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

by Dave Bry

  But that was my reality back then. And I remember breathing deep that night, walking out past the pool onto the grass and looking up into the sky and feeling like I was starting to get it a little more—the mysterious social codes that had flummoxed me for so long. It was nearing the end of the party, and I turned and saw all the kids in my class gathered on your patio, faces glowing in the lights mounted on the back of your house. It seemed like everyone was wearing white. Some of the girls had started dancing, which made me proud, because the music playing was a mix tape I’d brought. I’d made it special for the night and filled it with songs carefully chosen to make people like me more. Party Songs! I titled it. I included “Start Me Up,” of course, to remind Liz Ryan and everyone else of how like Mick Jagger I was. “Let’s Go Crazy” and “Mony Mony” were on there. And “Shout” from the toga-party scene in Animal House and the Romantics’ “What I Like About You.” And “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and “Joy to the World.” The Big Chill had come out that year, and its popularity felt a little like a conspiracy, carried out by those of your and my parents’ generation, to get us kids to like your music and not listen to rap. (That’s pretty much what it was, right?)

  Soon after returning to the patio, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Jason Appio, who whispered that I should come with him. He’d found something I should see. We cut through the crowd and slipped through a back door that led into your garage. Waiting there, in the dark, huddled near a refrigerator against the house’s side wall, were a few other guys from our class. Colin Dodds and Eddie Griffin, I think. Jerome Connelly and Mike Scaccia. All more popular than I was; but again, that was not a difficult status to attain. And I was catching up.

  “Check this out,” Jason said.

  He looked around to make sure no one was coming and opened the refrigerator. A hushed buzz arose from the group. There was beer inside.

  He closed it quickly, and we all stood there, bouncing on the soles of our feet. Jason looked at me. “What do you think?”

  I knew what he meant. I knew why he had come and gotten me. Earlier that year, at Mindy Gallop’s bat mitzvah at Temple B’nai Israel in Rumson, after the ceremony, while Mindy and her family stood in the receiving line outside the main sanctuary, and we were all left to mingle out by the tables spread with the cheese and grapes and crackers and wine they always had out in the lobby area, before heading to the reception, I had been the one to take a bottle and hide behind a couple taller boys and pour the little plastic shot glasses of Manischewitz that counted, for me at least, and probably for Jason and a bunch of the rest of us, as our first non-adult-sanctioned sips of alcohol.

  It wasn’t really a question what any of us thought about your beer. We all wanted to take it, if only for the adventure. The question was who would be the thief.

  The fridge was opened again; its interior light glowed in our faces. The six-pack beckoned. The sounds of the party, the nice party you were nice enough to throw for us all, came in muffled from the patio outside.

  “Grab it.”

  “Grab it.”

  “You grab it.”

  I grabbed it. The fridge closed silently. We made a beeline to the door on the other side of the garage. I held the cans by the plastic rings that kept them together, held them as low against my leg as I could.

  Outside, though, behind the bushes near your driveway, I held them up high for the other guys to see. Then I pulled them out of the packaging and handed them out. Booty, bounty, proof of my derring-do. I forget what kind of beer it was.

  “I told you,” Jason said to the others as we stifled our giggling and popped the tabs. I was catching up fast.

  Of course, in retrospect, I was falling behind in some other ways. Important ways. My willingness to excuse myself of anything in the name of being cool and more popular, for example. I went into this knowingly and aware, accepting it on the principle that desperate times call for desperate measures. And that poor, jerky behavior was okay because I was a teenager and that’s what I had read and heard and seen that teenagers did.

  It’s not the biggest deal in the world, I know. But I owe you a six-pack. I think I left that mix tape at your house, though. Maybe you still have it. Maybe you still listen to the Motown songs on there from The Big Chill. I hope you do.

  Dear Matt Weiss,

  Sorry for sneaking out of the cabin while you were asleep.

