Public Apology

by Dave Bry

  The gatherings had grown less frequent by the time your son Rick, who’d recently dropped a y off the name we were to call him, turned thirteen, and stepped up on the bimah at Temple Beth Torah. The older kids in the group—Adam and Ariel, the Feldman girls, your daughter Lori and I—were all in high school and increasingly uninterested in spending Friday nights in the vicinity of our families. But attendance at bar and bat mitzvahs was still pretty much mandatory.

  There was no way I was going to wear a coat and tie, though. I had developed a strong sense of fashion over the past year, having noticed that wearing the same types of shirts and shoes as the popular upperclassmen in my school would draw compliments from the girls in my grade. My style was hyper-preppy, accented with what I liked to think of as a sort of new-wave flare. Two polo shirts at a time, both collars turned up. Prefaded jeans with Jackson Pollock–style bleach splatters, carefully spaced so as to look haphazardly punk rock. (I can still smell the fumes rising from my bathtub, staying on my hands for days afterward.) L.L.Bean duck boots, laces left loose, but just so, with little knots tied at the ends to keep them from slipping out of place. Army Navy Store trench coat and as much Ralph Lauren as I could convince my parents to buy me—something that I did most successfully by telling them that wearing nice clothes made me feel better about myself. All of this is embarrassing to remember.

  My father hated it. He was not particularly frugal (bucking stereotype!). But clothes were the last thing he would have chosen to spend money on. The fact that he did so for me gave me a glimpse into a truth about parenthood that I couldn’t fully understand at the time.

  One day around this time, I walked into his office with a mind to start a philosophical argument. “Everything that anybody ever does is selfish,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” he said, turning in his chair. This was the type of discussion he liked.

  “Well.” I had been thinking about it for a while. “People control their own actions. We choose what we do. And even when we do something nice for someone else, we get something in return. We’re rewarded for doing the nice thing. And that’s why we do it.”

  “Hmm.” My father’s eyes narrowed.

  “Even if the reward is just a thank-you. That makes us feel better about ourselves, so that’s why we do it. Even if the person you help doesn’t say thank you, you still get a reward. Even if it’s just a smile. Or even if it’s not a smile. Even if it’s nothing you can see. Just knowing you helped someone can be the reward. It feels good to help someone. When I do something nice for someone, something that makes someone else happy, or feel better or something, that makes me happy. It makes me feel better about myself. I know this and that’s why I ever do anything nice for someone. To make myself feel good. I choose to do it, to get something, this good feeling, for myself. So it’s really totally selfish in the end.”

  He considered it for a minute and then disagreed. “No, I can think of times where I do something totally for someone else,” he said. “For you. And your sister. There are times where I do things for you not because it makes me happy to do it, but just because it makes you happy.”

  “But making me happy makes you happy,” I said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t do it.”

  “No, there’s a difference. And I don’t expect you to necessarily be able to understand it. But there are times when I do something that I really don’t want to do, just because it makes you happy. But not because it makes me happy to see you happy. It’s something else.”

  “But I mean, you choose to do it. At some level it must be making you happy.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said and paused a moment. “Like with your clothes. I don’t want to spend all this crazy money on clothes. You know that. I think it’s gross. And it doesn’t make me happy to see you happy about something like expensive clothes. If anything, it makes me sad. I feel kinda guilty about it actually. I’m not sure it’s the right thing to do; I’m not sure I think it’s good for you. But your mom and I talked about it, and we do it anyway. We do it because of the time you told me that wearing these clothes makes you feel better about yourself. It’s hard to explain. It has to do with being a parent.”

  I didn’t like this answer at all. I didn’t like him making a claim to some mysterious secret knowledge that I didn’t have access to. (He was right, though. And now that I have my own kid, I better understand what he was getting at—the extent to which, as a parent, you’re living more for another person than you are for yourself.)

