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

by Dave Bry

  “A desk lamp?” I said, as if I couldn’t conceive of such a thing. I couldn’t actually. It took me a minute to visualize what a desk lamp, in fact, was.

  “Yeah,” you said. “Is there one in your room?”

  “A desk lamp.”

  “Yeah.” You giggled. “A lamp on your desk.”

  I did have one. Right on my desk. Like most college students do.

  “Yeah,” I said cautiously. “I have a desk lamp.” I was suspicious. What could you possibly need a desk lamp for?

  “Could you get it?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”

  “Thanks!” You were cheery. As you usually were. You’re a very nice person. But I was not in a cheery mood. And I could only imagine ulterior motives.

  You stepped away, leaving me bewildered. Why would you ask me for a desk lamp? I couldn’t think of a reason.

  But I started back to my dorm. I was supposed to be working for you. You ask me for a desk lamp, I’ll get one.

  Walking across campus, I racked my brain. What could it be? Gradually it came to me: you were setting me up for public humiliation. I was to walk all the way to my room, unplug my desk lamp, and carry it all the way back to the party, at which time you would point at me, standing there with an unwieldy desk lamp in my hand, and shout, “Ha-ha! Look, everybody! Dave has a lamp in his hand!” And then, since there would certainly be no place to put a desk lamp at a party, I’d have to lug it around with me for the rest of the night—marked as a dupe. I even imagined that I’d heard of this before. That it was a hazing ritual at certain college fraternities. (Our college had no fraternities.) That pledges were made to carry their desk lamps with them wherever they went for the duration of Hell Week and that they’d be punished severely if found without one. (I do think a similar tradition may in fact take place in fraternities. But probably not with desk lamps.)

  By the time I’d gotten to my dorm, I’d convinced myself that I was the butt of a well-known party gag. Everyone knew I had taken too many drugs, everyone was waiting for me to get back there, and they were all going to have a big laugh when they saw me with the lamp in my hand. You would be high-fiving with someone. I was resigned to it.

  I walked into my friend Will’s room. Will was a senior and was getting ready to go to the party. He was showered and relaxed in clean clothes. He could tell something was wrong as soon as he saw me.

  “Why so glum, chum?” he asked.

  “I fell for the old lamp trick,” I said sadly.

  “The what?”

  “You know, the thing where someone asks you to bring a lamp to a party. And then there’s no place to put the lamp, so you end up holding the lamp in your hands all night.”

  Will gently assured me I was out of my mind. I went upstairs and got the lamp, and we walked back to the party together. The band had started playing, people were dancing. I found you and presented the lamp. To my surprise, you took it. But when you walked away, I assumed I’d just lost a lamp. “Yeah, like she needs a lamp at a party,” I said to Will.

  Ten minutes later, Will pulled my shirt. “Come here,” he said. “There’s something you should see.”

  He walked me over to a folding table set up near the back of the tent. My lamp was sitting on it, shining its light on an array of cassette tapes of the band that was playing. A ska band from Boston. Chucklehead, they were called. The tapes were for sale. “See?” said Will.

  I think everyone but me had a really good time at the party.

  Dear Aunt Ava,

  I’m sorry for breaking Pa’s sculpture.

  It was made of a solid, dark wood. Around two feet tall, an oval-shaped figure rising off a square block base, vaguely representational of a mother cradling her child, it was one of my favorite sculptures of his. He’d had it on the mantel of the fireplace in his living room, under one of the golden angels mounted on the chimney. He was a good sculptor, Pa.

  I had driven to your parents’ house in West Orange to pick it up on my way to my friend Jim’s house in nearby Montclair, where I was set to spend the night. Pa had told me that I could choose a sculpture of his to display in my dorm room that fall, so after a short visit, a cup of coffee, and a zwieback, I carried it out to the car and laid it on my duffel bag on the passenger seat—I wanted to give it a cushion.

