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Kitabı oku: «Open: An Autobiography», sayfa 5
3
I’M TEN, playing in the nationals. Second round. I lose badly to some kid who’s older, who’s supposed to be the best in the country. Not that this makes it easier. How can losing hurt so much? How can anything hurt so much? I walk off the court wishing I were dead. I stagger out to the parking lot. As my father gathers our stuff and says goodbye to the other parents, I sit in the car, crying.
A man’s face appears in the car window. Black guy. Smiling.
Hey there, he says. My name’s Rudy.
Same name as the man who helped my father build his backyard tennis court. Strange.
What’s your name?
Andre.
He shakes my hand.
Nice to meet you, Andre.
He says he works with the great champion Pancho Segura, who coaches kids my age. He comes to these big tournaments to scout kids for Pancho. He puts his arms through the window, leans heavily on the car door, sighs. He tells me that days like this are tough, he knows, very tough indeed, but in the end these days will make me stronger. His voice is warm, thick, like hot cocoa.
That kid who beat you, why, that kid’s two years older than you! You’ve got two years to reach that kid’s level. Two years is an eternity—especially when you’re working hard. Do you work hard?
Yes, sir.
You’ve got so much ahead of you, son.
But I don’t want to play anymore. I hate tennis.
Ha, ha! Sure you do. Right now. But deep down, you don’t really hate tennis.
Yes, I do.
You just think you hate it.
No, I hate it.
You’re saying that because you’re hurting right now, hurting like heck, but that just means you care. Means you want to win. You can use that. Remember this day. Try to use this day as motivation. If you don’t want to feel this hurt again, good, do everything you can to avoid it. Are you ready to do everything?
I nod.
Fine, fine. So go ahead and cry. Hurt a while longer. But then tell yourself, that’s it, time to get back to work.
OK.
I wipe my tears on my sleeve and thank Rudy and when he walks away I’m ready to practice. Bring on the dragon. I’m ready to hit balls for hours. If Rudy were standing behind me, whispering encouragement in my ear, I think I could beat that dragon. Suddenly my father climbs behind the wheel of the car and we drive slowly away, like the head car in a funeral procession. The tension in the car is so thick that I curl up on the backseat and close my eyes. I think about jumping out, running away, finding Rudy and asking him to coach me. Or adopt me.
I HATE ALL THE junior tournaments, but I hate nationals most of all, because the stakes are higher, and they’re held in other states, which means airfare, motels, rental cars, restaurant meals. My father is shelling out money, investing in me, and when I lose, there goes another piece of his investment. When I lose I set back the whole Agassi clan.
I’m eleven, playing nationals in Texas on clay. I’m among the best in the nation on clay, so there’s no way I’m going to lose, and then I lose. In the semis. I don’t even reach the final. Now I have to play a consolation match. When you lose in the semis they make you play a match to determine third and fourth place. Worse, in this particular consolation match I’m facing my archnemesis, David Kass. He’s ranked just below me, but somehow becomes a different player when he sees me across that net. No matter what I do, Kass beats me, and today is no different. I lose in three sets. Again I’m shattered. I’ve disappointed my father. I’ve cost my family. I don’t cry, however. I want to make Rudy proud, so I manage to choke back the tears.
At the awards ceremony a man hands out the first-place trophy, then second, then third. Then he announces that this year a sportsmanship trophy will be awarded to the youngster who exhibits the most grace on the court. Incredibly, he says my name—maybe because I’ve been biting my lip for an hour. He’s holding the trophy toward me, waving me to come and get it. It’s the last thing in the world I want, a sportsmanship trophy, but I take it from the man and thank him and something shifts inside me. It is an awfully cool trophy. And I have been a good sport. I walk out to the car, clutching the trophy to my chest, my father a step behind me. He says nothing, I say nothing. I concentrate on the clickclack of our footsteps on the cement. Finally I break the silence. I say, I don’t want this stupid thing. I say it because I think it’s what my father wants to hear. My father comes alongside me. He rips the trophy from my hands. He lifts it over his head and throws it on the cement. The trophy shatters. My father picks up the biggest piece and throws it on the cement, smashing it into smaller pieces. Now he collects the pieces and throws them into a nearby dumpster. I don’t say a word. I know not to say a word.
