Odd Jobs (5 page)

I guess every minute is a defining moment somewhere in the world. Ten minutes ago, Billy Bob Buttfuck in Ohio just bought a winning lottery ticket and the next minute Igor Roganovich got hit by lightning in Croatia. Good or bad, is the new direction permanent? For me, every day since those brutal moments has been a fight to get back to where I was. Where I want to be.

For the next few years, my mother was a virtual zombie. She barely had the desire to get out of bed to go to her bookkeeping job. Mom was there and I was grateful, but damn, I missed her. If
I
weren’t around, my mother would have offed herself long ago, I’m sure.

Any extra money I made after the accident went to maintaining our shoebox of a house in Hempstead and buying her medication, but there was rarely enough money for both. Then, when there was some extra cash, instead of putting it away for a rainy day like I should have, I’d be too tempted to go out with my friends and see a movie or grab a burger, anything to squeeze in some “normal.” And those little things add up. The extra pressure of a stupid thing like money was killing us.

Harris North IV changed all that, though.

I remember the first day I saw him. I was in my last year of middle school and Harris North IV was watching me play basketball at Hempstead Park, a hotbed for street basketball. There were 30 or so shirtless basketball players wearing long shorts and high-top sneakers. Along the tall brick wall were another 20 hand-ballers wearing long pants and wife-beaters. Also lounging around in the vicinity was an assortment of old-timers with scraggly beards and dental issues. Then there was this one guy sporting khaki slacks, a pink golf shirt and Gucci loafers sans socks. Yeah, he was some chameleon. Fit right in.

His Gucci ass showed up at my house and he started talking to my mother about giving me a great education. This guy was actually scouting parks looking for people to put his school on the map. I wasn’t any better than my buddies Loot or Carey, but Harris wanted me because I played b-ball pretty good and I was white. I found out later that the school had this whole strategy worked out. A football team had too many players and too much equipment, so a major football program wasn’t worth the trouble. With no expensive equipment and only 12 players to award scholarships, hoops was just what they needed. And what they really wanted was lily-white players.

This guy really laid it on thick for my mother. Hempstead schools couldn’t compare with a private school like Remington. I would be a target for drugs and in a bad element if I stayed where I was. He could open up important doors for me. This grown man with a pink shirt, hanging out in shitty parks, was gonna open doors for me?

It wasn’t like I bought into North’s visions; I had no choice. The guy had no idea what buttons he was pushing. After all, my mom had just lost two of the three people dearest to her in the whole world. She sure as hell wasn’t about to lose the third – me. And if Harris North IV had the solution, she was going to take it. While speaking with him, Mom came out of her trance and flat-out demanded that I go to the academy. If something like sending me to a private school moved her, I wasn’t going to argue. I just wanted her to be happy, not that she ever could be. Not like she was.

Looking back, though, Remington Academy was fine. It showed me some stuff I never would have seen. On the other hand, it made me want stuff I didn’t know I wanted. Bottom line was that I was in a packed 10-cent candy store with only nine cents to spend.

The funny thing was that this bozo Harris North IV sold Mom on getting me away from all the drugs in Hempstead. Meanwhile, you can’t believe the drugs rich kids get their hands on. While we were scoring dime bags in Hempstead Park, the guys at Remington were getting blow, X and ‘shrooms like they were renting movies from Blockbuster. Their money made all the difference.

These guys lived in a different world, and for a while I got to live in it. I liked living in it. They showed me there was another world outside Hempstead, and I couldn’t help it, I wanted in. I got a front row seat courtesy of Constance Wendy Wellington. Everyone called her C.W. You’re not really allowed in this world without a weird name. It’s like a password at the door. No lie. We had a Bunny, Potter, Bucky, Rip, Chip, A.J. and every combination of initials possible in the alphabet, landing me right with C.W.

I remember always trying to have an excuse to talk to her, to find any reason to see her. I can practically still feel her straight brown hair that was so silky and shiny that it drew in the light and sent it back out with a subtle glow. While the rest of us were fighting the good fight versus a tsunami of zits, C.W.’s skin was flawless. Her dark complexion managed to look tan in the winter. Beautiful green eyes and a mouth that was inviting in a plump and seductive way accented it all.

It was hard not to be drawn into C.W.’s world. She would talk to me about basketball and the games we had coming up. When she talked to me about hoops, I was pumped. I tried to fit in. In my second year at Remington, I actually busted my ass to nail down literature class. To make things even tougher, her favorite author was Charles Dickens, so besides the regular reading, I tried to tackle Dickens. I didn’t give a flying fuck about literature, but it was C.W.’s favorite subject. Girls make you do some weird things. English Lit was hard enough to grasp, and they didn’t make it easy for a guy like me. We were reading books in class like
The Catcher In
the Rye,
A
S
eparate Peace and The Great Gatsby —
stories about these characters with tons of money and fancy lifestyles, perfect for the Remington crowd. For them, it was like reading about their next-door neighbors. For me, it was like reading a story about aliens from the Planet Zeron.

Later on, C.W. admitted that’s what got her really liking me. I’d like to think I charmed the fuck out of her, but that’s a reach. She knew I couldn’t care less about this stuff but I was doing it for her. I never minded doing the work to get what I want but when I looked around, everyone else was either getting things handed to them or expecting to get things handed to them.

I spent a lot of time at C.W.’s house...if you want to call it a house. The damn place could have had its own ZIP code. I always knew people had swimming pools and tennis courts, but the Wellingtons even had a stable and horses. It was her mom’s “hobby.” This hobby could drain the economy of some small countries.

