That left only me, and the college dean gave an overly winded intro of which I did not hear a single word. Toward the end of it, though, Gunther Frisk appeared and walked over to him and whispered. Then the dean intoned a few sentences more and I did hear a few words that gave me that icy feeling in my toes and fingertips: “dead.”
“friend.”
“Lenny Burns.” What? I thought. The dean signaled and waved me over. I stood, and Gunther Frisk met me halfway and hugged me with crushing force. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “Don’t mind what?” I asked. “Don’t mind saying a few words about Lenny Burns,” he said, handing me Lenny’s essay.
I approached the mike, tapped it, and blew into it; I don’t know why. “It’s really Lenny who should have won this today,” I said, knowing that Lenny was me. “Lenny was a high school friend, and we continued our relationship…” Oops. Sounded bad, like we were boyfriends. But I could see the first few rows before they were lost in the lights and they were still a stretch of frozen smiley faces. “Lenny loved the ladies,” I said, countering myself. I felt I was now even. “And what is America if not the freedom to love indiscriminately?” I had fallen behind. I said a few more words, each sentence contradicting the last, and I wrapped up with, “I will miss him,” and managed a little tear in my voice on the word “miss.” I read a few lines from “his” essay and secretly knew that had the winner-me-not already been decided, my display of grief over the missing Lenny would have softened the judges and won him a prize right then. I finished the speech with a flourish, stealing Sue Dowd’s head-bowing bit, which worked terrifically. Lenny Burns received the applause he deserved, and not just because he died so horribly, as I explained to the audience, from knee surgery gone awry.
I fumbled for my speech, which I realized was not only sticking out of my jacket but about to fall onto the floor. I buttoned my coat and noticed my fly had creased up like an accordion, plus my pants were hanging too low. I pulled them up by the belt, then bent over and tugged at my cuffs to stretch the pant legs straight. This eliminated some of the wrinkles and I felt ready to read. I began my speech with an “ahem,” a superficial throat clear that I thought showed a command of the room. I spoke the first few sentences confidently, though my voice surprised me with its soprano thinness. Then I noticed the rapt looks on the faces in the audience and felt myself become more impassioned. After all, I was scoring. I invested myself more and more in every word, and this was a mistake, because I began to realize that my speech made absolutely no sense. “I am average because the cry of individuality flows confidently through my blood”? I am average because I am unique? Well then, I thought, who’s not average, every average person? My tricky little phrases, meant to sound compelling, actually had no meaning. All my life an inner semanticist had tried to sniff out and purge my brain of these twisted constructions, yet here I was, center stage with one dangling off my lips like an uneaten noodle. The confusion of words and meanings swirled around my head in a vortex. So I bent down again and pulled at my cuffs. While I was inverted, I was able to think more clearly. I remembered that my speech was not meant to be a tract but more of a poem. More Romantic. And as a Romantic, I had much more linguistic leeway than, say, a mathematician at a blackboard. Still upside down, I reminded myself I was in front of an audience who wanted to be enthralled, not lectured. I decided to reach deep down, to the wellspring of my charisma, which had been too long undisturbed, and dip my fingers in it and flick it liturgically over the audience.
I unfolded from my jackknife bend. My voice deepened and my testicles lowered. I spoke with the voice of a Roman senator: “I am average,” I said, “because the cry of individuality flows through my blood as quietly as an old river… like the still power of an apple pie sitting in an open window to cool.” I folded my papers and sat down. There was a nice wave of applause that was hard to gauge, as I’d never received applause ever in my life. Gunther Frisk clapped with speedy little pops and leaned into the mike, “Let’s hope he means a Tepperton’s Apple Pie!” The applause continued over his interjection and I had to stand again. He waved me over and made a big show of giving me the check, then waved over all the other contestants and gave them the smaller checks. The auditorium lights came up and a few people approached the stage to ask for autographs, which bewildered me. After about four seconds my time as a rock star was over, and I was calmly ushered outside to a golf cart that had been secured by Brian and driven back to his car.
On the way home, Brian gave me several compliments that I discounted and denied. This tricked him into reiterating the compliments, and once he was enthusiastic enough, I accepted them. Then he segued into sports talk, mentioning Lakers and Pacers and Angels, teams I was so unfamiliar with that I couldn’t connect the team name with the game. But Brian had been so wholeheartedly on my side that I felt obliged to respond with ardent head nods and “yeahs,” though I might have misplaced a few, judging by Brian’s occasional puzzled looks.
Brian took me to my bank and we barely made it before closing time. I deposited the five-thousand-dollar check, keeping forty dollars in cash, offering Brian five for gas. Not having driven a car in ten years, I didn’t know how stratospherically the price of gas had risen. Now I know the amount was way low for what he must have spent, and I would like to make it up to him one day.
I heard about Granny’s suicide before it actually happened. She must have had second thoughts or been unable to pull together the paraphernalia, as her death date fell several hours past the day and minute of my reading of her note. This one lay for just a few hours on my kitchen table before I pulled myself up to it with a jam sandwich and cranberry juice. “Sweetest Daniel,” it began, and I suspected nothing. Her handwriting was always large and gay, filled with oversized loops and exuberant serifs. Only in the last few years had I noticed a shakiness starting to creep in. “I won’t trouble you with the state of my health, except to say I’m in a race to the finish. I can’t let my body drag me down like this without fighting back in some way. My heart is sad not to see you again, but on this page, in this ink, is all my love, held in the touch of the pen to the paper…” Then, in the next paragraph, “I can’t breathe, Daniel, I’m gasping for air. My lungs are filling up and I’m drowning.” She said, in the next few lines, that it was time to free herself, as well as the ones who care for her, of their burden. Granny had two Mexican senoras who attended to her, and one of them, Estrella, loved her so much she called her “Mother.” One last line: “Finally, we do become wise, but then it’s too late.” Granny, dead at eighty-eight of self-inflicted vodka, pills, and one transparent plastic bag.
The news of her death left me disturbingly unaffected. At least for a while. I wondered if I were truly crazy not to feel engulfed by the loss and unable to function. But the sorrow was simply delayed and intermittent. It did not come when it should have but appeared in discrete packets over a series of discontinuous days, stretching into months. Once, while tossing Teddy into the air, a packet appeared in the space between us, and vanished once he was back in my grip. Once, I positioned my palm between my eyes and the sun, and I felt this had something to do with Granny, for it was she who stood between me and what would scorch me. It was not that I missed her; she was so far from me by the time it was all over that our communications had become spare. She lived in me dead or alive. Even now, the absence of her letters is the same as getting them, for when I have the vague notion that one is due, I feel the familiar sensation of comfort that I did when I held a physical letter in my hand.