She gave him a look.
“Alex picks up his father’s booze for him at the package store on Falls Road. Call him and ask. That’s how cool Alex’s dad is. Also, Alex turned eighteen two days ago.” A lie, except for the part about Alex’s age—his parents had held him back a year to allow him to excel at lacrosse—but he knew his mother would never call the home of Alexander Simpson III.
“I have told you before and I will tell you again—I do not approve of this fast crowd you have fallen in with, Gerry.”
“They’re not fast,” he protested. “They’re fun.” He wasn’t sure this was even true, but they were more fun than any other options he had. He helped them with their school papers and they, in turn, let him hang out with them with only a modicum of teasing. They spent their summer evenings scouting for beer, then used the liquid courage to approach girls. But they didn’t really know what to do with girls. All four were star lacrosse players and they could do marvelous things with a stick and a ball, but face-to-face with a girl, they were hopeless. That’s what they had been doing at the Elkridge Club all afternoon, splashing girls and tormenting them, then wondering why the girls didn’t want to go see fireworks with them. Gerry secretly thought he would do better with girls without Alex and his gang, but how would he ever get into any place as rarefied as Elkridge without Alex?
They had been in Alex’s green Mercedes sedan when he lost control on a bed of wet leaves on Falls Road. That part was true, too. Alex had been driving much too fast for the curvy country road. The car spun in circles, making what felt like five rotations before it came to rest on the opposite side. No one was hurt, but the car hit a retaining wall, popping the battery cable. They had the presence of mind to hide the empties, so the only beer in the car was an intact six-pack. Still, the Baltimore County cop who came to their aid decided it was time they learn an important lesson about drunk driving, so he had taken them to the precinct and made them watch a film they had already seen in school, Mechanized Death, then called their parents to pick them up.
“You cannot afford to screw up,” his mother said. “Do you understand that? Those other boys have parents, fathers, who can get them out of trouble. They have money. All you have is a mother who works as the office manager for a pediatrician.”
“Jeez, Mom, I didn’t even do anything.”
“You drank beer! You got into a car with other boys who had been drinking beer. You could have been killed.”
“Maybe if Alex drove a piece of shit car like this we would have been hurt. He has a Mercedes; you could T-bone that thing and walk away without a scratch. If the battery cable hadn’t popped, we wouldn’t have ended up at the police station.”
His mother carefully checked her blind spots, pulled over to the shoulder, and slapped Gerry hard enough that he saw strange lights around his eyes. So that’s what was meant by seeing stars. They weren’t stars, not exactly, but—
“Apply yourself and maybe one day you can buy yourself a Mercedes. If you care about such silly, empty things. But you’ll have to work, and work hard, for any money you get. That’s how life is going to be for you. It’s not fair and it’s not right. But it’s not fair to me, either, and you don’t hear me complaining.”
Gerry started to cry.
“I’ll be good, Mama, I promise I’ll be good. And I’ll buy you a Mercedes. I swear I will.”
“Just be a good man, Gerry. That’s all I’m asking. Be a good man.”
“I will. I will.”
February 22
IT TURNS OUT that “scrubbing” one’s penis from the Internet is a thing. Of course it is. There is an entire industry designed to help people manage how they appear in online searches. But trying to delete a mention of one’s penis from Twitter is something else entirely—and more complicated.
“You’re not understanding me. I did not send anyone a ‘dick pic,’” Gerry tells Thiru. “I have never even taken a selfie, or allowed anyone to make a video, a sex tape, of me. I don’t know what this ‘woman’ is talking about. And let me remind you, no photograph has been posted. She’s just, um, claiming to know something about my personal anatomy.”
He can’t believe he even has to say these words—dick pic, selfie, sex tape. To utter them is an affront to his dignity. He has been assiduous about not cluttering his mind, his work, his life with this silly digital world, and here it is, dragging him in, like some whirlpool or abyss. Then again, it wasn’t that long ago that a porn star told the world a sitting president has a penis shaped like a mushroom. The claim about Gerry is not only preposterous, it’s derivative.
“But you are not, in fact, circumcised?”
“Thiru.”
“I’m sorry, it’s just that’s what she—”
“If it is, in fact, a she. I have my doubts.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t think young women are that vulgar.” Gerry may have doubts about the gender, but he assumes everyone on Twitter is young.
“Gerry, do you know any young women? Our firm signed a memoir by a twenty-seven-year-old the other day who could make Norman Mailer’s testicles retract in a casual conversation. You would not believe what these young women are willing to—”
“Thiru, let’s not get sidetracked. What can be done about this?”
“Not much. She didn’t violate the TOS.”
“The what?”
“Terms of service. She didn’t threaten you, she didn’t post a photo, she didn’t defame you. I mean, I don’t think it’s defamation to say that a man has an unattractive penis. Rude, subjective, but not defamatory.”
Gerry wants to weep, literally. He has lived too long—and he’s only sixty-one! Did the world feel this way to his mother, his father, like some science fiction film in which everything jumps to warp speed? He had wondered, frequently, if the affair that led to his father’s second marriage was a reaction to the changing mores of the early 1960s, to the sense that the world was moving rapidly and Gerald Andersen Sr. had just missed the party.
But that was part of his father’s myth-making, that he had met wife number two in an airport bar the week after Kennedy was shot, or maybe it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Something Kennedy-adjacent. Gerald Andersen Sr. wasn’t a run-of-the-mill horndog cheater, he was a man who believed himself on the brink of annihilation. They had been married by some local yokel justice of the peace who had asked for no proof of anything. And what proof would Gerald Senior have been forced to provide? As Gerry came to learn, to his great sorrow, proof is required if one remarries after a divorce. Much less paperwork is needed if one has not shed one’s current spouse. Of course, he married her a second time, once he was divorced from Gerry’s mother. He sent a postcard from their honeymoon.