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

by Marc Acito

  I've never liked Duncan O'Boyle. Once, in the fourth grade, he lured Natie onto the roof of his house with an invitation to go “hedgewalking” on top of the fifteen-foot laurel bush that surrounded his property. Natie went first.

  He needed thirty stitches.

  But just because I loathe and despise everything Duncan represents doesn't mean I don't want to impress him.

  “Sure,” I say, “just give me a sec.”

  I find Natie and tell him to look after things, then interrupt a fornicating couple in my room so I can change into Father Groovy's collar, adding a pair of round wire-rimmed glasses I wore when I played the tailor Motel Kamzoil in Fiddler on the Roof. I'm practicing a few Jesuit-y looks in the mirror when I hear the grind of the garage door opening. I dash outside and there is Duncan backing Al's Midlife Crisis down the driveway.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I shout. “That's my dad's car.”

  Duncan grins at Roger Young, the team's quarterback, who's riding shotgun. “Oh, no,” Duncan says, “this is no car, my friend. This is a penis on wheels.”

  “Well, it's my dad's penis, okay, so just stop right there.” I tap on the side of the car and point to the backseat, which is already such a tight squeeze for Boonbrain that he appears to be wearing the car rather than sitting in it. “Look,” I say, “there's no room for me, and you need me to buy the beer.”

  Duncan smiles. “We'll just take a little ride then, and come back and get ya'.” He revs the engine and puts the car in first, but before he can take off I grab hold of the side and hop up on the trunk, shoving my legs next to Boonbrain's refrigerator-sized frame. I must look like the Catholic grand marshal of a St. Patrick's Day parade.

  “Go Blue Devils!” Duncan screams, such a dumb jock thing to say, and he floors it.

  Asshole.

  Sociopath that he is, Duncan does everything he can to send me flying off the back, deliberately making sharp turns and sudden stops. It's not quite as malicious as it sounds—I guess for someone who engages in a sport that involves knocking the crap out of people, vehicular homicide is just good, clean fun. Luckily, all those dance classes really have been good for something, because I manage to keep my balance the entire way. Once we stop, however, I fumble the dismount as I attempt to hop out in the suave, easy manner of Magnum, P.I., and end up flat on my ass in the liquor store parking lot. Everyone laughs—not in a mean way, but in a way that shows they appreciate the irony of someone being capable of holding on to a sports car going seventy miles an hour down unimproved roads but failing to stay upright once it's safely parked.

  Lightning shoots up my spine but I make faces at the guys like I'm only pretending to be in pain. I hobble into the liquor store, hoping that a limp will contribute to an overall image of maturity.

  A big heavyset guy who looks like a Hell's Angel appears behind the counter. “Hey, Fawther,” he says, “how can I help yuz?”

  I say a silent prayer to St. Genesius, the patron saint of actors or, in this case, bold-faced liars, but the guy seems more focused on the clerical collar than the person wearing it. I lean across the counter like I don't want to be overheard. “Sister Paula from the Convent of the Bleeding Heart suggested I buy beer here,” I say in a breathy, Father Mulcahy from M*A*S*H kind of voice. “Do you know what brand she normally gets?”

  “Oh, sure, Fawther,” Hell's Angel says with a conspiratorial nod. “We all know how Father Monty likes his beer.” Father Monty is the old souse of a priest Paula invented as the reason why a nun would need to buy a case of cheap beer every weekend.

  “I'm Father Roovy, by the way,” I say. “Greg Roovy. I'm new.”

  “Nice to meetcha, Fawther. Where's Sister Paula tonight?”

  “She's, uh, been transferred into Manhattan.”

  Hell's Angel gives me a look like someone just ran over his puppy. “She didn't even say goodbye,” he says.

  “It was very sudden,” I explain. “That's why they brought me on to assist Father Monty—we're very shorthanded now.”

  Hell's Angel plops a couple of cases of beer on the counter. “Well, God bless her,” he says.

  “Yes, God bless her,” I say as beatifically as I can.

