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

by Marc Acito

  But if you think there's anything pleasurable in admiring the trim muscular form of the brother of your ex-girlfriend and the son of a man who fingered you until you got a stiffy, you'd be mistaken. With each step on the pavement, lurid, unwelcome thoughts of Dr. Corcoran pound in my brain and I'm helpless to stop them.

  “Y'know, 'Dward,” Brad says (being a true prep, he's already invented a nickname for me), “you really oughta come up to the lake with us sometime. There's some truly righteous fishing to be had.”

  “Really?” I huff. “That sounds great . . .” (Your father got me hard. Your father got me hard. Your father got me hard.)

  “You sail, then?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I lie, “I'm a born sailor . . .” (Your father got me hard. Your father got me hard. Your father got me hard.)

  I run six goddamn miles, despite suffering from what I'm sure is a collapsed lung. What's more, Brad's got that competitive Kennedy-brothers-playing-touch-football-on-the-lawn-at-Hyannisport thing going on, so somehow we manage to do it in just under forty-five minutes. My skin is so red and wet by the time we get back I look like Carrie on her prom night.

  Kit's up now, and she scolds Brad for not waking her to go jogging, blah, blah, blah. She hands him a Bloody Mary, which is the first sensible thing either of them have done since they got here. I collapse on the couch.

  “You hungry?” she asks in her too-loud voice. “I'm making blueberry pancakes.”

  I shake my head and Brad tells me I can have the first shower while he eats breakfast. I trudge upstairs, noting that neither Kathleen nor Kelly have stirred yet, which is just one of the many reasons I love them both.

  I'm resting my head on the tile when I hear the shower curtain swoosh open, giving me a Janet-Leigh-in-Psycho kind of scare.

  “Yo, 'Dward. What's takin' so long?” Brad yells. “Ya' jerkin' the gherkin?” He swats me on the ass with the back of his hand and laughs like this is the height of wit, when in fact it's kind of true. I shut the curtain and try to conjugate French verbs to make my cock go down.

  “There's no need to be shy around me,” Brad says. “I live in a frat house. I see dudes naked all the time.”

  This visual doesn't help at all. J'aime, tu aimes, il aime . . .

  “Besides,” he says, “you've got nothin' to be embarrassed about. A beefy Italian guy like you, all you have to do is work out a little and, whammo, you've got muscles.”

  “Really?” I say.

  “Sure,” he says, pushing open the curtain again. “If you'd like, I'll show you a thing or two.”

  He better not mean that to be as sexy as it sounds, though it's difficult to tell because he's standing there completely naked.

  “If you don't hurry, I'm gonna have to come in there with you.”

  Like father, like son, I guess. I turn the water to cold.

  The next week is like boot camp. Every morning, Brad and I rise at the ass crack of dawn and do our lung-collapsing regimen of jogging and calisthenics, most of which seem to involve touching each other in a Greco-Roman wrestling kind of way. It's torture, not just because my muscles are so spasmed that I twitch all day like someone with Parkinson's, but because the homoerotic subtext of Brad's every statement drives me insane. (He actually feels up my pecs at one point and says, “Yo, 'Dward, if you were a chick, I swear I'd fuck ya'.”) A little homoerotic subtext goes a long way, though. All Brad has to do is smile his Irish eyes at me and I find myself doing those push-ups where you clap in between. I even promise him and the Headband I'll come out to Notre Dame for some “righteous keggers.”

  On Saturday, Father Groovy takes the train into Hoboken to check our post office box. There's a brochure for the summer series at Lincoln Center (guess we're on the mailing list), but no word from Jordan yet. Then I head into the city, stopping in the men's room at Penn Station to remove Father Groovy's collar and spectacles.

  Paula's standing in front of the theater as I come running up, her tiny teardrop hands knotting and unknotting a purple scarf that matches her left shoe. I call to her from across the street and she waves the scarf at me in the grand manner of someone departing on a luxury liner. I dart through traffic to get to her.

  “Sorry I'm late,” I gasp.

  “Don't worry about it, scruffy,” she says, taking my face in her hands and giving my beard a scratch. “You're here now and we're together and that's all that really matters in the end, isn't it?”

  I love Paula, too, but I'm used to getting a little lecture on punctuality first. She blinks her Disney eyes at me and I notice the thin blue vein that courses under the white-white skin of her forehead. “Are you okay?” I ask. There's something about her curtain-up-light-the-lights smile that seems forced.

  She gives my shoulder a squeeze and pulls a thread off of my herringbone sports jacket, or perhaps I should say Father Groovy's herringbone sports jacket. “I just wanted you to know that no matter what happens,” she says, “I'll always be here for you.”

  What the hell is going on?

  The show is Neil Simon's new play, Brighton Beach Memoirs, which is something of a departure from his usual urban comedies. It's an autobiographical coming-of-age story—like there aren't enough of those already. But I suppose every writer has to write about his childhood at some point, and at least Neil Simon has the good sense to make his funny. That being said, I fail to see what the big deal is about the kid who plays the lead.

