Joe College Read online

  A towel wrapped around my waist, I pushed open the door of my bedroom and stepped into a maelstrom of scattered books and papers and articles of clothing and sporting goods. It looked as though my closet had become ill and vomited its contents across the bed and floor. For a moment I entertained the possibility that an intruder had ransacked the room, but then I saw Matt sitting at my desk, his back to me and the chaos, calmly reading my Shakespeare essay.

  “Well, well,” he said. He hardly seemed real to me at that moment, turning slowly in the chair and adjusting his paper cap. “The great sahib returns from the jungles of New Jersey.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, letting my eyes rove over the mess, too tired to formulate a fresh metaphor. “It looks like a cyclone hit.”

  “Hurricane Matt.” He smiled proudly. “That’s what my mother used to call me.”

  “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  He nodded, flipping the paper to its cover page and pronouncing my title in a stuffy British accent, as though he were the host of Masterpiece Theater, his lower lip jutting out like Churchill’s.

  “‘Bastard Authority: Legitimacy and Subterfuge in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.’” He retracted his lip and shook his head, chuckling like I’d just told him a good joke. His hands bobbled up and down in front of his chest, as though he were juggling invisible oranges. “‘Legitimacy and Subterfuge.’ Oh, baby.”

  “They’re actual words,” I told him. “You can find them in the dictionary.”

  His expression grew serious, even a bit skeptical.

  “This paper won a prize?”

  “Second runner-up. Why? Doesn’t it meet your standards?”

  I must have sounded annoyed, because he held up his arms in front of his face as if to fend off an expected attack, momentarily re-creating Junior’s posture in the parking lot.

  “It’s good,” he conceded. “But your thesis feels a bit contrived. I mean, isn’t it unfair to superimpose a modern definition of political legitimacy on a pre-modern text?”

  “I can’t talk about this now,” I told him, trying not to think about the weight of the bat in my hand, the cringing expression on Junior’s upraised face. “I’m totally exhausted. I’m going into my parents’ room to take a nap, okay? I’ll be out in an hour or two.”

  When I got downstairs, Matt and my father were immersed in another round of Monopoly. I wandered over to the dining room table and pretended to be interested in who was the thimble and who was the winged shoe, and which of them owned the houses on Baltic and St. James. My father asked Matt to give him a minute.

  “Come into the kitchen,” he told me. “I need to have a word with you.”

  His expression was unusually serious, and I wondered if he’d somehow found out not only about the damage to the truck, but about the whole mess I’d gotten myself into over the past few days.

  “Not in here,” he whispered, when I stopped in the front of the dishwasher. “In there.”

  Following him into the cramped and chilly laundry room, I couldn’t help noticing that he was walking a lot better, almost like a fully evolved specimen of Homo sapiens. His face looked better too, unshaven though it was. His eyes were clear and engaged with the world; he seemed ten years younger than he’d been a week ago, as if the doctors had removed a lot more than one angry hemorrhoid.

  “Shut the door,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him, before he could get another word in. I had already made up my mind to throw in the towel. The moment had arrived for me to take full responsibility for the lies and the damage to the truck, to apologize for putting his business and his only child at risk for no good reason. “It’s all my fault.”

  He looked confused.

  “It is?”

  “It’s not?”

  “You didn’t invite him,” he said with a shrug. “He just showed up on our doorstep.”

  “Who, Matt?”

  He gave me a disapproving look, as if I wasn’t keeping up.

  “Don’t get me wrong, he’s okay in small doses, he really is.” He frowned, running his fingers through his matted hair. “Why don’t you take him somewhere tonight? Out to a movie, whatever. My treat.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  My father smiled with relief. “And maybe bring him with you on the truck tomorrow?”

  “No problem. I could use the company.”

  “Great.” He started toward the door, then stopped. He looked happy and relaxed, eager to return to his game. “Oh, by the way, how’d it go today?”

  I hesitated only a fraction of a second.

