We were now on the freeway and I had focused the air conditioning vent on my pants, thinking it might serve as a steamer. Finally I said to Brian, “would you mind if I lowered my pants a little?” “Huh?” he said. “If I could lower my pants a little, I don’t think they’ll get so wrinkled.” “Sure,” he said, leaving me wondering if nothing disturbed Brian, ever.
I unbuckled my belt and lowered my trousers to my thighs. I skooched down in my seat so my pant legs ballooned out to keep them from wrinkling, too. I aimed the air vent at my shirt, which bellowed like a sail, preventing even more wrinkling. Satisfied, I then turned to Brian and said, “I really appreciate you taking me.
Considering he was driving, Brian looked at me a dangerously long time, but absolutely nothing registered on his face. Even when he was pummelling Mussolini, his face had never changed from its Mount Rushmore glare.
We did have a few laughs as we wheeled down the Santa Ana Freeway. Small industrial neighbourhoods lined the access roads and Brian pointed out a factory sign that innocently read, A SCREW FOR EVERY PURPOSE. He found this hilarious, and because he did, I did. As we neared Disneyland, traffic thickened and Brian said don’t worry, because right up here we go the other way. Every other car on the road was an SUV, and Brian’s green Lincoln rode so low that we were like the Merrimac in a sea of ocean liners.
Brian was right. Everyone was turning west toward Disneyland when we were turning east, which meant we avoided a horrendous wait at the freeway exit. We ended up on a wide-open four-lane street that headed toward a few low hills, while behind us soared the Matterhorn. I consulted the directions and soon we were entering what I would describe as a wealthy parking lot. There were wide lanes for access and every third space was separated from the next by grass-filled islands. Trees lined the rows making it all look like an automotive allée. In the distance on a hill, stood—or sat—Freedom College, announced by a gilt sign tastefully engraved in a large plank of oak. The bottom line of the sign read, “PRIVATELY FUNDED.”
At one end of the parking lot was an open tent with a banner promoting Tepperton’s Pies and something about Freedom Day. There were twenty or so people milling around; there were tables where students were signing people in, and also several official-looking ladies and gentlemen in blazers, including my contact with Tepperton, Gunther Frisk. Gunther was decked out in a tartan suit, the plaid just subtle enough to keep him from looking absurd. His body was so incongruous with itself that it looked like he had been made by three separate gods, each with a different blueprint for humanity. “That must be where we’re supposed to go,” said Brian, and he turned off the engine. I laid my shirt over my underwear as flatly as possible, and then gingerly pulled up my pants and closed them over my shirttail. I raised to my prone position, opened the car door, and angled my legs onto the asphalt with as little bend as possible. I took my coat off the hanger and slipped it over my shoulders, tucking my protruding notes back in my coat pocket. I surveyed myself and was deeply pleased that very little wrinkle damage had been done to my fly front. In fact, I looked nearly as crisp as I had when I exited my front door in Santa Monica.
Gunther Frisk spotted us and shot out of the crowd as though he were launched. “Yoo-hoo… here, here!” he shouted, as he flailed and waved. We made our way toward the tent, but the parking lot had an uphill trend that made me worry about sweating into my cotton shirt, so I slowed to a rhino pace, which forced Brian, who was walking at a normal speed, to retard his tempo so I could catch up. After Brian introduced himself as my manager, Gunther directed us into the tent, where we were handed a packet of welcoming materials. We had our pictures snapped and two minutes later were given laminated photo IDs threaded through cords that were to hang from our necks like a referee’s whistle. In one corner of the tent stood a clump of misfits, the other winners. Sue Dowd, with a body like the Capitol dome—a small head with a rotunda underneath; Kevin Chen, an Asian with an Afro; and Danny Pepelow, a kind of goon. And me. The only one missing was the recently evaporated Lenny Burns.
We were introduced all around, and honestly, it was clear I was the normal one. But as motley as we were, I suspected there was a unifying thread that ran through us all. It was a by-product of the instinct that made each one of us pick up the Tepperton’s entry form and sit home alone in our rooms writing our essays. The quality was decency. But it had not really been earned. It was a trait that nebbishes acquire by default because of our inability to act upon the world with a force greater than a nudge. I stood there that day as a winner but feeling like a loser because of the company I kept. We weren’t the elite of anything, we weren’t the handsome ones with self-portraits hanging over their fireplaces or the swish moderns who were out speaking slang at a posh hotel bar. We were all lonely hearts who deemed that writing our essays might help us get a little attention. We were the winners of the Tepperton’s Pies essay contest, and I, at least for today, was their king.
