Getting Off Clean

by Timothy Murphy

  “You told me you loved the sausage today!” my mother says.

  “I did. I just overdosed, that’s all.”

  “Your brain is turning—to—sausage,” Charlie says to me in a Boris Karloff voice, his eyes huge.

  “Let’s go.” I can’t take this anymore.

  “Why don’t you take my car?” my mother says.

  “Thanks, Ma.” I grab the keys from the hallway table.

  “Just call me if you’re going to be late. You know I trust you guys.”

  “Thanks, Ma,” I say again, giving her a kiss on the cheek. I know she partly wishes I’d stay in tonight, so she could tell me what happened at the meeting. My mother always needs to debrief, and it’s usually with me that she has to do it. “We can talk in the morning,” I say.

  “I love riding in your hatchback, Terry,” Phoebe says as we’re walking out. “It’s so compact!”

  “Thanks, Phoebe,” my mother says. “The hatchback loves you.”

  Charlie turns to me and says, “For the same reasons.” My mother hears him and laughs ruefully before going back into the house.

  “You two are so stoned,” I say half-reprovingly as we get into the car.

  “It’s Phoebe’s fault.” Charlie adjusts the passenger seat so he can fit his legs inside. “I was just hanging out at home, innocently practicing my new techniques from drum camp, when she comes over straight from the Dead show and fills up a pipe with this amazing stuff.”

  “This stuff is soooo amazing, it’s like total goodness and beauty washing over you,” Phoebe rhapsodizes from the backseat, before leaning forward and setting the radio to WAAF, where, wouldn’t it figure, they’re playing more Grateful Dead.

  “The show was incredible. I’m definitely taking you to the next one, Eric. It’ll change your life.”

  “I like my life the way it is,” I say.

  “All you listen to is that faggy alternative shit,” Charlie says. “You’ve got to listen to some classic rock. It’s got the best drum shit.”

  “Dude,” I say in a fake surfer accent. I love mocking Phoebe and Charlie’s hippie talk.

  “How’s your scary Mafia family?” Phoebe asks me. She always says we’re both lucky that we’re half-breeds, so we’re not completely under the evil spell of being one hundred percent Italian. “Did they break anyone’s knees today?”

  “Oh, please!” I laugh. “They wish they were Mafia. Then they’d have some real clout. They’re just Merrimack Valley petty mercantiles. They don’t even own any franchises.”

  “What was that meeting about, anyway?” Phoebe says.

  “It’s about what to do with my grandmother. She’s staying with us now and they’re trying to decide where she should live permanently.”

  “Oh, my God,” Phoebe says. “The last time I saw your grandmother, she said to me, ‘You’re so cute. You look like a little stuffed elf you hang in the kitchen to keep out the devils.’”

  This sets Charlie off on such a hard laughing jag that he starts snorting through his nose.

  “Shut the fuck up, Charlie,” Phoebe says. “You sound like a fucking ’tard.” Then she remembers about Joani. “Oh my God, Eric, I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean that.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I say. Phoebe and everybody else are always slipping up around me and using the word retard. I tell myself that they’re not even remotely thinking of a real mentally retarded person like Joani, but it still bothers me a little. I mean, why can’t they just remember and use some other word?

  “Oh, Eric, I brought something for you,” Phoebe says, rummaging around in her big canvas bag. “Here it is.”

  She passes me a book over my shoulder. It’s Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins, which she’s been trying to get me to read for ages now. I have this funny feeling I’m not going to like it. I don’t know—it just doesn’t seem dignified enough for me.

  “Thanks,” I say. “I’ve been meaning to get this from you for a while.”

  “It’s soooo excellent,” Phoebe gushes some more. “It totally changed my life. I mean, Tom Robbins, he’s really sharp.”

  “I can’t wait to read it,” I say again. “I don’t know when I’m going to have time, with school starting Wednesday. Did you guys read anything on your reading list?” Phoebe and Charlie are smart enough to be in the top classes with me, but they usually get C’s because they never do any work and the teachers are always threatening to demote them to a lower section. They basically get through because I dictate their papers to them over the phone the night before they’re due.

  “I read Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg,” Phoebe says. “Four times. That’s it, though.”

