The Grievers Page 5

  “Getting into a few fender benders doesn’t amount to a life of suffering,” I said.

  “Fender benders?” Greg said, already pouring himself a second drink. “Is that what you heard? Because that particular turn of phrase hardly does justice to the horrors I’ve been through. Just waking up in the morning is sheer agony. I need a pill to get out of bed. And taking a shower? Forget about it. In fact, it’s a minor miracle that I’m even sitting here this evening.”

  “There’s also a decent chance that Dwayne might come,” Neil interjected. “But other than that, I think it’s only us.”

  “Will he be in uniform?” Greg asked.

  “I don’t know,” Neil said. “Why?”

  “Because if he is, the wait staff might assume that the fallen comrade to which I alluded was also a police officer, and that, by extension, we’re all, like Dwayne, members of the force. This perception, false though it may be, will foster the impression that we’re deserving of at least a modicum of recognition and, thus, that a table for twelve is a small price to pay for the privilege of serving us. We will, in short, be regarded as heroes, and there’s a better than average chance that we’ll receive a free round of drinks before the night is through.”

  “That’s idiotic,” I said.

  “On the contrary,” Greg said. “It’s human nature. Just watch.”

  Greg gestured in the direction of the hostess stand where Dwayne Coleman stood in full uniform, towering over the hostess, whose demeanor toward our table went in the blink of an eye from wary to enthusiastic as she pointed our friend in the right direction with a wide, welcoming smile. Watching him cross the crowded floor, I thought about the race joke Frank Dearborn made at his expense on our first day at the Academy: I thought this school was segregated! As was the case with most of my friends from that era, the only reason I knew Dwayne at all was that we were both friendly with Neil. Though we never talked much at the Academy, Dwayne and I had a standing date to drink beer and wallow in self-pity on his father’s back porch every other Friday night in the jobless, womanless, directionless summer after college.

  As if to prove Greg’s theory, our waitress appeared with a plate of nachos as soon as Dwayne took a seat. Ignoring the eight empty chairs at our table, she asked Dwayne if she could get him anything to drink, and he ordered a glass of water. He was going on duty in a few hours, he said when the waitress left and Greg offered him a margarita, so alcohol was out of the question. When the waitress returned with Dwayne’s water, she also brought Sean Sullivan, who handed me his business card by way of saying hello.

  “I know this isn’t the best time,” Sean said. “But Neil tells me you’re in the market for a new car.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “It’s not the best time.”

  “I only mention it because I’m concerned. Are you still driving that old Saturn?”

  “I wouldn’t call it old, exactly.” A leprechaun winked in the corner of the card. On weekdays, Sean put his graduate degree in counseling to work by helping the mentally and physically infirm find jobs in the private sector. On weekends he put dents in his student loans by selling cars to the same demographic. “I prefer to think of it as broken in.”

  “All the more reason to trade up,” Sean said. His voice had the shrill tenor of a pennywhistle and the urgency of a police siren, and he’d recently taken to sporting a goatee to highlight the boundary between his neck and chin. “A few years from now, we’ll laugh you right off the lot.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” I said, pocketing his card. “Right now I have bigger things to worry about.”

  “Indeed,” Greg Packer said. “Our fallen comrade deserves our full and undivided attention.”

  “And let’s stop with this fallen comrade shit,” I said. “He was our friend, for Christ’s sake. Would it kill you to use his name?”

  “My apologies,” Greg said. “I didn’t realize you two were so close.”

  I opened my mouth but didn’t say a word, ashamed to admit that Billy and I were never close at all. Friendly, yes, especially back at the Academy, but I’d be surprised if we spoke more than three times since graduation. Always polite, always cordial, but always with the ulterior motive—on my part, anyway—of escaping the conversation. In fact, the only reason I invited him to my New Year’s Eve party was to put off meeting him for dinner the night before Thanksgiving, and the only reason we’d planned to meet up the night before Thanksgiving was that I’d been putting off invitations to have lunch with him since the previous summer. In some ways, it was my main reason for having the party—not to see Billy so much as to gather all of my acquaintances together and not have to talk to any one of them for too long.

