Tasteful Nudes: ...and Other Misguided Attempts at Personal Growth and Validation (5 page)

“Dave, uh, why don’t you walk Sheila to the door and I’ll pull the car around so it’s facing the right way for us to drive the rest of the way home?” Todd blurted as we pulled into Sheila’s driveway.

A little awkward maybe, but I still thought he was the best guy ever for seeing to it that Sheila and I got a little alone time as, terrified sixteen-year-old that I was, I had yet to muster the courage to actually kiss her yet. It would not be a stretch to say that the line “Oh, God, my chance has come at last” from the Smiths’ “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” was running through my head over and over at that very moment. (In fact, I still hear it pretty much every time I find myself in that sort of situation.)

Sheila lived on a cul-de-sac, so Todd drove my parents’ station wagon as slowly as possible, his foot barely on the gas pedal, all the way down to the other end before slowly turning around and heading back toward Sheila’s house. It was freezing out, so because of that and the near-paralyzing fear I was feeling at the moment, I was shivering. I stood with Sheila in her driveway while knowing full well that I absolutely had to make my move before Todd returned if I didn’t want to spend the following week anxiously waiting for another opportunity like this to come around.

“So, uh, that was fun tonight,” I said.

“Yeah, thanks for driving,” Sheila said.

“No problem.”

Shit. There were literally seconds to spare as I saw Todd begin to lurch back toward us in the Impala, which by then looked like some slowly approaching phantom to me. Suddenly, a force I had never known before sent me hurdling toward Sheila’s face, my eyes closed and my mouth open as wide as humanly possible. Sheila picked up on my brazen cue and did the same. It was pure magic as our lips finally met for the first time, the moon shining down on us through the trees as if we were the only two people on earth.

Until Todd pulled back into the driveway.

As the headlights of my parents’ station wagon blinded us, Sheila and I slowly pulled apart to return to the awkward, stammering state we had been in only moments before.

“I’ll, uh, talk to you tomorrow,” I said as the biggest smile of all-time spread over my face.

“Okay.”

“Good night, Sheila.”

“Good night, Dave.”

I climbed back into the Impala easily feeling like twice the man I was after that night on the ski bus back in the eighth grade. Even Todd, not normally the sentimental type, couldn’t keep himself from giving me a high five.

“Awesome, dude,” he said.

“Totally, dude.”

Sheila and I continued our unbridled romance through the winter and it seemed like we were still going full-steam ahead by the following spring when she invited me out to her family’s lake house one Saturday afternoon. It was our first official getaway, like we were a real couple or something.

As we wandered toward the water in front of the house in what I assumed was just some casual lovers’ stroll, like the kind you see all the time in those karaoke videos, Sheila said to me, “I … need to talk to you.”

Dammit. There were those words again.

“Um, okay,” I said.

“My mom says I can’t have a boyfriend until the school year is over because I need to get my grades up and boys are a distraction.”

“Huh?” I gulped.

“I can’t date you anymore. Because of school.”

“Oh, you mean just for the rest of this school year and then when summer comes you can have a boyfriend again? Um, you know, meaning me, for example?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“But we can still talk on the phone and stuff, right?”

“No, my mom said I can’t do that, either. Sorry.”

I was devastated, but, blinded by love as I was, I figured that the school year would be over in less than two months and then Sheila and I could resume what I was pretty sure was the stuff of Harlequin romance novels, probably even better. As soon as we both finished finals, I went down into the laundry room and called her.

“Hello?” Sheila’s mom answered.

“Hi, it’s Dave, Dave Hill, from before,” I said. “Is Sheila home?”

“Just a sec.”

I waited breathlessly for Sheila to come on the line so we could pick up things right where we left off. Instead, however, Sheila’s mom picked up the phone again.

“Sheila can’t come to the phone right now,” she told me. “So I guess she’ll just have to call you back, maybe.”

“Okay, great,” I said obliviously before hanging up.

And then I waited. And waited.

A couple of hours later my sister Katy discovered me sitting on the dryer all alone. “What are you doing just sitting here?” she asked.

“Nothing. Get out of here!”

“Fine. Weirdo.”

