2007-07-31 - 11:42 p.m.
Our hotel in downtown Brooklyn was not too far from Saint Ann�s School, where we had originally met and dated in the late 1980s. This is where our post-honeymoon celebration (a.k.a. �wedding, part II�) was. We were very lucky to be able to use the space. Like I said, the school is just a beautiful building, all pillastered and frescoed (it used to be a men�s club in the 1920s).
The fact that the hotel was within walking distance was a very good thing, as it meant we could avoid the nightmare of getting a wheelchair-accessible taxi in New York. We walked over through downtown and Brooklyn Heights. It brought back such a flood of memories � the park we used to play in, the subway station from which we used to take the �A� train to Manhattan, even the courts we used to find it amusing to walk through on the way to buy weed.
I hadn�t been in the school building for over five years and Nya hadn�t been in in almost a decade and a half. There had been a few changes, but not many. The pay phone in the lobby is gone. The elevators, which used to be really old-school � manually operated by a guy who turned a crank to make it go and opened a lattice metal gate to let you out, are now automated with buttons.
They�ve added an upstairs balcony to the lunchroom, which has a two-story ceiling. While in a way this gives the space all the charm of a Wendy�s, it�s still a beautiful room with windows overlooking the street off the main lobby where you come in. We had thought that most of the activity would take place in the lobby, that people would get their food and take it in there. But people mostly stayed near the food in the lunchroom.
We did have music set up in the lobby. My friends with whom I used to DJ on the radio had brought a sound system (borrowed from Bishop Allen) and were already playing songs. Sadly, I missed the opening song with the words �rock�n�roll� in the title. All my radio shows (the �Friday Night Sock Hop�) started with such a song. I think I requested Nick Lowe�s �I Knew the Bride When She Used to Rock�n�Roll�. Which isn�t a very good song, but I did and she still does.
I sometimes refer to these friends as from �my second Harvard career�. There were a number of years after I was dismissed from being a student when I still hung around the college doing radio. I became more involved in the rock department and got to know these folks well, who were a few years younger than me. They must have thought I was so strange still hanging around, if intriguing for my dedication to the station and knowledge of the music.
Our friendship well outlasted our involvement in the radio station and almost unbelievably we�re still friends now that we�re adults, lawyers and grad students. I can�t believe they stuck by me when I was so crazy and lowdown (at an early stage of our acquaintance, I was sleeping in an abandoned building). I was very glad they were still around when I got myself together more. So, props to them.
When the guests showed up in force, it was like a parade through all phases of our previous lives. It was just beautiful. I had people from Brown, Harvard, Saint Ann�s, even elementary school. J. was there with her then-fiance, now husband (Nya and I attended the wedding in DC and I�ll write about it soon). Also Captain Video, my sleepaway camp counselor from the summer of 1986 (him having to deal with me as a twelve-year old - chilling).
Although it was actually pretty Saint Ann�s-heavy crowd. We had a friend of Nya�s and mine who I�d known as a little kid (our grandmothers were friends). And Nya�s best friend (and identical cousin). As she said, �Wow, this is like a high school reunion except with only people I actually want to see!�
Perhaps the most unexpected guest was a guy from the year above Nya. We didn�t know him very well, but heard what he was up to from a friend of ours who�s become a real estate broker and is helping buy a place for him and his wife. His wife is also from Saint Ann�s, from Nya�s grade! He had a beautiful baby in tow, one of several little children of our guests who came.
Intra-Saint Ann�s marriages are uncommon, but not unknown. A good friend of mine who also came, I�m particularly proud of. His marriage to another girl in our grade is a triumph of delayed gratification. He liked her at Saint Ann�s, but they never went out until their 20s. Now they�re having a baby together! Go him. I�m also proud of her. We both entered Saint Ann�s in fifth grade and she was even more outer city than me, from Staten Island.
He lived in a big Brooklyn Heights brownstone overlooking the Manhattan skyline (I went there for New Year�s 2000, thinking I�d have a good view if the lights across the river started going out because of the Y2K bug) and was certainly a symbol of WASP establishment. Her union with him symbolized to me the idea that, outer city or downtown, we�re all the same when you get right down to it. Maybe this isn�t a very profound idea, but it means a lot to me.
I was very happy that a couple of my former teachers came. There was my Latin teacher from middle school, to whom I remember talking obsessively about Nya in eighth grade. She left teaching for a while to become a lawyer, but returned to the Saint Ann�s fold (she�s also a graduate!) a few years ago and is now the dean of the faculty. She apologized that she didn�t remember me spouting off about Nya back in the day, but that�s okay because I do.
One of my Latin teachers from high school was also there. I remember looking up to him as a paragon of intellectual toughness, a one-time Chicago cabbie who could theorize about Roman concepts of valor and also explain how use of the optative mood made ancient Greek verbs more precise. He gave out the number of a pay phone at his favorite pool hall in case we needed help with homework. Today he�s a lawyer and will no doubt cut you down if you try to impress by throwing around legal Latinisms.
There were so many friends there from Saint Ann�s, I won�t be able to get to them all. Stan the Man Unusual was the only person from Saint Ann�s to come to both Vegas and Brooklyn (a few friends from Harvard also did this). My best friend from high school (part of a triumvirate with me and Max, who couldn�t make it) and my other best friend from later high school (and her little sister, who�s now in college!). Even a close friend from middle school, who went to another high school.
