Authors note:
I don't own anything. By that, I mean that I don't own any of the characters, but it's also true that I don't own much else, either. Kirsten's rescued-from-the-trash couch is inspired by an actual piece of furniture in my apartment. If Josh Schwartz or Fox really want the proceeds of my dumpster-diving, I guess they could sue me, but it'll save us all a lot of hassle if they don't.


Chapter 5:

 Sandy couldn't quite wrap his head around the idea of a guest room with its own attached bathroom: he could swear there were more bathrooms in this house than in his entire building in the Bronx. He had grown up fighting his whole family for shower time; here, each of the Nichols could have had two baths of their own, and there'd still be a few to spare for the hired help. It was obscene; everything about Kirsten's parents' house was a bit obscene. But he was grateful to be able to clean up without worrying about bumping into his hosts. He'd have to face them again tomorrow, but at least there would be no opportunity to see anyone tonight. He peeled his clothes off and stepped into the shower, flinching but relieved as scalding water hit his skin. He wasn't sure whether he felt so dirty because of the long car ride or his encounter with Kirsten's father. He wasn't sure this was the kind of dirt that could be washed off with hot water and soap. But it was better than nothing.

Fucking idiot, he told himself savagely. What did I think I was doing here? I was going to take her home to her dad and they'd make up and we'd all live happily ever after? Because he was really a great guy, and she'd refused to talk to him for a year and a half for no good reason? Kirsten's not a moron, and she doesn't hold grudges. I should have known there was something really wrong with him. Where do I get off trying to rescue everyone else from their problems? I don't have my hands full enough with my own?

Sandy wasn't really afraid that he'd throttle Caleb Nichol. He could have: Kirsten's father wasn't that old and he looked like he was in good shape, but if Sandy's childhood had taught him anything, it was how to fight. Where he grew up, little boys proved their manhood with their fists, and he'd had more to prove than most: a white kid in an increasingly black and Puerto Rican neighborhood; a cop's son in a place where plenty of people weren't much inclined to like or trust the police. Holding his own was how he showed he belonged: there were no hard feelings, and the next day they'd all be back to playing stickball in the park. But if he'd learned to fight as a kid, he'd learned to check his temper as a teenager, when fists gave way to knives and guns and the kind of fights that Sandy couldn't afford to lose or to win. He'd figured that out the hard way, and he'd learned to swallow his pride and walk away. He could still yell with the best of them, but he hadn't thrown a punch since he was 17, and he wasn't planning to start now. He had far too much to lose. Someone might get hurt this weekend, but it would be the kind of damage that's done with words, not with blows. At least, he sincerely hoped so.

So, he thought, my girlfriend's parents hate me. Kirsten's mother had been scrupulously polite, but Sandy didn't think anyone that image-obsessed could approve of him. He clashed with pretty much everything about Newport Beach, he thought ruefully. His accent was wrong; his clothes were wrong; he was pretty sure he'd let on how intimidated he was by all the obvious wealth; he wasn't convinced that he could even follow a conversation about real estate or golf or how hard it was to get good help these days or whatever it was people here talked about. He wondered what manicured, coiffed Mrs. Nichol would make of his own mother, with her too-loud voice and too-red lipstick and frizzy dyed hair that refused to stay in place after a long day bending over steam plates at the hospital cafeteria where she worked. He pushed that thought aside. There was nothing wrong with his family. He had nothing to be ashamed of.

Except that it wasn't that simple. Before he'd arrived in Berkeley, it had never occurred to him that people might feel sorry for him. Things that seemed normal in New York, like not knowing how to drive, took on a totally different cast once he left town. His new friends had staged an immediate intervention, dragging him out at 7 on a Saturday morning so he could practice driving a stick shift around a parking lot and get his license. He'd been glad to learn, but he wasn't pleased with the pitying look on their faces when they discussed the fact that a guy in his 20s might not know how to drive. He'd tried to explain that no one in New York had a car, and they claimed that made sense, but he was pretty sure they were just humoring him.

