Public Apology Read online

  My father tsked and got up slowly to turn off the TV. He shook his head as he came over to the bed, and there was both scolding and sympathy in his voice when he said, “I told you not to watch that.”

  It must be a weird thing to go on a trip with your son when he’s twelve.

  Along with my horror was great shame over the fact that I was so horrified. Shame for crying in front of my father. Chagrin at such immediate proof that I had been wrong and he had been right. And I could tell that he was mad at himself, too. His tone softened when he sat down next to me. “I should have turned it off myself,” he said.

  I was in a panic. The television images flashing in my head, everything spinning and high-pitched and hot. It was very much like a nightmare actually, but one for which I was awake. I felt my father’s hand on my back and pulled away and dug deeper under the covers.

  It took him a long time to calm me down. I had lost any sense of control. I bawled and bawled and bawled and rambled in a hyperventilated stream of what I’m sure was mostly gibberish. But I know a repeated assertion that I didn’t want to die was part of it. I don’t know whether I connected this sudden mortal fear to what had happened with the stranger on the cobblestone path that night; I don’t think I did. It’s easier to in hindsight. I imagine it occurred to my father, though. He put his hands on my shoulders and forcefully turned me to face him.

  “You don’t have to be afraid,” he said, looking in my eyes and not blinking. “I’m never going to let anything happen to you. Do you understand? As long as I’m here, I will never let anyone hurt you. You or Mom or Debby. Never.”

  The next day, in retaliation for my father’s protection and comfort when I was scared and crying and needing help, I sought even more distance from him on the sidewalks. In fact, when we went to the Louvre, I chose to stay outside in the topiary gardens while he and my grandparents went to look at the Mona Lisa. (The topiary was exquisitely manicured. Still, I now regret this decision, having never gotten back to the Louvre. I owe a separate apology to the museum’s curator, or perhaps all artists everywhere, for so cavalierly passing up the only opportunity in my life so far to see the most famous painting on the planet.) The Louvre, I whined, was yet another in a long string of museums we’d been going to. Looking back, I’m pretty sure I just wanted some time alone. You can understand. And I’d bet my father did, too. He was a psychologist.

  And then there we were at your bistro for lunch. A small place, six or seven other tables, most of them full. It was just me and my father at ours. I don’t know where my grandparents were. We ordered burgers. My father had been exclaiming about the food in Paris all week. I don’t remember appreciating it so much. I did like the cheese-and-butter sandwiches we’d make for breakfast every morning. And Orangina, I loved Orangina. Oh, and Nutella. Yum!

  The burgers you brought us were super tender and juicy. I had my father, who spoke a little bit of French, ask for ketchup. But following his lead, thinking it very cosmopolitan, very haute cuisine, I put mustard on mine, too.

  “This is delicious!” I told him after a few bites.

  “Yeah?” He smiled. “I’m glad you like it.”

  “This might be the best burger I’ve ever had in my life!”

  This time his smile was a little bit more to himself. “Good.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing. I’m glad you’re enjoying it.”

  “What?” I pressed.

  “Nothing,” he said. “It’s good, right?”

  I was halfway through my burger and had a bite half-chewed in my mouth.

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “You know what it’s made of?” he said.

  I stopped chewing.

  He told me. “It’s horse meat.”

  I thought he was kidding at first, but quickly realized he was not. It turns out the French don’t mind a little horse in their diet. I waited a moment and processed this new information and what I should do about it. Then loudly, exaggeratedly, I spit the food out of my mouth and onto my plate. Pthew! Pthew! Pthew!

  “No!” my father whispered, angry and disappointed. “Come on! We’re in a restaurant. Other people are here.”

  I wasn’t really that disgusted. And really, why should I have been? I’ve never had any special relationship with horses. I wasn’t a cowboy or a jockey. I’d ridden on a horse a handful of times—at fairs or farms or whatever. It wasn’t like I’d been tricked into eating a pet. My dad was just trying to expand my horizons. Taking an opportunity to show me the limits of American provincialism. And sure, having a naughty little parental laugh while he was at it. He didn’t think it would be such a big deal. But he’d underestimated my capacity for melodrama. The extent to which all of my behavior was beginning to be dictated by a notion of how I ought to be acting; how I might look to someone—someone like myself really in an out-of-body, mind’s-eye perspective—sitting in a movie theater watching my life unreel on the big screen. Or reading about it in a trashy rock star biography. Or seeing it on TV in a sitcom. If Jack Tripper, say, or the Fonz were told that they were eating an animal that they didn’t know they were eating, an animal that we didn’t generally eat in America, that’s what they would have done, coughed it up in a big, silly spit-take. That’s what I imagined, at least.

