by Rob Spillman
“Mom, my ride has been drinking and I don’t feel safe.” My voice was echoing in the black rotary phone.
The silence was sickening. I could hear the synapses firing in my mother’s brain. “I’ll be right there,” my mother, far down the tunnel, said. “Don’t go anywhere.”
I held on to the phone, thinking, She knows, she has to know.
“Hey, Bass, I mean Cass, can I have some of your gum?”
I was a cottonmouth bass chewing a stick of cinnamon gum. Not good enough.
“Charlie, you carrying your Binaca Blast?” Of course The Tuna is carrying his Binaca. Peppermint on top of cinnamon. Mom will never smell the beer and pot.
Outside of my classmate’s sprawling Roland Park house, the air was like glue. Must move legs. Keep pushing. Shit, there’s Mom’s Camry. How long has she been out here? The car door was so heavy, but I made it inside.
“You okay?” my mom asked, but didn’t look at me. She jerked the wheel and sped away from the party.
“Fine—tired,” I said, and slumped against the window.
She knows. She has to know. Say something, Mom. Anything. C’mon, Mom, say something.
I thought this all the way home.
47
“Anger is the blanket that comes around me, and that blunts and blurs my sense of proportion.”
—Pete Townshend
Soundtrack: The Who, “Substitute,” 1966
TOWARD THE END of what should have been my sophomore year but was now my junior year, Jack and I went to our classmate Bob’s house for a party. We usually avoided the Boys’ Latin parties, even though I could play the chameleon and blend in. Yet I never felt comfortable or welcome. Russ and Bob were the exceptions. I had liked Bob ever since an eighth-grade English class, when we’d had an assignment to use twenty vocabulary words in sentences and my classmates went through the motions, doing the least amount of work possible. One even wrote, “My teacher gave us the assignment to use EXPENDABLE, CONTEMPTABLE, EXERABLE, [etc.] in sentences and I did it in one.” Ballsy, with bonus anti-points for misspelling most of the words. I wove all of the words into a story about a lost unicorn, and after the teacher called on me to read it out aloud in class, Bob turned to me and said, “That was really funny.” I hemmed, I hawed. I didn’t know what to do with a compliment even when it bit me in the ass. “Yeah, it was silly,” I said.
“No, Robby, that was funny,” Bob insisted.
Now, two years later, Jack and I were on the second-floor landing of Bob’s rehabbed Federal Hill row house, literally looking down at the beer-swilling future frat-boys. Bob walked upstairs, and he had the same look as in English class—serious, unsmiling, scary calm.
“What’s up, Bob?” I asked when we were face-to-face.
“You guys think you’re above everybody else,” Bob said.
“We are,” I said, and waved my beer at our classmates below.
“You act like you’re superior or something just because you’re different,” Bob said, and I realized he wasn’t joking.
“No, man, I don’t . . . I mean . . . the jocks.”
“Not just the jocks,” Bob said. “You’re above everyone, you know?”
“I don’t—”
“No,” Bob insisted without raising his voice. “And you’re not. You’re just not.”
“Okay,” I said, and Bob pushed past us and into the heart of the party.
Jack shrugged and headed downstairs toward the keg, and I tried to follow, but I was stuck. I couldn’t move my legs, as if I had been pithed. Bob was right: I was comfortable up on my perch, looking down, far down, on the scum below me. And those who were scum were a “they.” Not a Bob or Russ. It was easy to throw up a blanket condemnation—Boys’ Latin is filled with rich cretins who are homophobic and racist and classist and I hate every one of them. It felt good to say.
