I Shudder Page 18

  The terrified children refused to raise their heads.

  “But what are you doing here?” I asked Susan.

  “I work for the Internal Review Board of the State Commission on Faculty Performance,” she said, with a glimmering satisfaction. “I’m sent to schools throughout the city to evaluate all substitute teachers. I file reports and make recommendations. I have the authority to hire and fire any nontenured personnel.”

  4.

  Later that day, I stood in a particularly airless subway car, squeezed in between five high-decibel teenage girls having a vicious slap fight over who stole someone’s nose ring and boyfriend named T-Poke; a family of tourists sharing what looked and smelled like a barbecued skunk; and a woman wearing a hairnet over her face who wouldn’t stop howling that she was having the mayor’s baby. As all of these people’s sweating bodies became molded to mine, I pondered why my fate lay in the grasping talons of Susan Marie Henkelman. Then, just before my stop, the train ground to a halt, and remained stalled between stations, with the passengers stranded in darkness for the next two hours. After we finally got moving and I left that malarial petri dish on wheels, I trudged toward my building, where I saw Susan stepping blithely out of a cab. “Oh, hello,” she said. “You look terrible.”

  “I took the subway.”

  “Really. I’ve just had dinner at this great new French bistro, and then I did some shopping, for just a few fun things. Isn’t it lovely out, and there are cabs everywhere.”

  I focused all of my abilities on trying to make her head explode, into a billion glistening particles of painfully bleeding goodness, but it was no use.

  “Sweet dreams!” she trilled, shoving her way past me and into our building. As I reached the elevator, the doors were just closing, with Susan inside, performing a thoroughly unconvincing mime of trying to locate the button which would keep the doors open for a few seconds longer.

  “Oopsie!” said Susan, as the doors hissed shut. “Sorry ’bout that, Ellen!”

  Life and Death and New Jersey

  1.

  Whenever I stumble over my own feet, or blurt out a thought that makes no sense at all, or leave the house wearing one pattern too many, I always think, It’s okay, I’m from New Jersey. I love New Jersey, because it’s not just an all-purpose punch line, but probably a handy legal defense, as in, “Yes, I shot my wife because I thought she was Bigfoot, but I’m from New Jersey.”

  New Jersey never disappoints. The paper placemats at Jersey diners are often printed with factoids about the Garden State, but they rarely mention that, as of this writing, the last three New Jersey governors have all broken their legs while in office. Among those on this disabled list was ex-governor McGreevey, who stepped down after coming out as a proud Gay American, having appointed his Israeli mancrush as the State Director of Homeland Security. McGreevey and his understandably peeved ex-wife then published dueling memoirs, and Jim later crowed that Dina’s book hadn’t sold well due to “her awful appearance” on Oprah, “in an inappropriate and ill-fitting ball gown with a plunging neckline.” Jim is now studying to become an Episcopal priest.

  I was raised in the suburb of Piscataway, where the Chamber of Commerce sponsored a promotional billboard picturing two cartoon Native Americans, in feathers and striped war paint. One of these braves was shading his eyes with his hand and scanning the horizon, above the caption, “They went Piscataway!” Piscataway is also the home to many industrial parks, where gracefully landscaped acreage surrounds the buildings that market bath towels, silicone breast implants, and napalm. There’s a nearby complex that manufactures the contraceptive Orthocreme, and the site is so large that it contains a road named Ortho Drive. There also used to be a majestic grove of evergreens along the highway, enhancing a sign that advertised feminine hygiene products, with mammoth, lustrously lit scripted letters reading, “Modess…because.” As a child, this sign enticed and confused me. Because why?

  My high school was a standard cluster of low brick buildings that housed students from varied social and economic backgrounds. The school once hired a mediator to run a student discussion group, to figure out ways to improve the school’s performance. I was part of this group, and as we all brainstormed about class size and additional after-school activities, one student politely raised his hand and asked to be excused for a bathroom break. He returned to the room a while later, after having used a screwdriver to yank a few tape decks out of parked cars, and he was carrying the tape decks with him, with their slashed wires dangling.

