My Mistake Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘the fuck’ is in that sentence structure.”
    She has already threatened to disown me if she ever hears me say “Tiffany’s” again—instead of “Tiffany.”
    Another evening, around the same time, she tells my father and brother and me, at dinner, of a researcher who burst into tears when she jokingly said to her that day, about a question of factual accuracy, “Let me know when you make up your alleged mind.” My mother asks, “Isn’t it clear that I was just kidding?” Before she dies, suffering from metastatic pancreatic cancer, forty years later, she writes a last entry in her journal: “Is this what I get for feeling so superior my entire life?”
    Â 
    Mrs. Giles, my ninth-grade English teacher, assigns us homework of writing sentences that are declarative, compound, complex, interrogative, and imperative, and one sentence in the passive voice. I write:
    Â 
“The dog chased the cat.”
“The dog chased the cat, and then the cat chased the dog.”
“After the dog chased the cat, the cat chased the dog.”
“Did the dog chase the cat?”
“Dog, chase the cat!”
And, of course: “The cat was chased by the dog.”
    Â 
    She says it’s very funny and gives me a C.
What?
A
C?
But it is the beginning of my humor-writing career.
    Â 
    Fourteen to twenty-one
    Â 
    In Nyack, The Boys play sports, get into small amounts of trouble with the cops, find bars that allow us to pretend to be eighteen. Peruna’s in Spring Valley, the Deer Head in Blauvelt, but mainly the wonderful bar owned first by Charlie and called Charlie’s, and then, when Charlie’s bartender Paul O’Donoghue takes over the business, O’Donoghue’s. When I’m home from college, and when Paul gets a little tipsy himself and starts talking with a brogue and calling out “Up the Irish!,” I sometimes get to tend bar, at two or so in the morning and after the place has been locked up and only The Boys and a few stragglers—like the closeted doctor who once treated me for groinal ringworm with a little too much interest and the high-school Latin teacher, Stan Callahan, the good Callahan, grizzled, portly—remain. (There was also a bad Callahan teaching at Liberty Street. I stole the key ring from his desk and threw it away. Everyone hated him.) I sometimes run into my brother at O’Donoghue’s and am proud to be seen with him, as he was one of The Boys in his class.
    Mainly, for both of us, Nyack High School is “American Graffiti East.” There are sports and friends and Fifties clothes, like white bucks and argyle socks and white shirts and khakis and at one point chartreuse shoelaces, and for the girls sack dresses, girdles, white blouses, and circle pins, and there are romances and diabolically unique bra clasps and soccer and baseball practice and loud-muffler cars that break down all the time and “marriage manuals” left in bookshelves for adolescents to read and pickup basketball games in the freezing cold, when your hands start out like slabs of ice and magically end up as warm as waffles and tingle when you go indoors, and the mesmerizing Army-McCarthy hearings on television sets that show test patterns in the mornings and summer jobs as park attendants and the blunt truths, for middle-class white kids, of “race music” and then the rest of early rock and roll, which seems so impossibly innocent now, and dancing the lindy—yes, the lindy—for hours at parties. My girlfriend Pam, who when we graduate is voted Wittiest, is the daughter of the man who drives the bus that my parents take to their jobs in New York.
    Mike is cool. Six feet two, black hair, very white teeth, handsome, smart. On the swimming team. He works construction one summer—he’s a hod carrier—and at the end of August he is Mediterraneanly tan and has put on ten pounds of muscle. He