THE BRO-MAGNET (2 page)

I can’t feel it because I’m going to senior prom with seven other guys in a limo I rented for the night with some of the money I’ve saved helping my dad out in his painting business. It used to be called John Smith’s Painting, Interiors and Exteriors, but after Mom died he renamed it simply Big John’s.

It’s not like I wouldn’t like to be taking a girl to the prom; actually, one girl in particular. There was only ever one girl in that school I’d buy a corsage for. But as I walked up to her in front of her locker about three weeks before the big day, getting up my nerve to ask, I could hear the response already: “You suck, Smith.” So, not really wanting to hear those words directed at me yet again, I asked to borrow a pencil instead.

“Really, Smith?” Alice said. “What – am I the only person in this school who might have a spare writing implement? Do I
look
like a pencil factory to you?”

So that’s as close to inviting a girl to prom as I ever got.

Oh, and when word got out that I was going, but going stag, and seven of my buddies decided to go stag with me because they figured it would be more fun? Pretty much every dateless girl in school decided they hated my guts for taking seven guys off the prom market.

Anyway, it’s the big night and I’m wearing a regular black tux with white shirt because my dad always says that any color other than black, like something trendy, you regret later in life when you look back at the pictures. He should know. In the wedding photo he’s got on his night table, he’s wearing an all-white tux with wide lapels, with lots of big gold chains and medallions dangling down from his neck.

In the pocket of my black tux, I’ve got the condom Dad slipped me on the way out the door.

“You know,” he said awkwardly as we shared our big bonding moment, “just in case.”

As if.

Then he reached out, smoothed my lapel with one hand while he crushed his beer can with the other. “Your mother would be so proud.”

Really, Dad? Mom would be proud of her dateless son? I’m thinking no.

I’m still thinking that as I climb into the limo and later as we pick each of my seven friends up at their houses.

“Hey,” Mike II says when he climbs into the limo, the last to be picked up, “look what my dad gave me.” I’m thinking he’s going to pull out a beer and, whoop-de-doo, we’ll share it eight ways for a whopping one-point-five ounces each. But instead he pulls out a condom. And before you know it, all the rest are excitedly pulling out condoms too, all courtesy of their dads.

What are the dads in this town, like, the most optimistic guys in the world ever? Do they really think that eight stag guys are going to somehow magically pick up eight dateless girls at prom and somehow score?

As my friends high-five each other over their new prophylactic prowess, I’m figuring by dawn we’ll be using these to throw water balloons at each other.

As we make our big entrance at prom, I can tell the other guys still think it’s so cool we’re going stag together, and I can tell that even a lot of the guys who have dates wish they were us, free to do whatever we want all night instead of having to pretend we like to dance or that we care about corsages.

Secretly, I’d love to dance with a girl. I’d even love to get stabbed by the pin of some stupid corsage I bought a girl if it means I get to slow dance with her.

And the girl I’d really like to dance with most just walked in on the arm of Mark Leblanc: Alice Knox, who’s wearing a simple long white sheath dress, shoulderless on one side and not at all like the elaborate dresses all the other girls have on, the kind they’ll regret later in life when they see themselves in pictures. Alice’s chestnut hair is gathered into a high ponytail, the tresses flowing beautifully, and around the crown of her head is a narrow sparkling circlet thing that looks just perfect and proves to be prophetic when later on she and Mark win King and Queen of the Prom.

I’d be jealous right now, but I just can’t be as they dance to Prince’s “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World,” because she deserves this. She is the most beautiful girl in the world and she’s nice, even if she’s always telling me she hates me and that I suck. And while I’d really like to hate Mark, I can’t do that either, because he’s like the definition of nice and I know he’s good to her and that he’d, you know, never snap her bra in public. Hey, wait a second: Did Mark’s dad give him a condom too?

I shake that thought away.

And I realize then that I might as well give up on girls, at least for the night, that my dad’s condom-in-the sky dreams for me aren’t going to come true at prom and even though I’d been secretly hoping to at least get
some
girl to dance with me once, I decide to do what Luther Vandross says in his remake and “Love the one You’re With.”

