32. The Summer After My Freshman Year

I spent the summer after my freshman year of college at home. All my friends did. It was the last time we would: other summers, we’d stay at school, travel abroad, head to a different place because our parents had divorced or moved. But that summer, we were all still together.

Milford felt different to me that summer. It wasn’t a place to escape from anymore—I’d already done that. It was a place to dip back into, enjoy like a tourist, but there was no longer any question my real life was somewhere else.

We had different jobs. They didn’t matter: they were something to do when we weren’t hanging out. I worked on the cleaning crew at a conference center in Sterling Forest, the only man with ten women. They always gave me the most disgusting jobs. Olson was on the maintenance crew at the auto plant where his father worked, and Jack served food at a Hot Shoppe on the Thruway. Andy’s father had died during the school year and so Andy was spending the summer trying to help his mother keep the family’s printing business going. Tierney had the best job of all of us, working the grounds of a local golf course. He spent most of his days outside, riding a lawnmower, raking sand pits. He’d try to tell us his job was hard, too, he had to spend a lot of time on his feet, but we’d take a look at his tan and cut him off immediately.

We drank a lot, during that summer. We’d come home from school with stories of drunken escapades, waking up naked in the dorm room shower at four a.m. with no idea how we’d ended up there, and after telling these stories felt the need to live up to them with each other. There was: the night Jack fell asleep on my basement couch after finishing most of a bottle of vodka and we wrote notes on his face in ballpoint pen. There was: the happy hour at Brothers where I threw up into my shirt after chugging my third Long Island Iced tea, went to the bathroom to clean up, then came back with a soaking shirt as though nothing had happened. There was: the week Tierney's parents went away on a cruise to Bermuda, and we all happened to have that Friday off, and so we went over to his house and started drinking at 9 in the morning just so we could say we’d gotten drunk one time at 9 in the morning.

We also spent a lot of time in bars, at which we could drink legally for the first time. There was: the Captain’s Table. There was: Brothers. There was: Snees. There was a place in Greenwood Lake that sometimes booked bands who did entire shows of cover versions of other bands. We saw a Kiss cover band, a Who cover band, and a Doors cover band. We avoided the Goose Pond, because that was where some of our fathers hung out, and we had no interest in running into them.

***

Tierney met the woman he ended up spending most of the summer with at Snees. Snees was where we’d go if we were hungry after spending the earlier part of the evening getting drunk somewhere else: they sold pizza and cheap pitchers. You had to grab a slice of the pizza as soon as the waitress laid it down on the table and gobble it up piping hot, or else you’d never get your share. Mornings after we went to Snees, I’d wake with my mouth aching from the night before’s burns.

This night at Snee’s, we were eating our pizza, minimizing the burn damage with mouthfuls of beer—you had to drink fast, too—when Tierney went over to the jukebox to play his favorite song, “That’s Life,” by Frank Sinatra. The rest of us hated this song, but Tierney loved it, and he would usually punch it up two or three times whenever we went to Snees. We were too busy scarfing down our beer and pizza to notice Tierney hadn’t returned by the song’s end, which deprived us of the one thing we did like, which was when Tierney would intone the lyrics during the instrumental breaks, just before Frank sang them.

“Where’s Tierney?” Andy asked, and we all scanned around. We spotted him sitting at a table of girls, all of whom seemed to be asking rapid-fire questions while he shyly nodded and spoke his typically brief answers.

“Jesus,” Olson said. “Jackpot for Tierney.”

“It wasn’t a big deal,” Tierney insisted, when he returned to our table. “They just wanted to know why I liked that song so much. I guess they’d heard me play it before.”

“You know them?”

“One of them, Gloria Nevins. She was in my Social Studies class last year.”

“Cassidy on the loose!” Jack said, in his drunken radio announcer voice. “Cassidy the god of sex!”

“Fuck off,” Tierney answered.

A couple of weeks later, Tierney confided to me that Gloria had given him her phone number that night, and he’d been out on two dates with her since. The first time they’d just gone to Pizza Hut and a movie, but the second he’d taken her to a classical music concert at West Point. I wanted to make a joke about Tierney not even liking classical music, but I understood it wasn’t the moment for a joke. As far as I knew, Tierney had never been out on a date with a woman before. I’m not sure if he’d ever been alone with one.

“Please don’t tell everyone,” he asked, and I promised I wouldn’t. I think the only reason he told me was because I was the only one of us who’d had a steady girlfriend for any amount of time, and he thought I would understand.

I didn’t have a steady girlfriend then, though. Lisa and I had only lasted through Christmas in our attempt at a long-distance relationship. With tears and long heartfelt conversations, we’d decided what we’d had was beautiful but we were growing apart and it was better to move on now so we wouldn’t end up hurting each other more later. We told each other it was a mutual decision, but it was me who’d forced the issue. I’d known for a long time, from even before we went away to college, it wasn’t going to work out, and by Christmas I felt it was wrong to pretend anymore.

Though broken up, Lisa and I continued to see each other, and to sleep together. We’d done it through Christmas vacation as a way to console each other, and then sort of fallen into it out of habit during spring break. And now, this summer, we were doing it again.

We justified this by saying things like, “It’s just another way of showing our friendship” and “This reminds us of the closeness we had.” Or, in more flip moments, “We’re so good at this, why should we let it go to waste?”

Deep down I understood Lisa thought of it as way to keep me around, and potentially of getting us back together. I think she thought if she was patient and available I’d eventually change my mind. But I knew that wasn’t going to happen.

Part of why it wasn’t going to happen was I’d met someone back at school who was I sort of fascinated with. She came from outside Boston and had a slight accent from there, which I thought was exotic. She was an English major like me and loved tequila and Patti Smith’s music and tilted her head sweetly to the side when she made hilarious, witheringly sarcastic comments. We’d only been out a few times, but I was curious to see where things would go when I went back in the fall.

It was fun to watch Tierney fall in love that summer. He eventually did tell everyone else about Gloria, although he saved the most details for me. I remember the story he told of getting Gloria a scarf for her birthday. She’d mentioned needing a red scarf to go along with her winter coat, and Tierney was convinced she was hinting to him. He went up Orange Plaza to find one, but it was summer: no one had scarves in stock, or if they did, they were more fashionable silk scarves, not the kind that Tierney wanted. “I wanted, you know, a real scarf,” he said. “Something that would keep her warm.”

He went to the tacky stores in downtown Milford; he drove to Newburgh. Finally, at Paramus Park, the biggest mall in our area nearly hour away, the saleslady at Lord and Taylors saw him haunting the women’s clothing section and came over and struck up a conversation. She told him there were no scarves being displayed this time of year, but she might be able to find something in the back. What she found was more brown than red, but it did have some red it.

“Cashmere,” the saleslady told him, “very warm,” and then she told him the price, which was forty dollars more than he’d intended to spend. He bought it without hesitating. What better thing was he going to do with the money?

There was a note of amazement in Tierney's voice as he told me this story. It was as though he was surprised himself with what he was capable of.

***

I had a few surprises myself that summer, from an unexpected source: my own family.

My father surprised me first, with the big 25th wedding anniversary party he threw for my mother. I wouldn’t have even thought he was keeping count. He told me about the party as we were driving home after he picked me up at school, my boxes of books and bags of clothes jammed so tightly into every available space of the car he could barely move his arms to steer. “You and your brother are throwing us an anniversary party,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’ve got it all taken care of. And don’t tell your mother, I want it to be a surprise.”

He really had taken care of everything, too. Or, at least arranged to have it done for him: he’d taken up golf while I was away and was having the party at the club where he played, and they were helping him out with the catering and decorations. But he did hire the band by himself and send out the invitations. They were white with purple flowers along the side, and in silver writing talked about walking hand in hand down the path of life and wanting their closest friends to come share the magic.

It was all completely out of character, and I would never have thought my father had the attention span for it. But he seemed generally different to me, that summer. At first I thought it was like Milford: going away and coming back had lessened his power over me. And there was a little of that going on, but it was more, he himself seemed changed too. He didn’t pick as many fights with my mother and me, and when a tense situation did come up was more likely to walk away from it. He stayed home most weeknights, but he was like a ghost, he didn’t talk much, just watched television and drank beer. He still spent most of the weekend away, playing golf and having a few drinks afterward. But now on Saturday nights he’d try to make us go out for dinner as a family, which I hated, because it cut into the time I wanted to spend with my friends.

It was better, he was easier to be around, but it made me feel sad, too. He seemed not himself, diminished, somehow, like someone in the hospital after an operation.

We managed to fool my mother completely. When she walked through the country club door and the fifty or so people there yelled surprise—my father’s friends, my mother didn’t really have any friends of her own—the look on her face was one of total shock. The party was nice, too, the people at the golf club did a good job with the food. Even the band was okay. My mother and father danced to a few songs, “Someone to Watch Over Me” and “Summer Wind.” I couldn’t remember ever seeing them dance together before.
My mother surprised me a few weeks later as we were driving home from Orange Plaza. We’d gone up there to shop for my brother’s birthday. My mother hated to drive, and especially to drive in traffic, so I offered to take her up there on a Saturday morning. She’d gone off to buy Jeffrey a shirt somewhere, and I’d browsed at the book and record store, wishing I had enough money to buy everything that interested me.

A Simon and Garfunkel song came on the car radio. “What is this song about, anyway?” my mother asked me, as she often did.

I’d been into Simon and Garfunkel a few years ago, though now at school had moved on to Elvis Costello and Sex Pistols. “I think he’s saying, he’s lonely, but he’s never going to admit he’s lonely. He’s going to say he’s a rock,  like he likes it, like it’s a choice he’s made.”

My mother nodded meaningfully. “I’m still going to leave your father, you know,” she said.

“Okay,” I answered.

I didn’t know. I had no idea she was thinking of leaving in the first place, much less that she was still going to.

“The party, it doesn’t make any difference. It doesn’t change anything.”

“Okay,” I said again. “When?”

