Joe College: A Novel (18 page)
Read Joe College: A Novel Online
Authors: Tom Perrotta
“Excuse me?” I said.
“That stop’s ours.” With another herculean effort, he pushed the sunglasses on top of his head and squinted down at me. His voice was flatter now, more matter-of-fact. “You don’t go there anymore.”
I felt a brief flicker of fear, but it vanished as quickly as it came, leaving an unexpected sense of calm in its wake. Now that his whole face was visible, I couldn’t help noticing the acne on his cheeks and the almost alarming smallness of his head in comparison with his neck and torso. The overall effect of the mismatch was freakish and comic at the same time, as if a twelve-year-old dork had somehow succeeded in grafting his head onto the body of Mr.
Universe. It must have been to the twelve-year-old that I addressed my next question.
Universe. It must have been to the twelve-year-old that I addressed my next question.
“You got a dentist?”
The non sequitur seemed to annoy him.
“Whuh?” he demanded, sticking his head a little further out the window.
“Make an appointment,” I advised, a split second before the light changed and we parted ways. “Tell him you’re gonna be missing a whole bunch of fucking teeth.”
The whole thing happened so fast it was almost like it hadn’t happened at all. And yet this brief exchange dominated my thoughts for hours afterward, filling me with a strange and giddy pride that nothing could dispel, not even the creeping suspicion that I’d just made a really big and really stupid mistake.
My parents made
it home from the hospital around six. They were both in the kitchen by the time I dragged myself out of bed and marched groggily downstairs, my mother crumbling a brick of ground beef into the frying pan, my father standing by the refrigerator, clutching what appeared to be an infant-sized life preserver and looking around uncertainly, as if he’d wandered into a stranger’s house by mistake.
it home from the hospital around six. They were both in the kitchen by the time I dragged myself out of bed and marched groggily downstairs, my mother crumbling a brick of ground beef into the frying pan, my father standing by the refrigerator, clutching what appeared to be an infant-sized life preserver and looking around uncertainly, as if he’d wandered into a stranger’s house by mistake.
“Hey,” I said. “How’d it go? Was the exorcism a success?”
“It went fine,” he said, in a tone that suggested that even a “fine” hemorrhoidectomy didn’t quite qualify as a life-enriching experience. “How’d it go for you?”
“Okay. A little rusty at first. But tell me about the operation.”
“Nothing much to tell,” he muttered, subjecting me to the kind of scrutiny my mother used to inflict on me when she suspected me of coming home drunk or stoned from a high school party. “You sure you’re okay?”
“A little tired,” I conceded. “Why?”
“Just curious. I was worried about you today.”
I shifted my gaze to my mother. “So everything went okay? No complications or anything?”
My mother looked up from the sizzling meat, arching her eyebrows with playful significance. She seemed oddly merry for someone who’d spent most of her day in a hospital waiting room.
“Let’s just say that your father was not exactly a model patient.”
He didn’t deny it. He just stood there, frowning slightly and shifting his weight from one foot to the other, holding the little
tube in front of his chest and squeezing it as though it were an accordion.
tube in front of his chest and squeezing it as though it were an accordion.
“What happened?”
“He was a little—” My mother paused, searching for a word I had a feeling she’d already found. “I guess
uncooperative
is a good way of putting it.”
uncooperative
is a good way of putting it.”
“Uncooperative?”
“Recalcitrant?” suggested my mother. “Bordering on belligerent?”
My father didn’t protest any of these characterizations. Instead he just kept staring at me, as if I were the one who’d behaved badly during a minor operation.
“Next time,” he said, “I don’t care how simple the procedure, I’m going for the general. It’s not natural to be awake when they start passing out the scalpels.”
“What about those guys in the Civil War?” I reminded him. “Some of them were wide awake when they got their legs amputated. At most they got a shot of whisky or something to calm them down, maybe a bullet to bite on. And the surgeons back then were just using these rusty old hacksaws.”