And then there'd been the jerk he'd been introduced to at a party because they were both from the Bronx. The guy's name was Chris Levy, which should have been some sort of heads up: what kind of Jew names their kid Christopher? Anyway, Chris Levy was from Riverdale, the rich neighborhood just north of Manhattan that might as well have been in the suburbs, and he'd immediately assumed that Sandy was, too. He'd asked if he was the Sandy Cohen who'd been a couple of years behind him at Fieldston, which Sandy later found out was one of the toniest prep schools in the city. Sandy hadn't thought anything of it: he'd told the guy that he was from Hunts Point and had graduated from South Bronx High. He hadn't expected Chris Levy's response: the guy looked surprised and a little intimidated and started asking questions that would have made sense if Sandy had said he'd grown up in Belfast or Beirut or the ninth circle of Hell. No, Sandy patiently told him, he'd never been shot. Yes, he knew people who had been. Yes, there was a lot of arson in the South Bronx: landlords mostly, hoping to get rid of buildings that weren't profitable anymore. No, he wasn't in a gang. Yes, there were still some white people left in Hunts Point. A few. Sandy's family.

The thing was, Sandy had always been a little proud that his family had stuck it out in Hunts Point when all the other Jewish people left. It had been a choice, at first. This is a nice neighborhood, his father had said. There's no law that says you have to live near people who look like you. Later, after his dad died, it had come down to necessity: his mother couldn't afford to give up the rent-controlled apartment, even when the neighborhood really did fall apart. But even then, Sandy had taken pleasure in his ability to negotiate different worlds; he liked that he was equally at home at street-corner breakdancing battles and at CBGBs. He thought it was cool that his friends at City College had spanned the city's whole physical and cultural geography. He thought of himself as worldly and intrepid. Chris Levy just thought of him as an exotic specimen: a white guy who'd grown up in the ghetto.

So while Sandy knew there was nothing to be ashamed of about his family, he also knew that they were not exactly the Cleavers and that he'd have to think about how to explain it all to Kirsten so she'd get the right idea. She said she wanted to know, and he wanted to be honest with her. But he couldn't stand the idea of her pitying him. Not that there was anything to pity him about.

He dried himself off with one of the Nichols' impossibly soft towels and climbed into bed, luxuriating in the impossibly soft sheets. They probably cost a fortune, like everything in this house, but Sandy thought soft sheets were worth it. When he was a lawyer, he would definitely shell out the money for sheets like this. They were a lot nicer than the ones at Kirsten's apartment, and nicer still than his sheets, which he'd snagged from Rudi's place and which had probably come from the store where Rudi had worked as a stock clerk. They sure as hell didn't deal in high thread count there.

Rudi, Sandy thought, was someone he could tell Kirsten about. He was important but mostly safe, if Sandy told it in the right way. He was Sandy's great uncle, the much-older brother of Sandy's mother's mother. Sandy's grandmother had come to America with her parents when she was just a little kid, but Rudi had had a life: a job, a new wife, a baby on the way. So he'd stayed behind. And when he finally did show up in the Bronx, Sandy's mother had been embarrassed by his old-world accent, his stiff demeanor, the numbers tattooed on his wrist. Before she died, Sandy's grandmother had trouble dealing with him, too, although she always invited him to family events. Later, Sandy would learn that there were theories to describe all of this: survivor's guilt and that kind of thing. But when he was a kid, he'd had no idea why the only grown-up with whom Rudi really hit it off was his father.

They seemed like unlikely friends. It wasn't just the age difference, or even the vast chasm of life experience that separated Rudi from almost everyone else in Hunts Point. Sandy's dad was gregarious, instantly buddies with everyone he met, while Rudi was almost pathologically reserved. Sandy's father was a bit too fond of liquor and the track; as far as Sandy could ever tell, Rudi's only vice was the cream-laden pastry he ate every day at 3 PM. Sandy's father's sense of humor tended towards funny stories, jokes with punch-lines, the kind of thing that could diffuse any tense situation or entertain an entire room. Rudi liked understated irony, sly mocking; it wasn't until he was ten or eleven that Sandy even realized that his great-uncle had a sense of humor. He supposed part of their bond was politics. Not the formal kind: it was hard to imagine either of them stumping for a candidate or attending a rally. But they quietly agreed that the war in Vietnam was a bad thing, that there were civil rights issues in the North, too, and that the student protestors, although they might be spoiled college kids, were sort of onto something. They both rolled their eyes when people started ranting about how the Puerto Ricans were ruining the neighborhood. Neither of them would cross a picket line. That kind of thing.

When Sandy was little, Rudi would come around every Saturday to talk to Sandy's father. Sandy's dad would pour himself a beer, make Rudi some coffee, and they'd sit in the kitchen discussing the news. Sandy liked to sit in on these sessions, quietly at first, later gathering up the courage to offer an opinion or two. His dad and Rudi treated him like a grown-up: heard him out, agreed with some of what he said, pointed out what they thought were the logical flaws in the rest. Sandy tried to hold his ground, imitating his dad and Rudi's style: passionate but not angry; confident, but not so much so that it got in the way of hearing the other person's point of view. He must have done a pretty good job, because once Rudi turned to his dad, smiled, and said, this one should be a lawyer, no?

