by Sam Polk
The first night, Kirsten and I exchanged looks from opposite sides of the group. The next night, we talked quietly on the perimeter. During a snowball fight, I tackled her. Later that night, I kissed her.
She had a roommate, so we couldn’t be alone in her room. Instead, I pushed two couches in the lounge together to make a sort of bed. Anyone could walk by, so we didn’t hook up. We talked, then fell asleep in each other’s arms. I slept for fourteen hours. In the morning, Kirsten and I went for breakfast.
I didn’t want to return to Columbia. I felt safe with Ben. And Kirsten seemed a gift from God. Edward agreed to skip classes for a week to stay at Cornell.
A few nights later we went out to Ben’s favorite drinking spot, an old Irish pub called Rulloff’s. I stood at the bar with Kirsten and Jen, while Edward and Ben floated off to a table. An hour later, I looked over to see Ben and Edward engaged in intense conversation. As I walked to the bathroom, I wondered what they were talking about.
When I came out, Ben was gone. Edward’s head was in his hands. I walked to the table and sat down.
“Where’s Ben?” I asked.
Edward kept his head in his hands. He seemed very drunk. Suddenly, I knew.
“You told him about Emma,” I said.
Edward’s head dropped deeper into his hands. I stared at him, dumbfounded.
“What could you possibly have been thinking?” I said. I called Ben from a pay phone. He didn’t pick up. I kept dialing. Ten minutes later his girlfriend answered. “Ben wants you to leave,” she said. “He’s in my room, so you can pick up your stuff from his room and go.”
It was two in the morning. Edward and I fetched our luggage and stood silently in the Ithaca cold until the 4:00 a.m. Short Line bus arrived. As we settled into our seats, Edward’s eyes continued to seek mine in apology. I ignored him. I looked straight ahead and thought about Kirsten. I hadn’t even said good-bye. I knew I might never see her again. I knew it would be years before Ben forgave me.
CHAPTER 8
The Boy with the Dragon Tattoo
¤
After freshman year of college, Ben stayed at Cornell, but I went home for the summer. It would be the last time I ever went home.
During second semester, I’d befriended another freshman wrestler, a heavyweight named Francisco who loved to party. We’d become drinking buddies, then drug buddies. I now smoked weed every day. I was still throwing up, but not as much. I’d used a combination of willpower and sleeping pills to cut back. Hungry at night, instead of eating, I’d take two Valiums to knock me out. But I still yacked from time to time. The second day of the summer, home alone, I ordered an extra-large cheese-in-the-crust pepperoni pizza and two dozen chicken wings, ate them, and then vomited in the toilet.
One night I was smoking a joint in the backyard when Dad came out. He looked at me, looked at the joint, and then asked if he could have a drag. I looked up at him in surprise.
“You remember how your friend Nate Robertson used to stop by all the time while you were in high school?” he asked. I nodded.
“He was selling me pot,” Dad said.
I felt a dull ache in my chest as I registered that Dad and my friend had kept a secret from me for years. But I didn’t protest. I didn’t want Dad to get mad, go inside. Sometimes it felt like the price of being with him was getting my feelings hurt.
Dad didn’t talk to me like a son. More like a fishing buddy. The summer before, when I worked for Dad’s public relations firm, he’d told me during one of our drives home that Stacy, an attractive young woman he’d hired to answer phones, sometimes gave her boyfriend “Altoid blow jobs,” where she’d put two Altoids in her mouth and then go down on him.
“It’s an amazing feeling,” Dad said. “Apparently.”
I’d known it was weird for Dad to tell me that and to be talking to Stacy about stuff like that. But I loved that he was giving me a peek into a world he kept hidden from the rest of our family. Dad and I had an unspoken understanding—I’d stolen his porn magazines for years, and he never said a word. I smiled conspiratorially and never looked at Stacy the same way again.
I got a job as a bicycle messenger on the Disney Studios lot. It was a good job—fresh air, riding a bike all day. But there was one problem—our family only had two cars, which meant I had to carpool with Mom. I would drop her off at the clinic, then drive to Disney. After work I’d pick her up and drive her home.
