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Authors: Tom Perrotta

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BOOK: Joe College: A Novel
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The busboy came to clear away our mess. He couldn’t speak English and had to communicate by pointing. Polly said something
in Spanish that made him smile, and he began gathering our plates and glasses. Trying to be helpful, I flicked a dirty napkin in his direction, and suddenly felt like a jerk. To him I must have looked like a prince of privilege, drinking beer at midnight with a pretty girl, attending a school that cost more a semester than he probably made in a year. He muttered,
“Gracias,”
and dropped the napkin into the empty pitcher.
“You know the real reason I want to paint this summer?” Polly’s foot touched mine under the table again. This time she kept it there.
“What?”
She smiled. “I want to look like an artist. I love those paint-splattered jeans they wear. It makes them look so serious.”
“Don’t do it,” I said.
“Don’t do what?”
“The paint-splattered jeans.”
“Why not?”
“It wouldn’t be fair.” My foot felt huge against hers, like someone had inflated it with a pump. “You’re too cool already.”
 
 
Both of us
needed to use the bathroom before we left. The women’s room was upstairs, not far from the pizza counter, but men had to descend a steep stairway and follow a narrow hallway to a cramped, doorless stall lit by a naked bulb. I unzipped and cursed myself for not wearing a decent pair of underpants or packing one of my lambskins just in case, but these recriminations were beside the point. The night had veered wildly off course, heading toward a destination that hadn’t even been on the map when I’d gotten dressed after my shower. I briefly considered ditching my shabby briefs in the garbage can, presenting myself to Polly as more of a devil-may-care sort of guy than I really was, but quickly realized that removing my underwear in the present circumstances was out of the question. If we really did end up in a pants-off situation, she was just going to have to accept me for the slob I was.
This was the thought foremost in my mind when I stepped out of the bathroom and into her arms. I hadn’t expected her to be there, and let out an involuntary cry of alarm that she stifled with a kiss. It was an abrupt, determined kiss, almost like someone had dared her to do it, and it was over before I really had a chance to process what was happening. She stepped away from me in the murky hallway, tilting her head to study me from a different angle.
“Walk me home?” she asked. There was an anxious tremor in her voice, as if she’d somehow gotten the idea that there was the slightest chance in hell I might say no.
She lived right around the corner, so we didn’t have far to go. It was too bad, in a way, because everything seemed perfect just then. The night was clear and cool, the moon bright; Polly’s hand was warm. I would’ve been happy to walk with her for hours down the quiet streets, traversing the entire campus, past the darkened libraries and lit-up residential colleges, the closed stores and the blank fronts of secret societies, past stone walls and ivy-covered moats and iron gates, never out of earshot of tapping typewriters or the sound of laughter seeping through a closed window.
As it was, the walk lasted maybe a minute. Even so, I remember feeling like Wordsworth on the verge of a sublime experience, one of his “spots of time.” I was alert and deeply connected to my surroundings, the familiar world seemed to vibrate with unexpected significance. The revelation it brought me wasn’t grand or romantic, though—it was just a simple sense of belonging.
I’m
here
, I thought.
I’m happy.
“Oh, shit,” said Polly. Her hand slipped out of mine.
Peter Preston was waiting out in front of the Silliman gate in a leather bomber jacket, leaning against the hood of his Volkswagen Rabbit. Polly looked at him. He looked at me. I looked at her, then back at him, feeling instantly diminished by his presence—shorter, younger, more badly dressed than I’d been a second ago. He made me think of all the books I hadn’t read, and all the ones I’d read but hadn’t fully understood.
“Hi, Danny,” he said, as if it were a chance meeting in the street,
involving just the two of us. He knew me from class the previous year—my final paper on
Measure for Measure
had been nominated for one of the sophomore English prizes—and had taken me to lunch to congratulate me on a job well done.
“Hi, Professor Preston.”
He gave a weird laugh.
“Might as well call me Peter.”
“Okay.”
He combed his fingers through his hair and gave a big sigh. He seemed stricken, like he’d just received terrible news but for some reason felt obligated to smile about it. Out of the blue, I remembered this girl in my section remarking on his uncanny resemblance to Andy Gibb.
