Friday night was Taco Night at Tanner’s house.
Mr. Potts cooked the meal. An investment banker at Morgan Stanley, he arrived to the apartment in his suit and overcoat. We saw him appear at the front door, shopping bag in hand, from where we sat watching TV off the kitchen. He placed this on the countertop, disappeared down the hallway to his bedroom, and, absent the tie and jacket when he returned, donned an apron, took his place behind the range—from where he cooked, he had a perfect view of the screen—aimed the remote, and then changed the channel to the news, which I knew not to protest but which Tanner always forgot. “It’s my TV,” said Mr. Potts, “so I get to watch what I want.”
It was day 398 of the Iran hostage crisis.
At the kitchen counter, Mr. Potts began by preparing the stew beef, and while it browned, he chopped the onions, garlic, and peppers; as these sautéed, he opened a beer and took a sip, and he grated a block of cheddar and Monterey Jack cheese. He added canned tomatoes to the pan, poured the remainder of his beer into it, and, while all this simmered, he cooked each tortilla individually in vegetable oil, the hot liquid shining and then foaming at the circumference, out of which he tonged and then flipped them, arraying the finished stack on a baking sheet where, after popping them into the oven, they took on their final clamshell form.
The Pottses’ Upper East Side apartment was as big as the one we’d lived in before moving back to Lincoln Towers, maybe even bigger, certainly longer, the lengthy hallway running down its center, branching off of which were, in order and to the left, if you walked it as Mr. Potts just had, Tanner’s elder sister Gwyneth’s room, followed by his younger sister Melissa’s room; to the left again, as you made your way back, was the Pottses’ master, Tanner’s bedroom, the dining room, and, once again, the sitting room off the kitchen—this where nearly the majority of our time was spent and a fact that I found ironic, given all the space it enjoyed. This hallway was the apartment’s spine and terminated in a living room, which I’d never once seen anyone sit in, though it was decorated with their most expensive furniture and was the only room with west- and south-facing windows—by far the brightest in the entire place.
By now the chili’s smells had lured Tanner’s sisters from their rooms. Gwyneth, who was a senior at Spence and the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, sat between Tanner and me on the couch, Melissa—an eighth grader—on the rug at our feet. Mrs. Potts had just arrived home, also in her overcoat and business suit (all three of the women were blond). She too reappeared, having lost her jacket, having unbuttoned her collar to reveal a string of pearls. Her contribution to the meal was to make the margaritas, and while she concentrated on squeezing the limes, I stole a glance at her. She was, my father liked to say, “a very handsome woman,” a phrase I tried to decode, something he remarked upon after the annual parents’ nights at Boyd. (A banker like her husband, she called on my father once a year, over the phone, to invest money with her, and he responded to her pitch with several “uh-huhs” as if he were in a rush to be somewhere else. “Sharon,” he said, and his eye twitched, “I’m working with someone else right now, but if I make a change, I’ll be in touch.”) Mrs. Potts, balancing her margarita, joined us on the couch, seating herself to my left, and now, with a Potts woman to either side of me and Melissa at my feet, I was in a sort of heaven.
To Tanner, Mrs. Potts said, “What happened to you?” and gently took his injured hand. He explained he had dislocated his middle finger in practice today; it was buddy-taped to his ring finger and the size of a hot dog. “I’m going to splint that,” she said, and, after asking Tanner to hold her margarita, excused herself, upon which Tanner took a sip and then offered me some. She had been a nurse before she became an investment banker. True, she couldn’t keep anything sports-related straight in her head: she called a home run a touchdown, a touchdown a goal. When we watched games and she joyfully screamed these aloud, her family heaped upon her endless derision, but I admired her for having multiple careers. If my mom became a nurse, I figured she and Dad might not fight about money so much.
Tanner took another sip of his mother’s margarita. “How psyched are you we don’t have a wrestling tournament this weekend?” He offered the glass to me again. “No making weight. No Kepplemen. We can just pig out and sleep in.”
“Cheers,” I said, and took my sip.
Soon we were called to the dinner table, which everyone helped set. The Pottses had a custom dining nook off their kitchen. It felt like eating in a restaurant, enclosed and intimate.
“…but preferences,” Mr. Potts was saying to me, “preferences are measurable, quantifiable, and therefore somewhat predictable, at least in terms of market behavior,” and I, who very much enjoyed listening to the ticker of Tanner’s dad’s talk, said that was true, that some people preferred The Brady Bunch to The Partridge Family, McDonald’s to Burger King, Marvel to DC Comics, the Osmonds to the Jackson Five. Then I asked for another taco. “Exactly, Griffin,” he said, and passed the platter, “you are absolutely right, and among other things, it is the job of investment bankers to identify the companies that have cornered the market on these preferences or that know the consumer’s preference before he or she even knows what that preference is.” Gwyneth said, “I thought the job of an investment banker was to determine a company’s value,” and Mr. Potts replied, “It is, but I’m trying to make a finer point to Griffin. Why is it,” he continued to me, “that we remember certain slogans? Crazy Eddie, his prices are insane. Or certain taglines. The American Express Card, don’t leave home without it.”
“Sometimes you feel like a nut,” I said, and asked him to pass the guacamole.
“Sometimes you don’t,” said Mr. Potts, and handed me the bowl. “It sticks in the mind. Stickiness is the advertiser’s modus operandi. His holy grail. What’s your dad’s line in that commercial? Treat your dog to Liv-a-Snaps. We don’t even have a dog, but I pass one on the street and I want to blurt it out to its owner.” To which Tanner said, “This is boring,” since he thought any grown-up talk I engaged in was bullshit ass-kissing. “Well then, you’re an idiot,” his father said, “and your friend here clearly has what we call ‘business acumen.’ ” Which, I realized, Oren also had, and also that Tanner wasn’t completely wrong. I was only half interested in the discussion. I felt I owed the man something for eating ten tacos, a fact that Mrs. Potts clearly did not approve of (“Clearly,” she said, echoing my father, “someone is growing”) but one that Melissa marveled at and Gwyneth welcomed, if only to prevent a scolding about her refusal to eat. “The onions give me bad breath,” she announced, then directed her gaze at her father, “and I plan on getting kissed tonight.” Gwyneth tried to shock her father whenever possible, but Mr. Potts, usually quick with a retort, merely sipped his drink in response.
With some scorn, Tanner asked Gwyneth, “Going to Studio tonight?” and she replied, “Going to Dorrian’s first.” (We had heard vaguely of both but were yet to visit either.) Melissa invariably launched into a long story that had no clear point—it was something we suffered, Melissa’s tortuously digressive stories, which usually began with “You’ll never believe what happened in math today” but somehow managed to wend through each and every one of her classes before arriving at her stated subject. During which Mrs. Potts often did strange things, like brush something invisible from her chest while balancing her margarita in her free hand or lifting her plate in the air to look beneath it. “Did you lose something?” Tanner asked her. In response to which, Mr. Potts said, “Don’t talk to your mother like that!” and then “For God’s sake, Sharon, listen to your daughter.” In response to which, Mrs. Potts said, “What did you say?” At which point Gwyneth, who had been examining a strand of her long blond hair as if she had a piece of gum stuck in it, caught my eye across the table and said, “Huis clos,” which was the title of a book I’d noticed sitting on her desk as I walked by her room, which I stared into any chance I got.
Gwyneth’s walls were painted an artic blue, and of all her room’s artifacts—a pennant from Yale, where her boyfriend was a freshman (she called him a “frosh”); her golfing trophies and regatta medals; her burbling aquarium, bejeweled with tropical fish—the one I admired most was her collage. Hers was enormous and themed; it used, like so many other girls’ collages I’d seen, magazine ads and images, but instead of a random mash-up or agglomeration of interests, Gwyneth selected and organized her snippets by color, these the various shaded blues of Tiffany boxes, of Jordache jeans and JAG clothing, the Reagan for President campaign poster, the American Gigolo poster (He leaves women feeling more alive than they’ve ever felt before, went Dad’s line in the promo), the Rive Gauche perfume glossy, the blue velvet background of the Crown Royal whiskey ad, and the cover of Billy Joel’s Glass Houses, all of which she cut into rectangular pixels to form a set of waves, from one of which, rising up, was the shark from the cover of Peter Benchley’s Jaws, the Club Med Neptune trident, and the blue whale from the Museum of Natural History catalog—a work of art atop which she’d titled in bright, foamy white letters made of cotton balls: If Life Is a Sea of Love, Dive In! If I fashioned my own, what would I include in it? And what would its mantra be? I had ideas, but just the fact that it had occurred to Gwyneth to make such a thing was what I most envied. Or that I would never dream of such a clear announcement of self—that was what I lacked.
“What are you doing?” Tanner said. And I hurried from Gwyneth’s door to join him in his room.
