Knuckleheads (18 page)

“I bet he can’t buy food anywhere,” Sylvia wrote. “It’s one thing to go to class naked, but a restaurant can just kick you out. A restaurant can just say, hey, we don’t want any naked people in here.”

“Health hazard probably,” I wrote back.

“I bet he’d like a burrito,” she said. “Can you imagine going to school in Berkeley and not being able to buy a burrito?”

I tried and grew immediately, intensely sad. There were four burrito shops on every block in Berkeley, all of them delicious. Not being able to go into any of them felt something like not being able to date any of the beautiful women on campus. That too was a matter of much speculation. If The Naked Guy did date anyone, it wasn’t another Berkeley student. He was an attractive dude but, face it, who’d want to be seen giving a goodbye kiss to a naked person on the quad before class? What if the kiss grew passionate and something started to twitch?

The guy was basically an ambulatory statue—a conversation piece, not a person.

“Let’s buy him a burrito,” I wrote. “Let’s get here early one day and drop it off for him.” We knew he’d be sitting in the same place. Once The Naked Guy staked out a seat in a lecture hall, it was his for the rest of the semester. Sweatshirt or not.

The next day Sylvia and I met for lunch at El Guapo, and, after we finished eating, returned to the counter to order a burrito to go. “What kind should we get?” I asked.

“Grilled veggie,” Sylvia said. “Guy won’t wear clothes because he thinks it’s immoral. He’s gotta be a vegetarian.”

“All right,” I said, then waved her money away and paid for The Naked Guy’s burrito as if I were some kind of gallant knight. We left it for him on his seat with a note that read, “This one’s for you, Naked Guy. It’s a veggie burrito. Thought you might like it. From Greg and Sylvia in the back.”

We were giddy when he walked in and placed his backpack on the floor, then went to spread the sweatshirt. He seemed to pause for a moment as if he didn’t know what to make of the package on his seat, as if he wondered if maybe someone else had decided to sit there, but then he saw the note and read it. Next he picked up the burrito and examined it, squeezing it tenderly in his big hands. His expression was skeptical, as if he feared someone were playing a joke on him and, for a moment, we worried he wouldn’t eat it. But then he unwrapped it from its foil, sniffed it, and bit into one end. We watched him chew. It didn’t seem to matter that he was breaking his tradition of eating the contents of his homemade lunch in a particular order. He gobbled the thing in about five bites, wiped a glop of sour cream from his chin, and turned around with an enormous little kid smile and proffered a thumbs-up to the back row. “Good call on the veggie,” I wrote to Sylvia. “Looks like you made The Naked Guy happy.”

“I have some experience with that,” she wrote. “Making naked guys happy.”

I could hardly disagree, not then or later, after we made love in her apartment that night before watching
David Letterman
. It was probably the greatest moment in my life so far when she grinned at me and whispered, “You’re a better naked guy.”

We graduated in the spring and got engaged shortly thereafter. I asked Sylvia while we were hiking through the Tule Elk Reserve in Point Reyes. She was hungry and wondered if I would pass her some trail mix from my knapsack. “Only if you marry me,” I said.

Is there a more glorious sight than the woman you adore, her long legs tanned and sweating, standing at the golden crest of a California hillside, looking down at a grazing herd of prodigiously antlered and endangered deer, ceremoniously spraying an entire bag of trail mix to the wind as if she’s spreading the ashes of a deceased loved one?

“It’s eleven miles back to the car and that’s the only food we had,” I said.

“Still want to marry me?” she said.

“More than eating.”

By the time The Naked Guy got kicked out of school, we were in San Jose and I’d begun working for Neil, another classmate who’d started Org.com, a company that developed software for on-line calendars and address books. Maybe it was then things began to fall apart for us.

We read about the university’s ruling in the Mercury News. Sylvia was furious. “We should do something,” she said. “It’s not fair. The Naked Guy never bothered anyone.”

“He bothered that professor.”

“That guy was a prick. We need to do something.”

“What?” I said. “What can we do?”

“Protest. Be naked all day. Write a letter to the editor. Something.”

“Can we be naked later? I have to go to work.”

This is how it happens. Your wife suggests being naked and you decide to go to the office. You go back to Berkeley sometimes for football games or to buy used records or to get high and you never notice piles of rocks in the streets that The Naked Guy built to stop traffic and to arm himself because he thought the CIA was after him. Pretty soon you’re following Neil to Michigan because he says, look, everyone else is already in the Bay, there’s no one doing this in the Rust Belt, and you think maybe he’s right, and then here you are living in Canton and no one knows how to make a decent burrito and you never did anything, never even wrote a letter.

You’ve never cheated either, but lately you’ve begun to think about it.

There’s a new woman at the office. She’s eager and admires you. She’s fleshier than Sylvia, more bountiful. She drinks coffee, not tea: tall sugared drinks with clouds of whipped cream. She holds them chest-high and asks you about your family. Your average Midwestern tribe, you tell her. Pretty wife. Smart kid. Nothing special.

Josh had a sophisticated system. If he had pills to sell, he’d wear his book bag slung over his left shoulder. Kids would know to meet him in the library during lunch. He hung out in the paperback area, in a corner hidden by a rotating kiosk of S.E. Hinton novels. He only got caught because it was middle school. Sold two tabs to a boy who went mentally airborne and broke up with his girlfriend in the cafeteria, in front of her friends. The girl was humiliated and, to get back at the boy, told the principal he was stoned. The kid ratted Josh out so he wouldn’t get expelled.

