Chapter thirty-one

Hatch and I are sitting in our apartment at Varsity Villas. We’re a little drunk at the moment. What am I saying? We’re a lot drunk at the moment. We blew off all our Friday classes to drink forties of Crazy Horse malt liquor and watch the Star Wars trilogy on the old LaserDisc player Dad gave me from the dealership. I have a collection of twenty LaserDiscs, fourteen of which are General Motors sales videos. The other titles comprise the aforementioned three Star Wars movies, The Hunt for Red October, When Harry Met Sally, and Chevy Chase’s highly underrated Modern Problems.

We tried the fraternity life together, but both of us washed out as pledges. Hatch wasn’t a big fan of attending compulsory study tables or washing dirty toilets. I wasn’t a big fan of getting pelted by rotten pig intestines while doing push-ups and sucking on a stick of butter rolled in Copenhagen Original Fine Cut tobacco as Matthew Wilder’s “Break My Stride” played on a continuous loop. Hatch quit in the middle of pledgeship. He didn’t mind the hazing, just the study tables and the chores. I minded the hazing. Two weeks after I punched my pledge trainer in the face during a midnight lineup—“pledge trainer” being fraternity code for World’s Biggest Cocksucker—I was blackballed. We both struggled through our freshman year, skipping more classes than we attended, and yet somehow emerged with GPAs north of 2.0.

Hatch hands me a fresh forty of Crazy Horse. “Thanks,” I say reluctantly.

“Pals, Fitzy?” He offers the toast as more of a question than a declaration.

I unscrew the cap, taking a small sip of malt liquor. “What’s on your mind?”

“Nothing,” Hatch says.

“Bullshit.”

“Promise you won’t go apeshit on me.”

“Nothing you do surprises me, Hatch.”

“Beth Burke and I fooled around last night.”

“Excuse me?” I say.

“I didn’t want you to hear it from someone else. We ran into one another at a party on the other side of the Villas. One thing led to another. I couldn’t help myself.”

Hatch spares no details, but the gist of it is they got “totally ripped,” went skinny-dipping in a pubic fountain, and had “Olympic-level” sex in a hotel suite that was so expensive he maxed out his Discover Card. He doesn’t shut up, rambling on for ten minutes, talking about the flexibility of gymnasts, and about sexual positions that may or may not exist.

“You finished?” I say.

“Yep,” Hatch says.

“Do you even know what an iron cross is?”

“I made that part up. Sounds good though, doesn’t it?”

“Sure, it sounds good, if you’re fucking a dude. An iron cross is when you hold a position like a cross on the rings. It’s a men’s gymnastics skill.”

I lift the Crazy Horse to my mouth, taking down a good twelve ounces with three swallows. I sit the bottle down on the coffee table. I pull a half-smoked cigarette out of the ashtray on the coffee table and light it.

I can tell the silence is killing Hatch. He’s fidgety, agitated. Good.

“So, we cool?” Hatch says.

The stale smoke rims my head halo-like. “Why wouldn’t we be cool, pal?”

“You know, you and Beth. You had a thing there for awhile.”

“What thing? We never really dated.”

“You broke her heart when you stayed with Laura.”

“I did?”

“Stop playing dumb,” Hatch says. “Look, as much as I’d like to pretend she’s really into me, a part of Beth will probably hold a torch for you till the day she dies. You can still see it in her eyes every time your name comes up. It’s disgusting.”

“And yet you still fucked her?”

“Show a little respect, Fitzy.”

“And there it is,” I say.

“There what is?”

“You’re crushing hard on Beth.”

“Am not,” Hatch says.

“I know you.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do. Ask me.”

“Ask you what?”

“Do we really have to drag this out?”

“So you wouldn’t mind if I asked Beth out on a proper date?”

“You and the word ‘proper’ go together like JFK and the military-industrial complex.”

“Fuck you, Fitzy.”