“In a year. When Jeffrey goes to school. I can hold on until Jeffrey leaves for school.”

I nodded, said okay one last time. It did surprise me to hear her say this, but I also didn’t believe it for a minute. If she’d wanted to leave, she would have already, when things were really bad, and now that my father seemed to be making some kind of odd effort it was even less likely she’d have the nerve. They were both of them stuck, and always would be, that’s the way it seemed to me.

My brother wasn’t even there when he surprised me. It was a Sunday afternoon, and I was alone in the house. I wasn’t seeing Lisa that day, there was nothing on television, so I thought, well, let me jerk off. I went to find my Playboy magazine, the one with the Bob Dylan interview I’d begged my father to buy me the year before. I really had wanted to read the Bob Dylan interview, but I wasn’t above the centerfold.

Only, it was gone from the spot in the back of my closet where I kept it. I immediately thought, Jeffrey took it. Which made me a little angry, and gave me, I felt, the right to root through his stuff to retrieve it.
I looked in the back of his closet, couldn’t find it, tried under his bed, no, then tried his dresser. It wasn’t in the underwear drawer, but then there it was, buried in his bottom drawer underneath his wrestling magazines. And underneath it, a copy of Playgirl and a fifty or sixty pictures of men wearing underwear torn from various magazines.

I slammed the drawer shut. I really did. But then I opened it again and stole back my Playboy.

I didn’t talk to Jeffrey about what I’d seen—no way was I going to talk to him about it!—but I thought about it whenever I saw him that summer. It made me think, of all things, of that time we’d found the Little Pond, back when I was a kid. There were new places in even the most familiar landscapes, and depths to even the most familiar people. Thinking this made me feel good, hopeful. The gay part itself I still had to work through a bit.

***

One Friday night in July I nearly got into fistfight with Andy. We were at my house, down in the basement. My parents had gone away for a week to the West Coast to visit my Aunt Jane. She’d moved out there about ten years before, after Jane and Phil divorced. My brother had lied about a family emergency to get the time off, and my parents wanted me to as well, but I told them I didn’t feel comfortable doing that. I would have liked to see my cousins, but I wasn’t as good a liar as my brother, plus I’d been looking forward to having the time alone.

It was around 11:30, and we’d been drinking beer and shooting pool for three hours. I’d been drinking more than I usually did, since I didn’t have to drive. “Hey, Chris,” Tony said. “I keep meaning to ask, you still fucking Lisa Pratt?”

We’d all come home from school last fall for Andy's father’s funeral. It was unexpected. Andy's father had been diagnosed with lung cancer the summer before, but we thought he’d have more time. At the funeral, Andyhad shaken all our hands and given us hugs. He’d been especially excited to tell me he’d put a baseball cap from the little league team his father coached that Andy and I had played on in the coffin with him. “Look for it, when you go by,” Andy said. “I tucked it under his arm.”

Andy rarely talked about his father during the summer, but he did talk a lot about women, usually referring to them as bitches or cunts. He made us howl with laughter describing the grotesqueness of the ones around us in any given bar, and told us in vivid detail about his sexual exploits at college. These exploits tended toward the grotesque, too. Andy either only slept with girls he hated, or he hated any girl who would sleep with him. He’d always been a lot smoother with women than the rest of us, but he’d never been quite so compulsive about it before his father died.

“Ha ha,” I said, when Andy asked me about Lisa.

I hadn’t ever talked much about Lisa with any of my friends, either the good parts of what happened between us or the bad. It just wasn’t something I did.

“No, really,” Andy asked. “I see you with her too much for two people who are broken up, she must be giving you some. Good arrangement for you, I guess. Fat bitches are good fucks, I hear.”

His voice was hard, vicious. “Andy, enough,” I said.

“What? What did I say?”

“Just enough. Let’s play pool.”

“I don’t want to play pool. What, Lisa is all of sudden off limits? What the fuck do you care what I say about her?”

“I do care. Just let it go, okay?”

“No. I’m not letting it go. Answer me. Are you fucking her or not?”

Andy joked this way with everyone. I’d heard him go to town on Jack’s mother, who was kind of attractive.

I should have just lied, said no. He wouldn’t have believed me, but he would have dropped it.

I said, “Look, Andy, why don’t you leave, if you can’t shut the fuck up.”

I wasn’t mad at him. Or, I was mad at him, but only because what he was saying was so close to the truth. That’s just what Lisa and I were doing, fucking, using each other. Defending her honor here with Andy made me feel like I wasn’t betraying her as deeply as I knew I was.

Andy looked at me with disgust. “Lighten up, Chris. You’re not even going out with the bitch anymore.”

I put down my cue stick. “You know, I think you should leave.”

Andy put down his cue stick, too, squared off in front of me. “But I don’t want to leave.”

“It’s my house, and I’m asking you to. Now.”

We stood there, staring at each other, waiting for a punch to be thrown. Neither of us threw the punch, and eventually Andy stalked out of the house. We both laughed it off the next time we got together—“Can you believe we were arguing about a woman?”—but we also never had a conversation between just the two of us alone for the rest of the summer.

***

The big event for the month of August was Jack moving out of his house after a fight with his father. I found out about it from Olson. “We’re meeting tonight at Pine Tree Elementary school. The parking lot,” he told me on the phone.

“Why?”

“That’s where Jack’s living now. We thought we’d get a few six-packs, help him break it in.”

Jack had been there four days by then, and he had a pretty good setup. He said there was a place just around the corner of the school where he could park and not be bothered by any lights from the street. He told us he brought food from the Hot Shoppe to eat, and that there was a trucker’s shower right there that only cost a couple of bucks. It was repulsive, he said, and he already had a wicked case of athlete’s foot, but it was better than nothing. He said he sneaked back to his house a couple of days ago to get some clothes, and would probably have to do that again, depending on how long he stayed away.

“Do your parents know you’re here?” I asked.

“They know, Chris. I couldn’t very well not tell them, could I? They’d call the police.”

“What do they think?”

“They’re not thrilled. I think my mother understands. She came by yesterday to drop off a blanket. I didn’t need it, though, it was a warm night.”

Jack told us about the fight. He’d come home drunk from one of our nights out and woken his parents up rummaging in the refrigerator for something to eat. Jack’s father had been drunk, too, and he’d stormed downstairs and started in on Jack about how he treated their house like a hotel and had wasted his summer and how Jack’s father was sick of it, and also sick of paying for Jack to go to college, and of Jack in general. Jack had offered some opinions about his father being an alcoholic asshole and if his father was so sick of him then Jack would just leave, he didn’t need any fucking handouts.

I had my doubts about Jack’s version of these events. Jack’s father was not a nice guy: sarcastic when sober, mean when drunk. Aggressive too: Jack had told us stories of his father coming home in police cars from scuffles in bars, of purple bruises his father showed off the day after like they were medals. I had a feeling that if Jack had said the things he told us he’d said, he’d have ended up in a hospital, not the Pine Tree School parking lot.

We ended up not even going anywhere that first night, just hanging out at Jack’s car, and for the next week that happened more often than not. We’d meet at Jack’s car, expecting to go out for the evening, and instead just hang there. We were all a little tired of Milford bars by then. Anything that was going to happen in those bars had already had a chance to happen.

So we drank our beers, talked, and when we got tired of played a game we made up called “Imaginary Basketball.” We all got on the court and fought to narrate and act out a basketball game instead of actually playing one, since we didn’t have a ball. Whoever talked the loudest, whoever found the opening to say “Steal” or “Drive down the lane for a dunk,” was be the winner. Why none of us ever thought to bring a ball I’m not sure.

***

The Friday before the Labor Day weekend was supposed to be our last night on the town together before going back to school, a real blow-out. We’d discussed it, sitting in the grass in front of Jack’s car, how we were going to hit every bar in Milford, maybe head out to Greenwood Lake to see a band, or go to Newburgh to a strip club. We’d been talking about a strip club all summer, and what better time than the last night? We wanted to make it memorable. But then Tierney said that he wanted to spend the night with Gloria Nevins instead of us, and Andy decided to drive back early to school, which I of course self-centeredly thought had something to do with not wanting to spend any more time with me.

Jack, Olson, and I went out, but it was the wrong dynamic with just the three of us. Brothers was boring, and Snees too crowded, and the Brazen Head was filled with jocks, and at 11 Olson told us he was packing it in, he had an 8:30 flight the next morning back to Nashville. “One round at the strip club,” I begged, still holding out for something memorable, but Olson smiled and said no, and wished Jack and me the best of luck in our studies.

I drove Jack back to his car. We both knew the moment for the strip club was passed. “How about a nightcap?” Jack asked. “I’ve got a few beers left in my trunk.”

“Sure,” I said.

We sat on the hood of Jack’s car, against the windshield, looking up at the stars. “So are you going to go back home at all?” I asked.

“Yeah. I’m going back tonight.”

“Are you really?”

“Yeah. My father came by the other night and told me I had to. He said enough was enough.”

“Are you okay with that?”

“No. Of course not. The bastard didn’t even apologize. But it doesn’t feel like a choice. I can’t stay out here forever. I can’t get back to school by myself, can I?”

“I…admire you for doing it, anyway,” I admitted. “I think it was brave.”

Jack laughed. “Brave and stupid.  What good is brave, if it doesn’t change anything?”

I sipped my beer. Jack took off for a few minutes behind the building He returned pulling up his zipper.

“Have I ever told you I have a bashful bladder?” Jack asked. “You know what that is?”

“You can’t piss?”

“I can’t piss when there’s someone else around. Like, in a men’s room, I just can’t go. I don’t know what it is.”

“Must be inconvenient.”

“It is inconvenient. It’s fucking inconvenient. I remember this one time, my father took me to the Knicks game, down at Madison Square Garden, and I had to go so badly. I was standing there outside the men’s room, waiting for it to empty out, but there was always someone else going in. Finally, I thought I was going to piss my pants so I went in. They had one of those long silver things to piss into, you know? That’s the worst, that’s no privacy at all. But I had to do, so I whipped it out, and there’s an older guy on one side and a young guy on the other side and I’m pointing my dick at this big silver thing and nothing will come out. The piss was just building up in me, but it wouldn’t come out, until those two guys left and I managed to get a minute alone in there. My father was all pissed when I got back to the seat because I’d missed the most exciting play of the game.”

