Big Wheels for Adults

Abstract

Big Wheels for Adults Adam Prince (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 38] Time passed, and Peter didn’t know what to do. He’d never liked long hugs, not even from women, and this was becoming one of the longest of his life. He was getting squirmy, uncomfortable, while Jocko just kept hanging on, pulling so tight that Peter could feel the density of his old friend’s fat. It was maybe a full minute before Jocko let out what seemed a conclusive sigh. Peter loosened his arms. But Jocko went in for one more clinch. It was to make some kind of point, thought Peter, some kind of claim about who was the better friend, the [End Page 39] better man. And though Peter had never examined precisely why he didn’t like long hugs, a reason appeared to him now: there was always something coercive about them. “I’ve been doing great,” said Jocko, though he didn’t look it and Peter hadn’t asked. His eyes had gone wider and he’d put on more weight; his skin had the tint of a yellow crayon. He was thirty-one but might have passed for forty-five. Looking over Jocko, Peter felt sorry for his childhood friend and at the same time proud of himself for having gotten through his own thirty-one years looking so much better. Carli joined Peter in the entryway, and Jocko bent to kiss her hand. “Lovely to see you,” he said, and then in a completely different tone, as if Peter’s girlfriend had gone from a princess one moment to a cocktail waitress the next, “How about you make us some Jack and Cokes?” Still, Carli played along. Made the drinks. Peter smirked to himself, knowing that most women with her education and career would have told Jocko to eat shit. But Carli had never been that way. Unlike Jocko, she seemed to have nothing at all to prove. Soon the three sat together in Peter and Carli’s catalog-looking living room with its celery and azure color scheme. She had put the room together, had put the entire apartment together and paid for most of it, too. It was the first nice apartment they’d ever occupied. Peter was cozy there and restless within that coziness, much the way he would get in the midst of a very long hug. Jocko talked, and Carli humored him. He told her about the seven thousand dollars he’d made selling a guitar bought at a pawnshop on the road. He snapped the cash out of his gold Harley-Davidson money clip to show her. “That’s a lot of money, huh?” he prompted, and Carli agreed that it was. As always when the two were around someone being absurd, Carli avoided Peter’s glance so as not to give herself—her amusement—away. It made Peter want to catch that glance all the more. Still, even as he tried, he knew it wouldn’t happen. So he looked on with a mix of tenderness and quiet hilarity, the joy of being on the inside of a joke. It was always when people were around that Peter loved her best, and these moments often fueled him through the others. Not until after Peter had kissed her good-bye for Jocko and his guys’ night out did Carli finally relent and look at him. It was a couples’ kind of look. An arch in one eyebrow, a private smile communicating how, when he got home tonight or else tomorrow morning, over coffee, the two of them would review [End Page 40] his entire evening, would say to each other, “Can you believe that guy?” and agree that no, they could not. The last time Peter had been to a strip club was with Carli on a winter break trip to Montreal back when they were still in college. It was an all-nude place where the women were beautiful in that French way: full lips, easy slenderness, a naked, liquid prowl. And then there was Carli, short and rounded in her puffy orange sweater. They had taken a...