Hold On Tight

  hold on tight

  an insiders novel

  by j. minter

  Contents

  what i could really use is a little time away from it all …

  what wouldn’t mickey pardo do for a thousand dollars?

  arno’s turn on the couch

  the new new david grobart

  it’s a brave girl who tries to domesticate patch

  my guys and I move slowly, slowly northward

  he’s not my little ted anymore

  david adjusts his armor

  arno in outer space

  i am now known as …

  patch (almost) loses his cool

  mickey goes underwater

  arno practices going to bed alone

  david just can’t stop winning

  art chicks are crazy

  i am on the outside of cool, looking in

  arno gets right

  patch spreads the cool around

  that old thing that’s been pumping in arno’s chest all these years

  my friends are the afterparty

  david and the poor little rich girl

  i’m back, and i’m trying

  was that patch flood waiting on a call?

  mickey v. dad

  arno tries on a little more complexity

  david tries to keep a secret

  tuesday afternoon with uncle heyday

  i find out how dark it is when you care

  mickey runs into an old special someone

  arno would just like to know what meaningful really means

  david goes home to his lady

  patch puts on a blazer

  blinded by the flashbulb lights

  meanwhile, back in the west village …

  me and my demons

  the artist at school

  patch goes west, again

  i discover a little-known creature called the penguin

  david amidst the ghosts of the little screen

  arno gets some advice, and gives some

  patch in the wilderness of the soul

  all mickey wants from his papa is a nice, warm art crit

  i finally get some answers

  arno tries to remember the dream

  if mickey pardo’s your guest, you send the limo

  a daring escape

  networking, patch style

  i have to find that girl

  meaning, and how to get it

  what would duchamp do?

  it’s not breakfast at tiffany’s, but i’ll take it

  arno has one too many mornings

  mickey in the spotlight

  i make it to the front lines of caring about stuff

  arno takes to the trees

  david still can’t help it if he looked great naked

  i know when it’s time to go

  Also in this series

  for EER

  what i could really use is a

  little time away from it all …

  When I stepped out of my apartment Friday morning with the vague idea of getting a cup of coffee and a chocolate croissant and heading up to school, I had no idea I wouldn’t be coming back until Sunday night.

  My John Fluevog croc loafers hit the pavement and I was suddenly overcome with that feeling all Manhattanites experience when they’ve forgotten to leave our hallowed island for far too long. The streets were full of people carrying bulky bags and moving way too slow, and the May air felt dense and sooty. It’s like the population of the city doubles when it’s warm like this, I swear, and that kind of overcrowding can really trigger the ol’ fight or flight mechanism. (In my case, that would mostly be flight.) Now that my friends and I are at the end of our junior year, all anybody can talk about is which colleges they’re applying to and what percentage of applicants Harvard accepts a year and blah blah blah—that alone could make a guy want to catch a cab to Grand Central and hop the next train out of here.

  The second sign that I wasn’t going to be sleeping in my own bed that night was the phone call I received just as I was on my way out the door. It was my brother Ted, who’s a sophomore up at Vassar—he just wanted to let me know that he’d heard about all the bad stuff that went down with our stepbrother Rob a month ago. (Or ex-stepbrother, as I prefer to think of him, if you can divorce a step-sibling without your dad divorcing his absurdly wealthy British-Venezuelan wife.) Rob did try to ruin my life, but realistically, so did I. See, New York magazine crowns one guy Hottest Private School Boy every spring, and I wanted that guy to be me. A little too much. So when it was my friend Arno who was picked, I spent an interminably long week acting like a total jackass, alienating my friends, and really messing up with my girl, too.

