Back when we’d lived on the farm, my parents had listened to Sly and the Family Stone, Fleetwood Mac, the Beach Boys — music unheard in our house any longer, unless I put it on the turntable myself. They’d once hosted parties where all their friends got drunk and said funny things and played volleyball barefoot while wearing their hats at goofy angles. They were young, and it was the Seventies, but now the Seventies were over. Reagan had proclaimed morning in America, and the parties had stopped. Hangovers were no longer cool in this new dawn. My parents had even parted with their copy of The Joy of Sex, my favorite book of the hundred or so we owned, half of them Louis L’Amour novels. I mostly blamed Amway for the loss of everything fun and attractive in their lives. Now it was all work and church and boring sitcoms on the boob tube after dinner. I’d overheard one of my skeptical relatives call Amway a cleverly designed pyramid scheme built on a foundation of Christian sanctimony. Those words gave me the courage I needed to take a stand. With money I made bagging groceries at the Red Owl, I became a brand fanatic. I bought Crest toothpaste and Tide detergent and did my laundry separately from the rest of the family’s, to avoid using Amway products. This pointless insurrection left my father baffled. If I needed some token way of asserting my individuality, he said, then fine. Go for it. Waste your money on Tide.

He said, You know, I’m 67 years old and I’ve never stuck my pecker in a woman’s mouth. My wife wouldn’t let me. Not that I didn’t try. Jesus, I tried. You know something else? We haven’t had sex in eight years. I doubt we’ll ever have sex again. I envy you, buddy. You’ve got all the good stuff ahead of you.

[...]

I felt bad for the old man. It hadn’t occurred to me that anyone over the age of about 40 still felt sexual desire. Trying to picture him acting on it made me think of some freak carnival act.

During our last month of confirmation meetings, at a time when I was supposed to be drawing near to the numinous embrace of the Holy Trinity, he tried every time to grope me, and every time I swatted his hand away. It became as much a ritual as our three cans of Old Milwaukee apiece. During our last meeting, just before I was to be confirmed with my classmates in a ceremony before the whole church, he tried with particular insistence to cop a feel while simultaneously straining for a kiss in the manner of the French. It was a terrible thing to see, the purple, swollen tongue of an alcoholic old man; it made me ashamed to be human. I knocked him away with a punch to the chest, a punch as hard as I could throw. He slumped in a corner of the couch, wounded. There were tears in his eyes, whether from pain or thwarted longing I wasn’t sure.

I mean it now. You guys be careful. I’d hate myself if something happened to you. You’re the best friend I’ve got left in the whole world.

He leaned in. I turned my cheek. He hugged me, nuzzling his stubbled jaw against the flesh beneath my ear, running one hand slowly south of my lower back. I closed my eyes and let him savor for a moment these affections, figuring they were a reasonable trade for the beer.

I stopped by his house one weekend unannounced, thinking he’d be happy to see me, thinking I’d score a bill. It was the middle of the afternoon, and the old man was drunk, reeking of brandy, slurring his words. His wife was away visiting her family in Iowa, so for the first and last time we sat in her domain, the living room. He said it was nice to have the place to himself. He could stay late at the bar if he wanted to, or drive up the road and visit one of his drinking buddies, a man his wife didn’t like him to see. Drinking had become not only his primary diversion but the ordering principle of his days. He spent less and less time at the bank, having ceded control to others. His back and hip were failing him. He moved awkwardly, gingerly, like a man breaking in a new prosthetic leg. For years he’d laid off cigarettes, but he lit one now. I grabbed the pack and took one too without asking.

You must be excited to graduate, he said. This is it. Your time has come.

Excited to get the hell out of here, I said.

He ignored me and played the pity card, as he had so many other times. He often said he was an old man with nothing left to look forward to, nothing but his friendship with me. Now he said he wished he were me. He wished he were in my shoes. Everything good was still ahead of me. He was just an old man creeping up on death, drinking the days away.

I confess I didn’t see the allure of my life. It felt like everything good was behind me, and I told him so. My basketball career was over. My girlfriend had dumped me, but not before we’d lost our virginity together. I was as heartbroken as only a recent novitiate in the joy of sex can be.

I doubt I could have told you at the time why I let him do it, but from twenty-five years on the answer is as clear as day. This was one part of my life where I had the upper hand. In school and at home I was subject to rules devised by others. I thought I was an adult — the overnight job, the car — but no one treated me as one. So be it. The adult world was an elaborate sham anyway, a web of unspoken disappointments, outrageous hypocrisies, crooked desires of unaccountable origin. I wanted to punch a hole in that web, but if that wasn’t possible I could at least feel righteous while punching an old man.

He wasted no time getting to it. He worked with a firm tenderness. His hands moved lower and lower. There was no doubt about where he was headed. He began to get pretty cozy with the contours of my gluteus maximus. I tried not to flinch as he pressed himself against me. I felt his breath on the back of my neck, his lips tickle my ear. He had me in a spot where he could have held me down if he wanted to, the sudden thought of which sent a charge through my limbs. I twisted my torso and boxed him upside the head rather viciously with my elbow. He slipped off the couch and let out a shrill cry as he landed on the floor. It took all my willpower not to kick him in the ribs while he lay there, whimpering.

Before I left I made sure to grab some beer for the road.

