Public Apology: In Which a Man Grapples With a Lifetime of Regret, One Incident at a Time

by Dave Bry

  “Yeah, they’re all right,” he said. “Good band.”

  “They rule,” I said, suppressing the urge to qualify the statement by explaining how the Scorpions ruled slightly more than Golden Earring or Saga or Krokus in my estimation, but slightly less than Rush or the Who or Zeppelin. Also suppressing a smile because I had braces. And I was trying to be cool. But still, it was a big moment for me. Andrew must have been eighteen or nineteen or even twenty.

  I suppose that’s about how old you were that summer, too. Though to me, at the time, all camp counselors seemed like full-grown, super-secure, and comfortable adults who knew everything. I remember in particular how you would tuck your acoustic guitar under your right breast at the start of every lesson my bunkmate Chad and I signed up to take with you. Like it was nothing, like you didn’t even notice doing it, sitting on a tree trunk stool in the little camper-built lean-to gazebo thing we’d use for shade. While I tried and failed not to stare. You had pretty large breasts. I was thirteen.

  The goal of the lessons, which were the first such lessons either Chad or I had ever taken, was to be able to play a single song, Neil Young’s “Old Man,” by the end of the summer. We were supposed to play it in front of the rest of the camp at a commencement ceremony talent show.

  It’s a great song, “Old Man,” and you taught us the lyrics, which are about youth and aging and loneliness and perspective. It’s hard to learn to play the guitar, though. Harder than I’d thought it would be. The camp provided guitars for Chad and me to practice with; you’d said we should sit in the lean-to for an hour a day and go over whatever chord you’d taught us in the previous lesson. But I could barely reach my fingers around the guitar’s neck; forming even a single chord that sounded like any of the ones you strummed seemed like an absolute impossibility. There are six different chords in “Old Man.”

  So I went to the lean-to to practice like twice. Hidden Valley was a big camp, on hundreds of acres of property. There was a private lake with floating docks and canoes, tennis courts, a soccer field, a ropes course—even a corral where they kept llamas. As it turned out, there was much more fun stuff to do with an hour of free time than struggle one’s fingers into the unnatural position required for an A major seventh. Sneaking off into the woods and making out with Wendy Siegler, for example.

  Do you remember Wendy Siegler? I doubt it, unless she was one of the campers in your cabin. Which I don’t think she was. But I can’t be sure. I can’t actually remember which cabin Wendy was in. The fourteen-year-old girls’ cabin, I suppose; Wendy was a year older than I was. But it’s strange, I don’t have a mental image of her cabin. And you’d think I would have been there. Even if I was perhaps not allowed inside because of rules, I would have seen the outside, known where it was. It’s funny what you remember and what you don’t, right? Certain things about that camp come back as clear as photographs. My cabin was a log cabin right next to the ropes course set up in the pine trees. It had a slanted roof, and a second-story loft where the counselors, Andrew and Matt Weiss, slept, and the door was near a wide plate glass window looking out at the path past the tennis courts toward the main red farmhouse. Or the shanty-style hot tub deck, where Matt taught an elective called ’60s Rock. Taught seems like a funny word for it; he’d play tapes on a giant boom box and talk to us about the music. (Man, you counselors must have smoked so much pot at that camp, huh?) But actually, it was teaching. And I learned a lot. I can remember exactly where I was standing when he told me the story of the time the reporters were asking Bob Dylan about the meaning of his protest songs and Dylan said, “I’ve always thought of myself more as a song-and-dance man.” I could draw a picture of it on a piece of paper. Other things, though, are hazy. Where was the lake in relation to the llama pens? Other things, gone. Where was Wendy’s cabin that summer? What did it look like?

  There’s a pretty good chance you wouldn’t remember Wendy even if she was in your cabin, I bet. She was a shy, quiet, short girl with curly blonde hair cut into a pyramid shape above her shoulders. Sort of like Madonna’s in the “Borderline” video. She had braces.

