I Will Be Complete Page 14
Things could have stood like this for a while. My mother would have stayed in New York but for one thing: Peter Charming got the shit beaten out of him.
* * *
—
I had obeyed her and stayed away from him. Maybe I broke down because I was lonely; maybe he manipulated me into coming; maybe there was some arrangement between him and my mother. In any case, I was alone in his house one night, waiting for him and Sue to come back from a bar, and they were gone far longer than expected. I fell asleep on their living room couch.
Around three, the front door flew open and Sue ran into the kitchen for ice; Peter limped in afterward and collapsed on the stairs. His face was bloody. His nose had been broken, and his eyes were swelling shut. And he was laughing. For a moment, I thought he’d fallen through a window again—a few months beforehand, he’d snorted too much cocaine, smashing through a Union Street storefront and going into convulsions.
He clutched at his side. “Hey, it’s the midget,” he said. He started stripping off his clothing. Bloody leather coat, bloody shirt. He had a story to tell me, he said with a smile. Sue returned with the ice, and a hunk of steak, which he held to his eye as he tried to stand up straight, nude in his foyer.
I remember her holding him upright. They had been walking down Polk Street, Peter said. He’d bumped into a guy, and the guy had picked a fight with him. Peter had tried to talk his way out of it, but the guy swung at him, and you can’t walk away from that. So Peter started wrestling with him on the sidewalk, and Peter was winning. “Sue Blue, I was winning, right?”
“You were,” Sue said. “He knew he didn’t stand a chance.”
“So the guy pulled a Peter Charming on me. I can’t believe it. He broke away from me, and he saw we had a big crowd, and he said, ‘That’s right, motherfucker, I am a fag! I don’t care what you call me, I’m proud to be a fag!’ ”
“You called a guy a ‘fag’ on Polk Street?” I asked.
Peter snapped at me. “Of course not. But all of a sudden, the crowd was on his side, and they started in on me, too. Kicking me. Sue Blue got me out of there.”
He took a shower, drank brandy, smoked dope, yelled at Sue as she patched him up, and they told me the details over and over again. The guy became bigger and more cowardly, the crowd more vicious, Peter the consummate pacifist.
“I mean, fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke,” Peter said, more than once. I wasn’t sure what that meant anymore. It was sounding like a way to seem he’d won something when he clearly hadn’t.
Peter’s time was up. I would like to say I saw it in Sue’s eyes while she was dressing his wounds, how when he flinched and cursed at her for the bite of the rubbing alcohol, she was already picturing her suitcases, thinking of which friends whose numbers Peter didn’t have might be awake and have a couch for her.
A couple of years later, Sue did leave him. My mother was in touch with her quickly to ask something she’d been wondering since all of them had met. And yes, Peter had taken Sue’s money, too. Sue had a large divorce settlement—she’d been a dental hygienist married to a wealthy dentist. Peter had come in as a patient, and the moment he looked at her, her husband no longer mattered. I think she felt bad for how she’d ended up as the obviously good-hearted bait standing at the door with a glass of wine for a number of women like my mother.
But back to the night of his beating. One of those flashes of memory: Peter clean and in his robe, his eye blackened, mouth upturned with a half-million-dollar smile. Him saying, again, “The guy pulled a Peter Charming on me.”
* * *
—
My mom came back a day or so later. I don’t think I had much to say to her—our relationship had changed. She quizzed me. Wasn’t I upset? I wasn’t. Peter was fine. It proved to me that people could get beaten senseless and survive. I came away from it with a weird sense of urgency. I needed to get out.
* * *
* * *
—
Eighth grade was ending. It was time to apply to high school. Town School fed to University High, whose aspirational name indicated exactly what it was, a prep school for the neighborhood kids heading to college. With my mother back in town for a while, she let me know her own plans: she was moving to New York permanently. I was free to stay in San Francisco if I wanted. I wasn’t sure how that would work.
