Speech team, p.1
Speech Team, page 1
VIKING
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
penguinrandomhouse.com
Copyright © 2023 by Tim Murphy
Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint lyrics from “Children Will Listen” from Into the Woods. Words and music by Stephen Sondheim. © 1988 RILTING MUSIC, INC. All rights administered by WC MUSIC CORP. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Murphy, Timothy, 1969– author.
Title: Speech team: a novel / Tim Murphy.
Description: New York: Viking, [2023]
Identifiers: LCCN 2022037197 (print) | LCCN 2022037198 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593653845 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593653852 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3563.U76196 S64 2023 (print) | LCC PS3563.U76196 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23/eng/20220804
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022037197
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022037198
Cover design: Derek Thornton / Notch Design
Cover image: Ron Dale / Shutterstock
Designed by Amanda Dewey, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen
Illustrations by Nada Celsha
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
pid_prh_6.1_144430950_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
February 2013
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Acknowledgments
About the Author
_144430950_
To Ellie
Careful the spell you cast,
Not just on children
Sometimes the spell may last
Past what you can see
—Stephen Sondheim, “Children Will Listen,” Into the Woods
Mendhem High Gazette, Mendhem, Massachusetts, April 22, 1987
Mendhem High Speech Team Warriors Crush “Elite” Private School Rivals in State Finals
Story by Tip Murray ’87
Can we tawk?
To that inquiry, popularized by supremely mouthy and controversial comedienne Ms. Joan Rivers, the answer would be a resounding yes. The last weekend in March—and a frightfully frigid one at that—the silver-tongued minions of Mendhem High’s Speech Team, under the skillful tutelage of team coach and Honors English teacher Gary Gold, nabbed gold medals across several categories at the Massachusetts Speech and Debate Society Finals, held at tony, Tudor-style Truscott Academy on the elbow of Cape Cod.
Especially shocking was the fact that, in most categories, Team Mendhem placed higher than participants from so-called “elite,” and usually highest-scoring, private schools statewide including Truscott, the Barnes School in posh Wycham, St. George’s in rustic Minleyham and, most eyebrow-raising of all, Samuels Farm in horsey Blandford, longtime incubator of the nation’s presidents, professors and other cultural pooh-bahs.
Among the Mendhem gold wins were Hampshire College–bound Mr. Peter Stroman, in the original oratory category, for his quirkily uplifting cri de coeur “All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Rush” (the band); University of Massachusetts (Amherst)–bound Ms. Natalie Farb-Miola, in the children’s literature (fondly known as “kiddie lit”) category, for her artfully bilingual rendition of the Italian youth classic “La Tartaruga Pigra” (“The Lazy Turtle”); New York University–bound Anthony Malouf, in the debate category, for robustly arguing the “pro” side of the question “Is Stress Good for Eighties Teens?”; Yale University–bound Ms. Jennifer Douglas, in the oratory interpretation category, for her stirringly soulful reading of Sojourner Truth’s seminal “Ain’t I a Woman?”; and finally, this writer, Bard College–bound, in the poetic interpretation category, for his coolly exuberant delivery of selected sections from Walt Whitman’s iconic “Song of Myself.” (Note: News writers seldom, if ever, refer to themselves by name in their own copy.)
Asked to comment on his team’s landslide win, the team’s always (sometimes too?) candid Coach Gold enthused, “We showed that, with unstinting practice and shrewd guidance, students from your average Massachusetts public school can talk circles around the state’s top-ranked teams, bringing home a bevy of ribbons to grace MHS’ elegantly refurbished trophy cases in the main hallway.” (Note: Mr. Gold signed off on this quote, fashioned by this writer.)
As the Mendhem Speech Team winds down for the year, it looks eagerly toward the 1987–88 competition season, during which one is certain that Mr. Gold’s “straight-talk” approach will once again lead “the little team that could” to astounding statewide vindication.
Finally, before this writer decamps for the verdant expanses of the Hudson Valley, just north of the cultural hub that is New York City, he would like to express his unvarnished gratitude to his voluble confrères (note: in case you were wondering, foreign terms are often italicized) for the opportunities afforded him by participation on the speech team. The validation and affirmation that this writer could not find on Mendhem’s grassy playing fields, or amid its increasingly exclusive social circles (dominated as they are by the ubiquity of Ralph Lauren rugby shirts and frightfully oversized Benetton sweaters), was to be found in spades in the speech team’s spirit of exactitude and solidarity.
So, to reiterate the query that commenced this piece—that being, Can we talk?—it appears that, when it comes to the Mendhem High School Speech Team of academic year 1986–87, the riposte would be most robustly in the affirmative.
