Mustache Shenanigans

by Jay Chandrasekhar

  With my mom six months pregnant, my dad called back to India to tell his mother that he was “thinking” about getting married to a woman he had met in Chicago. My grandmother flipped. She had plans to arrange her doctor-son’s marriage, so she told him that he was forbidden to marry my mother. Boxed in, my dad said he was going to marry her anyway and hung up. My grandmother was a wily woman who was used to getting her way, so she secretly called my mother and offered her $10,000 in diamonds to end her relationship with my father. My grandmother had a lot of diamonds. My mom was pissed and forced my father to tell his mom the truth. When he finally told Grandma not only that they were married, but that Mom was pregnant, my grandmother embraced reality, packed up, and booked a flight to America, where she would live for the rest of her life. She arrived in time for my sister’s birth and became the full-time babysitter, which my parents needed because they were playing the real-life George Clooney and Julianna Margulies (yeah, I know Julianna M. played a nurse, but you get the point), treating gunshot wounds in Cook County’s ER. Though my mother and grandmother made up, their relationship never quite got over its rocky start.

  Two and a half years later, on April 9, 1968, my mom went into labor again. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot five days earlier, and Chicago, or, more specifically, the area around Cook County Hospital, was on fire. My parents worried that they might not make it through the riots, but they did, and in a cosmic fluke, I was born. They’d been in America roughly five years at this point, and my father, likely at my grandmother’s behest, suggested moving back to India to raise the children properly. But my mother balked, saying there was no way she was going back to a country where women were second-class citizens. I often wonder how different things would have been had Mom just gone along. I’m just guessing, but I imagine I would be skinnier and four inches shorter (because of Indian nutrition and pollution), I’d speak three languages (my parents both speak three), I’d have an Indian accent, I wouldn’t eat beef, I might be vegetarian, and I’d probably be a doctor. Talk about a fuckin’ fork in the road.

  Three years later, we left our Oak Park apartment and moved to Willowbrook, Illinois. There was a lake in front of my house, along with a clubhouse, tennis courts, and a pool. I had a phenomenally active childhood and was part of a neighborhood pack of ten kids. In the summer, we’d fish, have raft fights, play baseball, and throw crab apples at one another. In the fall, we played a lot of tackle football. And in the winter, we played king of the hill on huge plowed snow piles, played broom hockey on the iced-up lake, and had snowball fights. In the summer we’d egg and toilet paper houses, and in the winter we’d hide in bushes and throw snowballs at passing cars. Punks.

  The adults in the community ranged from late twenties to early forties, and, as it was the seventies, they partied. Everyone smoked cigarettes and drank a lot of martinis. My father was a lung disease doctor, and even he smoked half a pack a day. He eventually quit after my sister and I saw antismoking TV ads and bugged him into submission.

  My best friend in the neighborhood, Jim, was a white kid with blond hair. We had been friends since we were three and used to walk around the neighborhood telling people we were twins. I was very close to Jim’s family. His mom, a former flight attendant, treated me like one of her own, feeding me lunches of PB and J and Chef Boyardee ravioli.

  My uncle was a neuroradiologist at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and had a new baby, so my grandmother moved there to live with them. Meanwhile, Mom hired a Lithuanian woman, Irene, to look after us. Irene was friendly and strict, and she made us potato knishes. I still had a lot of freedom, including a house key, which I wore on a shoelace around my neck. After school, I came and went as I pleased, which was fine as long as I was home around the time my mom got back from work.

  Mine weren’t the typical hard-charging, grade-grinding Indian parents you hear about. They were warm, loving, philosophical people, and they were clearly influenced by the freedom vibe of their new country. It was a permissive environment and we took advantage of it. We dumpster-dived to collect knickknacks to decorate our basement forts. We played in an under-construction apartment building, leaping over the open fifth-floor elevator shaft. In the summer, we’d stop by our neighbor Mrs. Canfield’s house for Popsicles. Afterward, Mr. Canfield would take us upstairs to show us his extensive handgun collection. Mr. Canfield was an ex–Chicago cop, and he’d let us hold guns while we peppered him with questions about how many guys he had killed. He never told us, though. He just smiled and laughed.

