We Should Not Be Friends, page 8
The beer was now on our dime, so it was no longer Rolling Rock but PBR: Pabst Blue Ribbon. “God, this stuff is awful,” I said as I grabbed another.
Maxey motioned me over to the edge. Scary, but I followed. We sat in silence for a while.
“I’m going to keep trying for the SEALs,” Maxey said. He’d retaken the aptitude test and was pretty sure he’d passed this time. That, however, was just the first hurdle.
“And if that doesn’t work out?” I asked.
“I don’t have a frickin’ clue.” Maxey grabbed another beer himself. “You?”
“I’m going to go to Hong Kong. I mean, as you all said, fuck them. I don’t need their stupid teaching fellowship. I’ll stay at home this summer, work as a temporary secretary, save up enough for a one-way ticket, and just go.”
“Do you know anyone there?”
“I met a friend of a friend at a party in New York. He just moved to Hong Kong. I think he’ll let me stay with him for a few days until I find a job. Huei-Zu still thinks I’m nuts and tells me I’ll hate it there. But if I don’t go, it’s like they win. So that’s what I’m going to do. Unless I can’t save enough money. Or unless I chicken out.”
“And what then?” Maxey asked.
“I don’t have a frickin’ clue,” I said in my best Maxey accent.
We sat for a while, drinking beer after beer. Then I moved around the roof talking with the others. Singer joined Maxey for a while. They had gone from giving each other endless grief to one of the strongest friendships in the hall.
The sun disappeared entirely. I found myself back on the ledge with Maxey.
“What if this is it?” Maxey asked. “What if it’s all downhill from here? What if we just fuck up from now until we die?” Maxey was smiling, but he sounded more serious than I’d heard him since his audit. “You know, when I began wrestling, I had these incredible opportunities. I surprised myself when I started wrestling varsity even though I was only in eighth grade. That was crazy. It was beyond amazing to be on a great team as this little kid with an awesome coach and these high school men teaching me and encouraging me. I was even more shocked—and they all were, too—when I kept winning. I mean I was always the first guy out on the mat because I was ninety-eight pounds. I had to set the tone. And when I won, which I always did, I got this awesome reaction—like I was bear-hugged by all these heroes of mine, they were so psyched that I’d gotten us off to such a great start with a win. But they also hugged me when I lost. I mean, these were the big brothers I’d always wanted and never had.”
Maxey grabbed another beer. I think it was his fourth, at least.
“I worked so hard at being strong and keeping my weight down and learning. There was a kid named Andy Nipon who was my mentor, and he taught me everything. If I let my head drop, he smashed it into the mat. If I reached back in practice, he threw me on my back and pinned me. As I learned and improved, he was proud of me—he didn’t say it, but I knew he was—and that gave me confidence. I only lost three matches that whole eighth-grade year and pinned at least a dozen opponents. I was the surprise new kid on the block—not even in high school yet—thirteen years old. Andy went on to win the Nationals his senior year. I was so proud of him, and so proud that he was proud of me. I knew that nothing would stop him. He was going to Penn, and I knew he would beat every top wrestler from Texas to Maine to Virginia.
“But I also was getting more and more anxious, even while I was continuing to overachieve. In my freshman year, wrestling at a hundred and twelve pounds, I made it to Nationals—all the way to the semifinals. It was a big surprise getting that far when I was just fourteen. Everyone was talking about me being the next Andy Nipon—or even better. I had twice the points he had at the same age and now it was my turn to be a mentor and lead the dynasty. For the next three years I never lost a match during the regular season—three years of winning. But there was one big problem every year. When I got to the tournaments that followed, I would choke. I shined all year long but after freshman year screwed up at every postseason championship tournament.
“Still, by the time I was a senior I was on fire. I didn’t just win; I crushed the competition at every regular meet. And I was captain of the team, just as I had been junior year. We were coming off another sensational season, again winning our league. The coach was loving it. Everyone expected me to go on to win the Nationals just like Andy Nipon had when he was a senior.