Living with my father and Ann was no longer an alternative. She was pregnant and they were going to have a child soon. There was no room for me in their apartment, which they didn’t even have to explain to me. I didn’t want to live there anyway.
High school counselors came to Town School to give presentations. Boarding schools on the East Coast, Andover, Exeter, sounded like attending school on Jupiter. But there were also boarding schools in California, and one of them was called Thacher.
Thacher’s presentation was led by Mr. Livermore, after whose ancestors the city was named. Mr. Livermore had gone to Thacher himself, then Yale. He was a type I hadn’t seen before—even though he was wearing a tweed jacket and a knit tie, he was also wearing cowboy boots. He looked uncomfortable indoors, but he spoke kindly, with an instant moral clarity, like a sheriff who, when things were slow, would bring out a broken-back copy of Thoreau to read trailside.
Thacher was a small boarding school in the rural town of Ojai, which I couldn’t place on the map. North of Los Angeles, south of Santa Barbara, it turned out. It was in an east–west valley that was near the ocean and yet it had a desert climate. Freshmen were required to feed, groom, and exercise a horse. “As Mr. Thacher said—‘There’s something about the outside of a horse that’s good for the inside of a boy.’ ”
And now girls. Thacher was going coed. The first slide Mr. Livermore put on the screen was a view from Thacher into the deep bowl of the Ojai Valley. Here was the upper soccer field, Mr. Livermore explained, with tennis courts to the left and stables to the right, and then beyond that, ranches and then, five miles away, the town of Ojai (population five thousand), and beyond that, rings of mountains.
It was like my first night in San Francisco or my first bid at a coin auction. It was obvious to me that I belonged at Thacher. I wanted to sleep every night on a campus where there were girls sleeping nearby. I predicted I would be popular and that sex would occur. I would become athletic. I would become interested in the outdoors. I have no idea why I thought those things.
It was shockingly expensive to go—almost six thousand dollars a year. And no matter what Livermore said about the atmosphere there, it was equally likely to be a prison population of despicable rich kids contained there in lieu of being forcibly set adrift on ice floes before they murdered any more relatives.
I decided it would be friendly. I ignored the horse situation. I was going to apply to Thacher and be admitted and go there. Then I was going to Yale. Then I would move back to San Francisco and start assembling the team of friends that would include artists, rivals, musicians, and a girl in white painter pants.
My father was puzzled by this—he asked me if my mother had put me up to applying. She hadn’t. After balking at the price, he noted that there was financial aid, so perhaps the money wasn’t an issue. This was more complicated than I understood. My father had plenty of money—rather, Ann did—and to their credit neither was that troubled by spending it on my education. They were hesitant to have any more of it go through my mother, as they suspected she would figure a way to siphon it off. So my father told me we would look into financial aid if I was accepted.
Which was going to be a huge problem. It was highly competitive to get into Thacher. I had learned a great deal in the previous year, but I hadn’t exactly been doing any schoolwork. My grades were mostly Cs, except for the Ds.
The Thacher application was many pages long. I think it was assumed by the school that an adult would help me. There was an essay question. Who were my heroes? I wrote
: “Bill Cosby. And whoever planned the raid on Entebbe.”
But that was all I wrote. I didn’t know what an essay was.
There was more like that, my chunky and terrible handwriting, my incomplete sentences, my evasions. What intramural sports had I played? Willingly, none. I was always picked last in softball, after Wade, who had one eye.
I wrote down “baseball” and “soccer” and “running” and, since I knew they played it at Thacher, “lacrosse,” even though I’d never seen a lacrosse stick. I didn’t play those other sports, either. I had played baseball once and been hit in the face with a baseball bat so hard it broke my nose. I put “running” down because technically, after school, when being teased I did run places. I said I’d camped even though I hadn’t and I listed books on my mother’s shelves as ones I’d read myself.
After I sent it in, a wave of shame swept over me, and I felt like I was drowning in my own mistakes. I knew I hadn’t done well enough to get into that school, and I knew I had to do better somehow. I felt it could help if Thacher met me.