I moved my arm back and forth, grimacing from the effort of forcing my rusty old hacksaw blade through a stubborn mass of muscle and bone. My father raised one hand in a subdued plea for mercy.
“Spare me, okay?”
“By the way,” I said. “What’s with the inner tube?”
“It’s a donut. I’m supposed to sit on it to keep the weight off my stitches.”
“Speaking of sitting,” my mother said, steering him gently out of the room on her way to the refrigerator, “why don’t the two of you go somewhere else and let me cook in peace?”
I followed my
father into the living room, saddened to see him walking with such obvious discomfort, tiptoeing almost, his legs
wide apart, shoulders hunched and arms dangling, looking like something on the far left side of one of those Ascent-of-Man charts. He stopped in the middle of the room, as if confused about what to do next.
father into the living room, saddened to see him walking with such obvious discomfort, tiptoeing almost, his legs
wide apart, shoulders hunched and arms dangling, looking like something on the far left side of one of those Ascent-of-Man charts. He stopped in the middle of the room, as if confused about what to do next.
“Want the couch?” I asked.
“Nah.” He dismissed the suggestion with an almost haughty air, as if he had not been in the habit of sitting down for many years now and didn’t expect to return to it anytime soon. “I’m fine right here.”
I plopped down on the couch and smiled up at him. He returned the grin without enthusiasm, slipping his right hand into his pocket and striking as casual a pose as you could strike while holding a rubber donut.
“So tell me,” he said, lowering his voice and glancing quickly over his shoulder before speaking. “Did those guys give you any trouble? The ones I was telling you about?”
“You mean the Lunch Monsters?”
He nodded, casting another swift glance. in the direction of the kitchen.
“Did something happen today?”
I hesitated for a second or two, long enough to register how pale and tired he looked.
“No,” I lied. “No hassles at all.”
“Good.” It wasn’t until I heard the relief with which he uttered the word that I realized how upset he’d been. “I was worried sick. I was sure something had happened.”
“Why?”
“One of their trucks was parked across the street.”
“Across the street from what?”
“From our house,” he said. “Right in front of the Wetzels’.”
“When?”
“Just now. A few minutes ago. They drove off as soon as your mother and I turned into the driveway.”
“Wow.” I tried to look puzzled instead of brightened. “That’s pretty weird.”
“That’s the kind of crap these people pull.” He took his hand out of his pocket and crossed his arms on his chest, shaking his head in disbelief. “Can you imagine? Trying to intimidate people in their own homes?”
I looked down at the rug, my mind flashing suddenly on the image of a baseball bat making contact with a Chihuahua. When I looked up, my father had uncrossed his arms and was leaning forward with both hands clasped behind his back. It made me nervous to have him looming over me like that.
“You sure you don’t want to sit down?” I asked him.
I was restless
after supper. My afternoon nap had revived me, but not to the point where I felt clear-headed enough to start working on my George Eliot paper or even to tackle the last thirty pages of
On
the Road
. What I needed was distraction, diversion, a cold beer, and someone to talk to. But I couldn’t think of anyone in the immediate vicinity I wanted to call, anyplace I wanted to go.
after supper. My afternoon nap had revived me, but not to the point where I felt clear-headed enough to start working on my George Eliot paper or even to tackle the last thirty pages of
On
the Road
. What I needed was distraction, diversion, a cold beer, and someone to talk to. But I couldn’t think of anyone in the immediate vicinity I wanted to call, anyplace I wanted to go.
Yale’s spring break was out of synch with those of other colleges—the big weeklong parties in Florida had already come and gone by the time our vacation began—so most of my high school friends were already back to the grind at Rutgers or Kean or Stockton State. Even if they’d been home, though, the sad fact of the matter was that we’d drifted apart in the past year or so in a way that had begun to seem irrevocable.
