ANEW: Manchild at Yale: A Novel -- Chapter 11 (working title)
Episode #11 -- Formerly B.C.Y.: A Novel (working title)
We are at the penultimate chapter of Manchild at Yale: A Novel (working title), formerly B.C.Y.: A Novel (working title). This week and in two weeks are the final chapters of Manchild at Yale: A Novel.
To be honest, I thought the novel was over at Chapter 11, but my Indigenous brothers and sisters would have scoffed at that out of principle. The sacred numbers are in multiples of four, with twelve being the conclusion of this movement. Manchild at Yale: A Novel really wanted and needed to be twelve chapters long. So, who am I to argue? The final installment of this serialization will drop on Friday, April 18, 2025.
These final chapters have been something to behold for me. I feel more like a midwife than a writer. Something outside of me, that is in me, is being born. I can’t wait to see what it does when it is finally in its full form and how Schaeffer wants to show up in the world and in the lives of people he doesn’t yet know.
Preface: This is a serialization of Manchild at Yale: A Novel (working title). Remember, you can always jump in wherever you are. If you missed the earlier Chapters, you can find them here: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, and Chapter 10.
Chapter 11
It was the final push. I taped a big banner that I made down in the Pierson computer lab that said “COMPLETION!” above my bed. I printed out one letter per page, even though the damn printer in the steam tunnel room ran out of ink before the ‘T’, or ‘C-O-M-P-L-E.’ Com - Ple. Come Play? Couldn’t have that. I finished the sign with a Sharpie I borrowed from the new dean’s office. Although I had a gnarly amount of work to do on my senior thesis, I knew I would need to figure out some exit plan for a job after graduation.
Mylie told me that I would end up back at home at some point, like our cousin Zeke, who still lived with his mother in Robbins. Mylie said this when he was twelve and I was nine, but that gauntlet was thrown when we were kids in the “don’t ever tell me the odds” fashion. I resolved that I needed to get a “real” job before the end of the school year, so that I wouldn’t have to prove him right. However, after my thwarted job search last summer, I began in earnest looking for something that would support me so that I wouldn’t have to wait on tables, which was too close to serving, and way too close to being a slave. Or, so I twisted that logic to suit my ends. I’m sure that Mylie forgot about his challenge, but I didn’t.
I went to the Yale Career and Counseling Center, which was on Hillhouse Avenue just down the street from the president of Yale’s home, which seemed incongruous when I thought about it. It was hard to imagine Bart Giamatti going to find a career as an undergrad and coming out as the head dude in charge and eventually moving “on up” down the street. But I guess that is how it all worked, I was finding. You put your oars in the water — and rowed.
Rowing leitmotifs aside, I couldn’t see myself navigating my way towards being an investment banker or traveling up to the Pacific Northwest as a desk jockey and part-time environmentalist to count how many salmon spawned in Alaska. Where in the hell did they come up with these ridiculous jobs?! For weeks and weeks, I read in the New Haven Register about the re-opening of the Shubert Theater, the now defunct theater that was once a pre-Broadway traveling road house and even a Vaudeville theater at one point that hosted the Marx Brothers and many other pre-Broadway shows in days of yore. I was captivated. I ended up harassing the management team about joining their staff when the theater reopened. The problem was that the theater was slated to have a soft opening again in February, with a grand opening in April. Perhaps I could get hired in January, but not start working until June.
I talked my way into seeing the new ED. But when I told him I had worked for the Shubert Organization in Chicago as an intern, he hired me on the spot. The problem was that I would have to begin working and planning immediately for the soft opening.
Crap! This was not good. I had the equivalent of seven credits to get before the end of the school year, and now I needed and was offered a nearly full-time job. Up to 32 hours per week! There was no way in hell I was going to turn this down.
Luckily, I had some courses that jazzed me. I just wish my thesis and thesis advisor were amenable. I had spent a few hours with Marty Cuthbert, my red-haired advisor who might have well been Thomas Jefferson, the way he glared at me down his nose like I was his non-prodigal son. Marty’s sneer aside, I still had no idea exactly what the hell I was going to write about. Maybe I’d write about a little-known battle of the Civil War. Nope, there was no such thing, which I was told by Marty. Go figure.
