How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater Read online

  What you see might surprise you. New Jersey may be the most densely populated state in the U.S. (or as Paula likes to say, the state where the population is most dense), but you wouldn't know it from Wallingford.

  Colonial Wallingford.

  Twenty minutes in any direction you'll find the Jersey you're thinking of—the toxic waste dumps; the wise guys who say dese, dem, and dose; the gangs, the ghettos, and the Garden State Parkway. But the moment you enter Wallingford the houses take a giant step back from the street, like they're too good to be seen near it, and expand upward and outward, sprouting things like turrets and gables and chimneys. Founded in 1732, Wallingford takes a disproportionately absurd amount of pride in its colonial heritage. The American troops may have camped at Camptown (or as we call it, Cramptown, because the food at the diner always gives us gas), and fought what was essentially an eighteenth-century version of a water fight at Battle Brook (the town over from that), but somehow Wallingford emerged as the epitome of all things traditional and quaint.

  Wallingford is a bedroom community, which means that most people work an hour away in Manhattan and only sleep here. On the one hand, I find the term “bedroom community” sort of sexy, imagining that all kinds of otherwise respectable people are swapping wives and having orgies behind closed doors, but it probably just means that not much else happens in Wallingford beyond sleeping.

  I get as far as Washington Street and sit for a moment behind the wheel, MoM's diesel engine chugging like a locomotive, while I decide which way to go. If I make a left and take it almost as far as the freeway I'll get to Oak Acres, the neighborhood I'm embarrassed to admit I live in. There are no turrets or gables or chimneys in Oak Acres; there aren't even any actual oaks, just sprawling ranch houses with circular driveways and phoney-baloney columns designed to appeal to people who possess more money than taste. Oak Acres is so full of Italians and Jews relocated from places like Hoboken and Bayonne that the Wallingford blue bloods call it Hoboken Acres. I turn right and head to the high school instead.

  I pull into my usual spot, the one marked VISITOR PARKING ONLY, because I like to think of myself as someone who is just visiting a suburban New Jersey high school, rather than someone who actually attends one. When they make the movie of my life, this'll be where the credits end.

  I duck in through a side door that only the Play People know about. (Play People. Like we're not real. We're the realest people in this preppy prison.) Revolting Renée, the choreographer, is onstage teaching the Hand Jive while simultaneously grossing everyone out with her noxious BO and backne. Her excuse for not bathing is that she's like some ex-hippie or something, but personally I think there's a statute of limitations on body odor as an act of rebellion. Some little ninth grader sees me and points me out to the other kids in the chorus.

  “Okay, people, that's right,” Revolting Renée says, raising her scary Vulcan eyebrows, “the famous Edward Zanni has graced us with his presence.”

  I gesture to the cast with a grand port de bras.

  “Let's show him what we've been up to while he's been lyin' around workin' on his tan,” she says.

  Did I get color? Cool. Without a tan I look like I'm jaundiced. I catch Kelly's eye and wave to her. She peeks up from under her blond bangs and waves back in that shy way that pretty girls do—wiggling her fingers, rather than actually moving her whole hand. She mouths “Hi,” or “Hiyeee” to be exact, and smiles at me with both rows of teeth. She's wearing character shoes for dancing and the combination of high heels with tight terry-cloth shorts makes her look like a teen prostitute in a TV movie of the week.

  It's a good look.

  She turns her back and slides her thumbs under her shorts to pull them down over her Valentine ass, and I feel my cold, wrinkly dick stir in my pants.

  Revolting Renée hollers “Five, six, seven, eight . . .” and leads the chorus in the Hand Jive, but they have a hard time following her characteristically inept choreography. Kelly, who's playing Sandy, spins across the stage, the muscles in her pale legs rippling like a colt's, and lands in the veiny arms of Doug Grabowski, who dances like someone whose foot has gone to sleep. (What can you expect when his usual mode of physical expression is knocking people over on a football field?) Doug wears a PROPERTY OF WALLINGFORD HIGH SCHOOL ATHLETIC DEPT. T-shirt, but since he's actually a jock it's not meant to be ironic.

  He and Kelly look good together; so—I don't know—Northern Hemisphere, I guess. Kelly could easily date plenty of guys just like Doug, football players with necks thicker than their heads, popular boys who shout each other's last names in the halls and who mutter when they're called on in class. But for some unfathomable reason she chose me. It's like the high-school equivalent of Princess Di ditching Prince Charles to date a commoner. Like that's ever gonna happen.

  I suppose I'm not bad-looking in my own way. My body's a little softer than I'd like it to be—my ratio of Twinkies to dance classes being unequal—but I look all right as long as I keep my shirt untucked; and girls have always liked to play with my curly hair and complain they're jealous of my eyelashes, which are long and thick, like a camel's or Liza Minnelli's. But still, Kelly is everything a high-school boy wants in a girl—she's thin, she's blond, and, most important, she likes to mess around. She was even a cheerleader back in junior high, but had some kind of falling out with the Rah-Rah's the summer before sophomore year and sought refuge with the Play People instead. Still, there's something kind of WASP-y about Kelly, despite her actually being Irish Catholic on both sides. After all, she does live in Wallingford Heights, a neighborhood so exclusive you practically need a blood test to get in or, perhaps I should say, a blue-blood test. I watch her do the Hand Jive and wonder whether we'll have time later for a hand job.

