How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater (36 page)

“Ca
-ree-
py,” Natie says under his breath.

Alas Poor Yorick's vacant, rheumy gaze is way too
Night of the Living Dead
for comfort and the three of us back away as far as we can get, plunking ourselves down on the concrete bench at the other side of the cell.

Doug buries his face in his hands. “My old man is going to kill me,” he says.

“Not if this guy does it first,” Natie whispers.

I can't believe it's come to this. I grew up in a house with a circular driveway, for Chrissake. How did I end up in jail with Skeletor? Finally, to our relief, Alas Poor Yorick shuts his horrible yellow eyes and rolls over, his shirt riding up to reveal bruises on his back.

“It's always nice to get out and meet new people, isn't it?” Natie says.

I use my one phone call to contact the Camptown Police Department but, what with getting confirmations from both Kathleen and her cryent, it takes over an hour and a half to get us released, which is sufficient time for me to envision my entire future working in the prison laundry and fending off knife attacks from scary guys in hairnets.

The girls are standing
in the parking lot next to the Lincoln Continental Divide when we get out. “Are you all okay?” I ask.

Ziba flicks her cigarette on the ground and rubs it out with her foot. “We learned all about prostitution from these two hookers,” she says, like it's yet another tedious high-school class she had to sit through.

“And venereal diseases,” Kelly adds.

“It was absolutely
fascinating,”
Paula says. “I hope I can remember it all for my acting.”

Paula.

“You guys were lucky,” Natie says. “We watched a heroin addict choke on his own vomit.” He frowns at me like it's my fault.

“C'mon,” Doug says, giving Natie a shove into the car, “we've got a Buddha to deliver.”

The house is dark
and for a moment I wonder whether it's too late to be doing this, but there's a light coming from the kitchen. “You guys stay here,” Doug says. “I'm the one who stole it.”

“But I kept it,” I say.

“
We
kept it,” Kelly adds. “It's my house, too.” She opens her door to get out.

“She's right,” Paula says. “We got into this together, we should get out of it together.”

Natie clears his throat. “Don't you think at least one of us should wait with the car?” he says. “This isn't the nicest neighborhood, y'know.”

“All of us,” Ziba says, and she shoves him out the door.

The seven of us (including the Buddha) go around the side of the house to the kitchen door. We knock.

A middle-aged woman with a dried-out perm and split ends peeks through the curtain, then unlocks the door. Sneering at us like we're the most contemptible bunch of fiends ever, she shouts, “Ma, they're here.” We all take extra care to wipe our feet, partly out of politeness and partly to stall, then slouch our way into the kitchen. You'd think that after everything I've been through I wouldn't shock easily, but what I see truly takes my breath away.

Buddhas. Everywhere.

I mean, everywhere. There's a Buddha cookie jar, a Buddha egg timer, and Buddha oven mitts; a Buddha lamp, a Buddha clock, a Buddha salt, and a Buddha pepper; here a Buddha, there a Buddha, everywhere a Buddha Buddha, all of them laughing deliriously in spasms of joy, taunting us with their lopsided grins.

Now when they cast the role of the Buddha woman in the movie of my life, they'll need to find the smallest, oldest, most arthritic-looking grandmother type you've ever seen. Better yet, imagine for yourself the absolute last person on earth you'd ever want to harm and then cast her.

The Buddha woman reaches for her walker so she can stand.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the woman needs a walker. I'm going to burn in Hell for eternity.

I have no idea what to say. I consider introducing myself, but it feels weird and somehow wrong. Everything feels weird and wrong. “We brought your Buddha back,” I hear myself say. “We're so . . .”

Thoughtless? Selfish? Evil?

“. . . sorry.”

The Buddha woman regards us through her trifocals and I can tell that forgiveness is not forthcoming. “I certainly hope you are,” she says in a chipped teacup of a voice. (Lord almighty, even her voice is frail.) “You kids have no idea the hell, excuse my language, you've put me through. I can't for the life of me understand why you chose to pick on me, ringing my bell in the dead of night, scaring me that way and making me move my statue back time and again.”

I try to imagine this parchment-y looking woman, barely bigger than the Buddha itself, trying to lug a fifty-pound ceramic statue back into her garden. Did I mention I'm going to burn in Hell for eternity?

“And then to steal it from me, like it's a big joke. My dead husband gave me that statue, you know.”

Oh God, and it was probably the last thing he did before expiring from a sudden heart attack, leaving her without life insurance and only her Buddha collection to give her solace in her lonely remaining years.

O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I.

You know how on
The Flintstones
when Wilma is scolding Fred and the more ashamed he feels, the tinier he gets? I feel about as small as the Buddha air freshener above the sink.

“I don't know how we can make this up to you,” I say.

“You can't,” she says. “Just put it back in the garden where it belongs and don't ever bother me again.”

I must remember this shame for my acting.

Edward.

O
nce the trauma of being arrested,
jailed, and completely humiliated passes, I'm able to finally get my head around the other mind-altering event in our lives: Ziba and Kelly.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

In retrospect, I suppose there were some clues, like how Ziba could be so worldly and yet act like such a prude; and as for Kelly, well . . . still waters, I guess. Doug drops some completely unsubtle hints about wanting to be with the two of them at once, but Ziba makes it abundantly clear that she's had enough of men. (“And no, you can't watch either,” she adds.) I try to take advantage of Doug's pent-up sexual frustration, but he's not buying the whole Aldonza the whore one-pair-of-arms-is-like-another thing.

