Sunrise with Seamonsters (32 page)

"Guess who won't be there?" Humphrey said, and quickly added, "Gagliardi. Guess why?"

"No idea."

"He's dead. Killed in the slammer, by another prisoner. The amazing thing is that about a year or two before he died,
he
killed someone in the slammer. Guess who? Albert DeSalvo!"

"The name rings a bell. Was he at Medford High, too?"

"You were probably in Fuckawiland—you usually are. Listen, Albert DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler."

So a Medford boy, a murderer from the Class of '59, had killed the Boston Strangler. And I remember Gag—sallow-faced Italian who, even at the age of fourteen, had a vicious scar over his eye. He was a merciless bully at the Milton Fuller Roberts Junior High, affecting the tough style of
1955; low-slung pegged pants, suede "spade" shoes, shirt collar up, a flick-knife in his pocket. He sneaked smokes in the boys' john, exhaling the smoke through the ventilator, so no one would know. He was halitotic with meatballs and nicotine. Once—we were both in the seventh grade—I walked past the gym and saw Gagliardi beating up another boy and hitting him so hard the boy was being stuffed into an open locker. Gagliardi turned from the boy's bloody nose and smiled at me. "Theroux," he said. "You don't see nothing, do you?"

I said no, and walked away. I could have reported him to the principal, George F. Weston, who was known to everyone as "Poopy". Poopy had written a book,
Boston Ways: High, By and Folk
("Copiously Illustrated"). He was an intelligent and learned Yankee and had made a study of the Chinese community in downtown Boston. What was a sensitive soul like this doing at such a foul school as the Roberts? He would have suspended Gag for fighting and, nipped in the bud, Gag's homicidal tendencies might have been curbed. I didn't report Gag, and I have never told this story before. But then, Gagliardi is dead.

Humphrey said, "I'll see you at the reunion. But if you think I'm wearing a suit, forget it. I haven't owned one for fifteen years. By the way, I'm not married. I've got a good mind to pick up a huge blond bimbo in the Combat Zone and take her. They'd shit!"

The reunion was held at the Hilton Inn, a preposterously over-sized motel on that part of Route 128 in Massachusetts which is thick with topless bars, country-and-western lounges, massage parlors and discount stores—in Lynnfield, the suburb's suburb. Humphrey was at the reception table, sticking a name-label
(Hump)
on his lapel. There was no blonde with him, but even so he looked fairly spectacular, in a fawn suede jacket and black silk shirt with a chrome chain around his neck. By way of greeting he said, "You asshole—I saw you on television!"

But this was pure affection. We had grown up together, built huts in our backyards out of old lumber, gone "coasting" in the snow down Water Hill and, one summer, constructed a large raft on which we had poled down the Assabet River in Hudson, Mass. Humphrey had the largest collection of comic books I had ever seen ("Yogi Berra reads nothing but comic books," he once said). I swapped him my "Classic Comics"
(Lorna Doone, Moby Dick)
for his horror comics—
Tales from the Crypt,
they were called, about ghouls and cannibalism in towns much like Medford.

Humphrey said, "Look, there's Goose!" and went to hug him.

Oscar ("Goose") Goings was black. He wore a powder-blue jumpsuit
and carried a sheaf of papers. Throughout high school Goose said, "I'm going to be a Leatherneck when I get out of here," and for twenty years, whenever I heard the word "Leatherneck" I thought of Goose. But Goose took me aside and said that in the end he had decided against the Marines. "I've been writing poetry," he said. "Let me know what you think of this one." He pushed a folded sheet of paper into my pocket.

The room was jammed. Humphrey and Goose squirmed towards the bar and left me buying coupons for drinks. Fishing for my money I pulled out Goose's poem.
What's wrong with being black?
it said.
I'll tell you—nothing!
There was more, but in the crush of people I could not read further. There had been five hundred and seventy-four in the class of '59; there were close to three hundred people in the room, mostly graduates, a scattering of spouses—the non-Medford spouses were the stunned, disbelieving ones wearing rigid smiles. With my coupons in my hand I headed for the bar. A girl I knew as Jeanne Ventresco said to me, "Buy me—a drink, you fruit" and "Why are you talking funny like that?" And here was Chris Cunha. He had just flown in from Hawaii, where he was in the service. He said he was retiring.
Retiring? At the age of thirty-eight?
He said, "I've done twenty years."

