Joe College Read online

  The door to my single was closed. I opened it to find Max sprawled out on my bed, barefoot and shirtless, reading Assassin’s Diary. Every bone in his rib cage was visible, clearly articulated against its taut sheath of skin. He was a dedicated vegetarian, the first I’d ever known, and his thinness was the source of both amazement and concern for the rest of us.

  “Hey,” he said, eyes straying from the page to issue only the briefest flicker of greeting. “Wanna know something cool? Arthur Bremer was all set to kill Nixon in Toronto, had a spot along the motorcade and everything, but missed his chance because he decided at the last minute to run back to his hotel room to change into a shirt and tie. He wanted to look respectable on the evening news after he was arrested for killing the president. Isn’t that great?”

  After John Hinckley’s attempt on Reagan’s life the previous year and the revelation that he’d done it to win the heart of our fellow Yalie, Jodie Foster, Max had become fascinated by the links between Hinckley, the movie Taxi Driver, and the story of George Wallace’s would-be assassin, Arthur Bremer, who seemed to be at the root of it all. He had the feeling that the tangled knot of history, pop culture, celebrity, class resentment, insanity, and sex contained some essential nugget of truth about our society. He’d gotten an Am Stud grad student to agree to supervise an independent study on the subject, but the department had nixed the project, leaving Max to pursue it on his own, to the detriment of his actual classes.

  “Uh, excuse me,” I said. “I was under the impression that this was my room.”

  Max looked around, my autographed picture of Uncle Floyd and the crooked Mark Rothko print confirming the fact that this was indeed the case.

  “Yeah, well, I got home from the library, and Ted and Nancy had barricaded the door to my room. You weren’t around so I figured I’d borrow your bed for a while.”

  “Well, your room’s free now,” I said, sounding harsher than I meant to.

  He sat up, looking more bewildered than hurt, and ran his fingers through the knotted mop of his curls. Sang and I had once pressed him on the issue of hair care, and he’d finally admitted, after much prodding, that he didn’t actually own a comb or a brush and did all of his grooming by hand.

  “Sorry, man. Didn’t mean to violate your space.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said, suddenly feeling like a jerk. Only a few weeks earlier, this room had been his, so it was a little weird for me to be pulling rank like this. “I’m kinda stressed. I’ve got a lot of reading to do tonight.”

  “I’m outta here,” he assured me.

  He hopped off the bed, took a couple of steps toward the door, then stopped. He closed his eyes for a few seconds, grimacing with the effort of recollection.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I forgot to tell you. Cindy called again last night.”

  highlighting

  Somebody must have had a deadline, because the suite was empty when I got back from the shower. Naked except for the towel around my waist, I stood for a moment in the common room, savoring the silence and the rare sensation of privacy.

  Unlike most of my friends, who claimed they couldn’t get any work done in their rooms, I found it impossible to work anywhere else. The library was just too distracting—too many people, too many noises, too much searching eye contact with total strangers, not all of it friendly. I knew from bitter experience that it was possible to spend three hours in the main reading room and get about ten pages of reading done. The more remote corners of the library were no better. The carrels up in the musty stacks of Sterling, where Sang spent most of his time, were far too creepy and desolate for me. It was like a horror movie, the way you could hear footsteps echoing down the endless corridors as they approached, the sound growing louder and clearer by the second, until you expected a crazed fifth-year senior to yank back your head and slit your throat, leaving you to bleed to death all over your Tocqueville. The closetlike weenie bins in the Cross Campus Library were disconcerting for an entirely different reason. The partitions between the different bins didn’t reach up to the ceiling, so noises traveled easily. I often thought—sometimes with more certainty than others—that people in nearby bins were having sex rather than studying, a suspicion aggravated by Ted and Nancy’s frequent boasts of weenie-bin assignations. Whenever this happened, I found myself oscillating between intense self-pity and equally intense feelings of arousal, neither state of mind particularly conducive to the kind of concentration demanded by a book like Middlemarch.

