Peace in the Middle East
Where I am from it is considered an awfully bad thing to speak ill of the dead, so I’ll try not to. At the end of my freshman year in college I caught the eye of one of the mantenance workers. My college was (and still is) an overpriced, East Coast institution with few students. Girls far outnumbered the boys, and the straight men who were there made no sense to me at all. I did not have the imagination to find them sexy, so, for this reason, I went four years without bedding a single Sarah Lawrence man. Actually, I could not be more proud.
I did, however, like Chris very much. He was a Yonkers native only a year older than myself. The crew he worked with would wore grey tee shirts with the school’s name on them and Timberland boots. He was the youngest of them all and the cutest. His grandfather, the foreman, had white hair and a stern Irish face. The only other man I remember from the crew of seven or eight was a tall oafish one, and this is largely on account of his being far too old to have had a newish eyebrow piercing.
In between making sure the facilities ran well, the men appeared to have a significant amount of free time. They would sit outside the college cafe and carry on loudly, telling jokes, some even directed at the students. Chris, however, was quiet and aloof. He seemed he would have preferred to be invisible, perhaps because it was his job to change the light bulbs of people his own age, many of them born worlds apart from the one in which he was raised. One day I smiled at him. On another I asked him his name. It was clear that no other student had dared to do so, but I could not help myself.
“Chris Marconi. I used to get in a lot of fights cause people would call me macaroni.” I told him my name. From there not much happened, until after school let out for the year and I spent a week staying with a friend on campus before heading back to Kentucky. We got stoned and fooled around, rather chaste, really, considering how wonderful he looked from the waist down and how hard up a year on that campus can make you (if you are female and enjoy mouth kissing boys).
Sophomore year passed without a single dalliance, for no reason in particular.
By the middle of my junior year Chris had befriended a number of Sarah Lawrence students. Largely stoners who went insane whenever “Scenario” or “Ante Up” was played at a campus party. I, myself, was skeptical. He seemed more like their mascot than their friend, proof that they could share a 40 ounce with the working classes. He’d even bring a pal along. (More on him later.) None of this mattered, of course, since Chris and I had run out of things to say to one another several months before. I could, perhaps, credit it to a single moment, though, in all honesty, it was always bound to happen:
After a summer of lost nights in DUMBO, I had moved back to campus to begin the school year. I had a small room in a house near the woods that would never feel like home. I found my tiny bedroom, with its piss white walls, and college life beneath me. I would have preferred to be in a bathroom anywhere in the city being gross with someone I wouldn’t see the day after. But alas, there I was, probably on an unmade bed, with Chris and my best friend Joshua. If memory serves me correct we’d just gotten high. Josh was to leave in the coming hour and from there, who knew? On his way out Joshua looks over his shoulder and says, “Peace in the Middle East.”
Before I can reply Chris, with more passion than I’d ever imagined from him, declares, “Fuck them!”
This is not the kind of talk one is accustomed to hearing on such a campus. We ask, “What?” and “Why?” Do we giggle out of discomfort? Do we pretend he is making a joke?
“Fuck them,” he repeats. “Fucking A-rabs!”
It really was too much. There was some more talk pertaining to 9/11— him, not us, and as a general principle we relayed our disapproval, but with little vigor. A year had passed and Iraq had since been invaded. Joshua and I had done our part by marching at a handful of protests, we believed in self determination for the Palestinian people. It hardly seemed worth it to go into this, while he went on about suicide bombers. Agree to disagree, if you will. Besides, I was too bummed to say much of anything. From then on I knew it would cost me a roundtrip ticket to Grand Central on the Metro North if I were to be near a cute boy again. There was some chance the Oxford exchange students would be attractive that year, but the prospect was slim. I wanted to apologize for Chris.
Josh left us and Chris soon followed. Years later the words “Peace in the MIddle East” followed by “Fuck them” still inspires fits of laughter. This, even after his tragic, sudden death. Only twenty one years old, Chris was pushed from a hotel balcony while trying to protect a female companion from her violent ex. The woman wound up paralyzed, but eventually regained her ability to walk, I think I saw on the evening news.
From his ashes arose a young man I referred to as Single White Female. His friend, a more suburban, sunnier version of him, took over Chris’ role on campus. He got a job with the maintenance crew, attended campus parties, and fucked rich girls who liked hip hop. It was only in seeing this pale replica that I missed Mr. Marconi. His bowed legs, his lisp, his Yonkers mixed with gravel accent.
