Put On Your Big Boy Pants

Tahiti Dreams, Part V

Scott turned to me and explained that Rich suffered from chronic colds, depression, and a sort of dementia that required that he and his wife constantly care for him. They served him hot chicken soup, baby food, and a special mush preparation they fortified with vitamins and minerals. They swathed him in blankets when he was overcome by chills. And they ordered him Beatles memorabilia from around-the-clock shopping channels to brighten his days. During the summers when he felt less sickly, Rich would sometimes emerge from the cottage when Scott and his wife were having back-yard barbecues and, trying to recapture the glory of his past, he’d do a feeble Beatles performance on a little stage Scott had built for him. The stage had a concrete scallop backdrop. Rich would dress in a black velveteen vest, a billowing white shirt, tattered black slacks, and wear cowboy boots or hole-ridden black slippers. Squinting his eyes in the glaring sunlight,  he’d hobble toward the stage. Arthritis had turned his hands into gnarled claws and he struggled in vain to strum his electric guitar while Beatles music blared over loud speakers.

“It’s almost too unbearable to watch him up there,” Scott said. “But it’s good for him. It keeps his spirits up, you know?”

“I can’t take this anymore,” Scott’s wife said. “Can we go now?”

I thanked Scott for telling me the story and thanked him again for taking care of Rich. It really meant a lot to me. Scott shook my hand and said he and his wife had had enough of the reunion. It seemed he had been looking for someone—perhaps me in particular—to tell this story to and that once he had told the sad tale he felt free to leave the party, which, based on the expressions of him and his wife, had been a source of great displeasure for both of them.

I, too, felt no more reason to be at the gathering. Unnoticed, I exited the clubhouse and drove home to my lonely apartment. Getting out of my car in the dark subterranean parking lot, I contemplated the fate of Rich Drakos. I imagined him, a hunch-backed, sun-dried homunculus, doing his unconvincing Beatles act for Scott’s uncomfortable party guests before retiring back to his cottage where one of his caretakers spoon-fed him a bowl of fortified mush. Rich’s life was almost too pitiful to contemplate.  But my pity wasn’t so much for him; it was for me. I was a fool and a madman who had wasted so many years envying the great Rich Drakos, the man who had been the measure of my own failed greatness, now lost forever. 

 

Tahiti Dreams, Part IV

Scott explained that Rich dropped out of college his second year when his mother, recently re-married, offered Rich the opportunity to move with her and her new husband to Tahiti. Flunking all his classes, Rich thought it would be a welcome change so he moved to the tropical island and became a bodybuilder. His small-boned, muscular frame grew rapidly and within a year he became Mr. Tahiti, an honor that had made him a beloved legend. To add to his status, he exploited his resemblance to Paul McCartney and formed a Beatles cover band, which enjoyed sold-out shows every night at five-star hotels. Less than a year in Tahiti and Rich was so adored that there were velvet paintings of him in restaurants and even a bronze statue in front of one of the tourist shops.

Upon hearing of the statue, Scott’s wife rolled her eyes and accused her husband of exaggerating. This made him angry. He dismissed her with an annoyed gesture, then turned to me and said, “I know it sounds crazy but it’s true. I’ve go the photographs to prove it.” He continued to explain how Rich had become a sort of god on the island. Everyone glommed onto him. Beautiful women, many of them European and American millionaires, obsessed over him and paid his way to stay in their condos and mansions. They coddled him. They bought him fancy cars, tailored clothes, first-class plane tickets to anywhere on the globe. One woman bought him his own Tahitian bungalow with maid service. He didn’t need to work. He could walk into any restaurant and get a free meal.  Owning more than ten cars, his biggest challenge of the day was deciding on what car to drive. As far as carousing went, he didn’t care whom he went to bed with. He had reached the point where all the women were, more or less, the same.

I could tell by Scott’s wife’s impatient expression that she had heard this story many times before. Again, she said she wanted to go home, but Scott grew testy and explained this was important.