But what about Bob? What about Stan Gann, the smart Jewish kid who transferred to the Park School? What about Juan Bendia, the shy, kind South American kid? What about Fred Chalfant, the nerdy cool kid who played ridiculous board games with me and Jack? Dan and Joe, my punk friends? What about the teachers who tried to reach out to me? Mr. Duff, the Latin teacher who, on the weekends, took me along to Habitat For Humanity projects where I set myself apart with my enthusiastic work with the sledgehammer. Or Mr. Becker, the history teacher who gave me extra credit for reading historical novels, letting me plow through the entire Horatio Hornblower series of seafaring sagas, all eleven, from cabin boy to admiral. Or Mr. Silver, my English teacher, who pushed a paperback of The Shorter Novels of Herman Melville on me. I was surprised to find myself getting teary when he handed me that book. Bartleby, the Scrivener, with the title character’s refrain of “I would prefer not to,” blew my mind. To opt out, to not go with the flow, to the point of passive suicide—the idea was an incredible revelation, and to receive such gifts, such life-changing kindnesses . . . how do you write that off?
And if I hated Boys’ Latin so much, why didn’t I leave? Why didn’t I transfer to Friends or Park?
And what of my mother and father? So often I put them in neat categories: Father—good, giving, endlessly loving; Mother—abandoning, cold, and distant. Clean divisions. Neat compartments. But what if the truth was messier? What if my father had abdicated? What if my mother was the one who had tried to create a stable home for me and I was making her job as a parent a grueling slog? Then I would have to ask myself what my role in my misery was. Remaining silent is a form of communication. Passivity is a choice.
Bob’s rebuke had unlocked a door. All I had to do now was walk through and away from passivity. On the other side was engagement. I could see this new life on the other side, one that was complicated and messy, one that risked sentiment. This possible new life could be so much richer than the closed, judgmental one I was hunkered down in. Move, I told myself. But I was a coward. I followed Jack downstairs, my legs not quite right, and made my way to the keg and poured myself two beers.
48
“Don’t be a writer; be writing.”
—William Faulkner
Soundtrack: Bronski Beat, “Smalltown Boy,” 1984
ELISSA AND I HAD HEARD that there were Sunday-night dances at the former neighborhood socialist youth headquarters. We were expecting a dismal gray box, not a modest nineteenth-century church that would have been right at home in Dubuque. The church’s large oak doors were ajar, cold white light spilling out onto the steps. Inside three- or four-dozen East Germans in their late teens and early twenties were dancing where the pews should’ve been, their outlines still ghosted on the hardwood floor. Folding chairs were propped beneath six panels of stained glass on either side of the church. Sections of the stained glass were missing, replaced by clear glass, so that each of the twelve apostles was crippled in one way or another—Paul missing his left arm, Peter his upper-right leg, Matthew most of his head except for his right ear and some long locks of black hair.
The altar was intact. On top of it records were spinning on a turntable connected to a boxy gray amp and receiver held together with electrical tape. Speaker cables snaked along the wall and into the balcony, where tinny speakers did their best to crank out Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy.” Along the face of the balcony were six identical posters of Lenin, a classic white bust on a red background, but each poster was altered with black marker, someone having added granny glasses and a T-shirt that read “I♥NY.”
I stared at the Lenin-to-Lennon posters for a few seconds, the Bronski Beat song ending, and as New Order’s “Temptation” switched on, Elissa pulled me to the dance floor, the young Easterners giving us room and shy smiles as we joined them. At the altar, the female DJ replaced the record in its pink-and-black slipcover and glared at us. I smiled and she continued to glower. Everywhere we went at least one resistant local refused to engage the interlopers. Yet here, like mostly else
where else, the majority of people were trying to be cool, dancing while stealing glances at us. Elissa ignored the glare and pulled me close.
49
“Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable.”
—Janis Joplin
Soundtrack: Janis Joplin, “Kozmic Blues,” 1969
“EMBANKMENT.” An awkward, bulky word. Rachel couldn’t turn the car in time and then we were sailing through the air. A good twenty feet above concrete, my one thought was I might die.
But then everything slowed, the Mustang stuck midair, like a fly in amber. How did I get up here? I wondered.
