When Mr. Berry, our tenth-grade biology teacher, plopped a formaldehyde-soaked fetal pig on an aluminum tray at our shared lab station, Lisa and I looked at each other with sad eyes and morbid smiles. It looked like a small hairless dog with skin the color of lunch meat. “Oy. Look at that face,” Lisa said, channeling Jackie Mason. “It’s a face only a mother could love. I was hoping he’d become a doctor. Such a disappointment. You’re dead to me.” She fake-spat on the floor.
I burst out laughing. Her old-Jewish-man shtick always cracked me up.
Lisa had moved from a nearby town into my school district in the middle of seventh grade and, because her last name began with an H and mine with a K, she was placed in my homeroom. That’s tough, I remember thinking, making new friends in junior high. Because of my parents’ divorce, I had changed schools a few times over the past four years and hated it every time. Inevitably, I would vomit before my first day of school and occasionally sob afterward.
So I looked right at the new girl and smiled. She smiled back, but not in the self-conscious or defensively bitchy style of other girls her age. It was a look I hadn’t seen before, expressing a combination of boredom, mischief, and omnipotence. Somehow she seemed both above and below it all, like she knew this whole adolescence thing was pure bullshit but found it amusing anyway. We became best friends almost immediately and here we were three years later laying a guilt trip on an unborn pig.
“You’re worse than dead to me. You’re unkosher.”
Mr. Berry, clad in black elbow-length gloves that might have been elegant had they not been made of rubber, was doling out more to-be-dissected specimens. He turned his head back toward us and said, “If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry.” It was his favorite expression. His Maine accent, much different from the Long Island ones we grew up among, made almost everything he said sound hilarious to us. Except that line. He was right, and we knew it.
“Let’s name him Abercrombie,” I whispered. For some reason I had become obsessed with a commercial for laundry detergent in which a dutiful mother attempts to save a grass-stained day by breaking out a jug of All. This delights her precocious children, who see this as an opportunity to familiarize their Labrador puppy with the alphabet. “Let’s teach Abercrombie how to spell!” one of them suggests, while the other glides the dog’s paw over the letters on the bottle. “A-L-L!”
Lisa agreed that the name suited him and over the course of the next week, we cut into Abercrombie with our scalpels, learning about various organs and systems, all the while pretending he was our own flesh and blood.
“Look at our baby’s intestines,” we would say. “So curly, like his mother’s.”
“Oh, his heart is smaller than I thought, just like his daddy’s.” And every day we would teach him a new word, moving his little pig foot along imaginary letters. On Monday: “Let’s teach Abercrombie how to spell! P-E-N-I-S.”
On Tuesday: “V-A-G-I-N-A.”
On Wednesday: “T-H-R-E-E-W-A-Y.”
On Thursday: “E-J-A-C-U-L-A-T-E.”
Lisa cut biology on Friday, which was disappointing. We were scheduled to dissect Abercrombie’s brain. And teach him to spell “anal beads.”
Skipping class had become a common occurrence for Lisa. Her mother had been battling breast cancer for a few years, and under the not-so-watchful eye of her father, Lisa was living a life apparently devoid of rules and goals. So Lisa became a little bit of a wild child before my eyes, which fascinated the hell out of me. My life was crammed so full of parentally imposed rules and self-imposed goals I could hardly breathe. I didn’t even know there was another way to live.
Sometimes I’d stop by Lisa’s house and stand in awe at the condition of her bedroom: clothes on the floor piled as high as the bed. Half-full mugs on her dresser with little circles of bluish-green mold floating like miniature galaxies in a coffee-beige cosmos. I might spot a month-old newspaper lying next to her pillow or a bikini top hanging from the doorknob in the middle of February.
