Joe College: A Novel

by Tom Perrotta

  I didn’t see him again until the summer after my freshman year in college, when I bumped into both Barnhouses at the Stay-A-While. Mark waved at me from across the bar and beckoned me over like we were old friends.

  “Hey,” he said. “Aren’t you the guy who gouged my eye?”

  “You bit my leg,” I reminded him. “I’ve still got the teethmarks to prove it.”

  He shook his head. He’d put on a lot of weight and gotten glasses in the year since our fight.

  “I’m surprised I didn’t give you rabies,” he said with a laugh.

  Ronnie asked me what I was drinking. He reached into his pocket with his mangled right hand—it looked rudimentary but still functional, a little like a miniature catcher’s mitt—and slapped a wad of crumpled bills on the bar.

  “This one’s on us,” he told me.

  I was thinking about the Barnhouses that morning as I approached the construction site, my mood swinging wildly between bravado and terror. I was thinking that I was a basically lucky person, that bad situations had a way of working out in my favor, and I was thinking how glad I was that I’d decided to defend myself back then, how much better it was to walk around with a rock in your hand than to cower in your room until it was safe to go back outside. But then the terror kicked in, and I was hearing Barnhouse’s voice in my head, telling me I was a dead man, and sounding even more convincing than he had the first time. By that point, though, there wasn’t anything I could do about it, because I was already through the gate and inside the site, bouncing over the dirt toward a bunch of guys in hard hats and muddy boots who were busy forming a ragged line in honor of my arrival.

  i’m not even here

  Whether out of courtesy or calculation, the Lunch Monsters waited until I had closed up shop and was heading out of the site to spring their trap. In an elegantly choreographed example of what military documentaries called “a pincer movement,” two of their jacked-up monster trucks—one emblazoned with the crude Frankenstein head I’d seen before, the other with an equally primitive rendition of Count Dracula—converged on the front gate from opposite directions, sealing off my exit. I stopped about twenty yards away and watched as four musclemen spilled out of the cabs and began moving toward me without haste or hesitation across the flat dirt expanse of the parking lot, the emptiness of which was relieved only by the gooseneck light poles that had been cemented into the ground at regular intervals. Given the numerical mismatch, I was relieved to notice that only one member of this contingent, the kid whose dental health I’d threatened, was armed with a baseball bat.

  I couldn’t say I was caught off-guard. A jittery air of anticipation had hung over the construction site that afternoon as I exchanged money and small talk with my customers, whose number had shrunk considerably since the previous week. A couple of guys insisted on shaking my hand and made cryptic remarks suggesting that they didn’t expect to be seeing me again. The young welder I’d gotten friendly with, the one who’d gone camping with his girlfriend over the weekend, seemed particularly concerned for my safety. He was off by himself as usual, perched on the hitch of a spare generator, eating from a single-serving can of ravioli and watching anxiously as I closed up the truck.

  “Yo chief,” he called out.

  I looked up just in time to see a yellow hard hat spinning through the air like a misshapen frisbee. I snagged it with one hand, the brim biting into my palm. Along the back was a piece of duct tape with the word “MURPH” written on it in shaky block letters.

  “Who’s Murph?” I asked, impressed by the hat’s no-nonsense protective heft, the illusion it provided that you could tap dance safely through a downpour of hammers, wrenches, and metal beams.

  “He fell off a scaffold,” the welder told me. “He won’t be needing it anymore.”

  I pressed Murph’s hat more firmly down on my skull, but otherwise made no move as the Lunch Monsters approached the Roach Coach, the kid with the bat leading the procession. He was wearing a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves and collar ripped off, the better to display his meaty biceps and thigh-sized neck. One of the guys behind him was even more pumped than he was, a blond giant with the overcooked, slightly radioactive complexion you could only acquire at a tanning salon. The other two were bodybuilders as well, but they were slipping past their prime, going a bit thick in the middle and thin on top.