“There was no way I was going to let the pressure and spotlight get to me this time. I knew I could win the thing. I cruised my way to the semifinals of the state independent schools championship. No problem. So, there I was—matched against a kid from a rival Pennsylvania school. And the very first thing he did was pick me up and pile-drive me into the mat. I’m lying there and I can hear everyone in the stadium gasp—they were watching the great Chris Maxey get his butt kicked. I took an injury time-out and looked over at this guy. He was tough and I was going to have to reach really deep down to beat him.”
“So, you did, right?” I asked.
“No. I was in shock. After my injury time-out, I looked over at him again and realized that he was even more confident and even more hungry to kick my ass—me, Mr. All-Year-Undefeated. I could have dug down deep and gone back out there, but I didn’t. I went down with an injury. I threw the match, making the excuse that my bell was rung. The next weekend at the Nationals, I lost to the same kid—but at least that time I went the distance. I ended my high school career with a third-place finish. Not a first. I was no Andy Nipon after all. And I did the same thing here. But worse. Wasn’t elected captain. Didn’t make it through the Easterns to the Nationals.”
“Yeah, but you were injured! You ripped up your shoulder, and you were still undefeated during the regular season and ranked second in the Easterns at a hundred and fifty pounds, right?”
“In the end, what really matters is that I didn’t win. I choked. In my final match, I was wrestling this army guy. I was just one win away from to a ticket to the Nationals. I had trounced this same guy in the qualifiers earlier in the tournament, but then my spirit was gone and my head got in the way. I got out front in the match but this army guy never gave up. He just kept coming at me—and then with seconds left, he took me down for the win. So, that was it. The end of my wrestling. Cool Maxey, fun-loving, great wrestler Maxey, became history in one swift takedown.”
I was touched by how Maxey was confiding in me. I thought back to when Maxey had felt he had to apologize for being emotional; clearly, he no longer felt that need. Had Maxey really lost his confidence? Or was this just a temporary crisis of faith? I didn’t know, and didn’t think Maxey did either, so I said nothing. We just sat there, on the roof, staring out at the dim lights of New Haven. After a while, Maxey told me that he was really glad we were friends. I said the same and told him I was sure he was going to be a Navy SEAL.
“If I am, and they send me to Hong Kong, and you’re there, we’ll have some beers and look back to this night,” Maxey replied. “And we’ll laugh about when we sat on the roof and didn’t know what would become of us.”
* * *
—
The next morning, I woke up with a dreadful hangover. In the days that followed, parents arrived, and soon it was graduation—a sodden mess as it rained torrentially all weekend long and the ceremony was held outside and unsheltered as always. Some of us brought our parents to the hall. I’m sure I did, but I have no recollection of that; all I remember is my drenched clothes. Then college was over. The fourteen of us had eaten dinner together twice a week for a year and shared our lives and thoughts. On our final day in the hall, we promised to keep in close touch and spend all sorts of times together. I was certain we all would.
Maxey and I would talk on the phone a handful of times and even exchange a few letters. But it would be a decade before we saw each other again.
Chapter Two
Twenties and Thirties
BACK ON THE ROOF
When Maxey and I were in our mid-twenties, a show was launched on television called Thirtysomething. When it first aired, thirtysomething seemed unimaginably old: it might as well have been called Ninetysomething. Here was a program about people getting married and divorced, having children, quitting jobs, starting companies, and paying mortgages. These were adults. I didn’t feel that I would ever be among them. I simply couldn’t imagine their problems belonging, ever, to anyone I knew. At our tenth reunion, in 1994, we were ourselves thirtysomething, even if just. Yet those of us who assembled at the hall that spring seemed to me to be far younger than the characters featured on the by-then-beloved program. Maybe that was because the show was written by people older than us, or maybe I still saw myself and my classmates as the recent college graduates we’d been when we were last all together. Or maybe we were just plain immature.
