Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman (best self help books to read .TXT) 📕

what did Lana Gatto, the faded memory of that teenage girl, mean to me? Here I was, having just published my first novel, reviewed on the cover of Sunday’s Arts section of Fred Tarrell’s newspaper, the large photo of my face on that page now serving as birdcage liner and laid over floors for puppies to pee on all over New England, and now here was Mr. Fred Tarrell of the Globe asking about Lana Gatto, who I hadn’t seen even once in seventeen years.

But the mention of Lana Gatto evoked what it always does, not primarily a memory of Lana herself but of an autumn Saturday afternoon of sophomore year when I found myself walking with Marianne Lucas and Lana across our high school football field after a varsity game toward the steep, grass-covered hill that our high school sat atop, looking out over the town. Marianne and Lana were singing “Come Together”—they knew all the words—in unison flipping their hands outward from the wrists and snapping their fingers to the abrupt beats. I felt incredibly happy to be there, included in their cool girlfriend intimacy as they sang that song, and I thought something like: This is what being a teenager is. Or: I can’t believe this is me, walking across the football field with these two girls.

Marianne was half one thing and half another, like me. She was half-Irish and half-Portuguese. She had pale matte skin, slightly nutmeg hued, and ebony hair worn in a careless bob falling partly over one eye, and that she kept tucking behind the opposite ear. Neither tall nor short, she was skinny but so well proportioned that her skinniness, snugly adhered to by her jeans, was also ample, her floppy emerald-green sweater far from new, her breasts like emergent islets underneath. Dark brown eyes, elongated and a little slanted, flashing vivacity and humor, and from her upper lip’s crest a thin scar, faint as a vein of milk, slanted toward a nostril, from when her cat had scratched her when she was a little girl. Lana was extroverted too, but Marianne was in a different way—chirpily sarcastic and sultry. Words poured out of Marianne in streaks of cheerful distress, and she had a robust laugh often directed at herself because she was her own favorite hapless comical character. She could talk on the phone for hours with me barely getting a word in, but I loved that more than anything. I grew much closer to her voice than I ever did to her physically. I didn’t have much choice.

Marianne and Lana were both junior varsity cheerleaders, and I was on the sophomore football team. In middle school, I’d never risen above third string. For years, though, I’d been playing yard football, those long afternoon three-against-one muddy backyard battles, often in the rain or snow or after darkness fell, when I’d carry the football on every play against Mark Milbauer, Matt Blum, and Leo Seltzer, Jewish kids from the Wooded Hollow Road neighborhood, relentlessly ramming my body into theirs for hours like some blind demented animal. At home, in the new house, I’d stomp up and down the stairs of our split-level, pumping my knees, or hopping up them one leg at a time, over and over, in a sweaty trance. During one of our first sophomore team practices, I made a perfect tackle on Joe Botto, though he seemed twice as big as me, thrusting my helmet into his solar plexus, driving forward with my legs. Joe got up wobbly and looking queasy, fixing me with a glance of perplexed resentment, and Coach Gomes shouted: That Frankie Goldberg, he’s a tiger! There’s a future Harvard University cornerback! Coach Gomes was under the impression that I got good grades, a studious Jewish boy who loved the violence of football. Goldberg’s a ferocious little tiger, our coach repeated in that laconic rumble that we were always imitating. It changed my life a little, that one tackle in front of all those kids who heard Coach Gomes. I knew I’d get to play in our games. Our team went 0–8, but a few were close losses. In one game that we lost 14–8, I ran the ball across the goal line on a two-point conversion. Maybe I’d never been happier.

The JV cheerleading squad, including Marianne and Lana, cheered at our games, which were played on Thursday afternoons. Probably that had something to do with why I was walking with them across the football field that Saturday. But also, I remember now, Lana was in a couple of my classes, including English, taught by Mr. Brainerd, whose best friend in college had been one of John Steinbeck’s sons. Mr. Brainerd had even stayed at John Steinbeck’s house. When we read Of Mice and Men, Mr. Brainerd told us personal stories about the man who’d written it and what he’d heard John Steinbeck say, not all of it nice, about some of the other authors we read in our class, like J. D. Salinger, Ernest Hemingway, and Truman Capote. One thing I especially remember is when Mr. Brainerd told us that in high school Hemingway had been a D student, because my overall grade average was a D too. Some weeks, though, Mr. Brainerd had us write short stories for homework, the only assignments I always handed in, and he always gave my stories an A, with comments like: “Putting a grade on this is ridiculous. But why can’t you write with margins and indented paragraphs like I always ask you to?”

Not everyone was as encouraging as Mr. Brainerd. The next year in a creative writing class taught by Mr. Gripper, I wrote a fifty-page story about a lumberjack during the French and Indian War and the magical powers of his axe. Mr. Gripper gave the story back to me with a grade of F and the written comment “Write what you know!” An F for a fifty-page story! That seemed unfair, and anyway I did