11

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who know where their high school yearbook is and those who do not.

— SLOANE CROSLEY

Three thousand kids attended Greenwich High School. We had no idea how good we had it. The state-of-the-art facility and the tastefully manicured grounds eclipsed those found at most small colleges. The crown jewel of the campus was the student center. An acre in size and maybe four stories tall, it was described as the second-largest “room” in Connecticut. The space was ample to accommodate several large trees planted in enormous concrete pots and grand spiral staircases that wound down from two of the four academic houses. To get from one class to another, kids often had to pass through the student center, so when the bell rang, the place became Grand Central Station at commuter rush hour. At its quietest moments, there were still hundreds of students in the center, eating, studying, or lounging during free periods.

The student center was a case study in adolescent anthropology. It was broken up into unofficial neighborhoods where kids sat according to their standing on the social food chain. The popular kids, or “preppies,” as they were called, occupied the middle. The drama club types and marching band kids sat under one of the staircases near the entrance to the cafeteria; the stoners loitered by the doors that led to the science wing; the kids who smoked hung out by the exit doors in front of the library, where they could pop out for a butt whenever they wanted to; the jocks hung out in a zone next to the cool kid area; and the kids who thought they were above being on the social food chain at all congregated near the main entrance, until they flunked out and were packed off to boarding school.

The kids in wheelchairs, the lost souls with oozing acne, the students in special programs who drooled or talked to themselves, and anyone deemed freakish had their own area as well. We avoided it. No teenager wants to see someone whose outside looks like the person they feel themselves to be on the inside.

By senior year, I had become one of the cool, preppy kids who sat in the middle of the student center. Like a lot of them, I not only played hard but studied hard.

In Greenwich, the pressure to get into the right college was suffocating. Over-caffeinated parents spent fortunes on SAT prep camps, educational consultants, and private tutors. They would chew their nails and argue about whether their kids had picked the right combination of extracurricular activities or put in enough hours teaching poor kids how to read to make an admissions officer’s heart go pit-a-pat. All this so you would get into one of fifteen schools. If you did, you were considered to have made it. What kept you awake at night was thinking about how many qualified applicants there were relative to the number of available spots in the freshman classes of these schools. There were hundreds of kids scratching and clawing for every space. It was a cage match.

I knew from the moment I read about it that I wanted to go to Bowdoin College in Maine. Bowdoin is one of a group of small liberal arts colleges in the Northeast called the “Little Ivies.” It was a top-ten liberal arts college, but that wasn’t why I wanted to go there. I believed that if Bowdoin took me, I would magically stop feeling out of true. It would be like God saying the lien on my happiness had been removed. It would mean no more going through the day asking, “How do I compensate for who I am?” I thought this mysterious voice could make me believe what I couldn’t make myself believe: I belonged on earth.

I spent two hours just completing the personal information section of the application. If there was a way to wordsmith your name, address, and phone number, I was going to find it. I made fifty people read my essay while I stared into their eyes to see how it was grabbing them. If after finishing they didn’t cry, “My God, it’s a triumph!” and hug me, I would be wrecked.

I was betting everything I owned on one horse: Bowdoin.

I sped home from school every day to check the mail for the decision letter from Bowdoin. Like every kid waiting to hear from a college, I believed that if the envelope was thick and heavy, it was good news. A fat envelope meant it contained an acceptance letter along with all kinds of other forms you needed to fill out and send back in. It was bad if the letter was light and thin. This was the one-page rejection letter with advice on how to break the news to your unhinged parents.

On a gray Friday afternoon I pulled into our driveway. It was covered in thick, lumpy ice, deeply grooved and rutted by our cars pulling in and out. I trekked across the tundra to the mailbox. Nothing but a three-inch stack of Christmas catalogs and a few bills.

My shoulders fell. “Give me a freaking break,” I said to myself.

Then I saw it. The corner of a letter stuck between the pages of an L. L. Bean catalog. I slipped it out slowly and saw the words Bowdoin College Admissions Department in the return address. I gasped, threw the mail back into the box, and ran inside.

I paced the living room rug until I thought I’d wear a hole in it. I smoked one cigarette after another until I ran out. I dialed Tyler’s number to have him come over to open the letter for me but hung up before someone answered. Secretariat would’ve been shocked by the number of bowls of oat bran I consumed. I pulled back the curtains in the living room and stared out the window at the mailbox and the light coating of ice and snow on top of it, then repeated the same routine.

It was now five o’clock and getting dark. I couldn’t hold this off forever. But there was so much riding on what was in that mailbox. I’d worked my butt off to get the kind of grades that made me even eligible to get into a top college, and I’d done it while living in a house with a madman. I had succeeded at playing the “good boy” role, and even though it hadn’t won my father’s love yet, I’d found some measure of self-respect. I felt I deserved this check in the win column. Even though I didn’t much believe or care about God anymore, as I marched to that mailbox without a jacket, the cold wind slicing my 128-pound frame, I shot an arrow into the low ceiling of pewter-colored clouds: Let me have this one, okay?

