Knuckleheads (17 page)

You absolutely do not want Davey clamping on your wrist. His fingers will squeeze your bones like pliers.

Davey’s like Archie who can’t decide which girl he likes better, Betty or Veronica. With Davey, the question is baseball or wrestling, which one merits top priority. Even though he’s baseball captain, I’m betting it’ll be wrestling. Davey likes to control shit and baseball has too many variables. You can smack the blood out of a ball and some fucker on the other team can still dive and catch it. Wrestling’s more elemental, a one-on-one battle. Two bodies push against each other, flesh on flesh. One body folds.

Davey doesn’t like folding.

Maybe it’s because it’s too sad to chill there with his dad gone, but nobody ever hangs out at Davey’s house, except occasional girls. The rest of us pretty much only stop by his front porch. Pick him up and bring him wherever we’re going, like Mike D’s or Johnny’s. There was a rumor once about Davey and Maria Louisa. That’s bullshit, Davey said, a rumor only. But I had a feeling it was true.

Stacey’s:
Girl had a basement bigger than my house. Like twelve rooms and a bathroom she called a changing room. People used it to get out of their bathing suits after swimming in the pool in her backyard. Her yard was surrounded with a wrought-iron fence with metal spikes and we’d never pool-hopped there because nobody wanted to risk his family jewels climbing over it. Swimming with her at night felt like pool-hopping though, like it was a scam to use the luxury pool because Stacey was overweight and her nose was too skinny, sharp like a broken bottle. I dove into the deep end and glided under the surface in the manner of a sleek penguin and when I came up she made jokes that were provocative and there was no reason anyone had to know about it, so we ended up kissing in the hot-tub portion of the pool. Her tongue was surprisingly soft and skilled, and she turned on an underwater red light so the episode glowed like a diabolical porno movie.

Her parents were home but never ventured downstairs and we continued to kiss in the changing room. Her breasts were large and plump and popped out of her swimsuit like two fat grocery-store muffins. Nobody ever had a problem with Stacey’s breasts. We migrated into the TV room and inserted a movie in the VCR, a comedy with Richard Pryor. It was funny, but laughter wasn’t what we were thinking about. The air conditioning was freezing but its hum was atmospheric and the blanket we huddled beneath was a down comforter that weighed eight hundred pounds and covered us like a promise that was not broken. Afterward, she baked chocolate chip cookies in the basement kitchen while I flipped through a picture book about tragedies that had befallen the original cast members of
Saturday Night Live
. The kitchen had linoleum tiles in a pattern of blue and yellow flowers. The cookies tasted buttery, better than anything my mom or my grandmother ever fed me.

Mike D’s:
Twice a month on Friday nights, we covered the bumper pool table and played cards. The Yankees were still green on television. Our game was seven-card stud, deuces wild, but sometimes we played anaconda—deal seven cards, keep four, pass two to the left, one to the right, start betting. Five-of-a-kind beat a royal flush. Quarter ante and no buy-in. Beer if we could get it. Potato chips, original flavor or barbecue.

We never invited G-Lover when we played cards. Probably we thought he didn’t have any money. Johnny bet high and bluffed and tended to lose big early. Ended up watching green baseball games from the vinyl couch with Mike’s little brother Christopher. Davey accused Lennie of cheating every week. Two wrestlers who liked to beat the shit out of each other. You’re a scumbag, Lennie would say, and Mike D. would cut it off right there. Go out to the yard, he’d say, make each other eat grass.

They would and we’d follow. Normally it didn’t get bloody. Christopher and Johnny liked to speculate, made bets neither had intentions of paying off. Lennie had more moves and was a better athlete, bigger too. Davey was more vicious. Would bite your wrist if he had to, or squeeze somebody’s nuts to win. It was uncomfortable watching them fight outside where the only place to sit was on a rock wall near the forsythia bush Claudia had urinated on three years earlier, back when we were still kids.

There was an old C.B. radio in the basement. If there were no baseball game on TV, Johnny and Christopher liked to monitor the truckers discussing the location of speed traps and the best prostitutes. Once, in the yard, Davey elbowed Lennie in the side of his face and his ear started to bleed, then wouldn’t stop, leaking like a hose someone poked a hole in.

Mike’s parents weren’t home and nobody had a car. I held Lennie’s head against my sweatshirt to try and sop the blood. Davey cursed and kicked the rock wall. Inside, the Yanks rallied from three runs down and Johnny said into the radio, Breaker one-nine, breaker one-nine, can anyone take us to the emergency room?

