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

by Marc Acito

  Paula looks disappointed. “Madonna's a flash in the pan,” she says. “She'll never last.”

  We order Manhattans. None of us knows what they are, but they sound sophisticated. From across the room Humpty-Dumpty calls out to me. “Hey, ‘Corner of the Sky,' you wanna sing?”

  I don't feel much like singing, but my friends urge me on, clapping and cheering as I amble over to the piano.

  “The usual?” he asks.

  I shake my head no. “Do you know the finale from Yentl?” I ask.

  He gives me a look like, “This is a gay piano bar; of course I know the finale from Yentl,” and starts to play.

  The song feels good in my throat and by the time I sing the final lines it's as if my whole body were singing.

  What's wrong with wanting more?

  If you can fly, then soar.

  With all there is, why settle for

  Just a piece of sky?

  Why, indeed? I know I should be grateful if I can just stay alive and out of jail, but there's a part of me that simply can't stop dreaming, that can't abandon the idea of people lining up around the block to see me, that knows I'm supposed to do something important and meaningful with my life. The sky's the limit.

  The crowd in the bar gives me a big hand. My tribe. My not-so-secret brotherhood.

  Back at the table Paula requests a toast. “To Edward,” she says.

  “To Edward,” everyone echoes.

  “No,” I say, “to all of you. To the best friends a guy could ever want.”

  “To best friends,” Natie says.

  “To best friends.” We all clink glasses and once again tears surge out of me. I don't know what's wrong with me. Now that I've learned how to cry there doesn't seem to be any stopping me. I collapse in my chair. Doug puts his arm around me.

  “This isn't right,” Kelly says. “We've got to do something.”

  “It's because of that stupid Austrian bitch,” I say, crumpling up a cocktail napkin. “Everything was fine until she came along.”

  Natie agrees. “Al always paid for everything before that.” He takes a sip of his Manhattan and makes a face. “What the hell is this, lighter fluid?”

  “Natie's right,” Paula says.

  “I'll have yours if you don't want it,” Ziba says.

  “No, I meant about Al,” Paula says. “Sure, he made a lot of noise about business in the past, but that never stopped him from paying for acting classes and voice lessons and dance classes. Edward's right. Everything changed when Dagmar showed up. In fact . . . oh my God . . . I can't believe I never thought of this before.”

  I grab another cocktail napkin and blow my nose. “What?” I say.

  “Don't you see? You've been going about this whole thing backwards. Instead of having gone to all this trouble to get the money for Juilliard, you should have just tried to get rid of Dagmar.”

  We all sit in silence pondering this thought while the group around the piano sings “Papa, Can You Hear Me?”

  She's right. I can't believe I never thought of it before, either.

  “So what's stopping us?” Kelly says finally. “Let's get rid of her now. She's, like, only going to make more trouble.”

  “No,” I say, “I've given up my life of crime.”

  “It's not like we're going to kill her,” Natie says. He looks around the table. “Are we?”

  “Don't be ridiculous,” says Ziba. “We'll just find a way to make sure she never bothers us again.”

  I shake my head. “But . . .”

  “But nothing,” Ziba says. She raises her glass. “I say reopen CV Enterprises and finish what we started.”

  Natie, Kelly, and Doug lift their glasses, too. All eyes turn to Paula.

  “I'm not so sure about this,” she says.

  Ziba leans across the table. “You don't want to see Edward end up in prison, do you? Or me, or Nathan, for that matter?”

  “No, of course not.”

  Ziba arches an eyebrow at her. “Well . . . ?”

  Paula takes a deep breath, her boobs rising toward her chin, then exhales. “All right,” she says, “I'm in.”

  Ziba turns to me. “Edward . . . ?”

  I sigh and feel tears well up in me again. I nod my head.

  “Wunderbar,” Doug says.

  We spend the rest of the night formulating a plan and, for the first time in months, I feel the same heady thrill I experienced last summer when our only mission was to make the world safe from boredom.

  The key to our plan is getting our hands on a narcotic that will knock out Dagmar for a few hours. Luckily, it just so happens I have a sister who works at a pharmacy. Or at least I thought I did. I call Karen the next day and she tells me in her rambling, incoherent way that she lost her job for doing exactly what I was about to ask her to do.

  “I can hook you up, though,” she mumbles. “I mean, as long as you can drive.” I borrow the Wagon Ho and pick her up at her apartment, which she shares with some other burnouts above a Dollar Store in Cramptown.

  Karen and I are not close. It's not like we hate each other; it's just that I'm repelled by everything she represents. But we're family and, when needed, we come through for each other, mostly by providing alibis or, in this case, black-market pharmaceuticals.

  “Hey, bro,” she says as she slides in the car. “Mind if I crank some tunes?” She flips on the radio without waiting for an answer and chooses a heavy metal station. Normally I'd protest, but I'm willing to do whatever it takes to keep her conscious.