IF ONLY I COULD play soccer instead of tennis. I don’t like sports, but if I must play a sport to please my father, I’d much rather play soccer. I get to play three times a week at school, and I love running the soccer field with the wind in my hair, calling for the ball, knowing the world won’t end if I don’t score. The fate of my father, of my family, of planet earth, doesn’t rest on my shoulders. If my team doesn’t win, it will be the whole team’s fault, and no one will yell in my ear. Team sports, I decide, are the way to go.
My father doesn’t mind my playing soccer, because he thinks it helps my footwork on the court. But I recently hurt myself in a soccer scrimmage, pulled a muscle in my leg, and the injury forces me to skip tennis practice one afternoon. My father isn’t happy. He looks at my leg, then me, as if I injured myself on purpose. But an injury is an injury. Even he can’t argue with my body. He stomps out of the house.
Moments later my mother looks at my schedule and realizes I have a soccer game this afternoon. What do we do? she says.
The team is counting on me, I tell her.
She sighs. How do you feel?
I think I can play.
OK. Put on your soccer uniform.
Do you think Pops will be upset?
You know Pa. He doesn’t need a reason to be upset.
She drives me to the soccer game and leaves me there. After a few jogs up and down the field, my leg feels good. Surprisingly good. I dart in between defenders, fluid, graceful, calling for the ball, laughing with my teammates. We’re working toward a common objective. We’re in this together. This feels right. This feels like me.
Suddenly I look up and see my father. He’s at the edge of the parking lot, stalking toward the field. Now he’s talking to the coach. Now he’s yelling at the coach. The coach is waving to me. Agassi! Out of the game!
I sprint off the field.
Get in the car, my father says. And get out of that uniform.
I run to the car and find my tennis clothes on the backseat. I put them on and walk back to my father. I hand him my soccer uniform. He walks onto the field and throws the uniform at the coach’s chest.
As we drive home my father says without looking at me: You’re never playing soccer again.
I beg him for a second chance. I tell my father that I don’t like being by myself on that huge tennis court. Tennis is lonely, I tell him. There’s nowhere to hide when things go wrong. No dugout, no sideline, no neutral corner. It’s just you out there, naked.
He shouts at the top of his lungs: You’re a tennis player! You’re going to be number one in the world! You’re going to make lots of money. That’s the plan, and that’s the end of it.
He’s adamant, and desperate, because that was the plan for Rita, Philly, and Tami, but things never worked out. Rita rebelled. Tami stopped getting better. Philly didn’t have the killer instinct. My father says this about Philly all the time. He says it to me, to Mom, even to Philly--right to his face. Philly just shrugs, which seems to prove that Philly doesn’t have the killer instinct.
But my father says far worse things to Philly.
You’re a born loser, he says.
You’re right, Philly says in a sorrowful tone. I am a born loser. I was born to be a loser.
You are! You feel sorry for your opponent! You don’t care about being the best!
Philly doesn’t bother to deny it. He plays well, he has talent, but he just isn’t a perfectionist, and perfection isn’t the goal in our house, it’s the law. If you’re not perfect, you’re a loser. A born loser.
My father decided that Philly was a born loser when Philly was about my age, playing nationals. Philly didn’t just lose; he didn’t argue when his opponents cheated him, which made my father turn bright red and scream curses in Assyrian from the bleachers.
Like my mother, Philly takes it and takes it, and then every once in a great while he blows. The last time it happened, my father was stringing a tennis racket, my mother was ironing, and Philly was on the couch, watching TV. My father kept after Philly, mercilessly nagging him about his performance at a recent tournament. All at once, in a tone I’d never heard him use, Philly screeched, You know why I don’t win? Because of you! Because you call me a born loser!
Philly started panting with anger. My mother started crying.
From now on, Philly continued, I’ll just be a robot, how’s that? Would you like that? I’ll be a robot and feel nothing and just go out there and do everything you say!
My father stopped stringing the racket and looked happy. Almost peaceful. Jesus Christ, he said, you’re finally getting it.
Unlike Philly, I argue with opponents all the time. I sometimes wish I had Philly’s knack for shrugging off injustice. If an opponent cheats me, if he pulls a Tarango, my face gets hot. Often I get my revenge on the next point. When my cheating opponent hits a shot in the center of the court, I call it out and stare at him with a look that says: Now we’re even.
I don’t do this to please my father, but it surely does. He says, You have a different mentality than Philly. You got all the talent, all the fire--and the luck. You were born with a horseshoe up your ass.
