Before Anthony Rienzi was married with two daughters and working for a marketing startup in North Carolina, he used to steal girls’ underwear.
Rienzi was the panty-pilfering bandit of Louis Pasteur Middle School in Little Neck, Queens. His heists started in the seventh grade and ended—as far as I know—when Corinne K. died in a car crash on Little Neck Parkway.
Rienzi was never caught. He’s never confessed. I’m the only one who knows about the jobs he pulled. We were best friends.
This morning Rienzi sent me a friend request on Facebook. We haven’t spoken in nearly two decades, and there he is, an older, thumbnail version of the kid I used to eat lunch with every day. For nearly three years we goofed on the special-ed kids, who, for some reason, were allowed to line up for lunch before the rest of us. We talked about starting a ska band called The Skafellas—I’d been pulling off trumpet solos in Jazz since the sixth grade, and Rienzi was gonna start bass lessons, once he saved up enough dough to buy a used one. And, of course, we talked a shit-ton about girls.
Rienzi had the experience—and he wasn’t lying about it either. I pretty much had none whatsoever. Which I didn’t understand. I mean, I played an instrument. And looks-wise, it’s not like Rienzi was a catch. He was shorter than me, got his mohawk after my parents had already made me get rid of mine, and he had really fucked-up teeth. His palate was too narrow—that was the problem. I know that because I had the same problem—except I got braces. I got braces—and the torturous palate expander that came with them. Rienzi got girls.
I didn’t hook up with a girl until my junior year of high school—meanwhile, Rienzi’s hooking-up never ceased. (But he never did get that bass.)
Maybe it was because his mother worked two jobs and his dad was in and out of their lives so much—the absence of adult supervision gave Rienzi permission to wander Little Neck Parkway from Glen Oaks to the Little Neck Train Station, hopping off the road whenever he wanted (whenever he wasn’t eating over at my house), to ring a doorbell and cater to the first-, second-, or even third-base needs of any girl that would let him in.
And off to their hampers he’d go.
He copped a feel on Alison R. and left with a pair of red panties that felt like my grandmother’s scarves. He fingered Kathleen G., but didn’t get a hold of the drawers she was wearing at the time—“Dude, they were so wet!”—although he managed to swipe a couple pairs of hers with flowery prints. He even got to Corinne K.
They never hooked up—Corinne was faithful to this seventeen-year-old named Donny she was dating—but Rienzi managed to use Alison R., who was Corinne’s best friend, as a decoy. He and Alison popped over to Corinne’s house. He asked to use the bathroom…
The first thong I ever held belonged to Corinne K. It was white and weightless. Eerie. She wore this? I couldn’t believe this tiny piece of cotton and lace in my hands. It must have been a joke. Because girls like Corinne had always seemed so big to me. They weren’t fat! No. But they gave off this illusion of mass—like at any moment, especially when they were passing you in the hallway, they could crush you. And Corinne had been this gigantic thing of beauty. She dated older boys—men, compared to me. Forget out-of-my-league—she was out of my species! And the smell of her underwear was only more evidence of that.
“That’s why I only take the dirty ones,” Rienzi said. “Sniff it. It’s like we’re animals: all primitive and shit.”
He let me borrow the Corinne stash for a weekend. One night I set her undies on my bed and stood over them. I imagined I was a giant and that there were three Corinnes lying beneath me. Each wearing nothing but one of the soft stolen artifacts.
I took off my underwear—a pair of tighty whities, which looked humungous next to Corrine’s intimates. I picked up the white thong and dropped it on top of my Fruit-of-the-Looms. The other two pairs of panties followed, like jumpers onto a fireman’s trampoline. I rolled up my drawers into a bindle, and it was like they had devoured her somehow. It felt creepy, so I opened the bindle and laid out the panties on the bed again.
I had a mirror over my dresser. I looked weird wearing a T-shirt with no underwear, so I figured why not try on one of Corinne’s. They barely fit over my thighs, and I was afraid I’d tear them. It was an uncomfortable sight: my junk spilling out of a baby blue triangle.
I also felt jealous. It was strange. There I was, standing in my bedroom, jealous of Corinne, who, I figured, must love herself so much, because when you’re that tiny, you can’t do anything but love and be loved. The next day we were supposed to have gym together, I remember, and I thought about holding her. I’d pull her into my arms—gently—and love her, before she got lost in the expanse of my chest.
Then I saw the stain on her black briefs. It had almost blended into the material—and would have disappeared had it gone through the wash—but it was still there. And I felt this wave of embarrassment. Discovering this flaw made me feel like a creep. I had exposed her and weakened her. Hurt her. Somehow.
She was so small. And she’d be dead before eighth-grade graduation.
Her boyfriend survived the crash, you know. He didn’t attend the graduation, where they held an in memoriam for her. It was like the Oscars—that is, if Corinne had been the only actress in our lives.
Rienzi sat next to me in the auditorium, while pictures of Corinne passed across the projector screen. I thought about her panties…and Rienzi’s dirty fingers clutching them. Then his crooked teeth tearing into them like an animal would. Primitive. Shameless. Alive.
I’m thinking about accepting his friend request. I have missed the kid.
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Luis Amate Perez is Lou Perez, the bearded half of the comedy duo Greg and Lou and host of Uncle Lou’s Safe Place. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fiction, Born in the 1980s (Route Magazine, 2008), Rejected: Tales of the Failed, Dumped, and Canceled (Villard, 2009), Beyond Race Magazine, Religion Dispatches, Zouch Magazine, PoV Magazine,Sabotage Times, and Portable.TV. Follow him @LOUontheSUBWAY and www.LouPerez.net.
