A boy who had to be approached, who wouldn’t speak until spoken to.
And who would then never shut up.
Alice Atkinson McDermott arrived at Davidson College with one ambition. To be different. Just being here was the first step. She’d made her stand, insisting on matriculating at this small, well-regarded liberal arts college—a spawning ground for communists and sexual libertines, in her father’s certain estimation—instead of the small Catholic women’s colleges her older sisters had been forced to attend. As formidable as those Amazons were, they, unlike her, hadn’t had the good fortune to be born the youngest, the prettiest, and the favorite. And so her father, infamous among television-addicted insomniacs in both Carolinas as the King of Unpainted Furniture, finally conceded. On one condition. That Alice promised to attend Mass and take Holy Communion every Sunday. By the middle of Lent, I was attending with her.
But a month of Sundays and three dozen Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary wouldn’t have fooled J. Curtis McDermott. He sized me up on first sight, at that tense Sunday afternoon brunch where I chain-smoked and refused to allow anything but black coffee to pass my lips. The simple fact that he hated me convinced her she was in love with her smart-ass, daydreaming little rebel. If truth be told, she would have preferred it if my armpits hadn’t needed a good shellacking with an anti-perspirant. But my sour apple presence certainly made an impression in the prissy little restaurant that served dessert cakes dusted with confectioner’s sugar sifted over a paper doily.
But the body odor she mistook as an act of defiance was, in reality, the byproduct of sheer, abject terror. The overbearing pitchman on television, the King of Unpainted Furniture, was a soft sell compared to the Grand Inquisitor confronting me across the table. He was a massive, strawberry-blond Irishman with chiseled features, a barrel-chested Spencer Tracy with a seventeen-and-a-half-inch neck. He waved his hands as he spoke, inspiring irrational fears of the Boston Strangler’s meaty hands gripping my neck. He bore down on me like a heat-seeking missile.
“Where are you from?”
“Gastonia.”
“How do you spell your last name?”
“N-O-C-E-R-A.”
I enunciated as slowly and carefully as a parent teaching a toddler the alphabet. Alice giggled, drawing an apprehensive look from her mother.
“I don’t think I know your family,” he said, suspicious of my origins.
“I have a cousin in High Point. Maybe you know him. Zack Vanzetti?”
Alice kicked me under the table, barely able to contain her glee.
“I don’t think so. What parish does he belong to?”
“Alice says you’re an English major,” her mother interjected in a futile attempt to steer the conversation to neutral territory.
“I just don’t understand that,” he declared. “You’ve been speaking English since you learned how to talk.”
“Actually, Daddy, Andy grew up speaking Bulgarian,” Alice said, purposefully avoiding the pleading looks from her mother.
“I thought you were a wop?” he blurted, hypertension pumping blood into his cheeks.
“My mother was born in the Balkans,” I lied, suppressing any trace of sarcasm in my voice.
“Jesus,” he said, exasperated, turning to his wife for reassurance that North Carolina hadn’t been infiltrated by communist agents from behind the Iron Curtain. “Are those people Catholic?”
I refused to let him pay for my meal, such as it was, and threw a couple of ones on the table when he wouldn’t take my money. He wanted to have me drawn and quartered. His daughter would have married me on the spot.
That night we made love for the first time.
I was sprawled on the floor of her dorm room, flipping through her records in a futile search for Buddy Holly in the stack of Schubert lieder and Bach choral works. Try as I might, I couldn’t appreciate the subtle beauty of Strauss’s Four Last Songs.
“Let’s listen to this instead,” she said and I flopped on my back, swept up in the overture to The Magic Flute. She curled up beside me. I felt the heat of her body and could almost taste the peppermint on her breath. I stared at the ceiling and she touched my chin, gently turning my face toward her. I knew what I was supposed to do next. I closed my eyes and kissed her.
I knew she could tell I was a virgin. I could tell she wasn’t, which made me all the more nervous. When she undressed and turned to show me her body, I realized I had never fantasized about how she looked naked. I stared at her breasts and her vagina. I knew I liked her, maybe even loved her. I knew I didn’t desire her body. Funny thing about the body, though. It can respond to anything, anytime, even without the desire to possess.
