Joe College Read online

  The bartender must have heard me. He finished rinsing a few more glasses in a tub of brown water topped with a thin layer of soap scum, wiped his hands on the towel tucked into the waistband of his pants, and shuffled over to our end of the bar. He picked up the empty pitcher and moved it in front of our faces like a hypnotist.

  “Another one, fellows?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, checking with Matt. “We’ve got to get up at four in the morning.”

  Matt glanced at the clock. He rubbed his chin, adopting the demeanor of a person involved in a complex cognitive operation.

  “It’s still pretty early,” he mused. “I don’t see that our impending work obligations necessarily preclude further consumption.”

  I looked at the bartender, shrugging as though the matter were officially out of my hands.

  “You heard him,” I said, happy to pretend for the moment that four in the morning was a long way off. “Bring it on.”

  There are two kinds of drunk drivers: the ones who know it and the ones who don’t. I was the first kind. My mind was racing a little too quickly, so I tried to compensate by driving very slowly, turning and braking with great care, as though maneuvering my way through a blizzard.

  “Jesus,” I said. I was perched way up on the edge of my seat, squinting through the dirty windshield. “Visibility’s not so good.”

  “Maybe it would help if you turned on the lights,” Matt suggested.

  “Good idea,” I said. Even one light was an improvement.

  The Stay-A-While was in Springville, only a few miles from my parents’ house. It was an easy drive sober, over before you knew it. That night, though, Springville Boulevard seemed to last forever. It was like some crew of practical jokers had blown through town while we were in the bar, stringing up traffic lights at every possible intersection in a diabolical effort to prolong my misery and confusion.

  “I’ll tell you what’s weird about Measure for Measure,” Matt remarked as we negotiated the tricky stretch of the boulevard that runs past Nomahegan Park. “Can you imagine living in a place where you can get the death penalty for premarital sex? Would that be a drag or what?”

  “Don’t talk,” I instructed him as we puttered past the county college, moving at about the clip of a riding mower. It felt to me like the truck was standing still, the world rushing madly at my windshield. “It’s hard enough for me to concentrate as it is.”

  “You’d be a dead man,” he announced, patting me consolingly on the shoulder.

  “Me? What about you?”

  “In my own mind I’m a virgin.”

  I tightened my grip on the wheel as I turned off the main road onto the squiggly back streets that cut through Cranwood and into Darwin. Somewhere around here, back when I was in high school, Jill Arnott drove a driver’s ed car over somebody’s front lawn and into their house, crashing right through the wall of the family room. No one was hurt, and she said that the people who lived there were cooler about it than you might have expected. Matt leaned over and turned on the radio. After a couple of commercials, the David Bowie song “Changes” came on.

  “Mind if I turn on the radio?” he asked, about halfway into the song.

  “Be my guest,” I said, riding the brakes through the unexpectedly sharp curves of the residential streets.

  A feeling of preliminary relief washed over me as we crossed the border into Darwin and “Changes” segued into “Dust in the Wind”; we weren’t there yet, but we were getting close. Matt reached over and turned up the volume.

  “Oh man,” he groaned, drumming on the glove compartment with both hands. “I love this song.”

  “‘Dust in the Wind’? Are you serious?”

  “You don’t like it?” He stared back at me, mirroring my incredulity. “It was my high school anthem.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s kind of bleak.”

  “That’s the whole point.”

  “What’s the whole point?”

  “That we’re dust in the wind,” he said, nearly shouting to make himself heard over the lugubrious strains of the song. Something about this concept seemed to amuse him, and he laughed out loud. “Dust in the wind, dude.”

  That didn’t seem like much of a point to me, and I was about to say so when I was struck by the realization that, impaired as I was, and despite the fact that I hadn’t the heard the song in years, I knew all the lyrics by heart. Matt did too; in fact, he’d rolled down his window and begun shouting them to the sleeping town.

