(part two) The Roller Skating Hall Putsch and the Rise of Fascism
“Beauty, cleanliness, and order clearly occupy a peculiar position among the requirements of civilization. No one will maintain that they are ... essential to life ... and yet no one would willingly relegate them to the background as trivial matters. Beauty is an instance which plainly shows that culture is not simply utilitarian in its aims, for the lack of beauty is a thing we cannot tolerate in civilization.”
- Civilization and Its Discontents
Sigmund Freud
(four) The Embassy
Eddie was a player, all right. More than any of the suburban fascists with whom Jake had come in contact, Eddie had mastered a subtly nuanced yet iron clad control over his surroundings. He oozed the charm and confidence that was needed to sway the sweating puling underlings in his charge. Like a demented piper, he led the milkfat white-bread children around him into dangerous and potentially life-threatening situations their parents wouldn’t have dreamed they’d follow. They hung on his every word, his every opinion, aching for the morsels of advise like junkies in a rat-infested flophouse. This boy Stephens was the sole arbiter of taste. They dazed helplessly in the waft of his brio, turning on each other in turn as they jostled for position in his hierarchy. Daily, they made fools of themselves prostrating before the Manboy God, the Supreme Leader. Jake’s first gut reaction to this Dalai Lame-ass came home in spades, diamonds, hearts and clubs. Though he’d previously suffered humility at the hands of other ersatz fascists, those petty tyrants paled before their true master.
It was spring. The gutters in the street bled red with the fallen buds of maples, choking the drains and flooding the dead end of South Martin. The boys, they were younger then, would sometimes build paper boats, waterproofed with candlewax spread on along the keel, and float them in the makeshift pond at the end of the street. They graduated to models of the U.S.S. Arizona, and the U.S.S. Detroit equipped with motorized propellers. Occasionally, these would sink. One of the boys, likely a twin, would stand on the curb/bank whining over the loss. He wouldn’t dare wade in and right his boat. That would break the illusion of the high seas. And, besides, the pond was a good four inches deep.
Then, without warning, they started to sink them on purpose. They would gleefully stage elaborate pyrotechnic displays, building them into the models, blowing them up, each catastrophe bigger than the next. The twins were the best at it. Each handcrafted model would be destroyed exactly as it died in real life. Encyclopedias and history books were pored over, pictures were studied to achieve the utmost in historical accuracy. The smoke trailing from the blasted hull of the Arizona, her listing to the side, going down slowly, gracefully in the mid-morning sun. It would’ve brought tears to the eyes of Jake’s dad, who had the luck of being transferred from the mighty carrier to another ship 6 months before December 7, 1941.
Yes, it was spring, and with spring came thoughts of baseball, of tromping through the dank, musty woods down past the dead-end that separates Clayton from Royal Oak, of, more importantly, girls in shorts and halter tops, their swelling breastlets outlined under the polyester fabric. Of girls, clumped near the pretzel stand sucking down Cherry Coke slushes in a frigidly air-conditioned Mall.
Girls had lately taken precedence over other matters since the first time all the boys had, at the suggestion of Eddie no doubt, walked up to the Embassy Roller-skating Hall. Not rink, Hall.
See, it once was a dancehall where minor Big Bands would play. This part of the sleepy bedroom community would wake, grind the sleep from its eyes and dance the night away. The post-war crowd was desperate for fun and yearned to stuff every moment with it. This crowd was slowly phased out by bobbie sockers, their sweater-wearing lettermen Squares, and the Greasers who would come between them. Cops would trawl by in their heavy low-bottomed cruisers taunting the boys smoking outside. Fights broke out in the vacant lot next door, site of what eventually would be the new Burger King.
Soon the crowds thinned to the point of breaking the owners when they decided to change tactics. After a closure of only two weeks, a new sign was hung over the word “Dance” in Embassy Dance Hall. It read “Rollerskating” in a cramped script. It was awkward, but it got the idea across. When they eventually changed the sign to the bright Neon sign that exists today they kept the name the same; Embassy Rollerskating Hall.
The boys bilked skating money from their frazzled mothers-- except Richie, who actually went so far as to steal it from her purse when she asked him to fetch her cigarettes--and started their hike up to 14 Mile Rd. to stand in the line that ran along the white stucco facade of the Embassy.
Shortly after turning onto Custer Ave. and safely out of view of his house, Eddie had produced a pack of Marlboro Lights from his pocket, tapped one out of the pack, lit it and passed to Morris with the nonchalance of a career smoker. Morris took it out of reflex more than out of actually wanting to smoke and stared at it awkwardly before bringing it to his lips. Alex and Scott looked at each other and then to Jake. Jake’s eyes widened and he made a motion with his head that seemed to convey, 'I will if you will'.
Morris started to pass the cigarette back to Eddie.
“Pass it on”.
Morris turned to the others and passed it down the line.
Alex hit off the cigarette and immediately started to cough, his face glowing red from the effort. Scott tittered at the discomfort his sibling was experiencing. Alex reached up from his coughing fit and slapped his brother in the back of the head. His raspy hack thinned to a wheeze as whiteness returned to his mug. He accusingly thrust the cigarette at his twin.
Scott took it and took a small hit, like he was faking it.
“C’mon, Pussy”, Eddie snarled.
Scott took another deeper hit, like it was a joint. For a moment he looked like scene from a disturbing high school anti-smoking filmstrip with its copious shots of ruined, shriveled lungs. Or, an all child version of a Cheech and Chong film. He puffed out a great white-gray cloud of smoke, revealing that fact that he didn’t inhale, and passed the cancer stick to Jake.
Jake put his hand up to say “No”.
“Do it or walk home. Everyone else is in. Don’t be such a Fag.”, Eddie threatened.
Jake took the butt. This was nothing. He’d seen his brothers and sisters do this a thousand times. He’d watched intently as his brother went through the whole smoking ritual. The packing of the hard box. The shake to bring the cigarette up from its neat little row. The drawing it from the box with his mouth. The ‘tink’ the lid of the Zippo made as he opened it with a flick of his thumb. The ever-so-slight smell of lighter fluid before the strikewheel was spun. The gold flame touching, toasting the tobacco seconds before igniting. The orange glow blooming with the first hit. The smoke cascading from the nostrils and mouth in slow curling tendrils. It was all so sensual, so cool, so forbidden, so fucking bad.
Jake did it exactly like his brother. For the moment he was filled with all the fragile James Dean machismo that his plump pubescent frame could hold. He let the smoke drift from his nose and exhaled, passing the butt to Richie and bobbed his head up and down to a non-existent tune.
“Look at that. Yer a fuckin’ pro, Jake. A Fucking Pro”, Eddie laughed and took the cigarette from a retching Richie.
Jake nodded vaguely at the remark and bit the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling.
“You know what they call a cigarette in England?” Eddie questioned no one in particular.
“They don’t call ‘em cigarettes?”, Scott asked.
“Why would he ask the question if they did?”, Alex blurted at his twin. They loved getting the best of each other, loved every opportunity to show the other up to be an asshole or stupid or in any way diminish or dehumanize him. They reveled in it. To Jake this seemed to be a bit masochistic in a sense, them being nearly identical twins, and winced every time they set into each other.
“Fuck you”, Scott replied in a confrontational yet vulnerable tone, the awkwardness of the retort made sad by the crack in his high tenor voice.
“I’m tellin’”, was Alex’s pat response.
“A Fag”, Jake said.
“Yeah. And, it takes one to know one”, Eddie yelled and put his hand out for a slap five, his voice pumping out a rattling scattershot trill of laughter.
Jake was caught between getting it right and indirectly being called a fag. Reluctantly, he moved to slap Eddie’s hand, though he really didn’t know why, and Eddie pulled it away.
“Too Slow”. Eddie snickered a laugh and dragged on his dwindling cigarette.
And, so it went until they reached the Embassy. One after another belittling, infantilizing, feminizing, questioning their sexual preference, questioning their lineage, anything to hurt or offend each other. Eddie dished the sharp, stinging insults out fast and furious, sparing no one. The remaining kids hurled minor barbs riffing off of Eddie’s first one, rippling them out like rings on pond water; each less harmful than the previous.
This was typical behavior, no more harsh or gentle than any given day. Sure, occasionally, someone would go too far and there would be an odd, graceless groping and shoving match that caused some sweat and was broken up by someone in a passing car or someone mowing their lawn. Someone would get their favorite shirt torn. Another would have a slick green grass stain on the knee of their new grey cords. “Fuck, Mom’ll have a shit fit. That’s never coming out”. The two fighters would walk apart from each other, flushed and winded until they got to where they were going. Eddie said they needed to toughen up or the high school guys with their muscle cars and black belts in Tae Kwon Do would eat them alive. They loved to administer the dread “Swirly” to the weak or the outcast in the new pack of freshmen.
Ever since Jake had the near death experience at open swim at the Clayton pool when David Polks pushed him in the deep end, the boys feared drowning. But they feared drowning in a piss-filled toilet even more. Eddie would teach them what they needed to cultivate the hardass burnout don’t take no shit from no one demeanor they would need to survive in highschool, “You fucking wussies”. In Jake’s opinion, the highschool guys weren’t the ones they should’ve feared, but there was no way he could sway the others from Eddie the Great without first alienating himself. He was a member of the Stephens Youth whether he liked it or not; he would assimilate or perish.
