When You Are Engulfed in Flames Page 6

  Next on my list of people to tell was my former college roommate, Todd. I hitched from Raleigh to Kent, Ohio, but once I got there, the time didn’t seem quite right. It was harder telling a guy than it was telling a girl, and harder still when you’d taken too much acid and were trying to keep the little people from sticking pins in your eyes.

  After my failure in Ohio, I headed back south. It was early December, and I had forgotten how cold it could get in the Midwest.

  Todd had suggested that I take his down jacket, but I thought it was unsightly, so here I was in a thrift-shop overcoat that didn’t even button all the way up. He’d also offered a sweater that belted at the waist. It was thick and patterned in bright colors, the sort of thing a peasant might wear while herding llamas, but I’d said, “No, it might ruin my silhouette.” That was the phrase I had used, and now I was paying for my vanity — because what difference would it have made? “Oh, goodness, I can’t give him a ride. He looks too lumpy.”

  I’d left Kent at eight in the morning, and the next five hours had taken me less than fifty miles. Now it was lunchtime — not that there was anywhere to buy it, or anything much to buy it with. It began to rain, and, just as I thought of turning back, a tow truck pulled over and the driver motioned for me to get in. He told me that he wasn’t going far — just thirty miles up the road — but I was grateful for the warmth and climbed into the passenger seat determined to soak up as much of it as I possibly could.

  “So,” the man said after I had settled in, “where you from?” I pegged him to be somewhere between old and ancient, midforties, maybe, with gray-tinged sideburns shaped like boots.

  I told him I was from North Carolina, and he slapped his palm against the steering wheel. “North Carolina. Now, there’s a state for you. My brother and me went down on vacation — Topsail Beach, I think it was — and we just had the time of our lives.”

  When the man turned to address me, I noticed that his ears stuck out and that his forehead was divided almost in two by a vertical dent that started at the intersection of his eyebrows and ran to within an inch of his hairline. It was the type of thing associated with heavy thought, but this was so deep and painful-looking that it might have been left by a hatchet.

  “Yessiree, good old North Carolina,” the man continued. “N.C., I guess you call it down there.”

  He went on about the state’s climate and the friendliness of its people, and then he looked into his side mirror to monitor the progress of an advancing eighteen-wheeler. “All I know is that if anyone wanted to give me a blow job, or have me give him one, I’d do it.”

  This came out of nowhere, and what threw me was the way he’d attached it to his previous observation. North Carolina is temperate and populated with well-meaning people; therefore I will engage in oral sex with another man.

  “Well,” I said, “they’re not all friendly. I remember one time I was walking down the street and a group of men grabbed me by the arms and spit in my face.” The story was true, and, at its mention, I recalled the stench of their sour, phlegm-clotted saliva. I expected, and reasonably so, that the tow truck driver might ask for details: “Who were these men? Why did they spit in your face?”

  But instead he picked up where he’d left off. “I mean to tell you that I would actually crouch down on this seat and perform fellatio,” he said. “Either that or I’d sit up while someone performed it on me. I really would.”

  “Then, another time,” I told him, “another time this guy threatened to knock my teeth down my throat. I was just standing there minding my own business, and all of a sudden there he was.” This was a lie, or at least the last part was. The man had threatened to knock my teeth down my throat, but only because my friend and I had given him the finger and called him a crusty old redneck. “I was twelve years old at the time,” I said. “In Ohio you’d never threaten a kid like that, but down in North Carolina it’s par for the course.”

  Par for the course. I was sounding more idiotic by the minute — not that it mattered.

  “I mean, why not give someone a blow job?” the driver said. “It’s just a penis, right? Probably no worse for you than smoking.”

  Outside the moving truck were flat, barren fields, some bordered by stands of trees and others stretching without interruption out to the horizon. One second they’d appear as a blur, and then the windshield wiper would make its shuddering pass and everything would leap back into focus. A station wagon pulled in front of us, and the children in the backseat signaled for my driver to blow his horn. He seemed not to notice them, and just as I thought to bring it to his attention I realized that the request included the word “blow.” And so I let it drop and turned my attention back to the landscape.

  Had I been able to address the real subject, I’d have told this man that I was saving myself for the right person. I wanted my first time to be special, meaning that I would know the other guy’s name and, I hoped, his telephone number. After sex, we would lie in each other’s arms and review the events that had brought us to this point. I could not predict exactly what this conversation would sound like, but I had not imagined it to include such lines as “I knew this would happen five minutes ago, the moment you climbed into my tow truck.” Not that I minded this man’s profession. It was the other stuff that bothered me: his dent, his forwardness, and his persistent refusal to turn the goddamn page. He sounded like me when I sensed that drugs were around: “All I know is that if someone wants to get high, or wants to watch while I smoke his dope, I’ll do it. I really will.”

  I cringed to think of myself, skeeving pot off my friends and believing all the while that I was sounding casual. After dropping in uninvited and basically forcing someone to share his drugs, I’d pocket the roach and take my leave, saying, “That’s the last time I let you fuck me up like this, I mean it.”

