by Dave Bry
HIGH SCHOOL
(Or when being drunk becomes the excuse for everything, even though it is never a legitimate excuse for anything.)
Dear BMX Bike Rider,
I’m sorry for shunning you after you got up in front of everyone and cried at the personal growth workshop our parents sent us to in Philadelphia.
We were around the same age, fifteen. I had recently started getting into trouble at home, caught drinking for the first time and lying to my parents. They were psychologists, my parents, former hippies from the ’60s. (“Flower children” has always been my mom’s preferred term.) They were pretty permissive as disciplinarians and understanding in terms of expectations. My dad used to tell me, “Every generation of teenagers thinks they’re discovering sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll for the first time. And no one ever is.”
But in the ’80s, they were into a lot of this New Agey personal-development stuff. I don’t think they ever did EST per se, but they were in a group called Marriage Encounter that was based on the same ideas, and they’d been going to these Insight Transformational Seminars. It was cool for them; they felt like they got a lot out of it. But it was really very definitively not my thing. So when, in lieu of a harsher punishment and in the expressed hope that it would help us communicate better as a family, they signed me up for the youth version, Teen Insight, and insisted I attend, it was one of the times I considered running away from home.
I imagine you can relate. You did back then. You were a skate rat. And, you said, a professionally sponsored BMX “freestyle” rider. You’d brought your bike with you, in fact, and impressed everyone with what were certainly professional-looking stunts—bunny hopping down steps, doing a handstand off the seat while balancing on one wheel, that sort of thing. You wore your bangs hanging down over your eyes, and a wiseass sneer, and some very punk rock shredder gear that I realized was infinitely cooler than the Brine Lacrosse “Chicks with Sticks” T-shirt that I was wearing.
It was called the Awakening Heart Seminar for god’s sake. (I can still taste the puke in my mouth.) But there we were, Friday night, sitting on the floor in the beige conference room of some corporate park hotel outside Philadelphia, where we were encouraged by a man and a woman with voices like easy-listening radio DJs to take part in first-day-of-camp get-to-know-you exercises with thirty or so other teenagers we’d never met before. There were hand-drawn posters and signs on the walls, daily affirmation–type slogans written in thick colored marker. “If it takes all night, that’ll be all right. If I can get you to smile before I leave.” Fucking Jackson Browne.
I was very surprised to see how receptive many of the other kids were. Some had done the seminar before, I learned, or ones like it. Many of them, apparently, were there not under duress but of their own volition. And an astounding number of them leaped right in with the sharing and the singing and the hugging and expressing. It didn’t take long at all to get them to smile.
We were smiling, too, after a while. And laughing. You and me and a small group of what I considered to be normal teenagers had taken to making jokes at the ridiculousness of all of this—often at the expense of the leaders and those so willing to participate. I remember the faces but none of the names. There was the lanky guy with the fake front tooth that he could flip in and out with his tongue, who wore a denim jacket with the cover to the Smiths’ Meat Is Murder album painted on the back. The black guy, who I think was the only black person there, with the peach-fuzz mustache. And two girls, a shorter one with curly dark hair and a taller one with glasses. The tall girl was sour and sexy like Catherine Keener, and I’m sure we all fell in love with her immediately. I did anyway. We sat at the far edge of the assembly, this crew, and cracked ourselves up in an enjoyably mean-spirited way. Under our breath, of course. But it was surely obvious to everybody what was going on. We didn’t make much of an effort to hide our disdain.
It was a horrible sort of prison. The hours passed as slowly as hours can. There was great pressure to participate, to open up and share our feelings. But the six of us supported each other in holding out. At one point, I was surrounded by a crowd of the other kids, the ones with awakened hearts, who were urging me to take part in one of the exercises—talk about my fears, my innermost wishes, or make a list of words to describe my parents. Someone literally asked me, “Why are you hiding inside this shell?” It was a difficult moment. They’d backed me into a corner, like in a zombie movie. I looked out over their heads, frantic, searching for help. When I spotted you and the Smiths jacket guy standing off to the side, snickering and making eyes at me like, “Ha-ha—better you than me,” it was exactly the type of sympathy I needed to get through. Thanks.
