Getting Off Clean

by Timothy Murphy

  The way whole nations thrive.

  The way whole nations love.

  Eric Arthur Fitzpatrick

  Senior, West Mendhem High School,

  West Mendhem, Massachusetts

  I slam shut the notebook and chuck it across the room near my backpack—the final flourish. I don’t want to look at it again. Now my digital clock says three in the morning. I put out the light and get back under the covers, but it’s cold, so I climb out again to close the window. There’s someone prowling in the backyard, I think, someone who looks to have been walking with a limp, in a striped white shirt, hastening toward the bush, frozen now in my gaze—but it’s not, it’s the humanoid shadow a tree makes against a hedge. Still, it’s creepy to look out there. There are cold snaps coming on, shorter days; there is fall coming outside this house.

  November 1986

  Five

  After I fell asleep that night, the night after he and I went to that little pond in Boxford, I kept having dreams that turned to nightmares. I would wake up sweaty and spooked, and stare around my dark room and out into the dark yard, until I fell back asleep, and then the dreams would start again, turning to nightmares, scaring me awake, and so on like this until the sun started coming up. In the dreams, I was with him, hiding out in secluded places, in a forest or a car or, most strangely, in our old cottage at Hampton Beach, and while we made it together he was saying the most astonishing things to me, explicit things but said with his usual gravity, and more strangely, I was saying them back. And then what would happen was, we would become concentrated on each other, to the point where we were all wrapped up together, naked, limb for limb, in a contortion impossible to unlace on a moment’s notice.

  That was always the exact point where the dream would turn into a nightmare, because suddenly there we were, in the same position, but somewhere else, in broad daylight, like my backyard, or in the hallways at school between classes, or, worse, in the middle of the auditorium during an assembly, and whole hordes of people were watching us. There were kids from school screaming, “Faggots! Faggots!” and their parents, looking away, saying to each other, “Oh, I’m gonna be sick.” In one nightmare, Phoebe and Charlie were there, getting stoned, making out, and wearing little matching John Lennon sunglasses, just smiling smugly like they had known it all along. But worst of all my family was there, my whole family, with my mother bawling and begging me to stop (but I couldn’t, because I was stuck to him) and my aunts and Bethie Lynn trying to console her, saying, “Terry, it’s okay, he just wants attention, he’s always needed to be different,” Joani looking bewildered and terrified like she didn’t understand why her brother was at the center of a riot, Brenda actually leading on the chanting pack, screaming the loudest, and my father staring at me with absolute disgust, then looking away, then staring back, then looking away, until, finally, he just stalked away, past a whole pack of other dads wearing West Mendhem Booster Club baseball caps just like him who kept laughing and saying, “Sorry, Art, real sorry about your son.” And then about half a dozen football players started to come toward us, saying, “We’re gonna kill you homos,” and all their jeering girlfriends behind them, and even Mrs. Bradstreet and Mrs. Farnham standing together, frowning and saying, “It’s too bad, he was going to be our first at Yale in nine years.” And Brooks stuck to me, naked, saying out of the corner of his mouth, “Can’t you disentangle yourself from me?” and me struggling like a madman, screaming, “I’m trying! Can’t you see I’m fucking trying?” And then, of course, it was like any nightmare: I woke up, saved at the last minute, telling myself, It could never happen. I wouldn’t let it happen.

