Excerpt 3
I started smoking weed after a premonitory dream… Webster’s defines “premonition,” as “a strong feeling that something is about to happen, especially something unpleasant”; “premonitory,” which of course is a declension of “premonition”—either in the “genitive” or the “ablative,” I don’t know (I’ve never really understood all that “tensive” jive)—is defined less ambiguously, as to mean “giving warning”; “premonitory,” strictly speaking, if you trust Webster’s, which I don’t, not indiscriminately, doesn’t just “especially” mean something unpleasant, they would have it that it means unpleasant, across the board; but I don’t mean the dream was a fair warning, I just mean it gave me a premonition of something not necessarily unpleasant… although now that I say it, perhaps the premonition in the dream was an unpleasant one, after all that came to pass. Anyway, just like the rest of my generation, I grew up taking state-mandated “health” classes, in which spavined old Mrs. G stood in front of our class five days a week—sipping a diet soda whose consumption she herself in her lessons had expressly enjoined—and harped upon various hygiene, diet, and lifestyle-related topics which were variously discredited, equivocated and qualified, and, only rarely, affirmed, as the years went on and as science progressed and, in any case, after we had already graduated middle school and the damage was already done and it was, in sum, too late. Our easily-impressionable young minds had already been impressed, and Mrs. G had been the one with the branding implement. She had been known to instruct us in no uncertain terms that marijuana, a hot topic of the day, was, like masturbation, something to partake in only if (this was a Catholic school, remember) we happened to like our afterlife on the hottish side. This, of course, only spurred me to think of the hydroponic substance all the more kindly. Which planted the seed, after a manner of speaking. But my best friend at the time, Ryan Zoellnor, later had occasion, naturally in conversation, to mention that he, for one, found any and all smoking of weed to be reprehensible, not just because of the health effects—though health effects there most certainly were, and mighty deleterious ones too—but leaving aside the health (dis)effects, even, Ryan found the practice unmanageable because of the effects weed has on your spiritual (so to speak) rigor. He was aping something his parents told him, I must imagine. Ryan Zoellnor told me that smoking weed, makes the fool who imbibes lazy, stupid, and unconcerned, and all in all the chap will probably never have a chance in life. That was what did it for me—not his actual argument, or rather his parents’s, but a sort of loyalty I felt towards my friend, who I felt very highly of at the time. If Ryan Zoellnor doesn’t smoke weed, then Peter Schutz won’t either. Peter Schutz, no thank you, won’t toss his life out the window and maybe lose a bosom companion in the process. I really respected Ryan Zoellnor, you see; and had this really quite annoying habit of copying everything the poor fellow ever did. I have a similarly annoying habit with any and everyone who chances to fall into the orbit of my social sphere. Or rather, if I happen to fall into theirs: whether it be Ryan Zoellnor or some of the cronies I met in Brooklyn during my podcasting tenure, if I ever meet someone I really respect—whom I meet and immediately start to idolize all out of proportion—unconsciously or no I’ll start copying all their attributes I admire as my own. Even choice catch-phrases of my beloved, I’ll start to mimic, I guess in some bid to be admirable myself. But by and by, this friend of mine—more seasoned, socially, and more fluid in the drifts of all things social, than myself, as a rule—will notice these certain “tics” I’ve adopted and began to get a little “creeped out.” As one often does when met with their double. The subject is well trod in the literature. By and by they begin to distance themselves from their unsolicited “mini-me.” Rightly they’ll recognize me as a leech, and a leech of a particularly pernicious sort. Well, back then, my host happened to be Ryan Zoellnor. I would do anything to defend his honor, and to uphold my honor in his eyes; and if that meant no weed-smoking, then, by golly, when my peers started to smoke weed, Peter Schutz was uniformly counted out—and not always just because the “cool kids” didn’t want him there to begin with, but on his own charge. No thanks, as if to say. Turning-up-my-nose-like, even if they didn’t mind including me for once. (I wasn’t too popular; hence why Ryan Zoellnor wasn’t just my best friend, but my bread and butter. Another reason why these figures in my life began to distance themselves from Peter. There’s too much pressure on them. They can tell that if it weren’t for them, I would be utterly adrift in the world. I’m not just latched on like a leech, I’m clinging to them as if to a shootling on a cliffside. Of course, it’s a pressure that’s applied tacitly, and these “figures,” as I say, in my life, are usually loath to “presume” on my social affairs outside of their limited [so they un-presumptuously assume] involvement therein—it’s all very humble, and indeed humility is often one of the key virtues I admire in one of these hyper-personal heroes of mine—but gradually, compounded with my constant nagging, constant hanger-on-ism, my echolalia and echopraxia, and the more spiritual echopraxia of recalibrating myself to match the morals, worldviews, ethics, and all that my special friends du jour respectively hold in esteem—gradually, an image takes shape in their mind that I do not just expect them to be my one and only friend, and for me to be theirs, but that I even expect them to take on for me the role of, so to put it, “the father I never had.” On top of their jobs and all