Getting Off Clean

by Timothy Murphy

  He just looks at me, and smiles thinly, and then I smile, feeling foolish, and then he reaches over to me and says, “Come here, child,” and he doesn’t sound sarcastic at all. Then, sitting Indian-style, he puts his arms around me so that I can’t see his face; it’s resting on my shoulder behind my head, and he doesn’t say a word. Staring into the pond now, I realize I’m still quite stoned, and what does this mean, this silent embrace? But then, with my arms around his naked warm back and half his scrubby, angular head against my face, it’s perfectly all right just to stare out at a black pond glinting silver with lilypads. And it’s all right to pretend that it all begins and ends here, there is no tomorrow, no next month, no next year, no West Mendhem, Massachusetts, no Arthur, Terry, Brenda, Joani, Grandma, aunties, uncles, cousins, teachers, Phoebe, Charlie, no Kerrie Lanouette and all her floating facsimiles. Nobody, living or slain, tonight or tomorrow, but the two of us, black and silver, in a pocket of silence.

  “So—are you?” he finally says to me, not moving.

  “Am I what?” I ask, still staring out.

  “You know. What I asked you the first night. I asked you if you were or not.”

  “Oh,” I say, remembering, and feeling that this time, it’s okay to answer honestly. “No. I don’t think so. It’s just a label anyway, right? I hate labels.”

  “Uh-huh,” he says, slowly.

  “Why? Are you? I don’t care if you are, you know.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I am,” he says. “I don’t stay in any one place long enough for it to matter. It remains immaterial. Splendidly immaterial.”

  “But it must matter to you,” I say. “I mean, not just that, but everything. If you don’t have a sense of self, I mean—I mean, if you don’t have a sense of identity, then how can you function in this world?” I realize, vaguely, that I’m invoking ideas I’ve only encountered in English class—ideas that I frankly haven’t given much thought to, myself, outside of tests and essays for the literary magazine—but suddenly they seem incredibly important to me, very real and relevant. I think, Imagine thinking it doesn’t matter who you are! My mother and all the aunts would have a fit over that. They would say, “You’re Italian, that’s what you are, and you’re an Ianelli.”

  But he doesn’t seem agitated. He just says, “No, it should matter to you. You’re not going anywhere, not immediately anyway—and even when you do, you’ve got to come back. You have got to deal, my friend. That’s my privilege: I don’t have to.”

  I want to tell him how wrong he is, how he won’t escape it, how it will catch up to him, how he will always feel incomplete until he finally sits down and takes the time to look himself in the face. But I’m catching on to him now: that’s exactly his problem. He doesn’t know how to sit down and just do anything; that’s why he keeps getting kicked out of schools. He’s a procrastinator and lazy, a classic underachiever. I didn’t say it first, he did, and now I’m beginning to believe it.

  So I sigh, exasperated. “If you say so,” is all I say.

  Then, suddenly, I feel him go completely rigid, and I wonder if he’s seen somebody, since he’s facing toward the pathway.

  “What is it?” I say, tensing myself, not daring to turn around. This is it, I’m thinking, it’s the Boxford police, or the Staties, and I can’t even begin to count the number of laws we’ve probably broken tonight.

  He doesn’t say a word. But then he relaxes and begins uncoiling himself from me, carefully. “It’s nothing,” he says. “I got a funny cramp.” Then he’s lifting me up—we’re standing now, starting positions resumed—and he kisses me one more time, cleanly and briefly, on the mouth (I still can’t reconcile myself to the sensation), and then he says, “We’d better get you back.”

  “It’s Saturday tomorrow,” I say. “I don’t have to be up.”

  “Well, I’d better be back, before a proctor gets up in the middle of the night to go to the lav and decides to do a surprise two-thirty A.M. bed check. Come, come. Let’s go back to the car. Look away, great lake,” he whispers, flourishing in the direction of the pond. He pulls another cigarette out of his shorts and lights it.

  Hastily we dress and trudge back to the car. Still stoned, I’m super careful backing out down the gravel road and onto Route 133 heading back toward West Mendhem, but he obviously trusts me, because he smokes on, out the window as before, oblivious to the mechanics of reverse-driving down an unpaved wooded road in the middle of the night.