I spent a good deal of my time in the microfiche room at Sterling Memorial Library looking at old diaries from a band of soldiers who first went into South Carolina in 1861 after Fort Sumter fell to the South. Maybe I could write about those people? No luck. I went down a rabbit hole because many of those diaries had already been covered in great detail.
I then turned my attention to the generals who called North for a number of people, mostly civilians and women, who would help the newly freed men and women get settled again. Maybe I could do some work on these early Freedman’s Bureau folk? Again, a good deal of that terrain had already been trodden. Finally, I hit upon a couple of dairies of the teachers who went to work with the freed Blacks in Beaufort, South Carolina, which was off the coast. That would be my angle, my hook. Not much had been written about these monographs, although I didn’t know if I could keep all of the plates spinning before they came crashing down around me. It was a ridiculous amount of work and things to keep straight. Something would have to be sacrificed for expediency's sake.
The first problem was the job. Did I have to have a job right away? Could I postpone it? Were these questions even relevant? After all, I didn’t have a family or trust fund to fall back on. I needed more than a twelve-hour-a-week minimum wage gig for when I graduated. I would make enough to save for first, last, and a security deposit. I’d take the job, which was the assistant house manager. I’d be managing the paid and volunteer ushers, the bartenders, and helping the house manager keep it all straight. Speaking of straight, my boss wasn’t, but we got along great. Unfortunately, he had a massive temper. Mt. Vesuvius didn’t erupt as much as he did. We worked in a very small, cramped space in the back of the theater, up a flight of stairs that would have led to the mezzanine or the upstairs lobby of the hotel that was once associated with the theater.
The Shubert in New Haven was one of the grand old theaters in America. Back before it closed and Broadway was booming, the Shubert was the final stop before Broadway. The theater was far enough away from the critics and the adoring hordes, but close enough for a less than two-hour train ride to the City. The Shubert probably saw more stars than any other theater in the United States back in its heyday.
When I first landed at the theater, the restorers were putting on the finishing touches to the original colors that the theater had—rose and ochre. The ornate chandelier, sconces, and fixtures were also a nod to the art deco period that the theater grew up around. I imagined some of the shows with Fanny Bryce or the Marx Brothers on their stop at one of the other Shubert Brothers-controlled facilities.
The first afternoon of work, before the real job began, I saw the theater before the rose colored seats were installed. The seats had been sent out to be restored before they would get the final bolt down into the various levels: orchestra, mezzanine, and balcony. I had not lost my fear of heights because when I went up into the balcony, it felt like a scene right out of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.” I couldn’t imagine an old man or woman getting to the top of the balcony, tripping down the severely raked stairs, and plunging end over end over the side of the railing. Even though there was a high guardrail up, I freaked each and every time I peered over the edge and imagined careening down over the side. Or worse yet, one of the blue-haired old ladies from Hamden arcing like a diver into the seats below.
The dynamic of the house manager’s office was a good one. I found that I could come in and get a lot of work done in hiring paid ushers and bartenders, while also gathering names from Yale students and senior citizens for the volunteer corps that would save us money and allow poorer folks to see the various shows. We had a ton of one-night-only kinds of shows, like the Japanese dance and acrobatic group Sankai Juku, who slid down the exterior of the building head first from ropes suspended from the nearly four-story rooftop. How the hell they got permission from the City to do that was beyond me.
Back on campus, the classes and senior thesis were not going all that well. I had one more film class that I was taking, which was cake, but the other classes were just there. One thing I did notice about myself is that I didn’t need much sleep and my boss, Marvin Kennick, could give me time away when I needed it. It was a crazy time. There wasn’t much auditioning happening in New York, at least parts that I was “right for,” but I certainly was splitting my focus all over the place.