  He takes my money, but hesitates. “Y'know, Fawther,” he says, “whenever Sister Paula came in, it was kind of like she brought the church with her, you know what I mean?”

  “We're here to serve,” I say. What the hell is going on?

  Hell's Angel leans his elbows on the counter and says to me in a soft voice, “It's been kind of a tough week . . .”

  Twenty minutes later I finally emerge from the liquor store. “What took you so long?” Duncan asks.

  “Who knew I was going to have to hear confession?” I say.

  (Later on when I ask Paula about it, she just says, “Now you be nice to poor Larry. His mother has been very sick and he's under a lot of stress right now.” Such a Paula thing to say.)

  My tailbone is really throbbing now and I'm in no mood for fucking around, so I hold the beer ransom until Duncan agrees to get on the back and be the grand marshal. I just want to get my father's penis home in one piece.

  Then I get behind the wheel.

  I don't know what comes over me, but suddenly I'm worse than Duncan, tearing around corners, zigzagging up and down hilly backstreets, and probably ruining Al's alignment as I deliberately land in potholes. We approach the high school and, rather than go all the way around the block, I simply drive right up onto the playing fields and cut straight across, even rounding the bases a couple of times on the baseball diamond.

  Duncan practically coughs up a lung from the dust.

  Back at Oak Acres I take a shortcut across the lawn of our neighbor, Mr. Foster. Okay, I admit this is more Vandalism than Creative, but Mr. Foster's the kind of guy who gets up at six on a Saturday morning to vacuum his driveway. I figure he's got it coming to him.

  SOTGFTT think it's fucking hysterical.

  As a result, Duncan treats me with a begrudging respect for the rest of the night, although he and the others take every opportunity to mock Doug for being in a musical and liking to sing, calling him Florence Nightingale without realizing how stupid that makes them sound. I definitely sense Duncan is competing with me for Doug's attention because he keeps bringing up various “comical” things from their shared past that I don't know about and, frankly, aren't particularly comical. But then Doug will do something like know where the towels are kept in my kitchen or refer to us as “we,” and Duncan will challenge me to a chugging contest or some such nonsense. Not that I mind; alcohol helps dull the throbbing pain in my tailbone. But it's like there's a little version of each of us on Doug's shoulders, a Teen Angel and a Blue Devil, both vying for his soul.

  Doug stays over and as we clean up the house and talk trash about the guests I indulge in the fantasy that my suburban split-level ranch house is actually a converted SoHo loft that Doug and I live in together. I'm aching to tell him that I'm bisexual, that I'm destined for a life of sexual deviancy way more interesting than the buttoned-down future he can expect staying in Wallingford. I'm longing to whisk him away to Neverland like I'm Peter Pan and he's one of the Darling children. What's more, I'm longing to reach for his peter and have him call me “darling.”

  But instead I just ask him if he'll drive me to the emergency room.

  “I think I broke my ass,” I say.

  Wuss.

  There's this scene in South Pacific where Nellie, the hick army nurse, and Emile, the cultured Frenchman, sing a number called “Twin Soliloquies,” but they never actually sing it together. In the original Broadway production, Mary Martin, who played Nellie, was afraid of being overpowered by Ezio Pinza, the Metropolitan Opera basso who played Emile, so they just traded verses back and forth, singing their thoughts. That's kind of how it is with me and Doug as we sit in the emergency room, except that occasionally we're interrupted by people with knife wounds and heart attacks.

  There's somethin
g about sitting in a hospital late at night that makes you want to swap autobiographies. So I tell Doug all about how the 1960s and '70s hit my mom like a ton of wind chimes and made her have a Feminist Awakening, but how I completely understand because if I were married to Al and had to live in Wallingford the rest of my life, I'd get out as soon as I could, too. And I tell him how she rejected her Roman Catholic upbringing, threw off the yoke of bourgeois oppression, and became totally funky-woo-woo. Now, whenever I visit her, we always do cool New Age-y stuff together, like balance our chakras or make jewelry from hemp. She's in South America now, communing with the Incan spirits.

