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  Dad gives the starter a few more tugs. He comes as close as he’s capable to cussing, managing a “sheee-oot.”

  Mom yells out the garage door, interrupting our exercise in futility with the news that she’s put on a second pot of coffee.

  “Sounds good to me.” Dad pushes the mower back into the garage.

  I nod. “Don’t have to ask me twice.”

  My father looks at me. I look at him. We exchange wordless smiles. I enjoy Dad’s company more than I’m willing to admit.

  Chapter Two

  My family is sorta semi-nomadic. When I was born, we lived in an apartment on the south side of Indianapolis off Thompson Road. It shared a parking lot with a Red Lobster. Our next door neighbor, Uncle Angelo, was a fat, bald guy with black-rimmed glasses and a salt-and-pepper mustache. He tended bar at the Milano Inn but moonlighted as the Fitzpatrick family’s guardian angel. When someone broke into our apartment when Dad was out of town, Mom grabbed me and went straight to Uncle Angelo’s place.

  “Debbie, you-anna-uh-Hank stay here with-uh-yur Aunt-uh-Pat,” he said with his thick Italian brogue. He went over to our place in full crime-stopping gear—white ribbed tank top, stained boxer shorts, loaded rifle on his hip. Uncle Angelo’s wife’s name was Pasqualina, or “Aunt Pat” to everyone who knew her. She fed me my first solid food—pasta in marinara sauce.

  After the place on Thompson, we moved a couple miles south to Southport, an incorporated town inside Indianapolis that got the South part of its name because it’s on the far Southside of Indy and the port part of its name apparently because the town’s founders had a perverse sense of irony about having a port in the middle of a waterless stretch of farmland. Our backyard overlooked the playground at St. Ambrose, the Catholic parish my family attended for most of the first ten years of my life. My sister, Jeanine, was born when I was three years old. Mom wrapped our piss-yellow, velvety living room couch in white sheets for Jeanine’s first formal photo shoot. She was too fat to smile.

  After I turned four, we moved outside the city. Claiming it was “an unbelievable opportunity,” Dad took a sales job with a Chrysler dealership in Kokomo. Mom had to pull up the olive-green shag carpet in our two-bedroom ranch because the floors smelled like cat urine, while Dad found out the deal he got on our house had less to do with his negotiating skills and more to do with the previous owner hanging herself in the garage.

  There was a large gray gas tower crowned by red-and-white checkers that served as Mom’s primary guidepost when she drove around Kokomo. She spent most of her day at the mall with me and Jeanine in lieu of fraternizing with our neighbors who had cigarettes permanently attached to their lips and drank Budweiser for breakfast. Mom was so depressed she started taking belly dancing lessons. It would be the only time in my mother’s life she would feel inclined to do anything that could be interpreted as exercise, so essentially we should have been on suicide watch.

  On some afternoons, Mom would take me to see Dad at the dealership. Dad showed me off to the wrinkled suits and grease monkeys, who I thought were the coolest bunch of guys I’d ever met. But mostly I stayed at home and did my best to stay out of the way of my mom’s misery. My favorite thing to do was skip rocks across the creek running through our backyard, at least until a mosquito bit Grandma Eleanor and she almost died from encephalitis. We fled Dad’s “unbelievable opportunity” after less than six months. As we were driving out of town for the last time, Dad thought Jeanine and I were sleeping when he pointed to his rearview mirror and said to Mom, “Hey, Debbie, did you know Kokomo pronounced backward is oh muh cock?”

  After Kokomo, Dad got a job selling Mercedes while his family sought refuge in a newer neighborhood back in Southport just off Meridian Street called Clematis Gardens. No matter how many times Mom pointed out “clematis” was a flower and not a sexually transmitted disease, Dad still snickered at the name.

  The summer after my sixth birthday, we moved into an old farmhouse north of County Line Road, during which time I attended St. Ambrose through all of elementary school. St. Ambrose had separate girls’ and boys’ monkey bars on opposite sides of the playground. The boys would “launch” periodic attacks into the girls’ monkey bars, pretending with our outstretched arms and fake propeller noises to be fighter planes as we weaved in and out of the biting and scratching flurry of plaid skirts and white oxfords.

