After the kidnapping, I was something of a local celebrity. At the time, I had developed a strong business sense and I exploited every opportunity that came my way. I turned my kidnapping into a little cottage industry. I signed short-lived endorsement deals with local pizza shops, the gas station in the center of town and was even featured in an Ocean Spray commercial that only aired once or twice. I was interviewed by all the local news stations and newspapers and had basically saturated the market by January. And then, by February, the calls stopped coming. Just like that I was no longer popular. I took it well, though it was nice to be regarded as somewhat important for a while. It was novel.
I quickly settled back into anonymity in high school. My parents were upset with me because I did not show a commitment to anything. My grades were low and I showed no dedication to any extracurricular activities. So I joined the marching band and agreed to be the team manager for the baseball team to keep them quiet. They were satisfied, because it seemed to them that I was finally showing some ambition, and I was satisfied, because it was February and neither of these activities would start until April. When spring finally arrived, I quit both of them before I had to march a step or lug any equipment.
The best part of all of it was that my parents never noticed that I had quit everything because they had crises of their own to deal with by then. My father’s administration was being lambasted as being wasteful at best and corrupt at worst by the local press. It was all completely unfair, because my father was an honest mayor, if only because he had so little money to work with that there was really nothing worth embezzling. Because of some oddities in the town charters of Burlington and our neighbors in Farmington, any tax hikes in town had to be approved by a two thirds majority. This never happened simply because voter participation hovered around 20%. Our town had a bare bones budget that had to be funded with our meager tax revenue, with the difference being funded by Farmington's perpetual surplus. They resented the arrangement for obvious reasons, and my father resented it as well because he didn’t want to feel that he owed Farmington anything. Most everyone in town wanted to be free of our obligations to Farmington, but this was next to impossible. Even if every voter was rallied to go to the polls, it is unlikely that two thirds of them would really vote for a huge increase in taxes if it were really to come down to that. And even if every voter in town did vote for a tax hike, the framers of our town charter required two thirds of the town’s population, not just two thirds of registered voters. Because our town was so popular with families, mainly because of its incomparable tax rates, there were not even enough adults of voting age to pass any kind of tax hike. Though the two thirds was a result of a democratic zeal that the framers figured would never go away, the whole population thing was clearly a mistake.
My mother, meanwhile, was dealing with a tobacco addiction that she had only just picked up weeks earlier. She had found a pack of cigarettes in one of the twins’ bags and was furious. She laced into both of them and crushed the package with her bare hands. She made her point, but she couldn’t get the smell of tobacco off her hand for days. If you believe her diagnosis, she was so agitated that she obliterated the cigarettes to such a degree that the nicotine was absorbed into her bloodstream through her pores or something like that and she became addicted. It was always unseemly how strong she was, and we were careful throughout our childhood to make sure we never sent her into a rage, at least not around things we did not want to see crushed in her wiry hands. I have no idea where all that power came from.
I got through the ninth grade and the following summer without any hobbies and it was one of the best times in my life. I began to ponder what I would do after high school. Every job required sacrifices, I reasoned. I rejected the idea of finding the best job as offensive, something that was only seriously considered by the greedy or the self-indulgent. The most honest approach, as well as the most realistic, was to find the least worst job available and go after that one. So I considered a lot of options before I finally settled on joining a monastery. Not right away, I would wait until I graduated, but my heart was set. Though there were few real tangible benefits beside the slim possibility of spiritual enlightenment or something, I thought it required the fewest real sacrifices on my part. Basically, I had to agree to stop talking with people and to stop seeing females. I had basically already mastered both of these over the course of my reclusive summer, so the rest, I figured, would be a cinch.
