I climbed on a desk and entered the ceiling. I’d seen enough spy movies to know to carefully lower myself and not put any weight on anything that wasn’t completely solid. But unlike in spy movies, there was no red laser to avoid or alarm to trip. Getting up over that wall was easier than any of us expected.
I got a few small scratches on my forearm, but I successfully went over the wall, replaced the ceiling tiles, picked up the doll, and walked out the door of the senior class president’s office without issue. Dan told me I should have climbed back over since there was no way to lock the door from the outside without a key. And that is why I walked out the door instead. It wasn’t due to an unwillingness to climb back over; I wanted the juniors to think that their mascot vanished because they had accidentally left their office unlocked. I’d never stopped enjoying a good prank.
We waited until most people had left for the day before hiding the doll in a garbage bag and walking him out of the newspaper office. We had the entire weekend to plan what we’d do with Chimp Daddy. When most people steal a mascot, the big reveal is, Ha ha, we stole your mascot. We wanted something better.
Hunter had a wall at the edge of the courtyard with a few “windows” in it that had been part of an old armory. It was just a red brick wall, not connected to a building, and the windows had bars but no glass. If you can picture that, now you understand why our theater company was called Brick Prison.
Our plan was to show up early Monday and string up the doll on the side of that wall holding a sign that said, WHO’S YOUR DADDY? Even now, I look back and still believe that was a perfect way to reveal what we’d done. The only problem was that getting the doll up there was much harder than climbing into the office.
There were six of us, so we stationed three students on each side of the wall. We tied the doll to a tennis ball on a long string, and threw the tennis ball through the window. Or we tried to, anyway. Getting a tennis ball through a third story window covered in bars wasn’t easy.
Wild as my arm was, I did have an arm, so it was my job to get that ball through that window. It took several throws but I finally succeeded. As the doll was being hoisted by the three on the outside of the building, it was suddenly dropped. Those of us on the inside heard the guys on the outside loudly say, “no, it’s just us.” We didn’t know what was happening, but we knew it couldn’t be good. There was no sense in all six of us getting caught, so the three of us on the inside ran.
It wasn’t until later that day that we learned what had happened. The rumors of Dr. Haanraats jogging around Hunter at five A.M. were true, and he saw three students using a pulley system to hoist something onto the side of the school. Instead of being proud that they were using something they had learned in physics class, Dr. Haanraats suspended all three of them for theft.
I’ve already made it clear that I thought Dr. Haanraats was a terrible school administrator, but those suspensions cemented it. Suspension was beyond a harsh punishment for a harmless prank, and pranks were a senior-class tradition at Hunter. The doll wasn’t damaged, and the juniors would be getting their pimp back as soon as they got to school. Sure, we all deserved punishment, starting with a phone call to our parents (though with Brent, calling his parents would be difficult). But what we didn’t deserve was a potential black mark on our futures, particularly when this level of punishment was unprecedented for previous, similar pranks. Phillip pulling a knife on me twice was fine, but playfully hoisting up a toy in the context of a school-encouraged rivalry—that demanded severe punishment.
I wasn’t suspended, but only because Hunter never knew I had anything to do with it. The three of us on the inside of the wall got away, and those on the outside swore they were the only ones that were involved, and they weren’t pressed any further. Clearly Dr. Haanraats had never done the build-a-pulley physics assignment. I never took physics and even I knew you needed someone on both sides of the wall to make this work.
The three who got caught saw no benefit to turning the rest of us in. Their punishment was no harsher than it would have been had there been more of us, so they just accepted their fate and protected us. I was amazed that I had friends willing to do that for me.
Dr. Haanraats never found out I was involved, but the rest of my class did, and I showed off my scratches as battle scars. While we didn’t get the picture we wanted of the mascot up on the wall, we were heroes for trying.
PAPA WAS A ROLLING STONE
Unless you count my bunk at Ramah, I only ever knew one home until I was fifteen. And then Forest Hills became my second.
I loved it. Forest Hills was the most upscale part of Queens, and upscale was something I didn’t normally get to be around. I loved walking up and down Austin Street and going into stores, even though I couldn’t afford to buy anything. Jacob and I knew every inch of those streets. We knew the staff of the pool hall and played pool before we were legally allowed. We made friends with the clerks at McDonalds, and they told us that if you filled out a survey card, you could get a free order of fries (which we did every time we were hungry). We even said hi to the homeless guys, who also said hi to us. We were part of the neighborhood. Then one day, I wasn’t anymore.
At the time, if you sold a property for profit and didn’t buy another within two years, you got hit by a massive capital gains tax. We’d lived in Forest Hills for two years, so my mother was faced with a problem—buy something else now or lose the money to taxes and the opportunity to ever buy in the future. We could not afford to buy a place in Forest Hills. We could barely afford to rent a place in Forest Hills, and that was with four of us living in a two-bedroom apartment. So we moved.
As our time in Forest Hills was ending, David got married and moved out. I had only a few months before graduation, and I was pretty sure I was going to a school where I didn’t have to live at home. But for the time being, we all still needed places to sleep, so my mother looked for small apartments one neighborhood over, in Rego Park.