“Relax, Hatch ol’ buddy.” I pat him on the back. “You don’t have to ask me for permission. We’re not in high school anymore. Beth is a big girl now, with plenty of suitors from what I’m told.”

“You’re one to talk.”

“Excuse me?”

“Who should we start with?” Hatch says. “Pattie, Emily, Summer, Nicole, Maria, Angelina the Untouchable, Harper, my fucking cousin.”

“Okay, you made your point.”

“Have I?”

I think Hatch loves to do the play-by-play recap of these past two years more so for his own edification than anything else. Hatch affectionately refers to the twenty-two month window between July 1989 and now as my “Monster of Cock Tour.” And I will reluctantly admit, when I step outside myself, that I do look like a bit of a whore.

Laura and I broke up on the Fourth of July—well, the fifth of July, considering we didn’t say the actual words ‘break up’ to one another until we had finished having sex for the third time in as many hours around two in the morning our last day in Disney World. She left for Bucknell and was back in Pennsylvania the very next week, the same week I started seeing Emily Kaufmann.

Emily and I first met when we were both in high school. Hatch dated her for something like a month. I think, statistically speaking, given the number of girls we’ve swapped, Hatch and I have all but fucked each other.

Emily was my height, the tallest girl I’ve ever dated—dark hair, slightly bow-legged, with a lean, athletic build. She was also on the rebound from her high school sweetheart. I caught her eye at a pool party—a party at which, drunk, stoned, and wearing only my boxer shorts, I jumped off the roof of a house into the shallow end of a backyard pool, my head absorbing most of the thirty foot fall. Emily was the first one who noticed the bleeding. She drove me home. I told her not to tell my parents. She told me she’d never seen me without my shirt on and didn’t realize I was in such good shape. She held a gauze pad on the back of my head all night, every hour checking my wound and shaking me awake to make sure I wasn’t in a coma. Our month or so of dating was unusual, borderline chaste. We made out for hours at a time but didn’t do a whole lot beyond that. We cried in the front seat of my car to Bryan Adams’s “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You” when we said our goodbyes over Labor Day weekend. Emily cried because I was “special” and “as much a friend as a lover.” I cried because we never had sex.

My first night as a freshman at IU, and all of twenty-four hours after lip-synching to Emily, “There’s nooo love, like yourrr love,” I fooled around with a full-time med student and part-time amateur boxer named Summer. To my credit, she looked a lot like an older Emily. She invited me over to her place. We started kissing, and Summer had just taken off her shirt when she said, “I’m going to slip into something more comfortable.” Two minutes later, she walked out of the bathroom wearing a white V-neck men’s undershirt, red Umbros, and matching red boxing gloves. She threw me an extra pair of gloves, said it would be fun to box. “It’ll be like foreplay,” she said. It was fun, right up until she caught me with a left uppercut to the chin that knocked me unconscious. I was only out for a few seconds, but the ensuing headache left me crippled on my couch for the rest of the weekend.

I first met Pattie Reisen the December before Christmas break 1990. She was a baseball groupie who followed around the IU players with her tongue hanging out of her mouth. I wasn’t a baseball player. But I was athletic, and I pulled off the Richard Grieco look—triple-pierced left ear, long hair with bandanna, black leather jacket, ripped jeans—enough to merit an AIDS test. Pattie made her first pass at me the Thursday night before Christmas, stumbling intoxicated into my apartment wearing an IU “We’re #1” foam finger. “I wunna’ kith you right now,” she kept mumbling, shaking her foam finger at me. At the time, she was dating a guy on the baseball team. He was a pitcher, reputed to have the meanest fastball in the Big Ten conference. With her cropped, dark brown hair and tanned skin, Pattie reminded me of Rachel Ward—more Against All Odds than The Thornbirds, although both examples are infinitely hot. Her birdlike features—small eyes positioned close together, a petite sharp nose, tiny feet—didn’t quite complete the Ward impersonation. But in concert with one another, these features just worked. If not the most beautiful, Pattie was the most striking girl I’d ever contemplated sleeping with. Still, I preferred my head attached to my shoulders as opposed to severed by a baseball traveling at a ninety miles per hour. Pattie and I “kithed” for about five minutes, then I told her to come back for more when she was single.

