Public Apology: In Which a Man Grapples With a Lifetime of Regret, One Incident at a Time

by Dave Bry

  Like many teenage boys, I was extremely squeamish about all things related to menstruation—a position that, thinking back on it, was largely put on. I thought guys were supposed to be that way, all freaked out and uncomfortable at the first mention of a girl’s period; I associate this with Scott Valentine, the actor who played Mallory Keaton’s boyfriend Nick on Family Ties. I think he got the heebie-jeebies about the subject one episode, and I don’t know, I guess I thought he was cool. The way he said Yo all the time and stuff. (This goes pretty far toward explaining why I hadn’t had sex earlier than I did. It was hard growing up in the ’80s.) Anyway, I adopted that stance and refused to touch the pads and tampons. I told Dad I would make Jennifer and Betsy do it. He shook his head, disappointed.

  Then it rained.

  I had no idea how absorbent those things are! The pads ballooned to the size of bricks—like giant sodden baby diapers. The tampons were like dog bones, plumes of cotton exploding out of their thin cardboard tubes. My car looked like a quilted Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. It was way more disgusting. Dad was way more insistent about it being cleaned up. I was way less happy about the notion. And Jennifer and Betsy just laughed and laughed.

  The rain stopped. Days passed. The stuff stayed inflated—like those aspirin-sized capsules that blow up into foam dinosaurs when kids put them in a bowl of water. (Magic!) This was their new shape.

  “What’s the big deal?” you said, far more reasonable at age ten than I was at seventeen. “It’s just paper.”

  Being my little sister, you were always looking for opportunities to score points with me. I don’t mean that in a way that implies fakeness. You were naturally cheery and effervescent and far less lazy than I ever was. Your disposition matched the sunny freckles on your face. (Those freckles were on my face, too. But in high school, I would have scrubbed them off with sandpaper if I could have.) I took advantage of your eagerness to please and, rising just above the level of a Tom Sawyer–style swindle, gave you a dollar for what must have been an hour’s work on a Saturday.

  This is perhaps a good time to make a blanket apology for my behavior as an older sibling. Much of it lacked in kindness and generosity: The time when you ordered a Miss Piggy sandwich at the sandwich shop in Truro because Miss Piggy was your favorite character on The Muppets, and I told you that they’d named it that because the ham in the sandwich was cut from the corpse of Miss Piggy herself. (That is sort of why they named it that, I suppose. But you were only five.) The time Chris Pack and I used you as a human shield during that rock fight in our driveway with Ryan Mingo and Michael Peterson. The time I told you not to talk to me for the entire four-hour drive to Boston. Oh, and I stole your Pogues CD. (Only Hell’s Ditch, not one of their best. But that song “Lorca’s Novena” is on there, with that killer bass line. I still have it. I was just listening to it, in fact.) I’ll bet you can remember other stuff, too. My general air of dismissiveness. I always took family relationships for granted, too willing to put the notion of unconditional love to the test. And you’re so much younger than I am. I never treated you as well as I should have.

  You did a good job that day. When Dad got home, he was pleased to see the car had been cleaned. He thanked me. Then, after hearing I’d had you do it, shook his head again.

  So, really, this is as much a thank-you as it is an apology. But I am sorry for being such a Scott Valentine and everything else. And you can have your Pogues CD back if you want.

  Dear Bon Jovi,

  Sorry for throwing empty beer cans on your lawn.

  You know how sometimes you tell the day by the bottle that you drink, and then other times when you’re alone and all you do is think? Well, sometimes when you’re seventeen, and a world-famous rock star who is famously from the state where you live but whose music you strongly dislike buys a fancy house on a cul-de-sac in the next town over from yours, you find out where that house is and drive over there with a bunch of your friends and sit outside in your car and drink beer and throw the empty cans over the fence into the rock star’s lawn. Like three times.

  Kind of obnoxious, I realize, to start an apology by making fun of song lyrics you wrote almost twenty-five years ago. Though I do think they are incredibly bad. They are some of the worst lyrics to a rock song that I can think of. (Just after the ones from Kansas’s “Carry On Wayward Son” about masquerading as a man with a reason and how that charade is the event of the season. Those are the worst.)