  Having something that Pa had made was important to me. Your brother, my father, had died a year and a half before, and we’d all been knocked off balance. My mother, always clear-eyed and stoic, kept herself busy with work and taking care of Debby and the house, but fell into social isolation. Debby was doing great in lots of ways. She attended an adolescent bereavement group, I know, and got very into modern dance and did well in school and had a strong group of friends. But at her bat mitzvah, when you got up and asked the congregation for a moment of silence in honor of my dad—which was a nice thing to do, of course—I looked over at her, standing so poised in her shiny blue dress, and thought about how unfair it was. I remembered myself at her age, free to invest more emotional energy than was warranted into normal thirteen-year-old concerns like who was the better drummer, Keith Moon or John Bonham (Moon), or how I could get my hair to look the way I wanted it to look (I couldn’t), or whether or not to invite Wendy Metzger or any other girls to my bar mitzvah (I didn’t. I was such a dork). Debby didn’t have that luxury. Even when she smiled, you could see it: she knew a lot more about the heavier stuff than kids her age were supposed to.

  Dad’s death aged your parents like the passage of time never had before. Your mother, Thea, my grandmother, talked about it in evolutionary psychological terms. “We are designed to bury our parents,” she said. “It’s a normal part of human existence, the natural order. I buried my mother. That was right. We are not designed to bury our children. When your father died—a mother is not designed to cope with that. It broke something in me.”

  David Landy came to our house about a week after Dad died. I was glad to see him; I had a question for him. I had gone through Dad’s old clothes and taken a bunch of stuff that I thought I might wear—belts, T-shirts, sweaters, his suede coat from the ’60s. But I’d felt weird doing it. The phrase grave robber occurred to me. I asked my mother what she thought, and she recommended I talk to David Landy. His father had died a couple years before. So right away, right as I answered the door, I explained the situation and asked him, “What do you think my dad would have thought?”

  He put his hand on my shoulder. “I wear something that belonged to my father every day,” he said. “I think that it would make your dad happy to think about you wearing his clothes. In fact, I know it. It would make him proud. I cherish the things I have from my father. For me, wearing something of my father’s is like a way of keeping him with me a little bit.”

  Pa’s statue served a similar talismanic function for me. He was getting very old, in his eighties. I’m not sure whether or not he’d had his first heart attack yet, but it was around that time. I was reading Marx and Max Weber and Freud in college and coming to appreciate our family’s history—Pa’s role in the Socialist resistance movement against Hitler’s rise, Thea’s work as a first wave psychoanalyst—in ways that I had not before. Laying on the duffel bag next to me as I started the car and pulled out of the driveway on Shady Glen, the sculpture’s elegant curves, the dark stain that brought out the patterns in the wood’s grain, the patience and care so evident in the carving, all this spoke to something in Pa that I liked to think was in me, in my blood. It was beautiful. I was proud.

  But I was not a good driver. I have never been good with directions. At that time of my life, my mental state was like the water in a snow globe just after you shake it up, the bits of glitter swirling in all directions before settling into their downward drift. I was always feeling frantic, even when I might have looked calm from the outside.

  So navigating myself to an unfamiliar address always threw me into a panic. This was the case with Jim’s house. I had written directions; it shou
ld have been a ten-minute drive. But after pulling off Harrison Avenue, I found myself lost in the maze of same-looking streets that make up northern New Jerseyan suburbia. I was on a commercial strip, passing the small, manicured lawns and parking lots out in front of banks, Italian delis, Laundromats, etc., shouting curses at my feeble brain as I peered out the passenger side window and struggled to read the street signs, when I glanced back in front of me and saw that I was coming up on a line of cars stopped at a red light. Coming up much too fast.

  I jammed on the brakes and heard the tires squeal, felt my seat belt pull tight across my chest. The sculpture flew off the duffel bag and smashed into the dashboard with a crack. I was lucky it didn’t hit the windshield. I was lucky I didn’t hit the car in front of me.

  “Fucking idiot!” I shouted. The sculpture lay on the floor in front of the passenger seat.

  When I finally found Jim’s house and pulled into his driveway and parked, I unbuckled my seat belt and reached down and picked up the sculpture and turned it over in my hands. I wasn’t expecting it to be broken. It was a thick, solid block of wood. But there it was: the lovely, smooth curve Pa had cut and sanded and polished with his hands—split down the middle like a tree after a lightning storm. I ran my finger along the crack, felt the sharp splinters.