  I had another problem with Middlemarch, though, one that afflicted me even in the safety and solitude of my own room, and slowed my laborious crawl through the novel to a virtual standstill. The problem was highlighting.

  I had seen highlighters before coming to college; I just hadn’t understood what they were for. I thought of them, quite simply, as yellow Magic Markers, objects for which I had little use in the present, and for which I could imagine little use in the future. It certainly wouldn’t have occurred to me to mark up my books with them, or with any other writing instruments. My high school textbooks were school property; we weren’t supposed to deface them, period. This prohibition made sense to me. I was always annoyed when I received a book that someone else had underlined or commented on. My own reading experience was somehow diminished by the visible traces of a third party who was neither me nor the author. I spent more time than I should have wondering why the previous reader had marked one passage rather than another, or comparing my reactions to my predecessor’s, though, to be honest, the comments generally didn’t extend far beyond Yes! or How True!! or Hester Sucks Dick!!!

  But then I got to college, where I suddenly found myself surrounded by an army of people wielding yellow highlighters, carefully illuminating the crucial passages in their reading, the main ideas, the provocative metaphors, the striking epigrams. Some highlighted judiciously, selecting only a key word here and there, while others did it wantonly, scribbling furiously over whole paragraphs. One of my freshman roommates used a ruler to keep his highlights straight; another guy I knew, who had taken an expensive class on improving his study habits, kept an array of highlighters at the ready to color code his texts for handy reference at exam time.

  By the end of my first semester, I was already hooked. By the middle of my junior year, the period I’m referring to here, I could no more imagine reading without a yellow highlighter in my hand than I could have imagined going to bed without brushing my teeth.

  What happened with Middlemarch had happened to me with other books, but it had never caused me so much difficulty. Too much of the book seemed to demand highlighting. George Eliot wrote with such sustained profundity that I found myself coloring over line after line after line, sometimes covering entire pages with a thick coat of yellow neon. Every now and then I’d forget myself and absent-mindedly highlight a completely banal sentence, something on the order of: “I shall take a mere mouthful of ham and a glass of ale,” he said reassuringly.

  After I had slipped up in this manner a number of times, I decided that I needed some other mark, some way of distinguishing truly important highlighted passages from the ones that were slightly less important or not important at all. Over the course of two hundred pages I had improvised a byzantine system involving highlighter, underlines, and marginal punctuation marks. What a truly major passage looked like is hard to re-create, though I can report that the people who sat next to me in seminar often felt the need to comment on my thoroughness.

  In the end, my reading process had been warped into a strange kind of inventory taking, in which I was forced to divide the book into miniscule units, weighing the present sentence against all sentences that had come before, trying to find a place for it in my mysterious and ever-shifting hierarchy of classification. A more reasonable person might have simply declared a moratorium on highlighting, but that struck me as the coward’s way out, hardly better than not reading at all.

  My concentration was further disrupted by guilty though
ts of Cindy, whose calls I’d been dodging for the past several weeks. I knew we needed to talk, but I figured that if I avoided her long enough, she’d get tired of waiting and supply my half of the conversation on her own, thereby sparing me the unpleasantness of having to be the bad guy. She wasn’t getting the message, though, and her persistence was starting to worry me.

  Cindy was a girl from home. We hadn’t moved in the same circles in high school, hadn’t been well-enough acquainted even to sign each other’s yearbooks. I had forgotten all about her until my first day of work the previous summer.

  God knows I hadn’t wanted to spend the summer riding shotgun in the Roach Coach, selling plastic-wrapped danishes to tired-looking factory workers. I would much rather have been in Manhattan or Washington, D.C., interning for a magazine or a congressman, but nothing had come through that paid enough to make either plan even remotely plausible. In the end, it had come down to the Roach Coach or the forklift for me, and the Roach Coach at least offered the promise of novelty, as well as a boss who wasn’t going to address me as “Joe College” and reserve the shit jobs especially for me.