  If nothing else, I’m a very social misanthrope.

  “Remember how he used to bring a wok to school?” Sean asked.

  “It wasn’t a wok,” I said. “It was a bucket.”

  “Some kind of Asian thing,” Sean said. “Greens and rice every day. The kid should have outlived us all.”

  “It wasn’t Asian,” I said. “And he wasn’t a kid. He was an adult like the rest of us.”

  “I’m saying then,” Sean said. “He was a kid back then. Christ, Charley, do you have to be so goddamn difficult all the time?”

  Greg signaled the waitress for another pitcher of margaritas. Neil asked if he thought it was such a good idea, but Greg brushed Neil’s concerns aside with a flick of his wrist. He’d made arrangements for a ride, he said.

  “A cab?” Neil asked.

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “He bit into a grub,” I said, still caught up in our previous conversation. “He was eating lunch one day, and when he looked down there was half a grub on his plate.”

  “On his plate?” Dwayne asked. “You said it was a bucket.”

  “Fine,” I said. “His bucket.”

  “So, what?” Sean asked. “Was this some kind of Asian thing? Like eating grasshoppers in Mexico?”

  “No,” I said. “It was an accident. That’s my whole point.”

  “You’d think he’d be more careful,” Dwayne said. “Using chopsticks and all.”

  “He didn’t use chopsticks,” I said. “He used a fork.”

  “I remember chopsticks,” Greg said. “And Sean’s right. It was a wok.”

  “The point I’m trying to make is that he ate a grub one day, and I watched him do it,” I said. “I could have stopped him, but I didn’t. I saw the grub, and I saw him going for it, but I let him eat it anyway.”

  “When you say grub?” Neil said.

  “A worm, okay? I let Billy eat a worm.”

  “Like an earthworm?” Sean asked.

  “Like a maggot,” I said. “Only bigger.”

  “And you didn’t try to stop him?”

  “What was I supposed to say?”

  “I don’t know,” Dwayne said. “How about, ‘Hey, Billy, there’s a giant goddamn maggot in your lunch.’ ”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I should’ve stopped him.”

  THE WAITRESS brought our second pitcher of margaritas, and soon we were meandering across the same conversational terrain we’d been treading for the past decade: Anthony Gambacorta’s extensive porn collection, Brother Timothy’s fascination with donkey dicks, and the unfounded rumor that a certain modern language teacher left in the middle of a semester because she was pregnant with a certain friar’s love child. When our perverted walk down memory lane started to repeat itself, Neil took a moment to remind us once again, and more gently than I’d managed, why we were gathered. We wanted to make a donation to the Academy in Billy’s name, he said—because he always loved the school, because he always lived the Noblac ideals, because our friendship meant the world to him. I added that I’d spoken to Phil Ennis, and though a scholarship in Billy’s name was out of the question, we could at least make a respectable donation to the fund the Academy was setting up for Philly boys.

  “What if we bought the school a ping-pong
table?” Sean suggested. “For the student lounge. I know some people. We can get it wholesale. Add a brass nameplate for twenty bucks or so? It could be a nice gesture.”

  “We’re thinking more of a cash donation,” Neil said.

  “If I recall correctly—and there’s no reason to believe I don’t—Billy did play a lot of ping-pong,” Greg said. “So Sean’s idea certainly has merit.”

  “When did Billy play ping-pong?” I asked.

  “Every day,” Sean said. “At lunch. I remember like it was yesterday.”

  “You also remember that he brought a wok to school.”

  “Even so, I think it’s an appropriate gift.”

  “Whatever you guys decide is fine with me,” Dwayne said. “Put me down for twenty bucks.”

  “Twenty?” I said.

  “Okay, thirty.”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “We were hoping everyone could at least give a hundred,” Neil said. “It’s not a lot, but at least it’s something.”