  Anyway, the day of Rick’s bar mitzvah, I stepped into the synagogue wearing a Polo oxford shirt, untucked, over a Polo polo shirt with the collar popped up, army fatigues pants that were short enough to show off the argyle socks I had on, and new penny loafers. I had also just gotten a haircut, shaved close on the sides, left longer on top, in the surfer style that was in vogue at the time. So I looked like a sort of mushroom-headed caricature of a villain from a John Hughes movie. Strangely, I liked this. The villains in John Hughes movies were always snobby jerks, but they always had superhot girlfriends. I imagined a song by Echo & the Bunnymen playing as I walked through the lobby.

  People, all of them dressed more formally than I was, shot me looks as I passed. Or at least I imagined they did. I did not know a lot of people there—only those in our havurah group. After the ceremony in the reception hall, I sat at Lonnie’s table with Adam and Ariel and one of the Feldman girls and a few other kids I didn’t know. We complained about being forced to endure Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” at every single bar mitzvah any of us had ever been to and made jokes about the things we would say to Ernie Anastos, the anchorman for Channel 7 News, who was in attendance, apparently being an old friend of yours, if any of us worked up the gumption to approach him. (“Are you theeeee Ernie Anastos?” I suggested and laughed. Though that isn’t funny at all.) None of us did, of course.

  Rick and his seventh-grade classmates slid across the parquet dance floor in their socks, the boys throwing their yarmulkes like Frisbees, the girls taller than them and more self-controlled. The adults danced, including my parents, early and enthusiastically, horrifying me as they did at every bar or bat mitzvah or wedding we went to, with their jitterbug moves and big smiles on their faces. They were good dancers. Or just fine ones, at least. It’s funny how every adolescent is so embarrassed by the sight of his or her parents dancing and thinks it’s because the parents are such terrible, dorky dancers, when what is surely at the root of the embarrassment is the realization of how much more comfortable in their own bodies the parents are than the adolescents—how much more able to relax and let themselves have fun, how much freer from the paralyzing effects of self-consciousness.

  I didn’t get up from my seat for the whole party. What energy I expended went toward making sure that everyone around me knew how lame I thought everything was. I hoped that all the other guests there, all the younger kids, all the adults, would look over at me and see a teenager with a capital T. Radical, rebellious, possibly even dangerous.

  In my argyle socks.

  Obviously, I was very confused about a lot things.

  Dear Girl from California,

  I’m sorry I didn’t try to kiss you.

  You were visiting your friend Kristen Anderson. She’d moved to my town that year and had James Cash and me over to drink wine coolers at her house while her mom was out for the night. As you might remember, James and Kristen had gone into Kristen’s room, leaving you and me out on the couch in the living room watching Cynthia Gibb and Rob Lowe in Youngblood on HBO.

  I don’t remember your name. But you were very pretty, and I certainly did want to kiss you.

  In all honesty, I wanted to do much more than that. I don’t know about you, but I was still a virgin at the time. A condition that had me ruing my decision, two summers prior, to bring a pack of condoms to camp in hopes of having sex with a girl named Wendy Siegler. Those hopes turned out to have been in vain. And those condoms—most of them collecting dust in a d
rawer in the desk in my room, one of them creating the all-too-clichéd ring in the leather of my wallet—had since turned into a heavy dead albatross around my neck. (Only metaphorically, of course.) I hadn’t come anywhere close to needing a condom since then. And I couldn’t escape the thought, as ridiculous as I knew it was, that I had jinxed myself. Those condoms sat in their wrappers mocking me, stretching each day that passed with them unopened into an eternity, giving me my first real sense of mortality, in fact: every night as I fell asleep at that time of my life, my last waking thought was a prayer to god to not let me die before I had sex.

  Unfortunately, despite all this, and despite the fact that it was just you and me sitting alone in a room with no lights on in a house with no parents in it, despite however many wine coolers we’d drunk, I could not find the courage to unpin myself from the far corner of the couch and slide over next to you. Not even during that incredibly explicit sex scene when Cynthia Gibb comes to visit Rob Lowe in the boarding room with the wood-burning stove. We hadn’t spoken for a while by the time that scene came on, and we didn’t say anything while it was on. We just sat there watching naked Cynthia Gibb and Rob Lowe flop down on the mattress they’d thrown onto the floor, listening to their breathing and grunting and the sound of their sweat-slick bodies writhing around and atop each other.

