Speech team, p.2
Speech Team, page 2
As for why we drifted: Maybe, implicitly, we were giving each other permission to cultivate another primary relationship, one that each of us had been lacking for a while. I hadn’t been the only one who’d floundered in my thirties; her entanglements had been not with substances but with cocky Jack and then sullen Julian—one nonstop shitshow of infidelity and screaming recrimination right after the other, each yielding her no lasting happiness except one of her two miraculous kids.
All of which is merely prelude to say that I was mildly surprised to see her show up one morning at the top of my text queue on my phone.
Tippy my love . . . very long time, no speak, I know. But did you hear about Pete Stroman?
Pete Stroman. I merely stared at the name for a moment, slightly dumbstruck, as though it were an asteroid flying in from the past. Let me tell you something: No crush will imprint itself on your hippocampus like your high-school crush, such that even seeing their name in print years later will make you catch your breath and recall a kind of beauty that has gone unrivaled by all the succeeding beauties. No Hollywood star, no Celtics or Patriots god, no muscled, Speedo-wearing deity of Provincetown or Fire Island, will ever compare, because your first flush of desire, amid the tender years where there is no clear line between the treble notes of infatuation and the bass notes of brute lust, will always be the sharpest and the sweetest.
Such were my feelings upon seeing Pete Stroman’s name. He was a small-town hick beauty with the most stick-straight hair and nose I’d ever seen, lips like Jim Morrison’s, six feet two inches of lithe cross-country superstardom, huge hands whose machinations on a guitar fretboard melted my closeted seventeen-year-old heart. No article of clothing that wasn’t ripped, frayed, faded, or overshrunk ever caressed his lean frame. A vision in three-quarter-sleeve baseball shirts that were billboards for the prog rock he adored, talked about in long, uninflected, unblinking monologues—Rush, Genesis, Yes, King Crimson. He was too cool and beautiful, too aloof and esoteric, to be bullied, but too weird, folded into himself, to be truly popular. He existed in a high-school genre netherworld, a hybrid of dreamboat and doofus, a heat-seeking missile into my heart. Even the fact that he participated in Speech Team, that apex of geekery, was a testament to his unpindownable mystique. I was searching for some Romantic ideal, some seeker out of the Whitman verse I was so besotted with, and in that football-, beer-, and Van Halen–obsessed New England middle town, he was as close as it got. So I privately worshipped him.
To pass him in an empty hallway was cause for palpitations. I’d have only a moment to arrange my face into some kind of sardonic rictus, to affect an indifferent sashay. Desperate for jocularity, I’d point at his Rush jersey and declare, with mock enthusiasm, “Tom Sawyer, man! Rad!”
Once, absorbing this, he gently but firmly pushed me up against a locker, his breath—intriguingly earthy, like sage—warm in my face. “You know what you are, Murray?” he asked.
“What am I, Stroman?” Could he hear my heart throbbing?
“You’re a fucking pundit. Do you know what a pundit is?”
His right hand was up against my left shoulder. I had to keep my bearings. “Of course I know what a pundit is. It’s a commentator. One who opines.” We were thick in the days of SAT tests, gaggle is to geese as pride is to lions, all those words that the average person needs in life about as badly as a real-estate agent needs calculus.
He sneered lightly. “I mean pundit in the original sense.” Then he released me, swaggered off, pulling his BVDs out from under a bunch-up below the top of his jeans. He did this so unselfconsciously, with such indifference, it only made me love him more.
Later that night on the phone with Nat, I asked, “Did he mean he thinks I’m an ancient Indian wise man? Like, India Indian, not Native American Indian. Because that’s actually what a pundit was. A pahn-dit, actually.”
“You should’ve just sucked face with him and gotten it over with,” she said. “You know you’re in love with him.”
We had this thing, Nat and I. Nat outright accused me of being gay and I protested extravagantly, even though she didn’t really think I was gay and of course I really wasn’t, even though she really did think I was gay, and in fact I really was. But that third layer down didn’t clarify itself until a few years later. Nat said she’d be gay for Janis Joplin, young Grace Slick, or Joan Armatrading on the cover of her To the Limit album, but I think she said that just to sound cool, because actually she was obsessed with male endowment. The few times she’d encountered such extreme giftedness, she’d recounted it to me with eyes popping wide, as though she were talking about a good mushroom trip, which she also enjoyed.
So when she said that, I answered “Shut up!” with ostentatious offendedness, and then we moved on to other things.
But on this late morning in 2012, when I glanced at my phone while sitting at my desk at work—inside an old retrofitted Providence mill overlooking the power station on the water, office space consumed by university-affiliated research centers and nonprofits with purposes too marginal, or futures too tenuous, to waste on actual campus real estate a mile away—the text from Nat, the first in a very long time, read just that: Did you hear about Pete Stroman?
I picked up my phone. No—what?
He killed himself.