“Jack, why are you telling me this?”

Jack shook his head. “I don’t know. Why do you tell anyone anything? Because I can. Because I know you’ll listen. Look, I’m going to call it a night and head back home. I might as well get this over with. Have fun back at school. We’ll get together at Thanksgiving. Have a few beers or something.”

***

Stories are gifts. You tell them because you can; you tell them because you hope someone will listen. You tell them to fill the moment and to keep the moment from going away. The moment still goes away.

Driving home from the Pine Tree Elementary School Parking Lot on the last night of the summer after my freshman year of college, I wasn’t thinking of any of this. I was thinking I hoped my brother was awake, so we could maybe watch some kitschy late night television together, like we used to. I was thinking I hoped my father had come home early that night, so my mother wouldn’t be in one of her angry moods all day tomorrow, my last before I headed back to school on Sunday. I was thinking about that girl back at school, the one I was fascinated with and curious about:  what I’d say when, on pins and needles, I spotted her coming toward me across the Great Lawn, hopefully wearing the green dress I liked so much and had once helped lift over her head. I thought I would say something like this: “Hello! How are you doing? It’s so great to see you. Tell me about your summer.”

31. Motel Room

I drove to the motel in the afternoon and registered and got the key. It was in north Jersey, along a stretch where there were ten or fifteen of these near-identical motels. I guess they were big with truckers. I’d driven by these places many times, with Lisa on our way to Paramus Park, or with my parents to visit my cousins in Bergen County. I had it in my mind to register using a funny name, Holden Caulfield or something like that, but in the end I used my real name and even my real license plate number. The lady behind the desk was middle-aged, with a hard look on her face like she’d been through some rough times. I thought if I tried to lie about anything she would see right through me.

She barely glanced at the information I wrote down, though. She just gave me the  key and told me the check-out time.

I needed to get home to get ready, but I couldn’t resist taking a quick peek. It looked like every motel room I’d ever seen on television, or stayed in with my parents during road trips to Washington or Pennsylvania Dutch Country: beige rug, faded comforter, lots of molded plastic in the bathroom. Still, I got flutters in my stomach standing in the doorway.

There was no reason for this. Lisa and I by this time had had every kind of sex we could think of. It was just the thought of being there with her, overnight, in a motel room. That was maybe the one kind we hadn’t had: in a bed of our own, without any need to immediately put on our clothes when we were done.

Back at home, I took a 45-minute long bath until I reeked of Dial soap and then put on my tuxedo. It was powder blue, with a black cumberband, and I’d made lots of jokes about black and blue being appropriate colors for me as I left high school. I drove over to Lisa’s: she looked beautiful, her white dress tight and gauzy, angel’s breath threaded in her hair. I knew it was angel’s breath because she’d insisted the corsage I bought her include angel’s breath, to match her hair.

“Look at us, we clean up good,” I said, and kissed her.

“Don’t even imagine a lot of effort didn’t go into this,” she answered.

Her parents took pictures: in front of the living wall unit, in front of the hedges in the front of the house, entering the car to be on our way. “Did you get it?” Lisa asked, as we drove off.

I motioned toward the glove compartment. She opened it and took out the diamond-shaped red plastic keychain. “8,” she said, reading the number. “Think we can do it that many times tonight?”

“No,” I admitted, “but I’m enjoying thinking about trying.”

We stopped back at my parents house. They took pictures: in front of the living room wall unit, in front of the weeping willow in the backyard. “Give a call if you need anything,” my father said as I got in the car. I’d explained to him how the night was going to go, the sleepover party at Cliff Kennedy's, the drive to the shore the next morning. I think he both believed it and trusted that I knew what I was doing if it wasn’t true. My mother, she just thought I looked good in powder blue.

The Prom itself was sort of like the motel room: standard issue, the same thing I’d seen too many times on television. There was dancing to terrible soft-rock songs, the kind I’d loved when I started high school four years ago. There was food: chicken cordon bleu, crumbly blueberry tart for dessert. There were sarcastic conversations about the decorations with the few my friends who’d made it. Jack was there with a girl named Christine Rock, but only as friends, and Andy with a very beautiful though nearly-mute girl named Heather Leonardo. She’d transferred to our school in the fall, and Tony had immediately asked her out. “Does she talk more in person?” we asked, and Andy told us no, she never had much to say, but she was lonely and missed her friends back home and loved to fuck. “She’s so grateful I’m being nice to her,” Andy explained. “She’ll do practically anything for me.”

There was even some TV-show style drama: Pete Veeck, Lisa’s former boyfriend, came over and asked her to dance. He was there with a junior, the girl he’d broken up with Lisa to pursue. She said a cold no and turned her back to him. After he left I told her it was okay with me, and that maybe she should dance with him, just for the closure. We walked out to the back porch of the Meadowbrook Lounge and talked it over for a half hour, until Lisa decided yes, she should have one last dance with Veeck, but she should be the one to ask him. By then it was getting near the end and people were starting to leave and she never got a chance.

A bunch of us went to a McDonalds in our Prom clothes. Someone had seen it in a movie. After, most people were heading off to the party at Cliff Kennedy's. There really was one, which was the beauty of our cover-up story. Lisa and I promised to meet everyone there, but as soon as we got in the car we headed for Jersey.

Lisa was grossed out by the room, which did look seedier under electric light than it had in the sunlight, but I could tell she was trying to be a good sport. I suggested a shower: “If the room isn’t clean, at least we can be.” We soaped each other and attempted intercourse standing up but the shower enclosure was too small so we toweled off and hit the bed. It crackled with every move we made: there was a plastic sheet underneath the regular one.

The first time went quick. We talked a little more about Veeck and then about how drunk Mary Anne Massimano had been—one of the teachers had escorted her out about midway through the prom—and then we gave it another try. It took longer, a while actually, the whole exhaustion and excitement of the day catching up with me, and when I finally came I had a thought that there was no way I was getting to 8 but maybe there’d be time for one more tomorrow morning.

I reached down to make sure my condom stayed on as I pulled out. Only I couldn’t find the condom.

“It’s not there,” I said.

“What?”

“The rubber. It came off. It’s not on me anymore.”

“Where is it?”

“Still inside you, I think.”

This had never happened to us before. We’d always been so careful.

First, we dealt with the mechanical part, the recovery. We were both very calm doing this. We found that the condom hadn’t just come off, it had split into two pieces.

Lisa started crying as soon as she saw. “I’m scared,” she managed to say, her body shaking.

“I can’t get pregnant. I can’t.”

I did all the right things. I took her in my arms. I let her cry. When she was through the worst part of the crying, I tried to take a light tone. “Getting pregnant on Prom night? What are the chances?” I said. I talked about how we should bring a lawsuit against the condom company. I asked what kind of world it was where you couldn’t even trust latex. I tried to attribute the breaking of the condom to my enormous endowment.

“Don’t worry,” I kept saying as Lisa nodded off in my arms. “Nothing’s going to happen. It’ll all be all right.”

I didn’t believe any of this. I was as full of panic and dread as Lisa. She was right: she couldn’t be pregnant. Being pregnant would ruin everything.

I turned on the TV. I gunned around until I found a “Twilight Zone” episode about a dummy who takes over the ventriloquist’s act, and then I scored an “I Love Lucy” with Lucy making a Western movie starring Fred and Ethel because she’s jealous of Ricky. The movie is of course awful. Lisa was asleep by now. I thought of that “I Love Lucy” episode where Lucy is pregnant and can’t find the right moment to tell Ricky, and she ends up going down to the club and requesting a song about having a baby. My brother and I had seen it about ten times, it was one of our favorites. I remembered how Ricky walks from table to table, asking each couple if they’ve requested the song, until he comes to Lucy’s table. She nods at him, smiling, to indicate yes, she’s the one.

I thought about the glowing, beatific look on Lucy’s face. Then I thought about the hard look on the face of the woman who’d rented me this room. How long, I wondered, would I be able to keep doing the right thing, when the right thing got harder than mouthing comforting words and making jokes about lawsuits?

30. Fights With Teachers

Mostly teachers liked me. I worked hard, did what I was asked, and on a good day could say something or write something that must have made them feel like some of what they were working so hard to get across was sinking in. A few teachers, like my sixth grade teacher Mr. Diana, nearly idolized me. “Twenty-nine more Chris Newsomes would make teaching a complete pleasure,” he wrote on my report card one quarter.

Which is why the fights I got in with teachers stuck out so much. The first time was in fourth grade, when a substitute teacher named Mr. Merriman accused me of stealing someone else’s art folder. Mr. Merriman was a young guy, maybe early twenties, much younger than our regular teacher Mrs. Wortmann. When he came in that morning, he introduced himself by saying he was totally new to being a teacher and didn’t even have a job yet and that was why he was working as a substitute. He told us he knew all about how classes treated substitutes, he wasn’t that far from doing it himself, and he would make a deal with us: if we did the work that Mrs. Wortmann had left and didn’t give him a hard time, he’d make sure we had some free time at the end of the day. He said it was only fair.

I thought this was pretty cool, both that he’d admit he was new to teaching and that he’d make this kind of deal. I always finished my work early, and Mrs. Wortmann wouldn’t even let me read a book until everyone was done.

Art period was right after lunch, and this was where the trouble started. Each of us had a legal-sized manila folder we used to store our artwork. We kept these in a closet in the back of the classroom, brought them home at the end of the week, and returned them empty on Monday. This day was a Monday.

Mr. Merriman told us all to get our art folders and get ready to go to art class. I went to the closet and grabbed my folder and got on line. “Is everyone all set?” Mr. Merriman asked, before beginning our march down to the art room.

