How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater

by Marc Acito

  “Greetings and salivations, cutie,” he says. “Waddya wanna sing?”

  “Do you know ‘Corner of the Sky' from Pippin?”

  He gives me a look like, “This is a gay piano bar. Of course I know ‘Corner of the Sky' from Pippin,” and segues into the introduction. I hop up on the lid and sit cross-legged, smiling in as puckish and beguiling a manner as I can, which, being puckish and beguiling by nature, is pretty easy. Within a few measures there's a perceptible change in the atmosphere. The crowd grows quieter and some of them smile knowingly at one another. They know talent when they see it, I'm sure.

  Rivers belong where they can ramble.

  Eagles belong where they can fly.

  I've got to be where my spirit can run free,

  Got to find my corner of the sky.

  The crowd gives me a big hand and someone has the good sense to shout “Encore,” so I graciously invite Paula up to sing our surefire showstopper, “Carried Away” from On the Town, which is something of a life philosophy for us. As far as we're concerned, more is more.

  The number goes over even bigger, and since Kelly and Doug have pushed their way to the front it seems only natural to hand them the mics and insist they perform “Summer Nights.” Doug looks embarrassed at first, but the guys in the crowd cheer him on, particularly when he starts doing Revolting Renée's pelvis-shaking choreography. No fewer than four men give him their phone numbers before the night is over.

  I look at him and Kelly and feel a subversive sense of pride knowing that a high-school football player and a former cheerleader are performing for a roomful of ecstatic gay men. I look over at Paula, who's behaving as if she were Dolly Levi returned to Harmonia Gardens, then Ziba, chain-smoking foreign cigarettes in the corner and refusing to sing, and then Natie, who is in serious danger of losing his virginity in a way he never intended, and an almost evangelistic sense of purpose overtakes me. I realize that it is my duty to be the missionary for this Summer of Magic and Mischief; that I am to lead the Play People Parade like the Pied Piper or the Dr Pepper guy. I am to be my friends' Peter Pan, stealing them away to Neverland where you never grow up.

  My objective clear, I leap onto the piano bench and encourage the crowd to sing along and soon the entire bar is swaying and singing together “Tell me more, tell me more.” It's almost overwhelming to be at the center of all that energy and enthusiasm (I mean, just the sheer volume alone—do you have any idea just how loud a hundred gay men can be?), but I'm buoyed by the tide of goodwill that surges around me.

  This is going to be the best summer of our lives.

  The day after we go into the city I sit down and come up with a schedule. Missionary of Magic and Mischief or not, I have serious work to do.

  First, there's my body. I've simply got to get it in shape this summer—not for vanity's sake, mind you; an actor's body is his instrument and mine is way out of tune. It's not so much that I'm overweight; it's that I'm both too skinny and too fat in all the wrong places. Soft. I read somewhere that if you get up just an hour earlier every day you can gain fifteen whole days a year, so I've resolved to rise each morning for a brisk jog (I sleep way too much, anyway) followed by some push-ups and sit-ups before going down to the Workshop to choreograph the kids' show which, no matter what Paula says, is indeed a real job because I'm being paid for it. (She's just jealous because I'm amassing a professional credit and she isn't.) Then after a light and healthy lunch I'll go over to Aunt Glo's and spend the afternoon poolside reading The Complete Works of Shakespeare, taking occasional breaks to swim laps and develop a swimmer's V-shaped torso.

  I'm really quite amazed at how simple it is, once I've planned it out. There are nine weeks left in the summer, and thirty-seven Shakespeare plays, which averages out to about four plays a week, or roughly one every other day, which seems completely doable. In fact, if I can get through one a day I could even move on to some lighter reading—y'know, like Chekhov or Ibsen.

  This summer is my big chance to improve myself and I'm determined to give up sugar, caffeine, alcohol, red meat, white flour, and fried foods, as well as finally learn to meditate and become the spiritually evolved person I know that I truly am inside. I am my mother's son, after all.

