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

Yes it was, Marianne, I answer. I was a thug too, come on.

She looks startled, until she gets it and laughs.

We’re sitting at a small corner table in this restaurant Marianne chose. We’ve already ordered but are having a round of drinks first. She’s been telling me about the reunion and my old sophomore football friends who, she claims, were all sorry I wasn’t there. But Space Cavanaugh wasn’t at the reunion. Seems nobody knows anything about what’s become of him. Mike Bonks wasn’t there either, though Joe Botto has kept up with him a little. Joe’s a house builder who hit the jackpot during the suburban Boston housing boom. But Mike has had a hard time, Joe told her. He owned a company that cleaned up construction sites, but it went bankrupt. Bonks lost everything.

Unbelievable, I say. It’s like his nickname held his future.

But Marianne didn’t know he used to be called Mickey Dumps, so I tell her about that. Good thing high school nicknames don’t always foretell destinies, I say, because that would be awful. She doesn’t pick up on this bit of ironic metacommentary.

Oh, poor Mickey Dumps, she says with sincere-sounding sympathy.

So Joe is rich. Good for him, I say, not in the mood to feel even a little bit sorry for Bonks. Joe and I were in a lot of the same classes together. Because of my grades, I was mostly in lower-track classes, except for in English. School was never Joe’s thing either. But you, you were always in top-track classes.

No big mystery, she says pleasantly. I just studied and did my homework.

Marianne’s a family and divorce lawyer with her own practice here in Boston. I really am kind of thunderstruck by how good she looks, how fit and prosperous. She’s dressed urban stylish, all in black, cashmere jacket, silk blouse, her legs as proportionally long and slender as ever in skinny pants. Only her leather ankle boots with slanted cowboy heels aren’t all black but instead a gray-and-black zebra pattern. She wears her glossy black hair, no silver that I can see, pinned up in back. Just a little softer in the neck, around her eyes.

We ask after each other’s moms. From our Facebook chats she knows that my father died a few years ago, at ninety-three, and I know her dad died around the same time, though in his midseventies. Our mothers are about the same age, Marianne’s living on her own in a duplex in Swampscott.

Why not get right to it, the reason we’re here, those few months when we were close during the autumn of tenth grade. Remember Space Cavanaugh’s toolshed? I ask. Not the most direct prompt, but Marianne’s expression lights up, because of course she remembers. It was there in that toolshed that I told her the whole story, she says, of War and Peace. Oh, Frank. Space and his toolshed, how could I forget? That was all so funny.

Among our classmates the Space and George Show was a much more popular show than mine and Bert’s, we didn’t offer comedy routines. In this week’s episode, so as to no longer have to live under the same roof with his father, Space moves out to his backyard toolshed. It was like a miniature of the cocoa-brown neo-Colonial out front, one door, one window, standing in a small grove of birch trees and pines at the back of the yard. Joe Botto had done the carpentry, getting it ready for Space to move into. He even had a television that we’d stolen from the student union of the women’s college in the next town, driving it back in Bonks’s car. Space lived there until George padlocked it later that fall.

At first it was three of us in the toolshed that afternoon, drinking barely cool beer from a six-pack. Then Space said that he had to go and meet his pot dealer. We could hang out there as long as we wanted, he wouldn’t be back until at least dinnertime. I hadn’t asked Space to do that.

The girl who gets out of bed in the morning and her bare feet touch the cold floor and she says, Ohhh, it’s going to be a cold winter, says Marianne. You said that foretold that all those French soldiers were going to freeze to death outside Moscow. I’ve still never read that book, but whenever I get out of bed and the floor is cold, I remember that girl and those poor French soldiers.

Natasha Rostova, I say. Effervescent, funny, impetuous, adorable Natasha. But young Natasha falls for Anatole Kuragin, the novel’s Ian Brown.

We sat nearly shoulder to shoulder on the bottom mattress of the bunk bed that Hose had built. More beer for us, Marianne said cheerfully, pulling off a flip top with exaggerated exertion. She’d been doing almost all the talking, school gossip mostly. She lay back, knees up and poking through the thready spray of the rips in her jeans. Meanwhile I stiffly sat there, mentally rehearsing and visualizing lying back on the mattress, too, putting my head close hers, turning to kiss her.

I told her that she was like Natasha Rostova, and she asked, Who’s that? That’s when I’d started in on the story of War and Peace, which I’d read during the summer, the two-volume Penguin paperback edition Aunt Hannah had given me for my birthday. “And when Natasha set her bare feet down on the cold floor …” As if my not daring even to try to kiss her, going on with this story instead, was a charming show of quirky precocity and individuality. My hands were shaking so violently that I had to clench them into tight fists. That was the first time that ever happened to me, my hands shaking when it was the moment to kiss a girl, when I believed that the kiss was expected even though it probably wasn’t, and that by bringing my