* * *
—
The road from Ojai to Thacher was one-lane, with waist-high stone walls marking orange groves next to corrals and ranch houses. It seemed to follow, more or less, a barranca of huge white rocks worn smooth thousands of years before by a river no longer there. My father drove.
A few months beforehand, he and Ann had left Chicago and moved back to Los Angeles. The weather there was better, making it more appealing to start their new family. They had a three-bedroom apartment in West Los Angeles, close enough to the ocean for a nice coastal breeze, and a tiny Mercedes with a backseat a thirteen-year-old could just barely fit in.
We went uphill, gently, for a few miles. I yawned from nervousness. There was a fork in the road, and my father slowed down to figure out the map. Turn left on McAndrew? I wondered if there would be a time where I thought “once, I knew so little about being here I didn’t even know whether to turn left on McAndrew.”
Thacher’s white stone gates appeared under the shade and litter of pepper trees. The campus was, like the valley, dotted with orange groves, and the buildings were Arts and Crafts or Mission stucco. When I saw students, I could decode how they dressed—preppy, not surprisingly—but not how they walked, which was a slow lope, with some swagger and ease. They walked as if nothing terrible was about to happen.
I was introduced to Mr. Twitchell in Admissions. He was East Coast, atrocious plaid sweater, and a sunburned pink face that came with an appraising squint. As he described Thacher, I could barely hear him. I was too consumed with the realization that if I didn’t get in, I would die.
I was trying to memorize the photographs in the office, the names of the staff, and I was trying to anticipate how to dress for dinner. I hadn’t brought a tie. Suddenly that was all that mattered. I hadn’t brought a tie. It was very possible I needed to dress for dinner even though I hadn’t seen a single tie since I’d gotten to campus.
Also, I was being looked at.
“Glen, this is Weston Richardson,” Mr. Twitchell was saying. Weston was a freshman, and his job was to show me the school. I would sleep on the floor of his dorm room that night.
Weston didn’t shake my hand. If Mr. Twitchell was evaluating me, Weston was already finished. He wasn’t wearing a tie, but I wasn’t relieved by that, as his demeanor was frightening. He was only a year older than I was but from the confidence that wafted off of him, he might have spent that year in an urban militia. Khakis, Top-Siders, no socks, preppy clothes worn not as if they indicated club attire, but as if he couldn’t be bothered to think of wearing something else. He had, beneath his blond bowl haircut, an utterly dismissive expression.
“Glen’s visiting us from San Francisco.”
“That’s a thrill,” Weston said. “Stuart Hall?”
“Town School.”
“Oooh,” he said, as if he’d caught me bragging. I wanted to protest, and then from his cool look, I understood he actually didn’t care. Not even slightly.
“Weston’s great-grandfather was something of a Thacher legend,” Mr. Twitchell said. “He was the first person ever expelled from here.”
“Really?”
Weston nodded. “I think he knifed a guy. That your sleeping bag?” He threw it over his shoulder, and gestured that I should follow him out of the office.
I ran to keep up with him. He looked at me again. “Dinner’s at six-fifteen. Did you bring a tie?”
I shook my head.
“Classic.”
* * *
—
Weston gave me a tour of the campus. He talked. And talked. That it was a great school academically was something he didn’t dwell on. He focused on the only important thing: the school was going coed.
We were standing in the art studio with another freshman. Craig, who didn’t quite have Weston’s presence, said something about how things would change when the girls were finally there.
Weston said, “What, for you? Not for you. In your dreams. Even the sloppiest gash who shows up here won’t give you the time of day.” Somehow, Admissions had only let in ugly girls. Not a one of them was hot.
“Joni Katz is hot,” Craig said.
Weston sighed. “Son, you think anything with two legs and a twat is hot. You reek.”
I listened hard to all Weston said, and his vocabulary for saying it. I wanted to be blasé about girls.
