Joe College Read online

  “Wait,” he said, rapping his knuckles against the side of his head, as if trying to dislodge a stubborn fact. “Didn’t Max tell me you drove an ice-cream truck last summer?”

  “A lunch truck,” I told him. “It’s my father’s.”

  Mr. Friedlin had maintained a playful expression for most of the conversation, but now it changed. His face grew serious, quietly respectful.

  “A small businessman,” he said, nodding as if this were a wonderful thing indeed.

  “I guess you could call him that.”

  “The independent entrepreneur is the engine of capitalism,” he informed us, as if reciting a line of poetry.

  The engine of capitalism. Something about the phrase sounded funny to me, at least in relation to my father. I was debating whether to make a comment about the engine’s itchy rectum, but our waitress reappeared just then and asked if she could take our orders.

  All my life I’d been an enthusiastic carnivore. In the dining hall, I’d once consumed nine French dip sandwiches in a single sitting, supposedly on a dare from Sang, but mostly just because I thought they tasted so great. Until that night, though, I’d never eaten filet mignon. It wasn’t nearly as exotic or elaborately prepared as the name seemed to promise, but that was okay with me. It was just this thick lozenge of beef, maybe the size of a squashed baseball, so tender that employing my teeth in its consumption seemed almost unfair, a form of overkill. I sat there in a daze of primal ecstasy, gazing into its pink bull’s-eye center, feeling like one of Plato’s cave dwellers who’d suddenly been offered a rare—or should I say medium rare—glimpse of the Real Thing in place of the pale, trembling shadows I’d been settling for up till then: the greasy, paper thin Steak-Ums with their crimped and shriveled edges, the too-round industrial hamburger patties studded with pearls of cartilage, the disagreeably veiny or suspiciously squishy mystery cubes of “meat” floating in bowls of stew or lurking in furtive disgrace beneath blankets of brown gravy. How, I wondered, would I ever face them again?

  “So,” said Mr. Friedlin, releasing a soft preliminary sigh of resignation. “I don’t suppose you guys are big Reagan fans.”

  The three of us traded a quick round of glances.

  “We kind of hate him,” said Sang.

  “Why’s that?” Mr. Friedlin didn’t seem upset, just curious. We all knew that he had given a lot of money to Reagan’s campaign, and that photographs of Gail and Howard with Ron and Nancy were prominently displayed in the Friedlins’ den, to Max’s undying shame and outrage.

  “He supports all those dictators,” I said.

  “He acts like the rich are oppressed by the poor,” Sang complained. “Like it’s the people on welfare who are getting away with murder.”

  “Plus,” said Ted, “isn’t he kind of stupid? Didn’t he say that trees cause pollution or something like that?”

  “And that we could retrieve nuclear missiles after they’d been launched,” I added. The litany was lengthy and familiar.

  “And what about those idiots he surrounds himself with?” Sang wondered. “Ed Meese and James Watt and those other guys.”

  Mr. Friedlin laughed. “You’re right about that,” he conceded. “It’s not exactly the Institute for Advanced Studies over there on Pennsylvania Avenue.”

  I wished I could say that we’d scored a point, but I could tell that we hadn’t. He was laughing, but the laughter was affectionate, the way it usually was when people who liked the president contemplated his intellectual deficiencies. It was like they were proud of him, like it was a point in America’s favor that a man of such dim wattage could get himself elected to the highest office in the land.

  The whole Reagan phenomenon eluded me. I had arrived in college in 1979 with an open mind and very little political baggage. Freshman year I was too focused on my own life—to be specific, on not flunking out of Yale, which I secretly believed had made an enormous error in admitting me—to pay much attention to the world beyond New Haven. In fact, I had so much reading to do first semester that I didn’t learn that Americans were being held against their will in Iran until something like Day 17 of the crisis, when my history TA made an offhand comment about Ted Koppel’s hairdo.

