Joe College: A Novel

by Tom Perrotta

  “You mean the Lunch Monsters?”

  He nodded, casting another swift glance. in the direction of the kitchen.

  “Did something happen today?”

  I hesitated for a second or two, long enough to register how pale and tired he looked.

  “No,” I lied. “No hassles at all.”

  “Good.” It wasn’t until I heard the relief with which he uttered the word that I realized how upset he’d been. “I was worried sick. I was sure something had happened.”

  “Why?”

  “One of their trucks was parked across the street.”

  “Across the street from what?”

  “From our house,” he said. “Right in front of the Wetzels’.”

  “When?”

  “Just now. A few minutes ago. They drove off as soon as your mother and I turned into the driveway.”

  “Wow.” I tried to look puzzled instead of brightened. “That’s pretty weird.”

  “That’s the kind of crap these people pull.” He took his hand out of his pocket and crossed his arms on his chest, shaking his head in disbelief. “Can you imagine? Trying to intimidate people in their own homes?”

  I looked down at the rug, my mind flashing suddenly on the image of a baseball bat making contact with a Chihuahua. When I looked up, my father had uncrossed his arms and was leaning forward with both hands clasped behind his back. It made me nervous to have him looming over me like that.

  “You sure you don’t want to sit down?” I asked him.

  I was restless after supper. My afternoon nap had revived me, but not to the point where I felt clear-headed enough to start working on my George Eliot paper or even to tackle the last thirty pages of On the Road. What I needed was distraction, diversion, a cold beer, and someone to talk to. But I couldn’t think of anyone in the immediate vicinity I wanted to call, anyplace I wanted to go.

  Yale’s spring break was out of synch with those of other colleges—the big weeklong parties in Florida had already come and gone by the time our vacation began—so most of my high school friends were already back to the grind at Rutgers or Kean or Stockton State. Even if they’d been home, though, the sad fact of the matter was that we’d drifted apart in the past year or so in a way that had begun to seem irrevocable.

  Zeke, Woody, the Squidman, and Steve—the litany was popular among my friends at Yale—these were the guys I’d hung out with in high school, guys I’d smoked pot and drunk beer and gone to countless concerts with. We called ourselves the Teenage Diplomats, after a phrase from “Blinded by the Light,” and made drunken pledges on graduation night not to let college and adulthood get in the way of our friendships. Less than three years later, though, any one of them would have been shocked to get a call from me out of the blue on a Monday night. None of us would have liked to admit it, but I had become for them—as each of them had become for me—a voice out of the past, a guy they used to know.

  Woody and Steve were at Rutgers, pledged to the same frat whose name I could never remember—Alpha Kappa Gamma, Gamma Kappa Alpha, Gabba Gabba Hey, it was all the same to me—and excelling at their respective majors (accounting for Steve, food science for Woody) while getting shit-faced three or four times a week and scoring with the occasional freshman girl too drunk to judge them on their merits. Zeke and the Squidman were living at home, Zeke half-heartedly attending Kean while spending the bulk of his time pumping iron at the gym where his on-and-off fiancée, Suzy, taught aerobics. Meanwhile, the Squidman had fallen into a dispiriting rut, loading trucks part-time for Jersey Express, delivering pizzas in the evenings, and spending his nights at the bar in Darwin Lanes, in the company of hard-core alkies and sad old guys in bowling shirts.

  True to our pledge, the Diplomats had managed to stay pretty close through our freshman year of college and reached what in retrospect appeared to be the pinnacle of our togetherness the summer after that, when all five of us played softball for the Stay-A-While Tigers, a team affiliated with a bar the Squidman had become a regular at while flunking out of his first semester at Union County College. Most of the teams in our league decked themselves out in double-knit uniforms closely modeled on the colors worn by their professional namesakes—the Chem-Lawn Mets, for example, and Frank’s Wholesale Seafood Cardinals—but we just wore sweatpants and T-shirts bearing the two-part motto of our sponsor, Stay-A-While … THEN GET THE HELL OUT!, the first part set in tasteful cursive on the front, the second part printed in huge block letters on the back. Despite our humble attire, we made it all the way to the league finals, where we got our butts whupped by the Lemon Tree Transport Padres, a team of trash-talking school-bus drivers who slid into second with their sharpened cleats aimed at your shins.