“Shit,” I said, pushing myself away from her. “We can’t do this. I don’t have any rubbers,” I announced, not exactly regretting the reprieve.
“Don’t worry. I’m on the pill.”
I was awkward at first, but found my rhythm soon enough. I knew her moans were real. You can’t fake a faker.
She made it easy for me, always careful not to be too demanding. She seemed genuinely impressed by the inanities that rolled off my silver-tipped tongue. I’d always been the listener, never the talker, and certainly never the center of attention. But there was something in Alice’s deep green eyes, something about the way she’d nod her head, anxious that I know she absolutely, positively, one hundred percent, agreed with me, that compelled me to share my insights and announce my opinions. All of which, in hindsight, were the pathetically ordinary pronouncements of a self-absorbed undergraduate, the all-too-familiar polemics endured by long-suffering parents footing the bill to gild their (temporarily, they hope) obnoxious offspring with a liberal-arts education.
Alice insisted I go home with her one warm spring weekend. Their house made the Monument to Heat and Air where I’d grown up look like a shack. We arrived late Friday and were driving back to the dormitory by Saturday afternoon. The King had gone ballistic when he stumbled upon the copy of The Militant, the Voice of the Socialist Workers Party I intentionally left sitting on the toilet tank of the guest bathroom. Bellowing at the top of his lungs, he declared me guilty of treason. In my snidest, most condescending voice, I informed him it was perfectly legal to cast my vote against the oppression of free-market capitalism. And I then announced I could not spend one more minute in his house. Alice followed me out the door, triumphant.
Her mother came rushing toward us, pleading for a treaty or at least a temporary cease-fire.
“Alice, please, come back inside. He’ll be miserable if he thinks you’re mad at him.”
“Well, I am.”
“Alice, he loves you.”
“And I love Andy,” she announced, closing the door and telling me to start the car.
I knew she was mine forever.
Little Gloria Bunker can’t accept that I can’t stay for the Big Game tomorrow. The booze is flowing; everyone’s loose and insistent on having a good time. She realizes she’s going to have to be a little forward. After all, the night’s not getting younger and my hands have yet to stray under the table. They’re announcing last call, one more round, and the invitation to my room isn’t forthcoming. She’s shouting, thinking I’ll believe she’s just trying to be heard over the din. But I know she’s hoping that her breath tickling my ear is what I need to get me started. Her friends are on the dance floor, flailing away to Donna Summer’s “Last Dance,” very consciously having decided to leave us alone. Little Gloria arches her back and takes the plunge.
“Would you like to stop by my hotel for a little while?”
She’s mortified when I politely decline. She hates me for forcing her to declare herself, to put herself on the line, only to be rejected. I feel for her. I really do. But better to disappoint her now than later, when she’s lying naked, ashamed of the body that’s incapable of provoking the appropriate response in me. She couldn’t know that I’m done with that. I’ve exhausted my ability to respond to a woman. I couldn’t do
it if I wanted to. And I don’t want to.
I know what I do want. Knoxville’s the big city in these ol’ parts and it’s a party weekend. Tucked in my pocket is a torn page from Damron’s Men’s Travel Guide promising a Young Crowd and Entertainment at the Annex, a Very Popular starred entry, a Private Club, serving after hours for Members Only. The parking lot is full and idiots like me are driving in circles, waiting for a space to open up. A couple steps in front of my car, forcing me to throw on the brake. It’s Laurel and Hardy, a pair of clowns, parodies of masculinity in tight leather jackets and faux motorcycle caps, trailing cigar ashes as they wobble in their lace-up combat boots, as unsteady as two drag queens in stilettos.
“Good thing you’re cute, baby,” the taller one giggles, blowing me a kiss.
This is not what I want.
They disgust me, these preening mannequins, mocking everything I believe in. I made a mistake. I should have left with Little Gloria. I should give my old life another chance, if not with Alice, then with someone different, a new start, a fresh beginning. I don’t belong here…
…but a parking spot miraculously clears and I’m standing at the door of the club, looking for a member to approach to sign me in as his guest.
There he is. The boy I’ve waited for my whole life. The boy I dreamed of being. Broad shoulders, open and friendly face, floppy hair, a wrestler, an Eagle Scout. He’s Clark Kent, Wally Cleaver, and David Nelson all rolled into one.
