T
he next night, before dinner, Vance, an ultra-solemn look on his face, beckoned Hoyt into the otherwise empty billiard room, crossed his arms over his chest, and said, “Hoyt, we've got to have a serious talk about this shit.”
“What shit is that, Vance?”
“You know âwhat shit.' This governor of California shit. You think the fucking thing's funny. I don't. And you want to know why?”
I already know why, Vancerman, thought Hoyt. You're scared shitless, that's all. As he stood there waiting for Vance's lips to stop moving, his mind wandered â¦
⦠those who cower and those who command ⦠Europe in the Early Middle Ages, taught by a wizened old Jew named Crone, as Hoyt thought of him, whose droning voice would put you right under but who was a notoriously, or gloriously, easy grader. To Hoyt's own surprise, the course had captured his imagination. He had experienced the sort of moment that real scholars, as opposed to Saint Rays, lived for: the
Aha
! phenomenon. In the early Middle Ages, according to old Crone, there were only three classes of men in the world: warriors, clergy, and slaves. That was itâChina, Arabia, Morocco, England, everywhere. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a leader of the people was, or had been, a warrior, baptized in battle. In
the hundredth case, the man was the high priest of the local religion. Mohammed had been both warrior and high priest. Likewise Joan of Arc. Everybody else on earth was some sort of slave: serf, indentured servant, or outright chattel, including artists, poets, and musicians, who were merely entertainers existing at the sufferance of warrior-leaders. In the Bible, according to Crone, King David had started out as a boy of the slave class who had volunteered to fight the Philistines' champion of “single combat”âGoliath. When, against all odds, David defeated the giant, he became Israel's warrior of all warriors. He ascended to King Saul's royal household and became king when Saul died, leapfrogging over Saul's own son, Jonathan.
Hoyt loved that story, the Nobody who was King. His own ambitions were analogous. His father, George Thorpe, wasâ
“âhire a bunch of goombahs to intimidate witnessesâ”
Goombahs. Every now and then some phrase from Vance's earnest, frightened lips would snag in Hoyt's mind.
“What's a goombah?” he said, not because he wanted to know, but just to make Vance think he was paying attention.
“An Italian thug,” said Vance. “And these guys ⦔
Goombahs. Oh, give me one fucking break, Vancerman, thought Hoyt. My dad would have eaten your goombahs for breakfast. As Hoyt remembered him, his dad, George Thorpe, was handsome and a half, with a thick stand of dark hair, a strong, square jaw, and a cleft chin. His old man loved it when people said he looked “just like Cary Grant.” He spoke through his nose with a New York Honk accent that intimated a boarding school background. He made oblique references, stuck inside relative clauses, to his days at Princeton, and
his
dad's before him, too, not to mention his stint with the Special Forces in Vietnam, where he had seen, literally
seen
, swarms of AK-
47
bullets coming straight at him at five times the speed of sound. They looked like green bees. But since he had been a member of the elite of the elite, Delta Force, he couldn't really go into details. Strictly speaking, he shouldn't even have told his family he was
in
Delta Force. It was that elite. On the strength of these New York Honked-out credentials, he managed to gain membership in the Brook Club. There was no more socially solid club in New York. With the Brook escutcheon on his shield, he gained entry to four more swell clubs of the Old New York sort. Thus established, he recruited club brethren into three esoteric hedge funds he had set up based on a strategy of selling corporate bonds short. This was during the Wall Street bond boom of the 1980s. In the late eighties, he changed his legal name
from George B. Thorpe to Armistead G. Thorpe. Even at age eight Hoyt found that strange, but both his dad and his mother explained that Armistead was his dad's mother'sâhis grandmother'sâmaiden name and he had loved her profoundly, and Hoyt swallowed it.
Hoyt's mother, the former Peggy Springs, a pretty, brunette, washed-out, submissive lab rabbit of a woman, was a certified public accountant with a master's degree in economics from her alma mater, the University of Southern Illinois. She cooked George B. Thorpe's books for him and Armistead G. Thorpe's, too, backed up his stories even when they became so tall they collapsed of their own lack of foundation, and was willing to keep her timid Peggy Rabbit self at home, at his suggestion, when he went trolling for investors over lunches and dinners at his clubs.
Hoyt always hung on to the assumption that his father's intentions had been on the up and up. But not even a son could fail to see that toward the end his father had been setting up the new hedge funds for no purpose other than to get cash with which to assuage the investors in the old ones who were getting cranky and threatening to sue. He had even convinced a bank tellerâa twenty-four-year-old Estonian girl who had grown up on an island in Maine called Vinalhaven, a lissome little blonde he liked to flirt with when he was at the bankâto invest all her savings, a $20,000 Treasury bond her parents, a night watchman and a nurse's aide, had given her on her twenty-first birthday, in a hedge fund based on selling
futures
on bond sales short. It was complicated stuff but absolute dynamite ⦠She should think of it as a “hedge against a hedge with a multiplier or âwhip' effect” â¦
Bango!
