He spent most of his days sitting in an armchair in the Royal Chamber, a pale, shriveled creature with a little tuft of white hair poking up from his liver-spotted scalp. After a week or two, he could feed himself, provided that the food was soft and cut up into very small bites. Discounting the occasional moments of incoherence, his speech returned to normal, though we might have preferred that he’d lost his voice entirely.
“That mother of yours is sleeping around on me,” he might say. “She dresses up like a bitch in heat and tramps around all over town.”
“Don’t say that, Dad,” I’d reply.
“You know who she’s screwing, don’t you?” he’d say. “Brad Culver.”
“Come on, Dad,” I’d say. “You know that’s not true.”
“Oh, but it is,” he’d say. “She locks me up in this room and flashes the front porch lights to give him the all clear. I can hear them, you know. I can hear the two of them screwing, right through the goddamned door!”
Often I sat with him in his bedroom, watching reruns on television. His two favorite programs were The Waltons and Charlie’s Angels. He couldn’t follow the plot of either program, but the bucolic, pastoral life of the Walton family seemed to elicit a gauzy nostalgia for his Depression-era childhood. The appeal of Charlie’s Angels was understandably less quaint.
One afternoon in his first week home, I left the Old Man with Farrah Fawcett and Jaclyn Smith and crept out of the Royal Chamber. Heading toward the kitchen, I overheard my mother in the dining room speaking with a man whose voice I recognized to be that of Mosby Watts, the Old Man’s accountant.
“I warned him, Alice,” Watts said, his voice pleading and contrite. “But he wouldn’t hear it. He said this First Atlantic deal was a sure thing.”
As I listened, I began to realize that it was not my mother but the Old Man whom Brad Culver had screwed. Black Monday had done their big venture-capital plan in. A day or two before Leigh’s wedding, Culver had informed the Old Man that their company—First Atlantic Investors LLC—was going to have to declare bankruptcy. They had lost their entire investment—which, for the Old Man, was everything.
Ever since Black Monday, the Old Man had privately borne the dizzying fact that he was facing ruin, hoping against hope that something could be done to avert the inevitable. On the night of Leigh’s wedding, the skyrocketing pressure of his blood seared off that one, tiny fragment from the walls of his arteries and sent it tumbling into the fragile webbing of his brain.
Perhaps, like Leigh’s spectacular breakdown, the stroke would have happened either way. Had the First Atlantic venture-capital group prospered, had Black Monday seen a 20 percent gain instead of a horrific drop, had Leigh’s wedding gone off without a hitch, had Paul never left and Annie Elizabeth never died, and on and on, he might very well have ended up in the same exact position at the same exact time. But if all those things had happened, one critical difference would remain: the Old Man wouldn’t be flat broke, with a cascade of medical expenses descending just in time for Christmas.
NOT LONG AFTERWARD I went snooping through my mother’s rolltop secretary and found where she’d hidden the stack of bills. I flipped through them, my eyes widening over what then seemed like staggering amounts: $5,000 to a medical laboratory for a list of tests I’d never heard of; $14,000 to the hospital for fees uncovered by insurance; $2,000 owed to a contractor for repairs on the roof of the Old Man’s office building.
Among the bills, I found a crisp white envelope with the crest of Macon Preparatory Academy in the upper left corner. I slipped out the contents—a kindly phrased letter on Macon stationery with the signature of the head of finance at the bottom, followed by a xeroxed copy of a tuition bill for $18,000.
$18,000! Could a year at Macon really cost that much? I’d never thought about it. I just treated my education as a given—as if it came at no expense.
Studying the bill more closely, I discerned that the past-due amount was not for a year’s tuition but rather for three semesters, including unpaid balances for miscellaneous items—meal plan, required athletic apparel, and so forth. The Old Man must have needed every free penny to buy into Brad Culver’s venture-capital scheme. He probably assumed that once First Atlantic started bringing in the big returns, he’d pay it all off with a single check.