“Sure,” he says. “No problem. What’s your name, in case they ask at the door?”
“Andy.”
“Great. I’m Sam.”
Sam. It’s perfect. I’m gonna buy him a drink when we get inside. I’m gonna fight the urge to light up a smoke. I’ll ask him to dance. Better yet, he’ll ask me. We’ll dance until they turn up the lights, then we’ll end up in bed, fucking until the sun comes up, unable to get enough of each other. I’ll even bottom if he wants. And I’ll cancel my flight tomorrow so we can spend the entire day together, watching the game. Knoxville and Charlotte aren’t that far. We can see each other every weekend. I can move.
A young fellow, lanky and good-looking, jogs toward us.
“Shit, dude, I had to park almost a mile away.”
“Andy, this is Jason, my boyfriend.”
“Hi,” he says, shaking my hand.
“Jason, you sure you wanna do this?” my Sam asks. “It’s getting really late and my parents are expecting us to tailgate with them tomorrow. I should just sign Andy in and we ought to go home.”
But I’m already halfway to my car. I can’t get away from them fast enough. I hate them, everything about them, if only for one brief and fleeting moment. I don’t want to be a bitter old son of a bitch, steeped in envy. I’m glad they’re happy. I really am. It’s not their fault that I’ll never know how it feels to tell the boy I’ve been waiting for my entire life to step up, shake a leg, get a move on, because my old man is checking his watch as he flips the dogs and burgers, telling everyone the party can’t start until we arrive.
Randy T and the Long Red Snake
“Didn’t you tell me once you were admitted to the University of Chicago?”
My counselor can be a bit unpredictable. I’ve thrown him a bone, sharing my little Tennessee adventure, expecting we’ll spend our mandatory hour chewing on my rather promising attempts at insight. But instead, the motherfucker tosses me a curveball, a complete non sequitur.
“Yeah, so what? Don’t you want to talk about my huge breakthrough on the night of the Volunteers pep rally?”
“I’m just curious. I mean, Davidson’s a good school, but what made you give up such an amazing opportunity?”
“You’re a real fucking snob, you know that?”
“I suppose it sounds like I am. But what I’m actually thinking is that it doesn’t seem likely you’d be sitting here today if you’d made different choices.”
“What makes you think I had a choice?”
“Everything’s a choice.”
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t always feel that way.”
The old man put me to work the summer before I was to leave for the University of Chicago. He’d done all right for himself, a big dago who came south with only his tool bag and the certification by Pennco Tech, courtesy of the G.I. Bill, of his proficiency in resolving the mysteries of the brave new world of HVAC. He took a chance on a hunch that the oh-so-genteel, seersucker-and-magnolia folk of Dixie would pay through the nose for the chance to sprawl spread-eagled in their underwear enjoying the frigid air blasting from their ceiling ducts. He was true pioneer stock, one of the trailblazers who conquered blistering sunlight and sweltering heat to make the Sun Belt safe for telecommunications empires and multinational insurance conglomerates in search of affordable real estate and cheap labor.
It made him a rich man. More importantly, it made him a shirt-and-tie man even if the tie was a clip-on and fastened to a short-sleeved dress shirt with a Knights of Columbus tie clasp. His kingdom was 4,500 square feet of partitioned office space and he commanded a fleet of twelve vans and an army of ten repair technicians, assorted clerks for payables and receivables, dispatchers, purchasing agents, and a timid young Catholic girl, handpicked by my mother to be his secretary.
And he had a son. To everyone within earshot, he bitched about my hair, my clothes, my eating habits, my new cigarette habit, my music, my this, my that. But after years of tension, after I’d won a state championship in the breaststroke, after I was named a National Merit Scholar Finalist, he needed to have me close, within earshot, within reach. He insisted I drive to work with him, long sweaty hauls to and from the dispatch office because Mr. HVAC refused to use the air-conditioning in his new Chrysler New Yorker because it was hard on the engine. I’d fidget while he fiddled with the dial of the radio, searching for the one low wattage station that played Sinatra, “King” Cole, and Sassy Vaughan instead of “that fucking shit-kicker shit.” He filled the space between us with AM band static and his revelations about the crucifixion of Nixon, whom he’d loved, and the Democratic Party, which he hated for selling its soul for the endorsement of the goons and extortionists that called themselves organized labor. His world had changed forever the night Ed Sullivan, Ed Sullivan, kissed that Supreme girl right on her big fat lips, defiling the sanctity of our living room. That’s what he got for voting for Johnson in ’64. Ronald Reagan would lead the nation out of the wilderness, you better believe it! Sometimes I’d respond with something vaguely “radical” to get a rise out of him. But it usually took every ounce of energy I could summon just to stay awake.