“No,” a girl named Perri Knoblauch said. “Someone took my folder. It’s not here.”

“I’m sure no one took it,” Mr. Merriman said. “Let’s take a closer look.”

He and Perri inspected the closet. But there was no folder there. Perri walked back out in the classroom, looking about to cry about some stupid art folder. She looked us all up and down in the line—we were being very well-behaved, standing there in line hardly talking, we hadn’t forgotten Mr. Merriman’s deal—when her eyes landed on me. “He has it,” she said to Mr. Merriman. “That’s what my folder looks like.”

Mr. Merriman walked over to me. “This girl says you have her folder.”

“Nope,” I said. “It’s mine.”

“Can you prove it? Is your name on it?”

I couldn’t remember if I’d put my name on the folder, so I looked at it front and back. There was no name.

“Maybe you should just give it back to her,” Mr. Merriman said.

“It’s mine, not hers,” I said. “I picked it up from exactly where I left it. Her name’s not on it either.”

“Don’t let him steal my folder,” Perri said, again looking about to cry.

Let me describe Perri Knoblauch. She looked like a doll. Blonde hair, blue eyes, always dressed in pretty dresses and black shoes. She wasn’t one of the smart kids, but she looked like she should be.

Let me describe me, at least right at that moment. At lunch recess we’d been playing some football game we made up, where we chased each other and then piled on. My shirt was out of my pants, and the knees of my khaki pants were grass-stained. My fingernails were caked with dirt.

“I think you should give Perri back her folder,” Mr. Merriman said.

“No. It’s mine. Why are you believing her? She’s the one trying to steal my folder.”

“I seriously doubt it,” Mr. Merriman said, in an angry voice he didn’t look like he would have been capable of. “And for that, you can sit here while everyone else goes to art. But first, take the pass and go down to the bathroom and clean up. Your hands are filthy.”

I felt wronged, sitting by myself in the dark classroom, but also humiliated and hurt. I was never punished like this. Teachers liked me. I knew Mr. Merriman had judged me on my dirty fingernails, my messy clothes. He had decided I looked like someone who would steal. I thought how if he knew me even a little, he would have realized I wasn’t a thief. But he didn’t know me, and so it was everything was up for grabs, which was a scary thing.

The next time I got in a fight with a teacher it was in 6th grade. Mrs. Gunn was an older teacher, heavy and white-haired. She taught Math, and did it in a very strict and by rote way. One of the things she liked to have us do was to write out multiplication tables. Each day we had to write out one multiplication table and hand it in along with our regular homework. It was boring—I already knew my math tables by heart, right up through 12—and one day I forgot to do it. “Mr. Newsome,” Mrs. Gunn said, the next day, “you didn’t hand in a multiplication table yesterday.”

“Oh,” I said, thinking it was no big thing. “Sorry. I have one for today.”

“Not good enough,” Mrs. Gunn said. “I’m marking your assignment yesterday as failed.”
I made a disbelieving face. “Why?”

“Because you didn’t do the assignment.”

“But I do the assignment every day. I always do the assignment.”

“And yesterday you didn’t, and you should suffer the consequences.”

“You know I already know my multiplication tables. I just forgot once to write them out. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too. But everyone has to follow the rules,” Mrs. Gunn said.

“And I do. I always do. Other people don’t do their homework all the time. I miss one assignment and—“

“Enough,” Mrs. Gunn intoned. “Please leave this classroom right now. Wait outside until we’re done.”

“But all I said—“

”Goodbye,” she thundered.

So there I was, by myself again, this time in the hallway right outside the classroom. I didn’t know where else to go. In the middle of my next class, which was Music, Mr. Diana showed up and motioned me out to the hall. “So what happened with you and Mrs.Gunn?”

There was a shake in my voice when I spoke. I was still upset. “I don’t know. I don’t why she got so mad at me. All I did was miss an assignment.”

“She’s definitely mad. I think I can calm her down. But I’d suggest you do whatever she tells you to do from now on.”

“But I always do, and then this one time…”

“That’s probably the problem,” Mr. Diana interrupted. “If you of all people stop doing your assignments, it makes us wonder who will do them.”

If my first fight was because the teacher didn’t know me at all, and the second because the teacher knew me too well, the third one, the one that got me suspended, had something to do with knowing myself and not especially liking what I knew. It was in high school. I was sitting at a library table with a group of guys, Bob Wagner, Alex Greer, a few others. They weren’t my regular group of friends but I hung out with them sometimes. The library was supposed to be a quiet study period, but these guys had this game where they each in turn would shout a word into the silence. The word they always shouted was “Corn.” I’d once asked Bob Wagner why they’d chosen this word, but he shrugged and said he couldn’t remember.

Usually, there’d just be one or two “Corn” shouts in a given period. The librarian, a woman named Mrs. McGinnis, was part-time and not much into discipline, so she just ignored the shouts and everyone was happy. But on this day these guys were feeling especially frisky and a kid named Paul Miroff went for a third try.

The thing about the good “Corn” shouters, like Bob Wagner, was they could actually disguise their voices. And they used not only a different voice but a different inflection: sometimes a long, drawn-out “Coooooorn,” sometimes (more often) a barked “Corn” that was over so fast it made you wonder whether you’d really heard it.

Paul Miroff was not such a master. His “Corn” was loud, but in his normal voice and inflection. Maybe it was how flagrant this “Corn” was that made Mrs. McGinnis stride over to our table, or maybe she felt some unwritten code had been violated by the third shout.
“All of you,” she said. “Stand up.”

We all stood up.

“Get in a line.”

We did what she asked. It felt like we were in a police line-up. Everyone else in the library was staring.

“Which one of you just shouted?”

Nobody said anything. And as the silence continued, I smiled. Partially it was out of nervousness. But mostly it was just how stupid this all was. Being confronted by the librarian for shouting a meaningless word. These guys really were idiots.

Mrs. McGinnis noticed my smile. “You. Were you the one who shouted?”

Of course I wasn’t. I wouldn’t have had the nerve, to begin with. I was a watcher, not a participant, by personality, by reputation. If I’d just offered a simple denial, Mrs. McGinnis would have moved on to one of the other guys. And I’m sure everyone, the other guys and all the staring faces in the library, expected me to make this simple denial.

“What difference does it make?” I asked.

It came out before I’d even known I was saying it.

“What did you say?” Mrs. McGinnis asked, in surprise and amazement.

“What difference does it make? It was just a joke. It was funny. It didn’t hurt anybody.”

Mrs. McGinnis became upset. She started talking in a heated voice about how the library was a safe place to do work and it was disrespectful to other people to distract them wasn’t that hurt enough? What if they had to get something done and they couldn’t finish it because of me? What about then?

At this point I realized that whatever point I was trying to make had already been made or not made. In my heart, I sort of agreed with what Mrs. McGinnis was saying.

So I raised my hands in what I thought was a placating gesture: okay, all right, I see what you’re saying. Let’s move on.

A seething anger now filled Mrs. McGinnis face. “You just bought yourself some detention, mister. I’m getting Mr. Peck down here.”

Over the next 10 minutes, the phrase “What did I do?” must have come out of my mouth at least 10 times. It seemed that Mrs. McGinnis was convinced that my placating gesture had been insulting, that I was fake-bowing to her. She continued to be all-out-of-proportion emotional as she discussed the incident, and Mr. Peck, the principal, looked uncomfortable listening to her insist I be given detention and that my parents be called and how she wasn’t going to stand for this kind of disrespect any longer at this school. Something had to be done, starting now.

“Why don’t you come with me to the office,” Mr. Peck said. “Mrs. McGinnis, you should be confident the situation will be handled appropriately.”

“I’m going to have to call your parents,” Mr. Peck said, when we were alone. “I’m sorry, but I don’t have any other choice.”

I waited in the office, unable to meet the eyes of the secretaries, trying to figure out why what had just happened had happened. I knew I wasn’t blameless, but it had all seemed to go out of control so quickly.

My mother and father both arrived a half hour later. It was odd to see them together: I rarely did. I’d been expecting my mother, this was one the days she didn’t got into work in the city, but my father must have been getting a late start on his sales calls for the day and still been at home. They nodded to me and were immediately escorted into Mr. Peck’s office, where they stayed about 15 minutes. They came out with grim looks on their faces and my father motioned me to follow. We went outside, to the parking lot and his car.

It was a beautiful sunny day, and the car had that great sunny day cocoon of warmth I usually loved. I sat in the backseat and my father drove away. I waited for him to start, tried to figure out how I would explain my version of the events.

Finally he said, “You’ll stay home tomorrow. It won’t technically be a suspension. It won’t appear on your record. But Mr. Peck doesn’t want to see you in school tomorrow.”

His voice was tight. I waited for the follow-up questions, for which I still didn’t have good answers.

“Mr. Peck explained what happened,” he continued. “And all I can say is…why in the world would you possibly do something so stupid? What was on your mind?”

My father’s tone was one of true astonishment. Then he started laughing. And my mother and I started laughing, too.

I began to try to explain, but he waved me off. He asked my mother if she felt like going to lunch, and she said yes, she had nothing going on that afternoon. We went to a place my father knew in Mahwah, a restaurant built into what used to be a railroad car. At his suggestion, we all ordered the French Dip. We talked about how they could make a railroad car into a restaurant and then we talked about how trains used to be so much more popular than there were today. I told them about the song “City of New Orleans,” which I’d heard someone singing on TV, and they were interested in hearing about it, which pleased me, and then they talked about the subways back where they’d grown up in the Bronx, “the Old El,” they called it. “Don’t act now like you liked taking the train,” my mother teased my father. “You used to hate it whenever you had to go into Manhattan.”  We were all trying a little too hard to be people we weren’t anymore, and I think we all knew it, but we were all having fun, too.