  In the first grade, I fell in love with Kimberly Thompson after she rescued me, bloodied and torn, following a kamikaze dive into the girls’ monkey bars. As a token of my devotion, I stole a silver tin of consecrated hosts from the church sacristy for Kimberly. Stealing the body of Christ for love—where does a guy go from there to impress the ladies?

  Kimberly refused my gift. She always did the right thing, except for the time she swallowed aspirin when she had chicken pox and died of Reye’s syndrome. Mom made me wear my First Communion suit to Kimberly’s funeral. It was navy-blue polyester wrapped around a butterfly-collared shirt of powder blue. I remember standing at the funeral and Mom whispering to me that Kimberly would have thought I was handsome. I remember thinking her casket was too small and that I hated my haircut.

  We moved to Louisville, Kentucky, the summer before my fifth-grade year. Dad felt bad about moving out of state, what with his mother, Grandma Eleanor, getting sick and all. But the financial security afforded him as general manager of a BMW franchise in northern Kentucky was too good to pass up.

  Our new house stood on a wooded hilltop just off Highway 42. Uncle Mitch and Aunt Ophelia drove down from Indianapolis to help us unpack. Uncle Mitch was not my real uncle, but Dad was an only child and Mitchell Hass had been Dad’s best friend since they were kids. A month after I was born, Mom and Dad asked Mitch to be my godfather, so calling him “Uncle” became an afterthought. Three years after that, they extended the same courtesy to his wife, “Aunt” Ophelia, after Jeanine was born.

  Our first night in the house, there was a thunderstorm that knocked out our power. Dad went down into the basement to check the fuse box. He left me alone with Uncle Mitch in my bedroom. It wasn’t the first time or the last time Dad left me alone with him, and it wasn’t the first or last time Uncle Mitch took advantage of the situation. My godfather handed me his beer and moved next to me on my bed. He winked at me and said, “Our little secret, Hank.” It was my first beer. It tasted awful, but I kept the beer on my lips and drank the whole thing. I stared at the ceiling while Uncle Mitch put his hands down the front of my underwear. He liked touching me. A godfather’s love measured by the length of his godson’s erection.

  Our little secret, Hank.

  Dad cried when he told us the news. The owner of the BMW franchise fired Dad because his employees preferred Dad’s leadership to that of the guy signing their checks—plus Dad busted said owner for having drinks with his mistress. Dad was rewarded a nice severance package from a judge who agreed Dad’s former boss was a complete asshole. It was the second time I ever saw my father cry. The other time was when Grandma Eleanor died. Our Pentecostal cleaning lady, Charlotte Fayne, sang “The Old Rugged Cross” at the funeral. Charlotte wore her hair and skirts long because the Devil had a place reserved in hell for shorthaired women who wore pants.

  We moved from Louisville back to the south side of Indianapolis—Greenwood this time, a town that’s of course more grey colored and relatively devoid of trees. Dad took a job as a stockbroker for Paine Webber, commuting back and forth to downtown Indy. He worked sixteen hour days in a three by five cubicle doing a job that a monkey flipping a coin could perform with equal competence. Dad’s new career came and went in a span of less than two years.

  Those two years were much kinder to me. In addition to being the home of the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Greenwood staked its claim to a Chinese restaurant with the state’s largest indoor Koi pond and a Catholic school with the state’s largest pool of pubescent hormones. My seventh and eighth grade
years at Our Lady of Perpetual Help were what I classify as my awkward, albeit enriching, years. Faced with the prospect of fading into adolescent obscurity, I compensated better than most for bad acne and twenty extra pounds. I quit football and became a wrestler, a sport my singlet-wearing fat ass inexplicably peddled into a higher-than-deserved social status. My sly sense of humor disarmed my peers and teachers into thinking I was harmless, and thanks to a couple years of cotillion, I could pull out dance moves that embarrassed the guys and enflamed the girls.

