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

by Dave Bry

  I decided I had to get out of there. So I made sure I got good grades at Brookdale and sent my transcripts up to my original college’s deans’ office as soon as I’d earned enough make-up credits. By mid-December, when people were arriving home for Christmas break, I had already started preparing for my return to Connecticut, but I was nonetheless eager to socialize. The night of my twenty-first birthday, my friend Mark, who had turned twenty-one in August, took me out for my first legal drink in a bar. We went to Brannigan’s, an Irish pub down by Marine Park in Red Bank. It was a Thursday night, and we chose Brannigan’s because we figured it would be less crowded than the more popular Globe Hotel across the street. But there were still lots of beefy guys in goatees and overcoats. We were still in New Jersey in the early ’90s. (You’ve seen Kevin Smith’s movies, right?)

  My first legal drink turned into a great many legal drinks, of course. With various strangers and acquaintances buying me birthday shots. Much of the night is a blur in my memory. The way it ended, though, is all too clear. Two guys I knew from high school, Karl and Rob, they’d graduated a couple years before Mark and I and were drinking down at the far end of the bar. They never liked me and my friends much, I don’t think. Karl knew karate, we’d learned one night a few years before, when he’d choked my buddy Dave almost to death during a fight at a party over a girl. (It was scary. Dave lost consciousness; all these blood vessels in his eyes burst. He looked like a Halloween mask for weeks.) And Rob, who had worked delivering pizzas for the same pizza place that I did, had warned me, on my first day on the job, not to accept offers of sex from any of my delivery customers. “Trust me,” he said, “don’t go inside. There’s gonna be some big dude in there waiting to jump out and beat the shit out of you.” All right, I told him, not at all expecting this to ever happen. “Don’t get me wrong,” he went on. “I’ve banged my share of customers—we all have. But you gotta be careful.” I never knew quite what to make of that. He was not the type of guy you would ever believe had had sex with pizza delivery customers. But then, I don’t know.

  Anyway, the night at Brannigan’s, when I had already had far too much to drink, Karl and Rob called me over to say they wanted to buy me a shot. “A Cement Mixer,” Rob said. His smile was a sneer. I should have been leery, but I was too drunk to care.

  A warning: If anyone ever offers to buy you a Cement Mixer, do not accept. It is not a real shot. As it turns out, a Cement Mixer is a mix of Baileys Irish Cream and lime juice. The lime juice curdles the cream, turning it to a consistency not unlike that of wet cement. I vomited soon after gulping it down. Right on the bar, which made the bartender very angry. (Though it was as much his fault as anyone’s for serving such a drunk person such a not funny “gag” drink in the first place.) He demanded that I leave, and Mark ended up in a shouting match with him that almost turned into a fistfight, and we were both eventually removed from the premises by force. And thus, ridiculously, I found myself officially banned for life from the establishment that had served me my first legal alcoholic drink.

  So it was not my best birthday. I should have called in sick to work the next day. But I was still pretty drunk when I woke up and didn’t realize how bad my hangover would get. Also, I wouldn’t have wanted to let Suzanne down, or you, or any of the other kids in the class.

  By around ten thirty or so that morning, it was clear I’d made a mistake. The class was in its gym period, and I was lying with my face against the cool, rubberized floor. You were supposed to be playing kickball or Red Light, Green Light or something, but were instead leaning on me and talking to me—at me mostly; I wasn’t doing a very good job of talking back. My head was ringing with pain, and my skin felt clammy underneath my clothes.

  “What’s wrong?” you asked me.

  “I don’t feel very good today,” I said, trying to breathe as slowly as I could.

  You sniffed the air and said, “You stink!”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You smell like whiskey,” you said.