He says this once a day. Sometimes he says it with conviction, sometimes admiration—sometimes envy. I blanch when he says it. I worry that I got Philly’s good luck, that I stole it from him somehow, because if I was born with a horseshoe up my ass, Philly was born with a black cloud over his head. When Philly was twelve he broke his wrist while riding his bike, broke it in three places, and that was the beginning of a long stretch of unbroken gloom. My father was so furious with Philly that he made Philly keep playing tournaments, broken wrist and all, which worsened Philly’s wrist, made the problem chronic, and ruined his game forever. Favoring his broken wrist, Philly was forced to use a one-handed backhand, which Philly believes is a terrible habit, one he couldn’t break after the wrist healed. I watch Philly lose and think: Bad habits plus bad luck—deadly combination. I also watch him when he comes home after a hard loss. He feels so rotten about himself, you can see it all over his face, and my father drives that rottenness down deeper. Philly sits in a corner, beating himself up over the loss, but at least it’s a fair fight, one on one. Then along comes my father. He jumps in and helps Philly gang up on Philly. There is name-calling, slapping. By rights this should make Philly a basket case. At the very least it should make him resent me, bully me. Instead, after every verbal or physical assault at the hands of himself and my father, Philly’s slightly more careful with me, more protective. Gentler. He wants me spared his fate. For this reason, though he may be a born loser, I see Philly as the ultimate winner. I feel lucky to have him as my older brother. Feeling lucky to have an unlucky older brother? Is that possible? Does that make sense? Another defining contradiction.
PHILLY AND I spend all our free time together. He picks me up at school on his scooter and we go riding home across the desert, talking and laughing above the engine’s insect whine. We share a bedroom at the back of the house, our sanctuary from tennis and Pops. Philly is as fussy about his stuff as I am about mine, so he paints a white line down the center of the room, dividing it into his side and mine, ad court and deuce court. I sleep in the deuce court, my bed closest to the door. At night, before we turn out the lights, we have a ritual I’ve come to depend on. We sit on the edges of our beds and whisper across the line. Philly, seven years older, does most of the talking. He pours out his heart, his self-doubts and disappointments. He talks about never winning. He talks about being called a born loser. He talks about needing to borrow money from Pops so that he can continue to play tennis, to keep trying to turn pro. Pops, we both agree, is not a man you want holding your marker.
Of all the things that trouble Philly, however, the great trauma of his life is his hairline. Andre, he says, I’m going bald. He says this in the same way he would tell me the doctor has given him four weeks to live.
But he won’t lose his hair without a battle. Baldness is one opponent Philly will fight with all he’s got. He thinks the reason he’s going bald is that he’s not getting enough blood to his scalp, so every night, at some point during our bedtime talks, Philly stands upside down. He puts his head on the mattress and lifts his feet, balancing himself against the wall. I pray it will work. I plead with God that my brother, the born loser, won’t lose this one thing, his hair. I lie to Philly and tell him that I can see his miracle cure working. I love my brother so much, I’d say anything if I thought it would make him feel better. For my brother’s sake, I’d stand on my own head all night.
After Philly tells me his troubles, I sometimes tell him mine. I’m touched by how quickly he refocuses. He listens to the latest mean thing Pops said, gauges my level of concern, then gives me the proportionate nod. For basic fears, a half nod. For big fears, a full nod with a patented Philly frown. Even when upside down, Philly says as much with one nod as most people say in a five-page letter.
One night Philly asks me to promise him something.
Sure, Philly. Anything.
Don’t ever let Pops give you any pills.
Pills?
Andre, you have to hear what I am telling you. This is really important.
OK, Philly, I hear you. I’m listening.
Next time you go away to nationals, if Pops gives you pills, don’t take them.
He already gives me Excedrin, Philly. He makes me take Excedrin before a match, because it’s loaded with caffeine.
Yeah, I know. But these pills I’m talking about are different. These pills are tiny, white, round. Don’t take them. Whatever you do.
What if Pops makes me? I can’t say no to Pops.
Yeah. Right. OK, let me think.
Philly closes his eyes. I watch the blood rushing to his forehead, turning it purple.
OK, he says. I got it. If you have to take the pills, if he makes you take them, play a bad match. Tank. Then, as you come off the court, tell him you were shaking so bad that you couldn’t concentrate.
OK. But Philly--what are these pills?
