Read Joe College: A Novel Online

Authors: Tom Perrotta

Joe College: A Novel (28 page)

“Do I know you?” I asked, pronouncing the words with great care so I wouldn’t sound drunk.
The question didn’t seem to surprise him.
“Larry,” he said, pulling off his hat to reveal the closely cropped hair underneath. “Larry Barlow.”
“Jeez,” I said. “You’re a cop?”
“Just got hired. Hard to believe, huh?”
“Not really,” I lied.
Larry was the older brother of Mike Barlow, the biggest stoner in my class. Mike wasn’t a close friend of mine, but we’d known each other since kindergarten. When we were sophomores at Harding, Larry used to drive Mike to school, and sometimes in bad weather they’d pull up to the bus stop and offer me a ride, their car a rolling cloud of reefer smoke. Back then, both Barlows had long blond hair that fell way past their shoulders.
“Aren’t you at Harvard or something?” he asked.
“Yale. It’s our spring break.”
“Yale, Harvard.” Larry pronounced these names as a pair, the way people often did in Darwin, as if it were somehow beside the point to distinguish between the two. “Same bullshit, right?”
“No kidding,” I said. “How’s Mike?”
“Okay.” Larry shook his head like he wasn’t too keen on elaborating.
“Tell him I said ‘hi.’”
“Hey,” he said. A sly smile spread across his face. “Know who I saw from your class?”
“Who?”
“That girl Jenny. The one who did the Coletti brothers. She dances at Cousin Butchie’s.”
“I know. I saw her there last summer.”
“Fuckin’ amazing.” The walkie-talkie crackled on Larry’s belt. He brought it up to his mouth and mumbled some numbers into it. Then he shoved it back into its holster and pointed at my front end. “You got a broken headlight.”
“I know. My dad’s taking it to the shop tomorrow.”
“Take care, man.”
“You too.”
I watched in the sideview mirror as Larry climbed back into his patrol car, turned off his overhead lights, and swung what would
have been an illegal U turn if anyone else had done it. We were free to go, but I just sat there in the driver’s seat, waiting for the turbulence in my stomach to subside.
“That was weird,” said Matt.
“Excuse me,” I told him.
Cheeks bulging, one hand cupped over my mouth, I stuck my head and shoulders through the open window into the cool night air, wriggling forward as far as I could go to protect my father’s truck. At the crucial moment, I uncovered my mouth and spread my arms wide, as if preparing to take flight.
 
 
Things could be
worse, I reminded myself. I wasn’t in jail, I wasn’t in the hospital, and I wasn’t married. My life was pretty much on track, unchanged by the obstacle course of potential disasters I’d been running for the past several days. A week from now I’d be back at school, picking up where I’d left off, re-dedicating myself to my studies, hanging with my friends, hopefully straightening things out with Polly. Things could definitely have been worse.
In general, I had a fairly high opinion of myself at that stage in my life. I considered myself an intelligent person, trusted my instincts and judgment, and didn’t spend a lot of time brooding about mistakes I’d made in the past. I believed that my success in the world, such as it was, was my own doing and no one else’s, a well-deserved reward for years of hard work, perseverance, and good-humored self-denial. I believed that I was a decent person and expected the future to be good to me.
But that wasn’t how I felt just then. Lying in bed long after midnight, the darkness streaming into my wide open eyes, I saw my life as a car with no brakes careening down a dangerous mountain road. Get in my way and I’ll run you down, or at least leave you in the dust. Not because I want to, but simply because I have to. There’s Cindy. Whoops. Oh hi, Kevin. Sorry. Zeke, Woody, Steve, the Squidman, my old roommate Seth. Later, dudes. Even Junior. Who else would I have to bowl over or whack with a Louisville
Slugger on my way to wherever the hell it was I was going? My parents and teachers, the women I’d love and the one I’d eventually marry, my unborn children, my current and future best friends? Might as well bring them on, get it over with, because I’m on my way, there’s no stopping now, no way, not even if I wanted to.
 
 
I must have
fallen asleep, because the phone woke me at eight minutes after three in the morning. Maybe I was dreaming of Polly, because I remember thinking it was her—it had to be!—as I threw off the covers and launched myself out of bed, forgetting as I did so that Matt’s recumbent body was positioned midway between me and my desk. I stepped on his arm and stumbled over his torso, eliciting only a feeble groan of protest from the deepest recesses of the sleeping bag, while at the same time managing to maintain my balance well enough to snatch up the receiver before the completion of the third ring.
“Polly?” I gasped.
A confused moment of silence followed.
“Danny?”
The voice was unfamiliar, but definitely not Polly’s, and I found myself retroactively gripped by the fear that usually accompanies a 3 A.M. phone call.
“Who’s this?” I asked.
“Alice,” she said. “From next door. DeFillipo.”
“Oh hi,” I said, sounding cheerfully idiotic even to myself. “How’s it going?”
“Your truck’s on fire.”
It wasn’t until that very moment that I became aware of the unusual brightness in the room, a warm orangey glow filtering in through the window shade.
“My truck?” I said.
“Your father’s,” she said, a certain edge of impatience creeping into her voice. “The truck in your driveway.”
“It’s on fire?”
“I called 911. They should be there any minute.”
“Thanks,” I told her. “That was nice of you.”
 