  And yet. And regardless. That night was two months ago. It’s November now, nearly Thanksgiving, the ground is freezing, and since then I’ve seen him a lot—something like every other day until just last week. Even though he was arrested, and let off, and he’s on probation at St. Banner, even though so much insane stuff is going on here at home, and in West Mendhem, that I can hardly keep my mind on what I’m supposed to do, even though I am doing what I’m supposed to do, although I’m doing it like a sleepwalker, dazed and vaguely amused that I’m actually getting it done, even cocky, maybe, but God, I hope not, because pride will bring me down faster than anything else; if I slip for just one minute, I’m a goner. But it’s like everything else is a kind of cyclone—it’s so noisy I can hardly hear myself think—and at the center, in the only quiet place, there’s him, Brooks, and me, and it’s such a bizarre, cut-off part of my life that I can’t even believe it is my life. I’m convinced I’m playing out some part in somebody else’s life, or some movie they’ve never made, and never will make. And yet. And regardless. It’s the only part of my life when I feel wide awake, when I feel like there’s some other Eric Fitzpatrick. Not the “Eric!” I hear from the bottom of the stairs at dinner, not the “Eric Fitzpatrick” Mr. LeFebvre calls out during attendance in homeroom every morning, not the “Eric honey,” “Eric sweetie,” “Eric you asshole,” “Hey Erky” I get from my mother and aunts and sisters, but another Eric, who’s yet to exist, who might exist in five years, or ten, twenty, God knows when.

  And him, Brooks. It’s so funny now to think back to that first night at B.J.’s, and to think back to how he intimidated the hell out of me, with his low, measured voice that held everything, including me, in contempt, and his endless name-dropping, about books, about art, in French (and a little Italian, too), in a code I only feebly understand. This guy couldn’t be real, I thought, but now, thinking back, the funny thing is, he was. And he still talks like that, like nothing—probation, or whatever—is going to wreck him, but now I know better than to let him scare me.

  He can’t leave campus anymore; he can’t take the chance, or they’ll kick him out, for good. (In fact, now all he does is stay in his room, or at the library, and read all the time, and he tells me that he is excelling, especially because the work is idiot’s work compared to what it was at Exeter, and he’ll probably win all the departmental awards at the end of the year.) So now we have a new place: the barn where they used to keep the rowing sculls until they built a real boathouse right on the lake. The barn, at the far end of campus on the other side of the soccer fields, is deserted, with lofts you can climb up into, a perfect place to meet. We’ve also worked out a new system: after school, when I’m through with meeting for the newspaper or the yearbook or the literary magazine (or when I’m pretending to be detained with them), I’ll call the pay phone in his dormitory, and someone will call him to the phone. Then I’ll say, “Can you meet this afternoon?”—which he usually can, because the mandatory after-class athletic requirement that he chose is building sets for the school plays and the head of the drama club at St. Banner is a narcoleptic—and he’ll say, “Yes, when?” And I’ll say, “In fifteen minutes, the usual place?” and he’ll say, “But of course,” or something like that. And then I’ll say, “Should I bring you cigarettes or anything?” and he’ll say yes or no, depending, and then he’ll say, “Don’t get arrested,” and I’ll say, “You neither”—because it’s become a joke after what happened, Don’t get arrested—and we’ll both say, “See you soon,” and then I’m off in my mother’s hatchback, heading outcountry toward St. Banner.

  When I get there, I park deep into a dirt road, and then I skirt the woods on the border of the school, until I sprint across a corner of the grounds, timing it so that all the soccer players are after the ball in the direction opposite from me. The barn is big, and drafty this time of year, and still smells faintly of hay and manure from way back when St. Banner was still farmland, and the only light is that let in by the small window at the very place where the pitched roof joins and by the occasional cracks in the wood. I climb up the grotty old ladder into the loft, the one way in the back, and I wait for him. (Sometimes, peering through a break in the wall, I can see him stalking toward the barn from the other end of campus, backpack slung over his shoulder in case anyone should ask him where he’s going; th
en he’ll tell them he’s going down to the lake to study, because it’s more conducive to absorption there, more Thoreauvian, and they leave him alone, because they think he’s a freak: very “bright,” but “troubled.”) From below, then, in the shaft of light from the open door, I hear it, low and tentative—because we don’t know who else might use this barn as a hiding place—“Hello?” and I’ll lean over the edge of the loft, expelling old, gray shards of hay, and call, “Up here.”