* * *
They stood against the stucco wall huddling together in a clump, trying desperately to look older and far more sophisticated then they were. Only Eddie was succeeding in this. He looked 18, 17 at least and he had the swagger that comes only from having had sex, which, considering he hadn’t, added to the mastery of the performance. The girls passing by noticed him first and then the other pathetic specimens: Alex and Scott, the two bickering twins, Morris, the awkward geek with a buzz cut, Richie, the Latinate looking punk with a shifty demeanor and the marks of a professional thief and, poor Jake, a bulky boy who looked as if he’d never grown out of the last vestiges of his babyfat. When the girls saw them, their step quickened, their gaze would stiffen and turn. Eddie would bristle and become embarrassed, then rain down insults under his breath, chiding them for their clothes, their shoes, their whole demeanor, even their breeding. They were dragging him down. They’d better shape up or they were gonna get cut loose.
“And, I mean it, you sad fucks.”
The deeply tanned diminutive and grizzled owner of the Embassy unlocked the door, came out of the building and lit the stump of his Phillies Blunt. He spit a loose piece of tobacco to the ground and jerked his head toward the entrance. The boy first in line then entered the building and the crowd began to move. Jake visibly stiffened as he passed in the waft of the old man’s cigar stench. Deep, carved vertical lines ran across the man’s face like faultlines. His eyes were packed in behind the folds of loose skin created by years of hard toil. They flashed beneath the large greyed caterpillars that were his brows. He wore a hunter orange John Deere cap and a blue quilted vest with duct tape vainly trying to hold its fiberfill guts from bursting out. Strapped to his feet was a worn pair of rental skates with eraser-colored wheels. Hanging around his neck from a tattered shoelace was a gleaming silver whistle. If it weren’t for the skates, Jake would have surely dwarfed the man. If it weren’t for the whistle, the talisman in which he carried his strength, wielding the supreme power to eject Jake from the rink, or, hall, he would not be someone to be feared.
The boys got their skates, tied them on and bolted on to the skating floor. Weaving in and out of the taller slower skaters, most of them older boys skating backward in front of older girls, making their way toward the end of the rink where the mirror was. At this far end of the hall, mounted above the skating surface was the DJ booth. The short-- for he wore no skates-- mustached, long-haired man that spun records like, “Play That Funky Music White Boy”, “Sad Eyes”, “Free Bird” and the most of the songs by Journey, mounted the metal ladder attached to the wall and climbed into the box where he would stay until he needed to relieve himself. This was usually when the skaters would be treated the interminable “Inna Godda Davida” by Iron Butterfly or “Moby Dick” by Led Zeppelin, because the bathrooms were located on the complete opposite side of the hall.
When he played Disco, most of the boys sat down and let the girls skate, except Jimmy D’Monaco who either knew something the other boys didn’t or really really liked Leo Sayer. Occasionally, the DJ peppered the mix with new stuff from The Cars or Blondie and the young boys and girls, those Jake’s age, would flood the floor with awkward sexuality. Eddie would skate backwards--he was the only one of the boys who knew how--and talk with girls. The other boys skated next to him, jockeying for position in the girls’ field of view.
Most of the females they encountered were girls from their own school, Kernwood. A few were girls from other schools in Clayton. Girls from Schram, Bunter, Hacker and even as far as Strickland School flocked to the Embassy because it was an inexpensive way to spend four hours, both for them and for their parents. The parents looked at it as a way to ditch the kids and have some quiet emotionless sex before they went back to doing lawn work or laundry. The kids saw it as a way to test out their blooming sexuality while getting some aerobic exercise. In both cases, all parties came away sweaty and unsatisfied.
“Switch Directions”, came over the loudspeaker, temporarily drowning out “Whip It” by Devo.
“All Skaters. Switch Directions.”
A few of the younger skaters fell trying to maneuver the stop and the turn. This included Alex. Scott stood above his sibling laughing and pointing at him. He turned and looked toward Eddie for approval for his ridicule when Alex kicked him in the back of the knee buckling it and sending him to the parquet. The rest of the boys skated away from the twins as Scott crawled on top of Alex and started to wail away on him. Eddie, Morris, Jake and Richie had made it to the huge mirror that ran under the DJ booth, along the entire back wall of the rink before they heard the whistle blow. Jake looked into the mirror through the oncoming bodies and saw Alex and Scott on either side of the wizened troll in the blue quilted vest being escorted from the floor.
“I swear to fuck, you can’t take them fucking anywhere. They fuck everything up.” Eddie shouted over the beat. “Fucking Fuck-Ups.”
This was No Parents Land and Eddie made the most of it. He swore like an autoworker, testing new and interesting combinations of the word ‘fuck’. He’s use it as a gerund, a noun, an adjective and even a substitute syllable, as in his original phrase ‘Per-Fucked, Just Per-Fucked.’ Jake found this redundant. The word was repeated until it made absolutely no sense and held no weight whatsoever.
It was like the story that Jake’s mother told about his sister Denise reading the packages of make-up at the store. She repeated the word “Maybelline” over and over until the heavily lip glossed girl behind the makeup counter looked at her like a special needs child. His mother always ended the story with: “And I gave her a little pinch under the arm”--which she would always demonstrate on Jake-- “...and she hasn’t said it since.” Jake was saddened by the fact that his sister would only by off-brand makeup and she left the room every time a cosmetic commercial came on. Which, Jake thought, probably explained why she was never a big fan of Soap Operas.
Jake wanted nothing more than to administer one of his mother’s patented under-the-arm-makes-your-eyes-water-and-your-nerves-stand-on-end pinches. He would love to get just the barest quarter of an inch of skin between his thumb and forefinger, squeeze and twist until Eddie was down on his knees before him, crying Uncle with tears streaming down his peachfuzzed cheeks. He would then, in his daydream, knee him in the mouth and watch him fall limply to the wood floor, his tongue lolling out of his mouth like a fish. Then he’d turn and skate over to where Cheryl Tiegs was waiting in her pink bikini; they’d link arms and skate to his favorite new song, “Cars” by Gary Numan.
“Hey, Space Cadet. Over here, Fucko.” Jake broke from his revenge fantasy and rolled over to the rest of the boys lined up along the mirror.
Eddie had already extracted the black long handled comb from his crushed cords and proceeded to drag it through his intricately feathered locks. Richie pulled a blunt Ace comb from his pocket, probably one he pilfered from his dad while he was passed out on the couch, and mimed everything Eddie did. Morris didn’t have a comb, nor did he need one. His father didn’t believe in hair on boys. Every time his hair got long enough to grab, Mr. Shuler carted him off to the myopic town barber, Bob.
Invariably, every kid in Clayton got his first cut at Bob’s. The sign out front read: Bob’s the Barber. Jake didn’t know if this was a grammatical error or just a simple statement, seeing how Bob was the only barber in Clayton. Bob’s was a little three-chair shop on the main drag, where the barber pole spun not only red and white, but blue as well. Why one man would need three chairs was a puzzle to all the kids who went there. Jake’s dad had mentioned once Bob had had two partners, brothers, but one got sick with cancer and the other had to care for him. So, they sold their shares to Bob to pay the doctor bills and he ended up with two chairs he didn’t need and more scissors and combs than he’d ever use.
The fathers of the boys who polished the vinyl seat of Bob’s center chair with their butts every few weeks would sit in one of the other chairs, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee--Bob always had a fresh pot on--or reading the latest issue of Playboy. Oddly enough, it was here where their hair was shorn that most boys would see a woman naked for the first time.
Morris stood rubbing his scared stiff buzz cut, his back to the mirror, elbows resting on the bar that ran the length of the wall. Jake did the same, not because he had no hair, but because he had no comb.
Jake unbuttoned his light plaid shirt with the fake mother-of-pearl inlaid buttons. Despite the 45° weather outside, the rink was steamy and warm. Jake fanned himself with the front of his shirt, revealing his personalized T-shirt beneath. The shirt was blue with the word “BRAT” running across the chest in mirrored reflective iron-on letters. He turned toward the mirror and wiped away the beading sweat gathering in the peach fuzz on his upper lip.
“What’s this?”, Eddie asked, poking his sharp finger into the “A” in “BRAT”.
“It’s my shirt.”
“Where’d you get it?”, Eddie shot back.
“The Mall. At the shirt stand near Sander’s Ice Cream”.
“They spelled it wrong. It should be...”, he said, jabbing his finger hard into Jake’s chest with every letter. “F-A-T”.
Eddie looked over at Richie and Morris, rolled his eyes, and skated off.
Richie leaned into Jake’s face. “Brat.”
He followed Eddie, looking back and shaking his head. Jake wondered if he really knew why he was shaking his head, or if he was just aping the leader. Morris scooted over to Jake.
“Hey”, he said leaning into Jake’s ear to compensate for the music thundering down from above. “I think its pretty cool. It’s like ‘Fuck You, Take me as I am. Right?”
“That’s right.”