  And Doug tells me about his creepy, square-headed father and how the happiest years of his dad's life were when he was stationed in Germany. But then his dad went to Vietnam and got weird and now he hates his life because he drives a Tastykake truck. And he says that sometimes his dad takes his frustration out on him, like the time he knocked over the breakfront and then chased Doug down the street, calling him a candy-assed pussy. “But then I got big enough to fight back,” Doug says. “Now he just yells at the TV.”

  He goes on to tell me that his only reprieve from all that unrestrained testosterone was spending summers in Germany, visiting his mother's gay brother, the former Olympic gymnast.

  That is, until he met me. (Sigh.)

  Then he teaches me all kinds of dirty words in German, like Schwanzlutscher (cocksucker), Arschlecker (ass licker), and our favorite, Hosenscheisser (pants shitter).

  Eventually the doctor shows up and informs me I have a “contusion” on my coccyx, which I guess is Latin for “you fell on your ass.” Nothing's broken, but he gives me a three-week gym excuse and one of those foam doughnuts to sit on.

  But I don't feel the pain in my ass (or, as Doug calls it, my Arschschmerz) because, like Nellie in South Pacific, I'm in love with a wonderful guy. I'm bromidic and bright as a moon-happy night pouring light on the dew, you might say.

  Until Al and Dagmar come home.

  I swear, they aren't in the house five minutes before they completely nail me for having a party, despite my putting the beanbag chair back together bean by bean and flipping the cushions on the smoking couch. Apparently the senior class of '84 scuffed Dagmar's new hardwood floors.

  She goes ballistic. “Don't you know you cannot valk on tse floors vit shoes!” she screams.

  Actually, I didn't. I always assumed that, being the indoor version of the ground, floors were meant to be trod upon, but apparently they do things differently in Austria. Al grounds me for a whole month, even though it's obvious he can't tell what's wrong with the goddamn floors, either.

  School is great, though, a warm retreat from the frost that's occurring at home. With the exception of typing, a necessary evil Al insists I take even though I'm certain I'll never have any use for it as an actor, and gym, a necessary evil mandated by law, I've got a really good schedule.

  AP history, for instance, is going to be way better now that Ms. Toquitz has taken over from Mr. Duke who, as the coach of the girl's track team, made the mistake last year of adding fucking as a track and field event.

  And AP French looks good, too, not because Madame Schwartz is so intéressante (she's not) but because the unexpected arrival of Ziba in class is. I say unexpected because I know for a fact that Ziba's fluent in French and therefore is obviously scamming for an easy A. She spends the entire class that first day staring out the window, completely overdressed in a pair of pleated slacks and a silk blouse, answering questions distractedly and looking more like a woman awaiting an assignation with her lover in a café than some kid taking French in a suburban New Jersey high school.

  After class she tells me she's never been particularly interested in school. “They don't teach anything I'm interested in, like fashion or cinema,” she says as she strolls down the hall like it's the Champs-Élysées, “but this school is by far the worst.” She waves a hand toward the hordes of students and says, “The people here are such snobs.” She doesn't seem concerned that those snobs can hear her. “But I honestly don't understand what they've got to be so snobby about. Don't they realize they live in New Jersey?”

  “I know,” I say, feeling cool by association.

  “I bet no one here has even heard of Fellini,” she says.

  I tell her you can't expect these uncultured philistines to appreciate the Renaissance masters.

  Then there's AP English with Mr. Lucas.

  Mr. Lucas.

  I'm sure no one who's ever met Ted Lucas walked away not knowing how they felt about him. He's just the kind of person you can't help but have an opinion about. People on the anti-Lucas side find him patronizing and arrogant, cruel even. He hands back tests in descending grade order, will actually send people to the principal's office for being “absent mentally,” and nearly got fired for throwing a book at a student, for which he was completely unrepentant. “Lucky for her it was just The Metamorphosis and not Moby-Dick,” he said.