  A week later I find myself feeling weak and craving a Whopper and fries, which probably means there's some essential oil in them that my body is accustomed to getting and needs. What's more, having just endured three hours watching Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander on Ziba's recommendation, we all could use some junk food to redress the balance.

  “Why is it there's no Burger Queen?” Ziba asks as the six of us pull up to the drive-through. “There's a Burger King.”

  “Maybe he married the Dairy Queen,” Natie says.

  Paula pulls up to the window cautiously. Maneuvering Aunt Glo's Lincoln Continental, a vehicle so enormous we call it the Lincoln Continental Divide, is like trying to dock the Queen Mary. Paula requests six crowns with our order. “Everyone has to have a crown,” she says, “you just have to,” such a Paula thing to say, and she tells us we each need to decide which king we are.

  There are so many to choose from. There's King Arthur, King Ludwig, and King Henry the Eighth. There's King Henry the Fourth, parts one and two. There's King Kong, King Size, and King Dom. There's the King of Kings, forever and ever. There's the King Family Singers. There's Stephen King. Plus there's no shortage of Edwards, Charleses, Georges, and all those Louies.

  Natie impresses everybody by being able to name all the monarchs of England in order since William the Conqueror, which we're able to confirm because Paula always keeps a World Almanac handy in the glove compartment. She makes room for it by keeping the car's manual and registration in the trunk. “I'm much more likely to want to know what article two of the Constitution is than how to change a tire,” she says. Aunt Glo doesn't drive much since her stroke, so Paula's been free to customize the car to her own peculiar needs, like making seat covers out of her old costumes from Hello, Dolly!

  So we're driving around, bored as usual. There never seems to be enough to do when you're a teenager, and it's not just because we live in Wallingford. I've known kids from Manhattan who say the same thing, and they live in the greatest city in the world, for Chrissake. For lack of anything better to do, I suggest we take a ride over to Cramptown and look at the house I first lived in when we moved from Hoboken and didn't know any better.

  Being a Cramptowner herself, Paula is very sensitive on the subject, and complains that all us “Wallies” are snobs, but as far as I'm concerned, being accused of snobbery just confirms that you have something to be snobby about. Anyway, we take a ride by the house because that's the kind of thing you do when you're bored on a hot summer night.

  The house is a split-level ranch, not unlike Aunt Glo's, essentially a garage with a house attached to it, but it's what's in front that immediately gets our attention. There, in the middle of a bed of anemic-looking pansies, is possibly the ugliest lawn ornament I've ever set my eyes on. I mean, we're not talking some innocuous little lawn jockey here, no, but a hideous three-foot-tall green ceramic Buddha, his pudgy arms reaching up gleefully, his sloppy man breasts hanging over his huge distended belly, his toothless grin twisted into a horrendous and slightly disturbing spasm of joy.

  I can't fucking believe it. There's a Buddha on my memories.

  In a moment of blazing insight, I spontaneously leap from the car and start tucking and rolling my way across the lawn like I'm avoiding snipers. I can hear my friends' bewildered cries behind me, but that only invigorates me all the more as I zigzag across the lawn to the Buddha, and plop my Burger King crown on his head at a rakish angle.

  I swear, it was like he was meant to wear it; it's almost like he's smiling because he knows he looks so snazzy. In that moment, the Manifesto for the Summer of Magic and Mischief is born.

  We call it Creative Vandalism.

  Our commitment is to bring a Bobby-in–A Chorus Line kind of flair and vitali
ty to the sleepy New Jersey suburbs, but with Paula's proviso that we don't do any damage to personal property or engage in any illegal activity, such a Paula proviso to have.

  So when they make the movie of my life, the summer of 1983 has to be one of those montage sequences filled with madcap adolescent high jinks, not the dumb shit you usually see in most movies like lip-synching into hairbrushes or squirting each other with the hose while washing a car. No, you'll see the cool Creative Vandalism stuff we really do, like putting department-store mannequins in compromising positions or hopping into the freezer section of the grocery store and pretending to be the cryogenically frozen Walt Disney.

