punch catcher
chapter 18
previous (off the road)
next (the face in the tree)
Our senior prom (we called it ‘ball’ for some reason) was a different proposition to our junior prom in terms of memorability. I remember a lot of the actual event of ball because it was riddled with inescapable shame, an emotion which for some reason buoys the most unwanted thoughts to the foreground of our consciousness.
The shame of that night of senior ball was rooted in a different, long-term shame that had grown steadily throughout my senior year. It had to do with the matter of where to attend college, the conclusion we would be doing so reached without question and without consideration of an alternative, nailed to the expectations of our parents and the astronomical loans on offer to everyone and anyone who needed one.
What I wish we knew was that the choice of college did not necessarily mean a definitive and final choice for an occupation and a career. How would that be possible, to know who we were and what we wanted to do when we were only seventeen? Yet every year, a new crop of privileged youths across America agonizes over a decision that they think will decide their fate, and we were no different.
As such, being the ‘smart’ kids—each one of our little group was in the top ten of our class, big fishes in our little pond—it felt like there were high expectations for us, and it would be a betrayal of our modest hometown if we didn’t make the most of it and do as well for ourselves as possible. In the wake of the financial recession of 2008 and the harsh realities that followed, this meant that it felt like you could go to school for only a few things without scoff and ridicule, most of which were included under a single umbrella:
S.T.E.M. (science, technology, engineering, and math).
“I feel like I’m getting into STEM so that I can tell people I’m getting into STEM,” Cynthia said to me one day, and I think that summed up the feelings of many. Anything else seemed to be greeted with—if not scorn—mild incredulity from teachers and peers, a slight smile that seemed to say, “Ah, another smart one who has decided to throw their life away.”
The shame I harbored was not that I did not want to go to school for STEM. I did well enough in those subjects, but I had no interest in them, no burning passion, nor did I really feel concerned about ‘making six figures,’ which was what everyone seemed to think was the ultimate achievement with regard to money and lifestyle.
What was shameful was that I wanted to go to school to be a writer.
Just as Tommy had confessed in his youthful and naïve way on Kinderhook Lake that he wanted to be a poet, I wanted nothing more than to also abandon all logic, reality, and practicality to shout from the window that I, Jude Harris, wanted to be a writer.
People who obsessively listen to music eventually want to make music. People who obsessively watch movies eventually want to make movies. And people like me, who obsessively read books, eventually want to write. It didn’t matter to me what I would write. I could have been a marketing writer, or a copywriter. I could have been a journalist. I could have been a ghostwriter. Most embarrassingly, I wanted to write novels.
In the aforementioned zeitgeist, none of these were hopeful prospects.
Luckily, my parents were wise, and either ignorant of or unbeholden to the zeitgeist. My father even encouraged me to go to community college, which seemed anathema to me and would have been a massive embarrassment, despite being good advice.
I compromised with myself and the expectations of those around me: I would go to school for the general, vague, and inclusive major of ‘business’ and attend a State University of New York (SUNY) school, so that whatever mistake I was making came with a smaller price tag.
Tommy’s father and the world at large seemed to have successfully hammered out of him the desire to ‘be a poet’ (whatever that really meant, in the professional sense). He continued to read his volumes of Keats, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Whitman, Dickinson, and the rest, but decided, somewhat arbitrarily—in my view—that he would go to school for biology, a subject neatly under the STEM umbrella.
I knew he must have had doubts, though, because he too chose a SUNY school. His father had desperate misgivings and grumblings about this and his own doubts about the parity of ‘state education,’ but he acquiesced, if only because he could afford to send Tommy there without taking out loans and would pay for his tuition up front. Tommy chose this school for little reason other than because it was in the same town as the private college of Hartwick, which was where Emma was going to study pre-law.
My choice of college was also related to, but not influenced by, my relationship with Cynthia.
Things were good between Cynthia and me. We were in love, in a high school way. We told each other we were in love, but when I remember the hopes and dreams I had at that time, I must have known we were not truly in love because the future I envisioned always had someone new in it, always saw me falling in love in some exotic place or under some exotic circumstance.
I have no doubt that she felt this way as well because, throughout the application process, neither of us brought forth any sort of plan to stay together, go to the same school, or expressed any trepidation at staying in touch if we did not.
I think the reason for this was that Cynthia and I were smart, modern kids who, despite enflamed teenage brains doing their best to sweep us away, managed to stay somewhat anchored to reality. We were the kind of kids who knew that one could not form the basis of their future on a significant other they met when they were sixteen, and that, in general, it took many iterations of romance as one changed and evolved to end up with someone who was a potential life partner, and by staying with each other we would only deny one another precious time spent on each iteration.
As our senior year ended, we went through the motions of the relationship, happy as ever, but there was this question of our future cresting to the surface, the answer to which we both knew but were too in love to fill the other in on.
That was the situation when we went to senior ball together, which was held at the Sir William Johnson Manor by the Mohawk River, not far from Tommy’s house.
