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

by Dave Bry

  It was such a stupid thing to do. A very immature sort of prank and not very original. Though by the confused expression on your face as I did it, I’m guessing that you’d never had it pulled on you—and you’d been principal of Red Bank Regional High School for eleven years.

  It was a warm but gray day in early June. Many of us in the class of 1989 had spent the two hours before our graduation ceremony at my friend Ted’s house. His family had an old barn on their property with a loft that had been converted into a studio apartment that was the site of lots of parties during high school, and we’d all gathered there to drink beer and smoke pot before this important rite of passage. Earlier in the day, at the last practice session before the real thing, a plan had been hatched. Andy Callahan, always a fun-loving mischief maker, had heard of a thing that some other high school students had done in the past: as the graduates were called up one by one to receive their diplomas and the traditional congratulatory shake of the principal’s hand, they’d all given him a beer cap they’d been palming on their approach to the podium. The idea was that the principal, not wanting to disrupt the ceremony, would have to slip the caps into his pocket. But if all went according to plan, if a critical mass of participants was achieved, his pockets would fill with caps and he’d have to just start dropping them on the ground, where a visible pile would form and hilarity would ensue. I really liked the sound of this prank, as it spoke to anti–school spirit and announced to the world the very important fact that high school students liked to drink beer. Word spread, and we all promised we’d do it. It was going to be great!

  By way of explanation but not of excuse, I will tell you that my father was sick with cancer. A first round of chemotherapy had laid him flat, and he couldn’t get out of bed to come watch me graduate. Looking back, I can see that I may have been partying with extra abandon at this time of my life, caring less if I was to be arrested or get in a car crash or something, with the thought that this would make a dramatic plot development in the novel that I saw as my life. Everybody sees their life like that to a certain extent, right? Especially when we’re teenagers. Even though it’s wrong and unhealthy. Also, it’s hard to say that my behavior would have been any different if my father had not gotten sick. I was living in much the same way before it happened—I consoled myself with this fact whenever I thought about a promise I’d made to my father to not “hide” from him with drink and drugs. I’d been getting drunk and high all the time before his diagnosis; nothing had changed. It’s easy to rationalize things to your own conscience. I could still look him in the eye over dinner every night. I’d yet to cry about his having cancer; yet to feel like crying even. I was still in shock maybe. I don’t know. Regardless, I don’t want to accept it as an excuse. Plenty of people have bad things happen in their lives. Not everyone acts like a schmuck.

  So at the barn, as the time approached to leave to go graduate, as we chugged our last beers and smoked our last bowls in the warmth of four years’ worth of comradery, Andy and I and a couple of others went around making sure everyone had kept a bottle cap with which to execute the hilarious prank. “It’s only going to work if we all remember to do it,” we told people. And I accepted a ride to the ceremony, not with my best friends Mark and Ted, nor my girlfriend, but with some other friends, less close friends, who had offered me some cocaine to snort on the way.

  I’d tried cocaine a couple of times before. But only a couple. So it was still a new thrill—and, as everyone in the car impressed upon me, a big serious secret—when we pulled into the parking lot of the church on Tower Hill and passed around a newly published Red Bank Regional yearbook with white lines of powder cut on the vinyl-smooth cover. We drove around for a while and stopped once more for another bump before pulling up to the school and floating into the gym, where most of our class had already assembled.

  Two hundred and forty-two kids pulling gowns on over their clothes, finding their place in the procession. Teachers and vice principals and guidance counselors pointing directions, shouting instructions. I wandered around the crowd, not bothering to find my spot, looking up at the ceiling in the gym, imagining the perspective from up in the rafters, where the basketball banners hung. It must have looked silly—the hustle-bustle, the formality, all this dolling up, for meaningless tradition. For nothing. I smiled to myself, feeling above it all. No one else could see what I could see. No one else knew what I knew.

  Mark stopped me as I wandered past him. “Breeze,” he said, like snapping his fingers. “Breeze.” (My nickname in high school was “Breezer” because the y in my last name is pronounced with the long e sound, like Brie cheese. Perhaps you remember this? I would be impressed. Regardless, I did not choose the nickname and will not take responsibility for it.)