  My friend Ted’s dad took us skeet shooting, which was his family’s obsession. His dad had huge bins of gunpowder and four shotgun-shell-making machines in his basement, and he put us to work making hundreds of shells for him. Ted’s brothers were a few years older and introduced us to Monty Python, Animal House, Steve Martin’s Let’s Get Small, and Led Zeppelin. At my friend Mike’s house, his older brothers taught us how to air-band and introduced us to the Beatles and the legend of Paul McCartney’s death hoax. They showed us all of the clues, including how to play “Revolution Nine” backward to hear John Lennon say, “Turn me on, dead man, turn me on, dead man, turn me on, dead man . . .”

  We watched The Exorcist and then held a séance using a Ouija board to raise the ghost of Ted’s deceased sister. In the middle of the séance, Ted freaked out and started crying. And then my mom walked in and shut us down. Though Mom is a scientist, she felt strongly that we shouldn’t mess around with the occult. She has a little of the Old World in her.

  We played kick the can, spin the bottle, and truth or dare. And at age ten, we drank for the first time. A little context . . . Jim had a massive beer can collection in his basement. I’m talking floor-to-ceiling beer cans from all over the world. His father took us to beer can conventions, where he’d buy us rare cans. When we were ten, my friend Tom’s parents took us on an overnight trip to Milwaukee to tour the Pabst Brewery. I got a red Pabst beer T-shirt, which I wore all the time.

  I mention all of this to give you an idea of how much alcohol was part of the culture. All of the adults we knew drank, and no one ever spoke publicly about addiction. The funniest commercial on TV was for Miller Lite beer (“Taste great!” “Less filling!”). Smokey and the Bandit, a Burt Reynolds film about two guys who illegally drive Coors beer across state lines, was the biggest movie in America, and we loved it—lived for it. People drove drunk routinely and it was considered just fine.

  We had tried sips of beer from stray cans at parents’ parties, but what I proposed to my friends one day was about to take it to a whole new level. We had a full bar in the basement, and my idea was to take a plastic pitcher, fill it with ice, and then, to avoid detection, put a small amount of alcohol from each bottle into the pitcher. We poured in a little gin, vodka, whiskey, tequila, scotch, white wine, red wine, port, peach schnapps, and crème de menthe. Then we shook it up and walked around the neighborhood, drinking. Since it was from my basement, and I was out to impress, I drank the most, taking big guzzles. The next thing I remember, I was led, stumbling drunk, by my two pals to my doorstep. They rang the doorbell and left. They were ten and had curfews. I remember my mother opening the door. Then I remember being in the bathroom, throwing up as my mom comforted me. The next thing I remember, it was five P.M. the next day, and I woke up nursing my first, brutal hangover.

  My parents filled in the rest the next day. Apparently, I threw up for about four hours. My mom was with me the whole time, taking care of me. She says I called her a “fucking bitch” a number of times. Yipes. My mom and I were close. We fought every morning, but only because she had to wake me up to go to school. I always woke up angry at being disturbed and lashed out. What a prick. That said, I loved my mom and respected her brain and was humiliated to have cursed her out.

  My parents took me to dinner at an Italian restaurant that next night, where I assumed I would be hearing about my punishment: Grounded for life felt justified. I remember e
yeing a glass of red wine on the next table and almost losing it. When I asked if I was being grounded, my dad said my hangover was punishment enough, and that based on my inability to even look at alcohol, it was clear that I wouldn’t be doing it again. And I didn’t, for another two years.

  Ten was a transition age. I was playing a lot of sports, but also Dungeons & Dragons. My friends and I started using the word “boner,” but I had no idea what it meant. When I asked my friend Mike, he scoffed, “You know, when your, uh . . . thingy is like a stick . . . in your pants.”