I extracted the letter from the mailbox with all the care of a surgeon removing a tumor and compared its weight to all the other letters that had come. I placed the admissions letter in one hand and another standard business envelope in the other, but all I learned was that you lose the ability to differentiate one ounce from two ounces when your hands are shaking. I’d have to open it. I walked back to the house and stood in my living room. I looked up at the ceiling, took a deep breath, and tore open the envelope. My heart leaped halfway up my throat when I saw that there was a letter and a green card inside. Now I ripped the envelope away and pulled out the cover letter. It read something like this:

Dear Ian,

The Admissions Committee has completed the selection process for Bowdoin’s Class of 1982, and while we are unable to offer you admission at this time, we have placed you on our Wait List.

Candidates on the Wait List are the first to be considered for admission should space become available in the class. It is important to note, however, that in a typical year more than five hundred applicants are placed on the Wait List, from which only a very small number are chosen to join the incoming freshman class. We strongly advise wait-listed applicants to be realistic and pursue other options should a spot at Bowdoin not become available.

Please complete and return the enclosed Wait List card by April 7 to indicate whether or not you wish to stay on the Wait List. If you opt to remain on it we will give you an update by late May.

We know this letter comes as a disappointment to you. The college application process is stressful and being placed on the Wait List only prolongs that stress. We would not ask you to endure this process if we did not believe you were the kind of applicant we would like to see at Bowdoin.

Regardless of where you choose to go to college, we thank you for your interest in Bowdoin and wish you the best for your future.

Warmly,

James Fitzpatrick

Director of Admissions

I fingered the letter. It was weighty, made from a more expensive grade of stationery than less-important letters. The added heft gave it gravitas, but even worse, a sense of finality. I collapsed into the wingback chair under the oil portrait of my mother. I placed the point of my elbow on the worn arm and rested my chin on my closed fist. I stared into space. The Wait List letter with its two razor-sharp folds lay in my lap. The message was twilight—neither day nor night. I wasn’t accepted, but I wasn’t rejected. I wasn’t in, but I wasn’t out. I was in college purgatory.

I picked up the letter again, but the words read differently now.

Dear Champ,

At first the Admissions Committee decided to accept you, but just before the letters went in the mail we took a closer look at your application and realized you weren’t what you appeared to be at first glance. You present like the perfect candidate until discerning people like us get under the paint and see who you really are. Perhaps if you had just worked a little harder or come from a less screwy family, you might’ve been able to compensate for your personal deficiencies. Alas, you fell short and always will.

I wasn’t angry. I didn’t cry. I didn’t tear up the letter or crush it into a ball and toss it away, nor did I burn it. I left it on the sideboard with the rest of the mail and went upstairs to my bedroom. I’d made plans to see the Steve Miller Band that night in Hartford with Tyler and two other good friends, Andy and Harlan. I was depressed enough that I would have backed out and stayed home, but I was the only guy with a car.

I lay on my bed with my hands behind my head and stared at the ceiling. I thought about the pictures I’d seen in the Bowdoin catalog of kids playing Frisbee on the quad, and of how I’d imagined being one of them. What an idiot.

I remembered as a boy hearing a priest give a children’s sermon about how God answers prayer. He said, “God answers prayers one of three ways: yes, no, or not now.” Maybe if I half believed in God, then I’d have interpreted being wait-listed as God’s way of saying not now, and trusted him for whatever was next. But God didn’t say anything. God was a deaf-mute.

I was thirty minutes late picking up Harlan, Andy, and Tyler. Thankfully, all three were waiting at Harlan’s house, so I didn’t have to drive all over town to pick them up one at a time. I’d gone back and forth about whether to tell them the disappointing news about Bowdoin and finally decided not to for two reasons. First, I’m not immune to magical thinking. What if at that moment the admissions director was driving home from the office, anguishing about my application, and changed his mind? What if he called tomorrow and said that he’d accept me, but only if I hadn’t told anyone about having been wait-listed yet?

The second reason was that I’d awakened from my nap in a vengeful state of mind. Bowdoin could screw itself. I didn’t need their approval. I was going to prove how little I cared about their laughably disguised rejection letter by going out and having the time of my life, or else.

“About time you showed up,” Harlan said, bending to cram himself into the backseat of my car, with Andy following so close behind that his head was nearly up Harlan’s butt.

Tyler settled into the passenger seat and closed the door. He turned and looked over his shoulder. “You guys got enough room back there?” he asked, grinning.