The leaders had asked that we not use drugs or alcohol for the duration of the seminar as that could interfere with the sensitive personal growth and development processes that were supposed to be taking place. So of course, during Saturday’s lunch break, we got a ride into West Philadelphia with an older kid with a driver’s license and his parents’ BMW to buy a bag of pot and a case of beer and had a really fun party that night in one of the girls’ rooms in the hotel. It was like camp it turned out, even for those of us who didn’t go along with the official program, in that we got very close very quickly.
We were all bleary come Sunday. Goofy and even more obnoxious for our lack of sleep. Maybe that’s why things got weird. We were back in the conference room, sitting on the floor in our spot in the back, cracking jokes while people took turns standing at a podium, talking about what they’d learned about themselves so far. It was an extremely emotional scene by that point; there was a huge amount of hugging and holding hands and stroking of hair and stuff—among the others, I mean.
I can understand how it could happen, a fifteen-year-old kid, hungover, in that strangely charged atmosphere—but still, it came as a major shock to suddenly see you up on the stage at the front of the room. You’d been sitting right next to me. I hadn’t even noticed you getting up.
You started hesitantly, mumbling words and hiding behind your bangs. But then your shoulders fell and you let out a loud sob, and then you were bawling and shaking, talking about how much you loved your dad but you couldn’t tell him, about how you felt judged. You cried and talked for a long time. The leaders hugged you when you stepped down. A lot of people hugged you. Regardless of how cultish and after-school special it all was, I think this was maybe a good thing for you.
Needless to say, it was uncomfortable for all of us when you came back to where we were sitting. You looked at us apologetically—you knew the rules. One of the girls put her hand on your shoulder. But none of us said anything, and the other guys were like me in avoiding eye contact with you.
You didn’t sit with us for long. There was some other activity soon, and for the rest of the day, you joined the others, the participators, in more hugging and crying and stroking hair and talking about feelings. As soon as you were out of earshot, we talked about how weird it was, how we had lost you, and so abruptly with no warning. We made fun of you, as I’m sure you were aware. But I doubt that bothered you. You didn’t look sad. You looked relieved. In fact, you were beaming.
Dear Judy Gailhouse,
Sorry for letting your children watch The Amityville Horror.
This was at the house on Long Beach Island that you and your husband, Michael, and my parents and a bunch of your other friends rented every summer. I shouldn’t even have been there. I didn’t want to be there. I was not supposed to be there. I was supposed to be at home, at my parents’ house, where I had been given the responsibility of staying by myself for the week.
Of course, I had a party on the very first night. I’d had unsupervised parties before—over winter weekends during the school year, when my parents were away skiing—and been able to clean up well enough before they returned to avoid getting caught. But this was in the summer, and the party got bigger and more out of control than the others had. A door got broken; Kool-Aid was made with beer on
the kitchen floor; a metal fork was microwaved, causing a flash of light and a booming explosion that knocked the microwave off the counter onto the Kool-Aid-covered floor. (Amazingly, it still worked when I set it back up and plugged it back in. But I’ve wondered for years whether or not this might have had anything to do with the fact that both my parents got cancer later. Probably not. We lived in New Jersey; chances are they both would have gotten cancer anyway.) Bottles broke in the pool. Peanut butter somehow ended up all over the living room curtains. No one died, that was lucky. But after spending a sad, hungover next day trying to make repairs and hide evidence, I realized that I was going to have to fess up this time. I called my parents, who were understandably unhappy to hear the news, and my dad drove home to pick me up and bring me down to Long Beach Island, where I was to not leave the house for the rest of the week.
That hour-long car ride was no fun at all. My dad was about as mad as I’d ever made him. But he wasn’t yelling or scolding me. He was not looking at me. He was disgusted. I tried to muster up some disaffected indignation in return, but I couldn’t pull it off. He was right to be angry. I would have liked to be able to say, “God, what’s the big deal?” But I knew what was the big deal.
