Nevertheless Page 4

  My father, with an almost haunting sense of timing, called me into the den of our house, a room my mother rarely entered. “What’s the situation with the coin collection?” he asked.

  I will never forget the look in his eye. “Here it is,” he seemed to say. “Here’s your chance to get a whiff of what I’ve been dealing with all these years. Go ahead, lie to me. Tell me that it’s all intact up in your closet. You won’t throw your mother under the bus, but just look me in the eye and know that I know you’re lying.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s all there.” He stared at me for a long beat. I thought I heard a blood vessel of his rupture. He sagged a bit more than usual. He couldn’t win. Some of this was his fault, he must have known. But he was just so fucking tired of all of it.

  Everyone in my home seemed to be moving apart. My younger siblings had their friends and sports or other activities. Beth seemed overwhelmed from always helping my mother around the house, and would run off with her boyfriend, who could buy her little things and give her some much-needed attention. Meanwhile, I wandered between three groups of people, none of which completely satisfied me. One was the group of rock-and-roll-worshipping, drug-and-alcohol-abusing, street-fighting tough guys. My way into this pack was my friend’s older brother. Most of these guys were older, some around eighteen or nineteen and a few in their early twenties. Almost none were in college, and most still lived at home, waiting for a shot at some type of job. My group, the younger siblings and their friends, buzzed around them like apprentices, begging them to buy cigarettes and beer. The owner of the local delicatessen announced that anyone passing beer on to minors would be reported to the police. Thus, we got a lot of “Get fucked” from our elders, until finally one of them relented, recalling his own desperate pleas on many such cold nights. He told us to walk way down the block, where he would hand us the bag. Every night that I spent with them in this way, I knew at that very moment, was wrong.

  Standing on the corner of Unqua and Suffolk Roads, the temperature freezing, bundled up and begging someone I hardly knew to buy me beer and cigarettes, I thought, “I don’t know what I want, but I know it’s not this. I’m acting as if I’m happy, as if I belong. But this is just like the black guys on the couch on St. James Place. Or more like my grandfather, inside the walls of his apartment—now the suburbs themselves were the wall. And these guys are my grandpa-in-training: white, getting by, unfulfilled, bitter.”

  Next to Berner High School was a vacant wooded lot through which ran a modest stream whose source no one knew. The hideaway was nicknamed Zappaland, or just Zappa for short. Frank Zappa’s songs, and especially his lyrics, were favorites of the crowd who gathered there to smoke pot at 7:15 a.m., right before the assembly bell. These were the most dedicated of pot smokers. Long before the advent of medical marijuana, they smoked it like it was medicine. They smoked pot like they were on the U.S. Olympic Pot Smoking Team. I wondered what these youths might have achieved if they put as much energy into other, more constructive activities as they did into smoking pot. They lived on a kind of academic sideline. They didn’t care about Gian Carlo Menotti or the Sykes-Picot Agreement or even where the stream originated. They just wanted to kill time and get numb. Eventually, I smoked a handful of times with that crew, but I couldn’t keep up. I ended up sitting in calculus class, stoned, wondering if calculus could help me fly out of the window, away from calculus class.

  In high school I played football and lacrosse, neither of them well. I was skinny and had no desire to physically pummel other people, so my choice of athletic pursuits was a poor one. By the time I was in ninth grade, however, I began to think I wanted a girlfriend, and that being on these teams might facilitate that. But everything was filtered through the realities of our house. I remember my parents arguing in another room, my mother yelling something about my father giving up his pretensions about living among professional men. In our neighborhood, there were doctors and lawyers and businessmen. Their waterfront homes were well kept, with boats lolling in canals in their backyards. It was easier to attract someone if you had a giant TV or a boat or a swimming pool with a gleaming barbecue nearby. Getting laid, I suppose, would have been easier if someone, anyone, had folded the laundry and cleaned the kitchen after baking a pile of chocolate chip cookies for my friends before we headed out on my boat. But that wasn’t my situation.