Mom had always been late. Growing up, it wasn’t unusual for Ben and I to be kicking dirt on the baseball diamond, the stadium and parking lot empty, an hour after all the other kids had gone home.
Each morning I’d be standing at the front door. “Mom, we were supposed to leave ten minutes ago.”
“Almost ready,” she’d yell back.
After work it was even worse. I’d call her as I was leaving Disney and ask her to meet me outside. When I arrived, there’d be no sign of her. I’d wait in the car, stewing.
When she got in the car I’d say, “Mom, I’ve been waiting twenty minutes!” I tried to keep my voice calm, but when I finished I’d be shaking. She’d say one of her patients took longer than expected. We’d ride home in a toxic silence.
One night, I was in the living room reading, and I could hear Mom and Dad arguing in their bedroom. Mom was trying to sleep. Dad wouldn’t get off his cell phone.
“Tony, can you please be quiet?” she said. He didn’t answer her.
A few minutes later, Mom tried again. “Tony, I’m trying to sleep,” she said. I could hear the anger in her voice.
“Leave me the fuck alone, Linda,” Dad spat back.
“Go talk somewhere else!” Mom barked.
Dad ignored her. For a few seconds we listened to him talk into the phone.
“Fuck you, Tony,” Mom suddenly shouted. The bed creaked. I imagined her turning away from him, enraged.
I hunched over in anticipation. I knew Dad was going to retaliate—I just wasn’t sure how. He hung up the phone. For a moment there was silence. Then the bed creaked as Dad stood up. A few seconds later, he charged past me into the kitchen. I heard the freezer open and ice cubes hitting the bottom of a pitcher. He stormed past me going the other way, this time carrying a pitcher of ice water. He walked over to Mom’s side of the bed and pulled the covers off her. When he dumped the pitcher of ice water on her, she screamed. I’d never heard anything like that scream before. It was animalistic.
When they fought, I’d always sided with Dad. But hearing him douse her, warm in bed, with freezing water was the single worst thing I’d ever witnessed. I wanted to comfort her, but I didn’t.
For several days, I went out of my way to be kind to Mom. But she kept making me late to work, and by the end of the week my resentment had returned. On Friday, I called her after work and said I’d pick her up in ten minutes and would really appreciate if she were downstairs when I arrived. She said she would be.
When I got there, she was nowhere to be seen. I called her number. When I got her voice mail, I became furious. I called back three times before she finally picked up.
“Sam,” she said, exasperated, “I’m coming down.”
“You said you’d be waiting,” I said tersely.
“Oh fuck off,” she said.
Suddenly, I was angrier than I’d ever been. Blood pounded through my temples. She never respected my time. She always put herself first. How dare she treat me like that. By the time she walked out, twenty minutes later, I was a boiling kettle. As soon as she got in, I jammed the accelerator, and the Mazda minivan shot off down the road. As she fastened her seat belt, I let loose the torrent of words that had built up inside me.
“Mom, I’ve had enough of your shit,” I said. “I’m sick of always waiting for you. I’m sick of you wasting my time. I’m sick of all of it. This is the last time that happens.”
As I t
alked, she was silent. I had to keep my eyes on the road, but I kept glancing at her to make sure my words were affecting her. She stared straight ahead, but I could tell by the set of her jaw that she heard every word.
I was looking at the road, about to change lanes, when a clenched fist slugged me in the side of the head.
I looked over at Mom, shocked. She looked like a demon. Her face was bright red, making vivid the white hairs on her chin. Her eyes were wild. Her jaw quivered.
“Mom, what the fuck?” I shouted. “I’m driving!”
She turned in her seat so that she was facing me directly. Wham! Wham! Wham! She unleashed a series of punches. We were in the middle of traffic going about forty miles an hour, so I had to keep my eyes on the road. I hunched my shoulders to my ears and raised my right hand to block her punches. One hit me square in the neck. One landed on the meat of my upper arm. She hit me on the top of my head.