  He seemed to be enjoying himself, so I figured what the hell. By the time the chorus arrived I was right there with him, broadcasting the mournful news at the top of my lungs.

  Dust in the wind

  All we are is dust in the wind

  “Oh shit,” I said.

  “‘Dust in the wind,’” Matt continued, both hands pressed over his heart, his exuberance undiminished by the fact that he was on his own again. I was too busy to sing; it was all I could do to pull the Roach Coach over to the curb without actually driving it up onto the sidewalk in front of Mr. B’s Pet Supplies and Grooming, my own heart pounding as the flashing red lights painted their swirly designs on the glass of my sideview mirror.

  I had a hard time falling asleep, but it wasn’t because the bed was spinning or anything like that. Getting pulled over had gone a long way toward sobering me up, and throwing up afterward had taken me the rest of the way there. A bad taste lingered in my mouth, a sour sediment that four glasses of water and a marathon Listerine session hadn’t washed away, but my head was clear, my thoughts racing in the darkness as Matt snored peacefully beside me in his sleeping bag on the floor.

  I hadn’t gotten arrested for drunk driving. I hadn’t even gotten a ticket for the broken headlight, which was the reason I’d been pulled over in the first place. The cop who came swaggering up to my window, shining a flashlight in my face and barking at me to hand over my license and registration, suddenly burst into a big grin when he realized who I was.

  “Danny?”

  “Yeah?” I said, cringing at the light, struggling to locate a face in the blinding glare. “Who’s that?”

  The cop snapped off the flashlight and took a couple steps back from my window so I could get a better look.

  “Do I know you?” I asked, pronouncing the words with great care so I wouldn’t sound drunk.

  The question didn’t seem to surprise him.

  “Larry,” he said, pulling off his hat to reveal the closely cropped hair underneath. “Larry Barlow.”

  “Jeez,” I said. “You’re a cop?”

  “Just got hired. Hard to believe, huh?”

  “Not really,” I lied.

  Larry was the older brother of Mike Barlow, the biggest stoner in my class. Mike wasn’t a close friend of mine, but we’d known each other since kindergarten. When we were sophomores at Harding, Larry used to drive Mike to school, and sometimes in bad weather they’d pull up to the bus stop and offer me a ride, their car a rolling cloud of reefer smoke. Back then, both Barlows had long blond hair that fell way past their shoulders.

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

  “Yale. It’s our spring break.”

  “Yale, Harvard.” Larry pronounced these names as a pair, the way people often did in Darwin, as if it were somehow beside the point to distinguish between the two. “Same bullshit, right?”

  “No kidding,” I said. “How’s Mike?”

  “Okay.” Larry shook his head like he wasn’t too keen on elaborating.

  “Tell him I said ‘hi.’”

  “Hey,” he said. A sly smile spread across his face. “Know who I saw from your class?”

  “Who?”

  “That girl Jenny. The one who did the Coletti brothers. She dances at Cousin Butchie’s.”

  “I know. I saw her there last summer.”

  “Fuckin’ amazing.” The walkie-talkie crackled on Larry’s belt. He brought it up to his mouth and mumbled
some numbers into it. Then he shoved it back into its holster and pointed at my front end. “You got a broken headlight.”

  “I know. My dad’s taking it to the shop tomorrow.”

  “Take care, man.”

  “You too.”

  I watched in the sideview mirror as Larry climbed back into his patrol car, turned off his overhead lights, and swung what would have been an illegal U turn if anyone else had done it. We were free to go, but I just sat there in the driver’s seat, waiting for the turbulence in my stomach to subside.

  “That was weird,” said Matt.

  “Excuse me,” I told him.

  Cheeks bulging, one hand cupped over my mouth, I stuck my head and shoulders through the open window into the cool night air, wriggling forward as far as I could go to protect my father’s truck. At the crucial moment, I uncovered my mouth and spread my arms wide, as if preparing to take flight.