SYLVIA'S IMPATIENCE IS A HOT ORANGE SHIMMER. She’s drumming her fingers against her teacup and she’d punch me in the face right now if she could, nail me right here in Toledo, in this god-awful antiseptic waiting room, scrubbed up in our prettiest clothes while Josh, our twelve-year-old son, is getting interviewed by the good doctors Weiss and Sutter. The doctors get to decide if Josh is an acceptable candidate for rehab. If they say, no, sorry, your son’s a lost cause, we’ll have to find another program, but this one in Toledo—Maple Ridge, with the lake and the ice-skating and the organic food—is supposed to be the best. Sylvia’s nervous. She wants Josh here, only an hour from home. If Maple Ridge doesn’t accept him, and if we can’t find somewhere else, Josh goes to juvenile detention.

That’s what happens, the judge told us, his face a rusty anvil, when your son is arrested for selling Ecstasy at his middle school.

Sylvia hates me for lots of reasons, but right now it’s mostly because I’m reading. We’re sitting in these unforgiving plastic chairs that smell like old milk and the good doctors are grilling Josh and he might go to jail. Our twelve-year-old son’s a drug dealer and I’m pissing Sylvia off because I’m somehow not zoned out and stunned into paralysis. I’m reading
The New York Times Magazine
, the year-end issue about all the famous people who died over the past twelve months, and Sylvia’s fed up because, really, how can I behave like this, as if life just goes on, as if we haven’t irrevocably screwed up our son by failing to raise him with the proper aversion to addicting his pre-teen friends to narcotics?

Leaving aside for a moment the hypocrisy that Sylvia, despite the trauma, despite the stress and the this-can’t-be-happenings and the oh-my-Gods—leaving aside that Sylvia remembered to pack in her purse the special Raku green tea bags or whatever she’s addicted to drinking like she’s a registered and certificated Buddhist monk—leaving beside all that, who the hell is she to judge how I respond to a crisis?

It’s not that I’m emotionless. I just don’t want to panic. I want Josh to believe I’m here for him. Panicking, finger-drumming on the teacup and all that attendant hostility, that will only freak him out more. Still, all I could think about the whole way here with him in the backseat, asleep or pretending to be, his long greasy hair tilted against the window and covering his eyes, is what did I ever teach this kid? In his twelve years on this planet, what wisdom did I, his father, impart to him?

I could think of only one thing. When he was younger, four or five maybe, before he got skinny and acne and started wearing the black t-shirts, I’d take him to Michigan basketball games. I remember the time-outs, usually toward the end of the game when the idea was to hype the crowd to encourage the Wolverines to go on one final run, and they’d boom the Village People’s "YMCA" through the PA. This is the one thing his father taught his son, how to make his hands first into the “Y” spread out above his head, then to curl them into his shoulders to approximate the “M,” then the curved “C” to the right side, then above the head again, palms meeting to form the “A.” To spell YMCA with his hands—this is what I taught him. He’d practice it at home and we’d head to the arena pretty much just to anticipate the late-game time-outs.

“Read this,” I say to Sylvia, handing her the magazine, which entails approximately the same risk as presenting her with a pistol and suggesting she shoot me with it. She rolls her eyes as she often does, basically growls, and returns to the process of rapping her fingers against her tea. “No, really,” I urge, but gently. “For real. Just read it.”

Since it’s the first time in four days I’ve spoken to her without irritation in my voice, she heaves an enormous disgusted sigh and decides to glance at the story. “The Naked Guy,” she says, then starts to read.

Sylvia’s a beautiful woman, if a bit less so than when I first met her, cheeks more hollowed now, neck still elegant but beginning to hint at places where skin will eventually flap. When she reads though, she’s stunning, her face a portrait of deep devotion, as if the words on the page were written expressly for her. Maybe she knows this, how stunning she looks, the mid-morning light from the lone waiting-room window bronzing her. She reads and her hand brushes her teacup, teasing it with her fingers as if she’s petting a dog.

It’s not a long article and Sylvia reads quickly, much faster than I do, so it’s less than two minutes before the spell of my watching her is broken by her sharp intake of breath. She’s reached the part where The Naked Guy—Andrew Martinez, the article says—suffocates himself in a jail cell with a plastic bag. “Damn,” she says. “Whoa.”

I’d like her to stop holding the teacup at this point and to reach for my hand, but we haven’t touched each other in weeks so I don’t expect it, and it doesn’t happen. When she finishes the article a few seconds later, she hands the magazine back to me. “I didn’t know about the rocks thing,” she says. “Did you ever see that, what the article says about the rocks? I never saw piles of rocks anywhere.”

