Joe College

by Tom Perrotta

  The only problem we’d ever had came at a dance near the end of the summer, when a bunch of us—five or six boys and Jenny— were playing tag in the outfield. At some point, tag changed into something else, with whatever boy was It chasing after Jenny and tagging her on the chest or ass, copping as much of a feel as he could before she squirmed out of his grasp. Everyone was doing it, and Jenny didn’t seem to mind; she just let out this weird high-pitched giggle whenever anyone groped her. Then she always ran after another boy and tagged him to keep the game going.

  Finally my turn came and I ran after her like everyone else, my heart pounding like crazy. In the parking lot, the band had just started up again after a break, grinding out “Sunshine of Your Love” at a brutal and exhilarating volume, and I could feel the music surging through me as I chased her. The game had pretty much been confined to left field until then, but this time Jenny just kept running, a lot faster than I’d thought she could go, past the scoreboard, almost to the right field line. I was just about to grab her when she stopped in her tracks and turned around.

  “Don’t,” she told me, breathing hard and holding both hands in front of her chest.

  “What?”

  “It’s over,” she panted. “I quit.”

  “What?” I repeated. She was wearing a tight shirt, a dance leotard with glittery planets painted on the front, and I couldn’t keep my eyes focused on her face. “You can’t just quit. I have to tag you.”

  “Come on,” she said, not quite pleading, but still holding her hands up, as if she thought I might take a swing at her. “Just cut it out, okay?”

  “It’s not fair. Everyone got to tag you but me.”

  Jenny bought time, looking off toward the first-base bleachers. A bunch of older kids were sitting with their backs to us, facing the band.

  “Can’t you just leave me alone?” she asked.

  “Please?” I whimpered. “It’ll only take a second.”

  She stared at me for a moment, then dropped her arms in defeat. Saturn was located over her left breast, and that was where I placed my hand. I’d never touched a girl like that before, and it felt great. I cupped her breast from underneath, lifting as gently as I could, testing the weight in my palm, listening to the sound of my own breathing. If she hadn’t yanked my hand away, I might have stood like that for hours.

  “Okay?” she said, glaring at me with helpless fury. “Are you fucking happy now?”

  A long time had passed since that night at the Little League. The Coletti brothers and lots of other guys had done lots of worse things to her in the meantime. She was a professional stripper who’d had her baby taken away by the state and put into foster care. It was hard for me to believe that she’d even remember that stupid incident at the dance, or hold it against me if she did. But when she finally came around to our side of the bar, she rushed past the Squidman and me without even stopping, not giving us the chance to add our carefully folded bills to the impressive bouquet of money that had sprouted between her hips.

  “I don’t know what was wrong. with Jenny tonight,” the Squidman observed, reaching into the open sack of burgers between us. “She’s usually a lot more friendly. Once she even came out and talked to me during her break.”

  “It was weird seeing her up there.” We were perched on the warm hood of his car in the parking lot of the White Castle in Union Village, our customary destination after a night on the town. “I mean, imagine if you had a sister and that was what she did for a living.”

  The Squidman chuckled lasciviously. “I wish I had a sister who did that for a living.”

  “Why? What good would it do you if she was your sister?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Maybe she could introduce you to her friends or something.”

  “I guess. But would you still want to go out and see your sister and her friends dancing naked in front of a bunch of strangers?”

  “If they looked like Jenny I would.”

  White Castle hamburgers are small and square, not much bigger than a driver’s license, and it wasn’t unusual for me to consume ten or twelve in a sitting. That night, though, despite a wicked case of the munchies, I found myself feeling a little queasy around burger number six.

  “Damn,” I groaned. “I can’t eat as many of these as I used to.”

  “You’re not quitting, are you?” The Squidman sounded concerned. “We still got a half a bag to go.”

  “I don’t know. My stomach feels like the Love Canal.”

  He studied me for a couple of seconds, puzzled by the reference, then decided to let it pass.

  “I guess we can save the leftovers,” he said. “Then we won’t have to stop for breakfast tomorrow morning.”

  “Cold ratburgers for breakfast?” The thought made me shudder. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “They’re not bad,” he said, a bit defensively. “I do it all the time.”

  The Squidman slid another burger out of its little cardboard sleeve and stuffed the whole thing straight into his mouth. He chewed slowly, his eyes narrowing in contemplation, like a connoisseur searching for the precise adjective to describe the miracle taking place in his mouth.

  “I wish we’d made it to that party,” he said finally. “Those college girls are pretty hot.”

  “You visit Woody and Steve a lot at the frat house?”

  “Not really. Not since Halloween.”

  “How come?”

  He shrugged, shook his head, then shrugged again, as if the whole thing were too complicated to go into. Against my better judgment, I reached into the bag for burger number seven.

  “You know what would be cool?” he said. “If you could join a frat without going to college. That would be pretty cool.”

