“It’s not called babysitting if you’re the dad,” Cal huffed to me, as if he were an expert on the subject. “It’s called parenting.”
Bob’s take on music was even more appalling to Cal. As far as Bob was concerned, music was part of the background noise of the world, not an art form that deserved to play a major role in a person’s life.
“Never trust a man who isn’t moved by song,” Cal reasoned. “It means he’s dead inside.”
One particular weekend, Cal talked Bob into taking us to the big Tower Records in the city on Friday night because Bob was having a party and we didn’t want to have to sit around listening to his guests get drunk and babble about how much they’d spent on their houses. Bob had agreed, but he punctuated his consent by saying, “There’s something wrong with two teenage boys who have nothing better to do on a Friday night than go to a record store.”
“We don’t think there’s anything better to do,” Cal replied on both our behalves, as he was wont to do.
“What are you, his lawyer?” Bob barked. “You know what I was doing on Friday nights at your age? Chasing girls.”
“Harp and I don’t have to chase girls. Girls chase us.”
That was only marginally true. Girls chased Cal, he picked his favorites, and then he made sure whoever he was dating had a cute friend for me.
Back then, Cal wasn’t what most people would call handsome. His face was too birdlike, all of his features too small to be considered traditionally attractive, and he was built like an I beam. But his confidence and charisma overshadowed all that. He was a player. And more often than not, he had the coolest girls in the room swooning.
On more than one occasion, Bob made it a point to tell me I was empirically better looking than Cal, as if this were something I should value or exploit. But I was one of the smallest kids in class, and I was shy and self-conscious around normal people, so you can imagine what I was like when I was in the vicinity of a girl I liked.
As the car pulled in to the Tower Records parking lot that night, Bob said, “You two better start putting as much energy into getting into college as you put into getting albums.”
Cal caught my eye and I shook my head, silently begging him not to say a word. Early on in our friendship, I made Cal promise not to mention our Brooklyn plans to Bob until the time came for us to go. He had agreed, but I think he found it disappointing that I wouldn’t tell Bob the truth.
When we got out of the car, Cal said, “Sometimes I question your commitment to our dreams, Harp.”
“You don’t understand. Bob would flip if I told him. He’d probably lock me in the house and homeschool me. And I know for sure he wouldn’t let me hang out with you anymore.”
That kept Cal quiet, but he was skeptical, and right to question my dedication. Unbeknownst to my best friend, I had already taken the SATs and ACTs and was working on applications to numerous California universities. I told myself I was just doing it to placate Bob, but there was a part of me that wondered if I was going to have the guts to go to Brooklyn with Cal.
I eventually applied to Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, and UC Santa Cruz. Stanford rejected me, but I got into the others.
“You’ll go to Berkeley, just like your old man,” Bob declared during the winter of my senior year as he stood over me in his kitchen.
I knew it was now or never, and I told myself to come out with it. After pacing around the deck outside and then calling Cal for advice, I walked back into the kitchen and asked Bob if I could talk to him about something important.
He made direct eye contact with me, and I started glancing around the room, looking for something distracting on which to focus. Bob’s kitchen looked like a dungeon. Everything was charcoal gray and blackened steel. The architecture of doom. Nothing calmed my nerves.
“Sit,” Bob said.
I sat at one of the tall stools flanking the breakfast bar and knew immediately that I’d chosen the wrong location. My feet didn’t touch the ground from there, and that made me feel already defeated.