“Give me a break,” Neil said. “I’m getting the same static from my mom. She told me yesterday she had to take the knobs off the stove to keep dad from burning the house down. She thinks I’m leaving because I don’t want to deal with him.”
“She’s just scared,” I said. “Believe me, I know how she feels. I’ve been trying to be you for the past week or so, but I don’t think it’s working.”
“That’s funny,” Neil said. “Why would you want to be me?”
“Got tired of being me, I guess. That and you’re the only sane friend I have.”
Neil laughed. “Please. If I were sane, I’d shack up in Mrs. Packer’s Christmas room and join the cast of Down in the Stalag.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “There’s something oddly attractive about that boy’s life.”
“He’s so damn sure of himself.”
“It’s his model of the universe,” I said. “You’d be sure of yourself, too, if you had it all figured out.”
“That’s the thing,” Neil said. “Sometimes I think I do. It’s just a matter of getting all the pieces to fit. The only problem is they never hold still. As soon as the puzzle’s out of the box, you realize the pieces are all screwed up. Half of them don’t even go together, and the ones that do start moving and changing and losing their minds before you can even start to figure out what’s going on. You could force them, of course.”
“But then you’d be Greg,” I said.
“Yeah,” Neil whispered. “Stone cold crazy.”
“It’s like that time on the two bus,” I said. “Remember when the riot broke out?”
“Yeah,” Neil said. “Clubs and chains and two-by-fours.”
“And a knife, I think. Broomsticks and a soup ladle.”
“Fist grabs broomstick,” Neil said. “Broomstick sweeps pool cue.”
“You just keep playing and hope the driver knows what he’s doing.”
“That’s fine when you’re a dumb kid,” Neil said. “But what happens when you wake up one day and find yourself behind the wheel?”
“You open the door and let the crazies on,” I said. “Or off, depending on what they want.”
“Meanwhile the bus keeps moving,” Neil said.
“It has to,” I said. “Otherwise?”
“Otherwise,” Neil said.
He left it at that, and we sat quietly as a pair of moths slapped the porch light above with an unsteady rhythm. It wasn’t the end, I told myself. We’d always be friends. Yes, there would be distance, yes, there would be work and wives and probably children, and, yes, there would be long stretches of silence where neither of us would hear a peep from the other for months or maybe even years; but each of us would always know the other was out there somewhere, a phone call away, an email, a thought, a joke, a dream, making the world a more bearable place, divining some measure of sense from the chaos, laughing and crying in the same breath because neither is ever enough on its own and the alternative is to give up on the game altogether. As we sat on my porch, two men, not quite old, but no longer boys, I knew that Neil was my friend, and at the moment, it was all I needed.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Two days before Billy Chin’s memorial service, Karen and I received separate invitations to see Greg perform in the world premiere of Down in the Stalag. Printed on heavy stock, the invitations made no mention of Billy whatsoever. They simply stated that Gloria Packer was pleased to announce that her son, Gregory James Packer III, would be starring as Sergeant Schlitz in the production. Certain words in the invitation were printed in block capital letters. GREGORY JAMES PACKER III, for example. STARRING and WORLD PREMIERE as well. Our kind attendance, the invitations informed us, would not be overlooked, and Karen’s included a handwritten note from Greg’s mother stating that she would be more than delighted if Karen would see fit to enjoy the musical seated next to her in a row reserved for friends and family.
When I called Neil to find out if he’d received an invitation as well, he told me that in addition to inviting every member of our graduating class, Greg’s mother had invited anyone with whom Greg had come into contact over the past ten years. The list included (but was not limited to) aunts and uncles, college professors, women he’d met online, the doctor who prescribed his painkillers, a fourteenyear-old opera singer, a cadre of lesser-known conservative radio personalities, a retired professional wrestler named Crusher Helgstrom, the police officer who arrested Greg at the grocery store, and the Mayor of Philadelphia. Naturally, Greg was furious at his mother for meddling in his personal affairs, and he vowed that vengeance upon her would be swift and merciless.
“Sullivan’s pressing for another intervention,” Neil said.
“And you?”
“I don’t know.”
“We could make it a weekly event,” I said. “Rotating cast. Celebrity guests for the February sweeps.”
“Madeline would love that. We barely see each other as it is.”
“You did what you could,” I said.
“I told him to give it up—this thing with his mother, I mean. I told him to let it go. It’s not healthy, I said. You’re not getting anywhere.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“I can only say it so many times.”
“Maybe it’s time for you to let him go,” I said. “It’s his life. Let him live it.”
“That’s what Madeline says.”
“That’s what everyone says.”
“She wants to know why I bother.”
“Good question,” I said.
An audible shrug. “I wish I knew.”
“Listen,” I said. “There’s something I need to tell you. I really screwed things up between us.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“No, it was stupid. I don’t care what Ennis thinks. Or Frank Dearborn, or any of those guys.”
“Yes, you do,” Neil said.
“I know. But I wish I didn’t.”
“Let it go,” Neil said. “Whatever you have against them, let it go.”
“Right,” I said. “As soon as you let Greg go.”
“As soon as he lets this war with his mother go.”