  Just shortly after passing the sign announcing West Mendhem, sixteen-something-something, I see it again, the Kerrie Lanouette poster, even this far out of town: first on a tree, then a telephone pole, then pasted to someone’s roadside mailbox. Of course I can’t make out the particulars of her face in the dark, but by now I’m so familiar with it—everyone is—that I could probably spot it from half a mile away.

  “Oh, God, there she is again,” I say aloud.

  “There’s who?” he asks, vaguely, still smoking away from me, out the window.

  “A poster of this girl from West Mendhem who they found all slashed up in the state park. My older sister sort of knew her. Everybody’s on a witch-hunt now to find some Puerto Rican guy from Leicester to blame it on.”

  “Good Lord,” he says, exhaling, indifferent.

  “I can’t believe you haven’t heard about it. It’s been all over the paper and the news every day for the past week or so,” I say.

  “Well, you know us at St. Banner Academy. We’re our own little universe. Besides, they don’t let us read anything except for The New York Times, and I don’t presume it was that big a story.”

  “I guess not.” We drive on in silence, me careful on the roads and probably slower than usual, until, about a half-mile before we get to even the edge of the S.B.A. campus, in the middle of the woods, he puts a hand over my own on the steering wheel and says, “You can let me out here. I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

  “That’s crazy,” I say. “It’s got to be a half-hour walk from here, and it’s the middle of the night. You could get run over. Let me just drop you off where I did before, and I’ll turn off the headlights.”

  “No, Eric, please,” he says, gripping his hand tighter over my own on the wheel, almost literally steering us over to the side of the narrow pitch-black road. “I want to smoke another cigarette before I reach Mendhem—”

  “You can smoke it in the car,” I say. “You’ve already had two in here tonight, anyway, one more isn’t going to matter.”

  “—and I really don’t want to take any chances that the car will get seen.”

  “Brooks, someone could come along and clip you right off the road.” But by this point I’ve drawn the car to a stop, or rather, he has, and he’s already got one hand on the latch.

  “I’ve got a white shirt on,” he says.

  “That’s not what I mean,” I say, frustrated. “Nobody would be visible walking along Route 133 at this hour. The turns are too sharp.”

  “I’ll be fine. I’ll cut through the woods. Just me and the tigers and bugger-boos and creepy-crawlies, and rattlesna—”

  “Why are you so self-destructive?” I suddenly lash out, and I can’t believe how much I sound like my mother, rebuking Brenda, or Joani, or (occasionally) me. “It’s almost like you want to make trouble for yourself. Why?”

  “That’s not true at all,” he says airily, drawing on the cigarette, but I can see he’s edgy, ready to spring from the car. “I take impeccable care of myself.”

  “No, you don’t!” I protest, as though I’m pleading with a problem child. “You take stupid chances!”

  “Don’t talk to me about taking chances, Hester Prynne,” he says, wagging his finger in my face.

  “Oh, shut up!” I say, but now I’m laughing, and before I say another word, he grazes my lips with his, jumps out of the car, and runs across the headlights and toward the woods. Then he stops and turns around.

  “When again?” he calls. “Mardi soir?”

&n
bsp; I nod, dazed, and before I can call him back to say, But what are we? or Why are we doing this? or Won’t you ever get caught?—or Will I?—he leaps over the guardrail and vanishes into the dense woods.

  I’m freaked driving home, still stoned, and moving at a crawl for fear that I’ll miscalculate distance, but it’s so late no cars pass me or approach, and when I get into town, there are no yellow lights in windows in my neighborhood. None but the lighted square of our own den window. Creeping into the driveway and gentling the car door closed behind me, I hope desperately that my father forgot to turn out the light before sleepwalking up to bed. But when I slip inside through the back door, ease off my sneakers, and try to pad silently up the stairs, I have no such luck.

  “Eric?” from the den. It’s my mother, and I’m still half-baked.

  “Uh-huh?” I call back, trying not to sound too loud or too weird.

  “Get in here.”

  “I’m really tired, Ma,” I call, poised, panicking on the lowest step.