After dinner, Tanner and I did the usual. To manage our food babies, we took off our shirts, put on the Stones’ Emotional Rescue, and then had a push-up contest—first to a hundred wins—followed by multiple sets of curls in front of his mirror. Tanner had two beds in his room. We played wall ball using lacrosse sticks, and whoever failed to make the catch on the rebound had to accept a dead arm. Melissa appeared at our door and said she was headed downstairs to sleep at Buffy Biggs’s house, a classmate who lived on the second floor. Tanner said, “Who cares?” and she left. Mr. Potts, on the way to his bedroom, paused at our door, considered our toplessness, and said, “Kiss-kiss, ladies, nighty night,” because on Saturdays he and Mrs. Potts ran the Central Park loop first thing in the morning and made it a point to go to bed early. He pulled the door closed and then reopened it: “You’re making too much noise,” he said, so we dropped our sticks. As soon as the latch clicked Tanner shot a double-leg takedown on me and we wrestled for the next hour. When we rolled, Tanner would occasionally bury his mouth in my neck when he took my back and growl, “Try to get out of it, cocksucker, you know you fucking like it,” but it only made me madder and I’d Granby out of his hooks and stuff his face in his rug to let him know I was displeased. From the hallway, we heard Gwyneth say, “Bye,” and later, while we both lay on the floor, spent and sweaty and staring at the ceiling, we heard the buzzer ring and hurried to the kitchen to answer it.
It was Sean, the doorman. He was maybe in his thirties. He was a giant with a thick Irish brogue, and in something close to a panic he said, “Pick you boyos up in the service elevator, I need your help right feckin now.”
The door to the rear stairwell and service elevator was off the Pottses’ kitchen, and we waited until Sean rose into view. His doorman’s coat was laughably short at the sleeves. When he pulled open the accordion gate and waved us aboard, it wasn’t clear how we’d fit on the car. “Mr. McAllister’s in a mess on eleven, so no gawking.”
Through the McAllisters’ differently furnished kitchen with the same layout as the Pottses’, down their hallway with different paintings but the same hallway as upstairs, into the master bedroom with floral wallpaper and sconces but the same bedroom, there lay elderly Mrs. McAllister in her bed, in her nightgown, her white hair perfectly coiffed, her back perfectly straight against the headboard, watching us walk by as if we were pedestrians passing her on a street bench. Sean said, “Cavalry’s arrived, Mrs. McAllister, don’t you worry,” and led us into the master bathroom. Bald Mr. McAllister, in broadcloth pajamas, sat stuck between the toilet and the sink, having obviously slipped, a bright pool of piss spread in a circle beneath him. He appeared dejected, disoriented. “Well, lift him up for Chrissakes,” said Sean, filling the doorway, and then watched as Tanner and I lifted Mr. McAllister, his darkened pants making a sucking sound as we raised him up, the small room heady with the puddled stink. We walked him into his bedroom, his arms draped over our shoulders, his cuffs leaving a trail of drippings and wet footprints behind us that marked a path to the bed, whose covers Sean folded back as Tanner and I guided the old man into position (“It’s okay, Mr. McAllister, you got this, you’re all right,” Tanner said) and then sat him down. Following this, Tanner made a great show of tucking him in (“There you go, Mr. McAllister, nice and comfy”), and now that Mr. McAllister was safely in place but still soiled, he too sat ramrod straight next to his wife, neither of them speaking, the pair at once wide-eyed and frozen-faced, as if we were burglars plundering their home, their expressions neither embarrassed nor grateful but closer to stunned. “Okay, Mrs. McAllister,” said Sean to her, “we’ve got your fella back where he belongs, we’ll be going now.”
After Sean dropped us off on our floor and thanked us and then ashamedly slammed the gate, Tanner and I stood in his kitchen, staring at nothing in the quiet apartment.
Tanner perked up. “A good deed like that calls for a drink,” he said, and from the cabinet he produced a bottle of rum and a pair of shot glasses, the pair of which he filled to the brim. “Through the lips and past the gums, watch out stomach, here it comes.”
We drank.
“Time for bed,” Tanner announced.
He killed the lights and was soon out cold. He slept on his stomach, hugging the pillow to his smushed face and occasionally mumbling puckered nonsense. As I lay awake, I could not shake the thought of Naomi and me, standing in her bathroom together. Of her nails slowly sliding down my back. From my briefs’ waistband, my cock emerged, hard as a policeman’s baton, and to banish the thought of her, I imagined Gwyneth and me, doing the Hustle at Studio 54, which I pictured as the dance floor in Saturday Night Fever. “You sorta look like John Travolta,” Gwyneth said, but in Naomi’s voice, since she often whispered this to me. Was there not some way to make the perfect girl? I wondered. She’d kiss like Deb Peryton, have Gwyneth’s face, but be easy to talk to, like Naomi. Did such a person already exist, and if we met, would I recognize her? If I recognized her, and we started dating, I was certain I’d be happy. Without meaning to, I next replayed the scene at the McAllisters’ apartment. Of the couple’s expectant muteness as they watched us march in and out of their bedroom. Were they lying there now, I wondered, just as we’d left them? Was there really no one else they could call for help? I had no answers to these questions and found myself weeping a bit, but my erection had receded, thank God, and before I drifted off to sleep, I was strangely certain of this: for as long as I lived, I would neither forget those two poor people nor their sad tableau.
Morning, and I was up with the sun. I heard Mr. and Mrs. Potts pad down the hallway and out the door, off on their jog. Tanner’s clock radio read 6:57, and I forced myself back to sleep.
I woke again at 7:43, hoping I’d overslept, but it was useless. I had no excuse to miss my appointment. I got up and went to get some breakfast.
I found Gwyneth in the dining nook. She was wearing a black cocktail dress and her mascara was smeared—from sweat or tears, it wasn’t clear, though she seemed upbeat, in spite of the hour. She smelled of cigarette smoke and limes. She was reading the financial section of the New York Times, the Saturday listings of all the stock prices, several of which she’d underlined with a pen, writing out their arcane abbreviations and symbols on a small notepad. On the table was also a plate with a half-eaten taco and a stubbed-out Marlboro Light, the pack with a Studio 54 matchbook atop it by her side as well. She had cracked the window in front of the sink; its breeze was cold. She blew her nose into a napkin that was lightly dotted with blood. “You’re up early,” she said, and returned to scanning the broadsheet.
I helped myself to a bowl of graham crackers and then poured whole milk over it—a Tanner Potts specialty. I ate, staring at Gwyneth intently. Her concentration was total; occasionally, she sniffled. After a few more minutes of reading, she took her plate to the window, raised farther the sash, and smoked one more cigarette. The view was an east-facing alley, a back-of-the-building, streetless one, and into this void she ashed. Afterward, she scraped her plate into the trash, then rinsed it under the faucet and placed it on the dish rack.
“Good night,” she said, and excused herself to her room.
The clock above the rear entrance read 8:26.
If I didn’t leave now, I’d be late.
At Fifth Avenue and Seventy-Third Street I looked downtown and then dejectedly headed north. I entered Central Park just above the Seventy-Ninth Street transverse, past the Met, the Temple of Dendur visible through its wall of glass and silent in the morning light. I merged onto the bridle path running alongside the reservoir. A beautiful woman on horseback cantered past me, prettier even than Gwyneth. It was gray and windy, the air damp and promising either rain or sun, it was not yet clear. Exiting the park, I rode uptown again, on Central Park West, to school.
When I entered the building, there was Coach Kepplemen, waiting for me on the pews.
He had been sitting as he had at the sports award assembly, his ankle, which he held in his hand, at rest atop his knee and his foot flapping. At the sight of me he smiled with unguarded fondness, an expression that, I realize now, signaled a surprised happiness, a relief or amazement that I had showed up—that any of us did—in the first place, which elicited, of all things, sympathy from me. Then he got up without further acknowledgment and walked the long hallway, ahead of me, as always, toward the wrestling gym, his preferred place for us to practice on Saturdays—though on these weekends he never turned on the room’s overhead lights, choosing also to roll on the practice mats, which lay against the same wall as the double doors, so that we were hidden from view. Even if you’d gotten on your toes to peek through one of the small porthole windows, you couldn’t have seen us. He was already dressed for our session, in wrestling shoes and a T-shirt, but also, I noticed, wearing shorts. I hated when Kepplemen wore shorts; he had neither a jockstrap nor underwear beneath these, ever. When we drilled, I could feel everything. And even though it was only the beginning of December, with three full months left in the season, I suffered the tiniest itch for wrestling to be over.
Later, at home, Dad still hadn’t put away the challah French toast and Canadian bacon. I wasn’t hungry but upon arrival ate a second breakfast, which Dad insisted on reheating, even the syrup. I had seconds of that too. I didn’t understand why I did this to myself. It would make cutting weight this week hellish. The sweat from my workout was overlaid with the sweat from my ride home, and my wind-dried neck was salty with the perspiration and the smell of Kepplemen’s cologne. Dad and Mom were seated on the couch, dividing the New York Times between them, their faces hidden behind Arts & Leisure and the Book Review. I’d taken the seat facing the window and was staring at the sky…
Dad said, “Your mother asked you a question.”
