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

by Marc Acito

  It's Independence Day.

  The morning of my birthday I arise shortly before the crack of noon, and as I stumble out of bed I catch sight of myself in the mirror. What I see surprises me. I haven't shaved in over a week and, since I've inherited Al's lycanthropic genes, I find I've practically grown a full beard.

  I'm not sure if it looks any good, but I like it. It makes me feel like a man, even though I'm wearing Kelly's sister's tartan flannel nightgown.

  I open my bedroom door to find an envelope lying on the floor. On the outside it says, “For all the years we've missed having you in our home. Love from Kathleen and Kelly.” I open it and see that it's a birthday card for a one-year-old:

  You're 1 today! Harooh! Hooray!

  'Cause on the day that you are 1,

  We want to say, “We love you, son!”

  Son. I've been adopted. A few steps away lies another card, this one for a two-year-old, followed by a card “For a big boy who's 3,” and, at the top of the stairs, another one that says, “Wow! You're 4!,” and so on through the years and down the stairs and into the kitchen until finally there's a card for an eighteen-year-old on the table. Next to it is a present: Uta Hagen's Respect for Acting. I'm going to assume they bought it because it's the best book on acting as opposed to being some kind of comment on my failed audition.

  I hope.

  The doorbell rings, making the cats scatter. I wander into the entryway, open the front door, and there he is in front of me, wearing a party hat and holding a balloon.

  The Buddha.

  For the first time in 1984 I laugh out loud.

  “Happy Birthday,” a voice says, and I turn to see Doug leaning against the house, a Cheshire cat smile on his lips.

  I immediately feel my spirits lift. It may not be a love offering, but it's at least a peace offering, and it means Doug's ready to be friends again. We move the Buddha to a place of honor in the garden and then go out to lunch.

  They keep the interior of Mamma's as dark during the day as they do at night; in some ways it seems even darker because of the bright winter light outside. The large overstuffed banquettes provide a good hiding place for guys with Mob connections and truant high-school students. Doug and I both order chicken scaloppine.

  “Youz kids want anything to drink?” the waiter asks, emphasis on the kids. No wine for us, I guess. Maybe once the beard grows all the way in.

  “I'll have a Coke,” Doug says.

  I click my tongue. “Actually, we'll both have 7Ups.”

  “Why?” Doug asks. “I don't even like 7Up.”

  “Because you only drink Coke or Pepsi with meat and pork,” I explain quietly, trying not to embarrass him in front of the waiter. “With chicken or fish you drink 7Up or Sprite.”

  He still has a lot to learn.

  Doug's just starting to fill me in on what's been happening at school when he stops cold and says, “Don't turn around.”

  Now it's a funny thing about people telling you not to turn around, because that's precisely the first thing you do when they say it. It's almost an invitation, really, as if they were tempting you to turn into a pillar of salt. So, naturally, like a stupe, I turn and who do I see coming through the door? My evil stepmonster.

  Happy fucking birthday.

  She's got another member of the master race with her, a blond Valkyrie just like herself, and they stride purposefully toward the back of the restaurant and the booth next to ours. Feeling panicked, I do the very first thing that comes into my mind: I hide.

  Now I realize that sliding underneath a table in a restaurant is somewhat of an I Love Lucy response to a crisis, but once I'm down on the floor I can't very well reappear without giving some thought as to how I'm going to accomplish it. So while I sit pondering my colossal stupidity, Doug drops his fork and leans over to talk with me.

  “Stay where you are,” he hisses. “They're talking in German.”

  While on the surface his statement may appear to make no sense whatsoever, I immediately understand that what he means is that he's going to eavesdrop and that my reappearance would spoil his cover. This gives me a certain satisfaction in my decision—like, “Oh, that's why I'm lurking underneath this table”—and I settle in, resigning myself to spending my birthday lunch on the slightly sticky floor of an Italian restaurant.

  I'm down there a long time but Doug is thoughtful enough to pass food my way, as if I were the family dog begging for table scraps. To add to my humiliation, I find myself exactly eye level with Doug's crotch which, while pleasant enough viewing, is also torturously enticing. It's a full hour and several leg cramps later when I'm finally allowed to emerge.

  “So, what did she say?” I ask Doug as I limp out of the restaurant.

  “Now you gotta remember,” he says, “I'm not a German scholar . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, just tell me.”

  “Well, as far as I could make out, not only did Dagmar marry your dad for his money—but she's stealing from him, too.”

  “What? Are you sure?”

  “She told her friend that she's been funneling money into an account Al doesn't know about. In fact, she said Al's made it easy for her because he's always teaching her about his finances by taking her out for—I think I got this right—‘business dinners.'”

  I'm just about to respond when someone mistakes me for a waiter and asks for more salad dressing, despite the fact I'm wearing an old admiral's jacket and leg warmers.