“You always say that,” she said.

“Well it is.”

She sighed, sunk her white, bony fingers into a glass bowl of peanuts, and receded into the background while Scott resumed with his story.

He explained that with no warning Rich became overcome by “island fever.” He had to get away from Tahiti. He could no longer be treated like a demi-god and lavished with praise and adoration everywhere he went. He was sick of people fawning and slobbering before him. He wanted to live a normal life, so he moved back to California and got married. The thing of it was, the woman he married was unbelievably ugly. Built like a tank with broad shoulders, a thick, strapping neck, pasty skin and a pinch-faced expression, she worked some boring job in a bank. That’s where he met her. He was opening a checking account when he and this woman hit it off and he asked her out on a date. Six months later he married her. No one knew what became of him after that. There were rumors that his wife kept him chained in the basement, forced him to give her deep-body massages, and threw him scraps of food twice a day. Some had gossiped that Rich, suffering from a car accident during one of his reckless, drunken forays in Tahiti, had suffered brain damage, which, impairing his judgment, compelled him to marry this nightmarish ogre. The brain damage could not be verified but rumors of it continued to spread. Nevertheless, he was married to a woman who kept him under lock and key. That much was a fact. Scott said he tried repeatedly to call his old friend but Rich’s wife always hung up on him. Scott finally gave up trying to reach Rich and thought he’d never see or hear from him again until he received a letter, postmarked from Italy. Not giving any reasons, Rich explained in the letter that he had left his wife and tried to pursue a career as a professional soccer player in Italy. He was cut from the team, but managed to live off his savings.

Scott received about a dozen more letters, but they became more and more disturbed and difficult to understand. “I was convinced that he was going crazy,” Scott said. “I was concerned about him. My instincts told me he was in trouble, so I bought a ticket to Italy. I searched for him at the return address of his letters, the Rigobello Hotel near Capo Vaticano, but he was nowhere in sight. I asked the local police and one of them told me a story about this American guy who walked up and down a beach with nothing on but a gold medallion around his neck. He was known as a crazy man who earned his living as a gigolo or a prostitute. He was said to be mute, due to a psychological trauma or because his tongue had been severed from an angry lover. A legend surrounded him. He was known as this insane man who simply walked up and down the beach all day, his naked body blackened from the sun. He had a nickname, the Stallion. At night there was this bar he hung out at. He sat at the bar and watched as people tried to hit on him. He’d egg them on, toy with them like little children, and just when they thought they were going to a hotel room with him, he’d suddenly disappear. He wanted people to desire him, to drool all over him, and then to suffer the agony of being denied him. That’s all he lived for. He just wanted to have this power over others. He thrived on it. And it had driven him insane.”

“I’m sure your friend doesn’t want to hear about all this,” Scott’s wife said. “Can’t we go now?”

“I’m not done yet,” Scott said with great vehemence. He then turned to me and continued his story.

When he exhausted his savings, Scott explained, Rich became a homeless vagabond, living off the generosity of the locals, many who pitied him. The police officer Scott contacted said this strange American had been last seen at the Reggio Calabria, a popular beach resort. A week later Scott found him. Rich didn’t even recognize his old friend. He had long, stringy hair down to his shoulders, his sun-saturated flesh was nearly black and wrinkled like old elephant hide. He was naked save a gold necklace that glimmered around his neck. Years of alcoholism in the scorching sun had aged him. He was hunched over and shrunken like a prune. Scott shouted his friend’s name over and over but Rich’s crazed eyes, showing no signs of recognition, pierced a hole right through his old classmate.

“There was nothing I could do,” Scott said, “but take him home with me. If I didn’t, he would have died out there.”

Scott’s wife jutted her unpleasant face between ours. “That was over five years ago,” she said. “He’s lived with us ever since.”

“Not in our house,” Scott argued back. “He lives in the cottage in our back yard.”

“Same thing,” his wife said.

“It is not.”

“You’re right. It’s worse because he’s so helpless it’s like taking care of a baby.”

