We Should Not Be Friends, page 11
The success of Maxey and his team started to gain the attention of the instructors. At first, the instructors laughed and made fun of the men, wondering aloud how “the little guys” could be winning everything, and using it as a way to humiliate the other teams. But then the instructors started to get pissed off.
“Instructor Parker, who we decided was actually the devil, began jogging beside us as we were carrying our boat over our heads. Three days earlier, his presence would have had us all freaked out. Now we were too numb and too zoned out to care.
“ ‘Ensign Maxey,’ Parker shouted in my ear so loudly that I could feel his anger and frustration. But I knew that I was willing to endure whatever he had to offer. My response was: ‘Whooyaaaaaah,’ which is the way candidates are trained to answer the instructors, but I had added some sarcasm in there. It was almost like I was saying, ‘You bastard, you can’t hurt me.’ Parker continued, ‘Ensign, you know what? You are a piece-of-shit little Ivy League pussy.’ My answer: ‘Whoooooooyaaaaaaaaaaah,’ the more a’s the more sarcastic. ‘Ensign, you and your team need to stop running and put your boat down right now.’ We put the boat on the ground. He continued: ‘I have been watching you. Your guys have been carrying you and the boat. You are worthless. Your team is only winning because of them. How are you ever going to lead men into combat?’ ”
Parker ordered Maxey to sit in the boat and then made his team lift the boat with Maxey in it over their heads.
“The goal was to humiliate me, and it worked,” Maxey said. “It hurt more than the cold water, more than my skin, which was chafed raw, more than the pounding headaches I’d been having, more than the long, painful days that never ended. Instructor Parker, that sick bastard, knew exactly how to hurt me.
“But the amazing thing was that my team of munchkins only got stronger with me in the boat over their heads. They were screaming up to me as they shuffled forward. ‘Don’t worry, Ensign Maxey. We got you. You are on our team and that SOB can’t hurt us. He can’t stop us now.’ This was the last leg of a paddle-run-paddle obstacle course. We were so far out in front that even with me sitting like a fool in the boat, the munchkins crossed the threshold into the grinder before all the other crews. ‘Put that piece-of-shit officer down and stand tall,’ Parker shouted. My team answered with the traditional ‘Whooooyaaaaaaah,’ but it was all sarcasm. It said to Parker: ‘You can’t hurt any of us. You can’t divide us. You can’t stop us.’ ”
“So that was the end of it?” I asked Maxey.
“Not even close,” he replied. “Parker then came up to the team with a smile on his face. There was nothing more frightening than when that sick bastard tried to fake benevolence. ‘Ensign Maxey, your boat crew has consistently outperformed the other crews. They have finished first again, and all while carrying your worthless ass, sir.’ When he ended a tirade with sir, it was like spitting at the end of a race. Parker continued, ‘It pays to be a winner and you guys are dismissed to the tents for a nice nap.’
“No team had been allowed a nap. Nothing made sense anymore and yet nobody was going to argue. We knew we were winning but none of us had really expected a reward. We left Mr. IBS on the grinder and started walking toward the breakout tents.”
It was the first time they had walked anywhere without that boat over their heads. Maxey described how they had lost all sense of time: it seemed like months had passed since they were all waiting in the breakout tents at the start of Hell Week; it had been five days. They could hear Parker and his bullhorn screaming obscenities at all the other teams and telling them how worthless they were: ‘This is by far the most pathetic class in BUD/S history. So we decided to add another day to Hell Week so that we can get all of you SOBs to ring out. Do me a favor, the bell is right here….’ Maxey and the munchkins listened and yet sheepishly ignored the rest of their class; they let the tent flap close out the noise and the lights.
“We all fell instantly onto the cots,” Maxey continued. “Holy shit, how good did it feel to be not moving, to not have someone yelling in my face? I went quickly into another world. In my dream, there was soft light and trees and grass; there was a girl with long legs playing Frisbee….