I spent the rest of the night in that laundry room and, while the phone rang repeatedly, it was never for me. Sheila did eventually call me again, but, looking back on it, it was most likely just to get me to stop phoning her house every five minutes. Do I still think about her, you ask? Of course I do. She was my first love and, unless you’re made of stone or something, I guess you never quite get over that sort of thing.

I realize there might also be some people out there wondering if any other “stuff” happened after that night Sheila and I totally made out in her driveway. And to that I say yes, maybe it probably might have. But if you think for one second that I’m about to go into graphic detail about what two teenagers got up to in the back of a Chevy Impala station wagon just so some sicko can get a few cheap thrills from it, you’ve got another thing coming, thank you very much. Besides, it’s not like any of that stuff really matters anyway. The important thing to remember is that I’m now a major, major celebrity and there are so many chicks out there who totally want to make out with me that it’s actually a bit weird. Even so, there’s just something about that first kiss in her driveway all those years ago that I’ll never forget. In fact, not too long ago, in a fit of wistful and maybe just a little bit of drunken nostalgia, I decided to give old Sheila a ring.

“Hello,” her husband answered.

He sounded like he might actually be a pretty nice guy. And if I didn’t hang up right away, I bet I could have found out for sure.

As of Now, I Am in Control Here
1

It was the ’90s and I had just graduated from Fordham University, shot like a cannonball from the warm, grassy bosom of a private liberal arts college and into what my guidance counselor kept trying to tell me was the real world, a place where my bullshit would not be tolerated. The original plan was to transition seamlessly from cafeteria-loitering undergraduate to globe-trotting rock star. I had the hair—curly, unwashed, and just long enough to make it clear to everyone around me that I was pretty much giving the finger to conventional society. I also had the guitar. I even had the rock band. The only things that were missing were the fame and money, those crucial pieces of the puzzle that would help all that rocking translate into no longer calling my parents collect to hit them up for cash all the time.

Since New York City rents had yet to reach fully ridiculous heights and my tastes at the time ran mostly toward wandering the streets drinking beer out of a brown paper bag and urinating between parked cars, my overhead was pretty low. Still, those forty-ounce bottles of whatever-was-on-sale weren’t exactly going to pay for themselves, so—not wanting to move back home with my parents or make the most of my boyish good looks by trolling the West Side Highway in search of a quick buck followed by an awkward good-bye—I decided it was time to do the unthinkable and get a job.

I thought about working as a temp. My mother had run a temp agency back home in Cleveland, so showing up at some random office building to stuff envelopes for a couple of days only to disappear forever before I even had a chance to figure out exactly what sort of business was conducted there was practically in my blood. But the thought of someone seeing me on the subway dressed in a button-down shirt and a pair of Dockers
2
and thinking I had surrendered to the straight life was more than I could handle. Fortunately, my older and historically more responsible brother Bob already had a job as a case worker at a homeless shelter on the Upper West Side and suggested I might pick up some part-time work there until the whole rock star thing kicked in as planned.

Like the rest of the nine-to-five staff, my brother’s job at the shelter involved actually helping people get their lives back on track, or at least as close to the track as possible. Then there was the skeleton crew that kept the residents fed, medicated, and out of trouble within reason the other sixteen hours of the day. This group consisted of a supervisor, who ran the show, a security guard, who mostly just answered the phone, and two program aides, who did whatever the supervisor or security guard told them to do. I had neither the experience to be a supervisor nor the air of menace to provide any sort of real security, so my brother figured working as a program aide was right up my alley. Being a legacy and all, I was hired after a brief phone call.

“Hi, this is Dave Hill,” I said to Janet, the shelter’s director, over the phone one day. “My brother Bob said you might need a new program aide and that I might be good at that sort of thing.”

“Great,” she said. “You can start next week.”

As best I could tell, all I really had to do at my new job was help serve meals, do bed checks at night, bake the occasional cake, and promise not to get drunk on the job. I took the fact that they actually had to include that last part in the job description as a sign that I would be working with a fun-loving bunch. For all this I would be pulling in a cool $7.77 an hour. Add to that the fact that I planned on helping myself to whatever food might be lying around the kitchen, I figured with even just a few snacks each shift I would be effectively making at least $8.88 an hour. Friends were impressed with my new job, as if working with the homeless were some noble deed.

