Sixers Review

Other Peoples’ Property 

I first saw Dreb Larch on the quad. It was past midnight and he was just standing there, paused at the eastern edge of the lawn, staring out to sea. Absurdly enough, as I recall, the moon was out that night too, tracing the edge of everything with that species of lunar electricity which—to a moderately doom-smitten sixteen year old—can seem suggestive of supernatural forces, coolly meddling in the lives of young men.

       In the fury of adolescent friendship, best and worst selves are traded like baseball cards. It’s as ineluctable as seeing green after staring at red. Seems to be the way the mind works. If it weren’t for this tendency, I might not have had any friends at all.

         That Dreb Larch was charming, everyone was prepared to admit. He was six-and-a-half-feet tall and everything about him tapered, as if his fingers, his nose, and even his brow, were not just coming to a point, but making some point. He possessed real gravity. He did not snort when he talked; he didn’t squeak or effuse; you could poke him all day and never find any ungainly enthusiasms. Awkwardness, enthusiasm, and striving were for the rest of us. He was no prig in training either; six prep schools had asked him to leave, for drinking. He was our number one heavy, more or less.

            When Dreb was around, we all felt like we had to be some Platonic ideal of ourselves.

Most hated him.

 

I grew up in Boston, spending summers on Nantucket with my family—a decidedly unserious collection of sailor slash brokers. We looked unserious too: most of my relatives were pretty enough to be in poor taste, even the men. The six other families on our little spit had, only half-jokingly, called us the ‘bonny Vanderburghs’ for decades. This is not to say that all Nantucketers are unattractive; aside from my kin, ours was an ugly spit.

           Dreb teased me about my appearance right from the start.

           “Your face is a major character failing, Vanderburg,” he said to me once.

Compared to the Larch family we were lightweights—transplanted New Yorkers, whereas the Larches went back to the buckle-hat days.

          “My family made money the old-fashioned way: in the mills, on the backs of one-armed ten year old boys. Elbow grease.”

         He said things like this, and though I’m embarrassed to admit it, I liked it. Before I met Dreb, I talked about the same things as the other young men at school, about scoring girls, sports, coke, whatever. I kept score, just like everyone else. In these aggressive and deceptively hide-bound conversations, it was important to seem regular, even cool. We weren’t buds on the branch of power, watering at the spring of privilege; no, we were rock-stars in training, men of action; on our secret résumés were barroom brawls and tawdry one-night stands; we had lived.

          Dreb talked about old things, but he seemed younger than us all; after our first long conversation together, my other friends sounded like old men on park benches nattering about past glories.

        Instead of sitting down and thinking about how circumscribed my future was likely to be, which would be painful, I struck up a friendship with Dreb; he had my number so I didn’t have to have it myself. This was very liberating. It allowed me the illusion of infinite possibility, which is natural to sixteen. That feeling is gone now, but then just breathing in, feeling the spaces between my ribs ache, filled me with the joy of expansion, an expansion that would keep pace with the big bang itself.

          Dreb didn’t encourage me.

          I would meet him at midnight, and he would let me drink his whiskey nips. His beer, pulled from a tattered knapsack, was somehow always cold. We would sit on a memorial bench, near a nettled patch of beach heather.

          “You know, of course, that you are drinking with a descendant of Lizzie Borden’s?”

           I shrugged. His family was from Fall River; it was entirely possible.

      The ocean and the beer foam would hiss in unison. Dreb’s smile toggled between ironic  amusement and toothy appetite. Most of the time he looked like he was trying very hard not to bite me.

          “In Fall River Massachusetts an axe-murderer is a more reputable creature than a broker.”

           I laughed at his jokes. I asked rude questions.

          “Were you hospitalized for madness, like everyone says?”

        “Madness, hardly. I have an imaginary mouse. My father thinks it is time I outgrow him. I refuse to say goodbye…” he held out his palm, “Mr. Timmy, say hello to the golden boy. My father is a cruel man…he hates Mr. Timmy, so he paid some Nazis to lock me up.”

            He had to be kidding with me, right?

            Nonetheless, he was as close to exotic as it got at a New England prep school, which prompted me to treat him like the Delphic Oracle. I was in awe of him therefore he must know things. And so I asked sloppy questions.

           “Do you ever think about what you will be doing, ten years from now?”

           “Have you heard that song, I’m down with OPP?”

           “The rap song?”

           “Yes, that one. Other people’s pussy…apparently some erotic fetish.”

           “I’ve heard it.”

         “Well, I’m down with OPP too, other peoples’ property. Across the sound there, on a clear day, you can see a white dot on Tashmoo beach. My mother’s sister’s place…where that branch of the family fled when black people started moving into Vineyard Haven. White flight. Over there, on the smallest of the Naushon Islands, lives a girl who nearly killed herself over me. A flattering misunderstanding. And my uncle’s place, you can see it if you walk up the beach. He lives in a sterile white cube, like a sugar cube, because we used to own Cuban sugar plantations. He’s still sore about it, hence the cube—architectural nostalgia.”