“And then I was jolted awake, totally dazed. It had only been fifteen minutes that we were allowed to sleep, and now Parker was in the tent with the bullhorn and two other instructors, who carried buckets of water, ‘Get your lazy asses up. Mr. IBS needs to go for a swim. Get your boat and get your asses over the berm and down to the beach.’ It hadn’t been a reward at all. It was just another form of torture. As we were coming out of that deep sleep, we had ice-cold water thrown into our faces. Moving again was painful beyond belief—much more difficult than it had been when we were on autopilot—and yet we managed to regain the zombie-like state that allowed us to keep breathing and ignore the pain and exhaustion. I loved every one of those munchkins and was proud to be one of them.
“Hell Week somehow ended the next day. And I started to think that I just might make it through the next five months of training.”
When Maxey was finished with the story, I asked him how he managed to survive that week. He answered without hesitating, “It was really just thanks to one big thing: realizing that you don’t become a SEAL, you become a member of a SEAL team. I didn’t make it through; those guys pulled me through.”
CATCHING UP
After meeting up on the roof at our tenth reunion, Maxey and I talked more often. Neither of us ascribed any meaning to the fact that we had only recently reconnected. During the years after college, we hadn’t not talked; we just hadn’t talked. And that was true for most of us in the secret society, and for most of the people we’d befriended in school. Partly, it was the times in which we lived: with no social media, no email, no cell phones, and with many of us itinerant, the logistics of keeping in touch were daunting, involving phone calls or letters to parents or mutual friends just to track one another’s whereabouts. But it was also partly time itself, as we scrambled to establish ourselves in jobs, or finish graduate schools, or start relationships.
I had quickly filled Maxey in on the other major events of my life. I’d told him how I’d returned to Asia after a few months in New York, following the epic train trip; how I’d stayed in Hong Kong for two years on staff at two travel magazines; and then how David and I had decided to move to North America. I explained that David and I had spent five years having to commute between New York and Toronto, only able to spend every other weekend together; Canada had granted him immigration when my own country wouldn’t. Once David had become a Canadian citizen, then he’d finally been able to move to the U.S. and look for work.
Maxey and I both marveled at how soon after graduation he had met Pam, and I David, and how lucky we were. We discovered more in common, too.
I told Maxey how I was still grieving the death of David Baer, my best friend, who had been hit by a bus and killed while riding his bicycle by Lincoln Center, and how I’d flown back from Hong Kong for the funeral. Maxey volunteered that he’d lost a good friend, too, and was still suffering. He didn’t say more and I didn’t ask; I assumed he would tell me when he was ready.
We always talked about other members of the group. I’d kept in closest touch with David Kelly, now a banker working with musicians, who had come out as gay a few years after graduation; with Renata, who was working as an associate choreographer with a New York dance company; with Huei-Zu, who was recently appointed as an assistant curator at New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art; and with Singer, who had gone into biotech. Singer had been continuously in touch with Maxey, except during the years when Maxey served abroad.
But other than telling me about how he made it through Hell Week, Maxey never said anything else about his time as a SEAL. I assumed it was secret or maybe that something had happened that he didn’t want me to know—maybe something involving the friend he had lost. Besides, now Maxey was busy teaching high school and raising a family with Pam, so it didn’t seem odd that it didn’t enter our conversations.
I did bring up the SEALs once. In 1992, there was a huge best-seller by a fellow named Richard Marcinko who chronicled his time as the leader of SEAL Team Six. It was called Rogue Warrior. On the cover of the paperback was an out-of-context quote from the New York Times Book Review that said that the author made “Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Little Lord Fauntleroy.” This first book was followed by a string of best-selling spin-offs: Rogue Warrior Red Cell; Green Team; Task Force Blue. Every color in the rainbow—save lavender. And it inspired a host of other books by Navy SEAL team members.
“What do you think of this Marcinko guy?” I asked Maxey.