 
It seemed like
a long time before the fire department arrived. I stood beside my father on the front stoop and watched the Roach Coach burning in our driveway. It wasn’t a big deal, really, nothing too spectacular. It was the cab that was on fire, the toxic-looking flames licking out of the empty spaces where the windows and windshield used to be, a cloud of acrid gray smoke gathering over the remains of my father’s big dream like a cartoon illustration of bad luck.
“I don’t think you two should be out here,” my mother said, sticking her worried face out the front door. “What if it blows up?”
My father didn’t answer. He seemed riveted by the tiny inferno, as though he were making an effort to memorize it down to the smallest detail: the strange chocolatey undertone beneath the stench of burning plastic, the abrupt way the truck sank—like an elephant kneeling in the grass—when one of the front tires blew, the disappearance of the paint on the front door—like an eraser moving from the bottom up—our trademark bug turning to vapor before our eyes, followed in turn by my father’s own name. All the while the storage cube kept gleaming brighter and brighter, as though it were being polished and purified by the flames. I remember wondering if maybe it was fireproof, if, when it was all over, we could just pop open the display door and treat ourselves and the neighbors, many of whom had gathered on their own front stoops to bear witness to our misfortune, to a miraculous breakfast feast of warm but intact fruit pies and Ring Dings and Funny Bones.
“Come on,” my mother said. “Both of you.”
Neither one of us moved.
When the firemen came, they sprayed our Roach Coach with chemical foam. They kept spraying long after the flames had been snuffed out, until the husk of the cab was barely visible beneath the frothy meringue and the whole truck seemed to be made of soap suds rather than steel and rubber.
I wanted to say something to my father, to tell him how sorry I was, how it was all my fault, how much I knew the truck meant to him and how I’d figure out some way to make it up to him, but I was scared just then, scared not only to look at his face but to have him look at mine. I thought he might be able to see beyond my shame and sorrow to the secret feeling underneath, the purely selfish sensation of having been saved yet again—saved from the Lunch Monsters, from the expectations of Chuckie and the rest of the guys at the warehouse, from having to get up at four in the morning for the rest of my vacation.
My father must have mistaken my silence for sadness, because he laid his hand on my shoulder and left it there for what began to seem like a long time. We didn’t touch each other much, and when we did it didn’t usually last much longer than a handshake or a pat on the back.
“It’s okay,” he told me.
Finally I turned to him, expecting to see any number of things on his face—anger, grief, panic, maybe even tears—anything but what was actually there, the mild expression of acceptance, maybe even the ghost of a smile hovering underneath.
“It’s okay,” he said again, nodding at the piece of smoking, foam-drenched wreckage in the driveway. “That goddam thing was killing me.”
Townies
From a distance
, it makes perfect sense that the people and the things you think will save you are the very ones that have the power to disappoint you most bitterly, but up close it can hit you as a bewildering surprise.
At least that’s how it was for me, returning to school after spring break. In my mind Yale was the garden from which I’d nearly been expelled, a haven of learning and friendship, the one place in the world where I could really be myself. My roommates would be waiting to welcome me back into the fold, and so, eventually, would Polly. All we really needed was some time together, a few long talks to burn away the shadows Cindy and Peter Preston had cast on our budding relationship. The weather would warm and we’d spend our days reading under flowering trees and our nights pressed together on my single bed, giggling under the covers.
I passed the two-hour drive to New Haven fine-tuning this fantasy, while Matt perplexed my parents with a barrage of devil’s advocate—style questions meant to provoke serious discussion of controversial issues, not my family’s preferred method for killing the time on long car rides. Didn’t they think everyone should spend at least one night in jail, just to know what it was like? Didn’t the Iranian militants have a point about the U.S. being the Great Satan, at least from their perspective? And really, what was the difference between a religion and a cult? Looked at from a certain angle, wasn’t the Pope every bit as preposterous as L. Ron Hubbard or the Reverend Sun Myung Moon? And what was the story with deodorants? Did we really need them, or were we just being duped
into using them by the big corporations? On this last subject, at least, my parents had strong opinions.
“Believe me,” my mother said. “No one was ever sorry they put on deodorant.”
“But do we really smell bad?” Matt wondered. “Or have we just been trained to think of normal human odors as somehow being repulsive?”
“Stop using it and see how many dates you get,” my father suggested.
“You should get a whiff of some of the guys I work with.” My mother waved her hand in front of her nose as though the offenders had joined us in the car. “Between the B.O. and the bad breath …”
“The Europeans don’t believe in deodorant,” Matt remarked.
“Some of them aren’t too big on bathing either,” my mother pointed out. She thought it over a moment, then added, “I guess if everybody smells bad, they don’t notice it so much.”
“The ladies don’t even shave their underarms.” My father glanced in the rearview, checking Matt’s reaction to this little tidbit.
“I don’t mind,” Matt told him. “I had a girlfriend once who didn’t shave her pits, and I kind of liked it.” Neither of my parents had any response to this, so he forged ahead. “It’s completely natural.”
My father chuckled. “That’s one way of putting it.”
“I’m sorry,” my mother said. “It’s not very attractive.”
“But who’s to say what beauty is?” Matt inquired. “Doesn’t it differ from culture to culture?”
On another day I might have intervened to spare my parents the interrogation, but I was happy just then to let Matt give them something to think about besides what my father was going to do on Monday morning, his first official day as a lunch-truck driver without a lunch truck. They’d have more than enough time on the ride home to be alone with each other and their worries, and they seemed as grateful for the diversion as I was.
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” my father declared.
“That’s original,” my mother told him.
“You can quote me,” he said, winking at the mirror.
 
