Cheerful Money by Tad Friend

Author:Tad Friend [Friend, Tad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Biography & Autobiography, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯), BIO000000
ISBN: 9780316071444
Publisher: Little, Brown
Published: 2009-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

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SPORTS WERE the Shipley boys’ vehicle for advancement. David Hunt, an intense and meticulous young man who rubbed his forehead wearily when problems arose, was our leader. I was only the first of several decent athletes who followed him over from Swarthmore, and by junior year we formed a doughty corps. We had a good soccer team, cocaptained by David and me, and an excellent tennis team. After we beat Episcopal in tennis, 3 to 2, we swarmed the courts like Visigoths, feeling that we ought now be permitted to carry off their women (their women being our women).

By midway through junior year, we were going to parties at Pam Borthwick’s. Her parents’ pool house embodied the Main Line as it was in 1978, rather than in Ralph Lauren’s ads: a party cocoon with kelly green shag carpeting, a teak bar, orange Naugahyde cushions, orange-and-rust-striped wallpaper, and picture windows that steamed up from everyone smoking and draining beer balls — round mini-kegs — and dancing to the Doobie Brothers and the Grateful Dead and Meat Loaf’s teen-sex anthem, “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” or really just yelling along and believing that we, too, were glowing like the metal on the edge of a knife. (Somehow disco, the actually danceable music of the period, failed to penetrate the Main Line’s green hedges.) Later, we’d flop into the pool, using the empty beer balls as floaties to keep from drowning.

Pam, a funny, scornful girl just outside the inner circle, was doing exactly what we were: asserting her claim. Once she and I became coeditors of the school paper, she stopped calling me Grasshopper — a dig at my skinny frame — and began calling me Taddeus. Then she wrote in the Beacon that at the recent mixer, “most of the Haverford and Episcopal studs refused to dance, although they did do a good job of holding up the gym walls. If it hadn’t been for the Shipley guys, who were uninhibited enough to get out there and show up the other guys, things would never have started cooking.”

We finally had a stereotype: uninhibited. Of course, the only boy it really fit was Rob Nikpour, whose family had fled Iran with the fall of the shah. Rob was a nineteen-year-old rake with a sparse, pungent English vocabulary, his default expression being “Boy, how did you get so fucked up?” At his attic parties we’d down whiskey shots and put on Nick Gilder’s “Hot Child in the City” for some vital truths:

Danger, in the shape of something wild

Stranger, dressed in black, she’s a hungry child.

Leaving one of Rob’s parties to drive a Shipley boarder home, I backed my parents’ station wagon right through his hedge. Danger, in the shape of a Chevy Impala. Then she and I made out until we passed out. There was still the split between girls you could get somewhere with — the boarders and outliers — and the Main Line set, most of whom preserved their virginity for college.

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