“No,” I say. “I didn’t either. I don’t remember anything that happened to him after he got kicked out. I didn’t even know his real name.”

“I did,” Sylvia says. “Andrew. I remember that.”

For a moment, I’m jealous, as if Sylvia had something going with him back then, but the feeling passes quickly. It was a long time ago when The Naked Guy was famous, when the fuzzed-out pictures of him wearing just a backpack as he walked to class were regular features on the national news, and now, right now, our son’s getting interviewed to see whether he’s beyond redemption. I drum my fingers, quietly, exaggerated and in slow-motion, against the plastic chair, and pray that in addition to the YMCA gestures, that at some point I taught Josh to sit up straight, to make eye contact from beneath that greasy mat.

Sylvia and I both knew The Naked Guy. Or, at least, we saw him a lot. We were students at Berkeley in the early nineties and met in a class that The Naked Guy was in too. It’s true what the article says, he was very polite about his nakedness. He used to spread a sweatshirt out—a red hooded one that said Lifeguard—on the seat in the lecture hall before he sat down. That’s what grossed Sylvia out the most about him, the sweatshirt.

“He better wash that thing, like, every day,” she wrote to me once in a note during a lecture. “Which thing are you talking about?” I wrote back, even though I knew what she meant. She laughed and almost spit out her gum and the professor glanced up at us from his lectern and Sylvia’s cheeks turned red too. I wanted to kiss her right then, and did later that night, for the first time, after we went out for Indian food. “Spicy,” she said, one hand patting the collar of my shirt.

The class was a strange one, the professor trying hard to be odd, but actually winding up fairly standard-copy for that campus. A couple hundred people were in the class, including The Naked Guy. It was called “Man and His Legs: A History of the Evolution of Military Transportation,” and it was definitely one of those only-at-Berkeley classes, propagated on the idea that the less we as a species had to use our legs in military combat, the more capable we became of killing each other in mass numbers. The hippie professor clearly floated the agenda that we should all surrender our material possessions and spend our days strolling Thoreau-style through the woods. Then we wouldn’t be able to sit on chairs in the cold caverns of nuclear submarines and launch missiles with the press of a button that could vaporize thousands of people instantly, our own legs inert beneath gun-metal desks.

“Think about that,” the professor repeated about a billion times. “Here is Man stationary. He no longer has to use his legs to run from his enemy because he’s far enough away that his enemy cannot strike him. He just sits there and kills. He could be
legless
and still cause massive destruction.”

I thought the guy was naïve. Sylvia mostly was steamed he kept saying “man” all the time. “What about women?” she’d say to me, sometimes with a wink if she were in a spicy mood. “Don’t we have legs too?”

“Thank God you do,” I’d say back. We both loved the irony of a class called Man and His Legs that featured an actual man-student who attended class with his long, bare legs—the whole vast landscape of them, from hip-bone to toes—angling out from his seat. You’d have thought the professor would have appreciated The Naked Guy, how he was a living, breathing example of someone rejecting materialism, but he seemed nearly as irritated with him as he was with Sylvia’s laugh. When The Naked Guy raised his hand to comment or ask a question—which was surprisingly often—the professor would cut him off after barely a few words. “Yes, yes,” he’d say. “But, no, no, you don’t have it quite right.”

“He’s rude,” Sylvia wrote. “The Guy’s already naked. Does he have to be humiliated too?”

I thought it was probably the professor who felt humiliated. He’d probably never signed on to have a guy with no clothes ask him questions. Sylvia said he was just jealous, that The Naked Guy was practicing what he only had the guts to preach. “Hypocrite!” she wrote another time.

It could have been, though, that the professor was irritated because The Naked Guy always spent the first ten minutes of each lecture eating. Nothing particularly wrong with someone chowing down in class, but the guy was nude. We tried to be nonchalant about it, but we couldn’t help but be fascinated by everything he did. Half the class would watch him eat. He had a wide mouth and huge bright teeth, and the event was a complicated process. In the same careful way he’d spread his sweatshirt on his seat before sitting down, he’d retrieve a paper bag from his backpack and unpack his lunch. It felt like elementary school, the same thing every day, an apple, a carton of milk, and what looked like a homemade peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He’d eat them in the same order too, as if he were superstitious about it—half the apple first, then the sandwich, then the milk, then the rest of the apple.