Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride

by Sweany, Brian;

  “I’m not using that as justification for your behavior. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Then what’s up?”

  “What’s up is us. Does it hurt me to hear my boyfriend made out with my best friend? Sure it does. But at least you’re being upfront with me.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” I’m beyond confused. “Uh, you’re welcome?”

  “That’s not what I want to hear, Hank.” Laura pats the couch. “Come here, sit down with me.”

  “On one condition,” I say.

  “What’s that?”

  “If I sit down, you have to tell me why you’re acting so weird.”

  “That’s kind of what I was getting around to.”

  She tells me his name is Ian Powell. He’s a little older than she is. He took a few years off after high school to do some soul searching as a yoga instructor in Belize. He works nights at UPS to help pay his tuition at Bucknell. They met last year at freshman orientation, talked a lot in those first few months, when Laura thought she had lost me. They’ve been close friends ever since. Nothing has “really” happened between them, but they’ve been talking on the phone a lot this summer. She met his family. They live in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Dad is a representative in the statehouse. Mom is an Episcopal priest. Come fall semester, Laura and Ian “want to give dating a shot.”

  She squeezes my hand. “You okay?”

  “This is getting to be a bad habit with you.”

  “That’s not fair, Hank.”

  I raise her hand to my lips, kiss her on the knuckles. “Yeah, I know.”

  “This really isn’t about Beth or Ian. You know that, right?”

  “You should have figured out by know that in the grand scheme of things I don’t know shit.”

  “It’s about us,” Laura says. “You and I have been through a lot, more than most couples twice our age. But we’re high school sweethearts. We’re not supposed to make it. I’m at Bucknell for three more years. You’re at Indiana University next year. We’re going to be something like five hundred miles apart, right?”

  “Six hundred and twenty point three-five miles.”

  “Exactly!” This time Laura seems unmoved by my geographic acumen. “Six hundred and twenty point three-five miles apart for more than two-thirds of the year, maybe more if I stay out East next summer like I plan to do. The odds just aren’t in our favor.”

  “Since when did you become such the pessimist?”

  “For Christ’s sake, you’re rooming with Hatch at IU. You’ve already cheated on me multiple times; you just don’t know it yet.”

  She has a point there. If Hatch has any say in the matter—and he usually has the only say—there will be no shortage of liquored-up whores in our apartment come fall semester.

  “You know I’m right, Hank.”

  “But it feels like we’re just giving up,” I say. “Has our relationship lost some of its spark? Maybe. Probably. I mean, of course there are times when I want to be with other girls, but there are also times when I look at you and can’t imagine being with anyone else.”

  “And I feel the same way. A part of me will always love you. But we owe one another some time to figure out these moments when we think about other people. We’re too young to start living with regrets and what-ifs. I have to do this—for me, for you, for Ian.”

  “I realize that, Laura. And I’m just as ready for this as you are. I just can’t—well, I don’t quite know how to explain this. I can’t…”

  “You can’t what?”

  “I can’t imagine my life without you in it. Do I want to have the full college experience? Yes. Do I want to see other people? Yes. But do I want to just walk away from you, from us? Do I want to never touch you, never hold you again? Laura, I—”

  She cuts my last sentence off. When all else fails, kissing a boy shuts him up faster than anything else.

  We remove each other’s clothes, oblivious of the fact that we’re separated from my parents and siblings by a few sheets of drywall and a couple hollow-paneled doors.

  Laura gets on top, maybe to feel in control one last time of a relationship that’s never quite seemed to be in anyone’s control. If only for a few fleeting minutes, our love-making is new again—naive, bold, reckless.

  I push her off me. Bending her over the couch, I take her from behind. I smack her ass, maybe a little too hard.

  1990-1991

  Chapter thirty-one

  Hatch and I are sitting in our apartment at Varsity Villas. We’re a little drunk at the moment. What am I saying? We’re a lot drunk at the moment. We blew off all our Friday classes to drink forties of Crazy Horse malt liquor and watch the Star Wars trilogy on the old LaserDisc player Dad gave me from the dealership. I have a collection of twenty LaserDiscs, fourteen of which are General Motors sales videos. The other titles comprise the aforementioned three Star Wars movies, The Hunt for Red October, When Harry Met Sally, and Chevy Chase’s highly underrated Modern Problems.