I’d arrived before the ten or so others who were coming to our planned secret-society get-together at the hall and was hanging out on one of the sofas with a book that everyone was then reading, Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel. As always, I carried a book both to give myself a way to pass the time and as a kind of security blanket. This particular novel told the story of a woman who suffers a series of cruel disappointments; it seemed an apt thing to have with me in case the reunion didn’t live up to my hopes for it.
I was excited to see everyone again but anxious. My concentration was soon interrupted by happy voices. We fell into easy conversations, as though we’d never left. There was a lot of catching up to do. I’d kept in very close touch with a few people from the crew who lived in New York or passed through and had been in sporadic contact—calls and letters, but no visits—with others, including Maxey. With some, there’d been no contact at all.
Maxey had said he was going to be there but had yet to arrive.
Then the buzzer rang annoyingly—again and again and again—and I broke off from a conversation and went to open the huge wooden door. There was Maxey, grinning goofily and hefting three cases of beer.
He put down the cases and gave me a bear hug.
“Schwalbs! It’s good to see you. Been a long time, man. Hey, this is Pam.”
That’s when I met the woman who had married Maxey. She’d been inspecting the hall from the street and now joined him on the doorstep. They’d met in San Diego after Maxey finished his Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL training (BUD/S) in 1986 and had married in Subic Bay, Philippines, months later.
Pam’s eyes were almost as intense as Maxey’s, but amber brown. She was definitely the California surfer Maxey had described to me—sun-bleached auburn hair, easy smile—and yet she had a vaguely military posture. She didn’t hunch over the way Maxey did but instead carried herself four-square, shoulders back. She pushed Maxey to the side to say hello to me, and when I reached out to shake her hand, she, too, gave me a big hug.
The beers were here. The reunion proper could begin. Maxey picked one case of beer up off the ground; Pam grabbed one: I struggled with the third.
“To the roof!” shouted Maxey.
“I don’t know,” I said, “I’m pretty comfortable down here.” Soon, I was climbing the steep ladder that led to the roof.
Maxey had monkeyed his way up already, balancing a case on his shoulder, whereas I was trying not to drop the bottle of beer I’d already started to drink. When I got near the top, I realized I was stuck. You needed both hands free to heft yourself up over the edge. I considered trying to cradle the beer in my armpit but instantly realized that wouldn’t work. So I just hung there.
“Do you need help?” Maxey asked me, peering down through the hatch.
“Nope,” I said.
Pam was coming up behind me, with a six-pack. “Give me your beer,” she said. I wasn’t sure how she would be able to manage mine without risking a fall and serious injury, but then I saw: she’d looped her arms around a rung so she could balance the six-pack on one hand and hold my bottle in the other. Simple engineering solution. I scampered up onto the roof, painfully scraping my knee as I did so, and then reached down to retrieve my beer from Pam. She followed effortlessly, and others from the group joined us. No one else needed help.
I hadn’t remembered it being such an ordeal to make it up. But I also had been thirty pounds lighter the last time I’d tried.
Someone asked Maxey how he’d met Pam.
“You mean, how on earth did someone like Pam agree to marry a dickhead like me,” Maxey replied. “I met Pam at the place you always want to say you met your soul mate: a dive bar in Mission Beach, California—the kind where you go upstairs and there’s so much beer spilled that your shoes stick to the floor. It was right after BUD/S. I was a SEAL team officer living in San Diego and was pretty impressed with myself.”
“Very true,” Pam added, smiling, but it was clear that she was going to let Maxey tell the story. I think she wanted to see what version he would share with all of us.
“Our meeting was kind of funny because we literally bumped into each other. The first thing she said to me was, ‘What happened to your face?’ Which is a good pickup line. Then I remembered that I had this big bruise on my cheek—jumping out of a plane the week before, I’d gotten too close to the guy in front of me and been kicked in the face. It looked grim. I said, ‘Well, I was parachuting as part of some special forces training exercises.’ I tried to play the macho thing. She looked at me and said, ‘Oh, you’re in the service?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m in the navy. Have you ever heard of the SEALs?’ She said she’d never heard of them—and then added, ‘But I’ve got to tell you that if you’re in the service, I want nothing to do with you.’ Then she turned her back and walked away.”