  There was concern in Mark’s eyes. “Breeze, you all right?”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to relax my smile. “I got a great buzz goin’.”

  I collected myself and put on my gown and went to my spot in line and tried to get my mortarboard cap to tilt just the way Robert Downey Jr.’s did in Less Than Zero. Then we all marched through the roll-up garage doors at the side of the gym, out to the football field where all the white folding chairs were arranged facing the stage and the podium and the bleachers behind them. My mom was sitting in those bleachers and my little sister and my grandmother, Thea. But so were some two thousand other people, and I couldn’t make out their faces from my seat.

  What happened during the ceremony? People gave speeches? You? The valedictorian of our class? Who was that? Mary Jude Cox? She was always so smart and also very nice, but I don’t remember anything she said that day. Did someone sing? The school band played “Pomp and Circumstance”? I wasn’t paying a lot of attention. I was gazing off into the sky and looking up at the crowd in the stands, thinking how funny it was that they were all there watching us, watching me, but from so far away. They’d all come thinking this was such a big important day for us, and here I was as high as I was and glad to not be caring about anything.

  It felt like a villain’s victory. And at one point I considered doing something to disrupt the ceremony, to make a big ridiculous mockery of it all—shout out a profanity, strip naked and run around like a crazy person. There was definitely something attractive about that: going out in a ball of fire in front of a big audience. But I would have never done it. Not just me alone certainly. I was never that brave. I might have liked the idea of shocking people—Keith Moon driving a Rolls-Royce into a hotel swimming pool—but if I was honest with myself, I could never get over the fact that, when it came down to it, I wanted people to like me. Ruining graduation, making a big show of it, that was beyond me. I would have to settle for the subtle bottle cap prank.

  I did take my hat off and throw it up in the air long before I was supposed to. The hat throwing was the part of the ceremony I was most looking forward to. (Well, besides the bottle cap prank.) Everyone knows the graduating class is supposed to throw their hats in the air at the end of the show. Everyone has seen the videos. I’d always thought it was cool how aerodynamic the mortarboard shape was—those things can really fly like Frisbees if you angle them right.

  At one point in the proceedings, deep into the proceedings, but before we’d been called by name to get our diplomas, the excitement level rose. Whatever the person at the podium was saying (was it you? I think it might have been), whatever whoever was speaking was saying was eliciting big applause from both the crowd in the stands and my classmates around me. You were or someone else was talking about the accomplishment of completing high school and how we should be proud of ourselves and stuff. And just as I fully tuned in, you or someone else said, “Congratulations to Red Bank Regional’s class of nineteen eighty-nine!” Everyone clapped and cheered. I thought that was our cue. I wanted to get rowdy; I was eager to get those caps flying. I took mine off my head, let out a hearty “whoo-hoo! ” and flung it skyward.

  It was a pretty good throw, twenty feet high or so, and I
enjoyed watching it cut the air in a graceful downward arc and land on the running track to the left of the stage. All by itself. I realized my mistake when no one else followed my lead.

  So I waited, hatless, through the rest of the speech. A few minutes later, it was time for us all to stand. Someone else stepped to the microphone and started reading out our names. I reached under my gown and into my pants pocket and grasped the bottle cap. We filed behind the last row of chairs, and down an aisle to the left of the stage like we had done in practices, and one by one, crossed in front of our classmates and took our turns striding up to where you were standing in your fancier cap and gown with its colorful sash and gold piping. I got to the edge of the stage and heard my name called and heard the clapping and cheers from the crowd—my family, my friends’ families, teachers, and school staff, I suppose, some genuinely happy for me, others perhaps just happy for me to go. I looked down at the ground next to you as I approached and saw no bottle caps. But I was pretty early in the procession, my last name beginning with B. I figured your pockets were not yet full. I grinned goofily when you said congratulations and handed me my diploma, and we shook hands and I palmed you the bottle cap. You received it wordlessly without looking down to check what it was. I watched your face for reaction. You were nonplussed. You knew what it was I’d given you, it seemed, but your expression said simply, “Why did you just give me a bottle cap?” Nothing more. You were also probably wondering why I wasn’t wearing a hat.