 
My parents came
up to my room to help me “get settled,” but they barely stayed long enough to marvel at what a pigsty it was, though I must say that it looked fairly clean to me. None of my roommates were around, and they were eager to get a jump on the long ride home. I offered to walk them back to the car, but they told me not to bother.
“Stay put,” my mother said. “I’m sure you’ve got a lot to do.”
Ushering them to the door, I was gripped by a feeling of wild desolation. Please, I wanted to tell them.
Please don’t leave me here.
I hadn’t felt anything like this since the first day of freshman year, when I waved good-bye and burst into tears on College Street.
“You all right?” my father asked.
I nodded, reluctant to open my mouth for fear of what might come out.
“You sure?”
“Honey?” my mother said. “Is something wrong?”
I was mystified by their blindness. They didn’t seem to understand the first thing about what had happened. My father had been furious when he heard the highly sanitized account I’d given the police about my trouble with the Lunch Monsters—and even then he’d been more upset by my silence than my actual behavior—but aside from that one brief outburst, he’d absorbed the whole calamity with bizarre composure. My mother had been more openly shaken by it, but in all her dark mutterings, there hadn’t been a single word of blame directed at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice quivering like a child’s. “It was all my fault.”
“What was?” my father asked.
“The truck.”
“That wasn’t your fault.”
“Yes, it was.”
“You have nothing to be sorry about,” my mother told me. Her face was kind, and she spoke with such gentleness and certainty that I almost believed her. “You didn’t do a single thing wrong.”
“Don’t worry about us,” my father added, giving me a supportive pat on the elbow. “You just worry about yourself.”
 
 
I had just
begun unpacking when the phone rang. It was Albert, the dining-hall manager.
“Jesus,” he said. “Where the hell have you been?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve been calling all afternoon. I need you to work the dish line.”
“The dish line? Isn’t it Eddie’s night?”
“Didn’t you hear? He’s in the hospital.”
“He is?”
“He got mugged last night. Beat up pretty bad.”
“My God. Is he—”
“No, no. He’s okay. Can you take his shift?”
I looked at the clock. It was four thirty, and I was totally unprepared. I’d barely have time to change my shirt and grab a bite before being besieged by an armada of dirty dishes. The only thing worse was the thought of sitting alone in my room, doing absolutely nothing.
“Okay.” I sighed wearily, as if submitting to his relentless pressure. “I’ll be right there.”
 
