ANEW: B.C.Y.: A Novel -- Chapter 2 (working draft)
Episode #2
Preface: In our imagination, some things loom larger than they actually do in real life. Driving back halfway across the country last evening, Thanksgiving 2024, I might add, to arrive in time for a few hours of sleep as I begin the arduous task of cleaning out my once formidably sharp mother’s townhouse. She’s in memory care now and can no longer care for herself, which is a stark reminder of how fragile we all are.
Today, I post Chapter 2 of B.C.Y.: A Novel, about coming of age during the college years, writing this quick note at her kitchen table. The other day, someone asked me what the impetus of writing B.C.Y. was. As in all things, it is to tell stories and to understand. The story of “Schaeffer” is a universal one, especially today when we see a lack of thriving from boys at every age level, particularly young men entering college. Lost doesn’t come close to describing Schaeffer’s journey from hardscrabble Chicagoland’s streets to the cobbled-stoned walkways at that “University at New Haven” (F. Scott Fitzgerald). The understanding comes, if artfully enough done, with a different take on a time, a person, and a subject that deserves to be told. At some point, these stories are like children whom we must, at some point, let go. Let go to find their own lives to live, and maybe one day, find a life like the rest. (Thank you, Kevin Arkadie).
If you haven’t read the working draft of Chapter 1 of B.C.Y.: A Novel, you can do so HERE. It is a draft because our readers, or beta readers, might have a thing or two to say or point out that a good editor at a publishing house may not catch. Thank you in advance if you have supplied me with edits or changes.
I talked about serializing the working draft of B.C.Y. a few posts ago, which is to garner interest more than anything else and to begin to work out more ideas for readers like you. You can find that post about serialization and NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) HERE. This is not a rough draft, but something that, in formation, is well on its way. I wouldn’t do that to you.
What I didn’t anticipate is that some folks would ask amazingly artful questions that may eventually help me to sharpen the focus even more for a publication. One note to remember: Most names are completely made up, and some are famous people or professors who actually existed. Those actual people's actions are true as I remember them. Well, as for the made-up people with the made-up names, they are an amalgam of many people and a product of an over-active mind. Any resemblance to actual individuals is purely coincidence or “inspired” by a glimmer of a memory. After all, this is not a memoir. It’s a novel that should act and behave as novels do, with some degree of nose tweaking and ass-kicking, especially our dear friend Schaeffer himself. He is flawed and a college freshman obsessed with what college freshmen are sometimes obsessed with in those younger and more vulnerable years. But like all college kids, he’s got some ‘learnin’ to do. To become human…
Take a look at, Chapter 1, if you haven’t already
WORKING TITLE // D-R-A-F-T – B.C.Y.: A NOVEL
2015)
Chapter 2
Winter came early that fall in New Haven. At least, it felt like it was earlier than it usually was in the South Suburbs of Chicago. The trees across the street from Old Campus along College Street were bare. One of my roommates who had gone to prep school in New Hampshire called it “stick season.” It should have been called “black & white TV season” because everything felt washed out and cadaverous, like the dead people my brother Miley practiced on. The Frisbee games had long stopped. Cold things like frisbees and baseballs, when they hit your hands, felt like a slap. And, we were anticipating our first snow right in the middle of Mid-terms.
Yale was hard. I had never typed so much in my entire life. My little piece of shit manual typewriter that I got from Mymama, a Royal, just wasn’t all that good. I blamed my Cs on what I presented to my teachers. I was writing something, typing something, or reading something arcane and monotonous almost every night. It was hard to punch out all these words using two fingers, staring down at my hands and not feeling like what I had to say amounted to much of anything. The stuff I read was even worse. I didn’t have much connection to what was in “Bio for Poets” or some of the other jazz that we were made to swill.
As the writing got more and more intense, I took to borrowing my roommate Jonathon’s Seletric, which was so much better, but he had his own papers to type. He was in some rarified group that studied the Greeks. Man, those dudes from Andover and Exeter could drink and get their smack done in a matter of no time. They could even read lying down in bed. That almost always put me right to sleep. I tried to keep up, but the only thing I was good at was staying up late. The later I stayed up, the less I could get done.
One Saturday afternoon, I just felt like fleeing before the first snowfall. I could feel it coming. I went out the Phelps Gate up to Chapel, hanging a right at what looked like an old hotel that had closed down but was about to make a comeback, somebody told me. New Haven had once been a thriving city, this girl at Cross Campus Library once told me. She grew up in New Haven, and her mom worked in one of the offices, Bursar or Purser.