His question was answered by hand gestures, neither of which were A-OK signs.

Tyler had phoned me an hour earlier to call “shotgun” on the trip up and back to Hartford. Guys didn’t normally call and make reservations to ride in the passenger seat on a road trip. Most didn’t think about it until the sight of an empty vehicle awakened the alpha-male drive to occupy the seat of privilege, triggering a mad dash to the car. But Tyler wasn’t stupid. Andy and Harlan were each over six feet and weighed more than two hundred pounds. And Tyler was taller and heavier than either of them. A silverback gorilla would’ve been more comfortable in the backseat of my Bug for an hour and a half than Tyler. The gorilla would’ve been more cheerful when he got out too. Tyler made sure he was riding shotgun.

“Where’ve you been, Ian?” Harlan asked.

“The show starts in an hour and we’re at least ninety minutes from Hartford,” Andy said. Andy wasn’t the most optimistic kid. His nickname was Eeyore.

I held my index finger in the air. “Did I not tell you?” I got out of the car, opened the trunk, and returned with a case of cold Heineken, two bottles of Bacardi premixed piña colada, and a bottle of tequila with a fresh lime and salt. I’d made a run to a liquor distributor in Port Chester and bought party supplies. I hadn’t planned on buying the tequila, but the bottle, shaped like a statue of a Mayan god, caught my attention. It was way too cool to pass up.

Andy and Harlan grinned. “Nice,” they said, nodding.

“Should we open the tequila and the piña colada or have beers first?” Harlan asked.

“Open everything,” I said, putting the car in reverse and flooring it out of Harlan’s driveway. “We’ve only got ninety minutes.”

Tyler was quiet. He looked out the passenger window while the beers were being popped and the bottles of tequila and piña colada were passed around.

Tyler held up his hand when Andy tried to hand him a beer. “No, thanks,” he said. “I’ll wait awhile.”

Andy shrugged. “More for us, bro.”

My heart fell. Tyler’s refusal to join the festivities bummed me out and confused me. We’d met sophomore year when we sat next to each other in Spanish class. It hadn’t taken us long to become inseparable. I was amazed that one of the most popular kids in school had wanted to hang out with me and introduce me to his friends. And at first, Tyler had been far wilder even than me. I stuck to drinking and maybe smoking the occasional joint, but he would try anything. A few months before, we’d gone to a party, and by the end of the evening I’d had so much to drink that I couldn’t tell you what model of car I owned, much less have driven it. I thought Tyler was in better shape, so I gave him my keys. He neglected to tell me that he’d just smoked a joint dipped in angel dust. He’d never tried it before, and now he was certifiably out of his mind. Once we got onto the interstate, he panicked. He gripped the steering wheel like a man in ten-foot seas clutching a life ring. “We’re going too fast! We’re going too fast!” he screamed. I put my face as close to the speedometer as I could so I could read the blurred numbers. As near as I could tell, it said we were going twenty miles an hour. I told him we were fine, but there was no convincing him. It was no small task managing a driver who belonged in a straitjacket while intermittently having to open my door enough to get sick onto the speeding pavement passing beneath us. It was hell in high definition.

The next thing we heard was the sound of someone tapping on the windshield.

“Are you boys all right?”

It was a neighbor of ours, an older man who lived three houses down from mine. Neither Tyler nor I remembered the sequence of events, but we’d ended up parking cockeyed in this man’s driveway and passing out. Usually we’d think this sort of thing was hysterical and brag about it to friends, but we’d gotten too close to the edge this time, and neither of us wanted to talk about it. We weren’t ashamed, just unnerved.

Two weeks later, Tyler began seeing a girl named Hilary, who introduced him to a Christian youth group called Young Life. The more he became involved with it, the harder it became to convince him to party with me the way he had in the past. He eventually avoided it altogether. He’d still go out with me and maybe have a beer, but it wasn’t like before. He didn’t act judgmental or self-righteous toward me—he just wasn’t interested in the sorts of things we’d done before. When I asked him what was going on, he’d shrug and say we could talk about it some other time.

Every Tuesday Tyler asked if he could pick me up and take me to this thing Young Life put on called “Club.” It was hard not to laugh when he described what they did there. He said meetings took place in this cool barn behind someone’s house. Kids sat cross-legged on the floor on carpet squares and sang jerky songs, some that involved choreography. Even Tyler admitted this part weirded him out. Then they performed melodramas or skits that were supposedly funny. Or you might be called up like an audience member from a game show and made to participate in a ridiculously childish contest. From what I could tell, other than humiliation, there was no first prize. Tyler told me about one where four people competed to cram as many marshmallows into their mouths as possible. It was called Chubby Bunny. A guy who had tried angel dust and nearly gotten us killed on the interstate one month earlier was now singing and clapping along to John Denver’s song “Country Roads” and playing Chubby Bunny. You’d think the g-force required to make this kind of moral 180 would’ve snapped his neck. He said that after the songs and skits, the Young Life leader, a guy named Mike, stood up and gave a short message about Jesus and about how God wanted to be in relationship with us.