 
In the dining
hall I received the kind of warm welcome I’d been fantasizing about in the car. Albert shook my hand and thanked me profusely for bailing him out. Kristin and Djembe applauded when I sat down at the worker’s table, and Sarah inked the words “Our Hero” on my paper hat with a fountain pen and yellow highlighter. Even Nick seemed happy to see me.
“Hey Pencil Dick, have a good time in Florida?”
“Yeah.” I offered up a pasty arm for his perusal. “Like my golden tan?”
Lorelei arrived a couple of minutes before five and glided past our table without a word of greeting, her face its usual mask of self-containment and private amusement. Looking at her, you wouldn’t have had any idea that her boyfriend had just been hospitalized after a brutal attack. I searched more closely for signs of distress when I bumped into her by the time clock, but there was only that faint mocking smile that was her basic response to the world.
“How’s Eddie?” I asked.
“Okay,” she said. “Much better since they took out his spleen.”
“They took out his spleen?”
“They had to,” she said, removing her time card from its metal sleeve. “It was ruptured.”
“Jesus. Do you know what happened?”
She shoved her card into the slot; the machine bit down.
“He got jumped. In the lobby of his building.” She squinted at the card as if something was wrong with it, then slipped it back into the sleeve. “I wasn’t there.”
“Was it your brothers?”
She looked me square in the face for the first time, examining my face as closely as I was examining hers. Her voice was calm, matter-of-fact.
“Probably.”
“What do they have against Eddie?”
“They’re just assholes. They think it’s funny.” She shook her head in disgust, like it wasn’t worth going into it. “What’s that on your hat?”
“It says ‘Our Hero.’” I turned my head to give her a better look. “Sarah did it.”
“How come?” Lorelei seemed annoyed, like this was one of those stupid college pranks we were always pulling.
“Beats me.”
“Hey.” She smiled like she’d just remembered something. “Who was that girl you were with the other night? Outside of WaWa’s?”
“Her name’s Cindy.”
“She’s not a Yalie, is she?”
I shook my head. Lorelei narrowed her eyes and studied me with a newfound interest. Her voice was playful, laced with a tiny dose of sarcasm.
“I didn’t know you dated townies.”
Like “weenie,” “townie” was one of those words I’d never heard until I got to Yale, and it still had the power to make me wince. I was about to object on the grounds that Cindy wasn’t from New Haven when I realized that it didn’t matter. By Lorelei’s standards—and my own too, now that I thought about it—Cindy was a townie.
“I date all sorts of girls,” I said with a shrug.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, brushing past me on her way to the front desk.
I punched myself in and headed over to the dish line. As the workers’ trays floated lazily in my direction, I replayed Lorelei’s last statement in my mind, amazed that she could sink so low as to flirt with me while her boyfriend was in the hospital, and even more amazed that I could sink so low as to like it.
 
 
Max was sitting
in the common room when I got back, reading
The Wretched
of the Earth
while Ted and Nancy fucked in the double. I knew they were fucking because Nancy kept saying
Fuckmeohfuckmepleasefuckme
while Ted kept answering with these weird little grunts, like he was trying to lift something that was bolted to the floor.
“Hey,” I said. “How’s it going?”
Max looked at me for a second or two before responding. The look wasn’t friendly.
“Fine,” he said.
I sat down on the armchair and tried to ignore the noise.
“How was your vacation?”
Max stared at his book and pretended not to hear me. Before I could repeat my question the action in the double kicked into high gear, a shift signalled first by a rhythmic pounding on the wall and followed almost immediately by a pronounced change in Nancy’s monologue.
“Ted,” she began chanting. “Ted, Ted, Ted …”
She didn’t say it exactly the same way every time. Sometimes it was
Ted
? and sometimes it was Ted! Every once in a while it even sounded like
TEEEDDD!!!
And then
tedtedtedtedted.
She said his name like she was talking to him across the room and like she was calling him from down the street. She said it like he’d done something cute, and also like he’d done something stupid. She said his name like she hadn’t seen him for years and then again like he was getting on her nerves. She sang and muttered and chortled it. Once she even yodeled it. She said Ted like it was the only word she knew, like it had to do the work of the whole damn dictionary. And then finally she screamed it so loud, with such ecstatic finality, that even Max had to look up.
“My vacation sucked,” he told me. “How was yours?”
 
 
I thought about
calling Polly, but decided to pay her a surprise visit instead. I had the feeling that what was required of me was some sort of grand spontaneous gesture, something that would throw her off-balance and give me at least a small amount of leverage over the situation, and just showing up at her door was the only tactic I could think of. And besides, I had important news for her, news I wanted to deliver in person and as soon as possible.
I moved across the campus in a blur of anticipation, a sudden and unaccountable surge of optimism inspired by Ted and Nancy. After all, Ted was nothing special, just an all-around regular guy, slightly out-of-shape and a little on the boring side when you got
right down to it. And yet, there was Nancy, this intelligent and attractive and charming woman, crying out his name as if he were the God of Love lowered down from the clouds to give her a taste of heaven on that rickety old bunk bed. If Ted and Nancy were a plausible couple, why not Polly and I? If they could make each other happy, why couldn’t we?

Other books

Cats in Heat by Asha King
Seduction by Brenda Joyce
The Evening News by Arthur Hailey
Embracing the Fall by Lainey Reese
Briarpatch by Ross Thomas
Holden's Performance by Murray Bail
Maratón by Christian Cameron