Morris patted Jake’s shoulder, shoved off the wall with his left foot, and skated into the circling crowd. Jake closed his eyes and wished with all his might to be thin; thin enough to fit into the average faceless crowd and not stand out, thin enough to slip through the cracks in the sweating cinderblock above his reflected face and lose himself in the tall grass in the abandoned lot next door.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Friday, June 18, 2010
(three) Smear the Queer
(three) Smear the Queer
It wasn’t until after Halloween that the news The Polks’ Clan was moving to Houghton Lake made it to Jake’s dumbfounded ears. David Polks, the tyrant of South Martin St. would be out of his life for good. Jake’s spirits visibly lifted in anticipation of slowly repairing his reputation and character. He fantasized about the day when the rest of the kids on the block would accept him regardless of what the former resident of 716 South Martin thought. When they would cast off their former ways and bring him into the fold. He was sure that Mr. Polks’ opinion and the opinions it begat in the minds of his sycophantic followers would fade and a truer more flattering portrait of Jake would emerge. The kids would see him for the cool, funny and eminently fascinating person he was, instead of the groping, desperate and awkward freak into which David Polks had conjured him.
And, he still had his Lions Hat. Which meant he still had at least a lone talisman of Cool upon which he could build his new lore. The pom-pom had been separated from its rightful place and his Mother had threatened to reattach the member. Jake had to plead with her not to sew it back on, explaining that he liked it better without the pom-pom. She, in her vast wisdom and inconsideration for her son’s wants, told him he didn’t know what was good for him. He explained to her that it made him look like a pansy, for which she chided him. He hated to refuse her attempt at doing something so quaint and motherly as the times were few and far between that she swam to the surface of her depression and hypochondria to actually take up the reins of raising her last child. He hated to agree with David Polks, but he was right about the hat sans yarn snowball; it was cooler. It was that fuzzy globe that was the difference between looking like a prancing Nancyboy and looking like a Longshoreman. In the end, she had forced the issue and he had to resort to a full-blown Hissy Fit in order to get his way.
He had learned from the master. His mother was supremely accomplished at the Hissy Fit or the Blow-Up or the Guilt Trip, whatever you wanted to call it. It was a desperate kind of interpersonal performance art, a melodrama of sorts, that was taught to successive generations in strictly a silent Mentor-Protege manner. Jake watched intently being the receiver of many a Fit and marveled at the skill and deftness in the way few heavy sighs and extended closing of the eyes could make one change one’s mind. Occasionally, if he stood fast to his opinion, she would fall back on the Voice.
The Voice was always the breaker. She would raise the pitch of her voice and add a warble to it; a tremolo of which even Johnny Mathis would be proud. This was usually accompanied with the beginning of a mock-sob-filled “Why are you doing this to me”? Or, “After all I’ve done for you”. Or,”Don’t you love me anymore”? Nothing could survive the onslaught of performed emotion and pathos emanating from his mother’s contorted face.
The fact that his mother relented in the matter of the pom-pom showed how far he’d come in his training at getting what he wanted through guilt. Later, much later, his finely tuned prostrating and cunning manipulation of voice and gesture would get him his first car, his dad’s old 1974 Dodge Dart. This fact alone, that he was saved from being ridiculed for the yarnball on his head should’ve been enough for him to eek happiness out of for at least two days. Something unexpected eclipsed that happiness and sent it into pure joy.
The U-Haul was parked outside The Polks’ House for three days. Jake began to fancy the color orange. It made him happier. Many of the boys were still busy trying to deal with their emotions, but Jake had already gone through the separation anxiety straight to accepting his life without the asshole-in-training. The boys had taken to treating David Polks as if he had recently contracted brain cancer. They were terribly morose while around him and a few had even spoke of him in the past tense in his presence, which made Jake smirk with joy. The boys had taken to just hanging around David’s porch, talking of things they had done, things that they all would do in the coming days. David would speak of his new house and invite everyone up to Houghton Lake during the summer. There would be water fights in the lake, everyone would try the tire swing and they would camp out, look at the stars and make up stories about people that they didn’t like.
Of course, none of that would ever happen. The children had no power to sway adults in their vacation plans. And, adolescent minds wander faster than an unattended toddler. When David left, no one would stay in touch with him. By the first snow, his name dropped from conversation. No one speculated as to what his new school was like or how he was doing. He would disappear from the neighborhood and the neighborhood’s collective memory. The only thing remaining would be the house, which would always be called The Polks’ House, no matter how many families would occupy that abode.
A Ryder truck replaced the U-Haul and the new family arrived with it.
The boys sat on Morris Shuler’s porch, which, in itself, was rare. Morris’ dad was a very hard worker. He and his wife had five sons and one very strapping young tomboy, so strapping she might as well have been a son. He expected his son’s to have the same work ethic, even on Saturday and especially during the summer months. He apparently liked parenthood not for the nurturing and shaping of a young child into a good moral person, but for the seemingly endless supply of Free Labor.
The daily routine would be this. Morris would come out to play late because he was always finishing his chores. At quarter past five o’clock, when he saw his father’s big blue Suburban turn the corner, he dove into the nearest bush or one of the other boys’ backyards, where he would hide until his father remembered he had a son who needed to be working and called or came looking for him.
So, the boys sat speculating on whether the kids in the family were gonna make the cut. They’d already seen a pink 20’’ Huffy with a rattan basket exit the yellow truck, but girls didn’t count, not yet, anyway.
Then they saw it. And, they all knew immediately this new kid was going to be a force with which to be reckoned.
Out of the back of the van came a high-gloss black finish, aluminum mag-wheeled, freestyle, Mongoose moto-cross bike with a Haro numberplate attached to the bars sporting the number 1 in deep blood red. The kick-ass bike was one thing, but someone with the bravado to give himself the number 1 was another. Not only was this kid cool, but he knew it. Jake’s testicles tried to retreat into his abdomen, to a happier place and time when they were younger and weren’t in danger of being kicked. His head throbbed in rhythm to the thrumming of his foot against the side of the porch.
“This guy’s a Badass or the little girl’s got a lezzie for a big sister”, Scott Carson breathed lowly into the circle of friends on the porch.
The side door to the house opened and the all got the first glimpse of the new kid.
He was bigger than all of the kids, except Jake. He wore navy suede Pumas, grey boot-cut cords, a blue windbreaker with a hood and a Detroit Tigers hat. The glasses he wore got darker and darker as he headed toward the van. By the time he mounted his bike, they were sunglasses.
“You could help, Edward” his other brother shouted at him, his cigarette bobbing up and down on his lip, cascading ash down the front of his coat.
“Fuck you, I’m going to the store for Mom’s smokes”.
Jake was now very close to losing control of his bladder.
This kid not only swore, he was a twelve or thirteen-year-old who could pass for seventeen. The other kids tentatively watched him pedal off on his bike as he bunny-hopped and jumped curbs until he was out of sight.
“What hubris”, Jake said loudly.
The other kids blinked into his face, silently.
“What the hell are you talking about?”, Morris said, cautiously darting his eyes up to the window of the door to check for brothers or parents as he said the word ‘hell’. Morris, being raised a strict Catholic was told he could only use the word in church.
“Balls”, Jake replied.
“Oh”, the others chimed in, nodding in agreement.
Jake was cursed--had cursed himself, really--with knowledge beyond his years in public school. You, see, bored out of his skull one rainy day, he began scouting about the house. He had gotten into the cupboard below the hall bookshelf and taken some of the books that no one would care were missing. All the flashy, brightly colored romance novels his mother read and the smattering of westerns his father read lined the bookcase above like soldiers presented to the General, polished and ready for action. All the good books where down below: The Collected Works of Wm. Shakespeare by a Texas publisher with all the sexual innuendo and references to “Hymen” excised, The Story of America-an eleventh grade History Text no doubt left there by one of his older brothers, volumes A-C through T-V of the American Heritage Encyclopaedia, including the 1976 and 1977 yearbooks and dog-eared copies of Alice in Wonderland, Catcher in the Rye, Peter Pan and Soul On Ice.
What puzzled Jake more than the inclusion of Eldridge Cleaver’s book was the fact that the copies were dog-eared at all. Not one of his family seemed to have the sophistication indicated by such an eclectic collection. Not even his mother would put down her latest 100 page novella de amore to crack the binding on any of these tomes. In the end he rationalized it away by thinking that the books must’ve either been loaned to the family by others in hopes of broadening the family’s horizons and never returned. Or, that they were going through what must surely be a natural process of decay from neglect.
“Balls the size of Softballs”, Alex said
“The size of Bowling Balls”, Morris improved.
“The size of Jake’s head”, Scott chuckled.
The boys laughed at Scott’s comment. A feeling came over Jake, sinking in like wet snow through a wool sock; a feeling that with all the things that had changed in the last few weeks, things still remained the same.
They retired to Morris’ backyard, to the leaf-strewn plot of ground that in summer would be Mrs. Shuler’s garden. Where, in the smolder of August, Morris and the boys would wade into the waist-high green with salt shakers, plucking bulging red tomatoes pregnant with juice from the vine and plunging their teeth into them like rabid vampires. Now there was a thick smooth bed of brown, gold and orange maple leaves. At the back of the garden, stacked in cords next to the chainlink fence rested a nicely weathering pile of pine. Smoke trailed from the house’s chimney and, caught by a downdraft, floated down and dissipated just above the boys’ heads. The clip of the brisk air and the homey scent of burning wood would be burnished forever into their memories, filed under “F” for Fall.
