John and I met for the first time in a gym at Stuyvesant High School, about a ten-minute walk from the Trade Center. I found it ironic that the mentorship organizers had decided to stage their event in the gymnasium of a selective magnet school that most likely none of the mentees could ever get into. Then again, maybe what I took for cheap irony was someone’s idea of a subtle point. Either way, for Meet Your Mentor Night, the Stuy’s janitors had tacked, abraded, and buffed the gym floor to a shine. Plastic chairs were arranged in small groups, but no one wanted to sit. The mentors introduced themselves to each other near the trophy case; meanwhile our future protégés shot baskets and stole cookies from the kitchen.
Eventually, the white-haired program leader entered from a side door, clapped her hands, and set half-rim glasses on the end of her nose. “Let’s get to it, people,” she said.
A few of us smiled but no one moved.
“First rule,” she said. “No talking to people your own age.”
Everyone wore a nametag, but that didn’t help. I introduced myself to three teenagers named John, but no one was John Marion, no one had ever even heard of him. My forehead had just begun to prickle with sweat when I noticed a lanky kid with a ponytail leaning against the bleachers at the back of the gym. He had on baggy black jeans and a thick gold-chain necklace that he wore over his black t-shirt. The black t-shirt made him look especially pale and ghostly. He did not move as I started toward him, but I could tell he’d been watching me the whole time.
Earlier, the mentorship program leaders had told me that John Marion was a high school senior who wanted to write gangster stories for indie comics. To do this, they said, he needed to quit dealing drugs and stop failing half his classes. I was the head editor for a Wall Street boutique investment firm and during the phone interview I’d said that I was a sucker for film noir and pulp fiction. Not quite a match for John, but that tells you something about the pool of mentors, right?
All the mentors had been warned to be friendly and persistent even if our new protégés refused to say much at all. To my pleasant surprise, John was so well spoken that I could have been meeting the latest college intern at McGrath & Swinburne. I knew his amiability was likely a disingenuous shtick, a method for reeling in suckers, though; and he had more than a little attitude, which was apparent from the start:
“Is your name seriously Ace?” he asked.
“Actually, it’s Horace,” I explained. I shrugged: usually, the nickname needed no explanation once you learned my given name. I wanted to come off as relaxed, calm, and without ego. I already looked the part of a stale grown-up in my dull tan sport coat, v-neck sweater, and mud-brown tie. Letting John call me Ace had seemed like a way to loosen up things – and besides, to be honest, whenever I hear someone call me “Mr. Mejeur,” I feel the need to sit up straight and summarize last night’s American History homework for the rest of the class.
“Horace, huh?” John said with a smirk. “So I guess you’re all carpe diem and shit.”
My face went rigid with an idiotic smile, as if a pretty girl had asked if she could take my picture. If I had liked the kid before, I was now smitten. To be honest in my youth I had always hated when teachers or professors made allusions to the Roman poet Horace after reading off my name. It all seemed so pretentious, and I’d not gone by “Ace” all my life because I thrive on pretension. But to hear this kid, a skinny underage drug dealer, knock off a passing reference to the fact that my name was the same as the author of a well-known if well-worn phrase like “seize the day,” well, you could color me pleasingly shocked. Clearly I was dealing with someone different and more knowing than I’d expected.
“You read poems by Horace in school?”
“Nah,” he said. “But I read some on my own.”
“In the original Latin?” My voice cracked a little as I said this.
“Do I seriously look like that kind of loser, Ace?”
Like the ideal straight man, I’d walked right into his setup. John’s laughter attracted attention, but I didn’t care. I was laughing, too. I admired how effortlessly, and how quickly, he’d taken me down a few notches. John had seen straight through to the pith of me. Nobody, and I mean nobody, offers to mentor a kid without some ego involved. Mentoring a kid made me feel smart, like I’d learned something from life so far, and John knew how to stoke that feeling and make me believe that we’d been open with each other, even though we hadn’t, really.
“But seriously, I think I’ll just call you ‘chief.’”
“I think I can handle that.”
And so the mentorship began. Quickly, I learned that John didn’t give a damn about art or ancient Roman poets. He just liked how esoteric knowledge made hoity-toity jerks swoon. (The latest hoity-toity jerk in this picture is me, by the way.) Just being smart and quick-witted wasn’t good enough for John. He wanted to prove he was better than anyone else. He liked the idea of writing for crime comics, but he didn’t have very serious career aspirations. He was in the gym with me because the State had given him a choice after a recent arrest for selling drugs to an undercover cop: enroll in a mentorship or spend the next six months in juvie. Tough call.