  I followed the person in front of me back to our chairs and sat and watched the rest of the class get their diplomas. Some people were really psyched, lifting their arms over their heads like boxing champions and stuff. Lots of big smiles. As more and more people shook your hand, I periodically leaned forward and looked to see if I could see a pile of bottle caps forming next to your feet. I never did.

  You gave out the last diploma (to…Jen Yankowski?) and soon after the applause had died down and everyone was back seated, there was another address. (Was this when you gave yours?) This one was short, and this time when we heard the words, “Congratulations to Red Bank Regional’s class of nineteen eighty-nine,” everybody somehow knew it was the real thing and not a second false alarm. The caps flew en masse this time, like they were supposed to, falling like big black confetti. It was satisfying, and the cheers were louder than ever, and everyone was so happy. We were officially graduated.

  Dizzying chaos on the football field as families flooded from the stands to greet their graduates. Mine found me and my mom snapped a picture of me standing and smiling with my sister and my grandmother. It came out nicely, the three us smiling, looking right into the camera. My mom hung it on the fridge in our kitchen at home, where it stayed all summer. Deb looked cute, Thea looked proud, and I looked fine, too—if a bit slack, my gown undone, no cap. But I never liked to look at it. I felt like I could see the drugs in my eyes, and the way I held my face said something fake. Even standing there with two people that I loved, there was an ugliness behind my smile. The thought that I was tricking people, getting one over on them. Sure, there I was posing. But I knew full well that what I was thinking about was how soon I could get back to Ted’s to drink another beer, how I could hook up with the crew who had driven me to the ceremony so I could get more cocaine. I definitely wanted more cocaine. Even as my grandmother kissed me on the cheek, leaving a lipstick mark you could see in the photo, what I was mostly thinking about was how to get more cocaine.

  I would get some more later that night. Once everyone had finished their celebratory dinners with families at Italian restaurants or backyard barbecues and the teenage wasteland had reconvened at my old friend Dave’s house, I got a tap on the shoulder and was told in a whisper that a surprise had been left for me under a lace doily in the pink, potpourri-scented, floral-print bathroom off the kitchen—right near the pantry I’d been pulling Double Stuf Oreo cookies out of since the fourth grade. It all felt so dark and depraved. It was just what I wanted. I was up all night that night, and I didn’t tell anyone about it. Not even my girlfriend when I went back to her house.

  Earlier, though, a bunch of us were sitting around a table on the back deck. Andy was there and Mark and Ted and Kevin Krosnick. I asked for a report on the success of the prank. Had anybody seen any beer bottle caps amassing at your feet? Had you said anything to anybody as the numbers you’d been handed continued to rise?

  “Oh, I didn’t do it,” someone said.

  “Neither did I.”

  “I forgot.”

  “I don’t think anybody did,” Andy said casually. “I think pretty much everybody pussied out.”

  “What?” I said. “I did it!”

  “You did?” Kevin’s eyes bugged. “What did Nogueira do?”

  “Nothing. He just took it.”

  “Oh, man,” Andy said, cracking up. “I didn’t think anybody did it. It didn’t seem right once you got up there. It just felt wrong.”

  It should have.

  Dear Mark,

  Sorry for getting tears and snot and probably a little puke all over your shirt.

  This was soon after you and I had graduated high school. We were in the barn at Ted’s house very late at night—or, really, very early in the morning. The sun was coming up. There had been a party there, like there had been most nights that summer, but we were the last two people left. Ted had staggered off to bed in the main house.

  For some reason, before we collapsed onto the couch or the floor or attempted to stagger back to our respective houses, we decided to chug one more beer. This turned out to be a bad idea.

  I forget what we said as we clinked our plastic cups. I forget whether we said anything at all. But I know we were standing by the fridge by the stairs, and immediately after I’d gulped mine down, I went into the bathroom and puked it right up. Along with lots more of the beer I’d drunk that night.

