Dad because his employees preferred Dad’s leadership to that of the guy signing their checks—plus Dad busted said owner for having drinks with his mistress. Dad was rewarded a nice severance package from a judge who agreed Dad’s former boss was a complete asshole. It was the second time I ever saw my father cry. The other time was when Grandma Eleanor died. Our Pentecostal cleaning lady, Charlotte Fayne, sang “The Old Rugged Cross” at the funeral. Charlotte wore her hair and skirts long because the Devil had a place reserved in hell for shorthaired women who wore pants.
We moved from Louisville back to the south side of Indianapolis—Greenwood this time, a town that’s of course more grey colored and relatively devoid of trees. Dad took a job as a stockbroker for Paine Webber, commuting back and forth to downtown Indy. He worked sixteen hour days in a three by five cubicle doing a job that a monkey flipping a coin could perform with equal competence. Dad’s new career came and went in a span of less than two years.
Those two years were much kinder to me. In addition to being the home of the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Greenwood staked its claim to a Chinese restaurant with the state’s largest indoor Koi pond and a Catholic school with the state’s largest pool of pubescent hormones. My seventh and eighth grade years at Our Lady of Perpetual Help were what I classify as my awkward, albeit enriching, years. Faced with the prospect of fading into adolescent obscurity, I compensated better than most for bad acne and twenty extra pounds. I quit football and became a wrestler, a sport my singlet-wearing fat ass inexplicably peddled into a higher-than-deserved social status. My sly sense of humor disarmed my peers and teachers into thinking I was harmless, and thanks to a couple years of cotillion, I could pull out dance moves that embarrassed the guys and enflamed the girls.
After a three-month flirtation with an eighth grade volleyball player during which I was crowned King of All Seventh Graders, I became drawn to Twyla Levine, a tall, brunette vixen who sat next to me in Mr. Marker’s seventh grade class. On an overnight field trip to St. Louis, Twyla and I made out during a game of spin the bottle. Later, on the bus ride home to Greenwood, I put my hand up Twyla’s skirt and managed to fiddle with the elastic on her panties. Someone witnessed the panties episode, so by the time we got back to Greenwood, Twyla had given me a hand job while I fingered her in the back of the bus. None of this was true, but over the years, as the story followed me and took on a life of its own, I never tried very hard to deny the rumors. Years later, I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles I lost my virginity in the back of that bus. True or not, you have to admit the image of a thirteen-year-old stumbling around a bus looking for a place to stick his dick has a humorously scandalous quality to it.
The truth was Twyla did give me an orgasm. After I got back from St. Louis I locked myself in the bathroom with Twyla—or at least, Twyla’s seventh grade class picture cut out of my yearbook and taped to the body of 1984 Playboy Playmate of the Year, Barbara Edwards. Twyla’s ambitions were “To fulfill my dream as a promising artist and actress and to contribute my share of help to the starving children of the world.” Her turn-ons were “Being a Sigma Chi sister of USC, drawing, traveling, and attending musicals.”
Even though I was a Notre Dame fan, I let the USC comment slide. Anything for Twyla.
In the wake of Dad’s stock broker experiment, a couple investors whose portfolios quite miraculously quadrupled on his watch set up my father as president of his own car dealership. We moved, again, putting down what turned out to be permanent roots in Empire Ridge, a mill town about halfway to Cincinnati. We said our driveway goodbyes to our Greenwood neighbors, a brand-new Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser station wagon hunched low over the tires with the weight of a couple more years of memories. I mailed a goodbye letter to Twyla, outing myself as the town pervert with the affecting words, “How about you take a picture of yourself naked and send it to me?” And in the fall of 1985, with the “Fitzpatrick Olds-Cadillac-Subaru” marquee hoisted and lit and my family settling down after our eighth move in twelve years, I enrolled as a freshman at Empire Ridge Public High School.
It’s been more than two infant-free years since Dad reversed his sterility. Much like his failed attempts to cajole disinterested sperm cells in the general direction of my mother’s worn-out uterus, I’m still finding my stride in Empire Ridge. I grew ten inches without gaining a pound, my complexion cleared up, and I carry one hundred and seventy pounds of taut muscle over a five foot ten inch frame. Student council, the wrestling team, Catholic youth group—everything to me is an opportunity for initiation. And there is no faster road to acceptance in a sleepy Indiana town than getting drunk, something I try to do as much as possible.
I hold the shot of Jim Beam to the light. Its amber glow is the color of hope—my hope it will somehow magically disappear without having to touch my lips. A goofy-looking guy sits next to me. He’s skinny, skinnier than me at least, and maybe a half inch taller, with a round face and a head sprouting random cowlicks rather than curls.
“Drink it, you fucking pussy,” he says.
“Hatch,” I reply, “shut the fuck up.”
Elias Hatcher has been my best friend since I met him at freshman orientation. Hatch is your typical child of divorce. His mother is a recovering hippie who now raises free-range ostriches somewhere in Oklahoma, his father a Vietnam vet turned semipro sport fisherman who’s spent the better part of the eighties chain smoking clove cigarettes and crawling out from the bottom of a liquor bottle. Hatch’s every move, at least in public when he has an audience, is a premeditated, loud, and more often than not obnoxious attempt to draw attention to himself. He is overly protective and sentimental toward his closest friends to the point of making you feel uncomfortable. Stick Jimmy Buffett’s “A Pirate Looks at Forty” in the tape deck, and Hatch is hugging you while bawling his eyes out—guaranteed. If you’re unwilling to commit any impulsive act—shotgun six beers in a row, jump off high bridges into shallow water, or drop everything and take a road trip because you’ve snagged some warm Natty Light with your fake ID and need an excuse to drink it—Hatch invokes the word “pals” and you have no say in the matter.
Like tonight.
“We’ve almost downed this entire half gallon.” I hold up the nearly empty bottle of Jim Beam save for an inch of bourbon—the remains of a sobriety lost hours earlier. “How about we take a break?”
“Pals, Fitzy.” Hatch grabs the half gallon from me. He finishes it, drinking it straight from the bottle. “Bring it!”
“Come on, Hatch.”
“Pals!”
“But I can’t feel my legs.”
“Pals!”
“Ah, fuck it.” I open my mouth and raise the shot glass to my lips. I throw the warm brown liquid down the back of my throat, doing whatever I can to prevent the harsh, woody bite of cheap whiskey from gagging me. I slam the empty shot glass down.
“That’s what I’m talking about!” Hatch offers me a large cup of Mountain Dew. “Chaser?”
I nod, grabbing the cup. I drink the lemony soda until it runs out the sides of my mouth and down my face.
Last weekend Hatch and I got kicked out of the big hockey matchup versus Prep. Half-cocked on a bottle of Jägermeister we split before the game, we started taking liberties with the last names of the Prep players. By the middle of the third period, Mrs. Pocock tired of the demonstrative harassment of her son and had us removed.
Founded as Whiskeyville by a couple drunken Scotch-Irish trappers in the eighteenth century, Empire Ridge was renamed in the nineteen-twenties in honor of the large quarry just outside of town that supplied every inch of limestone to the Empire State Building’s exterior. Empire Ridge Preparatory Academy and
