Getting Off Clean by Timothy Murphy

Author:Timothy Murphy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466886070
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Eight

The contest awards ceremony was tonight, the last Friday before Christmas. I had to put on a coat, tie, and loafers, and drive into Boston with my mother and father, Joani (looking sweet and uncharacteristic in a dress), and Phoebe (who said she wanted to come so she could hear how bad the second- and third-place speeches were). Grandma wanted to come, but my mother had to convince her she wasn’t up to the late night. I’d called Brenda at work earlier in the week asking her if she wanted to come, and she said she’d try to make it. Then, Thursday night, she called home and said she had been put on the schedule at the card shop for Friday night, at the last minute. I gave her the benefit of the doubt.

The ceremony was in some enormous room inside Faneuil Hall, complete with gilt and towering windows and marble floors, a colossal Christmas tree, pine boughs, and tiny lights everywhere for the holiday season. First, there were opening speeches: the editor-in-chief of the Globe, who talked about the power of the written word in such trying times; then WASP-y Philip Coe, who talked about the history of the contest and looked about as suave as ever in a red tartan jacket; then a thin, exceedingly jaded-seeming nun in a tailored suit, talking about the methadone clinic she ran in Roxbury and the meaning of the word “ministry” in the 1980s; then a rookie for the Celtics who had pulled himself out of the ghetto somewhere and up into the pros, talking about pride and dignity and self-reliance; he got a huge welcome from the audience (including my father, who seemed more excited than I could remember him being in a long time) and, when he was finished, a standing ovation in which Phoebe and I joined, although neither of us had ever heard of him before.

A jazz band played swing versions of Christmas songs after that, and they served a fancy dinner (something with chicken, which meant that Phoebe, being a vegetarian, ate only her vegetable medley). Then Philip Coe got up and announced that the top three winners would now read their essays, starting with third place. “This is it,” my mother whispered, beaming like my father, and Joani held my hand underneath the table. Even Phoebe seemed to be chomping nervously on her hair. I felt inside the breast pocket of my coat to make sure my typed copy of the essay was there.

The third-place winner was a skinny black kid with big, square-framed glasses who was leaving the tough neighborhood of Roslindale and going to M.I.T. on full scholarship next year, the oldest of nine fatherless kids and the first in his extended family to go on to college. What he cherished in America, he said in his speech, was that anyone, even a poor inner-city kid like him, could get a top-notch education and achieve success as long as they worked hard and stayed out of trouble.

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