I don't like him. He needs a haircut in the worst way. Not that I ordinarily care about haircuts, but for the limousine driver at my grandmother's funeral, I thought they could at least have given us a guy who had had his hair cut.
The circumstances forming the dramatic conflict at the heart of the novel arise from the opening pages which detail the immediate aftermath of the death of Davy’s grandmother. Following the breakdown of his parents’ marriage, Davy has been living with his grandmother and so her passing becomes not just a traumatic event in his life, but a major turning point. Davy doesn’t really provide much explanation for why he has been living with grandmother when both his parents are still alive and living not all that far away, but the answers to that question will slowly be revealed as the narrative plays out.
I give Mother a kiss, practically falling on the floor because there's so much alcohol in the air around her.
With his grandmother dead and the family trying to decide who should take him in, Davy’s mother settles the accounts by insisting that he come to live with her. Nobody seems terribly excited by this prospect—including Davy’s mom—but she is perhaps the least resistant. There is reason why Davy did not go to live with his mother after the divorce and there is a reason why no one in the extended family is particularly happy that Davy will be going to live with her now. She is a stinking drunk. Not one of those nice people who happens to have the “disease” of alcoholism, but an all-out, it’s happy hour somewhere sort of drunk who makes everyone around her miserable when she hits the sauce which is pretty much constantly.
Altschuler and I laugh a lot over Fred's adventure. We go back to my mother's apartment and repeat about ten times how the guard looked, what he said, and how dirty the seminarian got catching Fred. We laugh each time we recall a moment. To tell the truth, it's probably the best laugh I've had since I got to New York. Fred finds us curious and looks from one to the other with surprised interest on his mug. I fall on the floor and give him a hug, which he likes so much that he goes into his purring-cat act. Altschuler bends to listen too, so, dopey me, I give Altschuler a dumb kiss. He looks surprised, and so do I, I guess. I get up right away.
Although often referred to as the first or among the first YA novels to deal with homosexuality, that aspect of the relationship between Davy and his new friend Douglas Altschuler is not exactly what would be termed explicitly addressed. This very first hesitant kiss is as far as things go in in this scene which quickly moves to the two teens experimenting with the whiskey of Davy’s mom. Before you know it, both boys have been overcome by the depressant qualities of alcohol and have fallen quietly asleep on the floor together. This is the scene which greets Davy’s mom when she comes home and from that point the novel really becomes more of a story about the suspicion, possibility, and shame of homosexual desires than it is really a story about an actual love affair itself. Fred, by the way, is Davy's dachshund.