We drove in silence. South down the Garden State Parkway on a sunny Monday in summer. The trees got pinier the farther we got; the grass at the side of the road turned to sand. After a long while, my father spoke. He told me he understood about thinking that I was old enough to handle things that I couldn’t handle and thinking I knew everything even when I didn’t. He said it hurt him that he couldn’t trust me anymore, but that he even understood that. He understood rebellion. But he said that I was still his son, still living in his house. And if I was going to make his life less pleasant, he would make my life less pleasant. “You got your job and I got mine,” he said.
There was an acknowledgment in the phrase that felt honest, that I appreciated. But it also felt a little bit like good-bye.
The rest of the week was an effective punishment. Anywhere my family was was absolutely the last place I wanted to be at that point in my life. The other kids that were there—your children, my sister, and four or five others—were all at least five years younger than me. My parents were mad at me, but of course, you guys and the other adults weren’t. You gave me some good-natured teasing upon my arrival.
“Why weren’t we invited?” you asked with a smile.
I grumbled something surly, too embarrassed to take anything good-naturedly.
To add insult to injury, I learned that some of you were going up to the roof deck to smoke pot after dinner every night—which had the devastating effect of making me feel jealous of, and less cool than, my parents’ forty-five-year-old friends. I spent most of the week alone in a room reading magazines and listening to LL Cool J’s Radio album. But not even on a big woofer box that I could have played at volumes intended to offend older ears. Just on my Walkman.
One night I was in the TV room, flipping channels to find something to watch, when Sarah Landy and my sister and your two boys, Patrick and Eddie, came in. Sarah was ten or eleven. Patrick must have been eight or so, my sister seven, Eddie five. There was only one TV in the house, so I stayed sitting there and tried to pretend they didn’t exist. It turned out The Amityville Horror was on. I stopped flipping, at least partially in hopes that it might chase them out of the room. I warned them that it was a scary movie. But they stayed and I absolved myself from any responsibility. I wasn’t there to babysit. I was trying to mope.
The kids became transfixed, as kids will do in front of a television, and it was quiet, which I liked. After about half an hour—after the buzzing of the flies, after the statue falling on the priest in the church, after James Brolin sees his face in the fire—little Eddie burst out wailing like an ambulance siren. He was inconsolable, totally freaking out. Sarah got up and led him downstairs.
I knew I’d fucked up, and it occurred to me that I might be hearing more about it, but I was determined to play out what I saw as my role as the blasé no-goodnik. So when you came up to fetch Patrick and my sister, and looked at the screen, and then at me, and said, “Real nice, Dave. Thanks a lot,” I gave you a well-rehearsed “whatever” shrug and turned back to the TV.
So you have my sympathy, as well as an apology. I know I wouldn’t like it if some sullen teenager showed up in the middle of my nice beach vacation and showed my kid that movie. If it’s any consolation, I didn’t sleep well at all that night. I kept seeing James Brolin seeing his face in that fire. That shit is terrifying.
Dear Mr. McCormack,
I’m sorry for rejoicing over the prospect of your hometown being destroyed.
I should never have been in the French 2 class you were teaching in the first place. The teacher who had taught the French 1 class I had taken the previous year had been a sad-sack pushover and either didn’t notice or didn’t care that I had been cheating on pretty much every test he gave, and so awarded me a passing grade even though I hadn’t learned how to say much more than “Je m’appelle David.” Oh, and the words for “to dance” and “to sing,” danser and chanter—for some reason those always stuck in my head.
