Problem was, the other kids thought so, too. Neal felt stupid enough anyhow, wearing the blue blazer, khaki slacks, and cordovans. With the white button-down shirt and brand-new old school tie. White fucking socks.
Then there was that assignment in Mr. Danforth’s English class about your life at home. Neal had scribbled something straight out of Leave It to Beaver and the class had laughed its collective head off at him and Danforth got pissed at him.
What am I supposed to write? Neal thought. That my hophead hooker of a mother has split, and the nearest thing I got to a father is a one-armed dwarf whose idea of a father-son outing is breaking into somebody’s office and lifting files? So don’t ask me for real life, Mr. Danforth, because I don’t think you can handle reading it any better than I can take writing it. Settle for June Cleaver and be happy.
Or how about the usual jokes? Your mother’s like a doorknob. Everybody gets a turn. Your mother is like the Union Pacific. She got laid across the country. When these made the rounds, Neal was the only kid in school who knew for a fact they were true.
And when the talk turned to family vacations, Christmas presents, brothers and sisters and crazy aunts, Neal had nothing, flat-ass nothing, to say, and was too proud and too smart to make things up. Nor could he invite other kids over to his place, because it literally was his place-no mom-and-pop combo, cookies on the table-and his place was a one-room slum.
Neal was a lonely, miserable kid. Then that son of a bitch Danforth made him read Dickens.
Oliver Twist. Neal devoured it in two all-night sessions. Then he read it again, and when it came time to write about it… Boy, Mr. Danforth, can I write about it. Your other students may think they know what Oliver feels, but I know what he feels.
“This is excellent,” Danforth said, handing him back his paper. “Why don’t you talk in class?”
Neal shrugged.
“You liked Dickens,” said Danforth.
Neal nodded.
Danforth went to his bookcase and handed Neal a copy of Great Expectations.
“Thank you,” Neal said.
Neal went straight back to the neighborhood, bought himself a jar of Nescafe and a half-gallon of chocolate ice cream, and dug in to spend the weekend with Pip.
The reading was great. The reading was wonderful. He was never lonely when he was reading-never cold, never afraid, never alone in the apartment.
He returned Great Expectations with a small essay he’d written, and received David Copperfield in exchange.
“Did you like it?” Danforth asked.
“Yeah, I liked it… a lot.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It made me feel…” He couldn’t find the word.
“I know what you mean.” Danforth smiled at him. “You’re okay, Carey, you know that?”
Parents’ night was hell. Neal dreaded it with a near-tangible fear: exposure. He could hear the taunts that would follow him around the hallways the next day and ever after: bastard.
That night, he sat in the back of homeroom as the parents drifted in, smiled their dull smiles, shook their wooden handshakes, feigning interest in their daughters’ dumb pastels and sons’ stupid poems.
He looked impatiently at his watch every few seconds and frowned a “Where the hell are they?” frown for the benefit of anybody who might be watching, awash in the adolescent conviction that everyone was watching. He was slumped so low in his chair that he didn’t see her come in, but he sure as hell heard her. Her rich voice dripped class.
“Hello, I’m Mrs. Carey, Neal’s mother. How nice to meet you.”
She was beautiful. She made Mrs. Cleaver look like a carhop. Her auburn hair was perfectly coiffed. Her gray dress was letter-perfect for the occasion. Brown eyes sparkled at the teacher, and as she held her hand out, the poor man almost kissed rather than shook it.
She strode to the back of the room, displaying a warm maternal smile as she kissed Neal on both cheeks and subtly hauled him from his seat. “Show me everything,” she said.
They walked the school together, pretending fascination with the various displays. She oohed proudly over his prize essay on Dickens’s London. She charmed teachers and parents, sipped punch, and nibbled cookies. She apologized for having to leave so early and swept, yea verily swept, out the door.
Neal found Graham at McKeegan’s later on. “Where did you get her?” he asked. “She was perfect.” Graham nodded. For two hundred bucks, he thought, she’d better be perfect.
“You’re faginesque, you know that?” Neal asked Graham. They were in a dark staircase in Neal’s building.
“What do you mean? I like women. Don’t tiptoe. You don’t make noise stepping on the stair; you make it stepping off.”
“That’s what I mean. Fagin was a character in Oliver Twist who taught boys how to steal and stuff.”
“I don’t teach you how to steal.” Graham didn’t have much patience at the moment for this Fagin shit. He was trying to teach the kid something important. “You plant your foot-not heavy, but firmly. You step off lightly, like you don’t weigh anything.”
“Yeah, okay, not steal. But stuff like this.”
Neal planted his foot on the edge of the step. The result was an awful screech.
“You want to wake the whole building?” Graham asked. “Always, always step to the butt end of the stair. That’s where it’s the most solid, least likely to squeak. Also you can feel your way. You can feel where the next step is. ‘Faginesque.’ I’ll give you ‘Faginesque.’ Get to work.”
Work this evening was learning how to climb stairs without making any noise. Work was doing it with your eyes closed. Work was realizing that you make more noise going downstairs than going up, so, generally speaking, you sneak up but run down.
“Christmastime,” Graham said as Neal practiced his step technique, “I run out and buy presents for those people who put carpet on their stairs.”
“Nice people,” Neal agreed.
Going downstairs was a genuine bitch, mostly because you can’t find the butt end of the step with your toe and you’re afraid of pitching forward and breaking your neck. So observed Neal to his tutor about the fortieth time he’d fucked up the maneuver.
“Worse comes to worst,” Graham said, “and it will, you get down on your belly and swim downstairs.”
“Swim?”
“Try it. Don’t be afraid. Lie down, headfirst, and do the dog paddle.”
“I can’t swim and I don’t have a dog.”
Neal felt stupid as shit lying down dangling over the stairs.
“You’ve seen Lassie, haven’t you?” asked Graham. “Do like Lassie does when she has to save that little bastard from drowning.”
“Timmy.”
“Right. Whatever. Quit stalling.”
Graham put his foot on Neal’s ass and pushed.
It wasn’t so bad when you got used to it, Neal thought, doing like Lassie does, etcetera. He made his way to the bottom of the stairs.
He asked Graham, “How do you do this with one arm?”
“You don’t. You hire some stupid kid to do it for you.”
He walked over Neal’s back and out the door.
A couple of months later, Neal tried to climb through a window and talk at the same time. He had something on his mind.
“If I gave you the money, would you buy me something?”
Graham stood on the fire escape. “What? Beer? Cigarettes? Rubbers?”
“A book.”
Neal was backing through the window, his feet already in the kitchen sink.
“A book? You really want to go through a window like that? So you can’t see what’s in the room awaiting your arrival with a Louisville Slugger? What book, Neal? Swedish Sex Slaves? Ruby and the Firemen? Like that?”
Neal climbed out. “Tom Jones.”
He started back through the window, headfirst this time.
“Tom Jones? Is it dirty?”
“Dirty enough, they won’t let me buy it.”
“Are you really this stupid, Neal, or are we just having an off day? Going into an apartment window head in the air like a hanging curveball? You go in like that, you come out on a stretcher, anyone’s home.”