  I met her outside a small manufacturing plant in Union Village that looked like a scale model of our high school. I’d already made change for her dollar before I paid enough attention to her face to realize that I knew her.

  “Cindy, right?”

  She gave me back the same squinty look. I raised the bill of my baseball cap to help her out.

  “Danny? What are you doing here?”

  “Helping my dad.”

  “Dante’s your father?”

  I hesitated a second before saying yes, not because I was embarrassed or anything, but simply because it was hard for me to get used to hearing my father referred to as “Dante.” Like me, he normally went by “Danny” or “Dan,” but for some reason had decided to use his given name on the truck.

  “He’s a trip.” She shook her head in cheerful reminiscence, as if she and my father were the ones who’d gone to school together.

  I took a moment to really look at her. At Harding, she’d always just faded into the background, but out there, in that sunstruck Monday morning industrial nowhere land, she seemed mysteriously vivid, a person worth getting to know.

  “Aren’t you at Harvard or something?” she asked.

  “Yale.”

  “Wow.” She shook her head in sincere wonderment and glanced down at the coins in her hand. “I guess I don’t have to count my change.”

  “You better,” I told her. “I’m an English major.”

  Cindy was a religious coffee drinker and made it a point to stand on my line instead of my father’s. From our brief exchanges, I learned that she worked full-time in the office of Re-Coil Industries, a company that manufactured a revolutionary kind of nylon hose for use in a highly specialized machine whose name she could never remember. During the school year, she took night classes in accounting and marketing at Kean College. She still hung out with her high school crowd, but said it was getting boring. She went to the gym whenever she could and was thinking about buying a new car.

  At the beginning of the summer, my attraction to her was tainted by doubt and disapproval. I was dismayed by her hair, the outdated Charlie’s Angels thing she was still doing with the curling iron and blow-dryer. She was big on pastels and had a weakness for matching culottes and blouses, an ensemble my mother referred to as a “short set.” She chewed Juicyfruit, painted her nails, and didn’t skimp on the eye shadow. The girls I liked in college favored baggy sweaters and objected to makeup on political grounds. On special occasions they wore thrift-store dresses and cowboy boots. They didn’t devote a lot of time to their nails, and a surprising number of them had mixed feelings about shaving their legs. I had the feeling they wouldn’t have approved of Cindy.

  As the weeks went by, though, my reservations began to crumble. Who was I to be a snob about hairstyles and nail polish? Maybe I went to Yale nine months of the year, but right now I was back home in New Jersey, spending my days speeding from one godforsaken industrial park to another in a truck with a cockroach painted on the front doors, trading stale quips about Jodie Foster with guys who wore their names on their shirts, and cultivating an impressive tan on the lower two thirds of my left arm. What did I care what the girls I went to school with—girls I hardly knew, from places like Park Avenue and Scarsdale and Bethesda and Newton and Buck-head and Sausalito and Saratoga Springs and Basel frigging Switzerland—what did I care what they would think about someone like Cindy, whom they were never going to lay eyes on or have a conversation with anyway?

  I was lonely that summer, and her face lit up every time she saw me. She complimented me on my new glasses, asked what I did to stay in such good shape, made frequent comments about what a jerk her ex-boyfriend had been and how she hadn’t had a date for the past eight months.

  Sometimes she wore a tight denim dress that buttoned down the front, and she always smelled like she’d just stepped out of the shower. Even in that little candy-striped jumper I hated, you could see what a nice body she had, that she worked out but wasn’t a fanatic about it, not like some of the girls I knew at school, girls who ran so much their bodies were just bones and angles. Cindy smiled a lot and had a distracting habit of touching me ever-so-lightly on the wrist as she talked, maintaining the contact for just so long, but not a fraction of a second longer. I’d spent my entire high school career pining for girls like her. Two years of college had changed me in a thousand ways, but not so much that I didn’t get a little dizzy every time she uncapped her cherry Chapstick and ran it lovingly over her dry, puckered lips.