  “This guy I know gets the best shit,” she says, drumming on the dashboard. I want to feel superior, but I've got to admit I'm grateful for her help.

  We drive to Battle Brook, past the neighborhood where Kathleen's cryent lives and into a section that makes Hell's Kitchen look like Mayberry. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised (we are on a quest for illegal drugs, after all), but I've got to confess I've never given much thought about exactly where drugs come from.

  We pull up in front of a dilapidated shipwreck of a house with moss on the roof and sheets of plastic lining the windows. An emaciated woman in a nightgown stands on the front porch hugging herself and rocking back and forth. I'm guessing she's not the Avon lady.

  “Keep the engine running,” Karen says.

  I can well understand the wisdom in this decision, but I can't say I'm happy to be in a situation where that particular kind of wisdom is necessary. She doesn't get out of the car.

  Over Karen's shoulder I see a skinny man amble down the front steps, but I can't get a look at his face from where I'm sitting. Karen rolls down her window. Guess we're getting drive-up service. Before you know it, drug dealers will be installing those pneumatic tubes, like at the bank.

  I feel sweat gathering in the small of my back and I adjust so I don't stick to the seat. I think I'm perfectly justified in being a little nervous. When you consider how the cops treated us for stealing the Buddha, I don't even want to think about the consequences of buying drugs in this town.

  The guy approaches the car and leans over to talk to Karen. He sticks his head in the window and my heart stops.

  It's Alas Poor Yorick.

  He's even more frightening in the light of day, the pale gray skin pulled taut over his skull, his hollowed-out eyes glazed and yellow. He smiles, revealing rotted teeth, and coughs what I suppose is his croupy version of a laugh. “Hey,” he says to me, pointing a bony finger, “how ya' doin'?”

  You know just how far you've sunk when you get recognized by your buddies from jail.

  “Fine, thank you,” I say, sounding way more like Julie Andrews than I intended. I turn away, hoping it will make me invisible. Karen gets on with the business at hand while I grip the wheel, eyes straight ahead, wondering whether Alas Poor Yorick is going to say anything else to me. But he just finishes the transaction quickly and Karen doesn't have to tell me twice to pull out. As I drive away I look in the rearview mirror and see Alas Poor Yorick waving his broomstick arms at the w
oman twitching on the front porch. I have to say I've never stopped to think how druggies like my sister actually got those drugs, so it's never occurred to me that I had any connection whatsoever with skeevy lowlifes like Alas Poor Yorick (I mean, beyond being cell mates for a couple of hours) or the poor junkie vibrating on the front porch like some highly caffeinated moth. Just the thought that I have anything to do with these people makes me shudder. I mean, I hate to sound like a snob, but ick.

  Karen's bought a bag of pot in addition to the sleeping pills for Dagmar. She opens the baggie and takes a good, long whiff. “This is some good shit,” she says. “You wanna smoke some when we get back?”

  “Maybe another time,” I say.

  A couple of days later I dash into English late as usual from my long lunch with Ziba.

  Mr. Lucas peers at me over his glasses. “So nice of you to join us, Mr. Zanni.” The fact that I have worked so closely with this man on some very emotional pieces of theater, run into him at a gay bar, and slept on his couch seems to make no difference to him. When it comes to the classroom, he's as formal as a butler.

  “So, as I was saying before the prodigal son returned, now that the AP exam is over there will be no more reading assignments.”

  The class breaks out in spontaneous applause.

  “There will, however, be writing assignments.”

  The class groans.

  He holds up a copy of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. “You've all read the book,” he says, waving a crutch for emphasis and narrowly missing the head of Calvin Singh, a National Merit scholar in the front row. “Or, judging from your quizzes, perhaps I should say some of you have read the book.”

  I would be one of those people who hadn't. From the very first page when the moo cow came down the road and met the “nicens little boy named baby tuckoo” I thought to myself, “What is this crap?”

  “Your assignment,” Mr. Lucas continues, “is to write your own Portrait of the Artist—a portrait of yourself as a young person, minimum twenty-five pages . . .”

  There's a gasp in the room.

  “. . . single-spaced.”

  This elicits a lot of conversation, even from the Ivy League early decision types. Assigning a twenty-five-page paper the month before graduation is like making the winner of the Boston Marathon walk home. I mean, enough already.

  “Settle down, ladies and gentlemen, settle down,” he says. “If you spent as much time writing as you do complaining, you'd be done in a week. It's not like you have to do any research. You already know who you are . . . prezoomably.”

  He says it the same way he says “uhbviously” and the class laughs. “This assignment is more for you than it is for me. Very soon you'll go your separate ways and your lives will be never the same again, so I want you to stop for a moment and reflect on who you are today. Right now. I don't want an autobiography with all the details of your lives. I want you to do as James Joyce does and describe for me what it's like to be inside your minds. And I want to know what made you that way.”

  Natie taps me on my shoulder. In the margin of his notebook he's written, “Saturday's the night.”

