Probation (6 page)

This used to be a hell of a lot easier. And a hell of a lot more fun. I suppose I’m too distracted to really concentrate on imagining the big, big movie star riding my cock, shouting filthy names at me, ordering me to slap his ass as he bounces on my pole. Then again, lately I’ve been too distracted to concentrate when an actual live body is riding my cock, shouting filthy names at me, ordering me to slap his ass as he bounces on my pole. Fuck it, why not just read a good book, I decide, turning the pages of
Bang the Drum Slowly
until I drift off to sleep.

I
t’s either this dump or the comfy linoleum of the Knoxville Regional Airport. One bounce on the bed makes me regret not spending the night on the terminal floor. I was damned lucky to get this sarcophagus. Every other room in town was booked a year in advance for homecoming weekend.

This was supposed to be a day trip. I flew in at nine. The manager of the emporium of Official, Authorized University of Tennessee Merchandise was emphatic. She would not, could not, make any decisions without the architect from Facilities who had been stricken by the flu that morning. I tried to persuade her she could at least
look
at the catalogue, let me take a few measurements.

“No, sorry,” she said, perspiring in her Official, Authorized University of Tennessee Sweatshirt, size XXX-Large. “Facilities is very strict about these things. It will have to wait until he’s back on his feet.”

I would have sliced the fat bitch’s brake cables if I’d known which car in the lot was hers. Now I’m stuck overnight in this backwater, on the hook for the cost of the counseling session I’d had to cancel with less than twenty-four hours’ notice, all on account of a five-minute sales call. It’s a beautiful autumn night, crisp and cool, the oaken hint of bonfires lingering in the air. It’s hard to believe that only a few hundred miles away, raging thunderstorms have halted all air traffic into the Charlotte airport, stranding weary road warriors who just want to spend Friday night in their own beds. I don’t have a bed to call my own so it’s hard to call this a hardship. It’s almost a blessing, in fact. When I called my mother with my traveler’s tale of woe, she worried about me getting a flight tomorrow. Randy T. Olsson and his (third? fourth?) wife would be so disappointed if I couldn’t make it to dinner Saturday night. He’s been asking after you since you came home from High Point, she said, a harmless little white lie. Don’t worry, I said, I’ll be there, nearly dropping to my knees to beg Jupiter Pluvius to take mercy on me and summon a hurricane gale to spare me from an evening of forced small talk with Randy T, who, as the president of Nocera Heat and Air, had been receptive to the gentle suggestion by the sole shareholder, my mother, that perhaps I might appreciate becoming reacquainted with old friends my own age.

A scavenger hunt for essentials—toothbrush and paste, disposable razor, personal lubricant—takes me deep into the heart of Knoxville, probably the most improbable candidate ever for the site of a World’s Fair. The town is teeming with alumni of all ages, drunkenly toasting Alma Mater and imploring the gods of the gridiron to deliver victory tomorrow. Not that it will really matter if the justification for excessive alcohol intake is celebrating a triumph or mourning a defeat.

I’m sitting at the bar of one those classic campus rath-skellers, eating a hamburger and nursing a beer. A short woman, just shy of middle age and sporting a cascade of blond ringlets she should have cut years ago, sidles next to me.

“You shouldn’t be here all alone tonight. Come over and meet mah friends.”

She’s a type I know all too well. The aging Party-Hearty Gal. Tri Delt, everyone else has. She’s surrendered to her metabolism and forsaken calorie counts. She has to believe there’s at least one man out there who’s looking for a girl with a sense of humor and a head on her shoulders instead of a stick-thin, broomstick-up-her-ass debutante. She’d made sure there was no ring on my finger before she’d approached.

“Class?” she asks.

“I’m not an alumnus,” I say.

“That’s okay, tonight everyone’s a Volunteer!” she says.

I might as well be a gentleman and help her caddy the drinks she’s ordered to her table. Her friends eye me expectantly as we approach. I realize it’s been a setup, sending Little Gloria Bunker up to the bar, all alone. The men stand and shake my hand. The women nod politely, squeezing their chairs together, clearing a space next to Little Gloria.

Andy, Andy, Andy, Andy Nocera, Andy, I repeat as I’m introduced round the table. I take my assigned seat, next to Little Gloria. They whisper among themselves, talking about me, giggling when they realize I know I’m the topic of conversation. They’ve been drinking since five; they’re all a little toasted. The men make crude remarks; the women act offended. Someone belches and everyone pretends to be disgusted. I feel like I’m back in college. I guess that’s what a homecoming is all about.