Speed.
What’s that?
A drug. Gives you lots of energy. I just know he’s going to try to slip you some speed.
How do you know, Philly?
He gave it to me.
Sure enough, at the nationals in Chicago my father gives me a pill. Hold out your hand, he says. This will help you. Take it.
He puts a pill on my palm. Tiny. White. Round.
I swallow the pill and feel OK. Not much different. Slightly more alert. But I pretend to feel very different. My opponent, an older kid, poses no challenge, and still I carry him, drag out points, hand him several games. I make the match look tougher than it is. Walking off the court I tell my father I don’t feel right, I want to pass out, and he looks guilty.
OK, he says, rubbing his hand across his face, that’s not good. We won’t try that again.
I phone Philly after the tournament and tell him about the pill.
He says, I fucking knew it!
I did just what you told me to do, Philly, and it worked.
My brother sounds the way I imagine a father is supposed to sound. Proud of me and scared for me at the same time. When I return from nationals I grab him and hug him and we spend my first night home locked in our room, whispering across the white line, cherishing our rare victory over Pops.
A short time later I play an older opponent and beat him. It’s a practice match, no big deal, and I’m much better than the opponent, but once again I carry him, drag out points, make the match look tougher than it is, just as I did in Chicago. Walking off Court 7 at Cambridge—the same court on which I beat Mr. Brown--I feel devastated, because my opponent looks devastated. I should have tanked all the way. I hate losing, but I hate winning this time because the defeated opponent is Philly. Does this devastated feeling prove I don’t have the killer instinct? Confused, sad, I wish I could find that old guy, Rudy, or the other Rudy before him, and ask them what it all means.
4
I’M PLAYING A TOURNAMENT at the Las Vegas Country Club, vying for a chance to go to the state championship. My opponent is a kid named Roddy Parks. The first thing I notice about him is that he too has a unique father. Mr. Parks wears a ring with an ant frozen inside a large gumdrop of yellow amber. Before the match starts, I ask him about it.
You see, Andre, when the world ends in a nuclear holocaust, ants will be the only things that survive. So I’m planning for my spirit to go into an ant.
Roddy is thirteen, two years older than I, and big for his age, with a military crew cut. But he looks beatable. Right away I see holes in his game, weaknesses. Then, somehow, he fills in the holes, papers over the weaknesses. He wins the first set.
I talk to myself, tell myself to suck it up, dig in. I take the second set.
Bearing down now, I play smarter, quicker. I feel the finish line. Roddy is mine, he’s toast. What kind of name is Roddy anyway? But a few points slip away, and now Roddy is raising his arms above his head, he’s won the third set, 7-5, and the match. I look into the stands for my father, and he’s staring down, concerned. Not angry—concerned. I’m concerned too, but damned angry also, sick with self-loathing. I wish I were the frozen ant in Mr. Parks’s ring.
I’m saying hateful things to myself as I pack my tennis bag. Out of nowhere a boy appears and interrupts my rant.
Hey, he says, don’t sweat it. You didn’t play your best today.
I look up. The boy is slightly older than I, a head taller, wearing an expression that I don’t like. There’s something different about his face. His nose and mouth are out of alignment. And, the capper, he’s wearing a fruity shirt with a little man playing polo? I want no part of him.
Who the fuck are you? I say.
Perry Rogers.
I turn back to my tennis bag.
He won’t take a hint. He drones on about how I didn’t have my best game, how much better I am than Roddy, how I’ll beat Roddy the next time, blah, blah. He’s trying to be nice, I guess, but he’s coming off like a know-it-all, like some kind of Björn Borg Jr., so I stand and pointedly do an about-face. The last thing I need is a consolation speech, which is more pointless than a consolation trophy, especially from a kid with a man playing polo on his chest. Slinging my tennis bag over my shoulder I tell him: What the fuck do you know about tennis?
Later I feel bad. I shouldn’t have been so harsh. Then I find out the kid is a tennis player, that he was competing in the same tournament. I also hear he’s got a crush on my sister Tami, which is undoubtedly why he talked to me in the first place. Trying to get close to Tami.
But if I feel guilty, Perry is pissed. Word spreads along the Vegas teenager grapevine: Watch your back. Perry is gunning for you. He’s telling everyone that you disrespected him, and the next time he sees you, he’s going to kick your ass.
