Joyland (12 page)

I stayed friends with Tom and Erin after that summer, and I’m friends with Erin still, although these days we’re mostly email and Facebook buddies who sometimes get together for lunch in New York. I’ve never met her second husband. She says he’s a nice guy, and I believe her. Why would I not? After being married to Mr. Original Nice Guy for eighteen years and having that yardstick to measure by, she’d hardly pick a loser.

In the spring of 1992, Tom was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He was dead six months later. When he called and told me he was sick, his usual ratchetjaw delivery flowed by the wrecking ball swinging back and forth in his head, I was stunned and depressed, the way almost anyone would be, I suppose, when he hears that a guy who should be in the very prime of life is instead approaching the finish line. You want to ask how a thing like that can be fair. Weren’t there supposed to be a few more good things for Tom, like a couple of grandchildren and maybe that long-dreamed-of vacation in Maui?

During my time at Joyland, I once heard Pops Allen talk about burning the lot. In the Talk, that means to blatantly cheat the rubes at what’s supposed to be a straight game. I thought of that for the first time in years when Tom called with his bad news.

But the mind defends itself as long as it can. After the first shock of such news dissipates, maybe you think,
Okay, it’s bad, I get that, but it’s not the final word; there still might be a chance. Even if ninety-five percent of the people who draw this particular card go down, there’s still that lucky five percent. Also, doctors misdiagnose shit all the time. Barring those things, there’s the occasional miracle.

You think that, and then you get the follow-up call. The woman who makes the follow-up call was once a beautiful young girl who ran around Joyland in a flippy green dress and a silly Sherwood Forest hat, toting a big old Speed Graphic camera, and the conies she braced hardly ever said no. How could they say no to that blazing red hair and eager smile? How could anyone say no to Erin Cook?

Well, God said no. God burned Tom Kennedy’s lot, and He burned hers in the process. When I picked up the phone at five-thirty on a gorgeous October afternoon in Westchester, that girl had become a woman whose voice, blurry with the tears, sounded old and tired to death. “Tom died at two this afternoon. It was very peaceful. He couldn’t talk, but he was aware. He . . . Dev, he squeezed my hand when I said goodbye.”

I said, “I wish I could have been there.”

“Yes.” Her voice wavered, then firmed. “Yes, that would have been good.”

You think
Okay, I get it, I’m prepared for the worst,
but you hold out that small hope, see, and that’s what fucks you up. That’s what kills you.

I talked to her, I told her how much I loved her and how much I had loved Tom, I told her yes, I’d be at the funeral, and if there was anything I could do before then, she should call. Day or night. Then I hung up the phone and lowered my head and bawled my goddam eyes out.

The end of my first love doesn’t measure up to the death of one old friend and the bereavement of the other, but it followed the same pattern. Exactly the same. And if it seemed like the end of the world to me—first causing those suicidal ideations (silly and halfhearted though they may have been) and then a seismic shift in the previously unquestioned course of my life—you have to understand I had no scale by which to judge it. That’s called being young.

As June wore on, I started to understand that my relationship with Wendy was as sick as William Blake’s rose, but I refused to believe it was
mortally
sick, even when the signs became increasingly clear.

Letters, for instance. During my first week at Mrs. Shoplaw’s, I wrote Wendy four long ones, even though I was run off my feet at Joyland and came drag-assing into my second-floor room each night with my head full of new information and new experiences, feeling like a kid dropped into a challenging college course (call it The Advanced Physics of Fun) halfway through the semester. What I got in return was a single postcard with Boston Common on the front and a very peculiar collaborative message on the back. At the top, written in a hand I didn’t recognize, was this:
Wenny writes the card while Rennie drives the bus!
Below in a hand I
did
recognize, Wendy—or Wenny, if you like; I hated it, myself—had written breezily:
Whee! We is salesgirls off on a venture to Cape Cod! It’s a party! Hoopsie muzik! Don’t worry I held the wheel while Ren wrote her part. Hope your good. W.

Hoopsie muzik? Hope your good?
No love, no do you miss me, just
hope your good
? And although, judging by the bumps and jags and inkblots, the card had been written while on the move in Renee’s car (Wendy didn’t have one), they both sounded either stoned or drunk on their asses. The following week I sent four more letters, plus an Erin-photo of me wearing the fur. From Wendy, nothing in reply.

You start to worry, then you start to get it, then you know. Maybe you don’t want to, maybe you think that lovers as well as doctors misdiagnose shit all the time, but in your heart you know.

Twice I tried calling her. The same grumpy girl answered both times. I imagined her wearing harlequin glasses, an ankle-length granny dress, and no lipstick. Not there, she said the first time. Out with Ren. Not there and not likely to be there in the future, Grumpy Girl said the second time. Moved.

“Moved where?” I asked, alarmed. This was in the parlor of
Maison
Shoplaw, where there was a long-distance honor sheet beside the phone. My fingers were holding the big old-fashioned receiver so tightly they had gone numb. Wendy was going to college on a patchwork magic carpet of scholarships, loans, and work-study employment, the same as me. She couldn’t afford a place on her own. Not without help, she couldn’t.

“I don’t know and don’t care,” Grumpy Girl said. “I got tired of all the drinking and hen-parties at two in the morning. Some of us actually like to get a little sleep. Strange but true.”