  “Fine,” I told him. “Business as usual.”

  “Forget the car,” Matt called out, as I headed down the front walk toward my parents’ Malibu wagon that evening. He was standing by the dented front door of the Roach Coach with a hopeful, slightly pathetic expression on his face. “Let’s take the truck.”

  I was all set to explain that insurance regulations prohibited me from using the truck except for business purposes—we ignored this prohibition all the time, but Matt didn’t need to know that—when it occurred to me that it wouldn’t be a terrible idea to get the Roach Coach out of the driveway for a few hours. I still hadn’t told my father about the damage and didn’t want him to discover it on his own if he or my mother decided they needed to make a quick run to the store while Matt and I were out. He might have overlooked the dent—it wasn’t that conspicuous in the dark, just a slight depression in the thorax of our cockroach—but he wouldn’t have missed the busted headlight.

  “Okay,” I said, reversing course with the aid of the decorative lampost at the edge of the lawn. “Might as well get used to it. You’re going to be spending a lot of time in there in the next few days.”

  I should have known Matt would get all excited when he saw the hard hat resting between us on the seat. He picked it up and studied it from a variety of angles, as though it were a relic from a distant and peculiar land.

  “Well, lookey here.” He brought the helmet to his ear and rapped on it with his knuckle. “Is this real?”

  “I guess. As real as anything can be in an age of mechanical reproduction.”

  “Cool.” He jammed it on over his dining-hall cap, then scooted over on the seat to admire himself in the rearview mirror. “I’ve always wanted one of these.”

  Against my advice, he was still wearing the hard hat when we entered Scotch-Wood Lanes, his face set in a proud smirk as he acknowledged the grins and double takes his headgear inspired in the league bowlers, men around my father’s age sporting team shirts with the names of factories and small businesses sewn on the back: Freez-Dry Incorporated, A-I Paving, Reliable Auto Body, On-Time Trucking. I picked up the pace a bit, hoping to place some distance between us as we approached the front desk.

  Scotch-Wood was cramped and a bit dingy, but I’d chosen it that night as a protest against Echo Lanes, which had recently installed a computerized scoring system. Magic Score was supposed to be the next big thing in bowling technology; it kept track of your score automatically and displayed it on an overhead screen, relieving you of the burden of calculating it on your own with pencil and paper. Aside from insulting the intelligence of bowlers, the real purpose of Magic Score was to prevent you from taking a couple of practice rolls before starting your game, a custom some consultant must have decided was costing the bowling alley thousands of dollars a year in lost revenue and needed to be eliminated.

  There was no computerized scoring at Scotch-Wood, just like there was no “pro shop” in the lobby and no foreign beers at the bar and no new coat of varnish on the saggy, dead-sounding lanes and not a lot of chitchat from the surly-looking guy who was reading The New York Post at the front desk. He waited until he was finished with his article to peer at me over the top of his glasses, which were perched way down over the tip of his nose.

  “Yeah?”

  “Any lanes free?”

  “One or two?”

  “
Just one.”

  “Shoes?”

  “Eight and a half.”

  “No halfs.”

  “Make it eight.”

  The counterman was a wiry, gray-haired guy with a military-style crew cut. Without looking, he reached into one of the cubbyholes behind him, grabbed a pair of worn-out, three-tone rentals and slapped them on the counter. One glance and I knew exactly how they’d feel: loose and slippery and none-too-sanitary, the soles eroded to the thickness of cardboard. The counterman shifted his glance to Matt, taking in the hard hat with a look of mild, pursed-lip disapproval that passed so quickly I wasn’t sure if it had been there at all.

  “What about you?”

  Matt looked puzzled.

  “What about me what?”

  “Shoes,” I said, acting as his guide and interpreter. “What size?”

  “Don’t need ’em.” He stepped back, lifting one foot to show the guy his footwear. “I’m an owner, not a renter.”