  The mood in our house was tense. It seemed, at times, to be every man for himself. Trudging my lawn mower from house to house, cutting grass and all alone, didn’t seem appealing anymore. Also, I needed more money. Someone hooked me up with Steve, a tough guy who ran gangs of kids who cut grass and charged more money by calling it landscaping. Steve wanted to get this work over with as fast as possible, get his money and go party. So he’d drive us to a house, we’d leap out of the trailer, and hit the sidewalk. Steve would start his stopwatch. We had fifteen minutes, give or take with the size of the yard, to cut, edge, and blow before rolling on to the next house. Two or three guys handled mowers, and two guys worked with edging tools and blowers. I think he paid us by the house, not the hour. Perhaps I did it to be with the “squad,” as opposed to being by myself all summer while working.

  There is an image I retain from high school, perfect in that it matches sight with sound, touch with smell. After football practice, my teammates went home to places where their uniforms were tossed into washers and dryers and came out clean and ready to be bundled into a gym bag and toted off to school the next morning. I often put my uniform, damp and soiled, back into my locker, unable to bring it home because our washing machine was broken and the following day was not one of the two days a week when we drove to the laundromat.

  The image I can’t erase is of me standing along a curb, waiting for my mother to arrive with my clean uniform in time for afternoon practice. Behind me, my teammates walked from the locker room to the playing field. A perimeter roadway separated the building from the field area, and as they crossed it, I could hear their metal cleats striking the concrete. The procession went on for two minutes or so. I kept my back to them, straining to see my mother’s car, knowing I was late, convinced that each of these guys behind me knew I had no washing machine in my house. The team marched up a concrete staircase to the field level. By the time the sound stopped, they had all hit the grass, ready for warfare. I was still in my street clothes. When my mother came, she handed me the clothes, sometimes actually wet, moaned her excuse, and left.

  After playing football in ninth grade, I came to my sophomore year with a very big chip on my shoulder. I began to wonder, had I not bothered to suit up, would they have even noticed. I felt like I didn’t want to be there and they didn’t care either way. My sophomore year, I walked off the field and quit the team. The coach was an acquaintance of my dad and, unbeknownst to me, the strings were pulled to get me back on the team. My father drove me to the school himself on a Saturday, which was rare and a clear sign of how much this all meant to him. I went in, sat and listened, and walked out. When I got in the car, my father seemed anxious. A father wants to believe, particularly as a child grows up and is no longer a baby in the arms of its mother, that he will help guide and advise his children. This is his time, when he wants to teach them how to make difficult decisions, especially his sons. He wants them to listen and heed his advice. I told him that I had not taken the coach up on his offer and that I would not rejoin the team. And although he accepted that it was useless to make me do it, I could feel something change between us. My father, pretty reticent to begin with, didn’t speak to me for a month.

  I had been hanging out with guys whose parents didn’t want them around. We shared a need to temporarily run away, for different reasons, all wanting somewhere to go that wasn’t home. Sometimes we would pop into someone’s house to take liquor or money. But what mattered was that we were outdoors, cracking jokes, smoking cigarettes, or drinking beer year-round. In the dead of winter, we were outside, keeping the flame burning, literally. This crow
d didn’t drink or smoke pot more than the football team, who were among the more degenerate drinkers and partyers I’d ever known but whose athletic status gave them a legitimacy that the street kids lacked. I didn’t fit in either place, but this gang seemed easier at the time. I didn’t feel that I was better than them, although many of them struggled greatly in school. But at least I didn’t feel like I was less than them either.

  Eventually, the handwriting was on the wall and, sure enough, my mother found a bag of pot in my room. My father, who had moved to the suburbs to give his kids a better life, seemed to sink lower under the gathering evidence that white-flight suburbia had its own set of problems. As a public high school teacher, he was exposed to a parade of troubled kids who were being pulled under by drugs and petty crime. Thus, he came down on me hard. Maybe more so than he would have on any other kid in my home, if they’d been caught doing something similar. He threatened to send me away to a military school and painted a picture of the years of hard labor ahead. I assumed they must have a washer/dryer at military school, so I pondered the idea for just a moment. It is, I believe, uncommon for parents to love all of their children equivalently. And I feel that my father cared for me in a different way, maybe even more than he did for my siblings, because he believed that I might get ahead somehow. He wanted that so badly. He was obsessed with it. As he laid into me about military school, his voice quiet yet filled with angst and threat, I got it. I rejoined the football team, and though, at 172 pounds, I held a tackling dummy most of the time, I suited up for my junior and senior years. Our school beat my father’s school in a legendary crosstown rivalry, and although I made no contribution whatsoever to those two victories, I think he was glad I was there.