  I had been feeling bad about the fact that I was planning to leave to go back up to college for the next semester. I don’t remember whether I’d told you yet or not. Right then, though, as I was beginning to realize the limits of the tragicomic wastrel persona I had been cultivating for years. (“It’s just not that cute anymore,” Bill Murray’s girlfriend told him, breaking up with him at the beginning of Stripes. “It’s a little cute,” Bill Murray retorted, in a line that I’d long embraced like a daily affirmation.) Right then, considering that and the various elements of your situation at home and at school, I had the thought that you might be better off without me. Not that that made me feel any less guilty.

  I knew I stunk.

  Dear President Clinton,

  I’m sorry I wrote that thing about you getting caught with underage girls on the bulletin board at Bob Kerrey’s campaign headquarters during the New Hampshire primary in 1992.

  Truth is, I had no business being in anyone’s campaign headquarters at that point in my life. I had recently returned to college from hiatus, but not for the right reasons. I was not at all politically active or even very politically interested. My friend Matt, though, had been volunteering for Kerrey that winter and dragged a carload of us up from our Connecticut campus to pitch in for the final weekend before the vote. Poor judgment on his part.

  While Matt was assigned to more important jobs, or perhaps just ones that required a more presentable demeanor, Will, Todd, Carter, and I made cold calls from the phone bank in the dreary Manchester office, hiding warm cans of Milwaukee’s Best between our legs and sneaking outside every few minutes to smoke bowls by a Dumpster in the parking lot. (Jesus, those cold calls. “Hi! Do you have a minute? I’d like to talk to you about why I’m supporting Bob Kerrey for president.” That’s like a hundred more people I should be apologizing to. Most notably a Mrs. Beaupre, whose name I pronounced “Booper” after a long pause and some stammering, which caused Carter, who was sitting next to me, to burst out laughing, which caused me to then join him and hang up the phone in a panic.)

  So I’m afraid we were not very productive. Rather, we found our fun in trying to find new ways to crack each other up, or sabotage Matt’s political future in his absence, or shock and embarrass any of the earnest young Democrats unfortunate enough to be trapped inside a building with us.

  One of the walls in the phone bank room had been covered in paper and turned into a bulletin board where staffers and volunteers hung banners and pinned pictures and wrote messages to rally the troops: “Keep up the fight!” “Latest poll: Kerrey gaining among undecideds!” Stuff like that. I decided to get in on the rah-rah spirit and add a few words of my own.

  That was poor judgment on my part. What I wrote was very silly. I believe I used the phrase compromising positions. And it was not true. Not to the best of my knowledge anyway. You were the front-runner at the time (or was it Paul Tsongas?). Whatever the case, you were leading Kerrey. And aspects of your personal life had recently come into play. The Gennifer Flowers story was the talk of the town. I didn’t know what was true or not. I didn’t care. I just thought the folks at Kerrey HQ might enjoy a little topical humor at the competition’s expense.

  They didn’t, if it makes you feel any better. Awhile after I returned to my seat next to Carter, someone in charge came in, having been alerted to the presence of my note, and angrily asked who’d done it. It must have been fairly obvious from our giggling. “There’s press around,” she said, crossing out the words in heavy black marker. “Don’t be stupid.”

  Turned out, of course, that you were a really good president. And seeing as how you wound up in such hot water for certain transgressions that hewed uncomfortably close to those I fabricated that day in 1992 and how Kenneth Starr put your personal business out there in that report for everyone in the world to read—well, I don’t much like the thought of being in league with Kenneth Starr. That guy’s a jerk.

  Dear T.,

  Sorry f
or telling you what I was thinking about when you asked me what I was thinking about.

  There are times in life when we should lie. This—junior year of college, lying in your bed, having just had sex with you—was one of those times.

