Part One
Three Ds and two Fs. Not a great report card.
Fortunately, I had the maturity to take it in stride. I was midway through ninth grade and it was shaping up to be a banner year in my social development. No, I hadn’t lost my virginity (though I had done some extensive French kissing and had even touched the lower third of a girl’s breast–through clothing of course). But my hair had reached the shoulder-length mark, I had some really cool friends, and boy was I smoking a lot of pot and dropping a lot of acid. Regrettably, my grade point average had failed to keep pace with the meteoric rise in my social standing among the kids who hung out on the corner opposite Roxboro Junior High School. But, hey, when you’re putting the kind of time and energy I was into emulating Jimi Hendrix and Che Guevara (both dead but cooler than ever) something has to give, right?
My parents didn’t see it that way. In fact, they freaked out. So what do liberal Unitarians do when they can no longer ignore the fact that their baby boy is a complete fuck-up? Ground him? Make him cut his hair? Pack him off to the nearest military academy? Nah. They send him to a psychologist.
Dr. Wortman was also a Unitarian (they met him at coffee hour!) but, perhaps because he’d been hardened by all the time he spent locked in rooms with long-haired fuck-ups, his views on child rearing were decidedly less liberal than my parents’. “Get him the hell out of Cleveland,” he growled.
So off we went to the wilds of Maine in search of a school that might save poor little Paulie from himself. Why Maine? I don’t know, I can’t remember. Probably because it sounded far away, which suited all of us just fine.
We were to visit four schools and first on the list was The Hyde School, in Portland. We didn’t stay long, just long enough for the headmaster to explain, with barely contained delight, that the punishment for minor infractions like smoking cigarettes or engaging in “inappropriate sexual activity” was to shave the offender’s head (for a teenager in 1973 this was about as horrifying a prospect as having a limb lopped off). I suddenly became uncomfortably aware of the pack of cigarettes I kept in my coat pocket and the penis I kept in my pants. We didn’t stick around long enough to hear about how they dealt with more serious crimes at The Hyde School, though I’m pretty sure I heard the words “escape,” “restraint” and “necessary force” as we made for the door. Between the headmaster’s “pitch” and the two or three dozen shaved heads I saw on my brief tour (many of which silently mouthed the words “Don’t come here” as they passed me), I couldn’t get back to the car fast enough. Even my parents got the willies when the headmaster followed us to the parking lot and suggested—demanded really—that we cancel the rest of our trip and sign up right then and there for The Hyde School. Dad almost crashed through the front gate he was driving so fast when we pulled out of there.
Next stop was Kents Hill, a school whose students—at least the ones I saw on the tour—I was relieved to discover came with full heads of hair (for a minute there I was afraid this head shaving thing was a state requirement). I can’t remember much else about the place other than the color beige. There seemed to be a lot of it there. I can’t tell if this was literally true or if my memory is just using a little shorthand—i.e. “I’m not going to go into all the boring details about that place because, well, frankly it’s a waste of my resources, instead I’m going to show this bland color…Get it?” It’s not fair, I know, and I apologize in advance to the good folks at Kents Hill and all its fine alumni. It wasn’t their fault, the problem was one of proximity, proximity to the next school on the list, Gould Academy.
If boarding schools were Presidents, Hyde would be Nixon, Kents Hill Gerald Ford, and Gould would surely be a ringer for JFK. Where Hyde was all dark, oppressive authoritarianism and Kents Hill was, you know, beige, Gould was bright and colorful, the color of lots and lots of money, money in quantities only the truly beautiful people possess, beautiful people with long flowing hair who float effortlessly across rich green, weed-free lawns. Christ, the whole place smelled of cream rinse! I wanted to be there more than anything.
But there was one more school on the itinerary and, it being two hours away, we had to get going if we were to arrive there before sundown as planned. We were on our way out when I noticed two particularly attractive females lounging on a sunny patch of grass in front of Gould’s elegant library. So serene, so graceful, and—get this—they were smoking. Watching them from the back seat of the car, I said to myself, as if in silent prayer, “Don’t worry girls, I’m coming back.”
It was already pretty dark when we finally found the entrance to The Hinckley School. Unlike Gould, whose main campus was laid out like the village green of a small New England town, Hinckley was literally all over the place, a collection of buildings—some old, some modern, some typical administration buildings, all brick and slate, others modest clapboard homes with wide porches—scattered seemingly at random. It was difficult to get a sense of the place in the gathering gloom, other than the vague feeling in my gut that I did not want to be there. Indeed, Hinckley would have gone straight to the reject pile right then and there were it not for the fact that, it being the last school on my list and the hour being late, the plan was that I would spend the night there in a spare dorm room and take the campus tour the next morning.
Hard against the Kennebec River (a body of water I’d never even heard of before that night), Hinckley was about as close as you could get to the middle of nowhere, and believe me there’s a lot of nowhere in central Maine. Stepping out of the car into the chill night air, silently cursing my parents for not having scheduled my overnight stay at that tropical paradise Gould Academy, I had no way of knowing that the temperature was actually quite balmy by Maine standards. To me it felt as if I’d been dropped off at some lonely outpost on the North Pole. And as my parents drove off into the night for a nearby motel—picture an old DC-9, with skis for landing gear, lifting off the frozen tundra and disappearing into the black sky—it took all the willpower I could muster (and the certainty that I would never survive the embarrassment) to keep from chasing after the car wailing, “Mommy! Daddy! Don’t leave me here!”