For every upscale neighborhood, there are people who keep the neighborhood running. Clerks at the stores and servers at the restaurants. The housekeepers and cab drivers and garbagemen and cops who all work in Forest Hills—they don’t live in Forest Hills. They live in Rego Park.
In addition to simply being a much less expensive alternative to Forest Hills, Rego Park is also an old-immigrant neighborhood. When I say old immigrants, I mean World War II immigrants. The people who lived in Rego Park were not children and grandchildren of the people who’d moved here from Europe. Those children and grandchildren grew up and moved to places like Forest Hills. When I say Rego Park is an old-immigrant neighborhood, I mean most of my neighbors were old immigrants.
My mother found a first-floor apartment that was technically on the second floor because the complex was on a hill. The apartment was a small two-bedroom, so my mother built a temporary wall in the master bedroom to give Beth and I enough space for a bed and a dresser each. I gave Beth the slightly bigger part of the room, since she was commuting to a city college and I had every intention of leaving Rego Park as soon as I was able.
As my mother was in the process of apartment hunting, I was still waiting to hear back from Columbia. I did, however, begin hearing from other schools.
I was accepted into Hunter College, though I had no intention of ever accepting their acceptance. I’d applied because I needed to have a school on the list that was cheap enough that I could afford to go if I didn’t get any scholarships or financial aid anywhere else. My high school’s full name is Hunter College High School because it is administered by Hunter College. Because of that relationship, Hunter High School students are able to take classes at Hunter College. I’d been to Hunter College many times, and I had no interest in making the relationship permanent.
I was also accepted to Stony Brook, a state college in New York that is fondly referred to as Stoner Brook. It wasn’t my top choice, but I’d have been okay with it. Hey, Mrs. Acker was often stoned, and she was great.
I was still waiting on my big three. Columbia, NYU, and Syracuse. I didn’t particularly want to go to college upstate, but Syracuse has an excellent journalism program and their mascot has red hair, too. Syracuse accepted me and gave me their highest possible journalism scholarship, which actually made it affordable. They were very impressed by my sportswriting internship (though they didn’t comment on what they’d thought of my winning homecoming king). The only problem was that Syracuse gave me a deadline to respond, and it was right around when I was supposed to hear back from Columbia and NYU. How could I respond to Syracuse before hearing back from my top two choices? I didn’t want to play my hand before I knew what all my cards were.
NYU came back a few days before Syracuse’s deadline. While I was accepted, the financial aid just wasn’t there. At the time, NYU was the most expensive college in the country, and without a scholarship, I could barely have afforded textbooks. With NYU ruled out, I started considering whether I’d go to Syracuse, Sarah Lawrence, or Stony Brook. Columbia was both a long shot and expensive, and I still hadn’t heard from them.
My mother called Syracuse to ask them to extend their scholarship deadline. “If you want him enough that you’ll offer a scholarship, why can’t you wait one more week?” There was something hilarious about my mother pleading with someone to be irresponsible about their deadlines. But it also made me feel great to see her fight for me like that. It didn’t make me feel great to see her lose. I had to make a choice—accept Syracuse right then or gamble on Columbia. I don’t know why, but I gambled.
I just couldn’t imagine committing to Syracuse only to find out I’d gotten into to Columbia a few days later. Though I was also terrified of refusing Syracuse only to find out I’d gotten rejected from Columbia a few days later. I imagined showing up on Syracuse’s front steps pleading with them to take me back.
“Baby,” I’d say, from behind a huge bouquet of orange flowers. “You’re the only college for me!”
Meanwhile, Jacob bet me ten dollars I’d be accepted into Columbia. It was a good bet to take—if I was accepted, I’d be so happy that losing ten dollars would be fine. And if I was rejected, hey, at least I’d get ten dollars to offset the sadness a bit. It didn’t.
The day I got that rejection letter from Columbia was an extremely tough day. It was tough enough that I was still sad the next morning. So when I got to school, I decided to just leave. I took the ten dollars I’d won from Jacob, and I went to a movie. For all the time I’d spent in the nurse’s office, I’d never actually skipped a full day of school before. I didn’t know what would happen—would my parents get a phone call? Or would the school not even notice? Maybe I was just in the nurse’s office the whole day and not a movie theater on Eighty-sixth Street.
For most of my life, the thing that kept me from getting into trouble was the generic fear of trouble, even without the knowledge of what trouble actually looked like. Fear of the unknown was also the reason Theo terrorized me so easily. But at this point, I didn’t care. Whatever trouble was, I would face it. My dream of going to Columbia had been crushed. I was entitled to see a movie.
When I got home that day, my mother didn’t ask how school was, which was out of character for her. Did she know about the movie? Was there a system in place to catch kids skipping school? Trouble had arrived. I didn’t know what form it would take, but it was happening.
“Go look at the dining room table,” my mother said, as if we had a separate dining room and not just a table in a corner of the living room. I did, cautiously, half expecting to find Dr. Haanraats hiding beneath it.
There was a letter on the table from Columbia. I’d been accepted.
