Almost Like Being in Love (2 page)

Craig McKenna

Room 311

BECKLEY SCHOOL

TARRYTOWN, NEW YORK

Things He Said

When he found out I live in St. Louis he lit up like the Tappan Zee Bridge during a fog alert and wanted to know if our house is anywhere near 5135 Kensington Avenue, which has something to do with Judy Garland but I couldn’t figure out what.

After his parents got divorced, he stayed with his father for two years until his stepmother popped the only two screws that weren’t already loose by deciding he was going to stick open safety pins in her pillows and throw acid in her face. So they sent him here and told him not to come back.

When he was 15 he snuck backstage at the Tony Awards by telling the doorman he was Carol Channing’s son. He also gets letters from people like Mary Martin and Bernadette Peters and the mother on The Brady Bunch and Lotte Lenya (who was the old bag in the James Bond movie with the knife in her boot). This isn’t bullshit. I saw them with my actual eyes.

The only thing missing from his life is an out-of-print record of some musical called Greenwillow that has the guy from Psycho in it. Norman Bates singing?? I think he’s putting me on, but I don’t know him well enough to be sure. (Yet.)

He knows what “Hey, Smerko” means. And how old Bobby Di Cicco is and what his favorite colors are.

Things He Didn’t Say

When he gets nervous his voice squeaks. It isn’t funny but it makes me grin just the same.

He has three different laughs that I’ve almost got a lock on. Number 1

and Number 2 were no-brainers, but I struck out on Number 3. This is going to be a challenge.

You can tell when he’s ready to pop his top because the tips of his ears get red and his forehead frowns, which I found out twice by accident when I bad-mouthed Eleanor Roosevelt and Wilma Flintstone (long story, but it has something to do with the Equal Rights Amendment and both of them getting stuck with sexist douchebags like FDR and Fred).

He picked USC for college not because of the Trojans but because L.A.

is the farthest he can get from his parents.

The only reason he never said anything to me in the hallway is because he was afraid.

He needs to be talked out of wearing the blue Van Heusens.

There’s nobody else like him in the whole world. And he thinks that’s a handicap!

QUESTION: How come he wants to hang out with me?

Travis Puckett

Room 214

BECKLEY SCHOOL

TARRYTOWN, NEW YORK

Bulletin: He has a dimple in his chin that you can only see when he (a) smiles, and (b) smiles at me. May I be struck dumb if I’m making this up.

We passed each other in the hall after dinner. Craig said “How’s it going?” and I squeaked four times. (Four times!) THEN I DID TWENTY

MINUTES ON ANGELA LANSBURY, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE! What was I thinking? That’s no way to talk to a jock. It’s a whole other language.

“Johnny Unitas.” “Notre Dame.” “Third down.” “Gridlock.”

My life is over. The only way he’ll even grunt at me again is if he’s hanging off a cliff by his fingers and I come to his rescue. And what are the chances of that?!

Craig McKenna

Room 311

BECKLEY SCHOOL

TARRYTOWN, NEW YORK

Somewhere along the line, I got it into my head that “Review Week”

meant we were only going over notes of things we were supposed to know already, so in case you needed to catch up on some z’s during class you wouldn’t be missing anything. That lasted until third-period English when Naylor started a whole new rap on Wuthering Heights that we never had before. Terrific. It had to be Wuthering Heights, didn’t it? The only book the whole year where I couldn’t find the Cliff ’s Notes or the Classic Comics version. So I hunched down in my chair by the window and tried to turn myself invisible—which only makes you stand out like one of your organs just fell on the floor.

“Mr. McKenna.” See?

“Sir,” I swallowed, sitting up straight.

“Would you care to comment on the complexities of the relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine?” Yeah, about as much as I’d care to have a Fleet enema, sir. Instead, I came up with the only answer I could think of that might terminate this conversation early, seeing as I wouldn’t know Heathcliff or Catherine if they were both peeing on my shoes.

“What relationship?” I asked, daring him to challenge me. “Personally, I don’t think he liked her all that much.” Now, you have to understand Mr.

Naylor, who—while I like to give him a hard time—may be the most dedicated teacher I ever knew in my life. Too dedicated. When he asked me what Hamlet’s tragic flaw was and I answered “serious drugs,” he acted like he’d just caught me fucking his mother. This was no different. His eyebrows nearly shot off his face.

