Jonathan Nasaw - The Boys from Santa Cruz

I didn’t say anything, though. When it came my turn to talk, I told the group that as far as I was concerned, I was still in jail, even if it was a jail without walls. And in jail, my father had taught me, you don’t put your personal business out into the population, so I would pass on the soul baring.

“Passing is not an option,” said Dr. O.

“You can’t make me share,” I replied. Share was their word for whine.

“No,” he said. “But I can make sure nobody eats or sleeps until you do.”

I looked around the campfire. Everybody was giving me dirty looks. Peer pressure: when you’re a teenager they’re always telling you not to give in to it, but then they use it against you whenever it suits their purposes. But I didn’t give in because of the peer pressure, I gave in because I was hungry and tired. So hungry and tired that this time when I told the story, I left it all in, even Teddy’s titties.

“Your stepmother had implants?” asked Dusty.

“My stepmother,” I told her, “had a dick.”

In the old days, FBI special agents were required to be on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, even when they were off duty, because, of course, special agents are never off duty. Until the advent of sky pagers, they were expected to leave one or more telephone numbers at which they could be reached, and/or call in their whereabouts at frequent intervals. You could always tell a G-man by the dimes jingling in his pocket, the in-joke ran, back when a phone call cost ten cents and there was a booth on every street corner.

Technically, then, Pender was already in violation of Bureau regulations when he left the motel Wednesday night without his newfangled sky pager. He only dug himself in deeper by not calling in Thursday morning, not to mention failing to report to work. But any residual guilt he might have experienced was more than trumped by the relief that came with realizing that he didn’t have to watch any more goddamn snuff videos.

Thursday afternoon Amy dropped him off at his motel so he could check out. Just seeing the Bu-car parked outside the motel room was a material reminder of all the stuff he’d been putting off thinking about. Little stuff like turning in his resignation and telling his wife that he wouldn’t be coming home. But he wasn’t ready to deal with any of that just yet. Maybe Monday, he told himself, and quickly went back to not thinking about the stuff he wasn’t thinking about.

A second night of free drinks, slow dancing, and vigorous sex, followed by a second day lazing around the farmhouse, left Pender feeling like a gigolo. So when one of the Nugget’s two bouncers called in sick late Friday afternoon, he gladly offered to fill in. By then he’d met most of the full-timers-Steve, the head bartender; Barry, the head bouncer; Nestor, the cook; the waitresses, Karen and Mindy. And if their reception was a tad grudging at first, he understood they were only being protective of Amy.

Just in case he hadn’t understood, Barry took him aside to let him know that he was one lucky son of a bitch and to warn him that if he mistreated Amy in any way, he’d find himself in a world of hurt.

“Now that that’s behind us-Amy says you have some experience as a bouncer?” Barry was around Pender’s size, but looked taller in his cowboy boots and high-crowned Stetson hat.

“It was a long time ago, but yeah.” Like most of his colleagues in the Cortland County Sheriff’s Department in the late sixties, he’d done his share of moonlighting in bars and at shows.

“’Cause no offense, hoss, but you look a little out of shape to me.”

“Maybe, but I reckon I can still eighty-six a drunk with the best of ’em-hoss.”

The first few hours, there wasn’t much work for the bouncers. Pender helped Barry break up a fight, took the car keys from a falling-down drunk, and called a cab for him. By the end of the band’s second set, when he did have to run a bottle-throwing customer, the come-along hold he’d learned as a young deputy sheriff in Cortland came in handier than anything he’d been taught in the FBI Academy. What you want to do, Sheriff Hartung used to tell his men, is leverage the subject’s wrist up past his shoulder blade, so he’s too busy treading air to put up a fight.

When things heated up during the third set, Pender earned even Barry’s respect by smoothly disarming a drunken patron. “You’ll make a bouncer yet, hoss,” he told Pender later, after closing, when the crew and the band were unwinding with a few drinks, swapping songs and shooting the bull. And with a few slugs of Jim Beam under his belt, Pender discovered, it was almost possible, if not to actually forget the stuff he was trying not to remember, then to pretend to forget, at least for a little while longer.

Although I’d figured out the game the first night, it wasn’t until the next morning that Dr. O explained to us what the stakes were. If you played it right, you got to go home (graduate, they called it) and finish your treatment in the bosom of your familial unit. If you played it wrong, you went from there into a residential program. And in case that sounds like bull sessions and pajama pizza parties to you, you should know that in rehab language, residential generally means “locked.”

On the second day’s hike, when we were finally allowed to talk to each other (the counselors sandwiched us in on the trail, two ahead and two behind), I learned that my revelations the night before had earned me some respect from my so-called peers. Brent was practically creaming. “Your own pad, your own gun, all da dope you cou’ smoke, no muhfuggin’ school. Muhfuh, dat musta been sweeeet!”

“Save your breath, wiggah,” I told him, having just caught a glimpse of the next rise in the trail. “You’re gonna need it.”

It wasn’t all work, though. After an especially hairy canyon descent, we broke for lunch at a secret swimming hole Gary claimed to have discovered-Lake Gary, he called it. Everybody changed into bathing suits, even the counselors, and we swam and splashed and frolicked around, happy as a bunch of otters for a couple hours.

The campfire group therapy that night was mostly about Dusty. Her deal was rough sex with older guys, we learned. It had started with her stepfather abusing her, of course, but by the time she was fifteen she had worked her way through a neighbor, two teachers, a minister, and the shrink who was supposed to be helping her with her problem in the first place.

Dr. O kept trying to get her to cop to having low self-esteem. He said that was why she liked it rough, and let the men use her. She made what I thought were a couple of very good arguments, such as that everything he was saying was based on the assumption that sex was bad. And even if that were true, she added, she was using the men as much as they were using her.

But after a while it appeared to me that she was starting to give in to him, to go along with all his bullshit. Dr. O would make some lame observation, and she would give him this wet-lipped, deer-eyed look, and say something like “You know, I never thought of it that way before.”

I was probably the only one who noticed what was going on. “You planning to let Dr. O screw you?” I asked her that night. We’d set up our tents with the back walls touching so we could talk to each other through them.

“If I have to in order to graduate,” she said. “I just can’t face being locked up again.”

They broke us up the third day. The girls hiked with Kara and Diane, the boys with Gary and Dr. O, and we had separate campfires that night. If anything, there was even more bullshit involved in the boys only therapy sessions, with everybody trying to outdo each other in acting tough.