It was two weeks before my sixteenth birthday, and my father had given me one and only one piece of advice about girls: “Watch out for redheads.” When he had told me this, I thought, You’ve got to be joking, but let it go at that, thinking that maybe because he was gay he didn’t feel qualified to hand out any further, or real, advice. Or maybe he thought I was doing all right on my own. That summer, age fifteen, about to be a senior in high school, with a fake ID so that I could get into bars, I found that girls in the festival now thought I wasn’t too young. Sixteen-, seventeen-, and eighteen-year-old girls tuned in to the fact that I was the son of one of the most popular teachers at the festival. And none of them cared about attachments. They were driven musicians, the summer festival a rung up the ladder to the best music schools; I was a fun, temporary distraction.
Which suited me fine. I guess my father thought I didn’t need any practical advice, though I would have liked a little more to go on than “Watch out for redheads.” But now, hovering twenty feet over hard pavement, about to be killed by a redhead, I realized that his one incontrovertible piece of advice was more useful than a platter of pablum.
Rachel was a wild Bryn Mawr junior I had been dating for a couple of weeks. She had been given the mint-condition black 1964 Mustang Convertible, an infinitely bitching ride, for her Sweet Sixteen by her yacht-building giant of a self-made gazillionaire father. On that particular grim, slate-gray December day we drove downtown, to a bar near the strip clubs where Rachel knew we could get served. We were, indeed, served—a lot.
Toward closing time she said, “Let’s go fool around,” and we stumbled to her car. She cranked up Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks,” peeled out, then swung the Mustang left around the corner, quite smoothly, but also heading the wrong way on a one-way street. She clipped the front left headlight of a behemoth white Cadillac waiting at the light, bouncing her Mustang hard to the right. Dazed from hitting the dashboard, I turned around and saw the middle-aged, beer-gutted Cadillac driver jump out of his car, yelling at Rachel, who stormed out of her seat, ready to shriek back, then registered that she had turned the wrong way. “Shit, let me get my wallet,” she told the Cadillac’s driver. She reached through my window and across me for her purse, rummaged around, then yelled out, “Shit, shit, shit!” as she ran to her side of the car, then jumped into the driver’s seat, started the engine, and floored the gas. “I don’t have my real license!”
“This isn’t a good idea,” I said as cars swerved out of our way. I turned around and saw the Cadillac driver get in his car, do a U-turn, and take off after us.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Rachel said again. She peeled around a corner, floored it for two blocks, and slid through the on-ramp to the Jones Falls Expressway, the main artery out of the city. I looked back and the Cadillac was right behind us.
“This isn’t a good idea,” I repeated, clutching the dashboard as the speedometer climbed past 70 to 80 to 90 and up to 100.
Rachel repeated her mantra—“Shit, shit, shit”—each time checking the rearview, and seeing that she wasn’t shaking the Cadillac on the wide-open, empty highway, Rachel yanked the wheel to catch the Twenty-eighth Street exit, and barely missed a concrete divider. The rear tires skidded and she locked the brakes and we screeched around the sweeping turn. I was sure we were going to roll. Everything slowed. I wasn’t scared; I was curious about what rolling in a car would feel like, to have no control, spinning as if on a roulette wheel—black, red, black, red, death, life, death, life. But, instead of rolling, the Mustang’s squealing wheels held the concrete through the turn and the road straightened out. Rachel exhaled and punched the accelerator. I was thrown back and felt relieved, yet disappointed. A fleeting thought as we both noticed, and both too late, that the ramp curved again after the brief straightaway. The Mustang rocketed through the apex of the turn and we went soaring off, twenty feet above the ground.
So there I was, up in the air, weightless. Removed from the earth. I didn’t want to descend. Nirvana. How can I stay here forever? Don’t look down. Don’t look down. Don’t look at the pavement. But the pavement did, sadly, rush toward me. A few feet past a black Dodge Dart we smacked down hard and each of the Mustang’s tires blew, bang bang bang bang, almost simultaneously. I bounced all over the plush interior as the Mustang careened forward, the metal tire rims grinding against tarmac. Silence for a split second. We were stopped. And alive. Then a roar of sounds which funneled into one sound—the hissing engine, steam pouring from the edges of the black hood.
