Reborn in the USA by Roger Bennett

Author:Roger Bennett [Bennett, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub

Chapter Seventeen

The Goers Go

The Bears’ world championship took place 3,779 miles away from me. I had not lifted a single finger to contribute to their success. Yet its accomplishment gave me a strut in my step that I very much needed.

By now, even the most introverted King David boys had hooked up with a girl and become “goers.”* That I had not created an intense self-awareness, a wound that pained me, not just at parties where everyone else but Jamie and me was copping off, but perpetually. The only time I had felt that so profoundly useless was when I was five or six and my parents forced me to go to a pool party even though I was the only kid who did not yet know how to swim. I spent an entire afternoon feeling a sense of inferiority and humiliation, marooned on a poolside bench alongside the birthday boy’s senile wheelchair-bound grandmother, who gargled involuntarily as we watched everyone else splash deliriously, spin diving and cannonballing with shrieks of delight. This same shame now plagued my waking life in the everyday.

The nadir was the Saturday night that Mike Nagel, the handsome paragon of virility of the King David crew, threw a house party. With his perfect bangs and well-stocked wardrobe, Mike was desirability personified. He had double cachet born of the fact that his elder brother briefly dated an it girl who ended up becoming a child bride of one of the Rolling Stones. Word also had it that Mike had recently been the recipient of a hand job from a university student at a fresher party, a rumor that, if true, radically escalated the stakes for all of us.

This breaking news made it a medical miracle Jamie and I were able to set out for this party in the first place, as we both were almost immobilized by both dread and hope. This sense was accentuated by just how far Mike’s house was from the nearest bus stop. The Nagels lived in a sprawling new housing development that had risen overnight on what had previously been a contaminated wasteland. The two of us stumbled in the darkness and damp around the unfamiliar labyrinth, squinting at the numbers on one identical house after another.

It took us an eternity to find the Nagel home. Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know” was throbbing through the closed curtains of the front room. We rang the bell. Mike Nagel himself answered but strangely decided to keep the door on the latch as he did so. Two girls, Laura Blumenthal and Stacey Silverberg, hung off his shoulders, trying to pull him back into the fray.

“What do you want, lads?” he purred in his smooth Irish brogue, which, as Mike Nagel was well aware, gave a new arrival an air of exotic sophistication in a city filled with rough Scouse accents.

“We’re here for the party,” Jamie ventured with a thin smile, attempting to evidence a confidence we did not feel.

“Can’t come in. This is a cop-off party,” Mike replied with devastating finality.

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