           “Huh…”

         “And you too. You’ll plant your stake in this swamp someday…and then you’ll be fifty before you know it, and you’ll realize the whole thing was foregone from the start, and you won’t give a damn.”

          “I’m going to travel…maybe live in Paris, write a novel.”

          “Better take a hammer to that nose of yours first…people are not going to let you waste that face staring into a novel. They’re going to tug on your sleeve.”

          I laughed. He was flirting with me. Back then, I didn’t know or care. I had found a friend upon whose shoulders I could lay every shadow that crossed my heart.

 

           College separated us. Owing to some large donation made by my grandfather, I continued along my hilarious way. My grades were not good enough for the Ivy League, but the donation apparently was. I was in the last wave of Legacy kids, bathed in a sort of penumbral nostalgia. I lived in a late Victorian time capsule: a four-story wood paneled club, with butlers, note-takers, and a collection of macabre objects; a steady stream of willing middle-class girls giggled perpetually in the hallways; I rarely went to class; I purchased a cigar cutter; pool was a way of life. My buddies were all characters: Clem, Birdo, and Goopers. We wore top-hats (really). Townies heckled us, understandably. Although these rites were two centuries old, they all seemed new to me.

          I met a girl from a Main Line family. I swear I had no Idea. Looking back, its all so cliché as to be laughable, if not outright horrifying. But there are still a few of us left, apparently, even if I didn’t know I was among them for the longest time. As my note- taker enlightened me on American history, my conversations with Dreb came back to me. I developed a tentative awareness of other people. Until this time, I thought everyone came from a family of blonde sailor slash brokers. Everyone spent the summer in a narcotic half-coma, living in rhythm with the sea, didn’t they? Apparently not. I thought my parents were poor because they didn’t own a helicopter.

           I missed Dreb. Over late-night cheeseburgers in the campus greasy spoon, I bored my girlfriend Liz with Dreb stories. I showed her my beat up picture of him. (Even in person Dreb looked like an old yellowed photograph). But she refused to accept this lugubrious shadow as my best friend. She said Dreb was some gay gothic damage, a prep school doppelganger, a ghost haunting me. She insisted I got the photo from an old family album. Sometimes I believed her. She was going to cure me of him, she playfully said.

 

        But Dreb was real. Rumors of his patchy, nutty life came through the grapevine. Even though I felt a painful distance between Dreb and myself now, he was closer than I knew.

          Over pool one night, Goopers mentioned him.

        “He got booted out of Kenton again,” said Goopers,“ so his father got him a job in Fall River, get this…” Goopers paused over his shot and wiggled his eyebrows, “as a meter-maid. And he actually wears a skirt. Can you picture that? What a case.”

         I hired a car that night.

         Dreb was perched on a corner stool at the Spinning Jenny cocktail lounge. Through the window,  I saw him, his crossed thighs jutting out into the dining area. Cigarette smoke, neon-pink, revolved around the ceiling like a small and gaudy Nor’easter.

        “Goldilocks…” he called out to me.

         He was thinner than the last time I saw him. He ordered me a martini.

         “I live off Olives,” he said, “they are a perfect food.”

         “How are you?”

         “I suppose you are spying for my father now?”

         “I heard you have a new job,” I said, trying to be polite.

         “Oh…I bet the chuckleheads are laughing.”

         “I miss you…”

         “I’m right down the road, Goldie.”

          He seemed quite drunk. I wanted to save him, from what I still really don’t know.

          He blew a big pair of smoke rings and watched them melt into the ceiling-cloud.

          “I’m the lead singer in a rock band now, Goldie,” he said.

          “Wow...”

          I was impressed.

         “I’m a huge sex symbol in Warwick Rhode Island.”

          Fear of AIDS rose up in me.

          “You’re careful, aren’t you?”

          “Careful?”

          He looked at me like this was a word he didn’t understand.

          “What sort of music?”

        “Like Exile On Main Street. Heavy Stones influence. I wear a feather boa, and heels. My father, that old whore, sometimes I wear it for him.”

          “Oh…”

          “He’s a judge, do you remember?”

          “How is he?”

          “He came to a show, and offered to have me hospitalized.”

          “Why don’t you get out of Fall River?”

          “I’m parochial, I guess. Mr. Timmy gets nervous.”

          “How is Mr. Timmy?”

          “He’s hooked on heroin. A Portuguese fisherman turned him onto it.”

          He held out his palm, just the same way he always did when showcasing Mr. Timmy. He tickled an imaginary belly.

           “He’s nodding right now, unfortunately.”

