Public Apology

In Which a Man Grapples With a Lifetime of Regret, One Incident at a Time

Grand Central Publishing

CHAPTER 1

Junior High

(Or a time in my life that might best be rendered as one long apology toeveryone I came into contact with. And also to myself.)

Dear Mike Eovino and Wally Rapp,

Sorry for offering you fake drugs in the boys' room at Markham Place MiddleSchool.

It was not a nice thing to do.

The idea had come to me the day before, after a conversation we'd had—youtwo and Jeff Cadman and I—on the bus ride home from a class trip. I forgetwhere we had gone. Was it the time we went to see the Shakespeare play at theGarden State Arts Center? A Midsummer Night's Dream, I think, but Ididn't understand any of it.

Sitting in the seats behind you, Jeff and I had been talking about what everyonein Markham Place Middle School was talking about that day: the party that hadtaken place the previous weekend at Chloe Jessop's house, when Chloe Jessop'sparents were not there. We had only heard about the party, of course. Chloe wasa year older than us and pretty and popular in a way that assured that, even ifwe had been in her grade, we would not have been invited to her party. I wouldbet that Chloe Jessop didn't even know our names. We were all dorks, Jeff and Iand you two, too. You'll remember, I'm sure, how far toward the front of the buswe were sitting that day.

Somehow, though, you came under the mistaken belief that Jeff and I had in factattended the party; the truth garbled like in a game of telephone. Things thatwe had only heard had happened at the party—drinking, make-out sessions,possibly even some pot smoking—you thought we were discussing firsthand.Your eyes peeked back at us through the space between the seats as youeavesdropped. Then your heads popped up over the top as you knelt up and turnedfully around.

"You guys were there?!"

It was a pretty long bus ride. Jeff and I didn't have anything better to do, sowe lied.

"Yeah," I said. "It was wild!"

"Really?"

"Oh, man," Jeff said, laughing in a way that I thought would sink us. "It wasawesome!"

But you guys must have been as eager to hear a good story as we were to tellone, because your eyes only lit up brighter.

"Did you guys, like, get drunk?" you, Mike, said.

I said yes. Though I had never gotten drunk in my life.

You were amazed. So I pretended to be amazed at your amazement. "You guys havenever gotten drunk?"

You had not. Wally, you mentioned that your dad drank beer and that you'd seenhim get "pretty tipsy," as you put it, and that that was funny. (I remember yourdad as being a particularly nice guy actually. He was an assistant soccer coachwhen we were on the Wolves, right? In fifth or sixth grade? Tell him hello fromme.)

"Oh, man," I said. "It's the best! Right, Jeff?"

Jeff agreed.

Then we told stories about the party, going into great detail about the wildnessand the craziness of all the debauchery we were imagining in our minds. Most ofmy details were coming from rock star biographies I'd read: No One Here GetsOut Alive, 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky, Hammer of the Gods. Pure fantasy,as far removed from my life as it was from yours. But you were buying it. So Ikept on.

"You've never gotten a blow job?" Again, like I couldn't believe it.

Here's how laughable it was for me to be recounting sexual exploits at that timein my life: do you remember the episode of the TV show Cheers when Dianehelps Sam write his memoirs, and Dick Cavett reads it and tells them that theyneed to spice it up with more salacious material about Sam's playboy daysbecause sex sells, and so Sam and Diane go back into Sam's office to work onrevisions and a little while later Diane comes out to the bar and asks Coach fora glass of water, but instead of drinking it she splashes it on her face andsays, "Boy, can I write!" Well, that bus ride was bumpy, as bus rides alwaysare, and my blue jeans were snug fitting, as blue jeans in the early '80s alwayswere—as embarrassing as this is to admit, I had to cut short my graphictelling of a fictional seven-minutes-in-heaven session for the same reason thatDiane needed a glass of water. Boy, could I write.

"You've never gotten high?"

Jeff and I debated our earlier assertion. Maybe getting high was actually betterthan getting drunk. And which was the best drug? Pot? Speed? Cocaine? LSD? Therewere so many drugs we'd never tried that we told you we had tried, it was hardto choose a favorite. We had fun talking about it, though. And you seemed to behaving fun listening, too. This was one of the most enjoyable bus rides homefrom a class trip any of us had had, I'm pretty sure.

So after it ended, after we got back to school, after school let out that day,Jeff and I decided to keep the fun going. We came up with a plan to turn oursuccessful ruse into a more tangible prank. We went back to his house and spentthe afternoon making fake drugs, which we would then present to you in a displayof the peer pressure we'd learned about from ABC Afterschool Specials and whenNancy Reagan was on Diff'rent Strokes.