  The school’s female population could be rambunctious. I knew two girls, Sherry and Barasella, who were best friends, until Barasella refused to return a certain red-and-purple-striped tube top that she’d borrowed. As revenge, a righteous Sherry snuck into the principal’s office and grabbed the microphone for the school’s public address system, and then everyone in the classrooms and hallways listened as Sherry chanted, accurately, “Barasella had an abortion yesterday! Barasella had an abortion yesterday!”

  LaDonna Racyk was always stomping around, on sturdy, shapely legs, with her mane of untamed, ragged hair flying out behind her. She was sexy, as a sort of white, teenaged Tina Turner, and while she could be violent, she wasn’t unreachable. During homeroom she once threatened my friend Jean Anne with a knife, but Jean Anne just sighed and said, “Oh, LaDonna, put that knife away,” and LaDonna did. One morning LaDonna appeared, uncharacteristically, in a short, filmy, flowered dress. When I asked her why she’d chosen this outfit, she said, “Because this afternoon I have to fucking get married.”

  Some of the teachers had a grim, defeated air, but others were quirky and helpful. Nina Denning was an art teacher, and indisputably cool, as she had short black hair, a bemused squint, and she drove a convertible. She’d encourage her students’ creativity, and she tried not to laugh at the results. My best friend James, with a sculpture deadline upon him, inflated a long, narrow red balloon, and tied it to a coat hanger, accompanied on either side by two smaller, round red balloons, as a penis mobile. Ms. Denning took a look and said, “Baby, I like where you’re going, but you’re not there yet.”

  Later that year Ms. Denning was assigned Ken Schatzke, an ultraliberal, committed young student teacher, who made the fatal mistake of trying to be buddies with his students. We instantly caught on to his ferrety, moist earnestness, and declared war. After he’d left early one day, we all made crappy clay vases and then loaded them into the art-room kiln, rigged so that the next morning, when Mr. Schatzke opened the kiln door, all the vases would cascade onto the floor and shatter. When this in fact happened, we all pretended to be devastated, sobbing and staggering around, clutching the shards of our broken vases. “But, Mr. Schatzke,” James moaned, “this was a gift for my mother!” “Everyone, I’m so sorry, this is all my fault,” said Mr. Schatzke, who was horribly guilty and upset. “And, Mr. Schatzke,” said James, “she’s sick.”

  Ms. Denning knew just what was going on, and could barely control her laughter. After a few months of this teen torture, Mr. Schatzke left the school and told us sadly that he didn’t know if teaching was really “my thing.” My art class baked him a going-away cake, and we bought some of those small tubes of neon, gel-like frosting at the supermarket, and wrote across the top of the cake: “Have You Learned Nothing From This Experience?” Ms. Denning scolded us, and then offered everyone, although not Mr. Schatzke, a ride in her convertible.

  One of the first people I ever knew who died went to my high school. I’d heard about people dying before this, including all of my grandparents, but I’d been too young to have these deaths really register. But Mike Berwin’s death made an impression. Mike was a few years ahead of me, and I’d only met him once or twice, but in Piscataway he was famous. He was an alcoholic and a drug addict, and he’d dropped out of school. After hitting bottom, he’d turned his life around, and he’d become a motivational speaker. One morning, he came to our school to talk to the student body, in the auditorium, about h
is life. He wore a tan polyester suit and his hair was moussed and slicked back; he was trim and good-looking, like a battered quarterback-turned-Toyota-dealer. He was still only in his early twenties, and he told us, “Take a look at my life. Learn from it. I was just like all of you. I was a kid. And then I got into drinking and drugs, until I was stealing from my mother’s purse to get high, and hot-wiring cars and waking up in the gutter, covered in my own vomit.”

  This got our attention; and it had also gotten us out of biology.

  “But do you think I was happy? Okay, sure, sometimes it was exciting, and I didn’t have to do homework and I met a lot of girls, but was I happy? No. I thought I was happy, I thought I was doing great, but I wasn’t. I was an accident waiting to happen.”