  I should have been terrified but instead a strange calm came over me, and I found myself thinking, for some reason, of Christmas dinner my freshman year at Yale. My roommates and I had dressed in jackets and ties, as we’d been instructed, and had arrived at Commons to find it transformed by ice sculptures and wreaths made of fresh spruce branches studded with holly berries and pine cones. After being serenaded by a series of singing groups, we were treated to the main spectacle of the evening, a medieval procession in which a whole roast pig—eyes and snout intact, a bright red apple stuffed ignominiously into its mouth—was paraded through the hall like Cleopatra on a wooden bier, held aloft by two grim-looking chefs in puffy hats and preceded by a team of student carolers and bell ringers. I stood at attention along with everyone else, my mouth hanging open in disbelief, feeling like I’d gotten lost a long way from home.

  This isn’t my life, I remembered thinking. A similar sense of unreality washed over me as the goon with the little head started tapping on the driver’s side window of the Roach Coach with the handle of the baseball bat, yelling for me to get the fuck out. This isn’t my life, I told myself again. I’m not even here.

  “Get out!” the kid was screaming, his voice muffled by my rolled-up window. “Get the fuck out!”

  There must have been something I’d been trying to prove by picking a fight with these guys, but I could no longer remember what it was, or who I was trying to prove it to. I just sat there in the locked cab of the truck with my hands clamped around the steering wheel, smiling stupidly and shaking my head no, as if he were one of those volunteer firemen who sometimes knock on your window at busy intersections on Saturday afternoon, hoping to collect a donation.

  “Fucking asshole!” He pressed his face right up against my window, so close his breath left an oval of fog on the glass. My assailant’s name, I later discovered, was Junior, but even if I hadn’t come across this bit of information, I would have known right away that he was Vito Meatballs’ son, the kid without much going for him upstairs. There was something about his face that made you think immediately of his father, even if the impressions they left with you were entirely different. Where Vito Senior seemed avuncular and basically good-hearted, tired in a seen-it-all sort of way, Junior just looked puzzled and mean, like he suspected you were going to put one over on him sooner or later and wanted to wring your neck before you got a chance to do it.

  I didn’t snap out of my daze until he started whaling on the truck. He seemed to be retreating in frustration at that point, backpedaling away from me in the direction of his buddies, but he stopped suddenly near my front tire, shifting from a right-handed batting stance to a left-handed one, and took a leisurely swing at my headlight, which exploded in a spray of sparkling fragments. Switching back to his right-handed stance, he wandered back to my door, smiling like a genius in the grip of a new idea.

  “How you like that?” he yelled, bending his knees and raising the bat like he was posing for a baseball card. The proximity of his massive arm to his chin made his head seem even smaller than it had before. “How you like that, Big Man?”

  This time he swung for the fences, the meat of the bat connecting with the metal of my door. It was a savage collision, and several things happened as a result, more or less simultaneously. An alarming thud resounded through the cab, the whump of buckling metal, and I imagined my father at home, doubling over and clutching at his stomach, as though he and the truck were one. I unlocked the door and reached for the handle—I did this on reflex, not really thinking about what I meant to do next—when I realized that my assailant had just screamed and dropped the bat,
the way you do when you hit something wrong on a chilly day, the wood shivering your arms and turning your hands to jelly. I followed through with the motion I’d begun—“Hey!” I was yelling. “Not the truck!”—flinging open the door just as Junior bent down to retrieve the bat. The whole sequence couldn’t have worked better if we’d rehearsed it: his hands were just inches away from regaining control of his weapon when the bottom of my door caught him square in the forehead, knocking him onto his butt. Before his thugs could make a move to assist him, I was out of the truck, standing over him with the bat in my hands.

  I raised the Louisville Slugger like the Sword of Damocles and smiled down upon my enemy sprawled in the dirt. He was ignoring me, looking more pensive than frightened as he massaged the sore spot on his furrowed brow, and for some reason this bothered me.

  “This is a really nice bat,” I told him, unable to suppress a burst of nervous laughter. “Do you mind if I keep it for a while?”

