Pete McKennedy
Pete McKennedy, the older brother of Charlie Decker's closest friend Joe McKennedy, appears briefly but decisively in Charlie's memory as a gateway to experiences that deepen his alienation. A twenty-one-year-old University of Maine student majoring in English, Pete works a summer job for the Bangor Sanitation Department when Charlie and Joe visit him in Bangor during the summer before Charlie's junior year at Placerville High School. Pete's easy, confident manner and his connections to the college social world mark him as someone who inhabits a realm of freedom and adulthood that Charlie, struggling through the open sewer of being seventeen, desperately wants to enter.
Introduction and the Weekend in Bangor
Pete takes the two younger boys on a tour of the University of Maine campus in Orono, which Charlie finds pretty even on a quiet July Saturday when most summer students have left for Bar Harbor or Clear Lake. It is Pete who spots a friend, Scragg Simpson, slouching toward the steam-plant parking lot, and who learns from him about a party at a camp owned by Dana Collette's parents near Schoodic Point. Pete immediately decides to attend, asking about marijuana and learning that Jerry Mueller, the biggest dope dealer in the Orono-Oldtown-Stillwater triangle, has a supply. Pete leads Charlie and Joe to Jerry's small apartment in Oldtown, where Charlie expects to find a stereotypical drug den but instead discovers a small, grinning man with a collection of bluegrass music. Pete lights a joint, draws the smoke deep, and passes it on, initiating Charlie into his first experience with marijuana. Under the influence, Charlie finds himself able to visualize banjo chords as bright steel threads shuttling like looms, a moment of vivid, almost ecstatic perception that he tries to share with Joe, who only looks at him in a puzzled, fuzzy way. They stay until almost five o'clock, and Pete buys an ounce of grass from Jerry before they leave for Schoodic. Charlie later reflects that this is the last really happy time he can remember.
The Party at Schoodic Point and Its Aftermath
At the party, Pete introduces Charlie and Joe to Dana Collette, a short, almost pretty girl with bleached hair and the shortest dress Charlie has ever seen. Pete produces his bag of weed, and Dana brings out a huge scrolled water pipe. As the night progresses, Charlie becomes intensely high and sexually aroused by Dana, who presses her hip against his and lets him look up her dress. Pete is elsewhere in the cabin, and Dana whispers to Charlie to go out the back door. Charlie follows her instruction, descending a flight of weather-washed steps to a small, crescent-shaped beach below the cabin, where he waits in the moonlight. When Dana joins him, they kiss and lie down together under the back steps, but Charlie finds himself unable to achieve or maintain an erection. His mind is invaded by the image of his father with his hunting knife, talking about the Cherokee Nose Job, and all sexual desire collapses. Dana, after a brief and irritated sigh, tells him it happens, dresses, and returns to the party, instructing him to wait before coming back up. Charlie is left alone on the beach, cold and humiliated, the certainty that he is queer creeping over him like rising water. When he finally returns to the cabin, Pete and Dana are gone, and Joe is making out with a girl in a corner. Charlie sits and waits for the party to end, feeling tired and grainy, unable to measure how much damage has been done to him. By the time the three of them return to Bangor at dawn, none of them has much to say. Charlie falls into a daybed and dreams of the Creaking Thing, a nightmare from his childhood, but this time the door bursts open to reveal his father holding his mother, her nose slit open and blood streaming down her cheeks. He wakes up screaming, with an erection.
Narrative Role and Significance
Pete McKennedy functions in Charlie's retrospective narrative as a figure of normal, uncomplicated male sociability—someone who can score drugs, find parties, and move easily through the college world—whose very ease highlights Charlie's profound inability to connect. The weekend with Pete leads directly to Charlie's first sexual failure, an event that crystallizes his sense of being fundamentally broken and that he later links to the psychological unraveling that culminates in the hostage crisis. Pete himself disappears from the story after this episode; he is not present during the events at Placerville High School, and Charlie does not mention any further contact with him. His role is that of a catalyst, a briefly glimpsed figure whose ordinary college life becomes, in Charlie's memory, the backdrop for a humiliation that accelerates his descent into isolation and violence.
