How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater (10 page)

And Doug tells me about his creepy, square-headed father and how the happiest years of his dad's life were when he was stationed in Germany. But then his dad went to Vietnam and got weird and now he hates his life because he drives a Tastykake truck. And he says that sometimes his dad takes his frustration out on him, like the time he knocked over the breakfront and then chased Doug down the street, calling him a candy-assed pussy. “But then I got big enough to fight back,” Doug says. “Now he just yells at the TV.”

He goes on to tell me that his only reprieve from all that unrestrained testosterone was spending summers in Germany, visiting his mother's gay brother, the former Olympic gymnast.

That is, until he met me. (Sigh.)

Then he teaches me all kinds of dirty words in German, like
Schwanzlutscher
(cocksucker),
Arschlecker
(ass licker), and our favorite,
Hosenscheisser
(pants shitter).

Eventually the doctor shows up and informs me I have a “contusion” on my coccyx, which I guess is Latin for “you fell on your ass.” Nothing's broken, but he gives me a three-week gym excuse and one of those foam doughnuts to sit on.

But I don't feel the pain in my ass (or, as Doug calls it, my
Arschschmerz
) because, like Nellie in
South Pacific,
I'm in love with a wonderful guy. I'm bromidic and bright as a moon-happy night pouring light on the dew, you might say.

Until Al and Dagmar come home.

I swear, they aren't in the house five minutes before they completely nail me for having a party, despite my putting the beanbag chair back together bean by bean and flipping the cushions on the smoking couch. Apparently the senior class of '84 scuffed Dagmar's new hardwood floors.

She goes ballistic. “Don't you know you cannot valk on tse floors vit
shoes
!” she screams.

Actually, I didn't. I always assumed that, being the indoor version of the ground, floors were meant to be trod upon, but apparently they do things differently in Austria. Al grounds me for a whole month, even though it's obvious he can't tell what's wrong with the goddamn floors, either.

School is great, though, a warm retreat from the frost that's occurring at home. With the exception of typing, a necessary evil Al insists I take even though I'm certain I'll never have any use for it as an actor, and gym, a necessary evil mandated by law, I've got a really good schedule.

AP history, for instance, is going to be way better now that Ms. Toquitz has taken over from Mr. Duke who, as the coach of the girl's track team, made the mistake last year of adding fucking as a track and field event.

And AP French looks good, too, not because Madame Schwartz is so
intéressante
(she's not) but because the unexpected arrival of Ziba in class is. I say unexpected because I know for a fact that Ziba's fluent in French and therefore is obviously scamming for an easy A. She spends the entire class that first day staring out the window, completely overdressed in a pair of pleated slacks and a silk blouse, answering questions distractedly and looking more like a woman awaiting an assignation with her lover in a café than some kid taking French in a suburban New Jersey high school.

After class she tells me she's never been particularly interested in school. “They don't teach anything I'm interested in, like fashion or cinema,” she says as she strolls down the hall like it's the Champs-Élysées, “but this school is by far the worst.” She waves a hand toward the hordes of students and says, “The people here are such snobs.” She doesn't seem concerned that those snobs can hear her. “But I honestly don't understand what they've got to be so snobby about. Don't they realize they live in
New Jersey
?”

“I know,” I say, feeling cool by association.

“I bet no one here has even heard of Fellini,” she says.

I tell her you can't expect these uncultured philistines to appreciate the Renaissance masters.

Then there's AP English with Mr. Lucas.

Mr. Lucas.

I'm sure no one who's ever met Ted Lucas walked away not knowing how they felt about him. He's just the kind of person you can't help but have an opinion about. People on the anti-Lucas side find him patronizing and arrogant, cruel even. He hands back tests in descending grade order, will actually send people to the principal's office for being “absent mentally,” and nearly got fired for throwing a book at a student, for which he was completely unrepentant. “Lucky for her it was just
The Metamorphosis
and not
Moby-Dick
,” he said.

I think he's great.

Sometimes I'll deliberately say something trite and uninspired in a discussion just so he'll peer over his glasses at me and declare,
“Whell,
Mr. Zanni,
uh
bviously.” But mostly I try to impress him. If Mr. Lucas starts tugging at his beard and staring off in space, that means you've said something to make him think. And if you can make someone as brilliant as Mr. Lucas think,
whell,
then
uh
bviously you're pretty smart yourself.

Best of all, he used to be an actor—a real, legitimate, classical theater actor who studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and performed Shakespeare and Molière and Chekhov all over the country. But then he had some kind of spinal cord injury and had to give up acting, which only adds to his quasi-tragic mystique. All manner of theories have circulated about the cause of his handicap, the most popular being that he was injured in Vietnam, which presumably explains why he's so moody. He walks using those crutches that wrap around your wrists, and more than once I've seen him swat through a crowd of kids like some giant praying mantis, shouting, “Out of my way, you juvenile delinquents. Can't you see there's a cripple coming through?”

As far as I'm concerned, Mr. Lucas is casting his pearls before swine. He got in a lot of trouble for his Viet Cong concept for our production of
The King and I,
even though it saved a lot of money on costumes, and no one understood why he had me play Tom in
The Glass Menagerie
as a dog on a leash when it's so frigging
uh
bvious. Frankly, I think Principal Farley just got upset with the scene where I peed on the carpet. The students don't really understand Mr. Lucas either, and are more impressed by the fact that he played the Tidy Bowl man on TV than anything else. Mr. Lucas says that just means his career was already in the toilet before he came here.

