birthday boy

chapter 23

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Many of the most important things in my life seem to happen during the summer, when the bonds that prevent change become unstuck. It’s only when we step outside and into the plentiful sunlight of summer that the horizon finally looks unbarricaded enough to step forth toward it along paths yet unrealized.

That summer after our sophomore year, after The Dead Malls concert, after Tommy and Emma broke up, on the week of my birthday, the Goodspeeds had invited me on a week-long vacation to a beach house near Wilmington, North Carolina, with the extended Goodspeed family.

We boarded the plane. Tommy and I sat next to each other. I closed my eyes and braced myself as the plane began its run-up to the air, wondering how in the hell we humans thought it possible to defy nature and find a way to fly.

Tommy laughed at me. “What’s the matter, Jude-dude? Afraid of flying?”

Whenever my family went on vacation, we drove. We drove to Cape Cod, we drove to Maine, we drove to Virginia Beach. All of my extended family who might be visited were within a similar, drivable radius. I’d never been outside the United States, not to Europe, not to Mexico, not even Canada.

“I’ve never flown before,” I explained, and it felt like I was at the top of the ski slope all over again.

The beach house was rented. It was massive, with eight bedrooms, enough for me to have my own room and bed. Tommy’s grandparents, his parents, Uncle Travis with his daughter Maggie (mercifully, without her twin Madison, who was away with a boyfriend), and Uncle Tyler with his two young kids were all there. The place was on Wrightsville Beach, a long embrace of the Atlantic near Wilmington, N.C.

Each morning Tommy led me on a run along the beach. We ran barefoot, through the area where the waves left the sand darkened but did not gather, such that with every stride there was a spritz of water from our heels. Running in sand is a different experience than running on asphalt or sidewalk, especially for someone like me, for whom asphalt or sidewalk already felt so difficult. It was only a couple miles in that my shins and the soles of my feet ached in ways I did not know they could ache, and the morning Carolina sun started to oppress me.

I stopped, doubled over. Tommy turned around and slapped me on the back. He was bare-chested and in his little red shorts. “How do you do it?” I breathed.

“What do you mean, Jude-dude?” he said, stretching. The beach was only just starting to fill with people.

“Run! Like this! Especially after we just smoked weed. Goddamn, sand is tough!” I complained.

“Jude-dude, you are forgetting something.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

“You’re human.”

“What, and you’re, like, super-human?”

“No, no. I only remember what I am. I only remember that I am human, Jude-dude. For that is what we are, we are runners. I learned in one of my classes that humans, more than any other animal, are meant to run. Long-distance. Over a long distance, a human can travel farther with greater speed and greater efficiency than any other animal.”

“And I thought our greatest strength was opposable thumbs.”

“We have bipedalism. We have perspiration. Our foot arches and Achilles tendon. The real question is why? What was the evolutionary advantage of acquiring our running ability? Some think it was to outrun predators or to hunt things over long distances. Some think it was to race scavengers to meat. But I like to connect it to fire. They think that, maybe, at first we couldn’t create fire and could only procure it, and the only way was to steal it from a wildfire or something naturally occurring like that. So, what happened when you saw a lightning strike across the savannah? You’d run to it, you’d get there before the other tribe or before rain put out the fire. Then, maybe, you’d try and take it back to your cave, so you could keep it going indefinitely, as best you could, anyway. Can you imagine that, Jude? Homo erectus running across the plains bearing a torch of fire, like Prometheus? That’s us.”

“So, you’re saying I should pretend to be a caveman carrying fire?”

“No, I’m saying you are a caveman carrying fire.”

“Whatever,” I said. “Can we go back now?”

Every morning the Goodspeeds made coffee in a French press, a method that was unknown to me until then (grounds or K-cup were how my family did it). I found it a superior way to drink coffee, but in the end, the effect was the same: a kowtow to the power of caffeine.

We were at the table with Tommy’s grandfather and his father. The rest were all down at the beach already, except for Tommy’s cousin Maggie, who slept until noon every day. Tommy’s mother was in the living room knitting. She had taken up knitting since her memory troubles intensified. Mr. Goodspeed had found that the best way to limit the nuisance of her confusions was to stick her someplace comfy with some knitting needles and let her happily click away at scarf after scarf.

“How’s school going, boys?” Grandpa Goodspeed asked us.

Mr. Goodspeed snorted. “Yeah, Tommy? How is school going?”

“Biology is difficult and not my chosen field, Father, as I have told you many times,” Tommy said.

“Don’t gotta love the thing you do for money,” his father proselytized. “But you still gotta pass.”

“I will pass,” Tommy said. “I have no doubt of that, Father. Again, as I’ve told you many times.”