29. Truman Capote

Truman Capote was telling a long story to Merv Griffith. It went something like this: A young man is visiting a woman in a New York City apartment. It’s not their first date, but it’s early on in their time together, He’s still trying to impress her. They’re on their way to a movie. The woman excuses herself, says she needs to go into the other room to get ready. The man is left alone in the kitchen with the woman’s dog, which is small, a terrier, white. He’s playing with the dog, tossing a sponge rubber ball around the apartment, letting the dog retrieve it. The woman calls in, “Just a few more seconds.” The man throws the ball one last time. But he throws it too hard. It bounces off the linoleum tiles of the kitchen floor and out the window. The dog goes leaping after it, right out the window.

The woman reappears. “We better hurry,” she says. “We’re going to miss the beginning.”

They leave in a rush. She doesn’t have a chance to notice the dog isn’t there. The man doesn’t say anything then, nor does he say anything during the movie. He can barely watch the movie at all. At the end of the night, he kisses the woman at the door, and leaves quickly. He knows she’s going to notice the dog is missing when she gets inside. But she’s going to think the dog jumped out the window by itself. He knows she won’t suspect him for a minute. He also knows he’s never going to call her again, or take her calls. Which in fact is what happens: they never do get together again after that night.

Truman exaggerated every detail of the story, which was why it took him so long to tell it. He couldn’t just say “a sponge ball.” He had to talk about how there was one side of the ball already bitten off, how wet it was with the dog’s drool.

“He’s drunk,” my mother said, about midway through the story.

“Do you think so? Or is it only because he talks like that?” I asked.

“No. He’s drunk.”

My mother and I liked to watch Merv on nights when my father wasn’t around, which was most nights these days. Sometimes he stopped for a few drinks after work and didn’t come home until well after dinner; sometimes something one of us said set him off and he’d storm off in the car. Thursdays he was in a bowling league, and Fridays he played poker at the VFW.

It was fine with us. It was much more relaxed without him here. There was less shouting.

My mother and I liked talk shows in general. Our favorite was Lee Leonard, the host on the midday show from New York City. We both admired the way he was able to talk to anyone, how curious he seemed to be about every minor Broadway actor or first novelist who sat down in the chair across from him.
Merv wasn’t curious. He more or less just let people talk and laughed at their jokes. But he did get bigger stars than Lee Leonard did.

“So here’s my point,” Truman said, in that nasal, syrupy voice. “Would you tell the woman about her dog? I think if you’re truthful with yourself, you’ll have to think long and hard about that. And here’s my other point: was the killing of the dog the reason the man never got together again with the woman, whom he really liked and anticipated a future with, or was it his being unable to admit it to her?”

“Of course I’d tell her,” my mother said. “How can anyone think they wouldn’t tell?”

“I guess he considers it a moral test,” I answered.

“That’s no test! What kind of person wouldn’t tell someone they’d killed their dog? Can you imagine how that woman must have felt? And this person, he just let her go on thinking that nothing was happening, let her go to the movie without knowing.”

I tried to smile. There was too much emotion in my mother’s voice. It wasn’t right for this silly story. It wasn’t right for Merv in general.

“It’s not that big a deal,” I said, trying to lighten the mood.

“It is a big deal,” my mother insisted. “How about you? Would you tell?”

I truly didn’t know. I guessed it would have depended on the girl. But I knew what my mother wanted to hear. “Yes. I would.”

“That’s right. Of course you would. Anyone, anyone moral, as you call it, would. I know that. I don’t care what any Truman Capote says about it.”

I nodded again. When the show came back from commercial, Truman was gone. Maybe he had been drunk after all. Merv introduced his next guest, David Jannsen. We’d seen David Jannsen before on other shows, and knew he was what my mother liked to call a “snore bore.” I was grateful to have an excuse to go to bed.

28. King Tut

My girlfriend Lisa’s father got tickets to see the King Tut exhibition at the Metropolitan. It was the hottest ticket in town. I’d read the articles in the New York Times and even our local paper about how impossible it was to track one down. “How’d he manage that?” I asked.

“He said the elevator man at his office had some kind of connection. Do you want to go?”

“Really?”

“Sure. He told me to invite you. He ended up with extras, I have no idea how.

As you know, he likes to be mysterious. I’m surprised he even told me about the elevator man.”

Lisa and I had been going out for about 8 months. We’d met at a National Honor Society dance in the spring. I was a member, Lisa wasn’t, but I never took the NHS very seriously anyway. I’d only gone to the dance because they made me volunteer to help set up.

Lisa was the one who asked me to dance. She was also the one who started the kiss, after we’d danced together four dances in a row, including a slow one. Her face tasted bitter. It was the first time I’d kissed anyone like that, full tongue, and I wasn’t sure if maybe that was the way such kisses tasted. She told me later it must have been her acne medicine.

Lisa was my first girlfriend, and I approached the task with the same focus and attention to detail I would an assignment at school. I bought her gifts to commemorate milestones like our first and second and third month together. I wrote her a poem about how she shimmered like light refracted through a prism. I was determined to fall in love with her and eventually did.

I think she started out a little in love with me—she’d mentioned a few times things about “having my eye on you for a while”— but my intensity scared her. I wrote a poem about that, too, her cruel detachment, but she was unmoved. “It’s too much,” she kept saying. Then she went away on vacation for a week to Virginia Beach and when she came back she was as in love with me as I was with her. “What changed?” I asked, not able to leave well enough alone.

“The moon on the beach was so big,” she answered, and wouldn’t say anything more. Her father wasn’t the only one prone to mysterious pronouncements.

We’d had sex for the first time the weekend before she told me about the King Tut tickets. It was something of a technicality, since we’d done everything but over the summer, yet it still felt momentous to me. Back seat of the car parked at the circle at the end of the street where Lisa lived, only as much clothes off as necessary, quick the first time and nicer the second. “Are you okay?” I asked afterward, conditioned by the teen novels I claimed not to read for tears, regret. “Okay?” Lisa said. “I’m great!” That’s when we started our second try.

“So do you want to go to Tut or not?” Lisa asked.

“Of course I do,” I said. “It’s the hottest ticket in town, right?”

Her father drove us down: me, Lisa, her mother, her two sisters. Her older brother Neil didn’t want to go. Lisa’s father drove a big car, a Lincoln, but it was still crowded with three of us in the back seat and three in the front. It was mid-January, so we were all wearing heavy winter coats, which made it even more of a tight squeeze.

During the ride Lisa’s father made each of the girls tell a story about something that had happened to them during the week. Lisa had told me he often did this. He worked long hours during the week, and there were many evenings he didn’t see them at all. Julie, Lisa’s younger sister, told a story about a friend who’d copied from her on a test. Karen, Lisa’s older sister, told a story she’d heard that one of her teachers was on an extended leave of absence because he’d gone into rehab. Lisa told about how I’d driven over to her house on a Thursday night just to help her with her homework.

I really had done that, and really just to help her with her homework. It wasn’t because I’d expected us to have sex again. I knew we would, sooner or later, but I wanted to make sure Lisa knew I would still do special things like that for her without the expectation of sex.

“How romantic,” Lisa’s father said, which embarrassed me, although I couldn’t tell if he meant it or was being sarcastic. He really was an inscrutable guy.

At the museum, Lisa and I quickly split off from the rest of her family. The place was a zoo. There were so many people you could barely walk. You had to wait in the crowd for five minutes to even get a glimpse of the exhibits. And once you did get there, what you mostly saw was gold. Piece after piece, room after room, until it was almost too much of a good thing, until you lost track of how valuable it all was.

“I guess expecting more like, ancient rocks and sarcophaguses and stuff,” I whispered to Lisa.

“He was kind of into jewelry, huh?” Lisa answered.

What impressed me much more than the exhibit was the people. They were so stylish, so clearly rich and sophisticated and powerful. I even thought I recognized Lee Leonard, who hosted the midday talk show on Channel 5 that my mother and I liked to watch during the summer.

I could see myself in crowds like this, going forward into the future. The high society of New York City, the elite, the best and the brightest. I picked out a young couple, the woman dark-haired and beautiful, the man in a green turtleneck sweater. They looked confident, relaxed, in love, and most importantly like they belonged here, like it was their due. Lisa and I would look like that someday.

“It says King Tut died at 18. They called him the boy king,” Lisa said, while we waited to look at yet another showcase full of gold.

“I read that. But he was only king for a couple of years, did you see that?”

“I guess his people must have really loved him, if they gave him all this stuff, right?”

“Or else they were just sad because he’d died so young.”

“Maybe.”

“Probably better for him that way, too. Didn’t get a chance to screw things up, right?”

Lisa smiled. “Step up. It’s our turn to look.”

We stayed a long time at the museum. There were so many rooms, and then we had a hard time finding Lisa’s family. By the time we got back to the car it was past midnight. We squeezed back in and Lisa’s father turned the heat way up. Before we even made it to the Thruway, Lisa had fallen asleep holding my hand, and by the toll booths Karen and Julie and Lisa’s mother were out too.

“Look at you back there, Chris,” Lisa’s father said, glancing in the rear view mirror in tollbooth light. “Sleeping with all the Pratt girls.”

One them at least, I thought, and smiled. I had no gold. Gold would come, or it wouldn’t. But there was more than one way to be a boy king.

27. My First Porno Movie

Andy told us he’d found it in his father’s underwear drawer. We were all so intrigued, sitting there around the cafeteria table during 8th period lunch like we did every day, that we didn’t even think to give him a hard time about what he was doing going through his father’s underwear drawer. “How do you know it’s porn?” Olson asked.

“It was in his underwear drawer,” Andy answered. “It’s called ‘Butcher Boy.’ What else do you think it could be?”

“Is there a picture on the box?” I asked hopefully.

“No. No picture.”

“We have to watch it,” Jack proclaimed. “We need to watch it.”

“I have a projector,” I said. “It’s 8 millimeter, right?”

“I have no fucking idea how many fucking millimeters it is,” Andy answered.

“My parents are going to be away for the weekend in two weeks,” Jack said. “We’ll do it then. You can all
come over.”

“I can’t drive at night yet,” Tierney said.

“Then we’ll do it in the afternoon,” Jack answered.