 

The next time I saw him he had cleaned up substantially. It was at a big wedding on the Vineyard, with a ragtime band. It was one of those theme weddings, the roaring twenties. The groom was a distant cousin of Dreb’s; the bride, a distant cousin of mine. My heart quickened when I saw him, plucking champagne off a tray with his giant hand. His hair was longer.

      People walked gingerly past him, and I watched this drama for maybe a minute before going   over. Dreb Larch, at a wedding, didn’t quite work. He looked like an undertaker at a baptism.

    Around midnight the party migrated to the beach. Everyone but Dreb and me ripped off their clothes.

   It was embarrassing, watching the wedding stripped bare in the cold, gray foam. Dreb was uncomfortable too. Joyful skinny-dipping wasn’t an option for either of us, so we slid down the shore to seem less voyeuristic.

   After a few minutes, the bodies of my friends became elemental under the starlight, and embarrassment subsided.

       Dreb had pinched a bottle of gin. We drank from it.

     “I’ve always loved you Goldie,” he said.

       I looked at him, he was smiling. I smiled back.

     “Me too, Dreb. I think you’re great. So,” I hiccupped, “so unique…”

     “Well, I do have lovely feet.”

      Dreb kicked off his loafers and waved his long feet over the crashing surf. He had webbed feet, I think; but it was dark, and I was a bit drunk.

     “They’re beautiful,” I said.

        I kicked off my shoes.

     “Oh, look at those marvels.”

        Dreb crawled down toward my feet, like a giant black crab.

     “Even your feet are perfect, Goldie.”

     “Come off it, they probably stink.”

        Dreb then grabbed my feet and tried to kiss them.

     “Knock it off, will you?”

     “Come on, let me get a taste of them, you dirty boy.”

      “Let go.”

       Dreb lifted me up by my feet now, and dangled me over the sand. He came awfully close to actually kissing my damn feet. I kicked hard and caught his cheek with my heel. He toppled to the sand like a big old groaning redwood.

       “Even your feet are beyond my reach,” he said spitting sand.

       “Behave yourself, Dreb.”

       “I am behaved, dammit.”

       This was a new Dreb, a needier Dreb. He was so inhuman once that his fall was uncomfortable to witness. His voice was squeaky and imploring now.

       “Come to Paris with me, Goldie; I’ll sing in the nightclubs, and you can write your novel.”

       “How will we finance the trip?”

       “I’ll kill my father, that old corpse…he’ll barely notice, and then we’ll live in exile.”

        Dreb’s smile was sly and bitter. The bathers hooted and splashed. Dreb watched them.

       “Tomorrow, they’ll pretend that didn’t happen.”

         I was starting to wish they would pretend a little sooner than that.

        “We may sign a record deal soon…”

        “Congratulations.”

        “I have found a way to make my rock songs both turgid and wistfully bombastic.”

        “How’s that?”

        “Leather pants and metaphysics.”

        “I bet you’re quite a sight in leather pants.”

        “Will you love me when I’m famous, Goldie?”

        “I already love you, Dreb.”

      He leaned over to me and fixed me with a long and undeniably sultry look. I thought he was goofing around, but then he put his hand on my cheek and kissed me. I pulled away.

         “What the hell, Dreb?”

          Dreb pulled his knees to his chest and turned to face the sea.

         “A hole is just a hole, Goldilocks…think about it.”

         “Is that what you mean by metaphysics?”

         “Fuck you.”

 

         I was sore with Dreb after the wedding. He was acting like humping me was his due, and the hole comment…well, it was beneath him. It was as if he had drawn the curtain back on his romanticism and there it was, the unspeakable: an idiotic anal tautology. I couldn’t seem to escape his utterance. In physics class—one of the few I actually attended—we seemed stuck on black holes, page after page of event horizons and giant phallic conic sections and ridiculously futile speculations about whether or not a wormhole would lead to some other galaxy. And I felt guilty that I couldn’t give Dreb what he wanted. I had failed him. He had fallen into a black hole because of me.

       So with this flattering and rather melodramatic take on things, I threw myself back into my lazy, privileged life. Tradition, at least for a young man, can be quite liberating. To have the years set in stone, carpeted before you like a potter’s field…well, it should create revolt, or panic, or at least dread. But me? I was content; no, even more than that, I felt free.

       And I forgot about Dreb. I acted the lead in our venerable, annual, cross-dressing extravaganza. Academically, I was blissfully invisible, shrouding myself in a cloak of gentleman’s C’s. People talked about the new meritocratic class of world-beaters: androgynous young things modernizing Russia one day, and off chasing paper billions through Silicon Valley the next. But I stayed inside my Victorian print of Ivy-League indolence, meriting nothing and enjoying everything. Liz would meet me by a famous statue, nightly, and we would steal off into the night for junk food and beer. We never discussed the future, but somehow it was all we ever talked about.