  “I read Rolling Stone all summer,” Charlie says.

  “How literary,” Phoebe deadpans.

  “Hey! I read it faithfully, every other week. That’s self-discipline!”

  “Yeah, that’s stoic!” Phoebe hoots, using one of our favorite vocabulary words, and we all laugh. Privately, though, I’m always wondering what’s going to happen to these two after graduation. Charlie says all he wants to do is move to Boston and work in a coffeeshop, get in with a good band, and play T.T. the Bear’s every Friday night, but I know his parents are going to pressure him to go to college, anywhere, as long as it’s private and looks bucolic and prestigious. Phoebe says she wants to go to some little semiagricultural school in the Berkshires and major in creative writing, but at the rate she’s going, I don’t know if she’ll get in anywhere. She can’t pass math to save her life; she says she has a quantitative learning disability. I wonder why Phoebe and Charlie don’t approach the whole matter of the future with as much urgency as I do.

  Thankfully, Harrington’s Roast Beef isn’t too crowded. It’s a big high school hangout, and although I’d always much rather be sitting at Algiers in Cambridge sipping an espresso and nibbling at tabooleh, Harrington’s has to suffice on those nights when we don’t make it into the city, which, unfortunately, is most.

  Phoebe and I order ice cream and Charlie gets a large roast beef sandwich with American cheese and barbecue sauce, as well as a large order of fries and a chocolate shake. He always gorges like this when he’s stoned, which is often, and I don’t know how he still manages to look like a scarecrow. I figure he must have a high metabolism.

  Across the room from us are a group of West Mendhem High kids, incoming juniors probably, the girls all squealy in their little pastel shorts and moussed-up hair and the boys looking like little thugs-to-be in their football jerseys and spiky jock haircuts. They’re exactly the kind of people Phoebe and I can’t stand, which is most people at West Mendhem High, and most people in West Mendhem, for that matter. Charlie doesn’t mind other people so much, largely because they don’t give him a hard time. Charlie is very go-along, get-along, as my mother says of him, but that’s because most of the time in school he’s either thinking up drum riffs in his head, or stoned, or both. Sometimes I resent Charlie. I want to know where he gets off just moseying his way through life, never in a hurry, never stressed out, never cynical. I’d like to be that way some of the time, but it seems like a moot point, because I can’t see it happening anytime soon.

  Now the squealy-thuggy crowd is glancing over at us and I hear one of them say, just loud enough for us to hear it, “Fuckin’ freaks.”

  Phoebe gives them a big shit-eating smile and blows them a huge kiss. They look away, giggling to themselves. “I hate those fuckin’ brickheads and their skanky girlfriends,” she says, her mouth full of ice cream.

  “Why do you let them get to you?” Charlie says.

  “Because they oppress me,” Phoebe snaps back.

  Charlie laughs dismissively. “I’m gonna write a song about them for you to sing in my band someday,” he says, then, in a yodel, he sings, “Brickheads and skanky chicks / crampin’ my style / Brickheads and skanky chicks—” He can’t think of a rhyme, so he just sings, “Oh, yeah yeah yeah, baby.”

  “What about �
�Brickheads and skanky chicks / makin’ me smile’?” Phoebe sings.

  “Or ‘Brickheads and skanky chicks / fill me with bile’?” I join in.

  Phoebe laughs now, some ice cream dribbling out of her mouth comically. “Or ‘so fuckin’ vile.’”

  Charlie beats out a rhythm on the table. “Or what about ‘Brickheads and skanky chicks / Like scum on a tile.’”

  Phoebe and I explode now. “‘Like scum on a tile!’” Phoebe says. “That’s very sophisticated, Charlie.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Gorgeous imagery. You hear that, and instantly you think, ‘That’s obviously Metengarten.’”

  “Fuck you two,” Charlie says, straight-faced, with about nine French fries in his mouth.

  “Oh, Charlie, you’re so full of life!” Phoebe erupts out of nowhere, imitating her mother, who grew up in Brookline. Phoebe usually refers to her mother as a dervish, a JAP, a society pig, or a shrew, depending on the latest anecdote involving Mrs. Shapiro-Signorelli and her various church or school-related projects about town.

