his son, and when there was no answer he picked up the phone, telling Thad to stop running his mouth and get his butt down to the rumpus room ASAP.
A rush of footsteps on the carpeted staircase and then Thad sprinted in, all smiles and apologies. The minister had called. The game had been rescheduled. 'Hello, sir, and you are. .?'
He looked my father in the eye and firmly shook his hand, holding it in his own for just the right amount of time. While most handshakes mumbled, his spoke clearly, saying bothWe'll get through this as quickly as possible and I'm looking forward to your vote this coming November.
I'd thought that seeing him without his group might be unsettling, like finding a single arm on the sidewalk, but Thad was fully capable of operating independently. Watching him in action, I understood that his popularity was not an accident. Unlike a normal human being, he possessed an uncanny ability to please people. There was no sucking up or awkward maneuvering to fit the will of others. Rather, much like a Whitman's sampler, he seemed to offer a little bit of everything. Pass on his athletic ability and you might partake of his excellent manners, his confidence, his coltish enthusiasm. Even his parents seemed invigorated by his presence, uncrossing their legs and sitting up just a little bit straighter as he took a seat beside them. Had the circumstances been different, my father would have been all over him, probably going so far as to call him son — but money was involved, so he steeled himself.
'All right, then,' Mr. Pope said. 'Now that everyone's accounted for, I'm hoping we can clear this up. Sticks and stones aside, I suspect this all comes down to a little misunderstanding between friends.'
I lowered my eyes, waiting for Thad to set his father straight. 'Friends?Withhim? ' I expected laughter or the famous Thad snort, but instead he said nothing. And with his silence, he won me completely. A little misunderstanding — that'sexactly what it was. How had I not seen it earlier?
The immediate goal was to save my friend, and so I claimed to have essentially thrown myself in the path of Thad's fast-moving rock.
'What the hell was he throwing rocks for?' my father asked. 'What the hell was he throwing themat? '
Mrs. Pope frowned, implying that such language was not welcome in the rumpus room.
'I mean, Jesus Christ, the guy's got to be a complete idiot.'
Thad swore he hadn't been aiming at anything, and I backed him up, saying it was just one of those things we all did. 'Like in Vietnam or whatever. It was just friendly fire.'
My father asked what the hell I knew about Vietnam, and again Thad's mother winced, saying that boys picked up a lot of this talk by watching the news.
'You don't know what you're talking about,' my father said.
'What my wife meant. .,' Mr. Pope said.
'Aww, baloney.'
The trio of Popes exchanged meaningful glances, holding what amounted to a brief, telepathic powwow. 'This man crazy,' the smoke signals read. 'Make heap big trouble for others.'
I looked at my father, a man in dirty shorts who drank his beer from the can rather than pouring it into his tumbler, and I thought,You don't belong here. More precisely, I decided that he was the reason I didn't belong. The hokey Greek phrases, the how-to lectures on mixing your own concrete, the squabble over who would pay the stupid dentist bill — little by little, it had all seeped into my bloodstream, robbing me of my natural ability to please others. For as long as I could remember, he'd been telling us that it didn't matter what other people thought: their judgment was crap, a waste of time, baloney. But it did matter, especially when those people werethese people.
'Well,' Mr. Pope said, 'I can see that this is going nowhere.'
My father laughed. 'Yeah, you got that right.' It sounded like a parting sentence, but rather than standing to leave, he leaned back in the sofa and rested his beer can upon his stomach. 'We're all going nowhere.'
At this point I'm fairly sure that Thad and I were envisioning the same grim scenario. While the rest of the world moved on, my increasingly filthy and bearded father would continue to occupy the rumpus-room sofa. Christmas would come, friends would visit, and the Popes would bitterly direct them toward the easy chairs. 'Just ignore him,' they'd say. 'He'll go home sooner or later.'
In the end, they agreed to pay for half of the root canal, not because they thought it was fair but because they wanted us out of their house.
Some friendships are formed by a commonality of interests and ideas: you both love judo or camping or making your own sausage. Other friendships are forged in alliance against a common enemy. On leaving Thad's house, I decided that ours would probably be the latter. We'd start off grousing about my father, and then, little by little, we'd move on to the hundreds of other things and people that got on our nerves. 'You hate olives,' I imagined him saying. 'I hate them, too!'
As it turned out, the one thing we both hated was me. Rather, I hated me. Thad couldn't even summon up the enthusiasm. The day after the meeting, I approached him in the lunchroom, where he sat at his regular table, surrounded by his regular friends. 'Listen,' I said, 'I'm really sorry about that stuff with my dad.' I'd worked up a whole long speech, complete with imitations, but by the time I finished my mission statement, he'd turned to resume his conversation with Doug Middleton. Our perjured testimony, my father's behavior, even the rock throwing: I was so far beneath him that it hadn't even registered.
Poof.
The socialites of E. C. Brooks shone even brighter in junior high, but come tenth grade, things began to change. Desegregation drove a lot of the popular people into private schools, and those who remained seemed silly and archaic, deposed royalty from a country the average citizen had ceased to care about.
Early in our junior year, Thad was jumped by a group of the new black kids, who yanked off his shoes and threw them in the toilet. I knew I was supposed to be happy, but part of me felt personally assaulted. True, he'd been a negligent prince, yet still I believed in the monarchy. When his name was called at graduation, it was I who clapped the longest, outlasting even his parents, who politely stopped once he'd left the stage.
I thought about Thad a lot over the coming years, wondering where he went to college and if he joined a fraternity. The era of the Big Man on Campus had ended, but the rowdy houses with their pool tables and fake moms continued to serve as reunion points for the once popular, who were now viewed as date rapists and budding alcoholics. I tell myself that while his brothers drifted toward a confused and bitter adulthood, Thad stumbled into the class that changed his life. He's the poet laureate of Liechtenstein, the surgeon who cures cancer with love, the ninth-grade teacher who insists that the world is big enough for everyone. When moving to another city, I'm always hoping to find him living in the apartment next door. We'll meet in the hallway and he'll stick out his hand, saying, 'Excuse me, but don't I — shouldn't I know you?' It doesn't have to happen today, but itdoes have to happen. I've kept a space waiting for him, and if he doesn't show up, I'm going to have to forgive my father.
The root canal that was supposed to last for ten years has now lasted for over thirty, though it's nothing to be proud of. Having progressively dulled and weakened, the tooth is now a brownish gray color the Conran's catalog refers to as 'Kabuki.' It's hanging in there, but just barely. While Dr. Povlitch worked out of a converted brick house beside the Colony Shopping Center, my current dentist, Docteur Guig, has an office near the Madeleine, in Paris. On a recent visit, he gripped my dead tooth between his fingertips and gently jiggled it back and forth. I hate to unnecessarily exhaust his patience, so when he asked me what had happened, it took me a moment to think of the clearest possible answer. The past was far too complicated to put into French, so instead I envisioned a perfect future, and attributed the root canal to a little misunderstanding between friends.
Monie Changes Everything
MY MOTHER HAD A GREAT-AUNT who lived outside of Cleveland and visited us once in Binghamton, New York. I was six years old but can clearly remember her car moving up the newly paved driveway. It was a silver Cadillac driven by a man in a flattopped cap, the kind worn by policemen. He opened the back door with great ceremony, as if this were a coach, and we caught sight of the great-aunt's shoes, which were orthopedic yet fancy,