  But I didn’t intend this to be a critique of your lyrics. Whatever my opinion of them, it’s no excuse for vandalism. The fact is, I think it’s wrong to throw empty beer cans, or any other trash, on another person’s lawn under pretty much any circumstances. Even if that person surely has a well-paid grounds crew on hand to pick them up. Especially in that case, really, when you think about it. It’s not like the guys in your grounds crew wrote “Wanted Dead or Alive” or “Livin’ on a Prayer” or titled their album Slippery When Wet.

  Jesus, this must be the least apologetic-sounding apology you’ve ever gotten. Obviously, I’m still conflicted about your contribution to my home state’s cultural image. You know, you titled your next album New Jersey. A couple years from now, I’ll probably be writing you another apology just for the tone of this one. So before I fall into some kind of infinite regression, allow me to be sincere again.

  While I believe very much in forgiving youthful indiscretion, including my own, I also believe in taking responsibility for one’s actions. It was my idea to drive there, to park there, to throw the first can. There were often a couple other cars parked there, too. Your real fans, I assumed, hoping for a chance at an autograph. There was a Camaro there once, and I wondered whether its inhabitants would be hurt or angry, would perhaps want to fight us when they saw what we were doing. I felt a twinge of guilt then for the snobbish insult to them, to their taste. But not about what I was doing to you, the rock star. I wish I had thought then as I do now: no matter how famous someone is, no matter how I might feel about the music someone makes, that someone is an actual person. He actually lives in that house, and this is not cool.

  And you’re probably a really good person. I’ve never heard otherwise. In fact, this past summer when I was back in New Jersey for the weekend, I ran into an old friend of mine, Kevin Krosnick, who told me you’d been doing a lot of charity work lately with his father, who is a doctor, an oncologist, who I know to be a good person because he helped my family when my father got sick. Apparently, you’ve been helping a lot of people that don’t have health insurance to get medical treatment. This is an unmitigated good, regardless of the quality of the lyrics of any given song. Sorry again. I just can’t let the lyrics thing go. Maybe you’d even agree at this point, though, huh? I mean, it’s okay, right? Lyrics are just one element of a song. A small part, really, of your job. You’re forty-eight, I’m almost forty. Everything is more complex than we think it is when we’re kids, right? And it’s not like admitting that—because, I mean, they’re kind of perfect in their way, too. For a silly, pubescent, rock star–outlaw-cowboy thing. Like Foreigner’s “Juke Box Hero,” too, right? I loved that song when I was twelve. Or Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page”—that must have been a big influence, right? I would have been the biggest Bon Jovi fan going if “Wanted Dead or Alive” had come out three years earlier than it did. In fact, I really liked the first song of yours that I ever heard, “Runaway,” which did come out three years earlier, in 1983—you had won a local battle of the bands 103.5 WAPP held, right? I heard it at the 7-Eleven, waiting on line to play Ms. Pac-Man. That dynamite keyboard line and then your voice comes in talking about streets and girls and social lives. It fit the scene just right. I still like that song! But even if you did agree with me about the problems with the lyrics to “Wanted Dead or Alive,” even if you chuckled and said, “Yeah, you know, thinking back, I have to admit, pretty ridiculous,” that wouldn’t change the fact that this song, this thing you thought of with your brain, is inarguably a classic. Get
in a car anywhere, drive around for an hour listening to the radio, and you’ll hear it—New Jersey and Long Island, of course, but California and South Carolina, too. Almost twenty-five years since it came out, your song gets played on the radio, how many times every day? Hundreds? Thousands? How many classic rock stations are there in the country? It must be very satisfying. Not to mention the money it’s made you. I don’t say this to be a dick. You deserve that money. It’s a very catchy song, eminently sing-alongable with, especially the part where Richie echoes you in the chorus, when he makes wanted into a four-syllable word. Everybody loves to sing that part. Everybody fights over it at karaoke. You know this. You wrote that melody with your brain. Surely you know how so many people love it. You’ve toured all over the world, performed it in front of millions of fans—you rocked all their faces, you said. I’m sorry, I can’t help it. Those lyrics! God, they’re so ridiculous, right?! You know it, too, right?! I mean, come on! You must know it. You must laugh about it, right? You and Richie and Heather or Denise or whoever he’s hanging out with at the moment. I’m sorry, I’m being a dick again. I don’t know what it’s like to be famous. But, man, the guitar-as-gun metaphor? And calling your tour bus a horse? Ha-ha-ha-ha! Right?! But it’s okay! It doesn’t matter. No matter how silly I think those lyrics are, no matter how much they make me laugh my snotty laugh, I know them all by heart. In fact, I’ve come to love them in a way. In a confusing and complicated way. In a way perhaps not entirely unlike the way you can feel sort of proud about some dumb thing you did when you were a drunk punk kid, even as you know and are fully willing to admit that it was wrong and so are, at the same time, honestly ashamed of it. That song is a part of me. It’s a part of New Jersey. The culture. A part of our state’s big, stinky, stupid, romantic, gorgeous, ugly, profound, cheesy swamp. And you wrote it.