I turned to him and then Mom, confused.
“I said,” Mom said, “what are you up to tonight?”
“There’s a party,” I told her. “But I’m eating at Cliff’s first.”
It was a rare treat to be invited to Cliff’s home for dinner, but especially tonight, which was the fifth evening of Hanukkah. The Bauers’ menorah sat atop a chest in their living/dining area, and it was Cliff’s night to light the candle and recite the blessings. We had stuffed breast of veal for dinner with ratatouille and latkes that Mr. Bauer had cooked. Mrs. Bauer did all the driving, the exact opposite from our family, but he did all the cooking, usually even the desserts—though tonight, instead of his usual cheesecake, he’d brought home a mess of chocolate and cherry rugelach. I ate so many I was like a goldfish. I could barely concentrate on the dreidel and had to lie down on the couch. We soon moved to Scrabble, which was an exercise in humiliation at Cliff’s house. Shira, his sister, a senior and a dark-haired version of Gwyneth, was the only one of us who could keep up with Mrs. Bauer, an editor at the New York Times, at least until the inevitable inflection point when Cliff’s mom considered the clotted board and her letters and in her gentle, singsong voice—it was the only time I ever caught her acting—said, “Oh, look what I have,” and with a single tile plopped on Double Letter Score activated so many branches of words it reminded me of lighting a Christmas tree.
The Bauers lived on Eighty-Seventh between Columbus and Central Park West, and though it lacked the grandeur our former apartment possessed, I recognized in Cliff’s home some of the same rot and charm: exposed steam pipes in the bathroom dusted with soot, and the parquet floors that popped when you walked across them. Like Tanner’s place, the kitchen and dining room windows faced west, onto one of the city’s streetless spaces, where all the block’s buildings stood bunched together and, in their varying heights, formed a set of rising and falling tar-topped roofs. These were populated with prickly television aerials and rotating air vents, with water towers and the steepled glass that crowned elevator shafts—it was easy to forget that a building is a machine. I often imagined that if I could find the right door or hop from the right window, I could walk the entirety of Manhattan by this staircase, or at least travel between my friends’ apartments unseen and, like some urban superhero, permanently live the fleeting feeling of freedom I now enjoyed, deep, as I was, into the weekend.
“We were in Bayonne,” Mr. Bauer was saying, now that the game had concluded, although we had still not put away the board, “in an internment camp the SS had set up there. I was ten, I think—”
“You were in Luxembourg for three years after fleeing Hamburg, so you were twelve,” said Mrs. Bauer.
“And I see an SS officer berating this decrepit old Orthodox Jew. He is accusing him of stealing food. We were all starving, so I say to him, ‘Leave the poor guy alone, can’t you see he has nothing?’ And the officer bends down to me and says, ‘And you are?’ I say my name, and he goes, ‘And what do you do, Alex Bauer?’ And I say, ‘I’m a Lebenskünstler.’ And he says, ‘What is a Lebenskünstler?’ And I say, ‘Maybe someday I will tell you.’ And he says, ‘Maybe you will, and maybe you won’t.’ And he kicks me in the head, here.”
Mr. Bauer lifted his eyelid to reveal the jagged scar.
“Flash-forward,” he continues, “it is March 1945, we are about to cross the Rhine…”
Cliff kneed me under the table to say, This is the best part.
“I’m on patrol with my friend Mark. We’re in the forest, just outside Cologne, and we realize we’ve wandered behind enemy lines. And as we’re trying to make it back to our side, who do we capture? The very same German officer from Bayonne. We tie him to a tree. I say to him, ‘You gave me this scar when I was a boy. You put your boot in my face, do you remember that?’ He says, ‘I do’—which I thought was brave. I say to him, ‘Did you ever learn what a Lebenskünstler is?’ He doesn’t remember that part. He says, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ‘A Lebenskünstler,’ I explain, ‘is a life artist. You have to be a life artist to survive in this world.’ And he says, ‘Why are you telling me this?’ And I say, ‘Because you are not a life artist.’ ”
Mr. Bauer sat back, his expression a vengeful cousin to pleased.
I looked at Cliff and then back at Mr. Bauer. “So, but—what happened to him?” I asked.
Cliff bunched his hair in his fists and shook his head. “Oy,” he said, which made Mr. Bauer chuckle.
The kitchen phone rang. Shira had her own line, so Mrs. Bauer got up to answer it. When she returned to the table, she said, “That was Tanner. He wants you to know he’s leaving his apartment right now.”
Like Oren, I too could be a fearless explorer of other people’s rooms—or in the case of our wrestling captain Roy Adler’s town house, where tonight’s party was being held, other people’s floors. It was one of a conjoined trio of four-story homes on Eighty-Fifth and Central Park West, distinguished, primarily, by their colors of brick (Adler’s was red, the other pair a shade of off-white) and also for their comparatively dwarfish size, standing uncowed beneath their much taller neighboring apartment buildings, so that with the city grown up around them, they reminded me of Virginia Lee Burton’s The Little House. Adler’s place was on the corner, and it had what I would come to learn were the classic architectural details of the Romanesque revival (oriel windows separated by acanthus friezes, decorative pediment arches above these and the doors, elaborate ironwork everywhere); however, what made it more magical than the others was its cone-shaped roof. I meant to see the room beneath it with my own eyes.
Hindsight reveals several important things about our social lives as city children in a city that, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists. Monied parents like the Adlers left town on the weekends for second homes in Litchfield or the Hamptons, but in their mildly dissociative and benignly neglectful fashion they neither insisted their children join them nor cared much what they did in their absence. Their kids might, as they not entirely untruthfully warned their parents, have “a few people over”; these gatherings might, as was the case of Roy’s party, swell to a number closer to a hundred. However, the fact that these parties were tacitly condoned often gave them a distinctly adult feel. They were sedate, intimate: music played but wasn’t blasting; several pizzas had been ordered and sat atop the vast kitchen’s island, but with paper plates and napkins provided. “Beer,” as Roy indicated to Cliff, Tanner, and me when we entered this vast space, “is in the fridge and the cooler”—the former double-doored and restaurant-sized, the latter an ice-filled galvanized steel tub. No one was hell-bent on property destruction or put their shoes on the furniture. There was a fire going in the Masterpiece Theatre living room. It was all more Apollonian than Dionysian, and it exemplified the distinctly Neverland quality to how we partied. As was the case with Gwyneth, spending all night out at Studio 54, we were impersonating the adults it seemed we knew only from afar.
Which didn’t mean I didn’t have an agenda. I snooped, but not inappropriately. I was determined to see the top floor. I was hung up on this, I cannot say why, perhaps because the building was as famous to me as any Upper West Side landmark: the Beresford, for instance, with its three octagonal towers overlooking Central Park, where Oren was now, at the apartment of his new best friend, Matt; or the Dakota, with its decorative iron railing surrounding it, of the bearded Wise Man framed by two dragons, the figures repeating at intervals like sentries. But given the fact that Roy was a senior and our wrestling team’s captain, I asked for his permission, to which he replied, after clinking beer cans with me, “I think there are already people up there.” So as not to appear overeager, I took my time. Juniors and seniors were gathered in the wood-paneled living room, grouped in loose cliques around the fire, standing by the mantel, seated on the couch and accent chairs. I spotted the members of the lacrosse team, also the preppy swimmers. Wrestling captain Santoro, who sat with Lisa Mullins on his lap, raised his beer in greeting, and I raised mine in response. Seated around the dining room table, as if they were having a work meeting, were the techies, a group of computer lab regulars and math geeks and drama stagehands: Marc Mason, Todd Wexworth, and Hogi Hyun, plus middle schoolers Chip Colson and Jason Taylor. The walnut staircase I ascended was magnificent, its decorative newel an eagle, its banisters and railings as brown as braised beef, its thick runner a deep green, as soft beneath my feet as the treads were solid. Worthy of note and attributable to a combination of my dimness and youth: I did not associate such palatial digs with wealth any greater than what the Pottses possessed, I being no Oren and entirely incurious about how the world worked. I just thought such domiciles—with their abstract paintings of three colorful lines or sculptures of men so long-legged and long-torsoed they looked like upside-down Ys—were a lot bigger than my own. The second floor’s hallways were dark, though light shined from a room with pocket doors, revealing a dedicated TV room as well as a second fireplace (this even more magical than the existence of a first one) in which a fire was also roaring. Roaring on the floor, a lion skin rug. Rob Dolinski, one of Boyd’s most popular seniors, was seated on the couch. If he’d had even a scintilla of interest in acting he’d have been a star, his wattage was that powerful. He wore a blazer and a sharp pair of corduroys. His hair was slicked back with sculpting gel and caught the firelight. On his left and right were the pair of gorgeous senior girls from whom he was inseparable: Andrea Oppenheimer and Sophie Evans. The trio passed a joint among themselves. “Are you lost?” Dolinski asked, and pointing to myself, I replied, “Just taking the tour.” “You want a hit?” he offered, and held out the roach. “No thank you,” I said. “Well,” he said, “if you change your mind,” and then, with the spliff, indicated the pair of ladies, as if he were offering them instead of the dope: “There’s plenty to go around.” In response, I continued my tour, pretending to admire the photographs on the mantel, the painting of black-and-white squiggles, sprays, and splashes above the fireplace, excusing myself immediately afterward for fear of getting contact high. “Be seeing you,” Dolinski said, with a confidence approaching certitude.