Every other thing at Yale and in town had a nautical kind of name, it seemed like. There was the Anchor Bar and the houses with widow’s walks, which were these places that old sailors built for their wives to see all the way to the harbor for their husbands who would sometimes not come home. So many sad tales embedded in such a pocket-sized city.
Except for Yale and a few bars, the town looked like it had seen better days; it was kind of shabby, like an aunt who had one of those barely perceptible pee stains on the butt of her dress that nobody wanted to say anything about.
The bright lights and fall decorations were lit in the beautiful windows of the Brian Alden home furniture store. I walked all along Chapel Street past the Mall and down towards Wooster Square. That was the old part of town where the Italians lived. A girl that I had a flirtation with lived around here somewhere. Dotty. An old fashion name with a sailor’s ability to curse you out. There was a solid seconds store that sold irregular-cut shirts. My suitemate Ethan and I went there a lot to buy Brooks Brothers irregulars or “solid seconds,” he called them. It probably should have been sloppy seconds. The clothes had one arm longer than the other. Sometimes, they had the buttons that were in the wrong place. Or, sometimes, there was a hardly noticeable stain somewhere on the tucked edges. I learned all of this from Ethan.
Today, Solid Seconds was also now closed. Nothing was open on late Saturday afternoons when there were no football games down at the other end of the City at the Yale Bowl. The city was a ghost town during days like these, oddly and eerily quiet. I walked and walked past gazebo-ed parks and the places where pizza was invented — into an area I hardly even recognized.
I heard that when my father and mother fought, he would just up and leave, too. Leaving her for days on end with two boys under the age of four, Mylie and me. I imagined what he would make of this place, our father “L’il Man.” I started thinking about him a lot these days. What the hell was he thinking? Whatever it was, it was about himself, and I firmly believed what Mama told me. “He don’t send no money. Court ordered! Court ordered! All he has to do is send thirty-five dollars a week. Court ordered, dammit!”
Those rants, however, directed, lodged in my brain like something I was guilty of. I walked and walked through the streets of New Haven, trying to walk out why the hell did I make this commitment. So far away from home. I didn’t belong here. I would never belong here. I didn’t like football, and I was beginning to hate this damned choice I made. What the hell was I thinking coming sight unseen?!
As I trudged past some of the old homes, Victorians mainly, now split into twos and threes, I thought about what the hell I was doing at Yale. I was a fraud. An imposter. I wonder if any of the other Black students or white students felt the same way. I didn’t see any of them walking around town when there might be a perfectly good football game going on at the other end of the city or in one of the neighboring states.
The weather took a sudden turn for the decidedly cold. It was thumping cold, and I could feel New Haven’s hawk, like that piercing Chicago wind rattling at my too-thin nylon jacket. It was much too cold for what I had on, but I walked on, breaking a sweat with my long strides, beating out the rhythm of my thoughts.
My Dad was born in 1935. The son of Lucille and Ezekial Burley. As far as I knew, Lu and Zeke came up separately from the same town outside of Birmingham. They married in ’28, both eighteen, meeting at his ma-maw’s church. She was a woman preacher. That messed everybody up. My Dad was number ten out of thirteen. When I do the math in my head, they must have been pumping out babies even before they got married, which kind of shocked me. Our father was small and sickly, hence the name, L’il Man, which stuck. He hid his littleness by finding friends who were smaller than he was and just being so nice. People would say to me when I went over to Grandma Lu’s house, “You like yo’, Daddy? He nice. Are you like him?”
That’s what echoed in my brain, “You nice?” bucking me up as I walked on through some of the skitchier places on the east end of New Haven. The temp was dropping like a stone, with the cold air drying the sweat at the small of my back. I could feel my teeth chattering, wind cutting into me, but I could not go back. Thinking, “Nice. Nice.”
Maybe that is why I stayed. I stayed because I, too, was too damned nice. Far off in the distance, near a segment of the Interstate, I could see the dump rising high above the street. Even in the chill, the crows and seagulls were having a field day, diving and coming up with bits of paper, rib bones, plastic, and anything that they could get their beaks on.
I wondered how those birds were like me or how I could be more like those birds. Attacking but not locked in the echo chamber of my memory and my father’s memory. I didn’t really know him, but like him, I had escaped. I refused to engage. I was the opposite of those birds. They soared and attacked.
What in the hell was I doing at this school? All at once, I wept with the strength of someone who had refused grieving, but now I balled like a baby. Those birds attacked high above my head, dive-bombing the trash that cascaded down the mountains of what was left when people no longer wanted or needed something. It was like no man’s land between West Egg and Manhattan. All that was missing was the sign of the glasses staring down at me, as if pointing, like God: “Goddamn nice!”