“Do you think you could sneak it out, Andy ?” I asked.

“I think so. I doubt he watches it, like, every night. But who knows, maybe he’s more a perv than I give him credit for.”

***

It was something of a big deal, planning to get together outside of school. We’d never done that before. We were new to being a group. We’d known each other on and off since elementary school, but we’d only ended up spending time together because we were hangers-on to the jocks, who let us sit with them at their lunch table. We all played sports but weren’t among the first-rank starters. At the lunch table, we listened as the jocks talked about the weekend parties they went to and the girls they were going to ask out. We were never invited to these parties. It was sort of boring, and eventually we started talking to each other, which was much more fun.

The Saturday afternoon designated for the showing, my father noticed me taking the movie projector out the door. I’d been hoping he wouldn’t. “What do you need that thing for?” he asked.

“Uh, Jack has some old movies he wants to watch. Sports movie. Ali and Foreman in Africa.”

My father smiled. He didn’t know what I was doing, but it was clear he didn’t believe me for a minute.

“Okay. Just be careful with it.”

***

I was the last to arrive. They were all down in the basement of Jack’s house: Andy, Tierney, Olson, Jack, and some guy named John Dickson who wasn’t really a part of our group but was totally obsessed with Jack, idolized him, and who Jack tolerated because he liked being idolized. None of the rest of us thought too much of John Dickson.

“All right, all right, all right,” Jack said. “Here he is. Here’s the man. Here’s the man with the plan.”

It was like he couldn’t stop himself. We normally would have made fun of him for this nervousness, but I think we were all feeling a similar way.

I threaded up the movie and someone turned out the lights. Jack didn’t have a screen, but he’d taped a light-blue sheet between the door and the wall. He’d also put black paper over the basement windows so we’d have maximum darkness.

There were no opening titles. It started right in with a young boy—he looked a little older than us, eighteen or so—showing up at the front door of a suburban home with a bag of groceries. A woman answered the door. She was wearing a negligee. He offered the bag. She shrugged, and there was a dialogue title, like in an old silent movie—“But I have no money.” The butcher boy waited. Another title card: “Come in. Maybe I have something better.” Cut to him sitting on the couch while she was blowing him. He looked happy, but disinterested. I noticed he was still holding the bag he was supposed to deliver in his hands. There was another abrupt cut, and the action shifted to the bedroom.

Jack’s basement, as we watched this, was utterly silent. None of us even seemed to be breathing.

The film ran out while the butcher boy was in mid-doggie-style-stroke. We sat in silence in the dark for a few seconds, as though we expected it to magically continue.

“You want to watch it again?” Jack asked.

This time, we couldn’t shut up. We made fun of the butcher boy’s haircut. We made jokes about his bag of meat. We made disparaging remarks about the appearance of the woman in the negligee and her thick bush of pubic hair. When the dialogue title cards came on, we all screamed the words at the top of our lungs: “BUT I HAVE NO MONEY.”

***

During our fourth viewing, we were at the scene in the bedroom where the butcher boy is holding the woman’s ankles to spread her legs, which was fast-becoming my personal favorite scene, when an amoeba suddenly appeared in the middle of the picture.

“It’s burning,” Andy yelled hysterically. “It’s burning up. Stop it! Stop it!”

I leaped up. But it was too late. The projector had burned the film right through. It flapped around the take-up reel with a sound like a baseball card in a bicycle tire.

“Oh, shit,” Andy said. “Oh shit oh shit oh shit, what’s my father going to say when he sees this? Jesus Christ, he’s going to kill me!”

We were silent again, caught up in Andy's panic. Then Tierney said, “Just put it back where you found it, Tony. He’s not going to say anything. Do you think he wants to think of you thinking of him as someone who owns something like this?”

It made sense. No one was going to get in trouble. But our mood had been punctured: something curdled hung in the air along with the acrid smell of the burning film. I felt embarrassed by how excited the film had made me and embarrassed to have seen how excited it made everyone else. I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong, I’d been dying to see a real porno movie, but then why the sudden rush of guilt when I’d thought about Andy's father and my parents finding out I’d watched one?

Glancing at the averted eyes around the room I didn’t think I was the only one trying to sort through some complicated reactions.

“You have anything else we can watch, Jack?” John Dickson asked.

“I think I have some old movies of a vacation my parents took to Florida.”

We put those on. It was something to do. We made jokes about the way Jack’s mother looked in a bathing suit, but then Jack threatened to turn the movie off if we didn’t shut up so we shut up. Jack’s mother turned and waved at the camera, as though telling Jack’s father to film something else. She smiled a radiant smile: for the camera? For Jack’s father behind the camera? John Dickson reached a hand up and hand-shadowed squeezing her tit on the screen and Jack made me turn off the projector and threw us all out.

26. Black Socks

When I got to Junior High and they started having school sports teams, I just assumed I would be on one. I was too skinny for football, and baseball didn’t start until High School, and I wasn’t fast enough for track, so I went out for basketball. Basketball wasn’t my best sport, but I’d played a lot around the block, in someone’s backyard afterschool with “Spiders and Snakes” and “Seasons in the Sun” blasting in the background on a portable radio. I had a decent outside shot, but I wasn’t much of a ball handler. I tended to make wild passes out of bounds whenever there was any pressure on me at all.

Still, I made the team in both seventh and eighth grades, mostly because I’d hit my growth spurt early and was taller than almost everyone else. The extra inch or two helped me out on defense.

I didn’t play much in games, usually just a few minutes at the end whenever we were winning or losing by a large amount. But I liked being on the team, liked the routine of the drills and the way I could feel myself getting better through repetition. I even scored a few points, all on outside shots: I never did get any good at dribbling or driving in for layups. I liked the ride home at night on the late bus, bone-tired, looking out the window into the dark and cold still steamy warm from my after-practice shower.

***

I wasn’t going to bother to go out for the ninth grade team. By then, everyone had caught up with me height-wise, and I knew even if I made it I’d be looking at four months of practice every night just to sit on the bench during games. It seemed like a waste of time, and I thought I’d be better off concentrating on school.

My father persuaded me to give it a try. He said if I did manage to get on the team it would be good for my college applications. Colleges, he insisted, looked for well-rounded kids, who had something going on besides just academics.

My father had been a basketball player himself, and a pretty good one. He’d been a starter on the Varsity team during the two years of college he’d had after getting out of the Navy, and he could still beat me in the games of H-O-R-S-E we played in the backyard. There was a ratty old black and white photo he had from when he played in college, even skinnier than I was, going up for a rebound against a bunch of guys who were much bigger and taller but he was the one who had the gray-ish ball gripped in his hands. He looked, I had to admit, like a pro in that picture.

***

I’m not sure why I made that ninth grade team. Part of it must have been how hard I played during tryouts, throwing myself after every loose ball, running tirelessly up and down the court. Any coach would have been impressed. And it probably didn’t hurt that the ninth grade coach happened to be Mr. Masten, my teacher that year for Math Advanced Placement. Maybe he liked the idea of being able to keep one of his smart kids on the team.

Making the team made me happy, and my father happier, but it turned out pretty much the way I’d expected. I didn’t have the skills to back up my hustle, and even in the scrimmages at the end of practice I didn’t play much, and not at all in the real games. Mr. Masten was the type of coach who put his best five players out there and let them play the whole time unless someone got hurt.

I didn’t care. I liked the uniforms, the cheerleaders. I liked thinking of myself as one of the 15 best basketball players in the whole ninth grade, even as I doubted it was really true. I liked the occasional times in practice when I’d swish a shot from the right corner, my favorite spot even from back during those around-the-block games.

***

The first time Randy Vite whipped me with is towel, I shrugged it off, let it go. It was after practice. I was coming out of showers, crossing over to my locker, and Randy flicked the end of his towel at me. It must have been purely an impulse thing. Randy and I had no history, had never even spoken.

It hurt, but not so much I cried out or anything. I ignored it, walked over to my locker and started getting my clothes on. Randy and his sidekick, a short, crew-cutted kid named Dave Miseak, giggled and high-fived.
Randy was a starter on the team, our best scorer. He was the opposite of me as a player: totally in control even when the defense was all over him, always able to get off a shot that more often than not went in. He had a terrible attitude, though: he never hustled, never ran back to get on defense. Mr. Masten would scream at him, but he didn’t pay any attention. Randy knew he was too important to the team for Masten to bench him.

Off the court, Randy was sort of a burn-out: everyone knew he cut classes, and we’d occasionally seen him sneaking a cigarette out near the edge of the playground during lunch. Later, I’d wonder if that was the issue he had with me, that I was good at school and he wasn’t—but I didn’t think it was. I don’t think he cared enough about school to dislike me because I was better at it.

***

A few days later, I happened to be walking across the locker room at the same time Randy was sitting on the bench, and he did the towel whipping again. Randy always waited as long as he could to get dressed after taking his after-practice shower. He’d sit on the bench with a towel wrapped around his waist making jokes with Dave Miseak or telling the team all the things wrong with Mr. Masten and how his bad coaching was the reason we lost most of our games. Randy was usually the last one on the team out of the locker room, and a few times we’d had to wait the late bus for him.

Like last time, it stung when he whipped me. It wasn’t like overpowering pain, but it did stung.

By reflex, I grabbed at the towel. “Stop,” I said, and in my voice I heard a little bit of a whine I wished wasn’t there. “Knock it off.”

“Stop,” Randy mimicked, and then Dave Miseak mimicked “Knock it off.” Then they stood up and high-fived, Randy totally naked, Miseak fully clothed.

***

It became a regular thing. “Time for your whips,” Randy would say every day after practice as I walked out of the shower, and then he’d flick his towel at me, two times, three times. I was usually walking fast to get to my locker, so only one of the whips would actually land, and that one not very hard.

Two or three whips were all he ever did. Then he and Miseak would giggle and do their high fives.