  Anyway, it all worked out—the crew is back together, and it’s probably a good thing that Flan and I broke up—but it was still nice to hear from Ted. The thing is, I feel kind of burnt on the whole New York party scene right now, and my older brother Ted is this intensely grounded, earnest guy. I know I haven’t said much about him before, but, well, we’re awfully … different. He’s my brother, so I wouldn’t want to say he isn’t cool, but suffice it to say that, he hasn’t spent a whole lot of time dreaming about what it would mean to be Hottest Private School Boy. And there certainly was never any risk of him being chosen. So when I told him I had to go, he said, “It was really good to reconnect with you, Jonathan. You should come up and see me at school sometime.” Normally if someone said that, I’d laugh, because the chance of them talking that way and not being sarcastic is about as good as finding your true love in the backroom at Marquee at two a.m., but with my brother it’s different. He’s sincere. To a fault. A totally dorky, but lovable fault.

  Then, as I was walking up Fifth, I thought, yeah, I should go see him.

  The third unheeded sign was the simple fact that my friends—David, Mickey, Patch and Arno—are the guys they are. And crazy shit just tends to happen. That’s definitely something I should know by now. After all, Mickey Pardo recently convinced a bunch of kids we know—all of them pretty sophisticated, but still, you know, in high school— to pose for him. In a restaurant. As a group. Naked. But wait—you’re going to hear a whole lot more about that in a minute.

  As I rounded the corner onto West Twelfth Street and looked for a cab, my phone started buzzing in my pocket.

  “This is Jonathan,” I said, very calmly flipping my phone open.

  “J, it’s Mickey,” Mickey said, and his voice didn’t sound calm in the least. “I need your help.”

  “What’s up?” I tried to redirect all my attention from the Fluevogs—it had just occurred to me that they might be a tad garish—to what had Mickey so rattled. (Mickey is not a guy easily rattled, I might add, although high-octane crises do tend to follow him around. His father is this famous sculptor, Ricardo Pardo, and his mom is an ex-model and actually super-hot for a mom. It’s basically a high-octane household.)

  “Remember how I’m supposed to lecture this weekend?”

  “Um, lecture?”

  “Yeah, you know, on the photo project …”

  Yes, that would be the naked restaurant photo project. I paused a moment, and tried to re-wrap my mind around the kind of world we live in. “Where are you lecturing, the basement of Pastis?” I asked.

  “Naw, man, it’s at some college.”

  “You were asked to lecture at a college?”

  “Why is that surprising?” In the background, it sounded like Mickey had knocked over a mighty stack of something. “Yeah, I think the art department asked me. Listen, it’s tomorrow night at like seven or something, but I’m supposed to be up there tonight because they reserved a place for me at this cottage and they’re paying me a stipend and—”

  “A stipend?” Like I said, I should have learned
to expect this kind of thing by now. But in the moment, I was just trying to take it all in and make sense of it.

  “Yeah, whatever, like a thousand dollars. Anyway, how am I going to get there? J, you know how to uh—plan travel. It’s got to be tonight.”

  “What college is putting you up and paying you money for a talk about your naked photos?”

  “Vassar? The Vassar Art Department has cordially invited you …” Mickey started reading something into the phone. “So, how do we get there?”

  The very same Vassar my brother Ted goes to. It was a sign. I told Mickey that I was coming over, and slipped my phone into one of the back pockets of my Yanuk six-pocket jeans. Then I turned and started walking in the other direction, back downtown, to the huge converted warehouse where the Pardos live.

  what wouldn’t mickey pardo do

  for a thousand dollars?

  “Gah!” Mickey screamed from under his down comforter.

  The massive house where the Pardo family lived and worked was full of noise, although Mickey’s room was perhaps the noisiest. He had recently taken over a spare bedroom that his father’s art assistants occasionally slept in when the workday went late. The floor was paint-splattered concrete, and the bed was a loft made out of chrome and driftwood. He had switched rooms mostly because the old room reminded him of his longtime girlfriend, Philippa Frady, who had recently come out as a lesbian and broken up with him.

