4. The Dummy

Most of them hadn’t seen each other all summer, and classes had just begun this morning, but by evening the boys at the Saint Ray house had already sunk into a state of aimless lassitude. First day or not, it was still that nadir in the weekly cycle of Dupont social life, Monday night.

From the front parlor came the sound of “quarters,” a drinking game in which the boys gathered around a table in a circle, more or less, each with a jumbo translucent plastic cup of beer before him. They bounced quarters on their edges and tried to make them hop into the other players’ cups. If you were successful, your opponent had to tilt his head back and the container up and chugalug all twenty ounces. There was also a cup out in the middle. If you bounced a quarter into that one, all your opponents had to drink up. Much manly whooping when a quarter bounced home or just missed. Needless to say, the tables, magnificent old pieces that had been here ever since this huge Palladian mansion was built before the First World War, were by now riddled with dents. It was hard to believe there were once Saint Rays rich enough and religious enough about the great fraternal chain of being to build such a place and buy such furniture, not merely for themselves—after all, their own Dupont days would be few—but for generations of Saint Rays to come.

From the terrace room came the music of a Swarm CD banging out of a pair of speakers that were fixed in place for parties. Everybody was beginning to get tired of Swarm’s so-called bang beat; nevertheless, Swarm was banging away tonight in the terrace room. Terrace room, front parlor, back parlor, dining room, entry gallery (cavernous), billiard room (ancient pool table, felt chewed up and stained because one evil night a bunch of blitzed brothers used it to play quarters), card bay, bar—the variety of rooms for entertaining on this one floor would probably never be built in a house again.

Here in the library a dozen or so of the boys were sprawled back on couches, easy chairs, armchairs, side chairs, window seats—most of them wearing khaki shorts and flip-flops, watching ESPN SportsCenter on a forty-inch flat-screen television set, drinking beer, needling each other, making wisecracks, and occasionally directing sentiments of awe or admiration toward the screen. About ten years ago a flood from a bathroom up above had ruined the library’s aged and random accumulation of books, and the once-elegant walnut shelves, which had the remains of fine Victorian moldings along all the edges, now held dead beer cans and empty pizza delivery boxes funky with the odor of cheese. The library’s one trove of mankind’s accumulated knowledge at this moment in history was the TV set.

“Ungghh!” went two or three boys simultaneously. Up on the screen a huge football linebacker named Bobo Bolker had just sacked a quarterback so hard that his body crumpled on the ground beneath Bobo like a football uniform full of bones. Bobo got up and pumped his enormous arms and shimmied his hips in a dance of domination.

“You know how much that fucking guy weighs?” said a boy with tousled blond hair, Vance by name, who was sitting back in an armchair on the base of his spine, holding a can of beer. “Three hundred and ten fucking pounds. And he can fucking move.”

“Those guys are half human and half fucking creatine,” said another boy, Julian, a real mesomorph—his short, thick arms and long, ponderous gut made him look like a wrestler—who had sunk so far back into a couch, he was able to balance a can of beer on his upper abdomen.

“Creatine?” said Vance. “They don’t take creatine anymore. Creatine’s a boutique drug. Now they take like gorilla testosterone and shit like that. Don’t give me that look, Julian. I’m not kidding. Fucking gorilla testosterone.”

“The fuck, they take gorilla testosterone,” said Julian. “How do they get it?”

“They buy it. It’s out there for sale on the drug market.” Vance had managed to make an entire statement without using the word fuck or any of its derivatives. The lull would be brief.

“Okay,” said Julian, “then answer me this. I don’t care if you’re the greatest fucking drug lord in the history of the world. Who the fuck’s gonna go out there in the jungle and harvest the fucking crop?”

Everybody broke up over that, and they immediately turned to a boy sitting in a big easy chair in the corner, as if to say, “But…do you think it’s funny, Hoyt?”

Hoyt was genuinely amused by Julian, but mainly he was aglow with the realization that this happened all the time now. The boys would crack a joke or make what was meant to be an interesting observation, particularly in the area of what was or wasn’t cool, and they’d all turn to him to see what Hoyt thought. It was an unconscious thing, which made it even greater proof that what he had hoped for, what he had predicted, had come to pass. Ever since word had spread about how he and Vance had demolished the big thug bodyguard on what boys in the Saint Ray house now referred to as the Night of the Skull Fuck, they had become legends in their own time.

So Hoyt laughed, by way of bestowing his blessing upon Julian, and knocked back another big gulp of beer.

“Holy shit,” said Boo McGuire, a roly-poly boy who had one leg slung over the arm of a couch and one elbow crooked behind his head, “I don’t care how big they are. If they’re taking gorilla testosterone, then they’ve all got balls the size of fucking BBs.”

And everybody broke up over that, since it was well known to habitués of SportsCenter that the downside to taking testosterone supplements to build muscle was that the body’s own testosterone factory shut down and the testicles atrophied. The room glanced at Hoyt again, to ratify the fact that Boo McGuire had indeed gotten off a funny line.

Just then Ivy Peters, a boy notable for how fat his hips were—and the way his black eyebrows ran together over his nose—appeared in the doorway and said, “Anybody got porn?” Sticking up in front of his chin was the sort of microphone one wears in order to use a hands-free cell phone.

This was not an unusual request. Many boys spoke openly about how they masturbated at least once every day, as if this were some sort of prudent maintenance of the psychosexual system. On the other hand, among the cooler members, Ivy Peters was regarded as one of the fraternity’s “mistakes.” They had been carried away by the fact that his father, Horton Peters, was CEO of Gordon Hanley, and a majority of Saint Rays with no particular aptitudes assumed they would become investment bankers, Hoyt among them. At first behind his back and now sometimes to his face, they had begun calling him Ivy Poison or Mr. Poison or I.P., which they made sure he knew didn’t stand for Ivy Peters. Hoyt’s own face went glum all of a sudden, as it often did when he saw I.P. these days…Gordon Hanley…to get hired by an i-bank like that these days you needed a transcript that shined like fucking gold…and his grades…He refused to think about them. That’s next June’s problem, and this was only September.

Vance was making an insouciant upward gesture for I.P.’s benefit. Barely even looking at him, he said, “Try the third floor. They got some one-hand magazines up there.”

“I’ve built up a tolerance to magazines,” said the mistake. “I need videos.”

Boo McGuire said, “What’s the microphone for, I.P.? So you can call your sister while you jack off?”

I.P ignored that. Julian got up off the couch and left the room.

Hoyt lazily knocked back some more beer and said, “Oh, f’r Chrissake, I.P., it’s ten o’clock at night. In another hour the cum dumpsters will start coming over here to spend the night. Right, Vance-man?” He gave Vance a mock leer of a look, then turned back to I.P. “And you’re looking for porn videos and a knuckle fuck.”