If my room looked like this, I thought, Mike and Terri would each shit a ten-pound brick. The most nonnegotiable edict in our house was to never, ever, under any circumstances leave it without making your bed. When I would sassily ask what difference it made, Terri would say, “Because I might have someone over while you’re at school,” which of course made me wonder who was visiting my mother during the school day and why the hell was she showing them my bedroom? When I asked, she never answered. Was she showing the house to prospective buyers? (“This room is perfect for a teenage boy with an Olivia Newton-John obsession.”) Was she having an affair? (“I force my children to make their beds. Does that turn you on?”) Was she giving tours to Japanese sightseers? (“In America, we value . . . discipline.”) The whole thing seemed pretty illogical, but she wouldn’t budge.
Thirty years later, bed-making is a popular topic around our Christmas dinner table. My sisters and I laugh at my parents’ obsession and reminisce about our individual ways of coping with it: I used to make my bed the second I arose from it to avoid any confrontation whatsoever. Jodi would leave the house, somehow “forgetting” to make her bed, and return home to an apoplectic Terri nearly every day. And Courtney, the twisted genius she is, would sleep on top of her fully made bed, covering herself with a blanket, then shove that blanket under the bed first thing in the morning.
The only respite I received from the barrage of rules and chores—making my bed, vacuuming the house, doing my own laundry, taking out the trash, being home by ten—was when I went to work. Even more important to my parents than keeping a tidy house was making money, and I had scored a job as a busboy in the nicest restaurant in town, Danfords Inn. While most kids my age were earning minimum wage working at one of the many fast-food chains nearby, I was bringing home a hundred bucks a night in cash tips.
So I was excused from family excursions to the ski slopes of Vermont in the winter and the beaches of Fire Island in the summer. We were living pretty high on the hog at the time, thanks to Mike’s beauty-supply business. Formerly a hairstylist, he made what turned out to be a wise career move, from giving individual women perms to selling salons the chemicals required to create truly huge hair. Considering we lived in the perm capital of the world (Long Island) in the heyday of the perm (the 1980s), I thought we should have been living in a castle instead of a split-level ranch. But I didn’t complain. We had a ski house and a boat, and I had my teenage privacy for most of the weekend while the rest of the family was gone.
During the weekends I had the house to myself, Lisa and I developed a private routine, separate from the weekday customs (mostly of eating fast food) we engaged in with our friend Meredith. The three of us were a trio, brought together by drama club and chorus class. In our firmly middle-class school district, those activities didn’t make us too popular, but we weren’t pariahs either. Mostly we spun in our own clique, a satellite too small to be noticed by the jocks and cheerleaders who lived squarely in the center of the universe. I resented our fringe status more than I dared admit, but not enough to attend even a single football game in four years.
Meredith, Lisa, and I had several nicknames for one another. On any given day, Meredith would be referred to as Bonnie, Snap, or The Superego. I would be Clyde, Crackle, or The Ego. And Lisa would be Baby Face, Pop, or The Id. Lisa always seemed to end up with the punchiest nicknames of the three of us, but neither Meredith nor I seemed to mind because, out of the group, Lisa was the one most likely to flash her tits at a passing car or scream “I just found my G-spot!” in a crowded movie theater. She earned them.
Like any triad, we occasionally split into twos. Sometimes Lisa and Meredith would get together alone and do girl things, like shop for homecoming dresses. (I was uninterested at the time, which seems funny in hindsight.) Sometimes Meredith and I would get together for coffee at the diner and study for a Regent’s exam. (Lisa had zero intention of going to college.) And every Saturday Lisa and I would get together, just the two of us, and memorize porn like a couple of pervert savants.
So, every weekend, I would work in the restaurant on Friday night, the rest of the family having left for a weekend trip around three o’clock, and come home to a house empty except for Noel, our eczematous Lhasa Apso. I’d let the dog out in the backyard to relieve herself, grab a few leftover chicken cutlets from the fridge, and watch TV until I fell asleep on the couch with Noel at my feet. I would sleep until around ten the next morning, feed the dog, and call Lisa. She would always be the one to answer her house phone because she slept with it next to her bed.