“Mind if I talk to Polly?” he asked.
I checked with her, already knowing the answer. She bit her lip, dismissing me with a nod.
“I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”
My face felt hot, like I was standing too close to a fireplace. I gave a shrug of what was supposed to be mature resignation and headed off down College Street as though it were all the same to me, as though I’d expected the night to end like this all along. It seemed important not to look back or give too much thought to what they might be doing or saying, so I tried to distract myself by whispering the word “fuck” over and over again, in unison with my footsteps, and thinking about how cool I would be in the leather bomber jacket I was sure I would someday own.
By the time
I got within striking distance of J. E.—Jonathan Edwards, my residential college—I had cheered up considerably. My initial sense of defeat had subsided, and I was beginning to see the night as a major step forward. Polly had kissed me; I had told her the truth about Cindy. I was off the sidelines and into the game, and the score wasn’t nearly as lopsided in Peter Preston’s favor as I’d imagined.
Fumbling for my keys by the main gate, I grew uneasy, as though I were being watched. Casting a furtive glance down Library Walk, the elegant bluestone path that separated J. E. from Branford College, I spotted a shadowy figure on the grass between the walkway and the Branford moat, maybe thirty yards away. He had his back to me and was partially obscured by a tree, but something—his distinctive slouch, or maybe just the drape of his coat—told me right away that it was Nick. I was amazed to see him still hanging around campus at this hour.
I wasn’t sure if he’d seen me, and could just as easily have slipped through the gate and left him to his business, but I didn’t. Part of my hesitation came from a fear of looking like I was snubbing him—grouchy and foul-mouthed as he was, Nick could be surprisingly touchy—but mainly I was just curious. Nick had gotten under my skin over the past couple of months. I’d met a lot of guys like him back home, factory workers and manual laborers who seemed too smart for the jobs they’d ended up with and only knew how to fight back with muttered curses and bitter jokes, guys who played the lottery every week just to remind themselves that you couldn’t win. Like them, Nick made me wonder if I was a fool for
thinking I had some kind of God-given right to satisfying work and personal happiness, for believing that what separated me from him was anything more than a few points on a standardized test and a little bit of luck that was bound to run out long before I reached the finish line.
I didn’t walk any more softly than usual, but for some reason he didn’t hear me approach. He just stood there, lost in thought, gazing into a lighted window on the ground floor of Branford, on the far side of the moat. Kristin Willard was framed in the window, her profile angelic in the pale glow of her reading lamp. She seemed to be concentrating hard, as if something in the book didn’t make sense to her. Another girl appeared in the doorway behind her, but Kristin read on, oblivious to the intrusion. Our conversation in the dining hall came back to me, Nick and Matt joking about inviting her to our orgy, but it seemed wrong now, creepy instead of funny.
I cleared my throat.
Nick couldn’t have reacted more violently to a gunshot. He spun on his heels, emitting a strangled yelp of distress, and flung his arms into an awkward karate stance that couldn’t conceal the flinch of pure terror on his face. I jumped backward, raising my own hands in a reflexive gesture of self-defense. We froze in these half-assed Bruce Lee poses for a few seconds, until Nick finally realized who I was.
“You got a good dentist?” he asked me.
“What?”
“If you ever do that to me again,” he whispered, “you’re gonna be missing a whole bunch of fucking teeth.”
He brushed off the front of his coat as if he’d gotten crumbs on it, and walked off without another word. When I checked on Kristin again, she was gone. All I could see through the window was the lamplight falling on her empty desk.
 
 
My heart still
pounding, I opened the door to my suite and stepped into a pungent cloud of pot smoke spiced with the industrial-strength odor of fermented pickled cabbage.
Pretzel
Logic
was playing on the stereo and the common room was crowded with visitors from the second floor, including the elusive Vernon Davis, the only black guy on our entryway. I had barely registered my surprise at his presence when Ted lifted the red plastic tube off the coffee table and held it out to me. Sang did the same with a glass jar the size of a human head.
“Bong hit?” asked one.
“Kimchi?” inquired the other.
