The Chris Sartinsky Memoirs: Chapter Eight: A Little Guidance

Returning to school in the eighth grade, I found myself as uninspired as ever. As the difficulty of the work increased, my determination to avoid doing well only grew. It’s not that I didn’t do the work. It’s just that I took a great deal of pride in getting it done with as little effort as possible. The solid B- average that I had maintained throughout my academic career slipped to an unstable C-.

My family normally would have noticed this sort of thing and done something about it, but it was a busy time for everyone. My dad’s mayoral campaign was wrapping up at about the time the school year began. The house was filled with flyers, posters, signs and paperwork related to the campaign. My dad’s campaign slogan was “Give me a call!” and the town took this to heart, although he really meant it to signify that he would be open to criticism if elected and not a literal plea for well-wishers, critics, members of the press, uninformed voters and bored teenagers to inundate us with calls at all hours. He used the phone because he felt the cliché of the open door was both technologically obsolete, generally played out and laughingly irrelevant as Burlington’s town hall was empty at all hours. It’s not that there weren’t dedicated civil servants working in our town. The building was simply structurally unsound as the infamous Mayor O’Reilly had embezzled thousands of dollars in the 70s when the building was constructed. Anyway, we were listed in the phone book, so no one in the town had any problem reaching us. My mother manned the phones all day long with me, my dad and the twins helping out whenever we were around. We all hated the situation, but my dad made us follow through with the misguided promise he never made lest it hurt him in the polls.

It was never really clear why my dad had decided to run for office. His platform was incoherent at best. I think it was just a lot of aggregate resentment over his life in general that made him decide he needed to do something to change it all. He was unhappy with his job and unhappy at home, I suspect, spending all his free time planting trees around our house until we were out of mulchy spaces, at which point he tore up bits of the lawn to plant more trees until the front lawn looked something like a Pachinko machine. So he decided the best way to change things—with no specific goal beyond change—would be to find the most powerful position in reach and then take it from there. He became mayor that October and celebrated by promptly changing our phone number.

Feeling more disconnected from ever and beginning to feel pangs of generalized adolescent angst and the need for pointless rebellion, I looked for something to do that would upset somebody. I quickly found something in the form of the bar in the center of town, whose barkeeper, an old man named Sully, was hoping to curry favor with the new mayor by treating his son like a sultan. Why he wanted to curry favor with my father at all is an open question. The mayor in our town is a kind of powerless figurehead. Most of the decisions made in the town, as my father soon found out, were made by the Board of Selectmen or the residents who showed up to town meetings. The mayor’s job was to run those meetings, cut ribbons at new building sites (there were to be none during my father’s tenure; we’re really a sleepy little town) and give the same backwards-looking speech every year at the annual Memorial Day Parade. The pointlessness of the task beat my father down quickly, but at least he was busy. Sully didn’t know any of this, however, so he figured it would be beneficial to get into the mayor’s inner circle, as if there was a Mafia operation running Burlington or something of that sort.

So Sully served me alcohol. I got ripping drunk every day after school and sometimes before as well. I got into more than a few bike accidents and had my share of scuffles, but the feeling of freedom it afforded me was wonderful and new. I made sure to get drunk enough so that my inhibitions melted away and I completely lost control of my actions—or at least enough to pretend that this was the case. I think because I felt so overwhelmed, so boxed in, so insignificant with everything so profoundly out of my control that the most rebellious thing I could do was to completely give myself into it and exacerbate the situation as much as possible at the detriment of my well-being. Which sounds paradoxical at best and stupid at worst, but I think there’s something to it that follows me to this day.

Sully became a kind of awful mentor. Taken with the images of bars I had seen on TV, I began to philosophize with him, telling him all my problems and thoughts and difficulties. Sully was not an intelligent man but he was a top-rate brownnoser, and he responded to all of my idiocy by affirming my rightness. Which only made things worse, obviously, because he only encouraged me to continue avoiding my problems by claiming it was below me to deign to solve them, or something like that. I don’t know if this philosophy was even within his grasp, as he mostly just responded to everything I said with some form of “you’re so right.”

As fools, though, we had a kind of symbiotic relationship, even if I only helped Sully in giving him false security. Later, when my father found out about our little arrangement, he had Sully arrested on trumped up charges of tax evasion and got him locked away for twenty years. Where Sully got the idea that giving the mayor’s twelve year old son alcohol was a good way to gain influence, I certainly don’t know.

But in the meantime, I was developing into a full-fledged alcoholic. I drank in the morning more and more often and my grades suffered. One day, my science teacher Mr. Berry asked me to stay after class with him. I was sober this morning because Sully had been bitten by his dog the day before and had to be rushed to the hospital, so the bar was closed for a while. It’s a good thing I was sober that day, though.