  “Not my table,” I say.

  When I get home, I forget all about this new development. There, on the floor with the mail, sits a letter. From Juilliard.

  It's a thin envelope.

  Everyone knows what a thin envelope means. Rejection. Colleges don't send big packets with maps of the campus and stuff when they're rejecting you. I don't know why I'm so disappointed; it's not like I'm surprised. I guess I just wasn't expecting it to come so soon. Happy fucking birthday squared.

  I consider tossing it out unread (Why bother, right?), but I figure I might as well get it over with. I open the envelope.

  January 2, 1984

  The Juilliard School

  Drama Division

  60 Lincoln Center Plaza

  New York, NY 10023

  Edward Zanni

  1020 Stonewall Drive

  Wallingford, NJ 07090

  Dear Edward,

  Let me be the first to congratulate you on your acceptance to the Juilliard School's Drama Division, Group XVI.

  Oh. My. God.

  The Drama Division prides itself on being the finest training ground for the best young actors in America. We sincerely hope you will make Juilliard your school of choice.

  This has got to be a mistake. Right now poor Walter Mancus is opening a rejection letter and thinking, “But I did such a great job.”

  I grab the telephone and punch in Paula's number. After about ten rings I hear a groggy, distracted voice that has to be Gino trying to speak through his wall of hair. Either that or it's the transvestite hooker from down the hall.

  “Is Paula there?” I ask.

  “She's . . . uh . . . busy,” he says.

  “Gino, this is Edward. Listen, I've got to talk with her.”

  I hear Paula's muffled voice say, “Who is it?” to which Gino replies, “Ouch, baby, watch the teeth.” The phone drops and there's some shuffling in the background.

  “Hello?”

  “It's me,” I shout. “I'm in, I'm in, I'm in!”

  “I knew it!” Paula crows. “Congratulations!”

  “ARE THEY OUT OF THEIR FUCKING MINDS?” I shout.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Sis, I vomited on their school.”

  “It's an arts school. They're used to eccentric behavior.”

  “But I sucked.”

  “That's not what I heard,” Paula says.

  “What?”

  “If you'd answered my calls you would have known. I asked my improv professor about you, y
ou know, the one who gave me an A plus when I reenacted losing my virginity?”

  I hear Gino shout “Hey!” in the background.

  “Gino, don't be such a fucking Neanderthal,” she says to him.

  “Is he an old guy or a middle-aged guy?” I ask.

  “He's a middle-aged guy with beautiful hair and a bored expression.”

  “He didn't hate me?”

  “No, he always looks like that. He's not bored, he's deep. Anyway, he said that in all his years of teaching he's never seen an audition like yours.”

  That's for sure.

  “He said you were like a raw exposed nerve, a gaping open wound.”

  “And that's good?” I say.

  “Are you kidding? That's what every actor dreams of. I knew you had it in you, I just knew it. I'm so happy for . . . oh dear . . . cut it out, will ya', I'm on the . . . just . . .”

  I hear more shuffling bodies.

  “Listen, I've got to go,” Paula says, giggling. “Something's . . . uh . . . come up. But know that I love . . .”

  And she's gone.

  I return to school revived and invigorated. Finally my baggy life seems to fit. I am one of the Best Young Actors in America. I am a raw exposed nerve. I am a gaping open wound. And I am not going to let that Austrian bitch stop me.

  The whole school seems to know the good news and even people who never talk to me, like Amber Wright, offer congratulations. I can't stop smiling. My life is bathed in a rosy glow, like an MGM Technicolor musical.

  For four periods.

  In a stunning display of colossal stupidity, I have, once again, missed the sign-up for the cushy sports in gym. Ms. Burro initials my absentee note (presumably because she can't spell her own name) and then spreads her mouth into what, on people with lips, would be called a smile. “Looks like a whole semester of basketball and softball for you, Zanni,” she says, and then actually tosses her head back and fires off a round of laughter, like she's the evil matron in a women's prison movie.

  When I'm famous, she's going to be the first person I remember to forget.

  I'm one of the Best Young Actors in America, goddamnit, I should be studying fencing or ballet, not dashing aimlessly about on the floor of a high-school gymnasium. I've endured this needless torture for forty minutes a day, four times a week for eleven fucking years. Excluding vacations, that's 144 gym classes a year, which comes to a lifetime total of 1,584; multiply that by forty minutes a class and it comes to 1,056 hours of nonstop harassment, or forty-four days of round-the-clock terror. POWs have died from less.

  I won't take another minute of it.

  I have got to get a medical excuse, but the only doctor I know well enough to ask is Kelly's father and I don't think he's unscrupulous enough to do it. If he were, Kelly wouldn't be taking gym. On the other hand, I'm certainly unscrupulous enough to fake an injury and clearly have the acting skills to pull it off. In fact, I can't believe I haven't thought of it before. Using sense memory, I can re-create the pain I felt when I fell off the back of Al's Midlife Crisis. How hard could that be?