Richard Travers was retiring, too. He was in Army Intelligence and had, he said, been on missions throughout Southeast Asia. "Tank" we called him in high school, but the name was far more apt now: he must have weighed close to three hundred pounds. He was retiring to start a detective agency. My memory of Travers was an early one. After school—this was the Swan School: we were ten years old—we used to cut through the railway yard near Riverside Avenue and hop the trains while they shunted. Travers asked me if I had seen John Brodie. But I hadn't—not for twenty years.

"Remember the toads?" he said.

Brodie, Travers and I spent the fifth and sixth grade catching toads along the railway line, where they lived in the ditches. We lugged them away in buckets to carry out obscure dissections. Travers said Brodie had become a teacher. They were all teachers, he said.

A familiar figure appeared. He crunched my hand and said, "Your father always told me I'd make a good cop." This was Paul Agostino, the wild man of Fulton Heights. True to my father's prediction, he had become a policeman; but he had retired early, with a disability.

"Stick any frogs lately?" he said.

I said no, but remembered. It was Augie who had shown me how to spear a frog with a sharpened stick. We did it after dark on summer nights at Wright's Pond, on the feeble pretext of earning a merit badge. We were Boy Scouts.

Augie was elbowed aside by a man unmistakably Pete Thompson, as
cherubic in adulthood as he had been in childhood. But his innocent look was misleading: he was a crack shot and owned an arsenal of guns.

"You still got that old Mossberg repeater?"

"I sold it," I said.

Thompson was now speaking to another classmate. "We had these 22's. We used to go to Paul's house and shoot out of his bedroom window. Squirrels, pigeons, anything that moved—
bam! bam!
"

Besides Thompson and Travers, there was Trotta, Terranova, Tartachny, Trebino. They were more vivid to me now than the others, because they had been in my home-room, at the end of the alphabet.

There is a bad dream which everyone suffers. It takes place in a large overbright room, filled with people going, "Quack! Quack!" You know every person in the room, and it seems incredible, because there are so many, big and small. Your whole populous past has assembled for a long night to torment you. I often get these dreams in distant places. I had them in Africa and Singapore, the Medford dreams in the tropical early morning.

The years fall away. The smallest figure in the corner has a name; one person's posture, another's ears, buck teeth, crewcut—it is all familiar. Face after face appears, most of them laughing and perspiring and poking fun. You wonder: What's the occasion? They know you better than anyone, and though you have only been subtly scrutinized you wake up feeling naked, because you have been judged. You have been reminded of what you are.

We like to think we have secrets. Childhood and early youth are full of them. Time passes, and the secrets are lost to us. But the high school reunion disinters the past and rehashes it, like that dream. Decades are pressed into a few hours. If it were not so brief it would be a nightmare. But it happens so quickly it is painless, and yet a shock, for no one changes so much that he becomes unrecognizable to his childhood friends. What shocked me there at the Hilton Inn, among the Class of '59, was the fact that I had kept my secrets so well they had become practically undiscoverable to me, and if I had not gone to the reunion I would never have known how I had made my childhood and high school days into a fiction.

It was not only the guns, the frog-sticking, or Humphrey's raft. Here was Patrick Shea reminding me of the time we made a canvas canoe, pushed it over a high steel fence at Spot Pond and paddled like mad to an island in the centre. This was illegal: it was a reservoir—drinking water! There were mounted police patrolling the bridle paths, but we escaped
getting caught, and even pissed contemptuously into the reservoir before we made off with our canoe. Was this a youthful lark? No, not so youthful. I was about sixteen and should have known better. My older brothers said I ought to take up basketball.