Standing by the sink in the Cadmans' kitchen, we spread out our materials on atray: oregano, baking soda, the kind of ice-cream sprinkles that were tiny roundballs of all different colors, Extra Strength Tylenol capsules, tinfoil, andJeff's stepfather's rolling papers. (He rolled tobacco in them. But thinkingback to the groovy John Lennon glasses frames he wore and the enthusiasm withwhich he showed me his original-pressing vinyl copy of Blind Faith's BlindFaith one night when I slept over there, I wouldn't be surprised to learnthat if we'd looked around that house with any serious intent, we might havefound some real pot to go with our oregano. Which would have probably freaked usout and ruined our whole gag.)

There was a window above the sink, and I imagined Jeff's neighbors looking inand seeing us rolling oregano into a cigarette, and folding the baking soda intoa tinfoil envelope, and twisting the Tylenol capsules apart and dumping out theyellowish powder and replacing it with the sprinkles—which looked somehow"druggier" to us, more like a picture you'd see on a poster in the nurse'soffice—and sealing them back up with some spit. This would be a stupidthing to have to explain to the police.

I put the product in a sandwich baggie and hid it in the outside pocket of myknapsack. The next morning at school, Jeff and I coaxed you guys into the boys'room between classes. We didn't know what your reaction would be. Would you fallfor it? Would you freak out? Would you tell the teachers? Would you take it?That seemed very unlikely, but hey, we didn't know. Who knows anybody that well,especially in seventh grade? And we'd all heard so much about the irresistible,almost demonic power of peer pressure. I hoped that you'd take some and thenexperience a placebo effect and start acting all funny, whereupon we would havethe chance to say, "Ha-ha—you can't be feeling anything, it's fake!" I wasprepared to swallow one of the sprinkle pills in front of you as encouragement.

"You guys are cool, right?" I said, checking the door to the bathroom over myshoulder. You looked suspicious but nodded a yes.

I pulled the stuff out of my knapsack. I took the joint out of the bag and heldit out in front of me in my palm. Jeff opened the tinfoil to show you the whitepowder inside and presented the pills in a plastic bag. We'd done an impressivejob. Everything looked very realistic.

Your eyes bugged, and you stiffened and took a step backward and stammered arefusal.

"No, no, no," you said, Mike, holding your hands out in front of you like thiswas a stickup. "No."

You giggled nervously, Wally, and moved to make an escape. "I ... I ... I gottaget out of here."

This was the same boys' room where Bobby Spano and Joey Figliolia used to pin meto the wall and call me "faggot" and muss up the hair that I'd been trying sohard to comb back in place every day after being out in the wind duringlunchtime recess. I was tiny, and my hair was a curly mop, naturally all overthe place, but I liked to grow it long because of Jim Morrison. But I also liked(or "desperately needed" is perhaps a more accurate phrase) for it to lookjust so if I was to be seen by any other people. Because of being inseventh grade. I hated that place a lot. That bathroom, Markham Place, seventhgrade, all of it.

My miserableness, I would think, is what led me to play such a mean-spiritedtrick on you guys. "Shit runs downhill," my father used to say when I'd talk tohim about bigger kids picking on me. He'd speak in a tone that acknowledged thesad unfairness of the world, but one that implied sympathy for the bullies, too.Maybe they had older brothers, he suggested, or mean parents who pushed themaround at home. I don't mean to excuse myself by saying this. And I'd guessyou'd know it already. But it's generally true, right? People who pick on otherpeople have probably been picked on themselves. Bobby Spano took pleasure inseeing me scared in that bathroom—I tried to be as tough as I could, buthe was way bigger than me and regularly twisted my arm behind my back untiltears filled my eyes and I whimpered some sort of "uncle." I, in turn, reveledin the looks on your faces, your widened eyes and quivering lips, as you backedaway from the joint I was offering you. Reveled in the little bit of power I hadfound.

"Come on, just try it," I said, mimicking the villainous, bad influencers fromall the "Just Say No" commercials. "It'll make you feel good."

I was awful.

You pushed past us and hustled out of there. Jeff and I laughed andcongratulated each other, but it was halfhearted, anticlimactic. The prankitself paled in comparison to the process of setting it up. What were wesupposed to do now, with these extremely lifelike fake drugs we'd spent so muchtime and care in preparing? And what did it say about us that we'd spent so muchtime and care in preparing fake drugs just to play a trick on you? We looked ateach other warily and walked back into the hallway, off to our next class.

Dear Owner of a Bistro in Paris,

Sorry for spitting a mouthful of hamburger back onto my plate in front of yourother customers.

This was the summer of 1983. I was sitting at a table in your restaurant with myfather. We had come to Paris with his parents, my grandparents, on our way toBerlin, where we were going to see where they had lived before leaving Germanyduring the Holocaust. Like a Roots thing. My grandparents were Jewish.

