“You must know what I mean, D-man,” he said. “You don’t seem like one of those hell-bent, gung-ho Corny assholes.”

“Haven’t exactly got a woody over the place.”

“What do you think of Mort?”

I shrugged.

“Asshole of the year,” he said. “He thinks he’s the cat’s nads.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You know what the dick does?”

“Uh-uh.”

“He comes barging into my room the other night—by the way, these doors without locks,” he lifted his hands, “what the hell, D-man. You can’t even snap your beef in private. Anyway, this lunatic Mort comes barging into my room and he starts screaming at me like I’ve been caught probing his wife with a salami. I’m sitting there picking toejam and minding my own beeswax, and he stings me three hours. Says he doesn’t like my act, that’s all. You know why he’s pissed? Do you know? I do. Because I arrived at Cornwall with a beard. You should’ve seen the looks. Might as well have been laying down lines at B.Y.U.”

The nurse rushed into the room, took our temps, bitched about how unruly we were being, and told us to shut up. When she left, we looked at each other in bewilderment. I knew that under different circumstances I probably would have liked him.

“Your old man make you come here?” I asked.

“Good God, yeah. What do you take me for? You think I’d be here if I had any choice in the matter? Harvey all but forced me at gunpoint out of South Portland. It was either Cornwall or military school. He thinks this’ll get me into an Ivy League school.”

“It might.”

“Fuck that. I told him I’m not going to even apply to any Ivies because I’d have to fellate too many people to get in.”

“Harvey your old man?”

“Yeah. He couldn’t handle the fact that I was a normal kid.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, D-man, he caught me shit-faced a few times, I cracked up his Mercedes, and I clinched a trip when one of his clients caught me siphoning gas out of his car.”

That night, after noting that I’d been “quite the anti-social bastard,” Jack said, “What’s your prob?”

“Nothing. Just that I got this habit of not talking much when I feel like I’m gonna die. It’s a Rhode Island thing.”

“Come on,” he said, “stop muffling your farts, man. Let’s get it out in the open.”

“Give me a break.”

“Listen, D-man, I know that you’ve got a big dink for Weston, and you probably hate me because you think we’ve got something going on the side. Am I right?”

I didn’t know what to say.