Knuckleheads (16 page)

We will pretend to rock parties until the break of dawn. We will pretend lots of the kinds of girls who think we are dull—the kinds who prefer lacrosse players who slant-park their Toyota hatchbacks and have parents who pay for SAT prep classes—will come to our blow-out bashes. They will mostly be blond and will dance with each other until they tire and then they will search for us in dark corners for groping and other activities of their own devising. We will prove we are not dull.

In preparation, G-Lover will show us how to work the needles back and forth across the backbeat to make scratching sounds. We will all look very beautiful with headphones covering one ear only. Johnny will make out with my sort-of girlfriend at a New Year’s Eve party. He won’t be sorry, but I will forgive him and not her. Johnny’s mother will sometimes bring pitchers of lemonade downstairs and will say, Don’t do that to your records, that’s how you ruin them. Johnny’s sister Maria Louisa is very cute and says hi to me shyly in the hallways at school. It’s an extraordinary privilege to stand behind her at the water fountain, but that is as far as it will go. When I’m playing shortstop, I backpedal on pop-ups and Johnny comes sprinting in from left field and calls me off. I let him and that’s how we win games.

The basement is well organized, its orange shelves filled with old children’s books and board-games like Trouble and Sorry. High up, two shelves are devoted solely to Johnny’s baseball cards. No one ever talks about them but one notebook is labeled Hall-of-Famers and there’s a mint Mickey Mantle in there from the early ’50s. It’s tempting to steal it. To fuck Johnny up on some tequila and slip the card out of its protective sleeve and into my pocket. Johnny said he played strip ping-pong one time with a snobby girl named Harriet from my chemistry class and that is bullshit. She is known for wearing paisley scarves and other pretentious accoutrements and he should pay for lying like that.

There are two hockey sticks in the corner no one ever uses. The window is left open so the music can bump the whole neighborhood. One Saturday night, when other less worthy kids are crawling their hands toward crotches of girls who should have nothing to do with them, it happens just like G showed us. Record and palm connect like lovers and the beat revolves backward, then forward, then backward again. I release it graceful and free, yearning, like a rooftop pigeon—
chikka-chikka-chik
—right on time with the rhythm. Johnny’s mouth opens in wonder. The sidewalks outside vibrate. The streetlights bust a groove.

Lennie Ross’s:
He and Davey are the token Jews, but does that matter? It’s all about the bench-press. Lennie’s a goddamn animal. He will lift weights every day if no one tells him to cease and desist. Davey too. Freaks. They talk about girls as if they actually get them, as if it’s as easy as dunking on the eight-foot rim at the elementary school across the street. His house has a TV with cable and MTV videos are present, but it’s background. Except for Aerosmith. Everybody stops for "Walk This Way".

We all hid down there once, quiet with the videos on, but no sound. It was summer. We were pool-hopping, a frequent activity consisting of jumping a fence and sliding into somebody’s pool after midnight, hanging there underwater up to our necks, and whispering until we started shivering. We were wraiths, silvery phantoms in the dark. On Lennie’s street, the pools were heated. Sometimes we didn’t shiver for hours. Dogs barked far away and people watched late-night talk shows. We ducked and slithered into their pools and they never knew.

G-Lover only came with us that one time. Skittery like a squirrel. I’m Black, he said, I’ll get shot. Jews don’t own guns, Lennie said. We negotiate. He snuck upstairs and got everybody towels from his mother’s linen closet. G’s was ugly, with a picture of a dog with its tongue hanging out. Don’t laugh, Lennie said, that used to be my favorite towel. I got laid on that towel at Jones Beach. Your mother got laid on that towel at Jones Beach, Johnny said. G-Lover laughed like it was the first joke he’d ever heard. He was running-back fast and played center field.

We went to a house we’d been to a million times.

The Gaynors’ was awesome because there was a corner of the fence that was wide open to accommodate an ancient apple tree. It was easy to monkey up the trunk and then drop silently from an over-hanging branch into the water. The pool was warm like a bath. We could chill there all night, listening to apples splash in the deep end. Leslie Gaynor was the hottest Jewish girl anyone had ever seen. We were always hoping she’d emerge from the sliding glass doors on her back porch, peel off a towel, and skinny-dip. Davey would later say he did her, but no one ever confirmed it.