“How can you say that?” he fired back. “My God, it’s one of the great romances of all time!” I shrugged and pretended I was dropping the whole issue.

“Not to
me
,” I retorted. Dead silence. Was he going to fall for the bluff?

“Mr. McKenna,” he said finally, “did you even read this book?” No. He wasn’t. McKenna fumbles on the ten. Then all of a sudden there was a voice from the other side of the room. Travis.

“He’s right, sir.” Of course everybody looked at him. Travis says maybe four words a year, and they’re almost always comparison examples that have Ethel Merman or Pearl Bailey in them. So Naylor wasn’t prepared for an attack from the left.

“Mr. Puckett,” he grunted, with snakes coming out his eyes, “have you something to say?” Boy, did he ever.

“According to Peabody’s Contemporary Criticism,” said Travis, “Brontë

intended a level of psychosexual ambiguity in order to leave the reader wondering.”

“Wondering what?”

“Whether Heathcliff was in fact attracted to Catherine or whether he was merely searching for a homoerotic substitute.” While Naylor was picking himself up from the mat, me and Travis made eye contact for about 1/100 of a second, which was just long enough for him to ESP

three things to me: '1( I’m pulling this out of my ass as I go along, '2( I’ll get you off the hook, and (3( we’re in this together. And for a minute I even felt sorry for Naylor.

“Mr. Puckett,” he glared, going for the kill. “I’m not familiar with Peabody’s Contemporary Criticism.”

“Neither was I, sir,” admitted Travis, “until I found it in the reference room at Donnell Library. Third floor.” And he didn’t even blink while he was saying it!

I need to find out what makes Travis tick. Then maybe he can teach it to me.

Travis Puckett

Room 214

BECKLEY SCHOOL

TARRYTOWN, NEW YORK

Craig:

I finished your essay, but I sort of rewrote some of it. No offense. I had to cut the part about the Mafia and the Jets and the Red Sox and being half-naked at Madison Square Garden and getting laid when you were 15. The only thing left was half a line—where you died. So I put in stuff about coming from Missouri and your mom being a doctor and your dad’s law practice and your Little League trophy and the way you scored three touchdowns in one game last year and how nobody in our class got into Harvard but you. And how come you didn’t say anything about the Citizenship Award? You were the only tenth-grader who ever won it.

I was two hours late getting it to him, but that was only because 'a( I’d been chasing down a used copy of Greenwillow from an out-of-print record store in Colorado that turned out to be a bum lead, and (b) I had to redo all four pages when Gordo dropped a chili cheese dog on them.

Gordon Duboise is the roommate from hell. The unsanitary part. At five feet ten inches, he weighs 158 pounds. Two-thirds of that is muscle and the rest is bacteria. You can tell where his side of the room starts and mine ends, because there’s an invisible Berlin Wall right down the middle—it kind of looks like what would happen if an intensive care unit collided with a city dump: randomly scattered biology notes, partly empty Coke cans, and three pairs of toxic underpants (all left over from junior year) in one sector, versus hospital corners, symmetrical dustballs, and carefully labeled history books that all smell like Windex in the other. (His half of the closet is no better—one time I found a radial tire, a bag of peat moss, and a 1911 New York Times.) Far from being ashamed, Gordo claims that he can identify any article of unwashed clothing by its aroma—even with his eyes closed.

“What stinks?”

“Sweatshirt,” he says, sniffing. “Georgia Tech.” And he’s always right!

It’s also impossible to keep secrets from him. Even the ones I don’t know about yet.

“What’s an option play?” I yawned casually, closing a physiology text and switching off my desk lamp. Gordo was sprawled out on a reprehensible mattress covered only by a World War I army blanket that hadn’t been dry cleaned since the battle of Argonne, engrossed in the most recent issue of Hustler.

“Who’s been asking you about option plays?” he replied, looking up from an improbable pair of breasts that couldn’t possibly have existed prior to the silicone patent. “You got a boyfriend or something?”

I hate it when he figures me out before I have a chance to do it myself.

Especially when I’ve been counting on at least seven more years of denial.

Craig McKenna

Room 311

BECKLEY SCHOOL

TARRYTOWN, NEW YORK

English Assignment

My Obituary

Mr. McKenna: In the unlikely event that you achieved this of your own
accord without any outside assistance, you’re to be commended. Otherwise,
disregard the accolade.