We began to drift apart soon after arrival, a physical manifestation of the unspoken divide. At some point, I began dancing with other girls, and she began dancing with other guys, which wasn’t necessarily a problem—we had done so before—but then it came at the cost of dancing together at all, and eventually I noticed her standing on the margins of the dance floor, arms folded and glaring, Emma a comfort by her side.
I was mostly preoccupied with Tiana Rivera. I could never forget how she looked in her bikini in the hot tub after prom the year before, and—somehow—I found myself dancing with her not once but twice, the second time after a trip to get some punch and clandestinely tuck my boner up into my waistband as I had learned to do the year before.
Tiana seemed intent on detecting said boner’s presence, practically shoving herself into me. She caressed my head into the crook of her arm and brought my head down to hers to whisper a sentence that any high school boy would be glad to hear: “Damn, you got a big dick, don’t you, Jude?”
If I had been a somewhat more mature and lucid fellow, I would have realized that she continued to dance with me and perhaps made such a comment not because she was so interested in me or because of my size, but because she hoped to incite the wrath of a jealous ex-lover who, much like poor Cynthia, also happened to be glaring in our direction.
Not long after she had approximated the size of my penis, a hand grabbed my shoulder and spun me away from Tiana, bringing me face to face with the jealous ex-lover who was, of course, a massive football jock with a buzz-cut and a chinstrap of facial hair that seemed to connect his cranium to his face.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he demanded to know, his voice slightly slurred. Yes, the consumption of alcohol before senior ball was a common occurrence among the youths of Veddersburgh High School.
I also wanted to know: what the fuck was I doing? I was acting as if I too were under the influence of alcohol, even though I hadn’t drunk since post-prom the year before. I looked over at Cynthia again, and her glare had softened to concern.
“I’m dancing, how about you?” I said, looking back to him and smiling. A smile was not what this guy wanted to see.
“Leave us alone, John,” Tiana said. “I can dance with who I want.”
“But why dance with this guy? You leave me so you can dance with guys like this pussy? Aren’t you the guy with the Asian girlfriend, why don’t you go dance with her?” the jock guy said, getting closer to me. ‘Hey Ya’ by Outkast was playing, which was an unfortunate soundtrack to the incident, for no reason other than it being an upbeat and happy song that I quite enjoyed.
“I thought you guys were broken up?” Tiana said, and she could be forgiven for thinking so, but her words went unheard.
I was quite allergic to being called a pussy, because of insecurities revolving around my late arrival to puberty and my small body, and for that reason, I had an incorrect reaction to his questions: “Because she wants to dance with someone who isn’t a total dumbass meathead.”
Amidst him saying, “What the fuck did you just say?” he grabbed me by my shirt somewhere below my misguided and garish bow tie and began to drive me back, at which point the attention of the dance floor began to shift toward us, as well as that of the chaperones and the security guards, who moved to take swift action.
As was usually the case, no one moved faster than Tommy. He came from somewhere behind me and shoved the jock by the shoulder, causing him to let go of me and, as he regained his footing, cock back a fist which he threw clumsily in our direction, whether at me or Tommy, I wasn’t sure.
What happened next was that Tommy caught the punch. He sort of blocked it with his palm with a meaty slap and then closed his fingers around the fist and pushed back.
By that time the two officers assigned to the event had grabbed the guy from behind and two chaperones had gathered up me and Tommy.
Tiana was in tears, Emma was in tears, Cynthia was in tears. The rest of the kids on the floor were ooh-ing and ahh-ing and laughing, untraumatized, as accustomed as they were to the frequent fights and violence that happened in the cafeteria or hallways of Veddersburgh High School nearly every day.
“You’re getting breathalyzed, now,” one of the chaperones said to us. My heart was pounding, and I would have been crying as well if it weren’t for the slight modicum of ‘manhood’ that had grown within me. The breathalyzer test didn’t scare me, I of course hadn’t been drinking nor had I been the aggressor in the fight, only a victim. But I was scared to face Cynthia.
“You okay, Jude-dude? What the hell was that guy’s problem?” Tommy said, putting his hand on my back.
Here it was, this great thing about Tommy: no matter what transpired between us, no matter our fights, our insecurities, our competitions and our differences, we always had each other’s backs.
They breathalyzed me, then Tommy. Then Tommy again. And again. Each time he blew a .07.
“You’re out, out,” one of the chaperones told him. “Call your parents, get a ride, whatever you gotta do.”
“I’ll walk home,” he said. They were of course doubtful of this until he told them where he lived.
We met Cynthia and Emma in the little park outside the Manor by the river. They were sitting on a concrete bench beneath a vintage looking lamppost.
“What the HELL guys!” Emma exclaimed. She looked lovely, regal even, in a purple dress, her golden hair blown out. She looked older than us, or perhaps I only perceived her to be based upon her demeanor.
“What the hell, Tommy!” I said, eager to re-direct things. “You’ve been drinking?!”
Tommy looked at me as if stabbed in the chest. “Yeah, perhaps I snuck in a flask, big deal, it’s not like I’m slopping around on the floor. If it weren’t for me, perhaps right now you’d have a black eye, Jude-dude. You were the one acting as though you’d had a sip or two.”