  After a three-month flirtation with an eighth grade volleyball player during which I was crowned King of All Seventh Graders, I became drawn to Twyla Levine, a tall, brunette vixen who sat next to me in Mr. Marker’s seventh grade class. On an overnight field trip to St. Louis, Twyla and I made out during a game of spin the bottle. Later, on the bus ride home to Greenwood, I put my hand up Twyla’s skirt and managed to fiddle with the elastic on her panties. Someone witnessed the panties episode, so by the time we got back to Greenwood, Twyla had given me a hand job while I fingered her in the back of the bus. None of this was true, but over the years, as the story followed me and took on a life of its own, I never tried very hard to deny the rumors. Years later, I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles I lost my virginity in the back of that bus. True or not, you have to admit the image of a thirteen-year-old stumbling around a bus looking for a place to stick his dick has a humorously scandalous quality to it.

  The truth was Twyla did give me an orgasm. After I got back from St. Louis I locked myself in the bathroom with Twyla—or at least, Twyla’s seventh grade class picture cut out of my yearbook and taped to the body of 1984 Playboy Playmate of the Year, Barbara Edwards. Twyla’s ambitions were “To fulfill my dream as a promising artist and actress and to contribute my share of help to the starving children of the world.” Her turn-ons were “Being a Sigma Chi sister of USC, drawing, traveling, and attending musicals.”

  Even though I was a Notre Dame fan, I let the USC comment slide. Anything for Twyla.

  In the wake of Dad’s stock broker experiment, a couple investors whose portfolios quite miraculously quadrupled on his watch set up my father as president of his own car dealership. We moved, again, putting down what turned out to be permanent roots in Empire Ridge, a mill town about halfway to Cincinnati. We said our driveway goodbyes to our Greenwood neighbors, a brand-new Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser station wagon hunched low over the tires with the weight of a couple more years of memories. I mailed a goodbye letter to Twyla, outing myself as the town pervert with the affecting words, “How about you take a picture of yourself naked and send it to me?” And in the fall of 1985, with the “Fitzpatrick Olds-Cadillac-Subaru” marquee hoisted and lit and my family settling down after our eighth move in twelve years, I enrolled as a freshman at Empire Ridge Public High School.

  It’s been more than two infant-free years since Dad reversed his sterility. Much like his failed attempts to cajole disinterested sperm cells in the general direction of my mother’s worn-out uterus, I’m still finding my stride in Empire Ridge. I grew ten inches without gaining a pound, my complexion cleared up, and I carry one hundred and seventy pounds of taut muscle over a five foot ten inch frame. Student council, the wrestling team, Catholic youth group—everything to me is an opportunity for initiation. And there is no faster road to acceptance in a sleepy Indiana town than getting drunk, something I try to do as much as possible.

  I hold the shot of Jim Beam to the light. Its amber glow is the color of hope—my hope it will somehow magically disappear without having to touch my lips. A goofy-looking guy sits next to me. He’s skinny, skinnier than me at least, and maybe a half inch taller, with a round face and a head sprouting random cowlicks rather than curls.

  “Drink it, you fucking pussy,” he says.

  “Hatch,” I reply, “shut the fuck up.”

  Elias Hatcher has been my best friend since I met him at freshman orientation. Hatch is your typical child of divorce. His mother is a recovering hippie who now raises free-range ostriches somewhere in Oklahoma, his father a Vietnam vet turned semipro sport fisherman who’s spent the better part of the eighties chain smoking clove cigarettes and crawling out from the bottom of a liquor bottle. Hatch’s every move, at least in public when he has an audience, is a premeditated, loud, and more often than not obnoxious attempt to draw attention to himself. He is overly protective and sentimental toward his closest friends to the point of making you feel uncomfortable. Stick Jimmy Buffett’s “A Pirate Looks at Forty” in the tape deck, and Hatch is hugging you while bawling his eyes out—guaranteed. If you’re unwilling to commit any impulsive act—shotgun six beers in a row, jump off high bridges into shallow water, or drop everything and take a road trip because you’ve snagged some warm Natty Light with your fake ID and need an excuse to drink it—Hatch invokes the word “pals” and you have no say in the matter.

  Like tonight.

  “We’ve almost downed this entire half gallon.” I hold up the nearly empty bottle of Jim Beam save for an inch of bourbon—the remains of a sobriety lost hours earlier. “How about we take a break?”

  “Pals, Fitzy.” Hatch grabs the half gallon from me. He finishes it, drinking it straight from the bottle. “Bring it!”