  We call it Disney on Ice.

  You'll see us on those su-hum-mer nights as we tool around in the Lincoln Continental Divide (Paula the designated driver, the rest of us the designated drunks) putting dishwashing liquid in the fountain downtown till it bubbles over, sending Paula's enormous bra up the school flagpole, drawing a hula hoop around the guy in the crosswalk sign, and, of course, visiting the Buddha.

  Time after time, you'll see me tucking and rolling my way across the lawn to dress him up: first in Paula's communion veil, then in Doug's jockstrap, then in Aunt Glo's old flowered bathing cap; each time the Buddha blissfully, almost freakishly happy to be so arrayed. You'll see me and Doug dragging the Buddha to the front door and setting him up with a breakfast tray of orange juice, toast, and half a grapefruit balanced on top of his outstretched palms, ready to deliver Buddha room service. And you'll see us ringing the bell in the middle of the night so that the owners will find him lying on their doorstep, a Hawaiian lei around his neck and an empty bottle of Southern Comfort next to him, as if he'd passed out after a wild night at some swinging Buddha bar.

  Meanwhile, Al and Dagmar are having a Summer of Magic and Mischief all their own. While having Dagmar spend the night is okay with me in theory, I have to say that in practice I find it pretty revolting. I'm sorry, but it's humiliating to have to cover your head with a pillow to block out the sounds of your own father making hot monkey love in the next room. Just the thought of Al climbing on top of Dagmar while she grabs his broad, hairy back makes me want to hurl. Al tries to justify their sleeping together by giving me one of those lame-ass father-son talks.

  “Now you gotta understand, kid, that when it comes to sex, I'm completely monotonous.”

  Hey, he said it, not me.

  Still, I'm thrilled to finally have someone in this house who understands me—a real artist. Frankly, I don't know what it is she sees in Al, but who cares? He's throwing money around like he's printing it and even takes me, Dagmar, and Kelly to see Sinatra at the Meadowlands. Box seats.

  Seeing the Chairman of the Board in person is the closest thing Al and I have to a shared religious experience; and even with a toupee, a paunch, and a wobble in his vibrato as wide as the Lincoln Continental Divide, Frank still sounds like he's singing every song with a cocktail in his hand and a fedora slung rakishly over one eye.

  Then, before I know it, it's closing night of Grease. I've got to say, for all my criticism of Revolting Renée, she's staged great curtain calls. Kelly and Doug make their entrance in Greased Lightning, just like in the movie, which gets a big hand and helps cover the fact that neither of them are really that good. Then, right as the cast takes a company bow, I swing in on a rope as Teen Angel, just like in the original Broadway version. (Okay, it was my idea to do it, but Revolting Renée had the good sense to take my suggestion.) I'm all in white, with a pair of wings I made myself and a gold halo that bobs over my head to great comic effect. As predicted, I'd stopped the show earlier with my one number, but the rope thing at the end slays 'em, just like when Peter Pan takes flight for the first time. To get that kind of rise out of an audience is a drug and I'm definitely an addict. What's more, I don't have to do any of Revolting Renée's strange semaphore choreography.

  Al and Dagmar come to closing night (Al would never think to come to every performance like Aunt Glo does), and Dagmar tells me I'm “goot” in the offhand manner of a critic who's seen it all, which I take as a supreme compliment. Only the uninformed masses rave about how great you are; people who actually know what they're talking about say things like “You're good” or “I liked your work.”

  As I take Dagmar's strangely rough hand in mine and give her the European two-cheek-kiss thing I notice something different on her gnarled finger: a diamond roughly the size of a Volkswagen.

  “Wow, what's that?” I say.

  “Congratulate us,” she says. “Your fahter and I are getting married.”

  It's weird. It's definitely fucking weird. One morning I get up, put some drops in my eyes, pick up my sister, and drive over to Wallingford City Hall to watch my father get married. It's about as romantic as applying for a fishing license.