Zeke, Woody, the Squidman, and Steve—the litany was popular among my friends at Yale—these were the guys I’d hung out with in high school, guys I’d smoked pot and drunk beer and gone to countless concerts with. We called ourselves the Teenage Diplomats, after a phrase from “Blinded by the Light,” and made drunken pledges on graduation night not to let college and adulthood get in the way of our friendships. Less than three years later, though, any one of them would have been shocked to get a call from me out of the blue on a Monday night. None of us would have
liked to admit it, but I had become for them—as each of them had become for me—a voice out of the past, a guy they used to know.
liked to admit it, but I had become for them—as each of them had become for me—a voice out of the past, a guy they used to know.
Woody and Steve were at Rutgers, pledged to the same frat whose name I could never remember—Alpha Kappa Gamma, Gamma Kappa Alpha, Gabba Gabba Hey, it was all the same to me—and excelling at their respective majors (accounting for Steve, food science for Woody) while getting shit-faced three or four times a week and scoring with the occasional freshman girl too drunk to judge them on their merits. Zeke and the Squidman were living at home, Zeke half-heartedly attending Kean while spending the bulk of his time pumping iron at the gym where his on-and-off fiancée, Suzy, taught aerobics. Meanwhile, the Squidman had fallen into a dispiriting rut, loading trucks part-time for Jersey Express, delivering pizzas in the evenings, and spending his nights at the bar in Darwin Lanes, in the company of hard-core alkies and sad old guys in bowling shirts.
True to our pledge, the Diplomats had managed to stay pretty close through our freshman year of college and reached what in retrospect appeared to be the pinnacle of our togetherness the summer after that, when all five of us played softball for the Stay-A-While Tigers, a team affiliated with a bar the Squidman had become a regular at while flunking out of his first semester at Union County College. Most of the teams in our league decked themselves out in double-knit uniforms closely modeled on the colors worn by their professional namesakes—the Chem-Lawn Mets, for example, and Frank’s Wholesale Seafood Cardinals—but we just wore sweatpants and T-shirts bearing the two-part motto of our sponsor,
Stay-A-While …
THEN GET THE HELL
OUT!,
the first part set in tasteful cursive on the front, the second part printed in huge block letters on the back. Despite our humble attire, we made it all the way to the league finals, where we got our butts whupped by the Lemon Tree Transport Padres, a team of trash-talking school-bus drivers who slid into second with their sharpened cleats aimed at your shins.
Stay-A-While …
THEN GET THE HELL
OUT!,
the first part set in tasteful cursive on the front, the second part printed in huge block letters on the back. Despite our humble attire, we made it all the way to the league finals, where we got our butts whupped by the Lemon Tree Transport Padres, a team of trash-talking school-bus drivers who slid into second with their sharpened cleats aimed at your shins.
During the spring of our sophomore year, the Squidman fell into a bitter argument with the owner of the Stay-A-While, a wide-ranging dispute that began with a disagreement over whether he had, in fact, ordered a bag of peanuts and ended with “you and your asshole friends” being barred from the Tigers the following summer. Even without that particular setback, though, a kind of entropy seemed to have taken hold of the group. Steve and Woody rented a place in Manasquan with some of their frat buddies. Zeke and Suzy announced their second re-engagement, insisting that this time they were serious. That left the Squidman and me to carry on the tradition, or let it expire quietly.
Despite the fact
that we only lived a few minutes apart, the Squidman and I managed to go a full month after I returned from college without even running into each other. When we finally did—I was in the driveway. one Saturday morning, hosing down the Roach Coach; he was passing by in his rustbomb Dodge Dart—we greeted each other effusively, trading solemn promises to get together as soon as possible, promises we knew were lies even as we uttered them.
that we only lived a few minutes apart, the Squidman and I managed to go a full month after I returned from college without even running into each other. When we finally did—I was in the driveway. one Saturday morning, hosing down the Roach Coach; he was passing by in his rustbomb Dodge Dart—we greeted each other effusively, trading solemn promises to get together as soon as possible, promises we knew were lies even as we uttered them.