  The new room already was full of his stuff, particularly the loft part, where he was now searching for the directions the Vassar people had sent him. He thought they were around here on the bed somewhere, but with all the CDs, rumpled T-shirts, and cans of spray paint scattered around, he couldn’t help but wonder where he’d actually been sleeping. Certainly not here. The big Ricardo Pardo-made couch in the living room? Whatever—he didn’t have time to think about it right now.

  He turned up the live, bootlegged Babyshambles recording that was blasting through the five speakers he’d hooked up in various corners of the new room. Mickey, who was attractive in a rough, simian way—no one would call him handsome, but lots of girls thought he was hot anyway—air guitared briefly. Then he went back to tearing through the piles of papers he’d practiced tagging on and schoolbooks that had somehow arrived in his room. Finally he found the piece of paper he had been looking for. It was on Vassar letterhead and it included various instructions on how to get to the school, what time his lecture was scheduled for, how long he should speak, and so on. It also reminded him that, on completion of his lecture duties, he would be offered a thousand dollar stipend.

  “Score,” he muttered to himself.

  Since Mickey had successfully staged a nude restaurant photo shoot, he’d been getting a lot of attention. Most of the photos had ended up on Websites, and there had been some newspaper and magazine attention. He’d been invited to several gallery openings, and been asked to sit on a panel or two, and some public radio person had wanted to interview him. But his father was a famous artist, and Mickey’s best friend, Arno Wildenburger, was the son of famous art dealers, so none of this felt all that special to him. He’d been declining the offers, mostly. But because his parents kept cutting off his cash flow for some behavioral reason or other, when these Vassar people had thrown money in the mix, he had called them right away and said he’d be there and could they make the check out to cash?

  Now he just had to find a way out of the city, get his overgrown thicket of dark hair in order, and think of something to say at this lecture-thingy that wouldn’t get that thousand dollar offer taken away. Luckily, his dad’s studio manager, Caselli, liked Mickey in spite of his many antics, and had converted the film from the photo shoot into slides. Mickey was sure that those were around here somewhere, too.

  It wasn’t that Mickey didn’t care about giving a good lecture—he did. He’d never been into school much, and the idea that maybe he could be an artist like his dad was novel and cool. So he did want to say funny, smart things at the lecture tomorrow. He had just never really seen the point in preparing for stuff.

  Mickey tucked the letter into the pocket of his cut-off seersucker suit pants, and half-climbed, half-dove down the loft’s ladder. When he hit the floor he was happy to find himself face to face with his friend Jonathan.

  “Hey man!” Jonathan shouted over the music. He was wearing some very loud shoes and a suede bomber jacket that the weather definitely didn’t call for. For once, Mickey was kind of psyched on something Jonathan was wearing.

  “Thanks for coming over!” Mickey shouted back. He gave Jonathan his usual, tackle-style hug; Mickey was not a tall guy, and his grip was powerful. “And for the unstated offer to save my sorry ass.”

  “So,” Jonathan said, locating the universal remote and turning down the music. “What’s the deal? What time are you supposed to be there?”

  “Well, it says in this letter…” Mickey handed over the typed offer on Vassar letterhead for Jonathan’s perusal.

  Jonathan skimmed it and then said, “Okay, looks like you’re supposed to meet the chair of the Art Department at five. It’s almost eleven now, and it takes about two hours to get to Vassar. You’re with me?”

  “Yup. Sounds like we’ve got lots o’ time.”

  “Right, but that’s two hours by car, and last I checked neither one of us has a license,” Jonathan said, as though he were administering a quiz. “Now, who do we know who has a license?”

  Mickey looked at him blankly. “What are you talking about? I drive all the time.”

  “Yeah, I know. But don’t you think, given your new stature, it would be nice to arrive without police intervention?”

  “You’re probably right,” Mickey said, because Jonathan usually was.

  “Good. Have you seen Patch—’cause I know he has a license.”

  “Great! Let’s go find Patch.” Mickey slapped his hands together. “Oh, the slides. I need the slides.” He started kicking through the piles of stuff he had left all over his bedroom floor. “Shit, I knew I should have paid more attention to those.”

