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

by Dave Bry

  What should the shirts say, though? What clever slogan to best represent our college and our wit? We all pitched in with ideas. I forget who came up with the winner, but I’m happy to think that it was not me.

  “Connecticut College,” the shirts were to say on the front, with a picture of Calvin and Hobbes laughing with cans of beer in their hands. Under the picture were the words “When It’s Night Out…” Then on the back of the shirt, the pair would be depicted lying prone, with X marks in their eyes, under the punch line: “We BLACK Out!!!”

  You brought the design to a silk screener at the Crystal Mall and put in an order for two hundred shirts for four hundred dollars. You planned to sell them for ten dollars each.

  A couple weeks later, the shipment arrived in a cardboard box the size of a large television set. Many of us on our floor bought one the very first day. We were being friendly, supporting you in your endeavor. I wish I could say that’s as far as my support went, but I actually wore the shirt a few times—once when my parents and eleven-year-old sister had come to visit. My father was sick, and as I remember his tired, defeated tone when he voiced his disapproval—“Why would you want to wear a shirt like that?”—well, this apology isn’t just to you.

  Credit to our fellow students’ taste, the T-shirts did not sell like hotcakes. You guys unloaded maybe twenty more in the following days, but after that, the mostly full box of product sat in your room next to Todd’s bunk.

  Also living in our dorm that year were a group of sophomores we looked up to and hoped to befriend. From time to time they would mix up a punch made with Kool-Aid and grain alcohol in an orange Gatorade cooler and serve it, for some reason, out of a plastic decoy duck someone had brought to school. They did this in the hallway this night, and we joined them, and I drank too much. (Which really, when it comes to drinking grain alcohol punch out of a plastic duck decoy, is pretty much the point.) One of the sophomore guys, Carter, drank too much, too. And at some point, unluckily for you, the party migrated from the hallway into your room. And because we were having trouble standing, Carter and I found ourselves sitting on the big cardboard box, cackling like the type of fools who would wear T-shirts that say, “When it’s night out, we black out.” Then we started pouring full cups of the punch over each other’s heads. The alcohol stung my eyes. I don’t remember a lot more. Because, you know, it was night out…

  The next day, we discovered that the punch had dripped through the box and soaked through the T-shirts, dyeing some solid, leaving even the least affected with a few small splotches of pink. All unsellable.

  You guys were unhappy. But largely because of Carter’s elder status, your loss was chalked up to collateral party damage. The shirts were your responsibility; you should have moved them or spread a tarp or something before allowing such obviously inebriated fun-loving innocents into your room. You’d made much of your money back already anyway. We’d mostly cost you potential profits.

  In hindsight, the ruination of those god-awful T-shirts was a good thing for everybody, a good thing for the world. The less chance another sick, tired father would have to see his son wearing one, the better. But still, businesswise, I guess I owe you a couple of bucks.

  Dear Visiting Music Professor Who Taught History of Jazz at Connecticut College, Spring Semester 1990,

  I’m sorry for comparing Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue to Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page.”

  I can only imagine what your reaction was. You there, grading papers, sitting in your office, or at home in your apartment in New Haven—you were visiting from Yale. As part of a faculty exchange program, was it? So a professor from Connecticut College was up there, teaching your regular students at the time? (Man, you got the short end of that one, huh?) I picture you reading the little blue test booklet I’d turned in, going red in the face, then ripping the beret off your head and throwing it across the room. You never wore a beret in class, but I always assumed you put one on as soon as you got home.

  It was our first assignment. We were to go to the listening library and listen to a selection of records from a list you’d handed out and write down our impressions. We were supposed to log six hours’ worth. Due at the end of the second week of class.

  I didn’t know a thing about jazz. My dad had a lot of old jazz albums, but I listened to rock music and rap. I had signed up for the course because it sounded easy. I was not a good student. Still, I liked what I heard, sitting in the library cubicle with those big old-fashioned earphones on my head. One of the first records on the list was Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, the consensus “greatest jazz album of all time,” a work many people would say stands at the very top of American musical achievement. Some would argue—and considering your field of study, I wouldn’t be surprised if you are one of them—that it stands at the top of American artistic achievement of any kind.

  Somehow, I doubt you feel similarly about Bob Seger’s classic-rock radio standard, “Turn the Page.” Frankly, I don’t either. I’ve always thought of Seger as a poor man’s Bruce Springsteen. A very poor man’s. (Though I’ll never be able to turn the dial when “Night Moves” comes on.) But hearing the mournful, haunting trumpet Davis plays on “Blue in Green” for the first time, my closest frame of reference was the mournful, haunting saxophone (all right, the cheesy, melodramatic saxophone) the Silver Bullet Band’s Alto Reed played on “Turn the Page.” So that’s what I wrote. That was my impression. That was the assignment, right? (I Google searched to get Alto Reed’s name, by the way. It is not his real one. His parents called him Thomas Neal Cartmell.)