  The chorus struggles with Revolting Renée's bizarrely Byzantine choreography, each frigging syllable accompanied by a supposedly appropriate hand gesture, the overall effect being less like a dance and more like a simultaneous sign-language interpretation for the hearing impaired, but I applaud loudly when they finish. It's important to encourage these chorus people.

  “Okay, that's it, people, see ya' tomorrow morning,” Revolting Renée says. I give her the thumbs-up sign and she looks grateful, as if my opinion meant something, which I suppose it does. After all, I have taken dance classes in New York City for nearly four years now and my voice teacher was in the chorus of Sweeney Todd on Broadway.

  I hop up onstage in one swift move (I love being able to hop up onstage in one swift move) and greet Kelly by pulling her to me and grinding against her while some awed ninth graders look on. Kelly responds by wrapping her endless leg around my waist like a belt.

  “You look hot,” I say.

  “I am hot,” she says, fanning herself.

  That's not what I meant, but I let it go.

  “We had to do that number like a hundred times and Doug still can't get it right,” she says. I glance over at him as he practices with Revolting Renée, flapping his arms like he's trying to land a plane. If I didn't know any better I would rush over and stick a pencil in his mouth to keep him from swallowing his tongue.

  “He'll get it,” I say. “You'll make him look good.” I push back Kelly's bangs so I can see her eyes. From a distance they appear to be green, but up close you realize that they're actually two different colors; that the left favors brown, the right blue. She's self-conscious about it, but I think it's cool, like she's two people at once. I kiss her freckled nose.

  “I'm telling you, Edward,” she says, “he's, like, the horniest guy I've ever met. Just dancing with him makes me feel like a dirty girl.”

  “You're not a dirty girl,” I say. “You're just a sweaty girl.” Kelly laughs, a machine gun. I love making her laugh. Making a mental note to keep an eye on Doug, I grind against her again, like I'm marking my territory.

  Doug spies me and saunters over, grinning like he's in on a private joke, and it's a dirty one. He may dance like a spaz, but I've got to admi
t he's got the Danny Zuko strut down perfect. “Yo, Teen Angel, hands off Sandy; she's my girl,” he says, twirling Kelly around and dipping her. Then, chuckling at nothing in particular, he puts out his hand to give me five.

  I hate giving five. I want to say, “Listen, it's 1983, not 1968, we're white and we're always going to be white, and if you're going to hang around with us this summer then you have got to stop calling us by our character names offstage because it is so junior high.”

  But I don't. I give him the requested five instead.

  Wuss.

  I can't help it. After all these years of being tormented by guys just like Doug Grabowski, I can't believe that I'm the person he actually wants to impress: me, Edward Zanni, a Play Person. He asks me to watch him and Kelly do the combination one more time and I can see that just saying the word “combination” gives him a jolt, like he's in on some cool insider theater lingo. I think back to the day last year when Doug shocked the school and auditioned for the choir, a football player of all people, and how he asked me to help him read music, and how I eventually convinced him he had exactly the right tough-guy quality to play Danny Zuko. And now I look at him, attacking a dance routine with unashamed enthusiasm—not in that fakey testosterone-y way that jocks usually have—but in a way that's, I don't know, joyful, I guess, like he's lit from within. I watch him as he grins and laughs at his own mistakes and I realize that Paula is right. He loves every minute of this. He feels more alive here than he ever has.

  He's a Play Person.

  There are certain pristine moments in your life when your destiny is made absolutely clear to you, like when I was nine and sang “Where Is Love?” from Oliver! in a school talent show and knew in an instant that there was no place I'd rather be than onstage, or when I was fourteen and saw the movie Fame and realized it was my destiny to live in New York City and wear leg warmers. I watch Doug tripping over his feet and my mission becomes clear: it is my duty to transform this goofy, horny jock into a sensitive, cultured young man. I am to be the Henry Higgins to his Eliza Doolittle.

  When Kelly and Doug finish I ask them if they want to go into the city on Saturday to get twofers for A Chorus Line.

  “What're twofers?” Doug asks.

  The tutorial commences. “There's this booth in the middle of Times Square that sells half-price tickets to Broadway shows on the day of the show,” I say. “Two fer one, get it? You have gone into the city before, right?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Doug says. “Last St. Patrick's Day I went in with the team and, man, we got shitfaced, it was comical. Boonschoft passed out on the train with his mouth open and we stuck his ticket to his tongue.”

  Charming. “But you've never been to a Broadway show?”

  Doug strikes a military at-ease position to think. “I saw the Ice Capades at Madison Square Garden when I was a kid,” he says.

  “Doesn't count. So are we on for Saturday?”

  “Sure.”

  Just then I hear a voice behind me say, “What're we doing Saturday?”