  During the spring of our sophomore year, the Squidman fell into a bitter argument with the owner of the Stay-A-While, a wide-ranging dispute that began with a disagreement over whether he had, in fact, ordered a bag of peanuts and ended with “you and your asshole friends” being barred from the Tigers the following summer. Even without that particular setback, though, a kind of entropy seemed to have taken hold of the group. Steve and Woody rented a place in Manasquan with some of their frat buddies. Zeke and Suzy announced their second re-engagement, insisting that this time they were serious. That left the Squidman and me to carry on the tradition, or let it expire quietly.

  Despite the fact that we only lived a few minutes apart, the Squidman and I managed to go a full month after I returned from college without even running into each other. When we finally did—I was in the driveway. one Saturday morning, hosing down the Roach Coach; he was passing by in his rustbomb Dodge Dart—we greeted each other effusively, trading solemn promises to get together as soon as possible, promises we knew were lies even as we uttered them.

  “Call me,” he said. “I’m around.”

  “Sure. Or you call me.”

  “Whichever,” agreed the Squidman. “Doesn’t matter.”

  Our wariness wasn’t all that surprising. The Squidman and I were an unlikely pair, and the most tenuously connected members of the entire group. Where the other four of us had grown up together in Darwin and knew each other from kindergarten, Cub Scouts, and Little League, the Squidman—his real name was Paul Skidarsky, his original nickname of “Skid” somehow evolving into “Squid” and finally into “the Squidman”—had only moved into town in eighth grade, and didn’t attach himself to our group until midway through our junior year in high school, when he and Zeke took Auto Shop class together and discovered that they both had a lot more fun messing around with engines when they were stoned.

  Given all the time we’d spent in each other’s company since then, I still didn’t know him very well. For reasons that were unclear to me, he’d been raised by his grandmother and didn’t talk much about his parents. He liked AC/DC and Molly Hatchet, bands the rest of us despised, but never complained when we dragged him to concerts by Yes and Genesis, or even Renaissance. (Our moment of greatest intimacy had come during a Richie Black-more’s Rainbow show at the Capitol Theater, when he barfed on my sneakers and promptly fell asleep with his head on my shoulder, where it remained through three raucous encores.) He thought it was okay to call black people “niggers” and seemed annoyed when Steve and I tried to convince him that it wasn’t, though he finally agreed not to use the word in our presence. He never talked much, especially if the rest of us were discussing books—we were big fans of The Lord of the Rings and anything by Kurt Vonnegut—or current events, and his silences had grown longer as the rest of us got more and more absorbed in our college lives. Still, you never got the feeling that he felt excluded. He just seemed happy to have us all back in one place again.

  In the end, we spent a grand total of one night together that whole summer, and even that was an accident. Woody and Steve had invited us down the shore for a weekend in late July—there were rumors of wild parties, sorority sisters in microscopic bikinis—but when I climbed into the Squidman’s car that Friday night, he co
nfessed that he’d lost the paper with the phone number and directions to the beach house. We tried calling Woody and Steve’s parents, but no one was at home in either place. After toying with the idea of driving down anyway and trying to locate them through trial and error—the Squidman was pretty sure they lived on a street with a name like Lighthouse or Seagull or something like that—we finally gave up and decided to stay in town until Saturday morning.

  “At least we can fire up a doober,” he said by way of consolation, producing a fat joint from behind his ear with a magicianlike flourish.

  It wasn’t good pot; the buzz I got from it was heavy and vaguely alarming, with an edge of paranoia aggravated by the Judas Priest tape we were shouting over. We smoked the joint down to nothing, driving up and down the familiar empty streets, then stopped at the bowling alley for a couple of beers, making awkward stabs at conversation over the background thunder of exploding pins.

