How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater

by Marc Acito

  Meanwhile, Mr. Lucas and I work on finding the perfect classical monologue for my audition. We try Mercutio's death scene from Romeo and Juliet, mostly as an exercise connecting with pain because Mr. Lucas says I'm too much of a clown. “No! No! No!” he bellows before I'm even finished. “Mercutio's suffering from a flesh wound, Mr. Zanni, not gastritis. Try it again, but this time use the sense memory of an actual wound you've had.”

  Having avoided any kind of physical activity that might cause a wound, I concentrate on the only injury I've ever had: Father Groovy's fall off the back of Al's Midlife Crisis. I stagger about, wincing as I grip my tailbone like Mercutio has been stabbed in the butt. I know I must look strange, but I try to compensate with a dramatic, Charlton Heston-y, talking-through-clenched-teeth kind of delivery.

  “That's perfect,” Mr. Lucas says when I finish. “Now if you just rang a bell you could play Quasimodo.”

  Exeunt Mercutio.

  I'm actually bold enough to suggest one of Hamlet's soliloquies, “Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt” to be specific. Sure, it's the greatest role in the entire theatrical canon, but I am so like Hamlet; as far as I can see, he's just another sulky teenager with shitty parents. I mean, here's a speech where I really can connect with the pain by substituting Hamlet's mother with my evil stepmonster. I try it for Mr. Lucas one afternoon and must say I'm quite pleased with how my voice throbs when I say the last line about the breaking heart.

  “Congratulations, Mr. Zanni,” he says. “You've put the ham back in Hamlet.”

  Exeunt Hamlet.

  Mr. Lucas suggests I try Edmund in King Lear because he, too, is enraged with his father. But rage seems to be all I can play these days and the whole soliloquy becomes too one-note. Mr. Lucas gives me all kinds of exercises to find the other colors (“Do it like you're waiting for a bus,” “Do it like you've just discovered penicillin,” that kind of thing), but frankly, the more I work at it, the worse it gets. I know I'm in trouble when I see him take off his glasses and rub his eyes. “That's enough, Edward,” he says. “Your acting is hurting me.”

  Exeunt Edmund.

  We're running out of time.

  My next job is as a busboy at a steakhouse, although I prefer to think of myself more as a “waiter's assistant.” But then I assist a plate of baby back ribs right onto some poor woman's lap and once again find myself looking for work. Honestly, people get so touchy about the tiniest mistakes. I mean, one little flesh wound to a Pekingese is all it takes to get fired as a dog groomer, even if you artfully arrange its hair so the scar doesn't show. And when I take a job delivering newspapers, the customers get frigging crazy just because a couple of times I deliver their morning papers in the evening. I'm sure if these people slept in once in a while, they wouldn't be so grouchy.

  Sure, I'm bummed at losing all the jobs, but I view my ineptitude for the working world as a sure sign that I'm best suited for a life in the arts.

  Meanwhile, back at the House of Floor Wax, Al and I can't seem to agree on anything anymore; the moment either of us brings up the subject of college it immediately escalates into yet another finger-wagging, door-slamming, yelling-at-the-top-of-our-lungs battle. I can hardly breathe when I'm in the house. I feel like Antigone: condemned by an unjust tyrant to be walled alive inside a tomb. With hardwood floors.

  God, I miss my mother.

  But it's thinking about Antigone that finally inspires me to find the right monologue: Haemon's speech to his father. I can't believe I haven't thought of it before. I am so like Haemon. We're both sensitive, misunderstood souls with petty despots for fathers. Here at last is a dramatic monologue where I can connect to the pain. It says everything I want to say to Al, and I practice it loudly around the house just to piss off Dagmar and maybe, just maybe, to get through to my father, who grows more distant, like someone on a faraway shore.

  Father, you must not think that your word and no other must be so.

  (That's right, Al, you son of a bitch bastard.)

  For if any man thinks that he alone is wise—that in what he says and what he does, he's above all else—that man is but an empty tomb.

  (Yeah, and you'll be sorry when I don't thank you in my Oscar speech.)

  A wise man isn't ashamed to admit his ignorance and he understands that true power lies in being flexible, not rigid.

  (Hello-o?)

  Have you seen after a winter storm how the trees that stand beside the torrential streams yield to it and save their branches, while the stiff and rigid perish, root and all? Or how a sailor who always keeps his sail taut and never slackens will only capsize his boat?

  (These are called metaphors, get it?)

  Father, I may be young, but you must listen to reason. Please, I beg you to soften your heart and allow a change from your rage.

  (Please, please, please, please, please.)

  Still, the misery that is phys ed continues to wear on me and I finally lose it during flag football when, after having made the simple error of tearing the flags off someone on my own team, I'm publicly berated by Darren O'Boyle, Duncan's younger brother and an obvious future wife-beater. Darren has the same nasty rodentlike features as his brother and you can tell in an instant that he's mean in that steal-your-lunch-box-on-the-playground-in-the-third-grade kind of way. For a month now he's been relishing the sadistic pleasure of being able to show how tough he is by humiliating an upperclassman. I'm sick of it. What's worse, soon we're going to switch to basketball, another game I cannot remotely begin to understand, and one in which we're submitted to the additional humiliation of having to play shirts and skins. I discuss the matter with Ziba over lunch at her favorite restaurant, La Provençal. So far, no one in the attendance office has noticed that she and I always leave school at the same time for faux doctor's appointments, during which we enjoy leisurely lunches in the Continental manner.

