Whiskey & Charlie Read Online Free PDF

sake, is there anything at all between your ears?”
    â€œAll right, Elaine, calm down. I was just trying to have a joke. Whiskey knows he’s done the wrong thing; I don’t think we need to labor the point.”
    â€œLabor the point?” She laughed then, a sharp, abrupt sound like the bark of a dog that has been unexpectedly shut outside. “No, you’re right, of course. We shouldn’t labor the point . Better to make a joke of it, give him a pat on the back, and with any luck, he’ll leave school at sixteen to become a pimp. Is that what you want?”
    Charlie was shocked to hear his mother use the word pimp . He sneaked a look at Whiskey, but Whiskey wouldn’t meet his eye.
    â€œDon’t be ridiculous, Elaine, you’re overreacting.”
    â€œOverreacting? Do you have any idea how many times I’ve had William’s headmistress on the phone this term? He can’t stay out of trouble for five minutes. I’m at the end of my rope!”
    Bill coughed. “Well, perhaps you’re right. But the boy’s already been punished. I don’t think there’s any need for us to get heavy-handed as well.”
    Their mother snorted. “One week off school! You call that a punishment?” She turned her attention to Whiskey. Charlie did not often feel sorry for his brother, but he felt sorry for him then.
    â€œThere’ll be no bike riding, no skateboarding, no television, no Atari. No phone calls, no hanging around at the shopping center, no listening to your records. And you won’t be seeing your partners in crime, that’s a certainty.”
    Whiskey was flattened. “What am I supposed to do then?”
    â€œThere are plenty of ways you can make yourself useful around the house. I can give you a list so long you won’t have time to scratch yourself. And woe betide you if you defy me, William, because I’ll find out, believe me, and then you’ll really know the meaning of the word ‘punishment.’”
    x x x
    By the time Whiskey got back to school, the whole thing had blown over. Once the book was gone, the source cut off, the fever subsided. When people stopped talking about them, the photocopies lost their currency; Charlie gave up reading them, left them for weeks under his mattress, eventually threw them away.
    Sex became once again about the girls you knew and how far you could go with them. As in the American movies they watched, progress was measured in bases . Since they had never played baseball, and no one knew the rules, there was some confusion about exactly what happened at each base. First base was kissing, that much was generally agreed. But to Charlie, even first base was a gray area. Because as everybody knew, there were two kinds of kissing.
    There was the kind of kissing that took place during a game of spin the bottle, in which you were shut in a darkened cupboard with a girl you may or may not fancy (and who may or may not fancy you, although this was considered largely irrelevant) and you had thirty seconds to locate her mouth and work your tongue inside it. To Charlie’s mind, this kind of kissing had more in common with pin the tail on the donkey than with baseball, and he did not know if it counted as first base.
    He suspected that first base meant the kind of kissing that happened at junior high parties, where no one played spin the bottle anymore, but people somehow paired off anyway, the kind of kissing where you locked lips with a girl and didn’t come up for air until you had attempted to touch every square inch of her body with your roaming hands. The second kind of kissing Charlie had seen plenty of but had never participated in himself, which meant, depending on one’s definition, he had never even gotten to first base.
    Second base had to do with breasts, tits, jugs, knockers, baps, or whatever else you might call them. A lot of the girls in Charlie’s grade didn’t seem