like motorcycles or mechanical stuff of any kind. He
had a tentative approach to the sciences, too, though we were sequestered there, in chemistry, at the pleasure of the New
York State Board of Regents. The laboratory tables were always marbleized, always black, swept clean of hazardous accumulations.
Songbirds in our town, New Rochelle, sang parochial songs, jingles, light fare. The windows were open. It was late autumn.
The chemistry teacher, Miss Rydell, said,
Bobby, you work with Everett here.
No one else would work with me. Not even the two Hispanic kids. A pairing off had transpired, boys of incredible beauty with
girls as perfect as in the Old Masters. What was my crime? Bobby Erlich, that blond, said nothing, accepted a glass beaker
from Miss Rydell, shoved past me toward the lab station. At the beginning of the experiment, sodium and water in equal parts,
I smiled genially at Bobby, thanked him for working with me, but this was simulated, because, when he still wouldn’t talk,
wouldn’t collaborate, kept taking beakers away from me, I had no choice but to deliver his fate, which came to me with a sort
of uncanny trembling that you associate with early stages of fever, as if foresight and shingles, or chicken pox, were identical:
You’re going to get maimed in a horrible motorcycle accident. It’s really going to hurt, too. The part you can feel, anyway.
Just remember we had this chat.
Know what, Bennett?
said Erlich,
I
always thought you were a jerk. And I was right.
The exchange in its entirety. Two lines. Had I known what was going to happen I would have feigned illness and taken a city
bus home, lugging my ring binder, my unused baseball glove, and the remains of my bag lunch. Why worry about the opinion of
Bobby Erlich? I could just as easily have said something polite. Nevertheless, class proceeded without incident, almost like
it was supposed to, despite discord between lab partners. Miss Rydell hummed as she circulated from lab station to lab station.
We performed the experiment, I balanced the equation in my lab notebook —Erlich didn’t know how to do it —I passed our results
to the front of the class. We got an A on the homework, and afterward Bobby avoided me wherever possible, especially in chemistry
class. I would see the rear view of him in the cinder-block corridors, a faded red backpack retreating.
Eventually, Erlich turned out to be, well,
gay,
the preferred colloquialisms in those days being
fag, mo, felcher, queer,
and so forth. Foreknowledge of his blossoming condition would have been possible among my prognostications, though in truth
I had a basis for my surmises, namely that Erlich had repeatedly been beaten and tortured by the
lobotomized physical-education students
of my school, most of whom are now plumbers with collections of child pornography taped inside their vans, or this seemed
to be the implication at our recent twentieth reunion. Anyhow, I didn’t tell Erlich he was
gay,
I just told him he would be maimed in a motorcycle accident, and the year passed, and I was grateful every time I saw Bobby’s
retreating backpack on the way to band practice, where he was first flute, or easing into the Green Room backstage at one
of hisbeloved high-school dramas. (I was property master for several of the shows that year.) I was grateful because Bobby was intact.
Then we were seventeen (along with everyone else in our class except the aforementioned
lobotomized physical-education students).
An age of promise, an age of adventures, of intoxications, of epiphanies. Bobby Erlich the seventeen-year-old meanwhile seemed
to be having an
intergenera-tional romance,
that was the rumor, and one night he was riding in an Olds Cutlass Supreme beside this off-duty policeman from our town,
Officer Meineke, a policeman with a wife and kids who nonetheless had found himself all dizzy over a flute-playing, theater-obsessed
boy from the junior class of the
had a tentative approach to the sciences, too, though we were sequestered there, in chemistry, at the pleasure of the New
York State Board of Regents. The laboratory tables were always marbleized, always black, swept clean of hazardous accumulations.
Songbirds in our town, New Rochelle, sang parochial songs, jingles, light fare. The windows were open. It was late autumn.
The chemistry teacher, Miss Rydell, said,
Bobby, you work with Everett here.
No one else would work with me. Not even the two Hispanic kids. A pairing off had transpired, boys of incredible beauty with
girls as perfect as in the Old Masters. What was my crime? Bobby Erlich, that blond, said nothing, accepted a glass beaker
from Miss Rydell, shoved past me toward the lab station. At the beginning of the experiment, sodium and water in equal parts,
I smiled genially at Bobby, thanked him for working with me, but this was simulated, because, when he still wouldn’t talk,
wouldn’t collaborate, kept taking beakers away from me, I had no choice but to deliver his fate, which came to me with a sort
of uncanny trembling that you associate with early stages of fever, as if foresight and shingles, or chicken pox, were identical:
You’re going to get maimed in a horrible motorcycle accident. It’s really going to hurt, too. The part you can feel, anyway.
Just remember we had this chat.
Know what, Bennett?
said Erlich,
I
always thought you were a jerk. And I was right.
The exchange in its entirety. Two lines. Had I known what was going to happen I would have feigned illness and taken a city
bus home, lugging my ring binder, my unused baseball glove, and the remains of my bag lunch. Why worry about the opinion of
Bobby Erlich? I could just as easily have said something polite. Nevertheless, class proceeded without incident, almost like
it was supposed to, despite discord between lab partners. Miss Rydell hummed as she circulated from lab station to lab station.
We performed the experiment, I balanced the equation in my lab notebook —Erlich didn’t know how to do it —I passed our results
to the front of the class. We got an A on the homework, and afterward Bobby avoided me wherever possible, especially in chemistry
class. I would see the rear view of him in the cinder-block corridors, a faded red backpack retreating.
Eventually, Erlich turned out to be, well,
gay,
the preferred colloquialisms in those days being
fag, mo, felcher, queer,
and so forth. Foreknowledge of his blossoming condition would have been possible among my prognostications, though in truth
I had a basis for my surmises, namely that Erlich had repeatedly been beaten and tortured by the
lobotomized physical-education students
of my school, most of whom are now plumbers with collections of child pornography taped inside their vans, or this seemed
to be the implication at our recent twentieth reunion. Anyhow, I didn’t tell Erlich he was
gay,
I just told him he would be maimed in a motorcycle accident, and the year passed, and I was grateful every time I saw Bobby’s
retreating backpack on the way to band practice, where he was first flute, or easing into the Green Room backstage at one
of hisbeloved high-school dramas. (I was property master for several of the shows that year.) I was grateful because Bobby was intact.
Then we were seventeen (along with everyone else in our class except the aforementioned
lobotomized physical-education students).
An age of promise, an age of adventures, of intoxications, of epiphanies. Bobby Erlich the seventeen-year-old meanwhile seemed
to be having an
intergenera-tional romance,
that was the rumor, and one night he was riding in an Olds Cutlass Supreme beside this off-duty policeman from our town,
Officer Meineke, a policeman with a wife and kids who nonetheless had found himself all dizzy over a flute-playing, theater-obsessed
boy from the junior class of the
Similar Books
