I stammered a bit. “So, yeah, you think, maybe, uh…?” as if that wasn’t digging me in deeper.
Kirsten, blushing, “Yeah, I’d say the same percentage of girls are liars.” And she looked away.
I mention this because I walked around that day thinking that after Frank Fish had attempted to ostracize me, I’d accidentally learned that girls jerked off. What other guys in my class had stumbled over this? None of them! Things were kind of horrible but I was also having the best day of my life, if only I knew how to get out of being harassed.
Late one afternoon, maybe a week later, I was tied into the bathroom in the upstairs hallway. I had gone in to use the toilet and Frank had lassoed the door shut and tied the rope to the railing across the hall, so I couldn’t get out. He taunted me for a while then had something better to do, and he left.
Somehow, eventually, I managed to open the door enough to get about halfway out.
I saw Mr. Robinson, who ran the dorm, standing quietly in the hallway. He was an English teacher and a lacrosse coach, with a demonologist’s Vandyke. He had an abrupt, dark sense of humor that I looked forward to one day being a good enough person to bear the brunt of. I should note that as I was pressing myself flat to get out, I wasn’t crying or red-faced, just a little bit bored about how my day was going so far.
Mr. Robinson met my eye. It was an interested look. My first thought was that he could have untied the doorknob at any time. And he hadn’t. But not because he was a bully. Something else was going on.
“How you doing?” he asked, not unkindly, as I squeezed myself through the door frame.
“I’m okay,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Yep.”
Finally, I was all the way out, my body a mess of abrasions. I looked at the lasso, which was still intact.
“Anything you need to tell me?”
I shook my head. I started to undo the rope, but he stopped me. “Next time, bring a knife. Don’t be so nice to Fish.” He padded away, all khaki trousers and penny loafers. He knew whose rope it was. I realized what had happened. He was seeing if I was the kind of person who could help himself.
“Oh, and one more thing,” he said. He shook his head and with a sigh, as if he’d told me this a hundred times before, moaned, “Shave, for God’s sake, Gold.”
I was delighted.
* * *
—
Over Christmas I visited my mother, who was living in New York. We stayed together in a hotel near the Empire State Building in advance of a Christmas that Trevor had planned for all of us. He was supposed to call and give us instructions about where we were meeting him. Mom took me shopping at Bloomingdale’s, where I bought a tin of Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies and, because it amused us both, she also bought me a Famous Amos baseball cap.
When we got back to the hotel, Trevor hadn’t called. No matter—she and I went to the movies. We went out to dinner. She took me to bookstores and candy stores. We got cheesecake from Lindy’s. Back to Bloomingdale’s. Still no phone call.
She went to the hotel window often, looking at the street outside and I could see in her face that look she got when working through a feeling of almost sublime unfairness. She didn’t deserve this, and yet it was happening to her.
I told her stories of Thacher. In late October I’d been on a weeklong camping trip, a forty-mile loop through Mineral King in the Sierras. We’d done the first thirty-eight miles, saving the last two, a climb over something awful called Sawtooth Pass, for the last day. But at four in the morning it had started to snow, and by daybreak there was over a foot of snow on the ground, making Sawtooth impassable. So we turned around and hiked the thirty-eight miles in a blizzard, without proper snow gear. Since it had been my first camping trip ever, I thought all camping trips were like that. I’d gotten frostbite in two toes. I’d only learned this when I tried to thaw my foot in front of a fireplace and my sock had caught fire, but I couldn’t feel it. It sounded terrifying, and it was, but there was something fun in getting to say I’d survived it.
She tried Trevor again, to no response.
I tried to make her laugh. I told her about my English teacher, who was a dwarf, and who had nude photos of herself in her house, and who taught us grammar lessons based on her own unpublished novel. I could tell my mother wasn’t actually hearing me. “One of the photos,” I said, “is of her on a trampoline.” I hadn’t seen that photo, or the others, but there were rumors. Boarding school, it turned out, had truly heroic rumors.
But my mother was looking right through me. She found a pay phone, fed it dimes, got the answering service.
One night after Christmas, she called me into her bedroom in the suite—I brought with me the book I was reading, her gift to me that described the history of comic books. My mother was propped up on pillows in her gown, phone on the bed with her. She asked if my book had anything in it about Garth.
“Garth was a comic strip I used to read when I was a little girl,” she said. “All I remember is that he was a strong man who’d been called away somewhere and who promised he was coming back home to rescue everyone. It never happened, not in my life at least. I had to learn not to believe those promises.” She sighed.
I looked in my book, and yes, there it was, an entry on a British comic called Garth. She looked at it. She said that her father had been gone so long when she was little that it had shaped all her life since then. She had learned to wait for men. She didn’t know why she couldn’t learn anything else.
“When you were little,” she said, “I never read you fairy tales. Do you remember that? I didn’t want you to think anyone would rescue you.”
