Sophomores

by Sean Desmond

  February 24

  Trying to turn this corner on the drinking, but I’m as fragile as an egg. I remember my mother sent my father to Father Mahon at St. Jerome’s when it got bad and he came home having taken the pledge. Didn’t really stick, but the memory of it spurred me to confession at Christ the King. I picked that parish for anonymity—the priests at Rita’s and Monica’s all know me. So I went into the booth and offered my confession and told the priest my big problem was the booze and I was praying for a cure. The priest had a very gentle voice and he absolved me and offered to meet in his office to talk about the drinking. Come after reconciliation, he said, so I said my penance and waited. I almost chickened out, but at the end of the hour I saw him come out from behind the screen and I gave him a few minutes and then followed his path out of the church to the parish offices. He met me straightaway, Father Thomas Meacham, Dallas Diocesan, and he offered me an iced tea and told me he was four years sober himself, which struck me funny—a surprise openness I wasn’t ready for. He drilled me with questions about my drinking—when had I last drank, was I ever in the hospital for it, etc. I didn’t tell him about the MS, or losing my job, and started walking it back on how big a problem the booze was. (Probably a sin of omission.)

  He was very exacting—I almost wrote “sobering” there—as he listed options for me. The first suggestion was through the Church—a prayer and meditation retreat. A month at Montserrat to dry out, basically. This sounded a little too holy roller to me, and while becoming a monk had its advantages in the Dark Ages, I have a mortgage and tuition payments to make, so I need to stay on the job hunt. Then he mentioned outpatient therapy, which was offered at Medical City and elsewhere. This shocked me—the Church I grew up in was very anti–head shrinking—but again I didn’t mention the MS and I was worried that this was a complication that could cross wires, and I’m sick and tired of doctors and treatments without cures.

  And that brought him to AA, which he said was started by a Catholic and offered a lot of guidance and fellowship similar to the Church, but at this point I got off Father Meacham’s train of thought. Like many a priest, he was used to hearing himself talk. A bit of a droner. On and on he went, and I noticed in the corner of his office a small painting behind a chalice that marked some anniversary. I peered at it closer and I could make out that it was St. Anthony. On the left side of the painting he was beset by demons, and on the right side he’s casting one out from the house of a poor shepherd. And it occurred to me—back then they just called it the devil, and now we call it a disease. But it’s being overwhelmed by temptation, and you can call it evil, but it lives in the person and it has to be purged, exorcised somehow. I thanked the good Father Meacham, who blessed me, and I left.

  February 25

  They say that depression comes with MS. Like overcast skies making it hard to focus.

  February 26

  Got my last check from American today. Severance severed. We are now running at a deficit. Probability of ultimate ruin equals one. Sent out another 50 résumés, now going past airline contacts into want ads and headhunters. This is getting hopeless.

  February 27

  Whiskey. The water of life. I’ve been good all week, and I can take it easy—there ain’t anything hard about drinking. Just a taste, as the old man used to say. The old man had a problem but he didn’t know. I at least know, so if I confine it and control it, I’m fine. I’m not hurting anyone. As long as I keep to myself it’s fine. What’s a life without whiskey? What is that worth? And what’s the point of being miserable?

  February 28

  Can’t stop. Can’t think. This train has gone express somehow. Nothing left to do but drink. Drink one drink, then two, then a river, a lake, an ocean, it’s all the same. The drinking makes me sick. The not drinking makes me sicker. Great job, Pat, you fucked up entirely.

  February 29

  I have to stop. Every night ends in tears. Anne and Dan won’t speak to me. I’m all alone and it’s my own goddamn fault. I did this to me. Fuck me. Just let me fucking die.

  March 1

  Last day, last pills. I stopped taking them five days ago but what the hell. My apologies to the MS Society, who will have to do without this bullshit.

  Heard from Frank Borman’s office at Eastern about a position. Wants to fly me down to Miami. So that happened. God help me. I have to go. I have no other leads. So I’ll go. On a wing and a prayer. I’m sorry for all my bad behavior. I’m sorry for making a mess of things. I’m sorry for how sorry for myself I am. I’m sorry to my family and I’m sorry I got sick. And I’m sorry for how long and whiny this is. If I had more time, as they say, I would have written something shorter.