     Then more rumors. Dreb is institutionalized! Dreb is detoxing with James Brown at Mclean hospital! Dreb is going to be in Rolling Stone magazine! Dreb is being sued by Jimmy Buffet? Dreb is sleeping with a Baron!

     And then, perhaps more unbelievably, Dreb is going to be playing the Rathskeller Lounge, next week.

     Though it went against tradition (nobody ever left campus) I was able to scare up a welcoming party for old Dreb. I even set him a bed, in our club, using some silly old linen sheets covered in our school’s insignia. Rebel that he was, I figured maybe he’d get a kick out some institutional swaddling.

   We raised some townsfolks’ eyebrows when we walked into the Rathskeller lounge in our dinner jackets. The waitress asked if we were a Beatles cover-band, and I said yes. This seemed to put everyone at ease. Beer in plastic flagons furthered the sense of ease.

    Dreb’s band, The River Lethe, came out and set up. Then the music, bluesy, started up. A mosh-pit comprised of young and drunken insomniacs started churning beneath the stage.

    Dreb sauntered out in a cape, his brow lowered, playing the Lord Byron thing to the hilt. He was sallow and hollow-eyed, but I shrugged it off. Before singing, Dreb looked over at our group and gave us an ironic thumbs-up. I smiled. Then he howled, which was disconcerting. The howl was unearthly, and chilling. As his howl attenuated, it became a groan, which sounded like Grendel playing a didgeridoo. I then had a whimsical thought: Dreb was unleashing his ancestral groan, if indeed there was such a thing.

     He sang. His low, fatalistic voice was perfectly suited to the music. I was proud of him. He was good at Rock and Roll, a rare enough aptitude for anyone, never mind the son of an old Quaker family.

     He had mastered prowling too, doing a herky-jerky Yankee pimp-roll at the front of the stage. That business drove the girls a little wild. I am no expert on Rock and Roll, but I’d venture to say that the music was soulful, and that Dreb possessed an undeniable pagan authority. And despite the genuinely strange lyrics—not many rock songs center around bailing the case of the great white whale—people were gyrating on the sticky black floor, sloshing dollops of beer from their mugs, and giving Dreb the occasional desultory lighter salute here and there.

    He grew drunker as the set wore on, tippling out of a fifth tucked behind an amplifier. And though I’m not exactly sure, I think his band mates started to get frustrated at him. Twirling the mike on its chord, he almost hit the bass player, and I think the guy said watch it asshole, though I’m no lip reader.

     After the set, my friends jumped in a cab. I waited for Dreb outside. My cool-crush was back. While I had been living like a museum relic, Dreb had been living, really living. Living so strenuously in fact that it had landed him on a ward with James Brown. The big-ticket item of angst in my generation is this whole question of authenticity. Even then, I found the debate absurd; if you’re even thinking about authenticity, you are authentic—authentically human at least. But even Victorian museum displays get periodic whiffs of the zeitgeist wafting in through the vents. I was aware that Dreb was inventing himself, and it probably made him more authentic than me.

      He came out in sunglasses.

      “Let’s walk Goldie.”

      We walked up the center-strip of Commonwealth Avenue.

      “You can stay with me at the club if you like,” I offered.

      “Mr. Timmy refuses to sleep anywhere without room-service.”

      “I could be your room service, and I’m sure I could find Mr. Timmy something to his liking.”

      “Nothing against you, Goldie, but Timmy finds undergraduates ghastly.”

      “I understand.”

      “Besides, he’s Jonesing right now.”

      “I see.”

      Boston, under a fine layer of mist, is a kind of time machine. In the blur, you can no longer tell that the old lamps are electric. If the cars are few and you ignore the reflections of headlamps in the street, you can pretend that it is the late Victorian period.

      It also helps if you happen to be walking with a young man who is dressed like the vampire version of Oscar Wilde…

      “Goldie, tell me, what do you do all day?”

      Dreb said this with a slight note of intoxicated disdain, and I fumbled.

     “Well, let me guess…you probably don’t go to class at all, because that would be vulgar…oh, and you play pool, don’t you? And you’ve dabbled in theatricals I hope, and if you are really in a mood, you grab your girl and you go eat mad cow on a bun at the local greasy spoon…”

      I just looked at Dreb.

      “How did I do?”

      “Fine Dreb. Now why don’t you turn your oracular gaze onto the rest of my life?”

      “Oh, I couldn’t. The stench of inevitability is too great.”

      This stung me, and I nearly shot back with a sarcastic remark about his life. But I caught myself.

      Dreb leaned against the pedestal of a tall city founder: one of those striding conqueror statues,  with a battering ram mandible and a billowing bronze topcoat. A statue chock-full of accusatory vigor. Dreb—also wearing a long flowing topcoat—looked like the striding founder, but deflated. I laughed.

      “So, what have you been up to?”

      “Do you mean when I’m not plotting to murder my father?”

      “Yes, I suppose.”