  “Ohhh yeah, stick, boner, sure, that,” I murmured, but wait—stick? I figured it out soon after, when I had my first (and only) wet dream. I was starting to think about girls, but I wouldn’t admit it. I had two posters on my wall—one was of Chicago Bears great Walter Payton, and the second was of Daisy Duke, in her tiny short-shorts. After the wet dream, I went about trying to accomplish that feeling again and stumbled onto masturbation. I hadn’t yet discovered lotion, so I spent my days hammering away, dry handed and open eyed, staring at Daisy Duke’s shorts. I wanted more of a connection, so I stood near the poster, jerking and kissing Daisy’s lips. But even that wasn’t enough, so I pressed myself up against the wall and humped the poster. It was a race between arousal and friction-generated heat, and arousal won when I finished onto the poster. I would have been ashamed if someone had walked in on me in the act, but it felt right at the time.

  My father was a great tennis player, and he and I played a lot. I had a temper on the court, throwing my racket around like John McEnroe. It was bratty. Dad let it slide for a while, but then he told me he was embarrassed, so I changed my role model to Bjorn Borg. My game became calm, stoic, emotionless. During the summer between sixth and seventh grades, I went to John Newcombe’s tennis camp in New Braunfels, Texas, where we bunked in group cabins and played eight hours of tennis a day. While I loved tennis, I was twelve, so I also loved masturbating. I considered myself a professional, finding time to work my root five to six times a day. I was jerking off so much, my dick looked like an hourglass. But the group cabins were cramping my schedule, so on the fifth day, I told the counselors I was sick and made a plan to spend the day making love to myself. I had since discovered lotion, and when everyone left for the courts, I searched the bathroom for some. But I couldn’t find any. Shit. This was a problem. I couldn’t exactly go to the camp store for lotion. They’d see right through that. And then I found it—a plump tube of Bengay. I was twelve. I had never had a muscle pain in my life. I didn’t know any better. I squeezed a dollop into my left hand (I do everything else righty, but I jerk off goofy handed), lay back on my cot, closed my eyes, and started to disappear into my fantasy. You know, the one where my hot, blond tennis instructor in the too-short skirt keeps me after for special overhead lessons? Ahhh. All was good in the world, but then it wasn’t. It started slow, like the frog in the slow-boiling pot of water. I cocked my head—What’s this? Within thirty seconds, my dick was on fire. I leapt up, buck naked, with a hard-on, sprinting for the bathroom. I turned on the cold shower and used an entire bar of soap as I scrubbed the satanic cream off of my favorite stick. Relieved, I got out of the shower, toweled down, lay back down, spat in my hand, and went back to work . . . Nope—shooting, brutal, all-encompassing pain! Back in the shower, more soap. I got in and out of that shower all morning. After shower six, the pain wasn’t gone, but it was tolerable. I still hadn’t accomplished my goal, but I was too sore to touch it, so I just put on my tennis clothes and trotted out to the courts, claiming a miraculous recovery. To this day, I won’t go near Bengay.

  We played a lot of capture the flag in school. Since speed was currency among guys, and since I was the fastest kid in the class, I had a lot of guy friends. Girls, though, were another story. In fifth grade, I was the only kid not to be invited to a roller-skating party. That hurt. In sixth grade, my popularity with girls started to show signs of life. I talked to girls (friends) for hours on the phone, making my way with my wit. In seventh grade, I brought a large bag of Jolly Rancher watermelon candy to school, and magic happened. Like a Chicago politician, I passed the candy out at school, and my popularity spiked. So I kept bringing it. I brought two to three bags of candy a week for a couple of months. Thanks, Mom.

  In eighth grade, I brought bags of balloons to school, which started the water balloon wars. I was the sole supplier, the Tony Stark of the eighth grade, and my popularity surged. I even got a girlfriend, Shannon, who I made out with in the school basement, during afternoon breaks—felt her up, outside the clothes, above the belt, all of that. Shannon was a cute, funny blonde with braces, and she was a fantastic first girlfriend.

