I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip.: 40th Anniversary Edition

by John Donovan

  Miss Stuart is all ready to go into rehearsal with our production of Julius Caesar and says the first thing we have to do is write the script. Everyone who is playing a part has to write his own part, and in that way we'll be sure to get the most out of the play. Some of the guys are playing murderers and that's all, so they're going to have a pretty easy week. People like me and Altschuler and the goodlooking kid who's going to be Mark Antony have to do a lot of work though, and I'm sorry that I got elected.

  We start to talk about the play and about the character of the various people who took part in the events surrounding Caesar's murder and about how Shakespeare thought of them, and before you know it everyone is very down on Caesar. Altschuler is telling them how Caesar wants to rule forever, and I pipe in with the fact that Caesar deserved the gratitude of the Roman people for leading them in so many battles and getting so much of the world for them and all that. Altschuler says that Caesar was like Hitler, which really turns all the guys against me, and we haven't decided anything before the class is over. Miss Stuart says that we'll begin to write the script tomorrow.

  At three thirty when I go out to the bus, Altschuler is standing there, waiting outside the bus door. I say hello to him.

  "Do you want to walk home?" he asks.

  I am surprised and don't say anything. Then I hear a tapping on the window next to the first seat. It's the kid Frankie Menlo. I wave to him, and he waves back, a big smile on his face.

  "I don't know. I have to get home to walk my dog," I say to Altschuler.

  "OK," he says and then turns away from me a little bit. Frankie Menlo has stuck his face against the window and is waiting for me. I go up the first step of the bus.

  "Hi, Menlo," I say to him.

  "Hi, Ross," he answers. "I saved a seat for you."

  I go up into the aisle. A lot of little kids are looking from Frankie to me, wondering if I'll sit down. Frankie pats the seat as though he is going to make it more comfortable for me to sit on. I look back out the door and see that Altschuler has moved away a few feet and is beginning to walk away.

  "Menlo," I say, "thanks for the seat. I'm going to walk."

  Frankie looks as though I dumped boiling water on his face, so I say, "Save me a seat in the morning, Menlo. OK?"

  He doesn't answer, and I run off the bus in a second. I call to Altschuler and ask him to wait up. He keeps walking but slows down a little and I catch up to him.

  "I thought you had to walk your dog," he says.

  "I do."

  "It doesn't take so long to walk home anyway. On some days I'm there almost as fast as the bus."

  We walk along for a few minutes in silence. The bus with Frankie Menlo on it pulls by, and I raise my hand to wave to Frankie. But he's looking the other way. I wonder if it's on purpose. Not that it matters. But I am sorry to disappoint the kid.

  "There's this little kid on the bus," I start telling Altschuler. "He's really a bright little kid. We had a talk together this morning, and he wanted me to ride home with him."

  "Yes," Altschuler says. "I saw him."

  I tell him about Frankie's allowance and the cost-ofliving thing connected with it. I tell him I think that's pretty funny, to have an eight-year-old kid on an allowance with a cost-of-living clause. I ask Altschuler if he doesn't think that's funny, and he shrugs his shoulders. I begin to be sorry that I didn't ride with Menlo. At least with him there's some conversation, to say nothing of the fact that Frankie looks at me as though I am a big deal.

  So I start looking around the street where we are walking. Altschuler knows the direction all right, so I just tag along with him.

  It's warm out, and the sun is shining. It's January thaw, and now that I'm walking, I'm in no rush. The street we are on is crowded. A lot of the people are only a few years older than me, and they look friendly. I ask Altschuler why some of them look so dirty, and he tells me they are hippies. I have read about hippies a lot of course, as who hasn't, but I've never seen any. A couple of the dirty-looking guys are wearing American Indian clothes and beads, and I ask Altschuler if they are Indians. He laughs, and I think that is the first time he has laughed at something I said, so I laugh too. He tells me that the real hippies are on the East Side, not here on Eighth Street. Someday if we have time, he will take me to see them. He laughs again when he says maybe we can let our hair grow for Julius Caesar and put on a hippie production of the play for Miss Stuart.

