Apologize, Apologize!

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

POP CALLED ME AT SCHOOL. I WAS LIVING IN A TOWN HOUSE off-campus. It was November 22, my twentieth birthday.
“You’re no longer a teenager, make of it what you will,” Pop said.
“Well, I guess I should be taking manhood a little more seriously. Today I am a man, or is that next year?” I said, back at Brown in my third year, mumbling offhandedly, phone to my ear as I lay stretched out on my bed. I glanced at the clock on the table beside me. It was almost two in the afternoon—Jesus, what was Pop doing up so early?
“Age is the least of it, and by the way, Collie, self-declaration is immodest.”
To Pop, being a good father meant never letting a lighthearted remark go unchallenged.
“I was just kidding, Pop,” I said, half smiling at his predictability.
“Oh well, so you say. Just remember, the graveyards are full of people who were just kidding. . . . I know a little something about manhood, and it’s not an automatic affair. There are strict time-honored criteria, which you ignore at your peril. To become a man you must undertake a quest. The arduous journey is critical if you’re ever to emerge from the shadow cast by your parents, the mother being a particularly tricky business. Simply put, to become a man you must go off into the woods and take your own measure.”
“Is that what you did?”
“In a manner of speaking. Think about how all through your life I’ve encouraged you boys to stay home from school occasionally, call in sick, take time off work.”
“You’d never let us get a job. . . .”
“There you go. Exactly. Absenteeism. Beautiful. It’s a journey of self-discovery. Of course, capitalists such as your grandfather encourage attendance in all things, attach moral significance to it, make it an aspect of character in order to ensure compliance and guarantee themselves a cooperative workforce. When a man knows himself through absenteeism, he can no longer be controlled, which would put an end to the world as we know it.”
I could hear Tom grousing in the background, angling for the phone and an in on the conversation.
“Tom’s driving me mad to talk. Just a minute . . . for God’s sake, Tom . . .”
“Collie?” It was Tom. “Do you want to know when I could call myself a man? The day I could freely admit to hating a child, that’s when. Do you remember that damn kid down the road, Adam, the porky one, always dressed up like Little Lord Fauntleroy?”
I could hardly forget Adam. Uncle Tom carried on a war of attrition against him and his mother, the Conceiver, for more than a decade.
“The size of the big lump, hanging on to his mother’s tit until he was three, diapers sagging in kindergarten, all the while she’s telling me he was special, with an IQ bigger than Einstein’s. I said to her the only thing oversize on that boy is his—”
“I remember, Uncle Tom.”
“The point being that regardless of what men may say, there’s no greater hatred in the world than you feel for a neighbor’s kid. Cold war be damned. The bottom line is that a real man is full of passions about which he can do nothing.”
“That’s an interesting perspective, Uncle Tom.”
“By the way, real men are never patronizing, and one more thing, a man makes himself useful.”
“How do you make yourself useful?”
“Jesus Christ, Noodle. Don’t they teach you anything at Brown? You learn to vacuum. . . . When I think how useless you are . . . Say, do you know that a hundred years ago cats used to deliver the mail, and presumably not one of them finished grade school? That puts someone like you in a little perspective. So I suppose your grand-father bought you the Taj Mahal for your birthday.”
“No . . . not exactly. Well, he got me a car. . . .”
“A car! You’ve already got a car. How many cars do you need?”
“It’s not as bad as you make it sound. I’ve got a car at home. I don’t have one at school. Anyway, I didn’t ask for it. He just got it for me.”
“But did you take it? That’s the question. You’re tempting fate with the way you allow yourself to be pampered and indulged by that devil. It’s an invitation to disaster.”
Uncle Tom used to insist that devils walk among us. He said you could recognize them by their black hair and blue eyes, their fair skin and bundles of so-called charm. Devils were finely dressed, full of self-regard, and easily distracted by the chattering of large gatherings of birds, according to Tom, who swore that he could smell them.
“Your grandfather fairly oozes verbena,” he said. “You want to watch out for him and his gifts. The only thing missing in his case is a forked tail, and how do I know what he keeps in his pants?”
I laughed.
“Look out, Collie. Watch your step. There is a great devil that’s turned his interested eye toward you. It’s dangerous ground to find yourself on when you’re on good terms with the devil. That’s just what they count on. Next thing you know, the earth’s given way beneath your feet and you’re a devil, too.”