their other, I’m sure admirably many obligations they have going on in their lives, eventually my father figure grows tired of my omnipresence and, just as tacitly, gives me to understand that I need to find another set of heels to be ever to heel to.) Then one day the dream came, in which I was crawling on my hands and knees along a dirt path, and little by little I approached a bridge; laying on the ground, still lit, I found what Mrs. G taught us to identify as a “roach.” Never before had I felt so elated! Excitedly, I picked it up, and began to smoke. I had never smoked weed before, of course—never in my waking hours—but in this premonitory dream, I began to get baked. It wasn’t the effect, the “high,” of the drug that did it—since, again, my first time doing it was in a dream, what I experienced as a “high” was probably (of course I don’t precisely recall) nothing like the actual high you get, and that I was later to “get” supernumerary times—was later to be as intimately acquainted with as ever with Ryan Zoellnor—from marijuana; no, it wasn’t that I got high in the dream, and liked the feeling, but what really did it for me was the fact that I was so elated before even picking up and smoking the errantly discarded roach. I was already elated just upon finding the weed—a smoky ember lying beside a forlorn bridge in the landscape of my subconscious and overcast mind, ready for my subconscious enjoyment—much more so than I would’ve imagined, given how rock-ribbingly anti-weed I was, or thought I was, in my waking life. I was so elated, so excited, and it’s that I remembered after I’d left the dream and returned to my waking life. Literally, overnight—I was convinced. Suddenly I began averting my head and scouring the gutters down every sidewalk I ambled, looking for carelessly abandoned pot-cigarettes: “joints” or “J’s,” “spliffs,” “doobies” or “doobs,” Mrs. G had alerted us. This was the infamous suburban Iowa sprawl, in which getting booked for weed practically meant a life sentence, and where, subsequently, sidewalk spliff-smoking, gutter roach-tossing, was kept to a practical minimum. I don’t know what I expected to find. But sure enough I never found it.
In any case, the hope lingered. The remembered hope of a dream—and remembered only with the caustic fidelity of a dream. But all that meant was that the fissures around the smoky ember had been burnt away—the dirt path, the forlorn bridge, and whether or not the sky of mind was indeed overcast that day, are all inventions for the nonce—and all that remained of the dream in memory was the smoky ember itself in all its tantalizingness. The hope lingered—and Ryan, incidentally, left. The summer before eighth grade his family packed up and moved to Colorado, the Rocky Mountain State. The asshole! I felt like a scorned lover! All we had discussed, all the plans we had made… we were going to take “Philosophy,” an elective course that counted as a religion class at Missionary—we were going to take it, together! He was obsessed with chess, Ryan was, and it was my idea that in high school, after I promised to learn how to play the game, the two of us would join the chess team, and take the regional circuit by storm! Nevermind that Missionary never even had a chess team—it was my idea to start it! Chess itself, was Ryan’s idea, he was the progenitor of his own fixation, but the chess team, was mine. And now, all was as nothing. He didn’t even have the heart to break the news to me until right as it was just about to happen. We, me and Ryan, had only just about a week together to spend before he and his parents and his two younger brothers boarded a flight whose tickets were booked months in advance. Why hadn’t he warned me months in advance! It was as though he were trying to escape in the cover of night, I thought, after a manner of speaking. I didn’t even notice his parents had sold the house. His parents had sold his house! The same house that Ryan and I and all of our friends used to conduct the most riotous sleepovers at, boots and all… they were the stuff of legend around the Sacred Heart hall lockers, these sleepovers were… of course, it was only later that I discovered there were many more sleepovers hosted, and somehow kept sedulously secret from me and me alone, than there were sleepovers at which I was in attendance; Mr. and Mrs. Zoellnor, you see, found my presence “obnoxious.” True, I was very loud. I was very obnoxious. But the humiliation at being excluded, and the further humiliation of my subtraction being held private from me so universally—a feat that surely required no little effort, a feat that was certainly quite impressive for a gaggle of sixth-graders—well, really, I don’t even need to say… The humiliation was astounding, no least, and leave it at that. It was all in the past now—I don’t say, it’s now all in the past, though of course I mean that, too, but instead, it was—that’s even how I looked at it then, right as it happened, right as Ryan broke me the news, right as Ryan and I, on my request, walked the not-insignificant distance from a community-park neutral zone (where we could hang out without the added and undue pressure of Ryan’s being “received” under my battlements) to the “For Sale” sign adorning the erstwhile lawn of all my erstwhile days of splendor, leisure and pleasure… I saw that “For Sale” sign and even right that very moment, even with the added emotional weight of Ryan standing beside me with distinct emotional deadness, the only thought that would come to me was it’s all in the past now. Thinking back now, it strikes me that every word of the statement carries with it a special significance, that can’t be captured by simply italicizing every word—for then it’d look like I meant the whole phrase, instead of every individual word within the whole phrase, to be emphasized. It—was—all—in—the—past.