  Up here is where I see him first, climbing up in school clothes: loafers, khakis, a blazer, a striped shirt, a tie in his backpack. His first question to me is always, “Did you get here all right? Did anyone see?” and mine to him is the same. He’ll smoke, cigarettes mostly, pot sometimes, which I don’t do here because later in the evening, I have obligations: family, homework, school applications. We’ll bring each other things: he brings me a book, or a magazine, or a tape he’s made. (He listens to strange things; a few weeks ago he brought me a recording of these chanting monks, which I actually like.) I’ll bring him cigarettes, or some snack he can’t get at school (Toffee-Fays, on which he seems to subsist, eating them delicately one after another), or, once, socks and underwear because, embarrassed, he wrote me a check and told me that he was in short supply and his great-aunt was becoming too addled to remind the housekeeper to pick them up and send them to him.

  We fool around up here; a few times, we’ve fallen asleep, and when we woke, it was getting dark outside, and cold, and we both sat up with a gasp. We talk in a kind of half-baked, wandering way, as though we’re both too tired for talking, as though hiding out here is activity enough. When I’m up here, the last thing I want to talk about is school, or home; I think it bores him, and when I’m here, it all seems rather boring and far-off to me, as well. He’ll ask occasionally how my college plans are going—in the most offhand way, because he professes to hate the very institution of college—and I’ll answer offhandedly, too. When I ask him about his summer plans, it’s always the same answer: “Paris, probablement.” He says he’ll probably finish the year out respectably after all, though he could care less; he’s just doing it because that’s the path of least resistance. After that, he says, he might just stay in Paris and get work in a café and maybe settle there, and never come back. Do you know any cafés that would hire you? I ask him, and he says if Paris hired Josephine Baker, they’ll hire him. He says he’s staying on campus for Thanksgiving, and, of course, before I ask him to my house, I think better of it. He says he’s going back to Virginia for Christmas Day, and then after that, with his holiday money, he’ll go to Barbados, alone, for January. And do what, alone, I ask? “Get lost,” he says.

  My last visit up there, last week, he got stoned in front of me, morosely, as though I were hardly there. It was frigid inside the barn at four o’clock, colder than it had yet been. Outside, dimly, we could hear the shouts from the soccer fields, hoarse cries that seemed to suspend for a moment and then get sucked up into the tremendous, precise cold of the air above the fields.

  “Listen to those idiots,” he said curtly, before taking a tremendous first hit and sitting cross-legged, his eyes closed, letting the smoke settle in his lungs for several seconds before exhaling. “Running around like orangutans in their little shorts. For what? For a ball? That’s unfathomable to me.”

  “Why are you in such a bad mood today?” I asked him, feeling suddenly very depressed, very alone, holed up here with somebody nobody else in my life even knew existed and watching him float away.

  “I’m not in a bad mood,” he said dully, taking another drag, concentrating entirely on his joint. “I’m just fine. How are you?”

  “Right now?” I asked. “I’ve been better.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” He shrugged his shoulders at me.

  “Maybe I’d better go,” I said. “You’ve got your pot, anyway.”

  “Thanks to the lovely rolling papers you brought me.”

  “Yeah, right.” I reached across the loft floor for my backpack.

  “You don’t have to go yet, Eric,” he said, putting his hand on top of my backpack. “Maybe I want your company.”

  “Maybe if you wanted my company, you wouldn’t get stoned when I come all the way out here to see you. My own friends do that to me. Why should I take it from you, too?”

  “Maybe I’m more than just a friend to you.”

  “Oh, really?” I couldn’t help spluttering. “What are you? Are you my mentor, because you throw books and classical music at me, because I’m a townie and you want to cultivate me?”

  “Oh, please,” he says, rolling his eyes. “You’re so self-dramatizing. You’re a little suburban boy who’s going off to Yale. You’re the goddamned American dream. Will you ever drop this illusory sense of yourself as this poor working-class ethnic?”

  “Well, what did you mean, then? Did you mean that we’re—that we’re boyfriends or something?” The word felt very thick on my tongue, and utterly absurd to say.

  “I didn’t say that,” he said, his voice so rich with what sounded like contempt, and I knew he was glad that I had said the word, not him. “I was thinking more along the lines of special friends. You know, like Gertrude and Alice.”