    “Well, that leaves precious little time. And I think that my current plan, Rock and Roll suicide, is perhaps the best. It’s a war of attrition. I get arrested for dropping my drawers in New Haven, say…and my father bails me out on the condition that I go to detox.”

       Out came a silver flask from his jacket. He drank. When he threw his head back, he slipped a little.

      “Maybe you should drink a little less,” I said, worried.

     “Oh, I’ve tried that, Goldie. Had seven seizures by the seaside…flip-flopped around like a beached fluke. Better to keep the tank a little full.”

   His tank was more than a little full. I should have scolded him, or said something about how completely unromantic dropping dead from booze had become…but I didn’t want to seem un-cool.

    “And with double-vision, I have seen the world twice over. You should really check out Prague, Goldie. All the drop outs agree…a trust fund really has some legs over there.”

      “What about your record deal?”

      “Mr. Timmy bristled at the terms,” said Dreb, waving with resignation.

      “Surely, you can’t allow him to interfere.”

      “It’s too late for that, isn’t it, Mr. Timmy?”

       Dreb was baby-talking into his palm, and I grew angry.

      “Isn’t it about time you stopped letting an imaginary mouse, or a bottle, call the shots for you?”

      “Yes, Goldie, of course.”

     Telling a budding rock star to stop listening to his muse, even if it happens to be an invisible and irritable junkie mouse, is maybe the height of un-cool. I stopped talking. We went to his room at The Ritz. Inside, I still felt like an awful scold, so when he handed me his flask, I downed half of it.

      Making a stab at remedial coolness, I splayed myself out on his sofa.

      “Aren’t you the delicious Mandolisque?”

     I laughed. If he made a pass at me, this time I was prepared to take him up on it. Through some strange calculation—one that would never hold in a court of law or even in polite conversation—I had decided that sleeping with Dreb would not constitute cheating on Liz. Noble motives yield electric liberties. He wanted me, and it looked like he was determined to have one of those brief and spectacular lives that young men admire, but can’t bear to watch. Even more ridiculous, I thought by offering myself up—in a grand, touching act of sexual altruism—I would be helping him somehow.

      “Do you have to wear that frightening uniform out when you are painting the town?”

      I ran my hand down my lapel and shrugged.

      “It’s silky,” I said.

      “Yes, I bet it is…”

       Dreb leaned on the arm of the couch, playing with his martini, and staring down at me. I looked at his face, at his chiseled bird lips, slightly parted.

     “Goldie, look at you…you are in peril. Hustled into the seducer’s room, and you are already half-tousled.”

       I laughed again, shy.

       “Sit up…you look ridiculous,” he snapped.

      Dreb looked at me. He knit his brow and closed his lips. I sat up and tried my best to act like I hadn’t been striking a deliberately erotic pose. Satisfied, Dreb came and sat down near me.

       He stared at the floor.

       “Did you like the show?”

       “I did.”

       “Maybe the last time you get to see us.”

      “Why? You all have such a terrific…rapport,” I said, with some difficulty. Sitting up had made me tipsier somehow.

       “I’m breaking up the band.”

      Dreb gave me his poker face, holding his indifference out as a dare. I never responded well to this look of his. Gravity has always exasperated me, especially in Dreb.

       “Well, no…you can’t, I mean…” I stammered.

       “Of course I can.”

       “But why?”

     I had got it into my head that Rock and Roll was keeping him alive. Without the structure and regularity of touring, I was afraid of what Dreb would do.

       “Why? My bandmates are in cahoots with my father.”

       “No way.”

       “Way…and they are always accusing me of forgetting the lyrics.”

       “Well you did seem to lose the thread there a couple of times…”

       “See, you’re on their side. I hate it when bands come out and enunciate. The tour is over. I’m firing them. They can all go back to sprinkling talc on rubber examining gloves, down at my uncle’s factory. To hell with them. I hope they die from latex poisoning. I’m going back to my stool at the Spinning Jenny cocktail lounge.”

       Again, Dreb held his face out, and this time I tried to kiss him.

        I slid across the sofa and forcefully wrapped my hand around the back of his neck. Then I pulled.          

      But Dreb didn’t budge. His face just hung there. In my state, I took this as a good sign; and so, I lunged up to meet him, my eyes aflutter, and whetting my lips with less than appealing flicks of my tongue.

        I was on the floor, and Dreb was over me.

        “Not like this, Goldie,” he said, wiping off his lips.

        “I thought you wanted me…”

        “You’re blotto,” he said, walking away now.

        “So?”

       “So, I love you, Goldie…but I don’t want to be groped by you. You look like a fucking porn-star: Gatsby sucks it in Nantucket. Get some sleep.”

In the morning, Dreb ordered up room service. We played chess in our bathrobes. Even on a fifth of liquor a day, he could still whoop me two out of three. My heart pounded as he advanced his big pieces in baffling, wild attacks, circling around my queen and my king, always just a couple of moves ahead.