Photo caption: On the bus back from Truscott Academy, the Mendhem gabbers hold aloft their profusion of first-place ribbons. (Photo courtesy Mr. Gold)
FEBRUARY 2013
Sarasota, Florida
On the Ringling Bridge from Longboat Key to the mainland, on the way to find Gold’s house—Anthony driving the ridiculously massive Escalade he’d rented at the airport, Jennifer sitting up straight beside him in the passenger seat, Nat slouched beside me in the back, mute—I contemplated the numbing idiocy of Florida. It was a better train of thought than obsessing over what we were about to do. Additionally, it was impossible not to, watching the eternal unfurling of periwinkle sky, cyan water, green palm trees, white boxy homes. How could someone not be rendered utterly imbecilic in this land of relentless sun that bleached away critical thought, frictionless weather that made cynicism a moot point? Was this what you yearned for once you hit your sixties or seventies, to trade the cold and damp of New England, that inclemency that made you cranky and mean but also kept you skeptical and alert, for this mindless blank paradise? Apparently this was what Gold had wanted. No more damp and musty herringbone overcoats, no more ugly rain boots, no more exhaling that final plume from his Vantage cigarette into the frigid gunmetal air of a Reagan-era Saturday morning in January before flicking it into the slush and boarding the bus, his breath sour with carcinogens and his tongue front-loaded with corny competition-day aphorisms, soon to be bestowed on us as the bus groaned its way toward the highway.
“This is the most mind-numbingly monotonous landscape,” I said.
Anthony snorted a short, nervous laugh. “I’ll take it over New York right now.”
“Amen to that,” followed Jennifer.
I glanced at Nat beside me, rolled my eyes. I’d picked up on this dynamic the night before, this subtle alignment of Anthony and Jennifer against—or, at very least, in counterpoint to—Nat and me. It had class overtones, Anthony’s dazzling success and Jennifer’s quieter but still unambiguous good fortune lording itself subtly over my existence as a nonprofit communications drone in a second-tier city, over Nat’s near-poverty as a small-plot farmer.
Projection on my part or no, the cleft bonded me more closely to Nat. I wanted her to roll her eyes back at me, at least yield a faint conspiratorial smirk, but instead she just glanced at me, her eyes full of—terror? Was that what I was seeing? I took her hand. It was shaking.
“Are you okay?” I asked her quietly. (Not so quietly, though, that Jennifer, hearing, didn’t twist around in her seat with a look of concern, brow furrowed.)
Nat looked straight ahead. “I’m fine.” Only then she glanced at me. “I mean, I admit it, I’m nervous. But I’m fine.”
Jennifer put a hand on Nat’s knee. “I’m nervous, too,” she said. “It’s understandable, isn’t it? We’re doing something kind of weird.”
Nat, finally laughing briefly, nodded emphatically as though she were relieved and grateful that Jennifer had spelled it out. “It’s really weird.”
“And it’s justified.” It was Anthony, glancing at Nat in the rearview mirror. “But honey, if you wanna back out, there’s still time. You could just wait for us at a Starbucks or something.”
Nat didn’t answer right away, as though she were seriously considering the offer. But then: “No. I don’t want to back out.”
As soon as she said it, the tremble in her hand—still lodged in mine—intensified. I squeezed it.
And then Anthony was turning the Escalade off a shopping strip into a network of residential streets, an infinite middlebrow landscape of fairly modest white- or sand-colored single-level ranch homes, landscaping tidy if not lush.
Jennifer pointed at the GPS mounted to the dashboard. “Look,” she said. “He is now about nine hundred feet away.”
Anthony slowed to a crawl. “This should be it up here on the left,” he said. “Sixty-seven fifty-nine, fifty-seven, fifty-five, and here we go.”
We were crawling up on the opposite side of the street upon a butter-yellow ranch house, fairly indistinguishable from the rest, a well-tended lawn. First I saw the mailbox.
“Gold!” I exclaimed, reading the name stenciled there.
And then we saw him. Gold, 1987 with the addition of twenty-five years, sitting on the front steps with a mug of coffee at his side, that same tight crown of curls now entirely snowy white, peeking out from under a Red Sox cap. The body still slim but smaller-looking, slightly hunched, in a polo shirt, golf shorts, and flip-flops.
“Oh my God, it’s him,” Anthony said, hushed.
But Gold had barely had a moment to look up from his newspaper at us before Nat cried out, “Keep driving!”
We all twisted around toward her. “What?” Anthony asked.
She exploded in tears, her hands to her face. “Keep driving, please!”
“Anthony, drive on,” said Jennifer sternly.
“But—”
“Just drive on, Anthony.”
“Okay!”
Which he did, down the street, then a left, then a right, all of us silent while Nat cried and I rubbed her back, until we were back on the main commercial road and he pulled into the parking lot of a Denny’s.
“Sweetie,” I cooed to Nat. “Shh, it’s okay. It’s okay.”
“It’s totally okay,” Jennifer said, her hand on Nat’s knee again.
But, for me, it really wasn’t okay. Regardless of what had just snapped in Nat, I was quelling my own private panic. Was this how it was going to end? After all the coming back together, the sharing of notes, reliving that shame, the deliberations about whether this was the right thing to do, and exactly how to go about it—now we were reversing course?
