In
Loco Parentis
by Lee Klein
I
would like to see him gone. It’s in the
name. The real thing. The solid jaw. The continuous
stream of mail-ordered clothing. The exclusive vacations.
The ease with which he maintains mediocre grades.
The girlfriends with exotic first-names, with last
names same as oil companies, same as the ones across
my mom’s coffee maker.
My parents aren’t from around here,
they grew up in and around Newark. They followed opportunity
fifty miles west after the riots twenty years ago.
I go to the School because I was raised here. Just
on the otherside of the School’s black gates.
I read my first word off the stop sign at the end
of a wooded street near the athletic fields. Walked
my now dead collie with my father. Fished for turtles
and caught tadpoles in the golf pond after elementary
school. On weekends, I’d play tackle football
on the campus with sons of the teachers. I always
figured one day I would go to the School, an OK student
and a better athlete. When time came to apply, I was
accepted. I have a history with the place that dates
back as long as I’ve been alive. But I have never
been to the Cape or the Vineyard or the Outer Banks.
I’ve been to Belmar and Seaside Heights and Beach
Haven.
When I arrive at age 13, I wear a jean
jacket. I chew my collars. My hair’s parted down
the middle. I think exclusively of Jim Morrison. I
hollow my cheeks and wear headphones. I mouth “Celebration
of the Lizard” through the School’s halls.
Although the School is part of me, I am not yet part
of the School. Names like Colin Garrison Noble of
Chappaqua, NY, they step on the campus and 175 years
of tradition rises to meet them. They are handsome
and genuinely kind. They play soccer, hockey, and
lacrosse at an elevated level. They could be varsity-quality
football, basketball, and baseball players, but these
are not the sports they play.
When I first arrived at the School,
the headmaster joked that I was all the way from a
development that’s a three-minute bike ride away.
I have since lost the jean jacket, put away the headphones.
I now look more like one of them, in flannels and
corduroys, with hair still a little longer than most.
My bangs perpetually burned and in my eyes just enough
so I can hide when I need to. Colin’s hair is
cropped short and his skin is extraordinarily smooth.
I am suspected, but I cannot be caught because I spend
most of my time off-campus. Colin was caught cheating
on a French test in third form. Since then he’s
been a model citizen. No one suspects him.
Make your enemies your friends and feed
them to the lions.
But since Colin is no one’s enemy,
there’s no difficulty making him my friend. We
have been together at the School since first form.
We’ve had many of the same classes together,
mutual friends, attended several off-campus parties
together. If we are making our way to the dining hall
for lunch, one of us will speed ahead to catch the
other. We’ll arrange a plan to meet. After lunch
I’ll spend consultation period driving off-campus
to buy a few bags from a friend instead of getting
the Pre-Calculus help I need. After our last-period
Art & Literature class, with the attractive and
enthusiastic 25-year-old teacher who soars if you
mention Faulkner (even if you’ve never read a
word of him), Colin and I go back to his room on the
third floor of a turreted dorm. The campus seems caught
in ice when seen through the window glass that’s
been settling for over a hundred years. I put some
music on his stereo. Colin grabs a few towels stolen
from the gym. He removes a panel from the wall of
his closet. We enter Inner.
All of the School’s buildings were
built in the late 1800s. All the ceilings slant and
the hallways twist. All these structural irregularities
form negative spaces behind the walls. We remove and
then replace a panel in Colin’s wall, crawl a
few yards through a narrow shaft to an angularly roofed
room. A den scrawled with initials and dates, some
going back to the 1930s. Although the School’s
administration must have known about it, since so
many of those teaching attended as few as ten years
ago, they’ve tolerated it, forgot about it. The
School had changed so much, they thought. What was
going on in Inner had nothing to do with their parietal
duties. They sealed off the panels to Inner each summer.
Never checked mid-term to see if they were reopened.
It was part of the tradition, sealing the panels after
the spring term. There’s more to tradition than
hazing and longstanding rivalries.
Angular walls. A small window giving
out on tall pines and the School’s tennis courts.
A bare mattress. A vanilla-scented candle. Two small
speakers rigged to Colin’s stereo. We lean on
initials carved in the wall. I show him what I’ve
got. He reimburses me. We drape a towel over the panel
to his room. We roll another towel as tightly as possible,
fasten it with a rubberband. We hit the bowl, trapping
the smoke best we can under a guitar pick. We direct
a stream of smoke into the towel, leaving brown-stained
lip prints. We return the paraphernalia to a cutaway
in the floor someone made long ago. Take turns with
the Visine and the breath freshener. Then we race
on bikes to the field house for practice.