That night my friends took me out to celebrate my birthday. Hysteria was my drug of choice in those days—my preferred pals the kind of guys who got drunk on laughs, who thought that leaving a pile of steaming dogshit on the doorstep of a four-star restaurant was the height of comedy. Bingo’s kind of guys.
It started as a joke, a dumb prank, something to do; it was just me vacillating between despondency and hilarity, finally settling on stupid. We got a little carried away. My buddy hot-wired a rickety old Impala, worth about five bucks tops, that belonged to the head of the English Department, and along with some other guys, two of them hanging bare-assed out the windows, the car swaying and swerving from lane to lane, we drove out into the country, along a dirt-and-gravel road, grinding the tires and hitting a hill so fast that we left the ground. It felt as if we were flying, the car spinning so far out of control that we landed facing in the wrong direction.
The engine smoking, we gunned it, the car lurched forward, and as it was accelerating, fifty, sixty, seventy miles an hour . . . wham! A young deer ran right in front of us. We tried to swerve, but it hit the windshield with a dull thwack, cracking the glass before being thrown several feet into the ditch at the side of the road.
I struggled a little with the passenger-side door, momentarily jammed by the impact. Reluctantly, my legs wobbly, I walked toward the fallen deer, whose shape was outlined by the light from a full moon, damp breath visibly rising, the air around me smelling of camphor and musk.
Sometimes out walking, playing in the conservation area near home, Bingo and I used to find pieces of deer strewn along the trails, fallen prey to wolves. I never did get used to the primordial jolt of seeing a deer leg minus the deer.
The deer looked up at me, eyes dimly aglow, like a mellow light in a distant room, and then it was quiet, and what happened next was so simple and common, almost a form of domestic ceremony, as if a curtain were quietly drawn, the light disappearing behind it, his view of the world forever obscured.
It was a pretty quiet drive back. I took over the wheel. The car was a mess and barely made it to the campus. I dropped the other guys off at their residence and, rolling into Professor Fuller’s parking spot, didn’t make any effort to conceal my identity from a couple of overly officious security guys summoned to investigate the missing clunker, their walkie-talkies crackling with self-importance.
Delighted for the opportunity to stick it to Peregrine Lowell’s useless grandson, Professor Fuller, called to the scene, sputtered invective about the moral turpitude of debutantes like me, threatened to involve the police, and insisted I be expelled.
I apologized, all but volunteered a nonessential organ, but he wasn’t impressed.
“You, young man—and I use the term loosely—embody everything that people rightly despise about rich kids,” he said, and pretty persuasively, too. Anyway, he convinced me.
Pop figured I was on drugs. “Think of the repercussions,” he said in a late night phone call. “Terry O’Neill back home was an immaculate boy until he started in with pep pills when he was thirteen, and from that point on you couldn’t get within a mile of him for the body odor. Eventually, he leapt out a window—that’s what they all do.”
He was just getting warmed up. I could hear Uncle Tom as usual hammering away in the background, demanding to speak to me.
“Uncle Tom . . .”
“It’s unseemly, that’s what it is, and your brother and mother not even cold in their graves. Now, look, mourning is a type of parole, Noodle. You need to put in one year of good behavior to guarantee against a lifetime of recidivism. If you give in to all your mixed-up feelings now, you might never find your way back home.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. What do you want me to do, Uncle Tom? Tell me what to do.”
I was practically begging him, glancing around my living room, taking in the view—my car keys were on the coffee table, my blue jeans were on the floor, my shirt was hanging over the front of the TV set, books were strewn everywhere, my jacket was flung over the back of the sofa.
“It’s simple,” Uncle Tom was saying somewhere in the background. “I want you to put away your dancing shoes for a while. Concentrate on walking. Just put one foot ahead of the other until it becomes automatic. Start delivering the mail.”
As part of my punishment, I had to perform two hundred hours of community service. I was almost happy about the idea of doing something worthwhile for a change; making amends seemed like something I should be doing. Smashing up the car was the last straw, but I couldn’t quite figure out what to do, and then I remembered that a friend of mine, working on his doctorate in psychology, ran a suicide prevention clinic at the university.
