Grouper's Laws

by D. Philip Miller

  Blondie felt Whipple’s eyes upon him like the grasp of a drowning man.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Whipple,” Blondie said. “I don’t know what Walter meant.”

  Whipple seemed both disappointed and relieved. Blondie knew he’d been hopeful Blondie could shed some light on his son’s tragic decision, but, even more, fearful Blondie would deliver a devastating judgment from his dead son.

  “Thank you,” he said and walked away.

  Feller appeared at his side, accompanied by the others.

  “What was that about?” Feller asked him.

  “He thought I might know something.”

  “It wasn’t a heart attack or anything like that, was it?” Feller asked.

  “No.”

  “At first, it never occurred to me that he would …. well, you know.”

  Feller struggled to say more. He couldn’t seem to find the next word.

  “Why should it have?” Blondie asked.

  “I never thought he was that unhappy.” Feller said. The rest of the gang was listening intently. “We thought we’d go somewhere and talk.”

  “Where?”

  “How about the bowling alley?”

  The bowling alley? Blondie said okay, though he knew he had no intention of going there.

  “See you later,” Blondie said. “I want to get out of these clothes.”

  “Yeah. That’s what we all thought. These aren’t what you’d wear up there,” Feller said, pointing to his suit.

  Sheets of rain washed over the lot as Blondie fought his way to the Pontiac. He was drenched and shivering by the time he got inside. He turned on the heat as soon as the motor was warm, fogging all the windows.

  What the hell, he thought, he might as well wait until the rain eased. He leaned back against the seat and tried to relax.

  September again. One year since he’d started Fenton High. One year since he’d met Feller, Shakes, Brick, Dispatch — and the Grouper. He’d needed them so much. He’d given the Club his heart and soul. Now, he had a choice to make. Stay with them and go to the University of Maryland or cut the cord and go to school out of state.

  The idea of attending Smith-Reid alone was scary. He wouldn’t know anyone. But Blondie knew if he went to the university, it would be taking the easy way out. It would be doing what everyone else did. It would be just the same as staying in Fenton. Grouper would never approve. Blondie wanted something different, something bigger, and he knew he’d never find it with the B & F Club.

  He remembered Grouper’s words that last night at the Overlook: “You can’t be a kid forever.”

  Smith-Reid was it.

  Blondie started the car.

  Epilogue

  An August night, 1974.

  Blondie looked across the hood at Feller. He felt an emotion akin to love for the one who, seemingly millions of memory-years ago, had been the Club Poet and official Namer of Names. He wondered what Feller was thinking as he gazed up at the night sky.

  Blondie wanted to speak to Feller, to say something that would join them together in the kind of conspiratorial brotherhood they’d shared. But he hadn’t spent any time with Feller for twelve years now. Not since the last big sortie to Ocean City.

  All Feller had said was, “Let’s drive out to Grouper’s Overlook tonight.” When Blondie had asked him why, he’d just said, “for old times’ sake.” But there wasn’t any overlook from the familiar dirt road. Someone had bought the open pasture and planted corn on it. Until it was harvested, it would not be possible to look down at the lights of Fenton as they once had.

  It seemed absurd as Blondie thought about it — two grown men hanging out beside a 1962 Cutlass in the middle of some farmer’s crop. What was Feller trying to do? Bring back old memories of the B and F Club parked in some lonely lane, drinking beer, regaling each other with preposterous stories?

  They were too old for that — both thirty. Too old to be trusted by the Woodstock generation. What they were doing was kid stuff, a shameless hanging on to the past.

  The sun had gone down hours ago. Feller was no more than a faint silhouette against the starlit sky. Still, Blondie could trace with his eyes the sharp lines of Feller’s profile … his high straight forehead, sharply etched cheekbones, perfect nose and chin.

  Feller had been silent for a long time. His face remained turned to the sky and into the net of stars night had cast upon it. Blondie followed his gaze to the Big Dipper and ran his eyes along its handle, then outward into the Milky Way’s dusty congestion.

  A burst of light illumined Feller’s face and Blondie saw on it a sad look. What was he thinking?