That was the deal breaker.

As I recall, we had just passed through a town called Wethersfield, and the lights of the city of Hartford were trembling on the horizon. Unfortunately, the horizon line was fuzzy and wouldn’t stay steady, which is more or less what you want a horizon line to do. An hour into the ride Andy, Harlan, and I had consumed a couple of six-packs of beer and half a bottle of tequila. The Bacardi premixed piña colada tasted like banana-scented aftershave, but that didn’t stop us from drinking it. We were nearing the point when the three cans of motor oil rolling around the back weren’t safe from being sucked down.

Andy and Harlan were obliterated. As driver, I had tried to act more responsibly. I was only three-quarters in the bag.

I found that keeping the car in one lane was becoming a challenge. Tyler begged me to pull over so he could drive, but I wasn’t ready to surrender the wheelhouse just yet. I remembered a trick someone had told me about recently. I rolled down the driver’s-side window and stuck my head out. If I could keep my left tires, front and rear, one to two feet to the inside of the broken white line, then I would know I was staying in my lane. I was just mastering this brilliantly innovative solution when I heard Andy say, “Houston, we have a problem.”

I pulled my head back into the car and looked in the rearview mirror. Andy ducked so I could see what was going on.

“Problem” was an incomplete description.

Unlike in most cars, the engine of the Volkswagen Beetle was mounted in the rear. It was one of the features I loved about it. There was a distinctive series of vents that ran in an arced line across the top of the engine compartment that were responsible for capturing the air that cooled the engine. These ducts were not intended to be openings for angry, three-foot-long, orange and yellow flames to jet out of, or as flues for huge plumes of noxious black smoke. Unfortunately, this was what they were doing.

“The freaking car’s on fire!” Tyler screamed, his eyes fixed on the inferno visible in the side-view mirror attached to his door. It was disheartening to hear an ordinarily fearless, 225-pound guy shriek like a six-year-old girl.

I knew nothing about cars. I knew even less about cars on fire. On every episode of CHiPs and Charlie’s Angels I’d ever seen, burning vehicles always erupted into angry fireballs, and dental records had to be used to identify the charred passengers. No exceptions.

“Hold on!” I hollered.

I cranked the steering wheel to the right and careened across four lanes of traffic. By an act of God, no one was in my flight path. My left-side tires screeched as they clawed for purchase on the asphalt while my right-side tires left the ground. We made it to the shoulder, but I was certain the gas tank was seconds from blowing up. I opened my door and yelled, “Everybody jump!” and leaped for my life. After rolling on the ground two or three times, I pushed myself up onto hands and knees and watched as my driverless car gently yawed right and bumped its way down a short, grassy embankment, the open driver’s door flapping like a wing, and Harlan and Andy’s faces looking at me forlornly through the rear window, until the drama was brought to a halt by a hedge of young trees and thick undergrowth. Flames were no longer spouting out the now-blackened vents, only the occasional curl of smoke.

It was possible I’d overreacted.

First out of the car was Tyler, followed by Andy and Harlan. Andy and Harlan, drunk as skunks, stumbled up the embankment. But they weren’t so blitzed that they couldn’t begin howling with laughter and imitating my cry of, “Everybody jump!” They did this over and over until I gave up trying to defend myself and laughed with them.

Tyler was quiet. He kicked a small pile of blue-and-gray gravel, then frowned down the highway toward home.

While Andy and Harlan went off to pee in the woods, Tyler sat on his haunches next to me. “We have to talk,” he said.

Volkswagens are not expensive dates. All they ask for is gasoline and a little oil now and then. I was good at keeping my VW filled with gas, but less vigilant about the Valvoline. A seventeen-year-old, oil-starved VW gets irritable when asked to drive for eighty minutes at sixty-five miles an hour with seven hundred pounds of teenagers rudely indifferent to her efforts. In these circumstances she’s apt to voice her displeasure. Mine did by throwing her rods and cracking her engine block.

My intention had been to put the cans of oil rolling around in the back of the car into the engine before we left for Hartford, but the guys were so stressed about running late that I’d forgotten to do it. Now my prized car was cooked and I would have to call my mother to come get us. It would be a long ride home.

On one level, life is not much different from a VW Bug. If you fill it with gas and the right amount of oil, it will take you where you point it. The driver is the wild card. All the proper maintenance in the world won’t save you from a nut job behind the wheel.

Life always comes down to who’s driving.