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.