  Eventually, Charlie and Phoebe start coming down off their highs and nodding off. I collect their trash and throw it away, then collect the two of them and we head back out to the car.

  It’s a muggy, still night, as most of the late summer nights have been, and West Mendhem actually looks pretty, all leafy and shadowy under the moon, as I drive outcountry to drop the two of them off. Phoebe and I are going into Cambridge tomorrow so she can buy school clothes at the thrift shops, and she’ll pick up her car at my house when we get back.

  “School Wednesday.” Charlie groans. “I can’t believe it.”

  “I’ve got so much work to do this year,” I say, more to myself than to either of them.

  “If you work really hard, Eric, you can be anything you want to be,” Phoebe says from the backseat. Through her drowsiness, I think I hear a little edge of meanness in her voice. I want to ask her exactly what the hell she means by that. But I don’t. I just say, “Thanks for the vote of confidence.” She doesn’t answer.

  After we drop off Charlie, Phoebe slumps down in the front seat and chews on her hair. The radio is on softly, the Grateful Dead again, and we’re both quiet as I navigate around Great Lake Drive toward her house. I love these moments with her, driving her home, listening to the radio, the lake glinting periodically through the trees, and neither of us feeling like we have to say a thing.

  When I pull into her driveway, I turn off the engine for a minute and it’s quiet in the car. There are lights on in the living room window, but Phoebe’s parents never pop their heads out to check on her when they know she’s with me. I think it’s because they’re hip parents. Phoebe says it’s because they trust me.

  “Good night, darling,” I say.

  “Good night, darling.”

  We share our routine theatrical peck on the lips. Before she gets out, though, she stops, just a few inches from my face.

  “I wonder if that’ll ever turn into a real kiss,” she says, giving me a dopey, stoned, lopsided smile.

  “You mean with tongue?” I ask in mock approbation.

  “With whatever.” She’s getting really dopey on me.

  “Oh, please,” I say. “I think you’re just using me to get to Charlie Metengarten. He’s your big, tall rock-and-roll fantasy.”

  She lets out a long, exaggerated sigh. “But he’s not as clever as you are.”

  “But he’s a rock star.”

  She just stares at me with that same dumb look for a few more seconds. Then she runs her hand through my hair and whispers, “Good night, little Eric.”

  “Good night, little Phoebe,” I whisper back, mimicking her ridiculous smile, which she suddenly drops. Then she’s out of the car and heading up the walkway to her front door.

  Driving home, I’ve got the windows down and the radio on quietly. The air is sweet, and as I negotiate the sharp turns of Great Lake Drive, marked by yellow signs bearing squiggly black lines, I’m thinking about a whole jumble of things: my mother and Brenda fighting, Brenda and Frank fighting, Phoebe and Charlie and their constantly glazed-over expressions. Then there’s school, that big airplane hangar building that smells always like foul putty, and then there’s Yale, which looks like it can’t really exist except as a backdrop for This Side of Paradise or Love Story or some other movie about rich, brilliant people acting out the drama of their lives. And there’s me in this car, finally alone at the end of the day.

  I drive by St. Banner, which sits in a kind of vale set back hundreds of yards from the road, barely visible through the trees and accessible only by two long, blacktopped driveways marked on the street by twin pillars of piled-up stone. Glancing away from the road, I can make out the modern buildings, the library and the hockey rink where I played on Saturday mornings when I was young, and around them, the old white clapboard buildings with windows lighted yellow, the buildings that must be where they live. At the bottom of it all is the lake, immense and black, where the rowers practice on fall afternoons and into which I’ve dived, late on summer nights, with Phoebe and sometimes Charlie, stoned and fully clothed and humming inside with fear and bravado.

  Then I swear it’s so bizarre, it’s like my dream never ended, because I’m driving along and all of a sudden I see this figure walking along the narrow dirt shoulder of the road, head bobbing among the lowest reaches of the overhang from the maple trees. I get up a little closer and it’s just who I thought, it’s him—it is he—from the sub shop. He’s walking fast, straight as a rod, almost like he’s trying to put distance between him and St. Banner but he can’t actually run because that might draw attention. He’s wearing a funny cap, like a golfer’s, pulled down severely over his head, and a white T-shirt glows against his neck and the surrounding shadows.