  “How’s it going with the lunch truck?” he asked, stroking the half-assed mustache he’d been cultivating for the past year or so. Other than that, his appearance hadn’t changed much since high school. He still had the same limp hair parted in the middle, still wore the same flannel shirts with the sleeves cut off and the untied work boots that had been his uniform at Harding. I usually got pissed off when my friends mocked me for going preppy on them, but sitting next to the Squidman in my jeans and Hawaiian shirt and penny loafers, I understood why they might think so.

  “Not bad. Kinda sucks getting up at four in the morning, though.”

  “There’s a truck that comes by the loading dock,” he said. “Coffee tastes like shit.”

  “Our coffee’s not so bad until about ten o’clock. After that it’s a little iffy.”

  A panicky feeling came over me just then, like I’d forgotten to do something important but couldn’t remember what it was.

  “Fuck,” he said. “I wish I hadn’t lost those directions. I can’t remember the last time I went to a party.”

  I closed my eyes for a few seconds, trying to get everything to slow down so I could think a little.

  “Did you get a weird buzz off that pot?” I asked.

  The Squidman ignored my question. He looked me over for a few seconds, like he was trying to figure out if he could trust me.

  “You wanna go to Cousin Butchie’s?” he asked. “I bet Jenny’s dancing tonight.”

  Cousin Butchie’s looked like a regular neighborhood bar, except for the fact its only neighbors were a few rundown houses on one side and the Bayway Refinery on the other, a sprawling, mysterious facility fenced in and lit up like a maximum-security prison. Every time I saw the storage tanks, dozens of them laid out in neat rows like a suburban development, I couldn’t help remembering the massive explosion that had ripped through the refinery when I was a kid. Even eight miles away in Darwin, the sky had turned a bright blazing orange, and people came spilling out of their houses in pajamas and robes, pointing heavenward and wondering out loud if the Russians had started World War III.

  Despite the universally glowing reports I’d gotten from my friends, it struck me as soon as I coughed up the three-dollar cover and stepped inside that Cousin Butchie’s wasn’t a place you came to have fun. There was a charge in the air, an aura of bottled-up tension and impending violence; with each step I took I felt myself becoming younger and younger, a little boy wandering into a circle of embarrassed and angry men. They were working men, mostly, guys in dusty jeans and steel-toed boots who probably bought their coffee off a truck, clutching beer bottles and staring at a sullen Puerto Rican girl in moccasin-style go-go boots and a feathered headdress who was gyrating to that song about how “they took the whole Cherokee nation, and put us on this reservation.”

  The Squidman and I claimed a pair of stools and ordered expensive beers. The bar was circular, and I found myself struggling not to make eye contact with the man directly across from me. He was about my father’s age and I had him pegged for a salesman of some sort, a chubby, exhausted-looking guy in a rumpled gray suit with an overstuffed three-ring binder resting on the bar next to his bottle of Bud. The stools on either side of him were empty, and I couldn’t help wondering what would drive somebody like him to a place like this at ten o’clock on a Friday night. His stardiously blank expression only changed once the entire time we were there, after a black dancer wearing a leopard-print G-string squatted right in front of him and shook her ass in his face for a long time. When she finally stopped, he looked like a different man, his eyes bulging and his mouth hanging open, his whole face shining with a look of awestruck gratitude. He took a bill out of his wallet and waved it back and forth over his head until the dancer took pity on him and did it again.

  There were five girls trading off in a round robin, dancing for a song or two, then making way for the next. Each one had her own meager costume and matching style of music. Besides the Puerto Rican Cherokee and the black woman, who had a kind of Sheena thing going (her signature tune was Jethro Tull’s “Bungle in the Jungle”), there was a voluptuous California girl (“Surfin’ USA”), and a petite Asian woman in a waitress uniform (“Brass in Pockets,” followed, for some reason, by Aretha Franklin’s “Respect”), and finally Jenny, who came bounding out to “Sugar, Sugar” by the Archies in an honest-to-goodness Harding High cheerleader outfit, complete with saddle shoes and green-and-gold pom-poms.

  It was a surreal moment, made even stranger by the fact that I didn’t recognize her right away. Part of it was that she’d dyed her hair black since I’d last seen her and was wearing it in pigtails, but mostly it was just the sheer incongruity of the costume. If they’d given out an award for the girl least likely to be mistaken for a cheerleader at Harding, Jenny would have been a shoe-in. She’d always been perversely proud of her identity as the school slut and was probably as scornful of the perky and cliquish cheerleaders as they would have been of her.

