Eventually, the handwriting was on the wall and, sure enough, my mother found a bag of pot in my room. My father, who had moved to the suburbs to give his kids a better life, seemed to sink lower under the gathering evidence that white-flight suburbia had its own set of problems. As a public high school teacher, he was exposed to a parade of troubled kids who were being pulled under by drugs and petty crime. Thus, he came down on me hard. Maybe more so than he would have on any other kid in my home, if they’d been caught doing something similar. He threatened to send me away to a military school and painted a picture of the years of hard labor ahead. I assumed they must have a washer/dryer at military school, so I pondered the idea for just a moment. It is, I believe, uncommon for parents to love all of their children equivalently. And I feel that my father cared for me in a different way, maybe even more than he did for my siblings, because he believed that I might get ahead somehow. He wanted that so badly. He was obsessed with it. As he laid into me about military school, his voice quiet yet filled with angst and threat, I got it. I rejoined the football team, and though, at 172 pounds, I held a tackling dummy most of the time, I suited up for my junior and senior years. Our school beat my father’s school in a legendary crosstown rivalry, and although I made no contribution whatsoever to those two victories, I think he was glad I was there.
Throughout high school, I coveted other people’s girlfriends and fantasized constantly about what it would be like to have one of my own. I ran for class president and lost. I wondered if I could improve my chances if I was a genuine football hero or if I cultivated the Jesus look and played the guitar. I wanted to be the Treat Williams character in Hair, a dancing Dionysian god. High school was a blur of wanting things I couldn’t have and missing the wonderful moments right in front of me.
All of the tedium and anxieties of high school life played out over where you sat and with whom in the cafeteria. The most popular kids tended to just bask in the warmth of their sycophants, a table that reveled in their status by passing around one of the old pebble-jacketed notebooks. The pages of it were headed with the names of random people who were deemed worthy of inclusion and not always for the most flattering of reasons. This was called a “slam book,” a primitive form of the TMZ-style tabloid garbage of today. A given page would say “Suzy J” across the top, and below people would write “Luv ya” or “You are the best friend anyone could ever have.” Others, however, might write “whore,” “bitch,” “skank,” and the like. Some people actually took this seriously. The publishers of the book wanted to hurt people. The fact that this happened with such openness and viciousness struck me as odd. When the one gay boy in our school killed himself, it was rumored to be the result of what he’d read about himself in the book. Berner High School: not a place to be gay. Some teachers vowed to confiscate the notebooks, but I once saw a teacher sitting in the cafeteria reading one, a slight smile on his face. I had teachers who were smart, kind, and who were true role models. Others were almost inconceivably limited. One teacher announced to his class that the best thing JFK ever did for his country was to get shot. I approached this man and asked him if he actually said that. He snarled at me. “Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “What’s it to you?”
And then, like a ball game called on account of rain, high school was suddenly over. Just as I had daydreamed away many classes until the bell rang; just as in football practice I’d be staring off, watching the sunset, when my coach would tell me to gather the equipment and I couldn’t remember what the hell we had been doing for the past ninety minutes; just as I had walked these halls for four years, wondering who I was and what the hell I was supposed to do here, it just ended, and too abruptly for me. I hadn’t figured it out. Everyone else had, or so I thought. I was supposed to go to college. My grades were good, but not what they might have been if I . . . What? Worked harder? Lived under different circumstances? Oddly, all this talk of bright futures and college plans made me homesick for this house I vowed to escape.
My home had provided several resounding reasons why I should get the hell out of there. But there was a strange barrier between me and any dreams of the future. I looked at my family and thought, “These are the only people who really know me? Or care about me? Be it ever so humble, wouldn’t it just be worse elsewhere?”
At graduation, all around me my classmates were hugging each other and crying and marking the end of something that they were fully engaged in. For them, high school was truly the best of times, providing a basket of memories to hold on to. But who were they to me? Saying good-bye seemed perfunctory with some, downright false with the rest. I was in the drama club one year, but I couldn’t find any of them in this morass to say good-bye to. I played football, but without distinction. The great athletes in our graduating class were embracing each other, confident that one more summer of raucous debauchery lay ahead. No one called me over to enter that circle.
I stood there thinking of Tom Wingfield:
For sixty-five dollars a month I give up all that I dream of doing and being ever! And you say self—self’s all I ever think of! Why, listen, if self is what I thought of, Mother, I’d be where he is—GONE! [He points to his father’s picture.] As far as the system of transportation reaches!
I was scared and I had no idea what I was going to do. Maybe that’s exactly how it had to be.
3
Not a Drop of Boy
When my family lived in the little two-bedroom house with eight people stuffed inside, we were on what were called “the water streets,” near the canals and the bay. After years of riding my bike in and around those streets, I can never forget their progression, alphabetical from west to east: Atwater, Brightwater, Clearwater, Deepwater, Edgewater, Fairwater, Greatwater, Highwater, Leewater, Nearwater, Ripplewater, Stillwater, Tidewater, Waterview. South Bay Drive, which was the spine that connected all of these roads, was my Shaftesbury Avenue, my Via Margutta, and my Bleecker Street rolled into one. I had a Stingray bike, but I might as well have been driving an Aston Martin, because in this land, your bike was everything.