       Near noon, he walked over to his bed and took off his bathrobe.  With his back to me, I could see his ribs. His stringy muscles twitched as he reached for his tightie-whities. His glutes were baseball sized. He slid the underwear over his knobby butt. He was skeletal.

       We said goodbye in the street.

       I told him that I’d drive down to Fall River soon, and I meant it at the time. But the spring formals proved more riveting than a quick road trip down to a sleepy industrial town. Perhaps with some guilt, I enjoyed Liz with a renewed appreciation. She could be so wry, and funny, even then, and Goopers, and Birdo and Clem…well, it was my last couple of months with all of them maybe.

 

Spring accelerated. In those last weeks everything generated its own instantaneous nostalgia.  Shuffling across the yard, I knew that most of my crossings there were behind me; I was now near to joining the ranks of those seasonal ghosts who walk alongside others more happily lost in immediacy. I had maybe ten Déjà vu’s a day. Our school song, an insistent and grating dirge, suddenly made me cry. I believed all the high and noble rhetoric of our commencement speeches. I was going to be a success, and this would help me to help others who hadn’t enjoyed the same advantages as I. That’s right. And when Liz would loop her arm underneath mine, I could hear our healthy brood laughing; even the soft flesh of my inner arm was optimistic. My life was going to be spectacularly good, and there wasn’t a damn thing that could be done about it.

       To hell with Dreb.

 

Law school. Arbitrary stuff, the law. Yet, I discovered a penchant for logistical niggling. Made review. Rode the Main Line to Liz on the weekends. Set a date to marry on my family’s beach.

       Before inviting Dreb to the wedding, I sent out some feelers. If he was in a bad period, I felt there was potential for serious harm on both sides. People would be wearing white and seersucker, and if Dreb were to show in one of his auntie’s black gowns…well… a six-foot seven inch cross-dressing widow in a sea of ritual white would make for a dissonant presence, at best. Additionally, the wedding seemed likely to come off without a hitch. All the dipsomaniacal uncles were on the water wagon, and there had been only one intra-familial dust up concerning the substitution of chicken for beef in the surf and turf. To Dreb, such harmony might be insulting.

     But he was sober, and working two jobs. I found this hard to believe, so I called him from my father’s beach house. The Queen Elisabeth was inching along the horizon when I heard him say my name. He sounded up-tempo. Of course he’d like to come, couldn’t wait. I hung up and watched the big boat on the horizon. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. People float over the sea in giant steel ships, I remember thinking, and Dreb is dry.

       I may never top my wedding day, and that’s ok by me, I don’t feel impelled to; but I can imagine a person ruined by a perfect day. Not me though.

       It wasn’t perfect because everyone had a smash of a time, which they did. The toasts were jokey, yet tasteful, and everyone showered that outrageous love onto the bride and groom, as if we were some double-headed deity in need of strenuous worship. Wallflowers danced, and the unattached skirted desperation. And Liz’s beauty grew somehow that evening, at least to me, when I saw a new look in her eye, the look you might give to someone at the beginning of a long journey. Though that look can cut both ways, I suppose. This all played some part in my doubtful claim to perfection, but it was Dreb’s appearance that capped it.

       He came late to the church, right as I leaned in to kiss Liz. There he was: dark and hesitant, behind the pews. After I finished sealing my vows, the minister had to call my name twice, because I was smiling at the sepulchral latecomer in the back. When Dreb waved, I realized my back was to the altar.

      At the reception, he made the rounds. I watched. He had put on some weight. I had never seen him socialize, but there he was nodding politely at my maternal aunt’s meandering chatter, muttering conspiratorially with my ill-tempered uncle, and, most amazingly, doing the twist with a random and smitten adolescent.

      Just after the sunset Dreb loped toward me, cutting the grass with his shuffling feet and suppressing a smile.

      “Mr. Timmy asked me to congratulate you. Ferries terrify him.”

      “Well, thank him for me.”

      “Yes.”

      Dreb looked out at the water. Evening light warmed his face.

      “There won’t be any obligatory skinny dipping tonight, will there?”

     This was a rhetorical question. Dreb knew that I would do everything in my power to enforce the dress code.

      “Not unless you start it.”

      “No, no…”

     Inside, I was glad. He had the sheen of a pampered movie star: skin plump and flush, silken hair catching the last rose rays of daylight, his whole face slack with joyful indifference. However many demons he had, they seemed exorcized.

     “Goldie, as you know, I dabble in meter-maiding…and, I should have brought my little book of tickets. So many cars out in the road.”

      “It’s a private drive.”

      “Plenty of moving violations on the dance floor.”

      “Is this…I mean my wedding, is it what you expected?”

      He paused a moment.

      “No, Goldie…it’s even better. My imagination is not up to this.”