There they stood tossing the brightly colored foam football around and hurling petty insults at not only each other, but also each other’s mother. The impromptu game of verbal one-ups-manship was cut off abruptly when they heard the sound of a pair of knobby tires rolling haltingly up the driveway. Jake turned to see the new kid dismount his aluminum horse and walk it to the grass.
“Hey”, his breath puffing out in one short cloud.
A chorus of “heys” followed. Jake stood witnessing the awkward dance that was unfolding in front of him. The boys surrounded the interloper in a semi-circle with him at the head. Then came the questions:
What’s yer Name: Edward Stephens
Where ya from: Bad Axe, in da U.P.
Where’d you get yer bike: Rick’s Bike Shop in Iron City.
And so it went for fifteen minutes.
Jake marveled at the hardness that resonated off this kid. It seemed every answer had either a “K” or and “X” in it. The towns he frequented were peppered with words like “City”, “Cement”, “Bad” or “Iron”. These weren’t pleasant suburban names like “Royal Oak”, “Sterling Heights” or “Pleasant Ridge” No. This kid hailed from the Michigan’s Outback, The Man from Bad Iron Cement City.
They learned that his Dad worked for Ford in the iron shipping end of the company, but was transferred to Pontiac, the city not the carmaker, due to layoffs and restructuring. His mother was a homemaker, as were many other of the kid’s moms, except Richie Valen’s mom who had a lucrative ceramics shop in her basement, kiln and all; the proceeds of which fed her two and a half pack of More Menthols a day cigarette habit. Edward’s, “call me Eddie”’s, folks had a pool table, a Spirit of ‘76 pinball machine and a brand new Atari 5200 video game with a color T.V. which was the jewel in the crown that was their Game Room/Basement. Eddie even had a skateboard, and not one of those cheap plastic skateboards, but a real plywood one with clear red wheels that reminded Jake of Strawberry Jell-O.
With every cool thing that was mentioned, Jake made a mental note. This kid was all surface, no substance. He had all the trappings of popularity that would ease his transition from the sticks to the suburbs. He was a suburban kid who had been stuck in rural jerkwater and now he would bloom. Jake saw his imagined future dwindling away like a sweet dream moments after waking.
“You guys wanna play Smear the Queer?” He offered, breaking Jake’s moment of melancholia.
“Sure, Jake’s the Queer”, Morris blurted quickly, knowing that David Polks had always said it during the opening of every game. “Jake’s the Queer” was sort of the National Anthem sung just prior to kick-off. The boys spread out on the field of leaves with Jake equidistant from each of them, alone, in the center.
‘Smear the Queer’ wasn’t a game really, but more of a version of cutthroat Rugby with no teams and very vague rules. It was more or less short bursts of chasing the person with the ball, ‘The Queer’ followed by process of dragging him down to the ground and johnny-piling on him, or ‘Smearing’; hence the name. No one was really queer, except Morris, which they didn’t found out until way, way later. And, the tackling and what Jake’s mother called “Roughhousing” was just a way to blow off the excess testosterone that was coursing threw their pubescent veins and arteries. It in no way resembled anything you could truly call ‘smearing’.
Except for this time.
Call it posturing. Call it anxiety produced by the introduction of new blood in the water. Call it unbridled friskiness. Whatever it was, it was not pretty. This was the harshest round of ‘Smear the Queer’ ever played on South Martin St. Usually, the boys would play a few rounds until they got hot and sweaty and then they take off their coats and play in their sweaters and sweatshirts. But, this time they’d sweat through those and were playing in their long sleeve thermal Long John shirts.
Most of their thermals were that ambiguously off-white cream color. Morris sported the top half of a faded red union suit. But, Eddie’s thermal was black. Jake hated him now. Hated him for everything that Jake couldn’t and, if it really came down to it, wouldn’t want to be.
They stood, puffing out huge clouds of steam like penned broncos, in their thermals and hats. Tendrils of steam rose from the backs of their necks and from the dark wet fields running down the centers of their backs and chests.
Eddie was holding the ball, ready to toss it in the air again after being hauled to the ground at the end of a very long chase. All the boys were ready, hands on their knees, except Jake who was still trying to suck down enough air to fill his rotund body. He held his side and winced in pain.
“Time out, time. I got a cramp”. This was a relevant reason for a time out. This was pain that was caused by your body, not to it, therefore it warranted attention.
“C’mon, Pussy” Eddie barked.
Jake swallowed a gulp of air and nodded ‘okay’.
Now, one of the few rules of the game was that once you ran and were tackled you could 1) throw it up to let someone else run or 2) fake the throw and run again. This addition of chance and subterfuge only heightened the intensity of the game. The boys stood in a loose circle and awaited Eddie’s choice.
Eddie faked the throw into the air and then cocked his arm back and drilled it directly at Jake’s chest. The only reaction he had was to close his arms around it. And, that’s when the boys broke their stance.
Jake eluded Richie’s feeble attempt at a diving tackle with quick fake he’d seen Billy Sims do during a Lions game on T.V. Richie always went for the dive, even if he wasn’t close, because he thought it looked cool. Morris clutched at Jake as he plodded past him, but grabbed air. Jake ran, unimpeded, toward the open end of the garden. He turned and stood facing the boys as they spread out in the middle of the field of play; creating their own pathetic version of Pittsburgh’s Famed Steel Curtain.
“You gotta run sometime, Fat Boy” Eddie sneered. “C’mon, let’s see what you got”.
Jake ran for the hole between Eddie and Scott Carson. He switched the ball over to the side Scott was on and stiffarmed his way past Eddie’s circling grasp. He had never expected Eddie to be this easy. He reveled in this briefly until he felt Scott latch on to his upper legs, slowing his movement considerably. Alex pitched in to help his brother and Morris jumped on Jake’s back, tipping the scales and sending Jake to his knees, then to his belly in a small graceless heap. Eddie arrived too late to do anything, but sit on the top of the helter skelter johnny-pile.
“Get the Fuck off me. I can’t fucking breathe” Jake whimpered from the bottom of the mound of smelly, sweaty boys. They untangled themselves and Jake lay on the ground gasping and pumping the cool air into and out of his apparently underutilized lungs.
“C’mon, Wheezie, Throw up the ball”. This was the extent of Alex’s bravado. He didn’t like calling names, especially to Jake because Jake was the closest thing to a friend. Jake treated The Twins Carson as separate entities, even when their mother dressed them in matching Coca-Cola shirts and tan slacks. Jake’s insistence on individuality was a kindness for which both were inwardly if not outwardly grateful.
“Who you calling Wheezie, Inhalerboy?” his brother Scott answered back.
“Frick off” Alex spit back at his twin.
“I’m tellin’ Mom”, Scott returned.
“I said ‘Frick’ not ‘Fuck’”, Alex pleaded.
“Now, I’m really tellin’”, Scott laughed.
“Quitchabitchin’” Eddie cut in. “Like a coupla fairies the way you talk”.
Jake rolled onto his stomach and brought his knees up under him, supporting his weight on the Nerf Football beneath. He raised up slightly to his knees and put one leg out in front of him. For a moment he looked like a player on a Fleer football card, posed, one knee down, helmet in front of him, holding a pigskin in the crook of his arm.
That’s when he left the ground and flew, head first, into the woodpile. Through the din of the newly forged bells echoing their painful song to the corners of his skull, Jake could make out Eddie saying the following words:
“He was gonna run, I swear.”
“Whatcha go and tackle him for?”, Scott asked with a whine.
“He was gonna run.”
“He was not”, Morris said, darting his eyes toward the back door of his house to see if his mom would come charging out and beat them all with a rolling pin for being too rough.
Jake pulled the Lions Hat back from where it had settled in front of his eyes and turned on his back. His hands flew to his head and the pain subsided. It was just a short little knock, not the full on wallop he had suffered at the hands of the Unholy Jack Goff/David Polks Tag Team Alliance, but it did smart a bit. It wasn’t until he saw his friends’ faces that he knew he was in trouble.
“Man, yer bleeding” Richie said in a curious way that sounded like equal parts fascination and revulsion.
“You better go home”, Alex said. “You’re gonna need stitches”.
“He’s not gonna need stitches”, Eddie downplayed, fearing a lawsuit or reprisal, it was unclear which.
“It’s just a scratch”. This kind of underplaying would later ingratiate him with the Clayton High School Football coach, whose motto was “You’re fine. Tape it up and get back in there”.
Jake took his glove off and reached his hand up. He drew it back with the tips covered in crimson.
In a shot he was up, grabbing his shirt and coat. This added burst of energy quickened the blood flow. He bolted into a run and leaped the new kid’s bike as he exited the yard.
“Wait, where you going, Candyass? We’re still playing”. Eddie’s voice faded as Jake left the driveway and yanked the Lions hat off his head. It was covered in blood. He looked back briefly and noticed that no one was following.
He stopped. He stood, holding the bloodied hat and looked back at the Shuler’s house, hoping one of the boys would burst from around the corner at full tilt. None did. Hot tears welled on his lower lids. His lips curled toward his nose and his eyes pinched shut, popping the tears out and down his ruddy red cheeks. He turned toward his house and quickly walked the two houses down toward Home. When he reached the edge of the lawn, he called for his Mom. His sister, who was in her usual place at the front door, dragging on yet another Winston 100, saw him first.
“Maaaaahhhm, come quick”. She howled as she threw down the last of her cigarette and rushed toward Jake.