When everyone else had left the room, Mr. Berry closed the door and looked at me significantly, so that I thought he was going to jump me and try to get into my pants because that’s the kind of thing eighth grade boys are most worried about in the world. But he sat behind his desk and sighed. He told me that he was worried about me, that he could see I was one of the brightest boys in the grade (I don’t know if this was true, especially since he used such a vague indefinable term, rather than something like “smartest,” but it flattered me at the time so I chose to believe it) and that I had great gifts that were going to waste. This kind of thing shocked me to be honest, as it never occurred to me that I had gifts of any kind and the whole idea of people having gifts was a bit ludicrous. He said he had never counseled a student like this at the time and I believed him then because he didn’t seem like the kind of teacher who went out of his way to counsel students, though I don’t believe it now because he was too good at it to be unpracticed. He said I needed to do something with my life or I would end up a nothing.

“Do you know what it’s like to be a nothing?” he asked me. I shook my head, though I had probably already had some experience. He told me that it wasn’t as fun as it appeared, even though it didn’t sound like so much fun to me. He said he had some experience with being a nothing and that his brother was still a nothing and that it was no fun.

“You’re doing nothing with your life. Do you realize that?” I nodded. “So why don’t you try to change it? There’s a time and a place for alcohol, but the mornings before you come to middle school is neither the time nor the place. You have a problem.” I assured Mr. Berry I had my alcohol use under control and invited him to come drink with me some time, even suggesting I could drink him under the table (which wasn’t true; I was well under a hundred pounds and it didn’t take much), but he was unimpressed.

“I see a little of myself in you,” he said. “When I was in high school, I was scared. And I think you’re scared, too. And you might not even know it, because I didn’t know it at the time, so you might be thinking, ‘Well no, Mr. Berry, I’m not scared of anything,’ but you’re wrong. I can see it. You’re scared. And the reason you don’t even know it is that it’s such a general fear, such a fear of nothing tangible or even an abstract that you can feel and express in real words, that it almost doesn’t seem like a fear at all. But I bet you’re feeling it now, now that I’m mentioning it. Do you follow me?” I shook my head, though I was definitely following him. I was a little frightened that he was able to nail me so exactly, but there was another, much larger terror that I could feel rising, not as if Mr. Berry were convincing me I had something where there was once nothing, but that it had heard its name and was making an appearance.

“I think you do follow me,” he continued, and I don’t know if he knew this because he knew me so well already or because he could see me shaking. “You’re afraid to try, because if you try and you fail, then you make a fool of yourself, but if you don’t try, then you can’t be a loser. Well that’s bullshit, Chris.” I was nodding now; there was no denying the man had me, and also because I was of the age that is delighted to hear a teacher swear. “If you don’t try, you get all the consequences of losing without the benefit of learning. There’s nothing good about a guaranteed loss, and just because you don’t think you have to think of yourself as a loser, don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re doing anything less than guaranteeing a loss.”

I broke down at this point and sobbed for a few minutes, asking “What? What?” Not because I felt unfairly criticized, but because I needed to know what to do without being able to comprehend that I really had to do something. “I don’t know what to tell you exactly, Chris. I can only tell you that you have to let yourself figure it out for yourself. And you’ve got to do it now, because you’re not guaranteed anything. And I’m sure you’ve heard that thousands of times and never really thought about it, but you need to think about it. You’re not even guaranteed your death. You could simply,” and here he snapped for emphasis, “cease to exist without even having the chance to realize your body is breaking down and that could be the end of the universe.” He was right. I had heard this time a thousand times and had never thought of it, but I had always thought that if I was at least a good-hearted failure, I would be rewarded with Heaven, which was, after all, for the fuck-ups, if you have a certain interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount. But the sheer frightening atheism of Mr. Berry was something new, no doubt about it.

“All I can tell you, Chris is that you have to give yourself a chance to figure things out. You can’t just not try. You deserve better. You deserve your best effort, in everything you do. Even if you’re wrong, at least you’ve experienced something, had something, learned something! Are you following me?” I nodded vigorously now and waited for some final piece of wisdom, and Mr. Berry didn’t disappoint. “In the end, you can’t save your soul and life by thought. But if you think, the least of the consolation prizes is the world.”

I was in awe. I rushed out of the room to my locker and wrote his last bit of advice down. I would stare at those lines for hours, even after I had long ago memorized the words, trying to figure out exactly what they meant and how they applied and feeling the warmth of truth emanating from the slip of paper. Of course, I was more than a little disillusioned when about fifteen years later I would discover that he cribbed this passage word for word from The Adventures of Augie March, but his heart was in the right place.