  We tried the fraternity life together, but both of us washed out as pledges. Hatch wasn’t a big fan of attending compulsory study tables or washing dirty toilets. I wasn’t a big fan of getting pelted by rotten pig intestines while doing push-ups and sucking on a stick of butter rolled in Copenhagen Original Fine Cut tobacco as Matthew Wilder’s “Break My Stride” played on a continuous loop. Hatch quit in the middle of pledgeship. He didn’t mind the hazing, just the study tables and the chores. I minded the hazing. Two weeks after I punched my pledge trainer in the face during a midnight lineup—“pledge trainer” being fraternity code for World’s Biggest Cocksucker—I was blackballed. We both struggled through our freshman year, skipping more classes than we attended, and yet somehow emerged with GPAs north of 2.0.

  Hatch hands me a fresh forty of Crazy Horse. “Thanks,” I say reluctantly.

  “Pals, Fitzy?” He offers the toast as more of a question than a declaration.

  I unscrew the cap, taking a small sip of malt liquor. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Nothing,” Hatch says.

  “Bullshit.”

  “Promise you won’t go apeshit on me.”

  “Nothing you do surprises me, Hatch.”

  “Beth Burke and I fooled around last night.”

  “Excuse me?” I say.

  “I didn’t want you to hear it from someone else. We ran into one another at a party on the other side of the Villas. One thing led to another. I couldn’t help myself.”

  Hatch spares no details, but the gist of it is they got “totally ripped,” went skinny-dipping in a pubic fountain, and had “Olympic-level” sex in a hotel suite that was so expensive he maxed out his Discover Card. He doesn’t shut up, rambling on for ten minutes, talking about the flexibility of gymnasts, and about sexual positions that may or may not exist.

  “You finished?” I say.

  “Yep,” Hatch says.

  “Do you even know what an iron cross is?”

  “I made that part up. Sounds good though, doesn’t it?”

  “Sure, it sounds good, if you’re fucking a dude. An iron cross is when you hold a position like a cross on the rings. It’s a men’s gymnastics skill.”

  I lift the Crazy Horse to my mouth, taking down a good twelve ounces with three swallows. I sit the bottle down on the coffee table. I pull a half-smoked cigarette out of the ashtray on the coffee table and light it.

  I can tell the silence is killing Hatch. He’s fidgety, agitated. Good.

  “So, we cool?” Hatch says.

  The stale smoke rims my head halo-like. “Why wouldn’t we be cool, pal?”

  “You know, you and Beth. You had a thing there for awhile.”

  “What thing? We never really dated.”

  “You broke her heart when you stayed with Laura.”

  “I did?”

 
“Stop playing dumb,” Hatch says. “Look, as much as I’d like to pretend she’s really into me, a part of Beth will probably hold a torch for you till the day she dies. You can still see it in her eyes every time your name comes up. It’s disgusting.”

  “And yet you still fucked her?”

  “Show a little respect, Fitzy.”

  “And there it is,” I say.

  “There what is?”

  “You’re crushing hard on Beth.”

  “Am not,” Hatch says.

  “I know you.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Yes, I do. Ask me.”

  “Ask you what?”

  “Do we really have to drag this out?”

  “So you wouldn’t mind if I asked Beth out on a proper date?”

  “You and the word ‘proper’ go together like JFK and the military-industrial complex.”

  “Fuck you, Fitzy.”

  “Relax, Hatch ol’ buddy.” I pat him on the back. “You don’t have to ask me for permission. We’re not in high school anymore. Beth is a big girl now, with plenty of suitors from what I’m told.”

  “You’re one to talk.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Who should we start with?” Hatch says. “Pattie, Emily, Summer, Nicole, Maria, Angelina the Untouchable, Harper, my fucking cousin.”