“Oooh, Baby, are you okay?”, she soothingly breathed her smoky fog into his hot face. She grabbed the Lions hat and stuffed it in a ball onto the split at his hairline.
From behind her came his mother’s voice.
“Get him in the house. Let’s see how bad is it”.
Jake winced both from the sharp bite of the sore and his mother’s grammar. Jake saw his mother peering from behind the mesh of the screen door--Jake’s father hadn’t yet gotten around to replacing the screens with the storms--her face hanging palely, ghostly in the darkness that surrounded it. The tufts of blaze red hair, not her natural color, rose from her head in flames. She opened the door and the light cascaded in. Jake realized he’d never really seen his mother in the bleak daylight. It was always in the house, the shutters or drapes pulled, allowing only yellowed dingy light to pass into the rooms. Or, at night when the heavily shaded lamps were on, casting slanted, odd, German Expressionistic shadows about the rooms. Or, in the living room, illuminated only by the bluish flicker of Happy Days or One Day at a Time.
It was at the sight of his mother in broad daylight that his knees buckled and he fell to the ground, not the dizziness brought on by the recent head trauma and heavy loss of blood. Of this he was sure as they dragged him to the back of the Chrysler Town and Country.
“Mom” He mumble this as a vain incantation to ward away the mounting fear of death. “Mom”.
“Don’t you go to sleep. Don’t you dare. You hear me?”
Jake’s mother was from a school of thought that the more you threatened an injured child with at least the prospect of more pain, the more helpful and comforting it was. Denying the pain was something that was good for you. It made you stronger, healthier. Not in any way did it cripple you emotionally or keep you from having healthy relationships with loved ones or women. Never. That’s just good old common sense.
Jake throbbed and sobbed in his seat all the way to the “Doctor’s” office.
* * *
It wasn’t a real Doctor’s office. It was the office of his old pediatrician. Jake hated it in the pediatrician’s office, but it was cheaper than the emergency room and that meant better. Sometimes, he felt his mother took her cutting corners and thriftiness too far. She once asked the nurse if the doctor was running any “specials”.
Holding his newly bandaged head, Jake sat on a molded plastic chair meant for a child much smaller than he. In fact, he dwarfed most of everything in this minute child waiting room. The tiny furniture was dispersed across the expanse of the primary colored carpeting. Games were stacked neatly in the corner next to the toybox that nearly spewed its cargo over the side. The whole room had a strong bouquet of disinfectant with woody feces undertones and a slightly urine finish.
At the far end of the room, under a great stuffed swordfish, stood a murky 50-gallon fish tank on a black wrought-iron base. The ironic juxtaposition of the stuffed fish over the tank of live fish made Jake smirk slightly. He stood and the molded plastic chair that had vacuumed itself to his ass came with him. He pried it off and stepped toward the tank.
He imagined the fish looked up to the Big Floating God Fish. He was the Ideal toward which all fishes should strive. He could breathe the Pink Creatures’ air and He protected us from them. It was He who forced them to feed us and keep us well. It was He who made them clean our tank and give us little divers to mock and plaster castles to swim through.
Jake tapped at the side of the tank and a few of the fishes scattered. He left his fingers on the glass and knelt to touch his bandaged forehead to the coolness of the tank. A smaller fish swam slowly past his eyes and floated there showing his yellow-striped flank to Jake. The fish slowly turned and looked straight in Jake’s direction. He saw what passed for desperation and an awkwardness to fit in, to be right with the world around him. He saw the little fish in the big tank. He felt a profound sadness at his plight.
Jake’s mother turned toward the nurse behind the counter and asked.
“How much for the fish?”
The nurse answered her, shifting her weight from one thick rubber-soled foot to the other.
“That much and you can’t even eat it?”, she paused and held out the blood splotched Lions hat. The blood had darkened to a burnt burgundy.
“Forget it. Do you have a garbage can?”
The nurse pointed to the end of the counter.
Reversed, in the slight opaqueness of the tank’s glass, Jake watched his Mom step on the little lever at the bottom of the chrome cylinder, drop the hat in and release the foot lever. The lid slammed down with a muffled clank.
Jake rose unsteadily and followed his mother out into the bright sun.
It wasn’t until after Halloween that the news The Polks’ Clan was moving to Houghton Lake made it to Jake’s dumbfounded ears. David Polks, the tyrant of South Martin St. would be out of his life for good. Jake’s spirits visibly lifted in anticipation of slowly repairing his reputation and character. He fantasized about the day when the rest of the kids on the block would accept him regardless of what the former resident of 716 South Martin thought. When they would cast off their former ways and bring him into the fold. He was sure that Mr. Polks’ opinion and the opinions it begat in the minds of his sycophantic followers would fade and a truer more flattering portrait of Jake would emerge. The kids would see him for the cool, funny and eminently fascinating person he was, instead of the groping, desperate and awkward freak into which David Polks had conjured him.
And, he still had his Lions Hat. Which meant he still had at least a lone talisman of Cool upon which he could build his new lore. The pom-pom had been separated from its rightful place and his Mother had threatened to reattach the member. Jake had to plead with her not to sew it back on, explaining that he liked it better without the pom-pom. She, in her vast wisdom and inconsideration for her son’s wants, told him he didn’t know what was good for him. He explained to her that it made him look like a pansy, for which she chided him. He hated to refuse her attempt at doing something so quaint and motherly as the times were few and far between that she swam to the surface of her depression and hypochondria to actually take up the reins of raising her last child. He hated to agree with David Polks, but he was right about the hat sans yarn snowball; it was cooler. It was that fuzzy globe that was the difference between looking like a prancing Nancyboy and looking like a Longshoreman. In the end, she had forced the issue and he had to resort to a full-blown Hissy Fit in order to get his way.
He had learned from the master. His mother was supremely accomplished at the Hissy Fit or the Blow-Up or the Guilt Trip, whatever you wanted to call it. It was a desperate kind of interpersonal performance art, a melodrama of sorts, that was taught to successive generations in strictly a silent Mentor-Protege manner. Jake watched intently being the receiver of many a Fit and marveled at the skill and deftness in the way few heavy sighs and extended closing of the eyes could make one change one’s mind. Occasionally, if he stood fast to his opinion, she would fall back on the Voice.
The Voice was always the breaker. She would raise the pitch of her voice and add a warble to it; a tremolo of which even Johnny Mathis would be proud. This was usually accompanied with the beginning of a mock-sob-filled “Why are you doing this to me”? Or, “After all I’ve done for you”. Or,”Don’t you love me anymore”? Nothing could survive the onslaught of performed emotion and pathos emanating from his mother’s contorted face.
The fact that his mother relented in the matter of the pom-pom showed how far he’d come in his training at getting what he wanted through guilt. Later, much later, his finely tuned prostrating and cunning manipulation of voice and gesture would get him his first car, his dad’s old 1974 Dodge Dart. This fact alone, that he was saved from being ridiculed for the yarnball on his head should’ve been enough for him to eek happiness out of for at least two days. Something unexpected eclipsed that happiness and sent it into pure joy.
The U-Haul was parked outside The Polks’ House for three days. Jake began to fancy the color orange. It made him happier. Many of the boys were still busy trying to deal with their emotions, but Jake had already gone through the separation anxiety straight to accepting his life without the asshole-in-training. The boys had taken to treating David Polks as if he had recently contracted brain cancer. They were terribly morose while around him and a few had even spoke of him in the past tense in his presence, which made Jake smirk with joy. The boys had taken to just hanging around David’s porch, talking of things they had done, things that they all would do in the coming days. David would speak of his new house and invite everyone up to Houghton Lake during the summer. There would be water fights in the lake, everyone would try the tire swing and they would camp out, look at the stars and make up stories about people that they didn’t like.
Of course, none of that would ever happen. The children had no power to sway adults in their vacation plans. And, adolescent minds wander faster than an unattended toddler. When David left, no one would stay in touch with him. By the first snow, his name dropped from conversation. No one speculated as to what his new school was like or how he was doing. He would disappear from the neighborhood and the neighborhood’s collective memory. The only thing remaining would be the house, which would always be called The Polks’ House, no matter how many families would occupy that abode.
A Ryder truck replaced the U-Haul and the new family arrived with it.
The boys sat on Morris Shuler’s porch, which, in itself, was rare. Morris’ dad was a very hard worker. He and his wife had five sons and one very strapping young tomboy, so strapping she might as well have been a son. He expected his son’s to have the same work ethic, even on Saturday and especially during the summer months. He apparently liked parenthood not for the nurturing and shaping of a young child into a good moral person, but for the seemingly endless supply of Free Labor.
The daily routine would be this. Morris would come out to play late because he was always finishing his chores. At quarter past five o’clock, when he saw his father’s big blue Suburban turn the corner, he dove into the nearest bush or one of the other boys’ backyards, where he would hide until his father remembered he had a son who needed to be working and called or came looking for him.
So, the boys sat speculating on whether the kids in the family were gonna make the cut. They’d already seen a pink 20’’ Huffy with a rattan basket exit the yellow truck, but girls didn’t count, not yet, anyway.
Then they saw it. And, they all knew immediately this new kid was going to be a force with which to be reckoned.
