Suddenly, I understood what the girl in chemistry had meant. She hadn’t meant anything. She’d only said it because the lacrosse team told her to. They put her up to it, to get me ready. It was part of the ritual. They were all shouting and laughing and the senior sitting on my chest was waving his dick around. It was limp, of course, we weren’t gay. I closed my eyes as he waved it in my face. I kept my mouth shut. I thought about the fact that the girl wouldn’t even have talked to me if I wasn’t part of the team, and how she wasn’t actually saying anything to me. She was just the messenger.
Then I felt someone rub my head and they said, “Like a monkey ready for space,” and the sound had kind of died down, and the weight was lifting off of me, a little bit at a time, like pulling yourself out of a swimming pool, and everyone’s dick was in their pants, and everyone was playing it cool.
“I thought he was gonna piss himself,” someone said. They were all walking out.
Then someone else said, You’re all right, Nick. You’re cool. We’ll see you on the field. Their voices had changed. Like they respected me all of a sudden.
I got up onto the bench and sat there for a second. I felt a little better. Then I stood up and looked in the mirror. My hair was gone, shaved off in uneven patches. My face looked strange—bigger. I stuck my tongue out at my stupid face.
They’d left me the buzz cutter. I ran it over my head until I was clean. It left a few spots of blood, but I wiped them on my jersey. A little blood on your jersey looks tough.
When I walked onto the field I was very late. The team was stretching as usual. But it seemed that I was not going to have to do any push-ups.
Sit down, Nick, Coach said, with a nod of approval.
I folded my leg and felt the stretch all the way up my thigh. I looked at Richard. His hair was gone, too. Ham and Alan wouldn’t look up from their knees.
Richard told me later that they’d gotten him in the bathroom outside the gym. After they shaved his head they stuck it in the toilet. His face wasn’t in the water, though. Just the top of his head. It wasn’t like they were trying to kill him. They stuffed toilet paper in his mouth and made him learn one of the sacred team songs. Every time he messed up, they added another wad of toilet paper. He had to get through the whole thing without gagging. This made sense. Richard was a little soft.
But I didn’t say that to Richard. I just said, That’s crazy! All they did to me was put me through the paddle wheel.
Ham said, Same with me. And Alan said, Me too, just a paddle wheel.
It was the first time I had ever caught a friend in a lie. I looked at Ham and Alan a little different after that. I wondered what the team had actually done to them.
But the important thing was that we had all been buzzed in, and together. I felt warm whenever I thought about that. It was humiliating, but at least we were humiliated together. Not like the usual humiliations, girls or parents or whatever. We had been through something important. We’d probably go to state again this year.
I wanted to play well on that first day with my hair buzzed. I wanted them to know that I was tough. The cold air around my scalp and neck felt strange as I ran, but I played well. I played maybe better than ever. I wondered if maybe, all this time when I felt humiliated, when I was alone and lonely, when I didn’t know what to say to a girl, maybe all this time it was my hair that was holding me back.
* * *
• • •
AFTER PRACTICE one of the seniors, Dean McGarvey, said, Hey. You maggots wanna hang out? So Richard and Ham got in his car, and Alan and I rode with Matt Komen and Sam Simpson. We threaded back through the neighborhoods to one of the guys’ houses. We parked on the street and walked around back. The lawn sloped down to a dock that stretched into the Chesapeake Bay. The sun was starting to set behind us and the sky was all pink. The dock stuck out like a middle finger.
It’s Coach’s, Dean said to someone.
“What?” Richard said.
I was annoyed at Richard for reminding the others that we were newbies. It’s Coach’s house, I told him, trying to play it cool, like I’d known all along. I hoped I was right.
I was. The seniors explained that Coach’s son was a senior when they were sophomores, and they were still allowed to use the dock, just not to go into the house. So if you gotta pee, you gotta pee in the bay. It’s nature’s toilet, Gary Wooten said. We all laughed and sat on the weathered wood and marveled: we were at Coach’s house.