  I slammed the heel of my palm against the steering wheel hard enough to hurt. I yanked at my hair with my hands. I felt like I might cry. I didn’t. But I sat there for a long time before going inside.

  The next day when I drove home, I put the duffel bag and the sculpture back on the passenger seat. This time, I thought to use the seat belt to strap it down. But it was already broken.

  Pa died four years later, in 1996. You have a lot of his artwork in your house in Boston. You’ve taken up sculpting in the past few years yourself. You work with clay, and some of your pieces remind me of his. I don’t know where the sculpture of the mother and child is. Maybe in the basement of my mom’s house; I never wanted to throw it away. I should bring it up to you next Thanksgiving. Maybe you could fill in the crack with clay. It wouldn’t be the same as the original. But it could be nice.

  Dear Nick,

  I’m sorry I ate your carrot cake.

  We were at college and living off campus in the house on Bragaw Street. You had bought the cake earlier that day, when we’d all gone to Super Stop & Shop for groceries. It was a small piece, an individual serving, wrapped in cellophane. You’d paid for it separately and left it in the fridge while you went to an afternoon class. But our roommate Scott and I didn’t have afternoon classes that day. Or if we did, we decided to skip them and stay home and smoke pot instead. Whatever the case, we stayed home while you were out and smoked pot. I got hungry, on account of the pot smoking, and went to the fridge, where I found the carrot cake. I knew it was yours. I knew you were saving it to eat later. I don’t even like carrot cake that much. Still, it looked good with that thick layer of cream cheese frosting on top, and self-discipline has never been a strong suit of mine. I decided to have just one little bite. Then I ate the whole thing.

  You came home and looked in the fridge and came into the living room where Scott and I and Pete from downstairs were sitting and asked what had happened to the carrot cake. I told you I had eaten it. You were angry—as well you should have been. That was very inconsiderate of me.

  But that’s not the worst of it. As you’ve pointed out many times since that day (as somehow, miraculously, we’ve remained friends), what really made you as mad as you ended up being was the fact that I refused to admit any wrongdoing.

  “You know this is a house where people smoke pot,” I said. “You know people tend to get hungry when they smoke pot. It’s unreasonable to expect a piece of carrot cake left alone in a fridge near where pot is being smoked won’t be eaten. Under the standard conditions of this house, I can’t take responsibility for what happens to a piece of carrot cake.” I smiled a stoned smile at you while you frowned—so obviously not stoned. “Especially,” I continued, just to be a dick, “a piece of carrot cake as delicious as that one was.” You called me a dick and turned around and went back into the kitchen. Scott and Pete were laughing. I sat there, happy with myself for constructing such an ironclad argument. I felt like a lawyer. Like Sam Waterston.

  Embarrassingly, thinking back, a good part of me actually believed that what I said had some merit. Like since we smoked so much pot, we somehow lived under a different code: the Pot Rules, unbeholden to logic or common decency. I’ll slough responsibility again now and blame the environment: our life at that college was just that divorced from reality. Tuition paid for by our parents, the extent of our responsibilities being to show up for, what, eight hours of classes a week? Make it to a professor’s office at some point and ask for another extension on an overdue philosophy paper? How could we not fall into spoiled, utopian thinking? But god, in hindsight, what an ugly utopia. Where any self-indulgent doofus is free to rationalize away transgression so long as there’s a couple other doofuses there to laugh along with him. (I believe there may have been a Star Trek episode along these lines…) Where right and wrong can be spun out of thin air and “pack the bong” is the last word on any subject.

  So I officially apologize. I hereby accept full responsibility for my actions. And I owe you a piece of carrot cake.

  NEW YORK

  (Or Stumbling into the Real World.)

  Dear Afrika Baby Bam,

  I’m sorry I used the word fiending in conversation with you.

  I must have sounded like such a dork. It’s not a word I usually use.