“It’s been alright,” I said, rescuing Tommy. “Nothing really inspires me.”

“Remind me, what is your major, again?” Grandpa Goodspeed asked me with a light smile. I always felt he liked me for some reason, like I was a curiosity to him, but a positive one, one to be investigated and brought into the fold.

“Business.”

“Why business?”

“Before I went to school, with the recession and everything, all anyone ever talked about were the majors that could actually get you a job. And I figure that any place that is going to be offering a job is probably a business, so a business major just about covers everything,” I said.

Mr. Goodspeed laughed and slapped his knee. “You might be right about that, right indeed.”

“Do you have plans for later, Tommy? I wanted to take you all out for crab cakes,” Mr. Goodspeed said. I didn’t know what plans we could have had besides doing exactly whatever he wanted us to do.

“Jude’s birthday today, wouldn’t you know?” Tommy offered. “So, I think we have plans for that.”

I made a face. I hated anyone making plans on account of my birthday. Tommy’s birthday plan involved drugs.

I have a theory about Tommy’s psychedelic drug use: Growing up in a life relatively free of ‘hardship,’ he imbued himself with artificial psychosomatic trauma by way of drug use, and from these experiences attempted to derive meaning from his life.

Was this the case for me? Perhaps, although what happened that night would have been disturbing enough without drugs.

We spent the day at the beach, bodysurfing, kicking around the soccer ball. I read on the Kindle my parents gifted me for my birthday before we left, which was the source of much ire from Tommy (“An affront to the smells, feels, and bendable spine of a good paperback.”)

We watched girls go by from behind our sunglasses as best we could without giving ourselves away as the rubber-necked creeps we were. Or, at least, we pretended to. I was much more interested in specifically watching Tommy’s cousin Maggie, who was hanging out with us in terms of proximity but not cordiality. It seemed a game to her to acknowledge our existence as little as possible. All she did each day at the beach was look at her phone, from all various positions and angles so as to not give herself a phone-shaped tan-line. As she did so, I noticed that she had become very hot, despite her lack of warmth.

Tommy wasn’t interested in girls at all, it seemed. While it had always been a matter of time before Emma finally had enough, once Tommy started something he could never give it up. He could never lose it or be less than victorious in retaining it. Emma leaving him had been the first big ‘loss’ of his life, not just literally the absence of her in his life, but in that it was the opposite of a ‘win.’ I initially thought that he had taken this surprisingly well, but quickly realized that he was simply in denial, and that he regarded this time without Emma as an intermediary period after which they would get back together, so assured was he of their status together.

Although, it must have been percolating somewhere in his subconscious and needed tempering in some way, because he was intent to explore every avenue we had for drug usage. We’d ride around on bikes, looking for out-of-the-way spots to smoke weed, like under a pier or by a drainage pond behind the beach house. He smuggled some vodka in a Smart Water bottle from home that we mixed with all our drinks. He bought a thirty-rack of Miller High Life at the gas station down the street with his fake ID, which we drank in his room after everyone had gone to bed, then smuggled the empty cans out to the recyclables.

This wasn’t enough for him, though, because we were on vacation and on that night especially, because it was my birthday. He didn’t have the hook-ups in Wilmington or Wrightsville Beach like he did when he was at school, so he turned to something we could get at the grocery store: dextromethorphan, better known as Robitussin.

I should have just said no. I don’t know why I did it, but when your best friend hands you something and says to drink it, it’s very easy (for me, at least) to forget that you don’t have to do exactly as they say. Perhaps I am simply a people pleaser, or I thought it would be rude to refuse on my birthday, as though it were the rejection of a gift. There was always something priest-like about Tommy when he offered me these things, as though the rejection of the call to adventure was a sin or an insult to the privilege of doing it. So, I drank the cough medicine, almost a whole bottle’s worth.

The timing of our ingestion wasn’t ideal. It was just before dinner at the crab cake place Mr. Goodspeed had taken us, and the first wave of euphoria had me more talkative than ever as we ate, and even had Maggie Goodspeed looking up at me from her phone.

Indeed, I was feeling myself for the first time in a while. Who knew that all it would take to fix my face was baking it in the sun day after day, killing the bacteria my body could not with UV rays? It wasn’t perfect, but it was as tanned and acne-free as it had been in a while.

“I’m just saying—I think Keaton is a bigger sex symbol than Fonda,” I said. Mrs. Goodspeed laughed.

“You can say that all you want, but you weren’t alive then, kid. You didn’t see Barbarella,” Grandpa Goodspeed said.

“Didn’t Fonda get into all that hippy-dippy stuff?” Uncle Travis complained.