After dinner, he took me to his dorm. We sat in his room starting at seven-thirty, when study hall began. The schedule was deliberately overloaded. There were chores in the morning and inspections and required breakfasts, then classes, and then required sports in the afternoon, and you had to care for your horse, and there were formal dinners five nights a week. Study hall, and something called “check-in” every night at ten, which even Weston treated with respect. One senior, a prefect, knocked on Weston’s door to see why he was talking, saw he was talking to me, and moved on. Weston continued: had I seen that guy? That was a senior, something that had been molded into a human being from the blob I currently was.
The school made one specific deal with its students: unimaginable freedom in exchange for following the honor code. The contract went something like this: “Promise us that while you’re here you’ll never cheat, steal, do drugs or alcohol, promise never to go into the dormitory of someone of the opposite sex, and above all never lie to us if we ask you questions about any of this, and in exchange we’ll trust you to do more or less anything else you want. That way you get a safe place to grow up and take chances and we get a better society out of it. Civilization is based on the balance of responsibility between the individual and the group, and if you can abide, you’ll become responsible enough to handle anything, and fast. Plus all the avocados and oranges you can eat.” It was a Southern Californian version of being welcomed to Athens, circa 800 BC.
I wanted that. But there was so much to know. If you wanted to leave campus, you had to fill in the sign-out sheet (the what?) on the pergola (the what? where?), and get permission from the TOAD (not a real toad) and it was hard to keep up with what he was saying about “wandering.”
“Wandering is something only seniors get. It means that after ten p.m. check-in they can do any fucking thing they want. Go anywhere. Walk the Perimeter Road, smoking cigarettes and jacking off into each other’s mouths if they want to. And some of them do want to, pretty boy. Just kidding,” he said. “The truth is, you’re ugly. Here you go,” he said, throwing a Hustler at me.
It turned out that evenings ran on porn and junk food. I could do that. At ten p.m., as promised, the prefect pounded on the door again, confirmed Weston was there, and at 10:30 the lights were out. In ten minutes, Weston was snoring and I looked at the ceiling.
I was thinking about all those rules, and how the reward for following them was to be a senior and wander. It wasn
’t lost on me that I longed to earn that ability again, the one I had when I was twelve simply because I declared I could. I needed to impress the admissions department.
* * *
—
There was a meeting during which I sat in a captain’s chair and I very carefully said nothing to Mr. Twitchell about how I was living in San Francisco. It was important for me to not seem weird, I thought, so I concealed as much as I could.
When I’m clearly in the wrong, I tend to speak from the corner of my mouth, eyes averted, my words coming out with an aural flinch, as if I’m already agreeing with whoever disagrees with me. That’s how I talked to Mr. Twitchell at the interview. My grades were mentioned. I had an explanation ready, but I didn’t need it—Thacher sometimes overlooked grades when an applicant had other aspects that made him or her seem like a good fit. Did I ride a horse already? No? What sports did I say I played? Oh, so when I said that, it was more like “I could play those if necessary.” Any hobbies? I didn’t mention that my hobbies included rolling joints for grown-ups. And I wasn’t very good at that.
What did I read?
Now I had something to talk about. Well, comic books, I said, but good ones. Now I wasn’t flinching. I was describing how I’d finished writing a very good origin for Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., and had sent it to Marvel Comics. Before Mr. Twitchell could ask anything else, I was in full-on Paris Review interview mode. I’d been waiting for the moment where someone would ask me about my work. It was twenty-six pages, I explained, and would last twelve issues, a whole year, and it featured every character in the Marvel Universe. I’d introduced a new character named Amatnon (I explained that it was Latin) and he had alternating plates of vibranium and adamantium that meant he couldn’t be harmed. In fact, he could feel nothing, he “loved not,” hence the Latin name, and it was, I could admit, autobiographical. I got even more about that out in an excited rush before I realized from Mr. Twitchell’s eyes that I had made a mistake. This was not impressive. This was weird.