The thing is, it’s not just me who’s going to be affected now that Goddard (and the other colleges Mom applied me to) has turned its collegiate back on me. It’s Alan, too. In this country, if you are a physically and mentally fit antiwar male of draft age who’s not going to college, you have two choices: move to Canada or go to prison for draft evasion. Either option would mean leaving home and Alan for a long time (in the case of Canada, forever) without a chance of visiting. I know he’s not going to starve (not as long as there’s raw spaghetti and frozen pizzas in the house), and except for going to an amusement park now and then, it’s not like I do that much with him. But I also know that having me around is a comfort. Together, we’re soldiers on the home front. Not all war zones are on the other side of the globe.
Speaking of which, the pizzas still have a few minutes to go when the door from the garage opens and Musclini enters, dressed in his tennis clothes. He’s lean, ropy-muscled, tanned, and about four inches shorter than me (which I sometimes suspect compounds his need to be the intimidating patriarch). His white alligator shirt is darkened with patches of sweat, and a white towel hangs around his neck. His face is still flushed from playing, but his short wavy brown hair is combed back to near perfection. Combing his hair is always the first thing he does after a match.
There isn’t much eye contact between us. Maybe someday I’ll ask him why, if I can figure out how to do it without eye contact. Silently, he leaves his tennis bag by the door and proceeds deeper into the house. On many evenings, I don’t see him at all (which is fine with me). If he isn’t off somewhere “working late,” he’s at the club playing tennis.
In the oven, the mini-pizza crusts have, as they say on TV, turned golden brown. It strikes me that, except for chocolate, brown is not a good color when it comes to food. Whoever came up with the “golden” bit was a genius. I call into the den and Alan appears. He used to be a scrawny kid, but now he’s chubby and round-shouldered from sitting on the floor in front of the TV all the time. I put two mini-pizzas on his yellow Superman food tray, pour him a glass of milk (soda and sweet fruit drinks are banned substances in the house of dashed dreams), and back to the den he goes. There used to be a rule that we weren’t supposed to eat in the den, but that was before the war at home went from covert to overt.
I’ve just settled at the kitchen table with the other two mini-pizzas when the squeak of tennis sneakers on linoleum trumpets the return of Musclini. He’s carrying the yellow post office change-of-address form. (Within these walls there is no privacy. My parents go into my room whenever they want. I keep my weed and condoms in a sock at the back of a drawer, where they are meant to be discovered. Hopefully that will discourage further investigation. One has to unscrew the bottom of my record player to find the pills and acid.)
“I want you to sign this.” The paterfamilias places the yellow card in front of me.
The childish instinct to obey quickly flits past, followed by the young man’s urge to resist. “I don’t get it. Am I moving to Bay Shore?”
“No.”
I await further explanation, but none follows.
“How will I get my mail?” I doubt Robin’s even gotten to Camp Juliette yet, but I’m already yearning for sacks of love letters from her. Also, the tickets to the Woodstock music and art festival should be winging this way soon.
The paterfamilias is steely quiet, as if incensed that I have the temerity to question his authority. Or maybe it hasn’t occurred to him that I actually get mail? “I’ll arrange for that,” he says.
“Can I get it myself?” Bay Shore is probably a two-hour round trip, but if that’s what it will take to retrieve a letter from my ladylove, I’ll gladly make the journey.
The paterfamilias rears up to maximum possible height, as he always does when challenged. The next words are clipped, almost a growl: “I said I’ll arrange it.”
In the house of dashed dreams,
The paterfamilias makes the rules,
The paterfamilias breaks the rules.
What are we who are ruled to do?