  Pressed to give my younger self a break, I can drum up a defense of “Turn the Page.” Yes, it’s a plodding, overserious account of a rocker’s life on the road. There are lots like it. Journey’s “Faithfully” comes to mind. And Bon Jovi basically rewrote it for “Wanted Dead or Alive.” But the part where Seegs talks about feeling eyes on him as he walks into a restaurant, hearing snickered comments about his hair—“Is that a woman or a man?”—that’s resonated with me since I was a seventh grader, brushing my own hair out of my face, keeping my finger on Record while I listened to 102.7 WNEW on my box. The song is very effective in its way. It caught something just right and, at least for a certain audience, stands the test of time. There’s a reason Metallica chose to cover it twenty-five years after it was recorded, though I wish they hadn’t.

  But Seger also wrote “Like a Rock” from the Chevy commercials. That’s enough to ruin anybody’s day. He belongs in a conversation with Journey, Bon Jovi, and latter-day Metallica. Mentioning him alongside Miles Davis, in hindsight, is embarrassing. Comparing Kind of Blue to “Turn the Page” is sort of like looking at Guernica and saying it reminds you of The Horse Whisperer. Y’know, because of the horse.

  Luckily for me, that first assignment wasn’t graded. Unluckily for me, subsequent assignments were. And subsequent tests. I stopped attending your lectures after a few weeks. Class met at eleven o’clock in the morning, which conflicted with my sleep schedule at that point in my life. But I was also too stupid to get myself to the registrar’s office and drop the course. So that June, after answering a very small percentage of the questions on the final exam and getting what I imagine to be only a small percentage of that percentage right, I became perhaps the first person in the history of college to actually fail History of Jazz.

  Dear High School Girlfriend,

  Sorry for leaving all the letters you’d sent me in the bureau in my freshman-year dorm room.

  I’d put them there with the intention of keeping them. But the day that my mom drove the car up from New Jersey, when I opened the drawer and saw all those pieces of paper, all scattered and crumpled with their half-torn envelopes, I didn’t know how I would collect them all and get them into a bag. I was having trouble thinking clearly. I was severely hungover.

  That’s never a good excuse, I know. Especially as you and my mom had already helped me through so much of the day, packing up all my clothes and books and
CDs and stuff, bringing everything downstairs and loading the trunk, while I lay in your bed. You had come to join me at Connecticut College that semester, because the previous one that fall, when I was there and you were at your school, a large mid-Atlantic state university, we’d missed each other with the type of it’s-the-end-of-the-world, I-can’t-breath-without-you desperation specific to teenagers.

  God, the time we spent on the train that fall. Seven hours there and back, Amtrak’s Metroliner, pretty much every other weekend. (I can still taste the Diamond brand smoked almonds they sell in the dining car.) And the time talking on the phone. I’d hunch myself into the tight wooden booth in the lobby of my dorm, pressing the receiver hard against my face, gasping ridiculous proclamations of subsumption and foreverness, aching at the sound of you crying, swearing I’d drop out and come down there and run away with you as soon as you gave the word. “Nothing else means anything to me,” I told you while groups of my new classmates walked past laughing at what I was sure must have been some idiotic joke. As if it were not, in fact, the end of the world. And, of course, we spent a great deal of time writing each other letters. Lots and lots of letters. I got a letter from you every day. Sometimes two. There must have been over a hundred letters in that drawer.

  You wrote me more letters than I wrote you. You were more miserable at your school than I was at mine. It must have been easier to feel lonely there, lost among sixteen thousand strange-faced students on a city campus. It was a big Greek scene there, and that wasn’t your thing at all. Connecticut College was about the same size as our high school: 1,600 students on a campus like a pretty park. It was more manageable, much less intimidating. There were no fraternities or sororities.

  I’d made a group of friends in my dorm, and you’d gotten to know and like them on visits that often and increasingly lasted three or four days. You were happier on your visits to Connecticut. I was happier when you were there. The obvious solution was to somehow get you up there to stay. We found out about the visiting student program and filled out the application as a first step to never spending another minute apart for the rest of our lives.

  It was awesome when you got there. You were given a single room in the dorm right next to mine. We immediately pushed two mattresses together to make a king-size bed and were thus able to avoid the uncomfortable sleepover parties we’d foisted on our respective roommates the previous semester. (College is so weird.) I brought over some clothes and CDs and basically moved in. The other people on your floor were less pleased with the situation. You happened to have been put on an all-girls floor—a rarity at the college, which prided itself on its coed bathrooms—and one to which most of your neighbors had been assigned by request. It was a quiet, sober, clean-smelling floor, and while we got along well with the girl who lived directly next to us (what was her name? She had that pet tarantula I let crawl on my arm. Otto. Funny that I remember the spider’s name and not hers. I bumped into her years later in the East Village. She was living backstage at a theater where Peter Arbour was directing a play. She was nice. Katie maybe?), your RA eventually alerted us that there had been anonymous complaints about my presence. We ignored these complaints on the grounds that it was 1990 and people should get over their Victorian era hang-ups. But that was not for us to decide, so they deserve an apology, too, the other girls in your hall.