  My political education hadn’t really begun until 1980, when I belatedly began to accept the fact that millions of American citizens not only took Ronald Reagan seriously—a mental leap that struck me as preposterous enough in itself—but were actually prepared to place their lives in his hands. I remember watching the debate between Reagan and Carter and feeling a huge abyss open up at my feet when the commentators began declaring Reagan the winner, even though he’d seemed to me to have performed a fairly plausible imitation of a twinkly-eyed village idiot. I wondered if it was Yale that had made me such a stranger to my own country or having smoked too much pot as a teenager. In any case, it was unnerving to find myself dwelling in a separate reality from the majority of my fellow citizens, my parents included. I was enough of a believer in democracy-or maybe just safety in numbers—to not be able to derive much comfort from the stubborn conviction that they were wrong and I was right.

  A couple of years into the Reagan presidency, I’d pretty much come to take this abyss for granted, but Mr. Friedlin made me contemplate it again as if for the first time. I’d already figured out why my parents liked Reagan. He appealed to an idea of America they cherished—i.e., that we were innocent and fair-minded and better than any other people who had ever lived on earth. But what about an educated man like Mr. Friedlin? He hardly seemed the type who thought that the fifties were better days, or that General Pinochet was by definition better than Nelson Mandela, or that welfare queens picked up their checks in pink Cadillacs. I must have been staring, because he looked right at me, as if answering my unspoken questions.

  “You guys are missing the point,” he said, in a patient and friendly voice. “All that stuffs just window dressing. Foreign policy, who’s smarter than who, who’s got the better statistic. The bottom line is that Ronald Reagan’s been a great president for people like us.”

  Whoa, I thought. Stop right there. “People like who?” I wanted to ask. But before I could open my mouth, Mr. Friedlin reached across the table and topped off my wineglass, filling it so completely that the ruby liquid began to dribble a little over the rim. To avoid spillage, I bent forward like a dog and took a big sucking sip to remove the excess. When I looked up, my lips still pressed to the glass, Mr. Friedlin was smiling at me, and I couldn’t stop myself, from smiling back, nodding my silent thanks. He stretched his arms overhead like a man who’d just awakened from a refreshing nap.

  “So?” he said. “Who wants to check out the Whiffenpoofs?”

  I had to stop back at J. E. to change my clothes for the party. I’d expected my companions to come inside with me to check on Max and Gail, but they only accompanied me as far as the front gate.

  “We’re twenty minutes late as it is,” Mr. Friedlins said, consulting his watch with an expression of grave concern. “Just tell them to meet us at Stiles.”

  I looked at Sang, but he just shrugged. He was about as enthusiastic about singing groups as I was, and on any other night I would have been surprised by his decision to go to the jamboree. But we were having a good time with Mr. Friedlin, and I couldn’t blame him for not wanting it to come to an end. If not for my date with Polly, I probably would have gone too. Ted delivered a brotherly punch to my shoulder.

  “You better go,” he said, unsuccessfully fighting a smirk. “Better sharpen up that pencil.”

  Sang cast a suspicious glance at my crotch. “Hey,” he said, “is that the stub of an Eberhard-Faber in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”

  “All right,” Mr. Friedlin said, draping an arm around each of their shoulders and gently steering them away from me. “Enough of this nonsense. Let’s get moving.”

  I’d felt oddly sober throughout dinner, but the sight of them heading down Library Walk without me, their arms snaking aroun
d each others’ shoulders as if they were Whiffenpoofs themselves, or soldiers helping a wounded comrade to safety, made me feel suddenly tipsy. Reaching into my pocket for my keys, I found myself dreading the prospect of making small talk with Mrs. Friedlin if Max hadn’t returned. There was no way around it, though; I was not about to jeopardize my standing with Polly by showing up at a big party in a borrowed leather tie, a sport coat from Sears, and factory-reject cowboy boots.

