How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater (9 page)

The moon shines silver into the dark room and I pull Kelly to me, grinding my hips against her as I point Doug and Ziba toward a fainting couch over by the dressing room. Doug flashes me a devil's grin and I see him undo the top button of his jeans, presumably because they can't accommodate Russell the Love Muscle any longer.

I push Kelly's straight, silky hair aside to kiss her long, lean neck, inhaling the clean, Coppertone-y smell of her skin and exhaling lightly in her ear, which I know drives her crazy. I've missed her while she was gone. More important, I've missed this. She tilts her head, the Internationally Recognized Signal for “Kiss me, you fool,” and I respond by tonguing her deeply and aggressively, the taste of beer mixing in both our mouths. She coils one sinewy leg around the back of my thigh and rubs up against me. I laugh knowingly into her mouth. She feels and tastes and smells so good I want to devour her whole. In one swift move I grab her other leg, hoist it around me, and carry her across the room. (It's nice to see those dance classes are good for something.) We hobble forward this way and fall hard onto the bed, laughing.

I prop myself up on my elbows and look at her face, the white of her eyes and teeth shining bright in the moonlight. She is so beautiful. I'm just reaching up to scoop her breasts in my hands when from across the room I hear Ziba shout, “No!”

Kelly and I both glance over in time to see Ziba give Doug a shove to the floor, where he lands with an unceremonious thud.

“What the fuck . . .” he says.

Ziba rises to her full Amazon height, flips her hair over her shoulder, and steps right over him. “Pig,” she says, and walks out.

Yikes.

Kelly gives a little push to get me off of her. “I better see what's wrong,” she says, then steps over Doug on her way out, too. “Excuse me.”

I don't get it. Just yesterday over lunch Ziba was telling me how she stayed out all night in Saint-Tropez with a couple of guys in their twenties, but Doug unzips his pants and she totally freaks out. Then again . . .

I look at him crouched on the floor. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he says, almost like he's in pain. I'm about to reach for him when he bounds up, punching the air. “She's such a fuckin' tease, man,” he says. “I'm about ready to burst.”

He looks down helplessly at his crotch, where the engorged head of his cock has pushed past the waistband of his jeans. It's the size of a doorknob. We both stare at it a moment, as if another person just entered the room. Time seems to stand still and I feel the pulse of my heartbeat radiate behind my ears. I look up at Doug's face and suddenly realize he's just inches away from me, his lips parted, the heat of his breath blowing lightly on my cheeks.

Please God, let him feel the same way I do.

D
oug licks his lips and swallows,
his big Adam's apple bobbing in his neck.

“I need a drink,” he says.

He pushes past me, adjusting his crotch as he goes through the sliding glass door.

I stand staring out into the yard. The moon is so bright it's casting shadows on the lawn. I don't quite know what to do, but every fiber of me says to follow him, so I step outside only to find myself face-to-face with Duncan O'Boyle, the captain of the football team. Duncan has a lean, ferret-y face and strawberry-blond hair that I envy because he wears it parted in the middle and feathered. I tried wearing my hair that way once but it's so thick I looked like Wile E. Coyote after he's had an anvil dropped on his head.

“We've got a little problem,” he says. He explains to me how Kevin “Boonbrain” Boonschoft, a big St. Bernard of a guy and the cheesehead of the popular kids, tried to use his big brother's old ID to buy beer for them, but nearly got arrested when the guy at the liquor store revealed that he actually went to high school with Boonbrain's brother. Duncan focuses his beady amber eyes on me. “I hear you can score some beers for us,” he says.

I've never liked Duncan O'Boyle. Once, in the fourth grade, he lured Natie onto the roof of his house with an invitation to go “hedgewalking” on top of the fifteen-foot laurel bush that surrounded his property. Natie went first.

He needed thirty stitches.

But just because I loathe and despise everything Duncan represents doesn't mean I don't want to impress him.

“Sure,” I say, “just give me a sec.”

I find Natie and tell him to look after things, then interrupt a fornicating couple in my room so I can change into Father Groovy's collar, adding a pair of round wire-rimmed glasses I wore when I played the tailor Motel Kamzoil in
Fiddler on the Roof.
I'm practicing a few Jesuity looks in the mirror when I hear the grind of the garage door opening. I dash outside and there is Duncan backing Al's Midlife Crisis down the driveway.

“What the hell are you doing?” I shout. “That's my dad's car.”

Duncan grins at Roger Young, the team's quarterback, who's riding shotgun. “Oh, no,” Duncan says, “this is no car, my friend. This is a penis on wheels.”

“Well, it's my dad's penis, okay, so just stop right there.” I tap on the side of the car and point to the backseat, which is already such a tight squeeze for Boonbrain that he appears to be wearing the car rather than sitting in it. “Look,” I say, “there's no room for me, and you need me to buy the beer.”

Duncan smiles. “We'll just take a little ride then, and come back and get ya'.” He revs the engine and puts the car in first, but before he can take off I grab hold of the side and hop up on the trunk, shoving my legs next to Boonbrain's refrigerator-sized frame. I must look like the Catholic grand marshal of a St. Patrick's Day parade.

“Go Blue Devils!” Duncan screams, such a dumb jock thing to say, and he floors it.

Asshole.

Sociopath that he is, Duncan does everything he can to send me flying off the back, deliberately making sharp turns and sudden stops. It's not quite as malicious as it sounds—I guess for someone who engages in a sport that involves knocking the crap out of people, vehicular homicide is just good, clean fun. Luckily, all those dance classes really
have
been good for something, because I manage to keep my balance the entire way. Once we stop, however, I fumble the dismount as I attempt to hop out in the suave, easy manner of Magnum, P.I., and end up flat on my ass in the liquor store parking lot. Everyone laughs—not in a mean way, but in a way that shows they appreciate the irony of someone being capable of holding on to a sports car going seventy miles an hour down unimproved roads but failing to stay upright once it's safely parked.

