The Grievers by Marc Schuster Read Free Book Online

restaurant that was mutually inconvenient for everyone. After driving nearly an hour north along the gray corridors of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, I spied an electric sign boasting eightyseven varieties of nachos and knew I was in the right place. That nachos was spelled with an apostrophe S didn’t make me cringe so much as it forced me to hold my tongue as the hostess seated me alone at a long table beneath a red bicycle that dangled precariously from the ceiling on superfine strands of fishing line.
    For the next ten minutes, I sipped iced tea and made a show of studying the menu while conversations buzzed all around me. When the waitress paused at my table to ask if I needed a refill, my sense was that the question had less to do with my drink than the hungry patrons-in-waiting eyeing the vast expanse of real estate in front of me with a mix of envy and outrage.
    “Hey, big boy,” I said when Neil arrived. “How about a drink?”
    “Sorry,” Neil said. “I never take a drink unless somebody’s buying.”
    “ Duck Soup ?” I asked.
    “Close,” Neil said. “ Animal Crackers .”
    Everything I knew about the Marx Brothers I’d pieced together from sound bites, documentaries, Trivial Pursuit, and conversations with Neil, but I’d never actually seen one of their movies in its entirety. Like anyone even vaguely familiar with their work, I knew Groucho’s iconic mustache and glasses on sight, guessed that his cynical outlook on life had earned him his nickname, and understood that the animated stork in the Vlasic Pickle commercials was modeled after his trademark stoop, deadpan delivery, and incomparable cigar-play. I knew that Harpo didn’t talk, that he wore a curly wig, and that he honked a horn whenever he got excited. I knew that Chico spoke in a broken accent and once told a reporter that he’d been Italian until he saw what they did to Mussolini and subsequently decided to become Greek. I knew that Zeppo had starred in only a handful of films, always playing the straight man, and that Gummo had quit the act before they made it to the silver screen.
    I’d learned all of this through the kind of passive research that makes renaissance men of us all—a PBS special on a rainy Sunday here, a zero-context rant from my grandfather there. Fortunately or not, this was how I learned pretty much everything in my life. I never read the Beats, I only read about them. I never went to war, but I saw it on TV. I never played football, but I looked forward to every new version of Madden NFL to hit the shelves. And the closest I’ve come to a psychedelic experience is reading The Doors of Perception . Some people immerse themselves in the things they love, the things that excite them, the things that pique their curiosity. At best, I’m the kind of person who dips a toe in the water, but more often than not, I’ll settle for hearsay, opting always to remain a safe distance from whatever it is that holds my attention.
    “Nice place, by the way,” I said, glancing at the bicycle above us.
    “Sorry,” Neil said, apologizing before I could really start to complain—about the drive, about the wait, about the superfluous apostrophe. “Anthony had a coupon.”
    “So he’s coming?” I asked.
    “Actually, no,” Neil said. “He just called to bail on us. Something about a Dukes of Hazzard marathon.”
    Back at the Academy, Anthony Gambacorta was a pudgy kid with thick glasses who used to hang out in the light booth and share his extensive pornography collection with the stage crew while the Carrot and Stick Drama Society butchered the likes of Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill in the theater down below. During our sophomore year, he made a name for himself when he replaced all the posters advertising an upcoming production of Bock and Harnick’s Fiorello! with counterfeits that read Fellatio! instead. The fact that nobody caught the mistake until a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer spotted it on the last