  No big deal. It was not at all uncommon for one of our crowd to puke up beer at the end of a night. But that night, or that morning, in the bathroom at the barn as I pushed myself up off my knees, it became a big deal. Standing but not steadily, I looked out the window above the toilet. I saw the pale dawn light of the sky and the leaves of the maple trees that grew out back, and I thought of my father, who was lying in bed at my house, his skin the color of yellow chalk, recovering from chemotherapy. He had been lying in bed like that, mostly unconscious, for two weeks.

  It’s not that I hadn’t been thinking about this. I had been thinking about it a lot. I had been opening his bedroom door every day and peeking in. We weren’t supposed to get too close because his immune system was compromised, but I could see that his hair was falling out and his muscles were shriveling faster than I would have thought those things could have happened.

  It’s not even that I hadn’t been talking about it. I’d been talking about it with my mom—a colleague of hers had had a husband die after being diagnosed with terminal cancer a few years earlier, and she had told my mom that the best thing to do was to accept the fact that the sick person was going to die, to accept this as early in the process as possible, and to do the grieving then. (Not in front of the sick person, of course, who is relying on hope to fuel his fight.) Then all the time you get with the person beyond that is like a bonus, and the death itself will come as a softer blow. She thought this made sense, my mom, and I did, too. We also worried that my dad might die very soon, imminently, from the side effects of the chemotherapy treatment. That happened sometimes apparently. And he certainly looked like he was dying. I’d been talking about it with my girlfriend, too, whose own mom had died of cancer when she was nine—we talked about it a lot. She was very good to talk to. But I hadn’t been talking much about it to you or Ted or Chris or Matt or Dave. I hadn’t been talking much about it to guys.

  I turned around from the toilet and looked at my reflection in the mirror over the sink. Panting, puffy, pukey saliva drooling down my chin—I was a picture I did not like to see. My face quivered and seemed t
o crack, and I realized I was losing control of myself.

  There were tears in my eyes when I walked back into the main room, back to where you were near the fridge by the stairs, and I stood in front of you, and when I saw that you saw the tears in my eyes, I stumbled forward and fell into your chest. You wrapped your long, basketball-player arms all the way around me and held me. My knees buckled and I collapsed and you held me up. You took my full weight as I sank into you and sobbed and sobbed and let you hold me in a way that I hadn’t let anyone hold me, not my mom or my dad, not my girlfriend or anyone else, in a long, long time.

  At some point, I lifted my head from your shirt, your soaked and mucousy shirt. “I’m a pussy,” I blubbered. “I’m a fucking pussy.”

  “You’re not a pussy.” You patted my head and talked soft sense. “No one thinks you’re a pussy. None of us can call you a pussy because none of us has gone through what you’re going through.”

  I cried harder and harder, emptying myself. You went on.

  “If anything, we’re the pussies,” you said. “Because we all want to say something, but none of us know what to say.”

  So this is more of a thank-you than an apology, I guess. For being a good friend, for making me feel better. But, you know, I am sorry about your shirt.

  COLLEGE

  (Or the six longest years of my life.)

  Dear Todd Schwartz and Chris McGuire,

  Sorry for spilling fruit punch all over the box of Calvin and Hobbes T-shirts you were hoping to sell.

  It was the first semester of our freshman year of college, on the second floor of Marshall Dormitory, in the prison-cell-like, cinder-block room you two shared with a guy named Scott. I lived down the hall, in a similar room with my roommates Sean and Jeremy.

  We’d only known each other for a month or so. We’d only known anybody we knew there for a month or so. And probably because we were all trying too hard to make people like us, you guys decided to invest some money in printing up a line of the familiar comic-strip-characters-acting-naughty T-shirts that were so popular on college campuses at the time. (Are they still so popular? I wonder.) You recruited another guy in our dorm, Jeff, a talented sketch artist, to draw a facsimile of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes drinking alcohol. It was a business venture. You weren’t trying to break any new ground.