  Something changed in the counterman’s expression. What had been a kind of habitual, impersonal disdain turned into something much more specific and hostile. He laid his glasses down on the folded newspaper and stood up a little straighter, smiling the way people do when they don’t like you and don’t care if you know it. He wasn’t a big man and he wasn’t young, but reading glasses aside, there was something in his ramrod posture and quiet self-confidence that made you suspect that he was either an ex-Marine or ex-cop or both. His veiny forearms, I noticed, were decorated with faded, hard-to-decipher tattoos.

  “You’re a thief is what you are,” he said in a quiet conversational tone. “Where’d you steal them?”

  “I didn’t steal them,” Matt protested with more amusement than indignation. “I coughed up four bucks for these babies.”

  The counterman shook his head.

  “A thief and a liar. Nice combination.”

  “I’m serious,” Matt told him. “I got ’em at a secondhand shop on Whalley Avenue.”

  “In Connecticut,” I explained, offering this fact as a kind of indirect apology for Matt’s faux pas. “That’s where we go to school. He’s just visiting for spring break.”

  The guy looked at me like I was babbling in a foreign language.

  “New Haven,” Matt added, trying to help me out. “Yale University.”

  I groaned to myself. It was better to leave Yale out of it.

  “Yale University, huh?” The counterman nodded, pretending to be impressed. “That’s a good school. Do they teach you anything besides lying and stealing?”

  “I didn’t steal anything,” Matt insisted, placing his hands on his hips and thrusting his chest defiantly forward, as though we were doing improv and he had just figured out how to play his role. “What kind of villain do you take me for?”

  “You can’t buy these shoes,” the counterman informed him. His face was visibly pinker than it had been a moment before. “You can only steal them from people like me. People trying to make an honest dollar. But you wouldn’t know much about that, would you?”

  “This is slander!” Matt crossed his arms on his chest and emoted in a stentorian voice he may well have considered Shakespearean. “It’s knavery, pure and simple.”

  “Shut up,” I muttered under my breath, but he gave no sign of hearing me.

  The counterman shook his head.

  “I suppose you bought that hard hat too.”

  “That’s mine,” I volunteered. “I loaned it to him for the night.”

  The guy ignored me. “It takes a lot of gall to walk into a bowling alley wearing something you stole from another bowling alley. A lot of gall. Do you have any idea how much a pair of these shoes costs?”

  “Four dollars,” Matt told him, reverting to his normal voice.

  “You got a smart mouth,” the counterman told him in that same flat tone. “I’m fifty-eight years old with a bum leg, but I’m about two seconds from jumping over this counter and kicking your ass.”

  Matt cowered like a mime, his face a mask of exaggerated fear.

  “Can you believe this guy?” he asked me. He had that frenetic, out-of-control look in his eyes, the same one he had when he launched into that stupid imitation of my dancing at the party.

  Things were drifting in a bad direction. I grabbed him roughly by the wrists and forced him to look at my face.

  “Listen,” I said. “I have an idea. Why don’t we just rent another pair of shoes. We’ll pay the money and everyone will be happy. Just tell the man your shoe size.”

  Amazingly, I seemed to get through to him. He closed his eyes for a second or two, trying to calm himself down. Then he nodded and opened them again.

  “Nine and a half,” he told the counterman, capping the request with a patently insincere smile.

  “No halfs,” I broke in, trying to help him out.

  Instead of reaching for another pair of shoes, though, the guy picked up the phone next to the cash register and began dialing. When he was finished he looked at us, cupping one hand over the mouthpiece.

  “If you leave now maybe you’ll be gone by the time the cops get here.”

  “The cops?” I said. “You’re calling the cops?”

  He turned away from us, speaking loud enough that we’d be sure to hear him over the background noise.

  “Frank? This is Lou. Lou from the bowling alley. I got a couple troublemakers down here. College kids. You wanna send a car? Thanks.”

  Matt was shaking his head, grinning like this was the best thing that had happened to him in years.