“Call me,” he said. “I’m around.”
“Sure. Or you call me.”
“Whichever,” agreed the Squidman. “Doesn’t matter.”
Our wariness wasn’t all that surprising. The Squidman and I were an unlikely pair, and the most tenuously connected members of the entire group. Where the other four of us had grown up together in Darwin and knew each other from kindergarten, Cub Scouts, and Little League, the Squidman—his real name was Paul Skidarsky, his original nickname of “Skid” somehow evolving into “Squid” and finally into “the Squidman”—had only moved into town in eighth grade, and didn’t attach himself to our group until midway through our junior year in high school, when he and Zeke took Auto Shop class together and discovered that they both had a lot more fun messing around with engines when they were stoned.
Given all the time we’d spent in each other’s company since
then, I still didn’t know him very well. For reasons that were unclear to me, he’d been raised by his grandmother and didn’t talk much about his parents. He liked AC/DC and Molly Hatchet, bands the rest of us despised, but never complained when we dragged him to concerts by Yes and Genesis, or even Renaissance. (Our moment of greatest intimacy had come during a Richie Black-more’s Rainbow show at the Capitol Theater, when he barfed on my sneakers and promptly fell asleep with his head on my shoulder, where it remained through three raucous encores.) He thought it was okay to call black people “niggers” and seemed annoyed when Steve and I tried to convince him that it wasn’t, though he finally agreed not to use the word in our presence. He never talked much, especially if the rest of us were discussing books—we were big fans of
The Lord of the Rings
and anything by Kurt Vonnegut—or current events, and his silences had grown longer as the rest of us got more and more absorbed in our college lives. Still, you never got the feeling that he felt excluded. He just seemed happy to have us all back in one place again.
then, I still didn’t know him very well. For reasons that were unclear to me, he’d been raised by his grandmother and didn’t talk much about his parents. He liked AC/DC and Molly Hatchet, bands the rest of us despised, but never complained when we dragged him to concerts by Yes and Genesis, or even Renaissance. (Our moment of greatest intimacy had come during a Richie Black-more’s Rainbow show at the Capitol Theater, when he barfed on my sneakers and promptly fell asleep with his head on my shoulder, where it remained through three raucous encores.) He thought it was okay to call black people “niggers” and seemed annoyed when Steve and I tried to convince him that it wasn’t, though he finally agreed not to use the word in our presence. He never talked much, especially if the rest of us were discussing books—we were big fans of
The Lord of the Rings
and anything by Kurt Vonnegut—or current events, and his silences had grown longer as the rest of us got more and more absorbed in our college lives. Still, you never got the feeling that he felt excluded. He just seemed happy to have us all back in one place again.
In the end, we spent a grand total of one night together that whole summer, and even that was an accident. Woody and Steve had invited us down the shore for a weekend in late July—there were rumors of wild parties, sorority sisters in microscopic bikinis—but when I climbed into the Squidman’s car that Friday night, he confessed that he’d lost the paper with the phone number and directions to the beach house. We tried calling Woody and Steve’s parents, but no one was at home in either place. After toying with the idea of driving down anyway and trying to locate them through trial and error—the Squidman was pretty sure they lived on a street with a name like Lighthouse or Seagull or something like that—we finally gave up and decided to stay in town until Saturday morning.
“At least we can fire up a doober,” he said by way of consolation, producing a fat joint from behind his ear with a magicianlike flourish.
It wasn’t good pot; the buzz I got from it was heavy and vaguely alarming, with an edge of paranoia aggravated by the Judas Priest
tape we were shouting over. We smoked the joint down to nothing, driving up and down the familiar empty streets, then stopped at the bowling alley for a couple of beers, making awkward stabs at conversation over the background thunder of exploding pins.
tape we were shouting over. We smoked the joint down to nothing, driving up and down the familiar empty streets, then stopped at the bowling alley for a couple of beers, making awkward stabs at conversation over the background thunder of exploding pins.
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