So that very first day, when you greeted the class in French (and with such a perfect accent—you were actually from France, I was surprised to learn!) and kept talking to us that way, like we were supposed to understand what you were saying, well, I had a pretty good idea that I wasn’t going to be able to bluff my way through for very long. It being the start of a new school year, we students were rambunctious—laughing, joking, still half-fried from summer. You asserted your authority. Standing at the front of the class, not smiling, you spoke to us sternly, all these crisp, mellifluous words I didn’t understand. Eventually I was made to know that you expected us all to write a one-page essay about what we did over the summer, in French. You handed out paper. I looked around. Were you serious? There was no way I could do anything like that. Could anyone else? Just how far behind had all that cheating left me? Quite far apparently as most of the class set themselves to writing. You sat down at your desk.
I stared at the empty page, marveling at how hopeless my situation was, thinking about the old saying about how when you cheat, you’re really only cheating yourself. Well, here I was. I decided to give it my best shot.
Je m’appelle David, I started. Mon vacacion de summer c’was magnifique…
I wrote more like this, sprinkling the few French words I knew among the mostly English bullshit. Le weather was tres bien. I wrote the letters as big as I could, gave myself two-inch margins, took up as much space as possible with cross-outs. Still, I looked at the page: a quarter full; it was ridiculous. So I decided to make it more ridiculous. I stood up and walked up to your desk. “Excuse me, Mr. McCormack?”
You corrected me. “Excusez-moi—”
“Excusez-moi, Monsieur McCormack. Where are you from in France? What city did you grow up in?”
“D’où venez-vous…”
“D’où venez-vous…”
“Je suis Niçois,” you said with a quizzical expression. “Je suis originaire de Nice.”
“Merci,” I said. I knew Nice was the name of a city in France. I even knew it was spelled like nice. I went back to my seat, sat down, and started writing again.
Mon favorite du jour de la summer, I wrote, was when le president de Etas Unis, monsieur Ronald Reagan, declared war on La France. La jour de tres joueoux! When President Reagan dropped le bombs on le cite de Nice, all le garcons y all la femmes dances y chantes!
Terribly obnoxious. And about half as clever as I thought it was. (Although considering it now, I wonder whether President Reagan ever did harbor a secret desire to attack France—and whether he ever did make an announcement like that, just as a joke, while recording a sound check for a radio address.) I cringe a little at the thought of what my face must have looked like as I passed my essay in, what yours must have looked like when you read it. The next morning during h
omeroom, I was called down to the principal’s office where I was told that you did not want me to come to class anymore and that my mother had been called in for a meeting with you and me and the school’s principal, Dr. Nogueira.
My mother was not happy to come to such a meeting, of course. And you and Dr. Nogueira were both frowning when we all sat down. I avoided eye contact with everyone and tried to suppress the smirk that so often crept onto my face when I was being reprimanded—a nervous reaction that was rarely taken for what it was. That day, though, I admit to feeling a bit of pride when you told my mother that you’d never been so personally offended in your career. My mother, who was a teacher herself, a professor at Rutgers, looked very sad. I was punished that night at dinner—a grounding.
My guidance counselor switched me out of French 2 and into Spanish 1. And I’m sure the next three years were better for it for all involved. You didn’t hold a grudge. You were actually a very nice guy, one of the teachers at Red Bank Regional who seemed to honestly like and care about the kids. Seeing each other in the hallways, or on the class trips you sometimes chaperoned, we eventually developed a friendly rapport—in English, of course.
This year, as it turns out, I’m going to France for a vacation—five days in Paris, my first time there since I went with my dad when I was twelve. From what I’ve heard, it’s still a place where speaking French comes in handy. So I will be at a disadvantage. Once again, I’ll be reminded that it was only myself I was cheating all those years ago. I fully expect some waiter at a café will insult me to my face without my ever knowing. Hard to say I won’t deserve it.
Dear Bob and Paula Cohen,
Sorry for the way I was dressed at Rick’s bar mitzvah.
Our families were in a havurah group together. There were not so many Jews in the part of New Jersey where we lived, so you and my parents and the Rosens and the Feldmans and the Gainsburgs started a club that would gather on one Friday night a month and on holidays to say prayers and share a meal and talk about being Jewish. Havurah means “fellowship” in Hebrew.