Unfortunately, in my case that means Billy, Drew, Pete, Mike I, Mike II, Steve and Matt, the latter of whose long hair I hold away from his face as he pukes out the window of the limo a few hours later. As some puke flies back onto my tux sleeve, I’m thinking all those dateless girls should be thanking me for taking Matt off the prom-date market,

“You’re my best friend, man,” Matt says, eyes closed as he collapses back against the seat.

Why is it, I wonder now, that I’m so good at so many things (even if I’m the one saying so) and admired by so many (well, it’s not immodesty when,
obviously
, all guys admire me), but I have no luck with girls? This is beginning to bother me.

“No,” Billy says to Matt, “he’s my best friend.”

“No,” Drew starts to say, but never finishes because right then Mike II stands up, sticks his head out the sunroof of the limo, waves his bottle of J.D. at the city of Danbury and shouts, “This limo rocks!”

And now I’m thinking that the theme for my own personal senior prom should be Seal’s “Prayer for the Dying.”

That’s right. Oh, and by the way? Fuck you, Elton John.

* * *

College graduation:

Yup. Still got that rubber in my pocket.

Outside of murder, there’s a statute of limitations on most things in life, so by the time I got to college, even though some girls from my high school showed up at the same college, all The Snapper talk had pretty much died down. Besides, in college there were guys doing a lot worse things than snapping bra straps.

But not me.

Still, it wasn’t like I was able to reinvent myself there, at least not as I’d hoped to. Somehow, when you get treated a certain way for X amount of years, like the kind of testosterone-heavy Neanderthal who’s only worthy of having girls say “You suck, Smith” to him, you begin to internalize it.

So, not long after starting freshman year I finally gave up and decided to go with the flow. I began belching at the dinner table. I was always the first one at a party to do a keg handstand. At football games, I yelled the loudest. Guys loved me. I mean,
all
guys loved me. Even the gay ones. They might act like I was crude on the outside, but I saw those secret smiles. Girls, however? Not so much.

The thing is, it’s not like I’m ugly or anything. In fact, most people would say I’m pretty damn good looking! But it’s never gained me any advantages in life.

Anyway, once I pretty much gave up on girls, I was free to study, which is why I managed to graduate Magna Cum Laude. My major was Poli Sci and I’d been figuring on maybe going to law school, but then right after the graduation ceremony, the mortarboard still on my head, Dad says:

“You want to be a lawyer? But that’s crazy talk. Lawyers are miserable, they hate what they do, plus they make everyone else miserable too.”

“But it’s a profession, Dad. I’d be a professional.”

I’d been thinking he’d be happy. I was the first in the family to graduate from college. Wasn’t the point of all this to wind up with a high-paying, well-respected profession?

“Professional, schmofessional,” Aunt Alfresca says. Leave it to her to make up a new word. “If you hadn’t killed your mother, and she’d gotten used to you not being a girl, she’d have never wanted you to be a lawyer.”

This was news to me: the idea that Mom might have had specific plans for me, if I wasn’t a girl.

“What would she want?”

“She’d want you to go into business with me,” Dad says, like he’s as sure of this as he’s ever been of anything in his life. He raises his arm and slowly moves his open palm as though he’s picturing skywriting against the heavens of a blue June day as he intones, “Big John and Johnny,” and then “Paint: It never lets you down.”

Which is exactly what was the motto of first John Smith’s Painting, Interiors and Exteriors and then Big John’s.

So that’s what I wind up doing with my college degree.

I become a house painter.

* * *

And here’s me now, age thirty-three, the same age, may I point out, that Jesus was when he got crucified. I’m the Best Man, about to give the toast at Billy Keller’s wedding. Let’s see if my life has changed in the past eleven years since graduating college.

You be the judge.

Billy was so determined to make his bride happy that he refused to heed my advice about traditional wedding attire which means it’s kind of hard for me to get psyched about standing up in front of one hundred and seventy-three people while wearing a white tux with purple bowtie and matching cummerbund, not to mention the white patent-leather penny loafers and white socks, but I give it my best shot, delivering the speech I rehearsed in the shower first thing in the morning.

