Class - Cecily Von Ziegesar [72]
The Lobster Shack was an old salty dog of a place, with the requisite dark wood, fishing nets, ropes, and anchors. What made it unique was that the restaurant was perched on the bank of the Kennebec River, which rushed by the back windows with dark, liquid ferocity.
“You want baked potato or fries with that?”
“Baked potato.”
“Salad or coleslaw?”
“Salad, please. And chocolate milk, if you have it.”
“Yoo-hoo okay?”
Patrick munched his house salad with bleu cheese dressing and slurped his Yoo-hoo. One of the tenets of Dianetics was that simple pleasures like eating a good meal, kissing a pretty girl, enjoying a game of baseball are a necessity. One can survive without pleasure, but without pleasure life is not really worth living. To him that made a lot of sense. And it seemed to him that the Lobster Shack was full of simple pleasures.
He flipped through the pages of the magazine he’d found in the car. It was Dexter’s literary journal. Shipley had written one of the poems.
The Years Between Us
My brother, the one in the looney bin,
Holds his arms raised up
to keep his balance, hands
in fists as he creeps,
crouching like a giant in a crawl space.
I imitate him as a joke to warn him.
I say, “You look funny.”
He responds with secrets in his voice:
“I have traveled a thousand light-years today.”
Funny that she’d chosen to write about a time devoid of simple pleasures, when he was only just barely surviving. It was after he’d been kicked out of boarding school again. This time he’d stolen a bicycle from one of the deans. Instead of taking him home, his parents took him to Mount Sinai hospital in Manhattan for a full psychiatric evaluation. He was there for two weeks, in a private room in the psychiatric ward. Each day he was interviewed extensively by doctors and put on various medications. He watched Wheel of Fortune in the TV room and ate his meals, family style, with the other lunatics. He couldn’t open his window or wear shoes with laces.
He wasn’t sure how long his parents intended to keep him there, so one afternoon he walked down the back stairs and out of the building. No one stopped him. He walked across Fifth Avenue and into Central Park, grateful that it was only October and still not too cold to be wandering around in only a hospital gown and bare feet. In the park, he found another bicycle and rode it out of town, all the way home to Greenwich.
He took the back roads, foraging for food and clothes in Dumpsters along the way, amazed by what people threw out and delighting in the freedom to take what he wanted and move about unseen in the shadows behind buildings. The first thing he found was a man’s pink dress shirt, still in the plastic from the dry cleaners. He’d had a thing for pirates when he was a little boy. Pirates stole stuff to live and stay free, just like he was doing now. It was on that bike ride, wearing that pink dress shirt, that he became Pink Patrick. It wasn’t a gay thing. It was his pirate name.
“Surf and turf medium well with a baked potato,” the waitress announced, presenting him with a heaping platter of steak and lobster claws. In the middle of the table was a red plastic basket containing the metal tools used for cracking open the shells of lobsters, a plastic bib, and a pile of Handi Wipes. He was going to need them.
It was Saturday night and the restaurant was busy. “I just need to sit down!” a guy yelled from