  This was late in the summer of 1985, a week or so after the camp took that day-trip to the lobster docks on the coast, and you and I found a place with a TV that was broadcasting Live Aid and sat there and watched for a few hours and marveled that Phil Collins was actually flying, at supersonic speed, on the Concorde, across the Atlantic Ocean, to get stadiums full of people to do the big drum part to “In the Air Tonight” in London and Philadelphia on the same day. And how sludgy and out of tune Led Zeppelin sounded. Remember that?

  We were both total music nuts. And good friends, in my eyes at least, despite our age difference—I was fourteen, you had just started college that year—and the fact that you were a counselor and I was a camper. I’d been in your cabin the previous summer. You and your friend Matt Palmer were widely regarded as the coolest counselors on the staff—this despite the fact that you wore Philadelphia Eagles jerseys and some sort of Greek tunic and sometimes a dashiki. Your favorite band was Jethro Tull. You had named our cabin Gonzo and decorated it with Doonesbury comic strips, with the explicit intent of introducing us to Hunter S. Thompson and New Journalism. I was so psyched to have been assigned to you again.

  Late one night, during the first week of camp, you’d come in and woken me up with a flashlight. You were coming back from a night off, and you and a couple of the other counselors had gone into town, where you had bought a copy of a National Lampoon spoof of Rolling Stone magazine. You stepped up on the ladder of my bunk and opened the pages next to my pillow. “You’ve got to see this,” you whispered, keeping quiet not to wake anyone else.

  We read through the whole magazine, which you had already read through once before, holding our hands over our mouths to stifle our laughter. It was really funny. They had a fake interview with Jerry Garcia, where he said he was looking forward to taking part in the recording of “We Are the World” and asked the reporter if he knew when that was happening. The song had been out for months already, of course—an annoyingly ubiquitous worldwide smash that had gathered, for its making, pretty much every major American music star of the moment to the highest-profile recording session Hollywood had ever seen. The joke being that Jerry Garcia was too old and out of it to have been invited. And also too old and out of it to realize this.

  “I had to wake you up,” you said. “I knew you would appreciate this.” I wonder if you knew how good it would feel for me to hear that, to know I’d been chosen as the one kid allowed to stay up late and share a private laugh with a counselor, especially a counselor as cool and universally beloved as you were. I think you might have.

  I had been having a terrible start to that summer. Wendy Siegler had broken up with me on the very first day of camp. Immediately, not ten minutes after I’d stepped off the bus. My heart had fluttered when I found her face in the crowd that had gathered to greet new arrivals. I’d been waiting to see her for almost a year. But when I approached her, when I leaned in to give her a kiss, she stopped me and said we had to talk. We walked a short way over to a picnic table near a pine tree, and she smiled a weird smile. There were still plenty of people near us. “I’m breaking up with you,” she said. Just like that.

  I don’t remember what I said. We talked only for a short time. She was cold and clipped with her words. And, in fact, seemed to be taking pleasure in them. Like she was acting out a scene she’d been practicing—and looking forward to. There was a gleam in her eye. I forget her reasoning, or whether she even offered any, and whether I argued or asked any questions. I tried hard not to cry as she walked away back to her friends, who had been watching.

  The
breakup came as a huge and brutal surprise to me. It shouldn’t have, but it did. Wendy and I had stayed in touch over the phone since the summer before. (She lived in Manhattan.) For the first few months, our conversations bubbled with the giddy excitement of young love. We talked about the start of the school year—she had started high school, a big scary deal—and about mutual camp friends we’d heard from, letters we’d received. We told each other that we missed each other and made plans to try to see each other that never materialized. Still, it was great.

  Simply having a real, live, actual girlfriend, even one that I never saw, counted as an important victory in my mind. Even if my success at camp didn’t translate directly into coolness and higher social status at home (and, of course, it didn’t), I could imagine now, if only just slightly, what it might feel like to be a popular guy like Mark McCarthy, making out with Suzie Lambert in front of everybody at the school dance.