“Hello,” she’d growl.
“Did I wake you?”
“Of course you woke me. You ask me that same damn question every Saturday.”
“What time does the video store open?”
She let out an annoyed groan. “Oh my God. Eleven. It opens at eleven, just like every other fucking Saturday.”
“Great. So I’ll pick you up at eleven,” I’d say. “We’ll get there around eleven ten. We don’t want to seem too eager.” She hung up without replying, but I knew she’d be ready on time.
At 10:59 I would get in my car, a 1979 Chevy Blazer my parents gave me after they were done with it. The car was basically a tank—an SUV before everyone started driving SUVs—that would break down almost weekly and cost me a full weekend’s worth of tips to repair. Lisa lived around the block, so I could arrive at her house at 11:00 on the dot and honk the horn. A few minutes later, she would emerge from her front door, looking perturbed as usual. She was a little wisp of a thing, five feet tall, probably not even a hundred pounds, with a mane of chestnut hair half-assedly feathered because she just rolled out of bed.
“Hey Clyde,” she said, lifting herself into the passenger seat. Today she wore acid-washed jeans, white sneakers, and an oversized lemon-yellow sweater.
“Good morning, Baby Face,” I replied.
Lisa and I drove to the video store where Lisa’s father had a membership he never used. Located in a strip mall featuring a Carvel and my dentist’s office, it was one of those independently run shops that were eventually crushed by Blockbuster, which was in turn crushed by the Internet.
The store was pretty big as far as stores of its kind went; the space had previously been a bank so it featured a drive-through window, which I always thought was pretty cool. But because the store wasn’t even computerized, the interaction at the window was inevitably more time-consuming than just getting out of your car and walking in. In any case, our video-selection process was more nuanced than asking a dim-witted teller for a recommendation.
We entered—just your average teenage duo looking for a movie to pass some time on an average Saturday in an average one-horse town—and started picking up VHS boxes. Younger readers might not understand how the video-rental process worked back then, so allow me to explain. A local store might have multiple freestanding racks and shelves displaying empty video boxes, which you could pick up to read a description of the movie and see a few stills. Usually, if you wanted to rent that particular movie, you would bring the box up to the cashier, who would give you the VHS tape to take with you in a generic hard plastic case. But this particular store had a particularly high-tech Velcro tab selection feature: When you decided upon a movie to rent, you would remove the corresponding “button,” a metal rim tab about the size of a quarter with the movie’s name written in felt-tip marker on the front and a Velcro button on the back, and bring that to the cashier. Ridiculous, I know. But at least we could watch TV without having to get up to change the channel.
We began perusing the racks, beginning with the movies closest to the front door.
Lisa picked up The Shining. “This looks like fun.”
“Nah. I hate romantic comedies,” I replied. I held up Raiders of the Lost Ark. “What about this one?”
“No. I hate arks.”
The bit continued for half an hour, same as every week. We were “That Crazy Couple Who Can’t Decide on a Movie,” all for the sake of the pimply-faced clerk two years our senior who barely noticed our existence. You would need a time-lapse camera to even realize it was happening, but the entire time we were slowly making our way to the back of the store.
Because that’s where the “adult” room was.
Eventually, Lisa would feign complete exasperation and say, “I can’t find anything I want to watch. Maybe there’s something in this back room.” Then she’d skip through the swinging saloon-style doors into The Room of Porn.
At this point my heart was beating like a jackhammer in my scrawny rib cage, but sensing the clerk’s eyes on me, I picked up another movie. “How about Annie? I like the part where the aliens kill everyone.”
“Get in here,” Lisa barked in her most annoyed voice. And as though I were jumping into an ice-cold pool, I held my breath and pushed myself through just one side of the swinging doors, so as not to cause too much swinging.