  I should have known better than to taunt him like that, but I couldn’t help myself; it was too exhilarating to suddenly have the upper hand, to have won it so unexpectedly in the teeth of such lousy odds. But the feeling only lasted a few seconds, just long enough to mark off the interval between the giddy surprise of knocking him down and the uncomfortable realization that there was no way in hell I was going to hit him or anyone else with a baseball bat, even after what he’d done to my father’s truck—not to mention Tito and the poor Chihuahua—and what he undoubtedly would have done to me if the situation had been reversed.

  “Did I mention that I was home-run champ of my Little League?” This wasn’t precisely true—I’d always been a better fielder than hitter, as a matter of fact—but it hardly seemed like the moment to be a stickler for the historical record. It was starting to get pretty awkward out there, the two of us frozen like we were posing for a picture, the other three musclemen looking on, pondering their options. “I’m told I have a very natural swing. The trick is knowing that your power comes from your legs and hips, not your arms.”

  “You fucking hit me you’re dead,” he muttered, rallying a little. “My boys’ll eat you for lunch.”

  He was right, of course, but only in theory. In practice, his boys were about ten yards away, and I had a feeling that even with a three-to-one advantage, they might be a little reluctant to get much closer.

  “You ever drop a pumpkin out a window?” I took a lazy practice swing, the fat end of the bat passing close enough to his face that he must have felt the breeze, but he didn’t even flinch. “My friends and I used to do that a lot when we were growing up. It’s incredible. The thing just splatters when it hits the ground, just splits right open. All the seeds and pulp and that weird stringy shit come flying out. Kind of like a piñata. You ever go to a party where they had a piñata?”

  I swung harder, stepping into an imaginary fastball. The kid was cringing now, holding his hands up in front of his face like a boxer on the ropes. I couldn’t help noticing the distinctive gold-and-silver band of a Rolex on his wrist and found myself thinking for some reason of the horsewoman who’d lost hers in the punchbowl. The kid spoke to me through the gap between his forearms. He sounded a bit worried.

  “Do you know who my father is?”

  “He seems like a nice man.” I took another cut, wondering if it could really be true, as Hank Yamashita had once informed me, that Rolexes could cost as much as five thousand dollars. “Some piñatas you hit once, they break right open. Others you got to beat the shit out of to get one lousy piece of candy.”

  “You shouldn’t fuck with my family,” he warned me. “I’m telling you this for your own good.”

  “Thanks.” I swung again, and this time he felt it necessary to duck out of the way “I appreciate your looking out for me.”

  I sensed movement to my right—the goons were closing in slowly—and my concentration faltered. I glanced over my shoulder in the direction of the unfinished supermarket, wondering why none of the construction workers were coming to my assistance. I could see a cluster of them gathered in front of the Port-a-Johns, watching the action from a distance of maybe a hundred yards, which seemed impossibly far away from my perspective. If worse came to worst, I figured I could just drop the bat and run like hell—I doubted any of the weightlifters could catch me—but that would mean leaving the truck behind, something I didn’t want to do unless I absolutely had to. Besides, I wasn’t sure if it made more sense to run toward the Port-a-Johns and throw myself on the mercy of the spectators or to make a break for the street, which happened to be a lot closer. The Lunch Monsters took note of my confusion.

  “Get up, Junior,” the blond giant called out, in a calm and confident voice. “He’s not gonna hit you.”

  Junior dropped his guard for a second and looked up at me with a hopeful expression, like a kid asking for permission. I made the mistake of turning away from him and addressing his comrades, who by that point had crept up to within a few feet of the truck.

  “Just fucking try me,” I said.

  The words were barely out of my mouth when I heard a sudden movement and felt Junior’s hand on my ankle, the fingers wrapping around the top of my work boot. I tried to hop away—he was lying on his stomach, his arm extended as far as it could go—but precarious as it was, his grip was tenacious. He wriggled forward a bit, raising his left hand to take a swipe at my other leg, his face scrunched and grimacing.