On New Year’s Eve, she wanted to go out in the crowds but she also didn’t want to miss a phone call, so we sat in the room together. It was overheated in an East Coast way that was beginning to become familiar to me, and Mom wore a festive red turtleneck. I had a pile of gifts she’d bought that week, books by Kurt Vonnegut and a gigantic Hershey’s Kiss that must have weighed a pound. As we waited together, I read and I hacked at the Kiss with a butter knife to break off manageable bites. Trevor never came.
I felt bad for her, because of a detail I haven’t mentioned. I don’t know when I learned of this fact. If I learned it before the trip, I felt sorry for my mother in a certain way, and if I was still ignorant of it then, I felt sorry for her in another, more naive way. Trevor was living with someone else. My mother explained this to me as if the woman were a gangster and she had a knife to Trevor’s throat. It was terrible for him, he didn’t want to be living with her but there was some circumstance that was forcing this to happen. My mother explained his agony, and then the details of what sounded like house arrest for Trevor, but the more I listened the less I heard. At some point in the near future, just a few weeks, he would be free, she said. It’s a hard thing to describe. I believed her, but I was also beginning to tune to different stations. I was fading away while she talked.
At midnight, we could hear cheers and she was sitting in the window, peering through the curtains, and I could see the city lights reflecting on her face, which was beautiful. “I’m almost forty-three years old,” she said softly. “How much longer do I have to put up with this?”
Maybe I knew about the other woman, in which case that question struck me as hopeless. Maybe I thought Trevor was unattached, but in that case the question was still hopeless to me. In either case, while hugging my mom, being funny for her, something had changed—part of me, an ember, frightened me with its wayward travels into the possibility of ignition. I thought there was an answer to her question, in that she didn’t have to put up with it at all. But here she was, choosing it. This was the part that did not sympathize.
* * *
—
A couple of freshmen didn’t come back after vacation (and for them, the single Thacher yearbook on a shelf, or
in a garage, is the kind of mystery that defines adulthood). This meant there was a room free. When I returned to school, my new spot, a single room, was directly across the hall from a boy named Ronald.
Ronald was friends with Frank, which meant he was a problem. But he had little use for anti-Semitism. Instead, he didn’t like me because I was weak. Ronald had a face pockmarked like a battlefield, and a perpetual sneer, and terrible grades that would eventually get him kicked out of school. But not yet.
I had returned from break feeling melancholy. After visiting my mother, I’d seen my father and Ann and my new half-brother, Seth. I don’t remember my first impressions, but shortly after seeing Seth I decided I didn’t need to tell my father about the $186. Guilt subdued.
At Thacher I wore my Famous Amos baseball hat and a silver Porsche racing jacket that was a gift from Trevor. These got a few chuckles. I was starting to make a name as a kid who was odd, but there was good odd and bad odd, and no one cared enough yet to make the distinction about me. It was a strange sort of low, in that I technically had three homes but no one in any of them cared much about me.
Ronald was bigger and more determined than I was, and there was nothing I could do to stop him if he wanted something from me. He would steal bags of Doritos, say he’d pay me back, and then that would never happen.
One evening, he opened my door and told me he’d heard I had the new issue of the X-Men and he wanted it. I have no idea how the following came to pass—either I put up some kind of real fight, given that this was a comic book and not just food, or Ronald made an offer outright. Thirty cents. Only he didn’t have the money right then.
It was obvious what I should do. “You don’t need to give me money,” I said. “Trade me your soul instead.”
He laughed. “Right.”
“No, really. Take the comic. You won’t owe me anything. Just your soul. Ha. Ha.”
“What, you want me to be your slave or something?”
“No, nothing like that.” I got out a yellow pad and handed him a pen. I dictated: “ ‘I, being of sound mind, hereby bequeath my immortal soul to Glen Gold for him to do with as he so pleases. This contract will become binding upon my death.’ ” And I gave him a place to sign at the bottom.
“You don’t have any control over me,” he said, double-checking. “I’m not cleaning out your corral for you.”
“It says ‘upon my death.’ ”
He thought about it. Then he signed. I countersigned, handed him the comic book, and pointed at my door.
“So you don’t want a quarter or anything?” he asked.
“Goodbye,” I said, as calmly as possible. He chortled once and left.
Our prefect came by to make sure we were in our rooms at ten p.m. Lights out was 10:30. Around eleven, I was awakened by my door opening. It was Ronald. He had the comic book in hand. He told me he hadn’t read it, it was in perfect condition, and he wanted to give it back.
I said sure.
“So we’ll just get rid of that contract,” he said, carefully.
“No. That’s done,” I said. “Your soul is mine even if you give me back the comic book.”
“Don’t be a dick. Here, take the comic.”
“The pact is made.”
Ronald told me to go fuck myself, and was on his way to searching my room, but by then the prefect was already standing in the doorway. He asked what the hell Ronald was doing. No answer, just a death stare. He left.
When I came back after school the next day, my room had been turned upside down. The sheets were off the mattress. My drawers had been rifled through. A couple of guys were in the hallway, alert that something was going on. You just didn’t mess up another guy’s stuff.