Marvin and I hired another Yale junior to do filing and bookkeeping for us. It was an even a better team than before. In the bowels of the building were the main offices of the booker and executive director, a guy who had been around the business for years and years. It was like a cadre of out-of-work company managers from Broadway shows had gotten together and decided to run their own show. That was great, in the beginning. We saw terrific shows, and some War Horses that came out of retirement just to come back to perform at the historic Shubert Theater in New Haven. Like Mickey Rooney and Ann Miller in “Sugar Babies.” The Mick was a hoot as he made his way around New Haven during the daytime. I realized that as a working stage actor who was not rehearsing during the day, a person had plenty of time to do absolutely nothing, except get in trouble and drink. What a crazy life these gypsies led.
The theater was like a neutral zone, a kind of Balkan state, that brought out all kinds of races, cultures, and ethnicities together whenever we had international groups come in. I would marvel at the crowds that found their way in off College Street.
The folks who redesigned the theater took a nod from the grand spaces that were in the Kennedy and Lincoln Centers. Having people mesmerized even before they took their seats meant that they were bound to be in for a treat whenever the show started. The architects figured out how to make a grand space, even though the last theater lobby they had was an old hotel that was demolished.
I often thought of my last semester’s work on the Elm Haven Housing Projects, particularly the high-rises that would also soon go to the wrecking ball. There was nothing to be saved or salvaged from those spaces. A few people would lose their homes, but the corresponding feeling from the City seemed to be good riddance.
Buildings were much like people in college towns. They, too, would be gone after a time or fashion. Some would be demolished sooner than others, but everything would have its season and be history eventually. My own time was coming to an end, come hell or high water. I often wondered what those school teachers who made it down to Beaufort, South Carolina, from places like New Haven were like. What did those people think about, and why did they eventually turn their backs on the poor that they breathlessly described in the diaries I was reading? It all seemed connected somehow. The projects of Elm Haven were a recent incarnation of those freed poor people. Those projects weren’t home, and Yale wasn’t home either. It was all a way station, or a time to find my place in the world without guidance. Freed men and women. Freed me. The old voices and old fears began to rise up again, like sewage after a bad storm. The more I did, the more the bilgewater seemed to rise. For a time, it seemed like my own internal voice had gone into hibernation, or at the very least was muted. Again, I was lost. I didn’t understand what I was supposed to do or be in the world.
Back at the Shubert, I was starting to put in more and more hours. I could also spend a little time with my thesis, in which I was trying to find a toehold. I was betwixt and between.
One night when Ethan had a night off from the childbride, we went over to our freshmen haunt at Naples Pizza.
“Number 42, your slices are ready,” boomed over the mic to signal that we were up.
We walked to the counter together, like an old married couple at the town buffet, to get the two round trays of pizza to take back to our booth.
“I’m going to miss this place; the minuscule slices and pitchers upon pitchers of watery beer aside.”
“I’m not,” I said. “This place sucks and it always has sucked.”
“Man, you certainly are a pill these days. What’s eating you?”
I had to stop for a moment to check myself. If Ethan thought I was being a douche, then he probably was right. “It’s just, you know…all of this stuff that I’m doing. I don’t think I’m going to be able to get it all done.”
“Shut the FFFF-UP, Man. You always rise to the occasion.”
I did manage to get stuff done, but at what price? I was tired of half-stepping. It was time that I rose, but I truly had taken on waaaay too much this semester. To top it off, I was falling for one of my co-workers—a poet who was ten years older than me.
“Remember, I was telling you about this Danish chick at work. She works in subscription series.”
“Hagatha?”
“Now, I never called her that. Hellé.”
“Hella, No!”
“Come on, Man.”
“Yeah, you might have mentioned her once, twice, or twelve times.”
“I think she might be the real deal,” I said without a touch of irony.
“She’s like…your mother’s age, right?”
“Look, cut the shit.”
“Yes, you may have spoken about the lovely Danish butter cookie,” Ethan stuffed an entire slice of pizza in his mouth, bones and all. “Mmmgrel lithhe aite gei or.”