I’d never had any kind of real job—my résumé was a little thin unless you count perfume testing and the tennis club. After I aced the two-week training course, my buddy reluctantly agreed to let me volunteer as a counselor.
“Just stick to the script,” he said. “No improvisation.”
My first shift, I was so excited by my enforced quest for goodness that every time the phone rang I pounced as if it were a game-show buzzer and I were in competition with the other volunteers. It was a slow night. Most of the calls were wrong numbers or personal.
“Hey, don’t worry about it,” said the guy sitting across from me. “Cheer up. There’s a full moon coming—that brings out all the crazies.”
He was right. The next night, the phone ringing like an alarm bell, I took a call from this guy who was so agitated that he insisted he was going to hang himself. He was crying, panicking, he kept dropping the phone and running around in circles. I could hear his frenzied footsteps in the background, it felt like bedlam on the other end of the line. I could hardly understand him—I talked a long time on the phone with him, trying not to sound like Pop or Uncle Tom.
It was an interesting personal exercise given recent events, me finding myself in the position of persuading some stranger that life was worth living. I don’t think I said much of value, but whatever I did it seemed to work. He calmed down and told me he was going to think things over.
The next night, the same guy called again, only this time he asked to speak to me. I spent two hours with him. It was pretty intense. Jerry’s statistics were alarming. He was in his midthirties, had no money, no job, no girlfriend, no friends, no education, and no prospects, was overweight, was bald, had only one testicle, was living with his parents, and had accumulated thousands of dollars in credit card debt and gambling.
“The worst part is that I used my parents’ credit cards. They never use them, they don’t believe in credit. They just keep them around in case of an emergency. They have no idea.”
“How much do you owe?” I asked him.
“Fifteen thousand dollars,” he said. “Oh, my God, I’m going to kill myself. My parents will lose everything.”
“If you kill yourself, then they really will lose everything,” I said, wincing at my sudden appreciation for clichés.
“You don’t get it. My old man will kill me anyway when he finds out what I’ve done. I’ve been hiding the bills and using one credit card to pay off another credit card. . . . What’s the use? I’m going to throw myself off a cliff.”
This went on for about a week—him calling and threatening to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge or swallow antifreeze. I even had to talk him out of lowering himself into the polar bear exhibit at the zoo, at which point he said he was going to douse himself in lighter fluid and strike a match. Sometimes he’d call two or three times a night, always with a new threat, another inevitably more gruesome method for disposing of himself.
I was running out of tricks and feeling increasingly desperate about Jerry’s situation. I was lying awake at night trying to figure out what to tell him.
“There must be something good in your life. Is there anything you like to do? Maybe you can find a way to make your interests work for you somehow—get an entry-level job and start paying back the money.”
“Well, I like history. I’m kind of an amateur historian. Ask me anything you want about the Second World War,” he boasted. “And then there’s sports. I like curling,” he said a bit brightly, but his enthusiasm quickly disappeared. “Jeez, what am I supposed to do—get a job sweeping sidewalks? Oh God, my life is a mess.”
I found myself nodding in agreement. His life was a mess. What the hell was he supposed to do? I decided to ad-lib.
“I’ll give you the money,” I told him.
“What?”
“I’ll pay off the credit cards for you, but you can’t tell anyone.”
“You’ll pay them off? How can you pay them off? Why would you do such a thing for me?”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s not a big deal.”
“Who are you? You must be my guardian angel. Oh God, I can’t believe it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” All the while, he was emitting a deep rumbling sound, like a low-grade weather disturbance. Jerry had a few distinguishing personal habits—you could hear every breath he took, and he was always loudly clearing his sinuses, tripping my gag reflex with every snort and honk.
It was embarrassing—all that misplaced gratitude. I came into some money on my twentieth birthday. I used some of it to help dig out Pop and Uncle Tom, temporarily, anyway. If Pop left the house with a million bucks, he’d find a way to come home later that afternoon having spent a million and a half—oh yeah, and he’d be drunk to boot.
The money was from a trust fund established by my maternal grandmother—it was gleefully administered by the Falcon, who could give lessons to the Mossad when it came to interrogation methods. Fortunately, he was hopelessly out of touch—I could have told him that I needed ten thousand dollars to buy a can opener and it wouldn’t have raised an alarm.