I thought it would stop by itself. I thought it was a kind of hazing, something Randy was doing to make me earn my place on the team. I thought if I didn’t show any reaction, didn’t let him get a rise out of me, he’d lose interest.

But he didn’t lose interest. I actually think it became his favorite part of practice, the one thing he looked forward to.

“Why don’t you just hit him?” Joey Licata asked me one day. Joey was another starter, not as good as Randy. We weren’t friends, but we’d sat at the same homeroom table for the last few years, and had talked a few times.

“You think I should?” I asked.

“He’s not going to stop unless you do,” Joey said. “We’d break it up before you got too beat up.”
“What good would it do, though?” I asked Joey, because of course I’d thought about this, thought about it over and over as I lay in bed trying to get to sleep. “Wouldn’t he just come at me harder if I hit him? You don’t think he’d just stop, do you?”

“No,” Joey admitted. “Probably not.”

During those nights in lying in bed, I’d wonder if it was just that I was afraid of getting hit. Coward, I’d think to myself, wimp. Asshole. Maybe you deserve to get whipped if you won’t fight back. I knew this was what my father would have thought, if I’d had enough courage to tell him about what was happening.

***

I’d never had any real friends on the team, but now no one wanted anything to do with me at all. It was as though watching me be humiliated by Randy embarrassed them, too, made them feel uncomfortable to speak to me. I went through the practices in a kind of trance, the dread of what was going to happen afterward preoccupying me. “Newsome,” Coach Masten would yell during scrimmages, “for Christ’s sake get your head in the game!”

I thought about going to Coach Masten and telling him what was happening. But what was he going to do about it? Tell Randy he had to stop? Randy wouldn’t listen, and Masten couldn’t be in the locker room with us all the time. And it seemed like such a baby-ish thing to do, to go behind Randy’s back and talk to the coach. I didn’t want to be someone who would do that.

I also thought about just quitting. It wasn’t like my being there or not made a bit of difference to the team.
But no, I wasn’t going to give that to Randy and Miseak. I wasn’t a quitter, either.

I stopped taking showers. As soon as practice ended, I’d walk fast to the locker room, pull my street clothes on over my sweaty body, get out of there fast. Some nights this worked, and I’d be out of the locker room before Randy made his way in. I’d sit by myself in the dark hallway, waiting for everyone else to come out and the late bus to arrive. Other times, my timing would be off and Randy would get a flick or two in through my clothes. I could barely feel them, but it had never been about the pain of the whips anyway.

***

It stopped as mysteriously as it had begun, on a day I wore black socks to practice. I couldn’t find any white socks in my gym bag. I’d thought for sure I had put them in that morning, but even after I’d frantically looked and looked again they weren’t there. So I had to leave on the black socks I’d worn to school. I rolled them down as low as I could, but you could still see.

It felt like just a matter of time, and sure enough about midway through practice Dave Miseak got behind me in line as we were doing a layup drill and whispered, “Randy is going to whip you good for wearing those socks. I can’t wait to see you get whipped.”

I looked at him. I didn’t want to be wearing black socks. But without socks my feet would have ended up torn and bloodied. I didn’t know if I’d even be able to walk home. No one else on the team liked me well enough to lend me a pair of socks even if I’d tried to ask, which I never would have done. I had to use what I had, I had no choice.

All this went through my mind, and I wondered if I said any of it how Dave Miseak would have reacted. I had a feeling it only would have made him hate me more, and I wouldn’t have blamed him.

All right, then. If Randy was going to whip me harder for wearing black socks, he was going to do it. I couldn’t worry about it anymore. There was a road I’d put myself on, and maybe I could have changed it at some point but with three weeks left in the season I couldn’t change it now, any more than I could change having to wear black socks.

I nodded at Dave Miseak. I may have even smiled. It was just this peaceful feeling, of sinking into a kind of blackness myself, of everything being decided and having no option but to go along with it.

Randy got held after practice that night to talk to Mr. Masten—he’d been dogging it during line drills, not running when Masten turned his back, and he’d gotten caught—and I was out of the locker room before he arrived. And then the next day there was a snowstorm, and practice got cancelled. The day after that was an away game against Goshen that we won by twenty points, and then that Friday we finally had practice and I did my usual thing of getting into the locker room quickly and putting on my regular clothes even though the shirt clung to my clammy back but Randy didn’t even look at me when he got into the locker room. And it was the same way the next few practices the next week: like I wasn’t there, like he’d forgotten all about the whippings, the way I’d hoped he would weeks ago.

The damage was done, though, for me on the team. I endured the last few weeks of the season in almost total silence, like I was invisible. I skipped the last game, told Coach Masten I had a cold. There was an end-of-season pizza party at Joey Licata’s house, but I didn’t go.

**

I never played basketball again, not even at home in the backyard, which upset my father since he still liked to get out on the court sometimes. I played a year of Junior Varsity baseball and then two years of Varsity soccer, where I turned out to be pretty good goalie, and no one bothered me because the real jocks played football in the fall.

Randy went on to have a great season of Junior Varsity basketball, but then he broke his hand during a practice when he was one of the only three Juniors on the Varsity team and was out the entire season. The story going around was that it happened when he punched the wall after missing an easy layup, during a practice, not even in a game.

When I heard, I almost felt sorry for Randy. What a stupid thing to do. I knew the basketball team would lose a lot more games without him playing.

The next year, though, when I heard Dave Miseak had been killed in a car accident, I was ashamed of how happy it made me. Someone else was driving, a kid named Chrismy Bloodgood. He’d taken the hairpin turn at Dunderberg Road too fast and they went right over the guard rail. Bloodgood had only had his license for six weeks.

I wanted to find Randy, high-five him the way he and Miseak had high-fived after the whippings. Would he understand? Almost better if he didn’t. I never did that high five, but I carried the image around in my head for weeks, always ashamed, always enjoying it.

25. My First Time Drunk

My father took us snowmobiling at the house of someone he’d met a few nights before at the Goose Pond. He would do this sometimes, strike up barroom conversations with strangers and then make us awkwardly socialize with them. It was one of the things he and my mother argued about. “He said we could come by any time on Sunday,” my father told us. “He’s got a trail right in his backyard. It will be great.”

It was a freezing day. Even in the car, with the heater blasting, I felt cold. The guy, my father’s friend, was young-ish, with a big bushy beard. He introduced himself as Paul, which was unusual, because I still didn’t call many adults by their first names. Paul turned on the television for me and my brother, and brought my mother and father into the kitchen. “I made us some dynamite martinis!” I heard him tell my parents.

Paul had a great TV, much nicer than ours at home, but the living room was kind of disgusting. The rug crackled as you walked across, like there was food in it.

There was nothing on TV except Wide World of Sports, and I soon found myself listening more to the adults talking. Paul was doing most of the talking. He had a booming, enthusiastic voice, it wasn’t hard to eavesdrop. The funny thing was, he was talking about all this really personal, heartbreaking stuff, but in a loud, cheerful voice. He was saying how his wife had left, but he was glad to be rid of her, but that she’d wanted the house and he hadn’t wanted to give her the house and weren’t lawyers bastards? He just went on and one.

“It’s a nice house,” I heard my mother say, one of the first sentences she’d managed to get in.

“Let me give you the tour,” Paul said. “Ellen, you’re going to love this place. This place should be on the historic register. Wait’ll you see what we did with the upstairs.”

I’m not sure why I did it. It wasn’t like there wasn’t open liquor around my house all the time. Maybe it was because I resented my father dragging us to these stranger’s homes, wondered how he could so completely ignore how much my mother and brother and I hated it. Maybe because I was feeling sorry for Paul, who for all the happy boom in his voice seemed like a lost soul in this house, his casual use of a “we” that no longer existed when he’d talked about the upstairs. Maybe I was just bored.

I went into the kitchen and poured myself my own martini. I drank in quick sips. It was horrible-tasting but I managed to keep it down. Then I poured myself another one and did the same thing. Paul had made a big pitcher. I was pretty sure no one would notice.

“What were you doing in there?” my brother asked when I returned to where he was watching television.

“I was thirsty,” I answered.

I’m sure it would have shown if we’d stayed inside the house. But as soon as Paul came back from his tour, he said, “Okay, everyone, get your coats on, it’s time for rides.” In the cold air, I didn’t have to say anything, so no one could hear my speech slur, and everyone was walking funny in the icy snow so my own lack of balance fit right in.

“This is a beauty,” Paul said, as we approached his snowmobile. It was yellow and black, very cool looking. 

“This here is my pride and joy. Don’t know how I’d get through the day without it.”

Paul started it up and first took a ride himself. He drove really fast, in figure eights. The snowmobile lifted entirely off the ground in a few spots. He returned back to where we were standing, freezing, and said, 

“Okay, who wants the first ride?”

“No way you’re getting me on that thing,” my mother said.

I raised my hand, like I was in class.

“Okay,” Paul said. “A brave soul. Hop on, my friend.”

He didn’t take it easy on me. He drove just as fast as he’d been driving solo. Probably he was drunk, too. I hugged onto the back of him, hugged as tightly as I could, closed my eyes. The wind was whipping by, but I couldn’t feel it. I felt like I was doing tumblesaults, felt like I didn’t know which way was up or down, felt like I was gliding, gliding, like I wasn’t on a snowmobile or any kind of vehicle or machine at all but just gliding along something so smooth, and twisting, doing my own figure eights but in mid-air.

So this is what being drunk feels like, I said to myself. No wonder my father likes it so much.

24. Mary Royce’s Bra Strap

Mary Royce's family had sublet the Ruhl's house, just for the summer. We'd never known anyone who'd done that before. The Royces would be cooking on the Ruhls' stove, sleeping in the Ruhls' bed, watching the Ruhls' television. Then, in September, the Royces would leave. Sitting around at the bus stop we had long discussions about how we wouldn't want someone to come in like that and live in our houses, and about people whose houses we'd want to live in, and what that would be like.

