THE SUMMER AFTER BEACH WEEK BROUGHT MANY CHANGES TO MY life. My brother Joe left for graduate school in Virginia and became seriously involved with Marianne, a med student whom he would eventually marry. Mike and Alyson were also both away at college, so the house was pretty quiet.

Despite feeling a little lonely, I was glad to have the place to myself. I had never been that close with my siblings, the result more of being the youngest rather than any animosity; by the time I was a teenager and ready to cultivate adult friendships, most of them had already gone on with their lives. Like many siblings, we knew each other, but not well. Besides, it seemed as though I only saw them at the worst times - Thanksgiving, after I had bombed my midterms, or Christmas, after I had received a wretched report card.

Although seemingly it would have been fairly easy for me to get good grades - I had scored high on enough standardized tests - I had the worst study habits of anyone I have ever known. Years later I would be diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder, but at this point I only knew that I had a difficult time keeping still and studying. My parents, possibly tired from raising the other three kids, never stayed angry long when I failed a course - in fact, they only tried to help, offering me tutors when my grades sank. They knew that I had a new group of nice Catholic friends and a girlfriend, Mary, and they never lost faith that I’d come through.

However, despite my frustration over getting low grades, I had more important concerns, namely girls and partying. A lot of guys in high school had relationships with women that were based primarily on sex - when you’re a teenager lust just seems to drive out everything else - but Mary and I actually became good friends. (This is not to say I wasn’t obsessed with sex, but Mary wasn’t ready for it.) We talked on the phone every night and opened up about the troubles we were having with our fathers. Hers was overly strict, blowing up when she came in twenty minutes past curfew. Mine drank too much and, when he wasn’t drinking, didn’t seem to care what I did. Therefore, I took to doing what I pleased.

When I returned to Prep for junior year, drinking became a pleasure central to my life. Denny, Shane, Mary, her friends, and I started going to keg parties on the weekends, and if there wasn’t a party, there was Georgetown. An elegant neighborhood of expensive colonial row houses on a rise just above the Potomac River, Georgetown is one of the oldest places in Washington. For high schoolers from all over the Washington area, Georgetown was also party central. While the back streets were red cobblestone and freshly painted homes, M street, the main strip through Georgetown, was a noisy bustle of stores and a bar on every block. There was only one minor problem: The drinking age in Washington was eighteen, and we were all seventeen.

To get around this, we did what has become a rite of passage in modern America - we got fake IDs.

There were two ways of obtaining a fake ID, one easy, the other incredibly high risk. The first way was simply to make one. I discovered how one afternoon while I was working in the yearbook office. Denny was one of the editors of Prep’s yearbook. He had also become something of a legend around Prep when word got out that he had recently gotten a part-time bartending job in Georgetown by lying about his age. Denny was fearless and was always coming up with a scheme to rile up the administration. He and I were both interested in journalism and worked on the yearbook together.

One afternoon we were typing up some copy when I found a piece of plastic lined with black letters. The letters were all in various sizes, from headline-sized point to barely perceptible scrawling.

“What’s this?” I asked, holding the sheet up.

“Just some stencil letters,” Denny said, his face buried in a pile of photographs. “The publisher sends them to us so we can decide what size of type we want.”

I put the plastic sheet on a piece of paper and rubbed one of the letters. It transferred onto the paper, and when I tried to erase it, it wouldn’t come off.

“Man, this stuff really sticks,” I said.

Denny’s head popped up. “Wait a minute. What did you say?”

“These stencils. It’s impossible to get them off.”

Denny jumped out of his chair and examined the sheet. He pulled out his wallet, plucked his Prep ID out of the flap, and laid it on the table. Slowly he placed the stencil sheet over the letters on his ID, lining it up so the letters would correspond in size. Then he began to stencil.

A few minutes later, Denny had a fake ID. I gave him my driver’s license and watched as he turned me into an eighteen-year-old.

“This is incredible,” he said, squinting at his handiwork. “We have to try this out right away.”

We jumped in Denny’s car and drove to the small convenience store next to Prep.

“You go in,” Denny said.

“Me? Why me?”

“Because you have a driver’s license. It’s better. All I have is this stupid Prep ID.”