WEEKS LATER TAMI SAYS the whole gang is going to see a horror flick, all the older kids, and she asks if I want to go along.
That Perry kid going?
Maybe.
Yeah, I’ll go.
I love horror movies. And I have a plan.
Our mother drives us to the theater early so we can buy popcorn and licorice and find the perfect seats, dead center, middle row. I always sit dead center, middle row. Best seats in the house. I put Tami to my left and save the seat to my right. Sure enough, here comes Preppy Perry. I jump to my feet and wave. Hey Perry! Over here!
He turns, squints. I can see he’s caught off guard by my friendliness. He’s trying to analyze the situation, weigh his response. Then he smiles, visibly releases whatever anger he’s been holding. He saunters down the aisle and slides down our row, throwing himself into the seat next to me.
Hey Tami, he says across me.
Hey Perry.
Hey Andre.
Hey Perry.
Just as the lights go down and the first coming attraction starts we give each other a look.
Peace?
Peace.
The movie is Visiting Hours. It’s about a psycho who stalks a lady journalist, sneaks into her house, kills her maid, then for some reason puts on lipstick and pops out when the lady journalist comes home. She fights free, and somehow gets to a hospital, where she thinks she’s safe, but of course the psycho is hiding in the hospital, trying to find the lady journalist’s room, killing everyone who gets in his way. Cheesy, but satisfyingly creepy.
When scared, I react like a cat thrown into a room full of dogs. I freeze, don’t move a muscle. But Perry apparently is the high-strung type. As the suspense builds, he twitches and fidgets and spills soda on himself. Every time the killer jumps out of a closet, Perry jumps out of his seat. Several times I turn to Tami and roll my eyes. I don’t tease Perry about his reaction, however. I don’t even mention it when the lights come on. I don’t want to break our fragile peace accord.
We roll out of the theater and decide the popcorn and Cokes and Twizzlers weren’t enough. We head across the street to Winchell’s and buy a box of French crullers. Perry gets his covered with chocolate. I get mine with rainbow sprinkles. We eat the donuts at the counter, talking. Perry sure can talk. He’s like a lawyer before the Supreme Court. Then, in the middle of a fifteen-minute sentence, he stops and asks the guy behind the counter, Is this place open twenty-four hours?
Yup, the counter guy says.
Seven days a week?
Uh-huh.
Three hundred sixty-five days a year?
Yeah.
Then why are there locks on the front door?
We all turn and look. What a brilliant question! I start laughing so hard that I have to spit out my cruller. Rainbow sprinkles are falling from my mouth like confetti. This might be the funniest, smartest thing anyone’s ever said. Certainly the funniest, smartest thing said by anyone in this particular Winchell’s. Even the donut guy has to smile and admit: Kid, that’s a head-scratcher.
Isn’t life just like that? Perry says. Full of Winchell’s locks and other stuff you can’t explain?
You said it.
I always thought I was the only one who noticed. But here’s a kid who not only notices, he points that stuff out. When my mother comes to pick up me and Tami, I’m sad to say goodbye to my new friend Perry. I even find myself less annoyed by his polo shirt.
I ASK MY FATHER if I can sleep over at Perry’s house.
No fucking way, he says.
He doesn’t know Perry’s family from a hole in the ground. And he doesn’t trust anyone he doesn’t know. My father is suspicious of everyone in the world, especially the parents of our friends. I don’t bother asking why, and I don’t waste my breath arguing. I just invite Perry to our house for a sleepover.
Perry is extremely polite with my parents. He’s agreeable with my siblings, especially Tami, though she’s gently discouraged his crush. I ask if he wants a quick tour. Sure thing, he says, so I show him the room I share with Philly. He laughs at the white stripe down the middle. I show him the court out back. He takes a turn hitting with the dragon. I tell him how much I hate the dragon, how I used to think it was a living, breathing monster. He looks sympathetic. He’s seen enough horror flicks to know that monsters come in all shapes and sizes.
Since Perry is a fellow connoisseur of horror, I’ve got a surprise for him. I’ve scored a beta copy of The Exorcist. After seeing him jump out of his skin at Visiting Hours, I can’t wait to see how he reacts to a genuine horror classic. After everyone’s asleep we slide the movie into the machine. I suffer a minor aneurysm with every rotation of Linda Blair’s head, but Perry doesn’t flinch once. Visiting Hours gives him the shakes, but The Exorcist leaves him cold? I think: This dude marches to his own drummer.
