I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip.: 40th Anniversary Edition

by John Donovan

  Fred gets to have a longer walk than usual, and when Altschuler and I bring him back to the house it is getting dark. My mother has come home, and she begins to tell me from the other room how worried she was about me and Fred. She finally stops talking long enough so that I can call to her that I have a guest.

  "Who is it?" she calls.

  "It's Douglas Altschuler," I call back. "From school."

  "Hello, Douglas," she says.

  Altschuler just stands there.

  "Douglas, hello," she says.

  "Hello, Mrs. Ross," he calls out.

  "The first Mrs. Ross," she yells, then laughs. She comes into the living room from the kitchen. Her hand is held out to Altschuler, and they shake hands. They tell each other how glad they are to meet each other, but Fred wants none of this. He has a few special toys he likes to have me try to get away from him, his hard ball and an old rag of a T-shirt I have knotted up for him which he grabs between his teeth as though I want to get it from him. He likes me to chase him around the apartment, trying to get these things away from him. Sometimes he works it so that I will get them and then toss them into another room where he can run after them and play the whole keep-away-fromDavy game all over again. Fred has grabbed the T-shirt this time and flaunts it before me and Altschuler, wanting one of us to grab it, or try to grab it, from him.

  "I'm so glad Davy has a school chum in the neighborhood," Mother says. "You can be friends, can't you?"

  Altschuler and I both mutter something indistinct to Mother and to ourselves.

  "Of course you'll be friends!" Mother declares, ever the gentle urger. "Ask him to come over to play with you tomorrow, Davy."

  I know that this is a game. Mother knows that Father has been getting me on Saturdays for the last few weeks, so if Altschuler is here it will make it awkward for everyone.

  "I can't, Mrs. Ross," Altschuler says. "I'm doing something else tomorrow." And I remember about Wilkins, whose seat I occupy in most of my classes.

  "Well, you'll be good friends, won't you?" Mother says.

  Altschuler tells me that he thinks Fred is great and it would be fun to get to know him better. His mother won't let him have a dog because of it being the city and all, and he'd really like to have one someday. Mother says that Altschuler should listen to his mother about everything and that Mrs. Altschuler is obviously a lot smarter than Mrs. Ross. Mother thinks that she has cracked a big joke, and she carries it further when she tells Fred not to worry, that she wouldn't think of breaking up the love affair of the century.

  Altschuler says that he has to go home now, that he is late. Mother says he must stay for dinner and the three of us will have a card game after.

  "We'll do anything you want, Douglas," Mother says.

  Altschuler says that that would be nice some other time, but not tonight. Mother says OK, he can suit himself, but that he has a home away from home any time he wants it.

  Mother the gracious hostess is someone I don't know so well, so it takes me quite a bit of time to collect my thoughts after Altschuler has gone. A home away from home, she told him, and he hadn't even been here for a half hour. And what about me? I have only talked with the guy a few times plus the two walks home from school. Plus I admire the way Altschuler is the class jock and plays basketball better than anyone else in the school. And I must say that he was pretty smart to get the whole class to make a hero out of Brutus and a heel out of Caesar. He's pretty good-looking too, but not as good-looking as the kid who played Mark Antony in the play. He invited Frankie Menlo to walk home with us today. Fred likes him.

  You should choose your own friends though, not have some dopey mother who invites strangers to make our home their home.

  he next part isn't part of the story, so it is all right to skip over it. It's about what happened to me inside, after just a few weeks of being away from my real home and being in New York. I dreamed some of these things, and some of them are real. It doesn't matter which are which.

  The very night Altschuler visited me in the apartment for the first time I dreamed a crazy dream. I was walking along the beach at home, my real home, and I never seemed to stop walking. The beach isn't that long in real life, so it wasn't my very own and familiar beach. It was an imaginary beach. But I thought it was the very one I used to take Fred to. At least I thought it was that beach in the beginning of the dream because naturally the little bastard was trotting along beside me. Otherwise I wouldn't have been at the beach. It was late in the year, and the only time I went there then was to walk Fred. So the dream started out to be a recollection of the good, free walks I used to have with Fred. We started out OK. Maybe I was wishing that our walks now didn't have to be so short and always in the same places.

  But after a while, as the beach got longer and longer and less the beach I knew but some other beach, the beach, the one that rims the beautiful ocean that people think about, the one without seaweed and jellyfish, poor Fred wasn't in the picture any more. I was. Just me. And the great expanse of sand and sea. And me running along that beach sometimes throwing myself in the sand and flinging it up in the air and sometimes splashing in the water that tickled my feet. I took off my clothes in the dream and then ran along the beach. I ran along the very rim of the tide, and it became windy and the sand blew all over me. I threw myself on the beach because the sand began to sting me as it blew against my body. Then I didn't know where I had left my clothes. I couldn't stand now because the wind was fierce. When I could stand up, the stinging was violent. How would I get my clothes? And what if I couldn't? Would I have to go back without them? Back where? I didn't know. I only knew that I didn't have what I needed to go on, to do anything. There was just me, and all I could do was lie there in the sand and try to bury myself against the fury of the wind and the awful stinging when I tried to get up.

