“So you’re saying you do masturbate?”

“Well … I have.”

“Wow. That’s intense.”

“What, you don’t think every guy beats off?”

“I mean intense that you’d admit it to me.”

She smiled. “Did you beat off the first time you got a boner?”

“Of course not. I’ve been popping woodies since I was in my mother’s womb. There, we finally brought my mother into a conversation.”

“You think married people masturbate?”

“No.” Then I thought about it. “Jesus, I hope not. That’d be pretty pathetic.”

We only had fifty dollars between us for the whole time so we slept out on the beaches. A couple nights we were chased out of little towns on the Gulf Coast by the local oinkers, but mostly people left us alone and it never rained once. We ate French fries and hot dogs and fried shrimp at greasy shacks along the road, and we fished off the pier for our dinner when we got to Naples. The last two days, when we’d blown all our dough, we chewed and screwed from three Howard Johnson’s. It was the best time of my life.

An almost-full-moon sat in the night sky like a lopsided softball when I returned to Pawtucket. The thick smell of pizza and cigar smoke seemed to rise out of the cracks in the pavement. I’d called DeCenz from Providence and told him to meet me at the Hilltop, but I had trouble catching a ride and didn’t get there for over an hour. The laughter of men echoed across the parking lot.

DeCenz wasn’t in the bar, but Shorty the bartender said that someone in the corner booth wanted to talk to me. The man had his back to us.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Someone,” said Shorty.

My old man was staring at his martini. I knew I was slunkmeat.

“Well, if it ain’t Beach Blanket Bingo,” he said.

“What are you doing here?”

“What the hell you think I’m doing here?”

“Drinking?”

“I’m waiting for you, Dildo.”

“How’d you know I was gonna be here?”

“I stopped in and your buddy DeSenseless told me you was on your way. You want to have a glass of loud-mouth soup with your old man?”

I sat across from him.

The old man called Shorty by his name and held up his martini. “Two more,” he said.

“You know Shorty?”

“’Course.”

“I didn’t know that.”

He smiled. “There’s a lot you don’t know about your old man.”

It sounded like a threat.

“So what’s the story? You running away from home or what?”

“Went to Florida,” I said.