Grade: A+

Shea Stadium was packed and so was the subway. We had to stand pressed together all the way from Grand Central to Willets Point and Travis squeaked six times while we were doing it.

He didn’t want me to pop for his Mets ticket, but considering that I deserve an A+ in English about as much as Pete Rose does, he really didn’t have a choice. So we wore our caps backwards and we used my phony ID to buy beer and we got mustard all over ourselves and by the bottom of the 9th, the Mets were trailing the Dodgers 4–3 with two out and two men on. Then Mazzilli came to the plate with “Don’t fuck with me” written all over his face and you knew he was thinking “first pitch outta here.” But instead it turned out to be a weak pop-up to first and I was already reaching for my jacket, when all of a sudden Steve (Your Highness) Garvey—who had the ball in his actual hands—dropped it on his Dodger Blue feet. YES! Travis and I were already jumping up and down on each other even before Foli and Flynn scored, and when Otis slugged Maz for sliding into home and the brawl started, we yelled ourselves into at least three days of laryngitis. I haven’t popped my cork like that since Fisk belted the homer in ’75.

Travis says that Roosevelt called us “The Arsenal of Democracy” the same week he locked up 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps. Also that Black soldiers had to ride in boxcars while German POWs got to eat in the dining car. And by the way, next month is the 215th anniversary of the battle at Bunker Hill.

I have six varsity letters. How come I don’t know these things? And where did Travis learn so much about baseball?

Travis Puckett

Room 214

BECKLEY SCHOOL

TARRYTOWN, NEW YORK

Somebody hit a ground rule double and somebody else stole a base and then a fight started, presumably for pro forma reasons. Then it was over. The blue-and-orange uniforms won.

What was I supposed to talk to him about?! Chugging brews? Naked girls? Crotch rot? If he hadn’t already said something about Carlton Fisk, I’d have been up shit creek. Thank God the library had a copy of The Baseball Almanac. “Carlton Ernest Fisk, born December 26, 1948, in Bellows Falls, Vermont. Has played with the Boston Red Sox since 1969

and is best known for a twelfth-inning haymaker in the 1975 Series off of Reds hurler Pat Darcy.” So I looked up Reds hurler Pat Darcy, who was only a short hop to Alvin Dark and the New York Giants. But that was the end of the line. When Craig asked me about Thurman Munson

'sp?(, I had to drag in Hitler just to throw him off the scent. I don’t know how long I can keep this up.

Craig McKenna

Room 311

BECKLEY SCHOOL

TARRYTOWN, NEW YORK

Tonight me and Travis stuffed our beds with pillows and snuck into Tarrytown to see the 10:00 P.M. I Wanna Hold Your Hand. While we were waiting in line to buy our tickets, Travis said we still needed to resolve Critical Issue Number 1—which one of us gets to be called Smerko in this relationship? So we flipped for it and he won. (Actually he didn’t, but it’s not like you needed much of a brain to figure out that he wanted it a lot more than I did.)

Anybody who’s never been to a movie with Travis needs to try it at least once, just for the entertainment value. First of all, he goes to take a piss exactly three minutes before showtime, even if he doesn’t have to. It’s a preventative measure just in case. The reason is because metabolism sometimes sneaks up on you faster than usual, and what if it suddenly happens smack in the middle of a good part?

Second of all, he won’t touch any of his popcorn until the movie starts, but previews don’t count and neither do the credits—you have to wait until after the director’s name rolls off the screen. '“Not even one piece?”

“No. That would invalidate the whole box.”( Meanwhile he sits there with his hand over the top like maybe a tornado’s going zip through the theater and blow some of it away or a popcorn thief is going to hit him up while he’s not looking. Finally, when he does get to eat some, it happens in three-piece installments. No more. No less. And he spaces it out so it lasts for an hour and ten minutes.

Third of all, where we sit is another big deal. It has to be exactly three-fifths of the way back (which means counting the rows first), on the right-hand aisle. How come? The perspective is better there. Scientists didn’t need to figure this out—Travis did it for them.

By the time the movie started, I was worn out. How does he do it? If I had to keep track of all those things, I’d wind up in a nuthouse. So I watched him for the first twenty minutes—thinking about metabolism and peeing, and eating three pieces of popcorn every seventy-five seconds, and counting the rows again to make sure we weren’t one off—and suddenly it all made sense. That was the scary part.