Roy’s room was on the third floor.
It was no bigger than the one I shared with Oren, but it did have its own bathroom and a view of Central Park. From this height, and through the leafless trees, the reservoir—dotted by the light poles palely illuminating its cinder track—was its own bluey emptiness on this almost moonless night, while the park’s winding walkways and roadways, lit by the same white lights, appeared streaked with incandescent bands that resembled snow. Beyond it, as brilliantly orange as the fireplace’s embers, glowed the great wall of Fifth Avenue’s facades. Still, it was not the vantage that impressed me so much as the decor—the incontrovertible Royness of the space that I studied. Atop his dresser, he had repurposed a shopping crate to stand his multiple wrestling trophies and hang his many medals, and like Gwyneth’s collage, I coveted the idea for the case—that someone so young might commemorate himself thus—as much as the hardware. Above his desk, framed posters for Apocalypse Now and The Warriors, which I also associated with Roy, he being possessed of a cool toughness to which I aspired. Like Mom, Roy also had an impressive bookshelf; however, his was tall and narrow and organized, so far as I could tell, by genre, blocks of science fiction and fantasy, none of which I had read (The Man in the High Castle, A Canticle for Leibowitz, a ton of Carlos Castaneda). Included among these was a cluster of Stephen King, Tolkien, the Dune trilogy, these giving on to Slaughterhouse-Five, Catch-22, The Crying of Lot 49, plus Franny and Zooey, Nine Stories, and The Catcher in the Rye. Such a library shamed me. These books were like tickets for entry to a club to which it seemed I was somehow not intelligent enough to be admitted, that demanded concentration I did not seem to have at my disposal. My mother looked up at me from such books and then back to the page. I felt this lack. This failure. (Last summer, Cliff had tackled the Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit, by choice.) I wanted to be someone like Roy, for whom these books seemed like bricks on which his self was built; whose identity was fashioned of the same stone as his home’s cantilevered corbels, of the same brass of his wrestling medals; refined in the same fires whose smoke filled these chimneys and that forged the silver and gold of his picture frames. In one such photograph, I picked out Roy, on a dock somewhere, during a recent late-summer idyll, behind which a stately country house sat, Roy standing amid his enormous family—cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents—who seemed, in spite of their sprawling Deuteronomy, to be straight out of central casting. Put another way, they appeared the opposite of actors, enjoying, in their unposed and unselfconscious cohesion, a closeness I feared that my family did not.
I heard girls’ voices in the hallway.
From the base of the stairs, I could see the room I’d sought to visit. But several girls from my class were congregated in a bedroom adjacent to where I now stood, most notably my lab partner, Deb Peryton, who smiled at me, invitingly, so I smiled back and then joined her. They had the forty-five of The Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” playing and were chatting over the music.
“We were talking about the scariest movie we’ve ever seen,” she said to me. “Mine was Jaws.”
Deb was wearing a black turtleneck and the same lip gloss as the night we’d kissed.
“My dad took my brother and me to see Dressed to Kill.”
“I thought that had an X rating.”
“It was R,” I said. “My brother and I were holding hands by the end of it.”
“If you take me to see The Shining,” Deb said, “I’ll hold your hand.”
“I’ll hold your hand now if you come upstairs and see the top floor.”
“Oh my gosh,” Deb said. “It’s like an aerie up there—”
But now Cliffnotes, who appeared out of nowhere, grabbed my wrist and yanked me into the hallway.
“Pilchard is here,” he said, and pulled me after him. On the first floor, Cliff banged on the closet door beneath the stairs and to the occupants inside said, “Pilchard is here,” and Tanner emerged with flush-faced Justine Keaton, who smoothed out her sweater and hurried past us.
“What are we doing?” I asked.
“Pilchard’s in the kitchen,” Cliff said to Tanner, as if that also answered my question.
Tanner rubbed his hands together like he was about to eat a meal.
In the kitchen, Cliff made a beeline for the fridge while Tanner, who had spotted Pilchard by the island, grabbed him by the back of the neck, pushed him into the corner of the dining nook, and took the seat next to him. Cliff placed a six-pack on the table and shouldered up next to Pilchard on the other side. He nodded that I join him, and I hesitated. He smacked the bench and I sat. When Tanner and Cliff snowballed like this, there was no stopping them. At which point Roy Adler appeared with two rocks glasses: one brimmed with Scotch, another contained a single quarter. He had a cigar in his mouth. “It’s my understanding,” he said, “you boys have a matter to resolve.”
“We do?” Pilchard asked.
“Oh yes,” Tanner said, as if Pilchard’s father had sued his family too. He was a big believer in blind loyalty, especially if it ended in violence.
Roy placed the empty glass with the quarter in the middle of the table. Seated higher than all of us on a barstool, he ashed from this purchase into a golden tray, tapping the cigar so forcefully it sounded like a doctor percussing a chest. He took on, I thought, a princely sort of appearance, wetly sucking at the head till the tip glowed and then sending out three perfect white rings, which I watched widen until, with what smoke was left in his lungs, he blew a tight stream through their tornadic outline so that they disappeared.
“You start,” Cliff said to Pilchard. He had already cracked a beer and was filling the glass.
Tiny Pilchard, mackerel-eyed and full-lipped, tried to gamely play along. “Nah, you go first,” he said. It was both an obvious stalling tactic and, somewhat sadly, an expression of gratitude for being included in our game.
“No,” Cliff said, and pushed both the glass and the coin closer, “you go.”
Pilchard took the quarter, placed it on the bridge of his nose, and released. It rolled and bounced on the table, tinking against the highball’s rim, then spinning until Cliffnotes stopped it with his finger. Taking the coin between his thumb and index finger, Cliffnotes bounced it on its flat side. We watched it arc and then clatter into the glass. He pointed his elbow at Pilchard. “Drink,” Cliff said. Pilchard chugged his beer until the quarter slid into his mouth, and before he’d even finished the suds, Cliff took it and refilled it. Cliff missed, then passed the quarter to Tanner, who, with a no-look bounce, sank the quarter again and pointed his elbow at Pilchard. “Drink,” he said. When he missed, he passed the glass to me, and I missed, intentionally, and passed the glass to Roy, who balanced the cigar on the table’s edge and, after he sank the coin, picked up the stogie and pointed it at Cliff. “Drink,” he commanded. Cliff drank, Roy missed, Pilchard sank, hit Tanner, missed, and then Cliff landed two in a row, firing an elbow at Pilchard each time. Pilchard burped loudly between each glass. When Cliff’s streak ended, he slid the quarter to Tanner, who once again tagged Pilchard. He was pausing between swallows now, contemplating the glass’s level, raising it above his head to consider it from underneath. “Hurry up already,” Cliff said.
There were three more rounds of this. Pilchard was laughing now. “Come on, guys,” he said. But he didn’t have the courage to quit. Had he found it, Cliff wouldn’t have allowed him to leave anyway. Within thirty minutes Pilchard was red-eyed and semiconscious, his chin drooping to his chest and lids heavy, at which point Tanner said, “He’s crocked.”
Pilchard said, “I don’t feel so good.”
Roy said, “No hurling on the premises, please.”
Cliff, satisfied but not satiated, said to all of us, “Pick him up and follow me.”
I looked at Roy for a lifeline, but he bit the cigar in his teeth and, before excusing himself, said, “You kids don’t stay out too late.”
The moment the cold air hit us on Central Park West, Pilchard jackknifed at the waist and vomited profusely. Bent double, palms to knees, he moaned after expunging and said, “Sorry about that.” He wiped his mouth with the heel of his hand and then spit a couple of times. He was so wrecked he then tipped forward, but Tanner caught his underarm and Cliff lifted him by the other so that he didn’t fall into his own sick, upon which Pilchard seized and barfed several more times.
“Can someone get me home, please?” Pilchard asked.
Cliffnotes leaned down and, after bunching Simon’s bangs in his fist to lift his head, looked into his swimming eyes. “Hey, buddy,” he said, “don’t you worry, we’ll get you where you need to be.”
I said, “Enough, man, he’s toast.”
“Are you gonna puss out on me?” Cliff said.
“Typical,” Tanner said.
“Can you just tell me what we’re doing?”
Allegiances had shifted. Tanner and Cliff were a duo now. They had a plan and loyalty dictated I go along with it, and this made me angry and glum. Cliff hailed a cab. Tanner grabbed the door’s handle before the vehicle had even stopped. Like a cop, he palmed Pilchard’s head and pushed him in first, slid next to him, and then rolled down the window. He shoved Pilchard’s chin on top of the glass. I slid next to Tanner. Cliff, after closing the door, said to the cabbie, “Columbus Circle, please.”