  Things could be worse, I reminded myself. I wasn’t in jail, I wasn’t in the hospital, and I wasn’t married. My life was pretty much on track, unchanged by the obstacle course of potential disasters I’d been running for the past several days. A week from now I’d be back at school, picking up where I’d left off, re-dedicating myself to my studies, hanging with my friends, hopefully straightening things out with Polly. Things could definitely have been worse.

  In general, I had a fairly high opinion of myself at that stage in my life. I considered myself an intelligent person, trusted my instincts and judgment, and didn’t spend a lot of time brooding about mistakes I’d made in the past. I believed that my success in the world, such as it was, was my own doing and no one else’s, a well-deserved reward for years of hard work, perseverance, and good-humored self-denial. I believed that I was a decent person and expected the future to be good to me.

  But that wasn’t how I felt just then. Lying in bed long after midnight, the darkness streaming into my wide open eyes, I saw my life as a car with no brakes careening down a dangerous mountain road. Get in my way and I’ll run you down, or at least leave you in the dust. Not because I want to, but simply because I have to. There’s Cindy. Whoops. Oh hi, Kevin. Sorry. Zeke, Woody, Steve, the Squidman, my old roommate Seth. Later, dudes. Even Junior. Who else would I have to bowl over or whack with a Louisville Slugger on my way to wherever the hell it was I was going? My parents and teachers, the women I’d love and the one I’d eventually marry, my unborn children, my current and future best friends? Might as well bring them on, get it over with, because I’m on my way, there’s no stopping now, no way, not even if I wanted to.

  I must have fallen asleep, because the phone woke me at eight minutes after three in the morning. Maybe I was dreaming of Polly, because I remember thinking it was her—it had to be!—as I threw off the covers and launched myself out of bed, forgetting as I did so that Matt’s recumbent body was positioned midway between me and my desk. I stepped on his arm and stumbled over his torso, eliciting only a feeble groan of protest from the deepest recesses of the sleeping bag, while at the same time managing to maintain my balance well enough to snatch up the receiver before the completion of the third ring.

  “Polly?” I gasped.

  A confused moment of silence followed.

  “Danny?”

  The voice was unfamiliar, but definitely not Polly’s, and I found myself retroactively gripped by the fear that usually accompanies a 3 A.M. phone call.

  “Who’s this?” I asked.

  “Alice,” she said. “From next door. DeFillipo.”

  “Oh hi,” I said, sounding cheerfully idiotic even to myself. “How’s it going?”

  “Your truck’s on fire.”

  It wasn’t until that very moment that I became aware of the unusual brightness in the room, a warm orangey glow filtering in through the window shade.

  “My truck?” I said.

  “Your father’s,” she said, a certain edge of impatience creeping into her voice. “The truck in your driveway.”

  “It’s on fire?”

  “I called 911. They should be there any minute.”

  “Thanks,” I told her. “That was nice of you.”

  It seemed like a long time before the fire department arrived. I stood beside my father on the front stoop and watched the Roach Coach burning in our driveway. It wasn’t a big deal, really, nothing too spectacular. It was the cab that was on fire, the toxic-looking flames licking out of the empty spaces where the windows and windshield used to be, a cloud of acrid gray smoke gathering over the remains of my father’s big dream like a cartoon illustration of bad luck.

  “I don’t think you two should be out here,” my mother said, sticking her worried face out the front door. “What if it blows up?”

  My father didn’t answer. He seemed riveted by the tiny inferno, as though he were making an effort to memorize it down to the smallest detail: the strange chocolatey undertone beneath the stench of burning plastic, the abrupt way the truck sank—like an elephant kneeling in the grass—when one of the front tires blew, the disappearance of the paint on the front door—like an eraser moving from the bottom up—our trademark bug turning to vapor before our eyes, followed in turn by my father’s own name. All the while the storage cube kept gleaming brighter and brighter, as though it were being polished and purified by the flames. I remember wondering if maybe it was fireproof, if, when it was all over, we could just pop open the display door and treat ourselves and the neighbors, many of whom had gathered on their own front stoops to bear witness to our misfortune, to a miraculous breakfast feast of warm but intact fruit pies and Ring Dings and Funny Bones.