      He waved his hand back at the tent. I looked back as well, surging with a strange new pride. It really was too much.

     “No painter would dare paint happiness on this scale, Goldie. A couple of summer lanterns glowing, maybe three young girls in summer dresses, and possibly one wistful adult, standing by with arms crossed. But this…if you hung it on a wall, it would simply depress people.”

      “Thank you,” I said, in all sincerity.

      “You’re welcome.”

      Dreb looked at the grass now, and flicked his foot from side to side.

      “Will you dance with me, Goldie?”

      I laughed. But he was serious.

      “Yes,” I said, with fear rising.

    And so we walked arm in arm to the dance floor. The band, a jazz quartet, shifted out of some jitterbuggy ditty into a slow and danceable version of Lush-Life.

      Dreb led.

      A small circle of twittering curiosity formed around us.

      “They’re best friends,” whispered someone.

      Relief. People were putting a generous spin on the most unusual coupling of the night.

      Dreb really whipped me about, and I did my best, but I kept stepping on his toes anyway. 

     He laughed. I felt like a giggly bride botching her virginal turn. Effortlessly, he steered me back into sequence, sometimes lifting me clear off my feet.

      “Didn’t you learn how to dance at that damn college you went to?”

    After the dance, I lost track of Dreb. I got into the champagne, heavily, bouncing around like a pinball in a machine called happy wedding. Down on the beach someone made a bonfire. The waves were big, generating a reddish mist near the fire. Dreb put his hand on my sleeve in the fog, telling me he had to go.  By the time I had burped my protest, he was walking back over the dunes, his slim shadow rising through the high-reaching flames.

    Even now, my dance with him comes back to me like a dream over coffee—insistent, but out of reach.

 

My firm, Brixton, Blade & Canning, engages in a form of research ‘hygiene.’ They sent me to seminars in London that winter, every two months, to learn this hygienic form of paper pushing. It’s all rather arcane, amounting to little more than an infinity of admonitions against fudging the data. But I suppose it’s necessary, given that mortals like me tend to be perpetually spinning things to their advantage. But I was resentful of the wet London winter, of the dislocation. Liz and I had just bought a house on Nantucket, and she was stuck watching a sloppy renovation on a cold and lonely island.

     I was reading some thousand-page beast of a brief in the Lobby of the Devon hotel when I got the call from Liz.

      “Dreb is dead…I don’t really know how…”

      “No…can’t be.”

      “Well, Goopers called, and he told me to tell you.”

     A woman, checking in, inadvertently hip-checked me.

       “No…”

      Some sweat function switched on. I looked at the lobby. For some reason, I began to think about what people were doing outside, in the street, out where I couldn’t see them. I pictured the people above me, in their rooms, walking out of the shower, or idling on their beds, flipping indifferently through cable channels.

     I wanted to yell something cruel, but I didn’t have any dirt on anyone, and it was beyond me to cook up some general insult. Everything was going on as before; it felt obscene.

      But it wasn’t obscene.

      “I’ll fly back tonight.”

      “You don’t really have to…”

      “Of course I do.”

      “He’s already been…”

      “Already buried?”

      “Yes.”

     Now I felt like the lobby was a large elevator, sprung from its cable. We were all falling, the whole of London, silently. To their credit, no one panicked. May as well live out the day...

      “I’m so sorry…”

      “Yes…”

      “Call me later…”

      “Right.”

     I hung up and tried to assemble what Liz had told me. But I was paralyzed. For quite some time, I just leaned on the cool marble of the check in counter. When I put my forehead on it, to see how cold it was, the concierge asked me if I was ‘all right.’

     The solicitousness confused me. His wide eyes seemed ready for me to announce that my best friend was dead, but that couldn’t be, I thought. I opened my mouth, but then he cocked his head impatiently, and that helped me to cut free of him.

    On maybe my third drink, I decided that this was just another rumor. Dreb was probably off on a bender, and a simple disappearance had somehow morphed into death. Half the rumors about him over the years had turned out bogus. He was drinking cocktails on some Los Angeles bound Jumbo Jet, going to get a screen test, or to meet with David Geffen.

     Airborne the next day, I was determined to dispel this bad misunderstanding. Nobody really knew what Dreb’s life was like in Fall River, and that had to change. Enough with the rumors, I thought.

 

Someone had shoveled the walk at Dreb’s ancestral Victorian. The moon-slick snow—riding the dormers, eaves and steps—furnished the only light coming from the house. The windows were onyx black.

      In front of his watering hole, I expected to see his long legs rising out of the smoke. There was the pinkish storm cloud and the dour dog-faced bartender, and in the corner a woman and a man were fighting, with the man seated and making drunken grabs at the buckle of the woman’s rhinestone belt.

     Dreb wasn’t inside.