The driver hesitated to pull his flag. “That’s not even a fare,” he said, and craned his neck around. He considered Pilchard through the plastic partition.
Cliff stuffed a five in the money slot and smacked it closed. “Just drive,” he said.
“He better not puke in my cab,” the driver said.
Pilchard did barf the moment we exited the taxi, spraying the street’s subway grates with tomato and cheese and then falling face-first, the odor from his guts wafting on the updraft. Tanner dipped into a fireman’s carry and, with Pilchard on his shoulder, followed Cliff, who marched up the Paramount movie theater’s steps. Raging Bull silently coursed its circumference via hundreds of bulbs, a magical marquee that made the title appear to travel its shape like a ticker.
“Where are we going?” I asked Cliff.
Tanner said, “Just keep up.”
“If you don’t tell me, I’m leaving.”
“Then fucking go home,” Cliff said.
From this elevated landing, all of Columbus Circle came into view. The wind, barreling down Broadway, seemed churned by the roundabout’s traffic, as if funneled by the GW building, and then whipped past the Coliseum—Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus read its marquee. Cliff skipped down the black steps and then down the subway’s stairwell, its nautilus curve leading to the Fifty-Ninth Street station.
“Four, please,” Cliff told the tollbooth operator and again pressed money through the slot. He took his tokens and put one in the plunger for Tanner, then sent him with Pilchard through the turnstile, holding the other coin aloft for the operator behind the glass to see and depositing it and spinning the bars, lest he think we were fare-jumping our sick friend. He flipped me my token and followed after Tanner. The platform was nearly empty. A homeless man lay against the wall, in a nest of collapsed cardboard. Two women leaned against the girders, watching us. They wore platform shoes covered in glitter, fishnet stockings, and bootie shorts. Their varsity jackets were as puffy-armed as ours, but satin and shiny, the only part of their outfits weather appropriate.
“Will someone please tell me what we’re doing?” I asked.
Tanner said, “You’ll see.”
The twin headlights of the northbound train sparked the rails. It came bombing into the station, accompanied by its electrically charged gusts that were warm and humid—dragon-blown. It was impossible to tell the cars’ original color, they were so completely covered in graffiti. The train’s brakes whined and, when it stopped, made a sound like a giant round chambered into a breech. The doors opened. Tanner boarded, still carrying Pilchard on his shoulder, and laid the limp boy almost gently on the bench. Then he stepped back and blocked the door from closing with his foot. The two women who’d boarded at the other end of our car hugged the pole, eyeing us suspiciously. I remained on the platform, as if by distance I was somehow exonerated. Cliffnotes bent to face Pilchard and took his chin in his hand. He lightly shook him. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, Simon.” And then as hard as Kepplemen slapped us, he slapped him awake. Pilchard’s head bobbled a bit; his eyelids peeled open. “Do you know where you are?” Cliff asked.
Pilchard considered Cliff for a moment and smiled. He said, “We’re at a party.”
Cliff said, “Do you know who I am?”
Pilchard reached out and tousled Cliff’s hair, then shook his head.
Cliff said, “You tried to hurt my family.”
Pilchard replied, “I didn’t hurt anybody.”
“Do you want to know where I’m sending you?”
And as if on cue, the conductor said, “This is the A train express. Next stop, One Hundred Twenty-Fifth Street.” By which time he’d backed off the car.
“Uptown, motherfucker.”
Years later, after I’d graduated college and returned to Manhattan—this was 1989—I got a job working for an Israeli named Uri Yaviv, who was CEO of a tiny startup called Trident. My title, computer consultant, had next to nothing to do with my responsibilities, which were primarily to oversee the editing of a several-hundred-page proposal full of data flow diagrams and technical descriptions in the coldest, most abstruse language for an antiballistic weapons manufacturing system that tested my capacity for mind-numbing work. None of this is particularly important, except for the fact that Uri ran the business out of his large apartment in Hudson Heights, just a few blocks north of Little Dominican Republic and the George Washington Bridge—neighborhoods farther north in the city than I’d ever ventured as a boy and so unknown to me in my youth that they might as well have been an entirely different state. I was living on the Upper East Side at the time. I was so busy, my hours were so long, that, weather permitting, I made the nearly nine-mile ride on my bicycle to ensure I got exercise, crossing the park and then making the remainder of the trek up Broadway, through Morningside Heights, past Columbia University, through Manhattanville, West Harlem, Hamilton Heights, Sugar Hill, and Washington Heights. When I was a boy this was considered the DMZ, the forbidden zone. And there were still stretches of urban decay on my ride but far more beauty and a vibrancy to the street life no different from any other part of town. This didn’t surprise me, because I was older, because I was smarter and wiser, as I think I am now, but I did not know, then, that this northernmost province of Manhattan was the land, for instance, of so many Orthodox Jews, the Hasidim who owned much of the area’s real estate. On my trip I spied Hispanic girls in Catholic-school plaid whose parents owned the bodegas and clothing shops and beauty salons, storefronts decorated in multicolored pennants that rippled in the gusts off the Hudson. I ate my meals at the Bolivian and Mexican and Dominican and soul food restaurants that were plentiful there, at the Chinese buffets and the kosher butchers, and a McDonald’s whose fries always tasted fresh out of the oil. I felt as at home and as safe in such density as anywhere in New York, and when I took the A train it was no different from any subway line but for the racial composition of its passengers, I being almost completely outnumbered from Fifty-Ninth Street north and 181st Street south. On that ride, I occasionally thought about what we did to Pilchard. My guilt had far more to do with our intent, which was to weaponize our city like a gun. It was also that I simply went along with things. As to my shame, that was retroactive, it was in hindsight. For what could we know, then, really, living in our tiny world on that infinite little island? And how lucky we were, as we grew older, to begin to unlearn such things—but not yet, not then. I am no apologist—“We were boys”—I grant no pardons. Our education was spatial. Racial. Tribal. Urban. American. But mostly—and this is the most important thing—it was dominated by Kepplemen, over whom we were each failing to gain leverage. And who wore the costume of love. And who was, day in and day out, teaching us fury, aggression, complicity, desperation, exploitation, and, most of all, silence.
Which is to say that all the way back to my apartment from the train station we neither spoke nor gave a thought to what we had done.
When we entered, I could hear the television on in my parents’ bedroom. They were asleep, and before I went to turn off their TV, Dad’s voice came over the speaker: It’s ten p.m., went the PSA, do you know where your children are?
Tanner and Cliff were in the kitchen. Tanner was making a quesadilla. After the three of us ate, we took a carton of eggs with us to the terrace and lay flat on the ground, waiting for unwitting pedestrians.
Oren appeared. He considered the three of us. “What are you losers doing?”
When we told him, he said, “Gee, guys, maybe when I’m in high school, you’ll let me join you.”
Tanner said, “What do you suggest, dickweed?”
To Cliffnotes, Oren said, “Let’s get the map.”
“Great idea,” Cliff said, and jumped to his feet.
Oren and Cliffnotes had a subway map along whose arterial lines they had listed the numbers collected from the city’s nearby pay phones. On slow nights like these, we picked a location and made prank calls.
We huddled in my closet and closed the door, so as not to wake my parents.
Tanner, still buzzed from the party, asked to go first. Receiver in hand and finger pressed to the cradle’s prongs, he took several deep breaths to nerve himself and then called a pay phone in Times Square. He tilted the earpiece away from his ear so we could all hear.
A woman said, “Hello?”
“Hello?”
“Who’s this?”
“Peter.”
“Peter who?”
“Peter Piper suck my pecker!” Then he slammed the receiver into the cradle and bent double, cackling.
All of us shook our heads in disappointment.
Oren, who had a special dislike for Tanner, who thought he was the prototypical Boyd Prep prick, said, “Lame.”
“Fuck you, Oren,” Tanner said, “you go then,” and handed him the phone.
Because I did not rise to his defense, Oren shot me a disappointed look and then consulted the map. He dialed and glanced between us while he waited for someone to pick up. When the man answered, he raised his voice an octave and whispered, “Dad? Dad, is that you?”
“Sorry, kid, this isn’t your dad.”
“You have to help me, mister, please, I finally got out of the closet—”
“Is this some kind of joke?”
Oren began to cry, tears and everything. “Mister, please, he only gives me a bucket to pee in.”
“Look, kid, calm down, okay?”
“Please don’t hang up, I have to get out of this place.”
“I said calm down—”
“He hurts me. He hurts me real bad.”
“Who does?”
“The man. Who keeps me locked up. All the time, whenever he’s here.”
“Kid, listen, what’s your name?”
“Etan.”
“Ethan?”
“Will you please call my dad and tell him to come get me please?”
“Holy shit. Is this…Etan Patz?”
“Please, mister, I’ve been here forever.”
“The Etan Patz.”