  “Yes, indeedy,” the tow truck driver said. “A little oral give-and-take would feel pretty good right about now.”

  I could have ended it so simply. “I don’t think my girlfriend would like that too much,” I might have said, but I wanted to put that particular lie behind me. There was my life before I told a strange woman in a negligee that I was a homosexual, and now there would be my life after, two chapters so dissimilar in style and content that they might have been written by different people. That’s what I’d hoped, but of course it wouldn’t work out that way. I needed a story that I could live with, and so I compromised and told the tow truck driver that I had an ex-girlfriend. “We just broke up a week ago, and now I’m going home to win her back.”

  “So?” he said. “I got an ex-wife. I got a current one, too, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t feel good to give someone a blow job, or to have somebody give you one while you laid back and enjoyed it a little.”

  Mine was the lie that got you nowhere, and, as I berated myself for wasting it, the driver took his right hand off the steering wheel and laid it on the seat between us. For a moment it was idle, and then it began to lumber in my direction, its movement as hesitant and blocky as a turtle’s. “Yessiree,” its owner said.

  There would come times in later years when I would have sex against my wishes. No one forced me, exactly — it wasn’t that. I just wasn’t sure how to say “Go. Get out. I don’t want this.” Often, I’d feel sorry for the guy: he was deformed through no fault of his own, he bought all his clothes at Sears, he said he loved me on the first date. Once or twice I’d be too scared to say no, but this particular man didn’t frighten me. I looked at him in much the same way that the fifteen-year-old, my father’s neighbor, must have looked at me: as a relic of an earlier era, when trees were stubs, women could be deceived, and everything inside your home was the color of rust or dirt.

  When the shambling hand at last reached my coat, I thought of how I’d assert myself and tell the driver that this was an excellent place for me to get out.

  “What?” he’d say? “Here? Are you sure?”

  The man would pull over, and I
would take my place by the side of the road, a virgin with three dollars in his pocket, and his whole life ahead of him.

  What I Learned

  It’s been interesting to walk around campus this afternoon, as when I went to Princeton things were completely different. This chapel, for instance — I remember when it was just a clearing, cordoned off with sharp sticks. Prayer was compulsory back then, and you couldn’t just fake it by moving your lips; you had to know the words, and really mean them. I’m dating myself, but this was before Jesus Christ. We worshipped a God named Sashatiba, who had five eyes, including one on the Adam’s apple. None of us ever met him, but word had it that he might appear at any moment, so we were always at the ready. Whatever you do, don’t look at his neck, I used to tell myself.

  It’s funny now, but I thought about it a lot. Some people thought about it a little too much, and it really affected their academic performance. Again, I date myself, but back then we were on a pass-fail system. If you passed, you got to live, and if you failed you were burned alive on a pyre that’s now the Transgender Studies Building. Following the first grading period, the air was so thick with smoke you could barely find your way across campus. There were those who said that it smelled like meat, no different from a barbecue, but I could tell the difference. I mean, really. Since when do you grill hair? Or sweaters? Or those dumb, chunky shoes we all used to wear?

  It kept you on your toes, though, I’ll say that much. If I’d been burned alive because of bad grades, my parents would have killed me, especially my father, who meant well but was just a little too gung ho for my taste. He had the whole outfit: Princeton breastplate, Princeton nightcap; he even got the velvet cape with the tiger head hanging like a rucksack from between the shoulder blades. In those days, the mascot was a saber-tooth, so you can imagine how silly it looked, and how painful it was to lean back in your chair. Then, there was his wagon, completely covered with decals and bumper stickers: “I Hold My Horses for Ivy League Schools,” “My Son Was Accepted at the Best University in the United States, and All I Got Was a Bill for $168,000.” On and on, which was just so . . . wrong.

  One of the things they did back then was start you off with a modesty seminar, an eight-hour session that all the freshmen had to sit through. It might be different today, but in my time it took the form of a role-playing exercise, my classmates and I pretending to be graduates, and the teacher assuming the part of an average citizen: the soldier, the bloodletter, the whore with a heart of gold.

  “Tell me, young man. Did you attend a university of higher learning?”

  To anyone holding a tool or a weapon, we were trained to respond, “What? Me go to college? Whoever gave you that idea?” If, on the other hand, the character held a degree, you were allowed to say, “Sort of,” or, sometimes, “I think so.”

  And it was the next bit that you had to get just right. Inflection was everything, and it took the foreign students forever to master it.

  “So where do you sort of think you went?”

  And we’d say, “Umm, Princeton?” — as if it were an oral exam, and we weren’t quite sure that this was the correct answer.

  “Princeton! My goodness,” the teacher would say. “That must have been quite something!”

  You had to let him get it out, but once he started in on how brilliant and committed you must be it was time to hold up your hands, saying, “Oh, it isn’t that hard to get into.”

  Then he’d say, “Really? But I heard —”

  “Wrong,” you’d tell him. “You heard wrong. It’s not that great of a school.”

  This was the way it had to be done. You had to play it down, which wasn’t easy when your dad was out there, reading your acceptance letter into a bullhorn.