C.W. had a great relationship with her mother. I would meet them at the Piping Rock Country Club and they would be there downing Southside cocktails, watching the tide roll in. They would spend hours together before I got there. It wasn’t that I thought it was so hip that C.W. was having drinks with her mother. It was that she was having anything with her mother. My own mother was so out of reach. Her hobby was jumping from one antidepressant to another. If that hit-and-run didn’t happen, maybe my life wouldn’t have been horses and cocktails, but it wouldn’t have been Hempstead either. I appreciated what I had and I tried not to be jealous of the Remington crowd, but it was hard to fight what I really felt. It’s not like I needed to drink Mimosas with my mother, but I didn’t need to be feeding her tranquilizers either. Shit didn’t have to turn as far left as it did. It didn’t always have to be that way, I thought. I could learn to win. Like I said, I was willing to do the work.

Buster Wellington, C.W.’s father, was a tough read for me. As the president of the board of trustees at Remington, he was so active with the school that you could almost imagine him taking calculus with us. When he saw me around the school, he barely gave me a look, let alone had any conversations with me.

Buster liked the basketball games, though. He was a real sports fan who had four daughters, C.W. being the oldest. While their girls were all good equestrians and field hockey players, old Buster was pretty bummed he never had a superstar lacrosse player. On that point, he treated me pretty well. He was at all the Remington hoop games and would spend some time talking basketball. I don’t have a ton of experience with fathers. Maybe I thought he could bring me into the fold a little more, but that was probably my own frustrated desire to have a father. Plus he had a natural desire to keep me out of his daughter’s pants.

C.W. must have done a great selling job on him though, because one time he took me with them on a family vacation. We went to Nevis, an unbelievable island in the West Indies. Just to get there, we flew to Puerto Rico, then took a tiny plane to St. Kitts and then a 45-minute ferryboat ride to the resort. C.W. and her l5-year-old sister Missy had one room, while her younger twin sisters shared another. I, the king, had my very own room. It was nice stylin’.

However, the separate rooms thing didn’t really work out the way Mom and Pop Wellington had planned. The vacation at Nevis turned out to be where C. W. and I did it for the first time. After scouting out several romantic moonlit locales, we decided on the big laundry room where all the beach towels were washed. We broke in and turned on the dryers and lay on top of them. It was like having a vibrating bed in a seedy downtown motel but we didn’t have to pay any quarters. Pretty ingenious, I thought.

The laundry room was C.W.’s idea; you never knew with her. She had an unbelievable appetite for fun. There were a lot of laughs and some great sex in the laundry room that night. We did pretty well a bunch of nights after that. We even managed to find a bed sometimes.

So there I was, living large with all the beautiful people, having the hottest girlfriend in history, enjoying great sex, playing basketball and even making some connections. Obviously, you should never get comfortable on the top of the world. The landing can be a real bitch.

After that vacation, I got a part-time job in a sandwich shop. One day my boss let me out two hours early, so I went to surprise C.W. When I got to her house, she and her father were heading toward their stable. They were pretty bundled up, but I was sure it was them. They didn’t see me come into the stable, and I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I heard my name. I stood still where I couldn’t be seen and just listened.

“I know where it’s going and not going,” I heard C.W. say. “I know what your expectations are of me, and I know what they are of myself. There’s a certain life I want to lead and a type of person I want to share it with. There’s a place for Kevin, but it’s not long term. I’m not going to have baggage in college next year.”

Holy shit,
I thought.
I’m a fuckin’ boy-toy.
I thought maybe she was just telling her father a story, you know, to get him off her back. But that wasn’t the case.

I left the stable so quietly they never even noticed me.

Right around the end of basketball season was when it happened. Oh, she was nice as could be; this culture has a way of having the brightest smiles when they drop the biggest bombs. She said she wanted to break up and stay friends. Man, it hurt so much. Worse yet, I
soon realized it was pretty much over for me with everyone at Remington Academy. It was like I used up my value when basketball season was over. At the end of the day,
I
was just the hired help. Just a fucking birthday party clown.

So C.W. went off to her liberal arts white-bread college. Maybe she thought of me when she saw a basketball game or a clothes dryer but probably not much more often than that. For me, it was different. Not a day passed when I didn’t think of her at least once. When I went off to New York State in Albany, I still tried to hang with that money crowd. Once you get a taste of that life, it’s hard to settle back in.

I took on odd jobs to get enough money for drinks and even some clothes to go clubbing. I had a dozen different jobs, anything that paid. Sometimes I would caddie at the country club. I’d hump golf bags and listen. One day I would hear political power brokers lobbying prominent state politicians. The next day it could be a hedge fund manager with his airtight arbitrage siphoning off affluent investors. They all pumped each other for resources and lied about their golf scores. There was a kingdom out there, and everyone was fighting for their share. Why shouldn’t I?

I worked my ass off during the day so I could get to the clubs and fake being cool at night. I didn’t have the Porsches and BMWs the others were getting from their folks to take me to the clubs, but I managed to go there sometimes. Mostly I was trying to find another C.W., but no luck. As soon as I discovered any quality in these girls that was different from C.W., I ended it. I had some short relationships but nothing satisfying. Sometimes, when I stopped and thought about it, I wondered what I was doing. Why was I searching for another girl to say, “fuck you” with a gentle smile and a kind word, the way the rich do it? But even that realization wasn’t enough to make me stop longing for the good life.