THE CRAZY ONE IN THE CAR -- episode 25
Going to college 1964-1968
Spring Quarter 1967
Yesterday I broke the school record for the one hundred twenty yard high hurdles with a time of :14.9. I want to be as ecstatic as I was three years ago when I broke the high school record, but now it feels like just another marker in a long line of markers that signify—what? that lead where?
*****
“Good morning, David, this is Lilla Edwards in the Dean’s office. The Dean has a proposal for you.”
Dean James J. Duquesne is leaving Allegheny at the end of the year to take over the headmastership at the Kingswood School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. The Dean’s office wants to do a comic roast of the Dean and they want me to write it and present it to the college community.
I accept.
Ford Chapel is packed. Dean Duquesne sits on the dais and I stand at the lectern. I’ve reworked Paul Revere’s Ride:
Listen, my schoolmates, to this refrain,
Of th’Allegheny career of James J. Duquesne.
Included are most of Duquesne’s career accomplishments and I manage a backwards swipe at his rumored attraction to female students. Ford Chapel rings with laughter and applause. The college’s president presents Dean Duquesne with a plaque and the Dean gives a brief speech.
Afterwards he shakes my hand.
“Beautifully done, David.”
I blush.
“I want to ask you: Do you have plans for next year?”
“Beyond trying to stay out of Vietnam, no.”
“I’m offering you a teaching position at Kingswood.”
He asks me to visit Bloomfield Hills over next year’s Christmas break.
Recently I’ve been thinking I might teach prep school since that doesn’t require secondary education certification. And suddenly there’s this. It feels like a “Did This Amazing Thing Really Just Happen?” moment.
I’m not going to tell anyone.
*****
Jane calls with a Jack Downs update: Emma Orzechaski is a thirty-year old spinster secretary at the mill. She visits Jack in secret every day at the hospital—and current thinking is that he is never getting out of the hospital. The nurses chuckle about her sneaking in before or after visiting hours. Everybody knows about Emma and Jack: “Why, yes, didn’t you hear? It’s been going on for more than two years.” Mom knows. Apparently she’s known for some time. And she doesn’t care. She asks Dad if he has visitors from the mill and he stubbornly shakes his head no. She tells him to stop hiding it, that it’s okay, that she knows. Maybe his constricted throat will clear up if he doesn’t have to worry about “the other woman.”
Mom calls Emma and tells her that it isn’t necessary to sneak around, that she’s not fooling anybody. And Emma apparently has anticipated Mom’s call because she has well-rehearsed counters to everything Mom says.
Mom: How can you stand to go there every day and look at him?
Emma: If you can’t, then you don’t know what love is.
Mom: How long has this been—?
Emma: I’ve been in love with Jack for over three years and I’ll love him forever.
Mom goes in for the takedown.
Mom: If I divorce him, will you marry him? Will you pay for his rehabilitation? Will you feed him every day for the rest of his life? Will you wipe his ass?
Emma hangs up.
May 14, 1967
Dad continues to get skinnier and less talkative. He’s lying on his stomach now to heal the blisters on his back and the bed sores on his butt, looking like an underfed chicken ready for the soup. Tomorrow a man from a rehabilitation center is going to view the body to see if he should be taken to the home. And I suppose he’ll go there and lie in his bed for years, loved by Emma, tolerated by Mom, and ignored by me.
May 20, 1967
PACs. Won the 120 yard hurdles and got fourth in the 440s.
I stay up all night—I’ve learned to say “pulling an all-nighter”—studying for tomorrow’s history of the theatre class.
I make my 11:00 sociology class and go to the 1:30 theatre history exam and I am dead tired.
There’s a home track meet today at 4:00 p.m. I’ve been awake for forty hours. I can’t do it. I go to my room and fall asleep.
The kid from the other school wins the high hurdles with a :16.5 time.
When I show up to practice the next day, Bernie says, “Jesus, Dave,” and he walks away from me.
Alpha Chi Rho wins the InterFraternity Council athletic trophy—nobody remembers the last time that happened—and we start the all-day celebration with a kegger at the house. Some time in the evening the keg runs empty and I go downtown with several very drunk Crows and we buy a couple of cases. On the way to the basement to continue drinking, Jerry and I take the off-ramp into the house library. We sit in the dark and we talk and, as always, I tell him how I feel about him and he refuses to believe I’m “that way.”
I lean in to him. “It’s true, it’s true, Jerry Mi Caro. Why won’t you believe me?”
He lifts his hand to my face. “I thought you hated me.”
I lean my head onto his shoulder. “I don’t know how to hate you.”
And something happens. Neither of us initiates, but together we somehow move from the sofa onto the floor. He lifts himself on top of me and he’s unzipping my jeans. He tugs them down and I raise my hips. He pulls my underwear down and I feel him touching my cock. It gets hard, he’s caressing it, he’s licking it. Ohmygod. He brings his mouth, his lips, onto it, around it. He’s sucking. His head bobs and he’s sucking. He’s moaning and I feel him sucking my cock.