Rachel looked over at me. God, she’s beautiful, I thought, her long, curvy red bangs clinging to her sweaty forehead. I wanted to lick the sweat from her forehead. “Marry me and be my wife,” I sang in my head. I couldn’t speak, and we both looked back, half-expecting to see the Cadillac right behind us, but the driver had stopped at the edge of the embankment. There was no way down on foot. He was out of his car, screaming. I thought that if it had been Hunter Thompson in that Cadillac like the one he drove at the beginning of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, he would have made the leap and then taken a golf club to our heads.
But we were alone in the middle of a mostly empty parking lot next to a nondescript gray office building. How did we miss that Dodge Dart? I wondered as Rachel downshifted into first and limped the Mustang on its rims through the lot and into an alley two blocks away.
“My father is going to kill me,” Rachel said, still gripping the leather steering wheel with both hands.
I nodded, wondering how I was alive, much less uninjured. Do it again, Rachel. Do it again.
“And he’ll dismember you if you’re around when he gets here,” Rachel added.
“Right,” I managed. “You going to be okay?” I asked as I unfolded myself out of the Mustang.
“My father is going to kill me,” Rachel said, staring straight through the cracked windshield.
At that moment, there were two things I knew for sure: I would never have another date with Rachel. And this was as great as any sex could ever possibly be.
I walked away from the crash unscathed, feeling like I could sprint all the way home, but after a few blocks my head began to pound, a persistent ache that throbbed with each footfall. With each slow step, spikes shot through every muscle in my arms, legs, and back. The world looked smeary for several minutes and then my vision coalesced in time for me to realize that it was late Saturday night, and I was a scrawny white kid wobbling across the borders of four gang territories, at North Avenue and Charles Street, featured in that month’s Spin magazine as the “most dangerous intersection in America.”
As I walked under a burnt-out street lamp, an improbable image came to me. I’d always thought I had no memories of my parents being in the same room at the same time, yet the image that came to me was from when I was five years old, waking up in a West Berlin hospital, in a criblike bed, and looking through the slats at my parents, who were behind a glass partition worriedly looking down on me. I’d been with my father at the ancient, ornate home of a famous voice teacher named Mauz. Blind, with bright white hair, Mauz was revered, treated as if she could connect her students with all that was musically profound and beautiful.
While my father was playing piano for her, I was quietly playing tag with one of her students, and I ran silently but full tilt to
ward a gate that blocked the second-floor landing. I leapt onto the railing along the side of the gate, slipped, and plummeted onto the stairs below. Berlin blurred by, a black world lit by the ambulance’s red strobe light. I passed out, then woke in a crib in the middle of a sea of cribs, in what looked like a picture of some third-world orphanage. My head was throbbing and I was confused—not by the wide-open children’s ward, but by the presence of both of my parents. They had separated just six months before, yet I had already wiped clean any memories of them together, had already forgotten what it was like to live in a “normal” family.
50
“It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of ‘culture.’”
—John Cage
Soundtrack: John Cage, 4’33”, 1952
A YEAR AFTER my Berlin concussion, my father took off my training wheels and gave me a gentle push and all of a sudden I was doing it, really riding a bicycle, fast, flying across the pavement, the Turkish kids from the neighboring Gastarbeiter complex taking a break from their soccer game to watch me pedal madly past their dusty pitch. “Turn, Robby, turn,” I heard my father yell behind me, but I was too scared. I kept the handlebars locked in place and pedaled and pedaled, right into an open garage and toward the back wall. Before impact, I had a moment of clarity—the garage’s cement wall was the exact same shade of gray as the Eastern side of the Berlin Wall, which was only a mile away from the apartment where my father and I lived. “Stop, Robby, stop,” I heard my father yelling, but I couldn’t stop. “Turn! Stop!” my father called out, and then I was sprawled across the garage floor. I jumped up, dazed and shaken. And proud. I could do it: I could ride a bike, even if it was straight into a wall.
