the legacy of parade day
chapter 21
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That was the last time Tommy visited me at college. As freshman year progressed, it became clear that regular visits from high school friends were not exactly common (they implied an inability to escape the past or move forward), nor convenient (you had to be a good host, and that could get in the way of partying). In my case, visits from home were perhaps even unhealthy as I tried to make my way through the college world and forge my own identity, which I increasingly found was still tied to the Emma-Tommy axis.
My grades were good, although I remained uninspired by ‘business’ as a major, yet still couldn’t make up the courage to switch to anything more creative. My face remained painful and bumpy, although my parents had finally sanctioned trips to the dermatologist, and the beginnings of an end to that issue were maybe in sight. My spending habits re: marijuana and alcohol necessitated that I work at The Big T every chance I got when I came home, still in the meat department, grinding beef, putting out frozen hamburgers, turkeys, packaging chicken, unloading cases of hot dogs. The summer after freshman year was one of avoiding Cynthia, playing video games with Danveer, swimming at the country club pool while Emma lifeguarded, working at The Big T, and running with Big T, who still busted my ass with every workout, and who still insisted on ending all our runs with smoking sessions in the Whispering Pines woods.
If Tommy had a drinking problem at home during that time, I didn’t see it. I think that the key which unlocked the tendencies I had heard from Emma the year before was the remoteness from his parents, for it was clear that Mr. Goodspeed still instilled a great fear in Tommy, and while we did have beers on the occasions we could acquire it and still smoked marijuana, it was always done with caution and never to an excess that could be detected.
When fall came around again, I could tell he was raring to go.
“Parade Day! Parade Day, Jude-dude, that is when our schools will collide on the most fortuitous of days, and when you shall visit me for the first time, in our inauguration as wise fools. It’s imperative that you do so, I’d even say required,” he told me after our last run of the summer, a six-mile one that felt like an eternity.
I promised him I would visit on Parade Day, for sure. Parade Day was this:
My school, SUNY Livingston, and his school, SUNY Otsego, both had the same mascot and team name: the Red Riders (‘riders’ being, in this case—apparently, judging by the logos for both—something like a knight). How both schools arrived at such an ambiguous and poorly thought-out nickname like Red Riders was unknown, but both schools stood their ground and insisted that they, not the other, were the home of the real Red Riders, and the other was an imposter who had stolen their name.
It was of no matter to me which school stole what from whom. All I knew was that for this reason of nomenclature, SUNY Livingston and SUNY Otsego were great rivals in the athletic arena, and when every season their football teams would meet, the occasion was known as ‘Parade Day,’ and the hosting city would throw the titular ‘parade,’ surrounding which was a larger festival that devolved into lawless partying in unimaginable quantities.
That year, Parade Day was at SUNY Otsego, in the first week of the school year, which also coincided with rush week at Hartwick (the private school that Otsego shared its city with and where Emma attended), which Tommy claimed was the perfect convalescence for a good time.
I was a bit intimidated by the way he was talking it up, so I was nervous when I arrived in the late morning of the Saturday that was Parade Day, having driven myself from SUNY Livingston in my old Town and Country van, the license to operate which I had only just acquired. There was excitement in the town, a feeling in the air like Otsego was like a city under siege and there would soon be a battle to determine its freedom.
That year, Tommy’s parents had paid for him to begin living in an off-campus apartment situation adjacent to the school, in a brand-new building that was quite comfortable and certainly shamed my campus living accommodations. He showed me up to his room after I arrived.
“Not bad,” I said. “Plenty of room here. And no sharing the same room with someone anymore, that’s gotta be nice. Especially for when Emma visits, right? What’s she up to, anyway? Is she going to meet us or something?”
Tommy rubbed the back of his neck as he opened his sock drawer. “Ah, well, not exactly. She’s decided to give this Parade Day happenstance the skip. She’s headed out to her parents for the weekend.”
“Ah, alright,” I said, trying to hide my disappointment.
“But that’s okay. I don’t think she could handle it anyway. She’s always getting on me about having a grand ole time, but there’s nothing wrong with that, is there? She doesn’t know what she’s missing,” he said, grabbing me around the shoulder. We looked at ourselves in the mirror of his dorm, and I couldn’t help but see the fear in my eyes, the confidence and glassiness in his, the clearness of his skin and the redness of mine. He closed his eyes and recited:
“It is by getting drunk that the soul reveals itself, drunk with poetry, drunk with virtue, or drunk with wine as you will.”
He unfurled a baggie by my shoulder, filled with what looked like rotten sprouts.
“But today, we do more than that. Today, my friend, we voyage,” Tommy said.