  My window is rolled open, and I’m slowing down, pulling up closer to him without even really realizing that I’m stopping. He whips around, startled by the crawl of the car. His first look inside is terrified, rabbity. When he sees it’s me, his whole face reframes itself in relief, until he pulls it back into that infuriating tight little smile and actually bows at me from the shoulder of the road. I’ve come to a dead stop, and I turn down the radio.

  “It’s my good man from the pizza emporium,” he says, glibly, but not so glibly as the other night, because I’ve come upon him in flight, or transit, or something. Even as he addresses me, he keeps glancing back down the dark road toward St. Banner, but there are no other cars approaching, from either direction. He doesn’t have that studied lethargy he had the night before; in fact, he looks a little bug-eyed, winded.

  “What are you doing out in these parts?” he asks me, stooping down, scooping up a handful of gravel in the road’s soft shoulder, rolling it around in his palm, like the Greek worry beads that Auntie Reenie hangs from the rearview mirror of her truck.

  “I’m dropping off a friend at home,” I say, innocent. “What are you doing out at this hour?”

  “I’m memorizing the terrain, so I can escape one night to a friendly farmhouse on the Railroad.”

  “The railroad?” I ask.

  He rolls his eyes, frowns at me in mock disappointment. “Yes, you know, the Railroad? The Underground Railroad? The thing that all you nice Massachusetts-y liberals set up to set me free?”

  I haven’t thought of the Underground Railroad since we studied it in maybe third grade. “But that was a long time ago,” I stammer. Pathetically, it’s all I can think to say.

  “Ah yes,” he says, speechifyingly, hand to his breast, “but it lives on in hearts like mine and yours. Does it not?”

  “I suppose it does.”

  “You suppose it does.”

  I’m dumbfounded; I don’t know how he can snap from utter solitude into this act, perfect grammar and all, caught alongside a road no less, without prompts or cue cards.

  “Isn’t this past your curfew?” I ask him. I’m idling the car by the side of the road, hoping no one’s about to take the corn
er, especially a cop. You don’t pull over in the middle of the night to talk to people you happen to pass on the road, at least not in West Mendhem, outcountry. I know he’d look suspicious. I know we would.

  He looks at his watch, that expensive-seeming watch that looks like it should belong to a prosperous grown man, not an eighteen-year-old. “As of this moment, I am twenty-five minutes in excess of my curfew.”

  “Don’t you ever worry about getting caught?”

  “Of course,” he says, so plainly that there’s nothing more for me to say about it.

  “Where are you going?” I ask him. “Really?”

  “To get smokes—at that little store you told me about.”

  “But didn’t you get them last night?”

  “Uh-huh. And I smoked them all.”

  “That’s a lot of cigarettes to smoke,” I say.

  He shrugs, loosing the gravel from his palm and back onto the road. I can hear the crickets buzzing from the trees behind him. Suddenly, he’s bathed in light; a car emerges, slows, and curves only to clear my mother’s hatchback, and vanishes past. But in this matter of seconds, he becomes rigid and ducks into the side of my car to obscure his face. It’s his fault, I think, his choice to be breaking curfew, taking this risk. And yet some part of me is hurt by this, fleetingly protective of him and his immediate instinct to hide.

  “Do you want a ride to the store?” I ask him. “I’ll take you there and bring you back. You’ll get back to S.B.A. faster, and nobody will see you.”

  He looks at me—suspiciously or what, I can’t tell—then glances up the road again. “Very good,” he says, low, and stalks around to the other side of the car, slips into the passenger seat, and sits up very straight. He’s not much taller than me, but slender, and for some reason I think how odd it is to see his skinny legs, almost bony, stretched out in camping shorts against the powder-blue vinyl upholstery of the car.

  I drive on; he’s got those long, webby-looking hands clamped over his knees, and suddenly he’s not saying a word. We pass the Shell station and Russ Treadwell’s ice cream, both closed, both cast in the stripes of security lights, and all of a sudden, it’s like I’m driving around in a town I’ve never seen before, after hours, locked up, and strangely forbidding.