The paterfamilias has gone to take a shower. I bite into the golden-brown crust of a mini-pizza. The yellow post office form lies unsigned on the kitchen table. Now that it’s understood that I’m not being exiled to some Siberian existence in Bay Shore, I’m pretty sure I know what this is about. It’s another one of his business scams. I’ve been an unwilling participant in the paterfamilias’s hustles since I was old enough to ride a bike and sign my name. After he got the chain of Laundromats — I was around twelve at the time — he added an additional chore to my role as indentured family servant and child laborer: two or three times a week, I had to get on my one-speed balloon-tire Schwinn after school and pedal to banks, where I would convert a couple of natural peanut butter jars’ worth of coins into bills. For every one hundred dollars of nickels, dimes, and quarters, my father took ninety-five and gave me five. He mapped out a dozen banks that I could bike to, each one visited roughly once a month so as not to raise suspicions. The farthest ones took nearly forty minutes to reach and required that I pedal along the curb of the Long Island Expressway service road, where cars barreled past at more than fifty miles an hour.
If someone at a bank asked where I’d gotten so much change, I was supposed to say that I babysat and walked dogs, cut lawns and shoveled driveways, raked leaves and washed cars. Strangely, no one ever asked why I only brought in change and never bills. And my father never explained why I had to pretend I’d earned the money myself. But you’d have to be a major doofus not to think it was part of some scheme to get around a corporate regulation or avoid paying taxes.
Actually, I don’t mind helping the paterfamilias avoid paying taxes to a government that uses the money to invade small countries and incinerate their citizens. So, mini-pizzas finished, I sign the change-of-address form and add my own chicken scratch to the bottom of his note: “Expecting mail soon!”
“When was the last time anyone was down there?” Arno asks while I clear old toys and games from the floor of the playroom closet, then heave open the square red trapdoor made of quarter-inch iron plating.
“Don’t know.” In the early sixties, around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, my parents added two bedrooms, an attic, and a playroom to the house. Under the playroom, the paterfamilias had a fallout shelter built in case of World War III.
For years it has lain unused and nearly forgotten . . . until this hot, humid summer day, when it has occurred to Arno that the poorly ventilated subterranean surroundings might be the perfect place to get high.
The damp odor of mildew wafts up. Milton squints into the dark below and wrinkles his nose. He’s finally begun to let his hair grow. It’s getting wavy and curls up at the sides and in back. He’s also started to cultivate something over his upper lip that could be construed as a mustache. Before he left for MIT last fall, Arno and I tried to get him to give up his leather sandals with the black soles made from car tires. He wouldn’t budge on that, but he did agree not to wear socks with them. All in all, these are positive steps toward his indoctrination into the cultural revolution.
“Why can’t we smoke in the backyard?” he asks.
“Afraid of the dark?” Arno needles.
“Half-wit,” Milton shoots back.
I climb down the cold metal rungs that jut from the cinder-block wall of the shelter. Arno follows. When we reach the bottom, the scrape of our shoes on the bare concrete floor echoes off the walls. It’s almost chilly in here. Milton stares down from above. The shelter is the size of a walk-in closet. He doesn’t like tight, dark spaces.
“Don’t be a pussy,” Mr. Sensitivity calls up to him.
“Genital wart,” Milton mutters, and climbs down. We sit side by side on a bunk under a bare lightbulb. The cans of food on the shelves are darkly spotted with mold. The cinder-block walls are stained brownish with moisture.
Milton groans. “Wonderful ambiance.”
“We won’t be here
long,” I assure him.
Arno lights up. The hypothesis is that a suitable degree of wreckage can be achieved by doing one joint and then rebreathing the smoky air.
“Guaranteed bad trip,” Milton continues to complain.
“Quit bellyaching,” Arno snaps. “And wash your face. You’ve got dirt over your lip.”
Milton self-consciously touches his fledgling mustache. Arno passes the J to me. “Your festival tickets come?”
“Not yet.” I remind myself to call the post office and find out how long it takes for a change of address to kick in.
“Mine just came,” Arno says. “Yours’ll probably be here in a day or two.”
“Where’re we gonna stay?” Milton asks.
“Who knows? We’ll bring sleeping bags.”
“And a tent?” Milton asks.
“Sure, a tent.” Arno turns to me. “So how was Maine?”
The mention of tents must have reminded him. I tell them it sucked.
