Monsieur, that’s not very jouissance-like.

* * *

When I eventually limped back to playing live music, I started with local open mics. Besides fearing I would see Mercy in the audience, the hardest part was overcoming my teenagery dread of running into ex-classmates. That happened less frequently than I had anticipated, mainly because the ones who remained local were married, had children, and were not frequenting the bars at which I performed. On the occasions when there were Beverly High alumni in the audience, most of whom (if I’m allowed to be gloriously mean and petty) had peaked as teenagers, socially if not physically (hello, polar-ice-cap receding hairlines), they remarked on my physical transformation. Like I said before, I do love my six-four height, Faustian-back-pain bargain be damned. I also had a scruffy, youth-culture-approved beard and carefree curling hair. When they said “Wow, look at you” or “You look great,” it was meant in comparison to the willowy, zit-infested, stick-bug high school me, in comparison to their diminished and/or exaggerated memory of the high school Art. (How many versions of that poor kid are there? If only I could collect them all.)

Occasionally, post-performance a fellow grad would buy me a beer and I’d regale them with frothy tales of my slightly exaggerated hard-and-fast times as a musician. My accepting any-and-all-offered-free-beers policy (a sound policy) backfired one night when Eddie Patrick (Remember him? Former bully? Initial member of the original Pallbearers Club?) interrupted my spinning of tall tales to ex-classmate Kate and her husband, both of whom were in the French department at Endicott College, by clapping me on the back and saying, “Hey, it’s ‘The Undertaker.’ ”

I knew who it was without turning to look at him. The feeling lasted only (and dammit, I know I should avoid “only” as a writer, and there was nothing “only” about this) a moment, but I was a freshman again, sinking into that no-one-will-help-me trill of despair. That mewling fear quickly turned to anger. I stood up from the barstool and filled my chest with righteous air, an animal display, to show him what I had become. He couldn’t see it. I could tell. He would never release the version of me he kept.

Who or what had you become?

A self-proclaimed self-made man (with help from his parents owning a chain of dairy farms), Eddie was a wildly successful hedge-fund manager, the type who played the shell game to his benefit, including his making (according to a scathing investigative piece in the now-defunct alternative weekly Boston Phoenix) north of $20 million during the housing crisis of 2008 by betting against the market, then cleaning up when prices bottomed out. He had a beachfront mansion in Beverly Farms (not that I was stalking him) worth $9.5 million (according to Zillow).

You’re totally stalking him.

Eddie said, “Whoa, a big guy now,” and his audience, two younger CrossFit bro dudes in slim-cut suits drinking low-carb beers laughed and chirped Hey Spike, anything you say, Spike support.