Things had changed, as they often do, by the time I got into tenth grade. Instead of being acquaintances with a great number of people, as had been the case through much of my life, social circles closed and I suddenly found myself associating with a smaller group of closer friends. But, being tenth graders, our friendships were adversarial kinds of relationships and every lunch was a savage Darwinian struggle with cutthroat social wrangling going on all the time. The things we did to one another and said about one another, all in the name of friendship, were awful. I’m sure I’m not the only one who ended up significantly scarred because of it. I could dish it out as well, and there might be more than one person still stewing over something I said to him. I wouldn’t be surprised. But my story is that we all went into Hartford one night after the first one of us got our licenses. I had sort of tagged along and they didn’t let me forget it the whole ride there, which I only took for good-natured teasing until they ran while I was using the bathroom and left me alone in the city for a few hours. I waited for them at the car and part of me thought they were going to get home some other way and leave me there until I figured it out and called a cab or caught a bus or something, but they eventually came back and found the whole thing quite funny. I didn’t say anything on the ride home. Well, I don’t have friends, I thought, but I never let on that I was pretty crushed and stayed friendly with them afterwards, because what else was I going to do?
So I decided to look elsewhere for validation. Any kind would do, I wasn't picky. I began by hanging out with the dregs of the social stratosphere at school, hoping I would stand out among them and be a kind of hero to them for stooping to their level. I ran into two problems with this scheme. First, they accepted me as one of their own. I didn’t want to be accepted; I wanted to be revered. Second, they were frightfully boring and terribly unpleasant. I hate to say it, but sometimes there’s a reason why some people don’t have many friends. Or maybe they became that way because they didn’t have many friends to begin with, but this was tenth grade and I wasn’t about to change anybody for the better, so I abandoned them.
Validation had to come from somewhere else. I signed up for every audition I could find and was rejected by every organization but one. I was given a bit part in the school musical. I ignored the fact that every male who tried out was at least assigned to the chorus and began to consider myself an actor, until the first rehearsal, at which point I learned that I absolutely hated it. The director was clearly less than satisfied with my performance and told me every day that I wasn’t enunciating clearly enough, which isn’t exactly what he meant. What he wanted to say was that I was too subdued for the stage, which meant I was pretty awful. His nice way of putting it was that I would make a fine television or film actor, because the camera could zoom in on me and I could express things with my face, but this was the stage and I had to express things with my whole body. This meant, apparently, that I should bounce around stage like something had been dropped in my drink and make an ass of myself by waving my arms wildly and prancing around like a goofball. I declined.
The drama club was a strange kind of clique. The cliché of the drama kid isn’t quite accurate, and if were all to stand in a line, you would be hard pressed to fit all of us into any one group of any kind and probably wouldn’t be able to guess that drama was the thing that connected us. But the one thing almost everyone in the play shared was the strange compulsion to be the weirdest one in the room, even when they were actually brutally normal. People would spontaneously break out into song because they figured that was the kind of strange and wacky thing that unique oddballs like themselves did all the time and described themselves as “random” even when their carefully considered quirks were anything but. It was quite amusing to watch these people compete with one another over who could be the wackiest. The one-upmanship was frightening and I always felt like a real knife fight could break out at any moment the way these people needed so badly to be the uniquest one of the bunch lest their whole identity would crumble. Of course they never did these strange things outside the safety of rehearsal, because it was all about fitting in, whether in the self-consciously weird world of drama club or the world at large where such silliness was frowned upon.
I couldn’t be friends with any of them, and neither could this girl named Laura who was in the play as well, so we became friends with each other and I kind of fell in love with her pretty fast. We were the same when it came to the important things. Both of us had small parts, both of us had joined the play for strange reasons because neither of us really enjoyed acting and we were both put off and amused by the way everyone else in the play tried to out-strange each other. But she was a lot nicer than I was and easier to talk to. She could carry the conversation on her own if I didn’t have anything interesting to say and I never got the feeling that I was annoying her, mostly because she was always the one to find me. She was also incredibly nice.
So we hung around with each other every afternoon for hours while rehearsals were going on, and most of the time we could talk to each other since our parts were so small and our stage time so limited. We enjoyed each other’s company so much and I think I probably could have made a move if I had felt any sort of urgency, but we were so young and we were such good friends that I figured I would have years to plan that kind of thing. It wouldn’t be much longer until this urgency festered in me and grew so fast that it led me to do a lot of stupid things, but back then the slowness of it all was one of the parts I remember most fondly.