“Wow,” they’d say with a gentle smile. “You’re a really good person for dedicating yourself to the underprivileged like that.”

That thought never really occurred to me, though. I just saw it as easy work and easy money in what I chose to believe was an all-you-can-eat environment. It would almost be like getting paid to hang out at Sizzler.
3
I felt like the richest man alive.

My first day on the job was the following Saturday for the three-to-eleven shift. When I arrived, most of the shelter’s two hundred or so residents were either out wandering the city or sitting in battered armchairs in the shelter’s main room on the first floor. Depending on their age, mental stability, and the amount of prescriptions they might have been hopped up on, those in attendance either napped, played board games, or conversed with either themselves or whomever was sitting within shouting distance. Some of the residents had just lost or been kicked out of their homes, some had come from other shelters, and some had recently been living on the streets. Most, if they weren’t native New Yorkers, were from Central America, the Caribbean, and South America. As a result, being a guy from the sleepy suburbs of Cleveland, I felt almost as displaced as most of them probably did. It felt like an even playing field, and I liked it. And having a different background from all the residents turned out to be a good thing because it meant we had no choice but to relate to one another on a basic human level.

“What’s for dinner tonight?” one of them might ask.

“Meat loaf,” I’d answer.

“You fucking kidding me? Again? I fucking hate meat loaf.”

“Me fucking too,” I’d lie, solidifying our bond the best way I knew how—through mutual hatred. “As far as I’m concerned, that meat loaf can go suck a bag of dicks. I’m tired of its bullshit.”

Other times we might discuss the possible merits of the temperature outside dropping or raising a few degrees, or exactly how many sugar and/or ketchup packets was a reasonable amount to carry on one’s person at all times. Fifteen was deemed reasonable. Sixteen or more made you a nutjob. It didn’t take long for me to realize that, hey, maybe we weren’t so different after all.

By 5:00
P.M.
, however, the honeymoon was over. Freddie Russo, a Brooklyn-born seventysomething whose mood, I soon learned, often and quickly vacillated between playful bordering on delirious and irritable bordering on completely out of his fucking mind, came in after a long day of riding the bus nowhere in particular and needed a diaper change. Fast.

“Dave, can you assist Mr. Russo with putting on a new undergarment?” my supervisor asked. It was the kind of question you never really want directed at you.

“Sure.” I gulped. “Th-thank you for the opportunity.”

Unlike me, Freddie didn’t seem to have too many hang-ups about the fact that—despite our having just met—we would soon be changing his Depends together. And I quickly learned, as we faced the task at hand in the fourth-floor corner room he shared with two other residents who had a cavalier approach to relieving themselves, the greater challenge in this situation was finding something, anything else to talk about while the diaper changing was taking place. Since it was Sunday, I figured I’d go with sports.

“So, uh, you gonna watch the game?” I asked him, not at all sure what game I might be referring to.

“I don’t care much for sports,” Freddie answered, the smell of fresh urine slowly mingling with the smell of stale urine already perfuming the air.

“Me neither. Uh, how about werewolves? Those things are pretty cool, right?”

He didn’t take the bait, but that’s okay—I wasn’t sure what I meant by that, either.

*   *   *

I soon learned tasks like changing diapers were pretty much business as usual at the shelter. Disposing of lice-ridden mattresses (especially daunting given my aspiring rock star locks), administering breathalyzer tests to residents, and even collecting urine and stool samples is just a sampling of the fun I might get up to on an average day at the office.

Toward the end of each shift I’d poke my head into each of the shelter’s sixty or so rooms to make sure every resident was in and accounted for by ten o’clock curfew. To rule out the possibility of someone’s roommate simply yelling out “Here!” in the dark to cover for a buddy who might have snuck out for a drink or worse, I was required to actually see each resident in his or her room with my own eyes. As a result, I regularly barged in on one guy who, like clockwork, would be perched on the edge of his bed masturbating like he was in some sort of contest, no matter how many times I knocked first. I could never tell whether I was hurting or helping his mission by walking in on him like that, but regardless it was hard not to admire his joie de vivre. You can take away a man’s home, and maybe even a little bit of his pride and dignity while you’re at it. But, dammit, you can’t stop him from living.