My rage was gone, and I was simply terrified. Mom didn’t seem to care if she killed us both. The car next to me honked as I faded into its lane. I veered back into my lane. Mom’s blows slowed. Her chest was heaving with exhaustion. There was a break in the traffic, and I yanked the wheel to the right and pulled us off the road.
“Mom!” I screamed.
That attack was beyond anything she’d ever done. I started crying. “Mom,” I begged. “Are you gonna let me drive us home? Will you promise not to hit me while I’m driving?”
She didn’t say anything. With tears streaming down my face, I pulled back onto the road. We had a fifteen-minute drive ahead of us, most of it on the freeway. I was scared she was going to start hitting me again. But what came next was even worse. Mom had gone somewhere deep inside herself. When she spoke, it was in a voice I’d never heard before.
“You are an ungrateful shit,” she said, “just like your father. You are a terrible son, a terrible person. I wish you’d never been born.”
For the next fifteen minutes she didn’t stop talking. She listed all the things she hated about me, the ways I’d let her down. At first I responded with sarcastic protestations. “Yeah, really, Mom? That’s really what you think of your own son?” But mostly I stayed quiet and listened as my mom told me how much she detested me.
When we pulled up to the house, I jumped out of the car and rushed across the lawn. Dad opened the front door. When I saw him, I started sobbing.
“What happened?” he said.
“Mom kept punching me while I was driving,” I said. “And then spent the whole drive home telling me how much she hated me.” I could hardly breathe.
He looked stricken. More than anything I wanted him to stand up for me. Do something. Protect me.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Which meant he wasn’t going to do anything. Mom had gotten into the driver’s seat and I heard her peel away. I went into my room and lay on my bed, exhausted. I felt like a satellite adrift in deep space, connected to nothing, cold and alone.
In the last week of summer, Edward came out to visit me, and Ben came home for a week. I was anxious about us all being together, but Ben ignored us, kept to himself.
That Friday Edward and I decided to go to a party across town. We were waiting to be picked up by some guys I knew from high school when, at the last minute, Ben said he was coming. He sat in the backseat, silent, looking out the window. I think he just needed to get drunk.
At the party we went our separate ways. A few hours later I was very drunk when I saw Ben getting in an argument. The guy stepped toward Ben; Ben head butted him in the face. I rushed in to help, but someone pushed me and I toppled backwards over a bush.
By the time I got up, Ben was being pushed back toward a gate at the rear of the backyard by people trying to stop the fight from escalating. Others were trying to calm the friends of the guy Ben had head butted. I ran to Ben, and he and I were suddenly pushed through the wooden gate, which slammed closed behind us.
We found ourselves in an alley that ran behind the house. Edward had come out of the gate before us, and was relieved to see we’d made it out safely. But Ben was screaming taunts over the fence, trying to open the gate to get back in.
“What are you doing, dude?” I hissed. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
“Fuck them,” Ben said. The shouts behind the fence were growing louder, and I could hear people frantically trying to quell the fury of what now sounded like a mob.
“There are like thirty guys back there,” I said. I looked to Edward for support, but he was fading into the shadows of the hedge next to the street.
“I don’t care how many there are,” Ben said and then ripped off his shirt. His thick muscles rippled under the red-and-green dragon tattoo that covered his right arm from elbow to shoulder. He’d gotten that tattoo right before college, and for the first time I saw it as more than just a symbol of toughness. Fighting thirty guys wasn’t tough—it was crazy.
The gate swung open and a cadre of drunk, angry men streamed out.
The first three went for Ben, and I saw him snap back the leader’s head with a left jab to the chin. The next four guys through the gate went after me, and I started backpedaling as I threw punches to keep them at bay.
My punches were connecting, and I kept my feet moving. I wasn’t getting hit too hard, but then a punch connected with my temple, and I went down but scrambled to my feet before anyone could get ahold of me.