  [ MARCH 17 ]

  “Jesus Christ, McGhee, it’s like you were born late. Are you waiting for your engraved invitation? Get on the goddamn bus.”

  Pacing the carpool lane of the Jesuit parking lot, Coach Moyle looked down at his clipboard without really reading it. He hiked his jeans and combed his mustache with his palm.

  “So much for an early start. Gonna hit rush hour and pay for this all the way down 35.”

  “Sorry, Coach, Steve O’Donnell is ovulating in the locker room and I had to talk him through that.”

  It was a surprisingly lewd comment from the apprehensive preacher’s son. Rob threw his duffel bag into the belly of the Ranger bus as Coach Moyle shook his head.

  “O’Donnell’s time of the month? Fantastic. Are all you ladies on the same cycle? We have to move with a goddamn purpose. Who’s left in the locker room?”

  The answer was the entire Jesuit swim team. Coach Moyle slapped the clipboard against his thigh and stomped off toward the doors to the athletic wing. As Moyle came into the school, Rick and Dan came out. He yelled at them for taking their sweet-tea time and ordered them onto the bus. The Ranger swim team was (slowly) gathering to drive to San Antonio for the TCIL state meet hosted by Central Catholic. The only good news about this: missing a day of school with an excused absence, and that State this year wasn’t at Cathedral in El Paso, which was a drive that took longer than Lent. Rob nibbled at his fingernails, trying to figure out the best seat on an empty bus. The back of the Ranger bus was reserved for upperclassmen, too close to the front was like sitting in an octane exhaust cloud, and anything near the wheel well subjected you to a death rattle at the slightest pock in the road.

  Dan plunked down across the aisle from Rick, three rows from the steering wheel. Rob slid behind them and pulled a bag of Funyuns from his backpack. “I’m going to sleep the whole way there.” Which was something you said at the start of a pain-in-the-ass five-hour bus trip, but Rob’s default setting was skittish and wired. He was nervous about State—Rob had joined the swim team as a diver. This was largely on a dare from Sticky, who, unlike Rob, actually had some ability. But to be honest, the Jesuit diving team was basically an excuse to keep the crew (Rick and Dan were the only real swimmers) hanging out together.

  Rob popped the foil bag, and the front of the bus bloomed with the perfume of onion powder.

  “Did you guys hear about Devin Osweiler?”

  “Qué pasó?” Rick already had his nose in Henry IV, Part 1, pretending to be doing the English reading, while already heading into a nap. The sight of the Oglesby assignment made Dan glad he was ahead on his work: he had spent the previous weekend in a cubicle at Park Forest library listening to Caedmon recordings of the Henriad, living in each weary lilt of Gielgud’s voice for hours.

  “Eighth period with Quickly, and she’s doing the whole female reproductive talk.” Jan Quickly was the sophomore biology teacher—how in an all-boys school run by priests she got assigned this lesson in anatomy was a question worth asking. “Osweiler stands up and asks a question with a hard-on.”

  “Tented or . . . ?”

  “Yup, Warner told me it was popping his khakis.”

  Rick snorted. “What
was the question?”

  “He pointed at it and started yelling, ‘What do I do? What do I do?’”

  “Did she jerk him off?” Rick asked in his best Rather/Brokaw fake newsman voice.

  “Of course, and then straight to penance hall,” Rob shot back.

  Coach Moyle hopped up on the bus.

  “Who we got here? Malone, Dowlearn, McGhee. Christ, where is everybody? It’s going to be past midnight with the traffic. This is two sacks of uncut bullshit, I tell you what.”

  Over the next fifteen minutes, the dribs and drabs of the swim team poured onto the bus. Then the upperclassmen came loafing back from a Taco Bueno run. Coach Moyle screamed and made faces while stealing a few chips from Preston Sarder’s nacho tray. Last to arrive: Drew Radcliffe, the team’s superstar, for whom Coach Moyle practically broke out a pillow and bonbons.

  “Drew, sit anywhere. McGhee, move out of his way. I’m coming back there.”

  Tortured by the smell of queso, Rick put down his Arden edition. “So who’s driving this bus?”