The Gaynors had a skimmer, an automatic vacuum cleaner they left on while they were sleeping. It whirred around the pool like a spaceship, spitting chlorine and clunking into floating apples and pushing them toward the filter. We emptied the filter-baskets under the stars, dumping the apples near the trunk of the tree by the fence as if that’s where they’d naturally fallen. Sometimes we fished frogs and turtles and drowned mice out of filters too. If we could do good deeds like that for the owners of the pools we trespassed in, we did them.

The night G-Lover came with us, the water was caressing us like some hot chick’s soft lips, everything lush and warm and still, our baseball dirt dissolving in the water and getting sucked up by the whirring vacuum as it scooted around the pool. This is fucking beautiful, G said. Your mother’s fucking beautiful, Johnny said. G laughed loud like we were on the back of the bus after trouncing some weak squad of hitless wonders and Davey hissed to shut the fuck up but it was too late.

The sliding glass doors opened and Leslie’s fat father yelled, Who’s out there? What’s going on? I’m calling the police.

We had a plan for that kind of situation, which was to morph into Saturday morning cartoon characters and duck our heads underwater. Hold our collective breath for forty-five seconds and then raise our eyes just above the surface and hope whoever thought he heard something would start thinking it was all in his head. He needed to stop smoking that cheeb or to get more sleep, and then he’d go construct a sophisticated salami sandwich with gourmet deli mustard to calm himself down and everything would be chill again. Except G-Lover didn’t know about the plan. As soon as he heard Leslie’s fat father yelling, he took off. Bounded out of the pool and scurried up the tree and over the fence. Fuck, Johnny yelled because he knew we were all busted. Everybody scrambled after G and Leslie’s pops was spitting and sputtering and erupting like a huge and loud volcano: I see you! I see you kids! Get the hell off my property!

G sprinted like the ghost of Gayle Sayers and we all ran back to Lennie’s house and hustled down to the basement and laughed our asses completely off the continent. Then we heard an engine tune down as a car pulled into the driveway. Shit, Lennie said, Kill the light, and he climbed up to the casement to look out the window. He said it was Gaynor, fuming, huffing out of his stupendous marshmallow white Cadillac with the dog towel in his hands. Damn, G, he said, you left your towel?

Man, I wasn’t thinking about a towel. I was thinking about not getting shot by that fat dude.

Lennie shook his head in the gloom and I thought he was about to start talking about Jews negotiating again, but he seemed too nervous for that. That’s an old towel, he said. I had it back in day-camp. My mom sewed my name in there.

Fuck, Johnny said. Why’d you run anyway, G?

I’m not white like you, man. They could hang me from that apple tree.

If Johnny were about to make another mother joke, he didn’t. I thought about G in center field, calling Johnny off on balls in the gap, sometimes when he couldn’t reach them. How they’d roll to the fence and our coach would rail at him, smack his palm against G’s temple and say, Use your head, for crissakes, use your goddamn head out there. You have one, right?

We heard the doorbell ring.

Everyone be quiet, Lennie said. No one move.

It was dark and damp. Cold cement floor. Nothing to shelter us but one beat-up couch and the bench for the bench-press. Our shorts were still wet and we were shaking. Johnny turned on the TV to create a little more light, but muted the sound. The doorbell rang again and we heard Lennie’s father clomp down the stairs from his bedroom and say, Hang on, hold your horses, hang on. He opened the door and then the voices were muffled, but we could tell Gaynor was pissed. We watched Janet Jackson dance provocatively in silence, our ears straining to pick up what was happening outside the front door. She was wearing something vampirish, black, rubbery-looking and low-cut. It was enthralling. I stopped listening to the muffled voices. G-Lover didn’t.

After a few minutes, we heard the door slam and Lennie reported that Gaynor, towel-less, was headed back to his car, muttering. He drove off and Mr. Ross opened the door to the basement, began to walk down the stairs. Yo, I’m gonna bust out, G said. I’m going home.

Just chill, bro, Johnny said. We’ll be all right.

You’ll be all right.

We could feel G vibrating, itching to run again, but he didn’t. Everyone stayed quiet. Janet Jackson opened her mouth to moan and it was spectacular. The round hole of it in the dark. Len, turn on the light, his father said.

He was holding the dog-towel. I don’t want you guys trespassing anymore, he said. It’s dangerous. I lied for you, Lennie. Told Bob Gaynor you were upstairs sleeping. Had been for hours. Said we sold the towel at a garage sale years ago. Got seventy-five cents for it. Know why I did that?