  What's totally cool, though, is the minimalist elegance that Dagmar brings to our big, tasteless house. Everywhere we turn we're confronted with her stark black-and-white photos of eerily empty spaces: abandoned lots, dirty restrooms, and a whole series of unmade motel beds. I don't understand what I'm looking at, but as a fellow artist I respect her vision. In fact, I gladly cooperate when Dagmar asks me if I wouldn't mind moving into the guest room so she can use my room as her studio. Northern exposure is “zo important for tse verk.”

  She also tears out every bit of wall-to-wall carpeting. As a photographer, Dagmar has an almost pathological aversion to dust, but apparently she's also allergic to carpet mites, something I didn't even know existed until she shows me a brochure full of close-up photos that make the microscopic insects look like hideous giant reptiles. “Flakes of dead skin get caught in tse carpet,” she says ominously, “and you can neffer, neffer get tsem out.”

  I figure artists are allowed their eccentricities.

  Dagmar arranges to have the floors redone while she and Al go on their honeymoon. “After all,” she says to Al, “no one vill be here.”

  “I'll be here,” I say.

  “Oh, right,” she says. “Vell, you can let in tse verkers.”

  I'm willing to overlook this little slight because I know that my time is limited in this house, with or without the Carpet Mites That Ate Detroit. In fact, one of the last things my mother said to me before she left was that I should try to get along with whomever my father married because eventually I'll leave and he'll need someone to be with him. Also, hardwood floors are going to look way more sophisticated than carpeting.

  So I've got the place to myself for two whole weeks. (Well, me and “tse verkers.”) I know you're thinking “Par-TAY!” but I'm determined to put my time alone to solitudinous good use. Sure, I may have allowed myself to get caught up in Paula's enthusiasm for the Summer of Magic and Mischief, but with Ziba off in the south of France with her manicured mother, Kelly on Cape Cod, and Natie at computer camp (such a cheesehead thing to do), I can finally get down to work and focus on The Complete Works of Shakespeare. With all these distractions I've only been able to read A Midsummer Night's Dream and half of The Comedy of Errors, plus watch the Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton Taming of the Shrew on the late show. But there's still a couple of weeks until school starts and I figure if I just skip the history plays (who really gives a shit about all those Richards and Henrys, anyway?) and read two a day I can still finish the other twenty-four before school starts.

  Oh yeah, and get in shape.

  Of course I have to help Paula with some last-minute college shopping (so many shoes, so little time) and to get in some quality bonding time before she goes off to Juilliard. We plan a final poolside soiree with Doug for her last night, as well as a farewell CV visit to the Buddha.

  I show up with a birthday cake. Paula's got a thing for birthday cakes, believing that they're magical, imbued as they are with wishes. And since every day is somebody's birthday somewhere, there's no reason why you can't have birthday cake anytime you want. I consult the almanac I keep in my own glove compartment and have the bakery put “Happy Birthda
y, Coco” on the cake, in honor of Coco Chanel. The only problem is that Doug doesn't show up. I call his house and his strange foreign mother tells me he's gone out with “some of the guys from the team.”

  He's blown us off. I can't fucking believe it.

  Paula and I sit in the dark swatting at mosquitoes as I light the candles on Coco's cake. This is the magic moment of birthday cakes, the moment that Paula and I love most. This is that time when they turn out the lights and everybody starts smiling at you and your mother comes through the door and the only light in the room is that fuzzy sort of glow from the flame on your birthday cake shining on your mother's face. And your mom is smiling that proud kind of “I'm your mom” smile and you're smiling that embarrassed kind of “this is my day” smile. And then you close your eyes and make a wish, any wish you want because it's your day. Then you blow out the candles and everyone claps and then, best of all, you get to eat cake.

  With Paula's mother long dead and mine long gone, neither of us can get enough of that feeling.

  Paula blows out the candles, not in her usual make-a-wish kind of way, but in a gimme-a-piece-of-that-goddamned-cake kind of way. “This was supposed to be my magic summer,” she says softly.