Despite the many hours I’d spent admiring college catalogs from Tucson, Seattle, and Boulder, I experienced a failure of nerve in the end. I’d made a visit to a fancy Catholic college in St. Paul, where the Mercedes and BMWs of rich suburban kids gleamed in the dormitory parking lots, and was instantly transfixed by the limestone buildings honey-colored in the afternoon light, the ivied walls of the football stadium, coeds strolling with books in their arms across the fastidious lawns. I’d never seen so many girls in one place. The whole scene was like the previously missing, wide-angle prelude shot to the porno film I’d been writing, directing, and starring in every time I thought of what my college years would be. Even deeper in my reptilian brain I sensed a chance to learn how to be rich by living in proximity to rich kids, the old dream not yet dead. Here I could finally begin the process of reinventing myself as a man of debonair tastes and urbane manners, a prairie sophisticate with a fancy car. I learned that through a University of St. Thomas scholarship fund I stood to earn $3,500 per year for my high school GPA, class rank, and ACT score. This seemed a phenomenal sum, the equivalent of nearly six months of work at the mom-and-pop bakery where I was then making $3.80 an hour. If the sight of pretty girls and shiny cars had been the initial seduction, the promise of free cash clinched the deal. I didn’t for a moment acknowledge the fact that I was merely getting a discount on a very expensive product. Nor did I bother to imagine, given that my parents were in no position to help, where I’d come up with the remainder of the $15,000 per year I’d be charged for tuition, room, and board.

Needless to say, I was not the prototypical Tommy. I drove a 1970 Ford pickup of a pale green hue that earned it the nickname Phlegm. I arrived with $2,000 in savings from my job at the bakery, which bought me six heady weeks of Coors Light party balls and Mexican ditch weed. Over the next few years I borrowed exorbitantly while working all sorts of stupid jobs: painting houses, unloading package trailers at a UPS hub, frying donuts for a little shop in the suburbs. It was the same work I’d performed since I was 15, and I came to loathe the stupefying repetition of it, eight at night till three in the morning, five days a week, the clicking handle of the donut dropper, the pox-like burns on my hands from the splash of fryer oil. The way I smelled like a jelly-filled bismarck even after I’d showered.

I dropped out for lack of cash, worked three jobs, returned to school for a couple of years, dropped out broke again. When the friends I’d met as a freshman graduated to begin their careers in corporate finance and accounting, and my girlfriend left for a magazine job in New York, I mostly sat around drinking wine alone in the afternoons. I was as confused as I’d ever been, which is saying something. I’d sunk tens of thousands of dollars — much of it borrowed, some of it earned by my own labor, some of it a gift from my grandfather — into a journalism education, but my scholarship had been revoked when I didn’t finish my degree in four years. Internships at the Fargo Forum and Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine had left me sour on the strictures of deadline hackery and service-mag pap. I didn’t want to be a cops and courts reporter; I didn’t want to be a mutual-fund guru, a blue-chip stock watcher. I wanted to be a novelist. Unfortunately, I didn’t know the first thing about writing a novel, and it was clear that even if I started tomorrow I’d be a long time in earning a dime from writing novels. I did what many before me have done in such circumstances: I became a bartender. This offered all the intellectual stimulation you’d imagine, which is to say none. The pleasures were other. I met party people. I drank on the job.

One night my telephone rang. It was the old man, of all people. He’d tracked down my home number. I never did learn how. The number was unconnected with my name, since I was living with my girlfriend’s gay uncle Charlie, who’d offered to put me up rent-free so I’d have time to write the great American novel, in compensation for which he merely asked that he appear, lightly fictionalized but still identifiable, as a demon lover with a giant cock in my great American novel. I’d overcome the residual homophobia of my Catholic boyhood by then, thanks in no small part to Charlie, whom I’m very happy to describe for posterity as one of the most generous people I’ve ever known, as well as a demon lover with an enormous and stunningly beautiful cock.

In practical terms, his example — the first such of my life — made me reluctant to pursue my sexual attractions with any gusto, which prevented my college years from becoming the sexual smorgasbord they were for a lot of my contemporaries. I had seen a man’s face contorted by lust unconsummated — I’m talking up close and personal — and it was not a pretty sight. A smoldering passivity became my style, and a tendency toward long-term serial monogamy with women who made the first move. Which, when I thought about it later, may have been a blessing, considering the kind of woman with whom this involved me, typically horny and radiant with self-confidence, the kind of woman you want to remain a friend even after you split.

I promptly cashed the check and booked a plane ticket to Amsterdam for the holidays. Out of the country for the first time in my life, loose on the Continent with a Eurail pass, I spent every dime of that dirty money as frivolously as I could — champagne in Paris, dope in Amsterdam, ephemeral pleasures of one sort or another from London to Venice — shadowed the whole time by a mixture of exhilaration and shame, that familiar cocktail of emotion in all my dealings with the old man, almost from the beginning: the exhilaration of having got away with something, the shame of having let him off the hook for one more gift of cash.

He had at last made of me an American hustler, just not the kind he’d hoped.

That summer, home for a funeral, I drove to his house and knocked on his door.

Old buddy, he said when he answered. I can’t believe it’s you.

Believe it, I said.

Why don’t you come in? he said.

I don’t want to come in, I said. You know why I’m here.

All right, he said, trying to remain friendly. How about we go have a drink downtown. My checkbook is at the bank. I’ll pick it up on the way.

How about I meet you at the bank, I said. We can skip the drink.

Ten minutes later I had a check in my hand for $1,000.

I never saw him again.