Getting Off Clean

by Timothy Murphy

  I can’t let go of him. The entire hallway, the rest of the world, has melted into nothingness around us, and he’s the only piece of matter, the only thing that matters, left in the whole world. I pull his shirt out of his shorts and dig my nails into his back, up his back, while he hitches up my gown and seizes me by the hips underneath, his scarred forehead against mine, my mortarboard fallen away from us, off the earth.

  “Sophie Rybold. Mark Salois. Phoebe Margarita Signorelli.”

  “I know. I know. I’m sorry,” I say to him through clenched jaws. “But don’t go. I’m gonna go away with you. I’ll go now. Let’s go now. Come on—come on. I love you, Brooks. I swear to God I do.”

  He pushes the two of us against the wall, holds my head against it with one hand, shoves his other down inside my pants, then comes up close until his bared teeth are an inch away from me, and he’s spitting in my face. “You say you love me, but you can’t. You’re not supposed to. No one should because I’m a freak, I’m a monster. I don’t belong anywhere, there’s nowhere—Oh, God!”—and he gasps—“there’s nowhere on this earth that I’m ever going to fit, so don’t even fucking try—you stupid, stupid white boy with your stupid family and your stupid ambitions and your stupid Yale! Go to your fucking Yale! Go and have a life for yourself, don’t fuck it up, don’t fuck it up, no, no way, not with me, not with the crazy nigger who talks like a white boy, dresses like a white boy, with no home, no fucking father, not even a fucking stupid motherfucking mother on this continent. Look at me!”

  “I’m looking at you!” I’m sobbing, clutching at him, fuck-flat against the wall.

  “But look at me! Look at this face! Whose is it? Do you know? Because I don’t. I think it’s mine. But I can’t even go walking at night without getting the crap and the shit and the piss kicked out of me by a bunch of fucking stupid, stupid devils! You’ll never know that! How could you know? Eric—Eric”—and he’s suddenly quiet, and we’re still holding onto each other, not bawling, just weeping—“Eric, baby, tell me. Where do I go? I’m nineteen years old today. I bought myself a black 1966 Karmann-Ghia. It’s outside. Where do I go in it?”

  “James Tetley. Lisa Marie Torricelli. Ashley Tucker.”

  We’re perfectly still now, entangled, up against the wall. “Wherever you go, I’ll go with you. Let’s go right now. Let’s just walk out the door and go. Fuck this,” I say, looking eastward, westward. “You fit in with me. I swear, you do. Fuck everyone else.” And I put my hand up to his face and smooth the wetness into his hard, trembling cheekbones.

  “How in the name of the Lord did we ever happen?” he says, hoarse and expended, and suddenly we’re sucking face like we never have before, we’re molesting each other through our trousers against the gleaming dark wall of this hallway inside West Mendhem High School, and it’s feeling better and better, and I’m envisioning a lifetime of this, and I’m feeling more fully a man than ever before in my life, more deeply an adult, a dark, visceral being freighted with meaning who can see clearly and bravely through the haze of children’s inchoate caprices, straight through to the pure, grave commandments of the heart, the incontrovertible imperatives that men and women design whole lives around, and I’m wanting to go there, full of astringent resolve, with him.

  Applause and hollers, just for the two of us, huddled here, exhausted and sticky inside. Shoes and rice, shoes and rice. I smile at him. “Let’s go.”

  He takes a step back, smiling. “Okay,” he says, docile, and then I see it in his right hand: a long jackknife, retracted, glinting wanly in the shadows of the hallway. I gasp; he steps in again toward me, smile crooked, and the knife lies now just between our two thighs, the blunt edge to his, the sharpened to mine, until he flicks it the opposite way, then back again, dully curious with his own toy.

  “What the fuck is that?” I say, low, standing stock still.

  “Eric, come on,” he says quietly, reasonably. “I told you way back that I carried knives. Remember?”

  I don’t say anything. Our faces are inches away from each other, his still luminous with drying tears, but smug now—smug, and oddly serene. He keeps rotating the knife loosely in his palm, its either sides announcing themselves in silent flashes of white, whispering faintly against his shorts, drily against the nylon of my crimson robe, in an interminable, steady tattoo, like a clock of palm leaves, an unhurried swish.

  “Kristina Uttley. Randolph Scott Vallone. Elizabeth Vance.”

  He lifts his free hand up, places it gently over my forehead, and props me back against the cold cinderblock wall. He inches in closer; we’re up against each other now, an infinitesimal, edgy chorus of rustlings and breath. The knife is rising up our sides, closer to our hearts, until he holds it, propped, like a birthday candle, hovering between our cheeks.

  “Come on,” he says, grazing his lips against mine, blowing his words into my mouth. “You wanna go with me?”

  “Uh-huh,” I say, blowing back, my hands pressed against the wall, not moving.

  “Go with me right now.”

  “Just like this?”

  “Uh-huh,” he says, and his lips widen in a smile—so dreamy, so content, so restful that I’m nearly swooning. I want to dissolve into him, gracefully and without a fight, I want him to completely swallow me up until there’s no more me left, just a quivering imprint on the wall.