The rest of our first meeting is a blur to me now, years later. The mentorship program had set up a few competitive events in the gym as a means to foster connections between the volunteers and the kids. In my recollection, John and I kept back from the hubbub; we perched on the bleachers like old chums, watching the people around us. If nothing else, the program organizers did a good job of matching together two practiced outsiders; perhaps we ended up together because no one else would have been able to stand us. Either way, we were compatible, at least at the beginning.
For our second meeting a few weeks later, I invited John to McGrath & Swinburne. I planned to toss him headfirst into the deep water of corporate America. The tides of the finance industry were dangerous but if one learned how to ride them, great rewards awaited. I had thrived here, and I thought that John might, too. I was sure he’d understand at once the basics of Wall Street culture: you know, trite maxims like ask forgiveness not permission, never curse unless the boss curses first. I wanted to show him that McGrath & Swinburne was the kind of place where he could excel.
I booked our most palatial conference room for the day, but we weren’t in our seats two minutes before Smoky threw open the door and bounced us. He said he needed the room to confer with the company’s lead attorney. “This is the corporate world’s version of normal,” I told John, as we headed down the hall to my office, which seemed much smaller than usual with John seated in it.
Unluckily, John’s visit to the office coincided with some major industry news. Earlier that day a Swiss bank had announced its plans to gobble up a prestigious New York firm, and the whole floor at McGrath & Swinburne had battened down for breaking-news mode. John and I never had more than a few minutes to talk. People kept interrupting us, asking for opinions on this report or that article. Smoky nabbed me for a meeting with the lawyers, and he kept me locked up for over an hour while we all debated the significance of an independent clause in some obscure contract. Returning to my office at last I found John using my computer to write email. He stood up when he saw me.
“It’s all right,” I said. “Finish up what you’re doing.”
“I’m done. I just had to tell someone where to meet me later.”
“No worries,” I said, trying to sound carefree. “You going out with some friends?”
“Actually, it’s for a meeting with a client, if you get me.”
I leaned against the doorframe to steady myself. I put down my notepad then picked it up again. Had I failed this fast? The mentorship program had told me in painstaking detail about all his legal problems, and the suspended sentence he was under for selling drugs. I was supposed to tell them at once if I saw evidence of recidivism. He’d almost certainly have to go to juvvie.
“You know,” I said, “they monitor email here. But if—”
“I’m kidding, Ace. Lighten up.”
For our third meeting, John and I were to attend a job fair at the Armory in Gramercy Park. But the night before the event, Smoky had me re-working a press release till two in the morning, and the next day I had to be in before eight for an all-hands meeting. By the day’s end I couldn’t bear the idea of mustering up all the energy needed to meet with John and beam sunshine at him. John had a snarky sense of humor and a penchant for constantly criticizing everything and everyone. The first meeting had gone well enough but by the end of the second meeting my smile had begun to ache. I figured he wouldn’t care if I ducked out of this one event. He was only there because the court required his attendance, right?
To cancel our meeting I left a message with John’s mother. Mina didn’t seem to buy my alibi: I was claiming a bout of stomach flu. I asked her to apologize to John for me and she mumbled assent. After I hung up, I worried for a few minutes that she might not give John the message. But then Smoky’s assistant paged me and I descended into another standard Wall Street frenzy.
I was dozing in front of the television at home that night at eight p.m. when an insistent visitor leaned hard on the downstairs buzzer. “It’s me,” a familiar voice said through the intercom. I went downstairs rather than let John up. Bad enough that he’d caught me malingering, there was no reason he should see me lounging at home. That would be just one more shortcoming he could hold against me in the future. I wasn’t even sure how he’d managed to find out where I lived. Later, I’d see this as the first intimation of how darkly resourceful he could be.
He was waiting in the vestibule with his hands deep in the pockets of a scuffed black leather coat with wide lapels. It was the sort of leather coat that all clichéd punks wore. But cliché or not, you still don’t want to see a scowling kid in a coat like that waiting in the vestibule of your building.
“You owe me two hours,” he said.
John hadn’t wiped the rainwater from his flushed cheeks. Maybe it was the cold, or the bright water on his skin, but he looked more spirited than I’d ever seen him, as if I was finally meeting the real John Marion. The real John had come to declare himself the victor in our struggle, which for him was just the latest fight to wear down the forces that meant to change him. He thought I’d quit the program. Maybe I had, in a way; certainly, I would have quit soon if he hadn’t come calling.
“You know,” I said. “I’m glad you came.”
“I bet you are.”
“Come on. I know a great use for two hours.”
“You don’t have a coat.”