I got to the party a semester too late. The dormitory alliances and rivalries had been etched in stone when I arrived at Davidson after the Christmas break. The other freshmen had already overcome their bouts of homesickness and laid the foundations of their new world. No one was particularly interested in a newcomer, particularly one who was shy by nature, unsure of himself, not the type to approach a table and introduce himself, a coward who would never make the first move.

So I would find a seat alone, at the far end of the dining room table, and hunker down over a plate of macaroni and cheese and a pint of milk, pretending to be absorbed in the run-on sentences of William Faulkner while I counted the minutes until Friday afternoon when I could run home to Gastonia for the weekend. Later she would admit she’d had her eye on me since the day I’d arrived and that she never got beyond the first thirty pages of the copy of
The Sound and the Fury
she’d bought as an excuse to strike up a conversation with me that February night. (Valentine’s Day, if memory serves.) And later still, she would admit she knew from that first night I was what she had been looking for.

A boy who had to be approached, who wouldn’t speak until spoken to.

And who would then never shut up.

Alice Atkinson McDermott arrived at Davidson College with one ambition. To be different. Just being here was the first step. She’d made her stand, insisting on matriculating at this small, well-regarded liberal arts college—a spawning ground for communists and sexual libertines, in her father’s certain estimation—instead of the small Catholic women’s colleges her older sisters had been forced to attend. As formidable as those Amazons were, they, unlike her, hadn’t had the good fortune to be born the youngest, the prettiest, and the favorite. And so her father, infamous among television-addicted insomniacs in both Carolinas as the King of Unpainted Furniture, finally conceded. On one condition. That Alice promised to attend Mass and take Holy Communion every Sunday. By the middle of Lent, I was attending with her.

But a month of Sundays and three dozen Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary wouldn’t have fooled J. Curtis McDermott. He sized me up on first sight, at that tense Sunday afternoon brunch where I chain-smoked and refused to allow anything but black coffee to pass my lips. The simple fact that he hated me convinced her she was in love with her smart-ass, daydreaming little rebel. If truth be told, she would have preferred it if my armpits hadn’t needed a good shellacking with an anti-perspirant. But my sour apple presence certainly made an impression in the prissy little restaurant that served dessert cakes dusted with confectioner’s sugar sifted over a paper doily.

But the body odor she mistook as an act of defiance was, in reality, the byproduct of sheer, abject terror. The overbearing pitchman on television, the King of Unpainted Furniture, was a soft sell compared to the Grand Inquisitor confronting me across the table. He was a massive, strawberry-blond Irishman with chiseled features, a barrel-chested Spencer Tracy with a seventeen-and-a-half-inch neck. He waved his hands as he spoke, inspiring irrational fears of the Boston Strangler’s meaty hands gripping my neck. He bore down on me like a heat-seeking missile.

“Where are you from?”

“Gastonia.”

“How do you spell your last name?”

“N-O-C-E-R-A.”

I enunciated as slowly and carefully as a parent teaching a toddler the alphabet. Alice giggled, drawing an apprehensive look from her mother.

“I don’t think I know your family,” he said, suspicious of my origins.

“I have a cousin in High Point. Maybe you know him. Zack Vanzetti?”

Alice kicked me under the table, barely able to contain her glee.

“I don’t think so. What parish does he belong to?”

“Alice says you’re an English major,” her mother interjected in a futile attempt to steer the conversation to neutral territory.

“I just don’t understand that,” he declared. “You’ve been speaking English since you learned how to talk.”

“Actually, Daddy, Andy grew up speaking Bulgarian,” Alice said, purposefully avoiding the pleading looks from her mother.

“I thought you were a wop?” he blurted, hypertension pumping blood into his cheeks.

“My mother was born in the Balkans,” I lied, suppressing any trace of sarcasm in my voice.

“Jesus,” he said, exasperated, turning to his wife for reassurance that North Carolina hadn’t been infiltrated by communist agents from behind the Iron Curtain. “Are those people Catholic?”

I refused to let him pay for my meal, such as it was, and threw a couple of ones on the table when he wouldn’t take my money. He wanted to have me drawn and quartered. His daughter would have married me on the spot.

That night we made love for the first time.

I was sprawled on the floor of her dorm room, flipping through her records in a futile search for Buddy Holly in the stack of Schubert lieder and Bach choral works. Try as I might, I couldn’t appreciate the subtle beauty of Strauss’s
Four Last Songs.