    His stool, the last one on the left, had an oval red vinyl seat-cover and lacquered black legs. Standard-issue. I sat next to it and ordered a beer and a shot.

    I drank, trying to get Dreb’s stool-eye view. Shifting my head to the right better approximated his vantage point. Then I saw it: a tiny map of the shoreline, with a water-stain covering the entire southern shore of Massachusetts. Dreb probably liked to sit here, listening to the jukebox, staring at that map, and musing on other people’s property.

      The bartender rubbed his eyes and looked my way.

      “What can I get ya?”

     “I’m looking for a friend of mine, Dreb...”

      He looked at the floor.

      “Nope, he’s gone.”

      “I heard that. He’s really gone then?”

      “Yep…went to the funeral myself.”

     “Why was he buried so quickly?”

     “His father…the judge.”

     “Oh…”

     “I’m sorry.”

     We both shook our heads.

    “He was a good customer…odd bird. I didn’t let him drink in here the last month. That boy needed a sandwich. I used to make him eat sandwiches, lots of them. Midnight snacks, too.”

     I waved my hand. Over the bar, a glowing yellow clock—Brown Penny Ale—read twelve ten.

     “Odd one,” said the bartender again.

     “He wasn’t odd…he was perfect,” I said, defending Dreb.

   “Well, I liked him too; but he used to sit here and talk about blimp accidents and mathematical equations for decaying corpses. He was a genius, I think.”

      “Yes, he was a genius.”

    “And that little mouse of his…what was that mouse’s name? Heyo, Ferdie…Dreb’s mouse, the name?”

      He looked at the man in the back. Ferdie had his hands on the woman’s rear end now.

      “Mister Jimmy…his imaginary mouse,” he yelled out, taking his hand off her and holding it out like Dreb, “Mister Jimmy, lived in his hand.”

       The bartender nodded.

       “Mister Jimmy. Did he ever introduce you to Mr. Jimmy?”

       “His name was Mr. Timmy.”

       “I don’t think so…” 

       That people would so quickly forget the name of his mouse bothered me. I had had about enough of this, so I finished off my drink.

       “He used to sleep it off across the street,” said the bartender, pointing out the front window.

      Sure enough, there was a flophouse across the street, with one of those terrible signs: Rooms for Rent. I had thought them anachronisms. Apparently not.

       The sign was rich with several kinds of decay—rain, wind, sun, and dents from tossed bottles. The lettering was almost offensively old-fashioned. Rooms for rent: three words that meant welcome to hopeless hovel, the fleas thank you, and the owner requests that you refrain from sniffing your pillow.

       I moved to Dreb’s stool, and stayed until last call.

       After kicking out Ferdie and his girl, the bartender tried to hustle me out.

       “Let’s go, pal…”

       I wanted to take something of Dreb’s with me, a memento mori. Standing up and weaving on my feet, I stared at his stool.

       “How much for the stool?” I asked.

       “Not for sale.”

       “Come on, I’ll give you a hundred bucks.”

       “This is an antique set that you are looking at here.”

       He waved his hand at the barstools. If it was a set, it was a mongrel one. I stared at the stool. There were two black cigarette holes, burned into the vinyl.

       “It’s damaged,” I protested.

       “Yeah, so what.”

        The forelegs were bare, the paint probably shaved off by Dreb’s shifting feet.

       “It needs a paint job,” I said.

       “C’mon kid, the bar is closed.”

       “One-fifty,” I said.

     He took the offer. I emptied my wallet onto the bar. At one-forty I remembered Dreb’s attitude toward other people’s property. I had my long, white beach now; I was on the map, Dreb would have snickered. Your house is like you, Goldie: smooth and harmless, like some pale stone pounded oval by the sea, collected by a child, and then dropped casually into the scrub pine. He had seen it all, and it made me angry.

       So I rented his stool, the only thing he ever owned. One-forty a year.

       It’s perfect for midnight snacks.

       But Dreb knew that, too.

 

 

 

Padraic O'Reilly’s plays have been performed, read, and chosen for various festivals in New York City. His first play, Would You Lie To Me? Please? was produced at Theater Three in the fall of 2001. Other venues and festivals include: The Here Performing Arts Center (The Living Room Festival), The Public Theatre’s ‘book club,’ and The Midtown International Theatre Festival. He has read stories and novel excerpts at Dixon Place, The Culture Center, the Tisch school, and Hunter College. In 2005, NYU curated his play Stray Dog Hearts in the HotInk festival of readings. In Los Angeles, he regularly participated in the Naked Angels reading series. He was also the Playwright in Residence at The Immediate Theatre Company for five years, a downtown theater troupe of over 100 individuals. Currently, he is writing a memoir based upon a magazine piece he wrote last year. Padraic graduated from Harvard University. Before that, he attended the School of The Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) in Boston, and The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In addition to writing, he has illustrated for a national publication and designed book covers. He lives in Boston.