“Like that’ll happen any time soon.”
“We need to move on,” Neil said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess we do.”
And I would have. Or might have. Conceivably. But then I saw Frank Dearborn on the morning of the memorial service, and it all came back to me—the anger, the fear, the panic, the doubt, the envy and self-pity. Who was I trying to kid? I didn’t know a thing about Billy Chin. Yeah, we were friends, but only in the sense that we’d gone to the same school and hadn’t managed to become enemies, only in the sense that we used to talk once in a while, only in the sense that his name never made it onto the evergrowing list of things that pissed me off. But beyond that?
I tried to conjure a picture of Billy in my mind, to reconstruct him with memories and anecdotes, but the best I could do as Karen and I got in the car and headed for the Academy that morning was to imagine a stick figure. Billy was skinny. He wore a blue suit. He played ping-pong and chess and was a member of the debate team. He ate rice for lunch and carried his books in a giant duffle bag. If I really thought about it, I could wrestle a few more details from the dim corners of my mind, but they were either too sketchy or tinged with regret to be of any use.
He scored summa cum laude on the National Latin Exam—or was I only making that up? He had an encyclopedic knowledge of breakfast cereal commercials from the 1980s—or was that someone else? He nearly threw up in biology lab when we first cut into our cat—or was that me?
“Are you okay?” Karen asked as we slowed to a stop at an intersection on the edge of the city. “You seem a little distracted.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just thinking about what I’ll say at the service.”
“You don’t have anything prepared?”
“Of course I do,” I lied, tapping my breast pocket as if my
remarks were all mapped out and folded in quarters an inch away from my heart. “But I want to make sure I didn’t forget anything.”
If Karen said anything after that, I missed it.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the sleek, silver cat on the hood of Frank’s Jaguar creeping over my shoulder and slinking discreetly but decisively into view. When I turned to get a better look, Frank leaned forward to peer past his wife and give me a wave. His roof was down, his hair windblown but stylish, his sunglasses worth more than the car I was driving.
“Asshole,” I muttered.
“You do know our windows are open,” Karen said.
“Fuck,” I whispered, pounding the steering wheel. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“Charley?”
Why couldn’t I have been nicer to him? Why couldn’t I have been a better friend? Why couldn’t I have returned his calls or answered his emails? We were supposed to be like brothers—that’s what they always told us at the Academy. We were supposed to be a family. But all I had were a handful of vague memories of walking the halls with Billy and bitching about friends who didn’t know how to be friends, about teachers who pissed me off, about bands that had sold out, and TV shows that had stopped being funny.
When the light in front of us turned green, Frank took off and was already half a block ahead of me when my cell phone went off, taunting me with strains of the theme from The Jeffersons. Letting out an aggrieved, rumbling sigh, I hit the gas, and my Saturn lurched forward in a tired approximation of hot pursuit.
“If he thinks he’s getting to this thing before me,” I said, and my voice trailed off as I jerked my steering wheel to the left to avoid slamming into a parked car.
“Why does it matter?” Karen asked, gripping her seatbelt.
“It matters,” I said, though I knew it didn’t.
In my head, at least, I knew it didn’t matter. But in my gut, I had to beat Frank. Just once. Just to prove that I could. Sure, he had the better car, the better job, the better house, the better life, but if I could only make it to Billy’s memorial service before Frank did, then maybe it would prove once and for all that I was the better friend.
Seriously, I thought as I pressed a heavy foot to the gas pedal—fuck Frank if he thought he could tell me what I did and didn’t say to Billy about his haircut. Yeah, I took shots at him from time to time, but we all did, just like we all took shots at each other every chance we got. Because that was the whole point. That was the game and how it was played. You saw an opening and you took it. A failed test, a shitty car, an ugly tie, a festering pimple—even a bad haircut.
And, okay, what if I did ask Billy if he cut his hair with a sharp rock? It was funny because it was true. Compared to the moussed-up, slicked-back, butch-waxed, permanent press coifs we all used to wear back when we were kids, Billy’s fine, black hair was a throwback to an age before hairspray. Not that he needed me to humiliate him over it, but what was the point of going to a prep school if not to be tortured day in and day out by your closest friends? And it wasn’t just any prep school, either. It was the Academy, for Christ’s sake. The best damn school in the history of the universe.
By the time I caught up with Frank, he was stopped at a light that was about to go green, so I used the opportunity to rocket past him and take the lead. It was early in the morning, and the street was dead. The few shops that were still in business in this part of the city specialized in rent-to-own kitchen appliances and secondhand furniture. All the others were closed for good, windows covered over with newspapers, plywood, or thin layers of soap. Karen begged me to slow down, but it was no use. It wasn’t just Frank I was trying to outrun. It wasn’t even the ghost of Billy Chin so much as the memories of all the shitty things I’d ever done to him.