I got out of the car and went inside. It was a small store with only one register. There was a girl about my age ringing people up.

For about ten minutes. I wandered down the aisles, pretending to look over the rows of soup or paper towels while I was trying to work up my courage.

Eventually I worked my way over to the cooler in the back. I grabbed a twelve-pack and then hustled to the front of the store. No one other than the check-out girl was there. I tossed the beer on the conveyor belt and pulled out my wallet.

She looked me right in the eye, “I need an ID.”

“Oh, sure,” I mumbled, trying to sound casual. I plucked out my license and handed it to her.

For what seemed like years she squinted at it, holding it inches from her face.

“Okay,” she said, and handed it back. Then she rang me up.

When I got back to the car, Denny shouted, “It worked?” He snatched the bag out of my hand. “I can’t believe it.”

By the end of the week, Shane and the rest of our classmates were lining up to get into the yearbook office. We spent most of the next two weeks stenciling, and soon the store around the corner was getting heavy after-school business. The word spread to the other schools, and we expanded our services to the students at other Catholic schools in Washington. We did it all free of charge.

There was one kid, however, who didn’t need our services - Corey Joyce. Corey had the worst reputation at Prep. He had only gotten into the school because his wealthy father had gone to Prep and was friends with Father Carmen. Corey had been in and out of reform schools and was one of the few boarders at Prep. The boarders lived on the grounds either because their homes were too far away to commute or because they had some kind of special need. Corey, whose parents lived in Washington but who wanted him under Jesuit supervision twenty-four hours a day, was definitely a special-needs case. Corey skipped Mass to smoke cigarettes - or, if he was caught and forced to go, would substitute lyrics in the hymns, changing “Shout from the highest mountain/Glory of the Lord” to “Jump from the highest mountain/Glory of the bored.” He hid liquor in his room and always went around telling people he was an atheist. “Think about it, man,” he said to me once during lunch. “Some dude that lived two thousand years ago dies and rises from the dead. It’s just a story that was made up because people are such wimps about death.”

When it came to fake IDs, Corey had us all beat. He had taken the high-risk road to acquire his fake ID, and as a result he was considered something of a folk hero. While the high-risk method of getting an ID didn’t require the painstaking physical labor of creating one, it was a test of nerves that could rattle a hardened combat marine.

It involved going into the belly of the whale - the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration. The MVA always looked like an army recruitment center: Hundreds of people stood in long lines for hours waiting to be processed, and nobody was thrilled about being there.

Yet the system’s very monotony presented an opportunity that was a fake-ID hound’s dream. After you successfully took the tests, stood in the proper lines, and filled out the right forms for a license, you got your picture taken and signed the new license before it was laminated. However, between filling out forms and getting photographed, there was a long wait. You would sit in a large room with other applicants, and only when the MVA officer called your name would you get your picture done.

For those with the guts, this waiting period was the Achilles’ Heel of the MVA system. The trick was to go with a friend who was of legal age and have him apply for a new license, claiming to have lost the old one. After presenting a birth certificate and filling out all the proper forms, he would be sent to the waiting room before getting the picture taken. Meeting him there would be his underage friend, who would respond in his place when the MVA official - often a Maryland police officer - called him for the photo and signature.

For anyone with the moxie, success of this quick-change resulted in a foolproof ID. It was actually the real ID of an older person, only with your face and signature.

Only Corey had pulled this off. As a result, he enjoyed the kind of freedom most of us dreamed of. He could walk into any bar or liquor store with his head held high and his hands steady.

 

The first time a group of us tried to use our IDs, we went to O’Rourke’s, the bar in Georgetown where Denny bartended. O’Rourke’s was a real drinker’s bar. It was in a two-story building and had three bars, one downstairs and two up. There were rickety wooden tables and a jukebox in the downstairs bar, and only one beer on tap.

Even though Denny worked there, he couldn’t guarantee that he would be working alone behind the bar, and it was usually the older, more experienced bartender who would card us.

A group of about ten of us, including Shane, Becky, and Mary, went down there on a Wednesday night when things were quiet. We walked past Denny without saying anything - if he said he knew us and then we got busted for fake IDs, he could lose his job. We got a table in the back and sat there quietly.