Out of the back of the van came a high-gloss black finish, aluminum mag-wheeled, freestyle, Mongoose moto-cross bike with a Haro numberplate attached to the bars sporting the number 1 in deep blood red. The kick-ass bike was one thing, but someone with the bravado to give himself the number 1 was another. Not only was this kid cool, but he knew it. Jake’s testicles tried to retreat into his abdomen, to a happier place and time when they were younger and weren’t in danger of being kicked. His head throbbed in rhythm to the thrumming of his foot against the side of the porch.
“This guy’s a Badass or the little girl’s got a lezzie for a big sister”, Scott Carson breathed lowly into the circle of friends on the porch.
The side door to the house opened and the all got the first glimpse of the new kid.
He was bigger than all of the kids, except Jake. He wore navy suede Pumas, grey boot-cut cords, a blue windbreaker with a hood and a Detroit Tigers hat. The glasses he wore got darker and darker as he headed toward the van. By the time he mounted his bike, they were sunglasses.
“You could help, Edward” his other brother shouted at him, his cigarette bobbing up and down on his lip, cascading ash down the front of his coat.
“Fuck you, I’m going to the store for Mom’s smokes”.
Jake was now very close to losing control of his bladder.
This kid not only swore, he was a twelve or thirteen-year-old who could pass for seventeen. The other kids tentatively watched him pedal off on his bike as he bunny-hopped and jumped curbs until he was out of sight.
“What hubris”, Jake said loudly.
The other kids blinked into his face, silently.
“What the hell are you talking about?”, Morris said, cautiously darting his eyes up to the window of the door to check for brothers or parents as he said the word ‘hell’. Morris, being raised a strict Catholic was told he could only use the word in church.
“Balls”, Jake replied.
“Oh”, the others chimed in, nodding in agreement.
Jake was cursed--had cursed himself, really--with knowledge beyond his years in public school. You, see, bored out of his skull one rainy day, he began scouting about the house. He had gotten into the cupboard below the hall bookshelf and taken some of the books that no one would care were missing. All the flashy, brightly colored romance novels his mother read and the smattering of westerns his father read lined the bookcase above like soldiers presented to the General, polished and ready for action. All the good books where down below: The Collected Works of Wm. Shakespeare by a Texas publisher with all the sexual innuendo and references to “Hymen” excised, The Story of America-an eleventh grade History Text no doubt left there by one of his older brothers, volumes A-C through T-V of the American Heritage Encyclopaedia, including the 1976 and 1977 yearbooks and dog-eared copies of Alice in Wonderland, Catcher in the Rye, Peter Pan and Soul On Ice.
What puzzled Jake more than the inclusion of Eldridge Cleaver’s book was the fact that the copies were dog-eared at all. Not one of his family seemed to have the sophistication indicated by such an eclectic collection. Not even his mother would put down her latest 100 page novella de amore to crack the binding on any of these tomes. In the end he rationalized it away by thinking that the books must’ve either been loaned to the family by others in hopes of broadening the family’s horizons and never returned. Or, that they were going through what must surely be a natural process of decay from neglect.
“Balls the size of Softballs”, Alex said
“The size of Bowling Balls”, Morris improved.
“The size of Jake’s head”, Scott chuckled.
The boys laughed at Scott’s comment. A feeling came over Jake, sinking in like wet snow through a wool sock; a feeling that with all the things that had changed in the last few weeks, things still remained the same.
They retired to Morris’ backyard, to the leaf-strewn plot of ground that in summer would be Mrs. Shuler’s garden. Where, in the smolder of August, Morris and the boys would wade into the waist-high green with salt shakers, plucking bulging red tomatoes pregnant with juice from the vine and plunging their teeth into them like rabid vampires. Now there was a thick smooth bed of brown, gold and orange maple leaves. At the back of the garden, stacked in cords next to the chainlink fence rested a nicely weathering pile of pine. Smoke trailed from the house’s chimney and, caught by a downdraft, floated down and dissipated just above the boys’ heads. The clip of the brisk air and the homey scent of burning wood would be burnished forever into their memories, filed under “F” for Fall.
There they stood tossing the brightly colored foam football around and hurling petty insults at not only each other, but also each other’s mother. The impromptu game of verbal one-ups-manship was cut off abruptly when they heard the sound of a pair of knobby tires rolling haltingly up the driveway. Jake turned to see the new kid dismount his aluminum horse and walk it to the grass.
“Hey”, his breath puffing out in one short cloud.
A chorus of “heys” followed. Jake stood witnessing the awkward dance that was unfolding in front of him. The boys surrounded the interloper in a semi-circle with him at the head. Then came the questions:
What’s yer Name: Edward Stephens
Where ya from: Bad Axe, in da U.P.
Where’d you get yer bike: Rick’s Bike Shop in Iron City.
And so it went for fifteen minutes.
Jake marveled at the hardness that resonated off this kid. It seemed every answer had either a “K” or and “X” in it. The towns he frequented were peppered with words like “City”, “Cement”, “Bad” or “Iron”. These weren’t pleasant suburban names like “Royal Oak”, “Sterling Heights” or “Pleasant Ridge” No. This kid hailed from the Michigan’s Outback, The Man from Bad Iron Cement City.
They learned that his Dad worked for Ford in the iron shipping end of the company, but was transferred to Pontiac, the city not the carmaker, due to layoffs and restructuring. His mother was a homemaker, as were many other of the kid’s moms, except Richie Valen’s mom who had a lucrative ceramics shop in her basement, kiln and all; the proceeds of which fed her two and a half pack of More Menthols a day cigarette habit. Edward’s, “call me Eddie”’s, folks had a pool table, a Spirit of ‘76 pinball machine and a brand new Atari 5200 video game with a color T.V. which was the jewel in the crown that was their Game Room/Basement. Eddie even had a skateboard, and not one of those cheap plastic skateboards, but a real plywood one with clear red wheels that reminded Jake of Strawberry Jell-O.
With every cool thing that was mentioned, Jake made a mental note. This kid was all surface, no substance. He had all the trappings of popularity that would ease his transition from the sticks to the suburbs. He was a suburban kid who had been stuck in rural jerkwater and now he would bloom. Jake saw his imagined future dwindling away like a sweet dream moments after waking.
“You guys wanna play Smear the Queer?” He offered, breaking Jake’s moment of melancholia.
“Sure, Jake’s the Queer”, Morris blurted quickly, knowing that David Polks had always said it during the opening of every game. “Jake’s the Queer” was sort of the National Anthem sung just prior to kick-off. The boys spread out on the field of leaves with Jake equidistant from each of them, alone, in the center.
‘Smear the Queer’ wasn’t a game really, but more of a version of cutthroat Rugby with no teams and very vague rules. It was more or less short bursts of chasing the person with the ball, ‘The Queer’ followed by process of dragging him down to the ground and johnny-piling on him, or ‘Smearing’; hence the name. No one was really queer, except Morris, which they didn’t found out until way, way later. And, the tackling and what Jake’s mother called “Roughhousing” was just a way to blow off the excess testosterone that was coursing threw their pubescent veins and arteries. It in no way resembled anything you could truly call ‘smearing’.
Except for this time.
Call it posturing. Call it anxiety produced by the introduction of new blood in the water. Call it unbridled friskiness. Whatever it was, it was not pretty. This was the harshest round of ‘Smear the Queer’ ever played on South Martin St. Usually, the boys would play a few rounds until they got hot and sweaty and then they take off their coats and play in their sweaters and sweatshirts. But, this time they’d sweat through those and were playing in their long sleeve thermal Long John shirts.
Most of their thermals were that ambiguously off-white cream color. Morris sported the top half of a faded red union suit. But, Eddie’s thermal was black. Jake hated him now. Hated him for everything that Jake couldn’t and, if it really came down to it, wouldn’t want to be.
They stood, puffing out huge clouds of steam like penned broncos, in their thermals and hats. Tendrils of steam rose from the backs of their necks and from the dark wet fields running down the centers of their backs and chests.
Eddie was holding the ball, ready to toss it in the air again after being hauled to the ground at the end of a very long chase. All the boys were ready, hands on their knees, except Jake who was still trying to suck down enough air to fill his rotund body. He held his side and winced in pain.
“Time out, time. I got a cramp”. This was a relevant reason for a time out. This was pain that was caused by your body, not to it, therefore it warranted attention.
“C’mon, Pussy” Eddie barked.
Jake swallowed a gulp of air and nodded ‘okay’.
Now, one of the few rules of the game was that once you ran and were tackled you could 1) throw it up to let someone else run or 2) fake the throw and run again. This addition of chance and subterfuge only heightened the intensity of the game. The boys stood in a loose circle and awaited Eddie’s choice.
Eddie faked the throw into the air and then cocked his arm back and drilled it directly at Jake’s chest. The only reaction he had was to close his arms around it. And, that’s when the boys broke their stance.
Jake eluded Richie’s feeble attempt at a diving tackle with quick fake he’d seen Billy Sims do during a Lions game on T.V. Richie always went for the dive, even if he wasn’t close, because he thought it looked cool. Morris clutched at Jake as he plodded past him, but grabbed air. Jake ran, unimpeded, toward the open end of the garden. He turned and stood facing the boys as they spread out in the middle of the field of play; creating their own pathetic version of Pittsburgh’s Famed Steel Curtain.