  I realized that this was precisely the type of opportunity teenage virgins were supposed to act on. (For what other reason is a movie like Youngblood made?) I knew I should be trying to kiss you. But I didn’t know what to do. Make a joke to break the tension first? Say something suave and sexy and scoot myself over to your side of the couch? Get up, walk over there, sit back down, and just plant one on you?

  You shifted in your seat, drawing your legs up under you, pulling them back out again—a sign surely, I thought. But of what, I didn’t understand. You weren’t glancing over at me as I was so often at you. It seemed like you might be bored. I felt like I was being concurrently blessed and punished by god. (The god I prayed to every night without really believing in.) I couldn’t feel my legs.

  Soon after the scene ended, you got up without a word and left me there sitting by myself. I felt like a giant loser. And guessed that I’d never had a shot with you anyway.

  The following Monday, though, when I saw Kristen on the bus to school, she told me that you were mad at me. That you had indeed wanted to fool around with me, too, and that you were mad that I hadn’t made a move. And that you’d already taken a plane back to California.

  It’s hard to describe how sorry I felt at that moment.

  Dear Mrs. Martinez,

  Sorry for having Jennifer McCartney call you and pretend to be my mom so I could cut school and go to the Sting concert at Madison Square Garden.

  This was February 1988. You were the secretary at the Red Bank Regional principal’s office. We had come to know each other quite well during my first few years of high school. I spent a lot of time in that office because I got in trouble a lot, and it was your job to schedule meetings for me with one of the vice principals, Mr. Moses or Mr. Conlin, or sometimes the head principal, Dr. Nogueira, and write up the forms assigning me to a punishment of Saturday morning detention or in-school suspension or, in a few extreme instances, full-fledged suspension. Saturday morning detention was sort of like the movie The Breakfast Club—except that at Red Bank Regional, the sessions were only two hours long and held in the cafeteria, not the library, and there were always like a hundred kids there instead of a perfect quintet representing the platonic ideals of white suburban teenager stereotypes. You had recently told me that I had broken the school record for Saturday morning detentions. I had been scheduled to be there every Saturday for the remainder of the year, a full book, and so was to be given in-school suspension upon all subsequent infractions.

  As mind-numbingly boring as in-school suspension was (detainees were to sit silently in a single classroom and work on extra assignments sent by the teachers of the classes they were missing for the full six-hour school day), part of me was proud of my accomplishment. (A new record!) The same part of me that had been smirking a couple of months prior, when I had walked into your office one sunny Monday morning wearing handcuffs, chaperoned by a police officer. I had just gotten my driver’s license; it was my first day driving myself to school, and my friend Matt was home on Christmas break from the boarding school he went to in Rhode Island. We rarely got a chance to see each other, Matt and I, so we’d made a plan that involved him stealing beer from his parents’ garage, and me picking him up, and us going to park somewhere and get drunk. Things went very wrong with the last part obviously. (We chose a bad place to park.) And after we’d spent an hour behind bars, occupying the only two jail cells in the Little Silver police station, singing “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” like you’re supposed to if you were raised on Bugs Bunny cartoons, after Matt’s very angry mother had come to fetch him, the arresting officer had brought me to the school, because since I was still a minor, I was the administration’s legal responsibility during school hours. This is a policy that rewards illegal teenage activity. As there is nothing that makes you feel cooler, more like Keith Richards, than being paraded down your crowded high school hallway, half-drunk, wearing handcuffs, in the custody of a uniformed police officer. That was one of the incidents that earned me a full-fledged suspension—another ill-thought “punishment”: not being in school being far preferable to being in school. (This aspect was, however, counterbalanced by the fact that I lost my driver’s license for six months and had to go to these classes about the dangers of drinking and driving.) When you saw me that day, you just shook your head, and when you told me that I had broken the school record for Saturday morning detentions, you didn’t say it like “Congratulations!” I think we had different senses of humor, you and I.