It was all in the past—all of it; it was all in the past.
It was all in the past. It was—no gainsaying it! It was undeniably so.
It was all in the past—where? In there. Inside of there—the past.
It was all in the past—so why bother dwelling on it? Ryan was moving away. There was nothing to be done. There was only the future now; the future, and, this very present. Me and Ryan still had this one last week left. We would make the best of it.
(And OK, maybe not every word can stand to be emphasized, you’re right. Italicizing the “the” does seem a tad gratuitous.)
As it turns out, me and Ryan were not to make the best of it. “What with packing and everything…” … Ryan was too busy. Oh, oh well. It was in the past now, anyway. Even now—even in this very present, which everyone’s always jabbering on about, about it’s being so very “precious,” the present… Supposedly precious, more like. Even the present is past, I decided. Ryan can’t come to the phone right now? Very good, Mrs. Zoellnor. (Should I take this opportunity to apologize to her, for that time she walked in, urged by all the screaming, on me trying, nude and fully erect, to piss on her son and all the rest of our friends as they ran around her basement, not really enjoying the “joke” or the “prank,” if a “joke” or a “prank” was what I was even doing…?) Very good, Mrs. Zoellnor, I said on the other line. (Maybe Ryan on the other other line actually could come to the phone—maybe he just didn’t want to, after hearing who it was.) Yes, Mrs. Zoellnor, very good. And in my head I added, after I hung up, the following: All for the best. So much the worse. All in the past—even the present! Very good! Oh, how much of life was very good indeed! It was all very good—so long as it was in the past, we could make it so. And everything was in the past. Even the present.
Ryan had already moved on, when he moved to Colorado, in other words. Ironically Colorado was later to be the very first state in the Union to legalize recreational marijuana. Unless he too had been visited upon in a dream since I last kept touch with him, I’ll bet he was all very supercilious, and morally indignant, about the whole thing. Just like a poor sport! (Just like when he yelled like a bitch to his mother when I pulled a little “prank” on him, the little snitch twerp…) You’ll notice I don’t respect him anymore! Yes, my admiration for him, is very much in the past. And it went the way of the dodo fairly well immediately. For it wasn’t much longer after graduating eight grade, the last school term before high school and my first Ryan Zoellnor-less year of not just middle school but elementary as well—and “graduation” it properly was… even over the (admittedly quite tame, and mostly ironic) grumblings of certain of our teachers, who said that a graduation was something you actually earn, you achieve, and not just a certificate mandated by the state to be handed out to all middle-school students regardless of attendance or performance (or whether the school at which they variously attended, performed, was private or public)—“Graduate college, better yet, successfully argue your post-doctoral thesis,” quoth one green-eyeshaded, and clearly quite embittered, Sacred Heart pedagogue, our Nigerian-immigrant chemistry teacher, “and then let me know! Then I’ll be impressed!” … whether his embitterment was itself earned, as in, whether, even with a PhD in biochemistry, he was teaching eighth-grade science classes at an institution that didn’t even require a teacher’s certificate of its candidates, because of either discrimination or because of nitty-gritty immigration particulars, I have no idea—eighth-grade graduation was a big deal, is what I’m getting at, with a proper “commencement” (into what, high school? just across the street, at Missionary?) ceremony and everything—my grand-parents flew out, the whole deal—and it wasn’t much later that I “commenced” smoking pot like it was my job. The same way some kids actually worked part-time jobs after school, for the extra money.