“We have no choice. He’d die without us.”

 

Tahiti Dreams, Part III

Ten years later, after embarking on the aforementioned quest, I can tell you with some bitterness and depression that I failed miserably and that I was the same shallow, self-pitying child I always was. This was evident when I received an invitation to attend my high school’s ten-year reunion. My immediate response was not to go. After all, the way I saw it, going to your high school reunion was little more than an opportunity to show your classmates how great you had become, exceeding everyone’s expectations and making all the girls see how dumb and blind they were for having shunned you; to show everyone that you were not, contrary to what your classmates believed, a loser, that in fact, you were simply a late bloomer who had blossomed into a handsome rich Alpha Male capable of making all the girls exceedingly happy, so much in fact that they would immediately dump their inadequate boyfriends and audition shamelessly for your favor. But I was no such Alpha Male. I was, by all accounts, incurably mediocre. I was a mere functionary at work, a stagnant peon, ignored by my colleagues, bereft of a social life, collecting a monthly pittance, and living in relative squalor. I was pudgy, bald, dyspeptic. Mediocrity didn’t suit me well. While others accepted their lowly lot in life with a gracious resignation, I had a big ego that hungered for greater things and the disparity between what I envisioned for myself and what my crappy life had become enraged me and this rage showed in my sour bearing and facial tics, which bore the evidence of a man smoldering with shame, frustration, and discontent. 

I didn’t want my former high school classmates to see me and then judge my life for the contemptible sham that it was. So what was the point of going? Showing up at the reunion would merely be an exercise in self-humiliation.

But against my better judgment, I did in fact go, if for no other reason than I wanted to know what had become of Rich Drakos who seemed to have the whole world at his disposal, who seemed, by virtue of his rare good looks, to enjoy unlimited possibilities. Whom, if anyone at all, had he married? What line of work had he pursued? What kind of license had his good looks afforded him? What divine, exquisite pleasures had he experienced that he might describe to us lowly mortals? Thus my curiosity over Rich’s fate proved greater than my fear of being judged a loser, and I attended the reunion.

The festivity was held in a game room at the Hacienda Country Club in Orinda, California. There were two rooms, a billiard room and a dance hall, adjoined to each other. I tentatively entered and, amidst the confetti, balloons and banners that read CASTRO VALLEY HIGH CLASS OF ’79, I noticed a few faces. I was relieved that I wasn’t the only one who had grown an unsightly paunch or who had developed a receding hairline. The adults—yes they were adults now, even though I still felt like the same child I was during high school—wore placid expressions, their full, fleshy cheeks gleaming with sweat, their lips wet with champagne. But they didn’t seem self-conscious for whatever physical inadequacies they brought to the party. They laughed heartily. They slapped each other on the back. They took huge swigs of champagne, wine and beer. Drunk, they guffawed, and spit flecks of potato chips with onion dip across the room. I was positively repulsed. Worse, no one seemed to recognize me. I stood alone by a pool table and, overcome by the same hurt and rejection I suffered at the high school dances, told myself that I didn’t belong here.

I was just about to leave when someone tapped me on the shoulder and called out my name. I turned and saw one of Rich Drakos’ best high school friends, Scott Maher. He was standing with his wife, a waifish woman with the bored, petulant expression of a spoiled sixteen-year-old princess. Unlike the others, Scott hadn’t changed in the slightest. Short and compact, he had baby smooth skin and undulating blue eyes. While not as handsome as Rich Drakos (for who could be?), he had been known as a “pretty boy” and a “lady’s man” and was for many years Rich’s number-one confidante. Scott’s wife (I don’t remember her name) tugged at her husband’s shirt and said she wanted to go home, but Scott seemed interested in my life, my job, my love life, or my lack thereof. I don’t know why he was so interested in my futile existence. I barely knew him in high school. Maybe I had said a few jokes in some classes we took, mocking the teachers, and this made him think I was cool. In any event, I asked him about Rich Drakos. Upon hearing Rich’s name, Scott’s expression sunk, and he shook his head.