“I might not have seen Barbarella, whatever the heck that was, but I have seen Something’s Gotta Give, she’s nude in that and wow, I mean, even clothed in that film, she is a fox,” I said.

Mrs. Goodspeed was laughing again. I always liked her. Even Mr. Goodspeed was smiling at her gaiety. I couldn’t understand why she married him.

“Ew, isn’t she, like, old in that?” Maggie protested.

“Did you know Town of Fonda, out east past Veddersburgh, is named after the same Fondas as those Jane Fonda is descended from?” Tommy added in. No one was in the mood for his local history, though, and it surprised me that that’s what made its way to the front of his brain as the drug took hold.

Later, back at the house, conversations continued until the adults, sunken with wine, began to yawn and head to bed at an embarrassingly early hour, and Tommy and I went upstairs to live out the rest of our experience plugged into headphones, listening to In Rainbows in his room. Not a minute in though, Maggie came knocking.

“I know you guys have beers up here. I saw them in the recycling, you dumbasses. I want in,” she said.

She sat on the bed while Tommy explained to her the biochemistry of dextromethorphan, the key ingredient in Robitussin (apparently, his poor grades in biology were not necessarily indicative of failing to pay attention):

“These NMDA receptors—they’re like, guardians of the gateway to the soul’s conduit to heaven, the glutamate pathway, and dextromethorphan blocks these, and suddenly the world dissolves, the real world and the ethereal can’t exist without each other. Serotonin’s released, sigma-1 receptors, and suddenly you dissociate, you’re untethered, on your own. Pointless, though, isn’t it? To affix technical terms and jargon to such feelings,” he said.

“I don’t get it. It gets you high?” Maggie asked, sipping her beer. She had no interest in joining us in any kind of drug endeavor. She didn’t even smoke weed.

“To say so would be reductive…” Tommy went on.

I closed my eyes and tried to affix myself to the feeling that Tommy was describing. It felt like I was wearing a halo and there was a particularly bright spot of light shining forever on my forehead, and I was seeing this all from just above the halo at the same time as being in it.

Before I knew it, I was in bed, alone, in my own room, my noise-cancelling Audio-Technica headphones on my ears, listening to The Dead Malls in total darkness.

The darkness became lighter in that way you can sense through your eyelids, or perhaps I couldn’t, but because I was both within my body and without it, I could see that someone had opened the door and let the soft light of the hallway pour in.

If sober, I might have popped up in a rush of adrenaline, but as I was, it felt more like an angel was descending upon me, and in a way there was, for when I opened my eyes, I saw Mrs. Goodspeed at the side of my bed. I took my headphones off.

“Mrs. Goodspeed?” I asked. She said something, a single word, a couple of times, and it took a moment for me to parse what she was saying.

“Jude?” she said as she stood by the bed. “Jude?”

I sat up against the headboard.

Mrs. Goodspeed was a very attractive woman. I always wondered how Mr. Goodspeed had received her attentions, as although he wasn’t bad looking (he was a greying, shaved sort of silverback type who managed to stay slim through a regimen of racquetball and swimming at the YMCA), he wasn’t a looker like she was—that is, until I remembered he was heir to a local grocery store fortune. She had long, dark, straight hair that was only just starting to go grey, which she allowed with grace and dignity, and there was a finesse to the way the wrinkles around her mouth and slate-blue eyes were forming, accentuating and outlining the youthful beauty that was still there. She was the subject of many of my youthful fantasies.

As she sat down on the edge of the bed, I saw the buttons on her pajama top had already been undone and the blessings of her breasts were tumbling out. I already had an erection, but it felt wrong and sad. Some fantasies were meant to stay fantastical. She put her hand on my leg, which did little to help things.

“Jude, baby boy, there you are you cutie,” she said. She untucked one of her breasts and brought the nipple to my mouth as if to nurse me.

“Mrs. Goodspeed!” I exclaimed and leapt from beneath the sheets and dismounted to the other side of the bed. My mind did a hundred-meter dash. I was in a very awkward position to explain if anyone awoke and investigated the situation, which was inevitable given she was speaking loudly and I had just caused a ruckus of my own, all with the door open.

“Oh! Honey, don’t be afraid, you’re my little Judey,” she said, getting on the bed and crawling across it toward me on all fours. I heard someone coming down the hallway.

I backed up and into the door to the bathroom that was shared between me and Tommy’s rooms. I turned, opened it, and entered as quietly as possible, locking it and turning on the light as I did so. I pressed my ear to the door, my erection making it difficult to achieve the proximity to do so. The footsteps grew louder until there was someone at the door.

“Kathy?” I heard Mr. Goodspeed say, his voice only slightly above a whisper, enough for me to hear. I could feel him look at the door to the bathroom. “What are you doing in here?! Jesus, your tits are out!”