He told Peggy to print up the necessary letterhead stationery, contract, and prospectus using computer fonts,
tout de suite
, and open a commercial bank account to receive her check. This was one of but many last desperate contortions before all of his funds crashed in a pile.
Hoyt and his parents were living at the time in a house built originally by the old cowboy movie star Bill Hart in the Belle Haven section of Greenwich, Connecticut, close to Long Island Sound. George Thorpe now found it advisable to disappear for “a while,” until things smoothed over. Ever mindful of the potential wrath of his creditors and investors, he had long since put the house in passive Peggy's name. Now he wanted the title backfast. For the first time Hoyt's mother allowed her brain to take over from her faint heart. She stalled and stalled and stalled. She knew her husband's “things” inside out, and there was no way they were going to smooth over this time. One Thursday morning, he mentioned, in the Oh-I-didn't-tell-you?
mode, a weekend real estate conference he was going to on Sea Island, Georgia. That afternoon he packed two garment bags and headed off to La Guardia Airport. They never saw him again. The bankers, insurance companies, and investors descended on Peggy. She gave them nothing but an innocent, clueless face and managed to hang on to the house. She got a job in the accounting department at Stanley Tool in nearby Stamford and was able to bring home just enough honest dollars to pay the mortgage installments. But Hoyt's days at the pricey Greenwich Country Day School were over.
In the course of settling George's affairs, Peggy called the Princeton alumni office for some amplification of his record there, but they couldn't find his name, or that of his father, Linus Thorpe. Similarly, the army drew a blank on Captain George Thorpe. Peggy found a cache of aging, intimate letters from womenâaddressed to George Thornton, George Thurlow, and George Thorsten.
In short, she never found a single documented record of her husband's backgroundâor of his existence on this earth, come to think of it. Hoyt, being only sixteen, explained all doubts away. To him the old man remainedâhe had to remainâa tough, aggressive military hero. It all had to do with Delta Force being a secret unit of the Special Forces. They probably had to destroy records.
When Hoyt had moved from the lower school to the middle school at Greenwich Country Day, he was a short, slight boy, and two outsize bullies in the class above him picked him out for special torment. Their favorite torture was to lock him up in a janitor's broom closet in a seldom-used hallway and leave it up to him to shout and bang on the door until he got somebody's attention. He had missed entire classes that way, to the detriment of his academic standing. Naturally, there was no way he could explain to the teachers what had happened, because there was nothingâ
nothingâ
worse than a boy being a snitch. After three weeks of the ordeal, he finally told his mother about it, first making her swear not to tell his father, which of course was the first thing Peggy did. His father gave Hoyt his grimmest Vietnam search-and-destroy look and said he was going to the school tomorrow and lift the headmaster up by his shirtfront, if necessary, and tell him that this bullshit
will
cease. “Bullshit” was the word, since George regarded sharing vulgarities, father and son, as a part of helping the son grow up as a man's man.
Oh God, no! Tell the headmaster? There
was
something worse than being a snitch; it was having Mommy or Daddy being a snitch
for
you.
In that case, said the old man, you've got to make a choice. Hoyt could either give one or both of the bullies a good pop on the noseâDad demonstrated by administering an imaginary clout, not with his fist but his forearm (which Hoyt assumed must be the Delta commando way)âor he, the old man, would head straight for the headmaster. But such a pop on the nose was impossible! They were bigger than he was! They'd destroy him! Not so, said his father. One good pop on the nose, especially if it drew blood, and they would never bother him again; and neither would anybody else at that school. Not only that, but from then on, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you'll be able to dominate every confrontation with nothing more than an intimidating stare and a couple of give-a-shit words. “Give-a-shit” he shared, too.
Butâbutâthere was no way it could work out like that!
His father shrugged and said okay then, you've got a big problem. You're gonna have one totally pissed-offâ“pissed-off”âparent storming into that school and raising holy hell.
That did it. The next morning, one of the bullies approached Hoyt and began taunting him. Hoyt croaked out his usual nervous responseâand then, with no preamble whatsoever, lunged at the astonished kid and gave him a good whack on the beak with his forearm. Blood gushed out all over the place. Everything his father predicted had ensued. This was one sixthgrader nobody was going to mess with. Furthermore, never again did he run into a situation he couldn't handle with an unblinking stare and a few superior give-a-shit comments.