  It happens that while Altschuler is turning into this big comedian I am occupying myself with staring at someone, trying to decide if it's a boy or a girl. I'm not even polite about it, and I can almost hear my grandmother telling me that no one on earth should be looked at as a curiosity but only out of curiosity or friendship. Now I know what she meant because I'm looking at this person in a way Grandmother wouldn't have liked. And the person knows it.

  "It's love, baby," the person says. "That's what it's all about. You gotta wear flowers in your hair."

  And then the person laughs gently as I hurry on because I don't have anything to say and am too much of a coward to apologize for staring.

  "Did you see?" I ask Altschuler.

  He nods that he did.

  "I'm sorry I stared. I've never seen anyone like that before."

  "You have to keep your cool," Altschuler says.

  "What's that?"

  "You shouldn't get excited just because people don't look like other people."

  "I'm not excited or anything like that," I say. "Did you know if it was a boy or a girl?"

  "I didn't notice."

  "Didn't notice! How could you not notice? I mean the person had all this hair, and the way the person was shaped you couldn't tell, the sweater was so baggy. Is there a lot of that?"

  Altschuler tells me that he guesses there is a lot of everything in New York and that I shouldn't be so sur-prised at the things I see on the street. He tells me that he doesn't even notice things he was afraid of when he was a kid. He tells me that he used to get frightened when he saw a person lying asleep on the sidewalk but that he is not scared of that anymore.

  "Asleep on the sidewalk!" I say.

  "Sure. A lot of times you see people lying on the sidewalk or in a doorway. That's because they are drunks."

  He goes on to tell me about all the places these sleepers can go to live for a night or two if they want to. Places like the Salvation Army. He tells me that a lot of them like to go to jail, but it's hard to get in these days just for drinking. You have to toss a brick through a window or something like that. Then they will take you into jail for a few weeks and give you food and a bed. He says that's why so many store windows get broken in cold weather. Windows aren't broken in the summer because the jails don't have air-conditioning. That's why so many drinking people are on the sidewalk in hot weather, he says.

  "Maybe they aren't all drinking people," I say. "Maybe some of them are sick."

  "That's what I thought at first."

  "Couldn't it be that way?"

  "No," Altschuler says.

  We are walking up Sixth Avenue now, and we pass this candy shop with a lot of glass jars filled with wrapped candies in the window. I stop to look at the jars because I like candy. Altschuler tells me to come on if I want to walk with him.

  "Dougie!" a lady says from inside the store. "Dougie! I haven't seen you since before Thanksgiving!"

  This lady rushes out from the store and grabs hold of Altschuler. Altschuler stands there looking awkward and embarrassed. The lady gives him sort of a kiss, and Altschuler looks even more embarrassed.

  "Oh, Dougie," she says, "I've missed you so. And Larry, poor boy. How is he?"

  "He's home again."

  "That's good news?" the lady asks.

  "I don't know."

  The lady starts to sigh, and then I think she is crying. She says it isn't fair that anything should happen to such a nice boy. There are plenty of hoodlums on the street, she says, that something terrible like that should happen to. She says t
here's no reasoning with God's will.

  Altschuler is just nodding at the lady. He doesn't have anything to say to her, and he looks at me as though he blames me for stopping in front of the candy store. The lady sees me then too.

  "So? Who's this? Another Larry?"

  Altschuler moves away from the store.

  "How do you do," the lady says. "I'm Dougie's friend. And Larry's. If you're their friend, you're mine too."

  She holds out her hand and shakes mine. I tell her that I am new in New York and that Altschuler and I are in the same class and we live in the same neighborhood. I tell her that I don't know Larry.

  "So? Already he's forgotten," she says.

  "I just moved here. I never knew him," I tell her.

  "That Larry," the lady says, "oh, he's quite a boy. Dougie and Larry came in every Friday for seven years, didn't you, Dougie?"

  Altschuler nods. He is walking away, so I tell the lady that I am glad to meet her, and she says that I should come into the store the next time and that I should bring Dougie with me. She doesn't like to conduct her social life on the sidewalk, she says.

