CLASS OF '77

I ran into the smartest kid from high school in a topless bar on Christmas. He couldn’t believe that we graduated 15 years ago, but it didn’t matter if it’d been a week or 50 years, it all felt the same to me.

He went to California to sell computers, got married, had two kids, then got involved with a co-worker who was into coke. He was now divorced and selling carpet.

I told him I was an actor who worked temporary office jobs in the city, inhabiting the spaces of strangers who were on vacation or out sick, the acting portion of my life relegated to being background noise on movie sets, the cue for extras to begin their fake talking.

The bartender, Nikki, made me another Tequila Sunrise. When I sat down I said I wanted something colorful because the gray winter deadness had robbed anything of any life.

The smart kid rambled on about who was at the 15-year reunion and gave me an update on what various people were up to, people I either didn’t remember or care about, but when he mentioned running into the school bully in Dunkin’ Donuts, the old fear came back at the sound of his name. A suburban bogeyman.

He’s living with his parents, he said. Has a pest control business.

Perfect job for a rodent, I said. A big pest killing little ones.

I let him copy off me. Maybe that’s why he left me alone. Even with my yarmulke.

You weren’t supposed to hear that the guy who made your adolescent years miserable was back living down the street from you. That guy was supposed to be long gone. That guy was supposed to be a myth, the kind of person people at reunions had different recollections about where he’d ended up.

The smart kid said it was time to call it a night. I didn’t really talk to you in high school, he said, but I was sorry to hear about your mother.

We exchanged Merry Christmas’s and shook hands.

I was the only one left at the bar. Someone played Pac-Man.

The guy who was just here, I said to Nikki, the smartest boy in high school, once told me my mother’s cancer was fatal when I said she was going into the hospital. What kid uses that word?

Some smart people lack a certain sensitivity, she said.

Maybe he lacked more than that, I said. He screwed up his life.

Being smart can be a curse, she said. Look at me, working in a topless bar on Christmas. I’m Mensa. I’m on my third fiancé. He’s Mensa. We met at one of their get-togethers for smart people.

I didn’t know if Mensa was Rubik’s cube smart or SAT smart but I figured being smart didn’t stop making you a fool for love.

I asked her how she ended up working here.

Another phase in a long line of phases, she said. Starting with purple hair in my punk rock stage. What are you doing here on Christmas?

Why are you open on Christmas?

Holidays make people feel lonely. Women can help that.

The dancer wore a Santa cap and looked bored. The jukebox played the eighties song, Gloria.

I had dinner with my father, across the street, at the diner, I said. We used to go there after church and sit in the same booth by a window and I’d stare at your broken-down sign. You wouldn’t even know it was a topless bar with a cocktail glass on it. I figured it was time to take a look. I don’t think my father even knows what kind of place it is.

I mixed the colors around in my drink.

She said she was getting married this summer but it came out with the enthusiasm of someone who said they just saw an airplane in the sky.

I stood in the gravel parking lot. The road was empty but the diner was doing good business for Christmas. I was stunned to see the prom queen there, working as a waitress, apron and name tag, once voted Most Likely to Succeed, now divorced, she said, after living down south and studying horticulture in college, back with her parents on Blue Spruce Lane, the street named for a tree that never lost its color and the first street I knew the name of that wasn’t mine, which would’ve made for a nice metaphor if we ever got married, like we once said we would on the kickball field, before she went on to date sports team captains who drove Camaros and Trans-Ams.

The divorced, the bullies, the smart ones. The Class of ’77. All back in the Long Island town named for the Indian translation for fertile or pleasant land, where I remained background noise, cutting the grass in the summer and shoveling the driveway in the winter, vacuuming rooms my father and I didn’t use anymore, keeping up with formalities, old habits, like Norman Bates in Psycho said as he kept changing the sheets and lighting the lights of the forgotten motel.

When I got home my father was watching a western, his favorite genre because the good guys always won. He had a fire going, a pipe in his mouth.

That waitress was my first crush, I said. Do you remember yours?

Probably a movie star, he said. Everyone loved them.

I saw myself inside the square television screen, a showdown with the bully on a sun-drenched morning between the green leafy maple trees on our street replacing the muted blacks and grays of the dusty Hollywood backlot, the entire class of ’77 filling in as background noise, but they knew the outcome already because the good guys never won here, the bully saw to that, leaving our blood fossilized in the cracked granite crevices of school bathrooms or splattered on the leaves in the woods of the pleasant land.

Dinner was good, I said.

Your mother liked that diner.

I stared into the fire, the flames swaying like a belly dancer. The line from a Hemingway story I read in college came back to me, about people in a café who need a light for the night.

There was a light on for everyone.

Even at a topless bar on Christmas.