“Not much,” he replied curtly. “Remember what I said about how I made it through BUD/S—how everyone who makes it through BUD/S makes it through BUD/S? Well, that becomes more true once you become a SEAL, not less. It’s always supposed to be about the team. Not about the individual SEAL.” And then he added, “Most SEALs would never do a book like that. It’s not who we are.”
What Maxey did work into every conversation was something about the water—his love for diving and swimming, his need to lose himself in the waves, and his desire to give others the experience he had when he first dove below the surface and started to discover what he’d found there.
I was always glad to see Maxey when he came to New York, and he must have been glad to see me or he wouldn’t have called. But our conversations generally stayed within certain parameters—we would catch up on where we were in our lives, trade information on the others in our group, maybe talk about a book or movie or television show, and then say how much we were looking forward to getting together again.
In early 1996, Maxey called not to make a plan for an upcoming visit but to tell me some exciting news: he and Pam were thinking about starting a school on Eleuthera, an island in the Bahamas. He said that it was early days and already the most intense and frightening thing he’d ever done.
It was a crazy idea—to pick up and move to this island with three small kids and another on the way. (The year before they’d had their third, Tyler.) Maxey still wasn’t sure if they would go through with it, or even could; raising the money and finding the land were just two of the enormous obstacles. But they wanted to try. In the meantime, he’d continue teaching.
At the time, I was wrapped up in my own job crisis: I had a beloved mentor and boss who was being sidelined by the corporation that owned us; I had been forbidden even to talk to him. Ironically, I was simultaneously helping to plan a conference in Indonesia on freedom of expression—a tremendously complicated endeavor in a country under a brutal dictatorship, where possession of the wrong book could land you in jail for a decade. The first book I had edited after entering publishing was by Indonesia’s most famous writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, a man who had been jailed for his writing under three different governments. Pramoedya had finally been released after fourteen years’ imprisonment without trial but was under city arrest, and all his works were banned.
So when Maxey told me his idea to start a school, I was only vaguely encouraging: I asked a bunch of questions but didn’t pay much attention to his answers, mostly because I was stretched too thin in other directions, but also because the ambitious way he described it all made it sound unlikely that any two individuals could make it happen. The school sounded like what a German friend of mine once referred to as a “Schnapps-plan”—the kind of grandiose scheme you come up with after several glasses of schnapps but abandon in the sober light of day.
Later that year, the fourth Maxey arrived: Tegan. I accused Maxey of trying to confuse me with the names. Brittney and Brocq, the first two, were easy. But Tegan and Tyler? How would I ever be able to remember which was which?
* * *
—
In the midnineties, as I approached thirty-five and David headed toward forty, we settled into a routine that revolved around our two closest friends, whom we’d see a few times every week; other great friends with whom we were in constant contact; David’s pals from Hong Kong, whom he’d chat with on the phone for hours every Sunday; and a wide variety of people in New York City or around the country, whom we spoke to and saw every few weeks or months or years, alone or in groups. There were work friends, too—the ones you see for a meal when the day is over, or before or after industry events. We were lucky to have so many people in our lives, luckier to share friends with my parents and siblings, and even luckier that we enjoyed spending time with my immediate and extended family, including aunts and uncles, cousins, children of cousins.
Maxey, of course, had his own friends—from Lawrenceville, from the SEALs, Pam’s family, his family, people they’d met on the islands, other teachers at Lawrenceville, the parents of their children’s playmates, and a whole group of Yalies I didn’t know, including a few of the jocks I’d been so careful to avoid. In addition, he and Pam just didn’t have much time for socializing. They had four small kids and a school they were trying to start.
My bond with Maxey remained strong, I thought, even though we rarely found the time to talk. I was sure that if I ever was in a jam, Maxey would be there for me. And I was equally sure that if Maxey ever wanted something from me, I would give it or do it without hesitation.
