The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait by Blake Bailey Read Free Book Online Page A

bother telling him I didn’t want it, as he’d only become abusive and perhaps contrive to beat the shit out of me again. When I got home that afternoon I tossed the little canister into some bushes under my bedroom window, which made me feel virtuous, or anyway better than my brother.
    I retrieved it the following weekend, when my friend Matt (“Yo soy Mateo”) and I went to the French Market Mall to see Saturday Night Fever . That afternoon he’d ridden his bike to a head shop in a distant neighborhood, where he bought a pipe that appeared to be cobbled together from bits of cast-off plumbing. Matt proposed to smoke some ridiculous amount of dirt weed—neither of us had really gotten high yet, but Matt was enamored with the whole hobbyist side of pot smoking and determined to persevere—so I told him about the better stuff I’d tossed in the hedge. We smoked two fat buds of it in a field beyond the parking lot and then hurried to get in line for the movie. The mall’s Vieux Carré facade seemed not only kitschy but surreal and faintly menacing; the shortest kid in our class, Phil Philbin, came up to us in line and said hello; for some reason I felt a sudden, immense pity for Phil and began patting his head. Then I was watching the movie and then the movie was over. I remembered exactly this much: Travolta’s feet gliding along the sidewalk during the opening credits, his father hitting his hair at the dinner table, and Donna Pescow pulling a train in the car and crying about it afterward. I had no idea what Travolta was doing with that other, skinnier woman at the end of the movie, or why the movie had ended at all. Years later, when I watched it again, I was struck by how it all fit together.
    From then on I never failed to get high when I smoked, no matter what the quality of the dope. That would have been fine, except I didn’t much like being stoned and still don’t; it was a phase that pretty much ended after my freshman year—to be exact, after a “Youth Group” session at the parish house in our neighborhood, where we’d gather once a week to play Ping-Pong and Foosball and the like, or so the alibi went. I spent one of these nights smoking a bong in Paht’s car with a group of people I hardly knew. The whole scene depressed me: I knew Paht would brag to my brother about how wasted he’d gotten me, that he and the others would still be getting stoned and talking about it for many dreary, dreary years to come. But the worst part was when my father stopped in my room afterward to say good night; he smelled smoke in my hair and asked me about it. I mumbled something about how a lot of people smoked at these Youth Group things, that the place was just really smoky, and he seemed to accept this and went away. My heart was banging so hard the blanket trembled.
    SCOTT’S LOOKS BEGAN to fade toward the end of high school. As he lost the last of his baby fat, his face became narrow and angular, and its rather strange shape was accentuated by the way he wore his hair, long and lank, parted precisely down the middle like the later John Lennon’s. The main problem was acne. I used to have a photo of Scott from this time, thrusting his cheek toward the camera to show off his many pimples.
    My face was still perfectly clear at age fourteen—that is, during Scott’s last months in high school, when I became the better-looking one. I knew this because my mother’s gay friends began to make a bigger fuss over me, and one of them actually told my brother (because he’d asked) that I was the “tastier” of the two. This made me smug, and I wasn’t averse to playing the flirt, at least for a while. The fat chef at the GBR, for example, had an obvious crush on me; an amateur magician, he’d regale me with gadgety little tricks in his office that resulted in elaborate desserts that I was then welcome to eat. Another old friend of my mother, a tall guy with a comb-over named Roger, began to draw me out on the