Over the past couple of months, these two items had become the centerpieces of a popular late-night ritual in our suite. Sang had returned from Christmas break in California with three huge containers of his grandfather’s homemade kimchi—it was supposedly aged in the traditional manner, buried in a hole in the backyard—and he invited a couple of his Asian friends over to try some on the night before classes began. Shortly before they arrived, Ted broke open a gigantic Thai stick his prep school lacrosse coach had given him as a Christmas present. Those who partook of these two delicacies in the proper order—I wasn’t one of them—pronounced the combination nothing short of miraculous, and word had gotten around.
“No thanks,” I said.
“No bong hit?” Ted squinted at me in broken-hearted disbelief. It wounded him when people didn’t want to share in his pleasures.
“Sorry,” I said, my willpower already starting to erode. “I’ve got five hundred pages of
Middlemarch
to go before I sleep.”
“So?” Ted glanced around the room for support. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“You ever try to read George Eliot stoned?” I felt somewhat sheepish advancing this line of argument after splitting two pitchers with Polly, but it was important to my self-image that I at least try to resist. “You can’t get past the epigraphs.”
“Eat some kimchi,” said Donald Park, a Korean-American straight-arrow who only tolerated our dope smoking out of a deep, almost primal craving for his ancestral staple. “It’s scientifically proven to clear the mind and freshen the breath.”
“Danny’s a kimchi virgin,” Sang explained, as though this shameful fact hadn’t already attained the status of common knowledge. He passed the jar across the table to Donald, who unwrapped a pair of restaurant chopsticks he’d removed from his shirt pocket and used them to fish out a radioactive-looking wedge of cabbage, its pale surface speckled with chili powder. He munched it slowly, regarding me with undisguised pity.
“I’m working up to it,” I assured him. “I’m gonna get there any day now.”
Among my friends—especially my more or less omnivorous Asian friends—I was widely celebrated for my strange eating habits. I had grown up in a house where spices were frowned upon, and where eating out inevitably meant pizza or McDonald’s. Before college, the only Chinese food I had ever consumed was a mouthful of canned, uncooked La Choy water chestnuts whose unusual texture had left me deeply traumatized. But it wasn’t just the cuisine of other lands that gave me trouble; I had also cultivated a profound, unshakable revulsion for a number of common American foods, including eggs, raw tomatoes, mayonnaise, mushrooms, sea creatures, and every vegetable known to humankind with the exception of iceberg lettuce, canned corn, and overcooked green beans. On the other hand, the few things I did like—hot dogs, BLTs (minus the T), French dip sandwiches, chocolate pudding, pancakes, saltines with peanut butter—I consumed in amounts that had made me a minor legend in the dining hall. I justified myself by saying that I more than made up in volume what I lacked in variety, but the truth was that I was often embarrassed by my cowardice, the way I forced my friends to bend over backward for me when choosing a restaurant or even ordering pizza. I had a number of self-improvement projects in the works in those days, and one of the main ones involved forcing myself to become a more adventurous eater.
“Tonight’s the night,” sang Hank Yamashita, in a credible imitation of Rod Stewart. Hank was a six-foot-tall Japanese-American from the Upper East Side who read
GQ
and had taken it upon himself to act as my informal fashion advisor. It was at Hank’s urging that I had replaced my cherished blue suede winter coat with a less eye-catching parka, and had relegated my new Thom McAn cowboy boots to a dusty corner of my closet. (It wasn’t that Hank had anything against cowboy boots per se—he owned several pairs himself—but he did object to the peculiar orange glow mine seemed to give off, especially at twilight or in cloudy weather.) “Vernon’s gonna take the plunge,” he added.
“Tonight?” I asked.
Vernon responded with a skeptical nod, and it wasn’t until then that I noticed the chopstick in his right hand. On the tip, impaled like a check on a spindle, was a tiny scrap of kimchi.
“That’s the plan,” he said, holding the chopstick in front of his face like a sparkler. “How hard could it be?”