I heard some muffled and confused statements from Mrs. Goodspeed I couldn’t quite make out.

“Let’s get you out of here before poor Jude comes out of the bathroom,” Mr. Goodspeed said. I heard them close the door to my room.

I turned, put my hands on the vanity, and looked at myself in the mirror. It took me a long time to decide whether what I had just experienced was a real event aggravated by my drug use or a straight-up hallucination or a dream or real proof of Mrs. Goodspeed’s declining cognition or some intermediate of all these possibilities. The only thing I knew for sure was that I was still violently high.

I went to the toilet, kneeled, and threw up.

The opposite door to the bathroom opened and Tommy entered.

“You okay, Jude-dude?” he said, sitting on the floor with his back to the wall. I didn’t respond.

“I’m sorry I did this to us. It’s necessary, though. When there’s nothing on the outside, you have to go inside. When the world around us doesn’t reflect the nuance and pain of the world at large, perhaps the world inside us might. And it’s there that we have to voyage to find the truth, the truth with a capital ‘T,’ really, to find empathy and the solace therein, you see?” he said.

“Couldn’t we just meditate instead?” I asked between heaves.

“This is a shortcut, like all the other shortcuts we’ve been privy to, Jude-dude. Plus, it’s fun, isn’t it?” He giggled, patting me on the back.

I didn’t see anything fun about it, but it was my birthday, and I was twenty years old and didn’t see the harm either.

The final night of the trip I had another encounter with a Goodspeed woman, if you could call her that, one that I had known for a while but never really considered, and who certainly never considered me: Maggie Goodspeed, aged 19.

I was up late in the downstairs sunroom reading Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections on my Kindle. Tommy had overdone it with our nightly drinking and was upstairs passed out. It was past midnight, and the rest of the family was sleeping as well.

I heard her come downstairs and retrieve her sandals, then she stood between the French doors of the sunroom with a beach towel over her shoulder. She was wearing a sundress over one of the many bikinis she had worn during the week. She seemed to think it was necessary to wear a different one every day.

“I’m going to the beach,” she announced.

“Uhm…now?” I said, looking up from my Kindle. “Isn’t it late and like…dark?”

“Yep, it is, but I’m bored, and I don’t care,” she said. She didn’t leave though. She just stood there.

“Isn’t it a little dangerous, then, for you to go by yourself?”

“I guess. So doesn’t that mean you have to come with me?”

“Oh, I don’t know…I was going to go to bed.”

“Okay, so when I go by myself and get lost or raped or drown, you’ll have to explain to the rest of the family how I told you I was going, but you didn’t come with me. So, I think you’d better come with me.”

“Fine, fine,” I said, getting up. My life was full of situations like this with women, where you could hear the whooshing of something going over my head like a 747.

We walked down to the end of the street where the beach entry was. It was a full moon, and the beach was illuminated in a pensive grey light, empty and silent in both directions, as it was past midnight and technically closed.

“If you could come back to Earth after you died as any animal, what would you be?” she asked me, and I remembered the same question was asked of me after prom in the hot tub. Why was this a standard question of getting to know someone now? What did it actually say about someone, what animal they would be? And what did I say?

“I guess a dog,” I said, reconsidering and changing my answer from my high school days, which seemed to satisfy her. “What about you?”

“A koala,” she answered quickly.

“Why?”

“They’re cute, and they get to just lay around all day and eat leaves.”

Inarguable. We were sitting in a soft sand dune. The night was still warm as the day had been brutally hot. She took off her sundress.

“Have you ever been skinny dipping?” she asked.

“Me?” I said, as though she were talking to someone else. “No.”

“Why not try it out?”

“Right now? I don’t know if I really feel like swimming. And there’s no lifeguard on duty.”

Maggie undid her bikini top and stood there, hands on hips, revealing the second pair of breasts I’d seen in person in the last few days, more than I’d seen in the past few years combined. “I guess you’ll have to come with me and make sure I don’t drown.”

Satisfied with my gaping stare, she then pulled down her bottoms and ran for the ocean. I got up and followed her with my shorts on. I stood in the shallows and watched her naked body disappear beneath the waves. She popped back up into the moonlight.

“Come in, you little bitch!” she shouted, a bit too loudly.

“I don’t want to get these shorts wet.”

“Duh, that’s why we’re skinny dipping. Take them off.”

I pulled my shorts and boxers down past my erection, which bounced down then popped back up. The threshold had been crossed. I went into the water and Maggie took my hand and pulled me close to her, and the ocean waves, warm like bathwater, scooped us up and poured us into a cocktail of salt, sex, and sea.

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