  “Why don't you just take a hammer and break something?” she suggests, using her water glass as a finger bowl. “Something little you don't really need, like a finger or a toe.”

  “I don't know,” I say. “I'm not sure I've got the guts.”

  “Oh, I'll do it for you, darling,” she says like she's offering to feed my cat.

  “You would?”

  “But of course. You're an oasis for me in this cultural desert. You and Nathan are the only true gentlemen in this school. All the rest are hormonally imbalanced thugs whose idea of romance is to drag you into a dark room and hump you like a dog. Breaking your finger is the least I can do.”

  “Uh, thanks?”

  “Don't mention it.”

  Rather than resort to self-mutilation I turn to Natie for advice, who, despite his more irritating qualities, can be as dependable as a Japanese car in these circumstances and twice as efficient. His solution is characteristically simple and insane.

  “We'll just break into the school and change the sign-up sheets,” he says.

  “How do you plan on doing that?” I ask.

  “It's easy. We'll cross your name off of basketball and add it to the list for one of the blow-off sports. You can tell Burro that one of your friends signed you up.”

  “No,” I say. “I meant how do you plan on breaking into the school?”

  Natie jingles his keys which, in an effort to uphold his reputation as a total cheesehead, he keeps on his belt. “Having keys to the school is just one of the privileges and responsibilities of running the stage crew.”

  Natie.

  “So you see,” he says, “it's not really breaking and entering; it's unlocking and entering which, as far as I know, is not a punishable offense.”

  “But even if I add my name to the list, do you really think Burro's going to buy that line about someone else signing me up?”

  Natie scrunches his doughy little face. “Pleeeease,” he says, “if she were that smart, do you think she'd be teaching gym?”

  It may not be the best idea he's ever had, but it's worth a try.

  Now in
case you ever decide to unlock and enter your local high school, let me tell you that it's not as easy as you'd think. You can't just open the front door and wander in. And for reasons I still don't understand, Natie's key only allows him access to the boiler room in the basement. It's like the setting of some slasher movie, all sweaty, mossy pipes, inexplicable banging noises, and that dingy caged area lit by a bare bulb where you expect the crazed serial killer will do in the unsuspecting night watchman. From there, you have to crawl up a flight of stairs on your hands and knees so you don't set off a motion detector. The deftness with which the normally unathletic Natie accomplishes this task leads me to believe he's done it before.

  Once we're on the first floor we can move about freely, although we're still hyperconscious of getting caught. Doug's come along with us (it just wouldn't be a true CV Enterprise without him) and we wander the empty corridors together, the only sound coming from the squeaking of my sneakers across the linoleum floors. Why they call them sneakers I'll never know, because they don't seem very effective for sneaking. They should call them squeakers instead. To make matters worse, my left knee cracks every other step. “Jesus, Ed, you're like a friggin' one-man band,” Doug says.

  Everything looks different at night—the classrooms, the hallways, the offices—and it all appears more sinister and scary, like we're visiting an evil parallel universe. I'm aware of every echo, every shaft of light, every movement.

  It's thrilling.

  Natie accompanies me and Doug to the gym and leaves us there while he goes to the main office to intercept some detention slips and do a little forgery for his “clients.” Apparently, he's been building up a little cottage industry among the rich, white-boy druggies who can afford to pay a handsome fee to have their school records cleaned up. “I'll meet you guys here at 0200 hours,” he says. “And don't go wandering off. You don't know where all the alarms are.”

  Doug and I have to go into the girls' locker room to get to Burro's office and, as we pass through the door, it suddenly occurs to me—gym teachers go to work every day in a locker room. While admittedly there's a certain sexiness about it, overall it's got to suck, particularly for the men. Few things stink worse than teenage boys' feet.

  The door to Ms. Burro's office is locked.

  “Now what?” Doug asks.

  “We've just gotta wait for Natie, I guess.”

  Doug ambles over to the lockers and tugs on the locks to see if any are open. “I've always wondered what the girls' locker room looked like,” he says.

  I glance around. “Not so different from the boys', is it?”

  “Guess not,” he says.

  We wander through the shower room and out to the pool. The room is humid and smells of chlorine and mold. The only sound comes from the water lapping into the filters.

  Doug Grouchos his eyebrows at me. “You up for a swim?” he asks.