The Room of Porn was windowless and fluorescently lit, about ten feet square with five levels of shelves on all sides, every inch of which was lined with box covers. It was like being in a candy store, except this candy gave you hard-ons instead of cavities. I felt dizzy, probably because blood had been diverted from my brain. My instinct was to just grab any one of the Velcro buttons and get the hell out, but that’s not the way Lisa worked.
“This one is fine.” I held out On Golden Blonde.
She wasn’t looking at me. She was reading the cover of The Poonies. “Cool your jets,” she said. “I want to find one with a nice story.”
“Look at this. It’s called Beverly Hills Cox. I’m guessing it’s about horny policemen in California.”
“Shhhhhhh!” She was reading about the plot of Wet Paint, the story of a horny artist in California.
Back then porn was pretty silly, not the gonzo stuff you can’t avoid today. The average porno movie was about an hour and a half, with a story line, often a parody of a popular TV show or movie, and sometimes snappy dialogue. There were costume changes and sets and awesomely cheesy background music made on a synthesizer in some guy’s mother’s basement. The really high-end stuff featured actual theme songs.
After another half hour, Lisa and I were able to agree on Caddy Shack Up, the story of horny caddies in California.
“OK,” I said, pulling some money out of my jeans. “Here’s a twenty. I’ll meet you in the car.” She rolled her eyes, but she knew the drill.
I left The Room of Porn through one of the swinging doors. As per our unspoken agreement, Lisa would wait another five minutes before emerging. During that time I would pick up a few more video boxes from the nonporn collection and act as though I still couldn’t decide on one, slowly making my way toward the front of the store, at which point I would let out a sigh of defeat and give a shrug of indecision. Then I’d head out into the parking lot and wait for Lisa.
I decided to grab a soft-serve from Carvel before getting in the Blazer. Lisa was taking forever. I had finished almost the entire vanilla cone with chocolate sprinkles by the time she arrived.
“What took you so long?”
“Ronald was there.”
“Who?” I was wrapping the last bit of the cone in a paper napkin to give to Noel.
“My father, you idiot.”
“Oh my God. In the porno section?”
“No. He was at the drive-through returning some movies. I almost shit my pants.”
I laughed like it was the funniest thing I had heard in my life.
“Let’s go to Wendy’s, asshole,” Lisa said. “I think Meredith’s working.”
High on the excitement of a new dirty movie to watch tonight and the freedom of having my entire house to ourselves, we drove toward Nesconset Highway where a Wendy’s, Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Ground Round peacefully coexisted within a quarter mile of one another. When “Never Gonna Let You Go” by Sergio Mendez came on the radio, we blasted it and sang along at full voice.
Lisa had been correct. Meredith was working, but not the register as she usually did. She was at the griddle, so she didn’t notice us when we got in line to order. She took her job of flipping burgers very seriously, and her manager, a nervous-looking man of around thirty, was flitting around nearby.
“What do you think of that guy?” asked Lisa, referring to the manager.
“He looks like a rapist,” I said. “Why?”
Lisa let out a snort. “Awesome. Meredith has the hots for him.”
“Gross. He’s so old.”
“I know, right? I wouldn’t be surprised if she lost the big V to him.”
“No way,” I said. “Meredith will be a virgin until her wedding night.”
“Oh, please. Nobody waits that long anymore.”
“I’m going to,” I said.
“That’s so romantic.” Lisa rolled her eyes. “If you ask me, they should do it over there on the salad bar, right between the croutons and the shredded carrots.”
“That doesn’t seem very hygienic. Or comfortable. What’s his name?” I asked.
“Mark. As in Mark my word, he’s gonna pop her cherry tomato.”
My laugh caught Meredith’s attention. She must have been able to sense our mood because she shot us a look that threatened retribution for any behavior that might embarrass her, which Lisa took as a challenge, of course. When we ordered our food from the cashier, whom we did not know, Lisa asked to speak to the manager. The cashier grabbed Mark by the elbow, and Meredith glared at us. Mark hung a basket of French fries to drain and approached the counter.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“Yes,” Lisa said. “I was wondering, is the bleu cheese fresh?”