It took me a while to process this—how the hell was this possible? Was the letter I’d received the day before a mistake? A mistake could happen. Earlier that year, I’d received consecutive letters accepting me and then rejecting me from a school I hadn’t even applied to due to a clerical error. When that happened, it was hilarious, since it was a school I’d have never attended in the first place. But this wasn’t funny. This was serious.
I read the letter carefully, trying to bury the conflicting emotions of fear, excitement, and confusion. And I understood. I had applied to both Columbia College and the School of General Studies at Columbia, and I’d assumed that I’d been rejected from both when I’d gotten the first letter. But that first letter was only for Columbia College. Not only did I get in to the School of General Studies, but I was going to receive enough financial aid to make it feasible. Though I would need twenty bucks more, since clearly I had to concede loss in the bet with Jacob.
We moved to Rego Park soon after that, and I didn’t mind the tiny room and that my ancient neighbors would constantly be yelling at me in Russian (what’s the Russian word for young whippersnapper?). I didn’t mind Rego Park because I knew I had an exit strategy. In just a few more months, I’d be going to Columbia to be a writer.
Jacob got in to his first choice of colleges, too—Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Ozzie would be going to Villanova, Rebecca had gotten in to the University of Rhode Island, Mason would be attending the University of Maryland, and Randy was headed to Cornell. All the time I’d spent in high school trying to figure out who I was and how I fit in (or if I even should fit in) was coming to an end. But for now, I still had some friends to face life with.
THAT TIME I KILLED TWO PEOPLE
To understand Killer is to understand Hunter.
Killer is a game where teams of six students try to kill each other using toy guns. In my time at Hunter, it cost ten dollars to play, and the winning team split the almost two thousand dollars of entry fees. It had been outlawed by the administration as far back as the 1980s, and possibly earlier. Every year, students skipped school to stake out each other’s houses. Every year, someone almost got hit by a car (or did get hit). Every year anyone caught playing was immediately suspended and banned from prom and walking at graduation. And every year, hundreds of students played anyway.
That was the essence of Hunter. A bunch of kids too smart for their own good who didn’t respect authority when it didn’t make sense. Outlawing Killer made us want to play more and made the game more intense. Banning it wasn’t the answer. I don’t know what would have been, but banning it only made Killer grow in popularity.
Teams were pitted against each other in a wheel—so you had two teams coming for you at all times. As teams were eliminated, the wheel shrank and you were given new opponents until there was just one team left, or two weeks had passed. The guns were tracer guns (sometimes called disc guns), and the bullets were little plastic disks that looked like the middle of an old record album. Every now and then when I see a tracer on the ground in a park somewhere, I smile, thinking of Killer.
There were rules that kept us relatively safe. Not physically safe (you were never physically safe while playing Killer), but safe from getting caught. The main rule was that you couldn’t kill anyone on school grounds. So for two weeks, people would bring their lunch to school and find creative ways to sneak on and off the property. Once you had two feet off the school block, it was open season.
I saw some of my classmates do some pretty amazing things. One slid across the hood of a parked car as he shot his target. Another threw a giant piece of poster board in the air to block a shot coming at him, and shot his target as the poster board fell. If anyone is ever looking for an amazing documentary subject, I’d recommend Killer.
Buying modified guns from students who’d graduated the year before was a tradition among the rich kids. But I barely had the ten-dollar registration fee and the eight dollars it cost to buy two regular guns in the firs
t place, so I used my nerdiness and my father’s engineering knowledge (i.e., his nerdiness) to open up my two guns and modify them myself. We adjusted the spring to make the guns shoot farther and faster and added washers on the outside for stability. My guns could shoot twice as fast and twice as far as any nonmodified guns. My guns were badass.
The first few days of the game were relatively dull for me. No one but Jacob knew my new Rego Park address, so I wasn’t afraid of anyone staking out my apartment. Staking out really was a thing people did, and it was something I did the first day of Killer, too. Unfortunately, the enemy we were staking out was doing the same to someone else, so eventually we all just went to school.
I had one brief run-in with the law (i.e., a teacher). I was charging out of the basement doors after an opponent, who had his gun out ready to shoot as soon as we stepped off the block. As we got out of the doors, we almost bowled over a teacher. We were sure that we were caught, and both my opponent and I looked up at the teacher sheepishly. The teacher was our health teacher, sneaking a cigarette. We made eye contact—and with a mutual, I-won’t-tell-anyone-if-you-don’t-tell-anyone nod, we all went back inside.
Finally, a week in, someone found my address. I don’t know how—Jacob was a teammate, so it certainly wasn’t through him. Killer was played with enough intensity that someone probably looked up a public record of my mother’s that had our address on it. Maybe they bribed the mayor. However he got my address, a student named Kunal showed up at my apartment door.
My mother had been in the process of replacing the peephole on our door, because something in our lives was always broken, and we were always in the process of fixing it. Nothing was ever just fixed—it was always in process. These processes lasted for weeks, months, sometimes even years. Even my parents’ marriage took years to finally be replaced with a divorce. This particular peephole process had been going on since we’d moved in.
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