  “Okay, you made your point.”

  “Have I?”

  I think Hatch loves to do the play-by-play recap of these past two years more so for his own edification than anything else. Hatch affectionately refers to the twenty-two month window between July 1989 and now as my “Monster of Cock Tour.” And I will reluctantly admit, when I step outside myself, that I do look like a bit of a whore.

  Laura and I broke up on the Fourth of July—well, the fifth of July, considering we didn’t say the actual words ‘break up’ to one another until we had finished having sex for the third time in as many hours around two in the morning our last day in Disney World. She left for Bucknell and was back in Pennsylvania the very next week, the same week I started seeing Emily Kaufmann.

  Emily and I first met when we were both in high school. Hatch dated her for something like a month. I think, statistically speaking, given the number of girls we’ve swapped, Hatch and I have all but fucked each other.

  Emily was my height, the tallest girl I’ve ever dated—dark hair, slightly bow-legged, with a lean, athletic build. She was also on the rebound from her high school sweetheart. I caught her eye at a pool party—a party at which, drunk, stoned, and wearing only my boxer shorts, I jumped off the roof of a house into the shallow end of a backyard pool, my head absorbing most of the thirty foot fall. Emily was the first one who noticed the bleeding. She drove me home. I told her not to tell my parents. She told me she’d never seen me without my shirt on and didn’t realize I was in such good shape. She held a gauze pad on the back of my head all night, every hour checking my wound and shaking me awake to make sure I wasn’t in a coma. Our month or so of dating was unusual, borderline chaste. We made out for hours at a time but didn’t do a whole lot beyond that. We cried in the front seat of my car to Bryan Adams’s “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You” when we said our goodbyes over Labor Day weekend. Emily cried because I was “special” and “as much a friend as a lover.” I cried because we never had sex.

  My first night as a freshman at IU, and all of twenty-four hours after lip-synching to Emily, “There’s nooo love, like yourrr love,” I fooled around with a full-time med student and part-time amateur boxer named Summer. To my credit, she looked a lot like an older Emily. She invited me over to her place. We started kissing, and Summer had just taken off her shirt when she said, “I’m going to slip into something more comfortable.” Two minutes later, she walked out of the bathroom wearing a white V-neck men’s undershirt, red Umbros, and matching red boxing gloves. She threw me an extra pair of gloves, said it would be fun to box. “It’ll be like foreplay,” she said. It was fun, right up until she caught me with a left uppercut to the chin that knocked me unconscious. I was only out for a few seconds, but the ensuing headache left me crippled on my couch for the rest of the weekend.

  I first met Pattie Reisen the December before Christmas break 1990. She was a baseball groupie who followed around the IU players with her tongue hanging out of her mouth. I wasn’t a baseball player. But I was athletic, and I pulled off the Richard Grieco look—triple-pierced left ear, long hair with bandanna, black leather jacket, ripped jeans—enough to merit an AIDS test. Pattie made her first pass at me the Thursday night before Christmas, stumbling intoxicated into my apartment wearing an IU “We’re #1” foam finger. “I wunna’ kith you right now,” she kept mumbling, shaking her foam finger at me. At the time, she was dating a guy on the baseball team. He was a pitcher, reputed to have the meanest fastball in the Big Ten conference. With her cropped, dark brown hair and tanned skin, Pattie reminded me of Rachel Ward—more Against All Odds than The Thornbirds, although both examples are infinitely hot. Her birdlike features—small eyes positioned close together, a petite sharp nose, tiny feet—didn’t quite complete the Ward impersonation. But in concert with one another, these features just worked. If not the most beautiful, Pattie was the most striking girl I’d ever contemplated sleeping with. Still, I preferred my head attached to my shoulders as opposed to severed by a baseball traveling at a ninety miles per hour. Pattie and I “kithed” for about five minutes, then I told her to come back for more when she was single.