  "Poor Larry," she says as we walk on, and she goes back into her store. I can hear her take a deep breath and sigh. Altschuler doesn't say anything, and I don't figure that I should ask any questions. We walk without speaking for about ten minutes, and then we are at my corner. I stop and tell Altschuler that this is where I will leave him.

  "Larry lives in my apartment house," Altschuler says suddenly. "You are sitting in his seat in most of our classes. He had to stop coming to class just before Christmas. We always went to school together, ever since we were about three. Something happened to his blood. He gets tired all the time. He's supposed to die this month."

  I don't know what to say. Altschuler is standing there, expecting me to say he won't die or something like that, but I don't have anything at all to say. I want to say I'm sorry, but I know from when Grandmother died that that is a dumb thing to say about dying, so I just stand there like a twirp and look at Altschuler, who looks at me for a minute and then walks off toward his block.

  efore I know it, it's Saturday and I'm supposed to go over to my father and Stephanie's to have dinner with them. Fred is delighted that when I leave the apartment with my father he is invited too. My father has come in the middle of the afternoon. It has been arranged between my mother and him that she will be out shopping, and I'm glad of that. Mother has been saying regularly, like every night since New Year's Eve, that she prefers to deal with Father at a distance and that that is the only civilized way to act in situations like hers. I don't know what she's talking about most of the time, because I know that she would like my father to have stayed with her for one of her damned drinks when he brought me home a week ago.

  Father lives near Central Park, so Fred has his first genuine New York treat. From the way he begins to whimper in the taxicab when we get within a few blocks of the park, I have the eerie feeling that he knows where we are going. It's not as warm as it was last week, but there are still a lot of people in the park. It is quiet there, almost like the country. The roads are blocked off to automobiles on weekends, so Father and I decide that it is OK to let Fred off his leash. He bolts away as though he had been kept in a cage for years. For half a minute I get worried that he will run off and get lost, except I can see that Fred keeps looking to see me and zooms back to run a wide circle around me if he gets too far away from us. Fred goes batty; he is having such a good time. He keeps throwing himself on the ground to roll over in one delectable smell after another. I can guess what he is going to smell like after the sixth or seventh roll. He is having such a good time though that I don't want to stop him.

  A little kid runs over to pet him, and he jumps up and licks the ice-cream mess left around her lips. She thinks that is the funniest thing she ever saw and falls onto the ground so that Fred can get better licks. The kid's mother doesn't think it's funny though.

  "Pooky!" the lady yells. "Dirty girl! What are you doing with that dirty dog?"

  She grabs the kid from the ground and whacks her rear end. Fred is mystified. The kid begins to cry and babble away about the doggie at the same time. She is looking back at Fred and holding her arm out toward him as her mother drags her away. Fred runs right along with them until the lady yells at him to go away. Fred is surprised and growls a little. When I hear this, I run right over to him.

  "The dog should be on a leash!" the lady shrieks. "It's against the law to have him off the leash. There's no telling what he might have done to Pooky!"

  "I'm sorry," I mutter as I bend down to Fred to hold him back from his new friend, who wants him even more now that her mother has told me she's going to send me to jail if I don't watch out. I pick up Fred and carry him over to my father. In half a minute the lady and the kid have disappeared down a path in the opposite direction, so I put Fred down and my father and I have a good laugh. Fred jumps all over us, which is, I guess, his way of laughing.

  We mess around in the park for a long time. My father is all the time picking up sticks, pieces of branches from trees, and throwing them twenty or thirty feet in front of him. Fred wants to chase after them, but he won't do it until I say "Go get it, Fred. Bring it here." I hope my father doesn't mind if Fred won't run after the stick unless I tell him to. And when he brings it back, it's to me, not Father.