I got a little nervous when Komen said, Take your shoes off, gentlemen. Relax. Gary was pulling on a slimy rope. We were all playing it cool. We were all laughing and joking. We didn’t feel nervous, we were part of the team. I didn’t have to worry that Gary was pulling up a crab trap. I didn’t have to worry that they were going to make the crabs pinch our toes. We’d been buzzed in. We didn’t have to worry anymore.
And I was right again. It wasn’t a crab trap. It was a blue cooler, secured with a bungee cord and covered in barnacles. I felt that something incredible was about to happen.
Nature’s refrigerator, Gary said, gesturing toward the bay. He unhooked a rusty carabiner on the bungee cord and opened the top of the cooler. It was filled with rows of golden cans. Sunken treasure, Dean said. We all laughed.
Dean tossed beers to the others, one at a time. The smell from practice drifted away over the slow-moving water. We dipped our bare toes in the bay. Our feet were hot and tired, and the water felt good.
I wasn’t sure if we sophomores were going to get beers or not.
Greg Morrissey and Matt Iglehart didn’t want beer. I was confused, but I didn’t want to look stupid, so I didn’t say anything. But they told us anyway. We’re on Oxy, they said. Can’t drink on Oxy.
Shrivels your swimmers.
Which is why I don’t mess with Oxy.
Me neither. I save them for girls.
Yeah. It’s better that way. When the girl takes the Oxy. We all laughed at that.
“What’s Oxy?” Richard was my oldest friend, but I really wished he wouldn’t be such a dickhead. Dean still hadn’t tossed us beers. Morrissey and Iglehart looked at each other and started laughing.
Oxy makes you happy about everything, Komen said.
Yeah, Wilbur got it when he broke his ankle in June, Iglehart said.
Matt Wilbur, one of the seniors, raised his beer in salute. He didn’t say anything.
Komen said, He’s a true tough guy. He took, what, like one a day? Barely any. So he could save some of the love for the team. Komen had a couple of big pits on his nose, like he’d scratched a bad batch of zits. He had a lot of freckles so you couldn’t really see the scars. But I was sitting a few feet away from him; I could see. He was pretty funny looking, actually. But everyone seemed to like him. He talked for a while. You guys can try some next time, he was saying. There’s not enough to go around now, but it won’t be long until someone else gets injured and gets a prescription. There’s always injuries.
Then Komen looked at Wilbur. Wilbur nodded. He seemed to be the resident expert on injuries. He seemed to be a true tough guy. He hadn’t said a single word yet. And then he said, If it’s you? You know what to do.
We nodded solemnly. We agreed with all our hearts. We’d take only the minimum Oxy. We’d save some of the love for the team.
We never got beers. We worried that we had failed, and we were right: on Monday after practice the seniors got into their cars and drove off without us. We felt humiliated, and we blamed Richard, mostly. He shouldn’t have asked what Oxy was. He should have played it cool.
But the next Saturday we won our scrimmage, and we were invited to the party after. Everybody drank. I had a beer even though I didn’t normally drink back then because I was an athlete first. Ham and Alan drank a lot. Richard drank a little. We sang the sacred team songs with our arms around each other in Wilbur’s backyard. When Alan threw up o
n the driveway we all helped hose off the pavement. We hosed off Alan, too. It was hilarious. After that we were invited to all of the parties. We partied whenever we could.
* * *
• • •
THE MOST LEGENDARY PARTY happened the summer after our junior year, right after school got out. We had just won the state championship, our sixth in a row. The Matts Wilbur and Komen and Iglehart and all the other seniors from our first year on the team had graduated the year before. McGarvey and Simpson and those seniors were on their way out. We were the rising seniors, and we were running things now.
The party was at Dave Campbell’s house. He’d made the team junior year, along with Max and five other guys. They were all good guys. But Dave and Max were the best, next to Ham and Alan and Richard and me. We started every game, we played goalie and attack, and I was the face-off specialist. The six of us were the best. We were the heart of the team. We were the rising seniors running things.