  Your dorm room was so clean and neat with pink stuff and flower prints. It smelled nice, too. Like soft spices. What had I done to deserve even being there? I’d picked my clothes out of a bathtub-size pile on my floor. You were pretty and dressed nicely and seemed to have yourself much more together. By dint of beer and dumb luck, you’d started kissing me at a party a few weeks earlier. A friend of yours lived next to a friend of mine. We’d all gone out as a group, got very drunk, got to dancing. You stumbled back to my room with me and we fell into bed. I was painfully hungover the next day, and I had to go to New Hampshire to volunteer for Bob Kerrey’s primary campaign, which turned out to be a mistake. I smiled the whole drive up, though, while my friends teased me. Women didn’t fall into my bed as often as I would have liked them to.

  There were reasons for this other than my wearing dirty clothes. I had chosen to major in philosophy (shorter reading assignments, higher tolerance for half-informed guesswork in class discussions) and became deeply invested in telling the truth. Too invested. I had read this book, I and Thou by Martin Buber, that talked about the great importance of open and honest and thoughtful communication, that this is the only way to show respect for other people as our equals. At least, that’s what I thought it was about. It’s likely that I misunderstood a lot of what Buber actually meant. But I got off on it. I started seeing telling the truth as the most important thing in the world. Truth, as I conceived it existing in some a priori ideal form, was the ultimate good, the closest thing to god, I suppose, that I believed in. Honesty was the noblest thing a human could aspire to, a spiritual duty. I thought that any lie, no matter how small or how justified by earthly circumstances, was essentially wrong. I remember arguing to my friend Becca that had I lived in the apartment downstairs from Anne Frank in Amsterdam in 1942, though I thought that I would have probably lied to Nazi soldiers if they came asking questions, I also thought that, in the grand scheme of things, my doing so would have hurt the universe in some perhaps indiscernible but important way. It’s so embarrassing to think about now. Like the sound of my lying voice was going to bore a hole in the sky and burn a “minus one” mark on the collective soul—which I envisioned as a glowing blue orb of pure, undiluted Truth. Oy vey.

  So while I didn’t feel compelled to voice my every true feeling—I didn’t go around telling strangers I thought their shirts were ugly—I tried hard to never lie. Not even a little bit. Needless to say, it was impractical. And exhausting. One time a new friend, Jim, had come to my dorm room to hang out. I mentioned that another friend, Todd, was supposed to be calling—we had plans. “Oh, don’t tell him I’m here,” Jim said. I forget why. Nothing important. But before I could explain to Jim how difficult this seemingly easy request would be for me, the phone rang. “Hey, Todd,” I said as Jim held his finger to his lips. Todd asked me what I was doing. “Nothing. Hanging out.” I paused, struggling, and said, “Jim’s here.” Jim’s jaw dropped and I mouthed him an “I’m sorry.” After I hung up, he asked me why I had done that. When I explained, he thought I was pulling his leg. “Come on,” he said. “You never lie?” Then he cracked up, like I had just told a good joke. It does seem pretty funny, looking back.

  But what a terribly selfish way to behave. What business was it of mine if Jim didn’t want Todd to know where he was? Like I couldn’t have endured such a triviality in order to spare him what must have been a bit of discomfort, no matter how minor, the next time they spoke. I was living by a code that amounted to imposing my beliefs on other people. Like a religious zealot. Yuck.

  And you got the worst of it. We were having fun, sleeping together every other night or so. The kind of good, healthy, casual fun lots of coeds enjoy often and often with the same partner for more than a couple weeks at a time. But here’s a truth that I’m more aware of now than I was then: I was still in love with my old girlfriend from high school, who had dumped me and broken my heart more than a year before. One would think having new sex with different people might have served as a curative in this regard. But these things are rarely simple. Despite how stoned and ragamuffin I imagine I looked to others, I couldn’t really do anything casually at that point in my life. Not even have fun. I was wound too tight, strung too high. And because of the vision quest I took myself to be on at this middle-range liberal arts school in Connecticut, I brought my hang-ups into your bed.

  We were lying there, sweaty and quiet, our heads on your pillows, when you said, “What are you thinking about?”