  She was cute, though. And Matt Weiss told me that I should ask her out because she had told him she wanted a boyfriend. And he knew, I guess, that I wanted a girlfriend since my friends Chad and Fernando and Geoff had gotten girlfriends. He had mentioned me to her and she had seemed receptive, he said. So after the big soccer game—you remember how the soccer team played a game every summer against that other camp? I forget the name. And how we tied them that year, one to one, because Peter Martin scored that beautiful goal near the end of the game? That long, arcing shot from the right corner? You must. Everyone who was at Hidden Valley that summer must remember that. A few years ago—well, like fifteen years ago—I was out at a bar with some friends of mine from college, and there was this guy there, a friend of a friend of one of my friends, and he looked very familiar, and so I asked whether or not we might know each other. And he said that he was thinking the same thing. To try to figure it out, we went through where we had grown up and gone to school and where we’d worked in the city, and finally he said, “Did you by any chance go to a camp in Maine called Hidden Valley?” That was it; it turned out he was in my cabin that summer. And as soon as we’d put together this small-world coincidence, the first thing he said to me was, “Peter Martin’s goal!” It was a major big deal, Peter Martin’s goal, and the fact that we played this other camp to a tie, because we had lost to them like thirty summers in a row, because they were an all-boy sports camp and we were a coed hippie camp that raised llamas and had girls playing on our soccer team. Well, I had played in that game, too. I hadn’t played as well as Peter Martin. But I played fairly well. Despite being short and also slow and not particularly strong, I was actually pretty good at soccer at that point. I played the whole game at right fullback, defense, and I blocked a corner kick just in front of our goal with my head. (I don’t imagine you remember that.) So at the end of the game, when those of us who had played were mobbed by the rest of our camp, and it was all cheering and smiles and hand slapping and hugs, when I saw Wendy Siegler, I gave her a kiss right there on the crowded field and asked her if she wanted to go out with me. She said yes. This remains the single most heroic moment of my entire life.

  The next night after dinner, Wendy and I went for a walk in the woods and sat on a bridge that went over a stream and talked. And for the first time outside the auspices of a game of spin the bottle or truth or dare or seven minutes in heaven, I kissed someone with my tongue. We kissed for a long time, taking breaks to breathe, and shift positions, and stare at each other and giggle. We both had braces. It was her first time kissing this way, too.

  Walking back across the soccer field toward our cabins, we held hands and it was like the sky was staying as light as it was as late as it was just so we could get back to our cabins and not get in trouble. Like we were in our own magic bubble, and everything was made just for us.

  “Wow.”

  “Wow.”

  “I’ve never really done that before.”

  “Neither have I.”

  I heard the grass swishing under my sneakers, but I had the distinct and very powerful sensation that my feet weren’t touching the ground. I told her.

  “It feels like I’m floating,” I said, and my own voice sounded different, like it was coming from somewhere deeper in my head than usual, almost echoey. “It’s like I’m literally walking on air.”

  “I know,” she said, her voice sounding dazed in its own way—swept up in the same rush. “Me, too. I’ve never really felt like this before.”

  The feeling was very much like being on drugs. Though I wouldn’t have known that then as I had never tried any drugs. The effect of endorphins, I guess. I hadn’t the slightest sense of inhibition. Or nervousness. For the first time in years, I didn’t feel nervous. It was as if giant fingers had tamped down inside me on a guitar string that had been quivering for as long as I could remember. Suddenl
y I was calm.

  “Is this what love feels like?”

  “Maybe it is.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  Needless to say, we devoted the rest of that summer to finding opportunities to steal away and recapture that euphoria. We got caught plenty of times, off in the woods or lying in a hammock somewhere when we were supposed to be at dinner or a camp meeting or doing some activity like practicing guitar. We never got in too much trouble. The staff at the camp was cool; you guys must have been used to that stuff from thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds. In fact, the assistant director of the camp that summer was Jim Newman, a family friend who’d known my father since they were kids. (They’d gone to Hidden Valley together, actually, in the 1950s.) When word of my delinquency reached him, he took to scolding me, but gently, with half a smile and reminiscences of my father’s similar exploits. He found us himself once, on a bench on the trail that led to the lake, and marched us back to the dining hall with a smirk that said, “Wait till I tell your dad about this.” My heart swelled in my chest.