But I never needed the extra money. At first, I was only hanging around kids who were more than happy to tithe their supply out to me. By the time I was purchasing my own weed, for my own individual pleasure, away from the pestering expectations and grievances of the world around me and even the amiable company of fellow reprobates—all alone, in other words, without needing to rely on (what some of us did) a shared stash that a couple of kids pooled money to buy, and then kept safe in one bundle in the home of whomever was the most trustworthy of the group, or whomever had the most lenient parents—by the time that relying on the schedule and company of others in this way for my “fix” became distasteful to me, I could always count on Dad to spot me fifty bucks (“But bring back change!”) under the pretext of grabbing dinner with nonexistent friends; or, barring that, could always snatch the same amount from my mother’s purse, hanging unguarded in the laundry room as the rest of the house slept… So, about this time, it must have been after I started buying my own private “stash,” which I hid wrapped in a smell-moderating plethora of dryer sheets in the pocket of one of the jackets hanging in my closet—but before Mom, rightly suspicious of my “deny everything” approach to cross-examination, started keeping her purse locked up in her own closet at nights. She was already wary of me, at this point in the timeline, from the past fourteen years of countless tantrums—and backchat that never wavered even in the face of the most reasonable requests, the most reasonable corrective measures, like her asking me to pick my jacket off the floor, and hang it on a hook; or like suggesting I actually work with the tutor they so kindly hired, and not go catatonic in protest as he, the tutor, eventually gave up trying to shoehorn my learning into the deaf ear attached to the slackened body of the impetuous child whose grades he had been charged with augmenting… but she hadn’t yet caught on to the scent, so to speak, of whatever was hanging wrapped in dryer sheets in the back of her son’s closet, and in which he may quite well have been regularly partaking… That was to come later, after the school (and the police) intervened.
So far, it was still just pot. I still hadn’t moved on to the prescription pills, nicked from Patrick’s designated drawer in the bathroom we brothers had all once shared before one by one, we flew the coop, and started working to fulfill our class prerogative of higher education… I still wasn’t buying bulk poppy seeds—unwashed, important they be unwashed—from Persia Mart, the Middle Eastern specialty store that catered to a rapidly increasing Des Moines refugee population; still hadn’t yet learned the method of making gastrointestinal-havoc-wreaking opium-lite tea out of the stuff by sieving it along with some warm water and lemon juice through a T-shirt you don’t care about irrevocably staining. I don’t even think I was drinking yet, by then… No, because drinking, you see, you had to be invited to a party, generally, in order to do. And I nor any of the other “stoner” kids ever got invited out much. We tended to “harsh” the “vibe” of your typical old-fashioned “rager.” Too cerebral, I suppose. Not physical enough, for the Dionysians who played sports, attended school dances and school community-fund-raising events and who didn’t look to smoking pot as a nifty way to scorn that vile school (they didn’t even think our school was vile!) and that vile community and your parents all at once.
Smoking “pot,” I say… for this is what we called it. Or this is what the kind of kids I hung around later, in college, had come to call it: thus, it’s the terms in which I usually think of it—of marijuana, and all the lugubrious glee it once brought me, and the tumultuous pitfalls it once brought me to, inevitably right after, as the glee started to diminish just like it’d been wrapped in dryer sheets, its emotional “stink” getting smothered and repressed—now, for the rest of my life, it’ll be in terms of smoking pot whenever I do think about what I used to do during this stage of my life. (Which isn’t very often. It’s not the most pleasant to think about.) I forget what we used to call it in high school, but it was probably “weed,” the conventional term that’s still in current today. Even by the eighties the word “pot” was outdated. So let alone the early oughts, when I actually started smoking the stuff… But in college, me, George Yates—yet another who can count me as one of his “admirers” unrequited—and a handful of select others took to calling what we did with our spare time as smoking pot, and the phrase stuck… especially as a signal for in-group status, which status I was inordinately proud to carry… If you were ever in Santa Clara in the late twenty-tens and happened upon a couple of raggedy-looking young men talking about smoking pot, you could be sure it was one of us—and us was Mu Sigma, known colloquially as Mucilage, and we were the stoner frat. (They called us “Mucilage” after our hacking mating call—the death-rattling cry of all habitual pot smokers, and all the expectoration of dislodged mucilage that all that pot entailed.) George Yates was a year above me, and he had chartered a Mu Sig chapter at our school the year before I got there along with ten or so friends of his, all living in the same dorm and all samely rejected from the previously-established Greek organizations on campus. Starting Mu Sig was how they rebelled. And calling weed pot was how we rebelled too. It was a throwback to our parents’s generation, but more importantly, all of us had grown up with our parents—not to mention Mrs. G—telling us not to “smoke pot,” and it was a throwback to that, too. I suppose we got a sort of transgressive titillation out of the verbiage.