Vernon was a short, powerful-looking guy with no neck and the suave baritone voice of a late-night deejay. He lived with Hank and Donald, but generally kept himself apart from the social life of the entryway. If you asked his roommates where he was, they’d just give a vague shrug, as if to suggest that it was a big world out there, and your guess was as good as theirs. Ever since I’d met Vernon freshman year and learned that he’d attended the same Jersey City high school as my mother, I’d been hoping we could become friends, but lately I’d begun to suspect that it wasn’t in the cards. I couldn’t seem to find a way of talking to him that didn’t transform even the simplest conversation into some sort of debate about race in America. He’d been steering clear of me since our last meal in the dining hall, when I’d pressed a little too hard to enlist him on my side of an argument about Richard Wright’s portrayal of Bigger in
Native Son
.
“You know what?” I turned to Donald, seized by a sudden jolt of inspiration. “I think I’ll try some, too.”
“You’re kidding,” said Sang.
I shook my head. “Why not? I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”
“All right!” Sang congratulated me with an upraised fist. I was touched by how pleased he seemed. “I knew you could do it.”
Donald plunged a chopstick into the jar and speared a bite-sized morsel of cabbage. I took it from him and smiled at Vernon.
“Safety in numbers,” I said.
Vernon gave a barely perceptible nod. Then he brought the kimchi to his nose and gave it a little sniff.
“Here goes nothing,” he said, looking me straight in the eye as he closed his mouth over the tip of the chopstick. I followed his lead. He withdrew the chopstick and chewed slowly, his expression shifting from grave suspicion to cautious approval.
As soon as I bit down, my mouth flooded with powerful sensations. The kimchi was cold, briny, crunchy, and spicy, though not nearly as fiery as I’d expected. It was okay.
“Well?” said Sang. “What’s the verdict?”
Hank, Donald, and Ted leaned forward in their seats, as if something important were about to happen. Vernon and I traded glances, each waiting for the other to take the lead.
“Not bad,” we finally blurted out, almost in unison.
Something about our answer struck the other guys as funny. Sang slapped his leg. Hank and Donald traded high fives in our honor. Ted shook his head, an expression of solemn wonderment taking hold of his face. He held out both his meaty arms as wide as they would go, as if he were thinking about embracing all five of us at once.
“This,” he said, pausing to make eye contact with each of us in turn. “This is why I came to Yale.”
 
 
An hour or
so later, I slipped away from the party. It was almost two in the morning, but my breakthrough with the kimchi had given me a second wind. Even after a couple of celebratory bong hits, I felt strangely alert, eager to resume my plodding trek through
Middlemarch
My mood was such that it didn’t even bother me to open the door and find Max sprawled out on my bed, his bare, not-exactly-spotless feet propped up on my pillow.
“Hey,” I said, “what’s a nice girl like you doing in a dump like this?”
Unaware of the emotional progress I’d made since our last encounter, he scrambled into sitting position, shielding his face with a fat hardcover.
“Sorry.” He peeked out from behind the book. “I would’ve stayed in my room, but Nancy wanted to go to bed early.”
“No problem.” I dismissed his concerns with a magnanimous flick of the wrist. “Whatcha readin’?”
“Something about Leon Czolgosz. The anarchist who shot McKinley.”
“Nice guy?”
Max didn’t seem to notice that I was goofing on him.
“I wouldn’t call him nice, exactly. But I’ll tell you what—that McKinley was a first-class dirtbag in his own right. You want to know what’s wrong with America, study up a little on the McKinley Administration.”
“Got what he deserved, huh?”
“That’s not for me to say. I’m just saying there are different ways to be a killer.”
“I hear you,” I said, thinking suddenly of my parents, and the way my life sometimes seemed to embody their worst suspicions about college. Was this what they’d scrimped and sacrificed for all those years? So their son could spend his Tuesday nights drinking beer, smoking dope, eating weird food, and learning to see the assassin’s side of the story?
Max rose slowly from the bed, a distracted expression on his face. He closed his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose with two fingers, as if he had a headache.
“Guess what?” I told him. “I just ate some kimchi. Me and Vernon.”
He let go of his nose and turned his attention to his navel area, which he scratched with more than run-of the-mill thoroughness. The skin down there looked pink and a bit rashy, like he had poison ivy or something. When he was done, he paused for a few seconds to examine his fingernails.
BOOK: Joe College: A Novel
8.28Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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