  Nicole Chase was my Christmas fling. Dad made me take a “character building” job over winter break working third shift at a box factory. The foreman decided to give me the hardest job on the line—catching cardboard sheets out of the corrugation machine. My hands looked like raw ground beef for the first five days. Nicole’s job was to assemble the finished cardboard displays. She had long, curly blond hair, big eyes, and tanned skin that gave off an unnatural sheen beneath a daily applied layer of baby oil. She was eighteen years old and had a two-year-old son. She was neither married to nor dating the birth father. I went to the circus with Nicole, her son, Nicholas, and the biological father’s parents. It wasn’t even weird. We had a good time. I held Nicholas in my arms while he fed the giraffe sweet potatoes. Nicole stood next to me, and the grandfather took our picture. The animal handler passing out the sweet potato slices said we were a cute family.

  Okay, it was weird.

  Nicole never wore panties. I’d say she dumped me, but I don’t think we were ever officially dating. We were just having a lot of sex one day, and the next day we weren’t. She reconciled with her high school sweetheart—also, not Nicholas’s birth father. Nicole was a bit of a hose beast, I think.

  Pattie Reisen came back to me when she was single, and we started dating the first week of school in January 1991. She lived two doors down from me in the Villas, and over the course of January and February we had sex more times than I thought possible. In her room. In my room. In her shower. In my shower. Outdoors. On Valentine’s Day, for reasons still unclear to me, I told Pattie I loved her. In response, she did an interactive striptease for me that involved strawberries, whipped cream, and Bobby Brown’s “Rock Wit’cha.” Pattie is the only girl I’ve ever dated who woke me up in the mornings with blow jobs. On one such occasion she lifted her mouth off of me and watched as I shot my wad in my own face. She laughed, so I dumped her.

  By early March I had my eyes set on Maria. Armed with no musical training, save a half year of trumpet lessons in the eighth grade, I auditioned for the Indiana University Theater Department’s production of West Side Story solely to get in the female lead’s pants. Her name was Maria in real life, which of course made her that much hotter. I landed the role of Nibbles, and I landed Maria. We made out on a kitchen table at the cast party. Between her large breasts and supple lips, Maria could give the best combination pearl necklace–blow job I’ll ever receive in thi
s life or the next. She was three years older than me, a semester away from graduating, and already talking about her plans after school: maybe law school, maybe social work, but definitely marriage and a big family. I liked her enough to even float some halfway sincere reassurances, telling her right before I left for spring break, “I’m getting used to the idea of us—of being with you—for the long haul.”

  Twenty-four hours later, I fell in love with someone else.

  It started when I jumped on the hood of a random car idling down the strip in Panama City Beach. I had an instant crush on this olive-skinned vision who was riding shotgun. Angelina Valerio was an Italian girl from Boston. She spoke with a heavy accent and attended Florida State in nearby Tallahassee. We stayed up all night drinking and commiserating over our shared hatred of the University of Miami. We said our goodbyes, and the next morning she walked two miles from her condo just to give me fresh baked muffins that tasted homemade but, Angelina admitted, “came froom a baw-ux.” We made love for the better part of five days straight, pausing only to write love letters to one another while the other one was sleeping.

  When I got back to school, I walked the three blocks to Maria’s apartment to tell her, “I feel like we’re going too fast and this relationship thing is just too much work,” leaving out the part about casting aside our two months together because I was in love with someone halfway across the country who I’d known for less than nine days.

  Angelina drove back and forth between Bloomington and Tallahassee three times in four weeks. I introduced her to my parents, and they loved her. Over a four-week period, Angelina logged seventy-two hours and forty-six hundred miles in the name of love. On the Saturday night of the third weekend, I ran out of condoms, Angelina told me she was sterile, we had unprotected sex on the floor of my apartment to Depeche Mode’s Violator album, and I dumped her the very next morning. At the end of those four weeks, without ever leaving Bloomington, I was the one who told her, “This long-distance thing is exhausting and just isn’t working out for me.” The truth—that I was so obsessed with her I was heartbroken at the prospect of not ever having children with her—would have just fucked us both up. To this day I don’t know why I fell that hard that fast. Everyone has that one that got away, I guess. Mine just wasn’t on the line that long. So it goes.