  “Come on,” my mother said. “Both of you.”

  Neither one of us moved.

  When the firemen came, they sprayed our Roach Coach with chemical foam. They kept spraying long after the flames had been snuffed out, until the husk of the cab was barely visible beneath the frothy meringue and the whole truck seemed to be made of soap suds rather than steel and rubber.

  I wanted to say something to my father, to tell him how sorry I was, how it was all my fault, how much I knew the truck meant to him and how I’d figure out some way to make it up to him, but I was scared just then, scared not only to look at his face but to have him look at mine. I thought he might be able to see beyond my shame and sorrow to the secret feeling underneath, the purely selfish sensation of having been saved yet again—saved from the Lunch Monsters, from the expectations of Chuckie and the rest of the guys at the warehouse, from having to get up at four in the morning for the rest of my vacation.

  My father must have mistaken my silence for sadness, because he laid his hand on my shoulder and left it there for what began to seem like a long time. We didn’t touch each other much, and when we did it didn’t usually last much longer than a handshake or a pat on the back.

  “It’s okay,” he told me.

  Finally I turned to him, expecting to see any number of things on his face—anger, grief, panic, maybe even tears—anything but what was actually there, the mild expression of acceptance, maybe even the ghost of a smile hovering underneath.

  “It’s okay,” he said again, nodding at the piece of smoking, foam-drenched wreckage in the driveway. “That goddam thing was killing me.”

  part four

  Townies

  ted?

  From a distance, it makes perfect sense that the people and the things you think will save you are the very ones that have the power to disappoint you most bitterly, but up close it can hit you as a bewildering surprise.

  At least that’s how it was for me, returning to school after spring break. In my mind Yale was the garden from which I’d nearly been expelled, a haven of learning and friendship, the one place in the world where I could really be myself. My roommates would be waiting to welcome me back into the fold, and so, eventually, would Polly. All we really needed was some time together, a few long talks to burn away the shadows Cindy and Peter Preston had cast on our budding relationship. The weather would warm and we’d
spend our days reading under flowering trees and our nights pressed together on my single bed, giggling under the covers.

  I passed the two-hour drive to New Haven fine-tuning this fantasy, while Matt perplexed my parents with a barrage of devil’s advocate—style questions meant to provoke serious discussion of controversial issues, not my family’s preferred method for killing the time on long car rides. Didn’t they think everyone should spend at least one night in jail, just to know what it was like? Didn’t the Iranian militants have a point about the U.S. being the Great Satan, at least from their perspective? And really, what was the difference between a religion and a cult? Looked at from a certain angle, wasn’t the Pope every bit as preposterous as L. Ron Hubbard or the Reverend Sun Myung Moon? And what was the story with deodorants? Did we really need them, or were we just being duped into using them by the big corporations? On this last subject, at least, my parents had strong opinions.

  “Believe me,” my mother said. “No one was ever sorry they put on deodorant.”

  “But do we really smell bad?” Matt wondered. “Or have we just been trained to think of normal human odors as somehow being repulsive?”

  “Stop using it and see how many dates you get,” my father suggested.

  “You should get a whiff of some of the guys I work with.” My mother waved her hand in front of her nose as though the offenders had joined us in the car. “Between the B.O. and the bad breath …”

  “The Europeans don’t believe in deodorant,” Matt remarked.

  “Some of them aren’t too big on bathing either,” my mother pointed out. She thought it over a moment, then added, “I guess if everybody smells bad, they don’t notice it so much.”

  “The ladies don’t even shave their underarms.” My father glanced in the rearview, checking Matt’s reaction to this little tidbit.

  “I don’t mind,” Matt told him. “I had a girlfriend once who didn’t shave her pits, and I kind of liked it.” Neither of my parents had any response to this, so he forged ahead. “It’s completely natural.”