  Feller extinguished the match and took a long drag from the joint he’d just lit. Marijuana. Blondie had never considered pot legit. How could it be when flower children used it? The Grouper, if he were still around, would have scoffed at them, if not lashed them with a long-winded dissertation on the merits of Pabst’s Blue Ribbon beer.

  Still, when Feller passed him the glowing cylinder, Blondie took it and inhaled.

  Blondie didn’t expect anything to come of smoking it. He’d never been able to get off on the stuff before. Nonetheless, from politeness, he took a drag each time Feller passed the joint his way.

  “You finish it,” Feller finally said in a voice choked by smoke.

  Blondie took two more drags and threw the roach onto the dirt road. There was a brief glow, then only darkness.

  A breeze whipped up and began scurrying through the stalks of corn, making a sound like the blended murmurs of a cocktail party. Blondie began to feel lightheaded. He flashed on the thought that he was getting high after all and, then, that there were voices in the cornfield calling to him. He felt a chill in the upper part of his back, between his shoulder blades.

  “Do you remember…?” Feller asked. Blondie didn’t even know if Feller finished the question because suddenly he began to remember it all — the B and F Club, the Pussymobile, the sorties, Miss Darlington, her.

  “You mean…” he began to Feller, and Feller said, “Yeah” and that’s the way the conversation went for a long time. Later, Blondie wondered if they’d been so closely attuned or just whacked out of their gourds — but not then. Blondie was sure Feller was thinking the same things he was. It was eerie.

  Eventually, Blondie realized the moon had risen from behind the trees at the end of the field, a silver sliver. Some of Fenton’s lights had gone out. Blondie couldn’t remember how long he and Feller had been there. He couldn’t remember the last time either of them had spoken. He couldn’t remember why they’d come. He felt entranced by the darkness. The quiet. The cannabis.

  “Have you kept up your photography?” he asked Feller, to break the spell.

  “Not really.”

  Blondie waited for Feller to say more, to explain, but he fell silent.

  “Your wife is nice,” Blondie said after a while to rekindle the conversation.

  “Yeah.”

  To Blondie’s surprise, there was trace of regret in his voice. He’d seemed so pleased to present Barbara to him when he’d picked him up at the airport. She was a bright, cheerleader type Feller had met at Social Security headquarters in Baltimore where he worked as a program analyst or policy analyst or something like that. They had two girls — seven and three.

  Blondie was a bit envious. He was still unmarried with no prospects in sight.

  “You’ve got a good situation,” he said to Feller. “I think a family would be nice.”

  “Yeah. Mary and Shelly are peaches, too.” Feller’s voice ignited in a burst of enthusiasm. “Still, it’s not what I expected.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “More adventure, I guess.”

  “You can’t have everything.”

  “No.”

  Again, Feller was quiet for a while.

  “That’s what’s such a bitch about life,” Feller said. “The tradeoffs.”

 
; “You have to choose.”

  “I never felt like I did. Everything seems to have just happened.”

  Blondie sensed his friend’s distress. He stepped closer to Feller and put his arm around him.

  “You’ve got your freedom,” Feller said. “You stuck with your dream.”

  That was true. He’d become a writer — of sorts. He’d studied journalism at Smith-Reid, spending the summers as a cub reporter at the local weekly. When he’d graduated, he’d been offered a job as a reporter with a larger newspaper in the western part of the state. He was still there, now editor of the editorial page. No money in it, and he was hardly Woodward or Bernstein, but he was a writer.

  Flat feet had kept him out of the war. A family had done the trick for Feller.

  “It was good for a while though, wasn’t it?” Feller asked.

  Blondie nodded. As stupid as that whole year at Fenton High often seemed in retrospect, it had been the most meaningful of his life.

  After a while, Feller relaxed. “I feel dumb.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  Blondie dropped his arm. Again they fell silent.

  “Someday, you should write it all down,” Feller said after a while.

  “What?” Blondie hadn’t been paying attention.

  “About the B and F Club. About what happened.”

  Had it been that remarkable, Blondie wondered. Or had they merely repeated the frantic and senseless antics of millions of other adolescents?

