Jonathan checked the bus schedule, and we saw
that there was a bus leaving on the hour until midnight,
and it was already eight thirty.
“Why don’t you let us go with you?” I asked.
“No. I can travel better alone,” Jonathan said.
“But I can’t leave without Frankie,” I said. “I’m not
going.”
“Yeah. But I kinda better go,” Phil said meekly. “I’ve
still got to study for a biology test tomorrow, and you
know I’ve been doing pretty darn lousy in that class.”
“Yeah, Phil, that’ll be the day, when you do lousy in
a course,” I said sarcastically.
“But seriously, I really do need to hit the books,” Phil
said.
“So you’d better go,” Jonathan said. “If you get on the
next train, you can make it for the nine o’clock bus. And,
T. J., you don’t want poor little Phil to go off by himself.”
“Well, I guess not,” I said. Most people called me by
my initials: T. J. “Oh, but I really shouldn’t leave Frankie.”
“Forget about Frankie,” Jonathan said. “I’ll take care
of him. Poor Phil here needs somebody with experience
to get him through the subways.”
I knew old smart-aleck Jonathan was trying to
psychologize me into thinking I’d be some sort of a hero
if I went along with Phil. But he did have a point. It was
getting late, there was no reason why all of us should go
off looking for Frankie, and Jonathan was the only one
of us who knew anything about the subways. Just then,
the A train rolled in.
“Go on, you guys,” Jonathan said.
“Yeah, well, all right,” I said. “But you’d better find
Frankie. And if you don’t find him soon, you’d better call
the cops. And I’ll be waiting up for Frankie to call me
when he gets home. And if he ain’t home by midnight,
you know his parents are going to be hysterical.”
I kept going on until Phil grabbed me by the arm
and dragged me into the subway car. We caught the nine
o’clock bus and made it home by ten. I didn’t let on to my
parents that anything was wrong.
Jonathan and Frankie didn’t let out the real story
until almost two weeks later, when Frankie couldn’t hold
it anymore. He called me the night of the game at about
one o’clock in the morning and made me speak to his
parents about how he had gotten lost on the subway. They
didn’t believe Frankie’s story and thought he’d been out
carousing in the big city. Frankie was just starting to get
a reputation for doing a lot of screwing around, and his
parents were starting to get suspicious. As Frankie finally
let out, his parents’ suspicions were justified.
Frankie had done what none of us gave him credit for
being able to do. At first, he panicked. “I almost went in
my pants,” Frankie said. But he just got off the train at
the next station and simply hopped onto the next train
headed in the opposite direction. He got off at the Fifty-
Ninth Street station about a minute after Phil and I had
left. Of course, old conniving Jonathan wasn’t going to
let that golden opportunity slip away. Frankie said he
was relieved to see Jonathan, but he was surprised when
he heard the first words out of Jonathan’s mouth: “So
you wanna see a peep show?” Frankie said that Jonathan
figured they had the perfect excuse for coming home real
late and not catching hell from their parents. They would
say Frankie got lost on the subways and was wandering
around for hours until the gallant Jonathan found him,
and they both hurried home on the first bus they could
make, which was the midnight bus.
They took the subway to Forty-Second Street and
wandered around until they got to a peep-show place.
Frankie went on and on about how cool he and Jonathan
were and how they had no trouble getting to see a peep
show. Then, of course, Frankie went into great detail
about the peep show. It was such a detailed story that I
knew Frankie couldn’t be lying.
“Yep. We saw it all. Everything. Nothin’ left to the
imagination at a peep show.” Frankie went on and on.
“But weren’t you scared walking around on Forty-
Second Street?” I asked.
“Was I scared? I was friggin’ petrified,” Frankie said.
“There are more weirdos walking around there than
I’ve ever seen in my whole life—and I once went to Los
Angeles for a weekend with my uncle Vito! But gall dang.
It sure was worth it!”
I had to admit I was a little envious.
“Yep. Nothin’ left to the imagination in a peep show,”
Frankie said.
