Joe College Read online

  “Oh stop it,” a woman said, giggling nervously. “Leave them alone.”

  “Are they fornicators?” a second male voice inquired. It was deep and booming, but tinged with uncertainty. “Has the knave found his way to the forfended place?”

  With a groan, I rolled off Polly and squinted in the direction of our audience. Maybe twenty feet away, clearly visible on the well-lit path, three people stood watching us—two men in Elizabethan regalia, plus a woman in jeans and a long sweater. The shorter man, who happened to be carrying a pizza box, was decked out in patchwork tights and a jester’s cap; the other was tall and stooped over, with an unconvincing white beard glued to his young and handsome face. He had a crooked walking stick in one hand, a six of beer in the other. Polly sat up too, tugging the dress down over her thighs.

  “Is that Lear?” she wondered out loud.

  The white-bearded actor thumped his stick on the sidewalk. “I am the king himself.”

  “Sorry to bother you,” the woman said, tugging none-too-gently on King Lear’s arm. “They’re just jealous is all.”

  “Carry on,” the fool told us, balancing the pizza box in one hand and throwing us a quick salute as he scurried to catch up with his companions.

  I watched the three of them disappear around a bend, then turned to Polly, worried that the encounter had embarrassed or troubled her. But she couldn’t have looked more delighted.

  “I guess that’s what we get for making the beast with two backs behind the drama school,” she reflected.

  “I’m just glad it wasn’t Titus Andronicus,” I told her.

  She rose to her feet, extending a hand to help me up. In the distance, we heard King Lear shouting into the night: “Let copulation thrive, for Gloucester’s bastard son was kinder to his father than my daughters got ’tween lawful sheets!”

  “Speaking of sheets,” she said. “Have you washed yours recently?”

  “Don’t worry,” I assured her. “Once a semester, whether they need it or not.”

  I was hoping we could slip into my bedroom unobserved, making a clean transition back to the good place we’d been before King Lear had so rudely interrupted, but I’d forgotten about the Whiffenpoof party across the hall. It looked like the whole jamboree had transported itself to Entryway C; a mob of well-dressed people were swarming around the brightly lit doorway, talking and laughing in unnaturally loud voices, trying to compete with “Racing in the Street,” which was blasting from an open window on the second floor, the speakers turned out to face the courtyard.

  “I love this song,” Polly told me. “It’s so utterly desolate.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Not one of my favorites.”

  I wasn’t a huge Springsteen fan, but I always felt a bit proprietary about his music when I heard it at Yale. It didn’t sound right in this context, played for the enjoyment of people who were going to end up being the bosses of the people the Boss was singing about. Nobody in Entryway C was born to run; no one in the whole college—none of the students anyway—came home from work and washed up, and went racing the streets. I didn’t either, but I did take a certain pride in actually knowing a few people who did, or at least could have if they’d wanted to.

  The stairwells were packed wall-to-wall with revelers holding enormous plastic cups and shouting in each others’ ears. Polly and I had to push and squeeze and thread and hello our way through the festive masses; it was a little like moving through a tilted subway car at the height of rush hour. Already I could imagine the stale beer reek we’d wake to in the morning, the way the gummy stairs would grab at our shoes as we tiptoed down to breakfast.

  It must have taken us five minutes to climb three flights, ample time for me to consider the various scenarios that might confront us when we finally made it inside. The best one involved an empty suite, Polly’s dress on the floor, her bra draped over the back of my chair. The worst case had Mrs. Friedlin prostrate on the couch, still stubbornly waiting for Max, but it was after midnight and hard to imagine that the situation hadn’t resolved itself by now. In between those two extremes was a host of likelier possibilities, most of which would require us to make a few minutes of small talk with some combination of my suitemates before making a transparent excuse to escape to the bedroom. (“We’re tired,” Ted and Nancy always lied, holding hands and smirking cheerfully just in case anyone was unclear about the true nature of their mission. “Gotta catch some shut-eye.”) If you lived in a dorm, it was pretty much a given that your sex life unfolded in the public domain. You either moved off-campus, took a vow of celibacy, or learned to put up with it like everyone else.

