That night at dinner, I couldn’t look my parents in the face, absolutely certain they would realize something was different about me and interrogate me about what had happened in the few hours since breakfast when the old man had threatened violence if I kept flicking Alpha-Bits at my sister. I promised God I would never, ever, do anything like that again if He let me get away with this. And when He did, I climbed the stairs to Mr. Wright and Mr. Sax’s bedroom the very next afternoon and every day up to the evening they came home.

Mr. Sax was delighted to find Miss Hellman healthy and happy and insisted I accept a ten-dollar tip on the twenty he had promised. August turned to September and then it was fall, Mr. Wright and Mr. Sax still watching me from the veranda every Saturday until the weather turned cold and the lawnmower went into hibernation for the winter. One thing changed, though, after they came back from their holiday. I started taking off my shirt, my adolescent chest glistening with sweat, compensation of a sort, or maybe bribery, for the stolen contraband hidden in a small footlocker stashed in the corner of my bedroom closet. If they ever missed their copy of Sailor Tails they never said anything.

This used to be a hell of a lot easier. And a hell of a lot more fun. I suppose I’m too distracted to really concentrate on imagining the big, big movie star riding my cock, shouting filthy names at me, ordering me to slap his ass as he bounces on my pole. Then again, lately I’ve been too distracted to concentrate when an actual live body is riding my cock, shouting filthy names at me, ordering me to slap his ass as he bounces on my pole. Fuck it, why not just read a good book, I decide, turning the pages of Bang the Drum Slowly until I drift off to sleep.

Homecoming

It’s either this dump or the comfy linoleum of the Knoxville Regional Airport. One bounce on the bed makes me regret not spending the night on the terminal floor. I was damned lucky to get this sarcophagus. Every other room in town was booked a year in advance for homecoming weekend.

This was supposed to be a day trip. I flew in at nine. The manager of the emporium of Official, Authorized University of Tennessee Merchandise was emphatic. She would not, could not, make any decisions without the architect from Facilities who had been stricken by the flu that morning. I tried to persuade her she could at least look at the catalogue, let me take a few measurements.

“No, sorry,” she said, perspiring in her Official, Authorized University of Tennessee Sweatshirt, size XXX-Large. “Facilities is very strict about these things. It will have to wait until he’s back on his feet.”

I would have sliced the fat bitch’s brake cables if I’d known which car in the lot was hers. Now I’m stuck overnight in this backwater, on the hook for the cost of the counseling session I’d had to cancel with less than twenty-four hours’ notice, all on account of a five-minute sales call. It’s a beautiful autumn night, crisp and cool, the oaken hint of bonfires lingering in the air. It’s hard to believe that only a few hundred miles away, raging thunderstorms have halted all air traffic into the Charlotte airport, stranding weary road warriors who just want to spend Friday night in their own beds. I don’t have a bed to call my own so it’s hard to call this a hardship. It’s almost a blessing, in fact. When I called my mother with my traveler’s tale of woe, she worried about me getting a flight tomorrow. Randy T. Olsson and his (third? fourth?) wife would be so disappointed if I couldn’t make it to dinner Saturday night. He’s been asking after you since you came home from High Point, she said, a harmless little white lie. Don’t worry, I said, I’ll be there, nearly dropping to my knees to beg Jupiter Pluvius to take mercy on me and summon a hurricane gale to spare me from an evening of forced small talk with Randy T, who, as the president of Nocera Heat and Air, had been receptive to the gentle suggestion by the sole shareholder, my mother, that perhaps I might appreciate becoming reacquainted with old friends my own age.

A scavenger hunt for essentials-toothbrush and paste, disposable razor, personal lubricant-takes me deep into the heart of Knoxville, probably the most improbable candidate ever for the site of a World’s Fair. The town is teeming with alumni of all ages, drunkenly toasting Alma Mater and imploring the gods of the gridiron to deliver victory tomorrow. Not that it will really matter if the justification for excessive alcohol intake is celebrating a triumph or mourning a defeat.

I’m sitting at the bar of one those classic campus rath-skellers, eating a hamburger and nursing a beer. A short woman, just shy of middle age and sporting a cascade of blond ringlets she should have cut years ago, sidles next to me.

“You shouldn’t be here all alone tonight. Come over and meet mah friends.”

She’s a type I know all too well. The aging Party-Hearty Gal. Tri Delt, everyone else has. She’s surrendered to her metabolism and forsaken calorie counts. She has to believe there’s at least one man out there who’s looking for a girl with a sense of humor and a head on her shoulders instead of a stick-thin, broomstick-up-her-ass debutante. She’d made sure there was no ring on my finger before she’d approached.

“Class?” she asks.

“I’m not an alumnus,” I say.

“That’s okay, tonight everyone’s a Volunteer!” she says.

I might as well be a gentleman and help her caddy the drinks she’s ordered to her table. Her friends eye me expectantly as we approach. I realize it’s been a setup, sending Little Gloria Bunker up to the bar, all alone. The men stand and shake my hand. The women nod politely, squeezing their chairs together, clearing a space next to Little Gloria.

Andy, Andy, Andy, Andy Nocera, Andy, I repeat as I’m introduced round the table. I take my assigned seat, next to Little Gloria. They whisper among themselves, talking about me, giggling when they realize I know I’m the topic of conversation. They’ve been drinking since five; they’re all a little toasted. The men make crude remarks; the women act offended. Someone belches and everyone pretends to be disgusted. I feel like I’m back in college. I guess that’s what a homecoming is all about.

I got to the party a semester too late. The dormitory alliances and rivalries had been etched in stone when I arrived at Davidson after the Christmas break. The other freshmen had already overcome their bouts of homesickness and laid the foundations of their new world. No one was particularly interested in a newcomer, particularly one who was shy by nature, unsure of himself, not the type to approach a table and introduce himself, a coward who would never make the first move.

So I would find a seat alone, at the far end of the dining room table, and hunker down over a plate of macaroni and cheese and a pint of milk, pretending to be absorbed in the run-on sentences of William Faulkner while I counted the minutes until Friday afternoon when I could run home to Gastonia for the weekend. Later she would admit she’d had her eye on me since the day I’d arrived and that she never got beyond the first thirty pages of the copy of The Sound and the Fury she’d bought as an excuse to strike up a conversation with me that February night. (Valentine’s Day, if memory serves.) And later still, she would admit she knew from that first night I was what she had been looking for.

A boy who had to be approached, who wouldn’t speak until spoken to.

And who would then never shut up.

Alice Atkinson McDermott arrived at Davidson College with one ambition. To be different. Just being here was the first step. She’d made her stand, insisting on matriculating at this small, well-regarded liberal arts college-a spawning ground for communists and sexual libertines, in her father’s certain estimation-instead of the small Catholic women’s colleges her older sisters had been forced to attend. As formidable as those Amazons were, they, unlike her, hadn’t had the good fortune to be born the youngest, the prettiest, and the favorite. And so her father, infamous among television-addicted insomniacs in both Carolinas as the King of Unpainted Furniture, finally conceded. On one condition. That Alice promised to attend Mass and take Holy Communion every Sunday. By the middle of Lent, I was attending with her.