  On the way home, he invited me back to his house to watch a porn movie. He said he had a projector set up in his basement and five or six different movies, all given to him by this retired guy he’d gotten to know at the lanes. The guy apparently had an extensive collection and had started giving the Squidman the stuff he’d gotten sick of.

  “One of them’s this lesbian fistfucking thing,” he said, shaking his head in respectful amazement. “This girl’s whole hand disappears.”

  By then my gastric distress had reached a crisis point. The fumes from the leftover burgers weren’t doing me much good, nor was the Squidman’s choice of topics.

  “Yeesh,” I said.

  “See for yourself.” He made a fist and slowly straightened his arm. “It’s only like ten minutes long.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, pointing discreetly at my stomach by way of explanation.

  “You sure? It’s pretty unbelievable.”

  “Maybe next time. Right now I kind of need to get to a bathroom.”

  He nodded, unable to conceal his disappointment, and then fell into a deep silence that lasted all the way to Darwin. I just sat there, trying not to move or think too hard about the pressure in my abdomen. Just saying the word “bathroom” out loud had made everything that much more urgent.

  “You ever seen a porno movie?” he asked, as we pulled to a stop at the traffic light by the Hess station.

  “Once,” I said, staring desperately at the light, hoping to change it from red to green by sheer force of will. “At college.”

  Even as I said this, I wished I could take it back. Freshman year I’d gone with a couple of roommates to a soft-core midnight feature at the law school, which had been interrupted by a feminist group that had burst into the auditorium and begun chanting, “Shame! Shame!” and “Women are not Meat!” One of the protesters was a girl I worked with at the art and architecture library, someone I’d thought of as a friend, and she refused to talk to me for months afterward. The whole subject remained a touchy one for me, a can of worms I didn’t feel like opening with the Squidman, especially in my present condition.

  He didn’t press for details, though. He just turned to me with a certain amount of pride and said, “Bet it didn’t
have any fistfucking, right?”

  By the time we pulled up in front of my house, I had broken out in a cold sweat. I said good-bye through gritted teeth and hurried inside as quickly as I could without actually breaking into a run, something I’d learned from experience could be counterproductive at a moment like that. I still wasn’t right the following morning, so the Squidman had to go to Manasquan without me. The Friday after that I had my first date with Cindy, which gave me a standing excuse to avoid him for the rest of the summer, an excuse it turned out I didn’t need, because he never called me again, either.

  the emperor of ice cream

  Sang called from California around nine o’clock. It was a huge relief to hear his voice, to remember that I wasn’t lost in space or marooned on a desert island.

  “Hey,” he said, his tone friendly and cautious at the same time. “How’s it going?”

  My nerves were pretty much shot. For the past hour and a half I’d been bouncing around the room like a caged hamster, traveling a fidgety circuit from my bed to the window, where I checked the street below for signs of the Lunch Monsters, and then over to the bookcase, which I scanned in a halfhearted way for something that might save me from lying back down on my bed and staring some more at the bewildering paragraph in On the Road that began, “Remember that the Windsor, once Denver’s great Gold Rush hotel, and in many respects a point of interest—in the big saloon downstairs, bullet holes are still in the walls—had once been Dean’s home …” before giving up and returning to the window.

  “Not bad,” I replied. “How’s it going your way?”

  “Okay. Except for the blind date my folks set up for me. They think I need to meet some nice Korean girls. Like Yale’s not full of them.”

  I was intimately familiar with Sang’s position on Korean girls and the tension it caused between him and his parents. He had nothing against going out with them per se, but, as a committed pluralist and enthusiastic participant in the sexual melting pot, he objected strenuously to the idea that he was supposed to go out with them, and even more strenuously to the idea that he was more or less required to marry one at some point down the road. Not to mention the fact that—according to Sang, anyway—most Korean girls still believed that they needed to remain virgins until their wedding day, a tradition he respected from a cultural and intellectual standpoint, but found to be a bit of a drag on a day-to-day basis.

  “Know anything about the girl?”

  “Not much. Her name’s Katie Kim. She’s a junior at Wesleyan, and she’s out here visiting relatives. Her uncle’s my uncle’s old school chum or something.”

  “Where you gonna take her?”

  “Nowhere. She’s coming over with her aunt and uncle in about an hour.”

  “Katie Kim,” I said. “Katie Kim. You gotta admit, it’s kind of a cool name. I’ve always liked women who alliterate. Greta Garbo. Sally Struthers. Katie Kim. If I were you, I’d keep an open mind.”

  “I guess.” The pause that followed felt purposeful rather than awkward, as if Sang wanted me to know that he wasn’t going to let the conversation wander any further afield than it already was. Even though I knew he was home in Pacific Palisades, probably gazing out the sliding glass doors that overlooked the ocean, I pictured him sitting on the beat-up couch in our common room, running one hand over the brushy stiffness of his crew cut, a somber, almost paternal expression on his face. “That was a pretty gnarly scene the other night.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  He couldn’t help laughing. “That was quite a look on your face when you opened the door.”