Anyway, as I’ve said, I was never really a “good kid.” But I wasn’t a bad kid either, not really. That was the problem: I fell right in between. I wasn’t either. I was nothing. I wasn’t strong enough to tilt the scale in any direction.
In school my performance was poor, but it wasn’t like I failed any classes or anything. Now, that was nothing to write home about—these classes were remarkably easy to pass, in fact, were practically designed to make failure an impossibility. (An ‘F’ student—a held-back student—an expelled student—on the books, looks bad in the district reports come time for state-mandated funding assessments.) This, however, did not stop my teachers from doing just that: writing notes to send home to my parents constantly, almost on a daily basis. But not for my grades necessarily, although they did tend to remark that it was perplexing, given the exceptional, not to say sublime performance of my older brothers, that the younger Schutz was so exceptionally incompetent (defiantly catatonic)… no, rather, the notes sent home were of a more disciplinary nature. Catatonic during the lessons, yes, or at least, selectively so; but more worryingly and more problematically for the rest of the students who were trying to learn was my parents’s son’s tendency to disrupt the classroom… almost, it seemed at times, to whole-heartedly thumb his nose at the—at the whole classroom ethos!
It all started rather young, really. Mid-quarter, end-of-quarter, mid-year, end-of-year report cards delivered by hand (for the school feared they’d get lost in passage were I entrusted with their delivery, like the rest of my peers) marked up like the first draft of an aspirant novelist—‘F’ in history, yes, ‘F’ in math, but ‘F’ in handwriting? ‘F’ in gym? Really? My mother assumed it was a phase, at first, when I was still rather young, and then, when I was, still young but all in all, decidedly less young, she assumed it was still just a phase, only a less minor one. My father assumed similarly. He generally left the assumptions to my mother. He had more important things to worry about, like paying for the private-school tuition I seemed perfectly content to shrug and shirk my way through like a eunuch through a brothel—like putting food on the table, not to mention every other more fundamental concern than whatever more or less minor phase I happened to be indulging in today, or whether I’d turn it all around again tomorrow and correct course back to the high road down which he already had two other sons humming merrily anyway… But the grades could be corrected. Or my mother assumed they could. Whereas just the word my teachers were beginning to use concerning my overall conduct was incorrigible—deriving from the French corriger and meaning, more literally, un-fucking-correctable. My mother didn’t let her rudimentary French, or what she remembered of it from high school, stop her, just like she didn’t and was not ever going to let anything stop her. Me least of all. Grades could and would be corrected the same way she’d correct my errant behavior, the same way she never had to resort to when it came to those grades of my brothers, and in the same manner wardens of prisoner-of-war camps corrected insolence and selective catatonia in their charges—strict discipline. In one fell swoop, the strictest discipline would be enforced in order to ensure I had the proper time to study my courses and complete my homework, and, same strictest discipline would operate as a punishment for all the mayhem I wreaked on the third-grade playground… we only started getting letter grades in the third grade, and already I was failing! But more pressing a concern was that in third grade, already in third grade, I used to torture Marcos Gallindo with racist innuendoes, so much so that the school (not to mention my father, who could hardly look me, me, a Schutz, in the eye, his own son, a racist!, as he bent me over his knee and delivered one, two, three swats on the racist son’s lily-, Aryan-white ass cheeks, and on and on it felt to me to infinity) had to intervene… they used to hold the two of us in during recess, while the other children were playing, in mediation… yes, they even withheld his recess, for my benefit!