“It’s a long story,” he said.

His wife tugged his shirt and said she wanted to go home again. He broke free from her grasp and scolded her with admonishing eyes and a clenched jaw. This was his high school reunion, he told her, and they’d leave when he was good and ready. She pouted and disappeared into the background. There was drunken laughter all around us. A former cheerleader, now married to the former quarterback, had drunk too much champagne and had thrown up, just like in the days of the high school dances. The cleaning of the vomit seemed a cheerful chore, bringing familiarity and nostalgia and reminded the Class of ‘79 of the bonds that had united us. Scott looked affectionately at the ad hoc cleanup crew, shouted some playful taunt or other to the former cheerleader, then resumed a serious expression as he began to tell me the fate of Rich Drakos. 

 

Tahiti Dreams, Part II

It was no surprise to us that Rich was chosen to be the featured kisser at the five-bucks-a-pop Kissing Booth at our fund raiser for Senior Grad Night. Girls eagerly lined up for hours and paid Rich cash, plus exorbitant tips, for the pleasure of smacking him on the lips. I cringed with envy as I watched girls coming back from the courtyard, having received their kiss from him. One girl’s knees buckled. Another fainted. Another had an accident. It was all standard procedure, another typical day for the glorious life of the school’s most handsome boy. As a testament to his super human powers, Rich had made close to a thousand dollars at the Kissing Booth and would have made double that amount, but growing chap-lipped and fatigued, he quit in the middle of the day, resulting in a near riot and hysterical sobs from those grieving girls who had been turned away before they got their chance to experience an encounter with Ecstasy.

Now it was late in the afternoon, a couple of hours after Rich had made so much money at the Kissing Booth, that I witnessed my first piece of evidence that for all his good looks and popularity something wasn’t quite right with him. I was on my way to use the gym locker bathroom, for after school it tended to be relatively abandoned and afforded me more privacy than the bathroom by the classroom corridors, when I saw Rich and another girl outside the gym’s back door. They were unaware of me as I passed them by, which was a good thing, since they were absorbed in a marathon session of French-kissing. Seeing Rich smooch with another girl wasn’t my first clue that something was wrong with him. Rather, it was his choice of girl.

It’s hard to describe her without sounding insensitive, if not a bit cruel. First let me say I don’t remember her real name. I only remember what the boys, myself included, called her—Tasmanian Devil. It was a very cruel name indeed. It captured the horror she instilled in us. She was a hulk of a girl, no smaller than our football team’s offensive linemen, with an oversized head, long, black stringy hair, a snout for a nose, and those unfortunate fleshy cheeks that seem to push against the eyes so that they are barely visible.

Now what made Tasmanian Devil particularly frightening was that she was not, like the other homely girls, particularly apologetic about her unsightly appearance. Nor was she particularly smart, a claim reinforced by rumors that she took special classes for slow learners. On football Fridays when we had a home game, she was especially scary because she would show up to school wearing a pink mini skirt, white stockings, and a thick application of bright makeup. These measures did not diminish her dreadfulness. To the contrary, her “dressing up” only exacerbated her ugliness the way one might, by picking and popping a pimple, cause it to inflame.

Now for the record I need to make it clear that my sense of decency had stopped me from calling her Tasmanian Devil after seeing her sitting alone in the bleachers during a football game a few weeks before. It was raining that night and my friends and I were snugly close to each other protecting ourselves with our many umbrellas. We were full of adolescent exuberance, joking, laughing, slapping each other on the back. Twenty yards away Tasmanian Devil sat all alone, no one closer than thirty feet from her. She had no umbrella. Rain poured on her sodden hair, which clung to her wet forehead. Mascara ran down her face and reminded me of blood. But she appeared to be completely indifferent to the fact that she was getting more and more soaked. She was withdrawn into herself and there was a despondence in her expression as if she knew, in that moment, that she would be fated to a life-sentence of loneliness and ridicule.