  I think he's great.

  Sometimes I'll deliberately say something trite and uninspired in a discussion just so he'll peer over his glasses at me and declare, “Whell, Mr. Zanni, uhbviously.” But mostly I try to impress him. If Mr. Lucas starts tugging at his beard and staring off in space, that means you've said something to make him think. And if you can make someone as brilliant as Mr. Lucas think, whell, then uhbviously you're pretty smart yourself.

  Best of all, he used to be an actor—a real, legitimate, classical theater actor who studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and performed Shakespeare and Molière and Chekhov all over the country. But then he had some kind of spinal cord injury and had to give up acting, which only adds to his quasi-tragic mystique. All manner of theories have circulated about the cause of his handicap, the most popular being that he was injured in Vietnam, which presumably explains why he's so moody. He walks using those crutches that wrap around your wrists, and more than once I've seen him swat through a crowd of kids like some giant praying mantis, shouting, “Out of my way, you juvenile delinquents. Can't you see there's a cripple coming through?”

  As far as I'm concerned, Mr. Lucas is casting his pearls before swine. He got in a lot of trouble for his Viet Cong concept for our production of The King and I, even though it saved a lot of money on costumes, and no one understood why he had me play Tom in The Glass Menagerie as a dog on a leash when it's so frigging uhbvious. Frankly, I think Principal Farley just got upset with the scene where I peed on the carpet. The students don't really understand Mr. Lucas either, and are more impressed by the fact that he played the Tidy Bowl man on TV than anything else. Mr. Lucas says that just means his career was already in the toilet before he came here.

  On the first day of school, he hands us a syllabus, just like they do in college classes. “Our theme this year,” he says, pointing to an absurdly long list of titles, “is Rebels with a Cause. We'll begin with Oedipus Rex.” He tosses copies of it at us without looking up, which may explain how he beaned that girl with The Metamorphosis.

  “Oedipus Rex,” he says in a voice so resonant it sounds as if his whole body were hollow. “A heartwarming little family story in which our hero kills his father, sleeps with his mother, and gouges his own eyes out. If it had been written last year, the school board would be burning it on the front lawn, but since it's two thousand years old, it's deemed acceptable for your impressionable little brainlets. I want a paper on whether Oedipus really has a tragic flaw or not by next Monday.”

  The class groans.

  “Oh, quit complaining,” he says. “At least you can walk unassisted.”

  Back at home, the atmosphere grows increasingly Gothic. Now that she's got her claws into Al, Dagmar feels free to unleash the Beast Within. The transformation is so swift and shocking, it's like a horror movie—I Was a Middle-Aged Austrian Werewolf. She informs my sister in no uncertain terms that she's not welcome to come home to do her laundry (I don't know why, it's not like Karen's asking her to do i
t) and tells me to stop having my friends call when I'm not there because it interrupts her from “tse verk.” I try to explain to her that the only way my friends can tell if I'm home is if they call, but she just insists on telling me about the supposedly exemplary way things were done back when she was a girl. It seems like every conversation I have with this woman begins with the words, “Tse vay I vas raised . . .” followed by some example of how life was better growing up in Nazi-occupied Austria. Oh, and apparently everything I do is too loud, too, which is totally ironic coming from a woman who is so vocal during sex that even the Nudelmans across the street know when she's having an orgasm.

  Meanwhile, Al's too pussy-whipped to notice or to care that he's married a raving lunatic.

  Luckily I've got a lot of extracurricular stuff that keeps me out of the house (my classes in New York, for instance) plus my old standby for when I'm grounded: the faux babysitting job. Al still hasn't caught on that the only time I ever seem to look after the fictitious Thompson kids—Jason (nine), Kyra (six), and little Michael (just a year old)—is when I'm grounded. I've even snuck beer out of the house by wrapping a six-pack in “Happy Smurfday!” wrapping paper and pretending it was for one of the kids. I've actually developed a real fondness for the little tykes over the years, despite the fact that they don't exist.