  I turn, and there in front of me, or perhaps I should say below me, stands the diminutive and ubiquitous Nathan Nudelman, eager as always to insinuate himself into my plans with a determination that could only be described as viral.

  Shit.

  My dad only gave me one piece of advice when my mom left: “Kid, don't ever turn down a free meal.” Consequently, I've mooched dinners off of my friends since the sixth grade. That being said, Al decided we should definitely eat together at least one night a week and we have done so every Wednesday at Mamma's, a pizzeria in downtown Wallingford. Since we have absolutely nothing in common beyond genetics and our sorry shared history, Al also decided we should make these “business dinners” so he could teach me and my sister about business and use the expense as a tax write-off.

  I hate business. I'm an artist, not a businessman. I hate business and I hate Wednesday nights, and, as a result, I kind of hate my dad.

  Al is the chief financial officer for Wastecom, one of New Jersey's many treatment storage disposal facilities, or TSDs, which are not to be confused with STDs, an entirely different kind of health hazard. “Y'know, there's a lot of job security in toxic waste,” Al says.

  Al.

  I honestly don't know how I descended from this man. I take after my mother, which means not only am I a Free Spirit, but I, too, find it intolerable to be around Al Zanni. He's a nice enough guy, I suppose, in a crass New Jersey way, but there's no poetry in his soul. Al and I agree on exactly one thing: we both love Frank Sinatra. When you're from Hoboken it's practically a requirement. Forget Springsteen; as far as I'm concerned, Sinatra's the only native son of New Jersey who really counts.

  I stand outside Mamma's waiting for Al. Big, Spielberg-y storm clouds blow in fast from the east, while the late-afternoon sun shines low in the west, lighting the trees from below and casting them in high relief against the lavender-gray sky, like you see in 1940s MGM Technicolor musicals. I put on my new sunglasses to heighten the effect. The glasses have a sort of pinkish tint to them that bathes everything I see in a rosy glow, and I'm pleased with myself for buying something that doesn't necessarily make me look good to the world (they are a little faggy, I guess) but which makes the world look good to me instead.

  Al pulls up in his red Corvette convertible or, as I like to call it, his Midlife Crisis. He glances in the rearview mirror to check his hair, which looks like a toupee but isn't, then extracts his big, bearlike frame from the car and tosses the keys to the valet. Al's got a body like a linebacker gone to seed, which is exactly what he is, and which also explains why his runty, artistic son is a total mystery to him. Tonight he's got more cologne on than usual (if that's possible) and is wearing a short-sleeve silk shirt unbuttoned two, no wait, three buttons, exposing a pair of gold chains. With his golf slacks pulled up too high he looks like Elvis after he got fat.

  My older sister, Karen, is with him on account of her losing her license for a DWI. She sits slumped in the passenger seat, looking miserable or stoned (or, in all likelihood, both), her too-skinny frame bent like a boomerang. I push aside her sheepdog bangs and squint at her pupils while Al gives the valet a lesson in how to properly drive his Midlife Crisis.

  “You're high, aren't you?” I say to her.

  “Can you think of a better way to get through this meal?” she mumbles.

  “Faking your own death?”

  “Nah, I've totally got the munchies.”

  The front door of Mamma's swings open and Paula leans out, dressed in her black-and-white waitress uniform. Or I should say her version of a black-and-white waitress uniform. She's doctored the whole thing up with lace so that she looks more like a French maid, albeit a well-fed one. “Hello, Zannis!” she chirps with the enthusiasm of a game-show host. “I've saved you a table in my section.”

  “Paula! How are ya'?” Al says, spreading his arms in that gesture that Italian men think is friendly but Italian women know just means they're gonna get pinched. He pats me on the cheek as he passes, his usual greeting.

  “Hey, Mr. Z.” Paula leans her cheek out for him to kiss, but Al grabs her face in his hairy hands and kisses her on the lips instead.

  Ick.

  Then he says the same thing he always says to her: “You look like you've lost some weight.”

  “Really?” Paula says, flashing a molar-grinding smile. “I could have sworn I had it when I came in here.”

  “No, you are definitely losing weight. Eddie, ain't she losin' weight?”

  “Yeah, Pop, so are we while we stand here,” I say. “Can we go in?”

  “I tell you what,” he says, the sun reflecting off his Rolex as he wags a sausage finger in her face, “you keep away from the cannoli and you'll be a regular Sophia Loren.”

  Paula thanks him, her molars ground to a fine powder by now, I'm sure.

  Al puts his arm around her. “So, what are your plans for the fall?” he asks.

  Karen sits down on the sidewalk
.

  “I'm going to Juilliard, Mr. Z, remember?” She's only told him like a gazillion times. I'm jealous as hell she's going before I do, but I take her getting in as a good omen. After all, we're practically the same person.

  “Right, right,” Al says, “but waddya gonna do to fall back on?”

  I hate when people say that. It's like admitting defeat before you've even started.

  “Remember,” he says, “connections, that's what show business is all about, connections.” He turns to me and Karen like he's said something worth noting. Just because everybody watches actors on television and in the movies, they think that automatically makes them experts on show business. It's really annoying.

  “Can we go in now, Pop?” I say.