I was very glad a girl came (and rescheduled her trip back from Ireland to make it!) who was friends with both Nya and I. Although sometimes she had a love/hate relationship with Nya. In Nya�s high school year book, she wrote that she didn�t know if she wanted to slap Nya or kiss her. They both vied to be top hag to another guy in my grade. He sadly didn�t come because he was on that same trip to Ireland and couldn�t reschedule his return flight. (Nya will get mad at me if I suggest that the fact they took a trip overseas together implies that the other girl won in the end�)
I admit that I had an overwhelming crush on her in tenth grade, after Nya and I had broken up and she had stopped speaking to me. She was a big club kid and relatively famous in that scene. In fact, I originally picked the name Geoff Chaucer because she went to put my name on a club guest list. I didn�t want random strangers knowing my real last name and so picked Geoff Chaucer as my �club name�. (In fact originally it was Geoff X. Chaucer to show my affiliation with her, as her last name in clubland was �X�.)
Eventually, Geoff Chaucer became my �punk name� and now of course I use it here. But initially, I guess it was an attempt to impress her. Also in an attempt to impress her (probably misguided) I got myself a job dancing on the MTV show Club MTV (I�ll probably write about this at some point). This didn�t help my chances with her either and of course that�s a good thing in retrospect, as I�m so so ecstatic with Nya now. Although we never got together, we did once sleep on the couch of clubland killer Michael Alig (okay, I just wanted to work that in�).
I invited a Saint Ann�s classmate with whom I wasn�t terribly close in school, but recently found out had also been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. What are the odds that two people in such a small class would get MS? Well actually they�re (70 people in our grade * 2 with MS * 1 in 1000 chance of the average American developing MS = 0.0049 or less than 0.5%). Although she and I both unfortunately have a higher than average chance of developing MS � it�s somewhat more common among Sicilians (lucky me) and African-Americans (lucky her).
She lives in New Jersey and works as a corporate lawyer. She walks with a cane and I think it makes her look pretty distinguished. She doesn�t walk around much, as it wears her out. I�d really like to give her my old scooter (to keep it in the family, so to speak), currently just sitting uselessly back in Providence. But it�s at my friend Jill�s house (she sadly didn�t come to Brooklyn) and it�s always hard getting her to respond, even just to a request to let movers in to take it.
I also invited a friend of my sister�s who has MS too. I�d never met her, but she sent me some books from the publisher she works at in the summer of 2004, when I was feeling really low. Just a simple gesture, but it made me feel a lot better. So thank you to her again. She hasn�t presented with serious symptoms yet and hopefully never will. I don�t know if this is apocryphal, but I�ve sometimes heard that 10% of cases are so-called �benign MS� that never develops seriously. I pray that�s what she has.
Another friend of my sister�s who came, I think of now as my �daughter�. In a student-written play we were in in high school, she played the daughter of a woman I moved in with (I first met her when I exterminated her apartment). At the end of the play, she offers me coffee she�s put rat poison in. Lethal women, ain�t that how it always should be. It�s funny how, when I was a senior and she was a freshman, it seemed like such a vast age difference. But now it�s really not.
Several people came from my first Harvard career, when I was a student. My would-have-been roommates (we were scheduled to live together for our senior year, but then I got kicked out) Zack and his longtime girlfriend and also Kevin and his wife Erin, taking a break from their new baby. And another close friend who lived with me and like 5 other people in a house in Cambridge after college.
And my sister Jill! She brought her little son (!) with her and made biological clocks tick louder in all who saw him (me too). She was a lawyer (most of my friends seem to have taken that path) full-time, but took time off after her son was born to raise him. Now she�s back to working, part-time for a non-profit working on legal rights for the developmentally challenged. Right on.
Sadly none of my older resumed undergraduate friends from Brown were able to make it. But we did have several regular-age guests. There was one friend I made my last semester when she interviewed me for her thesis. She wrote a very touching creative nonfiction piece about various people with physical disabilities, inspired by her experience of her mother randomly getting temporary paralysis for most of her childhood. Today, she�s wrapping up her Teach for America stint and figuring out her next move. I told her to come stay with us in Chicago if she�s looking there!
I�m so embarrassed that I totally missed the boat with two of my regular-age friends. One guy was a fellow Urban Studies concentrator and we had a lot of classes together over my three years at Brown. We got to be friends and I invited him to Saint Ann�s, hoping he�d come as he now lives in New York. When he came in I dumbly didn�t recognize him at all and walked right by. He had longer hair and I assumed he was a friend of Nya�s I didn�t know.
When I finally recognized who he was, he was sitting in the lunchroom with his �girlfriend�.
�Hey, duh! I totally didn�t recognize you at first with the long hair. Sorry. How you doing?�
�I�m good. Congratulations.�
�Thanks. Man, I�m sorry the girl who went to high school with you isn�t here.� She took such good care of me at Brown. �I invited her, but I guess she couldn�t make it up from Miami.�
He looked at me nonplussed.
�Uh. You mean me, Geoff?� said the �girlfriend�.
I peered at her. Fuck. She had cut her hair shorter, but there was no good reason not to recognize her. I used to be really good at noticing haircuts (I almost wanted to put that on my resume � �Other skills: Notices haircuts�). Guess I�m not anymore.
I stammered my embarrassment and apologies.
The best surprise guest was a girl I�d gone to elementary school with. I kissed her on the first day of kindergarten and we �went out� for a little while back then, which I guess makes her my oldest girlfriend. Wait, not like �old� old, just � oh you know what I mean. I hadn�t seen her in 23 years. She unexpectedly brought us a present: a waffle iron! How �wedding� is that? How awesome is that?
So what did we do? Well, the caterer made delicious food and there was Brooklyn Lager, the beer of our youth. But most of all there was our friends, all together in one place. You are all beautiful people. Thanks to each of you for coming and celebrating with us.
� 2007 Geoff Gladstone
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