This was the summer girls became part of our group, meeting us when we met on weeknights under the street lamp at the bus stop, shushing everyone whenever a slow song came over the transistor radio. We knew most of the girls, had invited them to our birthday parties, or gone to theirs. This summer, though, they seemed different. There was Lisa Carmody, and Tina Cornerby, and Karen Golembowski, who had short blonde hair and always wore the same pair of blue satin shorts; there were Kim and Sharon Speechly, sisters a year apart who did everything together. And there was Mary Royce, the newcomer, who we all accepted. One warm night Mary played "Surfer Girl" over and over on a portable cassette player and taught us each the box step, first Jay, then Dougie, then Mark, then Billy, then me, counting off in fours, yelling at us to be serious when we acted like our mistakes were on purpose. Her whispered numbers sounded like part of the music as she guided my steps on the gravel, and her hair was damp, and smelled like shampoo.

Alone playing basketball in Dougie’s driveway, our ridicule of the girls was constant, accompanying the thump of the ball against the backboard like punctuation. We imitated their phrases, made comments on the smallness of their breasts. We accused one another of showing too much interest in them. "I saw you talking to Tina the other day," Mark shouted to Dougie. "Over by the tunnel."

"I was just showing her the sewage pipe," Dougie said.

"I'll bet you were showing her the sewage pipe," Mark said, and we all laughed. We didn't really know what we were talking about. Most of what we said was just echoes of what we'd picked up from older brothers, or overheard on the school bus.

Mary was the most sophisticated of the girls. Not the prettiest – that was Lisa Carmody – nor the smartest and funniest, which was Karen Golembowski. But Mary was the one who seemed the most to know what was going on. She had black hair parted in the middle that came down and made an oval around her face, big eyes and pencil-thin, tweezed eyebrows. She used a lot of make-up, something she introduced to the other girls. They would sit at the bus stop and talk about this eye shadow or that, or Mary would apply blush to Lisa while we looked on, smirking. In Dougie's driveway we talked about how stupid make-up was, how the girls looked like circus clowns with it on their faces. One night we let Karen paint our pinkies with a nail polish she'd brought down to lend Mary. The next day we didn't mention it, but pinpricks of jazzy purple flashed every so often as we fought for rebounds.

It was Mary who came up with the idea of going to the hill behind Karen's house to pick out constellations. Lisa brought the star chart. The night was a clear one. We lay in the grass and the girls pointed out Orion and Aries to us. The grass was moist, but warm. "Right there," Lisa said when I complained I couldn't see any pictures, lifting her arm straight up, pointing to where she wanted me to look. She was wearing a peasant blouse, with red stitching across the front that strained taut when she pointed.

"All I see is a bunch of stars," I said.

"It's right there," Lisa said again, moving closer in the grass, until she was right next to me, and I could follow her point directly. "That's the bow and arrow. There's the bear over this way."

"Whoever thought these up is crazy," I said, jumping up. "That guy could have said there was anything up there."

"They're up there. You just have to use your imagination," Lisa said, and also stood, pulling her shirt back down from where it'd ridden up her stomach as she slid in the grass.

It was a hot summer, and in mid-July Mary told us she'd managed to convince her father to open up Ruhls' pool. The pool was a six foot in-ground, with a diving board. I'd never been in it. My family wasn't such good friends with the Ruhls. That Saturday, we all showed up to help. The girls were there, too, sitting on the porch watching, drinking lemonade from frosted glasses. First Mr. Royce had us sift dirt, to fill in the cracks in the patio around the pool. Then we took the cover off, rolling it from the corners like unwrapping a present. The water inside had a greenish tint, and there were clumps of algae. Mark grabbed the skimmer from Dougie's hands, just as Dougie was about to dip it in the water. "I'll do that," Mark said.
Dougie glared at him.

We worked hard, harder than we had ever worked when our fathers asked up to help out around the house.

On the porch the girls played cards, called down to us, "How's it going?" Too busy, struggling with heavy bags of white sand that had to be poured into the filter, we didn't answer. After, as a single garden hose slowly filled the pool with water, Mr. Royce offered us each a few dollars. Tired, wanting it, the girls within earshot, we said no, said we'd get paid back by swimming in the pool. "Well, thanks then," Mr. Royce said. "You're all good workers."

The pool didn't get much sunlight, and so the water was very cold. Tina's bathing suit was almost the exact same floral pattern as the chaise lounge pillow she'd lie on tanning herself, face down with her legs slightly spread. We'd do cannonballs off the diving board and try to reach the girls with the freezing drops of water our splashes made.

Sometimes Mark and Billy didn't show up for our basketball games. "Where were you this morning?" Jay asked them that night at the bus stop.

"Playing cribbage at Mary's house," Billy answered, as if it didn't matter, as if it was just information. When they didn't show up we either played shorthanded or skipped the game entirely, and went over to someone's house to watch TV.

One night in August Dougie, Mark, and I were at the bus stop lofting rocks at the street lamp, watching them scatter the gnats from the brownish light, when Mary wandered down alone. A few houses away, her parents were having a party at Ruhls' pool. Our parents were all there. We could hear the familiar block party sounds, the clanging of horse shoes, a boisterous sing along to "Peg of My Heart." Mary was drunk. She said it was her first time, and that it felt great. She said her cousin's new boyfriend had been slipping her drinks and winking, she hadn't even asked for them. She said his name was Tom. She didn't stop talking. We just listened.

Mary lay down. Dougie, Mark, and I sat around her and grinned to each other at the words she tripped over, the amazement in her voice. I was thinking how I would describe this to everyone else the next night, when we were all sitting around. Mary told us how boring the party was, all old people. She told us the stupid things they had been saying as they jumped off the diving board, trying to act like they were funny.
Then Mary's voice dissolved to a gurgle, and she threw up on herself and passed out. All three of us jumped back, away from her.

Dougie and Mark wouldn't touch her at first but after I started we took turns trying to slap her awake. It was the way we'd seen them do this on TV. After touching her, we wiped our hands on the grass. Mary didn't move. The less she responded the lower our hands went on her body, the more our slaps became caresses. In the backyard of her house the adults switched to "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling."

Finally Dougie lifted Mary's soaked T-shirt, pushed her arms back and her training bra up. None of us said anything. Mark and I crowded in as Dougie stretched her shirt with a straight arm, peering beneath. The white of her bra strap almost seemed to glow, against her tanned throat.

Mary stirred, and vomited again. Dougie pulled his arm back. She locked my eyes and said, "What are you doing?"

I thought it was my eyes she locked.

Mary tried to pull herself up but then lay back again. Dougie and Mark took off, running in opposite directions. Mary and I looked at each other. A car went by on the road, but its headlights didn't reach us. I pulled down Mary's bra and shirt. Then I ran too. At home, on the couch in the dark, I felt like I was still running. Soon it would be September, I was thinking, and it would be like none of this had happened.

23. Spare Ribs

It was the MASH episode where everyone in the 4077th gets a craving for spare ribs. All they can think about is getting spare ribs from Chicago delivered to them all the way to Korea. There was a lot of talk about spare ribs, how delicious they were, how this place back home made the best ones in the entire world.

“Spare ribs,” my father said, about twenty minutes into the episode. “Some spare ribs would go down good right now. How do some spare ribs sound to you guys?”

No one said answered. We weren’t sure if he was being serious.

“You feel like some spare ribs?” he asked my mother.

“It’s kind of late,” my mother said.

“If I found some spare ribs, would you have some?”

“I don’t know. I guess so.”

“How about you two?” my father asked.

My brother nodded. “I could eat some spare ribs.”

“Chris?”

“Why not?” I said.

“Wait here,” my father said.

We heard him get out the phone book and get on the phone. We acted like were paying attention to the next show on TV, but instead we were listening to him talking to the people at the restaurants. We could tell they were telling him it was too late, their kitchens were closed, or that they didn’t even have spare ribs on their menus to begin with.

“It’s fine, Jack,” my mother called in after he hung up the phone for the fifth or sixth time. “We don’t need spare ribs tonight. We’ll get them over the weekend.”

“No,” my father yelled back, his voice angry now. “I’m in the mood for spare ribs.”

Finally after three or four more calls he poked his head out from the kitchen. It must have been 9:30 by now, well past my brother’s and my usual bedtime. “I found someplace. They’ll stay open for us, but we have to leave right now. Chris, you come with me.”

We didn’t speak during the ride. I was too sleepy, and my father was tense, concentrating on his driving. He was driving pretty fast: we made it to Vail’s Gate in record time. The Chinese restaurant where we stopped was empty. I felt a little guilty for making them stay open, but the Chinese man who sat there alone behind the counter didn’t seem to mind. He was watching TV, too, a little portable black and white. He smiled as he handed us the red and white bag, took my father’s money. “Did you see MASH tonight?” my father asked, pointing at the television.

The Chinese man nodded no.

“There were spare ribs on MASH. That’s why we needed spare ribs.”

The Chinese man smiled, but I could tell he had no idea what we were talking about.

The spare ribs were warm on my lap during the ride home. All of a sudden, I was ravenously hungry for them. I couldn’t believe how much I was looking forward to eating those ribs.

My father seemed to read my mind. “It’s funny, isn’t it? An hour ago, we didn’t even know we wanted these spare ribs. And then we had to have them. And now we do. Isn’t that amazing?”

I wanted to say something sarcastic—I was getting good at saying sarcastic things, it was a new talent for me—but I couldn’t. Part of me thought he was weak, for giving in to an impulse, and continuing to chase it even after it wasn’t fun anymore. But another part couldn’t help being impressed that he’d somehow managed to make his impulse happen, that out of nowhere and completely unpredictably here I was at 10:00 at night in a car with warm spare ribs in my lap. There was something amazing in that.

We were home by then. We put the spare ribs on a big plate and brought them into the living room and watched a detective show. I didn’t eat that many. I wasn’t as hungry as I’d thought I was. But the ones I did manage to eat were delicious. My brother and my mother, though sleepy-eyed, seemed to be thoroughly enjoying them, too.

“Hit the spot, don’t they?” my father asked us all.