The older bartender, a large man with a neat white shirt, tie, and crew cut came over.

“IDs,” he said.

We all tried to act surprised, then started fishing through our wallets and purses like it was a big imposition.

He collected up the IDs and slowly looked at each one. Then he went over to a bright little light by the bar - used to read credit card slips - and examined them further.

“We’re screwed,” Shane said.

The bartender came back to the table and handed me the stack of IDs like they were cards.

“What’ll it be?” he asked

For a second, nobody spoke. We were so ready to get bounced that we were, at least mentally, halfway out the door.

“Uh, two pitchers of beer,” I said quickly. “And make it fast, we’re thirsty.”

After that, O’Rourke’s became a hangout not only for Prep students, but for all the Catholic kids we knew in the area. On some Saturday nights the place looked like a party at beach week, with about twenty Prep guys, Mary and all her friends from St. Catherine’s, and girls from other Catholic schools. For the most part, our parents didn’t seem to care. For one thing, we lied, telling them that when we did go out it was only to someone’s house and we would have “one or two” at most. Second, most of our parents were drinkers, and they expected us to experiment a little.

Sitting in the smoke and the low, romantic light of O’Rourke’s, I felt alive. I lost myself in the magic of alcohol, its ability not so much to blot out life as to bring it into focus, make it spiritual, magic. We would stay there until closing, then sneak into the house so our parents wouldn’t wake up.

Around this time, I began to notice that not all drinkers are born alike. When I drank I felt hyperactive, yet focused and in control - at least until I had had so much, usually twice as much as anyone else, that I finally felt drunk - but everyone else was different. Shane would grow very quiet, his eyes squinting into tiny slits. Denny often became violent and antisocial, getting into fights or raging against his uptight parents before passing out. Becky had a very low tolerance and always stopped at two or three beers.

 

Of course, our parents and the Jesuits warned us against the dangers of demon rum, even while they were imbibing with frequent abandon. The cloisters at Prep where the Jesuits lived boasted a full bar, and our parents were always coming home well-lubed from cocktail parties. Still, we were underage, and the adults had to go through the motions of scaring us off the sauce. At one school assembly, Prep’s headmaster, Father Carmen, brought in a priest who was a recovering alcoholic to speak to the students. Father Pat, a balding, heavyset middle-aged man, regaled the student body with the long story of his downward spiral into addiction. He had started drinking as a teenager in Detroit, and by the time he left the seminary he was drinking two bottles of wine a night. He wound up in a rehab for priests in Maryland and had been sober for ten years. Throughout most of his talk, we all cracked jokes under our breath or didn’t pay attention at all.

At the end, however, Father Pat said something that made me take notice. “I know all of this is probably funny to you guys,” he said. “And some of it is. Getting drunk, doing silly things - a lot of it is funny, and I admit that. But right now there’s a guy in this audience who is going to have his first drink this year, and what happened to me is going to happen to him. He’s probably muttering under his breath right now that I’m full of it, that he’ll never become a boozehound. But it is going to happen. Statistics prove it. Father Carmen tells me you have 400 students here. Ten percent of the general population is addicted to alcohol. That means that forty of you are going to wind up like I did. I just want to say to those people that when it gets bad and you start drinking first thing in the morning to ward off the shakes, remember what I’ve told you. Don’t be afraid to pick up the phone and call for help.”

For a split second, I had a terrible thought: What if one of those drunks were me? I imagined myself lying by the side of the road in the worst part of town, vomiting into a drain. I might be a troublemaker, I told myself, but I’m no drunk. I have too much willpower.

Father Pat thanked us, then stepped down. Father Carmen, who had been sitting by the podium, leapt to his feet and warmly shook Father Pat’s hand.

As well as being headmaster and art teacher, Father Carmen was Prep’s drug czar, and he went about his duties with uncontained relish. Whenever there was a dance or a play at Prep, he would creep into the parking lot and rummage through backseats looking for beer. Often he found it, and the guilty parties would have to report to the disciplinary committee, a group of faculty members that questioned problem students and decided their fate.