  I’m sorry if I caused a scene, or worse, cost you any business. Like I said, it had been a weird week. You want so badly to be cool when you’re twelve. But sitting in a restaurant booth across from my dad in a foreign city famous for its strip clubs, two days after sobbing myself to sleep in his arms, I had a lot yet to learn about being cool.

  Dear Peter Arbour,

  I’m sorry for insisting you worship my Jim Morrison poster.

  This was when we were in sixth grade. You and Ted Trainor were over one afternoon. We were sitting upstairs in my room, bored, wondering what to do. Maybe it was raining outside. We were best friends, the three of us. We’d been so for years, through Indian Guides and Cub Scouts and carving weapons out of the bamboo that grew by the river, and sharing our first cigarettes in the fort we’d made at the base of the big walnut tree in your yard. My dad used to call us “The Three Amigos.” And this was before that movie with Steve Martin and Chevy Chase and Martin Short.

  But we were changing, as twelve-year-old boys do, and growing apart, at least in some ways. You and Ted were continuing with Boy Scouts. (You’d go on to become an Eagle Scout, I think. God, that’s so much work, right?) I’d quit before making Tenderfoot. After the first campout, when we learned we were supposed to wash the higher-ranked Scouts’ dishes after meals, I knew it wasn’t for me. I was hanging out more with other friends, Chris Pack and Blair Bryan, and cultivating antisocial obsessions with Dungeons & Dragons and classic rock.

  I had a poster of Jim Morrison in my room, tacked to the slatted door of my closet. It was that famous picture: bare chested, bead necklace, arms extended, Jesus Christ pose. “An American Poet,” it said at the top. He was staring right at the camera, so the eyes seemed to follow you wherever you went. Chris and Blair and I attached a metaphysical significance to this and took to bowing our heads whenever we looked at it, intoning a reverential “Jiiiiiimmm” in order to ward off, I don’t know, evil lizard spirits or something. “Indians scattered on dawn’s highway, bleeding” and all. “Ghosts crowd the young child’s fragile, eggshell mind…” (They’ll do that, won’t they?)

  Understandably, when I explained the situation, that you’d entered the lair of a fervid geek cult, you and Ted refused to play along. I must have looked very weird, genuflecting before a poster of a dead rock star in my bedroom. You sneered. “He’s not god, you know,” I remember you saying. I insisted that yes, in fact, he was: those were the new house rules. You took a balled-up pair of socks that was lying on the floor and threw it to prove a point. You hit Jim right in the face, and it dented the paper there. Not a full rip, fixable with Scotch tape on the backside, but noticeable if you looked close. A moment later you and I were stan
ding up, nose to nose. I was cursing at you; you were telling me again that it was just a poster. My cheeks were hot, and I remember the disdain in the way you looked at me. I shoved you and told you to get out. You didn’t shove me back, and maybe that said more than anything else about where we’d found ourselves. We’d fought many times over the years. We’d had some of the most vicious fistfights I’ve ever had in my life. Remember the time on the dock at that boat club on the Navesink River where our parents were making us take sailing lessons? Must have been the summer before—remember how much we hated those lessons? It was disgustingly hot, and we were in foul moods, the both of us, and I was drinking from your water bottle without permission, and you told me to stop and I didn’t stop and you hit me (well, nudged me) with an oar, and then I did stop, and we traded punches until your glasses fell into the water. That ended the fight because we knew we would be getting in trouble, the both of us. Which we did.

  But that day at my house, you and Ted just left.