And so you can imagine how disconcerted I was, two weeks later, to see Rich French-kissing her behind the gym. He couldn’t have been attracted to her. He had to be playing a sadistic game: First, giving her a taste of something forbidden, then denying it from her, and then watching the powerful, devastating effects of that denial. Tasmanian Devil was submitted into a mental institution a month later during Christmas vacation. I never knew her exact diagnosis but it was rumored that she would without warning erupt into violent fits in which she would babble Rich’s name over and over while being forced into a straitjacket and being injected with a variety of anti-psychotic drugs. Her insane reaction to Rich’s narcotic sex appeal was not uncommon. During our first year of college, for example, he played on the soccer team and paraded around campus on roller skates while wearing translucent onion skin red gym shorts and no shirt, revealing his lean, muscular torso. In the cafeteria, I’d see him roll up to some unsuspecting girl sitting at a table. Standing behind her, he’d cover her eyes with his hands and say, “Guess who?” When she turned to see who had been flirting with her, she’d be mortified that he had caught her with too much egg salad in her mouth and she’d dash to the bathroom to expel her mouth’s contents and freshen up so as not to be seen in an unfavorable light. Of course, by the time she returned to her place at the table, Rich had forgotten all about her and was now making his rounds with the other girls, laughing at their disarray, intoxicated by his own ruthless powers.

This is no lie: My freshman year in college Rich and I were on an elevator in the Humanities Building. The elevator stopped at the second floor. Two young women, one of them whom I recognized from my speech class, entered it and stared at him. My classmate’s friend was clearly beside herself. Her chin quivered and her eyes welled with tears. It was as if she had, against everyone’s advice, sacrificed her whole life searching for uranium and had, near the end of her life with nothing to show for her efforts, had finally come across a rich vein of the precious element, a bonanza so great that she was overcome with the assurance that she would finally be able to move her impoverished family from Hicksville to a plush seaside residence in California and buy them all mansions and a fleet of luxury cars. While she tried in vain to suppress her breathless rapture, Rich looked positively bored, a bit supercilious, and maybe, just maybe, slightly amused. Shortly after, the girl from my speech class started calling me. Mind you, she had ignored me before; she had even scoffed at my attempts to talk to her, but now she was calling me and saying hello with a cloying enthusiasm whenever we passed each other on campus. Who was she kidding anyway? Just because I was now vaguely associated in her mind with Rich Drakos, she had decided that I was worth a second look. Rich’s incredible sexual charisma merely highlighted my own conspicuous absence of it and at night I contemplated my lowly position in the Human Reproduction Scale, tossing and turning for hours until eventually I fell into a vexed, restless sleep.

To tell you the truth, my depression wasn’t so much the envy I suffered as I watched Rich Drakos enjoy his glory; it was more the shame I suffered for being so shallow, for allowing myself to get caught up in the trap of measuring my wellbeing by comparing my appearance to others and, falling short, succumbing to self-pity. I felt I needed to reach deep inside myself and find something deeper than the pathetic young man I had become—a scared little boy who, like that day in my tree house, was so quick to curl up and give up on life. I wanted to find a better, braver, more noble self that didn’t get caught up in the world’s obsession with good looks. I wanted to shun the world’s superficial preoccupation with appearances and go on a quest for Higher Meaning, Truth, and Light.

Tahiti Dreams, Part I

I was recently talking to a British friend, a married woman who now lives in America, and she complained that when acquaintances saw her in a bar they feared her marriage was on the rocks. She was appalled by their assumption. In fact, she said, she had gone to the bar simply to talk among her friends, a pastime that is quite common in England. In America, however, we don’t really have friends. The bar is a place to sell ourselves while using every trick up our sleeve. Married life, then, is a place to convalesce from all those exhausting single years of self-promotion.