  “Who?”

  “Stein? And B. Toklas?”

  “Oh. Well, this is West Mendhem, Massachusetts, not the Lost Generation,” I said, proud of my quick recovery.

  But he didn’t say anything back, didn’t even smirk. He just took another long hit off his joint, which had been incinerating in his hands, and stared over the ledge of the loft, down toward the vast, moldering space below.

  “Brooks, I probably should go. I’ve got a lot of work tonight,” I said, reaching again for my backpack. “I’ll call you next week, okay?” I stood halfway up in the loft and started to brush the dirt from my pants. It was already becoming night outside, and in the barn, I was losing his face in the gathering gloom.

  “Would you stay with me for just a few more minutes?” he asked, sounding weirdly hoarse, like he had caught a cinder in his throat. “I’ll put this out, all right?” And he carefully extinguished his joint on the floor of the loft. “There. Now, would you just grant me that much?”

  His voice sounded so strange and disembodied in the dark that it caught me off guard. I laid down my backpack and sat next to him on the floor. “Okay. If you really want me to,” I said tentatively.

  “Please. Thank you.”

  “Okay.”

  For what seemed like the longest time, neither of us said anything. I knew he was looking away from me, over the edge of the loft, and I could hear his steady, reedy breathing. I started to worry that something was wrong with him; it wasn’t the first time we’d been together when he had gotten stoned, but before I had hardly been able to notice the difference; he still always seemed talky, glib, sarcastic. Now it was as if he had crawled into some hole in the ground, as if he was falling deeper, and I was standing at the top of the hole, looking down, losing sight of him.

  “Eric?” he finally said, sounding weirdly tentative and scaring me.

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Do you utterly—loathe yourself?”

  “Loathe?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean, do I hate myself?”

  “I believe ‘loathe’ is a synonym for ‘hate,’ yes.” He was still looking away from me in the dark; I could feel it. I could feel his entire body leaning away from me and toward the edge of the loft, leaving me in a kind of dark vacuum all my own.

  “Well, I get upset at myself, yes. I think there are a lot of things I do that I could do better. But I can’t say that I hate myself, no. Hate is a pretty strong emotion, don’t you think?” (That’s what my mother has always said: “You don’t hate anybody. Hate is a strong emotion.”)

  “Yes,” he drawled. “It certainly is.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Do you think I do?”

  He didn’t answer for the longest time. Then he said, “No. I don’t
. Not yet, anyway. But you might learn to, if you give it time.”

  He was making me nervous now. “I don’t think that will happen. I think I just need a change of scenery, that’s all.”

  “You’re right. You’re absolutely right.”

  “Why, anyway? Do you hate yourself?”

  He laughed softly, eerily, as if he was hypnotized. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he slurred. “What’s to hate, right? What’s to hate? That’s a strong emotion.” It was then that I saw it, even in the dark. He was sitting cross-legged, and he started leaning rightward, toward the edge. One whole side of him rocked off the edge.

  “Brooks, what the fuck!” I hissed, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him back up. He was dead weight in my hands, and in the dark, as I yanked him back away from the ledge, I swore I saw him smiling at me.

  “You’re so fucked up!” I said to him, propping up his head with one hand. “You almost rolled right over the edge. You’ve got to stop getting stoned. You’re worse than Phoebe and Charlie.”

  Now he couldn’t stop the soft, drugged laugh; it came out of him like hiccups, spasmodically, the way Joani used to sound when she choked on her juice and my mother would have to whack her on the back to make her stop. “Eric, you saved my life.” He giggled, putting his hands up to my face. I pulled away, kneeling beside him. “That’s awfully sweet.”

  “You’re a fuckup” was all I could think to say. “You’ve got to get it together.”

  He just giggled more, looking depraved in the dark, and reached for my belt buckle. “Come on, let me suck your dick. You wanna suck my big dick, Eric? You haven’t done that in a while. Wouldn’t that be nice?”