But that was sweet little Greenwich Country Day. Now he had to go to a public school, Greenwich High. Greenwich High had a not-bad academic reputation, as public schools went, but it drew a certain element ⦠The third day Hoyt was there, a group of four Hispanic-looking guys blocked his way in the hall between classes. The group's spokesman had a week's worth of stubble on his face and a tight T-shirt with sleeves so negligible you could see the tubelike pumping-iron veins on his biceps as well as his forearms. He wanted to know Hoyt's name.
“Hoyt, hunh? That suppose a be a
nameâ
or wot? A fart?”
The thought of going through all the preliminaries, all the stupid words, all the moronic sneers, all the ritual challenges, depressed Hoyt tremendously. So without a word or the slightest change in expression, he smashed the guy in the nose with his forearm. Something cracked, and blood poured out of his nose like Niagara Falls. The bigmouth, the group wit, fell back with half a whimper and half a cry and brought both hands tenderly to his
hemorrhaging nose as if it were his child. Blood poured through the crevices between his fingers and down his arms. The other three piled on Hoyt and would have probably given him a pretty good drubbing except that a couple of teachers happened along and broke up the melee. The four tough guys vowed several types of crippling foggin' revenge upon the white mottafogga, but in fact that was the end of it, and Hoyt spent four years at Greenwich High as one white mottafogga you didn't mess with.
After that, he was regarded as cool by all factions. As he began to fill out and his cleft chin took on manly contours, he was regarded as hot by all the girls. He was fourteen when he first scored, as the expression went. It was one night on the couch in the den in the girl's own house, while her parents were directly overhead in their bedroom. The girl didn't go to Greenwich High, however, but to Greenwich Country Day. Without consciously planning it, Hoyt kept himself insinuated into the student social circles of Greenwich Country Day. He dressed in the marginally preppier, neater Greenwich Country Day boys' clothes, and he wore his thatchy hair in their longish, but not truly rebellious, style. That only made him hotter in the eyes of girls at Greenwich Highâ“hot” being the comparative degree of “cool” in teenage grammar. Hoyt didn't altogether neglect the Greenwich High girls by any means. In fact, it was they who, in short order, got him through the usual teenage male sexual trials, such as premature ejaculation and “how to do it.”
Thanks to his comparatively rigorous preparation at Greenwich Country Day, Hoyt was a good year ahead of most of his classmates at Greenwich High. He was diligent about maintaining that advantage, not because of any true interest in academic excellence, but rather because good grades were a sign that you were part of the better element. At the beginning of his junior year at Greenwich High, his Greenwich Country Day friends began to talk about how good grades alone weren't enough to get you into the top colleges. You needed a “hook,” sometimes called a “spike,” some area of remarkable achievement outside the academic curriculum, whether it be athletics, the oboe, summer internships at a biotech labâ
something.
Hoyt had nothing. He thought and thought. One night on television he saw a brief segment about a charity in New York City called City Harvest, which sent trucks with refrigeration units around to restaurant kitchens at night and collected unused food that would have otherwise been discarded and brought it to soup kitchens for the homeless. A lightbulb went on over Hoyt's head. He talked a nerdy classmate who had access to his parents' Chrysler Pacifica minivan into joining him in a venture called the Greenwich Protein Patrol. Thus read
the professional-looking posters taped to the front doors of the minivan. Hoyt had prevailed upon the new blond twenty-three-year-old art teacher, who was a real numberâshe obviously had a thing for Hoyt but restrained herselfâto do the graphics, which included two white sweatshirts with THE GREENWICH PROTEIN PATROL appliquéd in dark green. In fact, the Protein Patrol gathered no proteinâonly carbohydrates in the form of leftover bread at two bakeriesâsince they had no refrigeration for meat, leafy greens, or other protein-heavy food. This the two eleemosynary youths dropped off at the First Presbyterian Church, which had a soup line for the homeless. Hoyt laid eyes on the ultimate recipients of his generosity only once. That was when an idea-starved feature writer for the
Greenwich Times
named Clara Klein heard about the Patrol from the church's Reverend Mr. Burrus and wrote a story about it, accompanied by a three-column photo of Hoyt in his white sweatshirt with his arm around a little old soup-line regular who provided a striking contrast. There was Hoyt, the knight in white; and there was the poor little man, all in dark tones of brown and gray: dirty gray hair, sickly grayish brown skin, the turd-brown thirty-nine-gallon vinyl garbage bag he had converted into a poncho, the blue jeans that by now had turned soot gray, as had his Lugz sneakers, lurid stripes and all.