  The water is dark and scary looking and undoubtedly cold, but I'm not about to pass up an opportunity to see Doug naked. Normally I have to go to a lot of trouble to do just that—showing up early at his house so I might catch him stepping out of the shower, inviting myself to sleep over despite the fact that his father, the embittered Tastykake driver, totally gives me the creeps. Doug whips off his clothes the way little kids do, like he's eager to be liberated from them. But there's something almost graceful about the way he pulls his shirt off, reaching from the bottom instead of wiggling out from the neck the way I do, and I make a mental note to remove my shirt that way in the future. He strides past me, the muscles in his legs as attenuated as something you'd see in Gray's Anatomy and I feel ashamed that my body is so jiggly. He stands naked at the edge of the pool, spreads his cobra lats wide, and cracks his back before making a perfect javelin dive into the silver-black water. I descend the steps halfway and watch him flop about like a dolphin, his butt periodically popping above the surface of the water. He swims over to me.

  “Aren't you coming in?”

  I'm stuck in that stage between wanting to go in and being afraid to take the final plunge. So instead I stand there shivering like an idiot. “It's really cold,” I say, my teeth chattering.

  “Wuss,” he says, then grabs me by the wrist and yanks me in. All I can hear is the plunging sound of water as it rushes past me and I feel quite lost for a moment. I swim for the surface and look around for Doug but I don't see him. I paddle to the center of the pool, unsure of what to do next. It's kind of creepy swimming in a dark pool at night, like any minute you expect to hear the theme from Jaws.

  At that moment Doug grabs a hold of my foot and drags me under.

  We sort of wrestle, each of us preventing the other from coming up for air. Doug's body is hard to the touch and, even as I struggle for breath, I find myself envying it. (How great must it be to go through life with that sense of firmness under you, like you have a solid foundation?) When we can't stand it any longer we rise to the surface.

  “Very funny,” I gasp.

  Doug flashes me a lupine smile and I feel his legs brush up against mine as we tread water. He looks so handsome with his wet hair pushed off his face, like an old-time movie star. It's all I can do to stop myself from just leaning over and kissing him right on the lips.

  “What's wrong?” he says.

  “Nothing. Why?”

  “You're looking at me funny.”

  “That's 'cuz you're funny-looking,” I say and splash him. He pops up and dunks me and once again the water whooshes around my ears. I reach for his legs and find my head in his crotch and suddenly Doug is over my shoulder, his cock mashed against my neck, the muscles in the back of his thighs tensing in my hands. I have to push him off of me to get a breath, but as soon as I do, Doug whips around, thrusts his hand between my legs and gooses me.

  I squeal, just like a little girl, the sound reverberating around the room. Doug backstrokes away from me.

  “Hernia check,” he says, winking.

  This is what I imagine life with a male lover is like—rough and playful and grabby—and I revel in the sheer manliness of it all. I follow Doug down to the shallow end where we do handstands and have breath-holding contests until it's almost 0200 hours.

  We don't have any towels so we sit on the pavement to air-dry. Doug lies back, putting his hands behind his head and closing his eyes. I gaze at his lean and chiseled body, which reminds me of Jesus on the cross. (Is it just me, or is it strange that churches have statues that make our crucified Lord look like a triathlete?)

  “Ed, can I ask you something?”

  I turn and see that Doug has opened his eyes. Caught.

  “Sure,” I say.

  “Promise you won't take it the wrong way.”

  “'Course I won't.”

  I feel my heart skip a beat. Unfortunately, the blood rushes to my groin instead.

  Doug sits up on his elbows. “Are you gay?”

  He's cool with it; he's totally, totally cool with it, and reminds me yet again of his homo-friendly credentials (the ubiquitous gay German gymnast uncle). In fact, he even seems to admire me for being bi, like it makes me some kind of adventuresome sexual outlaw. Slut Cassidy.

  “But you gotta understand that I'm not like that,” he says. “There's nothing wrong with it, of course, but I'm just really, really straight, you know what I mean?”

  Methinks he doth protest too much. Now I just need to find a way to wear down his resistance without resorting to a blow to the head with a blunt instrument.

  Natie can't get us into Burro's office, but he does offer to break my finger for me. I decline, and turn my attention back to the college issue.

  Luckily, Mr. Lucas agrees to plead my case with Al. But just the thought of the two of them meeting (aka When Worlds Collide) gives me a pain in my chest like someone is gripping my heart and won't let go.

  I want to assert my identity as an artist by wearing my lime-green harem pants and judo jacket, but Kathleen says I'll get further if I dress conservatively (or “normal” as sh
e calls it), so I wear khakis and an Izod shirt, which I even tuck in, as well as one of those horrible preppy belts that looks like macramé. With my Hall and Oates haircut I look like a lesbian golfer.

  Being unemployed at the moment (you make a couple of personal calls when you're supposed to be telemarketing and you're out of there), I slip in the back of the auditorium to watch the Act One run-through of The Miracle Worker. It's the first time I've seen any of the show since I quit, and the moment Kelly enters I totally forget my worries. Her performance as Annie Sullivan is an absolute revelation to me. First off, she's completely convincing, down to the character's Irish brogue and troubled eyesight and I often forget it's Kelly I'm watching, so swept away am I by her performance. I had no idea she could be so good. She's so real, so harrowing, it makes me want to cry (assuming I could do that kind of thing), partly because I'm so proud of her and partly because I want so desperately to be up there myself being real and harrowing.