On the first day of school, he hands us a syllabus, just like they do in college classes. “Our theme this year,” he says, pointing to an absurdly long list of titles, “is Rebels with a Cause. We'll begin with
Oedipus Rex.”
He tosses copies of it at us without looking up, which may explain how he beaned that girl with
The Metamorphosis.

“Oedipus Rex,”
he says in a voice so resonant it sounds as if his whole body were hollow. “A heartwarming little family story in which our hero kills his father, sleeps with his mother, and gouges his own eyes out. If it had been written last year, the school board would be burning it on the front lawn, but since it's two thousand years old, it's deemed acceptable for your impressionable little brainlets. I want a paper on whether Oedipus really has a tragic flaw or not by next Monday.”

The class groans.

“Oh, quit complaining,” he says. “At least you can walk unassisted.”

Back at home, the atmosphere grows
increasingly Gothic. Now that she's got her claws into Al, Dagmar feels free to unleash the Beast Within. The transformation is so swift and shocking, it's like a horror movie
—I Was a Middle-Aged Austrian Werewolf.
She informs my sister in no uncertain terms that she's not welcome to come home to do her laundry (I don't know why, it's not like Karen's asking
her
to do it) and tells me to stop having my friends call when I'm not there because it interrupts her from “tse verk.” I try to explain to her that the only way my friends can tell if I'm home is if they call, but she just insists on telling me about the supposedly exemplary way things were done back when she was a girl. It seems like every conversation I have with this woman begins with the words, “Tse vay I vas raised . . .” followed by some example of how life was better growing up in Nazi-occupied Austria. Oh, and apparently everything I do is too loud, too, which is totally ironic coming from a woman who is so vocal during sex that even the Nudelmans across the street know when she's having an orgasm.

Meanwhile, Al's too pussy-whipped to notice or to care that he's married a raving lunatic.

Luckily I've got a lot of extracurricular stuff that keeps me out of the house (my classes in New York, for instance) plus my old standby for when I'm grounded: the faux babysitting job. Al still hasn't caught on that the only time I ever seem to look after the fictitious Thompson kids—Jason (nine), Kyra (six), and little Michael (just a year old)—is when I'm grounded. I've even snuck beer out of the house by wrapping a six-pack in “Happy Smurfday!” wrapping paper and pretending it was for one of the kids. I've actually developed a real fondness for the little tykes over the years, despite the fact that they don't exist.

Rehearsals for the fall play,
The Miracle Worker,
start but I don't have that much to do in it. I play the biggest male part, of course—Helen Keller's father—but it's still a supporting role. Mr. Lucas actually takes me aside and tells me he purposely chose something without a big male part because he wants me to focus all my attention on my Juilliard audition.

Kelly surprises everybody (me included) by landing the lead role of Annie Sullivan, which is a big stretch for her. She's nervous as hell about it, but I'm going to coach her. The first read-through is really ragged, but then again, it's hard to read through a play in which the principal character is blind, deaf, and dumb. I stay after and perform my audition monologues for the cast.
Amadeus
is solid, and for my classical I do “Bottom's Dream” from
Midsummer,
mostly because it's the only Shakespeare play I actually read this summer. It's funny and it goes well, but Mr. Lucas says he'll find me something else for better contrast.

Natie and I drop off Kelly, then rush home to change into dance clothes for rehearsals for
Anything Goes,
which Kelly and I are choreographing for the Wallingford Playhouse, the local community theater. “This must be what it feels like to be at Juilliard,” I think as I drive, “dashing from rehearsal to rehearsal, full of artistic inspiration.” I make a mental note to ask Paula about it; that is, if she ever gets the phone hooked up in that pit she's living in.

I park in front of the house because Dagmar has taken my spot in the garage with the Corvette Al bought her as a wedding present. In return, Dagmar bought them coordinated vanity plates—his says SEIN, hers IHR. It feels strange to come into my own house through the front door like I'm company, and every step I take in the entryway echoes because there's no carpet to absorb the sound. I pull off my shoes and slide across the floor like Tom Cruise in
Risky Business,
accidentally knocking a copy of
Forbes
out of Al's big, hairy hands as he rounds the corner.

“Where have ya' been?” Al says. “You missed dinner.”

“What are you talking about?” I say as I go into the kitchen. “It's not Wednesday.” I open the fridge to see what's available. Dagmar looks up from the stove where she's stirring what looks like hot cocoa in a saucepan.

“Don't make a mess,” she says. “I just cleaned everytsing up.”

Al glances at his Rolex. “You better hurry, kid,” he says, “or we'll be late.”

“For what?”

“Waddya mean, for what? For college night. I left the flyer on your bed the other day.”

I sniff at a strange-looking casserole. “I went last year,” I say. “There weren't any drama schools there.”

“So?”

“So, I've already got the applications for Juilliard, NYU, and Boston University.”

Al glances at Dagmar, who just keeps stirring the pot. “Well, maybe we should look at some other options,” he mutters.

There's something about the way he doesn't make eye contact that gives me a tight feeling in my chest. “Like . . . what?” I say.

“I dunno,” Al says. “That's why people go to college night, don't they, to find out?” He sticks his hands in his pockets and jingles his change.

I speak deliberately, like I'm a special-ed teacher and he's a mentally impaired student. “But I already know what I want to do,” I say. “I have for years. That's why I've already chosen the best acting schools.” I turn to leave the room. “Besides,” I add, “I can't go tonight. I've got play practice.”

“Well, you'll just have to miss it, then.”

Miss it? What the hell is he talking about? “I can't miss it,” I sputter. “I'm the
choreographer.
I'm in
charge
of the rehearsal.”

“Well, I'm in charge of you and I say you're going to college night.”