  “Yeah!” someone screamed. “Get ’im, Junior!”

  You couldn’t really say I swung at him. I just sort of let the bat fall in a gentle arc in front of me, a motion not so different from the one you might use if you were cutting grass with a scythe. It was an easy, almost graceful gesture; gravity did all the work. Even so, the impact was more dramatic than I’d expected: the bat bounced off Junior’s head like it had just come in contact with a fully inflated tire. At approximately the same instant, he let go of my foot and began screaming and rolling around on the ground like his clothes were on fire. I watched him for a few seconds, trying to gauge the seriousness of his injury, one part of me wanting to get down on my knees and apologize, and another part wanting to hit him again, now that I realized it wasn’t as hard to do as I’d thought. In the end, though, I decided to simply act as though I’d proven a point.

  “See?” I told his buddies, standing over Junior like a gladiator. “What did I tell you?”

  None of them responded. At some point in the past few seconds, they had turned away from the spectacle of Junior’s anguish and shifted their attention to the front gate. Their broad backs were blocking my view, so I had to step around Junior—he was calmer now, moaning and cursing at a civilized volume rather than wailing like a wounded animal—to see what was going on. A new lunch truck had just arrived on the scene—it was parked in the middle of the street, its front door flung wide open. I identified it as the Chuck Wagon at almost the same moment I caught my first glimpse of the stocky guy in a green sweatshirt squeezing with some difficulty between the front bumpers of the Frankenstein and Dracula trucks.

  Chuckie walked slowly across the dirt lot, his arms hanging loosely at his sides, grinning like he was late for his own party. It was a drab March afternoon, one of those frustrating days when you keep thinking the sun’s about to break through, but it never does. The whole world felt flat and dull beneath a low ceiling of clouds. Even the diamond-patterned silver box on the Roach Coach had surrendered its usual luster, mirroring instead the gray monotony of the sky. I think that’s why the gun in Chuckie’s hand seemed so conspicuous. I could have sworn it was glowing, that his little pistol was the only bright and shiny thing for miles around.

  “Is there a problem here?” he inquired.

  The Lunch Monsters respectfully assured him that there was not. In fact, one of the older guys reported, they were about to be getting on their way, just as soon as Junior was ready to get up.

  “I think he’s ready,” said Chuckie.

  Junior needed a litt
le help getting to his feet, but he actually looked pretty good for someone who’d just gotten beaned by a truck door and a baseball bat in quick succession. At least there was no blood or anything. He rubbed the bump on his forehead and looked around with the slack-jawed bewilderment I often saw on the faces of Yalies who’d nodded off in the library.

  “My father’s not gonna like this,” he told me.

  “Mine’s not gonna be too crazy about it either,” I assured him.

  dust in the wind

  The first couple of days after his operation, my father had greeted me the minute I walked into the house, peppering me with questions about the day’s business. Toward the end of the week, though, his interest had begun to flag, and I’d come home to find him sacked out on the living room couch, exactly the way he was that Monday afternoon—flat on his back, his mouth wide open to the ceiling. He wasn’t snoring, exactly, but he was making a weird guttural noise, like a beginning reader sounding out the letter K.

  “Kuh … Kuh … Kuh,” he rasped, releasing a dreamy, doglike whimper every third or fourth breath. He looked relaxed and innocent, like a man who’d finally found his place in the world.

  I left the money and paperwork on the kitchen table and tiptoed upstairs to the bathroom, locking the door behind me and turning on the shower full blast. My parents had recently installed one of those high-tech massaging showerheads. It featured a variety of settings, from a soft spritzer-bottle mist to pulsing bursts of pressurized pellets that might have been shot out of a firehose. I twisted my way through the dial several times that afternoon, soaping in the mist, rinsing in the pellets, soaping in the pellets, rinsing in the mist. If the hot water hadn’t given out, I might’ve stayed there for hours, shrouded by the steam cloud and the pea-green plastic curtain, trying to scrub away the fear with a washcloth.