“Nice, my ass. What are you doing here?”
I froze, snapped awake from my reverie.
“What in the hell are you doing way out here?” He said those last three words like he was punching the air with his fist.
“I’m not… I just went walking.”
“Went walking!”
Because of his jacket, I couldn’t see the man’s face all too good, but I knew that I had better be correct in my actions, or the Yale Police would end up looking places for my body that they would never find.
“I’m from the college,” I blurted, trying to recall the words once I spoke them.
“Quinnipiac?” He sounded impressed. “You came over here all the way from the Q?”
“Yale.”
“Ohhhh, pardon me, Throckmorton Coltrane the Third. Is your driver around the corner? Will he get here in time when I start kicking your ass for trespassing on my dump?”
“Your dump?”
“Yeah, boy. People own trash. There’s mountains of money to be made in people’s cast-off stuff.”
“I don’t steal, and I certainly don’t steal garbage.” I stood my ground, looking him dead in the eye at this point.
He flashed hot and angry at first, but his features, or what I could see unobscured, softened, or at least I thought I could see them soften in the dimming light.
“Then why are you here?”
I thought for a bit before I answered him. I fished around in my empty pockets before I realized that I had neither my wallet nor my college ID on me. “When I…”
The man looked at me, waiting for an answer. I could see that even though he had a care-worn tam hat on, he had very little hair, at least on the sides of his naked head.
“When I get homesick, I walk. I can’t stand being here sometimes.” What in the hell was I thinking? Why was I telling this guy anything? I had long since stopped trying to connect with Abner, who was trying to become some affected Buddha.
“So, you come out to places where somebody could lynch yo’ Black ass?”
“Who the hell would want to lynch me? I’m not worth anything to anybody?” Again, the tears started coming, hot now.
“Hey, hey, hey. You can’t just start blubbering for no apparent reason. What in the hell are they teaching you blockheads up there? Stop it!” he handed me a clean, unopened package of personal-size Kleenex from out of one of his side pockets. “Just stop.”
I blew my nose overloud as I do. I could hardly contain my coldness, this man who threatened and then was kind to me.
“Look, this ain’t no place for you to be walking out alone all by yourself, especially in what you are wearing.”
I looked down at my thin tan autumn coat with red racing stripes down the sleeves like Speed Racer, shivering visibly.
“Wait here.”
I don’t think that I could move anywhere anyway. I was so cold and felt so stupid. The man ducked behind one of the mountains of trash to my right. When he came back, he had a heavy parka, shoving it in my direction. We called them Nanook’s because they looked like something Nanook of the North might wear up in Alaska someplace.
“I can’t take this!”
“What you gonna do, give it back to me. Put it on, boy, or I’m gonna have to get rough wit’ you.”
I pulled the coat on. It smelled of tar paper and some indefinable kind of food. Mac and Cheese?
I wasn’t used to kindness from strangers. Back home, you learned to protect yourself. I always, always used being the funny guy as a weapon. I certainly wasn’t fooling anybody here. Not even this dude. Out here, people weren’t predictable. Sometimes, they threatened you; sometimes, they handed you warmth in the shape of a coat.
I felt good for the first time in a while. Something like calm and relief came over me like I was wrapped up in more than just a coat.
“You okay, son?”
“Fine.”
“You don’t look all that fine. Your teeth are chattering like you fell down a well.”
I couldn’t argue with him, but I felt good.
“You shouldn’t be out here by yourself with that thin little windjammer jacket on. You ain’t no boatman,” he grinned a little at this. “‘Cause even they got some sense not to be walking out in an about-to-be storm.”
“Hey, wait a minute…”
He looked over at me like he had been found out.
“You Black.”
“Are you askin’ or tellin’?”
“Well, I ain’t met that many Black people out in New Haven, and you look…”
“White!”
“Well, yes.” I could see him good with his Tam hat and big heavy furlined coat on, definitely dressed for the elements. He kind of favored Junious, but light-complected. He had Junious’s patchy skin, kind of gravelly voice, and mannerisms that made me all of sudden homesick.
“Well, a white man has to find love somewheres, too.” He squinted when he said that. “Why you looking at me like I got rabies or somethin’?”
“Uh, nothin’…I mean. Nothin’.” I put my right hand up as if to say, ‘No more.’
My world had already been disrupted enough in the last two months. The last thing I needed to be doing was imagining stuff that would make me feel like maybe I was wrong. When Mamma left, I thought that everything would be fine. But it wasn’t. I spent more time in front of the two typewriters than I had with any humans.