The idea came to me when we were at
a party one weekend, off campus at a day student’s
house. Colin and I and a few others were hitting a
bong in the garage. We were passing around the two-foot
Graffix with the weighted bottom. Alma, my girlfriend,
was there. She was hitting it too. Getting awkward
and laughing at the funny things Colin managed to
say as everyone got rowdier and more drunken and out-of-control.
I was quiet, recognizing something I could use to
my advantage if I needed it.
At the time, in the fall of our fifth-form
year, I discovered a recipe for euphoria. I drank
four shots of bourbon. Then smoked a well-packed bowl.
Then chased another four shots with Coca-Cola. I would
find a couch. All the hairs on my body standing on
edge. I’d get juicy mouthed and switch to water.
If I diluted the first wave of intoxication with water,
I could handle what I’d just done to myself.
The night would go on. I would stay standing until
eleven or so when whoever’s parents returned
and we’d all be long gone. After we cleaned and
disappeared, I always had a safe harbor, quietly returning
home and slipping off my shoes, making it up the stairs
in the dark, getting in bed, listening to my walkman,
falling asleep. Or I would stay up and write poems
about how people mistook Mercedes Benz symbols for
peace signs. Sometimes my mom would be awake, my father
always asleep. Out of the darkness I’d hear her
ask for a kiss goodnight. I’d have to pass her
scratch-and-sniff test. I’d admit to a few cigarettes.
No more than two beers.
When I’d wake up after noon my
mother would say she could still smell the alcohol
on my breath. I’d be fine though. My parents
had no experience with this sort of thing. They weren’t
from here. I got everything done and almost excelled.
Monday morning I would hear that the boarders I drank
with on Saturday night were busted by their housemasters
who weren’t as lenient as my mother. Two beers
and a cigarette meant a five-day suspension. If it
was your second suspension, you’d face a disciplinary
committee that was quick to expel unless they thought
you needed counseling.
Sometimes I would pick up people from
school who were waiting for the bus to the next town.
I’d pull over. Tell them I’d be parked behind
the hardware store if they didn’t feel like waiting
for the bus. Alma was waiting alone and accepted my
offer. We wound up smoking a bowl in a parking garage.
Wandering around the University’s Art Museum.
She was from New Orleans. Beautiful. In third form.
Hadn’t had an opportunity to meet many fifth
formers. She was into paintings and my mother painted.
She’d dragged me to the museum a hundred times
so I could be like that’s Van Gogh, that’s
Frank Stella, that’s Warhol. Alma liked that
I knew these things. Afterwards she’d sneak off
campus and I’d drive us as far away as I could,
up the Delaware River to the Water Gap, or to Philadelphia,
or New York, or the shore. Wherever we wanted to go.
I learned about where I was with her. Stopping the
car. Making out in weird rural parking lots. Getting
high whenever we felt like it.
I was busy when baseball season started.
Almost never around campus after school on weekdays.
Alma told me that she’d been seeing a lot of
Colin after dinner, in the library or walking around
the campus. I’d be at home, studying, reading,
getting high and playing guitar with a friend. We’d
try to talk around nine. She’d call. We’d
talk. Things would get quiet and awkward. She’d
tell me how Colin was taking friends (but not me)
down to Cancun for the three-week Spring break. How
she was thinking about going. Cancun was so close
to New Orleans, just across the Gulf. I told her—not
what I wanted to tell her—that everything’s
cool, Colin’s my friend, if you want to be with
him that’s cool. Everything’s cool. No one
owns anyone. You should do what you feel is right.
She would tell me she feels right with me but really
special with Colin. He’s part of everything.
She said she loved being with me too, removing herself
from the School with me, heading to the Village or
wherever we’d go. Returning, making fun of all
the shit. She didn’t know, she just didn’t
know.
I told her that I was really more a
part of the school than Colin or anyone. I’d
been catching motherfucking turtles and tadpoles at
the pond since I was little. I’d been in town
17 years as opposed to Colin’s four. I could
take her to places in the woods he would never know
about. I could take her to an underground fort I dug
with friends years before. A hundred things happened
there before she even thought of coming here.
That summer I would not be on the Vineyard
or any of that. My dad spent the summer reading on
the back porch, enjoying some leisure and the yard
and the open space he earned. My mother at her studio,
painting abstractions. If my parents went anywhere
it was to Spain or Turkey or Greece or Rome or Egypt,
not the Cape, not the Vineyard, not Vail, never again
to anywhere like Cancun. I told her I’d been
to Cancun the summer before my first year at the School.
You don’t want to go there. It’s bullshit.
All hotels. They put sliced hot dogs on pizza, nothing
worthwhile. The whole time there I had Montezuma’s
Revenge, watched the Chicago Cubs on cable until the
afternoon storms knocked the power out. She stopped
calling me. Colin was avoiding me. People were telling
me they were seen together. I said I already knew
things I didn’t. I said everything’s cool.