  “Well.” I smiled nervously at Polly as I selected my room key from the Roach Coach key chain and slipped it into the lock. “Here goes nothing.”

  I blinked and staggered slightly as we entered the common room, almost as if several flashbulbs had exploded at once. My immediate impression was of a large group of people, all of them staring expectantly at me, waiting for a signal to leap up and shout Surprise!

  Letting go of Polly’s hand, I blinked a few more times and tried to get a handle on the situation. It quickly became clear to me that the room was not as crowded as I’d thought. Sang and Ted were there, looking about as uncomfortable as it’s possible to look when you’re trying to pretend that everything’s cool. Nancy wasn’t present, nor was Max, though for a second I assumed that he was, since his parents were sitting on the couch, one on either side of a person it took me a surprisingly long time to recognize as Cindy. Part of it was that the bottom of her face was concealed by a Kleenex she was weeping into, but mainly it was just that it made no sense to see her flanked by the Friedlins, both of whom were patting and stroking her as though she were their adopted child. It felt unreal, like I’d stepped into one of those dreams where you find your dead grandmother working the drive-thru window at McDonald’s.

  “Well, well.” Gail Friedlin glared at me, her red-rimmed eyes brimming with accusation. “Looks who’s back from the big party.”

  “You have a visitor,” Howard Friedlin said, his voice containing both a taunt and a warning.

  “Is something wrong?” Polly asked.

  I brushed the question aside with an unconvincing shake of my head and turned back to Cindy. She balled the Kleenex inside her fist and sat up straighter, sniffling to pull herself together. My initial shock had faded by now, displaced by a raw surge of annoyance. It was bad enough that she called me all the time, I thought, disrupting my schoolwork. But to ambush me like this on the Friday before vacation was just plain rude.

  “You know,” I said, forcing myself to sound casual and friendly, “I’m not sure this is the best time.”

  “I’ve been calling you for weeks,” she said, her voice trembling like she might start crying again at any second. “You never called me back.”

  It was strange: Cindy wasn’t wearing anything that lots of girls at Yale wouldn’t have worn—jeans, sneakers, denim jacket—but on her the effect was entirely different; one glance and you would have known that she didn’t belong. Her jeans were designer, sausage-skin Sergio Valentis that she’d once told me took several minutes to wriggle into. Her jacket was two-tone, the collar, cuffs, and chest pocket a distinctly lighter blue than the rest of the garment, and her sneakers were just too damn white. As usual, she’d taken great pains with her hair and makeup, and I couldn’t help but wonder what she made of Polly’s wild tangle of curls, her five-dollar vintage dress.

  “Look, Cindy, I’ve been really busy. You have no idea what midterms are like.”

  “Cindy?” Polly said, finally catching on. “Your secretary?”

  She clapped a hand over her mouth as soon as she said it, but it was too late. Cindy didn’t say anything in response; she just stared at Polly for a few seconds, letting the word hang in the air. Her voice was stronger when she finally spoke, as if the insult had given her courage.

  “I came to tell you something.”

  “Couldn�
��t it have waited a day?” I asked, surprised to hear myself pleading with her. “I’m going home tomorrow.”

  “No,” she said. “I think you need to hear this.”

  “Okay,” I told her. “But it better be good.”

  Up to that point, I hadn’t been able to give much thought to the purpose of her visit. But all at once, in the brief space between my comment and her reply, I knew exactly why she was here and what I’d been hiding from these past several weeks.

  “Oh my God,” I said, before she’d even uttered a word.

  part three

  The Roach Coach

  tito the snack king

  With exquisite deliberation, my father lowered himself into the kitchen chair. It was early evening, just after the ritual viewing of 60 Minutes, which had long ago replaced church as my family’s Sunday obligation of choice. All three of us watched with righteous pleasure as Mike Wallace showed hidden camera footage of dangerous and unsanitary conditions at a poultry-processing plant to a stammering, heavily perspiring executive who moments before had insisted that his company adhered to “the highest possible standards of safety and cleanliness.”