… and whenever we had a field trip, Marcos’s dad, Mr. Galindo, stalwart father, sterling ornament of his community that he was, used to always volunteer to chaperone, and volunteered to drive a gaggle of us students to wherever museum or park we were all going to, and Mrs. Johnson, our teacher, made sure I was always assigned to his group, and me and Marcos would sit side by side in his father’s car during those stern and silent car rides… also in third grade was when I’d get all out of sorts after losing in some trivial game, and march forthwith up to my victorious opponent and launch with all my strength the ball we had been using into the kid’s face, one time leaving a mark… I had no impulse control, said the school counselor, no emotional regulation, which, it’s true, I didn’t… and then, how aghast Mrs. Johnson was, and how aghast were my parents, to hear me pestering little Morgan Cooley for a massage during our instructions one day! Come on, I’d say, give me a little rub… I drew mustaches of the style made infamous by a certain mid-century fascist dictator on every available visage (some of whom were rather holy, and rather profaned by my handiwork) lining the pages of my shared copy of the fourth-grade theology textbook, and during reading hours, instead of reading my overdue library book, an abridged children’s version of a well-known classic novel, I was to be found playing a makeshift variety of baseball with my hardcover, overdue abridged classic as the bat, a wadded up piece of college-ruled notebook paper as the ball, and Jack Fritz, who was lagging behind in his reading proficiency and who really needed the use of the reading hours—who in any case certainly did not need, to be incessantly distracted by the fourth-grade ne’er-do-well who didn’t seem properly able to appreciate the fact that not everyone’s parents had the luxury of providing their spoiled-rotten child with books and with reading hours at home—and scholarship-child Jack Fritz as the pitcher! Nevermind that to me, my mother-enforced at-home “reading hours” were the dread-most punishment—nevermind the mother-enforced at-home math tutoring sessions, enforced and taught by my mother; nevermind the mother-enforced at-home vocabulary quizzes, pouring over Dad’s old college-days copy of Webster’s, enforced by and neck moistened by, of course, no one else but Mother—Dad somewhere in another room doing anything but enforcing, he left the assumptions and the enforcements to her—nevermind, for that matter, mother-enforced at-home gym! How do you even fail at gym? How stupid can you be to fail gym? Nevermind that to me, the “luxury” (quoth fourth-grade Mrs. Zahm) of panting through an after-school four-mile jog being trailed, being hunted by my mother every step of the way, was nothing except the most Draconian torture, and that I wished, I longed, for nothing more in my most longing of moments, than to trade places with scholarship-child Jack Fritz even for a single day, and let him enjoy all the luxury my privileged, full-tuition existence afforded!
I duly reported this desire of mine to my parents, along with the report of Mrs. Zahm, which she had called home ahead of time to warn my parents I was to deliver. “I wish I was poor! I wish you,” I said to my mother, “did have to work—then maybe you wouldn’t always be hounding me about my grades, about school!” “You’re lucky you have the mother you have! What kind of mother would she be if she just didn’t care! You wouldn’t last a day with a mother who didn’t care!” My father was tired, he was always tired, after a long day of—oh, whatever it is he did all day… “Try me! Every day I wish she’d get struck in a head-on collision picking me up,” I said, referring in the third-person to the woman pacing, very much in the first-person and very much in a rage, right in front of me; “then I wouldn’t have to endure another extracurricular social-studies quiz! I wish you’d die—die die die!” My parents were never the “go to your room!” type of parents. No, they were in it for the long haul. First, I’d come home, and my father would be home early from work there waiting for me, forewarned of the day’s transgressions, and the two of us would sit there for a grim, albeit short, talk. “Man to man.” Then, we’d proceed to the spanking, which was never pleasant, but which was never as unpleasant as I made it sound, wailing and thrashing like a hysteric at the gibbet as he marched me, practically by the ear, to the doorwayed toilet-enclave of our house’s master bathroom for my penance. Then I’d lay on the floor of said toilet-enclave for some time “gathering myself,” as my father put it, staring at the shod pubic hairs scattered there, some forming Basque swastikas, some bundled into tumbleweeds. After that, either it would take place right there in the master bathroom, or, if I had finally emerged—the thought of somehow sneaking past the two of them was always tempting, but I knew they’d be in the living room, right past the master bedroom’s door, waiting for me, waiting for me with eyes like hawks—we’d rendezvous there, in the living room; and the much longer, impressively even more grim series of talks would commence. There I’d be given to understand what I already knew: that the thing I had done was the wrong thing, and that, in the future, it’d be best that I consider doing, instead, exclusively the right ones. My mother would be nigh on apoplectic with the personified failure of all her motherly efforts, and my father would use the same measured tone he used in particularly heated courtroom battles as he tried to calm her down at the same