I was annoyed when my secretary pulled me from the meeting. More pissed when she said Sylvia was on the phone, urgent. What the hell could be wrong now? But then Silvia was saying something about Josh and drugs, and when she told me we had to go to the police station, I thought she was delusional. When she began to cry, a loud rasp in my ear, I told her the whole thing was her fault. “Too damn permissive,” I barked.

“How would you know?” she yelled back. “You’re never home. You don’t even know him.”

It’s true. Before we searched Josh’s bedroom and found pills and about a dozen bags of marijuana, I hadn’t been in there for maybe two years. We have a big house. It’s down the block from Neil’s and not as big as his, but almost, and we have the same architect. Org.com donates ten percent of its profits to Green Tech research and both our back porches are built with recycled timber. We live at the end of a cul-de-sac. Our yard rolls down a steep hill and from our back bedroom it looks like we can see forever. Sunsets are majestic. For two years, I returned home after work and sat at my retro gun-metal desk in the study, my own long legs inert, and I didn’t set foot in my son’s room once.

It almost seems too easy. Find a program, drop off your son, read in the waiting room, shake the doctors’ hands, go home. Maybe I wanted it to be harder. Maybe I wanted us to struggle for a while, maybe two weeks of missing work, of driving all over the damn place looking for answers, lost, unhappy, sick from fried road food. Lots of mud and gas stations and blurred vision and something that feels like an epiphany.

But maybe the ride home is miserable enough. The empty back seat kills me. I feel like we took our cat to the shelter where they put animals to sleep and we’re returning home without his body. Like we cowered from the job and let the minimum-wage high school kid cremate him while we sat in the waiting room. Sylvia, her hair over her eyes, head leaned against the window, looks like Josh. I reach for her hand as we pull into our driveway. She ignores me.

It’s dark now.

Since we’ve been home, I’ve sat at the gun-metal desk. No sounds have left my mouth. Fingers numb, eyes glazed, I force myself to heave my legs from the chair and stumble upstairs. Each step is an absurd task, my feet like giant balloons filled with lead. I stagger into the bedroom, but I can’t get into bed. Sleeping near my wife seems like lying next to a glacier. She comes out of the bathroom and pulls back the covers. She’s holding a book but doesn’t open it. For a long time, she looks at me.

I’m pathetic, a dead discolored monument. If the house fell down around me, I’d still be here, rooted, birds and rodents shitting on my shoulders. The hinges of my jaw feel like chains holding a ten-ton drawbridge that hasn’t opened for centuries. I can hardly push words out, but I want badly, so badly, to talk.

“The Naked Guy is dead,” I say.

Sylvia keeps looking at me for another minute before her eyes soften. I think maybe there’s some kind of opening. My fingers feel as if they’ve turned to stone, but I force them to move. I unbuckle my belt. It’s an effort because I’ve gotten so flabby, and because my fingers are thick rocks, but somehow I manage to wriggle out of my jeans and boxers, to pull off my shirt.

My wife doesn’t look away, doesn’t turn to her book. At last, she swings her feet off the bed, walks toward me slowly and begins to unbutton her top. Then she steps out of her pants and underwear. We turn to the window. We don’t hold hands—there’s still a distance between us, that whole sonless drive back from Ohio—but we’re naked now.

We stand in the cold and shiver, looking west.

Many thanks to Steve Gillis and Dan Wickett for believing in these stories and to Matt Bell for making them sing (or grunt, or whatever it is they do). Much gratitude as well to David Marshall Chan, Lewis Robinson, Lesléa Newman, Alan Davis, Mike White, Baron Wormser, Richard Hoffman, Joan Connor, Scott Beal, Karen Smyte and Sarah Andrew-Vaughn for helping me along the way and to Junot Diaz, Julie Orringer, Adam Mansbach, Steve Amick, Davy Rothbart and Laura Kasischke for showing me how to do the thing right. Constant inspiration comes from Roger Bonair-Agard, Patricia Smith, Kevin Coval, Patrick Rosal, Aracelis Girmay, Regie Gibson, Ross Gay, Tim Seibles, Ben Cohen, Jon Sands and Jeff McDaniel and, of course, all the students who bring dazzle to their own pages including, but not limited to: Angel Nafis, Maggie and Coert Ambrosino, Caronae Howell, Big Ben Alfaro, Adam Falkner, Molly Raynor, Lauren Whitehead, Gahl and Jon Liberzon, Mike and Chris Moriarty, Mike Kulick, Daniel Bigham, Aimée Le, Fiona Chamness, Paco, Matt Dagher-Margosian, Maggie Hanks, Erin Murphy, Courtney Whitler, Arhm Choi, Erica Rosbe, Claire Forster, Carlina Duan, Emma Hamstra, Emily Berry, Sara Ryan, Glenna Benitez, Anthony Zick, Kate Rogow, Beth Johnson and Allison Kennedy.

Thanks also to invaluable friends and supporters: Pamela Waxman, Lisa Dengiz, Julie Cohen, JR, David Saxen and Nancy Puttkamer, Nancy and Drake Ambrosino, Kathy and David Falkner, Ken and Laura Raynor, Nina and Gary Rogow, Lori Roddy, John Weiss, Milt Liu, Michael Kim, Joe Eagleeye, Marty Shaffer, Brad Harris, Doug Petraco, Keith Goggin, Tracy Rosewarne, Ellen Stone and the Pi-Hi English Department.

Big ups to Andy, Jimmy and Laura for growing up in the same circumstances, to Joan and Steve Kass for raising us and to Julius and Sam for willing to be raised.

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