I had never done mushrooms, but I did them that day, and haven’t done them since.
Not that it was a bad experience. We ordered calzones for a large lunch to fill our stomachs with a solid base for the day, and the mushrooms kicked in soon after. They didn’t freak me out, necessarily. They didn’t freak Tommy out, as it was clear he was a veteran of shrooms, even if he had perhaps spent a summer without them. We were playing FIFA when they hit, and I noticed Tommy had stopped attacking my goal and his moves became more and more nonsensical as we both started cracking up, laughing harder than we ever had in our lives, over what we decided was the absurdity of an abstraction of cartoons attempting to imitate something so real and intricate as soccer.
Tommy looked at his hands and made weaving motions, as though he were spinning a web.
I asked for a notebook and paper and drew a circle on one side of the notebook, tracing it over and over again until the ink pushed through all of the pages of the notebook, then did the same on the other side.
“I know, let’s go to the park!” Tommy said, once it had been determined we needed stimulation that the confines of the apartment could not offer.
It was a nice day, not too hot, not too cold, sunny. Conditions ripe for exploration and debauchery. Each way on the sidewalk we were passed by large groups of students wearing school colors, whom Tommy said hello to in a booming, festive voice, which I found embarrassing but also endearing, although I couldn’t help but notice that our little group of the two of us was substantially smaller than any we saw, and that since my arrival no friends of Tommy’s had been found to join us.
It was on the way to the park we passed an old woman, probably over 80 years old, out in her front lawn lopping some hedges. Before I could stop him, Tommy crossed the lawn toward her.
“Excuse me, ma’am, how are you?” He asked her. She adjusted her glasses and frowned at him. “Do you mind if we give you a hand?”
She did not mind if we gave her a hand. Her name was Minerva Westington, and for the rest of that shroom-induced afternoon, at Tommy’s insistence, we did various chores for Miss Westington—lopping the hedges, weeding the garden, mowing the lawn, replenishing the bird feeders, weed-whacking, among other things—while she told us her life’s story.
Miss Minerva Westington was born and raised in Syracuse, New York. She went to Sarah Lawrence College to study music, but after a chance encounter with a car show promoter, after graduating she became a model for car shows, as she was quite beautiful (“Still are!” Tommy told her). At one of the shows, a nationally popular doo-wop group was scheduled to perform, but one of their members had unexpectedly just quit the group. With a robust background in choir singing, Minerva stepped in and performed well. She was offered a spot in the group, which she took, and with them recorded many hit songs of the time (none of which I had heard of, though). She was supposed to be a part of the coming tour but decided not to go as she had become pregnant via the car show promoter, whom she married. According to her, even though she quit the group, the royalties from those songs should have had her set for life, but due to some dodgy contractual shenanigans, she ended up seeing very little money. She and her husband settled down in Otsego, where she was a homemaker and then a professor of vocal music at the college as he became a used car salesman.
Only with Tommy would I have been privy to such an experience, to have randomly decided the afternoon on shrooms would be best spent helping an old woman with such an interesting background do lawn chores. Our previous destination—the park—was totally forgotten.
When we were done, she thanked us many times.
“My grandson was supposed to come this weekend, but he had to cancel. It’s so nice to know that on days like today, when these kids all roll into town hell-bent on destruction, that there are two nice boys like you,” she told us.
Little did she know the evening Tommy and I would have.
The journey from Miss Westington’s front lawn to the Hartwick frat house was a long one, but it felt like it passed through the eye of time at a canter. After helping her out, we had somewhat come down from the shrooms and were ready to seek new experiences. Tommy took to his iPhone and throughout the day texted various vendors and prognosticators of drugs and alcohol, dragging us around the town to wherever we could procure next. As the parade passed by on the street outside, we smoked weed from a bong in the apartment of some kids Tommy knew from his biology class. Then we went down said street and drank beers—in Tommy’s case, chugged them—in the kitchen of a pre-game party hosted by some kids Tommy would sometimes buy weed from in his apartment building. As the evening approached, we went to a kid’s apartment where Tommy apparently frequently traded him essays for cocaine (which I had never done) and which we did on the spot, although I was too afraid to snort it and instead rubbed it into my gums, which I am not sure had the same effect but the accumulation of drugs done to that point might have obfuscated its effects anyway.
It wasn’t the first time I’d noticed that, almost no matter how fucked up I got, I always maintained some small kernel of sanity within me, which I knew was composed of fear, an inability to give in to their effects. Tommy did not have this same kernel or did not try to maintain it. His goal was to always abolish it, and so he did.
Such it was that, after darkness fell, we arrived at the house of a Hartwick frat, which Tommy’s connections had evidently told him was ripe to plunder.