  “Not a lot?” Dwayne said. “I’ll go as high as fifty, but that’s it.”

  “This isn’t an auction,” I said. “We’re talking about a friend of ours.”

  “I still think we should go with the ping-pong table,” Sean said.

  “We’re not buying a ping-pong table,” I said.

  Neil shot me a glance that said I was losing my cool, but it was too late. My cool, if I ever had any, was long gone, and I felt as if I were watching myself turn rabid in a low-budget nature documentary. My eyes went wide. My pulse turned rapid. My hands started shaking. I could hear my voice getting louder as I spoke, but even the prospect of drawing unwanted attention to myself and my fellow Academy grads didn’t slow me down.

  “You understand that Billy’s dead, right? He jumped off the Henry Avenue Bridge because people like us never gave him the time of day. And now that we’re trying to do something nice for him, all you care about is trying to figure out the cheapest way to do it. He was our friend, for Christ’s sake. And you want to buy a ping-pong table? No wonder they call it the Bastard Factory. You guys are a bunch of—cheap—fucking—bastards.”

  The last words escaped my lips in stuttering staccato bursts, and our waitress hurried to the table to see if everything was okay. Before I could turn to her and say that, no, everything was decidedly not okay, Neil apologized for my outburst and asked for the check.

  “You’re upset,” Sean said. “I understand. Maybe we should continue this conversation another time. You do have my card, right?”

  “Yes, Sean. I have your card.”

  “Then call me sometime, okay? You’d be amazed at how a new car can change your outlook on things.”

  Neil raised a discreet hand to keep me from leaping out of my seat, but it didn’t matter. Something inside me had broken, and there was nothing I could do to fix it, so I slumped forward in my chair and told Sean I’d be in touch as he dropped a few bills on the table and said that he’d had a good time.

  “As have I, gentlemen,” Greg said. “But I fear I’ve kept Mother waiting long enough.”

  “Your mother still waits up for you?” Dwayne asked.

  “God, no,” Greg said. “She’s waiting in the car.”

  Greg opened his wallet and laid a ten-dollar bill on the table. He’d only had a hamburger, he said by way of explanation. In fact, we probably owed him some change, but given the somber nature of the occasion, he was willing to let it slide.

  “Two words,” Dwayne whispered as Greg followed Sean out the door. “Forcible commitment. We can do it tonight. Just lure him inside city limits, and we’ll lock him away.”

  “Maybe some other time,” Neil said.

  “Suit yourself, but you know where to find me if you change your mind.”

  Dwayne laid some money on the table. He’d love to stick around, he said, but his shift was starting in a little over an hour. Promising to send Neil a check, he rattled his keys and left the two of us alone at our long, empty table.

  “That was a great success,” Neil said, aping Groucho Marx as he totaled up the bill. “One more like that, and I’ll have to sell my body to science.”

  “Animal Crackers?” I said, taking a shot in the dark.

  “Close,” Neil said. “The Cocoanuts.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  All told, we raised $470. Neil kicked in an additional thirty to make it an even five hundred, and I wrote a brief letter to accompany the check that we forwarded to the Academy. The letter said that we’d always remember Billy as the kindest of souls and that our gift was the least we could do to honor his memory. It also listed the names of everyone who had contributed to the sum, including Greg Packer, whose donation of fifty dollars came in the form of a promissory note to Neil, and Anthony Gambacorta, who sent a check signed by his mother and a pledge of points on the back end of any and all future productions of Down in the Stalag. Though I didn’t know what this last piece of information meant, I included it in the letter anyway because it sounded like the kind of thing that Phil Ennis would love to mention on the AlumNotes page of The Academic. When he called for clarification three days after I mailed the check, however, all I could tell him was that I thought points had something to do with the amount of money a movie made after all was said and done.