Nicole Chase was my Christmas fling. Dad made me take a “character building” job over winter break working third shift at a box factory. The foreman decided to give me the hardest job on the line—catching cardboard sheets out of the corrugation machine. My hands looked like raw ground beef for the first five days. Nicole’s job was to assemble the finished cardboard displays. She had long, curly blond hair, big eyes, and tanned skin that gave off an unnatural sheen beneath a daily applied layer of baby oil. She was eighteen years old and had a two-year-old son. She was neither married to nor dating the birth father. I went to the circus with Nicole, her son, Nicholas, and the biological father’s parents. It wasn’t even weird. We had a good time. I held Nicholas in my arms while he fed the giraffe sweet potatoes. Nicole stood next to me, and the grandfather took our picture. The animal handler passing out the sweet potato slices said we were a cute family.

Okay, it was weird.

Nicole never wore panties. I’d say she dumped me, but I don’t think we were ever officially dating. We were just having a lot of sex one day, and the next day we weren’t. She reconciled with her high school sweetheart—also, not Nicholas’s birth father. Nicole was a bit of a hose beast, I think.

Pattie Reisen came back to me when she was single, and we started dating the first week of school in January 1991. She lived two doors down from me in the Villas, and over the course of January and February we had sex more times than I thought possible. In her room. In my room. In her shower. In my shower. Outdoors. On Valentine’s Day, for reasons still unclear to me, I told Pattie I loved her. In response, she did an interactive striptease for me that involved strawberries, whipped cream, and Bobby Brown’s “Rock Wit’cha.” Pattie is the only girl I’ve ever dated who woke me up in the mornings with blow jobs. On one such occasion she lifted her mouth off of me and watched as I shot my wad in my own face. She laughed, so I dumped her.

By early March I had my eyes set on Maria. Armed with no musical training, save a half year of trumpet lessons in the eighth grade, I auditioned for the Indiana University Theater Department’s production of West Side Story solely to get in the female lead’s pants. Her name was Maria in real life, which of course made her that much hotter. I landed the role of Nibbles, and I landed Maria. We made out on a kitchen table at the cast party. Between her large breasts and supple lips, Maria could give the best combination pearl necklace–blow job I’ll ever receive in this life or the next. She was three years older than me, a semester away from graduating, and already talking about her plans after school: maybe law school, maybe social work, but definitely marriage and a big family. I liked her enough to even float some halfway sincere reassurances, telling her right before I left for spring break, “I’m getting used to the idea of us—of being with you—for the long haul.”

Twenty-four hours later, I fell in love with someone else.

It started when I jumped on the hood of a random car idling down the strip in Panama City Beach. I had an instant crush on this olive-skinned vision who was riding shotgun. Angelina Valerio was an Italian girl from Boston. She spoke with a heavy accent and attended Florida State in nearby Tallahassee. We stayed up all night drinking and commiserating over our shared hatred of the University of Miami. We said our goodbyes, and the next morning she walked two miles from her condo just to give me fresh baked muffins that tasted homemade but, Angelina admitted, “came froom a baw-ux.” We made love for the better part of five days straight, pausing only to write love letters to one another while the other one was sleeping.

When I got back to school, I walked the three blocks to Maria’s apartment to tell her, “I feel like we’re going too fast and this relationship thing is just too much work,” leaving out the part about casting aside our two months together because I was in love with someone halfway across the country who I’d known for less than nine days.