  What did I ever do? I threw empty beer cans over a fence.

  Dear Mom,

  Sorry for choosing Hannah and Her Sisters when you asked me to go out and rent some movies for our family to watch to get our minds off the fact that Dad had been diagnosed with cancer.

  You remember, I’m sure, that this was just a couple weeks before I graduated from high school. It must have been a weekend because we were all at home in the afternoon. Dad walked into the TV room with his friend David Landy. You could tell that David Landy had been crying.

  “The doctor just hit me with it,” Dad said. “Boom.” His eyes looked like they weren’t really looking at us, and his voice sounded like it was coming from far away. But he said he thought that the doctor had done the right thing. “So I’m just gonna hit you with it.”

  The cancer had started in his lung. At least that’s what they thought. It was hard to tell. By the time anybody knew anything, it had spread to his brain and his lymph nodes and his spinal column and everywhere. Metastasized was the unfamiliar word. The doctor had told him that he would be dead in two months.

  We sat in the TV room for a long time with the TV off.

  Deb cried. I went upstairs and looked at myself in my bathroom mirror. I looked normal, but I felt like a different person. Like the person who I was when I’d woken up that morning was no more and that this new person that I had become was hidden inside my head, looking out through fake eye sockets at this thing in the mirror that was only a shell. Why wasn’t I crying? Why didn’t I even feel like crying? Shouldn’t a person be crying after learning that one’s father is dying? It felt like a dream, like I’d wake up the next day and this wouldn’t be happening.

  But I knew it was real and that it was a big deal. One that I felt wholly unprepared for, despite the fact that Dad had come into the kitchen a few weeks prior and asked me to get off the phone so we could talk and endured the put-upon expression I fixed him with to tell me that he was having some medical tests. He’d said that he’d been coughing up blood and that he didn’t know why and that it might be serious. It might be bad, he’d said. He hadn’t said the word cancer, though, and I had quickly pushed it out of my mind and not given it much more thought. Because I was so good at being what sitcoms and movies had taught me teenagers were supposed to be like and convincing myself that you and Dad didn’t mean anything to me.

  “Dad has cancer.” I said it out loud to myself. “Dad is dying.”

  I stood there for a moment, blinking, wondering if this would jog me into a burst of emotion that felt more real.

  “This is what it feels like when your dad is dying,” I said.

  I wrote Dad a clumsy note to tell him that I loved him. “You’re like Superman to me,” I wrote. I didn’t know what else to write. I went into your room and tucked the note under the pillow on his side of the bed. The house was quiet.

  Later, back down in the TV room, Dad told us he was going to fight the cancer as hard as he could. Despite what the doctor had told him, he was determined to do whatever it took to beat it. “I’ve been a fighter all my life,” he said. “I’m not going to quit now.”

  He came over to where I was sitting on the arm of the couch and looked me hard in the eye. “I’m gonna need you here with me on this one,” he said. “Don’t run away from me. I need you here with me and as part of this family. And I need you present. Don’t go and hide in the bottom of a bottle or inside the tube of a bong.” I told him I wouldn’t.