  On top of that, though, the pleasure of having a girlfriend was enhanced, as ridiculous as it seems now, by the fact that this particular girlfriend’s name was Wendy. I attached profound metaphysical significance to this. Not because another girl I knew, a girl with whom I’d once danced at a school dance, was also named Wendy, Wendy Metzger. That was mere coincidence. Rather, it was because (and I’m sure you understand this) to a certain kind of classic-rock-radio-inundated person from New Jersey, one who has most of the lyrics to Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run album memorized, the name Wendy is synonymous with an idealized sort of romantic glory. If you are that kind of person from New Jersey, and you are thirteen years old, Wendy is a girl with whom you want to die on the street tonight in an everlasting kiss. And then you say, “Chuh!”

  The fact that my first girlfriend’s name was Wendy seemed like nothing short of destiny manifest. It was like Bruce was singing my story, and surely, Wendy and I were meant to be together. Unsurprisingly, such faith in rock ’n’ roll fantasy occluded my view of the situation. As the year had passed, as summer faded into memory, and the pressures of the here and now took precedence, our conversations had become less frequent and more stilted. By that spring, the times when we did talk, Wendy sounded like a very different person than she had the summer before. (And who wouldn’t? Considering her age and the fact that this was her freshman year of high school. And that I was still in eighth grade. Like Howard Jones said, in one of the highlights of Live Aid that we watched on TV that day at the lobster docks, “No one is to blame.”) I know I noticed her blasé tone, her quickness to get off the phone. How much less friendly she’d become, how much less lovey-dovey. I was confused, but I chalked it up to the vast mystery of female behavior, of adolescent behavior or human behavior in general. To the vast mystery of the world. What did I understand about anything then? The system of signs and superstitions offered sparing revelation, brief glimpses of the truth. I clutched at what I believed to be fate and moved forward in blind hope. And, despite all the evidence pointing to the fact that I would not be needing them, bought a pack of condoms to bring to camp.

  It didn’t seem that outlandish, bringing condoms, considering where Wendy and I had left off the previous year. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to end up in a situation unprepared and have had a lack of planning—a simple $3.50 purchase or whatever a three-pack cost back then—impede an opportunity to achieve what had already become the single most anticipated event of my young life. The one thing that I prayed to god for. (To the extent to which I believed in god, which was not very much.) Please, dear god, I prayed. If you do in fact exist, please, please, do not let me die without knowing what it feels like to have sex.

  Except that it was not at all a simple purchase. It was excruciating. The Saturday before leaving for camp, I rode my bike to Krauser’s, our local pharmacy, and spent a very clichéd-feeling half hour beneath the overbright neon lights, collecting a range of inventory I did not want or need, and making a pile on the counter at the cash register, before taking a deep breath and lowering my voice and asking the clerk would she please retrieve a packet of Trojans from where they were displayed on a rack behind her. I was expecting her to laugh in my face. (“Ha! These are for you?”) But she didn’t.

  A couple hours later, after I’d gotten home and hidden the condoms inside a balled-up pair of socks at the bottom of the duffel bag I was packing, my father called me into his room.

  “I got something for you to take with you to camp,” he said.

  I waited, and he opened up a brown paper bag. From a pharmacy.

  “Your mother and I don’t want you to be having sex yet,” he said. “But I know you have a girlfriend you’re going to see. And I know people are having sex at younger ages than they used to. And if you do have sex, I want you to be safe about it.”

  He pulled a different three-pack of condoms out of the bag and handed it me.

  “Oh, god! Jeez, Dad!”

  Mostly joking, buoyed by a wave of pride I hadn’t expected, I scolded him, both for embarrassing me with this horrible issuance of responsible parenting and for not doing so earlier before I had blown thirty dollars in distractive purchases and suffered through the prior humiliation at Krauser’s. He smiled. It was actually a nice moment.

  So I had brought a total of six condoms to camp with me, in the hope that I might need them to keep from getting Wendy Siegler pregnant that summer. A hope that, once it was so decisively expunged, looked horribly, ridiculously hubristic in retrospect. (“Ha! Those were for me?”) The image of the two unopened packets, hidden at the bottom of the duffel in the cubby, gave me an extra bit of pain those first couple nights of camp, a twinge of self-reflective pathos, as I lay sleepless in my sleeping bag on that top bunk in Gonzo cabin, feeling like I’d had my chest kicked in.