This sinking feeling did not last. I reminded myself that my entry into the contest had been a lark and that it had really been done to extend my Rite Aid visit by a few extra Zandy-filled minutes, though I guessed that my competitors had taken their efforts seriously. I thought of them slunk over their writing pads with their pencils gripped like javelins and their blue tongues sticking out in brain-squeezing concentration. The spell was also broken by Gunther Frisk’s triple handclap and cry of “All right, people.” It was time, he said, to start the Freedom Walk. He tried to gather us into a little regiment, but there were enough docents and officials trailing us to make the group seem a bit ragtag. We trudged up a concrete pathway. I needed to walk slowly enough as to not break a sweat, so I cleverly started at the front of the group, hoping that by the end of the march I wouldn’t be too far behind. The sun beat down on me and I worried about a sunburn singeing one cheek, or the heat causing a layer of oily skin that would make my forehead shine under the spotlight like a lard-smeared cookie pan.
The top of the hill held an unholy sight. It turns out that Freedom College is a little village, pristine and fresh, with its classrooms set back on fertile lawns surrounded by low wrought-iron gates. In front of each of these bungalows, hung from natural wood supports, were white signs with the name of each department in calligraphic script, and each compound was set on its own block, with a Street in front of it, with sidewalks. And curbs. Curbs I had not counted on. In all my preparations for this day, the problem of curbs never occurred to me. Yes, there was the occasional access driveway for supply trucks, but they were never opposed by another driveway or were in some way askew. And worse, students of both sexes, sporting matching blazers, lined most of the sidewalks to hail our arrival, creating an audience for my terror. Our troop had gathered a small head of steam and was not about to regroup or swerve for my unexplainable impulses. The pathway fed onto a sidewalk and I saw that I was on a direct path to curb confrontation.
False hopes arose in me. Perhaps, I thought, the other contestants too could not cross curbs. But I knew the odds of finding anyone else whose neuroses had jelled into curb fear were slim. Perhaps my behaviour would be cancelled out by someone else’s even more extravagant compulsion. Perhaps we’d find out that Danny Pepelow needed to sit in a trash can and bark. Maybe Sue Dowd couldn’t go a full hour without putting a silver Jiffy Pop bag over her head. But no rescue was materializing and the curb was nigh. I could turn back. I did not have to speak at Freedom Hall, I said to myself. I could stop and cower in front of the curb, collapsed in a pool of stinking sweat, weeping and moaning, “No, no, I can’t cross it,” or I could simply move backward while everyone looked at me and my ashen face and my moon-walking feet. These cowardly solutions were complicated by another powerful force, the fear of public humiliation. The students had started to applaud thinly, probably because they had been instructed to. My fear of the curb and my fear of embarrassment clashed, and my extremities turned cold. My hands trembled with the chill. I felt greatly out of balance and widened my stance to keep
from reeling. I breathed deeply to calm myself, but instead, my pulse raced into the danger zone.
If I’d allowed my body to do what it wanted to do, it would have fallen on its knees and its head on the ground, its arms stretched out on the sidewalk. Its mind would have roiled and its throat would have cried, and nothing but exhaustion would have made it all stop, and nothing but home could have set the scale back in balance. But instead, I marched on, spurred by inertia and the infinitesimal recollection that I had recently crossed a curb and had not died.
My feet were like anvils, and it seemed as if the curb were nearing me rather than I nearing it. My fear represented the failure of the human system. It is a sad truth of our creation: Something is amiss in our design, there are loose ends of our psychology that are simply not wrapped up. My fears were the dirty secrets of evolution. They were not provided for, and I was forced to construct elaborate temples to house them.
As I neared the curb, my gait slowed. Most of the party had passed me and was happily, thoughtlessly mid-street. Even Brian, who at first had hung back, was now even with me, and as we approached the curb we were stride for stride, our arms swinging in time like a metronome. Just before Brian stepped off the curb, I slipped my index finger into the cuff of his jacket and clipped my thumb against it. I was hanging on to him for my life. I don’t think Brian could feel my minuscule clamp on his coat sleeve. As I raised my foot into the air above the road, I relived Brian as leader, how his leap across my curb weeks ago had shot me over it, too, how his he-man engine had somehow revved up mine. My foot landed on the street and it was like diving into icy water. The sound of the clapping students became more and more distant as I submerged, and I kept my fingers secretly clasped to my lifeline.