I would not. If the others decided to bail, if I had to get out of the Escalade alone and walk back to Gold’s, I’d do so. I’d come to believe that I could shake loose something in myself if I confronted him, that some kind of peace or freedom lay on the other side of the reckoning. I had to go through with it. The GPS, still running, told us he was only a quarter mile away—it was, in fact, outlining in emphatic blue the route back to his house. It was time to be brave, I thought, a rare chance to avenge the mortifications of youth.
Avenge? No, no, I thought. This wasn’t vengeance. Far too base a word for such a long and considered journey. This was—reckoning! Truth and reconciliation! As Jennifer put it: Restorative justice! Noble ends, unmarred by something as petty, primal, and hurting as vengeance.
Okay. It may have been all those things, but there was a touch of vengeance in it, too. At least for me. I’d felt that the moment I’d seen Gold sitting on that stoop, older and smaller. He was—vulnerable.
Like we’d been.
One
OCTOBER 2012
I walked away from alcohol and cocaine five years ago. Walked away. That makes me sound like a staunch and resolute heroine at the end of a film, frightened but brave, doesn’t it? Anne Welles leaving Lyon Burke at the end of Valley of the Dolls by marching out of her own ancestral New England home and into the snow-blanketed woods—in a mink coat, of course, her bouffant flawless. (That’s an ending that always baffled and delighted me in its camp illogic. Who dumps someone by walking out of their own home, leaving them in it?) Or Jill Clayburgh in the final shots of An Unmarried Woman, closing the door on her lover, tempestuous artist Saul Kaplan, and signaling to us that she can survive in gritty 1970s New York City without a man by wielding that enormous expressionist canvas all by herself through the streets of Soho.
Those analogies not only make me feel somewhat like the glamorous person I’ve always wanted to be, but conveniently also frame my vices as external bad actors—alluring but seductive men who were coming after innocent old me—rather than as extensions of my own internal demons. And I like that. It’s always nicer to think that you were just fine—perfectly well-adjusted, going about your business—until you stumbled upon some shiny object, wide-eyed and curious like Snow White confronted by a preternaturally red apple, and consumed it like anybody else would. Who wants to admit they felt like a wreck inside and were looking to get wrecked on the outside?
Because that’s really what it was for me. But I still like to say I walked away from that affair with amber liquids and white powders, because it has that air of Hollywood denouement to it. And seeing my own life as not quite dully and inconsequentially mine but as something grander, more crafted—scripted, scored, and lit—has always been a huge coping mechanism for me.
So, what I meant to say: Ever since I walked away, I’ve prided myself on staying connected. I know that sounds like a Forsterian start to a story, and in full candor, yes, Howards End is one of my favorite novels, and, yes, I’ve taken its famous edict, “Only connect,” to heart. But the truth is, when I was using, I blew off so many people, including my own family and friends, that, these past five years, every time I promptly get back to someone, or—more to the point—reach out to someone to catch up, check in on them, see how they’re doing, I consider it a kind of living amends for all the brunch dates, birthday parties, friend-in-need crises, even weddings, that I missed back in those messy years of the late nineties and the aughts. If you saw Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, you may remember the scene where Mickey Rourke wakes up, after a long night of sex and drugs in a seedy roadhouse, and realizes that he’s slept through his date with the daughter he’s been desperately trying to rebuild a relationship with. That’s the kind of shame that makes you want to die right then and there, and I knew it intimately, over and over again, until I woke up like that on my bathroom floor one Tuesday in 2007 around two p.m., a few days after my thirty-seventh birthday, my wallet and phone gone and my last bit of rebel fight, something I’d nurtured fiercely since I was eleven, depleted.
I sobbed into the tiles for a good ten minutes, then crawled to the landline, called a friend who’d repeatedly offered to take me to an A.A. meeting, and begged him to do so. Once there, slumped in a folding chair, my head pounding, words and phrases I’d long despised—surrender, powerless, turn over your will—suddenly seemed like invitations to peace, an armistice of the soul. I became the very twelve-step foot soldier I’d long sneered at, and my relief was total.
And with the exception of a twenty-four-hour binge last year, toward the end of which Marcus was about to call the Providence cops to find me when I walked back into the house stinking of debauchery and shame, I would say that a daily formal practice of mindful humility has managed to help me live with gratitude for all I have rather than with simmering resentment for all I do not. I’ve always been an acerbic little bitch, mainly for survival reasons, so believe me when I say that gratitude’s not a philosophy that came to me easily, or that’s easily maintained.
I tell you all of this not to suggest I’m about to embark on yet another dreary once-was-lost-now-I’m-found narrative—haven’t we had enough of those?—but to say that, despite my reformed social habits of recent years, I’d fallen woefully out of touch with Nat, our much-revived friendship during my early days of sobriety having dwindled to the occasional call, then a random text here or there, then an occasional Facebook “like” or “Congrats!” then, for the entirety of Obama’s first term, basically nothing. I suppose our tapering off coincided with her having moved with her latest boyfriend from Connecticut to New Hampshire, where they rented new land and started a new farm, and my having gotten both a real job and a real boyfriend myself, the aforementioned virtuous Marcus. Prior to that, with me in Providence and her near Hartford, we’d see each other fairly often.