I hold my champagne glass out toward Billy and his bride, hand steady.

“A man’s life is composed of circles,” I begin. “First, there’s the circle of the entire world, which a man keeps in contact with through reading the papers and watching the news. Or not.” I pause, give a wry smile. “The world can be a pretty depressing place.”
I pause again, wait for the laugh.

It comes.

“Then, if the man is like Billy and me and he chooses to stay in the same town he grew up in all his life, there’s that town. It may not be much but,” I raise my glass a little higher, “go, Danbury!”

Some more laughter, a few answering calls of “Go, Danbury!” – the latter mostly from locals who hit the open bar early and hard and a few out-of-towners trying to fit in and be supportive.

“Then comes the circle of a man’s acquaintances: friends of friends, coworkers, the guy with the little hot dog cart outside the library who overcharges like crazy but makes the best dogs in town. What’s that guy’s secret?”

Only a polite chuckle for that one. I detest polite chuckles. When it comes to laughter, a person should be all in or all out.

“And then comes a very small circle: the circle of a man’s dearest friends, his best friends” – I give a nod to the groom, Billy – “and family.” I tilt my glass at Big John in his wheelchair – MS. “I love you, Dad.”

I pause again, not waiting for the laugh this time – there won’t be any laughter for the rest of this speech – but rather to get control of my emotions, the tear in my eye mirroring the tear in Big John’s.

Tearing my gaze away from my father, I let my eyes sweep the entire audience.

“Now if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have noticed something. The circles I’ve been describing have been steadily decreasing in size while at the same time increasing in importance. And so now, finally, we come to the last circle, the smallest circle. If a man is extremely lucky, if he’s the luckiest man in the world, he finds the right person to share his life with, to form that smallest circle of two with, and that is exactly what my friend Billy has done.”

And now I raise my glass one last time toward Billy and his bride.

“To Billy and Alice: May the two of you always be a perfect circle together, as symbolized by the rings you exchanged just a short time ago.”

That’s right. Billy Keller – the fucker – somehow managed to snag Alice Knox. Go figure. Neither of us sees her for about a dozen or more years, then she moves back to the area, he runs into her in the cereal aisle of Super Stop & Shop, they debate the relative merits of steel-cut Irish oatmeal versus regular, then they date for a year, he drops to one knee and asks her to marry him right after she catches the bouquet at Drew’s wedding, and the rest is wedding-album history. Billy farts sometimes when he laughs too hard, he belches after he eats and his feet smell. So I was surprised when they started dating, amazed when they got serious and shocked when they got engaged. If I told you I haven’t spent this entire day wondering “Why him and not me?” I’d be lying. But he’s my friend, one of my best friends, so I have to wish him well.

“To Billy and Alice!” the calls come from all corners of the room.

I’d like to say that there’s not a dry eye in the house, but that would only be half true.

The guys all have tears in their eyes – “That was beautiful, man”; “If I ever get married again, I want you to be my Best Man and give that exact same speech”; “I’m Best Man for my brother next month and don’t have a clue what to say – could you write that down for me?”

The women? Not so much.

* * *

The chicken’s been eaten, the groom has danced with the bride, the bride has danced with her father and now it’s the whole wedding party’s turn to mix it up. All of the ushers and bridesmaids head straight out for the dance floor but Billy’s talking head-to-head with Alice, who sits at the head table between us – you know, girl-boy/girl-boy seating – with Alice’s maid of honor, who’s some out-of-town cousin, on the other side of Billy. The cousin’s looking a little bit three-sheets-to-the-wind and I’m thinking maybe I can sit this one out, so I get up to get another beer. But then, halfway to the bar, I get some kind of weird tingling sensation that makes me look back. That’s when I see Three-Sheets Cousin teeter to her feet and hold her hand out to Billy. Her being the maid of honor, how can Billy refuse? It would be so ungentlemanly. So he follows her out to the dance floor, leaving Alice alone at the head table.

I shrug, turn back to the bar, start to walk toward it again and something stops me again.