“Tommy, are you drunk?” Emma asked, her physical shaking now evident in her voice. Cynthia and I stared at each other, and I knew in a moment the issues between us would be partitioned into a conversation of our own.
“Yes, because, if we all recall last year, there wasn’t a good time to be had until we drank, and so I decided to get the drinking in earlier, if I could, is that so wrong? If Jude hadn’t provoked a degenerate like that, no one would be wise to it, would they?” he asked rhetorically.
I thought about Tommy and his behavior that night, how we could have let this slip by us. I remembered how at junior prom the year before he had taken such umbrage with the concept of prom and was so miserly in attending, while this year he had been much more willing to revel, as if he had inured himself to the senior ball with alcohol.
But the fact that Tommy had taken it upon himself to do his best to hide his drinking and drunkenness belied the notion that he knew we would not approve. Emma did not.
“ARE YOU FREAKIN’ SERIOUS?!” Emma leapt up from the bench. Cynthia and I nodded to one another, and she got up to follow me on a walk as we left Tommy and Emma fighting behind us.
We walked along a concrete path that followed the park along the Mohawk River and was lit by more of the streetlamps. The sounds of the music of prom escaped from the Manor house across the lawn. I tried to grab her hand, but she rebuffed it.
“Why have you been acting like such a jerk tonight?” she asked.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It didn’t seem like you were super interested in dancing. It doesn’t seem like you’re super interested in anything with me, lately.”
She frowned. “I could say the same about you.”
We stopped walking and I turned to face her, and this time she let me grab her hand. “What are we going to do about college? Are we staying together? And more than that, I guess, like: why haven’t we talked about it? At all? Don’t most girlfriends beg their boyfriends for a solution to those questions?”
“I didn’t want to get in your way. I didn’t want you to make choices based on me. We both know that’s not right,” she said.
“You? Get in my way? I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m not like you. You’re smart and confident, you’ve got it all figured out. W.P.I, biology, I mean that is a future, while me—I’m just going for business at a SUNY so that people don’t yell at me and tell me I won’t have a life. If anything, I’d be getting in your way. I’m not sure I even want to leave Veddersburgh. In fact, I don’t. I wish we could stay here together.”
Cynthia softened in the wake of this but wrinkled her nose. “Why do you want to stay here?”
I shrugged, looking out across the night to the black waters of the Mohawk. “I don’t know. I didn’t have any friends until I moved here. When I moved here in middle school is when I found Tommy, then Dan and you and Emma and...Veddersburgh saved me, I guess. It’s my home, I’m scared to leave.”
I began to cry. She hugged me. “It will always be your home, Jude, no matter what. It will always be here.”
“It’s not about me getting in your way,’ I told her, wiping my face. ‘It’s about me holding you back. I don’t want to hold you back. But I will always love you.”
“I love you too,” she said.
We sat on another bench and talked some more, agreeing to break up, but not until we left for school, so as to ease the blow and trauma. The flurry of college promised to help sweep aside the remnants of our heartache, or so we thought, and it turned out to be mostly true, although, in my case, I spent a while accidentally calling other girls her name and wondering far too much as to what she was up to and texting her late at night.
Emma and Tommy caught up to us, hand in hand, apparently made up, or as made up as they ever got. We all walked to Tommy’s house, which was several blocks away and on the other side of one of the ‘bad’ parts of town, one of the areas you had to drive through if you were passing by, the area that gave Veddersburgh its reputation in the region.
On the way, we passed the halfway house at the corner of Lotus and Main, always bathed in the red and blue light of the Veddersburgh police. We passed Memorial Park, where twice last summer there had been instances of shots fired. We passed the Andersen’s convenience store that had recently been held up by a man with a box cutter.
We weren’t afraid, though, we never were. The actual rate of petty crime in Veddersburgh was low. How could we be afraid of someplace we knew?
And though shame had consumed me that night for other reasons, never once would I be ashamed of where I was from.
We graduated. I don’t remember crossing the stage. But I can’t forget what Tommy wrote in my yearbook, because it’s on my shelf, and I read it often. He wrote:
Jude –
dude with
the righteous attitude,
friend to me from beginning to end.
all this time spent, to and from class
on the pitch and in the pool, the park and the present.
now we go from this stasis
to the volatility of our future,
with only one constant which shall always remain:
the thread between us, pulled taut with camaraderie.
Good luck, see you soon and always –
the big T
When I read this, I always then turn to his senior photo, his golden hair flowing and his big smile chiseled above the dented jaw, beneath it a quote from a poem by William Cullen Bryant:
So live, that when thy summons comes to join the innumerable caravan…thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed by an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, like one who wraps the drapery of his couch about him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
Tommy was right. Our friendship would remain despite going to different colleges. But the distance it opened between us and the more intermittent nature of our interactions led to a whole new dynamic, and the ‘thread,’ as he called it, became slack and frayed, but never broken.
next (the face in the tree)
previous (off the road)