  By this time, my friends and I were all pointing to each other and whispering, “That sounds just like you,” “He’s talking about you,” and “What does heroin taste like?”

  Drugs, at least back then, were New Jersey’s state hobby. If you opened any garage door, clouds of pot smoke would billow out. A friend of mine had a plastic bag of pot stolen from his locker and he asked me, quite seriously, if he should call the police, because, “Man, somebody stole my stash.” Later, during our graduation ceremony, out on the football field, a prim, studious girl named Teri climbed the stairs to the plywood dais to receive her diploma, in her cap and gown. Since kindergarten, Teri had always carried a round, hatbox-like black patent-leather purse. I was sitting near a group of raunchier students, and as the principal handed Teri her certificate, one of the bad girls yelled, “Yo, Teri! Whatchoo got in that purse? Co-caine?”

  But Mike didn’t approve. “You think that drugs are cool,” he told us. “You think that getting high will solve all of your problems. And that’s just what I used to think. And that’s how I almost lost everything—my health and my family and my future. Because one morning, I got so stoned on smack that I ran right off the road, hit a tree and totaled my car, and almost lost the use of my legs.”

  Now everyone was riveted because, to a pack of New Jersey high school students, getting injured wasn’t so frightening, but losing the use of your car would be an unthinkable tragedy.

  “I wonder what he was driving?” whispered someone behind me.

  “I totaled my dad’s car, but we still used it for parts,” said someone else.

  I was thinking about the tree involved. The poet Joyce Kilmer was a New Jersey native, and in elementary school I’d been required to memorize his poem “Trees,” which begins with the lines “I think that I shall never see / A poem as lovely as a tree.” Kilmer had allegedly written this poem about an actual tree, a white oak that had grown a few miles from Piscataway. After providing many decades of shade and leafy splendor, this tree had become diseased, and after much civic debate the town council had chopped it down. I was glad that Joyce Kilmer was dead by this time, so he wouldn’t have to come up with a rhyme for “ugly stump.”

  “The judge gave me a choice,” said Mike. “He said, ‘Young man, you can either go to jail, or you can get clean. I’ll give you one last chance.’ And I took that chance, and I turned my life around, and now here I am, I’m still young, I’m healthy, and I’ve got my life back. And I’m trying to help others, I’m trying to help you, before you make all of my same mistakes. Any questions?”

  There was a pause, as we all shuffled our feet and whispered to each other, things like, “Ask him where to buy acid,” “Ask him if he ever has cool flashbacks,” and “Ask him if he as a girlfriend,” a remark that was followed by, “Sherry, shut up, I can’t believe you, you are so horny!”

  Finally a teacher raised his hand and said, “Mike, first of all, thank you so much for being here today, and I’m sure we’d all like to know: Was there any one person who made the biggest difference in your getting clean and sober?”

  “Absolutely,” said Mike, “and I’m glad you asked, because that would be my girlfriend, Debbie, who, and God only knows why, but she stuck by me, even when I was using, even when I was treating her like garbage. But she believed in me, and she always told me that, deep down, I was still a good person, and today, she’s my wife. I owe everything to that judge, and to Debbie.”

  Led by the teacher, we all applauded, because Mike seemed like a good guy, because he had dared to try to talk some sense into a horde of snickering New Jersey teenagers, and because “Debbie” is pretty much the state name.

  “See, he’s got a wife,” Sherry told Barasella, during the applause.

  “So what, he’s still hot,” said Barasella.

  “So hot,” agreed Sherry.

  “I would so do him, even if he was still doing heroin,” said Barasella.

  Two weeks later, Mike was killed in a car accident that didn’t involve a drunk driver, just a flatbed truck and an icy stretch of highway. This death shocked me, because I’d just listened to Mike in the auditorium, and because I couldn’t figure out if his death offered any moral lesson. Why bother getting clean and sober if you’re just going to die at twenty-three? Or did Mike’s life still have value, because he’d died a happier man? And, after all of her patience and hard work and understanding, how did Debbie feel? But I think I was shocked mostly because, as a teenager, it hadn’t occurred to me that either celebrities or young people could ever die.