When the next curb appeared I came up for air and stepped up onto the sidewalk. Muffled sounds began to clear and sharpen. By now, Brian had felt the to-and-fro tug at his sleeve and he turned to me. My blood pressure had soared and had pushed streams of red into my eyeballs and he saw them wide with fear. But Brian seemed to think it was okay that I hung on to him for safety. And I felt safe, too, even though the contact point was only the size of a small fingerprint.
There were four curbs in all and each step down was like the dunking of a Salem witch. I would be submerged into the fires of hell and lifted into the sky for breath. My persecutors were Tepperton’s Pies, and my redeemers were my thumb and forefinger pinching a square half inch of wool. When I finally saw Freedom Hall a few yards in front of me, its name now held a double meaning. My pulse lowered to acceptable; my tongue became unstuck from the roof of my mouth. But my God, was I drenched. I attempted to walk so my body would not touch my clothing, trying to centre my legs in my trousers so my skin would not contaminate my pants with sweat. I held my arms bowed out so my underarms could aerate and dry, and I could feel that the hair at the nape of my neck was moist and starting to curl.
Finally we were backstage in an air-conditioned office. The chill matched my own body temperature, which had plunged to freezing, and my evaporating perspiration cooled me into the shakes. My nervousness was increasing and I was afraid that if anyone spooked me I would spring in the air and hiss like a Halloween cat.
Soon we were escorted to the wings, where we stood waiting to be brought onstage. We could hear our introduction through the curtain but the words echoed vacantly and were hardly intelligible. Several students lingered around us and I overheard one of them whisper “How’d he get away from his gardening job?” and then with a snicker nod his head toward Kevin Chen.
We were told that we would give our speeches in order, “worst first,” which was quickly changed to “least votes” first. This meant I would be going last. A stage manager paged the curtain and waved us onstage with a propeller elbow. We entered almost single file, and I realized it was the first moment since I’d left Santa Monica when Brian was not nearby. I looked back. The stage manager had barred him from the wings with a hand gesture.
Out on the stage, the four of us sat on folding chairs while the college dean introduced us one by one. I don’t think any of us could make out a word he said. We were behind the speakers and all we could hear was the din of reverberating sound. Occasionally, however, the dean would throw his arm back and gesture toward one of us, at which point we would individually stand and receive enthusiastic applause. From where, I wondered, did this enthusiastic applause generate? Certainly not from the hearts of the audience members, who had no clue who we were or the extent of our accomplishments. I figured it was an artificially instilled fervour, inspired by a version of reform school discipline.
Sue Dowd spoke first, and though I couldn’t understand a word she said, I wept anyway. For some reason, her body movements and gestures captivated me. She punctuated sentences with an emphatic fist or a slowly arcing open palm. Her oval body swayed with each sentence like a galleon at sea, and she concluded her speech with her head humbly bowed. There was a hesitation before the applause began, indicating that the audience was either so moved they couldn’t quite compose themselves, or didn’t realize her speech was over.
Danny Pepelow was next and inordinately dull. When I think of the trouble I went to to dress nicely, I wondered who’d suggested to Danny that a lumberjack shirt, jeans, and leather jacket would be fine. I was able to catch a few words of his essay because he spoke so slowly that the sound waves couldn’t overlap themselves. I wondered how he could have possibly gotten more votes than Sue Dowd. At least she gesticulated. Danny stood there like a boulder. His voice was so monotone that I welcomed the few seconds of audio feedback that peppered his speech. He sat down to half the applause Sue Dowd had coaxed, but still grinned as if he had spoken like Lincoln at Gettysburg.
The spotlight then swung to me, but the intro was for Kevin Chen. When the operator heard the Asian name, the light instantly bounced over to Kevin Chen, provoking a laugh from the audience. He walked confidently to the podium, but I still heard a few racially incited snickers from small pockets of the audience. Kevin Chen was supremely intelligent and quite moving, his essay involving an immigrant family success story with a true and abiding love of America. When he sat down, there was nice applause and I think Kevin Chen had shown them something real that must have touched every heart but the coldest. There was also a specific locus of exuberant cheers from the darkened rear of the auditorium that I presumed was family.
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 signalled 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 a
pplause 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, centre 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.