And then Sandy's father lost his job, and two weeks later he was dead, hit by a subway train in what was ruled an accident but neighborhood gossip claimed was not accidental at all. Sandy had never got the full story: he was too young to be told, and he wasn't sure he wanted to know. There was something about a gambling debt, and a bribe taken to pay it off, and possible jail time. Sandy chose to remember his dad as a charming, decent man who was liked by everyone, not as a compulsive gambler who would abandon his family when the going got tough. Other people were less charitable, though. In the weeks after his father's death, a lot of people avoided Sandy and his sisters, not sure what to say. But Rudi showed up the next Saturday as usual, brandishing tickets to a Yankees game.

That initial outing was a disaster: Rudi didn't even understand baseball, and he was such a poor substitute for Sandy's father that it made them both indescribably sad. Sandy would go to lots more baseball games, but always with friends his own age. After that, though, they hit their stride, sticking to things that Sandy had never done with his dad. Rudi would take Sandy to the Cloisters or the Met or Shakespeare in the Park: cultural attractions that were an easy subway ride from the Bronx but felt like a million miles away. Sandy wasn't sure where Rudi got the money for some of it. He didn't have much to spare. Some of the best stuff was free, though. They both loved the New York Public Library, with the lions in front and, according to Rudi, every book ever published inside. Sandy loved that idea, even after he realized it wasn't really true. You couldn't check out books from the library with the lions, but Rudi showed him where the lending library was, helped him get a card, and wasn't offended when every week for two years Sandy chose spy novels and mysteries over the classics that he recommended.

It was a good thing that Rudi was around in the years following Sandy's father's death, because everyone else in his family seemed to have too much on their minds to think much about him. His mother was preoccupied with making ends meet, working a full shift in the cafeteria before heading off to her after-hours office-cleaning job. He could go for days barely seeing her: she left for her first job just after he got up, and she was usually asleep by the time he got back from the park where he played baseball and hung out with his friends every evening. His sisters weren't any better: Karen was preoccupied with the high school sweetheart she'd marry two weeks after graduation, and Steph was increasingly preoccupied with finding her next fix, or finding ways to pay for it. That, he thought, was definitely one of the things he'd edit out of the version he told Kirsten.

Sandy didn't really miss the attention, or at least he wasn't conscious of missing it. There was lots to do in his neighborhood, and nobody to stop him from doing any of it. Not that it was all illegal or dangerous, and Sandy definitely had limits. He wasn't planning to end up a junkie like Stephanie, or worse. He had two close friends, Ray and Carlos, and they were a lot like him: not looking for trouble, more interested in music and sports and girls and martial-arts flicks than gangs or turf battles, but not above skipping school or smoking up when the opportunity presented itself.

Skipping school was the thing that finally got his mother to pay some attention to him. It seemed stupid to him at the time, and it still seemed a little stupid years later. On the rare occasions when Steph came home, they had to hide anything that could possibly be pawned, and he didn't want to think about what she was doing for money when she wasn't stealing her family's belongings. If there was someone in the Cohen family his mom should be worrying about, it sure as hell wasn't him. And she didn't even seem that mad that Sandy had been blowing off school. She seemed more angry that she'd had to confront the truant officer, who had apparently found her on the fifth try and implied that any parent who was home that rarely couldn't be adequately supervising her child's school attendance. She basically came right out and called me a bad mother, his mom yelled at him. As hard as I work to put food on the table for you. Do you have any idea how mortifying that is? Sandy couldn't see why it was any more mortifying than having the entire building hear this argument through their apartment's paper-thin walls, but he kept his mouth shut and retreated sullenly into his room. He didn't care about school: it was a holding pen, a place where they put kids all day so they couldn't go out and cause trouble. Glorified babysitting, and at fifteen he was plenty old enough to take care of himself. But he felt terrible about inflicting on his mother some pompous civil servant who had never tried to pay the rent on minimum wage.

His mom clearly felt worse, because she'd promptly summoned Rudi and washed her hands of her son. That truant lady was right, she said, loud enough so that Sandy could hear it through his closed door, which was loud enough so that it would be the talk of the block tomorrow. I can't supervise him. He's out of control: he skips school, he comes and goes as he pleases, for all I know he's shooting up just like his sister. You're the only person he respects. You take him. Sandy thought of himself as nearly grown and pretty tough, but he fought back tears when Rudi knocked on his door to tell him to pack his stuff.