“Is it fresh?” Evidently, it was not a question he received often.
“Yes, fresh.”
He spoke as one might to an eight-year-old. “It’s salad dressing. And it comes in a large plastic tub.”
“Thank you,” Lisa said, “I will take that into consideration.” Mark returned to salting his fries.
After I paid for lunch, we sat at a table by the window, not far from the salad bar. I scarfed down my chicken sandwich and saw Meredith enter the dining room through the door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY behind Lisa. “Uh-oh,” I said. “She looks pissed.”
“We didn’t do anything wrong,” Lisa stated.
Mark must have put Meredith on tray duty because she began to tidy the empty tables around us. She wouldn’t look in our direction, and I couldn’t blame her. We followed her with our eyes. Once she had a few trays stacked in her hands, she passed by our table.
“You guys are such assholes,” she said.
“I didn’t do anything,” I blurted, as she made her way back to the kitchen.
“You are such a pussy,” Lisa said to me, through a bite of half-chewed hamburger.
I shrugged. Maybe I was. I felt bad for laughing at Meredith’s expense, but I was also kind of hurt that she had a secret crush she had only shared with Lisa. We were a trio. If I had been a girl, Meredith would have told me too.
We finished lunch in relative silence, and I dropped Lisa off at home. I gave her my house key and told her I’d be home around midnight. I went home, entering through the garage, and put the porno in my dresser beneath my underwear, just in case there was an emergency and my parents came home while I was gone. I couldn’t have Caddy Shack Up lying on the kitchen counter. I also took a bottle of champagne, one of the many Mike’s clients had given him around Christmas, from the back of the liquor cabinet and put it in the refrigerator. Mike and Terri would never miss it. I had never seen them drink champagne in the seven or so years they had been together.
* * *
Work was uneventful, just the usual filling of water glasses, folding of napkins, clearing of tables, setting of tables, emptying of ashtrays. I was actually an excellent busboy. The restaurant had recently held a competition for head busboy, which I won, so I made an extra dollar per hour and got the busiest stations, the ones with the best view of the harbor outside. The waitresses all liked me because if I ever saw them so much as lift an empty plate, I would swoop in and finish the job. If they told me table 12 needed more breadsticks, I was on it like fire. They were obligated to give me 15 percent of their tips, but most gave me 20. Occasionally a diner, usually a man on a date with a woman, would tip me directly, thanking me for taking good care of them. I loved that job. It was the one place I felt I was truly popular.
I returned home around twelve thirty to see Lisa’s car in the driveway.
“This dog has been scaring the crap out of me,” she announced when I walked in the door. She was sitting downstairs in our den watching TV with Noel on her lap. “She’s been growling at every little noise outside. I thought someone was out there trying to kill us.”
“She’s a pain in the ass like that,” I said. “Last weekend I barely slept because she was barking at the bedroom window at three a.m. Lhasas were imperial guard dogs in Tibet or some shit like that.”
“Thanks for the history lesson, dork. Where’s the movie?”
“In my underwear drawer. Can you get the champagne out of the fridge? I’ll set up the movie.”
Lisa went up to the kitchen, and I rushed upstairs to change out of my uniform into jeans and a polo shirt. Soon, she came downstairs with the bottle and three brown ceramic coffee mugs, one of which was to be used as an ashtray. We were one of the first families on our block to have a big-screen TV, which was housed in a giant wooden cabinet that took up half the room. As she poured us each a mug of champagne, I put the video in the VCR and hit PLAY on the remote.
Lisa sat on the couch, and I sat on the floor. We watched the entire movie from start to finish in engrossed silence. Neither of us spoke. Neither of us took eyes from the screen for one second. We sipped champagne and refilled our mugs without looking at them. We lit, smoked, and extinguished cigarettes without looking at them. We were taking it all in, every sexual act, moan, and groan. But mostly we were memorizing the dialogue.