“You gotta run sometime, Fat Boy” Eddie sneered. “C’mon, let’s see what you got”.
Jake ran for the hole between Eddie and Scott Carson. He switched the ball over to the side Scott was on and stiffarmed his way past Eddie’s circling grasp. He had never expected Eddie to be this easy. He reveled in this briefly until he felt Scott latch on to his upper legs, slowing his movement considerably. Alex pitched in to help his brother and Morris jumped on Jake’s back, tipping the scales and sending Jake to his knees, then to his belly in a small graceless heap. Eddie arrived too late to do anything, but sit on the top of the helter skelter johnny-pile.
“Get the Fuck off me. I can’t fucking breathe” Jake whimpered from the bottom of the mound of smelly, sweaty boys. They untangled themselves and Jake lay on the ground gasping and pumping the cool air into and out of his apparently underutilized lungs.
“C’mon, Wheezie, Throw up the ball”. This was the extent of Alex’s bravado. He didn’t like calling names, especially to Jake because Jake was the closest thing to a friend. Jake treated The Twins Carson as separate entities, even when their mother dressed them in matching Coca-Cola shirts and tan slacks. Jake’s insistence on individuality was a kindness for which both were inwardly if not outwardly grateful.
“Who you calling Wheezie, Inhalerboy?” his brother Scott answered back.
“Frick off” Alex spit back at his twin.
“I’m tellin’ Mom”, Scott returned.
“I said ‘Frick’ not ‘Fuck’”, Alex pleaded.
“Now, I’m really tellin’”, Scott laughed.
“Quitchabitchin’” Eddie cut in. “Like a coupla fairies the way you talk”.
Jake rolled onto his stomach and brought his knees up under him, supporting his weight on the Nerf Football beneath. He raised up slightly to his knees and put one leg out in front of him. For a moment he looked like a player on a Fleer football card, posed, one knee down, helmet in front of him, holding a pigskin in the crook of his arm.
That’s when he left the ground and flew, head first, into the woodpile. Through the din of the newly forged bells echoing their painful song to the corners of his skull, Jake could make out Eddie saying the following words:
“He was gonna run, I swear.”
“Whatcha go and tackle him for?”, Scott asked with a whine.
“He was gonna run.”
“He was not”, Morris said, darting his eyes toward the back door of his house to see if his mom would come charging out and beat them all with a rolling pin for being too rough.
Jake pulled the Lions Hat back from where it had settled in front of his eyes and turned on his back. His hands flew to his head and the pain subsided. It was just a short little knock, not the full on wallop he had suffered at the hands of the Unholy Jack Goff/David Polks Tag Team Alliance, but it did smart a bit. It wasn’t until he saw his friends’ faces that he knew he was in trouble.
“Man, yer bleeding” Richie said in a curious way that sounded like equal parts fascination and revulsion.
“You better go home”, Alex said. “You’re gonna need stitches”.
“He’s not gonna need stitches”, Eddie downplayed, fearing a lawsuit or reprisal, it was unclear which.
“It’s just a scratch”. This kind of underplaying would later ingratiate him with the Clayton High School Football coach, whose motto was “You’re fine. Tape it up and get back in there”.
Jake took his glove off and reached his hand up. He drew it back with the tips covered in crimson.
In a shot he was up, grabbing his shirt and coat. This added burst of energy quickened the blood flow. He bolted into a run and leaped the new kid’s bike as he exited the yard.
“Wait, where you going, Candyass? We’re still playing”. Eddie’s voice faded as Jake left the driveway and yanked the Lions hat off his head. It was covered in blood. He looked back briefly and noticed that no one was following.
He stopped. He stood, holding the bloodied hat and looked back at the Shuler’s house, hoping one of the boys would burst from around the corner at full tilt. None did. Hot tears welled on his lower lids. His lips curled toward his nose and his eyes pinched shut, popping the tears out and down his ruddy red cheeks. He turned toward his house and quickly walked the two houses down toward Home. When he reached the edge of the lawn, he called for his Mom. His sister, who was in her usual place at the front door, dragging on yet another Winston 100, saw him first.
“Maaaaahhhm, come quick”. She howled as she threw down the last of her cigarette and rushed toward Jake.
“Oooh, Baby, are you okay?”, she soothingly breathed her smoky fog into his hot face. She grabbed the Lions hat and stuffed it in a ball onto the split at his hairline.
From behind her came his mother’s voice.
“Get him in the house. Let’s see how bad is it”.
Jake winced both from the sharp bite of the sore and his mother’s grammar. Jake saw his mother peering from behind the mesh of the screen door--Jake’s father hadn’t yet gotten around to replacing the screens with the storms--her face hanging palely, ghostly in the darkness that surrounded it. The tufts of blaze red hair, not her natural color, rose from her head in flames. She opened the door and the light cascaded in. Jake realized he’d never really seen his mother in the bleak daylight. It was always in the house, the shutters or drapes pulled, allowing only yellowed dingy light to pass into the rooms. Or, at night when the heavily shaded lamps were on, casting slanted, odd, German Expressionistic shadows about the rooms. Or, in the living room, illuminated only by the bluish flicker of Happy Days or One Day at a Time.
It was at the sight of his mother in broad daylight that his knees buckled and he fell to the ground, not the dizziness brought on by the recent head trauma and heavy loss of blood. Of this he was sure as they dragged him to the back of the Chrysler Town and Country.
“Mom” He mumble this as a vain incantation to ward away the mounting fear of death. “Mom”.
“Don’t you go to sleep. Don’t you dare. You hear me?”
Jake’s mother was from a school of thought that the more you threatened an injured child with at least the prospect of more pain, the more helpful and comforting it was. Denying the pain was something that was good for you. It made you stronger, healthier. Not in any way did it cripple you emotionally or keep you from having healthy relationships with loved ones or women. Never. That’s just good old common sense.
Jake throbbed and sobbed in his seat all the way to the “Doctor’s” office.
* * *
It wasn’t a real Doctor’s office. It was the office of his old pediatrician. Jake hated it in the pediatrician’s office, but it was cheaper than the emergency room and that meant better. Sometimes, he felt his mother took her cutting corners and thriftiness too far. She once asked the nurse if the doctor was running any “specials”.
Holding his newly bandaged head, Jake sat on a molded plastic chair meant for a child much smaller than he. In fact, he dwarfed most of everything in this minute child waiting room. The tiny furniture was dispersed across the expanse of the primary colored carpeting. Games were stacked neatly in the corner next to the toybox that nearly spewed its cargo over the side. The whole room had a strong bouquet of disinfectant with woody feces undertones and a slightly urine finish.
At the far end of the room, under a great stuffed swordfish, stood a murky 50-gallon fish tank on a black wrought-iron base. The ironic juxtaposition of the stuffed fish over the tank of live fish made Jake smirk slightly. He stood and the molded plastic chair that had vacuumed itself to his ass came with him. He pried it off and stepped toward the tank.
He imagined the fish looked up to the Big Floating God Fish. He was the Ideal toward which all fishes should strive. He could breathe the Pink Creatures’ air and He protected us from them. It was He who forced them to feed us and keep us well. It was He who made them clean our tank and give us little divers to mock and plaster castles to swim through.
Jake tapped at the side of the tank and a few of the fishes scattered. He left his fingers on the glass and knelt to touch his bandaged forehead to the coolness of the tank. A smaller fish swam slowly past his eyes and floated there showing his yellow-striped flank to Jake. The fish slowly turned and looked straight in Jake’s direction. He saw what passed for desperation and an awkwardness to fit in, to be right with the world around him. He saw the little fish in the big tank. He felt a profound sadness at his plight.
Jake’s mother turned toward the nurse behind the counter and asked.
“How much for the fish?”
The nurse answered her, shifting her weight from one thick rubber-soled foot to the other.
“That much and you can’t even eat it?”, she paused and held out the blood splotched Lions hat. The blood had darkened to a burnt burgundy.
“Forget it. Do you have a garbage can?”
The nurse pointed to the end of the counter.
Reversed, in the slight opaqueness of the tank’s glass, Jake watched his Mom step on the little lever at the bottom of the chrome cylinder, drop the hat in and release the foot lever. The lid slammed down with a muffled clank.
Jake rose unsteadily and followed his mother out into the bright sun.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
(two) Mr. Jack Goff
(two) Mr. Jack Goff
The buzz of the latest in Fall fashions was not relegated only to the runways of Paris, London and Milan. Every child in the public school system of Clayton went through the anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance of the subtle negotiation that took place every Fall when it was time for their weary parents to buy their kids new school clothes.
Mid-August came and parents carted their progeny off to Hudson’s, J.C. Penney’s, or, if the kid was poor, Montgomery Ward or, worse, K Mart. Crammed into a convection oven of a car, they’d bitch and moan about sticking to their sweaty sister or to the napalm-hot vinyl seats. Sibling would smack sibling, parent would try to cover yet somehow still silently communicate their rising dread that this shopping jaunt will end badly. Sadly, the drive to the Mall was the most pleasant thing about the whole trip.
One would think that the cool air-conditioned womb of the department store with its calming musak would’ve settled the hot, palpable friction between parent and child, but it had the opposite effect. The change from blistering hot parking lot to supercool manufactured air effected the very checks and balances in the human psyche. Pleasant society broke down. The family unit divided against each other and in a public place no less. Oh, yes, there was more fun to come.