  “The highest possible standards?” Mike Wallace repeated incredulously. “Those are your words, sir, not mine. Would you say that workers trampling on a chicken carcass and then putting it back on the assembly line represents the highest possible standards of cleanliness for an industry that feeds millions of Americans? Would you say that inspectors who regularly ignore high levels of salmonella and fecal bacteria—feca/ bacteria, sir—represent the highest possible levels of safety?”

  “Ha!” my father called out. These were the moments that he loved, when the mighty were humbled. “What do you say to that, you pompous bastard?”

  “I don’t … we can’t—” The executive held one hand in front of his face, shielding himself from the camera like a criminal on the TV news. “I must insist that we terminate this interview.”

  After Andy Rooney’s closing sermon, my mother remained in the living room to clip and alphabetize coupons from the Sunday paper while my father and I retired to the kitchen to talk business. He opened a spiral-bound notebook and cleared his throat, but instead of speaking he tilted his upper body to the right at a severe angle. In this awkward position, with the distracted expression of someone who’d just lost a filling, he mapped out the route and timetable I’d be following for the next two weeks.

  “There’ve been a few changes,” he explained.

  In fact, the new route was significantly different from the one I’d gotten used to over the previous summer. He’d picked up a couple of new stops—the Department of Public Works in Darwin and a big construction site in Springville—but had lost half a dozen. He exhaled slowly, raising himself into a position halfway between sitting and standing up, and spoke through gritted teeth.

  “We don’t go to Union Village anymore.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” He worked his mouth into an unconvincing simulation of a smile. “Never better.”

  “Can’t you put on some ointment or something?”

  “They only go up to Preparation H. For the thing I got, you’d need Preparation Z.”

  “Oh well,” I said, ever philosophical about other people’s distress. “Tomorrow morning it’ll all be a distant memory.”

  “I don’t know if I can last that long.” He lowered himself back onto the chair as if onto a bed of nails. “I’m tempted to grab one of those steak knives and do the job myself.”

  I followed his gaze to the phalanx of gleaming Sliceco knives arranged in ascending order of size along a magnetic strip above the stove. I’d been a Sliceco sales representative for a couple of months my senior year in high school, but hadn’t been able to close on any customers except my parents. The knives turned out to be too sharp to use and now served a purely decorative function in our kitchen.

  “Be my guest,” I told him. “Just don’t ask me to assist.”

  “On second thought,” he muttered, “maybe a pair of pliers would do the trick.”

  “What’s that you were saying about Union Village?” I asked, pulling him back from the abyss of do-it-yourself surgery.

  “It’s history.”

  “What? Even Via Commercial?”

  “Gonesville.” He mimed the act of crumpling a piece of paper and tossing it over his shoulder. “It makes it a lot easier to get to the rest of the stops on time.”

  Via Commercial, the industrial park off Vauxhall Road, had been one of the linchpins of my father’s route. He’d serviced three of six plants laid out along the sinuous cul-de-sac, including Re-Flex Industries, where Cindy worked, and where I’d been expecting to meet my fate in the morning.

  “What happened?” I asked, torn between relief on my own behalf and concern on my father’s. To lose three prime stops in a single blow was a bitter setback for the Roach Coach.

  “The Lunch Monsters.” He spoke the name in a grim, matter-of-fact voice, as if there were nothing even remotely humorous about it.

  “The who?”

  He shrugged. “That’s what they call themselves. They’re a bunch of bodybuilders who’ve outfitted their trucks with those ridiculous monster tires. They’ve pretty much taken over the entire town.”

  “How? I mean, they just can’t just drive up and steal your stops, can they?”

  “These guys don’t mess around, Danny.” My father lowered his voice. “Their boss is an Italian from Staten Island.”

  “So? What’s that supposed to mean? You’re an Italian from New Jersey.”