The self-promotion starts early, long before adolescence. I learned this the hard way many years ago when at five years of age I had a tree house that was in competition with another nearby tree house, one that was lorded over by Rich Drakos. Our tree houses were about twenty yards apart from one another in separate walnut trees. We lured girls into our tree houses with dolls, stuffed animals, sweets, anything that would get their attention. One afternoon, I tried to persuade Patty Wilson to climb up my tree by dangling a box of raisins, tied to a long string, in front of her face. I assured her the wood slats nailed to the tree trunk were secure enough for her to climb. She made her way up the trunk, tentatively grabbing each plank, her determined face grimacing, as I eagerly awaited her. Always wanting to outdo me, Rich popped his head out of a leafy cluster and, holding a box of Captain Kangaroo Cookies, he told Patty to forget about my “sad little raisins” and to come join him for a real treat. His tree house was vastly superior to mine. Bigger, lusher, sturdier, it was more elaborately decorated with stuffed animals and lollipops, which hung from nearby limbs. It was quite obvious to me that Patty would not settle for my wrinkled little raisins when what she could be enjoying were delicious cookies, the very same sweets the ruddy-jowled Captain Kangaroo and his side-kick Mr. Green Jeans gorged on. It was my first opportunity to see the power of TV-generated hype. Captain Kangaroo Cookies were promoted to the child demographic in a way raisins were not. So naturally Patty, upon hearing Rich’s scintillating offer, stopped half-way up my tree and greedily eyed Rich’s cookies as if they were gold bullion. She then gave a little snarl of contempt at my raisins before descending my tree, skipping to Rich’s tree house and climbing its little wood slats like a pro. Shortly after, she and Rich got cozy and feasted on their double-fudge, cream-centered cookie sandwiches. When they were done eating, they licked their lips and gloated at me, a lone loser, stuck with my pathetic little box of raisins.

As I watched them nestle together, I realized that Rich’s tree house was perched higher than mine and cast a dark shadow over me so that I felt chilled in the shade of my relatively small hovel. Inconsolable, I curled up in the fetal position and cried myself to sleep, only to be awakened hours later when my body was covered by red fire ants that, presumably attracted to the raisins, had swarmed my perch. My entire body felt like it had been lashed by stinging nettles and I ran to my apartment where my mother drowned the red ants, dozens still crawling over my body, by giving me a scalding bath. As I nursed my welts, I looked at my pain as indicative of the anguish that comes from losing a girl to another male whose powers are vastly superior to mine.

I was reminded of that horrible stinging sensation twelve years later when I saw Rich enjoy a type of power over the high school girls that I had never seen before. His fine features, long lashes and full red lips bordering on the feminine, rendered the other boys at Castro Valley High downright plain or ugly. But what was most striking about him was his resemblance to Paul McCartney. He had the haughty-faced crooner’s slightly upturned nose, puckered mouth,  ruddy cheeks, arched eyebrows, and sad-shaped puppy-dog eyes. He had the same hair, which for many years he kept groomed the way McCartney did in the 1970s and 1980s, long in the back and feathered in the front. But to be honest, he was actually a more handsome version of Paul McCartney. He had fuller lips, higher cheekbones, and a liquid iridescence to his dark eyes. All these qualities made him very proud of himself, perhaps even a little smug.  He always had a blissful smile on his face, which, owing to his extreme good looks, was born from the assurance that the whole world not only loved him but needed him, needed to be in his presence in order to be reminded of what beauty truly is and needed to be close to him because of the hope that his excess good looks might spill over and give heightened appeal to those who were lucky enough to be in his proximity. The boys wanted to be close to him just as much as the girls because we understood the power of association. If the girls, thinking we were part of Rich’s inner circle, believed they could get to him through us, they would pursue us with mind-boggling intensity. Or if some girls believed we were Rich’s close friends, we were then worthy consolation prizes to those girls who, giving up on the unattainable Rich Drakos, would settle for dating one of his chosen sycophants. We knew how needy we were to grovel and audition to be Rich’s toady, but we did not care because we knew the glories to be enjoyed from being his lackey were far greater than any pleasures we could muster by ourselves.