Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex

If one of the guys had a girlfriend there would be a girl around for a while. I stayed away from them, feeling they might guess my secret. I was like an immigrant, putting on airs, who runs into someone from the old country. I didn’t want to be found out, so remained tight-lipped. But I would have been laconic in that company in any case. They were all Deadheads, and that was what the talk was. Who saw Jerry on which night. Who had a bootleg of which concert. Matt had flunked out of high school but had an impressive mind when it came to cataloguing Dead trivia. He carried the dates and cities of their tour in his head. He knew the lyrics of every song, when and where the Dead had played it, how many times, and what songs they had played only once. He lived in expectation of certain songs being performed as the faithful await the Messiah. Someday the Dead were going to play “Cosmic Charlie” and Matt Larson wanted to be there to see creation redeemed. He had once met Mountain Girl, Jerry’s wife. “She was so fucking cool,” he said. “I would fucking love a woman like that. If I found a lady as cool as Mountain Girl, I’d marry her and have kids and all that shit like that.”

“Get a job, too?”

“We could follow the tour. Keep our babies in little sacks. Papoose style. And sell weed.”

We weren’t the only ones living in the park. Occupying some dunes on the other side of the field were homeless guys, with long beards, their faces brown from sun and dirt. They were known to ransack other people’s camps, so we never left ours unattended. That was pretty much the only rule we had. Someone always had to stand guard.

I hung around the Deadheads because I was scared alone. My time on the road made me see the benefits of being in a pack. We had left home for different reasons. They weren’t kids I would ever have been friends with in normal circumstances, but for that brief time I made do, because I had nowhere else to go. I was never at ease around them. But they weren’t especially cruel. Fights broke out when kids had been drinking, but the ethos was nonviolent. Everyone was reading Siddhartha . An old paperback got passed around the camp. I read it, too. It’s one of the things I remember most about that time: Cal, sitting on a rock, reading Hermann Hesse and learning about the Buddha.

“I heard the Buddha dropped acid,” said one Head. “That’s what his enlightenment was.”

“They didn’t have acid back then, man.”

“No, it was like, you know, a ‘shroom.”

“I think Jerry’s the Buddha, man.”

“Yeah!”

“Like when I fucking saw Jerry play that forty-five-minute space jam on ‘Truckin’ in Santa Fe,’ I knew he was the Buddha.”

In all these conversations I took no part. See Cal in the far underhang of the bushes, as all the Deadheads drift off to sleep.

I had run away without thinking what my life would be like. I had fled without having anywhere to run to. Now I was dirty, I was running out of money. Sooner or later I would have to call my parents. But for the first time in my life, I knew that there was nothing they could do to help me. Nothing anyone could do.

Every day I took the band to Ali Baba’s and bought them veggie burgers for seventy-five cents each. I opted out on the begging and the dope dealing. Mostly I hung around the mimosa grove, in growing despair. A few times I walked out to the beach to sit by the sea, but after a while I stopped doing that, too. Nature brought no relief. Outside had ended. There was nowhere to go that wouldn’t be me.

It was the opposite for my parents. Wherever they went, whatever they did, what greeted them was my absence. After the third week of my vanishing, friends and relatives stopped coming over to Middlesex in such numbers. The house got quieter. The phone didn’t ring. Milton called Chapter Eleven, who was now living in the Upper Peninsula, and said, “Your mother’s going through a rough period. We still don’t know where your sister is. I’m sure your mother would feel a little better if she could see you. Why don’t you come down for the weekend?” Milton didn’t mention anything about my note. Throughout my time at the Clinic he had kept Chapter Eleven apprised of the situation in only the simplest terms. Chapter Eleven heard the seriousness in Milton’s voice and agreed to start coming down on weekends and staying in his old bedroom. Gradually, he learned the details of my condition, reacting to them in a milder way than my parents had, which allowed them, or at least Tessie, to begin to accept the new reality. It was during those weekends that Milton, desperate to cement his restored relationship with his son, urged him once again to go into the family business. “You’re not still going with that Meg, are you?”

“No.”

“Well, you dropped out of your engineering studies. So what are you doing now? Your mother and I don’t have a very clear idea of your life up there in Marquette.”

“I work in a bar.”

“You work in a bar? Doing what?”

“Short-order cook.”

Milton paused only a moment. “What would you rather do, stay behind the grill or run Hercules Hot Dogs someday? You’re the one that invented them anyway.”

Chapter Eleven did not say yes. But he did not say no. He had once been a science geek, but the sixties had changed that. Under the imperatives of that decade, Chapter Eleven had become a lacto-vegetarian, a Transcendental Meditation student, a chewer of peyote buttons. Once, long ago, he had sawed golf balls in half, trying to find out what was inside; but at some point in his life my brother had become fascinated with the interior of the mind. Convinced of the essential uselessness of formalized education, he had retreated from civilization. Both of us had our moments of getting back to nature, Chapter Eleven in the U.P. and me in my bush in Golden Gate Park. By the time my father made his offer, however, Chapter Eleven had begun to tire of the woods.

“Come on,” Milton said, “let’s go have a Hercules right now.”

“I don’t eat meat,” Chapter Eleven said. “How can I run the place if I don’t eat meat?”

“I’ve been thinking about putting in salad bars,” said Milton. “Lotta people eating a low-fat diet these days.”

“Good idea.”

“Yeah? You think so? That can be your department, then.” Milton elbowed Chapter Eleven, kidding, “We’ll start you off as vice president in charge of salad bars.”

They drove to the Hercules downtown. It was busy when they arrived. Milton greeted the manager, Gus Zaras. “ Yahsou. ”

Gus looked up and, a second late, began to smile broadly. “Hey there, Milt. How you doing?”

“Fine, fine. I brought the future boss down to see the place.” He indicated Chapter Eleven.

“Welcome to the family dynasty,” Gus joked, spreading his arms. He laughed too loudly. Seeming to realize this, he stopped. There was an awkward silence. Then Gus asked, “So, Milt, what’ll it be?”

“Two with everything. And what do we got that’s vegetarian?”

“We got bean soup.”

“Okay. Get my kid here a bowl of bean soup.”

“You got it.”

Milton and Chapter Eleven chose stools and waited to be served. After another long silence, Milton said, “You know how many of these places your old man owns right now?”

“How many?” said Chapter Eleven.

“Sixty-six. Got eight in Florida.”

That was as far as the hard sell went. Milton ate his Hercules hot dogs in silence. He knew perfectly well why Gus was acting so overfriendly. It was because he was thinking what everyone thinks when a girl disappears. He was thinking the worst. There were moments when Milton did, too. He didn’t admit it to anyone. He didn’t admit it to himself. But whenever Tessie spoke about the umbilical cord, when she claimed that she could still feel me out there somewhere, Milton found himself wanting to believe her.