  Throughout high school, I coveted other people’s girlfriends and fantasized constantly about what it would be like to have one of my own. I ran for class president and lost. I wondered if I could improve my chances if I was a genuine football hero or if I cultivated the Jesus look and played the guitar. I wanted to be the Treat Williams character in Hair, a dancing Dionysian god. High school was a blur of wanting things I couldn’t have and missing the wonderful moments right in front of me.

  All of the tedium and anxieties of high school life played out over where you sat and with whom in the cafeteria. The most popular kids tended to just bask in the warmth of their sycophants, a table that reveled in their status by passing around one of the old pebble-jacketed notebooks. The pages of it were headed with the names of random people who were deemed worthy of inclusion and not always for the most flattering of reasons. This was called a “slam book,” a primitive form of the TMZ-style tabloid garbage of today. A given page would say “Suzy J” across the top, and below people would write “Luv ya” or “You are the best friend anyone could ever have.” Others, however, might write “whore,” “bitch,” “skank,” and the like. Some people actually took this seriously. The publishers of the book wanted to hurt people. The fact that this happened with such openness and viciousness struck me as odd. When the one gay boy in our school killed himself, it was rumored to be the result of what he’d read about himself in the book. Berner High School: not a place to be gay. Some teachers vowed to confiscate the notebooks, but I once saw a teacher sitting in the cafeteria reading one, a slight smile on his face. I had teachers who were smart, kind, and who were true role models. Others were almost inconceivably limited. One teacher announced to his class that the best thing JFK ever did for his country was to get shot. I approached this man and asked him if he actually said that. He snarled at me. “Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “What’s it to you?”

  And then, like a ball game called on account of rain, high school was suddenly over. Just as I had daydreamed away many classes until the bell rang; just as in football practice I’d be staring off, watching the sunset, when my coach would tell me to gather the equipment and I couldn’t remember what the hell we had been doing for the past ninety minutes; just as I had walked these halls for four years, wondering who I was and what the hell I was supposed to do here, it just ended, and too abruptly for me. I hadn’t figured it out. Everyone else had, or so I thought. I was supposed to go to college. My grades were good, but not what they might have been if I . . . What? Worked harder? Lived under different circumstances? Oddly, all this talk of bright futures and college plans made me homesick for this house I vowed to escape.

  My home had provided several resounding reasons why I should get the hell out of there. But there was a strange barrier between me and any dreams of the future. I looked at my family and thought, “These are the only people who really know me? Or care about me? Be it ever so humble, wouldn’t it just be worse elsewhere?”

  At graduation, all around me my classmates were hugging each other and crying and marking the end of something that they were fully engaged in. For them, high school was truly the best of times, providing a basket of memories to hold on to. But who were they to me? Saying good-bye seemed perfunctory with some, downright false with the rest. I was in the drama club one year, but I couldn’t find any of them in this morass to say good-bye to. I played football, but without distinction. The great athletes in our graduating class were embracing each other, confident that one more summer of raucous debauchery lay ahead. No one called me over to enter that circle.

  I stood there thinking of Tom Wingfield:

  For sixty-five dollars a month I give up all that I dream of doing and being ever! And you say self—self’s all I ever think of! Why, listen, if self is what I thought of, Mother, I’d be where he is—GONE! [He points to his father’s picture.] As far as the system of transportation reaches!

  I was scared and I had no idea what I was going to do. Maybe that’s exactly how it had to be.

  3

  Not a Drop of Boy

  When my family lived in the little two-bedroom house with eight people stuffed inside, we were on what were called “the water streets,” near the canals and the bay. After years of riding my bike in and around those streets, I can never forget their progression, alphabetical from west to east: Atwater, Brightwater, Clearwater, Deepwater, Edgewater, Fairwater, Greatwater, Highwater, Leewater, Nearwater, Ripplewater, Stillwater, Tidewater, Waterview. South Bay Drive, which was the spine that connected all of these roads, was my Shaftesbury Avenue, my Via Margutta, and my Bleecker Street rolled into one. I had a Stingray bike, but I might as well have been driving an Aston Martin, because in this land, your bike was everything.