  Even if you hadn’t been her classmate, though, it wouldn’t have taken you long to figure out that Jenny hadn’t logged a lot of hours at pep rallies, or in drama class, for that matter. Her impression of a cheerleader was fairly minimal. It basically consisted of shoving the pom-poms in one direction and jutting her hips in the other, and then reversing the procedure, all the while making absurdly lewd faces at the audience. When this got old she did a few jumping jacks and then gave up on the pom-poms altogether, tossing them over her shoulder to a wiry bouncer with a slicked-back Sha Na Na haircut whose job it was to collect the discarded items before they fell into the hands of the paying customers.

  The next segment of her routine played off the illusion—given the skimpiness of the G-string, it was a fairly convincing one—that she wasn’t wearing anything under her short pleated skirt. She skipped a quick circuit around the elevated walkway, flipping up her skirt every couple of steps to give the viewers a good peek at what was underneath. The Squidman, who was normally pretty shy around girls, clutched my arm as she approached and let out a roar of delight when she gave us the obligatory eyeful.

  “All right!” he bellowed, pumping both fists in the air. “Woo-hoo!”

  Pleased by his enthusiasm, Jenny skipped back in front of us and gave a brief encore performance for our benefit, adding a couple of well-rehearsed bumps and grinds to the mix. The way the walkway was rigged up, my eyes were level with her knees, so I had to tilt my head at an uncomfortable angle to look at her face. I wondered for a second if she might recognize me, but she just kept staring at nothing, her eyes glittery and hollow, as she ran her hands slowly up her thighs and over her breasts.

  She stripped before the next circuit, gathering the sweater over her navel and lowering it a couple of times before pulling it off completely. Wriggling out of the skirt with a similar lack of ceremony, she kicked it through the air to the bouncer, and then, for the first time since she’d made her entrance, really started to dance, turning in slow circles so that everyone could appreciate her small upturned breasts, bare except for the nipple-concea
ling pasties required by state law, and the shapely contours of her ass.

  I had been mildly troubled by the other dancers, embarrassed and amused by the spectacle of their near-nudity at the same time that I was amused by the goofy theater of it, but with Jenny these mixed feelings intensified to a different level of magnitude. I was riveted by the sight of her, but also a little sickened, like I was looking at something I shouldn’t have been allowed to see. My face burned as I watched her make her way slowly around the platform, pausing for a few seconds in front of each audience member so he could have a chance if he wished to reach up and tuck some money into her G-string.

  “Woo-hoo!” the Squidman was screaming beside me. “Shake those titties!”

  She was on the other side of the bar at the time, a few stools down from the salesman, but she turned and did as he’d requested, raising her arms and arching her back to give her breasts more forward thrust. That was when our eyes met. I felt the shock of recognition when it happened, saw the momentary flicker of startled displeasure pass across her face before she turned away from the Squidman and me, and got back down to business.

  Her reaction caught me off guard. I’d gotten the impression that lots of our high school classmates had been coming to see her dance—the Squidman claimed to have caught her act a half-dozen times—so it wasn’t like she objected in principle to being ogled by people she’d grown up with. And it wasn’t like I was a special friend or enemy of hers, either. I’d barely exchanged a word with her in high school—she had dropped out in the middle of junior year, after getting pregnant by one of the Coletti brothers, all three of whom had allegedly taken turns with her in their backyard toolshed—and had hardly given her a passing thought since the day I’d left for college.

  The last time Jenny and I had had anything to do with each other was way back in the summer between seventh and eighth grade, when we’d been part of the same big group of kids who hung out at the town-sponsored recreation center at the Little League. Even then she was way beyond me, letting high school boys get her stoned and take her out to the woods, but sometimes during the day, we’d kill time playing nok hockey or ping-pong, Jenny holding a cigarette in one hand and a paddle in the other, a box of Marlboros tucked inside her tube top. She never talked much or bothered to laugh at my jokes, but she didn’t seem to mind having me around, either.