  A minute later Mr. Donahue stormed through the exit doors of the athletic wing. He had a giant army thermos of coffee and lit an unfiltered Camel. Somebody had the good sense to not let Coach Moyle be the lone chaperone on this trip, and it turned out Donahue’s National Guard unit was drilling what to do when the Soviets crossed the Brazos, and so welcome aboard. Coach Moyle bummed a cigarette off him, and the two of them smoked in the well of the bus stairs while doing a head count. Then Donahue butted out and claimed the driver’s seat with a dragon’s breath of nicotine and coffee. He turned the engine over on the first try, which was some sort of miracle for this pilgrimage to San Antonio. Just as the doors closed, Sticky, who was wearing blue and gold sweats with his blazer, came wandering down the steps from the cafeteria. Donahue put the bus in gear.

  “Let’s give O’Donnell a scare.” And he pulled out of the driveway toward Inwood.

  Rob cracked the window the two inches it would go. “Run, Sticky, they’re leaving your ass!”

  The bus roared past the “Come on” flying out of O’Donnell’s mouth as he stood on the curb for two seconds before he started running to catch up. Coach Moyle heehawed and backslapped Mr. Donahue, who watched Stick in the driver-side mirror.

  “Man, is he slow. Run, white boy.”

  “Come on, Steve-o, you can do it!” Rob screamed. Everyone was dying. The bus was going five miles an hour and Sticky was barely pulling alongside the back tires.

  “I think I’ll take him out for a couple miles on the tollway.”

  “Fine by me.” Moyle waved him over to the bus’s door side. “Damn divers never get in shape.”

  Donahue gunned it one last time before reaching the turn for Inwood and popping the door open. Sticky climbed aboard completely winded from jogging fifty yards.

  “So glad you could join us.”

  “Thanks, Coach, it’s an honor.” No matter the situation, Sticky sweated sarcasm.

  “You know, O’Donnell”—Donahue checked traffic while taking a swig of coffee—“if you were an AEF doughboy and that late to the fight, you’d be SOL.”

  “What?” Sticky lay down in the aisle like he was dying.

  “‘Shit out of luck,’ son. ‘Shit out of luck.’”

  * * *

  As expected, the Ranger bus soon hit rush hour and the exits crept by for Duncanville, DeSoto, and Lancaster. Coach Moyle settled in a back row for a nap next to golden boy Drew Radcliffe. The sophomores kept to the front as Mr. Donahue gulped coffee and cursed traffic.

  “What are you listening to, Rob?” Dan asked.

  Rob stretched out over Dan like a cat. “The Eagle, but it’s starting to go out of range. Did you bring food? Your mom always packs extra shit.”

  Dan did have a second lunch courtesy of Anne Malone catering, and he handed some Chips Ahoy! to Rob. Rob ripped the blue foil open but then stopped, looked up, and whispered grace. Dan crossed himself, mocking his friend.

  “You’re going to hell, Malone.”

  “Those cookies are cursed by the devil.” Dan, admittedly, was trying to set off Bad Rob mode.

  “Stop it.”

  “Do you really think there’s a hell? Do you think God has nothing better to do than keep track of who is praying for cookies?”

  “Not funny.”

  “What if you choked on the cookies?”

  “Shut up.”

  “What if we die in a bus crash right now? Does the cookie prayer deliver your soul to heaven?”

  “Look, can’t hurt”—Rob put the cookies on the bus seat between them—“but let me say this . . .”

  Dan took one and chewed obnoxiously. “What if these were really crappy sugar cookies? Same prayer? Better salvation for Oreos?”

  And rather than activate Bad Rob, Dan got his smart and calm spiritual brother. “Hey, God is good, all the time.”

  Shocked by the simplicity of that and embarrassed at his teasing, Dan swallowed his cookie. Rob combed his hair behind his ear and scooched into the aisle. “Mr. Donahue, how long until we pull over for dinner?”

  “When I hit something that looks like good eating, I’ll give you the signal to go back and scrape it off the road.” Donahue gave Rob a don’t-fuck-with-me marine stare in the rearview, then softened. “We are an hour from Waco, then two hours to Austin. We have a shit-ton of miles to go.”

  Rob winked at Dan. “How much coffee have you drank today, sir?”

  Donahue bit his lip in estimation. “I’d say this is my twelfth cup. But it’s the office stuff, like drinking dirty water.”

  “You seem jumpy, sir.”

  “And you seem like a smart-ass, McGhee. Stop trying to trigger a Nam flashback where I drive us off the road.”