“Robin leave for camp?” Milton asks.
I nod. She’s been gone roughly thirty hours, and I’ve already written two letters. Three, if you count the one I handed her through the car window yesterday morning.
“Heard from Goddard?” Arno asks.
I hadn’t planned to tell anyone about the thin envelope. Not until I come up with a strategy to keep from getting a one-way ticket to Southeast Asia, since that is bound to be the next question everyone will ask. But Arno knows what my hesitation means.
“God . . . damn idiot.” He draws out the words, then switches to his Lucas imitation: “‘Man, with my SATs, Goddard’s gotta take me.’”
Oh, the inescapable agony of regret! Robin’s first choice was Middlebury, and with her grades, SATs, and extracurriculars, it had been a near certainty. Goddard is about half an hour away from Middlebury, and I thought I fit their applicant profile perfectly: alienated, antiwar, underachieving, and perpetually stoned (institution of higher learning, indeed). Perhaps my grades weren’t what they could have been, and my extracurricular activities were limited to reading, skiing, writing poetry, getting wasted, and sexual intercourse. But my SAT scores were (surprisingly) good, and I thought the epic poem I composed in iambic pentameter as my essay (in a single night with the help of a couple of Arno’s mom’s diet pills) was so unique and groundbreaking that the admissions people at Goddard would instantly recognize the boundless creative potential inside me crying out to be unleashed.
My mother, being more circumspect, had filled out applications for four additional colleges, even going so far as to write the essays for me. All I’d had to do was sign my name. I’d been rejected by all of them and wait-listed by Goddard, which asked to see my final-semester grades before making a decision. That meant that while everyone else got to enjoy senior slump, I was supposed to study hard and apply myself. I’d intended to. . . . I really had, but mostly I’d applied my tongue to rolling papers.
“Told your parents?” Arno asks, and again mimics me before I can answer: “‘No way, man. They’re the last people I’d tell.’”
“Can it, zitface,” Milton cautions, then leans toward me, his voice solemn: “Great Neck’s probably the toughest draft board in the country.”
“How’re they gonna know I wasn’t accepted?” I ask.
“You’re supposed to inform them within ten days if your status changes.” Milton knows the selective service laws because of his brother, Rudy, who recently fled to Canada to avoid the draft.
“Man, talk about the last people I’d tell,” I answer ruefully.
Milton shrugs. “Just saying.”
The joint has burned down to the roach. Pinching it gingerly between thumb and forefinger, I take one last toke and, of course, get the roach burn I deserve. “Damn!” I drop the roach on the floor and touch my tongue to the raw dark spot on the tip of my index finger.
“Maybe there’s still time,” Arno says. “There’s gotta be a college that’ll take you.”
“I don’t know,” Milton says. “It’s almost July. Kind of late. If I were you, I’d talk to a draft counselor fast. The American Friends have an office in a church on Jericho Turnpike. I’ll get the address. It’s the place Rudy used.”
Arno snorts. “Lot of good it did him.”
“They’ll lay out his options, douchebag,” Milton says.
My life has come down to options. None of them good. I continue to have a hard time believing this is actually happening. A little more than a week ago, I was a high-school student and my biggest problems were scoring good dope and finding places where my girlfriend and I could have undisturbed sex. Suddenly I’m in very real danger of perishing in a war I am wholeheartedly opposed to.
How did I let this happen?
I wouldn’t say that Arno’s one-joint hypothesis has worked. I’m feeling a negligible buzz. Maybe it’s because the air in the fallout shelter is a mixture of mildew and skunky smoke, with the heaviness of a damp log thrown on a fire. Maybe it’s due to these suddenly pressing concerns about the future. Maybe it’s Milton’s obvious discomfort. Confinement in this murky gloom eventually proves too much for him. “I’m out of here. Great idea, Arno. Maybe next time we’ll find a mausoleum and get high with the stiffs.”
We’re about to climb out of the shelter when the unmistakable tap of footsteps comes from somewhere above. It can’t be Mom, because she took Alan to Adventureland in Farmingdale and won’t get home until dinner. So it’s got to be the paterfamilias.