Junior year, for example. It was the sixty-fifth anniversary of Elvis Presley’s birth, and the tabloids had people sighting the King of Rock ’n’ Roll all over the country. Given that I was a cocky seventeen-year-old asshole with a clunky video camera and a complete lack of respect for anything, I thought it would be funny to shoot a documentary-style movie about the King’s return starring Billy as Elvis. The joke, I explained, would be that nobody would say a word about the fact that Elvis was a skinny Asian kid who played the flute. It wasn’t until I finished running the plan by him that I realized I might as well have called him Rice Dick. His eyes drifted down toward his scuffed black shoes, and his skinny hands twitched at his sides. Was that how I saw him, the look on his face demanded? As the punch line to a joke?
But the joke wasn’t on him, I wanted to say. It was on Elvis. Or his fans. Or all the people who believed he was coming back. That Billy played the flute was just the icing on the cake. Couldn’t he see the humor in that? Elvis Presley returning from the grave as a flautist? A Chinese flautist, no less? Which, the more I thought about it, made me realize that the joke came back to the fact that Billy was Asian, so I dropped the whole subject and told him I was only messing around. Anyone who knew me was also aware of the fact that I’d never follow through with something so ambitious as a documentary, even a fake one, even one shot on my parents’ VHS recorder. So what if I’d already written the script? So what if it called for Billy to deliver his lines like Charlie Chan? Did that mean I was a racist? Did it make me an asshole? Did it put me in the same league as Frank Dearborn?
I barreled past a public high school and a bright yellow sign warning me to watch out for children. The traffic was getting heavier now, the city more dense with bars and gas stations, so I took a sharp left and roared through the underpass that ran beneath the railroad tracks that cut a gash through the city like the stitches running up the length of Billy’s wrist.
He was going back to school for computers, he said the last time I saw him. Because working as a pharmacist? The hours alone were enough to make him—
He shook his head but never finished the thought.
It was New Year’s Eve. Everyone was there. Neil and Madeline. Dwayne Coleman and Sean Sullivan. Even Greg Packer, if only to hit on Karen, and Anthony Gambacorta to sabotage my cell phone. There was music. There was drinking. There were occasional snatches of something approaching wit. On television, there was the countdown, but the volume was low because the ball wouldn’t drop for at least another hour. Beyond that, I couldn’t remember.
I couldn’t remember what song was playing.
I couldn’t remember what food we served.
I couldn’t remember what I was drinking or wearing or even what I was thinking when Billy told me that he was going back to school for computers.
All I could remember was what I said next:
Computers? Jesus, Billy, I’d rather be dead!
I wasn’t being serious.
I didn’t mean it literally.
I just meant that I could never learn code or sit at a computer for hours on end.
What I meant was more power to him, but it came out all wrong, so I laughed to let him know that I was really only kidding, and Billy half-laughed, half-smiled, half-looked at his wrist as if to check the time, as if to make sure I saw his stitches, and said that he was sorry but he had somewhere to be.
Could I have stopped him? Maybe.
Could I have insisted that he stick around? Sure.
But the point is I didn’t, and now here we were.
“Charley, slow down,” Karen said, not for the first time.
Twists and turns. Dips and rises. I roared past a massive open air amphitheater, straddled two lanes as I slowed incrementally out of respect for a Japanese tea garden, revved my engine again as I thundered past a glass-domed art museum that had long since been converted to a municipal office building. All the while, Frank hung tight behind me while Karen closed her eyes and drew one sharp breath after another.
A left turn in front of opposing traffic and two blocks later, Frank and I were neck and neck, rumbling over broken stretches of asphalt. Up ahead, the imposing stone walls of the Academy loomed over the
neighborhood, the polished white façade of the Church of Saint Leonard gleaming in the morning sun. If I ran a pointless stop sign and went the wrong way down a one-way street, I could beat Frank hands-down, so I took the turn and blew past a stoopedover old woman in giant sunglasses who was pushing a small grocery cart along the sidewalk. Passing under the stone archway that opened into the Academy’s courtyard, I slammed on the brakes and screeched to a halt in the faculty parking lot mere seconds before Frank arrived.
“I win, motherfucker!” I shouted, shaking a finger in his direction as I leapt from my car. “I win!”
Billy’s face hung larger than life on either side of the church entrance—a real Chairman Mao look, just like the Kibble King had promised. Nazis marched in loose formation in front of the school as a man in a monkey suit unloaded an inflatable trampoline from the back of a truck. Greg’s mother was snapping photographs and cooing at everything she saw, but Billy’s parents just stared at me, mouths agape, from the steps of the church as my cell phone went off one last time.
“Jesus,” I said.
I took an uneasy step backward and slumped against my car.
I sank to the ground and drew my knees to my chest.
Vaguely aware of the people gathering around me, I rocked back and forth and wished the world would go away.
“Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped,” Neil said to Karen, emerging from the small crowd and reaching for my wrist as if to take my pulse.
“Neil?” I said, slightly dazed. “Can you do me a favor?”
“Sure thing, pal,” Neil said. “Whatever you want.”
“Can you destroy my cell phone?”
“Consider it done,” Neil said.
“Oh, and there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”
“Go for it,” Neil said.
“I’ve never actually seen a Marx Brothers movie.”
“Well, yeah,” Neil said. “That’s pretty obvious.”
“You knew?” I asked.
“Of course I knew. I’ve known since tenth grade.”
The Grievers Page 15