Yes, I was a hundred miles (actually, 85.3) from the sunny warmth of Gould Academy, but I soon discovered that Hinckley came alive at night. I had barely set down my overnight bag when one of the kids in the dorm said, “C’mon, the van for Waterville is leaving.”
Waterville is the big town in the area, home to Colby College, a shopping mall, and a couple of movie theaters. It’s about a half hour ride and our first stop was the shopping mall. There were a dozen or so Hinckley students in the van and more than half of them were getting off here. Jamie, the student who’d invited me on this little field trip, signaled for me to stay in my seat.
“Gettin off he-ah?” the driver asked in the thickest Maine accent I’d ever heard (and I’d been hearing a lot of them that day).
“Movie theater,” Jamie said to the rearview mirror. The driver shrugged, closed the door, and off we went. A few minutes later the remaining passengers—there were six of us—filed off in front of the movie theater.
“Be back by eight fawty-five,” the driver said. “I’m not waitin round if ya late.”
“We’ll be here,” Jamie said as he hopped down to the curb.
I can’t remember what movie was playing but it was popular enough that a sizable line had formed in front of the ticket window. As we stood there, Jamie kept his eyes on the rusty red van with “The Hinckley School” emblazoned across its side in dingy white letters. When it had disappeared around a corner, Jamie placed his hand on my shoulder and said, “Let’s go.”
Two other students, a girl and a guy, silently fell into step with us as we walked away from the theater. We were almost to the corner when one of the two Hinckley students who had remained in the ticket buyers line called to us.
“Jamie, where you going?” she said.
Jamie smiled at her and put a finger to his lips.
“But you’re going to miss the movie,” she said, a little sadly.
“Nah, you’re going tell me all about it on the ride back Audrey darling.” Then, to the boy standing next to her, the one with the permanent scowl of disapproval on his face, he said “And you’re going to keep your fucking mouth shut, aren’t you friend?”
I followed the three of them down a narrow lane and as we emerged from the shadows, there it was, cracked window, flickering Schlitz sign and all: The Bob-In.
I could go into lots of colorful description here: the pool table with the rip running from the side pocket to its center, stitched closed with what looked like medavac sutures; the smell of beer and piss that no amount of Mr. Clean, had he ever graced the place (clearly he had not), could mask; the waitress who’d probably been pretty hot right around the time President Kennedy was gunned down in Dealy Plaza, or the waiter who, looking just as fried by the harsh conditions that existed there at The Bob-In, could have been her twin brother. Let me put it this way. Today, as I was writing this, I began to wonder if The Bob-In still existed. (How could it? The fumes alone would have caused the building to collapse years ago.) So I punched “Bob-In” and “Waterville” into my search engine and what do you suppose came back? “Drug Bust Nets Five.” I don’t think it’s necessary to go into all the very predictable details (“Outlaws motorcycle gang,” “a drug smuggling ring centered at The Bob-In bar,” etc.) You can fill in the blanks on your own, I’m sure. Let’s just say I got a little misty reading the story. The world changes so quickly and so completely, yet somehow The Bob-In, with all its rich history and traditions, continues to endure.
Moving back a few decades, here were the four of us sitting at a table in the venerable dive when the waiter (I think it was him but it could have been her) walks up and says, “All yahs kids eighteen?” (this was before Maine’s drinking age went up to twenty-one).
Nods all around.
“Got some I.D. then, do yah?”
Heads shook in unison–“no,” “forgot it,” “in my other pants, sorry.”
His eyes narrowed on Jamie. “When exactly was ya bawn, son?”
“Eighteen years ago,” he said without hesitation.
“Right then, what’ll ya’ll have?”
“Kahlua and milk!” said the girl, whose name I had just learned was Sherry, though her friends called her “Sher.”
“Pitcha?”
Happy nods all around.
I don’t remember much more of that evening except that the ride back to campus involved a lot of spinning and a lot of making out with “Sher.” There may also have been some vomiting back at the dorm, I’m kind of vague about the details. But I do remember that I was severely hung over for the campus tour the next morning—I can picture the headmaster’s lips moving, I assume to explain why Hinckley and I would be a good fit, but I can’t remember any of the words. He needn’t have bothered, I’d decided the night before, at the moment Sherry placed her hand on my thigh there at The Bob-In, that Hinckley was the right school for me.
It wasn’t until the day I returned to campus the following fall and was unpacking my clothes that Nino, my new next door neighbor, informed me that that field trip I’d taken to Waterville was the only one they’d had all year.
“Are you sure? I thought they had one every Friday night.”
Nino laughed. “I wish! Nah, they never let us outta this fuckin prison.”
The other shoe dropped an hour later when I met “Sher” in front of her dormitory. I’d remembered her being kinda chunky, “pleasantly plump” my mother would have called her. I didn’t mind, if anything it made her boobs bigger (and she’d made it abundantly clear that I would have complete access to every inch of them, not just their lower thirds). But the girl who stood before me wasn’t chubby, she was fat. Either the Kahlua and milk had had an hallucinatory effect upon my brain and memory or Sherry had been seriously stuffing her face for the past four months.
“I’ve been thinking about you all summer,” she said. “Have you been thinking about me?”
I managed a weak smile. “Kinda,” I said.