“Let’s wait a minute,” I whisper. “He probably came home to change into his tennis clothes.”
“But he’s gonna know you’re here,” Arno whispers. “My car’s parked out front.”
“Doesn’t mean we couldn’t have walked somewhere.”
Arno and I sit down on the bunk again. Milton remains standing, his arms tightly crossed, a tooth pinching his lower lip. He’s the latecomer to our troika. Arno and I have been friends since kindergarten. We live only a few houses from each other. Milton lives down the block. He’s more than a year younger, so he was barely on our radar until he got kicked up to seventh grade.
When he skipped sixth and joined us in junior high, no one wanted anything to do with him. Young and nerdy, he reminded us of the dorky preteens we were so relieved to no longer be. But Arno and I took pity on him — exiled to the back of every classroom, wandering alone through the junior high wing, getting accidentally bodychecked into lockers by crowds of larger bodies — and decided it would be fun to have a pet genius. (Plus Milton could always be counted on to do our homework.)
From the fallout shelter, we hear a faucet run overhead. Milton cocks his head as water gurgles through the pipes. He takes a deep breath and starts to tap his foot. Maybe we should go up. It’s not like my parents don’t know I smoke grass. The paterfamilias has decreed that there shall be no smoking (of any kind) in the house. But we didn’t actually smoke in the house. We smoked under it.
Milton shoves his hands into his pockets and starts to pace.
“Relax,” Arno says.
Milton keeps pacing.
“So, how was MIT?” I ask. This is the first time I’ve seen him since the drive home from Cambridge, when he was busy sleeping and I was busy tripping.
Milton recently finished his freshman year. He got skipped again in ninth grade and graduated a year ahead of us, at age fifteen. Class valedictorian. Sixteen hundred on his SATs. Only applied to one college: MIT.
“A lot of really smart people and really stupid intro courses.” Milton’s answer is terse, anxious.
“Was it hard to make friends?” Arno asks. For all his bluster, he is deeply insecure about making new friends when he gets to Bucknell in two months.
“Everyone’s new. They’re all in the same boat.” Milton looks up at the ceiling again, then at me. “Sorry, man. I gotta get out of here.”
“Cherry Jag, man,” Arno says. A polished red two-seat convertible is parked at the curb behind Arno’s black GTO. Ten minutes ag
o, after climbing out of the fallout shelter, we waited silently in the playroom until the doorbell rang and the front door opened and shut. After that the house was soundless again.
The paterfamilias is gone and so is whoever owns this Jaguar. The car is long, curvy, and aerodynamic, with a tan leather interior. Affixed to the chrome grille are several round metal badges: Jaguar, Coventry, England; Bay Shore Sports Car Club; Veterans’ Car Club of Great Britain.
I glance back up the driveway. The garage door is open. The paterfamilias’s own classic two-seat convertible sports car, an MG TF 1500, is gone.
“Dig this, guys.” Arno pops the trunk of the GTO, a big, out-of-fashion muscle car that he clings to in the misguided belief that it projects an aura of powerful coolness.
In the trunk is a green caddie vest from Piping Rock, a nearby golf club. Also, a pair of grass-stained golf shoes and some tees and golf balls. Arno keeps this stuff so his parents will think that his money comes from caddying. But that isn’t why he’s opened the trunk. From a cardboard box, he pulls a metal contraption with a funnel and a hand crank. “Take a guess.” (He’s never outgrown the thrill of show-and-tell.)
Milton leans close, points at the funnel, and begins to think out loud. “The raw material goes in here. Probably like a wet . . . No, it has to be a powder or dry mix. Then you turn this crank. . . . But why would you . . . ? Oh, I get it. You’re compressing it. Right. . . . So, what comes out here . . . Uh, okay. The result is something small that’s been highly compressed.”
This takes about three seconds. The guy is scary smart. He chews the corner of his lip. “Hamster pellets?”
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