Like clockwork, when the movie ended, I hit rewind. The tape whirred in the machine and abruptly stopped. I hit PLAY again, and we began our second viewing of the evening, this time repeating all the dialogue we could remember and voicing our critiques. Such was our creative process.
Caddy Shack Up is the story of Cathy, an attractive young woman with a slightly crooked front tooth and shockingly conical nipples, who takes a job as a caddy at the Burning Bush Golf Club. In the first scene, we learn that while she would be open to meeting and marrying a rich club member, she is also just plain happy using her body for sexual pleasure. “You don’t have to have an alterior motive for everything,” says Cathy. To which Lisa cried: “The word is ulterior, you illiterate skank. Not alterior Ulterior.”
Cathy is soon undressed at the hands of a more experienced female caddy who says, “Why don’t you just lay down here and I’ll show you my specialty—the club massage.”
“What is with these people?” I wondered aloud. “You want her to lie there, not lay there. Lie means to recline. Lay means to place. I have never been so disappointed in the American educational system. Canadians must watch this stuff and laugh at us.”
“Well, they are the superior race.”
The second scene was our favorite for its pure absurdity and aggressive sex. It featured Sam, played by some catfishy mustachioed guy in a royal blue polo shirt (identical to the one I had just changed into!), and an actress named Purple Passion, who quickly became our hero. She was black and spoke with an exotic accent (which I recently learned was from Baltimore). They were in the clubhouse bar and Purple Passion was putting the moves on him. Sam started off the scene by mumbling, “Hellacious caddy, hellacious caddy.”
“What the fuck does that even mean?” Lisa asked.
“He’s setting the scene, letting us all know what a bad caddy she is, which does seem like a mean thing to say while she’s rubbing all up against him.”
“Prick.”
Then we had to stop the tape and rewind it a few times because we couldn’t understand what Sam was saying. It took us a solid ten minutes to determine that he had muttered: “I like to putt with holes this stiff.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Lisa said. “He must’ve screwed up his line. It was probably, I like to putt with poles this stiff. Not holes.”
“You don’t putt with a golf pole. You putt with a putter.”
“Who cares? I hate golf, and this guy is obviously drunk.”
Sam and Purple get down to business, despite the fact that Lisa and I agreed Purple Passion could have scored a better-looking dude. She seemed like the type of girl we could hang out with, if there were any black kids at our school. Everyone we knew was Italian, Jewish, or Puerto Rican. A black porn star friend would have been fun.
While she’s having sex with the drunk golfer, apropos of absolutely nothing, Purple Passion declares: “It’s not me knowin’ the clubs, it’s me havin’ the body.”
This line outraged Lisa so much that she demanded I stop the tape.
“What’s your problem?” I asked.
“She missed her opportunity for the best line in this whole stupid movie! She should have said, ‘It’s not me knowin’ the clubs, it’s me knowin’ the strokes!’ ”
“Yes!” I yelled, startling the dog, who up until this point had been asleep, despite all the sex noises blaring from the TV. “It’s not me knowin’ the clubs, it’s me knowin’ the strokes! Of course! I just fucking love you.”
It was true. I did love her, not in any sort of romantic way, but for her wit and her grumpiness and her loyalty and her dependability. She was The Id, and I was The Ego. And tonight we were operating free of The Superego, who was probably fast asleep in her bed, dreaming of making sweet love to a nervous-looking man with glasses on a bed of iceberg lettuce. Or romaine, which would be fancier.
Lisa went home after we finished watching the movie for the second time. Cathy the Caddy thinks about quitting, but then she decides not to. That’s the entire plot. I told Lisa I would return the tape on my way to work the brunch shift the next morning.
“Give me one ring when you get home so I know you’re not dead,” I told her.
Lisa rolled her eyes.
But a few minutes later, the phone rang once, and I curled up on the couch where she had been sitting, shut off the lights, and fell asleep.