That evening, I was alone in the kitchen with my mother after dinner, helping her wash and dry the dishes.
“Mom,” I said, “I’ve been thinking. Maybe I could go to Randolph next year.”
“Why on earth would you want to do that?” she asked, as if I’d just told her I was running off to join the French Foreign Legion.
“I’m just not really happy at Macon,” I said.
“Nonsense,” she said.
“I mean it.”
“That’s ludicrous,” she said. “Trust me, you don’t want to end up at Randolph.”
Randolph High, our district public school, had once been considered a jewel in the crown of the Virginia public system. Leigh Bowman had graduated from Randolph, along with most of the other children of all but the most affluent families in Boone’s Ferry. In recent years, however, rezoning and a resurgence of white flight had diminished Randolph’s reputation considerably. It was now thought of as “rough” and “rowdy,” which was really just a polite way of saying that a large percentage of the student body there was poor and black. For Macon students and their parents, being forced to attend Randolph had become tantamount to being shipped off to a Siberian gulag.
“Randolph High is simply out of the question,” my mother said.
“I just feel like I don’t fit in at Macon anymore,” I said.
It was true; I didn’t. No one at the school knew it yet, but I did. We were poor now. Poor kids don’t get to go to private school unless they’re exceptional. My only exceptional accomplishment since giving up my nascent career as a prepubescent theater prodigy was having an illicit affair with an older woman—not exactly the type of accolade Macon would want mentioned in the alumni magazine.
“I can’t really handle any more big changes right now, Richard,” my mother said. “Besides, it’s important to your father.”
If it were that important to him, I thought, he’d have paid the tuition.
I decided to try another tactic.
“I think—I think I might be happier going to school with girls,” I said.
My mother set down the dish she was scrubbing into the murky water and sighed.
“You’ve been going through the bills, haven’t you?”
I shrugged and nodded.
“It’s nothing for you to worry about,” she said. “I’ve already spoken to the finance office. This is really not all that unusual. People make late payments all the time.”
“Mom,” I started.
“We’re working something out,” she said. “It’s going to be taken care of.”
She smiled in a way meant to seem reassuring. She didn’t know that I’d overheard her conversation with the Old Man’s accountant. I didn’t want to bring this up, however; it seemed better to let her preserve the appearance of stability and control. Or maybe I just thought she’d be angry with me for spying on her. I decided instead to exploit an old weakness.
“It’s just that—well, I think my teachers—they hate me, Mom.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. I’d always been treated with exceeding warmth and generosity from my instructors, even more so in the weeks since the Old Man fell ill.
I noticed my mother’s knuckles whitening as she gripped the edge of the counter.
“Why do you think that might be?” she asked.
“Probably—”
I had to pause for a breath to finish.
“Probably,” I said, “because of Paul.”
My mother refused to lift her eyes from the bottom of the sink. For a moment I thought I’d touched the right nerve. Finally she spoke, her voice surprisingly stern.
“You will remain at Mac
on,” she said, “and you will graduate from Macon.”
“But Mom,” I protested.
“End of discussion,” she said.
I understand now why my attending Macon seemed so much more important to my mother than it did to me. It had nothing to do with class sizes or AP courses or even with the aesthetic appeal of tastefully tousled preppies in blazers and ties, ambling along brick sidewalks in front of white-columned neoclassical buildings. Rich people stick together and look out for each other—this was what the Old Man had always believed. Places like Macon existed primarily for the purpose of giving them cloisters in which to cultivate their alliances and ensure that their inferiors were kept in place. If you had children at places like Macon, you were in the club.
It would take me years to grasp the real reason my staying at Macon mattered so much to my mother. I very clearly understood, however, that I’d never persuade her to let me withdraw voluntarily. She was going to do everything in her power to keep me there, no matter what sort of reckless or humiliating steps that decision might require of her. I was expected to remain a spoiled little lord, traipsing off every day to a fancy school we could no longer afford, while what little money we had left dwindled and my mother lay awake at night trying to think of what else she could sell, what needed to be paid for first, what bills could be neglected the longest without being turned over for collection.