  “You’re not listening.” He looked away from me, taking a few seconds to peruse the simulated wood grain of the tabletop. “If these guys want your stop, you give them your stop.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My father wasn’t a tough guy, but he knew the rules as well as anyone. Lunch-truck drivers didn’t just hand over their stops without a fight. It didn’t matter how old or small or sick or peace-loving you were; if someone tried to take what was yours, you had to go after them. If you didn’t you were dead meat.

  “They took over the whole town?”

  He nodded. “You know Tito? Big red truck?”

  “Tito the Snack King? The guy who drives around with the Chihuahua?”

  “Drove,” he said pointedly. “They went after him first. He pulled into a stop—this warehouse he’s been going to for years—and these assholes were already there, doors open and everything. Tito’s been around the block, right? He doesn’t say a word, just walks over to the driver’s side of their truck, rips the keys out of the ignition, and throws them on the roof of the warehouse. It’s one of those flat roofs, you know, so the keys don’t slide down or anything. They just sit there. The muscleman driver comes after him, but Tito shows the guy his tire iron, and that’s the end of that. The driver slinks off and Tito goes on about his business. He said that when he pulled out, the asshole was up on the roof on his hands and knees, sniffing around for his keys.”

  “Good for Tito.”

  “waist. That’s not the end of the story. Same night, Tito takes his dog for a walk. He lives in Elizabeth, but not a bad area. Nice quiet street. Except that night two big white guys jump out of some bushes and work him and the dog over with baseball bats. They don’t take his money or anything. But when it’s over, they fish his keys out of his pocket and drop them down a storm drain.”

  “Did they hurt him bad?”

  “Bad enough. Broke one of his arms. Knocked out a couple teeth. Killed the dog, though. And you know how much Tito loved that ugly little mutt.”

  “Jesus.”

  My father tilted himself to the left for a few seconds, then back to the right. Neither adjustment seemed to do him much good.

  “Listen,” he said. “They’ve got their eye on this construction site I just picked up. It’s right on the border between Union Village and Springville. These are bad people, Danny. If they come after you, just walk away. I
don’t want you getting into a fight with them, understand?”

  “They killed the Chihuahua?”

  My father jumped up like his chair was on fire and began moving his butt around with both hands in a way that would have seemed obscene, or at least funny, under other circumstances.

  “I’m telling you, Danny, these are not nice people.”

  There was a phone in my room, but I only gave it a fleeting glance before flopping down on my bed and reaching for the copy of On the Road on my night table. I’d bought the book a couple of summers before, but for some reason hadn’t gotten past the first few pages. The previous night, though, I’d cracked it open again in a fit of restless anxiety, only to find myself startled by its raw hypnotic power. I stayed up until close to three in the morning, my mind racing along with the run-on sentences, the descriptions of driving that just went on and on like the highway itself, as if life were nothing but a perpetual cross-country road trip fueled by diner coffee, crazy talk, and whatever dope and liquor happened to be on hand. It made me want to pick up the phone and wake Matt in the middle of the night—he was staying with Jess in her apartment near Columbia—to find out if he’d ever read it, and how, if he had, he’d ever managed to stand living a normal life afterward, going to classes, eating three square meals a day, only studying the books some stuffy old professor with tuna fish in his beard insisted were the classics. Man, I wanted to tell him, let’s just get in the car and drive, realizing even as I fantasized about this conversation that neither one of us had a car.

  The manic buzz of Kerouac had stayed in my blood all day, making the thought of calling Cindy even more impossible than it already was. I mean, what was I supposed to tell her? I wished she wasn’t pregnant; I hoped she wouldn’t have the baby. The idea of fatherhood seemed like a kind of insanity to me, a nightmare on the level of paralysis or imprisonment. I actually knew one guy at Yale—Stew Johnson from Burlington, Vermont—who’d had a kid freshman year with his high school girlfriend. His parents had money, and were paying to support the kid and his mother while Stew finished college. Every now and then the kid came to visit, and whenever I saw Stew pushing the carriage around campus in his untucked paisley shirt and state trooper sunglasses, smirking like the whole thing was some absurd prank played on him by the gods, I smiled politely and averted my eyes from the spectacle of his misfortune.