  “This calls for civil disobedience,” he said, dropping onto his knees and curling into fetal position on the grimy linoleum floor. “Lock arms! Go totally limp! Call the ACLU!”

  “Do what you want,” I told him, stepping over his body on my way toward the exit. “I’m getting the hell out of here.”

  Matt wanted to go to Cousin Butchie’s after that, but I told him that all the topless joints were closed on Monday night, an excuse that sounded fairly plausible despite the fact that I’d made it up on the spot. After my misadventure with the Squidman I’d had little desire to visit another go-go bar, and I had even less desire to visit one with Matt. God only knew what sort of trouble he’d get us into at an establishment full of all-but-naked women. We settled instead for the calmer alternative of a pitcher at the Stay-A-While and the promise of an early night.

  “Here’s to New Jersey,” he said. “Where you can go to jail for wearing the wrong shoes.”

  “To New Jersey.” I touched my glass to his and took a sip of Budweiser aged to the perfect degree of flatness by the expert staff at the Stay-A-While. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “Did you see that guy? I thought he was gonna have a stroke or something.”

  “It was bizarre.” Now that we were out of there, I could more fully appreciate the irony of nearly getting arrested as the accomplice to a person wearing an illegal pair of bowling shoes on the same day I’d suffered no consequences whatsoever for hitting someone in the head with a baseball bat. “Those shoes must be a real sore point for him.”

  Matt puffed out his chest, re-creating his finest moment.

  “This is slander!” he bellowed. “It’s knavery, pure and simple.”

  “I thought he really was going to jump over the counter and kick your ass.”

  “For a principle like this, I’d be willing to get my ass kicked,” Matt declared with a grin. “How’d you like it when I hit the deck? I was all set to break into ‘We Shall Overcome.’”

  His eyes were bright; I could see how much fun he was having reliving the incident, how exciting it was to reflect on a dangerous moment after you’d escaped it unscathed. There had been a similar expression on Chuckie’s face as he’d paraded me around the warehouse that afternoon, telling everyone the story of how I’d held off four goons on my own with a baseball bat—“It was like Sergeant Fucking York!” he’d insisted, over and over again—and how lucky those bastards were that he
(Chuckie) had broken it up before the whole brunch of them were lying in the dirt with their heads split open like watermelons. All I had to do was stand at his side, nodding modestly like Gary Cooper to confirm the report of my bold deeds. I wasn’t relishing the prospect of returning to the warehouse in the morning to another hero’s welcome only to inform my admirers that I was throwing in the towel, that there was no way in hell Sergeant York was going back to the battlefield. Just thinking about it made me want to crawl into bed and stay there for a week or two.

  “What’s wrong?” Matt asked. “You seem a bit distracted.”

  “Sorry. There’s just all this bizarre shit going on.”

  I waited for him to probe a little deeper, but all he did was nod sympathetically and pour me another beer, filling the glass in tiny increments, like a mad scientist mixing his secret formula.

  “Your father’s a nice guy,” he told me. “You should hear him talk about you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s just so unbelievably proud of you. It’s like no one in the world ever went to Yale before.”

  “Your father must be proud of you too.”

  Matt shook his head. “He thinks I’m the world’s biggest fuck-up.”

  “You?” I smiled. “A fuck-up?”

  “I know.” Matt shook his head. “Once these misconceptions get started, they take on a life of their own.”

  “Still,” I said, “he’s gotta be a little proud. How many other car salesmen have kids who got into Yale?”

  Matt looked puzzled for a second, then waved away the question like it was smoke.

  “Nah,” he said. “Now he just thinks Bart Giammati’s a fuck-up too.”

  The glasses that came with our pitcher were small, the size of juice glasses at a diner. You could finish them off in a swallow or two, and Matt and I were feeling solicitous toward one another. As soon as my glass was empty, he filled it, and I did the same for him. Before long, the pitcher was history.

  “It’s too bad,” I said. “That beer was starting to taste pretty good.”