Free Marine Park: Stories by Mark Chiusano Page A

junior, even though everyone gave him a hard time for it: complaining that it was too far away and that they never saw him anymore, because he always retreated there to his single room and the graduate students with their guitars, reading theory in their beds. He maintained that this wasn’t true; that he, for instance, spent a lot of time in the Peace Room, which was in the place where the dungeon would be if the castle had a dungeon. He took me there once, although he opened the door first and peeked in to make sure no one was inside, because he said that the Peace Room regulars usually didn’t like to be disturbed. Not that I was a disturbance at all, he said. I was a good influence on him, and he thanked me for that.
    I’d always wanted to go to school away from home, but sometimes things don’t work perfectly. CUNY takes just about anyone, and they promised they’d be opening dorms at Brooklyn College by my sophomore year. They didn’t, of course. Brooklyn College is the type of place that hasn’t changed since my parents went there—my dad on the GI Bill, my mother looking for a husband who wasn’t Italian—and they didn’t end up finishing those dorms just like they never built the swimming pool that my dad and his Navy friends were always asking for. What were they supposed to do to stay in shape? they asked the administration. The provost at the time was a running guru who had done Boston, New York, and Berlin, enough years after that other war, and he tried to get them to start a track team (they didn’t), or at least go for runs with him all around Brooklyn. They did it once, but what they really wanted was to hit something or be completely covered by water, and running was a pretty poor exchange. I ended up living at home and saving my money, listening to my dad snicker about Brooklyn College. He’d stopped taking classes his senior year, and there wasn’t really an explanation why. Some things just happen. It was a better experience for my mother. If I could stand to, I stayed at the Sugar Bowl after classes until dinner, avoiding watching Lorris get back from school and sit right down to his homework. Eventually I stayed longer and longer, even when I wasn’t taking classes, looking at the captioned TV. I established once that the waitress knew my dad when he used to hang out there. After that she gave me the stale bagels, which I’d take home and let him eat.
    Hayden was always trying to get me to come visit, and I did, more often than I should have. Academically, there hadn’t been much of a difference between him and me, though I guess he wrote better essays. My mother said she didn’t think it was worth it to go away to expensive private colleges when we had perfectly good ones here. We do, and what’s the difference in the end, but Hayden seemed to enjoy living away. He said, even up to junior year, people had late-night conversations about the things they were studying, the books that classes assigned. Which sounds like bullshit to me, like one of the brochures that the private colleges send from random places in the South. Nobody was that earnest about it at Brooklyn, though if you kept your head down you could get an education. I was taking my math requirement that semester, even though the professor asked if I was sure I wanted to. I’d been in and out. He said, Are you staying this time? I said I was back for good. It was a survey: “Mathematical Topics.” Sometimes you learn some good things.
    I promised myself I wouldn’t spend more than two weekends a month up at Hayden’s that year—though because he was a junior, I was starting to get anxious that I was losing the chance. When we talked about it, he said simply, Literally, whenever. He invited Lorris too, though it was mostly just to be nice. He said we could move a mattress in and he could get me someone’s old Brandeis ID and a copy of his key.