  Remember on one of the last nights of summer, when there was a meteor shower, and the camp director let us all sleep out on the soccer field to watch? I’ll certainly never forget it. There must have been 250 of us out there. We clustered off as we wanted to, my friends and I claiming a patch of grass as far away from any counselors as we could get. Wendy and I zipped our sleeping bags together.

  We lay on our backs and looked up at more stars than I’d ever seen in one sky. You could see layers and strata, stars behind stars, the canopy making a dome above the treetops surrounding the field. It felt like we were in heaven, and we kissed a lot and cracked jokes with Chad and Claudia and Fernando and Becca and Geoff and Stephanie, who were lying nearby in the dark. Then the meteors started, brighter streaks of light appearing out of nowhere and shooting off in all different directions, a new one every few seconds, and we oohed and aahed along with the rest of the chorus on the field. It was like a fireworks show. But as the hours passed, the frequency of flashes tapered off, and the stars faded, and the voices and laughter got quieter and quieter, until the sound of our own hoarse, increasingly heavy breathing was all we could hear.

  We’d stopped kissing by then. Neither of us had said anything for a long time. Wendy had undone my shorts, and pulled down the elastic band of my underpants, and was rubbing me roughly, sometimes against the metal teeth of my open zipper. It didn’t feel very good, but I wasn’t about to stop her. Not even for the second it would have taken to adjust my clothes. I wasn’t going to risk breaking whatever strange spell we were under that was allowing what was happening to be happening.

  I had slid my hand slowly, tentatively, centimeter by centimeter, beneath the waistline of her sweatpants and that of her underwear, expecting to be stopped any second. But she didn’t stop me and instead reciprocated, and now I was being granted tactile access to heretofore secret contours and textures: the tight, scratchy curls of hair; the slope of the firm but bulbous mound; the surprisingly vertical angle of entry. The wetness—different from, slicker than sweat.

  Eventually, she withdrew her hand, and I withdrew mine, and with a soft, quick kiss on the lips, but still no words, we turned away from each other.

  I had no idea what time it was. Midnight? Two a.m.? Four? It was pitch-dark, and in my excitement and lack of sleep, I’d entered a strange mental state. Hyperaware of certain sensations, I found myself disoriented and confused about other aspects of my situation. Which way were we laying? In what direction were our heads pointed? How far away were we from the woods? From our friends? From the nearest counselor? Was I still wearing my socks, or was that just the lining of the sleeping bag? And of course, part of me suspected that this was all just the luckiest dream anyone had ever dreamed.

  So you understand, I’m sure. No matter how badly I wanted to learn to play the guitar that summer, no matter how good a teacher you were, or how cool and comfortable and easygoing, no matter how great a song “Old Man” is—and it is such a great song, and I think of you, sitting under that lean-to gazebo thing, every time I hear it, to this day—there were more powerful forces at work. We ended up not performing in front of the rest of the camp at the end-of-summer talent show.

  Later that year, after I got home from camp and school started, I convinced my parents to buy me an electric guitar. I took lessons from a guy named Chaz at Red Bank Music for two years. But he couldn’t make me practice, either. I made a lot of noise in my room, played with feedback, bashed out the riffs to “Smoke on the Water,” and “Iron Man,” and Neil’s “Hey Hey, My My.” But I never did learn how to make a proper chord.

  Dear Mrs. and Mr. Carr,

  Sorry for stealing a six-pack out of the fridge in your garage.

  After all, you were nice enough to host a graduation party for our class at your house next to the Arbours’ house on Point Road. Your daughter Tammy and I had just finished eighth grade, just graduated from Markham Place School together. We were supposed to sing John Lennon’s “Imagine” at the ceremony, which was held by the gazebo on the hill by the baseball fields. Our music teacher, Mrs. Bloomberg, had taught us the words, playing along on her piano. But there was controversy: certain parents, or perhaps members of the administration, didn’t like the part about imagining that there was no heaven and no religion. So we didn’t sing it. We sang something else. “Climb Every Mountain,” maybe?

  Your party was a couple days later. I picked out my nicest shirt to wear, a white polo shirt that was probably not actually Polo, as I would have liked it to have been, but more likely just Izod and maybe even just Le Tigre—my parents, to their credit, having refused to spend large amounts of money on clothes that I would soon spill pizza sauce on.

