THE MONOTONOUS THUD OF “SATISFACTION” FILLED the hall of Remsen 3, the kind of song that I used to always hear coming out of my dad’s study when he’d had a couple of bottles of high-priced grape and he was trying to get back to the days when guys were guys and rock could live on three chords.
I passed Clune’s room, with the door open. He was sitting at a desk, wearing nothing but those Bruin boxers, reading an Elmore Leonard novel, slapping a pencil on the edge of his desk, in rhythm to the song.
“Where’s Zowitzki’s room?” I asked.
“Two doors down.” Clune shouted, over the music. “And start lifting, son. Hesford’s a week from Saturday.”
Zowitzki’s room wasn’t what I’d expected: it was as neat as a museum gallery. Not a stray sock. The bed was made. Textbooks were lined up like soldiers at attention beneath his desk lamp.
“Lefferts! Glad to see you, boy.” He hopped off his bed, slammed the door shut, piled past me, dropped into his desk chair, and, in one fluid motion, unlocked the bottom drawer and pulled out a pile of football magazines. Beneath them I saw rows of plastic jars of powder and prescription pill bottles and little dark jars full of liquid. They didn’t have labels.
“Have a seat, boy, have a seat.” He pointed to another chair next to the bed and flicked a plastic bottle at me. Then another. Then another. I dropped all three.
“Start with the milk stuff,” said Zowitzki. He was talking about twice as fast as most people. “Banana’s not bad. Berry’s sweet. Whatever works for you. We order in bulk. Hey! Bulk. Get it? Then we’ll bump you up to the serious stuff.”
So that’s why they always smelled like some funky swamp in a lab beaker: he—and who else?—was sweating ’roids and supplements and who knew what from who knew where? What did they call it in biology? Spontaneous generation? Life from the swamp thanks to a lightning bolt? It was Frankenstein football. How many of them took the stuff?
“Do the shakes for two weeks,” he said, “you’ll put on a ten easy. If you’re not into needles, there’s other ways, but it’s way painless. But believe this: none of this shit works if you’re not holdin’ up your end. Do the lifting. No magic bullets here. If I had a hundred bucks for every jerkweed who thought it worked by itself, I’d be a rich man. You do the work, the stuff’ll do its thing.”
I scanned the labels, with their cheap comic-book graphics. It all seemed kind of lame, but I didn’t want to come off as a complete asshole. “This what everybody does?”
He frowned. “Are you kidding me? Half the league’s as loaded as we are. They surf the same sites. That’s where Oakhurst Hall enterprise kicks in. We do our homework, and experiment, and find the right cocktails.”
“From Germany?”
“That’s our competitive edge,” he said, putting the magazines back.
“Does Will take supplements?”
“Martin doesn’t need to take anything.” Gross little blots of spittle were clotting at the corners of his mouth. “He’s a natural. Freak of nature. He’ll be all-Ivy. Martin doesn’t hurt us by not being active. You, on the other hand, are no good to us at a hundred fifty pounds. You’ll last about two games before they carry you off on a stretcher. Wait’ll you see the linebackers from Chelton. They’re monsters. I mean, literally.”
“No they aren’t,” I said, ever the wiseass, but he was like my dad. It was just too easy. “If they were literally monsters, Zowitzki, they’d be supernatural. Literal means ‘real.’”
He was suddenly very serious and scary. “Let’s see who’s at Harvard two years from now, asshole,” he said, slamming the drawer. He cooled out a little as he locked it. “Lefferts, do you want to be a teammate or a solo?”
When I answered, “I just want to play football,” he whipped his head back around to look at me.
“Okay. Why?”
It suddenly felt like a final exam. “I want to find out if I’m good at it,” I said. “And my father thinks I can’t.”
“Right, got it. Psych 101,” he said sarcastically. I’d made the mistake of thinking that a juicer couldn’t also be smart. “Listen, this is bigger than what you or I want. It’s about all of us. Read your Freud. That’d be Civilization and Its Discontents: act for the good of the tribe—or in this case, the school that can make us all zillionaires. And, yeah, I read more than comic books.”
He got up from the chair and headed back to his bed. “Look, dude: Being on a championship team isn’t about you. It’s about Carlton being able to ramp up our recommendation letters for college. And it’s about the ring, man. It’s called champions.”
He looked back at me, all mock earnest. “Hey, you’re a moral guy. I can tell. So do some good for mankind, Gandhi. Help us out here. It’s win-win.”
Then he flopped back onto the bed. He was done with me. “See you in practice. Don’t wuss out on me.”
I stuffed the plastic bottles in my pack. Then I walked back down the hallway, to the sounds of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Talk about museums.
• • •
But as I walked back to Screwville 4, I figured it all kind of made sense. If you’ve been put in a place that’s supposed to give you an advantage over everyone else in the world, the pressure to pull it off is even more intense, right? So why wouldn’t you reach for every bottle?
Man, I hate needles.
• • •
The Ping-Pong game sounds coming out of the common room were all weird grunts and clicks at warp speed. It was Sam and a Chinese kid, tall and skinny. I stuck my head in. The point was going on forever. Sam was smashing forehand shots, grunting each time like some Russian girl tennis player, but the Chinese kid was like a human backboard, moving back and forth, all elastic, not making a sound. You couldn’t even hear his feet touch the ground as he shuttled from side to side, a good five feet behind the table, but sweat was streaming down his face, and his hair was matted to his forehead.