  There were certain neighbors of ours who always struck me as very sophisticated people and whose homes and daily lives were completely foreign to mine. One such family lived just around the corner, but I felt like I needed a passport when I entered their house. The father was a successful ad man in Manhattan, the mother an executive at a renowned psychiatric hospital in a nearby town. They had those framed Toulouse-Lautrec prints (Aristide Bruant, the Divan Japonais) on their walls before anyone else did. Miles Davis or bossa nova or Erik Satie played on a turntable. The mother was known as Big Lynn, a misnomer, as she was lithe and extremely stylish, always in black cashmere turtlenecks and slacks. They had three daughters, all of whom were blonde. Little Lynn, the eldest, was a stunning young woman who caused every boy in the neighborhood to gawk each time she left her house, as if she were Kate Middleton. My mother would stop by there, and Big Lynn would give her a box filled with last month’s magazines: Time, Look, Life, New York, Playboy, Penthouse, Cosmo, Psychology Today. Once home, my mother would skim through an odd copy here and there, normally falling asleep with the magazine at her side. I, however, took the box and read the issues cover to cover. Big Lynn got me hooked on reading.

  I read a lot from seventh through tenth grades. Sitting in my bed at night, waiting for my dad to come home, or on weekend afternoons, there was a period when I simply could not stop reading. I liked Nick Pileggi’s crime reporting in New York magazine, and I laughed and winced reading John Simon’s theater reviews. My dad pointed me toward Hugh Sidey at Time and
William Safire in the Times. I actually read Penthouse and its forum. I got hooked on Chris Miller’s writing in National Lampoon after reading crazy pieces like “Night of the Seven Fires.” Big Lynn included a lot of books in these boxes as well. I read The Godfather, Johnny Got His Gun, Salinger, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Exorcist, Leon Uris, Michener, Mailer, Ball Four, North Dallas Forty, The Valachi Papers. I read William Goldman’s screenplay for Butch Cassidy. I fell in love with Dickens and Twain and Poe. I loved biographies and the Playboy interview. In a 7-Eleven near my house, they displayed copies of Robert Sam Anson’s “They’ve Killed the President.” Staring in fascination and slight horror at Oswald’s autopsy photos gave me a lifelong obsession with the JFK assassination at the age of thirteen.

  In high school I loved any subject that involved reading and barely tolerated everything else. I wanted to read what I wanted when I wanted to, which wasn’t the best recipe for academic success. I planned to go to law school eventually, because I was most comfortable with words and I suppose I wanted to finish something my father had started. My dad had attended Syracuse Law School for one year but dropped out because my mother’s father was paying the bill. My dad’s pride got the better of him, and he walked away to begin his teaching career the moment he was offered a job.

  In my senior year, my parents’ discussion of my college plans was one of the more difficult ones they ever had. My mother’s well-worn argument that my father had to face reality and limit my options to what they could truly afford was restated ad infinitum. My father, however, continued to dream. I applied to the better state schools—Albany, Buffalo, Binghamton—and sent letters to a small list of good private colleges that appeared, on paper, to offer decent financial aid opportunities, like Muhlenberg and Colgate. My father’s goal, however, was for me to attend Columbia. He was still clinging to the hope that I would join a football team and actually play football. Columbia was part of an Ivy League “lightweight” program where the 158-pound limit had been raised to 165. The coaches in this league paired opposing players by weight, so that those over the limit were matched with someone their size. It was essentially a league populated by smaller athletes, some of them very quick, who weren’t big enough to play elsewhere. The skinnier version of me fell into this category. Once again, my father knew someone who knew someone, but it was to no avail. My grades were good but not good enough. Columbia made few, if any, allowances for athletes. You were either competitive academically, or not. My father tried to lessen the blow by telling me that the end of the Vietnam War in August of 1975 meant a flood of applicants and thus a more competitive field, but I nonetheless was frustrated and sad that a great opportunity had disappeared.