  I needed to temper his enthusiasm a bit, and so I announced that I would be majoring in patricide. The Princeton program was very strong back then, the best in the country, but it wasn’t the sort of thing your father could get too worked up about. Or at least, most fathers wouldn’t. Mine was over the moon. “Killed by a Princeton graduate!” he said. “And my own son, no less.”

  My mom was actually jealous. “So what’s wrong with matricide?” she asked. “What, I’m not good enough to murder? You too high and mighty to take out your only mother?”

  They started bickering, so in order to make peace, I promised to consider a double major.

  “And how much more is that going to cost us?” they said.

  Those last few months at home were pretty tough, but then I started my freshman year and got caught up in the life of the mind. My idol-worship class was the best, but my dad didn’t get it at all. “What the hell does that have to do with patricide?” he asked.

  And I said, “Umm. Everything.”

  He didn’t understand that it’s all connected, that one subject leads to another and forms a kind of chain that raises its head and nods like a cobra when you’re sucking on a bong after three days of no sleep. On acid, it’s even wilder and appears to eat things. But not having gone to college, my dad had no concept of a well-rounded liberal arts education. He thought that all my classes should be murder-related, with no lunch breaks or anything. Fortunately, though, it doesn’t work that way.

  I’d told my parents I’d major in killing them, but that was just to get them off my back. In truth, I had no idea what I wanted to study, so for the first few years I took everything that came my way. History was interesting, but I have no head for dates and tend to get my eras confused. I enjoyed pillaging and astrology, but the thing that ultimately stuck was comparative literature. There wasn’t much of it to compare back then, no more than a handful of epic poems and one novel about a lady detective, but that’s part of what I liked about it. The field was new and full of possibilities. A well-versed graduate might go anywhere, but try telling that to my parents.

  “You mean you won’t be killing us?” my mother said. “But I told everyone you were going for that double major.”

  Dad followed his “I’m-so-disappointed” speech with a lecture on career opportunities. “You’re going to study literature and get a job doing what?” he said. “Literaturizing?”

  We spent my entire vacation arguing; then, just before I went back to school, my father approached me in my bedroom. “Promise me you’ll keep an open mind,” he said. And as he left, he slipped an engraved dagger into my book bag.

  I had many fine teachers during my years at Princeton, but the one I think of most often was my fortune-telling professor, a complete hag with wild gray hair, warts the size of new potatoes, the whole nine yards. She taught us to forecast the weather up to two weeks in advance, but ask for anything weightier, and you were likely to be disappointed.

  The alchemy majors all wanted to know how much money they’d be making after graduation. “Just give us an approximate figure,” they’d say, and the professor would shake her head and cover her crystal ball with a little cozy given to her by one of her previous classes. When it came to our futures, she drew the line, no matter how hard we begged — and, I mean, we really tried. I was as let down as the next guy, but, in retrospect, I can see that she acted in our best interest. Look at yourself on the day that you graduated from college, then look at yourself today. I did that recently, and it was like, “Yikes! What the hell happened?”

  The answer, of course, is life. What the hag chose not to foretell — and what we, in our certainty, could not have fathomed — is that stuff comes up. Weird doors open. People fall into things. Maybe the engineering whiz will wind up brewing cider, not because he has to, but because he finds it challenging. Who knows? Maybe the athlete will bring peace to all nations, or the class moron will go on to become the president of the United States — though that’s more likely to happen at Harvard or Yale, schools that will pretty much let in anybody.

  There were those who left Princeton and soared like arrows into the bosoms of power and finance, but I was not one of them. My path was a winding one, with plenty of obstacles along the w
ay. When school was finished, I went back home, an Ivy League graduate with four years’ worth of dirty laundry and his whole life ahead of him. “What are you going to do now?” my parents asked.

  And I said, “Well, I was thinking of washing some of these underpants.”

  That took six months. Then I moved on to the shirts.

  “Now what?” my parents asked.

  And when I told them I didn’t know, they lost what little patience they had left. “What kind of a community-college answer is that?” my mother said. “You went to the best school there is. How can you not know something?”

  And I said, “I don’t know.”

  In time my father stopped wearing his Princeton gear. My mother stopped talking about my “potential,” and she and my dad got themselves a brown and white puppy. In terms of intelligence, it was just average, but they couldn’t see that at all. “Aren’t you just the smartest dog in the world?” they’d ask, and the puppy would lick their fingers in a way that was disturbingly familiar.

  My first alumni weekend cheered me up a bit. It was nice to know that I wasn’t the only unemployed graduate in the world, but the warm feeling evaporated when I got back home and saw that my parents had given the dog my bedroom. Above the dresser, in place of the Princeton pennant they’d bought me for my first birthday, was a banner reading “Westminster or Bust.”

  I could see which way the wind was blowing, and so I left and moved to the city, where a former classmate, a philosophy major, got me a job on his ragpicking crew. When the industry moved overseas — the doing of another former classmate — I stayed put and eventually found work skinning hides for a rat catcher, a thin, serious man with the longest beard I had ever seen.