I already felt I was at fault for what had happened to Leigh and, consequently, to the Old Man. I couldn’t bear the thought of being responsible for yet another burden and degradation for someone whom I loved, and who loved me in turn, more than I felt I deserved. Consequently a course of action became clear to me. The only way I was going to get us out of that tuition bill was to do something drastic. If my mother wasn’t going to let me withdraw, I was going to have to get myself kicked out.
In retrospect my reasoning seems specious to the point of absurdity. How could I have thought my mother would take my getting kicked out of school as a relief? Maybe only a spoiled, delusional adolescent is capable of such self-indulgent thinking. Maybe it was Paul again, creeping up in my subconscious, whispering in my ear like a little demon perched on my shoulder: Go on, do it—it’s better to be bad than to be good. Maybe I was genuinely traumatized by what was happening to the Old Man, or emotionally scarred by Patricia’s manipulations. Or maybe I just couldn’t stomach the thought of all the studying I’d have to do to pass exams.
Indeed, flunking out intentionally was the first thought that came to me. That plan, however, wouldn’t get me booted until the end of the year and might not work anyway, given how much slack my teachers had been cutting me since the Old Man’s stroke. My second idea was to get caught cheating on an exam. But nobody ever got kicked out of Macon for cheating. If the school expelled every boy who cheated on a test or paper, the enrollment—and moreover the tuition revenue—would drop by a third or more. You had to get sent to the honor council at least three, maybe four times to get expelled. I was going to have to come up with a far more heinous offense.
At Macon, in the final weeks of the first semester, classes cease and are replaced by formal review sessions and extended study halls. My study hall assignment was the school library, at a table between a cluster of potted plants and a large display of “recommended reading” atop a chest-high stack filled with reference books. I shared the table with a new boy named Stevie Lanier. Macon was his third stop in as many years—he’d flunked out of Choate and got booted from Woodberry for destroying a library toilet with a cherry bomb. His father was a shipping magnate of some sort. Over the few months we’d known each other, Stevie had distinguished himself only as a simpering misanthrope with a healthy contempt for the preening jocks and striving achievers who overshadowed wallflowers like us. I’d all but ignored him—until the afternoon I discovered that Stevie and I shared a peculiar predilection.
Every boy, it seems, at one point or another scribbles a little phallus on wood, paper, wall, or bathroom stall door. It has been documented to the point of tiresomeness how much time the average teenage boy spends thinking about sex. But what so compels him to draw pictures of genitalia? And why his own, instead of that of the object of his desire? Perhaps it’s the fact that he’s so much more familiar with his own equipment than the other kind. Freud and Kinsey would probably chalk it up to latent homoerotic impulses. It might come down to mere aesthetics: after all, even the most pathetic reproduction of a penis is somehow luridly amusing, while a bad drawing of a naked woman is just a sad reminder of how little any boy really knows about beauty. In any case, the compulsion to draw a penile rocket ship is a rite of passage as certain and familiar as a wet dream or acne. They say the earliest known cave paintings depict images of the hunt, but long before those deer and bulls and bison went up on the wall, I’m quite certain there was a giant paleoerection lurching out from between a pair of hairy testicles.
My first stabs at the form were the casual, unconscious type, inspired by the hasty versions generally found on public restroom walls next to scrawled phone numbers promising a “good time.” At some point, however, my ding-dong doodling escalated from the odd scribble into a sort of creative compulsion. I began to experiment with elaborate variations: actual rocket ships, with swollen thrusters and fins and tiny little smiling astronauts peering out from, yes, cockpits; World War II–era tanks and bombers; the Batmobile.
I was very careful to hide my creations. One day during study hall, however, a series of phallic Russian matryoshka dolls slipped out of my binder in full view of Stevie Lanier.
His mouth twisted into a lurid smirk.
“You’re quite the artist, Askew,” Stevie said. “A regular cocksman, as it were.”