  This was summer 1994. I was an intern at Vibe magazine, which was a new magazine then, not yet a year old. I had come down to New York City from college in Connecticut to stay at my friend Will’s apartment for two months—his roommate Joey was away for the summer. Every morning I would report to the offices on Lexington Avenue, where I would sort mail and transcribe interview tapes and read through the local newspapers looking for hip-hop-related stories, which I would cut out and photocopy and staple into ten or twelve easily digestible packets to be distributed to the editors and editorial assistants. I was happy to be there. I loved hip-hop; I loved all types of music. I’d wanted to be a music writer since I was in high school. (I’d written record reviews for the school paper my senior year: Full of fawning clichés about Keith Richards’s Talk Is Cheap and Lou Reed’s New York. Full of sub-clever snark about Europe’s The Final Countdown.) Even in its infancy, I thought Vibe was about the best music magazine going. And I found that I really liked the people who worked there.

  You were, as you know, a hip-hop star. A founding member of the rap group the Jungle Brothers, as well as the beloved and important collective of boho artists known as the Native Tongues. You and your partners Mike G and Sammy B, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, I had been listening to you guys, loving your music, for years.

  So I was very excited the day that Vibe’s music editor, Danyel Smith, the editor at the magazine that I had become closest with, gave me the special assignment of calling you to get a comment for a story she was working on. I forget what it was about. Queen Latifah maybe—another Native Tongues cohort.

  You hadn’t put out any new music in a while. Your first two albums, Straight out the Jungle and Done by the Forces of Nature, had come out in the ’80s and were—and are—stone classics. (I’m listening to the latter as I type this, and it sounds as terrific as ever.) Your third album, J Beez wit the Remedy, was marked by conflict you were having with your record company, Warner Bros. As the story went, you guys wanted to go in a more experimental direction, and the executives balked. The final product suffered for the discord, and the album didn’t sell. Your fans (like me!) were hoping for a comeback.

  Danyel said I should ask about this after getting a suitable quote for the Latifah story (or whatever the topic was). “And ask him what’s up with the JBs,” she said. “What are they working on? When might we hear some new music? Maybe we can get a
Start piece out of it.” (Start was the name of the front section of the magazine—full of smaller, newsy items.)

  I took a pen and notepad into the fact-checker’s room, a square, windowless space in the center of the offices where there was an empty cubicle and a phone I could use. I had never interviewed anyone for the magazine before. Dialing the number Danyel had given me, I was nervous.

  But you were totally cool and down-to-earth. We talked about Latifah or whatever it was for a couple minutes, and you gave me a quote Danyel could plug into the story. And then we started to talk about the Jungle Brothers. I expressed my admiration, and you were gracious, and I gingerly mentioned the record company drama and you talked about that for a while, and then I tried to ask you about the possibility of new music.

  “So what about some new Jungle Brothers music?” I started. “Everybody’s…”

  And then my mind went blank. I couldn’t think of a word to express the idea that your fans were eager to hear a new album. I should have said just that: “eager.” Or “hoping” or “anticipating” or even simply “we can’t wait.” There are lots of things I could have said that would have worked just fine. But none of them occurred to me.

  The only word that came to mind was a hip-hop slang term. One that I had only recently become aware of. I’d heard it in the lyrics to rap songs and around the Vibe offices, too. But it was relatively new to the lexicon. It was the word fiending. Usually pronounced with a clipped final g, so fiendin’, it came from the term “dope fiend,” or more modernly, “crack fiend,” and referred to a feeling of strong desire—a desire that matched a drug addict’s need for his or her next hit of drugs. A need so strong as to lead a person to commit evil deeds. Hyperbolic, sure. But I liked it. Fiend is such a great-sounding word.

  I had never before used it in conversation, though. I had been a rap music fan for a long time—since the mid-1980s when Run-DMC broke—but I’d never adopted much hip-hop slang into daily use. Even the most common, mainstream examples, fresh, or diss, or yo, generally felt funny coming out of my mouth. I had grown up in the suburbs and attended a small New England liberal arts college and didn’t like the thought of pretending to be someone that I was not.