Angelina drove back and forth between Bloomington and Tallahassee three times in four weeks. I introduced her to my parents, and they loved her. Over a four-week period, Angelina logged seventy-two hours and forty-six hundred miles in the name of love. On the Saturday night of the third weekend, I ran out of condoms, Angelina told me she was sterile, we had unprotected sex on the floor of my apartment to Depeche Mode’s Violator album, and I dumped her the very next morning. At the end of those four weeks, without ever leaving Bloomington, I was the one who told her, “This long-distance thing is exhausting and just isn’t working out for me.” The truth—that I was so obsessed with her I was heartbroken at the prospect of not ever having children with her—would have just fucked us both up. To this day I don’t know why I fell that hard that fast. Everyone has that one that got away, I guess. Mine just wasn’t on the line that long. So it goes.

The next year or so, from roughly May 1991 to now, was a bit more of a blur. There was Harper Donovan, a girl who had a crush on me in high school and has lately become my casual sex partner. Once even, when Harper was out of town, I think I had sex with her roommate, although I still can’t recall if there was actual penetration. There was Hatch’s red-headed cousin—man, he was fucking pissed about that one, although he did get a chuckle out of the fact that she told me the next morning I wasn’t that good in bed. There was the sorority girl—Kathy? Katie?—who was engaged the first time we had sex and then married the second time we did it. In my defense, she didn’t tell me about being engaged our first time in the sack, and I didn’t care to ask her when she was more than willing to make a follow-up visit. I even circled back around to Emily Kaufmann once. I fell back in love with her for about a week before I realized she still wasn’t going to sleep with me.

“Hatch, what was Beth even doing in town last night?”

“Just passing through, on her way to a gymnastics meet at Ohio State.”

“She’s competing for Illinois, right?”

“Yep, the Illini,” Hatch says just as the phone rings.

“I’ll get that,” I say, standing up. Dad and I have been playing phone tag the last couple days.”

“Can we continue this conversation later?” Hatch asks.

“What else is there left to say? You like her?”

“It’s like you’re not even fucking listening to me.”

“What?” I say.

“Beth is still into you.”

“Call me old-fashioned, Hatch, but fucking my best friend isn’t the way to my heart.” I pick up the phone. “Hello?”

“Hey, son, got a second?”

“Of course, Dad. What’s up?”

“You busy?”

“Nah, Hatch and I were just shooting the shit.”

“Finals going okay?”

“Great. Just one more to go.”

“What are your plans for next week?”

“No big plans really,” I say this while noticing Hatch hasn’t left the room yet.

“Dad, can you hang on a second?”

“Sure thing,” Dad says.

I put the phone against my chest. “Hatch, what do you want?”

“I want to know we’re okay.”

“Okay?” I ask. “You’re my friend, not my fucking wife. If you want to make a move on Beth, make a move. Regardless of what you think there is between her and me, that ship sailed a long time ago.”

“Really?”

“Really.” I start to bring the phone up to my mouth. I pause and then place it back against my chest. “But, Hatch?”

Hatch is halfway out the door. He pokes his head back inside the room. “Yes?”

“Thanks for asking,” I say.

Hatch nods, leaves the room. I don’t know why I’m being so gracious. Truthfully, I don’t want Hatch to ask Beth out. I don’t give a shit that I’m selfish. There’s no rational reason for why my throat hurts, for why my heart hurts. In the words of David Coverdale, here I go again.

“Hank? Hello? Hank?”

The voice on the other end of the phone interrupts my contemplation. I rest the receiver on my chin. “Sorry about that, Dad. Where were we?”

“Your plans for next week?”

“Oh yeah. Nothing on the schedule. Just hanging out. Don’t start back at the box factory until the first week of June.”

“You think you might be able to set aside next week for some time with your Dad?”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Your mother just called. Turns out she can’t get off work next week, last week of school and all. Says the guidance office is a madhouse.”

“To be expected. So what are you saying exactly?”

“What I’m saying is I can’t go on an all-expenses-paid Oldsmobile trip to the Bahamas by myself.”