Living with his uncle wasn't easy. For one thing, the old man was a mess: he was prone to depression and paranoia, hording food and morbidly planning for emergencies that Sandy knew would never come. There was all sorts of important stuff you couldn't talk about with him: questions you couldn't ask, gaps in his history that he would never allow you to explore. Sandy had always known that; he'd always realized that Rudi had been shaped by trauma and grief that he couldn't begin to discuss. But it was hard to deal with it every day, hard to think so much about saying the right thing or not saying the wrong one.

And there were more mundane issues, too. Rudi's apartment was a one bedroom, and he insisted on sleeping on the sofa so that Sandy could take the room and have a place to study. You don't have to study to do ok at my school, Sandy had protested. You just have to shut up and not get into fights or make trouble. I'm not taking your bed. But Rudi insisted. He had rules: Sandy would go to school every day, he'd stay in school until he graduated or moved out, and he'd get a part-time job to pay his expenses. He would do his homework. It wasn't Rudi's business what he smoked, but Sandy wouldn't bring home anything illegal. He would be home by the time Rudi went to sleep, because he'd wake the old man up creeping through the living room into his bedroom. Sandy chafed at all of this, but he complied, partly because he was afraid of where he'd be sent if his uncle kicked him out and partly because he suddenly realized how old Rudi was and how hard it must be for him to live alone. Sandy didn't mind schlepping groceries up three flights of stairs, but it couldn't be easy for a man who was pushing 80. He cared about his great uncle, but he also kind of liked feeling useful and needed. He figured he could stick it out. They eventually settled into a routine.

November of Sandy's senior year, two important things happened. The first was a bad thing: a street-corner argument that turned into a fight, a fight that turned into an all-out brawl with guys you really didn't want to mess around with, a terrifying night in a holding cell before Sandy learned he wasn't going to be charged with anything and then another terrifying three days waiting to hear for sure that his friend Ray was going to pull through.

When it was all over, Sandy tried to act like it was no big deal, but Rudi was having none of it.

I'm ok, Sandy said.

I don't think you are, Rudi told him. But why don't we pretend for a second that the universe doesn't revolve around you. My whole life, I have lost all of the people I have loved the most. Except you. I don't know why you care so little about your future. It makes no sense to me. But you are not the only person in the world, and you are not the only one who gets hurt when you hurt yourself. I shouldn't have to tell this to you, of all people. Maybe you want to end up dead or in jail, but you have no right to do that to me.

Sandy couldn't think of a response to that; he was taken aback both by what he took to be Rudi's oblique acknowledgment of the dead wife and children he never talked about and by his admission that he loved Sandy. Love wasn't something Sandy thought about a whole lot.

he said. No more fighting. I promise.

You mean that? Rudi asked.

Sandy replied. Dead or in jail don't sound so good to me, either.

And then Rudi said the second important thing. Since we're talking about your future have you ever thought about going to college?

I'm not the college type, Rudi, Sandy laughed. I couldn't get in. And besides, I can barely wait to get out of high school.

I think you could get in, Rudi said. City College has open admission: all you need is a B average. You don't have that?

Yeah, I probably do, Sandy admitted. You pretty much get that automatically if you can walk upright and write your name. That wasn't strictly true, but Sandy wasn't going to admit that he did crack the occasional book.

Then you like your job so much that you want to do it for the rest of your life?

Sandy snorted at that. He did kind of like his job, actually. Rudi had hooked him up with a gig in receiving at the store where the old man worked, and he liked the money and the camaraderie with the other guys. But it was only part time, and he didn't really see himself unpacking boxes eight hours a day for the next fifty years. He got pretty bored when he went to full time over the summer.

You're afraid you'll find out you're not as smart as you think you are? Rudi pressed.

I don't think I'm smart, Sandy protested.

You don't know if you're smart, Rudi told him. You always tell me they don't care at your school, as long as you don't make trouble. Maybe you should go somewhere where they care and find out.

Sandy wasn't convinced, but he really had no idea what he was going to do after graduation. Carlos was pretty certain he was going to join the Air Force, and if there was one thing Sandy knew for sure, it was that he wasn't cut out for the military. Ray's mom had announced that as soon as her son got out of the hospital he was going to live with her sister in Florida where, she said, glaring at Sandy, there were fewer lunatics. Sandy had to admit that his post-graduation prospects looked pretty grim: a boring job, no good friends, the same dull crap, only now a little more dull. College at least would mean new people. He decided he'd give it a semester and see how it went. Rudi said they could keep their living arrangement, and he refused Sandy's offer to help out with the rent.

