focused on you. And he was hot! I mean barefoot on the beaches of Jamaica hot! He put even the handsomest of guys to shame. His attractiveness was purely male and I loved every bit of it. Try as I might I couldn't shake the feelings that I had for him and as the days past, I began to slip up. It started off with a lingering touch here or there or he would catch me staring at him which he would pretend not to notice, but I began to do more risky things. The stares got longer and the touches more frequent and I had to forcibly make myself put distance between us. I made up a rule. When ever the urge to "touch" Victor got too strong, I would just walk away. But, of course I slipped up and broke it....
To Be Continued...
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Copyright 2005