  As the traffic finally broke up, Rob and Dan crept into the stairwell at the front of the bus to secondhand Donahue’s chain-smoking and reload him on coffee. Donahue was in full discourse mode, doing twenty solid minutes on Irish history (it was St. Patrick’s Day), the Afrikaaners’ claims to the veldt, a deep dive into the war of independence that Ho Chi Minh had been fighting, and the fact that short of “nukes and putting down blacktops in Hanoi” there was no way to win there, then a sudden veer into David Shipler’s Arab and Jew to explain the intifada. By Waco, Dan needed a break from this caffeinated run of Facts on File and wandered to the back of the bus, where Stick was playing hearts with Lee Molfetta and a couple of upperclassmen. A big rig air-horned, and Coach Moyle bolted out of his nap.

  “Lord Almighty.” He scratched at his stubble and patted down his mustache. “Where the hell are we?” Coach Moyle stared out at the darkness of I-35 looking for a billboard or road sign. Then he started to sniff.

  “Oh shit.”

  Moyle hopped out of his seat, half-waking Drew Radcliffe, who was passed out next to him. Moyle grabbed the gym bag below him. It was dripping.

  “Goddamn.”

  “What’s in there?” Stick asked.

  “The motion lotion. I brought it for the shave-down.”

  Dan shook his head. This trip keeps getting better. He thought Moyle was joking about shaving their legs and chest for the state meet.

  “Gotta have the motion lotion, Coach,” growled one of the upperclassmen lying down in the back rows of the bus.

  “No shit. Tell you what, we’ll stop at Eckerd’s when we get down there and I’ll make a new batch.”

  “What’s in it?” Stick cracked the nearest window.

  “That’s a secret recipe, trademarked, Moyle Aquatic Supplies.”

  “It’s lube and vodka, isn’t it?” Lee Molfetta deadpanned, not looking up from trying to shoot the moon.

  “More to it than that—there is a science to the motion lotion.” Moyle pulled out the spray bottle from his bag. Yup, it was cracked and leaking. “Takes off the dead skin
and makes you slick as a seal.”

  “What gives it that green color?” Dan asked.

  “Well that’s the horse urine.”

  His coach broke into a smile.

  “Malone, hand me that plastic bag to throw this shit in. Goddamn. Smells like a port-a-john back here now.”

  “When are we doing the shave-down, Coach?” Ron Fenatacci asked.

  “Tonight if we ever fucking get there, or first thing tomorrow. I brought barber clippers. Look at Malone’s face. Like he didn’t sign up for this.”

  “Oh, Malone,” Karl Amberson, junior asshole and backstroker, chimed in, “I’m taking off your eyebrows and gonna run those clippers down to your taint.”

  “Hey, Amberson,” said Clayton Dieter, captain and balancer of the Force, “are you trying to make it sound like the gayest thing possible?”

  “Is that a sign for Killeen? We’re not even fucking near Austin and it’s dark.” Moyle shouted up to Donahue. “This thing go above thirty-five?”

  “If we throw the freshmen off I can take it up to forty,” Donahue barked back.

  “Let’s do that then.” Moyle rolled his eyes. “Goddamn.”

  At this point Drew Radcliffe, who was still pretending to nap, let out a polysyllabic fart.

  Moyle jumped two rows away. “Fucking disgusting.”

  “Want me to pour the motion lotion on him?” Fenatacci offered.

  “Open the goddamn windows . . .” Moyle was both gagging and breaking into laughter. “I’m breathing your fucking bean burrito, Drew. Jesus.”

  * * *

  It was past ten p.m. when the Ranger bus wheeled into Circle the Wagons Cafeteria on the outskirts of Bexar County. The Circle cafeteria, with its big orange neon sign braided and knotted like a lasso (the L in “Circle” was burned out), was run by a Jesuit alumnus, Gerry Tillotson, and his wife, Gail, who seemed to stay in business by the infrequent subsidy of Catholic sports teams visiting the San Antonio area. For a restaurant on the major arterial highway of the state of Texas, it attracted less transient business than the flypaper in the toilets. The dinner rush ended promptly at six fifteen p.m., so the Circle was usually long shuttered at this late hour, except for its weird funereal side lounge, which looked like a bar in a bowling alley. Mr. Donahue had pulled over in Round Rock to let Mr. Tillotson know they were running late, and he’d agreed to keep everything out on steam trays.