  I ran for president of the school and lost by six votes. Eighth grade was also the year when I started drinking again. This time, I drank in moderation, and just on sleepovers. Twelve is young to start drinking, but we were within the range of normal for suburban Chicago kids, so it didn’t feel out-of-bounds. And drinking was as bad as it got. No one smoked cigarettes or even thought of smoking grass. We were deeply, morally opposed to both.

  When it came time to apply to high schools, I took my B-plus average and my overinflated view of self and applied to the top high schools in the country—Exeter, Andover, Hotchkiss, and Choate. My father and I flew back east for the interviews, but my grades weren’t good enough, and I was rejected by all of them. I decided I’d go to Hinsdale Central, a great public school a couple of miles from home, but my parents felt differently. My sister was already at a boarding school an hour north called Lake Forest Academy (LFA). I had applied there and was accepted, but I was reluctant because I loved the idea of going to school with my neighborhood friends. But my parents were insistent. They had both gone away to school young, and they assured me that I would love the freedom. Plus, they said, if I didn’t like it, I could transfer sophomore year.

  Going off to boarding school was a big unknown. On the night before I left, I drank with some of my neighborhood friends and eventually found myself alone with a girl from tennis camp who I had had a lifelong crush on. I was in love with her. She and I fooled around for the first (and only) time, and I ended up going down on her on a blacktop driveway. I don’t know where the impulse to do that came from, since I had only been to second base up to that point. What can I say? I was a little animal. Thirteen was a messy, weird, nutty, and great year, and I was piling up new experiences and loving every minute of it. But I was leaving my neighborhood cocoon and things were about to get difficult.

  CHAPTER 2

  —

  High School: A Narc’s Tale

  The most beloved sports team in the city of Chicago is the mighty Chicago Bears. Chicago is a tribal town, and being a Bears fan made me part of that tribe. For an Indian kid trying to belong, that was important. In the mid-eighties, the Chicago Bears were the roughest, toughest, most charismatic motherfuckers in football. My friends and I all wanted to be Walter Payton. I played a ton of tackle football in the yard, but when I joined a Pop Warner team in third grade, I quit after a week because the impact with pads felt different. Regardless, I still held on to the fantasy that I would one day be the starting running back for the Chicago Bears. So when high school started, I signed up again.

  Football camp started in mid-August, two weeks before school began, so my best friend Van and I packed all of our stuff up and moved into the Warner dorm. Van’s parents and my parents were close friends from medical school in India, so we had known each other from the time we were babies.

  On the first day of practice, I ran the forty-yard dash in 4.5 seconds, which made me the fastest guy on the team—thank you very much. Our head coach was excited and put me in with the running backs. Maybe my Chicago Bears dream wasn’t so crazy after all. Van, whose foot speed was a little slower, worked out with the linemen.

  Practices were brutal—two-a-days in ninety-five-degree heat. We’d lose seven pounds of water weight in the morning practice, a
nd another three in the afternoon. The ground was hard and crusty, which made tackling more painful. Our defensive coordinator, Coach Delaurentis (Delo), carried around a yellow whiffle ball bat, which he used to hit his linemen in their helmets when they made mistakes.

  At night, our coach gathered us together to talk about the school’s zero-tolerance policy. If you were caught with alcohol, drugs, or a girl in your room, you’d be kicked out—no second chances. If your roommate had alcohol or drugs and you didn’t say anything, you’d be kicked out. Guilt by association.

  On the first night, the freshmen gathered together in the TV room. When sophomore middle linebacker / co-captain Scott Jessman walked in, we all went silent. Jessman was an intimidating presence. He walked in, glowering, and grunted to signal that he wanted the prime seat in front of the TV. We moved.

  On day two, while running with the ball, I was lifted off the ground and slammed hard onto my back. It was a clean tackle, but I jumped up, pissed, and shoved the tackler. He wasn’t ready for it, so he fell over backward. He leapt up and ripped off his helmet to fight. It was Scott Jessman. Though other teammates restrained him, he stared at me, hard.

  Back at the dorms, we wondered about when exactly he would come to kick my ass. But when I saw him in line at dinner, he just gave me a tough-guy nod, as though I’d earned his respect.