  Now, as notorious as this question is—I believe it was another philosopher, Andrew Dice Clay, who once said, “If I wanted you to know, I’d be talking…”—it really shouldn’t be that big a deal. And it’s understandable that it would be asked. It’s quiet. Two people getting to know each other in an intimate situation, the silence starts to take on a weight; you want to make conversation. It shouldn’t have been that big a deal, even if I didn’t want to tell you what I was thinking. I could have said, “Nothing,” for example. That would have been fine. Or I could have just made something up, switched my focus to another thought: “It smells nice in here.” “Who painted that picture of the flowers?” “I’m supposed to read such and such for class tomorrow.” Whatever.

  It was really not okay for me to leave the question hanging for as long as I did and then say, “I was thinking I was worried about your feelings being hurt. Because I don’t know that I see this relationship lasting very long.”

  I thought I was being good and noble and respecting you more as a person by telling the whole, honest, undiluted truth. I was not. I was being an asshole.

  Dear Julia Neaman,

  I’m sorry for accusing you of conspiring against me when I was on hallucinogenic mushrooms.

  This was in May 1992, the last week of spring semester, when the seniors at our college were preparing to graduate. Senior Week, they called it, every night of which there was a different party thrown by juniors to celebrate the achievement. You were in charge of one of those parties, the school having given you a budget based on a proposal you’d submitted. You’d chosen me to be on your twenty-person party staff—something of an honor in that it allowed an underclassman to attend an otherwise seniors-only party, and also just nice of you because we didn’t know each other very well. We’d just met that year in Mr. Vogel’s modern philosophy course.

  The responsibilities of party staff were vague. Cart sound-system equipment? Serve seniors beer? Stand guard at an inflatable trampoline? Nothing too taxing, you assured.

  It was beautiful weather the day of the party, so I spent the afternoon lying on my back in the garden behind the Asian studies building, tripping on mushrooms with a bunch of my friends, letting my sense of time and selfhood dissipate like the puffy white clouds floating in the sky above. It was totally awesome.

  When the sun got low, someone mentioned dinner. Food seemed like an entirely foreign concept to me at the time, but we all got up off the grass and headed back to central campus. When we got to the quad, where the party was to be held, I saw you standing in the middle of a group of people, setting things up. Realizing that I was supposed to be there working, I said good-bye to my friends and walked over.

  You were busy. You said hello but had to see to a more pressing matter, so I just stood there by the tent that had been erected between the old stone dorm buildings, watching its shadow slant across the huge slabs of granite and thinking about how they’d been mortared into place so long before I was born. I didn’t know many of the other people working the party but eventually found myself standing with Brad, who’d also been in our philosophy class, and a guy named Shane, who was on the sailing team. There didn’t seem to be anything for us to do setup wise, so Brad and Shane asked if I’d like to go to Shane’s room and smo
ke pot. This seemed like a good idea but was not.

  Soon after we smoked, the tapestry-draped, cinder-block dorm room began to feel extremely cramped. There was nowhere to sit. Brad and Shane were talking about stuff I couldn’t understand. I wondered at some point whether they’d made up a secret language. But I nodded along so as to be polite.

  We left around eight o’clock or so. It was a great relief to get outside. But by that time, it was beginning to get dark and the road back to the quad had taken on a sinister air. I still had no idea what Brad and Shane were saying when they spoke. And when they laughed, it was worse.

  Back at the tent, the party had started. Seniors were arriving, drunk and loud as they’d been all week. You were a whirl of orchestrating activity, talking fast, with people surrounding you wherever you went. I didn’t dare approach. Brad and Shane, though, went to get their assignments and were soon stationed at the side of the stage, ten feet behind an orange rope. There would be a band playing later, and I guess they were supposed to keep people away from the instruments or something. It was all very confusing. I walked around by myself for a while, and it soon became clear that everyone was against me.

  So I probably had a scowl on my face when you found me, standing someplace apart from the crowd. If so, you didn’t mind and smiled friendly when you asked if I had a desk lamp in my room.