  “I know what points are, Schwartz,” Ennis said. “I want to know how many we’re getting.”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, carefully pacing the lawn in front of the bank, one arm tucked inside my giant dollar sign so I could hold the phone to my ear, the other arm held limply aloft by the bouquet of brightly colored balloons tied to my wrist. “But I can probably find out.”

  “And you have this in writing? That Anthony pledges a certain number of points on the back end of this—what is it? A movie or something?”

  “It’s more of a musical,” I said.

  “Broadway?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “So we’re looking at what in terms of box office?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “Did you get the check I sent?”

  “We received one check,” Ennis said. “From Neil.”

  “Actually, that was from both of us. All of us, in fact—everyone I mentioned in the letter. We thought it would be easier just to collect the money and write a single check.”

  “You mention four people in this letter,” Ennis said. “In addition to yourself and Neil.”

  “Right,” I said, quickly counting my friends on the fingers of one hand. “That’s six altogether.”

  “Yet the check was for five hundred dollars.”

  I sensed an unspoken only in Ennis’s statement and reminded him that he was also getting a percentage of any profits Anthony Gambacorta might make on Down in the Stalag. I was about to add that the promise of points on any musical based on Hogan’s Heroes—even one that had yet to be staged—was like having money in the bank, but the backdraft of a passing tractor-trailer knocked me off my feet before I could say it.

  “—a little disappointing,” Ennis was in the middle of explaining when, lying flat on my back, I regained my bearings and pressed the phone to my ear. “But you’ll be pleased to learn that we still have options.”

  “Options?” I said.

  I pulled my free arm inside the dollar sign and switched my cell phone from one hand to the other. The only problem was that the balloons were still tied to my wrist, and whenever anything larger than a bicycle whizzed by, the balloons tried to follow, tugging at my arm and yanking the phone away from my ear until I wrestled it back. As a result, I only caught about half of what Ennis said next, and even then, I could barely make sense of it.

  “We can still—situation—advantage,” he explained. “Letter—finesse. Classmates. Details. The key is—working. Noblac ideals—friendship—donkey—interested parties. You—Pogue. Rank—horn—Friday?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, switching hands again.

  “Then let’s plan for noon,” Ennis said.
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  “Right,” I said. “Friday at noon.”

  “Pogue, too?”

  “Probably,” I said, though I didn’t know what I was agreeing to. “But I’ll have to run it by him first.”

  “Good,” Ennis said. “Unless I hear otherwise, we’ll see you then.”

  “We?” I said, but Ennis had already hung up.

  THAT NIGHT, I paced our narrow hallway while Karen stripped more of the old, yellowing wallpaper from the walls. Given my brooding personality and general uselessness around the house, it was hard to say what she ever saw in me. To this day, the best answer I can give is that my life has been marked by short, random bursts of inspiration and activity, followed by extended periods of coasting, disenchantment, boredom, lethargy, and, eventually, surrender. Unfortunately for Karen, she happened to meet me while I was on the upswing. Two years out of college, I’d ditched three jobs and decided that the next mountain I wanted to climb would be graduate school. This time, I told myself, I’d give it my all. This time, I wouldn’t cut any corners. This time, I wouldn’t stop at simply buying the books—I’d actually read them and make notes and form study groups to make sure I got the most out of my education.

  As it turned out, Karen was the only person who joined my study group, and by the time we started dating, I had her convinced that I knew what I was doing. I wasn’t going to stop at the Master’s Degree, I told her. I was going to go on for my Doctorate. From there, I’d probably do some post-doc work (whatever that was), get some academic writing under my belt (it sounded plausible at the time), settle into a tenure-track position at a small liberal arts college (why not?), and spend the rest of my life discussing the significance of the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock in The Great Gatsby. But then came the Ph.D. program and all the books I had to read, and all the books about the books, and all the talk from all of the professors about how bad the job market was, and as my dreams started slipping further and further away, I stopped trying so hard to reach them, and soon I was marching back and forth in front of a bank and wondering whether the world might end before the next chapter of my dissertation came due.