How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater (40 page)

We stop at the door of Something for the Boys and Ziba pulls a long, silk scarf out of her beaded clutch purse.

“What's going on?” I say.

“It's a surprise,” she says, tying the scarf around my eyes. Natie and Doug each take an elbow and lead me into the club, where a group of men are singing a stirring rendition of “Climb Ev'ry Mountain.” I feel stupid and self-conscious, like everyone must be looking at me. We stop.

“Stay right there,” Doug says, and I feel someone untie the blindfold. I blink for a second to adjust to the hazy purple light and then see Paula in front of me, giggling with delight. She's holding a birthday cake that says “Happy Birthday, Salvador.”

“Salvador?” I say.

“Dali. He's eighty today. Quick, make a wish before the candles go out.”

I stop for a moment to take a mental photograph of my best friends, the fuzzy glow from the candles shining on their smiling faces: Ziba, with her spiky hair and dark eyes, beaming her Mona Lisa smile; Kelly, tilting her head in that way that pretty girls do; Paula, her mouth spread wide in full curtain-up-light-the-lights mode; Doug, deep-dimpling his satyr's grin; and Natie, the light surrounding his little cheesehead like a halo.

They all look so beautiful to me, like angels in an Italian fresco. I close my eyes to make a wish. You'd think that I'd wish for Juilliard to come through somehow, but you'd be wrong. I don't even want to think about Juilliard at this point. No, what I wish for is to feel normal again, to feel as carefree and happy as I did last summer, to feel the magic and the mischief and the laughter. I want all the uncertainty and weirdness of these past months to be over, no matter how it turns out. It's not like I want to be stupid and naïve again; I just want to be happy. And safe.

Most important, I want my friends to be happy and safe, too.

I blow out the candles and everybody claps, including the guys at the piano. The pianist with the Humpty-Dumpty face strikes up “Happy Birthday” and everybody in the place sings along. I can't very well tell them to stop, so I just stand there, embarrassed and grinning stupidly while the wave of sound washes over me. I feel something wet on my neck and when I reach up to brush it away I realize that I'm crying, not a pushed-out, constipated kind of crying, but an easy, steady flow, like a light rain.

It's transcendental.

Paula's done up extra special for the occasion. She's wearing combat boots (one brown, one black, of course), a large skirt made out of tulle, and a bustier which pushes up her enormous boobs like a shelf. There's no mistaking her for a drag queen this time.

“You look like that chick from MTV,” Doug says, “you know, the one who wears her underwear outside of her clothes.”

Paula looks disappointed. “Madonna's a flash in the pan,” she says. “She'll never last.”

We order Manhattans. None of us knows what they are, but they sound sophisticated. From across the room Humpty-Dumpty calls out to me. “Hey, ‘Corner of the Sky,' you wanna sing?”

I don't feel much like singing, but my friends urge me on, clapping and cheering as I amble over to the piano.

“The usual?” he asks.

I shake my head no. “Do you know the finale from
Yentl
?” I ask.

He gives me a look like, “This is a gay piano bar; of course I know the finale from
Yentl,”
and starts to play.

The song feels good in my throat and by the time I sing the final lines it's as if my whole body were singing.

Why, indeed? I know I should be grateful if I can just stay alive and out of jail, but there's a part of me that simply can't stop dreaming, that can't abandon the idea of people lining up around the block to see me, that knows I'm supposed to do something important and meaningful with my life. The sky's the limit.

The crowd in the bar gives me a big hand. My tribe. My not-so-secret brotherhood.

Back at the table Paula requests a toast. “To Edward,” she says.

“To Edward,” everyone echoes.

“No,” I say, “to all of you. To the best friends a guy could ever want.”

“To best friends,” Natie says.

“To best friends.” We all clink glasses and once again tears surge out of me. I don't know what's wrong with me. Now that I've learned how to cry there doesn't seem to be any stopping me. I collapse in my chair. Doug puts his arm around me.

“This isn't right,” Kelly says. “We've got to do something.”

“It's because of that stupid Austrian bitch,” I say, crumpling up a cocktail napkin. “Everything was fine until she came along.”

Natie agrees. “Al always paid for everything before that.” He takes a sip of his Manhattan and makes a face. “What the hell is this, lighter fluid?”

“Natie's right,” Paula says.

“I'll have yours if you don't want it,” Ziba says.

“No, I meant about Al,” Paula says. “Sure, he made a lot of noise about business in the past, but that never stopped him from paying for acting classes and voice lessons and dance classes. Edward's right. Everything changed when Dagmar showed up. In fact . . . oh my God . . . I can't believe I never thought of this before.”

I grab another cocktail napkin and blow my nose. “What?” I say.

“Don't you see? You've been going about this whole thing backwards. Instead of having gone to all this trouble to get the money for Juilliard, you should have just tried to get rid of Dagmar.”

We all sit in silence pondering this thought while the group around the piano sings “Papa, Can You Hear Me?”

She's right. I can't believe I never thought of it before, either.

“So what's stopping us?” Kelly says finally. “Let's get rid of her now. She's, like, only going to make more trouble.”

“No,” I say, “I've given up my life of crime.”

“It's not like we're going to kill her,” Natie says. He looks around the table. “Are we?”

“Don't be ridiculous,” says Ziba. “We'll just find a way to make sure she never bothers us again.”

I shake my head. “But . . .”