My heart was beating so hard I could feel it pulsing in my temples. “Did Renee go with her?”

“No, they had a fight. Over that guy. The one who helped Wennie move out.” She said
Wennie
with a kind of bright contempt that made me sick to my stomach. Surely it wasn’t the guy part that made me feel that way;
I
was her guy. If some friend, someone she’d met at work, had pitched in and helped her move her stuff, what was that to me? Of course she could have guy friends. I had made at least one
girl
friend, hadn’t I?

“Is Renee there? Can I talk to her?”

“No, she had a date.” Some penny must have finally dropped, because all at once Grumpy Girl got interested in the conversation. “Heyyy, is your name Devin?”

I hung up. It wasn’t something I planned, just something I did. I told myself I hadn’t heard Grumpy Girl all of a sudden change into
Amused
Grumpy Girl, as if there was some sort of joke going on and I was part of it. Maybe even the butt of it. As I believe I have said, the mind defends itself as long as it can.

Three days later, I got the only letter I received from Wendy Keegan that summer. The last letter. It was written on her stationery, which was deckle-edged and featured happy kittens playing with balls of yarn. It was the stationery of a fifth-grade girl, although that thought didn’t occur to me until much later. There were three breathless pages, mostly saying how sorry she was, and how she had fought against the attraction but it was just hopeless, and she knew I would be hurt so I probably shouldn’t call her or try to see her for a while, and she hoped we could be good friends after the initial shock wore off, and he was a nice guy, he went to Dartmouth, he played lacrosse, she knew I’d like him, maybe she could introduce him to me when the fall semester started, etc. etc. fucking etc.

That night I plopped myself down on the sand fifty yards or so from Mrs. Shoplaw’s Beachside Accommodations, planning to get drunk. At least, I thought, it wouldn’t be expensive. In those days, a sixpack was all it took to get me pie-eyed. At some point Tom and Erin joined me, and we watched the waves roll in together: the three Joyland Musketeers.

“What’s wrong?” Erin asked.

I shrugged, the way you do when it’s small shit but annoying shit, all the same. “Girlfriend broke up with me. Sent me a Dear John letter.”

“Which in your case,” Tom said, “would be a Dear Dev letter.”

“Show a little compassion,” Erin told him. “He’s sad and hurt and trying not to show it. Are you too much of a dumbass to see that?”

“No,” Tom said. He put his arm around my shoulders and briefly hugged me against him. “I’m sorry for your pain, pal. I feel it coming off you like a cold wind from Canada or maybe even the Arctic. Can I have one of your beers?”

“Sure.”

We sat there for quite a while, and under Erin’s gentle questioning, I spilled some of it, but not all of it. I
was
sad. I
was
hurt. But there was a lot more, and I didn’t want them to see it. This was partly because I’d been raised by my parents to believe barfing your feelings on other people was the height of impoliteness, but mostly because I was dismayed by the depth and strength of my jealousy. I didn’t want them to even guess at that lively worm (he was from
Dartmouth,
oh God
yes,
he’d probably pledged the best frat and drove a Mustang his folks had given him as a high school graduation present). Nor was jealousy the worst of it. The worst was the horrifying realization—that night it was just starting to sink in—that I had been really and truly rejected for the first time in my life. She was through with me, but I couldn’t imagine being through with her.

Erin also took a beer, and raised the can. “Let’s toast the next one to come along. I don’t know who she’ll be, Dev, only that meeting you will be her lucky day.”

“Hear-hear!” Tom said, raising his own can. And, because he was Tom, he felt compelled to add “Where-where!” and “There-there!”

I don’t think either of them realized, then or all the rest of the summer, how fundamentally the ground under my feet had shifted. How lost I felt. I didn’t want them to know. It was more than embarrassing; it seemed shameful. So I made myself smile, raised my own can of suds, and drank.

At least with them to help me drink the six, I didn’t have to wake up the next morning hungover as well as heartbroke. That was good, because when we got to Joyland that morning, I found out from Pop Allen that I was down to wear the fur that afternoon on Joyland Avenue—three fifteen-minute shifts at three, four, and five. I bitched for form’s sake (everybody was supposed to bitch about wearing the fur) but I was glad. I liked being mobbed by the kids, and for the next few weeks, playing Howie also had a bitter sort of amusement value. As I made my tail-wagging way down Joyland Avenue, followed by crowds of laughing children, I thought it was no wonder Wendy had dumped me. Her new boyfriend went to Dartmouth and played lacrosse. Her old one was spending the summer in a third-tier amusement park. Where he played a dog.

Joyland summer.

I ride-jockeyed. I flashed the shys in the mornings—meaning I restocked them with prizes—and ran some of them in the afternoons. I untangled Devil Wagons by the dozen, learned how to fry dough without burning my fingers off, and worked on my pitch for the Carolina Spin. I danced and sang with the other greenies on the Wiggle-Waggle Village’s Story Stage. Several times Fred Dean sent me to scratch the midway, a true sign of trust because it meant picking up the noon or five
PM
take from the various concessions. I made runs to Heaven’s Bay or Wilmington when some piece of machinery broke down and stayed late on Wednesday nights—usually along with Tom, George Preston, and Ronnie Houston—to lube the Whirly Cups and a vicious, neck-snapping ride called the Zipper. Both of those babies drank oil the way camels drink water when they get to the next oasis. And, of course, I wore the fur.