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.”