  “Brooks.” I expel air, sleepy. “Are you sure, Brooks?”

  “Eric, I’m so sure,” he answers, low and reassuring. “It’ll be so much better for me there.” Breath. “In that place. Fleurie’s there. She’ll like you so much, I know it.” More breath. “It’s easier there, I tell you.”

  He’s running the end of the knife now in the tiny cavity between our lips—no action, just a fuzzy rumination. It tastes cool and precise there, like an engraved invitation.

  “I always want to be with you,” I say.

  “Not here,” he says, understanding, a grown-up’s regretful tsk-tsk. “We’re doomed here. I told you that before.”

  I’m caught somewhere in the network of the veins running through his brown eyes; they’ve become huge, like a map of roads to a place growing larger and larger under a microscope, through a dilating lens. “I know,” I say petulantly.

  “So.” He dials the end of the knife into the soft flesh of his lower lip. “You ready?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  He smiles again, leans his head back, and I’m breathing hard down in the depths of his glistening tonsils, struggling to come up for air. The entire hallway darkens; somebody turns out the lights and the sound and the circuits, and I watch the flat lip of the knife coast in a shallow arc, across his distended neck, leaving in its wake one shimmering, prefatory ribbon of crimson, then tiny bubbles of blood that murmur seductively over the surface of the line.

  “There, that’s a decent start,” he gargles, smiling. “You go now, Eric.”

  “John Xavier. Patricia Young. Mary Ann Zinno. Ladies and gentlemen, presenting the West Mendhem High School graduating class of 1987.”

  I kick him, hard, in the stomach; he staggers back, groaning, and hits the opposite wall of the corridor with an offended smack; the knife, veined in blood at the tip, falls from his hands and clatters to the polished floor. He looks up at me, shocked and indignant, then reaches for the knife, but I kick it out of his reach, send it skidding down the hallway, then begin pummeling him on the back, dragging him to his feet, pushing him across the light-soaked foyer toward the glass doors.

  “Get out!” I’m screaming under my breath, in counterpoint to his aggrieved groans. “Get the fuck out of here! You were gonna kill yourself!”

  “So were you,” he chokes.

  “I know,” I gasp, and for the first time, lucidly, out from under a narcotic fugue, the thought strikes me—I was. I was. I push open the doors and haul us both out into the open air, where his black 1966 Karmann-Ghia sits, lustrous in the s
un. “Get in that car,” I say, dragging him to it, hauling him whole-body over the driver’s door and into the seat. He just sits there, splayed out, stunned, the one line of crimson drying, ineffectual, on his neck, staring straight ahead.

  “Drive!” I scream at him. “Go away, go away, go away. Go clean off your neck. Go help yourself. Brooks, please!”

  But he doesn’t drive, doesn’t say a word, just turns to me with a dead look that says, “So?” And stays that way.

  “Drive!”

  Nothing.

  “Fuck!” I stare at him, horrified, that ghost of a face, then run back inside the school, stand in the middle of the foyer, in the center of the light, shaking, my fist in my mouth, a crazy man. Right now, I feel like there are about a million things I want to do, and each one with the pyrotechnic rage of a million wild horses.

  Applause and hollers are subsiding inside. Doreen Prose back at the helm: “The keynote speaker for the graduation ceremonies for the class of 1987 will be Eric Arthur Fitzpatrick, with a speech entitled ‘Reflections.’” Then the low roar of restive murmurs from within.

  “Eric Fitzpatrick, you can come in now.”

  I grab my mortarboard, jack down my robe, slip and slide my way to the end of the hallway, grab the knife, shove it into my pocket, then push open the doors to the field house and stalk toward the platform, laughter and murmured gossip cresting around my ears in waves. Passing the faculty seating area, I notice out of the corner of one eye the stricken, bewildered faces of those who have guided me—Goody Farnham, Mrs. Bradstreet, Mr. McGregor, who whispers to me “Fix your hat!”—but I disregard him and all the rest, and succeed Doreen Prose at the podium. A bloated, luminous sea of grinning, gaping faces greets me, and my mad haze clears, only to be replaced by something harder, and calmer.

  I pull the speech out of my pocket, fold it open on the podium before me, swallow hard, blink, and begin, my voice an insane, swooping chaos of pitch and inflection. “Superintendent Riley, Principal McGregor, honored guests, faculty, staff, family, and friends. Today we, the graduating class of 1987, gather not only to gird ourselves for the achievements of years to come, but to reflect on the events of the past year, both within these walls and in the broader community of West Mendhem. I think everyone would agree that it was not the easiest year in the history of this community, and for many, certainly not the happiest. However—”

  I stop, suddenly, take the speech, refold it, and put it in my pocket. There’s silence, and the murmuring starts up again.

  “I just decided I don’t want to give that speech. There’s something else I want to say. It won’t take long.”

  The murmuring and titters recommence, in earnest this time. Inadvertently, my eyes fall on the faces of my parents—confused, concerned, and wary. I swallow again, and force myself to look away.

  Mr. McGregor half stands in his chair. “That speech was approved, Mr. Fitzpatrick. I advise you not waste time, and deliver it.”