  2.

  Years later, after I’d moved to New York, the first person I knew who died from AIDS, or, more correctly, from complications related to AIDS, was a lawyer in his early forties named Steve. This was before the disease had a name, or an acronym, so Steve was just a man who died very young and shockingly fast of what was then seen as a particularly virulent form of pneumonia. No one knew what to make of Steve’s death, which seemed freakish, an anomaly. I had often met up with friends at Steve’s Upper West Side apartment, before heading out to bars or clubs. I was living in a downtown hovel, so it was especially fun to visit a duplex with leather couches and nice sheets, where there was real art on the walls and the lights were set on dimmers. I loved New York because of this mix: the poor and barely employed could mingle with all sorts of people, and critique their imported Italian brass lamps and potted orchids.

  Gradually, other people began to get inexplicably sick and then die, often in agony. There was no preparation. It wasn’t like a war, where the soldiers leave home and perish on a battlefield in a foreign country. A plague happens down the hall, or on the next block, right where everything had seemed just fine the day before. Suddenly a friendly waiter was in the hospital, or an up-and-coming actor’s neck and arm were covered with crusting purple lesions. No one knew what was happening, or why, and no one had the slightest idea of what to do about it, other than panic. Rumors were all anyone had to go by; only a very few people, who were genetically susceptible, would get it. For some reason, porn stars and hustlers were immune. Some people would contract only the mildest case, and recover completely. Everyone, gay and straight alike, was going to get it, and everyone was going to die. Any facts were so unknown that, in those early days, I wondered if AIDS was being spread over the phone.

  I’d met Chris at college, where he was a graduate student in set design. He’d come north from Virginia, with his best friend Eric, who was studying to be a stage manager. Chris and Eric were a revelation: they were both great-looking guys who could slip effortlessly from the most raucous, masculine behavior, to the most flamboyant, hey-girlfriend carrying on. Chris and Eric were the opposite of political correctness.

  Political correctness predicts that in the future, once gay people have attained full legal equality, they will abandon urban ghettos and in-crowd mannerisms and psychologically crippling, effeminate hijinks. Chris and Eric, when they were bored, would sometimes “walk in heels.” When they were, say, waiting for the light to change, they’d raise their heels a few inches off the ground, and cross the street with a hip-swinging grandeur, as if they were aloof, highly paid runway models. Chris once left my apartment, and I heard him simulate a terrible f
all on the steps, as he cursed, “Dammit! Broke a heel!” Eric was once asked by a security guard to leave a public library for walking in heels.

  Political correctness insists that, as discrimination ends, gay people will flourish everywhere, and their lives will become indistinguishable from those of straight people, whom political correctness somehow assumes are indistinguishable from each other. Gay people will marry and raise families in the suburbs and small towns of the world, where a housewife will be heard to remark, “Wait, are Bob and Jim both gay men? You know, I really didn’t notice. I just don’t see gender preference anymore.”

  While Chris and Eric were comfortable everywhere, they thrived in New York. Gay people move to New York for the same reasons straight people do: sex, money, opportunity, and the chance to visit the giant Christmas tree that looms over Rockefeller Center, and to cruise the nearby ice skaters. And anyone who imagines that social and legal equality will erase a certain gay style, well, they just haven’t been watching the twenty-something contestants on Project Runway, who aren’t afraid of asymmetrical haircuts or making eloquent snap judgments with their eyebrows.

  No, all gay people aren’t witty and sophisticated, especially not the ones who think they are. But as I watched Chris and Eric, I decided that, among other things, being gay could be like knowing a second language, a banter composed of equal parts irony, healthy self-deprecation, and full-blooded swagger. I once saw Eric, on the street, as he spotted an especially hunky UPS deliveryman, in his snug brown uniform. Eric stopped dead in his tracks, admired the deliveryman from any number of angles, and finally growled, “Que hombre!”