“Now see, this is the thing about rush week, Jude-dude. The fraternities at private schools like this, they believe brotherhood is a transactional bond, a conditional thing. But for those like us who know the truth, it’s easy to fool them. All you have to do is pretend you’re from Hartwick, and that you’re a freshman looking for a frat. Then they throw the world at you trying to make you think you’re a king, and that you’ll forever be a king if you were only to join them. It’s sad, really, that none of them realize there is a kingdom within themselves that they might be masters of, but oh well. Are you ready for this?” he asked as we approached the house.
“Sure,” I said.
The walls of the house were sweating, like we were in the belly of some huge animal. It was dark, there was some kind of fog machine going, and punch was being served from large plastic containers. It was packed, wall-to-wall people, and every third or fourth person was either a young man in a red muscle shirt that said ‘ADK’ on it or a young woman in a green crop-top that said ‘EAT’, or something like that, presumably a sorority.
We posted up on a segment of the wall with our red cups filled with punch liquid. Even under the considerable influence of many drugs, I was careful not to directly lean against the wall, disgusting as it was. My eyes scanned for potential female interactions, as I had done at every stop of the day so far, single as I still was, and while there were many attractive sorority sisters, I stuck to my usual gambit of not speaking to any of them, ever, unless talked to.
“So, what is this frat’s deal? Are they like a philanthropic thing, or…” I asked Tommy.
“Oh, no, Jude-dude. They’re not even registered with the school,” Tommy said. “So, it’s pretty wild west. I would assume none of these degenerates could keep up the grade point average for them to remain in good standing with the school.”
As if on cue, a brother stepped forward to us with a cowboy hat in one hand, the other extended for a handshake. “Hey boys, I’m Mike, welcome to the house! You,” he said, pointing to Tommy, “have been chosen for a body shot.”
“A body shot? Chosen?” Tommy said. The brother put the cowboy hat on his head.
“Yep, that lovely lady right over there has singled you out to do a body shot off of her, my man, how’s that feel?” the brother said, pointing to a sorority girl across the room, who waved seductively. Tommy and I immediately saw that this was a ploy, that they waited for new arrivals to the party and then, based on their looks and vibes (the key and perhaps only qualifications for joining any sort of superficial fraternal group), had the girls single them out for a body shot to get things off on the right foot. Tommy fit their vibe. I did not.
“I don’t think my girlfriend would like that too much. That’s intimacy of a higher order,” Tommy said, and their faces screwed up at the word ‘intimacy.’ “But my friend Jude here would be much obliged.”
“Uh, alright then, maybe later, we’ll see how you feel after some drinking,” brother Mike said, disappointed as he reluctantly put the hat on my head.
“What’s up with the hat?” I asked.
“This cowboy hat is a sacred hat passed on from brother to brother in this house. We call it, ‘The Legacy,’” another frat bro who had pulled up to us answered. “Body shot or not, Joe?” I didn’t correct him on my name.
“Okay,” I said. I’d never done a body shot before. The brothers howled and announced my decision to the larger party, and the room cheered and chanted “bo-dy shot, bo-dy shot.” The sorority girl in question (indubitably disappointed to see me instead of Tommy doing the shot) stepped forward to the center of the room and was held up prone by her legs and shoulders by three buff frat bros, and a fourth poured a shot of vodka into her belly button as I stepped forward.
Instrumental in what happened next was an excess of body glitter the girl had spread upon the portion of her abdomen exposed by her crop top, including her belly button. I sloppily sucked in the shot and, as I retreated, some of the glitter must have been inhaled through my nose, and before I could realize what was happening (reflexes affected by the drugs as they were), I unleashed the mother of all sneezes into the poor girl’s stomach.
The brothers let the girl down with haste, and the party took on a sickly vibe for the moment, unsure of whether this was cringeworthy enough to be funny or just cringe. One of the frat brothers took off his shirt and handed it to her so she could wipe herself off.
“I’m so sorry,” I said at least three times, wiping my nose.
“It’s okay,” the sorority sister said in her meekest voice, with a smile that was even meeker.
The party forgot about the incident the next second, the music and drugs and dancing whisked everybody back up in its wake, and my embarrassment was probably forgotten by most, but not by me, nor would I be able to forget it for many years after and, perhaps, never would. One of the brothers snatched the hat they called ‘The Legacy’ off my head.
I looked around for Tommy, but he was suddenly gone, and I could only pray he did not see that body shot display.
“Sorry about that,” I said to the brother named Mike.
“Oh, it’s okay man. Worse stuff has happened to those sisters in this house, for sure,” he said, slapping me on the back. I almost shuddered.