College turned out to be a revelation. Sandy had no idea school could be like that: kids who didn't laugh when you used big words, classes where they assigned books you might actually want to read, teachers who seemed pleased when you argued with them, who were impressed by precisely the kind of comment that got you labeled a wise-ass at South Bronx. Not that it was easy. Sandy had never had to work very hard at anything, and he realized he had no idea how to study. All his classmates seemed to have gone to places like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, schools that were actually supposed to prepare you for college, and they seemed unfazed by assignments with which he struggled. At first, he worked like a dog for Cs. But by second semester, he was getting Bs and As, and the next year, much to his amazement, he developed a reputation for being a brain. He'd always been the kid with an opinion about everything and an argument to back it up, but that had never seemed to him to have anything to do with school. Nobody at school cared what you thought about things. Here, if you could argue your opinions well, people thought you were smart. He was specially invited to study sessions; classmates asked him to read over and critique their papers. He did things he'd never even contemplated: he stayed after class to finish discussions; he joined clubs; he met with professors just to talk about stuff he didn't understand. He felt like he'd finally located his people: a secret tribe of smart-aleck city kids who'd spent their childhoods in the public library. He'd never had trouble getting along with people, but it was the first time in his life when he didn't feel even a little bit like a freak.

Rudi died the summer before Sandy's senior year at CCNY. It was mercifully quick: Sandy was unloading boxes in the back of the store when someone came to tell him his uncle had collapsed. The paramedics let Sandy ride in the ambulance, and he could tell Rudi was gone before they even arrived at the hospital. Sandy wasn't sure whether he should perform the Jewish mourning rituals. Rudi wasn't at all religious: the only time Sandy had seen him in shul was for Sandy's bar mitzvah, and that was only to show support for a recently-bereaved little kid. They'd never talked about it, but Sandy assumed Rudi thought religion was a bunch of empty rites, meaningless tasks performed for a diety who didn't even exist. Sandy didn't really disagree, but he felt like he needed a ritual, something to mark the transition before he returned to an apartment now empty of Rudi's presence. So he went though the motions of sitting shiva, opening the apartment to mourners, even though there weren't that many people left to come by. The rabbi came and offered awkward platitudes, ignoring the obvious fact that there was a reason he'd never laid eyes on Rudi when he was alive. Karen and Jorge had moved to Boston and could only call, but Steph came, newly sober but even more awkward than the rabbi. Sandy made conversation and tried really hard to avoid glancing over at his wallet. Sandy's mom brought a ham and cheese casserole, which Sandy discreetly hid until the rabbi was gone. Rudi would have like that, he thought. It made him smile for the first time in days.

Sandy talked to his mom on occasion. Things were a little tense between them, but they both made an effort. She'd even taken off work last year to come see him get an award for the best undergrad sociology paper. He'd been embarrassed by the attention, but also secretly pleased she'd shown up. But they didn't usually talk about serious things, so Sandy was surprised when his mom smiled sadly at him and said, you're a bit like him, you know. I mean, you're not at all like him, but you're like I think he would have been if it hadn't been for the Nazis and his family and everything. A bit like the man he should have been.

Sandy wasn't sure that was true, but he liked to hear it anyway. Thanks, mom, he said. That's the nicest thing anyone has said to me in a while.

You're a lot like your father, too, she said, if he'd been a much stronger man. Sandy didn't think it was possible to be like both Rudi and his father: he didn't think he'd ever met two people who were more different. But he took this as his mother's way of telling him she was proud of him, so he let it pass. And the thing was, he didn't really want to be like either of them, but he did want to be the person they'd have wanted him to be. That was something worth striving for.

Sandy couldn't see any point in sitting shiva for the full week. He was mostly doing it for his own benefit, and after the first two days everyone who was going to come had already been by. So the third day he took the towel off of the bathroom mirror, took a shower, and made his way to City College, where he found the right office to ask what you had to do to apply to law school, how you could pay for it, and what were the five best public ones in the country.

Which is how Sandy came to be at Berkeley, and to meet an amazing girl at a job fair, and to be spending the night in her parents' over-the-top monument to conspicuous consumption. Tomorrow, he thought, he'd find a way to explain it all to Kirsten. Tonight he was going to drift off to sleep as if he was completely at home in a world of en-suite bathrooms, live-in maids and Egyptian cotton sheets.