  I think the wind stopped. Or maybe I stopped it with some miracle which dreams make me think I have a supply of. Whatever the reason, I did get up, and I did walk back, and Fred did trot into the picture I was dreaming about, and the beach did get smaller, and I must have found my clothes, and it all came out OK in the end.

  Except that in the morning I began to think. It was a Saturday morning, and the rule is that Mother and I play dead until it is inevitable that one of us gets up. That usually happens around the middle of the morning, though Fred and I have been awake for a few hours, just messing around in my room. And I think of all the reasons for my being here. I feel guilty as hell that I haven't thought of Grandmother for a long time. She's the only person I may ever know I didn't have to put on some big act around. She's the only person I could be myself with. My mother and my father don't know me yet. But I think of them more than of Grandmother, who will be the most important person in my life forever. And they aren't worth my not thinking of Grandmother. I love them and all that. They are trying to feel so goddamned responsible that they should be encouraged, but it's Grandmother who matters to me. And she is dead. And I'm forgetting her. Like a bastard. And I think of the beach in my dream and how I kept running farther and farther along it so that Fred and everything I knew and loved faded away. There was only me and that terrible wind and the stinging until I stopped it, which must have meant that I could go back to where I understood how everything fit together. Except I can't. She is dead. It has been many, many weeks now. There has been great cold, and snow, and she is back there in Massachusetts in that terrible box they put her in, in the ground. She is there, and it makes no sense that Grandmother and Fred and I are not sniffing around each other in our own ways. I cannot get buried in all this stuff happening to me now. The new stuff doesn't matter. As long as I remember.

  It's dumb thoughts like these which occupy me while I try to stay in my room on Saturday morning. There is a limit though, and Fred reaches it when he gives me his special don't-blame-me-if-I-make-here look.

  or the next couple of weeks the most important thing to happen to me is that Altschuler and I get to be buddies, for a whil
e anyway. He kept telling me that my mother was a real gas but also that he wasn't being friendly to me because Mother kept telling both of us that it was nice we were such friends. If the truth is to be known, we got to be buddies in spite of Mother rather than because of her. Altschuler, a native New Yorker, knew all kinds of places, and he took me to a lot of them.

  Mother's house is right across the street from an Episcopal seminary. Mother never went inside the seminary. She likes it because it is pretty to look at. Whenever anyone came to visit her for the first time, she made a big thing out of the view she had from her living room, and from my bedroom too at the front of the house, looking out across a little park and into a dark chapel. She never thought of going over to the seminary, but Altschuler took me there a lot just to schmooze around. Some kid whose father got his call to be a minister late in life was a buddy of Altschuler's, and that kid had some buddies, so we messed around in the little park a lot. One of the seminary kids had a football, and we played touch a few afternoons. They wouldn't let me bring Fred. They said it was because they didn't want a lot of dogs to make all over the place. I planned in my mind to work out something for Fred later. Just to run around on some grass would make Fred happy. Besides, I had already seen about eighty wild cats jumping through their fence, and I'll bet they make all over the place when no one is looking.

  One day Altschuler took me to the Holland-America Line pier, and we sat looking at the Nieuw Amsterdam for about an hour. Three sailors from the ship waved at us. They were just standing around, too. Altschuler told me that it took a day to land passengers, clean up the ship, and get ready for more passengers. It seemed very quiet on the ship. Only a few sailors were roaming around aimlessly, including the three who waved to us. Two guys in working clothes were doing something to some portholes. They were sitting on the same kind of thing window washers sit on when they are working on high buildings, a long platform fastened by ropes and pulleys to some place at the top. One of the workers was whistling.

  "Where do you want to go the most?" Altschuler asked me.

  I hadn't thought of going anyplace. I'd read about a lot of places and seen a lot of things in the movies and on television about foreign places, but I had never thought of myself in connection with those places.

  "It costs a lot of money to go places," I answered.

  "Suppose you had money. Where would you want to go?"

  Honestly, money is so important when you think of going anyplace, of getting on a ship like the Nieuw Amsterdam or in an airplane, that it seems goofy of me even to think about something like going to a place that is faraway. I mean, my father took me to Canada, and I'll go to visit Aunt Louise in Massachusetts this summer, I guess. But places that don't have something to do with some family person taking you there or being there and that's why you're going, places that aren't one of those places seem crazy for me to think about.

  "What about you?" I say to Altschuler. "Where do you want to go?"

  "I asked you first."

  "That doesn't matter. Maybe we want to go to the same places."

  "Come off it," Altschuler declares. "Either there are places you want to go or there aren't."

  I have a feeling that Altschuler is making a production out of this for a reason, but I can't think what the reason is. Is he trying to decide whether I think about anything other than what happens to me from day to day or whether I think about other things and the other things aren't worth a second thought? Or is he planning to be a travel agent when he grows up? Or what?

  "There is this place," I lie.

  "Where?"

  "Solo Khumbu," I say, remembering an old National Geographic of Mother's I had looked at last night.

  "Solo Khumbu! What the hell is that?"

