The Secret of Life

Chapter 11:

Thursday, March 4, 1965 “Hey, Pig.”

“Say, Ace. Look at this.” Conrad was alone in his filthy room, looking at a piece of paper. He was a sophomore now. Last spring’s happy love seemed far away. “It’s a letter from Dean Potts.”

“ ‘Dear Conrad,’ ” Ace read aloud. “ ‘I received a copy of the bill from the house director concerning room damage in your suite in A section. The amount of damage astonishes me since it is the largest bill of this sort I have seen. I ca

“Oh, yeah. My ninety-three-dollar Target Master throwing knife. Three dollars for the knife and ninety for the damages. It was those holes in the plaster that really got them. They sent bills to my parents and to Platter’s parents.”

“What did Platter’s parents say?”

“They said, ‘Ron, that’s what happens when you get in with a bad crowd.’ You’re going to have to pay his half, Ace. You were the one who always threw the knife at the wall on purpose.”

“Let’s get drunk.”

“Age, wheels, and bread, Ace. We’ll need all three.”

“Florman’s always sells to you, Pig. And I stole Chuckie’s car keys.”

“Is it still lunchtime?”

“Yeah.”

“OK. We’ll swing by the dining hall and I’ll go through some purses.”

“You’re a man after my own heart, Pig.”

Conrad found six dollars in a purse in the coat racks. He felt bad stealing it, but he really needed to get drunk. Things were going very badly indeed. Audrey was unhappy, the Dean was incensed, and Conrad hadn’t been to classes in over a week.

“Ka-ka,” said Ace, squinting through the slush on the windshield of Chuckie’s car. “The world is ka-ka.”

“We’ll get twelve quarts,” said Conrad soothingly. “Twelve quarts of Ballantine. We’ll take them to your room, and then we’ll put them in our stomachs.”

“Good. Feel good.”

Conrad still roomed with Platter, but this year Ace was sharing a large suite with Chuckie Golem and Izzy Tuskman. Ace had his own bedroom, a nice big room with two windows. One window gave onto a fire escape, the other led out onto a peaked roof. It was a good place to drink. Conrad and Ace had spent most Saturdays there in the fall, drinking and being glad they weren’t at the football game. Recently they’d started drinking during the week as well. It was a constant struggle but somehow worth it. It was a way of being cool.

“What’s with you and Audrey?” Ace asked after they’d started their first quarts.

“It’s like Platter says: ‘The little woman is tired of playing second fiddle to Demon Rum.’ When I showed up drunk for supper yesterday, she told me she didn’t want to see me for a week.”

“Doesn’t she realize how lovable we are when we’re drunk?”

“Less and less people do, Ace.” Conrad sighed and rubbed his temples. He was more worried about losing Audrey than he cared to admit. “Let’s put onCast Your Fate to the Wind . I love that song. It’s like life. Touching gently and not getting through. Laughing drunk and breaking things. Walking quiet holding a girl’s hand and looking at the sky and knowing it’s all in the moment and—”

“Being happy and ruining it on purpose so you can start over.” Ace interrupted. “Jacking off in a used rubber by the roadside while your girl is waiting in the car. Isn’t this beer going to get cold?”

“You mean warm. Let’s put it in your bed.”

“OK.” Ace began bustling around, happy and excited. “These are the twins,” he said, tucking two quarts under his pillow. “And little Ricky sleeps over here.” He wedged a bottle down between the mattress and the wall. “The neighbor kids go here.” He put six quarts under the quilt in the middle of the bed. “And Celia has her own room.” The last bottle went down at the foot of the bed.

The afternoon waned on pleasantly. When Ace and Conrad got tired ofCast Your Fate to the Wind , they began listening toChuck Berry’s Greatest Hits . That was an album you could listen to for a long time. So that they wouldn’t have to keep getting up to piss, they started pissing in the empty quart bottles.

It kept you on your toes—not to pick up the wrong bottle—and you could compare input and output.

They started grooving.

Ace: “Dean Potts should be here.”

Pig: “So we could slit his throat.”

Ace: “And rig it like a junk OD.” Pig: “His twisted body on the tracks.”

Ace: “Blackmail snaps of homo love.”

Pig: “And books with Platter’s name.”

Ace: “They’d have a Quaker service.”

Pig: “And we could give a speech.”

Ace: “Nothing’s wrong with being square.”

Pig: “Sperm, alcohol, and death.”

Suddenly most of the beer was gone and Ace was turning ugly. He lurched across the room and punched out a windowpane. “You see that, Pig? No cuts.” Ace held up his white fist. “The thing is tojerk through

. No wimp hesitation.” He punched out another pane.

“Don’t go breaking all the windows, Ace. I don’t want to get in any more trouble this week.”

“Candy-ass. You joke about death, but you’re really scared shitless. Dig.” Ace opened the window and hopped out onto the roof. There was a thick crust of ice and snow out there. Face set in angry brooding, Ace began tightrope-walking backward along the roof’s slippery peak.

“Hey, come on, Ace,” said Conrad, leaning out the window. “Iknow you have more guts than me. Big deal,man .” The roof sloped down to a sheer fifty-foot drop on either side.

Ace made it out to the end of the roof, but then he took one step too many. He disappeared as suddenly as a duck in a shooting gallery. Conrad had been tensed for this. For the first time since the trestle, his power was back. He flew out the window, along the roof, and down to tumbling Ace, still fifteen feet above the ground. He got his arms around Ace’s chest, and with a feeling of digging into Nothingness, Conrad managed to brace himself and slow Ace’s deadly fall. They touched down on the ground without a jolt.

“Jesus, Conrad!”

“I can’t always do it. So don’t fall off the roof again, shithook.”

They went back to Ace’s room and worked on the beer some more.

“Does Audrey know?” Ace asked. He’d calmed down a lot in the last few minutes.

“I’ve tried telling her, but she doesn’t really believe me. Last spring I was going to show her I could fly—I jumped out of her window. But my body knew I could catch one of the wisteria vines, so the power didn’t cut in. I can only fly when it’s a matter of life and death.”

“You could jump off Clothier Tower. That’s like a two-hundred-foot sheer drop. Jump off at lunch hour!

All the girls will want to fuck you. I’ll help you screen the applications.” Ace paused to open the second-to-last quart. “You know, Conrad, in China, if you save someone’s life, that means you have to take care of them forever. Will you give me half the money you get from flying?” “What money? From who? I mean if the government gets wind of it, then they’ll just draft me and use me for a suicide spy mission. I could go in the circus and pretend to be an aerialist ... but who wants to be a freak for dumb hicks? Crime might be a possibility, if I could learn tocontrol my flying, but ...”

“Use it to invent antigravity,” suggested Ace. “That’d be big bucks for sure.” He pulled at his beer. “I can’t believe this really happened. Why shouldyou be able to fly, anyway?”

“Jesus was a great ethical teacher, Conrad, not just some derelict who knew how to fly.”

“Well, anyway. I mean if God—or the aliens—gave me this magic power, it must be that I’m supposed to do something important.”

“So how come you spend all your time getting drunk?”

“That’s part of it. I get drunk to see God, you know? When I’m drunk I feel like I know the secret of life. Know it in my body. The teachers here can’t tell me anything—they’re old and square. The answer isn’t so much a bunch of words as it is a way of feeling.”