My face grew hot. Knowing Stevie, by the afternoon my drawing would be seen by half the school. Boys I didn’t even know would point and snicker at me in the hallways. I’d be forever branded Dick Artist Askew.
I lunged for the drawing, but Stevie snatched it away.
“Give it back,” I snapped.
“Now, now,” Stevie said. “Calm down. Your secret’s safe with me, Askew. As a matter of fact, there’s something I’d like to show you.”
He tucked the drawing into his own binder and shifted in his chair so he could reach the shelf of reference books behind our table.
“Here,” he said.
He handed me the P volume and opened the front cover to reveal a full-color schlong over the phrase P IS FOR PENIS.
“Flip to the back,” he said.
There, I found another enormous, elaborately detailed member over the words P IS ALSO FOR PRICK.
“When did you do this?” I asked.
“I get plenty of time alone in here on the weekends,” Stevie said.
Of course he did. Stevie played no sports and refused to involve himself in any nonmandatory activities. I appeared to be the closest thing he had to a friend. His roommate was a loutish lacrosse player—a classic thug jock who was far less likely to befriend a guy like Stevie than dunk his head in a toilet. And anyway, it wasn’t like Stevie would have been all that interested in spending his free time in the fitness center with the lacrosse team, lifting weights and practicing stick skills. Instead, Stevie had whiled away the hours alone in the library, vandalizing the reference section.
“Here,” he said.
He handed me the A volume. In the front cover was a shapely if somewhat androgynous rear end, with another hairy thruster floating above it, poised to take the proverbial plunge. A IS FOR ASS, read the inscription below.
“I’ve been working my way through the alphabet,” Stevie said. “But I’m running out of ideas.”
Stevie didn’t even have to ask. Before long, I had all but taken over the project. It was just the sort of misdeed that could get me kicked out of school before my mother started selling blood plasma to pay down my tuition bill.
Stevie had the right idea, I thought, but he needed a little more vision. We could do much better than D IS
FOR DICK. I began with a full-color naval destroyer with a dozen pink “guns” peeking out from hairy turrets. Other similarly puerile metaphors weren’t difficult to come by. By the first day of exams, we’d defiled close to half the volumes of the encyclopedia.
As the days passed, however, I began to worry that the project wouldn’t be enough to achieve the goal I had in mind before the end of the semester. Hardly anyone ever looked at the World Book, after all, except for a research paper or a history report, and no one would be working on that sort of assignment until after the holidays. There was also the added complication of Stevie Lanier. Stevie thought we were just having a little fun. He talked about the dick-art encyclopedia sitting on the shelves for years to come, a private joke among the few students who stumbled upon it. He had no idea he’d tossed his lot in with the one kid in school who actually wanted rather urgently to get expelled. As resolute as I may have been, I didn’t want to take Stevie down with me. I had to make sure both that the project was discovered and that I would be held solely responsible for it.
With three days left before the holidays, I was working on the front cover of the F volume, sketching out a map of Florida with a thicker, hairier, more orbicular version of the panhandle and a circumcised peninsula while silently trying to imagine a more reliably effective way of disgracing myself. Maybe a big hairy johnson spray-painted onto the walls of the faculty room?
“Heads up, Askew,” said Stevie.
Mrs. Carswell, the new librarian, was making her rounds through the study hall tables. We hastily closed our volumes of the World Book and pretended to be working on math problems when she peered around the stacks. Mrs. Carswell smiled and waved and floated off to the next set of tables.
“How old do you think she is?” Stevie asked me.
I peered up to get a look at Mrs. Carswell. It was her first year at Macon. I knew nothing about her and didn’t have a clue how old she was. Like most of the women at the school, she was purposefully modest in her appearance. She was pretty, but her appearance seemed calculated to deflect rather than attract our attention. She dressed, well, like a librarian: knee-length skirts, buttoned-up blouses, a string of pearls, and so forth. I guessed she was older than Patricia, who was around thirty, but younger than my mother, who had just turned forty-three.
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