“Please hurry—”
“Holy fucking shit.”
“He never goes away for long.”
“Where are you? I can come get you.”
“I don’t know, it’s dark in this place.”
“Are you in an apartment?”
“Yes.”
“Can you get to a door?”
“He locks it from outside.”
“What about a window?”
“There’s a window, but there’s bars on it.”
“Look out and tell me what you see.”
“I see…an intersection. I see a subway.”
“Are there letters on them?”
“It’s hard to make them out.”
“What about the street sign?”
“It says…Fourteenth Street.”
Silence.
“And I see a phone booth. With someone in it.”
Silence.
“Mister, are you there?”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Mister, is that bad?”
“Holy Jesus Lord.”
“Please, mister, you’re really scaring me.”
“You’re—you’re right here.”
“Where?”
“Here. Where I am. I’m on your block. I’m waving now. Can you see me waving?”
“Is that you, mister? In the phone booth?”
“It’s me. Which way are you?”
“The other way.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your back is to me.”
“Am I facing you now?”
“Yes.”
“I see your building.”
“You do?”
“I’m going to point toward you, okay? I’m going to raise my arm toward you, and when I’m pointing right at you say stop, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Stop now?”
“Keep going.”
“Stop now?”
“Stop.”
“You’re on the third floor. I got you, Etan. Don’t worry. I’m gonna call the police and we’re gonna come get you.”
“Can’t you stay on the phone with me?”
“Kid, I have to hang up just for a second and call the police.”
“Okay, but, mister, before you do, I should probably tell you—”
“Tell me anything, Etan, it’s going to be okay.”
“It’s that, it’s that—”
“It’s what? Tell me.”
“It’s that you’re the most gullible asshole I’ve ever talked to in my life.”
Very gently, Oren hung up the phone. He looked at me, then at Cliff, and finally at Tanner, with a that’s-how-it’s-done expression.
Even Tanner joined us in our reverential applause.
“My turn,” I said.
I called the pay phone on Sixty-Third and Central Park West. Someone answered on the first ring.
“Who’s this?” I said.
“Who’s this?”
“Griffin.”
“Well, Griffin, I think you have the wrong number,” the man said.
“Is this 787-3858?” I asked.
“It is.”
“Is this the pay phone next to the YMCA?” I said.
“It is. You know what that means?”
“What?”
“That it’s fate I picked up. Swear to God, I’ve been waiting for your call.”
“You have?”
“When the student is ready the mentor appears.”
“Help me, Obi-Wan, you’re my only hope.”
“I’m dead serious.”
“So am I.”
“Then meet me in fifteen minutes by the rocks in Sheep Meadow, and I’ll tell you the meaning of life.”
And he hung up.
At the Sixty-Seventh Street entrance to the park, we could hear the faint clop of hooves and the jingle of carriages making the late-night loop. Through the restaurant windows, waiters reset tables at Tavern on the Green, snapping open white tablecloths that billowed before settling over the round tops. In the nearing distance stood the great black pool that was Sheep Meadow, bottomless. There was a cessation of street noise once we crossed onto its grass, this stiffened by the iron air, so that the lawn, made vaster by the darkness, crunched beneath our feet. I felt brave. I was certain we all did. We were beside ourselves, whispering and laughing, rousing ourselves, shushing each other, bashing into each other, not believing there would be a rendezvous, believing we were going to learn something. That we had decided to accept this invitation was in and of itself some sort of triumph, since good sense dictated this was the last place we should’ve been at such an hour.
The ambient light was bright enough to illuminate a smudged outline of the man. He was standing on the exposed rock, near the meadow’s tree line, a small outcropping atop this lake bed of grass that looked comparatively bleached. He wore an overcoat that rounded his shoulders and had his hands stuffed in his pockets. Atop his head, a hunting cap, brim folded up, that made his round face seem rounder. His large glasses were tinted. He was double-chinned, closer to tubby—thick, that is, but not hulking. At the sight of us, he flapped the coat’s panels a couple of times—in greeting? He seemed utterly unruffled by the fact that he was outnumbered, a confidence that we could only attribute to his adulthood and was somehow unsettling. It suggested an as yet unrevealed power—that he might, at any moment, spread his coat’s wings and take flight.
“You showed up,” he said.
Tanner, Cliff, and I stood in a loose crescent beneath the rocks, which made the man seem taller. Oren squatted behind us, his elbows on his knees.
“Let’s hear it, man,” Cliff said.
“The meaning of life,” Tanner said.
“Do I get your names?” he asked.
“You do not,” Tanner said.
“Fair enough,” he said.
“The floor is yours,” Cliff said.
“Here’s the thing,” he said. “You know more about your feelings now than you will know ever. Swear to God. Something happens to you, say something good or bad, it doesn’t matter, and you let yourself feel it, and because it’s practically the first time, you don’t rationalize it or analyze it or overinterpret it, it’s just the thing itself. You don’t build a shell around it, it pierces you, it enters you, and, swear to God, if I could go back in time, you know what I would eliminate? What I’d lobotomize from my brain? The future. I’d let myself experience everything as it happened like you do now instead of wondering like I always did. Why isn’t this some other way instead of that? When will things be different? Better? Will they get worse? Do you understand?”
“No,” Tanner said.
“But keep going,” said Cliffnotes.
“It’s complicated, what I’m trying to explain,” he continued. “It’s inside-out thinking, but if I could communicate it, you’d realize that right now you are the most honest that you will ever be, and if you could somehow stay that way, then you would triumph over life, swear to God, because at some point soon, and maybe it’s already happened, you’re going to get hurt badly and repeatedly, small hurts over and over, things you don’t feel right now, like tick bites or leeches attaching to your skin. You’re going to stop listening and feeling and instead start making arguments, every day of your life asking yourself what isn’t instead of what is, and then it’s all over already. You’ll think you’ve bitten the apple, but really the apple’s bitten you. Your argument for what isn’t becomes the world and you become the argument and then it’s already happened: the beginning of adulthood.”
“I don’t follow any of this,” I said to Tanner.
“I think I understand,” Tanner said.
“This guy’s cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs,” Cliff whispered.
“Because phonies think they know,” the man continued. “But phonies don’t know what they don’t know.”
“Like my dad,” Oren said.
“You’re saying something bad is going to happen to us?” Cliff asked.
“Something bad happens to everyone,” he said. “Except it’s not bad. It’s just something. That’s the trick. Recognizing it’s just something. That’s the difference between pain and suffering. Suffering’s the former and pain’s the latter.”
“I’m confused,” I said.
“So what happened to you?” Cliff asked. “When did you stop feeling?”
“I have never stopped feeling.”
“When did you stop making an argument?”
“I have not stopped feeling or making an argument. I fight against not feeling and making an argument.”
“But when did you know,” Tanner asked, “that you weren’t…not?”
“Excellent,” he said. “I know exactly when I knew I wasn’t not. I know exactly when it happened.”
“Okay,” Tanner said, and rubbed his hands together, “here we go.”
“It was in Hawaii. Have you ever been there?”
None of us had.
“This was when I lived on Oahu,” he said.
He lived there in a way he had never been able to repeat in his life. He had a job, it was true, but his salary could only afford him an efficiency room with a warming plate, a mattress, a corner for his guitar, a bathroom with only a toilet. To bathe, he used his kitchen sink, splashed his face and, with a dampened rag, cleaned his armpits and balls, or he went to the Y to shower. On his days off, he put on the only good clothes that he had, the blue button-down shirt and white shorts and penny loafers that, after he combed his hair nicely and parted it to the side, made him look enough like a tourist that he could approach the front desk of luxurious hotels to ask what time check-in was and then join the sunburned families on the elevators. He pushed the buttons for the floors none of the other passengers pressed, nodding at the couples during the quiet ascent, and then, getting off at his floor, he wandered the hallways, looking for the maid carts from which he helped himself to pillow mints and bars of soap and a roll or two of toilet paper, which he placed in his book bag. He raised the polished lids on room service trays and feasted on the uneaten slices of mango and pineapple, the clusters of red grapes, the bitten strips of bacon, the toast points hardened with egg yolk, or, God bless, the untouched Danish or pastry, which he washed down with the miniature pitchers of heavy cream or a slug of coffee. If it were lunchtime, he’d next wander to the open-air restaurants and, like one of the small birds that landed beneath the wrought-iron legs of chairs or, bravely, on the tables themselves, help himself to what remained on unbused tables: the half-eaten Monte Cristos or tails of coconut shrimp, the curled ribbons of carrot, the split rose-hearts of radishes; even, sometimes, the parsley garnish, because the bright green bite of it was enormously refreshing. Picking up a newspaper someone hadn’t bothered to properly throw away, he might even take a seat, push the tip tray toward the somewhat baffled waiter, and say, “I’m not quite done here,” and then dip a soiled knife into the water glass and wipe it on his pants leg before cutting away the uneaten parts of burgers and omelets. Or, in a moment of inspiration, he’d drop a piece of cutlery so that it tinkled on the concrete loudly enough to bring the waiter over. “Could I get another fork?” he’d ask, and, upon the server’s return, wrap what was left in the new napkin, thanking him, and convincing even himself that he belonged.