No one answered. Johnny respectfully turned off the TV.

Because Bob Gaynor’s a jerk. Said he saw a Black kid in his pool. That’s all he said, a Black kid and a gang of hoodlums. Said if he’d had a gun, he would’ve fired it. Would’ve been within his rights. That’s bullshit, but one of you could have been dead. Probably G, because that’s where he would have aimed.

G nodded.

This nonsense stops, Lennie’s father said. It stops tonight.

He threw the towel at Lennie. If you want to swim, Mr. Ross said, go to the club. Better yet, go to Jones Beach. That’s where the girls are anyway.

He went back upstairs. Lennie and Davey began to lift weights. Prince danced and so did Madonna. Stevie Nicks in her hippie sandals. Give me a spot, G said, throwing more weight on the bar than any of the rest of us could lift. Don’t let this shit fall on my chest.

Davey’s:
As a crew, we only spend time there once. After a hurricane, his yard floods and nine inches of water seep through the floor. Six of us join Davey and work for five hours moving furniture and rolling up sopping wet rugs. They weigh excessive amounts that challenge our hamstrings. We pull and grunt and manage to drag them outside so we can spread them in the sun to dry. Mop an ugly grey river out through the garage. There’s no snow anywhere and not even the idea of it, but Johnny asks if he can borrow a pair of cross-country skis Davey hasn’t touched since middle school. There’s an unfinished collection of about twenty license plates from different states decorating a wall that also features a poster of Don Mattingly lining a base-hit. Since Davey’s dad is dead, his mom tells us what to do. She’s purposeful and driven. Nobody slacks off and, afterward, she buys us sodas and burgers from McDonald’s.

The thing only I know about Davey’s basement is that there’s a double ceiling. Davey’s dad built it when he was still alive. He died when Davey was twelve. He was forty and it was an unexpected heart attack. No previous problems and he was in good shape, golfed all the time, worked on the house when he could, so it was a messed-up situation. Davey heard one grunt while his father was sitting in the living room reading the newspaper in a big chair, and that was it. Dude stopped breathing. A fucked-up shock like that. The summer before, he’d covered the exposed pipes around the perimeter of the basement with a layer of sheetrock, and now the ceiling looks like an upside-down kiddie pool without any water in it. In front of the wall where the Mattingly poster and license plates are tacked, there’s a line of halfway hammered-in nails jutting from the sheetrock, each nail spaced about eight inches from the next.

The secret aspect is that I’m the only one who knows Davey put those nails there. He found an old practice net his father used to set up in the backyard to hit golf balls into, and he banged in the nails and hung the net from the sheetrock. Now he smacks baseballs into it. Every night. A thousand swings with the lucky bat he won in a raffle at the team banquet. He’s got an adjustable tee he stole from the equipment trailer at school and he sets it up so he can swing at two hundred pitches down and in, two hundred up and in, two hundred belt high over the middle, two hundred up and out, two hundred knee-high on the corner.

I only know about the net and the tee because one night after a game when he went oh-for-five, Davey felt his hands were too slow on pitches high and tight, like they were dragging through the zone. He called me up and told me to come over and I went because Davey never invites people to his house. When I got there, he made me sit on a milk crate and soft-toss balls to him so he could smash them into the net. Over and over. Bang bang bang. Chin high, he said. Put the ball right here toward my neck. I thought we’d do it for ten minutes. We didn’t. We did it for an hour-and-a-half. Toss him the ball—smack. Toss him the ball—smack. I was so numbed I felt like I was in Social Studies listening to Mr. Patterson talk about immigration quotas during the Industrial Revolution. Just a few more, Davey kept saying, tears streaming down his face, hands blistered and bleeding as he ripped one toss after another into the net. Gotta get it quicker, damn it. Just a few more. Gotta get quicker.

Neither the net nor the tee is present the day we help deal with the flood. Just the nails in a jagged line sticking from the sheetrock. I’m betting Davey hid the rest of the stuff in his bedroom. I don’t know why he doesn’t tell anyone how hard he works on his swing. He practices all year long. Winter too. It’s how he keeps his weight down for wrestling. A thousand swings makes me lose three-quarters of a pound, he told me. Makes my grip stronger too.