“So, your Dad was white?”
“One of ‘em was.”
“Is that why you live all the way out here on the edge of nowhere?”
“I’m half white. I ain’t no leper. There is a difference.”
I had been shaken out of my own reverie with the first snowfall looming, thinking about the situation of this man who showed me some kindness.
“I was just thinking, ‘Why would anyone just, you know, do that? Give me a coat.’”
“I met some assholes in my life, but you were just a dumbass to come all of the way from Yale Campus to the middle of nowhere in about to-snow weather to question somebody who just did something nice. For you.”
I couldn’t argue with that logic. It made me understand that I had some balls to criticize a man who was just trying to keep me from hypothermia.
“Thank you,” and I meant it. “I don’t often say the right things at the right time to people.
The journey back to the Old Campus didn’t seem to take that long. I hustled back with all the ardor of a young lover about to be a made man. And, I was happy to boot. It was the first time I connected with someone who called me on my negativity since leaving home.
That’s the problem; people either were reluctant to deal with you on an emotional level, or they just shined you on. I was happy that I had wandered into the wasteland to get a hit of home cooking. Something real. As I got towards the edge of the New Haven Green directly across the wide chasm of two city blocks from the Phelps Gate, it began to snow—and hard. I rushed across the zig-zag of the Green, diagonal in places, and ran toward the windows brimming with light.
Reaching the Gate, I tried my key, which was a little balky in the cold lock.
“What!”
I turned around with a start. The Gates were usually closed after dinnertime and guarded by a variety of Yale cops. I knew most of them by name, and generally liked most of them.
“My key…won’t work.”
“Your key? Whose key?”
“I went out, and when I came back, my key won’t…”
He pushed me out of the way in one swift move and took my key away with the same gesture.
“Hey, that’s my damned key.”
“Where’d you get this?”
“Where’d I get it? I…” I tried to find the words that were rattling around in my brain. I always went right to guilt and guilty mode, even if I wasn’t. Certainly, I wasn’t guilty of being anything but Black. I found my words, “My RA Abner gave it to me. I’m in Lawrence Hall.”
“ID,” he snapped.
“What is this South Africa?”
“Does it look like I’m amused? ID!” He peppered.
“Please….”
“Please, my ass. Show me your ID, or you ain’t going nowhere.” His short, stocky, mustachioed mouth was set. I couldn’t quite see his name tag because he was angled away from me like they teach when you might get hit or hit someone else. Protect your middle. I was thinking now about the protection that was hid behind my damned dresser.
A longhaired blonde girl came out of the Gate. Looking at the cop who was looking at me. She interrupted a spate of ugly words that formed on the edges of both of our mouths. She was headed somewhere, but she stopped right in front of us, forming a kind of triangle. She wore a white Pea coat, and the officer wore his Yale Police hat along with his warm eight-button jacket, with four sets of buttons parallel to each other.
The cop notices the girl staring at him, even though both of us are locked in this drama. “Can I help you, Ma’am?”
“No. No, not really. I was wondering if I could help you?”
“Excuse me, Ma’am?” He asked, doing an almost imperceptible shake of his head.
“Can I help you?”
“No. I have the situation firmly in hand. Thank you. Please run…”
“This is my classmate. Schaeffer.” The blonde girl gestures to me as if she were presenting a play in three acts to an audience.
How did she know my name? Who… Who was this? I looked hard to see if I recognized her from one of my classes or a mixer or something.
“And Schaeffer, this is Officer…” she looks closely at his badge, “…Officer Del Franco of the YPD.”
“You know this guy?” Del Franco gesticulates over to me with his thumb like he’s the Fonz and I’m a box of records.
“My classmate.”
“Schaeffer,” I say. “So you believe her and not me. Huh?”
“Schaeffer, I believe the man was trying to do his job. Is that right, Officer Del Franco.”
“Exactly,” Del Franco says adamantly. “Just doing my job.”
“But he isn’t color blind. He’s just not very bright,” she says.
“What? Hey…” Del Franco starts getting pissed because he’s just been busted by Blondie.
“Then what else would you call this? You stopped him because he was what? Stealing a Yale key? Looking for someone like me? What else is this then?” She says as dispassionately as if she were reciting the Emancipation Proclamation. “I would advise that you let him go or get him a key that works. That would be more like it. Help him. Help him like you would any other Yale student whose key to Phelps Gate no longer worked because the locks are archaic. Just. Like. You.”
I said nothing. I couldn’t even look at the dude because he was so ‘moted. I haven’t seen somebody get so checked in a long time.