  “So am I. Get in here.”

  My mother is on the couch in her nightgown, looking waxy and haggard in the nearly two A.M. light from the lamp. Home Shopping Club is on the TV, but she’s turned the volume almost all the way down, and the changing shots—product, hostess, product, hostess—cast different volumes of light on the walls. One look at her, and I only hope that please, in a million years, crime isn’t written all over my stoned face.

  “Eric, where the hell have you been?” she says, looking exhausted, and I hope this is going to be brief.

  “Ma, look, I’m sorry,” I say, and then I plunge right into my next vice. “Phoebe came by toward the end of work and we hung out all night.”

  She lets out a short, mean laugh, which scares me, because she’s never mean with me, really. “How can you look me in the face and just lie like that?”

  “Huh?” I say, like an idiot.

  “Eric, Phoebe called here at half past eleven to see if you were home. The phone ringing woke up Grandma.”

  “I know,” I say, feeling viler by the second as my improvisatory lying limbers up. What is happening to me? I think, sickly, but what I say is, “She didn’t come by till around midnight because I told her that Sal was gonna make me work late tonight.”

  “Oh,” my mother says, sounding more tired than angry or suspicious or anything else. “Well, then why couldn’t you have given me a call and let me know you were gonna be out? You know I don’t mind, but I want a call. I called Phoebe’s house after midnight and woke up Mrs. Signorelli, and she said Phoebe wasn’t home yet. Why do you want to scare your mothers to death?”

  “I’m sorry, Ma,” I say, emphatically, so grateful the exchange is over. “We went to IHOP in Danvers and just lost track of the time. You’re right. I should’ve called. I’ll fill the car up with gas tomorrow morning.”

  She waves dismissively, and yawns. “Eric, I don’t care about the gas. I just don’t want you to make me sit up all night and worry. I’ve got enough to worry about right now.”

  “Ma, come on,” I say, leaning down to kiss her good night. “Everything’s gonna be fine.”

  “Yeah, sure,” she says, accepting the kiss and running the back of her hand across my forehead, a gesture she’s reserved for me since I was little. “You’re a good kid, Eric. Don’t make me wait up like this again. I need my sleep.”

  “All right, Ma, sorry. Good night.”

  “Good night, honey.”

  In my room, in bed, I want to sleep, I’m so fried and tired, but I can’t. It’s like, things he said, things I said, and things we did, they keep converging and diverging in my head, like they’re on separate loops of tape and they keep looping over and over again. There’s “Baby, you’re gonna have it all,” and what did he mean by that? and “I take impeccable care of myself”—such a lie!—and, worse, “Don’t talk to me about taking chances”—and, oh, God, what chances did I take? Did anyone see us, leaving the sub shop and driving outcountry? And I have to call Phoebe tomorrow and tell her please to tell her mother that she was with me the night before just in case our mothers run into each other in the supermarket, and what will I tell Phoebe when she asks me where I was? (I’ll lie again, of course.)

  And then there’s that—that fetal moment with him, curled up there like two babies, and I’m getting hard again just thinking about it. And then I want to jerk off, but I can’t because I’m afraid my mother’s still awake and she’ll hear me and know I’m truly sick, and then, turning on my bedside light and grabbing my notebook, I want to write about it, I want to sort everything out on paper, but I can’t, because someone might find it, even if I threw it out later, even if I tore it up in a million pieces; someone in the house—Joani, probably, just for fun—would probably find it and piece it back together and hang it with a magnet on the refrigerator door for everyone to see.

  So instead, wanting to write myself to sleep, I remember that stupid essay I’ve got to write for Goody Farnham, for the contest—what is it?—“What I Cherish in America,” and I think about how dashing it off now, in this delirious state, would be perfect justice to a stupid, mercenary assignment I don’t even want to be a part of, and won’t Phoebe and Charlie think it’s funny that I—Eric, Honor Society me, perfect student—wrote an assignment when I was stoned, and in some stupid way I anticipate their approval, and their laughter. So I turn the notebook to a fresh page and write at the top, in huge, exaggerated letters, feeling cocky and full of contempt, “WHAT I CHERISH IN AMERICA.”