Of course, one place Carmen couldn’t get at us was in our homes. When we didn’t go to O’Rourke’s, we took turns having parties. The word would get out that someone’s parents were going away, and the other guys would pressure them into “popping,” promising to help them keep things under control. This, of course, was a joke - I had seen houses destroyed by rampaging hordes of drunken teenagers, friends of the kid whose parents owned the house.

At the end of my junior year at Prep, my parents decided to go away for the weekend. By this time my brothers and sister were all out of the house; Joe had gotten married to Marianne and was living in Virginia Beach, Mike was living in the city and enjoying success as a stage actor, and Alyson was in school in Loyola in Baltimore.

I had the house to myself, but tried to keep the news from Shane, Denny, and the other Prep guys. I wasn’t completely averse to having a party, but I had a healthy respect for the primary rule: Don’t announce too early. News of a party was like a deadly virus that had to be contained. If I spilled the beans too early in the week, the news would spread to Ocean City and the house would be overrun.

Unfortunately, my big mouth got the best of me. I was talking to Denny on Wednesday when he asked me if I had heard of anything going on over the weekend.

“Oh, I think we’ll have something to do,” I said.

He picked it up immediately.

“Wait a minute. Are you poppin’?”

“I didn’t say that,” I blurted. “There is no way that I’m poppin’.”

“Your folks are away, aren’t they? You’re going to pop.”

“No, that’s not true-”

“You can’t fool me, big guy. It sounds like you’re poppin’.”

I didn’t say anything for a few seconds.

“Come on, killer,” Shane said. “Pop.”

“Cripes, okay,” I said. “Just don’t spread it around.”

On Friday, Shane, Denny, Becky, and Mary showed up early to help me set up - or in this case, break down. We hid all of my parents’ china and silverware in the attic. We moved all the good furniture into my father’s den and locked the door.

Despite our precautions, I had a feeling I was in for an apocalyptic evening. The first sign came early. Shane and Denny were sitting in the family room drinking and waiting for the fun to begin when suddenly there was a loud boom in the distance and all the lights went out.

“Cool!” Shane yelled.

My heart almost stopped beating. I couldn’t bring myself to imagine what might happen: drunk revelers swarming through the house in the dark, smashing everything they came in contact with.

Sensing my panic, Mary clutched my elbow. “It’s okay” she whispered. “Everything’ll be cool.”

We filed into the backyard and sat around the picnic table. Shane broke out a bottle of tequila and we took turns doing shots. I had to grit my teeth to hold the booze down, but in a few minutes I felt the warm glow creeping up my legs. Although I was getting drunk, I had a queasy feeling that even if the lights did come back, the blackout was an omen. Something disastrous was going to happen. I did another shot and tried to smile.

Just as I was about to lock the house and post a sign that the party was canceled, the air-conditioner fan in the backyard roared back to life, and the lights inside the house blinked on. Shane and Denny cheered and headed back inside. Outside, it was almost dark.

For the next hour, I felt like a stake planted on the beach as the tide came in. The flow of people started, slowly at first, a few shy girls clustered by the keg, then some more Prep guys - including bogus ID King Corey Joyce, who, probably just to prove a point, showed up with his own bottle of tequila. The backyard filled up, and then people started spilling into the house.

Right when I thought I might actually get lucky and just have a nice little party, the invasion began. Between eleven and midnight a steady stream of kids poured through the front doors. Cars lined up and down my street and beyond. I recognized seniors from Prep, and sophomores, then saw faces I had never seen before.

As space got tighter and tighter, I drank. The only way I was going to survive this was drunk, and because it was my party, I always cut to the front of the keg line.

By midnight, I was completely hammered. I took Mary’s hand and we went to the top of the small hill in my backyard, away from the masses. We held hands and watched the swarming madness below.

“So when are your parents coming home?” she asked.

“Monday. I should have it cleaned up by then.”

“It’ll be all right,” she said. “In a few weeks, you’ll forget this ever happened. When it’s over, we’ll all help you clean the place.”

I smiled. Mary always knew just what to say. For a second, I felt a surge of optimism. Yes, the party was out of control. But it would be over in a few hours, and then we would straighten things out. My parents wouldn’t even know.

She turned my face to hers and kissed me.

“I love you,” I said.

“I love you, too.”

Just then, someone screamed my name.