  But Feller’s question again pushed him back in time. He could sense the ghosts in the air around him — the B & F Club. He tried to remember what had become of them all. Well, he had a fair idea.

  Shakes had married Janine Raznosky after all and now prepared blueprints for an engineering firm in Baltimore. Dispatch had disappeared, leaving Meryl to play the role of abandoned wife. According to Feller, she did it well. Brick had remained single and become the football coach at Percy Junior High — after a tour of Vietnam and some souvenir shrapnel. Then, as always, there was Grouper ….

  After the funeral, Mrs. Whipple sent him a note thanking him for attending. She enclosed a photograph she’d found on Grouper’s dresser. It was a picture of him and Grouper at graduation, arms around each other, beaming at the camera as if they’d just won the Reader’s Digest Sweepstakes.

  Remorse stabbed him then and periodically ever since. Why had he moved his hand that night at the Overlook? How much had that small, unthinking gesture played in Grouper’s fateful decision? Blondie hated to think about it. He wanted to tell Grouper “his aberration” didn’t matter to him anymore. He wasn’t even sure it had mattered much then. Why did you have to be so damned sensitive?

  And Tammy. Feller told him she’d married a guy who’d graduated from Fenton several years before them, a lawyer and a member of the Fenton City Council. He said he saw her occasionally when he came to visit his parents and that she still looked good but acted “kind of subdued.”

  When he thought about his own life, Blondie wasn’t too disappointed. He enjoyed what he was doing at the paper. He went out with women now and then and had a good time. Sometimes, a combustible mixture of alcohol, lust and hope would ignite and he’d imagine himself in love. But it never lasted. His mother told him he was too particular.

  Blondie conceded there was some truth in her words, although he wasn’t sure why it was so. He sometimes wondered if it had anything to do with Grouper. Perhaps the closeness he and Grouper had developed — the simpatico — had been so unique as to preclude finding it again with anyone. He even considered that Grouper had sensed something about him that kept him from completely connecting with a woman — some fatal disenchantment — and mistaken it for something else.

  If he had such a flaw, Blondie found it more plausible that it had originated with Tammy and the dream he’d woven around her. A dream that even now shaded his female relationships and ultimately turned them gray.

  “Anyway, it’s not like it’s all over,” Feller remarked, breaking into Blondie’s thoughts. “I mean, most of our lives are still ahead.”

  Feller was right. Why were they wallowing in times past? Why were they acting as if they’d missed the last train to happiness? It was pointless, self-indulgent, defeatist.

  He was hardly devoid of hope. At times, he still felt the powerful emotions of youth. Occasionally, one of the old songs would come on the radio and Blondie would reexperience that frightening, giddy feeling that any minute something unexpected and wonderful might happen.

  He looked down at the faint glare of Fenton again, then back up at the stars, and, when he shut his eyes, a shower of lights cascaded over his closed eyelids. He could see the sparks fall from that mirrored ball at his first CYO dance and hear the Lettermen’s voices wistfully recalling the image of a long-ago love.

  Tammy was looking up at him the way she had that night … her dark, surprised eyes, her smooth alabaster skin, her crimson lips. Then, the dance was over. The Lettermen’s last harmony faded into the night, and, again Blondie heard the echo of Grouper’s voice: Nothing hooks the romantic soul like the unattainable. And he knew he was forever lost.

  GROUPER’S LAWS

  Only an asshole takes advice from an asshole.

  A beer is a man’s best friend.

  A woman’s virtue is often a matter of circum- stance.

  Only assholes fall in love.

  Nothing hooks the romantic soul like the un-attainable.

  Never go calling with mouse in hand.

  Never, ever, conduct business with a billy.

  One man’s dog is another man’s queen.

  Never assume the road ahead is straight.

  Everyone is desperate for love.

  Life is consequences.

  It’s easy to be noble in advance.

  People die.

  With ugly girls, you always have to lie.

  Most of us will never recover from high school.

  Hell hath no fury like a wimp’s fears.

  You can’t be a kid forever.