  You had a pool and a big long lawn sloping down to the reeds by the river, and you’d set up tables on the patio with chips and soda and a six-foot sub from Danny’s. It was a warm June evening on the suburban Jersey shore and the air smelled like honeysuckle.

  We were all super-psyched, Tammy and I and our classmates, having just gotten out of grade school forever. I had not enjoyed the past few years at Markham Place. I was not so popular. On one of the last days of school, when we all got our yearbooks and people started asking each other to sign them, I mustered up the courage to ask Liz Dilascia, one of the most popular girls in our class, to sign mine. “Dear David,” she wrote, “I don’t know you very well, but I know you’re very nice! Have a great summer!” This made me wish I had not been able to muster up that courage. Not that that was Liz Dilascia’s fault. She was just being honest. (What was she supposed to write, “Give me a call some time?”) She didn’t sneer when I asked or say, “Gag me with a spoon!” or anything like that. Our class had gone on an overnight trip to Washington, DC, a week or so before then—one that served to bring us together as a group more than I had expected. On the bus ride, in the hotel, at the Lincoln Memorial, and the US Mint, kids talked to and laughed with kids they hadn’t talked to or laughed with through eight years of sharing a lunchroom. I guess everyone was really happy to be graduating.

  Immediately after the ceremony at the gazebo, the school itself had thrown us a party in the gym of the lower-grades grade school, Point Road. There was a DJ and pizza and cake with pink frosting so sweet that it hurt your teeth. We all went crazy to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” and shouted the “Hey! Get laid! Get fucked!” ad-lib parts we were supposed to shout when the DJ played Billy Idol’s version of “Mony Mony.” And we were moved to a level of genuine compassion and emotion that felt foreign to fourteen-year-olds when Martin Torbert, who was in a wheelchair because of the muscular dystrophy he would die from six years later, slow danced with his girlfriend to Survivor’s “The Search Is Over.” Then someone had the idea that Ted Trainor and Matt McCabe and Dave Murgio and I should do a lip sync performance of the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up.” Ted and Matt and Dave were all more popular than I was, but I w
as known as a music nut, and the Stones were my favorite band; this is the reason I was included. Dave and I argued for a minute over who would get to be Keith Richards, but since Dave was more popular, and since he said I would know the words better, he won and I agreed to be Mick Jagger.

  I was a little nervous when the music started, looking out at the faces of my classmates who I knew didn’t know me very well and who I feared didn’t like me very much. But everyone was smiling and obviously into it, so I got into it, too. I danced like Mick and put my hands on my hips and threw my arms back and stuck out my lips and pouted as I mouthed the words into the imaginary microphone I held in my hand. I had his moves memorized from watching the famous video of him singing this song onstage in the Philadelphia Eagles jersey during the Tattoo You tour from a few years before. I had practiced them plenty into the mirror in my bedroom. I strutted like a rooster and leaned back-to-back against Dave, just like Mick and Keith did, when we harmonized on the “You make a grown man cry-aye-aye” parts.

  Everyone screamed and cheered and mobbed us at the end of the song, just like we were real rock stars, just like what I wanted most in the world to be. Well, they mobbed Ted and Matt and Dave more than they mobbed me. But as things settled down, and people went back to get a last slice of pizza or piece of cake with painfully sweet pink frosting, Liz Ryan, who was pretty and popular but also a bit shy, came up to me and smiled and quietly said, “You were a good Mick Jagger.”

  So I was feeling like a new and different kind of person as I walked out onto your pool patio in my white Le Tigre polo shirt. A better kind of person, one who stood up straighter and might have greeted people with a joke because he was not afraid they would think it stupid and laugh at him and not with him. In my ridiculous fourteen-year-old mind-set, I saw myself on the verge of crossing over the imaginary but all-important line dividing my peer group into two clearly defined halves. The notion of popularity, the difference between being a loser and being cool, seems so vague in a quarter century’s worth of retrospect. Such a thing must be fluid and open to various interpretations, right? But that line seemed so stark as I saw it. So unbending and so desperately crucial. It makes me sad to think about it now.