HUEI-ZU
On a Tuesday morning in February 1997, I woke up, found a pair of blue jeans, wrapped myself in a parka, stepped into a pair of boots, walked down the four flights to the street, stumbled to the newsagent, and bought the New York Times, as I did every morning, stopping to buy two bagels on my way back. I then climbed up the four flights, put water on for coffee, shouted to David that it was time to wake up (“Five more minutes! Just five more minutes!” he shouted back, as he always did), and settled in to read the paper.
Even on pleasant days, the precipitous climb back to our apartment made the task a chore. And on days of bad weather, we wondered whether we really needed to eat or read. Can man live by coffee alone? We tested the hypothesis when it rained or snowed.
I had some leisure this day. After ten years at William Morrow Publishers, I was leaving my job. A new executive had been installed above my sidelined mentor, and he didn’t think much of me or the books I published. I didn’t think much of him and did little to hide it. It had been a tense and miserable workplace for months, and I was exhausted and saddened by all the office politics. I’d started my publishing career there as an assistant in the rights department and thought I would be a lifer. But I’d been forced to choose between my job as editor in chief and my loyalty to my mentor, a man who had given me my career and his friendship. Every day that I stayed and reported to someone else felt like a betrayal.
So I was going to go work for a new publishing company, one that was just a few years old, but they couldn’t bring me on board until their new fiscal year began, six months later. This meant I had a sabbatical of sorts ahead of me. David and I were talking about renting out our apartment and going to visit his family and our friends in Hong Kong, maybe travel a bit. We had enough saved to manage it, and I could take on some freelance editing. I was particularly excited that I was going to be allowed to start a new line at the new firm, publishing Asian fiction in translation; I could also use the trip to scout authors. And when again would I have a break like this and know that I had a job waiting for me? David was willing to quit his job designing children’s wear and look for another one when we returned.
The paper this February day carried stories about a jury award in a civil trial against O. J. Simpson, subway ridership skyrocketing, and morale in France sagging. I made my way through page after page, ending in the final section, D. It wasn’t really my habit to spend too long on the obituary page. But that day, I glanced at it. A food writer I admired had died. I had seen her byline, but we’d never met. And then I saw a name below it: Alice Yang. Curator and Historian. 35.
I put down the paper. Walked around the apartment, back into the kitchen. Maybe I had misread it. Maybe there was another Alice Yang. But when I was able to look at the paper again a moment later there was no escaping the fact that Huei-Zu—Alice—was dead.
The first line read:
Alice Huei-Zu Yang, an art historian and curator, died early Saturday morning after a hit-and-run accident at Canal and Varick Streets in Manhattan. She was 35 and lived in TriBeCa.
The obituary mentioned that Huei-Zu was born in Taipei in 1961 and graduated from Yale with a degree in art history in 1984. It said that Huei-Zu’s husband, an architect, had been injured in the accident and was in the hospital in stable condition. It described Huei-Zu’s prodigious success in her field.
Huei-Zu was one of those friends I saw only once every few years. She had just passed her oral exams for her Ph.D., taken a new job as a museum curator, and edited a book to accompany a show she organized. There was always going to be more time, and more reunions. We had friends in common and I would hear about her from them. And when we had met, we always laughed—about our experiences at Yale and about the fact that she told me I would hate living in Hong Kong and not only had I loved it but I’d fallen in love there.
We would also talk about contemporary Chinese art, her field of expertise, and in particular about a remarkable Taiwanese ink painter she was championing: Yu Peng. Huei-Zu had thought deeply about this artist and I was simply someone filled with a layman’s enthusiasm, but she seemed happy that I shared her love for his work.
In the days following, I spoke to many of our crew. (I hope I wrote to Huei-Zu’s husband and parents and brothers to tell them how sorry I was, but I don’t know if I did. When I was in my mid-thirties, I didn’t know how important that was.) I felt again the shock that comes from discovering that the spool has run out on a life, and that whatever time I’d had with that friend was the only time I would ever have. No do-overs. No chance to cram in one more drink, meal, or conversation. Done.