“Okay, I’ll wait ‘til you vomit.” I waited about two minutes while he swallowed and took a long pull from his beer.
“Ahhhhhh, okay, she is a very lovely poet. I read some of her stuff in that Bohemian rag that publishes long, drippy Elizabeth Bishop-y, Plath-y, Sexton-y, turgidity. Yep, it’s really good and well-crafted poesy.”
“You read her stuff?! She won’t even let me read her stuff.”
“I’m not the world’s best sleuth, Schaeff. Her stuff was hanging out there for all the world to see like a seaman at Madonna’s house. Is she your ‘lucky star’?”
“You’re my ‘lucky star’ kitten. Now, let’s be serious here. She’s not like any of the women we have dated here.”
“Schaeffer, there aren’t any women here.” He was gesticulating not just about Naples Pizza but at Yale in general. “You have roped in a WOMYNE. She’s the real deal with the uber red lipstick and everything. She really is closer to our mother’s generation than she is to ours.”
He had a point. I watched Ethan down four more pieces of our two ten-piece large pizzas like he was competing in a contest. He didn’t look like he was anywhere near slowing down.
We finished our pies, or at least, Ethan finished our pies for us. I thought about the entanglement that I was embarking on, which included the job, Hellé, final classes, and my thesis, which was stalled out over Charleston Harbor somewhere. Something had to give, and it looked like it was the writing, but I needed to make a non-Schaeffer-like decision.
Over these weeks together, Hellé and I spent a good deal of time at her place which was up near East Rock down Orange Avenue. I would get off work and walk down to her house because she finished up four hours before I did.
“Hey.”
“Hey…”
“Why don’t you come in. Are you cold? You look cold.” She would then take off my jacket and wrestle me to the ground in her long, narrow hallway. When we came up for air, I imagined her bright red lipstick was plastered all over my face like some weird cartoon from the Forties. I always fell for “Are you cold?”
The fact was, I never thought that much about how cold I was. I was febrile in her presence. I felt more flustered and feverish than anything else.
Inside Hellé’s place were very precious antiques from before the mid-century mark. Old Royal typewriters, pictures of Coca-Cola Santas, completely as a goof, and lavender, which was her familiar, were plastered everywhere. It was so bad that I wanted to sneeze from the accumulated dust and purple-y plants, and the two big cats she had. One had a special diet due to kidney issues. Going to Hellé’s house was an adventure. It wasn’t just the ramble up Orange Street, which seemed forbidden and off-limits, like heading to the dump years before, but because it was more “April in Paris” as opposed to the walk of shame from one of my peer groups’ loves. In the late winter and throughout the mid-spring, I felt overheated because of that long walk wrapped in too many clothes, like I was four again. Plus, the radiator heat she had was always unbearably ten degrees too warm. Hellé’s place seemed like she was at the edge of some fiery furnace from the Greeks, waiting to be discovered by some angry paramour, or worse.
Her bedroom was in the back, and we spent most of the time in there when we were together. If we weren’t in bed, I was going through my research, trying to make sense of Port Royal and Beaufort, South Carolina. In retrospect, I wish that I had at least pulled away from her before the crash and burn came. And, I knew it was coming, as sure as you’re born.
At work, Hellé often came dressed like a raven-haired Barbara Stanwyck from “Double Indemnity.” Once I got to know her and got to know her well, Hellé was a study in le bête noire. She simply was awful to all but me. Yet, like those who couldn’t see it coming, like a sudden hard frost in April that killed the early growth or an unexpected slap across the face, Hellé turned.
It all started around the six-week mark.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, this time.
“Nothing.”
“It’s got to be…”
“Nothing,” I said.
Hellé glowered, leveling her gaze somewhere behind me and slightly above my head, as if she were seeing something I could not. I even turned all the way around to see if there was something behind me.
Where the pique of anger came from, I had no idea. I backtracked a bit. Pausing and giving her my reality, once again, hoping she’d understand, “I need to get some stuff done on my papers and homework, but since I am always out here, I am way, way behind.”