  A couple months later, I would fail Ms. Mawson’s English class for refusing to write my final paper. We were all supposed to write a biographical report on a person of our choosing. I’d chosen, of course, Jim Morrison. (I’d memorized and recited the lyrics to “Not to Touch the Earth” for an earlier assignment.) Like you, I’d been an A student up to that point. (Technically, I guess, we’d been O students, since for whatever reason, Little Silver Schools chose Outstanding to represent the highest mark on our report cards, first grade through fifth.) But after reading No One Here Gets Out Alive as source material for the paper on Jim Morrison, I decided that the truest way to honor my subject was to not write anything at all.

  “Jim wouldn’t do homework,” I told my dad, who grounded me for two weeks. In a strange way, I savored the punishment. I felt that not doing what I was supposed to be doing was exactly what I was supposed to be doing.

  Adolescent rebellion is natural and healthy. Blind idol worship is not. You were right to throw those socks. Besides, as great a rock star as Jim Morrison might have been, his poetry sucked.

  Dear Wendy Metzger,

  I’m sorry for singing the last verse of “Stairway to Heaven” into your ear while we were slow dancing.

  We were in the Markham Place gym, getting toward the end of our first official school dance. I hadn’t danced with anyone up to the moment you approached me. I was a dork, you’ll remember. I had braces and a big pouf of red hair and wore flood-ready jeans and the exact same type of off-white baseball T-shirt with three-quarter-length navy-blue sleeves every day. (I had six of them.) And a gray Members Only jacket, much like the ones worn by my dork friends Jeff Cadman, Peter Arbour, and Chris Bruno. I’d spent most of that evening standing in a tight circle with those guys, air guitaring to “Beat It” and “White Wedding.” Thank god it was dark in that gym.

  We all stole glances at Mark McCarthy making out with Suzie Lambert—right there in front of everyone, right in the middle of the floor. Mark was in our grade, but Suzie Lambert was an eighth grader, a very pretty and developed one. Mark’s eyes were closed, but I’m sure he knew everyone was watching him. I wondered what he must have been thinking, how much like a champion he must have felt. It was like looking at a taller, different, cooler species of human. How must someone’s brain have worked to allow for something like that to happen?

  I’m sure my friends tittered when you walked up and tapped me on the shoulder. But you seemed way more confident than any of us did. You smiled when you asked me to dance, hamming up a Sadie Hawkins–style formality. I’m sure I made some joke for my friends’ benefit, but I was very happy to say yes, happy to be the one walking away with a girl.

  I don’t know what song we danced to first. “Little Red Corvette”? Probably not; I doubt I could have made it through the part about having a pocketful of “Trojans, some of them used” in that situation. “Every Breath You Take” was it? Or “Faithfully”? I know it was a slow song, because I was acutely aware of how close our pelvises were, and I was having a very hard time figuring how high or low on your back my hands should go. You talked to me nicely—we were getting to be friends in Mrs. Gill’s science class—and by the end of the song, I was comfortable enough to ask you to dance again.

  The lights blinked on for a moment, last call, and then the gentle notes started up and the flute, as familiar to me as my own name. I knew I was in trouble. It was “Stairway to Heaven,” the live version from The Song Remains The Same album. I loved this song. I loved Led Zeppelin and was regularly thrown into spasms of unabashed ecstasy at the sound of their music. As far as I was concerned, “Stairway to Heaven” was the greatest song ever written, the single greatest piece of art ever created, the pinnacle of human cultural achievement. How would I keep my composure?

  Not so well, as it turned out.

  I did all right at the start, holding you closer than I had before. “This is an awesome song,” I whispered. Surely you agreed. Everyone knew it. The music teacher, Mrs. Bloomberg, let us sing it in music class.

  But as considerate as it was of the DJ to play it as the last song because it was ten minutes and fifteen seconds long (we would come to learn that it was played as the last song at each and every school dance), “Stairway to Heaven” is a terrible song to dance to. It gathers in tempo and heaviness as it goes along, and you don’t know how to keep swaying, locked in an awkward twelve-year-old embrace, through the changes. (Mark and Suzie weren’t having any difficulty, I noticed. They weren’t even swaying really. And both Mark’s hands were on her butt.)