“Look here…”
“That is the problem, Officer. I did look. What I saw was not becoming. It wasn’t becoming to the YPD or to you. Give him back his key and help him get to his room.”
“Which is where?” Del Franco queried.
“Lawrence Hall.”
Blondie chirped in, “…and in what College?”
“Pierson.”
“See, Officer Del Franco. That, my friend, was the password. No ‘Open Sesame’ but Pierson College.”
Del Franco now knew that he had been checkmated. He said nothing. Any Police Officer on the Yale force would know that Townies would probably not be able to answer what College they were in. It’s the thing that Yalies used to discern if you were a true Yalie. “What College?”
As he opened the door to the Gate under the watchful eye of my benefactress, Del Franco called in one of his buddies, who ran over another key based on my room and dorm assignment.
I felt humiliated. Not special. Not saved.
“What’s your name?”
“Vivian.”
“How did you know my name?”
“You’re from Chicago, right?”
“How’d you know that?” This was getting a little creepy.
“I’m not a molester or anything. You don’t remember me because I looked different back then.”
“You mean? What do you mean? In Chicago? Different how? Were you a boy?”
“Why yes, I was.”
“Whaaaat?” I laughed audibly and loud enough for Del Franco to turn around, who was filling out an incident report and paperwork for my key inside his YPD lair. “You’re not joking?” I said in a kind of whisper.
“Do I look like I’m joking?”
“That’s craaaazeeee. You? You’re a he/she?”
“The term is transgender.”
“Oh. I’m…sorry. That’s not what I meant. You are a blonde…”
“I’m not sure who the bigot is now. I just saved you,” she said emphatically.
“I’ve never met someone like you before.”
She looked up at me with a quizzical look, shook her head, and laughed.
“What? No, what? I truly have never met someone who was…”
She laughed even harder now, kind of high-pitched at this point. I noticed that it had stopped snowing. Through the Phelps Gate, I could now see students making and throwing snowballs in the winter wonderland. Back from the game. One group way over near Wright Hall looked like they were playing Red Rover. It was a gigantic party, and we were missing it. And crap, I was cold as hell. And, Blondie was laughing. At me.
“What’s your name?” I said with some sense of urgency.
“You are so funny. And gullible. My name is Vivian. I’m just and have always been your basic average white girl from Evanston. I went to New Trier, and we competed against each other on the speech team. You went to State. I went to State. You said, let me see if I can remember now, “‘That I had the prettiest green eyes you had every seen.’”
“That was a good imitation of one of my lines. You’re good. I get that.”
“And, you believed me,” she broke.
“About your eyes?”
“That I was not who I said I was.”
“You mean that you aren’t…”
“A he / she. Correct.”
Del Franco said. “All set. Between gritted teeth.” He couldn’t even look at me.
Vivian and I went back through the Gate and onto Old Campus. Wherever she was headed was now forgotten or abandoned. Maybe she was just coming to save me. Vivian and her coat mixed in well with the newly fallen snow. Freshmen were acting like little kids to beat the band. There wasn’t enough snow on the ground to make a snowman or get a good ball of snow to throw, but people tried. Without mittens or gloves, hands became Freeze Pops.
Vivian and I walked north on the east side of the quad, past Lawrence, down the fenceline to its corner, which was Battell Chapel. I followed, and she led, making a left and heading towards Wright Hall. We walked without saying anything until we got near Durfee’s Sweet Shoppe.
“This is my stop.”
“You live in the candy store?”
“Not exactly.”
“Can I see you again?”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to fall for or date someone that I rescue.”
“Why?”
“You ask a lot of questions, Mister.”
“I do?” I teased.
“Look, I was walking by and saw that cop being an asshole. Okay, he’s a racist…”
“I didn’t call him a racist. I don’t think everybody who hates me is a racist. And even racists can be right, so…”
“So, just shut up. You become far less attractive when you talk a whole lot.”
After my run-in at the dump, getting harassed by one of Yale’s Finest, plus my own dumbassness thinking that Vivian was once a guy, I didn’t quite know what to say to that. I just wanted to test the theory that every girl I met wasn’t beddable. That I didn’t see them as a partner. That thing that I do that wasn’t even attractive – even to me. But I knew what I was. And what I wasn’t.
“Vivian, look. You did a nice thing tonight. For that, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. What I’d like to do is to get to know you since I obviously have not “seen you” to “see you.” Either in Chicago or here. Let’s say we…”
“Just shut up.”
With that, she turned around and went into her entryway.
At that, it began to snow. Again. Heavy this time.
If you haven’t already, take a gander at Chapter 1,