  “These slides?” Jonathan asked, lifting a slide carousel off the ground.

  Mickey was about to give Jonathan another tackle hug, but then reconsidered. “Let’s go.”

  Jonathan followed Mickey down the hall, which was twenty feet high and had an eerie, cathedral-like feel. The walls were decorated with early Pardo wall sculptures made out of half-demolished farm equipment. On their way out they passed the studio, where Ricardo’s latest project was being constructed by a small army of tattooed assistants amid a blaze of sparks.

  “Do you think I need to do something about my hair?” Mickey said as he swung the industrial metal door closed and reset the alarm.

  Jonathan shrugged. “They saw the pictures. They can’t say they didn’t know what they were getting.”

  arno’s turn on the couch

  “Sometimes teenagers can be very callous,” Dr. Guy Beller said, stroking his graying beard and looking at Arno Wildenburger as though he had just made the profoundest of observations.

  No shit, Arno thought, although he just nodded and pushed back into the couch in Dr. Beller’s spare Tribeca office.

  Everyone agreed that Arno, who was half-Brazilian, half-German and six feet tall, was handsome. But he liked to think—with his defined features and dark hair—that he was never quite so good-looking as when he brooded.

  Of course, thus far, his brooding had only landed him in therapy.

  This moping and soul-searching was new for Arno, and had been brought about mostly by a series of unusual rejections. One moment he was being named the Hottest Private School Boy in Manhattan by New York magazine, and being pursued by not one but three lank, bleach-blond Upper East Side party girls; the next it was publicly revealed that he was actually the magazine’s second choice, and those party girls had changed their cell phone numbers just to further humiliate and avoid him. The whole experience had had a really negative effect on his sense of sel
f.

  That was how he had ended up having twice-weekly sessions with Dr. Beller, a colleague of Arno’s friend David’s dad.

  Dr. Beller gave Arno a nod. “Do you agree?”

  “Oh yeah. I know this sounds weird, but it seems like girls can be even more cruel than guys sometimes,” Arno said. “It was pretty traumatic for me, being treated like, you know, just any other pretty face.”

  Dr. Beller leaned his elbows on his knees and gave Arno a searching look. After a pause, he said, “Would you say things come easy to you?”

  “Um, well, usually,” Arno said warily, “I guess.”

  “Would you say that—because of the way you look, the way you dress—people ‘hand you’ things?” Dr. Beller asked, making quotation marks with his long, slender fingers. Dr. Beller was even taller than Arno and he took up an awful lot of space in the room. He kept coming forward and crouching and staring, too, which wasn’t making Arno more relaxed.

  “Um, maybe,” Arno said darkly. “But it sure doesn’t feel that way lately.”

  “How did it feel to be the Hottest Private School Boy?” Dr. Beller went on, again using his too-long fingers to make lots of quotes.

  For a moment, Arno couldn’t help himself—his wide mouth broke into a smile, and the gorgeous creases in his cheeks emerged. “It’s was awesome, just getting attention, everyone wants to know you, getting into all the hottest clubs. Not that I couldn’t get in before, but everything was amplified, you know?”

  Dr. Beller nodded thoughtfully. “Have you ever gone out with a woman who wasn’t beautiful?” he asked.

  Arno chuckled. “Nope, they’re always hot chicks.”

  Dr. Beller sighed, and leaned back in his chair. “What I’m trying to get at is that maybe it isn’t entirely the world’s fault that you’re not feeling so hot. Maybe the fault is fifty percent the world’s, fifty percent yours.”

  Arno stared out the window at the skyline of expensive penthouses converted from industrial buildings and wondered how that could be.

  “These young women you were hanging out with, for instance. They treated you poorly, no doubt about that. But I’m not sure what you were doing with these ‘ladies,’ ” Dr. Beller again made the quotation marks, “in the first place.”