For twenty years, until the reunion, these high school days had receded and become distorted in a haze that made retrospection bearable. I saw myself as bespectacled and bookish, a bit of a shut-in, boning up for the Science Fair. As the years passed I concocted a version of high school which was an intellectual preparation for becoming a writer. The version continued to elude me: I could never quite pin down how it had happened. I had done very little writing in high school, apart from the required essays about
Julius Caesar
and my "project" on Piltdown Man (the Piltdown Hoax went on hoaxing Medford, long after it was debunked in academic circles). I did not edit the school magazine (the boy who did took up television production), and contributed only cartoons to the yearbook. And—weirdest revelation of all—I never threw a ball or swung a bat. In twelve years of school, I never joined a single team, wore an athlete's uniform, or competed in a sport. Even now, sports bore me stiff, with their bogus drama, their ill-will and their yelling. I have never sat through an entire baseball game.

Medford custom paired the cheerleader with the athlete in romance: they fell in love, they married. At the reunion I could see that these marriages worked, apparently. Paul King had married Judy Wallace, Joe Raffin had married Pat Gawlinski, Sonny Rossi had married Maureen Hurford, Wes Foote had married my first-grade girl-friend, Linda Rice. The hockey-player Dom DeVincenzo had married Jean Bordonaro, the quarterback Angelo Marotta had married Louise Carpenito. Every wife a cheerleader! Every husband a jock! The girls had been trained from a very early age to root for boys. I searched the yearbook in vain for pictures of girls' sports teams—twenty years on, their absence seemed the cruellest anomaly. But at Medford High, girls cheered, boys played—and I had done neither. The only thing worse than not being a jock was agreeing to be a water-boy. Well, at least I had escaped that.

Your intellectual upbringing
—the pompous but kindly-meant phrase has been used in questions put to me by people interested in how I became a writer. For twenty years I tried to account for my choice of this profession. I mentioned books I had read in high school. But the books I read in high school had not made me a writer (and if they had, they would have made me a bad writer). I read Perelman and J. D. Salinger for laughs, John O'Hara for its sex, and pored much more seriously over the L. L. Bean catalog which advertised tents, hand-warmers and snow-shoes. So: what intellectual upbringing? Television, radio, comic books, camping manuals and
The American Rifleman
? I didn't play baseball and wasn't
interested in electronics. That ought to have left me with plenty of time for the library, but in fact I chose guns, bombs and fires.

At least three men at this high school reunion reminded me of how we had made bombs. The bombs were simple and powerful—powdered zinc and sulphur sealed in a tube—but the detonators required ingenuity, a number of different wires of varying thicknesses and a transformer adapted from a set of model trains. The bombs were buried in my back yard: each one blew three cubic feet of Medford sky-high. It was very satisfying, thrilling even, and I still have scars on my right hand from one—it was my last one—which went off prematurely. Some fool had left the juice on. What else was there? Yes, Richie Collins said, once we had skinned a tom-cat and boiled the corpse, hoping to reassemble the bones. But the stink of the stewing cat was so godawful we had abandoned the project.

Other people's memories were fresher than mine. I prowled the ballroom button-holing my old pals, and I was told how we had gone swimming bollocky—it was the Medford word for skinnydipping—at Pickerel Rock, set grassfires at the Sheepfold, and fished through the ice at Wright's Pond. In those days, my heroes were sharpshooters and pool-sharks, and I had a sneaking admiration for Willie Sutton, "the man with a thousand faces," who was a bank robber.

School was a tedious punishment. It seemed slow and pointless and inescapable. The subjects were surprisingly easy, the discipline hard and humorless. I was amazed then—I am amazed now—that I did not do well. Perhaps I was afraid of the enemies that kind of excellence would have made me. Good, conscientious students were somewhat despised by us. They were collaborators, future Rotarians; they weren't interested in beating the system.

"There's Vic Garo," Humphrey said at the reunion. He sounded sourly triumphant. "He never missed a day of school. They mentioned it at graduation. Remember? He still looks like a pisser."

Everyone in the room was thirty-eight years old. The effect was odd and improbable; we were like obscure cultists, or members of a secret society. Some of the men had gone grey, a few were totally bald. Physically, the men had changed most. A girl of seventeen or eighteen has reached her full growth, so these women were roughly the same size as they had been in high school, and many were still pretty, even glamorous. Nearly all the men were bigger than they had been when I had last seen them, in June, 1959. They were fuller-faced, bearded, mustached, lined—older-looking than the women—and most of all they
were taller. Some were enormously fat; no woman was. Each conversation was penetrated by unspoken self—scrutiny, the nagging thought:
Do I look like you?