Lost In Place (19 page)

Scott and I got along well, and before long we were playing several times a week. He introduced me to another friend, a talented jazz guitarist who had already been accepted at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and the three of us got a few songs into working shape, but we couldn’t perform because I didn’t have an amplifier for my cello. For the time being, however, we were satisfied to play quietly in Scott’s room, then make tea and talk late into the night. Besides, I wasn’t ready to make my move with jazz yet—I needed time to develop a wider repertoire of licks. So it was just as well that I didn’t have an amp because I might have been tempted to rush into a gig, only to be disappointed with the results.

The Miracle occurred on a Wednesday afternoon late in the spring. On my way home from school I opened the mailbox and there was a letter in it from Yale. I took a deep breath, opened it and learned that I had been accepted
for the class of 1980. I wandered into the house in a daze. My mother was teaching a piano lesson. I stood in the living room staring at her while her student, a plump little boy who always carried a briefcase, groped his way through a Chopin waltz. My mother noticed me staring and gave me a disapproving glance, but nothing reached me in my fog. At last the waltz ended. “What is it, Mark? I’m teaching, you know.”

I held up the letter. “You won’t believe this! Remember that application I filled out a few months ago? Well, it worked! I just got into Yale!”

Now it was her turn to look as if she’d been knocked on the head. “Whaaat?”

When I told her the news again, her jaw dropped and she covered her mouth with her hand, dumbfounded. “Better call your father,” she finally said.

I had never had occasion to call Dad at work before. I reached a secretary at the school where he worked and she said she would page him. After a few minutes he got on the line and I could tell he thought it was the highway patrol calling to say that I, along with my mother and brother and sister, had been wiped out in an accident.

“I’m fine, Dad. You won’t believe this, but I got into Yale.”

“Whaaat?”

So I told
him
again. There was a long pause. “OK, let’s not get excited yet. Would you do me a favor? Call the admissions office and check. They might have stapled your application to somebody else’s or something. Make sure about it, Mark. Then call me right back.”

I called the admissions office, and they assured me that my application had not been stapled or glued to anyone else’s. When I called Dad back and told him, he was
speechless. When I pressed him for a quote, he said, “Well, some dean in New Haven is breathing a little easier now, because I held on to a copy of that parking ticket just in case. I really was going to stuff it up somebody’s ass if you didn’t get in.”

Everybody was in a good mood that night, but only I knew that we were celebrating for different reasons. My parents were happy because they could go to sleep knowing I was going to attend an Ivy League college, whereas I was glad because I would be finished with school forever in about four weeks. Soon, if I liked, I could realistically attain my earlier goal of forgetting, rather than learning, something every day. I had no intention of going to Yale; I saw the acceptance letter as a means of distracting my parents long enough to get my jazz career going. Once I was making good money, they’d be fine. The only problem was how I was going to explain to them that I wouldn’t be going to New Haven in the fall. I decided to hold off on that for a while until I had a watertight strategy and a damn good speech worked out.

I spent those last few weeks of high school struggling to keep the grin off my face. It was the least I could do for my classmates, who had another long year to go. Michael’s mother, who still worked in the cafeteria, heard the news through the faculty grapevine, and one day, as I bought a Popsicle from her, she said, “Michael’s over there. Why don’t you tell him the good news? He’ll be so proud of you.”

I didn’t see how Michael would enjoy hearing about it—we hadn’t spoken in almost a year—but I couldn’t avoid the encounter now that his mother had suggested it. I went over, sat down next to him and said, “Can I tell you something?”

“What?” It was just what I had expected; he didn’t even look up from the magazine he was reading.

“I, uh … I got into Yale.” Boy, did I not think this was a good idea.

“Great.”

That was it. I waved at Michael’s mother so she would know I’d done it, she waved back, and then I left the cafeteria.

When the last day finally came, it was, as most long-awaited events are, anticlimactic. I handed in a history paper, picked up a few final exams, cleaned out my locker and said good-bye to my favorite teachers. When I visited Mr. Leighton in the faculty lounge, he leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and put his palm against his forehead in the manner of a fortune-teller. He opened one eye and said, “This, by the way, is a strictly unofficial prediction.
Strictly
unofficial, do you understand? We never had this conversation.” Then he closed his eyes and started to sway back and forth like Johnny Carson doing his swami routine. “What do I see? What do I see?” he murmured, but his voice was so resonant that even sotto voce it echoed down the hallways.

“Aha!” he yelled, lurching forward. “I see brain cells! Many brain cells! And look—no, how can it be? Yes, it is! They’re dying! Many brain cells, dying over the long, hot summer! Now I’m pulling back out of the brain and I see … Mr. Salzman, and he is … enjoying himself in the company of other happy teens! Disgusting! I can’t stand it any longer.…” Then he frowned, as if concentrating harder. “Ah, now I see farther ahead—he is studying in the library at a prestigious university. It is late at night; he is applying himself again, as we all know he should. All is well. Excellent, excellent.” He pretended to shake himself
out of his trance. “Good luck, Mr. Salzman,” he said, shaking my hand so vigorously that I could feel it in my ankles, “and remember, that was a
strictly
unofficial prediction. I don’t want any calls from concerned parents, if you know what I mean.” Then he winked (it was 1976, before winking became uncool).

Right around this time all the matriculation forms for college started arriving, including the financial papers. My parents had to submit copies of several years of income-tax reports, and that’s when my father began to realize that he somehow had to come up with the money to pay for the Miracle. A letter came announcing that the financial-aid office had awarded me an extremely generous scholarship, but even so, and even with the money I had saved from the restaurant (minus the amount wasted on the Triumph), I knew we didn’t have enough to cover the rest.