I stared at those three words, blinked, stared again. My first reaction was puzzlement, disconnection. He may have preoccupied me in high school, but he wasn’t someone I’d thought much of in the ensuing twenty-five years save occasions, over drinks or a long car trip, when everyone is recounting stories of their high-school crushes. He’d not become one of the dozens of hometown people with whom I’d reestablished some shallow connection over Facebook; I never saw him there. Nor might I have seen him at our twenty-fifth reunion a few months prior. That was an affair I’d long told myself I’d only attend armored in blinding wealth and fame, and that certainly hadn’t worked out. The only other way I’d have shown up was as a caustic fly on the wall.
I’d heard through Nat and others that, after dropping out of Hampshire College, Pete had drifted up into Maine and Vermont and become a construction worker, or a restorationist, which made sense to me. He’d never married or had children, as far as I knew.
What? I texted Nat.
Call?
I did.
“Hi.” I drew out the hiiiiiiii that way you do with someone where it’s your first hi in a long time, the elongation conveying that fact.
And she slow-hi’d me back. “How have you been?” she asked.
“Steady,” I said. “I can’t complain. I mean, I can, but I won’t.” I stood at my desk and turned to look at the water and the power station, its three smokestacks vivid against a sky the hard blue enamel of early October. “What about you?”
“We’re really good! We’re harvesting lettuces. Isn’t that riveting?”
“Yummy. Salads!”
“Lots of salads! I miss you!”
“I miss you too,” I said, realizing abruptly that I sorely meant it. Just to hear her voice, those old ironic cadences, felt like coming home, in the best way.
“Let’s make a plan.”
“Totally.” We paused, and I continued, “So . . . what the fuck? That’s awful.”
“Right?”
“What—” I began, —do you know? I was going to finish, but it suddenly sounded so crass.
But Nat intuited it. “Did you see his Facebook post?”
“I thought he wasn’t on Facebook. I never saw him there.”
“I think he went on it to write this last thing.”
“I’m on my computer at work.”
“I’ll DM you the link. Hold on.”
In seconds, it popped up in my chatbox. I clicked. In the taxonomy of Facebook profiles, there is a subgenre one might call “I’m never here and I don’t give a fuck.” No profile photo, or a very outdated one, little to no biographical information, friends that don’t exceed the double digits, a few half-hearted reposts of articles about events that occurred four years ago. Such was Peter Stroman’s page.
“You have to scroll down through the posthumous tributes,” said Nat.
There were a good few dozen of them.
I will miss you, you beautiful man.
I’ll always think of you when I look at my back deck.
Uncle Peter, we love you so much!
We hope your [sic] in heaven now.
Strobaby, gonna miss you bad. I know life frustrated you. Hope you’re finally at peace.
That sort of thing.
And then I found it, which I reported to Nat before I read.
That’s it, folks, I’m out, it began. tired of trying to connect, tired of trying to find someone to love me and understand me, tired of trying so hard to “read faces” and make sure I respond the right way, tired of this fucking unequal oligarchy of a country (fuck you Wall St.), tired of this planet we’ve destroyed with our laziness and greed, tired of eeking [sic] out a living—just tired of it all. Don’t feel bad for me. Seriously. I’m relieved. Sending love and good vibes to everyone. And to Gary Gold, who told me I was a fucking drone robot, go fuck yourself. Seriously. You smelled like a wet dog, too, you fucking creep. Peace, everyone. See ya around. Pete.
I absorbed it, my eyes widening as I read. An image flew back to me, the first time in twenty-five years—Pete sitting alone in that dark hallway at Barnstable High School, his headphones on, impervious to my entreaties that he come back and join us at the little impromptu dance in the cafeteria.
“Fuck,” I finally said into the phone to Nat.
“I know, right? So tired of trying so hard to read faces, he wrote. Do you think he was—um—on the spectrum?”
I considered this. “That totally makes sense now.”
“All the fucking things we didn’t know in the eighties, right?”
“Right,” I echoed slowly. Then paused. “Oh, poor Pete Stroman.”
“I know. But—”
“I know,” I said, predicting her. “The Gary Gold part.”
“I know!” she exploded. “Do you really think he said that to Pete?”
“Would you be surprised?” My heart quickened and my brow flushed. “Wasn’t that just his delightfully unfiltered style?”
She was silent a moment. I realized my tone had quickly sharpened, unbidden. “Yeah, but—wow. That’s rough.”
“He did smell like a wet dog,” I added. “Gold. That damp overcoat.”
“Yeah,” Nat said uncertainly. “I don’t really remember. It’s a long time ago.”
We were both silent for several seconds.
“Do you know how he did it?” I finally asked.
“You didn’t read the obituary?”
I had scrolled right past it, it turned out, as I searched for his final post. “Oh, here it is,” I said, clicking it.
“He drowned himself in Lake Winnipesaukee. Off his family’s dock. I mean, it wasn’t their dock anymore. But he used it anyway.”
“Oh, man,” I said. “That is just too, like, A Separate Peace or something.”
“I thought, ‘It’s so New England Gothic.’ ”
“Totally!” We both cracked up, relieved to be laughing finally. This was the marrow of our friendship, going all the way back to prepubescence. Nothing was too sacred that we wouldn’t seize a pop culture reference to cheapen it with. It’s why people in high school called us Statler and Waldorf, after the two old men who sat in the balcony on The Muppet Show and shaded everyone. It was why I loved her—because we’d been outsiders together, looking in, taking everyone’s measure.