  “Come on, Hatch.”

  “Pals!”

  “But I can’t feel my legs.”

  “Pals!”

  “Ah, fuck it.” I open my mouth and raise the shot glass to my lips. I throw the warm brown liquid down the back of my throat, doing whatever I can to prevent the harsh, woody bite of cheap whiskey from gagging me. I slam the empty shot glass down.

  “That’s what I’m talking about!” Hatch offers me a large cup of Mountain Dew. “Chaser?”

  I nod, grabbing the cup. I drink the lemony soda until it runs out the sides of my mouth and down my face.

  Last weekend Hatch and I got kicked out of the big hockey matchup versus Prep. Half-cocked on a bottle of Jägermeister we split before the game, we started taking liberties with the last names of the Prep players. By the middle of the third period, Mrs. Pocock tired of the demonstrative harassment of her son and had us removed.

  Founded as Whiskeyville by a couple drunken Scotch-Irish trappers in the eighteenth century, Empire Ridge was renamed in the nineteen-twenties in honor of the large quarry just outside of town that supplied every inch of limestone to the Empire State Building’s exterior. Empire Ridge Preparatory Academy and Empire Ridge Public High School, or simply “Prep” and “The Ridge,” are separated by a mere three and a half miles.

  If the stereotypes are to be believed—and given that I have neither the time nor inclination to get to know most people beyond their subjectively imposed stereotypes—Prep is a bastion of entitled fucksticks. The school’s coffers are lined by old money trust funds and new money CEOs who buy their “Prepsters” Beamers on their sixteenth birthdays. Meanwhile we “Ridgies” aspire to little more than attending the next pig roast, slugging pure grain alcohol, and shouting as racecars make left turns for three hours. Excepting the fact I have my own personal automobile pipeline courtesy of Dad, most of us Ridgies drive fifteen-year-old cars inherited from an older sibling—Camaros, Firebirds, Dodge Royal Monacos, and trucks. Lots and lots of trucks.

  After the hockey game, we were eating our way to sobriety at the McDonald’s down the street when two Prep girls, one a petite brown-haired girl named Carrie, the other a taller brunette named Mary, introduced themselves. They were new in town, their fathers both engineers who’d transferred in from the East Coast. After a half hour of dedicated flirting on both sides, Mary invited us to her house that following Saturday on Gotham Lake, punctuating her invitation with four very unfortunate words: “Bring whoever you want.”

  Hatch has procured a new half-gallon of Beam. He pours himself another shot. “Some party,” he says.

  I wipe the traces of Mountain Dew from my mouth. “Yeah.” />
  By my rough calculations, “Bring whoever you want” has translated into two hundred and fifty people since the party started. Hatch and I sit at a table on the second floor balcony overlooking the carnage. Every potted plant is dumped out on the floor, creating a carpet of peace lilies, rubber trees, philodendrons, and potting soil. There are zero exposed surfaces. Wine cooler bottles line the fireplace, cigarette butts floating in every third or fourth bottle. A case or so of shot-gunned beer cans are piled high in the kitchen sink, and multiple decks of playing cards are crawling amongst the refuse.

  I’ve been drinking off and on since we got here this morning, some eight hours ago. I’m wearing nothing but a towel. Someone bet me twenty bucks to walk out to the middle of Gotham Lake, which is half-frozen at best. Formed by two limestone quarries adjacent to Empire Quarry that were later connected and flooded, Gotham Lake is shaped like a horseshoe. The bet was to walk out to the middle of the widest part of the lake, which is in the middle of the right curve of the horseshoe. I won the bet, but I lost my clothes, plunging chest-deep into the horseshoe just as I was nearly back to shore.

  Steve Miller Band’s Greatest Hits 1974–1978 starts up on the back deck of the house, replacing Fore! by Huey Lewis and the News, which inexcusably made the playlist. “Swingtown” is a few chords old before someone skips to “Jungle Love.” The techno introduction echoes across Gotham Lake. Hatch and I simultaneously mimic the whistle with our fingers in our mouths, transitioning to dueling air guitars, and then dueling air drums. Aside from us both flubbing the second line and saying “you thought you’d been lonely before” instead of “you thought you had known me before,” we sound pretty good.