I heard tires screech behind me, and I glanced back and saw the Nissan Pathfinder we’d arrived in lurch to a stop, perpendicular across the street. The back door flew open, and the guys we came with screamed for us to get in the car. Edward and I scrambled in. Then I looked for Ben, and I’ll never forget what I saw.
He was moving backwards, with five guys after him. There was one guy in the lead, and all of a sudden Ben leaned in and hit him with a hard left hook to the body. He must have hit a kidney, because all of a sudden the guy collapsed to his knees and dropped his hands. And without even pausing, Ben pivoted on his left foot, putting all his weight into it, and slugged the guy in the temple with his left fist. A sharp crack rang out, like wood being split.
The other guys pulled up short. The brutality of the punch stopped them in their tracks. Ben dropped his hands, stood up tall, and started walking toward them.
“Ben!” I screamed. “Get in the car.”
He looked back at me, and it was as if I had woken him from a dream. He looked at the guys, who were still backing away, looked down at the guy on the ground, and then hustled over to the car. The door slammed, tires squealed, and we were gone.
CHAPTER 9
The Burglary
¤
Six months later, I stood on the cobblestone path that bisected Columbia University. It was Christmas 1999—halfway through my sophomore year. I’d remained in New York over the break, because I didn’t want to go home. The sky was gray, drizzling. My jacket was thin so I jammed my hands into my pockets and hunched my shoulders to my ears.
I saw Neo in the distance, crossing Broadway from the west, wearing a hat and big pants, boots, and a puffy jacket. He was a Cuban from Florida, and he never looked comfortable in the New York cold. He wrestled at 119 pounds and was tall and lanky, all arms and legs, unusual for that weight class. When opponents would shoot in, he would sprawl and it was like a bug caught in a spider’s net. They would wriggle, and Neo would adjust. They would strain, and he would tilt. Before they knew it, they were trapped, and he was on top with a two-point takedown. Once he got on top, he stayed there. He was one of the best leg riders I ever saw. He’d started on varsity as a freshman.
I, on the other hand, hadn’t. After being injured for most of freshman year, I got cut from the team. I wasn’t surprised—I was smoking weed and taking Valium daily and had put on twenty pounds after I stopped throwing up, having replaced bulimia with new addictions.
As soon
as I was cut from the team, I started taking steroids. Many Columbia wrestlers took them during the season, but I hadn’t wanted to risk getting caught. But now that I was off the team, there was no chance of an NCAA drug test. Neo wanted to know why I wanted to take steroids if I wasn’t going to compete. I told him the truth—I just wanted to feel bigger, stronger, more powerful.
I’d been picking up the steroid pills from Neo’s suite, where many of the other wrestlers hung out. In an effort to impress them, I told them I’d figured out a way to break into any dorm room on campus. They laughed and said I’d never do it. Neo was the leader of that group. He said I didn’t have the balls to go through with it.
He was wrong.
Neo walked up to me and nodded, and we set off toward the security office where students who have locked themselves out of their dorm rooms can retrieve a replacement key.
“Do you want me to go in with you?” he said.
“It’s better if I’m alone,” I said. I left him leaning against a wall, his cap low over his face, water dripping off the tightly curved bill. I walked into the dark, dry hall. The security guard was at the counter.
“I locked my keys in my room,” I said.
“ID?”
“Locked my wallet in my room, too,” I said.
He matched my gaze for a beat. My stomach tensed. Then he sighed, eased off his stool, and turned toward the file cabinets on the back wall.
“Room number?” he called over his shoulder. With his back to me I didn’t need to hold my face so tight, and my lip quivered with fear.
“1109,” I said.
“Name?” he called.
“Randy Moreland,” I said.
Randy was a drug dealer who lived in the room next to me. His two best friends were Percy, the tallest hippie I’d ever seen, and Jim, who was soft, quiet, and always wore a huge smile on his face. They spent nearly every night in his room, rolling joints, passing pipes, even inhaling through a gas mask. I really liked Jim, wanted to become friends with him. But I didn’t know how.