I jumped to my feet. Shane came sprinting up the hill, out of breath.

“You better come quick,” he said. “There’s been an accident.”

I raced down the hill after him. He led me into the house, then upstairs to the second-floor hallway.

The first thing I saw was the leg, hanging from a hole in the ceiling like a piñata.

For a second, I just stood there. It was like one of those times when people describe an accident, when everything begins to go in slow motion.

Then the leg moved, a jerky back-and-forth motion like its owner was being electrocuted.

I moved closer, and that’s when I heard the voice.

“Goddammit, get me the fuck out of here! Where’s the fucking door in this fucking place?”

It was attached to the foot. By now I was directly under the leg and could see that its owner, Corey Joyce, was still attached to it. He had gone into the attic, then kicked a hole the size of a footlocker in the ceiling.

I went nuts.

Someone helped Corey down from the attic and I grabbed for him, throwing a punch. I missed wildly, and Shane pulled me back.

“Jesus, man, I’m sorry,” Corey said. “I couldn’t see a fucking thing up there.”

“What the hell were you doing up there?” Shane barked.

“I heard that there was booze hidden in the attic and went up to investigate.”

Great. What he didn’t understand - 400 beers tend to cloud one’s vision - is that in Potomac, attics were not accessible like the ones in the older homes. Ours was a new suburb with attics built for insulation, not human habitation, and when Corey climbed up through the square hole in the ceiling, he found himself in a big empty space with no light. Idiotically, he replaced the cover on the hole he had climbed through, plunging himself in darkness. Instead of feeling his way around the floor for the cover, Corey had panicked. He stomped against the floor with his foot, looking for an opening.

I covered my head in my hands. “Jesus, my life is over.”

Just then, Mary came up the stairs. “Oh . . . my . . . God,” she said, seeing the plyboards dripping down from the ceiling.

I went downstairs, unhooked the tap from the keg, and unplugged the stereo.

“OUT!” I hollered, shoving a group of people toward the front door. “Get out of my house! The party’s over!”

“Hey man,” a kid sneered, “get a life.”

Before I could stop myself, I was on top of him. People screamed and we tumbled to the floor, but the room was so packed I couldn’t even throw a punch.

Denny and Shane pulled me off. Luckily, the kid I had attacked was smaller than me and was already gone.

“Get out!” I screamed. “The cops have been called and will be here any minute.”

It was a bluff, but it got people moving.

After about a half hour, I had sent everyone home except for Shane and Denny.

Or so I thought. While I was upstairs reexamining the ceiling, I heard a noise in my parents’ bathroom. It sounded like someone crying.

I went into their room, but the bathroom door was locked. I cupped my ear and listened. It was definitely the sound of sobbing.

I knocked on the door. “Hey, the party’s over. Are you all right?”

The sound stopped.

“Come on, open the door.”

I waited for a few minutes, then the door slowly opened.

She had long, curly black hair, but her face was hidden behind a fistful of tissue.

“I passed out,” she moaned, rubbing her eyes. “And now my friends have gone.”

“I’ll take you home,” I said. Even though I had been drinking for about six hours, I felt sober, even keen.

We went downstairs. Shane and Denny were sitting on the back patio finishing a bottle of tequila.

“What’s your name?” I asked the girl.

“Laura.”

“Guys, this is Laura. She got stuck here and I’m going to take her home. Try not to trash the place while I’m gone.”

“I don’t think we can improve on Corey Joyce,” Shane said.

“Don’t remind me,” I said.

“So are your parents going to kill you?” Laura asked as we drove down Connecticut Avenue. She lived in Chevy Chase, the tony part of Washington where my father had grown up. Wary of cops I drove carefully, but it was past three o’clock in the morning and the streets were empty.

“I don’t even want to think about it,” I said. “My dad is going to freak.”

“He’s pretty uptight, huh?”

“Not really. He’s actually a real intellectual introvert and doesn’t yell a lot. But when he gets a few drinks in him, he can be really nasty.”

“My dad’s really strict. He and my older brother used to fight all the time when my brother was in high school. But then my brother started playing football and they started getting along better.”

“Your dad was mean to your brother just because he didn’t play football?”