  Then I act condescending and superior for several minutes and tell him that I thought everyone knew about Nepal, and Sherpas, and yaks and naks, and llamas and all the potatoes they eat, and all that stuff. Altschuler thinks I'm great, I can tell from the look on his face. So by mistake I ruin everything by throwing in some stuff about Thailand, which I had read about in another issue of National Geographic last night.

  "How can rice shoots grow in a small country that also has Mt. Everest?" Altschuler asks.

  "That's what's so great about Nepal," I tell him. Then I ask him right away where he wants to go the most. He tells me that wherever the Olympics are is where he wants to go. It doesn't matter about the place. He figures that he will get jobs where he can earn a lot of money in three years and then take off the Olympic year to go to the games, both the winter and summer Olympics. I think that I have just as good an imagination as Altschuler does but perhaps not his convictions.

  Another place Altschuler takes me to one day is a section of several blocks along Sixth Avenue where wholesale florists have stores. We go into some of the stores and look as though we are buying for a big florist out of town, and Altschuler says that we would like to take samples of stuff back to our shop before we make up our minds about which dealer we will bring our business back to. Some of the stores give us each a couple of flowers, and we get about thirty stems by the end of the afternoon. Altschuler takes fifteen home, and I take fifteen. My mother tells me that it's unusual to see a gladiolus and a rose and a whole lot of other stuff mixed up together and where did I steal them. I tell her about calling on all the wholesale florists. She thinks that is funny. Fred wants to eat up the whole bouquet. I let him sniff it several times, and it kills him not to get a bite of it. After it is in a pitcher, he sits up in front of it and begs. He whines his nobody-loves-me whine when I won't let him have it.

  "They'll make you sick, Fred," I say. "Flowers are to look at, not eat."

  Then I remember he had a good time rolling all over the flowers they put on Grandmother's grave when she died.

  "Maybe later, Fred," I promise. "When they stink more, you can roll in them then."

  A very good place Altschuler took me to was the stamp and coin department at Gimbels department store. We went back three days in a row because Altschuler hadn't been there for several months and there were some stamps he wanted to look at. He told me about his collection, which is exclusively stamps of new African countries. One afternoon at his house I looked at the albums he had. I helped him with his new stamps, but he wouldn't let me do the actual licking and mounting. All I could do was line them up and hand them to him in the right order, like a slave.

  One of the best things about going to Gimbels was going upstairs to look at all the puppies on sale. If I had the money I would buy every one of them so Fred would have buddies to play with. I'll bet that would go over big with you-know-who.

  Toward the end of the second week, after we had been going home and doing something together for a couple of hours almost every day, when I met Altschuler after school, he asked me if I wanted to come over to his house all day Saturday.

  "That's the day I always spend with my father," I tell him, "and Stephanie. That's his wife."

  "Oh," Altschuler says.

  But he says it as though he is mad at me.

  "That's the only day I get to see him."

  "Sure."

  "Maybe you'd like to meet him. He'd be glad to have you come with us. I don't know what we'll do, but I'm sure he and Stephanie would like to have me bring my friend with me."

  "Why?" Altschuler says.

  "What do you mean, why? Because you're my friend, that's why."

  "That's all right. Forget it."

  "OK," I say. Now I'm mad.

  "I don't have time to walk home today," Altschuler says. "I'm going to meet a friend later. See you." He gets on the bus just before the door closes. I don't even have a chance to get on. Altschuler leaves me standing there. I have to walk home alone, and I'm not sure why. I could run and catch the bus in a minute. It chugs along on donkey power, not like a regular city bus. I could catch it without any trouble at the first corner after it leaves the school yard. Why should I run just to do that? So I could find out w
hy Altschuler decided to disappear in such a hurry, that's why. What's so important about not going over to his house on Saturday? I invited him to come with me. It's not as though I didn't want to see him. To hell with him. I'm not going to run after the bus.

  So I walk home by myself. When I'm with Altschuler, there are certain ways we walk home, certain streets he wants to walk down, and some he tells me aren't worth bothering about. He's the expert, so we always go the way he says. Except for the first day I walked with him, we had never gone along Sixth Avenue on the side with the candy store, the one where the lady ran out to greet Altschuler. I decide that today I'll walk that way for no other reason than that it's a route Altschuler is always leading me away from. Besides, I like candy, and maybe I would like to buy something every now and then. Like today. When I get to the store, I go in. The same lady that made a big fuss over Altschuler is there.

  "Hello," I say.

  "Oh, it's Dougie's friend!" she says. "Where's Dougie? It's weeks since I've seen him."

  I tell her I don't know where Altschuler is, and I look at the glass jars with an intensity I don't particularly feel, in spite of how I like candy. How come this lady is so wrapped up in Altschuler? She probably has a million customers a week. Does she get wrapped up in all of them? I'd better watch out. Or should I? She asks me what I like.

  "Almost everything. I don't like licorice too well, but I'll eat it."

  "No licorice! Just like Dougie! When he gets jelly beans, I always have to take the black out. It's no wonder he's your friend."

  "How do you remember what everyone likes?" I ask. "With all the customers you have, it must be hard."