One evening just before dark I was sitting out in the dead body of the Triumph remembering what it felt like to drive it that one time when Dad came out to join me. He looked terrible; I could tell right away he was feeling guilty about something. I could almost see his hair turning from jet-black to white in front of me.

“Mark, I don’t know how to tell you this …” he began. It was awful for him.

In a flash I saw the opportunity in its gloriously unselfish disguise. “Dad,” I interrupted, “I think I know what you’re going to say, but before you do I want to tell you something. I’ve been thinking. Maybe it would be a good idea for me to postpone going for a year and work in the meantime to save up the money for school. The reason I think that would be a good idea is that I’m only sixteen years old, and all of the other freshmen are going to be
seventeen or eighteen. I’ve already had to suffer through public school being the youngest and shortest kid in the class, so why should I make college the same? I mean, there’s no huge hurry, is there? Even if I postpone a year, I’ll still be a year ahead of everybody else. Then I can spend more time playing the cello and seeing how it goes. What do you think?”

He sighed. “Have you really been thinking this, or are you just saying it to make me feel better? I really feel like I’ve let you down.”

“I swear,” I said, and it was the truth and nothing but the truth but just not quite the whole truth, “that I’ve been thinking about postponing from the day this whole thing started. I didn’t mention it because I was afraid you and Mom would hit the ceiling.”

“Well, I’d rather you went right away because I think you’ll love college and I don’t think the age thing would be a problem for you—that matters less and less as you get older. But things being the way they are, I guess that’s how we’ll have to do it. I’m sure glad you’re not disappointed, though.”

“To be honest, Dad, I couldn’t be happier.”

With that out of the way, at last I could do what I wanted all day long. What I wanted turned out to be waking up at almost noon, playing along to records in the afternoon and then either going out with Annette or practicing with Scott at night. Within a month I was bored and restless beyond my wildest dreams. I needed something more, something that challenged me intellectually and spiritually, something exciting that would … lead me through the doors of perception to a brave new world, perhaps?
Everybody except Annette and Michael was stoned all the time that summer. In fact, sometimes it seemed that everybody had been stoned since the ninth grade except me. I was the only guy in my industrial-arts class who wasn’t making a water pipe out of plumbing fixtures; I was always trying to make incense burners or kung fu throwing stars. I listened to the right music, I’d read the right books (in junior high I took Abbie Hoffman’s advice and stole his book titled
Steal This Book
), I was the right generation (I’d watched Woodstock live on television when I was nine, only to be ridiculed by Erich, who danced around me for years afterward singing,
“Mark wants to be a hippie, for that’s the way he was born!”
).

Clearly, I had been avoiding my destiny all those years. As Scott had said, purity was a phase I had gone through, but like all phases it had to give way to exploration and growth. Sooner or later destiny must be faced squarely. One night at a garage party, with the stereo blasting Aerosmith and somebody’s drunk mother dancing like Salome while two guys pointed flashlights at her boobs, someone passed me a joint. I couldn’t even count the number of joints I’d held; I was even quite good at rolling them. I’d spent many parties seated in a strange kitchen under fake Tiffany lamps rolling joints for everybody else—I just never smoked them. This time I brought the crooked white stick to my lips and nearly puffed at it, but then I remembered what Scott had said: If you change your mind, don’t smoke a joint at a party. It would be too lowlife—call me first. I looked at the party and saw that the mother was peeling off her blouse while her husband, who was too drunk to stand
up and stop her, cursed helplessly from a La-Z-Boy chair held together with duct tape. Yes, I could imagine reacting like my dad’s air force buddy under these circumstances.
Call me first
. I passed the joint along and asked to use the host’s phone.

13
 

S
cott closed his eyes for a moment and appeared to be concentrating on something just before lighting his carved wooden pipe.

“What’s that for?” I asked. My heart was beating wildly. I was afraid that I might have a bad high, and also nervous that we might be caught. The latter scenario was unlikely, however. We were sitting in front of a little campfire we had lit on the beach of the lake, only a few yards from where I used to practice with Michael. No cars could reach there, and it was a quiet, moonlit night—we would easily have heard or seen anyone coming.

“I’m asking the spirit of the lake to show us a good time,” Scott answered, grinning. “Every time I smoke, I consider it a lesson. I learn things when I’m stoned, and nature is the teacher. If you’re good to nature and pay attention to it, it will be good to you and show you amazing things.”

He lit the pipe and inhaled deeply, then handed it to me. The moment of truth. Was I really going to do it? All those drug films we’d had to watch in elementary school were playing out in my head like a videotape on fast-forward. A puff of marijuana and the next thing you know,
bam!
you’re popping pills, shooting heroin, snorting coke and then selling it. Then
clang!
that’s the sound of the jail-cell door closing behind you, and after five years you get out and realize that your life’s over, it’s finished, you’ll never be the way you were, so you go back to the drugs and die from an overdose in a slimy alley in New York City. What if those films were right? They made it sound as if that was what would happen to you if you smoked a joint, but no kid is stupid enough to believe that this happens to everybody, or even to the majority. It’s probably more like one in a thousand. But what if I’m the one out of a thousand? There’s no way of knowing beforehand. What if I freak out tonight and jump in front of a car because I think I’m Superman? Somebody had done this, I’d heard. I imagined my parents getting the call, I pictured their stricken faces. It was horrible.

Then I inhaled. I have no idea how the decision was made. One minute I was forcing myself to watch an imaginary movie about my own self-destruction, and the next I was puffing on that pipe for all I was worth. Just one more unexplained mystery of the human mind, I guess.