“Yeah. My dad was a big jock when he was in high school, and he was kind of crushed when my brother didn’t want to play sports. My dad kind of forced him.”

“He forced him?”

“Kind of. I mean, he didn’t say he was going to disown him or anything if he didn’t play, he just kept pressuring him, you know, telling him how sports build character and everything.”

“God, what a dick.”

“Actually, it worked out really well. My brother rode the bench all season, but he and my dad started getting along really great.”

“That’s beautiful,” I said sarcastically. More and more, my dad was looking good. So many of my friends had parents who drove them into sports or other things they didn’t want to do. All my father had done was try to instill in us the magic of literature and learning. Listening to Laura, I suddenly felt lucky.

“Take a right on Tennyson,” she said. “It’s the fifth house on the left.”

I pulled into the driveway. She lived in a large white colonial house with three floors.

“Good night,” I said.

She looked at me. “Uh, do you want to come in for a beer or something? My parents are at the beach for the weekend.”

For a second, I was too surprised to say anything. It was three in the morning. My parents’ house had been trashed. She wanted to have a beer?

Then it hit me. This girl wanted to have sex.

I stopped the car.

In the back of my mind, I told myself I should just start the car, back down the driveway, and head home. I couldn’t do this to Mary.

“Sure,” I said.

We went into her house, then into the kitchen. Laura opened the refrigerator and pulled out two beers.

She had barely turned back around when I was on her. She moaned and put her arms around me.

“Let’s go upstairs,” she whispered.

We left the beers on the counter, and she led me up the stairs by the hand.

We fell onto her bed. She pulled her shirt off, then her pants. I followed.

It was over in a matter of minutes.

I rolled off of her and looked at the ceiling. Free of the drive of lust, the reality of what I had done, of everything that had happened, began to sink in. I had just plunged a dagger into Mary’s heart. I would never be able to face her again.

“I’m a dead man,” I said.

Laura mumbled. She was already half-asleep.

“My parents are going to disown me.”

I got up and got dressed. Outside, a car down the street coughed to a start. The sound pierced my soul, like the cock of the crow on Judgment Day. I had hoped that maybe time would stand still for me, that I could hide here. The starting car heralded a new day. Time would continue, and I’d have to face my parents and Mary.

I got in the car and drove home. If I could have, I would have started heading west and never come back.

 

When my parents got home and saw the damage, they were too shocked to speak. My father slowly walked around the house, silently examining disaster after disaster. There were burn marks on the living room table where people had put out joints, and most of the patio furniture was in splinters. The mailbox had been plowed over.

I didn’t even ask about my punishment, and he didn’t say anything. I just went about trying to repair the damage. I went out to the hardware store and bought a new hammer, nails, and screws, and helped my dad fix the patio furniture that wasn’t beyond hope.

The following Saturday night I stayed home, hoping to get back in my parents’ good graces. Late at night, I went downstairs for a midnight snack. My father was sitting at the kitchen table reading. He was drunk.

“Hey, Dad,” I said.

He didn’t even look at me. “I want you to get a job,” he said.

“Right now?” I asked. I tried to laugh and sound light-hearted, but I was frightened. He was drunk, and it was like dealing with a different person.

“This isn’t funny, Mark. This summer I want you to have a job.”

I felt myself get tense. Although I had seen my dad like this often, it was always unpleasant. He wasn’t worried about me having a job over the summer. He just wanted to pick a fight. Still, I didn’t fully appreciate the warping effect alcohol could have on the human brain, the way it turns people into monsters.

“I’ll go out tomorrow and ask about some work,” I said. I started making a sandwich. He just sat there watching me.

“Are you planning on going to college?” he finally said.

I nervously laughed. Despite the obvious, I would just keep pretending that he wasn’t drunk.

“Of course,” I said.

“I don’t think you’re smart enough to go.”

I stopped making the sandwich and put the supplies back in the refrigerator. I knew that he wasn’t going to leave me alone and that I just had to get away.

“You know,” he said. “Your buddies are jerks. Staying out late,” he growled, “going to bars. You guys think you’re a bunch of hotshots.”

I turned to face him. “But Dad, you did the same thing when you were my age.”