Laura’s father worked in the marketing department of General Electric and she resented him because her moral sensibilities told her that her father’s company was much to large to be anything but evil. She had read some literature about the horrible things they and their subsidiaries had done to the environment and held her father responsible, even though his commercials had never done anything to harm anyone. He loved his daughter, of course, and hoped she would grow out of her idealism before he got too old. But I think he understood that idealism is one of those things you can only afford to have for so long, so he let his daughter enjoy it while he could. It’s a horrible thing when you become an adult and you’re pulled into pragmatism, and there are very few who make it to adulthood without hating themselves viciously for a time.
The play was a disaster. Despite the fact that rehearsals had basically consumed the lives of all of us for months, we were ill-prepared to actually present our show to other people. The director had only had us practice certain scenes over and over again because he felt they were most important to the meaning of the musical, which left others woefully neglected. Also, the play itself wasn’t very good and was just hard to follow in general. Half the cast didn’t really care and the other half cared a little bit too much. I, of course, belonged to the former group. I was chewing gum on the night of the performance and didn’t notice until halfway through one of the big dance numbers when I blew a bubble and someone gave me a sharp elbow to the ribs.
Laura’s father came to the play on the first night and was one of the few with the endurance to stick it out until the end (my own parents, whom I had warned beforehand, had stood next to the doors so they could make a quick exit, which they did after about twelve minutes). While the cast mingled in the lobby, accepting congratulations from the remaining audience (though at this point, cast and crew outnumbered spectators), I leaned against a pillar. Laura’s father came and found me and shook my hand with a magnanimous smile. He told me that he was excited to meet me and that I had a casual affability and a natural charm that was difficult to find among people who could act. I couldn’t act, but I thanked him for the compliment anyway. He told me that he was looking for people to star in a commercial for one of GE’s new ventures that he hoped would appeal to high school students. He lamented the fact that his daughter would not accept his “blood money,” which was a mistake for him to mention and he quickly realized it, and offered me a million dollars to appear in a few short spots. I told him I would talk with my parents and get back to him.
Laura came up to me and gave me a hug, which was nice because it was one of our first, and told me I had done a good job. She basically ignored her father and he looked defeated and dismayed, as if he had just realized the new girl he had called easy in front of the boss ended up being his daughter. They went off together to find Laura’s grandmother and left me alone.
I needed to think, so I walked away from the tiny lobby into the long darkened stretches of the school. I thought the hallways should look different in the dark, that there should be some kind of significance to walking around in the school I attended every day all alone in the dead of night, but it was the same, only without any lights on. I sat down against some of the lockers, ostensibly to think about the offer I had received, but actually thinking about nothing. After a few minutes or seconds of this, a dirty old man I didn’t recognize came strolling around the corner and found me sitting by myself.
“What are you doing down here?” he asked. I stood up and apologized, my mind clearly elsewhere. “It’s fine, don’t go anywhere,” he said, and so I sat back down. “You’re thinking about that offer, aren’t you.”
At first I didn’t know what he was talking about, but then I remembered. I don’t know how he knew it, but I didn’t think about it much at the time. I told him that he was right and then looked away because I didn’t really want to talk about it with a total stranger.
“Let me tell you one or two things.” I gave him a closer look and could see that he probably hadn’t had a good meal in a while. His clothes were dirty and old and he was thin with intensely throbbing eyes and a patchy gray beard. I asked him how he got into the building, but he didn’t answer me. “There are only a few good reasons you should do anything,” he said. “One is love, another is self-fulfillment. But money is never a good reason to do anything.” He pointed at his eyes to make sure he had my attention. “If you take that job, I’ll be honest. You might regret it and you might not. But if you don’t take it, and if you’re in love with this girl, then you won’t remember that you even considered it.” He began coughing and eventually lost control of himself and pulled out a handkerchief and hacked into that for a few seconds. When he was done, he spit a gob of bloody phlegm into the tissue and returned it to his pocket. He looked a little ashamed and shuffled back towards the lobby without looking at me.
I took the money, of course, and Laura never really talked to me again.
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