  My mother had been telling me all year that my father needed a rest, but I hadn’t realized how badly he needed one until I’d spent a few weeks on the job. He looked like he’d aged ten years in a matter of months. He had indigestion from too much coffee, hemorrhoids from driving all day, and the haunted, jittery look of a fugitive from justice. He talked to himself more or less incessantly, often in a hostile tone of voice: “You idiot!” he’d say, slapping himself in the head the way they did on those V-8 commercials, “you forgot to refill the cup holders!” A slow driver in our path could trigger a rage in him that was frightening to behold, a teeth-grinding, horn-pressing, dashboard-pounding fury that made me think he was just a couple of red lights away from a massive heart attack or a full-scale nervous breakdown.

  It was painful to compare this frayed version of my father with the optimistic, rejuvenated man he’d been the summer before, the risk taker who’d chucked his job as assistant manager of a Path-mark and gone deep into debt to buy the lunch truck and route from a guy who was calling it quits after thirty years in the business. You could see how excited he was by the uncharacteristic boldness of his decision, how proud he was to finally be his own boss, to own a truck with his name on it. He spent entire weekend afternoons washing and polishing it in our driveway, making that black-and-silver lunch wagon shine. His high spirits manifested themselves in the very name of the truck, which had previously gone by the more prosaic moniker of Eddie’s Breakmobile. If people were going to call you the Roach Coach anyway, he’d reasoned, why not beat them to the punch?

  It wasn’t hard to see what had defeated him. Running a lunch truck is grueling, thankless work, marked by long hours, low profit margins, and constant time pressures. If a company’s coffee break is at 10:15, you’d better be out in the parking lot at 10:14, open for business. Nobody wants to hear about the traffic jam or the flat tire that held you up, though they’re more than happy to give you an earful about the sludgy coffee or how you supposedly shorted them on the ham in yesterday’s sandwich. It starts to grind you down after a while.

  By late June I knew the ropes well enough for my father to start taking Fridays off, leaving my parents free to spend long weekends relaxing at their campground near the Delaware River. (They loved it there, though Camp Leisure-Tyme always struck me as a grim parody of the suburban life they were supposedly ge
tting away from, trailers lined up one after the other like dominoes, all these middle-aged couples watching portable TVs inside their little screen houses.)

  My first day in charge, hustling from one stop to the next, singlehandedly taking care of the customers we usually split between us, I carried in my mind a comforting image of my father crashed out on his hammock in the shade of a tall tree, empty beer cans littering the grass below. The following Monday, though, he confessed that he’d been a nervous wreck the whole day, unable to do anything but deal out one hand of solitaire after another, mechanically flipping the cards as he tormented himself with elaborate disaster scenarios involving me and his precious truck.

  Cindy asked me out on a Friday morning in early August, the third day of what turned out to be the worst heat wave of the summer. It was only ten o’clock, but already the thermometer was well into the nineties. I felt wilted and cranky, having awakened at four in the morning in a puddle of my own sweat. She worked in an air-conditioned office, and I could almost feel the coolness radiating off her skin.

  “Poor guy,” she said. “Looks like you could use a cold one.”

  “A cold two or three sounds more like it.”

  “Why don’t you come to the Stock Exchange tonight? A bunch of us hang out there after work on Fridays.”

  “I just might take you up on that.”

  “Great.” She smiled as though she had a question for me, but then decided to keep it to herself. “I’ll keep an eye out for you. Come anytime after six.”

  I drove through the day in a miserable heat daze, stopping every now and then to soak my head in the spray from someone’s lawn sprinkler. When it was finally over, I took a shower and fell asleep on the living room couch for a couple of hours. It was close to eight by the time I finally made it to the restaurant, and Cindy was alone at the bar.

  “I thought you stood me up,” she said, not even bothering with hello.