He looks up at me and rolls off and I straddle his knees and pull his jeans down. He’s hard. I take his cock in my hand. It’s bigger than mine, longer, thicker. I lean down and open my mouth and the head touches my tongue. And I suck it. Gently. Am I doing it right? He moves. He moans. I’m sucking his cock.
We’re drunk and I’m sucking Jerry’s cock.
A rush of light floods the floor as the door bursts open behind us. I lift off Jerry and turn to look. In the doorway someone—or two—silhouetted by the hall light, freeze and the door slams shut.
“Oh shit,” and I’m pulling up my jeans.
“We can’t stop! We can’t!” Jerry’s saying as he’s pulling up his zipper.
I open the door a bit and look out. The hall is empty. There are people in the living room. The stereo is blasting away. We sneak out and down the back hall.
“The tv room! The tv room!” Jerry says in his frantic ten-year old’s voice as he grabs my arm. “We can lock the door!”
Out the back door and down the walk to the tv room where there are at least six guys and their dates. Moth turns to us. “Hey, Downs! Rag! C’mon in!”
We close the door and go back to the house.
“There’s nowhere,” I’m saying.
“There is! There is! We have to!”
We run upstairs. People everywhere. The bunk beds have been taken down to create another social space.
“We can’t,” I say.
Who opened the library door and saw us?
“No! No! We have to!”
Down the back stairs and into the back hall to the front hall and back into the library. “Here! We can be in here!” He closes the door behind us and pulls me to the floor. He knows what he’s doing and I let him and I join him. It’s hurried, even frantic, but it’s happening.
It’s a minute. Maybe two. Before he stops. Before he pulls away.
And it’s over.
We didn’t cum.
He stands and pulls up his jeans slowly.
We didn’t kiss.
“I’m going to tell myself I did this for you and I’m going to believe it.”
“Jerry—”
“I don’t know why with you it doesn’t feel disgusting,” he says. Zipper up, belt buckled. “But I’m not going to think about it. I’m not going to ask myself why.”
He leaves. I sit for a minute.
Zipper up, belt buckled, I go back to the party.
He’s not there.
Can they tell my life has changed?
May 29, 1967
To think about it is ugly enough, to write about it is impossible.
But, it really wasn’t that great. It was a lot more physical than ever before, but I didn’t feel any more than I ever have. With anyone—even him. And he did all the moaning and most of the moving. He was all over me. And he didn’t do it just for me.
I will love this night always and want it more, but I don’t think now that I’d perish without it.
I’m drinking tea with Big Brother John Fergus in his apartment and I’m telling him about me and Jerry. I want his help and he’s got a pen in his hand and he bites on it as I talk and sometimes he taps it on the desk or he scratches his ear with it as he talks. I’m feeling like a patient whose wise physician is giving him the diagnosis. He hasn’t cracked a joke or used any of his funny voices.
“I think it’s Jerry’s problem,” he says, “not yours. Yet.” He gives me a moment to register this and as I’m about to object, he goes on. “I know you’re the one who makes the first move, but it’s only when he wants it, only after he lets you know you can.”
I want to believe this.
“You can tell by looking at a girl—the way she’s sitting, the way she’s holding her head—whether she has ‘Fuck’ written on her or not.”
And what would I know about it anyway?
“I’ve seen the way he looks at you. I’ve watched him. And he’s always laying around like a little boy who wants to be caressed.”
I want to believe him.
But I don’t want to believe this of Jerry.
But he’s right: no one would do that only because he thinks I want it.
But if it is Jerry, I want it to be me, too.
*****
Mr. Kerder’s in his office.
“I want to write a novel for my senior comp.”
He smiles an unkind smile. “If you want to try that, have at it.”
He thinks I won’t do it. Carolyn won’t be home this summer and I’ll work as a lifeguard and the rest of the time I’ll spend writing. And it will be autobiographical. And if Jack Downs ever reads it, his heart will explode. And Jerry Caraggino will shit a brick. But I’m going to do it. It will take up all my time and that’s good.
On my way to lunch at the house, sophomore Crow Mark Michaels walks with me.
“I’ve been meaning to ask,” he says. “if you already have a roommate for your apartment next year.”
I like Mark. He and I have had bridge playing dates in my room. He’s a good guy. Mark Michaels will do just fine. Since he won’t be a senior next year, we see Dean Duquesne the next day for apartment approval and he assures us that I will have no difficulty and as Mark will be rooming with me, he should easily be approved as well. Mark says he can come to campus during the summer and find us an apartment.
I say sure.
And that’s that.
The Crazy One in the Car is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely co-incidental.