“Let’s listen to this instead,” she said and I flopped on my back, swept up in the overture to
The Magic Flute.
She curled up beside me. I felt the heat of her body and could almost taste the peppermint on her breath. I stared at the ceiling and she touched my chin, gently turning my face toward her. I knew what I was supposed to do next. I closed my eyes and kissed her.

I knew she could tell I was a virgin. I could tell she wasn’t, which made me all the more nervous. When she undressed and turned to show me her body, I realized I had never fantasized about how she looked naked. I stared at her breasts and her vagina. I knew I liked her, maybe even loved her. I knew I didn’t desire her body. Funny thing about the body, though. It can respond to anything, anytime, even without the desire to possess.

“Shit,” I said, pushing myself away from her. “We can’t do this. I don’t have any rubbers,” I announced, not exactly regretting the reprieve.

“Don’t worry. I’m on the pill.”

I was awkward at first, but found my rhythm soon enough. I knew her moans were real. You can’t fake a faker.

She made it easy for me, always careful not to be too demanding. She seemed genuinely impressed by the inanities that rolled off my silver-tipped tongue. I’d always been the listener, never the talker, and certainly never the center of attention. But there was something in Alice’s deep green eyes, something about the way she’d nod her head, anxious that I know she absolutely, positively, one hundred percent, agreed with me, that compelled me to share my insights and announce my opinions. All of which, in hindsight, were the pathetically ordinary pronouncements of a self-absorbed undergraduate, the all-too-familiar polemics endured by long-suffering parents footing the bill to gild their (temporarily, they hope) obnoxious offspring with a liberal-arts education.

Alice insisted I go home with her one warm spring weekend. Their house made the Monument to Heat and Air where I’d grown up look like a shack. We arrived late Friday and were driving back to the dormitory by Saturday afternoon. The King had gone ballistic when he stumbled upon the copy of
The Militant, the Voice of the Socialist Workers Party
I intentionally left sitting on the toilet tank of the guest bathroom. Bellowing at the top of his lungs, he declared me guilty of treason. In my snidest, most condescending voice, I informed him it was perfectly legal to cast my vote against the oppression of free-market capitalism. And I then announced I could not spend one more minute in his house. Alice followed me out the door, triumphant.

Her mother came rushing toward us, pleading for a treaty or at least a temporary cease-fire.

“Alice, please, come back inside. He’ll be miserable if he thinks you’re mad at him.”

“Well, I am.”

“Alice, he loves you.”

“And I love Andy,” she announced, closing the door and telling me to start the car.

I knew she was mine forever.

Little Gloria Bunker can’t accept that I can’t stay for the Big Game tomorrow. The booze is flowing; everyone’s loose and insistent on having a good time. She realizes she’s going to have to be a
little
forward. After all, the night’s not getting younger and my hands have yet to stray under the table. They’re announcing last call, one more round, and the invitation to my room isn’t forthcoming. She’s shouting, thinking I’ll believe she’s just trying to be heard over the din. But I know she’s hoping that her breath tickling my ear is what I need to get me started. Her friends are on the dance floor, flailing away to Donna Summer’s “Last Dance,” very consciously having decided to
leave us alone.
Little Gloria arches her back and takes the plunge.

“Would you like to stop by my hotel for a little while?”

She’s mortified when I politely decline. She hates me for forcing her to declare herself, to put herself on the line, only to be rejected. I feel for her. I really do. But better to disappoint her now than later, when she’s lying naked, ashamed of the body that’s incapable of provoking the appropriate response in me. She couldn’t know that I’m done with that. I’ve exhausted my ability to respond to a woman. I couldn’t do it if I wanted to. And I don’t want to.

I know what I do want. Knoxville’s the big city in these ol’ parts and it’s a party weekend. Tucked in my pocket is a torn page from Damron’s
Men’s Travel Guide
promising a Young Crowd and Entertainment at the Annex, a Very Popular starred entry, a Private Club, serving after hours for Members Only. The parking lot is full and idiots like me are driving in circles, waiting for a space to open up. A couple steps in front of my car, forcing me to throw on the brake. It’s Laurel and Hardy, a pair of clowns, parodies of masculinity in tight leather jackets and faux motorcycle caps, trailing cigar ashes as they wobble in their lace-up combat boots, as unsteady as two drag queens in stilettos.