There was always more money, more money to come, turn on the faucet and money would fill the sink, the rest of my life was just one big money slide and me buried in it so deeply that no search-and-rescue team would ever find me, so rich that I’m a lost civilization.
I would be ashamed to tell you what I’m worth—financially, anyway.
A few days later—so easy, so solvable—debts paid, Jerry showed up at the clinic to thank me. “Anything you want. Just name it. I’ll do anything. I’m indebted to you for life.”
His face was so close to mine, I could smell an unappetizing combination of churning stomach acids and partially digested hot dog relish on his breath. Jesus, was this the face of charity?
“No. No more debt. You’re free. Just enjoy your life. Go curling,” I managed to joke, walking him to the door, my attempt at a kind of grassroots redemption rapidly coming unmoored, fallen victim to a failed deodorant and neediness so vulgar, it was its own sandwich board.
“I’d love to, but my knees are in pretty rough shape . . . all this extra weight I’m carrying,” he said, patting his stomach. Jerry, at least three or four inches taller than me, was about as big as someone could be without exploding.
“Maybe this would be a good time for you to start making some changes. Lose weight, get in shape, then you’d feel more confident about making friends and getting a job.” I was leaning against the door frame, reluctant to offer advice but feeling as if I should.
“I’ve got the only friend I’ll ever need or want,” he said with such passion that I was afraid the top of his head was going to erupt and start spewing steam and ash.
I looked down. His hand gripped my forearm so tightly, he cut off the circulation. A tiny silent alarm vibrated in my stomach.
His pressing money worries taken care of, Jerry was now free to obsess about me. He was waiting for me after classes, trailing me to the cafeteria, lurking in the library, calling me at the clinic every night and at home during the day, asking me to come with him to the gym, to a club, would I introduce him to some girls, did I want to go hiking with him?
“I’d like to, Jerry, but between school and volunteer work I don’t have time for much else. . . .” I was talking to him between classes, walking backward down the hall.
“Yeah, right, sure. I understand. Why would a guy like you want to spend time with someone like me? It’s okay. I don’t blame you. We come from two different worlds. You’ve got everything. I’ve got nothing. If I were you, I wouldn’t want to hang around with me either. I mean, what can someone like me offer someone like you?”
I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping that by the time I opened them I’d surprise myself by knowing what to do.
“Did you say something about wanting to go on a hike?”
“Holy crap, would you slow down? What are you trying to prove, anyway? This isn’t the Olympics,” Jerry said, sweat streaming down his face as he strained for air, gasping and exhaling windily.
“I’m walking normally,” I said a few feet in front of him, struggling for patience. “It’s just that if we walk any slower, we’ll atrophy.”
“Thanks for the cheap shot,” Jerry said. “Must be nice to be perfect. Where the hell are we, anyway? Is there some reason we have to set up base camp at the foot of Everest? Ever heard of a nice relaxing stroll?”
“We’re in the arboretum at a conservation site. We’re ten minutes from the main building. Senior citizens and little kids are leaving us in the dust. What are you talking about? You’re the one who begged me to go on a hike. This is a pretty gentle interpretation of a hike.”
“I didn’t expect to reenact the death march to Bataan.”
“Do you want to go back?” I asked him. I stopped and turned around to face him.
“Go back? Easy for you to say, yeah, right, let’s go back. What have I got to go back to?”
“I think this was a mistake,” I said, speaking over my shoulder as I turned away and resumed walking. A mistake, it was a goddamn catastrophe. I was beginning to think that the only reason people held ivory towers in contempt was that they’d never managed to scale one.
“No,” he said, panic in his voice, picking up the pace. “No. I didn’t mean it. Did you want to play tennis later?”
The next morning around two or three, I heard this roiling yowl, like a giant tomcat, and someone calling my name. I stumbled out of bed and onto the balcony, and there was Jerry, a BB gun in his hand, threatening to blow his head off if I didn’t invite him in.
“Go away,” I hollered. “Call me at the clinic.”
“Hey!” shouted one of the neighbors, fed up with all the noise. “Can you two girls please keep it down out there?”
Someone finally called the police, and they dragged him away kicking and fighting and screaming my name, hollering something about an apology, I couldn’t make it out.