  “For instance,” Mr. Lucas continues, “who can tell me why they think Joyce named his alter ego Stephen Dedalus?”

  Underneath Natie's message I scrawl, “Are you sure?”

  Natie nods. “He's going on a business trip.”

  “How do you know?”

  “What do I look like, an amateur?” Natie says out loud.

  “Mr. Zanni,” Mr. Lucas says. “Perhaps you'd like to tell us. Why did Joyce name his hero Dedalus?”

  “Daedalus is the Greek hero who escaped from prison by building himself wings,” I say.

  Hey, at least I read the Cliff Notes carefully.

  “And what is Stephen Dedalus flying to?”

  That's an easy one. What does any artist fly to? “To art,” I say. Even without finishing the book I know that I am so like Stephen Dedalus, constrained as I am by bourgeois oppression. “And sex,” I say.

  The class laughs.

  “Eggzellent,” Mr. Lucas says. “Mr. Zanni makes a good, if slightly crude, point. Like Joyce, I want you uncensored. Don't be afraid to include whatever tawdry and sordid details of your adolescent lives you wish. No one's going to read this but me.”

  Some of us are going to need a lot more than twenty-five pages.

  That Saturday, a nun and a priest stand in the Nudelmans' darkened living room, their faces pressed against the picture window.

  “Can you see anything?” Father Groovy asks.

  Sister Natie shakes his head. “HEY MA,” he shouts, “DO YOU KNOW WHERE THE BINOCULARS ARE?”

  Fran screeches back, “IN YOUR FATHER'S STUDY.”

  Natie turns to me and shrugs. “He likes to watch the birds,” he says. From the other end of the house I hear Stan shout, “WADDYA WANT 'EM FOR?”

  “WE NEED THEM TO SPY ON THE ZANNIS' HOUSE SO WE KNOW WHEN IT'S SAFE TO GO OVER AND TAKE INCRIMINATING PHOTOGRAPHS.”

  Stan laughs. “YOU KIDS,” he says.

  Natie's just gone to hunt for the binoculars when I see another nun and priest leave Al's house carrying a large cardboard box, which they place in the back of the Wagon Ho. They cross the street, heading toward us. “They're coming!” I shout to Natie.

  I open the door for them.

  “Good evening,” the nun says, “we're here on behalf of the Convent of the Bleeding Heart. Do you have any items you'd like to donate to our annual rummage sale?”

  “Get thee to a nunnery,” I say.

  Sister Paula pulls off her wimple and shakes out her hair.

  “She must have fallen for it,” I say. “You filled a whole box.”

  “Yeah, but it's all your old stuff.”

  Stupid Austrian bitch.

  Doug hands me Father Groovy's spectacles, then pulls off the mustache and goatee I glued on him. “I drank so much friggin' cocoa I thought for sure this damn thing was going to fall right off into my cup,” he says. “Say what you want about your stepmonster, but she makes a kick-ass Kakao mit Schlag.”

  Or in Doug's case, perhaps that should be Kakao mit Schlong.

  Dagmar's pride in her cocoa with cream was the key element for our little plan to work. “It was so easy, man,” Doug tells us as we sit on the back patio drinking lemonade and waiting for Kelly and Ziba to return. “The minute I said Guten Abend she was sweeter than a Sacher torte.”

  “What were you two going on about anyway?” Paula asks.

  “Mostly how you can't get a decent cup of cocoa in the States, which is true. Actually, it was kind of nice to talk with her. It's too bad she's such a psycho.”

  “Well, you made a very convincing priest,” Paula says. “It was an inspired performance.”

  Though certainly not divinely inspired.

  Doug beams, “Ya' really think so?”

  Paula reaches over with a tiny hand and twiddles his kinky hair, which has been slicked back into submission. “You might just be an actor, after all,” she says.

  Doug doesn't say anything, but I can tell he's pleased. A true Play Person at last.

  Paula goes on to explain how, when she went to use the bathroom, she opened the shades on the window facing the street so we'd be certain to get the signal, and I tell them how excited Dagmar sounded on the phone when I pretended to be a dealer interested in her entire photo series of blow-dryers in bathtubs.

  “It was perfect,” Paula says. “You kept her on just long enough for us to get the sedative in her cocoa, but not so long that it cooled off. Excellent job.” We all clink glasses of lemonade.

  We have to wait for what feels like a very long time until Kelly and Ziba return from their own reconnaissance mission, or maybe it's just that I'm restless.

  I sit listening to the buzz of cicadas in the air, wondering if something's gone wrong, when finally I see the silhouette of two nuns sneaking through the bushes at the back of the Nudelmans' property. I cross
the lawn to meet them.

  “What took you so long?” I say.

  “We would have been here a lot sooner, darling, if you hadn't made us come around the back way,” Ziba says. “Plus, she took this really long shower, which got us very worried. We were beginning to think she must have passed out and hit her head or something.”