I was twelve years old, which is a weird age to take a trip with your father.(It's probably more accurate just to say that twelve is a weird age.) On the onehand, it was wonderful. Flying in an airplane, staying in a hotel, seeing thedifferent architecture and fashion, it was all like a movie—which is howyou want everything to feel when you're twelve, or at least I did. This trip waseven more special because we'd left my mom and five-year-old sister back home inNew Jersey. My father sent me down to the boulangerie every morning, bymyself, to buy us a baguette and cheese. "Fromage," I practiced saying,rolling the r, and made sure to count the change carefully.

At the same time, there was a lot of push and pull between me and my father thatsummer. Our relationship, which had always been very warm and pal to pal, waschanging. Rock 'n' roll had replaced baseball as my principal obsession; I hadrecently come to an understanding of the notion of coolness and that this rancounter to enjoying time spent with one's family. And cool was something I verymuch wanted to be.

So Paris was a week of sightseeing and museums and walking around with a vagueawareness of being in an in-between state as a person. I remember being bored,and complaining about being bored, and wishing that I could just stay in thehotel and work on lists in the spiral notebook I'd brought, wherein Iobsessively ranked and erased and reranked again the things that were importantto me: rock groups, rock songs, rock albums, singers, guitarists, drummers, bassplayers. Even Jim Morrison's grave, which we visited on my insistence, was adisappointment. It looked pretty much like all the other graves in thecemetery—just with some graffiti and a little two-foot-tall statue of hishead. I was expecting something more along the lines of the Lincoln Memorial orthe Statue of Liberty.

But the buzz and excitement of Paris at night! It really is a beautiful city. Ican see why you've chosen to live in it. After my grandparents had gone to bed,my father took me out walking to look at the lights and the cars and theglamorous people in fancy clothes. I felt very grown-up and cosmopolitan.Swashbuckling even. Like we were a pair of playboys out on the town, staying uplate, cruising the streets. We came upon a building with a façade of red panelswith silhouettes of naked ladies on them—like the mud flaps behind theback wheels of eighteen-wheeler trucks. My father noticed me looking at them."The world-famous Crazy Horse Saloon," he told me, with a devilish, man-to-mansort of wink. "It's a strip club."

I'm not sure why this struck me like it did. The year before, he'd taken me tosee Porky's, the first R-rated movie I'd ever seen, and a very dirtyone, filled with nudity. And we'd enjoyed it; we had repeated the jokes to eachother for months afterward. (Especially the one where the guys are at the diner,being interrogated by the police because one of them, the big football playernamed Meat, is drunk, and they're all lying to protect him—"No, no! He'snot drunk! He's just tired!"—until the policeman threatens to arrestanyone who doesn't tell him the truth, and so they all immediately turn rat, andthe little guy, Pee Wee, blurts out an overly enthusiastic, "The son of a bitchdoes it all the time!" We really liked that joke.) But as I said, myrelationship with my father was changing that summer, and at that moment, outfront of the Crazy Horse, realizing that just beyond that door there were women,real live women, on a stage with no clothes on, I felt a twist in my stomach andsuddenly much less okay about being there with him. Swashbuckling with one'sfather is not swashbuckling at all. I stepped away to put more distance betweenus on the sidewalk. There could have been no sidewalk wide enough.

The next night, on a dark, crowded, stone-paved path that spiraled down a bighill where we'd gone to see the Basilique du Sacré Coeur after dinner, a strangeman with a beard and foul breath lurched out of the shadows and grabbed me bythe arm and said something loud and aggressive into my face in French. A quickblur later, before I'd even really registered what was happening, my father hadgrabbed the guy and slammed him against the wall on the side of the street hardenough that he crumpled to the ground. (The guy was likely headed in thatdirection already, drunk or drugged or both.) There was shouting and commotionand my grandparents hustled me away.

My father caught up to us a minute later. I don't remember exactly what myimmediate reaction was. I don't think it was a major one. We walked back to thehotel like normal. I was perhaps experiencing some shock.

Later, in our room, as we were getting ready to go to bed, I pestered him intoletting me turn on the TV. He'd said no at first—all the shows were inFrench; what was the point, other than to zone out? But eventually, he relented.I found a Japanese movie that looked interesting. A detective thriller, like aJames Bond movie. A cool guy in a slick suit was searching an apartment forclues. Downstairs, we learned, an enormous thug—a sumo wrestlerbasically—was on his way to come kill him.

The thug burst in on the cool guy and there was a terrific, extremely violentfight. Furniture broke, glass shattered, the cool guy being beaten to a pulp. Abloody pulp. There was lots of blood. It was very graphic.

"Come on," my father said, putting his dopp kit back into his suitcase. "Why doyou want to watch this?"
(Continues...)Excerpted from Public Apology by Dave Bry. Copyright © 2014 Dave Bry. Excerpted by permission of Grand Central Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.