“I’ll be fine. It’s not far.”
A hard rain was sparking off the sidewalk as we jogged up Sixth Avenue to the Quad theatre. Tonight’s offering in their retro Hitchcock series: Vertigo. If John had any misgivings about watching a fifty-year-old movie, he didn’t mention it as I paid for two tickets. “Keep your eyes open,” I said as we walked down the aisle to find our seats. “Nothing’s as it appears in this one.”
Later, as we filed out, I knew John was impressed because he kept saying he’d known all along Madeline was a fake. “Only a numbskull cop like Jimmy Stewart’s character could get it wrong,” he said.
“So you liked it?”
“It wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”
For six weeks of Tuesdays we watched Hitchcock films at the Quad. They showed all my favorite flicks. After Vertigo, they screened Rear Window, Strangers on a Train, Rope, and Dial M for Murder. After each film, John and I argued and drank cheap Mexican beer in a two-table burrito shop on Waverly. I would beat my chest with praise for the films, claiming they cast a light on mankind’s seamier impulses. John picked at their flaws like a disgusted scavenger: he had no other bones to feed on. He mocked my belief that movie criminals were just like the real thing.
“You think crime is just a great plot device,” he said.
I shrugged and said, yeah, well, tell me what it’s really like then.
“Where to begin?” John said wryly.
The reader might question my tactics as a mentor – watching films of questionable morality and (gasp) drinking with an underage kid. I don’t know anything about drugs, or dealing, or using. I wasn’t trying to buck John up, and I wasn’t hawking a message or an ideal. I just offered less damaging distractions. I just wanted to hear him think out loud. That would be an improvement. Yeah, I gave him beer now and again. Yeah, we watched Janet Leigh get stabbed in a shower. (“Chocolate sauce,” I said, as her blood swirled the drain, “Hitch did that shot with chocolate sauce.”) At least he wasn’t watching real people get stabbed.
Those Hitchcock movies at the Quad rejuvenated me and changed the nature of my interaction with John. I felt like we had a means to communicate, albeit indirectly, about life, real life, not bullshit chit-chat about careers or making money. I don’t think John experienced quite the same revelation in the movie theater or afterward in our chats. He remained wary of my intentions for quite some time; no surprise, given the fact that in his life nearly everyone had an ulterior motive.
I can’t pinpoint a moment when his perception of me changed - there’s no neat timeline where I can mark the place where trust arrived. But I do remember one night in particular when John acknowledged for the first time that maybe I wasn’t a phony.
We were seated in cushy loge seats at Madison Square Garden. Thanks to a friend at the office, I’d hooked us up with tickets for a Knicks playoff game. I didn’t care much for basketball, but I had assumed that John would be overawed by the chance to see a playoff game in person; if nothing else, I assumed, he would be impressed by our extremely expensive seats and, therefore, by the connections that I had in the business world.
At first John watched the game dutifully, cheering the big turnovers, jeering the other team, booing every foul that ran against New York. But he quickly tired of all the rah-rahs. He put his feet up on the railing in front of us and began reading the glossy pages of the program, especially the rags-to-riches biographies of the lesser known players. Finished, he tossed aside the program, turned to me, and asked the question that had been on his mind for a long time. “Be straight with me, Ace,” he said. “Why are you wasting time with me?”
“It’s simple,” I said, “I want to give back to society in return for the favors that—”
John groaned. “Please don’t shovel that kind of stuff onto me, man.”
“But it’s the truth,” I insisted.
“Sure, it’s true,” he said. “But it’s still a load of crap.”
“Then I guess I’m wasting time with you because I’m full of crap and you seem like you’re full of crap, too.”
This doesn’t seem like a particularly funny retort in retrospect, but at the time it struck just the right note. John laughed with his mouth open, shaking his head as if I were just another damn fool friend of his. And in that moment of ease I saw the first sign of success.
Down on the court someone from the opposing team fouled one of the Knicks guards, and fans all around the arena began to stand up and boo. A shoving match began down on the court and I stood up, too, shouting as if I were just another rabid season ticket holder. But of course that was all an act meant to draw John’s attention away from the topic at hand.
He had been right to say that my answer was a shovelful of crap. Yes, I meant what I’d told him about my motives. But telling the truth and answering a question truthfully are not the same thing; and if I’d answered his question honestly, I’d have had to admit that I didn’t really know what I was getting out of the whole thing. I just knew that it felt like something I needed to do, not just for John, but for myself. Of course looking back now, after everything that happened, it all seems like fate; but that’s the thing about fateful decisions—they don’t feel any different from regular decisions at first.
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