“But nothing,” Ziba says. She raises her glass. “I say reopen CV Enterprises and finish what we started.”

Natie, Kelly, and Doug lift their glasses, too. All eyes turn to Paula.

“I'm not so sure about this,” she says.

Ziba leans across the table. “You don't want to see Edward end up in prison, do you? Or me, or Nathan, for that matter?”

“No, of course not.”

Ziba arches an eyebrow at her. “Well . . . ?”

Paula takes a deep breath, her boobs rising toward her chin, then exhales. “All right,” she says, “I'm in.”

Ziba turns to me. “Edward . . . ?”

I sigh and feel tears well up in me again. I nod my head.

“Wunderbar,”
Doug says.

We spend the rest of the night
formulating a plan and, for the first time in months, I feel the same heady thrill I experienced last summer when our only mission was to make the world safe from boredom.

The key to our plan is getting our hands on a narcotic that will knock out Dagmar for a few hours. Luckily, it just so happens I have a sister who works at a pharmacy. Or at least I thought I did. I call Karen the next day and she tells me in her rambling, incoherent way that she lost her job for doing exactly what I was about to ask her to do.

“I can hook you up, though,” she mumbles. “I mean, as long as you can drive.” I borrow the Wagon Ho and pick her up at her apartment, which she shares with some other burnouts above a Dollar Store in Cramptown.

Karen and I are not close. It's not like we hate each other; it's just that I'm repelled by everything she represents. But we're family and, when needed, we come through for each other, mostly by providing alibis or, in this case, black-market pharmaceuticals.

“Hey, bro,” she says as she slides in the car. “Mind if I crank some tunes?” She flips on the radio without waiting for an answer and chooses a heavy metal station. Normally I'd protest, but I'm willing to do whatever it takes to keep her conscious.

“This guy I know gets the best shit,” she says, drumming on the dashboard. I want to feel superior, but I've got to admit I'm grateful for her help.

We drive to Battle Brook, past the neighborhood where Kathleen's cryent lives and into a section that makes Hell's Kitchen look like Mayberry. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised (we are on a quest for illegal drugs, after all), but I've got to confess I've never given much thought about exactly where drugs come from.

We pull up in front of a dilapidated shipwreck of a house with moss on the roof and sheets of plastic lining the windows. An emaciated woman in a nightgown stands on the front porch hugging herself and rocking back and forth. I'm guessing she's not the Avon lady.

“Keep the engine running,” Karen says.

I can well understand the wisdom in this decision, but I can't say I'm happy to be in a situation where that particular kind of wisdom is necessary. She doesn't get out of the car.

Over Karen's shoulder I see a skinny man amble down the front steps, but I can't get a look at his face from where I'm sitting. Karen rolls down her window. Guess we're getting drive-up service. Before you know it, drug dealers will be installing those pneumatic tubes, like at the bank.

I feel sweat gathering in the small of my back and I adjust so I don't stick to the seat. I think I'm perfectly justified in being a little nervous. When you consider how the cops treated us for stealing the Buddha, I don't even want to think about the consequences of buying drugs in this town.

The guy approaches the car and leans over to talk to Karen. He sticks his head in the window and my heart stops.

It's Alas Poor Yorick.

He's even more frightening in the light of day, the pale gray skin pulled taut over his skull, his hollowed-out eyes glazed and yellow. He smiles, revealing rotted teeth, and coughs what I suppose is his croupy version of a laugh. “Hey,” he says to me, pointing a bony finger, “how ya' doin'?”

You know just how far you've sunk when you get recognized by your buddies from jail.

“Fine, thank you,” I say, sounding way more like Julie Andrews than I intended. I turn away, hoping it will make me invisible. Karen gets on with the business at hand while I grip the wheel, eyes straight ahead, wondering whether Alas Poor Yorick is going to say anything else to me. But he just finishes the transaction quickly and Karen doesn't have to tell me twice to pull out. As I drive away I look in the rearview mirror and see Alas Poor Yorick waving his broomstick arms at the woman twitching on the front porch. I have to say I've never stopped to think how druggies like my sister actually got those drugs, so it's never occurred to me that I had any connection whatsoever with skeevy lowlifes like Alas Poor Yorick (I mean, beyond being cell mates for a couple of hours) or the poor junkie vibrating on the front porch like some highly caffeinated moth. Just the thought that I have anything to do with these people makes me shudder. I mean, I hate to sound like a snob, but
ick.

Karen's bought a bag of pot in addition to the sleeping pills for Dagmar. She opens the baggie and takes a good, long whiff. “This is some good shit,” she says. “You wanna smoke some when we get back?”

“Maybe another time,” I say.

A couple of days later
I dash into English late as usual from my long lunch with Ziba.

Mr. Lucas peers at me over his glasses. “So nice of you to join us, Mr. Zanni.” The fact that I have worked so closely with this man on some very emotional pieces of theater, run into him at a gay bar, and slept on his couch seems to make no difference to him. When it comes to the classroom, he's as formal as a butler.

“So, as I was saying before the prodigal son returned, now that the AP exam is over there will be no more reading assignments.”

The class breaks out in spontaneous applause.

“There will, however, be writing assignments.”

The class groans.

He holds up a copy of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
“You've all read the book,” he says, waving a crutch for emphasis and narrowly missing the head of Calvin Singh, a National Merit scholar in the front row. “Or, judging from your quizzes, perhaps I should say
some
of you have read the book.”