“Then take a break then. Take a break if that’s what you need.”
“Yeah, I might just need that…”
Silence.
“Are you saying you need a break from me? Is that what you’re saying?”
I was saying that, but Hellé could be so persuasive. This was all in the back of the house in her very solid and cloistered bedroom. Next to the massive and incongruous nineteenth-century armoire stuffed to the gills with her fifty-year-old retro dresses with massive shoulder pads and the bordello-carpet bagger’s drapery and window treatments. She even had a ceramic unicorn – lavender-colored, of course – hung between the armoire and the window that I imagined as some weird representation of my head being glazed, mounted, and stuffed.
I had a flash of sorts. I began to think that this was about as far away as I could get from that talk I had this summer with Lydia. Nothing came to mind that could assuage this feeling other than the fact I wanted, or I should say I needed, to break things off, to flee before something more powerful and unseen ensnared us together.
“I’m just floundering, and this is not a good idea.”
She inched herself closer to me, putting my left hand on her face, then down her shirt, then down her pants.
“Look, I can’t… I cannot continue to… I can’t do this!” I finally snapped, backing away while clutching the parka as a shield I had held onto all of these years.
She looked as if I had just slapped her, looking from me to the parka to the spot just beyond me. I hadn’t struck her, but the finality in my eyes, along with the defensive posture, was hard not to read.
“Okay,” she said to no one in particular, perhaps to whatever was beyond my back that was animating her.
I began to move to grab my things out of her hall closet. “This caught me by surprise. This… this… this… relationship.” Now, I just have to finish what I came here to do, I thought.
It was compression. It was the longest that I had ever dated anyone while at Yale. It was nearly two months, and now it all snapped by in a flash, like a rubber band to the wrist. The hard thing is that we would have to see each other at work. But I just couldn’t do it anymore. I had to flee as fast as I could, hurrying my exit as fast as I could.
“I hope you understand. I hope you get why I need to not be in a relationship at this time.” I felt strangely weak in saying all of this. After all, it was my idea to be with her and now I was feeling like a damned heel for suggesting we part.
“Okay,” she said, turning her back to me so that I could not see that she was crying.
“Hey…hey…hey,” I reached for her.
“No, you don’t get to.”
Stunned, “Oh-Oh-kay.” I clutched my sweater and scarf that she handed me, hustling all the way to the front door, with her following at a comfortable distance behind. Her hallway leading to the front of the apartment was surprisingly narrow and long to get to the Orange Street door. I gathered up all of my things on the way past the dining area – books, pens, papers – hoping I didn’t miss any of my outerwear or papers I brought with me; this would certainly be the last time for a while or…
I tried to kiss her goodbye one last time, but she turned her head to the other side. This time her lipstick was smeared across her face. I stepped across the threshold. “Good…”
She slammed the door in my face before “-bye.” Okay, I did not see that coming.
When I got back to my dorm room, Ethan and the child bride were snuggling in the living room. The light was dim, but they were both reading in their separate, comfortable cocoon. He looked like he was reading Proust, and she was digging into a Jonathan Spence Chinese history text.
“Hey, Schaeff-y.”
“Yep.”
“It went that well, huh?”
“Yep.”
“Is there anything besides ‘yep’ that you want to say?”
“Yep.” They looked at me expectantly. “Good-night,” was all I was able to get out before hauling my ass to bed.
Lying in my single bed, I thought back to what Lydia told me last summer: “People aren’t studying you that much. They got too much to worry about to worry ‘bout you!. Here me?!”
I really wanted them to care. I really, truly did. Because, for the first damned time, I did.
[The final Chapter of Manchild at Yale: A Novel (working title), Chapter 12, drops on April 4, 2025, in two weeks, which is the last serialized chapter on ANEW. Spread the word and (re-)read from the beginning: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, and Chapter 10. Tell a friend. Drink some water. Take your meds. Pet a dog. See you soon.]