My Mistake Read Online Free PDF

has good girlfriends—one especially good one thinks I’m cute and kisses me—and he drinks as much as he should, as much as we all do, with our class rings turned around at Peruna’s so that they look to the bartender like wedding bands, we hope. The drinking age is eighteen, so kids from neighboring New Jersey, where it is twenty-one, cross the state line to drink and get into fights with us.
    For all the fun, I continue to be anxious and timid, at least outside familiar circumstances, but Mike takes care of some part of that after I get to Nyack. He makes me go out for sports by not allowing me into the house after school. He takes over from my father in teaching me how to drive and sees to it that I fit in. He still makes terrific fun of me. My hair is thick and, to my shame, curly verging on kinky, and I am always trying to straighten it, with the aid of Brylcreem or Vitalis. One day, when I’m about to go somewhere with him in his ’49 Plymouth with Duotone mufflers and I ask him to wait because I have to comb my hair, he says, “Your what?” And from then on, to him, my hair is my “what,” as in, “Get a whatcut—your what’s too long.” But I often get the better of him in the taunting that goes on between us—I am quicker and sharper with words. I set the gold standard for ridiculous, devastating insults when, after he has punched me in the arm, leaving it close to paralyzed, and called me a “blivet” for taking a long time in the shower, I look at him with his towel wrapped around his waist and say, “At least I don’t have Jewish nipples.” He looks down at his chest with concern and goes to find our mother to ask her if what I said was true.
    Mike is always telling me, as I trail three grades behind him, how much harder school will be “next year,” but I keep on outdoing him, at least partly because he keeps on challenging and goading me. So then he disdains me as an intellectual, even though I am also a pretty good athlete. But I can tell that he’s also proud of me, especially after I get to college. My striving is not only to compete with him but to please him. His opinion of me means more than anyone else’s. (Later, on the day before his wedding, we’re playing pickup basketball outside his fiancée’s house in New Jersey, and I make some semi-fancy move or other, and Mike stands back and says, “I can see I’ve taught you well, my boy.”)
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    Younger brothers often idealize their older brothers, but Mike really is pretty remarkable. He is admired and praised in high school, and at Dartmouth he is rushed by Alpha Delta Phi, the crazy and wonderful fraternity that later becomes the basis for
Animal House,
and is beloved by his brothers there as well. Chris Miller, who wrote the screenplay for
Animal House,
is a Dartmouth freshman when Mike is a senior. I actually know some of the real-life people whose nicknames the movie uses—Otter and Flounder, for example. There is a room under the attic stairs in Nyack that my mother names Flounder’s Room, because Flounder—Nick Fate, a name I always wished I had—being far from his home in Oklahoma, sleeps off some of his Thanksgiving drunks there. My girlfriends always, but always, fall in love with Mike. He is smooth, funny, relaxed.
    He and I talk to each other a lot about sex and other basic matters. He tells me about resorting one night, in the absence of something more conventional, to bacon grease. I tell him about sleeping with a girl who, once she is interested and involved in what is going on, can have an orgasm from simply being ordered emphatically enough to have one. He tells me about a prostitute he unwittingly picked up in Copenhagen who was obsessed with Buddy Holly and, to his shock, gave him a squirting demonstration of lactation. On long-distance car trips we don’t stop to use gas-station bathrooms but piss in