  You fit in well in my dorm, becoming friends with my friends easily, smoothly, in a way that made me proud. You joined in the teasing at the lunch table and the wasting of long afternoons watching The Mod Squad and The Streets of San Francisco in syndication on channel 26. (New London’s WTWS, the only station that came in clear on the TV in Carter’s room.) You took to palling around with my closest female friend, Amy—you and she making a regular team in games of Spades, voicing a united feminist front, as you were often the only two girls in a big group of guys. The time when you two convinced me, after hours of bullshitting argument, that I really should say that Todd threw like “someone who hadn’t grown up throwing a baseball” instead of “a girl,” I warmed with that particular sense of matchmaker’s validation—you saw what I saw in them; they saw what I saw in you.

  It had worked, I marveled. Problem solved. Girlfriend imported. World rescued from the brink, remade any way we wanted it. I felt like a wizard. And at the age of nineteen, a champion.

  It wasn’t so awesome for so long, though. And maybe it was never actually as awesome for anybody else as it was for me. Understandably, you had some qualms about your role as the imported girlfriend. It was a compromised position from the outset, all of your friends having been my friends first. And your status at the school was officially uncertain; we didn’t know where you’d be the next year. And there were other problems—deeper ones, in hindsight—probably best explainable, or at least most broadly explainable, as you growing up and out of love with me. For whatever reason or reasons, halfway through the semester, you were rarely in anything other than a bad mood, and we were having sex far less frequently than I wanted us to be.

  And then you went to Vermont for the weekend with your parents, and I cheated on you with Amy.

  I confessed that Sunday night, after you’d returned, but before we went to sleep. We were lying in bed, our heads on our pillows. “I have something to tell you,” I said, and I told you. You sat up and looked at me, and the expression on your face melted into one that I had never seen before and that I don’t like to think about even today.

  “Did you fuck her?” you asked; your eyes were wet and red and wider at the bottom like bells. I hadn’t. But it didn’t matter.

  I slept on Carter’s couch that night, my original roommates having moved my bed out of the room, and every night for the next week. It was a horrible week. I brought you food from the cafeteria downstairs because you didn’t want to see anybody. You sat on the bed with a pile of crumpled-up tissues. I came to understand what a great song Wham!’s “Careless Whisper” is, George Michael singing about how guilty feet have got no rhythm. I’d never liked it before.

  You took me back eventually. An act of grace likely attributable to the fact that you didn’t really know anyone else in the state of Connecticut. Cutting you off from Amy as I had was perhaps the worst part of the whole thing. Who could you talk to about it? Even once you were feeling okay enough to sleep in the same bed with me, though, you told me that you didn’t think you would ever be able to forgive me, not entirely.

  “Really?” I said. “Never?”

  “I don’t think so,” you said.

  But you were calm when you said it and not angry, and I figured the feeling would eventually pass. We lived in that room together—where we left our clothes on the floor and listened to Michelle Shocked’s “Anchorage” over and over again and rested our feet on each other’s when we read—and I was convinced that we would be like that, together, until the day one of us died. I couldn’t imagine any other scenario. I pictured us older, living in a house, sitting in the kitchen or cooking dinner or whatever. You holding a grudge because I touched someone else’s boob when we were teenagers? That didn’t seem like how it would be.

  We survived the next couple months, and I thought things were getting better. But it was hard to know because I was such a drunken mess all the time. At the end of the semester, after we’d finished our classes and taken our finals, you’d spent our last night at school in our room, packing for home. I’d chosen to spend it drinking Milwaukee’s Best and Southern Comfort and jumping up and down on furniture while screaming along to Replacements songs with Carter and Matt and Will and Steve and Drew and Todd until we were all blind and hugging and telling each other how much we were going to miss each other. And so was lying in bed the next day, unable to function while you and my mom put all my stuff in bags and boxes and brought it out to the car. And so was unable to figure out how to get all the letters you’d written me into a bag when I found them in the drawer of my bureau on a final sweep through my original dorm room. And so just left them ther
e and limped downstairs.

  That summer was not a good one for us. What had long been a playful needle-and-nag dynamic had calcified into something less healthy. You were too often honestly disappointed in me; I was too often giving you wholly legitimate reasons for being so. You would register complaint; I would parry with jokes rather than any real effort toward remedy—reveling, or wallowing, in what I took to be my role as the lovable fuckup. Even after most of the lovable part had worn off. Looking back, I think we hung on to each other more out of stasis and fear than anything else. Fear of the change, of what the world would be like on our own, of what it would mean to finally leave high school and our hometown and the comfort of things we’d known as kids. Things we should have been ready to leave behind earlier but were not.

  It was when you heard about the letters, I think, that you started the long process of ending it. We’d been home from Connecticut for a month or so when I told you. We were at our old grade school, Markham Place, where we had first met, in seventh grade, when your family moved to our town. I don’t know what we were doing there. Just hanging out, I suppose, sitting on one of the benches up at the top of the hill, looking down at the baseball field and the gazebo and the library. I don’t know why I told you, whether you asked where they were or if it had just come up in conversation. I mentioned it casually, that I’d left them in that drawer at college. I didn’t think it was any big deal, and I was surprised when you got as angry as you did. I thought you were kidding at first. But you were not. You were aghast. “I can’t believe you,” you said. “I’ve kept every letter you’ve ever written me!”