These days spent among the tourists were vastly different from his shifts at a factory on the outskirts of Wahiawā, near the Schofield Barracks. It was a vast, high-ceilinged space with clerestory windows that, no matter the weather, seemed to pale the light to a fossil gray. The factory was an interconnected and intestinal array of machines, laid out lengthwise, of belts and sluices and sorters that transformed one thing into another. In this case, potatoes arrived in semitrucks, whose payloads tumbled onto conveyer belts that bore the tonnage of unwashed spuds, passing them first beneath high-pressure jets that unzipped their skins, which were funneled off to be ground into animal feed, while the peeled were sorted into handfuls and washed again and then fed to the slicer, where they were multiplied into tens of thousands of discs before being spread flat and, rinsed once more, tipped into oil vats in which they were fried. To then be variously seasoned and funneled into mylar bags, crimped and sealed and boxed, and loaded once again onto another fleet of trucks. He could not help but imagine, standing among the industrial clatter, an arterial clogging—not just the bodies whose insides were spackled with this mix of starch and salt once consumed but of the roads filled with wheezing trucks, of high-density feedlots ankle-deep in excrement, of once-clear streams clotted with the starchy silt of the runoff, of the islands’ winds seasoning the ozone layer with the factory’s poisonous sediment—the mess and noise of it all making its ineluctable way down to the water table and seeping quietly into tributaries and then into the sea.
Behind the factory and atop a slab of concrete were several picnic tables, these adjacent a scummed pond fed by one of the factory’s main drains, the water’s edge fluffed with food waste, pulverized potato processed to a bubbly powder. Pigeons flocked and fed on these soapy dregs, and watching them while he ate his PB&J and free bag of chips, he often wondered about these birds that populated the island. Did they come over on ships, accidental stowaways on tankers and freighters? Or were they blown here by opportunistic storms? And when was it, he wondered, that a pigeon, with its built-in homing instinct, sensed that it was too far from land to return and sought, in exhaustion, the oil tanker’s radar mast? Whenever he observed them here, victims of their own failed peregrinations, he wondered if such sights—the bejeweled throat of a dead bird floating on the wine-dark sea—had given rise to some minor myth, since most myths were answers to the question How?
Because how, he later wondered, had one managed to enter the plant, searching, he supposed, for food or a place to nest, perhaps just after the shift change when the first of the day’s trucks made their deposit. When the noise of the engines, the clattering rumble of potatoes, the explosive hiss and bang of the hydraulic lift sending pulses outward, should have spooked it but instead somehow herded the pigeon deeper into the factory. Here, where he spotted it. Here, where the processing machines were at their most vertical and entangled, and above which, now, it thumped its walnut-sized head several times against the high windows, confused by their promise of open sky. Finding no exit or relief, the pigeon buzzed the line workers. They had nothing to fear, of course, it wasn’t an owl or hawk, but they raised their arms over their faces when it swooped. Several men on the line had stopped to watch, most of them laughing as the bird tumbled and dove. Still others paused to consider its plight and to be, perhaps in some small way, impressed by it. Until one of them took a rejected potato from the belt and flung it at the bird.
He could see the idea take hold among the men. A few picked up potatoes and gave them a short toss, palming their heft. Others cocked their arms, raising the improvised missile to their ears and then either failing to nerve themselves or throwing it only half-heartedly. But then several of them took more careful aim, and when one of the men nearly bull’s-eyed the creature the others, encouraged, summoned a rage—he could see it on their faces—as the bird became interloper and prize and also, in its very capacity to fly, an insult to them. By now everyone had stopped their work. No one was inspecting the belts, and this further fueled their anger, since this abandonment of their jobs, the going off-task, revealed how unnecessary to the process they were, that the system, the factory itself, would no more stop its production without their presence than it was made more efficient by it. And what they were doing now, by mandatory neglect, was daring the foreman to notice their insignificance.
Soon the air above the factory floor was flurried with potatoes, crosshatched by their vectors, the pigeon somehow dodging and tumbling between their parabolic trajectories. The potatoes smashed with a tinny report against the walls’ corrugated tin; they splatted on the concrete floor. This madness had infected all the men except him, who had realized the bird’s only chance of escape was the windows. So now he took aim, cursing his weak arm with each toss but elated when a desperate heave finally shattered one of the panes. He fired again, knocking out another. Several of his coworkers had noticed his ploy and their faces registered something like appreciation: how he had iterated on the game, adding to it the satisfaction of breaking what did not belong but was owed to them, while introducing a new challenge—put a clock on the field, so to speak; gave the game a limit, a terminus. The pigeon seemed to sense the opening, the fresh air they could all smell. Darting, it homed toward sky. And as it climbed now, toward its escape, beelining toward safety and purpose beyond the empty window frame, it took a shot square in the chest. A great cheer went up as the bird fell. It landed on the floor, one gray wing flapping fishlike on the concrete. The man nearest where it landed turned and, with a quick and forceful step, crushed its skull with his heel. At this another cheer went up. Then he bent and pinched the prize by one of its wings, the torso appearing headless, and nodded in victory as he pivoted, stretching, for all to see, the creature’s entire and surprisingly broad wingspan to receive everyone’s applause. And, after taking a bow, after raising the bird above his head to what had become an ovation, he tossed it onto the conveyer belt. Which everyone silently watched as the creature slipped into the sorting machine’s innards, the dark in which it would be transformed and eventually consumed by some unlucky customer, thoughtlessly biting into what was once feather, some salted piece of claw, a metacarpus bone, some brittle sliver of beak, as much a part of the food as any other ingredient.
“That’s it?” Tanner said, since the man had gone silent. “That’s the story?”
“I don’t get it,” Cliff said.
“Me neither,” I said.
“I do,” said Oren.
I couldn’t sleep that night, my mind was racing so much. I thought about the story Mr. Bauer had told at dinner and imagined it first from his perspective, his having stumbled onto the very last person he’d have ever dreamed of seeing again, let alone capturing, and whom, it was obvious to me now, he had killed. He must have thought that God Himself had gifted him with such perfect revenge—for serving up this soldier, out of the millions, upon whom to inflict retribution, to balance the scales. And yet what sort of God arranged fate thus? Was God on the side of Mr. Bauer, I wondered, or was that only Mr. Bauer’s god? Because then I thought of it from the Nazi’s perspective. Tied up before these American servicemen, one of whom spoke perfect German, whom he recalled he’d once beaten, and who was now raising a rifle at his head. Was God punishing him? he must have asked himself. If this was his fate, whom in this great struggle did the Lord favor? And what of the other soldier, the one standing by Mr. Bauer’s side? Did he have misgivings, or egg Mr. Bauer on? Did he watch everything as I had, silently, when we put Pilchard on the train? Was it not better, at such a moment, to be Mr. Bauer? To act instead of stand idly by? At least there was some conviction in acting. Oh, those moments during that year when I stood paralyzed before that of which I could not speak, that which rendered me silent! Oh, my fury that previous morning, at Boyd, staring at the ceiling lights and torquing Kepplemen’s neck as he lay clutched to me in turn. “You’ve got to move,” Kepplemen would scream at me during practice. “You’ve got to move.” Yet there we lay, strangely embraced and still. Yet here I lay, in the dark, thinking about all these things—about the story, finally, the man at Sheep Meadow had told us. Was that the meaning of life: that some people tried to kill things while others tried to save them? Was that what Oren understood? Were you always on one side, or did you daily pick sides anew? Did Oren feel like I’d abandoned him somehow? Was that why I felt so guilty? And if that pigeon had managed to soar free, would it soon forget this brush with death? Or would the sky forever be a greater joy?
It was the thing I hadn’t realized I’d hoped for—my relief was so immense—to see Pilchard enter Boyd’s front hall Monday morning, safe and alive. He walked past the pews, the circles beneath his eyes darker than usual, but he was otherwise unscathed. He caught me looking at him, looking for him, although neither of us did more than acknowledge the other with a glance. Tanner, seated to my left, sat watching the front doors, oblivious to our exchange. Like me, Cliff also gave Pilchard the stare down, but before Pilchard registered his presence, Kepplemen appeared and intercepted him, and after cupping Pilchard’s cheek in his palm and touching his temple to his in greeting, he walked him the rest of the way down the hall and out of our sight, speaking to him with a hand clamped to his neck.
I didn’t see Pilchard again until that afternoon, in the locker room, ahead of practice, while everyone changed, and Kepplemen, who was checking my weight—I was six pounds over and we had a dual meet on Thursday—let me have it. “How the fuck are you gonna lose this, Griffin?” Before I could answer, he said, “Put on a rubber suit and don’t leave practice till you cut half.” There was an extra dose of wrath in his voice. It carried over to practice, where he singled me out during drills. “Don’t you quit,” he shouted at me as we did stand-up escapes, “don’t you dare wimp out.” To conclude practice we ran stairs, twenty-five flights in sets of five, and as further punishment he made me lead the team. After the third set, I was so gassed I had to drop to the back of the line. As punishment for this, he ordered I do two more sets on my own.