  A lot of dogs are off leash in the park, and Fred enjoys running up to big ones in particular and barking at them as though he is going to take them apart. A great dane starts to get frisky with Fred, who proves to be a real coward and zooms back for the protection he thinks I give him. The great dane follows Fred and jumps all over me and licks me like Fred, except that his tongue is about six times the size of Fred's and he's so strong that I'm almost on the ground before his master calls him back. When he is a safe distance away, Fred starts barking and growling at him again. I tell Fred he's all noise and no action. He doesn't understand and walks along next to us like a real hero protecting the defenseless.

  We are near the zoo now. I see that among the many things prohibited in the zoo are dogs.

  "They would excite the animals," Father says.

  "Fred?" I ask.

  "You know how he can bark."

  "What if I put his leash back on?" I do that in spite of my father's dubious look, and we march into the zoo. No one stops us or looks at us strangely, so we decide that it's OK as long as Fred doesn't start acting crazy. We walk past a couple of zebras in their cages and a lot of deer. Fred loves the smell, and I think he would be delighted if we would let him spend the rest of the day there. Some kids are holding out their hands to feed junk to the deer, even though there are signs everywhere telling you not to feed the animals. I conclude that a lot of sign painters paint a lot of signs no one pays any attention to. Including me.

  I drag Fred away from the deer, past a camel. I don't think Fred sees the camel, he is so tall, because Fred doesn't even nod in that direction. We turn the corner, and there is a row of wolves and wild dogs and things like that. Fred's hackles bristle right away, so I decide that we shouldn't walk down that row. We go instead to a big pool in the middle of the zoo to look at the seals. There are four of them. Two of them are sunning themselves on a concrete island in the middle of the pool, and two of them are swimming around in the water. People are standing there laughing at the seals for no particular reason. In a minute, after my father and I have stood watching them, we start to laugh too. I don't ask myself why, except that the seals on the island remind me of Fred. They are staring in my direction, looking me squarely in the eye.

  "You want to see your cousins, Fred?" I say. Fred is so low down that he can't see over the edge of the pool, and he's whining away to get a look at what everyone else is looking at. I pick up Fred at just the moment one of the seals lets out a high creepy honking sound which delights Fred. He lets out a sound almost like it. I've only heard Fred bark and whine before. I've never heard him honk. I'm surprise
d for a second.

  "Was that you?" I ask Fred, who's squirming in my arms.

  The seal honks again, and so does Fred. By now, all the people on our side of the pool are looking at Fred and laughing at him more than at the seals. Fred is trying to wiggle out of my arms and into the pool to have a long honk with his friend on that island, I guess, so I put him down on the ground. He immediately jumps up to the rim of the pool, which must be three times his height. I'm so surprised that I almost lose hold of his leash. Father just manages to grab Fred before he jumps into the pool.

  The seal and Fred continue to honk away at each other, and it is no small effort to drag Fred out of the zoo. He keeps tugging at his leash to get back to the pool, and it is almost ten minutes before we can get him to calm down and behave himself.

  "Honk for Stephanie," I keep urging Fred when we get to my father's apartment. "Show Stephanie how you honk."

  Fred doesn't know what I am talking about, and when I try to make a honking noise myself to demonstrate what I want him to do, he tilts his head to indicate that he thinks I am crazy. Stephanie thinks Fred is funny and that what happened in the zoo was funny and that the way Fred licks her is particularly funny, so she has a good time rolling all over the floor with Fred. I guess Fred thinks she's the Queen of Sheba, because he won't pay any attention to me and my father as soon as he has rolled around with Stephanie awhile. Of course, it helps that she keeps going into the kitchen every so often to look at some meat she is roasting. Maybe Fred thinks she's making his supper.

  In a way she is. When it comes time for dinner, Fred sits himself right next to Stephanie's chair. He has been taught never to beg food from the table, so he doesn't forget himself to the extent of doing anything as terrible as that. He just keeps his eyes fastened on Stephanie, who wants to know how I resist feeding him when he looks as though there is nothing in the world that would make him happier than a piece of roast beef.

  "Sure," I tell her. "It would make him happy all right. But you'd have to keep on making him happy. If he gets you to give him some stuff, you'll never eat another mouthful without having him look at you like you were robbing it from him. Isn't that right, Fred? Don't I know you?"