Part of living in the town and being
a day student as opposed to living on campus is that
all of the friends you grew up with haven’t gone
anywhere. You keep in touch with some. You live a
double life. They treat you differently as a guy from
the School. You change a little. Become more friendly
than you ever were. Speak with more authority than
you ever had. You become a little more socially graced,
a little more like Colin.
A few weeks after Spring Break a friend’s
parents were taking the weekend to go to a bed and
breakfast, a fuck-and-sleep, my friend said his parents
called it. I’d known this guy all my life. He
was a virtuoso on piano, violin, cello, guitar, and
drums. But he couldn’t read well enough to get
into the School. He never even applied. The School
wasn’t for musicians. It was for scholar-athletes,
or so they liked to say. I walked the fifty yards
between my house and his. I saw that he’d lit
a neon beer lamp in his bedroom window. A few cars
were parked out front. The sun setting. One of the
first warm nights of the year. We’d spend time
outside on the back porch. Bring guitars. Pass around
bombers. It’d all go as planned.
I invited Alma and Colin to come. Several
weeks had passed since she made the change. She went
to Cancun and came back tan, as they all did. They
all stood out from everyone who stayed up North. I’d
actually gone to Florida with the baseball team for
a week. I even had some sun on my arms and cheeks
but nothing deep enough to last more than a few days
at the end of March. They spent the whole three weeks
at a hotel owned by Colin’s uncle, partying and
getting into madness, renting VW bugs, tooling around
the Yucatan. Colin told me about some of it, never
mentioning Alma, who had already told me about some
of it, never once dropping Colin’s name. She
seemed older, like she’d pushed a few years into
maturity. Once she got high I could tell there was
something she wanted to tell me. But she couldn’t
tell it at all. She had to keep up appearances, maintain
casual conversation. It seemed like she had just figured
out how one goes about not saying what needs to be
said. She learned how to act like an alumnus long
before she graduated, even if Colin never fucked her.
It was easy. Alma and Colin and I passed
around a bottle of bourbon. Some guitars were played.
I played a little. Colin played a little. Alma watched
it all. She seemed to think all was fine. People really
didn’t own one another. I’d watch her watching
Colin as he sang “Feelin’ Alright”
or whatever song. Something had happened between the
two of them. It was not my role to force myself between
them and try to interrupt the natural pairing off.
They will fail each other. Colin will graduate and
go to Hobart. She will have two more years left. There
will be new post-graduate lacrosse stars to show around
the School. She and Colin can’t have much more
than a few months left. Maybe they’ll meet up
in the summer for a few romps at the Vineyard or wherever
the fuck. If I were with her maybe I’d have gone
to her parents’ place at the Vineyard. I’d
get to see it’s really nothing but trash. Not
much different than anything else.
I offer them slugs off the bourbon,
and it’s warm outside, smoking a joint, just
the three of us, and it’s really warm and beautiful,
stars, the leaves are breaking out of the trees, it
hasn’t rained for a few days, everyone’s
rolling around the backyard. Then I think we should
wander off on our own. I’ll take them to the
woods on campus, there’s a fort we built a few
summers ago that’s so cool this time of year,
when the ground’s fresh and you can really smell
the earth again. There’s enough of a moon, we
won’t need flashlights, so let’s go.
They agree, hesitantly at first. Then
they were probably thinking I’ll show them a
place where they can do whatever, whenever: be alone.
I brought them together. I’ll show them where
they can scrape the dregs of their relationship.
We all sneak onto the campus using a
service-entrance side road. Quickly ducking into the
woods where the trails start, heading towards the
abandoned ropes course. There had once been zip wires
though the trees you could ride to the ground after
overcoming vertigo and testing your balance. But a
summer thunderstorm brought the whole thing down last
year.
I was with an old friend who had helped
me build the fort, who that night would be my lover.
The fort we could find without a moon. We built it
one summer for lack of anything better to do. We smuggled
shovels out to the woods. Dug a foundation with a
roof of earth above. There was a trap door that you’d
open and lower yourself down. We’d bricked the
walls and the floor. Laid down tiling. Had some lawn
furniture and a lantern. The stoner students who found
it named it Mystic.
We lit the lantern. Left the hatch open.
Fresh air was cutting into the fort. We could breathe.
Exhale smoke. Colin and Alma started kissing. I started
with my lover. We pulled ourselves out of the fort
for privacy. We were beneath the moon. Colin and Alma
underground. I could bury them. Shut it all tight
on them. Lock it. They’d be trapped there.
Instead my lover and I just left, took
what we had and headed off-campus. No one spotted
us. We both went back to our places, where our parents
were asleep. My mom didn’t wake up for a scratch
and sniff. I fell asleep just as it started to rain.
The administration knows that I am probably
to blame for what happened, but they can’t catch
me. My parents watch over me fine.