Finally Sam hit a smash that the other kid lunged for and couldn’t reach. The kid slammed his paddle on the fireplace mantel in fury, and the paddle split in two.
Sam, meanwhile, bowed to the four walls, rotating in a circle, until he saw me.
“I am a god,” Sam said.
Maybe he was. He was sure a whole lot easier to believe in than a headmaster On-High Almighty preaching out of a chapel cherry picker.
• • •
“How was your visit with your buddy Zowitzki?” Josh, sitting on the floor with his back to the radiator, was noodling a chord progression on a perfectly restored Martin D-38.
“Weird smell, weirder guy.” I pulled out the bottles. “And he wants me to drink this stuff. Then shoot up steroids. Like, with a needle. That’s crazy.”
“No surprise there. You ever hear of ’roid rage? Never got it, myself. Where I come from drugs are supposed to make you smile, not go gonzo. On the other hand, maybe you bulk up, go Incredible Hulk, make the game-winning catch against Essex for the championship, and Lucy Prescott fulfills your every fantasy.”
He strummed a chord. “Hey, listen to this.” He played a few single-string notes. Real quiet. “I was thinking that could be the beginning of the piece. It kind of vibes with the old-guy chords you played that Danny liked.”
It was a good melody, a catchy couplet. “When’d you write it?”
He smiled. “I didn’t. It was a fucking bird. At five this morning. Singing the same four notes outside the window.”
He played them again. Birdsong. “I’ve been overthinking this music stuff. From now on, let it flow. Speaking of which, I am about to hit the basement for a small puff. Should you care to join.”
Zowitzki’s mad-scientist vibe had given me the creeps. And part of me kept thinking, I can get stoned at home. What’s the point of doing Oakhurst Hall if I’m just gonna burn more brain cells? But I followed Josh down the stairs and out the door, then around to the side of the building, where another door led down a flight of back stairs I hadn’t noticed before. At the bottom, on the other side of the creaky door, lit by a red-light exit sign, was a long, dark cement hallway, about as wide as a bowling-alley lane. It reeked of leaking fuel oil, moldy plaster, and rotting wood. Cobwebs hung from pipes that looked like they were wrapped in flaking asbestos. It was like a dungeon in Grimrock.
Josh pushed another door open, pulled a chain on a bare lightbulb, and lit up a dusty storage room. He propped the door open with an old folding chair. “There’s a stairway at each end of the hallway,” he said. “We hear someone coming down one stairway, we go out the other end.” He flopped onto a couch that looked new.
“Someone left that behind?” I said. I sat on a wooden classroom chair from maybe fifty years ago.
“They leave everything behind. Disposable income, disposable furniture. Sometimes I sleep on this puppy.” He cracked an old window and pulled a joint from his breast pocket. I took a deep hit. The room wrapped itself in silence. I was listening for sounds out in the hallway, with stoned antennae, growing paranoid as hell.
Josh made a pot-fueled pronouncement: “So here we are, the misfit offspring of misguided parental units, and I say, ‘Deal with it. These are the cards they dealt us. So we play them.’”
I took another hit. It was stupid cotton-candy-head time again.
“I’m turning in these cards,” I said. I stood up and started for the door. “Nothing personal. It’s all too weird. Too many people finding the easy way out. I got history to read. See you upstairs,” I said.
I went to the right and heard my steps echoing off the cement walls like in bad horror flick. I creaked open the outside door, ran up the steps into the dark night, and took a deep breath, just to get my head clear before starting to walk across the grass. Crackly, dusty leaves let loose a dusty smell: good, earthy dirt, not stoned dustiness.
Back in the room, I was starving. Then I remembered the plastic bottles. I pulled one of the supplements out of my pack and went into the bathroom, which was empty, except for the usual wet towels lying on the tiles, and bottles and tubes and crusty razors on the sinks and shelves. I filled up a smudged water glass and dumped in a couple of tablespoons of powder. I stirred it with the handle of somebody’s gross toothbrush. The stuff looked like swamp scum and smelled like bananas.
What the hell: nothing ventured, nothing gained.
It didn’t actually taste that bad. Like the milk at the bottom of a bowl of Lucky Charms.
But now what? That weed had been way too strong. I started to semipanic; what had I just smoked?
Josh was back in the room, sitting on the floor, working on those same four notes. I sat at my desk and cracked the history textbook. Athens. Athens? Athens was where REM came from, in Georgia, right?
Then I read the label of the bottle: endogenous creatine precursor—precursor to what? Purified bovine colostrum extract? Was that a cow’s asshole?
Great. I lay on the bed, picked up Gatsby, tried not to pay attention to my heartbeat.
“Hey,” I said. “I tried some of Zowitzki’s magic potion. I think I’m having side effects. Like death.”
“You’re having delusions. That supplement shit is harmless. And useless. It’s just some low-rent rip-off. You want to gain weight? Stick with me.” And he flicked a bag of cheese popcorn at my head. I tore it open and felt the normal world start to come back.