  Then I stop and think for a moment, and the only thing that comes to mind, unbidden, her chorus of photocopied faces, is Kerrie Lanouette, and I write:

  Just a week ago, right here in my bucolic New England hamlet of West Mendhem, a good half hour northward from the dangerous urban pulse of Boston, a murder took place. It was a local girl, a girl with a face full of hope and wonder, a girl with dreams of a life full of love and happiness and contentment, perhaps even big dreams, dreams of changing this unhappy little world for the better, of touching everyone she met with her generous, radiant smile. She could have been your sister, or mine, or your high school sweetheart, or maybe your best friend. She could have been any girl, really.

  But now she is gone, her body found maimed and exploited, in a public park meant for picnicking and bird-watching and other pursuits that bring families together, whatever their station in life. Already, her loss has rung like a gong throughout our little town, posters of her dream-filled face covering every street corner, every storefront, as a reminder of this vessel of youth and hope that we have lost—lost to eternity, to Heaven, perhaps. Many people say the culprit was a person of foreign complexion from the poor city next door, Leicester, where dreams have lain dead for some fifty years now. Many people say they will not rest until the culprit is apprehended, and made to pay due justice, and peace of mind is again restored to the uneasy little town of West Mendhem.

  At this point, I stop writing, read over what I’ve already written in the breathless space of five minutes, and decide where I should proceed. I need a main point, I tell myself, not even knowing what the main point of this is. But I keep on writing, mechanically, loving the feel of this abandonment, feeling like it’s the nastiest thing I’ve ever done, and that words really do have the power to hurt:

  But even before this provocatively titled essay was assigned me, I had already been thinking about what I [and I underlined the “I,” dramatically, three times] cherished in America, and this exciting and thought-provoking contest only gives me pause to commit to paper thoughts I had long been yearning to express. And I have decided that what I [underlined, again, now four times] cherish in America is just this—

  Here, I stop again, wondering where this could possibly lead. But I know where it’s leading—toward cliché, toward something affirming and positive, where all my high school essays lead, toward something that tastes like crap in my mouth because I doubt all of it so thoroughly, because I feel like it’s got noth
ing to do with me, and all I want is a one-way ticket out of this land of stultifying niceties and good intentions and unspoken bitternesses, embodied in my teachers and my family and everyone I’ve ever known here. And I write this, hating with all my heart, and feeling so good to hate, so good that the words just spill out onto the page like puke:

  What I cherish is that the spirit of Kerrie Lanouette, this young expired woman, lives on—it is unquenchable, it is a flame that burns deep, inextinguishable, in the hearts of all young people in America, regardless of race, color, creed, or physical handicap. It is a flame that says, You may kill me, but you cannot kill my smile, you cannot kill the ineffable fire that makes me me, that makes me me despite those who would try to remake me, or unmake me, or make me any less than me. It is the flame that our forefathers first carried when they arrived on these very shores of New England, the flame of their incredible pride in the face of persecution, the flame that ignited an entire nation and made it great, the flame that made it burn into the long nights of despair and destruction, the flame that even today, Anno Domini 1986—in the face of poverty, and crime, and sickness, and social unrest, and sometimes what seem to be unconquerable woes—still flames on, illuminating everywhere the nooks and crannies of hope, the hope you see in whole cities, towns, states, and regions, the hope you can still see in the face of a young girl from West Mendhem, Massachusetts, the flame that will not die, that says you may snuff me out, for a moment, but I will be back to flame on, flame on, flame on!!!

  Then I pause again, reeling, my entire right hand cramped and throbbing; and I collect myself and I write:

  It is an American flame, yes, and it is my flame, and the late Kerrie Lanouette’s, and yours as well. And in many ways, this American flame is the flame of all nations, just as the very utterance “America!” still rings, in all corners of the earth, as a call to truth, justice, and something uniquely, inalienably right. It is the flame of divine liberation and human dignity, and it is what I cherish most in America, even in this troubled year, 1986. For it is the flame that guides all nations, casting blessed, burning light upon the way whole nations live. [Here, I make a new paragraph, for effect; I can hear the roar of this pause as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” sounds beyond.]