  A little after the halfway point, when the drums had kicked in, I was fingering imaginary double-neck guitar riffs on your dress. Softly enough, I hoped, that you wouldn’t feel them. But you probably did anyway. “The piper’s calling you to join him,” Robert Plant sang, and a couple of minutes later, by the end of Jimmy Page’s solo, the song in full stomp, I was helpless. I knew I was going to sing the last verse. It wasn’t quite an uncontrollable urge. Almost. But it also had to do with holding on to what was my strongest sense of identity at that point. I was a Zeppelin fan. A rocker, even if only in my mind. I always sang along with this song. Usually in a full-throated scream, drowned out by the speakers in my room. It felt like I’d be breaking some kind of promise to myself if I didn’t sing the words I knew by heart.

  So, unlucky you, out they came. “And as we wind on down the road…” Had my voice changed yet? I don’t remember. But I’m guessing whatever adenoidal falsetto I mustered up didn’t sound quite as polished as Robert Plant’s professional pipes. It must have seemed very strange. Did you wonder if I was singing to you, like a serenade? Or whether there might be something wrong with me? Or with most boys our age? Perhaps you were impressed? That I knew all the lyrics? Or you thought how attractively uninhibited I was for singing along when the spirit struck me? That’s hard to imagine, knowing how I felt back then, and how I felt like I looked, and how much I thought about that. I could never have come off as uninhibited. More likely, you were just confused. I would have been if I were you. I was confused and I was me.

  Jesus, thinking back, what a performance it must have been! All the way to the end. That last line is so comically melodramatic in hindsight, stretching buying and stairway into three-syllable words. Sorry again. You must have been relieved when it was over.

  A part of me was relieved, too. But another part of me would have stayed there dancing with you all night. Your hair smelled like shampoo.

  Dear Australian Lady Guitarist Who Was a Counselor at Hidden Valley Camp, Summer 1984,

  Sorry I never learned to play Neil Young’s “Old Man” on guitar.

  If there was one thing I hoped to do when I went to sleepaway camp, it was learn how to play the guitar. At the start of the summer, I’d gone to Jack’s Music Shoppe and picked out a bunch of concert T-shirts—Pink Floyd, Rush, the Scorpions, Def Leppard—to wear with the OP shorts I’d bought with my mom at the mall. (Jack’s, in Red Bank, New Jersey, would later become sort
of famous, as the movie director Kevin Smith, who’d also grown up nearby, would have Ben Affleck’s character live in an apartment directly above it in Chasing Amy. I spent hours and hours and hours there as a kid.) I hoped to present a new, cooler version of myself at camp. Camp’s good for that. You can be anybody.

  It worked almost immediately. The day I arrived at camp, after the lonely, nervous, eight-hour bus ride up to Freedom, Maine, and the boring welcome speech from the camp director, and not knowing who to stand next to for the opening-day group photo, which was taken with a special type of camera that rolled on a dolly so it was important that you stand absolutely still for an excruciatingly long time or you’d make a blur and mess up the whole thing for all the other two hundred people who were standing still along with you, the first friendly exchange I had was with one of the counselors assigned to my cabin, an English guy with a faint blond mustache—Andrew, I think his name was; do you remember him?—who complimented me on the shirt I was wearing. It was the Scorpions one, which had three-quarter-length sleeves and the picture from the cover to their Blackout album, which had come out in 1982.

  “Cool shirt,” he said as I was unpacking my duffel bag into my cubby. (This is funny to think about if you know what the cover of the Blackout album looks like. It’s a picture of a guy screaming because he has forks stuck into his eyes. The Scorpions are a heavy metal band from Germany.)

  “You like the Scorps?” I said. (I’d heard a radio DJ once talk about how all real Scorpions fans called the band the Scorps. Like you’d never hear anybody say, “The Scorpions rule!” It was always, “Scorps rule!” I henceforth referred to them only as the Scorps.)

  “Yeah, they’re all right,” he said. “Good band.”

  “They rule,” I said, suppressing the urge to qualify the statement by explaining how the Scorpions ruled slightly more than Golden Earring or Saga or Krokus in my estimation, but slightly less than Rush or the Who or Zeppelin. Also suppressing a smile because I had braces. And I was trying to be cool. But still, it was a big moment for me. Andrew must have been eighteen or nineteen or even twenty.