  Well, the day of the Sting concert—to which Liz Dilascia had gotten tickets for herself and Kate Hendrickx and Melody Moses and me—we had decided to leave school early. We planned to cut the last three or four class periods, in order to take an early enough train into New York to fully exploit the unlimited-pitchers-of-beer deal that the Beefsteak Charlie’s outside Madison Square Garden offered with a steak dinner. We had fake IDs.

  Liz and Kate and Melody had lined up their excuses, or they were just planning to take the Saturday detention that came with skipping classes. I couldn’t afford that; unsanctioned absence would land me an in-school detention. And further trouble at home. I’d only recently gotten off grounding. I needed permission.

  Melody came up with the idea of calling the office from one of the pay phones in the commons. We could pretend it was my mom calling and say that I had a doctor’s appointment or a funeral to go to. But Melody was giggly by nature and didn’t trust herself not to crack up. Our friend Jennifer, tougher and always ready to tempt trouble, volunteered.

  The commons was a spacious, echoey, brick-walled area that was, as you know, loudly filled with students between periods. Jen had to make the call when it was quieter, so she asked to go to the bathroom in the middle of a class before lunch, quarters in her purse. We weren’t worried that you’d somehow know the call was coming from within the building, that there was some kind of light-button alert or phone-tap system, because the year before a guy from the class above ours had gotten the entire school a two-hour reprieve from our drudgery by calling in a bomb threat from those very phones. He’d chosen a nice spring day for his stunt, so we all got to hang out in the parking lot, sitting on car hoods or playing hacky sack while the fire department brought in bomb-sniffing dogs and everything. It was very exciting! I couldn’t believe it worked, and I wondered why someone braver than I was didn’t make such a phone call each and every day. (I can see now why such a thing is not good to do.)

  Jen’s call was not as successful. As she told me later, when we met in the hallway, “Sorry. You’re totally busted.”

  “Fuck,” I said.

  “I tried my best,” Jen said. She
felt bad. But mostly, we were laughing. “I thought I did a good job. I told her you had a doctor’s appointment, but that I was at Rutgers—I even put the details in there—so I couldn’t come in to sign you out in person.”

  “How’d she know?” I asked. “What did she say?”

  “She didn’t buy it for a second. She said, ‘I don’t know who this is, but I know it’s not Brenna Bry.’ I remained calm. I said I had a cold. She didn’t believe me. She said, ‘I talk to Dr. Bry on the phone at least once a week, and this doesn’t sound anything like her. And I’m going to talk to her again today, as soon as I get off the phone with you, whichever one of David’s friends this is.’ She told me to tell you that.”

  “What!?” This was upsetting. I had no idea you talked to my mom so often. What did you talk to her about? (Me obviously. I learned later that my mother had taken to calling in to get weekly attendance reports.)

  “I didn’t know what to say,” Jen went on. “I tried to sound insulted and act mad and stuff, but it wasn’t working. So I hung up. And I guess she’s gonna call your mom? I’m sorry.”

  I left school early anyway and took the train into Penn Station and went to Beefsteak Charlie’s and the concert. Liz, Kate, and Melody were three pretty, popular girls, and there was no way I was going to break a date with them—even at the prospect, even at the guarantee, of in-school suspension and parental punishment. “I don’t care,” I said. “They can’t tell me what to do.”

  Mostly, this speaks to just how misguided and, in fact, deeply conformist all my efforts at rebelling truly were. The notion of losing face, of seeming less than fearless and carefree in front of my friends, was scarier than any threat you or the school or my parents could hold over me. It was the worst thing I could imagine.

  Of course, the fact that I was as psyched as I was to go to a Sting concert doesn’t speak so well for my thinking at the time, either. As great as the Police were—and they were very, very great. I had all their records and multiple posters of them on the walls of my bedroom. One of their lyric passages in particular, from “Born in the ’50s,” a song on their first album, had resonated with me throughout my teenage years: “You don’t understand us/So don’t reprimand us/We’re taking the future/We don’t need no teacher!” I took that as a sort of mission statement; I remember writing it on the cover of my science notebook freshman year.