What Strange Creatures (20 page)

“I think that a big part of it was that Liam picked me out to harass. If he’d been harassing someone else, I think I could’ve been cooler about it, you know? If it happened to someone else, I’d have told that person, ‘Hey, just tell him you’re not interested. Or tell him to go to hell, if you want. And then walk away.’

“But since it was me, I somehow wasn’t able to do that. In the moment it felt very personal. Like, I was so sick of that shit. Just because you’re a little quieter, a little smarter, a little nicer, people think you’re gay.”

“So your friends wondered about your sexuality?” I try to clarify. “And you went along with them to put a stop to that?”

“I don’t know what other people wonder,” Anthony replies, a hint of impatience in his voice. “I just know I was angry. Not only at Liam. At the boxes people wanted to put me in. That night I didn’t want to be a nice guy. I wanted to tear the fuck out of that box, in a big way.”

“Do you wish now that you had told the guys no when they challenged you to trick Liam?” I ask.

“Well, yes. Of course.”

“Would you say you’re afraid of gays? Or they make you angry?”

“Neither. I’m not like that at all.”

“But do you think there was real anger in what you did? Anger at people different from you? Or was it just about the moment, about the other guys?”

“There was anger, yes. But it wasn’t at people different from me. It came from somewhere deep inside me, I think, and had nothing to do with Liam. I feel like I came to my senses, though, when I saw Patrick whaling away at Liam. Like, what have we done? How did I get here? But by then it was too late.”

“Do you think you are in control of your anger now?”

Anthony sighs before answering. “I hope so.”

Whenever I hear it—and I really try not to, but the most painful songs have a way of snaking into your car and your consciousness, into the background of every other bar scene of every other movie you’ve ever watched—I think of my old friend Jenny.

The three of us would dance to the Cranberries—Jenny, Missy, and me.

We got “Dreams” from Missy’s older sister. Missy’s older sister was cooler than mine, although I was cooler than Missy. Figure that one out.

I would lip-sync, and Jenny and Missy would do backup and dance. I was ten, and they were eight and nine. So I was in charge, always.

Jenny would do an exaggerated swirling sort of dance with a sly smile—what Missy’s sister called “an interpretive dance.” We didn’t know what that meant, except that it was funny. While Jenny would interpret, Missy would just hop up and down, pumping her skinny little arms. We would do this for hours in Missy’s garage after school that fall.

Jenny was pretty.

Probably if she’d lived to the double digits, she’d have been beautiful.

But when you’re nine, pretty is all there is. Pretty is where it’s at. And Jenny was there. Blond hair to her butt. Bright blue-green eyes. Light skin, but with a healthy pink glow across the cheeks. She always wore a shiny pink-and-silver jacket to match. Remembering her now, it feels like she was doomed from the start. Girls like that get snatched up, don’t they?

Maybe you don’t believe that. But it’s what happened to Jenny. She disappeared one Wednesday, and they found her body on the following Sunday. The details aren’t important. We all know what happens to girls like that when girls like that are snatched up.

Where would she have gone from there anyway? Such girlish perfection?

Jenny was so pretty and Missy so small and so innocent. Jenny didn’t know what a pimple was, and she never would. Missy didn’t know what a French kiss was. I have to believe now she does. Can’t be sure. A year or so after Jenny, we stopped being friends.

Oh, Missy and Jenny with their “-y” names, so delicately feminine. Next to those lullaby names, “Kim” felt like the crank of a wrench or the sound of a broken metal appliance being thrown off the back of a pickup truck.

Sometimes Jenny and Missy didn’t feel real to me—even back then. Sometimes I was afraid of them knowing me. Me: a whole year older than Jenny. Two years older than Missy. A lifetime. I wasn’t shocked by parents fighting or dogs humping couch cushions or older boys who threatened to kick each other in the nuts.

When Jenny died, I felt it was meant for me. I realize, of course, how self-centered that was, but I was ten, so I try to give myself a pass.

I was the one things happened to. I was the oldest. I was the one who told them things. Now Jenny knew more than any of us ever should. “Any” in the universal sense.

I guess this is more about three girls than about a song. More about one girl than a song.

When I hear “Dreams” now, I don’t hear the words. I don’t hear its upbeatness or its optimism. I don’t really even hear the woman singing it. The song dissolves into a memory of three girls—and then, ultimately, of one girl.

There is, in the end, only Jenny. Pretty like a girl on TV. Pretty like a girl who won’t last. Old as I was at ten, how is it I didn’t know that? How is it that of all the things I told her, I couldn’t tell her this? How is it that I didn’t open that door?

There is only Jenny dancing.

Interpretive dancing.

I can’t interpret her dance. All these years later, I still don’t know if I want to.

Occasionally, when I was in high school, he’d let me drive before I had a license—to the grocery store for his cigarettes and honey cough drops. And then, later, I’d take him out for lunch once a week. And occasionally I’d let him drive. Well into his eighties, he still drove. Technically. It was a swervy, slow-motion, white-knuckle kind of experience, but I owed it to him.

My grandfather always played gentle instrumentals in his car. There was a particular clarinet song that came tootling over his speakers every so often and turned my insides into vanilla pudding. I’d stare out the window and think about sharing an umbrella with my future wife, flying kites with my future kids, drinking beer at bonfires with my retirement buddies. I missed them like they’d already happened.

I didn’t know till after my grandfather died what the song was. He left me his black Buick Regal Grand National with all his cassette tapes still in it. I listened to them all, and it was the one marked “Acker Bilk.”

I was strangely relieved to hear it once I found it. Without lyrics to quote, how would I ever have found the song online? By Googling “clarinet song that sounds like a long-remembered Hawaiian honeymoon”? The song might have been lost to me forever.

But now I had it whenever I wanted, should I ever want it: “Stranger on the Shore,” by Acker Bilk.

For a time I listened to cheer myself up whenever I was down—about a lost job or a lost girlfriend or wasted opportunities—to remind me of my grandfather, who lived through the Depression and the war and never seemed depressed about anything much.

It didn’t work. It only reminds me that I am not him. That I wasn’t smart enough to ask the secret to being him while he was still here. That there is no secret anyway. That his way of being had begun to fade before I was even born.

Now I reserve the song for whenever some famous old dude dies. Some famous old dude I thought would always be there. Johnny Carson. Andy Rooney.

I got an ulcer when Dick Clark died, because I knew I’d be lost on every New Year’s from then on.

I might get another when Jim Lehrer dies. Or Bill Cosby. Or Jimmy Carter. Or Paul Simon. God help me then. Because I’m not sure how many more times I can listen to “Stranger on the Shore.”

You may boldly, when you are in bed, take me to you as your wedded husband . . . and boldly take me in the arms of your soul and kiss my mouth, my head, my feet as sweetly as you want.