  When my companions had finally drifted around the corner onto York Street and out of sight, I selected the key marked SWOG from the sneaker-shaped key ring my father had given out at Christmas as a promotional gimmick—Dante’s Roach Coach, it said, Good Food in a Hurry—and fitted it into the lock. At almost the same moment, the strangest feeling came over me, a burning, overpowering rush of shame, though what it was for I couldn’t say. The intensity of it literally buckled my knees, and I spent a few seconds squatting on the ground by the emergency phone, clutching my head in my hands and moaning in a soft singsong. Then I forced myself to stand up.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” I said in a soft, shaky voice, as if answering a question posed by someone other than myself. Then I turned the key in the lock and leaned my shoulder against the heavy wrought-iron gate. It resisted for a moment before giving way, issuing the familiar creak of protest that always accompanied my entrance.

  Mrs. Friedlin had, in fact, taken her shoes off. She was resting on the couch with a damp washcloth clamped to her forehead, listening to a Joni Mitchell record that had mysteriously attached itself to our collection, probably via Nancy. At the sound of my arrival, she lifted the washcloth and inclined her head in the direction of the door.

  “Oh,” she said, not bothering to conceal her disappointment. “It’s you.”

  “I’ll only be a minute,” I assured her, as if she were the resident and I the visitor. “I just have to change for this party.”

  Giving in to a delayed reflex of politeness, Mrs. Friedlin forced herself to sit up. Her shirt seemed to have faded to a duller shade of green over the past couple of hours and part of it had come untucked. She looked rumpled and bleary, and I knew better than to ask if she’d heard anything from Max.

  “Where’s Howard?” she asked, addressing this question to the pink washcloth draped across her palm like a slice of ham.

  “They went to see the Whiffenpoofs. He said you should join them if you feel like it.”

  “The Whiffenpoofs?” She pronounced the name as though it meant nothing to her.

  “They’re a singing group.”

  She looked up. The damp part of her forehead was shinier than the rest of her face.

  “I know what they are, thank you.”

  “The concert’s at Ezra Stiles. I can give you directions.”

  She responded with a look of sullen contempt, clapping the washcloth back onto her forehead with unnecessary vehemence. I nodded sagely, jerking my thumb over my shoulder with what I hoped was boyish charm.

  “Okay,” I mumbled. “Righty-O.”

  My party uniform that semester consisted of jeans, a green pocket T-shirt, and a tattered tweed jacket with suede elbow patches that I’d recently bought at a secondhand clothing store on State Street. Vacillating for a moment on the subject of footwear, I stepped into, then out of, my new penny loafers before settling on the safer bet of Adidas running shoes. The overall effect was surprisingly good, I thought, taking a moment to admire myself in the full-length mirror a previous tenant had mounted on the inside of the door. The outfit had a way of harmonizing the competing aspects of my personality that caused so much friction rubbing up against each other as I went about my business in the world. A powerful sense of wholeness and well-being descended upon me as I pondered my reflection, as if life were an endless costume party, and I’d finally figured out a way to come as myself.

  This feeling lasted about three seconds, until I stepped out of my room and back into Mrs. Friedlin’s field of vision. It was clear that she’d been waiting for me and had taken advantage of my absence to pull herself together. Her shoes were back on, her hair brushed, her shirt tucked in and shimmering. The washcloth was nowhere in sight. Something about the way she was staring made me suddenly self-conscious, like a kid playing dress-up, a person no one in their right mind had any business taking seriously. I wondered if it was my jacket. The sleeves were too long, and I had to fold back the cuffs so they wouldn’t swallow up my hands.

  “Tell me the truth,” she said, and I could hear the effort it was costing her to keep her voice calm and even. “How worried should I be?”

  “I don’t know,” I told her. And I really didn’t. My gut feeling was that Max was okay and simply avoiding his parents, but I also had no idea where he could have disappeared to for the past six hours.

  “Well, tell me this then,” she said. “Would you ever do something like this to your parents?”

  I shook my head.