I went to Ronald’s room with a small crowd around me.
“Is this what you were looking for?” I handed him the contract. He tore it out of my hands.
He did two things at the same time: announce that he didn’t care about it, that I was some kind of freak and he didn’t care about me either; he tore up the contract.
Then I showed him the photocopy I’d made. Well, one of the photocopies.
Within a day, the whole school knew I’d bought Ronald’s soul, that he was weak enough to want it back, and that I was tormenting him. After a few days, I let Ronald buy it back for two dollars, and afterward, maybe strangely, he had a small respect for me. I never got bullied again.
* * *
—
A few days later, I came back from the stables to find something strange in my room. There were four seniors in it, John Spencer and three I barely knew—Ross and Jaime and Steve. They were sitting on my bed and on my chair, feet up, reading comic books. My mother had given me a five-pound canvas bag of peanuts for Christmas, and the bag was open, and there was a pile of shells on my bed. I’m not sure that any of them looked up at first; they were having a conversation that didn’t include me. So I just listened.
Finally, Spencer said, “Is it true that you bought a kid’s soul for a comic book and sold it back to him for five dollars?”
It was true enough. I nodded.
Spencer wanted to know all the details. How had I worded the contract? I showed him one of the copies I’d made. He read it aloud. “Have you read Black Easter by James Blish? Never mind, you’ll never find a copy but I have one.”
Ross said, “Oh, God, here we go.”
“You should read the sequel, too.” In a few minutes, Spencer had specified five or six trilogies I needed to read. I should read books by Larry Niven except where Jerry Pournelle was his coauthor. He wanted to know if I had plans for my junior year yet, as there was an exchange program with Andover, where the girls were hotter, and a smart person would start planning to apply now.
Spencer had been looking to mentor someone. Ross and Jaime and Steve made fun of him for it. He’d been talking about this all the previous year. There were so many secret spots on campus to know about, places to take girls, he figured, though that was still theoretical. But then there was the occult: Had I gone to the Krotona Institute yet? It was home to Krishnamurti, the messiah of the Theosophists and it was the largest occult library outside the Vatican. And it was walking distance from downtown Ojai, he said.
At some point, there was a knock at the door and Frank Fish appeared. He looked startled. I think he was going to kick my ass for what I’d done to Ronald, but when he saw the seniors there, he did a perfect three-sixty—started to retreat, then got a better idea of how to screw me. He stayed. He tried to joke with the rest of them, to moderate effect. Then he said, casually, “Surprised you’re hanging out with this guy after I caught him jerking off like that.”
Dead silence. But not from anything dire. Just…no reaction. Ross shucked another peanut. “What the fuck would you say if you were my roommate? Jesus.”
Frank was ignored. Seniors, it turned out, were much more Realpolitik about this kind of thing. But Spencer understood why Frank brought it up. As Frank was about to leave, embarrassed, Spencer stopped him.
“Frank? Face,” he said.
Ross agreed. Faaaaaace. The rest of the seniors joined in.
So that is the story I told my father when trying to explain the meaning of the word “face.” He understood. It got a laugh. My work was done. Time to move on.
NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS
I BEGAN THIS MEMOIR by saying I have become autonomous. It’s not like I arrived, stepping off a boat and onto a bedrock land whose maps all promised a certain distance. Much as I like stories of immediate transformation, the bond between a child and a mother doesn’t work like that. Mom and I had estrangements and reconciliations, sometimes fueled by that feeling so deep it felt mercilessly like genetic truth, that if only I jiggled the kaleidoscope one more time, I would love her.
There isn’t a moment. There’s an accumulation of moments.
> Do you sweep them away because maybe there’s another moment upcoming, the one that makes you realize you were wrong about all the prior moments? That’s tempting if you have needs only a mother can provide. In other words, if you’re human.
* * *
—
When I was thirty-one, she called me. She needed surgery to restore her hearing. There were possible complications and she worried she was going to die. So before the surgery I visited her and sat with her on her couch and she tried to understand why I distrusted her.
I shied away from saying things that might make her angry or defensive. I learned to speak from an acute angle to absorb the shock. Also, she had increasing difficulty understanding conversations. So communication was one-way, and prone to me finding the right moment to insert a word she might hear. I listened, then didn’t listen, as her word avalanche swept down a hillside and I thought things like, “I am now the same age as she was when she began to get rich. Do I understand her better now?” My mind wandered. My mother was saying, “I never read you fairy tales as a child, you know. I didn’t want you to think you had to rescue anyone,” and then she was on to some other topic, citing the names of people I didn’t know, or would know if I were better at paying attention.
I tried to get her to go back. She couldn’t hear me. Her topics of conversation were now singing full speed down distant tracks. I was on my own.
I had thought it was “no one will rescue you.” Had I spent my life having heard the opposite of what my mother said? Or was I the type of person who would disbelieve myself in her favor? Yes.
I Will Be Complete Page 17