He didn’t say anything for a few seconds; he just played with his drink and watched me finish making the sandwich. I almost wished he would have laid down the law, issued an order, told me I was grounded for a week - some signal that he cared. But I knew he was just shitfaced and looking for a fight.

“I want you to read something,” he said. He disappeared into his den, then came back holding a book. It was called Washington and Baltimore, a collection of short stories by Julian Mazor.

“I want you to read the last story in this book,” he said. “It might help you. Because your mother and I don’t know what we’re going to do with you, Mark.”

I opened to the table of contents. The last story was called “The Boy Who Used Foul Language.”

“The writer lives in Washington. He’s a recluse. He wrote some great stories for the New Yorker, but after he published this book in 1968, he disappeared. I’ve often wondered what ever happened-”

“Can we talk about this tomorrow?” I said. This was always my ace. I would agree with everything he said, yet ask that we talk about it in the morning. Of course, by then he would be sober and would have no interest in having such a heart-to-heart.

“I’m serious, Mark.”

“I know you are. Dad. I’d just like to talk about it tomorrow.”

“Your grades at Prep have not been great-”

“Dad - tomorr-”

The drink hit me in the face so hard that I tumbled backwards and onto the floor. I ran out of the room so fast I almost knocked him over, then down the stairs and outside. I shot down the street and out of the neighborhood, the air roaring in my ears.

I picked up a path that Seamus and I used to take. It ran through the woods and to the village. When I was too exhausted to keep running, I slowed down to a walk. I hadn’t noticed before, but I was still carrying the book my father had given me. I kept to the path, the early summer night buzzing with the sounds of crickets and frogs. I imagined myself as Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, carrying the evil ring through the forest and toward Mount Doom. I was on the run from the Nazgûl, the servants of the Dark Lord who rode on winged creatures.

About an hour later, I got to the village. I sat on the sidewalk in front of the supermarket, wondering what to do. It was after two o’clock, and a phone call to any of my friends would freak their parents out and get me in trouble.

There was only one option and only one person I wanted to talk to - Mary. She lived about a mile away and had her own private line.

She answered on the first ring.

“Mary.”

“Mark? Are you all right?”

“Listen, I’m up at the village. I had some trouble with my dad.”

“Your dad? Are you okay?”

“Yeah, just the usual bullshit. But I need a place to crash.”

“Hold on. I’ll be right up.”

A few minutes later, Mary pulled up. She took me back to her house, and I told her what had happened. She led me around to the back of the house and down a short flight of stairs to the finished basement.

“You can sleep on the sofa,” Mary whispered. “Just don’t make any noise or my parents will wake up.”

I sat on the sofa. She sat next to me and started kissing my neck. We made out for a few minutes. I touched her breast, and she let out a little sigh.

Then I stopped.

“I can’t do this,” I said.

She backed away, surprised. “We’re not doing anything.”

“I know.”

“And you know I’m not ready to have sex yet.”

“I know.”

“So what’s the problem?”

The problem was obvious to me - Laura. Just being here was a slap in Mary’s face, and I shouldn’t have been touching her. Worse, I was convinced that I was in love with Laura. She had completely given herself to me, unlike Mary and the other girls I knew.

“I guess I’m just tired,” I said. “You know, the fight with my dad and everything.”

“I understand,” she said. She kissed me goodnight and went upstairs.

I lay down, then opened Washington and Baltimore and read “The Boy Who Used Foul Language.” Mazor’s writing was sublime. Set in the 1940s, it told the story of a young boy, John, who had gotten expelled from school for fighting with a boy who hurls a racial slur at John’s African American maid. John was no angel, but he was a troublemaker with a moral center. At the end of the story, he knows he’ll fight with the same boy again, but seems to rejoice at the prospect.

The message my father was sending by giving me the story to read was clear: I was a moral, decent boy, but could too easily succumb to forces that would ruin my life.

I reread the story, then started on another, falling asleep with the book on my lap.

The next morning, after Mary’s parents left for church, she drove me home. I knew that I was safe because it was daytime and my dad had sobered up; however, when I got to the house my parents weren’t home. They had gone for a drive in the horse country in west Potomac.

In my room, lying on my pillow, I found a note:

SORRY ABOUT LAST NIGHT - BOOZE TALKING