The party was a lacrosse party. But it was open to everybody. There were all kinds of people there. There were kids from the swim team, who were usually too preppy and uptight to drink, and from the soccer team, so even the German exchange student and Mateo, the guy who was born in Mexico, were there. There was a group of three girls who ran the school arts magazine who had shown up in matching wifebeaters. They all had Sharpies in their back pockets. As soon as they walked in the door they were telling people to write on them. So there were all kinds of people there. But everyone knew it was a lacrosse party.
Early on, some people were looking for Solo cups. Max had them. He wouldn’t give them out. He got up on the dining room table and held the stack of cups like a megaphone. He bumped into the ceiling fan. It was hilarious.
He shouted to everyone to be quiet. Gentlemen—and you know what I mean when I say gentlemen.
We were all cracking up. Then some guy heckled Max. Squeal like a pig! It was one of the younger guys on the team, shouting, You got a pretty mouth!
Max wasn’t fazed. He stuck his middle finger up in the air. He shouted louder. Gentlemen! And then he sang, We are the champions, my friends!
Max was hilarious.
He shouted, We are the state champions all year! Then he got serious. He almost looked like he was going to cry. For a second we worried. Then we realized he was faking it. He closed his eyes and bit his lower lip. He pulled himself together and said, We are state champions all year. And then next season?
He paused, pretending to sniffle back a tear. This time we all cheered. Our voices joined in. We lifted him up. We all said together, WE WILL BE THE STATE CHAMPIONS AGAIN.
Then he handed out the cups and everybody got beer and the legendary party began.
At the legendary party, four guys vomited and Max hooked up with three different girls in the same night. At the legendary party we all ate cherries that Ham’s brother’s fraternity had been soaking in grain alcohol for a month. At the legendary party we did our best impressions, and Richard was pretty good at Nicolas Cage, but I won with my Jack Nicholson. At the legendary party we drew a hundred dicks on one of the art magazine girls’ tank top, the girl thought it was hilarious, and she got back at us by tricking Seth Marcus into letting her draw a dick on his cheek. At the legendary party, Max’s dealer showed up, and like magic everyone came together with the cash, and we hotboxed Dave’s entire bedroom.
The cops broke up the legendary party before midnight. It was too legendary to last.
One of the art girls was smoking on the front porch, so she saw the cops first. She came into the house yelling, Cops cops cops!
We all ran. Everyone was pushing, trying to get out the back door. A bunch of kids jumped off the deck. It wasn’t so high. Dave’s house was back in the woods. We all got away.
My car was parked down the street. I ducked through a neighbor’s yard and got in, then drove the other way. I drove around alone for a while, too amped to go home.
But the magic of the legendary party was still with me. Because just when I thought I’d have to go home, that there was nothing else to do, I stopped for a Slurpee and found Richard, Ham, and Alan at the 7-Eleven. They were just leaving. Alan had a cell phone and Dave had called him to find us all and meet him at Denny’s.
(After that, it was tradition. We always knew to meet up at Denny’s after a party got broken up.)
Dave and Max were already eating pancakes when we got there. Dave grinned. Sit down, gentlemen, I have a story.
The man has a fucking story, Max said. He was grinning, too.
Dave had gotten out through the basement and run into the woods. Then he circled back to check what was going on at the house. The cop was still there, talking into the radio on the front porch. I freaked the fuck out, he told us. I could see the look on my dad’s face already. The cut-me-a-switch-boy look.
(Dave used to say his mom was a lawyer and his dad was an asshole. I didn’t know if he meant the switch thing literally, but no one asked.)
So Dave couldn’t go back in the house, with the cop on the front porch. But his car was parked on the curb, so he snuck around and waited until the cop had turned his back and then started the car and just fucking gunned it out of the neighborhood. He didn’t think the cop got his plates or anything.