  In the interest of creating verisimilitude, I decide to stage a fall; and where better to do it than right in front of Burro? First, I make sure I'm on the opposing team from Darren O'Boyle, even though it means I've got to play skins. Realizing that actually participating in the game might arouse suspicion, I hang about on the periphery a little more lazily than usual, not even bothering to go through the motions of trying to appear busy.

  My lethargy doesn't escape Commandant Burro's notice. “Hey, Zanni,” she yells, “get it in gear.”

  I cup my hand to my ear, the Internationally Recognized Signal for “I can't hear you, you stupid cow.”

  “C'mon, Zanni, move your butt.”

  That's all I need. In one swift, graceless move I place myself between the basketball hoop and the Evil Sophomore from Hell and flap my arms like some great, goony bird about to take flight. I feel as if my whole life has been a preparation for this moment. I narrow my eyes and think, “Come and get me, you mouth breather.”

  Darren brushes past me, his sweaty arm barely grazing mine, and in an instant I throw myself in the air and land with an echoing thud, which I accomplish by slamming the floor with my hands like those fakey pro wrestlers on TV. Burro blows her whistle.

  “I didn't touch him!” Darren shouts.

  Ms. Burro jogs over and kneels next to me. “You okay, Zanni?”

  Subtlety is the key here, not my strong suit, but crucial to making the scene believable. I look up and flash a quick, embarrassed smile, the kind where your upper lip disappears. “I'm fine, really, I'm fine,” I say.

  I stand up and wince, then bend over and exhale a couple of times, Lamaze-style, shutting my eyes tight to see if I can force out some tears. I am a raw exposed nerve.

  Ms. Burro looks worried, hopefully more about her job than me. “Why don't you sit down?” she says.

  I rub my tailbone. “I don't think that's a good idea,” I say through clenched teeth. I am a gaping open wound.

  “Hey,” she yells at Darren, who's dribbling the ball in circles while he waits, “why don't you cool off and take Edward here down to the nurse?”

  “I didn't do nothin',” he says.

  “GO!”

  Darren spikes the ball on the ground in frustration and heads for the door. I limp across the gym, my sneakers squeaking as the game resumes behind me, presumably now at a human pace. Darren struts ahead of me, his shiny, straight hair bouncing as he walks. I wish I had hair that bounced.

  “Sorry,” he mumbles as he holds the door open.

  I wince again, just to rub it in.

  I bring Natie with me to Dr. Corcoran's office, which is downtown in a brick building designed to look like Independence Hall. “What good is getting a gym excuse for just three weeks?” Natie asks.

  “That's where Nathan Nudelman, Ace Forger, comes in,” I say. “You're going to add a two before the three and turn it into a twenty-three week gym excuse, which is exactly how many weeks there are left in the school year.”

  “Who the hell ever heard of a twenty-three week excuse?” he says. “Don't you think Burro's gonna find that kind of strange?”

  I remind Natie that if Ms. Burro were that smart, she wouldn't be teaching gym.

  I take a moment outside the office door to prepare, then turn to Natie and say, “Now try to look real concerned about me but don't call too much attention to yourself, okay?” Natie nods, then holds the door open as I shuffle in. I make my way slowly to the counter and wait for the nurse to look up, but she's busy color coding files.

  “I'm here to see Dr. Corcoran,” I say finally.

  “Sign in and take a seat,” she says, still not looking up.

  I turn to sign in, but Natie stops me. “You take it easy, pal,” he says, oozing sincerity. “I've done it for you.”

  “You're the best,” I say, oozing back, but since the nurse isn't watching, our performance is wasted. Pearls before swine.

  We sit flipping through out-of-date issues of golf magazines for a long time. A couple of other people come in, some looking pretty banged up, which makes me feel kind of guilty for wasting Dr. Corcoran's time. Nurse Ratched treats them with the same comforting level of warmth and compassion she showed us. Finally, at what seems to me to be a completely arbitrary moment, she picks up the sign-in sheet and calls out the next name on it.

  “Craven Morehead?” she says. “Craven Morehead?” She looks around the room, but no one responds. “You there, with the magazine in front of your face,” she says to Natie, “are you Craven Morehead?”

  Natie looks up, all Bambi eyes. “I beg your pardon?” he says.

  “Are you Craven Morehead?”

  “No, ma'am,” he answers. Then, under his breath, he whispers, “At least not from you.”

  “Then who is Craven Morehead?” she asks, annoyed at the inefficiency. She stands up and leans over the counter to see if there's someone she's missed. �
��Is there anyone here who's Craven Morehead?”