“I'm sorry, man, you know I love you, but you just don't do it for me,” he says, almost as if he were apologizing for not being more of a sexual deviant. “I swear, if you were a chick I'd be with you in a heartbeat, but I just can't get past you being hairy and having muscles and stuff.”

At least he said I had muscles.

What's worse, though, is that now I find myself wanting Kelly more than ever. And I hate myself for it because I know it's just some knee-jerk reaction to her being unavailable, but the fact is I can't stop thinking about her. Living in the same house has become a whole new kind of torture.

So here I am—no girlfriend, no boyfriend, no father, no mother, no money, no job, and no future. The only thing I do have is a psychotic Austrian trailing me like a hired assassin. I give up.

I call off Jordan Craig's blackmail.

One night in the county jail was all I needed to realize I'm way too big of a wuss to consider white-collar crime as a viable career option. I wish I could say that sending Jordan the negatives makes me feel better (that is, after I pry them out of Natie's pudgy, clenched fists), but as far as I can see, an unwillingness to blackmail still ranks fairly low as a standard for ethics and morality.

Still, shame clings to me like a bad smell and the only peace I get is from taking insanely long runs, which become increasingly more compulsive the closer we get to the opening of
Godspell.

Godspell.

I know it's going to make me sound like one of those glassy-eyed Young Life kids (you know the type—the ones who always quote scripture in the yearbook and whose major social activity is the church lock-in, a scary brainwashing ritual where they play volleyball in the church gym all night until they're too exhausted to be reasonable and then accept Jesus as their personal savior just so they can go to sleep), but the fact is, right now Jesus is my only salvation.

Playing Jesus, I mean.

I've begun fasting on Fridays—okay, mostly because I have to take off my shirt in the baptism scene and I don't want to look jiggly—and I have actually read all four Gospels for research and even tried to do some of the Zen meditations my mother taught me, even though I have the attention span of a mosquito on cocaine. Everyone thinks I'm acting totally freaky (“You were more fun when you drank, man,” Doug says), but it makes me feel, I don't know, purer in a way.

Which is not to say that my version of Jesus is a wimp. I hate it when Christ is played all profound and dull, like he's addicted to morphine instead of inspired by God. Personally, I see Jesus more as a Pharisee-ass-kicking Christian superhero. Mr. Lucas agrees. Being a Mr. Lucas production, this
Godspell
promises to be unlike any ever seen before. The usual cast of Jesus and the disciples is backed by a chorus of fifty, which gives the whole thing a much more spectacular
Jesus Christ Superstar
kind of feeling.

You see,
Godspell
was written in 1971, so it's usually done in this hippie-dippy, flower-child kind of way, with the cast dressed as clowns and acting out the parables all wild and funny, but Mr. Lucas thought the whole thing was a little too
Hair: The American Tribal Love Rock Musical
for his taste so he's set it in a high school in the 1980s, which is particularly good for the weaker cast members because they won't have to stretch as much as actors. Our version is very
Fast Times at Ridgemont High;
there's still a lot of running around and being nutty, but it's our kind of nutty, with Mohawks and Moonwalks, and imitations of ET and Boy George and Ronald Reagan. No matter how crazy the show gets, though, Mr. Lucas makes sure that Jesus doesn't get lost in the mayhem.

I swear, it's the only thing that's keeping me in school. I mean, otherwise, what's the point? Since I'm legally emancipated I can write my own notes, so I pretty much come and go as I please; Mr. Lucas calls it the OAP—the Optional Attendance Plan. Pissing off the secretaries in the attendance office is one of the few pleasures I have left. Here are a couple of my faves:

On Easter Sunday, Kathleen, Kelly, and I go with Paula and Aunt Glo to Mass at Father Angelo's parish in Hoboken. Kathleen hasn't been to church since her parish priest refused to serve her communion because she got divorced, so Kelly and I get to enjoy watching Kathleen defiantly commit a minor heresy by allowing the Holy Host in her formerly married mouth. Aunt Glo is right about Angelo's version of the Mass; it is like a musical. There are two choirs, a small orchestra, and a soloist who was Betty Buckley's understudy in
Cats.
Angelo even sings (“Such a voice Maya Angelou has,” Aunt Glo says); it's all we can do to stop ourselves from applauding his rendition of the Holy Eucharist.

Afterward we go back to Aunt Glo's where lots of short, loud people eat and shout conversations at one another from opposite sides of the room. It makes me miss all the Zanni relatives in Hoboken, but it's not like I'd be seeing them anyway; Dagmar's cut Al off from all of them, too. Kathleen seems a little too Wallingford Tennis Club at first, but once she's gotten some wine in her she surprises everyone by knowing all the words to “Volare.” Paula and I harmonize on “Ave Maria” like we did at her cousin Crazy Linda's wedding, and every male D'Angelo cousin between the ages of fourteen and forty asks if I'm dating Kelly and, if I'm not, could I maybe hook him up?