  I laughed too, re-imagining the scene from his perspective. “I thought I was about thirty seconds away from getting really lucky.”

  “That Polly …” he said, his voice trailing off in admiration.

  A fresh wave of desolation washed over me, along with a sense of injustice I knew better than to put into words. For months I’d been biding my time, waiting for the planets to come into alignment just so I could be alone with Polly. To have come so close and still have had it taken away was almost too much to bear.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Tell me something. How long did she stick around?”

  “Who, Polly?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not very long. Maybe a minute or two. Why?”

  “Just curious.”

  He must have heard the disappointment in my voice.

  “What did you expect? I mean, what was she supposed to do? Sit down and make small talk with the Friedlins till you came back? If you came back.” Sang’s voice grew sober and neutral. “So, what’s up with you and Cindy?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We haven’t really talked vet.”

  I could sense his mystified disapproval from three thousand miles away.

  “Don’t you think you should?”

  “I keep meaning to call her. There’s just a lot going on around here. My dad had his hemorrhoid operation and we’ve been having a weird situation with the lunch truck and—”

  “Danny, you’ve really got to call her and talk this over. It’s not fair to leave her hanging like this.”

  “I know.”

  “If you talked to her a month ago, maybe you wouldn’t be in this bind right now.”

  “I know. I know. Fuck.”

  “Call her,” he instructed me. “Tonight. Right after you hang up with me, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  “She’s cute too,” he said, after a brief pause to clear the air. “I can see how you fell for her.”

  Right then, I almost blew up at him. Fell for her? I wanted to scream. I didn’t fucking fall for her. I was just stuck here in this hellhole, driving a lunch truck all day and trying to find a little company so I wouldn’t have to spend my nights listening to Judas Priest and watching fistfucking movies. It was just a stupid little diversion that got out of hand, that’s all it ever was. But I didn’t say any of it. I took a deep breath and got ahold of myself.

  “I’m glad you liked her,” I said.

  “Call her,” he repeated.

  “Right this minute,” I assured him.

  I meant to. I think I really meant to. I had the phone off the hook and everything when it occurred to me that Cindy wasn’t the only person who might have been frustrated by my silence over the past couple of days. Distracted as I’d been by more immediate dilemmas not to mention shamed by the memory of how I’d been forced to abandon her on Friday night—I’d done my best to shut Polly out of my mind. But now, quite suddenly—it must have been Sang’s assumption that to praise her, it was sufficient simply to utter her name—I found myself overwhelmed with longing for her, or at least for the sound of her voice, some sort of long-distance reassurance that she wasn’t lost to me forever.

  Polly liked to complain about how her father was never home, but it was Mr. Wells who finally answered on the seventh ring, barking out the word “Hello,” in such a way as to make it unmistakably clear what an enormous inconvenience and potential waste of valuable time it was for him simply to have to pick up the phone. Polly had described him as a thwarted, gentle soul, a brilliant tax attorney who lived to paint watercolor landscapes on the weekends, but he sounded to me like the kind of guy it would be best not to cross.

  “Yeah, uh, hi,” I mumbled, meek as a seventh grader whispering into a pay phone outside the 7-11.

  “What?” he demanded. “Would you speak up?”

  I cleared my throat and forced the words out at an audible volume.

  “I’m, uh … looking for Polly.”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “Uh … Danny.”

  “Danny?” he repeated, as if there were something preposterous about the name.

  “I’m a friend of hers from college.”

  Polly seemed groggy, and I wondered for a second if I’d dragged her away from a
nap. But then I remembered that it was nine thirty at night, hardly optimum nap time, even for a college student.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Not really. I’ve been killing myself over this paper for my Stevens and Frost class. It’s just a stupid little close-reading exercise. I should be able to do it with one hand tied behind my back.”

  “Which poem?”

  “‘The Emperor of Ice Cream.’ I’m analyzing the sexual imagery.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I see all the code words and hidden meanings. I just don’t know what to do with them.”

  “Can’t you just say that the poem seems to be about one thing, but really it’s about sex?”

  “But I don’t even know what it seems to be about. Isn’t that a little weird, when you can understand the hidden meaning, but not the surface?”

  “Maybe you could finesse that and get right to the sex.”

  “But what’s it saying about sex?”

  “Beats me,” I admitted. Not having read the poem, I was on shaky interpretive ground.

  “And who’s the emperor of ice cream?” Her voice broke as if she were on the verge of tears. “I’ve read the thing a million times, and I still don’t know what the title means.”

  “It’s a catchy title,” I observed, hoping to extricate myself from the nitty-gritty of her analysis.

  “You know what the worst part is?” she continued. “I could pick up the phone and call Peter, and he’d just laugh like I was an idiot and say something like, Can’t you see it? Hamlet is the emperor of ice cream. And as soon as he said it, it would all be completely obvious.”