Later, in the locker room, I sat trying to pull the tape off my rubber suit’s wrists, but my hands were shaking so much I had to use my teeth. By now the place was emptying out, the last to shower were leaving, and having disrobed, I weighed myself. I had lost nearly three pounds, but Coach was nowhere to be seen to deliver the report. I returned to the bench and sat disconsolately, listening to the showers hiss, watching the steam crawl along the ceiling, nursing my disappointment and mourning the dinner I’d have to skip. Then Pilchard appeared at his locker. He must’ve just weighed himself because he too was naked—he could not have been more than a hundred pounds in clothes, his ribs were so pronounced he looked like he’d swallowed a claw clip, and his cock, which amazed us all, hung thickly between his quads like a bell clapper from a nautical rope. From his locker he tossed me a towel and said, “Here,” forlornly. Before I could decline the gift, he retrieved another, wrapping it around his waist and entering the showers. “Thanks,” I called to him. Then I shouldered the towel and followed. I was of a mind to say something to him; I felt so guilty for what had happened over the weekend I wanted to apologize.
There were nine showerheads evenly spaced on three of the room’s four walls, and Pilchard stood under the jet directly across from the entrance with his back to me, his palms pressed to the tiles, as far as possible from Kepplemen, who was showering too. He stood in the near corner, to my right, but outside the spray, so entirely lathered with suds that he looked like a statue dusted in snow. The dark room was densely fogged. The water parted Pilchard’s hair and sluiced down his back and tiny buttocks. And then he looked over his shoulder at me. He appeared almost surprised to see me there. He blinked, his lashes wet, and then glanced at Coach and back at me again—I could not read his expression. For a moment I thought he wanted to tell me something. Kepplemen stepped beneath the head, the water peeling suds from his body that splatted against the floor tiles. His eyes were closed; they’d been closed, I thought, since I’d entered. He kept them closed when he said, “We’ll check your weight in the morning.” And though I was versed in his subtext, though I knew this meant I was dismissed, I said to Pilchard, “You ready to split?” To which he, taking my hint, said, “Sure.” We dressed quickly after drying ourselves.
On the bus later, just before he got off to catch the crosstown east, I told him I’d wash the towel he’d lent me and bring it back tomorrow. He said not to worry about it and rang the bell. He exited, and I felt relief that neither Cliff nor Tanner was here to see any of this, which did not eclipse my satisfaction that Pilchard and I were now officially square.
The next morning Dad appeared in our room to wake us. He turned on our television and, with something like excitement, said, “John Lennon was murdered last night!” In his hand he held a spatula covered with scrambled eggs. He gestured with it toward the screen. “Tragic,” he said. Then he sucked some eggs off the blade. “Shot right outside his apartment,” he noted while he chewed. “At the Dakota.” Even through my fogginess, I could tell that he wanted to be the first to deliver this news, that by hearing it from him he believed he was somehow attached to the event. That it touched him with just a bit of its dark glamour. It was, I was coming to realize, one of his character flaws: aping pathos, he flipped it to bathos. Not that I’d have been so articulate about it back then.
Thursday’s match was against Saint Paul’s School, in Garden City. It was, by reputation, a shitty program with a bunch of fishes, but because I was so depleted after making weight—I’d sucked my final three pounds in a single day—I could neither bring myself to warm up with any intensity nor summon the ferocity necessary to win. With an additional week of preparation, I might have matched my opponent’s velocity, but I was instead subject to his hummingbird speed. His fireman’s carry I saw coming but could not stop. His Half Nelson series was executed with a relentlessness I could not counter. A lesson. This was a lesson, I thought, after he did a stand-up escape, turned, and shot a double leg, and took me down. And then the most shameful resignation came over me as he rammed his head into my ribs to secure a cradle. I could’ve kicked open his grip and freed myself. I could have prolonged the contest rather than allow myself to be muscled over. But instead I bucked on my back with just enough power to appear as if I were actually fighting. Until finally the ref smacked the foam rubber and it was over—which was all I wanted.
In short, I tanked.
I walked off the mat to the shoulder pats of my teammates, with the exception of Kepplemen, whose disgust with me manifested in total disregard and was as hot as mine was for him. There was a confrontation coming. I was certain of it from the end of the match until the ride back to Boyd—Fuck you, I thought, and fuck this season—but it did not materialize.
I hopped off the bus before my stop and got two slices at Pizza Joint. I dusted these with garlic, Parmesan, and red pepper flakes and allowed myself to taste everything. I drank a large Coke to wash it down, and I was sugar-flooded, carbo-loaded. I didn’t give a shit if I lost, and if I wanted to pig out now, what of it?
So that to see Naomi parked there before Juilliard was like dessert. The dome light of the Mercedes illuminated its interior. Beneath it, contained within it, Naomi seemed to float, suspended above the street. She was reading the Daily News, the paper covering the steering wheel. I hadn’t seen her since the tournament at Friends Academy, since that night I’d showered at her house. When I knocked on her window, her face revealed more than pleasant surprise, and it filled me with anticipation. The moment I took my seat, she pulled me into her arms. Coffee, perfume, her bangles’ clink, how her hair, in its light caress, seemed almost prehensile. “It’s been forever,” Naomi said as she smushed me to her. She started the car. “Tell me everything, tell me how you’ve been, how was your day?”
This was the first time I recall ever wanting to kiss her. She drove and, when she found a parking space and cut the engine, the evening’s privacy settled on us. There shined through the windshield that sea-cave light of far-off streetlamps, projected onto the long garage’s bare brick wall that lined one side of our secret place. That lake of blackness to our right rimmed by the West Side Highway also enclosed us. I had so much to tell her, but she wanted to kiss me too, and when we did it seemed that we might somehow burrow into each other, the force with which she pressed herself to me was so great and which I returned in kind. “Do you want to go in back?” she whispered, and although I didn’t know exactly what she meant, didn’t completely understand what it implied, I knew it meant more and I said yes. Naomi nodded at this, assenting, at once resigned and joyful, and I felt older somehow. She was about to open her door but then giggled and turned to kiss me again. And then a police car’s lights flashed red, white, and blue, its siren sounding a single note. The interior was suddenly floodlit, and I froze.
Over the PA, the officer said, “Step out of the car, please,” and Naomi, at first frozen herself, exited but left the door open. The squad car’s passenger window rolled down; its spotlight blinded me. “You’re parked illegally,” the officer said to Naomi, and having raised my hand to cover my eyes and turn away, I noticed the hydrant outside my window. Naomi’s back was to me. After she said something to the officer, he replied, “Can I see your license, please?”
The other officer came around to my side. He too shined a light in my face, then tapped the window with the butt of his baton. “Step out of the car, please,” he said. When I did, he asked, “Where do you live, young man?”
And in a moment, which I now look back on as fateful, I said, with something like surprise because the answer was so obvious, “In Great Neck.” And then: “Did my mom do something wrong?”
The cop holding her license glanced at his partner and nodded.
After the officers left, we found another parking spot farther up the street. But the mood had altered. For a long time, Naomi sat with her hands on the steering wheel, her arms stuck straight out, as if she were bracing for a crash. “I should go,” she said, and started the car, but she instead resumed this pose and did not drive. Lips puckered, she slowly exhaled. “My heart’s still not beating normal,” she said. She had the heat going and she sunk into her seat. “Let me just calm down in a bit.” I picked up the newspaper and pressed it flat across my lap. It was that famous picture of Lennon, the one that would become iconic, of the rock star in profile, about to enter his limousine and stopping to sign his new album for Mark David Chapman, who stood, head down, staring through his tinted lenses, his eyes visible because of the angle. He looked vaguely familiar. He appeared as if he was about to say something to Lennon—words of appreciation? Admiration? What utterance, I wondered, could be more fraudulent than any of these, if later that night you were going to shoot that person in the back, playing at destiny when you were really nothing but a coward.
“Makes you think about the future,” Naomi said. “Makes you think about the signs you don’t see. Makes you think about love.”
The car was stuffy. I’d cracked my window, and from the river a great horn sounded, it must’ve been a mighty ship, like a tanker. Dad, who’d been in the navy, once told me that such a long blast alerted the crew that a journey was now under way, or it was what he called a “blind bend” signal—an alert to other vessels that might not see your approach.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I saw that man on the front page,” Naomi said, indicating Chapman, “and I thought about those times I watched The Nuclear Family with Danny and Jackie. And all those billboards I saw for The Talon Effect. And then seeing that movie with Sam and seeing you on screen. And how before I met you, there you were, you were right there. You know how Elliott says we have our backs to the future? I had no idea you were going to come into my life. And now,” she concluded, with something like resignation, “I don’t know what to do about it.”