Just before he turned onto the main street, he saw a guy walking on the side of the road. It was Max. For a while they drove around together.
Dave kept whining about his dad, his dad, what am I gonna do, Max said.
Dave said, But then Max gets an idea.
They went to the movie theater and waited until a couple of cute girls came out. They were private school girls. Dave and Max told them what had happened and got their ticket stubs from them.
What movie? we wanted to know.
Get this: it was the nine o’clock showing of Gone in 60 Seconds.
We all burst out laughing at that. It’s a sign, we said. Richard did his impression of Nicolas Cage again.
The story continued: Dave and Max drove back to Dave’s house, to all the beer cups scattered on the lawn. Dave called the police. He said someone had broken into his house while he was out at the movies on a double date. He wanted the cops to come and make sure it was safe.
We laughed and laughed at that. It’s true, Max said. I had no idea Dave had such big balls, but it’s true. I watched him do it. The cop who showed up was the same cop who had broken up the party. Dave played it perfectly. He acted like he was scared and upset. Max backed him up. The cop was skeptical, of course.
“You’re saying to me,” Dave said, doing the cop’s voice as Nicolas Cage. “You’re saying to me that you’re a senior in high school and you have no idea who might have broken into your house to throw a party on the Saturday night your parents are out of town.” And I just flash him my big baby blues and say, “No, sir!”
No way he believed you, I said.
Probably not. Richard shrugged. But it’s nearly one in the morning, he wants to go home, he doesn’t actually care about a party.
Plus we had the ticket stubs, Max said. Said we were on a double date, gave him one of the girls’ numbers if he wanted to check out our story.
She’s my alibi, Dave said. I think she likes me.
Of course Dave’s parents didn’t buy it. We found out later that he got in big trouble. But at Denny’s we were impressed. It was a really good lie. We were impressed with Max for having the idea and impressed with Dave for pulling it off.
We all ordered pancakes to celebrate. And then we started talking about what had happened during the party. Hotboxing the bedroom. Max’s three girls. All the incredible things that had happened that night. We hadn’t realized how legendary the party had been until we told the story together. As we talked about it, we realized we’d been through something amazing. And we couldn’t wait to do it again.
* * *
• �
�� •
FOR A WHILE THAT SUMMER, Dave hooked up with his alibi. Life imitates excuses, Richard said (he was always quoting The Kids in the Hall like we were still in eighth grade). Dave’s alibi loved comedy movies and she went to fifth base, so Dave didn’t hang out with us as much and we understood why. It was summer, anyway, and some of us were at the beach or in Europe with our parents, and a lot of us went to different lax clinics, especially if there was one at our top-choice school. Richard was at the Naval Academy, for example. I didn’t have a top choice so I went to one at the University of Maryland. I also got a retail job at the lacrosse store, Lax World, where I spent afternoons talking to kids who were just getting started. When I told them I was a face-off specialist and that my average was over 50 percent, they looked at me with real respect in their eyes, and I remembered what it was like when I was just a freshman, watching the team from the outside.
Which is all to say that we were busy, we didn’t really miss Dave. And our parties were smaller on the whole, just a few guys hanging out and drinking and telling stories about the legendary party and how we’d throw an even more legendary one in the fall.
By August, Dave and the girl had kind of drifted apart, so he was back with us in time for conditioning. Around then our parties started picking back up, too. Dave said all of the private school girls wanted to hang out. Even though he and the alibi had broken up, they were still friends.
Private school girls were like that. They never put any pressure on you. Not that they were the kinds of girls you wanted to hang out with all the time or anything. Our public school was a really good school. My mom said that kids in our town only went to private school because something was wrong, like a learning disability, or like they’d been kicked out of public school. We didn’t know exactly what was wrong with the private school girls, but you could just tell something was off. Like one time, I was talking to one who said that she loved to get a six-pack of beer on a Friday and just drive around all night, drinking and listening to the radio.
True Story Page 2