  “I ask you,” I say to Paula as we leave the theater, “what does this Matthew Broderick have that I don't have?”

  “Besides an agent and the lead in a hit Broadway show?” Paula says. “Nothing.”

  “Exactly! I mean, I could have done that part. And I would've been a lot funnier and less, y'know, real.”

  “Absolutely,” Paula says.

  “Do you want to wait at the stage door and get his autograph?”

  “Of course.”

  There's a big crowd in the alley filled with the usual loser wanna-bes with no lives as opposed to serious thespians like us who want to learn more about our craft. We get in line behind a couple of blue-haired matinee ladies reminiscing about Brighton Beach and the Depression. As Paula pulls a compact out of a purse she's made from a Smurf plush toy I ask her how Gino's doing.

  “Oh, we broke up,” she says, fluffing her curls.

  “You're kidding. I'm so sorry.”

  “No you're not. He was a creep.”

  “You're right. What the hell were you thinking?”

  Paula snaps her compact closed and puts it away. “He wanted me, Edward,” she says. “Not because I'm witty and talented and smart, but quite simply because I have a big rack.” She looks down and grabs her boobs in her hands like she's weighing them. “No one in high school ever wanted this body,” she says. “No one! They wanted skinny girls like Kelly and Ziba. Frankly, this fascination with girls who are built like little boys smacks of suppressed homosexual desires, but that's another story. The point is, Gino may have had the brains of a calamari but he sure liked having something to grab onto when he fucked.” She demonstrates by grasping her meaty butt in her hands. “And he wanted to do it all the time. Every day, just fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  The blue hairs scowl at her. Paula ignores them.

  “And for a while it was simply splendid,” she says. “But then he bought me a vibrator and I began to realize what I was missing.”

  “He didn't care about your orgasm, did he?” I say.

  “Worse,” she says, holding up her pinky at me. “Also like a calamari.”

  This is definitely the wrong thing to say to someone who's insecure about his equipment. “Let me ask you something,” I say. “Does size really matter?”

  “Depends,” Paula says. “In my case, well . . . do you see these big, childbearing hips?”

  I nod.

  “I've got just two words for you: big vagina.”

  The two blue hairs in front of us turn around, disgusted, and bustle out of th
e alleyway. As they pass, one of them mutters, “Slut.”

  Paula's Disney eyes go wide. “Did you hear what she called me?”

  “A slut,” I say.

  “Yes,” she says, clapping her fleshy little hands together. “Isn't that splendid?”

  The crowd begins to thin, more out of boredom than because of Paula's dirty talk. Various actors from the show come through the door, but no Matthew. Eventually it's just the two of us standing there. “He's probably waiting for the all clear,” Paula says.

  “Do you think he might invite us into his dressing room?” I ask.

  “Maybe.”

  It's happened before. Paula and I met Angela Lansbury that way when we saw Sweeney Todd. And the same with Geraldine Page in Agnes of God. The really great theater stars are gracious like that.

  “Maybe we could impress him so much with our serious-actor questions he might go out for a bite with us between shows and we could become friends with him and I could get a job as his understudy.”

  “You'd be perfect!” Paula says. “Then you'd have a job and you wouldn't have to worry about . . .”

  “Worry about what?”

  “Nothing. Isn't this alley divine? I just love stage-door alleys.”

  “No, really, what's up with you? You've been acting funny all day.”

  “Listen,” she says, “why don't we go get a drink? We can talk about it there.”

  “Talk about what?”

  “Nothing, really. Come on, Joe Allen's is just a couple of blocks . . .”

  “No, tell me now.”

  “It'd be better . . .”

  “Sis!”

  “You didn't get the Sinatra scholarship.”

  She blurts it out so fast I'm not sure I heard her right. “What did you say?” I ask.

  “You didn't get the Sinatra scholarship. They gave it to some relative of his—Anthony Something, from Hoboken. Oh, Edward, I'm just anguished for you.”

  The walls of the alley start to close in around me. I get dizzy and actually have to lean against the stage door to keep from falling over.

  Paula rubs her little teardrop hand on my back. “People are saying he wasn't even accepted before the scholarship was donated . . .”

  This can't be happening to me.

  “. . . but that they changed their minds when they realized they might get more money in the future.”

  Ten thousand dollars gone.

  “The whole thing is a travesty,” she says, “an absolute travesty.”

  Her voice sounds far away to me, like I'm underwater.

  “Don't worry, Edward, you'll find another way to pay for school. I know you will.” She embraces me, but I just stand there, rigid.

  The door opens, shoving us both aside, and out steps Matthew Broderick, wearing a baseball cap and a leather jacket.

  “Oh, sorry,” he says as he passes. “I didn't know you were there.”

  Like Superman, I jump into the phone booth at the Wallingford train station as soon as I get back and dial Natie's number.