time that he enumerated for me all the many (eminently reasonable) reasons that the thing I had done had been, generally, taken offense to. When he didn’t get to the point fast enough my mother would bubble over with some particularly animated ebullitions of her own, often directed so trenchantly in my face that they were at risk of leaving a mark. I, little lawyer I was, would try to turn the tables on them, naturally enough, but legal wunderkind I was not, and in this household, there was no judge to maintain order when the female attorney on the side of the prosecution reacted explosively to my insinuations that if she only wasn’t so hard on me at home all the time, I wouldn’t feel the need to act out so badly in school; to which she would in turn reply that the only reason she was hard on me in the first place, was that I always acted out so badly at school; whence my father would attempt to restrain his partner’s more wildly emotive gestures—he, for one, preferred the eminently measured gesture of the repetitive swatting of my ass—and all the more blood-curdling of her screams, while at the same time asserting that what she had said, alas, though he objected to the way she said it, he agreed with, and once again underlining all the more cogent segments of her outburst, and throwing in here and there some eminently well-reasoned replies to some of the less cogent segments of mine. This would go on all night, eating into my at-home supplemental-education time. Not til later did I learn to simply capitulate, and allow them, to allow me, to traipse on gratefully up the stairs and off to bed. Although, true enough, if I had tried this admittedly rather effective tactic at the time, I’m sure my mother would have been grateful in her own right for the chance to salvage some of the supplemental-education time still left before midnight, and I wouldn’t have actually been suffered to go to sleep any sooner anyway.
Jack Fritz, by the way, along with all the other so-called “scholarship kids,” I used to torment most cruelly, and all the other rich private-school Des Moines niche students used to join in with a special exultation, though of course, in concert, they all cried to their parents as well as to Mrs. Bicandi that they were only following my disreputable example… We all used to take special joy in cornering poor Jack Fritz, in hand-me-down uniforms from the school, shopworn polos graced with the Sacred Heart insignia… “When you wear this uniform,” our teachers used to constantly instruct us, an eye keenly on me, the problem-child, in particular, “you represent the school, and should act accordingly”… How much money do your parents make? we taunted him… Are you rich—Cristina Zimmerman’s favorite word, used to describe her father, the neurosurgeon, and my father, the high-powered lawyer—and Abby Cleary’s dad, the corn magnate—and Morgan Cooley’s dad, who ran a successful bike shop, the only one in town—they sponsored Olympic racers, even, Morgan Cooley’s dad’s company did, as she was always so excited to tell us… Are you rich, and, schmuck that he was—schmuck that we saw him as—Jack Fritz replied, yes. And we’d jump down his throat, challenge him on it—where did you go on vacation for spring break?—of course knowing that Jack Fritz had never been on a plane—and that his parents probably had to work over “spring break.” How big is your house? It didn’t matter that none of us knew anything about square-footage, and that the only answer we were looking for was big; and it really didn’t even matter if Jack Fritz fired back with the only answer we were looking for. Cristina and Abby and Morgan—and whomever else, come many, come all—and me already had it as a foregone conclusion that our houses were the big ones and Jack Fritz’s house was small. Why the unsolicited class warfare? Your guess is as good as mine. If anything, and precisely contrary to the narrative she had cooked up with Mrs. Bicandi and the rest of the gang, I think I probably learned this line of attack from Cristina Zimmerman, and all her incessant prattle on how rich she was and how really quite impressive it was to be a neurosurgeon, and how lavish whatever philanthropy Des Moines dinner-party her mother had put on that previous weekend had been—detailing this last point for the benefit of poor Jack Fritz, whose parents, unlike mine, hadn’t been invited, and who wasn’t present at the “kid’s table” at said functions, unlike me, Ryan Zoellnor, Abby and Morgan (and of course Cristina) and all the rest of us, where we gossiped about Jack and about Marcos and about Mrs. Johnson and about Mrs. Zahm, in much the same way that a little way’s over, at the adult’s table, our parents as time went on took to gossiping about rich private-school Des Moines niche’s resident problem child, me, and all the antics I was getting up to, and, as time went on, my parents’s invite to which started getting lost in the mail.