  “What’s he so upset about?” she asked, almost pleading.

  “I don’t know.”

  Mrs. Friedlin shifted her gaze to our fireplace. There was a charred log resting on the andirons, left over from an unsuccessful blaze on Halloween night. She stared at it for a long time, as though it were actually burning. I pushed my jacket sleeve up past my elbow, then tugged it back down again. Nothing ever fit me right. Mrs. Friedlin looked up.

  “Oh,” she said. “I almost forgot. Someone named Cindy called for you. She sounded pretty upset.”

  “She’s from home,” I said, feeling a vague obligation to explain. “It’s kind of a mess.”

  She looked me over for a few seconds, as if something didn’t quite add up. I wondered if the jacket would look better if I cuffed the sleeves under instead of rolling them back. That way, at least, people wouldn’t be able to see how ridiculously long they were.

  “You’re quite the little ladies’ man, aren’t you?” she asked.

  I was about to deny the charge when I registered the grudging note of respect in her voice.

  “Believe me,” I told her. “I’m as surprised about it as you are.”

  She smiled, as if we’d reached some sort of understanding.

  “Have fun at your party.”

  “Thanks.”

  I took a couple of steps toward the door, then stopped.

  “Mrs. Friedlin,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”

  She nodded. I moved back to where I was before.

  “Is this jacket okay?”

  She thought it over.

  “I think so.”

  “What about the sleeves?”

  “What about them?”

  “Do they look stupid?”

  “You look nice,” she told me, in a firm, motherly voice. “Very collegiate.”

  woo!

  The party was being held at Manuscript, which was basically the cool people’s version of a secret society—i.e., it was coed, and its members were not required to masturbate in a coffin, join the CIA, or leave the room when the name of the organization was mentioned in public. I’d heard numerous reports about their great house and excellent parties—Liz Marin was a member that year—and was thrilled to finally have been invited to one. But the excitement of having achieved temporary insider status was utterly eclipsed by the simple fact that Polly was waiting for me.

  Generally speaking, the headquarters of secret societies were hard to miss. They were forbidding windowless structures, reminiscent of bunkers and mausoleums, the kinds of buildings you noticed even when you weren’t looking for them. Manuscript was different, though. When I got to the spot where it was reputed to be, a short distance beyond Fitzwilly’s restaurant, all I saw was a white brick wall that looked like the backside of a garage or small machine shop. Figuring I’d been given bad directions, I walked a couple of blocks further down Elm Street, until I’d clearly left the campus neighborhood and entered the scarier precincts of greater New Haven. None of the buildings I passed seemed even remotely capable of being
mistaken for the opulent headquarters of an exclusive and well-endowed not-so-secret society.

  Baffled, I returned to my starting point and stared some more at the brick wall. A mild disorientation took hold of me as I pondered the unremarkable surface. It was a familiar feeling, a muted version of the panic that had regularly seized me during my first few days at Yale, when I’d had a series of urgent bureaucratic errands to run in ninety-five-degree heat and couldn’t seem to make sense of the campus map in my blue book. The low point in this frustrating odyssey came when I, along with an honor guard of three other losers, spent a half hour in the pitiless spotlight of the noonday sun, waiting for someone to unlock the door of the language lab so we could take our German placement exam. Fifteen minutes after the scheduled starting time, a passerby helpfully informed us that there were, in fact, two language labs on campus. The other one—the right one, needless to say—happened to be right across the street. We’d spent the past thirty minutes staring right at it, sweating profusely and cracking nervous jokes in bad German while watching one student after another stride purposefully through the open front door. How had they known the right language lab from the wrong one? Why, in the whole freshman class, were there only four of us with bad information? It was no disaster, of course—the graduate students administering the test barely noticed that we were late—but the feeling of bewildered exclusion that had been baked into me that afternoon had returned again and again in the years that followed. What was so great about Harold and Maude? What was the story with the blue blazers? Did I really have to say “Boola Boola”?