Maxey told us that he followed her. He learned that it was Pam’s sister’s birthday, and that that was the only reason she’d come out—she’d wanted to take it easy at home on her one night off from waitressing, but her sister had insisted.
Someone asked Pam: “Where was your sister when you met Maxey?”
“She was ready to go home, but after I met Chris, I decided to stay on,” Pam said.
Maxey continued. “We hung out a bit more at the Pennant—that was the name of the bar—and then went across the street to another bar and had a drink there. Then we went out to find my car, which was right in front of the bar—except it wasn’t, because it had been towed. And she said to me, ‘You fucking idiot, you parked in a no-standing zone. Didn’t you know they’d tow you?’ ”
Maxey used a pay phone to find out where the car had been towed and then asked Pam if she’d mind driving him to his car.
“Is this thing about your car being towed and your needing a ride some kind of pickup line?” Pam asked. “Because it’s really bad if you are making this up.”
At the impounding lot, Maxey spotted his car right away: “But it’s behind a metal gate next to a trailer with a light on, and inside the trailer I see a guy talking on the phone. I decided to do my SEAL team thing; I said to Pam, ‘I think I can get my car out of there without having to pay.’ I thought this would impress her, but she just looked at me like I was insane—I think she wanted to see me get arrested. The gate to the pen wasn’t locked, so that was easy, but I then realized that the tow truck was between my car and the gate, blocking the only way out. I thought maybe I could push the tow truck out of the way, and had actually put my shoulder to it, but it must have had its parking brake on. By that time, I’m making so much noise that the guy comes out of the trailer and says, ‘What the fuck?’ ”
Fortunately, Maxey had been able to talk him down.
“And that would have been it,” Maxey continued, “with me paying the fine and driving back to my place, and Pam driving back to hers, and the two of us probably never seeing each other again! But before she left, she wrote her phone number on a scrap of paper and left it on the windshield of my car.”
After he got Pam’s number, Maxey tried to play it cool, but he lasted only two nights before he broke down and gave her a call. “I said, ‘Let’s go out—let’s have dinner.’ ” She said, “Well, I’m really busy this week.’ So, I said, ‘All right, I’ll call you on Saturday and see what’s up.’ It was then that she said, ‘Well, I kind of have a boyfriend.’
“I thought she was really cool, but that was that. And then I had to go away on an extended cross-training exercise with crazy Canadian special forces. I guess when I was gone, she lost interest in her boyfriend, and there was a message when I got back saying I could ask her out.”
“I think I would have broken up with that boyfriend anyways,” Pam added.
“Yeah. It was not the Maxey charm. Not just the Maxey charm,” he added. Their first real date was on Valentine’s Day, 1986, when he invited her to a military banquet, a formal event where everyone would be in Dinner Dress Blues. Maxey had never gone before because he’d never had anyone to bring. This time, an admiral would be giving a keynote speech.
Maxey was thrilled that Pam agreed to come but also a little bit worried. “I knew my commanding officer would be there—the whole command, in fact. I told her everyone would be dressed up, hoping she would understand, but I thought she might wear cutoffs or a prom dress. But when I went to pick her up at her apartment, she looked amazing, beautifully dressed. When we got to the banquet, my buddies were all like, ‘Who’s that?’ What they really meant was, ‘Maxey, you loser, how did you get a girl like that to agree to come to dinner with you?’ ”
After the dinner, Maxey’s captain told him and the others that they were supposed to go up and introduce themselves to the keynote speaker. “We were near the front of the room, so Pam and I were among the first people to go up and greet him. I saluted and then shook his hand, and said, ‘Admiral, thank you for your talk. My name’s Ensign Maxey and this is my date, Pam Less.’