Afterward, we sit up drinking sodas and talking. Perry agrees that my father’s scarier than anything Hollywood can offer, but he says his father is twice as scary. His father, he says, is an ogre, a tyrant, and a narcissist—the first time I’ve heard this word.
Perry says, Narcissist means he thinks only about himself. It also means his son is his personal property. He has a vision of how his son’s life is going to be, and he couldn’t care less about his son’s vision of that future.
Sounds familiar.
Perry and I agree that life would be a million times better if our fathers were like other kids’ fathers. But I hear an added note of pain in Perry’s voice, because he says his father doesn’t love him. I’ve never questioned my father’s love. I just wish it were softer, with more listening and less rage. In fact, I sometimes wish my father loved me less. Maybe then he’d back off, let me make my own choices. I tell Perry that having no choice, having no say about what I do or who I am, makes me crazy. That’s why I put more thought, obsessive thought, into the few choices I do have—what I wear, what I eat, who I call my friends.
He nods. He gets it.
At last, in Perry, I have a friend with whom I can share these deep thoughts, a friend I can tell about the Winchell’s locks in my life. I talk to Perry about playing tennis, despite hating tennis. Hating school, despite enjoying books. Feeling lucky to have Philly, despite his streak of bad luck. Perry listens, patient as Philly, but more involved. Perry doesn’t just talk, then listen, then nod. He converses. He analyzes, strategizes, spitballs, helps me come up with a plan to make things better. When I tell Perry my problems, they sound jumbled and asinine at first, but Perry has a way of rearranging them, making them sound logical, which feels like the first step to making them solvable. I feel as if I’ve been on a desert island, with no one to talk to but the palm trees, and now a thoughtful, sensitive, like-minded castaway—albeit with a stupid polo player on his shirt--has come stumbling ashore.
Perry confides in me about his nose and mouth. He says he was born with a cleft palate. He says it’s made him deeply self-conscious and painfully shy with girls. He’s had surgeries to fix it, and faces one more surgery at least. I tell him it’s not that noticeable. He gets tears in his eyes. He mumbles something about his father blaming him.
Most conversations with Perry eventually lead to fathers, and from fathers it’s a quick segue to the future. We talk about the men we’re going to be once we’re rid of our fathers. We promise each other that we’ll be different, not just from our fathers but from all the men we know, even the ones we see in movies. We make a pact that we’ll never do drugs or drink alcohol. And when we’re rich, we vow, we’ll do what we can to help the world. We shake on it. A secret handshake.
Perry has a long way to go to get rich. He never has a dime. Everything we do is my treat. I don’t have much--a modest allowance, plus what I hustle from guests at the casinos and hotels. But I don’t care; what’s mine is Perry’s, because I’ve decided that Perry is my new best friend. My father gives me five dollars every day for food, and I freely spend half on Perry.
We meet every afternoon at Cambridge. After goofing off, hitting a few balls around, we go for a snack. We slip out the back door, hop the wall, and race across the vacant lot to 7-Eleven, where we play video games and eat Chipwiches, paid for by me, until it’s time to go home.
A Chipwich is a new ice cream sandwich Perry recently discovered. Vanilla ice cream pressed between two doughy chocolate chip cookies—it’s the greatest food in the world, according to Perry, who’s a raging addict. He loves Chipwiches more than talking. He can talk for an hour about the beauty of the Chipwich--and yet a Chipwich is one of the few things that can get him to stop talking. I buy him Chipwiches by the dozens, and I feel sorry for him that he doesn’t have enough money to feed his habit.
We’re at 7-Eleven one day when Perry stops chewing his Chipwich and looks up at the wall clock.
Shit, Andre, we better get back to Cambridge, my mother’s coming early to get me.
Your mother?
Yeah. She said to be ready and waiting out front.
We haul ass across the vacant lot.
Uh-oh, Perry shouts, there she is!
I look up the street and see two cars cruising toward Cambridge--a Volkswagen bug and a convertible Rolls-Royce. I see the bug keep going past Cambridge, and I tell Perry to relax, we have time. She missed the turn.
No, Perry says, come on, come on.
He turns on the jets, sprinting after the Rolls.
Hey! What the—? Perry, are you kidding? Your mom drives a Rolls? Are you—rich?
I guess so.
Why didn’t you tell me?