“So, Joe, what, uh, what dorm are you living in this semester?" he asked me with a hand on my shoulder. I became slightly sympathetic to their recruiting cause, because if this guy was still entertaining the prospect of recruiting me after that sneeze, they must truly have been desperate.
But in my flustered and drug-addled state (and underlying drunkenness), I forgot a cardinal rule of rush week which Tommy had espoused to me earlier.
“Oh, I don’t go here,” I said. “I go to SUNY Livingston. I’m just visiting my friend at SUNY Otsego for Parade Day.”
He took a mighty pause to let his barely prehensile brain interpret me before frowning. “So, you’re in here, in my house, with your busted-ass face, taking up space when there could be actual freshmen who might be actual Hartwick students and actual recruits trying to get a bid? Drinking our punch, doing a body shot off our girls, while your friend who also doesn’t go here smokes our weed upstairs?”
“That seems to be it, yeah,” I said, and with that, two brothers grabbed me under my armpits as onlookers hooted, hoisted me over to the door, opened it, and threw me down the porch steps, where I lay on the sidewalk with thankfully little more injury than a scraped elbow and an ego with some considerable denting.
I needed to warn Tommy. I paced around on the sidewalk outside and called his iPhone a couple of times, but it went straight to voicemail. Knowing him, it was dead. I looked up at the house, an old, beautiful Victorian thing, albeit with peeling paint and a roof that needed replacing. It seemed wasted on these brothers. I could see light from one of the windows on the second floor, and from within, sensed a commotion.
I whistled, as loud as I could, the minor third of Hey Jude. I’m Jude, I thought. I whistled it again.
And then Tommy appeared, bursting from the front door, bypassing the steps down from the porch in a single leap, the cowboy hat they called The Legacy clutched in his right fist.
“JUDE!” he yelled, midair. “ABSCOND!”
I turned, and we ran down the street as fast as we could. Behind us were a rabid pack of red-shirted young men emanating nearly visible clouds of violent testosterone, and for the first time in my life, I had no choice but to keep up with Goodspeed by name, good speed by nature.
It was difficult. My lungs were dry and screaming, I tasted blood in my mouth. I didn’t look back, but I could hear the brothers were dogged in their pursuit even after what was maybe a mile down the same street.
“Fuckin’ fast,” I heard one of them say, but they continued their chase, despite none of them being cross-country runners or track sprinters.
We eventually turned down a different street, and when I looked back again, I saw that they had not yet turned the same corner, and so for a few seconds we could get a head start on a change of direction. Tommy saw this too and turned from the sidewalk to lead us down a leafy embankment into the darkness of the park, which had been our original destination when we left his apartment. There were no streetlights, it was so dark I could barely see Tommy in front of me, but I trusted him to lead us to safety.
We crossed a grass field and a gravel pathway, then began to climb another wooded hill. It was then I got caught in an exposed root and had the heel of my shoe stripped from my foot. I kept going anyway, my shoeless foot getting stuck and stabbed by branches and rocks.
“I think they went through the park!” a voice shouted from what seemed like far away. Tommy and I got to a chain-linked fence, on the other side of which I was surprised to see was a stretch of mowed lawn and the tall, modern architecture of Tommy’s off-campus apartment complex.
Tommy laughed like crazy as we climbed over the fence and jogged across the complex to the door of his building, where he swiped his card, and we were safe.
I promptly threw up in the entry vestibule.
“Dude,” I heaved, as he laughed harder, seemingly not even out of breath. “Why? Why!?!”
“Because those guys were ingrates,” Tommy said, inspecting the brown cowboy hat in his hand. ‘The Legacy’ was written on the front brim in black Sharpie.
“I’m sorry,” I said, wiping my mouth. “I’m sorry I got us kicked out.”
“Ah, who cares,” he said. “I haven’t felt so alive in months. This is what college is about, Jude. The endless and bountiful pursuit of life.”
We showered and snacked at his apartment, still surrounded by the membrane of alcohol and drugs we had consumed throughout the day that had just been doused with more adrenaline and endorphins from the exertions of the chase, our bodies not yet aware of the fact they were exhausted.
When it came time to sleep, Tommy insisted I sleep in his bed, while he slept on the ground on a sleeping mat.
I sighed. “I wish I hadn’t lost my shoe,” I told him in the darkness of his room.
“I am sorry about that. I would say, ‘at least you still have one,’ but of things that are no good without their other half, shoes are at the top of the list. How about, in return, you get to keep the cowboy hat?”
“Deal,” I said. At some point, our exhausted bodies broke, and we went to sleep.
I still have the hat. It is Tommy’s legacy.
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Legacy ...? Uh-oh.