“Do you wanna get together this weekend?” I asked.
“We have to pick all weekend,” she moaned.
“I’ll help.”
“Seriously? Like when we used to work on Molaski’s farm together?”
“Totally.” We had indeed worked on a farm together one summer in high school—during which she cemented her love of the earth and all things that come out of it, and I, sunburned and devoured by bugs, had resolved never to work outdoors again.
“Then come up! Olivia and Otis are with me this weekend, too. They’ll be so excited when I tell them Uncle Tippy’s coming.”
“I can’t believe you let them call me that.” The day I left for college, I rechristened myself Thomas, my real name, and had been using it ever since. I can’t believe your childhood nickname was Tippy! friends in adulthood would shriek.
And I’d roll my eyes extravagantly and say, “Yes, that’s the name I was cursed with the first eighteen years of my life.” Nat was among the tiny handful of people outside my family I allowed to still use it, because to hear it was to immediately be thrown back into the state of being small, fey, unprotected: a turtle denuded of a shell—a sitting duck, a target.
* * *
I beat Marcus home that night, home to the two-bedroom top-floor unit of a Greek Revival in Fox Point we’d bought together a few years ago. Enough time remained for me to slather a chicken with olive oil, sea salt, cracked pepper, rosemary, and thyme, surround it on a cookie sheet with similarly dressed shallots and potatoes, then shove it in the oven. Then I poured a wineglass of Perrier while shedding work garb and donning shorts and a ratty old Bard T-shirt that I cherished as an artifact from a time when I was decadent but hadn’t yet totally debased myself. The wineglass of Perrier was what I turned to nearly every evening after work to still feel like a grown-up. If I really needed to feel sophisticated and soigné, I added a lime wedge.
Briefly bereft of something to do, I flipped open the laptop, returned to the Facebook page—hastily constructed, it seemed, to pen a digital goodbye letter to the world, a perfunctory attempt at explanation for one’s imminent absence. I scrolled and scrolled through the tributes—some of which, I noticed, were from high-school friends. I’ll miss you, Stromie, you were always an original, someone with the supremely blandly Massachusetts Irish name of Bill McGibbon had written, someone whose teen face I couldn’t even recollect and whose profile I didn’t bother clicking on. I didn’t need to see photos of him at a soccer tournament with his equally bland wife, some girl named Kerry or Casey, and their pink-faced, prematurely obese spawn.
A certain Jennifer M. had written: “This comes as very sad news. I still remember fondly my days on high-school Speech Team with Pete, all those early-morning bus trips practicing our entries, and I hope he is at peace now. Sending condolences to his loved ones.”
Gears in my head turned as I clicked into Jennifer M.’s profile. The lead photo was of a fashionably bespectacled Black woman, tight curls stylishly cropped and faintly dusted in silver, in a large, sweatshirted embrace with a Hispanic-looking man roughly her age and two handsome children, a boy and a girl. What appeared to be the beach houses of Wellfleet or Oak Bluffs rose up in the background.
“Fuck!” I whispered to myself.
Jennifer Douglas-Maldonado.
Lives: Montclair, NJ
Works at: Professor, American Studies, Rutgers University
Grew up: Mendhem, Massachusetts
Studied at: Yale University, BA; University of Michigan, MA, PhD
* * *
Jennifer Douglas! I’d heard, years ago, that she’d gone into academia, but I’d not kept up with her—in fact, not since that devastating fall freshman weekend many years ago in New Haven, which still mortified me to think about.
But now here she was! Looking so much more—relaxed? loose?—than I recollected her. Which I suddenly did, with a surprising pang. I recalled her brisk kindness and her tidily packaged intelligence and her game good humor, as though she were always waiting for someone else—like me—to make the naughty crack she would not permit herself, so she could then release herself in delicious laughter upon hearing it. On Speech Team, we’d always gently teased her for her too-perfect elocution; her near-uniform of pearls, Benetton sweaters, long skirts, white stockings, and sensible flats, straightened hair forever pulled back neatly with barrettes or with a headband; her prissy and charming way of responding to our vulgarities, with an “Oh, my!”—a hand raised to the clavicle, as though she were an Edith Wharton dowager. We never thought about what it must have been like for her being one of, if I remember correctly, three or four Black students and no more than a dozen students of color, nearly all of them Asian or Indian, in a high school of about twelve hundred. We’d say to one another, “Jennifer’s not really Black,” or “Jennifer acts whiter than I do!”
I remembered her intense devotion to Black literature, how she always had in hand a paperback of Toni Morrison or James Baldwin or Gwendolyn Brooks or Langston Hughes, often just for pleasure, how she’d sometimes put it down, spine up, when we approached, her hand lightly over the cover, as though she were embarrassed by it. It had never occurred to me that she was perhaps trying to hold on to her Blackness in a world where we denied her that merely because she defied our stereotypes of what a Black person should be, that perhaps she was dreaming of a future where she and other brainy Black people could discuss Black literature together free from the puzzled gaze of white people whose picture they didn’t fit into.