After two weeks of this torture, I accepted a job lifeguarding the rest of the summer. I told my father I was embarrassed, taking his money for doing nothing, that the guys drew lots every morning, loser gets the old man’s kid. I thought he’d have a stroke. He told me it was his fucking money and he’d spend it any fucking way he wanted and they were nothing but a bunch of fucking jealous bastards. And he was certain they were. But I knew they had never heard of the University of Chicago, couldn’t even consider the possibility such a place actually existed since it never had and never would appear in a bowl game or at the Final Four. And yet the old man bragged on, oblivious to the fact that they might have a hard time finding Chicago on a map if they were ever inclined to try, which they weren’t since they only feigned interest, and a mild one at that, when the boss backed them into a corner at the vending machines and lectured them about my future as a world-famous brain surgeon who would probably win the Nobel Prize. All they saw when they looked at me was a wiry kid with pimples on his chin.
Starting that day, he doubled my wages and told the dispatcher that, from here on in, I was assigned to Randy T. Olsson, no ifs, ands, or buts. The dispatcher called over to Randy T and, reaching out to shake his hand, I was conscious of every crack in my voice, aware of my gangly arms, absolutely certain I was going to humiliate myself before the Great One. Someone more clever with words than I might have cal
led my reaction a swoon. And, just like when he was a senior and I was a lowly sophomore, Randy T’s eyes skimmed right over me, looking over the day’s orders, barely registering my existence.
Randy T was one of the old man’s trophies. Still famous throughout Gastonia, the Big Man on Campus, in fact, had never been that big. He was graceful and agile as they come, had an arm like a rocket, and was an inspiration for an avalanche of four-syllable adjectives and inspirational inanities from sentimental sportswriters as far away as Wilmington. His perfectly proportioned frame was a canvas of solid muscle. He had a face that, decades after graduation, would still bring a sigh when middle-aged women stumbled upon a high school yearbook packed in a box in the attic. He was a god descended from Olympus—all five feet seven inches of him.
Randy T had never made it beyond the first semester at the state teacher’s college in the northwest corner of the state, the only place that had recruited him. The old man plucked him up and dropped him into an apprenticeship. The fact Randy T had real aptitude for the work was a bonus. The other technicians had to wear navy cotton duck Nocera Heat and Air work uniforms. Randy T had the old man’s blessing to hit the trucks in a white wifebeater and jeans.
Randy T was into being mellow that summer. Maybe it was a reaction to the profound humiliation he’d suffered when he came home early one afternoon to find his bride of seven weeks buck naked in bed with his best man. More likely it was the prodigious amounts of marijuana he smoked. When the old man told Randy T to look after me, he shrugged his shoulders and said cool. He offered me one of his unfiltered Old Golds and said let’s hit the road, coffee and bear claws five miles ahead.
Much to my surprise, on our third day together, Randy T asked if I wanted to hang out after work. He wanted me to hear the killer new Cheap Trick album; we could order in a pizza or maybe Mexican. I thought Randy T must have the life. Buddies to laugh at his stories, to roll his joints, to toss him another beer, to worship him. But long after midnight, when we were ripped on his homegrown pot and staring at some stupid shit on the television, I realized his phone hadn’t rung all night. Randy T must have been lonely, nothing but his two toaster ovens, a coffee percolator, and a huge Mediterranean television/hi-fi console—his share of the wedding booty—to keep him company. Randy T was off chicks for the time being; he didn’t even want to talk about them. He still loved his wife and wouldn’t file for divorce. He was saving to buy a leather sofa to lure her back home.
Probation Page 6