Lightning shoots up my spine but I make faces at the guys like I'm only pretending to be in pain. I hobble into the liquor store, hoping that a limp will contribute to an overall image of maturity.

A big heavyset guy who looks like a Hell's Angel appears behind the counter. “Hey, Fawther,” he says, “how can I help yuz?”

I say a silent prayer to St. Genesius, the patron saint of actors or, in this case, bold-faced liars, but the guy seems more focused on the clerical collar than the person wearing it. I lean across the counter like I don't want to be overheard. “Sister Paula from the Convent of the Bleeding Heart suggested I buy beer here,” I say in a breathy, Father Mulcahy from
M*A*S*H
kind of voice. “Do you know what brand she normally gets?”

“Oh, sure, Fawther,” Hell's Angel says with a conspiratorial nod. “We all know how Father Monty likes his beer.” Father Monty is the old souse of a priest Paula invented as the reason why a nun would need to buy a case of cheap beer every weekend.

“I'm Father Roovy, by the way,” I say. “Greg Roovy. I'm new.”

“Nice to meetcha, Fawther. Where's Sister Paula tonight?”

“She's, uh, been transferred into Manhattan.”

Hell's Angel gives me a look like someone just ran over his puppy. “She didn't even say goodbye,” he says.

“It was very sudden,” I explain. “That's why they brought me on to assist Father Monty—we're very shorthanded now.”

Hell's Angel plops a couple of cases of beer on the counter. “Well, God bless her,” he says.

“Yes, God bless her,” I say as beatifically as I can.

He takes my money, but hesitates. “Y'know, Fawther,” he says, “whenever Sister Paula came in, it was kind of like she brought the church with her, you know what I mean?”

“We're here to serve,” I say. What the hell is going on?

Hell's Angel leans his elbows on the counter and says to me in a soft voice, “It's been kind of a tough week . . .”

Twenty minutes later I finally emerge from the liquor store. “What took you so long?” Duncan asks.

“Who knew I was going to have to hear confession?” I say.

(Later on when I ask Paula about it, she just says, “Now you be nice to poor Larry. His mother has been very sick and he's under a lot of stress right now.” Such a Paula thing to say.)

My tailbone is really throbbing now and I'm in no mood for fucking around, so I hold the beer ransom until Duncan agrees to get on the back and be the grand marshal. I just want to get my father's penis home in one piece.

Then I get behind the wheel.

I don't know what comes over me, but suddenly I'm worse than Duncan, tearing around corners, zigzagging up and down hilly backstreets, and probably ruining Al's alignment as I deliberately land in potholes. We approach the high school and, rather than go all the way around the block, I simply drive right up onto the playing fields and cut straight across, even rounding the bases a couple of times on the baseball diamond.

Duncan practically coughs up a lung from the dust.

Back at Oak Acres I take a shortcut across the lawn of our neighbor, Mr. Foster. Okay, I admit this is more Vandalism than Creative, but Mr. Foster's the kind of guy who gets up at six on a Saturday morning to vacuum his driveway. I figure he's got it coming to him.

SOTGFTT think it's fucking hysterical.

As a result, Duncan treats me
with a begrudging respect for the rest of the night, although he and the others take every opportunity to mock Doug for being in a musical and liking to sing, calling him Florence Nightingale without realizing how stupid that makes them sound. I definitely sense Duncan is competing with me for Doug's attention because he keeps bringing up various “comical” things from their shared past that I don't know about and, frankly, aren't particularly comical. But then Doug will do something like know where the towels are kept in my kitchen or refer to us as “we,” and Duncan will challenge me to a chugging contest or some such nonsense. Not that I mind; alcohol helps dull the throbbing pain in my tailbone. But it's like there's a little version of each of us on Doug's shoulders, a Teen Angel and a Blue Devil, both vying for his soul.

Doug stays over and as we clean up the house and talk trash about the guests I indulge in the fantasy that my suburban split-level ranch house is actually a converted SoHo loft that Doug and I live in together. I'm aching to tell him that I'm bisexual, that I'm destined for a life of sexual deviancy way more interesting than the buttoned-down future he can expect staying in Wallingford. I'm longing to whisk him away to Neverland like I'm Peter Pan and he's one of the Darling children. What's more, I'm longing to reach for his peter and have him call me “darling.”

But instead I just ask him if he'll drive me to the emergency room.

“I think I broke my ass,” I say.

Wuss.

T
here's this scene in
South Pacific
where Nellie, the hick army nurse, and Emile, the cultured Frenchman, sing a number called “Twin Soliloquies,” but they never actually sing it together. In the original Broadway production, Mary Martin, who played Nellie, was afraid of being overpowered by Ezio Pinza, the Metropolitan Opera basso who played Emile, so they just traded verses back and forth, singing their thoughts. That's kind of how it is with me and Doug as we sit in the emergency room, except that occasionally we're interrupted by people with knife wounds and heart attacks.

There's something about sitting in a hospital late at night that makes you want to swap autobiographies. So I tell Doug all about how the 1960s and '70s hit my mom like a ton of wind chimes and made her have a Feminist Awakening, but how I completely understand because if I were married to Al and had to live in Wallingford the rest of my life, I'd get out as soon as I could, too. And I tell him how she rejected her Roman Catholic upbringing, threw off the yoke of bourgeois oppression, and became totally funky-woo-woo. Now, whenever I visit her, we always do cool New Age-y stuff together, like balance our chakras or make jewelry from hemp. She's in South America now, communing with the Incan spirits.