  Dad’s parents drove down from West Orange. Thea was crying as she walked in the door, tissues already crumpled into balls in her hands, her face twisted into an expression that made it hard to imagine that she would ever be able to smile again. Pa looked stooped and older than he’d ever looked before.

  At dinnertime, no one felt much like eating. I forget if it was you or David Landy who had the idea that we should rent some movies to watch, but I thought it was a good one. Get our minds off the news, lighten the mood to the extent that that might be possible. I remember Dad agreed and that he said to get comedies. “I want to laugh,” he said.

  I volunteered to go to the video store. I wanted to get out of the house, out of that atmosphere, even if only for twenty minutes. I liked feeling that I was helping, too, even in a minor way. Alone in the carport, once the door closed behind me, I took what felt like my first full breath in hours.

  Soft-rugged and fluorescent lit, the video store gave me the same dissociative feeling as looking in the mirror had. There I was in this very familiar place, a place where I’d spent so many hours of my life doing exactly what I was doing then, scanning the collection, searching for titles that I knew or new ones that looked intriguing, a place where there were always faces I recognized—Ms. Maxwell, an English teacher at my school, worked there some nights—a place where people met and stopped to chat. There I was, just like always, except not at all like always. Walking around the store, I couldn’t help thinking about what I looked like to the other people around me. I saw Mr. Johnson, Jeremy’s dad, there that night. Did he recognize me? Did I seem the same? I suppose I did. I wasn’t trembling or sobbing or breathing into a brown paper bag; there wasn’t blood dripping from my nose or soaking through my shirt from my chest. I was just standing there, my jaw set firm, squinting slightly as I scanned the titles on the plastic-sheathed spines of the VHS boxes on one of the racks in the comedy section. I felt like a spy. I felt like a liar.

  I don’t know how exactly it happened. I guess I was caught up in thinking about this stuff, in a sort of daze, as I was choosing videos. I got A Fish Called Wanda and, I think, Porky’s, which was always a favorite of Dad’s and mine. And then I found Hannah and Her Sisters. It’s weird because I had seen that movie before. We all had and liked it. We were big Woody Allen fans. But in remembering that we liked it, and in the daze I was in without really knowing I was in it, I forgot that one of the main plotlines of that movie revolves around Woody Allen’s character believing he has a brain tumor.

  I stopped on the way home to pick up my girlfriend. I had told her the news and asked that she come over.

  When we got back to our house and got out of th
e car, she saw the bag from the video store and asked me what I had rented. When I told her Hannah and Her Sisters, she stopped suddenly. “We can’t go in there with that movie,” she said. She reminded me what happens to Woody Allen’s character.

  “Oh my god,” I gasped. We were standing in the carport. “How could I have forgotten that?”

  I cursed myself and shook my head. I felt like someone who has been hypnotized onstage, awakening to the sound of the magician’s finger snap, looking around to see who’s watching. It was frightening—one of those moments when your trust in your own judgment falters.

  Thank god she had stopped me. Thank god I hadn’t gotten inside and popped it into the VCR. “Hey, is everybody ready to laugh?! This movie is about someone who thinks he has cancer!”

  I didn’t know what to do. She said we should go back and pick a different movie. I opened the door quietly and called you over from the TV room where everyone was waiting. “Here,” I said, handing you the two other movies. “You can start watching one. I have to go back to the store.”

  You looked at me quizzically. “Why? What happened?”

  I showed you the box for Hannah and Her Sisters. “Woody Allen’s character is a hypochondriac who thinks he has cancer.”

  “Oh.” Your voice fell. “Oh.”

  “I…I don’t know what I was thinking,” I stuttered. “I forgot.”

  “Yes…” You tried to be comforting. “I would like to think that Dad could find that funny right now, but I don’t think he could.”

  I closed the door behind me. I don’t know what you told everyone about where I was going. I think you started A Fish Called Wanda.

  Dear Dr. Nogueira,

  I’m sorry for slipping a beer cap into your hand when you gave me my diploma at graduation.