  You were the only person I really talked to about it. I tightened my throat against tears as I told you—in an otherwise empty cabin; I’d feigned illness to skip out of some activity—about what had happened when I got off the bus. You had already heard. You knew Wendy. (You had introduced us the summer before. I’m sure you don’t remember that. It’s funny how a shared experience can be such an auxiliary blip in one person’s life while accumulating such major narrative weight in the other person’s.) And you knew her friends, and girls talk about these things. You said you’d told Wendy that she was being a bitch. But there was not a lot you could do except offer me sympathy and tell me a story of when you’d had your heart broken by a girl, too. And share a wincing smile when I confessed the story of the condoms. I appreciated your honesty. “It hurts,” you said. “And the only thing that makes it better is time. But it eventually goes away.”

  You were right. And in the way that summer days can seem to encompass weeks, and weeks months, the heartache receded quickly, and I fell into the swing of soccer and swimming in the lake and, always a favorite part of my day, listening to records and talking about music with you and the six or seven other kids who’d signed up for your ’60s Rock elective. In a session dedicated to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, you played us the song “Ohio” and told us the story of how it was recorded: in May 1970, two weeks after the army had shot four students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University. How Neil Young had brought a magazine article about the incident to the studio, with the famous image of the girl kneeling over the dead body. How David Crosby started crying as he was singing. You could hear it at the end of the song. “Why?” he wails. “Why?” We learned a lot in that elective.

  My friends, too, helped make for a faster recovery. Chad had not come back that summer, but Fernando had from Spain and Geoff from California. And I’d made a new buddy, Jon, who was in our cabin. And the girls, too. Despite Wendy having dumped me, the core group of us from the summer before remained intact, so I stayed friends with Stephanie and Becca and Michelle, who was Jon’s sister, and Christina, who was Fernando’s sister and who was shy and didn’t speak English so well, even though she was a year older, but was tan and blonde and radiantly beautiful, and would smile and lau
gh along with whatever was being said, sometimes with the help of a brotherly translation. Wendy was often around but didn’t talk much to me. Soon enough, I didn’t mind.

  There was that one time, though, when I had a heavy whopping doozy of a freak-out. I would think you do remember this because I scared everybody and ended up sleeping in the infirmary for the night. I still don’t know what happened for sure. Best as anyone could tell, I had some sort of psychotic episode; that’s the way my parents always termed it afterward. They were both psychologists, my parents.

  It was around the middle of summer, two or three weeks into camp. There was some social event in the dining hall. A movie or a dance party or something. And then a big bonfire by the lake. I don’t remember exactly when I started to feel out of sorts. But at a certain point, around dusk I guess, as it started to get dark, I was gripped by the idea that I had to get away from the camp. I wanted to run away. To steal off to the road through the woods and hitch a ride somewhere, anywhere else. I don’t have a strong sense of why, except that it had to do with the idea that we, the campers, the kids, were being imprisoned. That we needed to break for freedom. I remember being sickened by the sight of couples cuddling at the social, too. So I suppose the whole thing might have been a delayed symptom of my broken heart; but it didn’t feel like that. I was angry, not sad. And Wendy was not in my thoughts at all, not consciously at least. Mostly, it was the notion of freedom. I repeated the word to myself, a weird mantra. I needed to get free.

  I left the dining hall in a fever and stomped around by myself for a while, formulating a plan of escape. But I needed a partner. I was certainly not brave enough to walk off into the woods of Maine by myself. So I went down to the beach on the lake. The fire was burning high, and a crowd had gathered, sitting on the sand, and one of the counselors was leading a sing-along with an acoustic guitar. (Was it you? I don’t think so. But you did play guitar, right? You used to play “Alice’s Restaurant” on our bus trips. You knew the whole thing by heart, the whole rambling, thirty-five-minute story. Or did Matt Palmer play the guitar while you just led the singing?)