  “This’ll be even shorter,” I say.

  “Don’t do it,” he says.

  “There was a beating this year,” I say, rushing ahead. “Right after the beating of Jesús Antonio de la Costa, a student from St. Banner Academy was beaten up on a Sunday night on the town common.”

  Now it’s Mrs. Bradstreet who half stands. “Eric,” she says over the rising din, “you don’t have to do this.”

  “I guess I sort of stopped that beating from going too far, even though it went pretty far. But when people asked me if I knew the student personally, I said no.”

  The din seems to be getting more indignant. “Why are you wrecking the graduation, Fitzpatrick?” some guy from the graduating class seated behind me calls out.

  “Well, I lied,” I continue. “I did know him. I knew him really well. His name was Brooks Jefferson Tremont. He was my good friend.”

  I pause. Somebody else might have hijacked my voice for all I feel that this is coming from me. “A lot of you, over the years, have called me certain things—a certain kind of person, and I think I don’t need to say what it is. Well, you might as well know. That’s the kind of good friends we were.”

  If there was murmuring before, there’s suddenly virtual silence. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you that,” I say, and then I scare the living shit out of myself by laughing into the microphone. “But I honestly don’t care anymore. So now you know.”

  Silence but for the buzzing of the fans, the buzzing of a thousand overhead fans, roaring into a vortex that must surely lead to an end to this day.

  “Now you know,” I say again.

  More silence. Then a rising murmur. Then, from somewhere in the dumbstruck crowd: “Faggot!”

  “Uh-huh,” I say into the microphone.

  Then another: “Fuckin’ faggot!”

  Then, a girl’s voice, from off to the left. “Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up, or I’ll fuckin’ kill you!” It’s Brenda, standing up in the bleachers, everyone pulling at the hem of her dress to make her sit down, but she won’t.

  The murmur is cresting, cresting, breaking out into full-throated voices—confusion, outrage, grief, hilarity—in a hundred different places now. I just stand there, wooden, as the pitch rises.

  The fracas continues—it’s become a free-for-all: Brenda fighting with my parents, half my graduating class mimicking me, the other half laughing or bawling; faculty and staff blah-blah-blahing amongst themselves. I don’t wanna be here, I think to myself. I have to say good-bye.

  So I just walk away, off the platform, across the floor, toward the doors.

  “Fitzpatrick, get back here,” Mr. McGregor bellows, but Mr. Fazzi, of all people, bellows back: “Just let him go.”

  “Thank you,” I call back to him, and I do go. I step off the podium, in the opposite direction, through the door, back into the cool hallway—out the door, into the sun, the first one out of the building, a whole flailing congregation just at my back.

  The black Karmann-Ghia is still there, idling, and so is he, cigarette steadily in hand. When he sees me, he turns and smiles—a perfect smile, wicked and poised, the summary of all the smiles that came before and the prologue, we know, of all that will follow.

  “I just told them everything,” I say, approaching the car.

  He unfurls in laughter. “The greatest story ever told, I’m sure.”

  I smile back, sheepishly.

  I dreamed last night of a wild party, ecstatic and glittering, that was born at the foot of a hill—it was Calvary Hill, briefly, and then it wasn’t—and manically, on a thousand drugged legs, it wended its way to the top, such a convention of gaiety that faces and voices merged into a horrible, dazzling whole, and for your life you couldn’t distinguish friend or foe, brother or viper, so keenly hungry you were to celebrate, or mourn, or just plain old fuck to death the first living creature you could secure squarely between your two burning hands. I can’t remember the name of one single creature in the throng, but I assure you everyone was there, and I was swollen with honor and pride to be leading this naked, black-tie legion up this steepest and most treacherous of hills, and when we reached the top, he was waiting there, naked and black-tied from head to toe, bearing torches for all, with a million drugged limbs clambering up behind me, and when he saw me and my great work, he laughed a laugh that shook the lighted wooded crown of the hill, and he said, low, “Baby, we’ve arrived,” and then the great mad revel commenced.

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

  “To Montreal. I’d invite you along, but it looks like you’ve got some unfinished business here.” He turns the key in the ignition.

  I smirk. “Happy birthday. I’ll pray for you,” I say.

  “Girl, don’t pray for me. Pray for yourself, that the Lord might hear ye!”

  “I’ll still pray for you,” I say.

  He drops the smile, extends his hand, all business now. “And I’ll pray for you, harder, and may the best fool win.”

  “Good luck, Brooks,�
�� I say, offering my hand. He draws it forward and presses it briefly into his lips.

  “Good luck, Fitzy. Ciao, then.”

  I watch as the car pulls away from the curb, up the driveway, and around the bend. When it’s out of my sight, I turn back to the building. The first dizzy ranks are emerging, my own family among them, dazed and wounded around the eyes.

  I straighten my mortarboard, pray for myself, and retrace my steps, knife in pocket, to meet the oncoming crowd.

  GETTING OFF CLEAN. Copyright © 1997 by Timothy Murphy. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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  First Edition: March 1997

  eISBN 9781466886070

  First eBook edition: October 2014