  Stan answers. “The Nudelman rrrresidence,” he says, trilling the “r.” Like Fran, he, too, becomes inexplicably British when he answers the phone.

  “Hey, Mr. Nudelman, it's Edward. Is Natie there?” I pull back the receiver in anticipation of the usual shoutfest, but to my surprise he speaks like a normal person.

  “Nathan went out for a little while,” he says. “Something about getting a real steal on computer equipment.”

  I don't know and I don't ask.

  “Will he be back soon?” I ask. The booth feels stifling and claustrophobic to me, so I stretch the cord as far as I can and step out onto the pavement to gulp the humid spring air.

  “He's gotta eat sometime. Are you okay, Eddie?”

  I don't know why, but his asking how I am both comforts and panics me at the same time. No, nothing is okay, nothing at all, and I can't possibly tell him why.

  I want my mommy.

  “Will you just tell him to wait for me when he gets back?”

  “Sure thing,” he says. “Say, bet you're pretty excited about Juilliard, huh?”

  I can't even answer him.

  Naturally it starts to rain, and not the cool, restorative sort of rain either, but the oppressively muggy New Jersey kind. Father Groovy's herringbone sports jacket starts giving me the itch, so I strip it off and carry it like it's some dead gray animal, switching arms every block or so as it grows heavier with wetness. Finally I quicken my pace to a jog, hoping that'll somehow make me less wet, all the while trying to work out in my mind what just happened. I can only guess that Frank Sinatra must have read the item in the New York Post and called Juilliard to inquire about it. In true Hoboken never-turn-down-a-freebie style, Frank probably mentioned he had a relative who qualified, and in true fund-raising suck-up-to-potential-donors style, Laurel Watkins made it happen.

  Courtesy of my ten grand. It's a shame Natie won't live to see adulthood, but it's obvious I'm going to have to kill him.

  By the time I get to the Nudelmans' I'm completely soaked. I lean on the doorbell and hear Fran scream, “FOR GOD'S SAKE, SOMEONE GET THE DOOR!”

  I step out of my muddy Keds, partly out of politeness, but mostly because my feet itch like crazy and I can't wait to scratch them. I feel like I'm about to burst out of my skin.

  Natie answers.

  “Jeez,” he says, looking me up and down, “what have you been doing—gathering two of every animal?”

  “Frank Sinatra stole my money.”

  “WHAT THE FUCK . . .”

  From the other end of the house Fran screams, “NATHAN, ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?”

  “JUST A LITTLE TOURETTE'S, MA,” he hollers back.

  “You don't have Tourette's,” I say, rubbing my bare feet on the mat to relieve the itch.

  “They don't know that,” he says. “Why do ya' think they don't pay attention to anything I say?”

  He really does scare me sometimes.

  I drop my wet coat on the linoleum floor and lean against the carpeted wall to catch my breath.

  “Let me get you a towel or something,” Natie says. “Fran just had that wall steam cleaned.” He scampers down the hallway, hitching up his sagging pants as he goes.

  I bend over and rest my hands on my knees. The swirling patterns in the linoleum look like those meteorological maps you see on the news and it makes me dizzy. I close my eyes.

  Natie returns with a robe that has Palm Beach Hilton stitched on the breast pocket, then leads me into the laundry room, where I stick my clothes in the dryer. I tell him the whole horrible story, putting special emphasis on how the scholarship was his idea. Natie doesn't look at me while I talk, but concentrates on tearing sheets of Bounce into tiny little pieces.

  “Okay,” he says when I finish, “the first thing we need to do is eat something. Come on, I got rugallah in the kitchen.”

  “I'm not hungry,” I say.

  Natie blinks his little button eyes. “Jeez, you must be upset.”

  I slam my hand on the washer, which echoes like a tin drum. “Natie, last month I had $10,000 in cash in my hands and now I've got nothing because I listened to your cheesehead scheme.”

  “Don't be such a baby,” he says, Pooh-bearing over to the cookie tin. “You wouldn't have had that $10,000 in the first place if it hadn't been for me.” He opens the tin. “You sure you don't want some rugallah? It's good.”

  I shake my head.

  “This is just a momentary setback,” he says, chewing. “Think of it as the price of doing business. We've got Jordan as a backup, don't we?”

  There's something about having blackmail as the backup to your failed money-laundering scheme that doesn't sit right with me.

  Natie gives me a pat on the back. “You're just tired,” he says. “Let me take you home.” He grabs a set of keys off a hook by the door.

  “You don't drive,” I say.

  “I've got a license, don't I?”

  “Yeah, but it'
s fake.”

  “Only you and I know that,” he says, shaking the keys.

  The house is dark and quiet when I get home and I feel depression envelop me like a wet blanket. Ten fucking grand. I bend down to say hello to the cats when I hear a groggy voice call out my name from the living room. I stand up and go to the entryway and see a figure huddled in the elbow of the sectional couch. She's cleared a warren for herself among all the usual debris and sits with her knees pulled up to her chest, her blond head resting on them, shining like a light.