Every child’s:
“Mom, can we get this?”
...was met with a stern look and a slow shake of the head:
“No”.
This led to a cold:
“Fine”
... and then a mumbled:
“You never let me get anything cool”.
“What did you say young man/lady?”
The trenches were dug. The Battle was on.
The Dad or Step-Dad would go AWOL almost immediately, throwing his hands up in the air in disgust and heading off toward the tools, tossing a “You deal with it. He’s your son” back as a parting dagger. This left the Mom, face red, eternally sad look on her face as if to say she never signed on for this shit.
The dance that ensued took all of two hours. Each side conceding points to their advisary in hopes that it all would end quickly. Each side took the concessions as further attacks and reboubled their efforts. It was as if the combatants had regressed to a more primal state where communication was just a series of grunts and nods.
The Boys wanted stuff with sports logos all over it. Didn’t matter what it was, could’ve been underwear, as long as it had a football team logo on it. And, jeans. Calvin Klein, Sergio Valenti, Jordache. Anything but Levi’s. Unless they were “Movin’ On” Jeans. Nothing else. And, Adidas, Converse, Nike or Pumas shoes. Mom, on the other hand wanted her boy in chinos and a nice broadcloth buttondown. She wanted her little boy to dress like the man she should’ve married.
The Girls, like the boys, wanted jeans in all the aforementioned brands, adding only Gloria Vanderbilt, Sasson and Chic. They had to be tight. So tight you had to put them on wet and blow them dry on your body, risking being late or a yeast infection, whichever came first. The process would mean getting up at 6 a.m. every morning. These jeans were the 1980’s version of the corset, forcing young girls to suffer greatly for their beauty. Tight skirts, too. So tight that they would cause hip displasia. And, short. So short that any passing boy could almost make what day of the week underpants the girl was wearing. They also wanted tee shirts. These were also tight. The girls wanted to dress like the sluts they knew the boys liked. Mom wanted her little girl to dress like, well, a nun. Long skirts and turtlenecks were the preferred choice. In Momland, all the girls in the school should pass for Martha Graham. Eventually a bargain would be struck somewhere in between and the girls would plod off to school in knee-length skirts and short sleeve blouses; looking a bit like backsliding Mormons.
It took a public confrontation to put the whole shopping thing into perspective for the young ones. Commands were barked so the sales clerk could hear or the Moms would feign leaving the store saying firmly, “I’ll be in the car”. If this didn’t get them moving, they would resort to the closer. An arm would be grabbed tightly and jerk to within earshot, then in a firm, low whisper came:
“Do you want me to take your pants down in front of all these people and give you a lickin’?”
This had less to do with oral sex than with getting your ass whupped.
A weak but bitter “No” was issued by the broken child and the battle was over.
Things were picked out hastily and paid for. The ride home was as silent as a morgue in slow season. Alone in their misery, the children would plot. They would by the stuff they really wanted, the short skirts, the black concert t-shirts, and keep it at a friend’s house. They would dress to please their mothers at home, and dress to please themselves on the way to school. Anything else they really wanted, but was too expensive, would wait until Christmas.
As it was with Fall, likewise the post-Christmas Fashion show delighted with all its alpine flair and cozy ski-lodge softness of acrylic blend ski sweaters and wide wale cordorouy. But, that was merely a prelude to the Spring fashion show that heralded the coming of Summer Vacation. Kids itchy for summer and made unstable by being penned up in the tiny aluminum sided faux-clapboard houses lining the bleak treeless streets were jonesing for warm weather. These kids, pink with Spring Fever would come to school in shirtsleeves and shorts when the snow was all but gone. The boys looked like adolescent flashers with their three-quarter length winter coats completely obscuring the fact they were wearing shorts. These kids, quite certainly, were children of single parent families because, as the teachers would mumble aloud during their Recess smoke break.
“No self-respecting Mother would let her children leave the house dressed in Bermudas, a Starsky and Hutch shirt and green, metal shank rubber boots in Mid-March.”
“Child Protection Services should be notified”, another would say as they tipped another Marlboro Light from their leatherette combination cigarette case/coinpurse.
These kids, boys mostly, looked more like clam diggers in the mudflats of Cape Cod than pimply-faced Midwestern sixth graders. These were the same kids that brought cold Government cheese sandwiches and an occasional apple to lunch to avoid eating the dread and embarrassing “free hot lunch”. These were the students that Our Poor Jake tried desperately not to make direct eye contact with for fear they’d recognize one of their own kind trying to pass himself off as middle class and out him.
The other children, the ones with good Mothers or, at least, Mothers who pretended to care, wore thick woolen mittens, scarves and hats, which were, perhaps, even handmade. The girls wore pastels and the boys wore a myriad of bright primary and secondary colors, except yellow and pink. The down coats and vests, the Moon boots, even the mitten or glove clips were gender specific. Everything was as it should be. Boys on one side, girls on the other. They could wait ‘til junior high to start the awkward dance toward each other and discovery.
The boys favored sports paraphernalia because the cool girls favored the boys who favored sports paraphernalia. Ring binders, folders, pencil cases, pencils to go in the pencil cases, erasers and book covers. Pictures of players with nicknames like, “White Shoes”, “Sweetness”, “Bubba”, “Spiderman”, “The Snake” and “Mean Joe” graced every inch of the school supplies. Football was the sport of choice for the school year. Sure, spring would bring a few very muddy games of baseball before the Summer Recess, but Football was king of the playground.
And so, our little boy Jake had been ushered, by the most meager of Good Fortunes, to the threshold of acceptance into this status symbol-oriented world by a chance gift of a Football hat from his father. With silent expectation of the glories to come, he sat in the split bucket seat of the shit-brown Dart, his breath puffing opaquely across the safety glass. This was finally his turn down the runway.
He never had new Fall clothes; none that he cared to show off anyway. His Mother had always packed him and his older sister up in the shitmobile to buy clothes at Montgomery Ward, Monkey Ward they liked to call it, to by their Fall clothes. At the time, these were places you’d buy your tools, your lawnmower, a major appliance or perhaps a fake Christmas Tree, not, for the love of all that is good in the world, school clothes. This past year, his older sister had begun working as an assistant to the florist at Tuxedo Floral and thus would be buying her own clothes this year, clothes that would allow her entré into the Glittering World. Jake, however, was still forced to brave the stiff-legged, deep blue Toughskins with the polyurethane re-enforced knee and the velour zip-up sweaters with the big ass metal zipper rings. Or, God please forbid, the boot-cut (he would never be allowed to wear bell or elephant bell cut) crushed red corduroy, or worse polyester, pants with the white piping on the ass pockets. He had worn this horrible garment, these trousers from the 5th circle of Fashion Hell, to school once and after nearly killing himself with embarrassment, he purposely-by-accident fell into the oilpatch that slicked the middle of his driveway, permanently ruining the pants.
“Aww, look what you did to your pants. I just can’t buy you nice things. Take ‘em off, they’re going to the Good Will”
“Great, Mom, like the poor aren’t ashamed of their plight enough, you have to dress them like rodeo clowns, too?” This he said to himself for he never sassed his Mother. Not until he had, at least, started lying to her about where he was going and that was years away.
But, now, seated under the warm dry Lions hat, he was about to be lifted from the mire of his existence and be placed on probation in the Kingdom of Suburban Culture. How he acted today would forever change how he was perceived. He would be noticed, maybe for the first time, as a sexual being, or at least what passed for sex in the sixth grade.
He stepped into the brisk air and into the world awaiting him.
* * *
It had gone famously. He strolled the short hall to his room with an easy grace, approaching full swagger with a hint of shyness. All heads turned when he entered with the hat on his head. Even Matt Lark, the man-boy forced to sit in the corner behind the medical clothes changing screen because he “had a problem concentrating”, was enthralled enough to look. Matt suffered from what would be later termed as “Attention Deficit Disorder”. Ms. Garter called him a “Mr. Fussbudget” which warranted such quarantine.
This kind of ridicule was standard behavior throughout the public schools of Clayton. Not one of the Oakland County Teacher of the Year recipients ever came from Clayton’s school system. Clayton’s tax revenue didn’t allow the school system to hire the cream of the education crop. Ms. Garter was more of the chaff of the crop than anything else. Just picking up a check while gleaning enjoyment from destroying young lives by issuing forth casually caustic remarks from her mentholated cigarette-smelling piehole.
He had gone through recess and was now waiting patiently in his seat for the last bell to ring, coat and hat on like everyone else, except Matt Lark, who always had to stay after class and help Ms. Garter “clean up”.
This meant let her molest him.
Once, a few of the boys had pretended to walk home and doubled back to catch her putting her hand down the front of Matt’s pants. He saw them and smiled a smile that wasn’t as much a smile as it was a bitter recognition that the position he was in was enjoyable yet frightening. They asked him later if he wanted them to tell the principal, but he said no. Because that would get Ms. Garter transferred, not fired, just transferred to another school in Clayton. And, Ms. Garter seemed to be the only teacher that really cared about educating the man-boy Lark.
Jake was walking home with the rest of David Polks’ entourage or ‘gang’. They would walk by the Thomas’ big black fence, from behind which came the feral and unnatural barking of the big black Doberman. The Doberman was the fiercest dog that the children knew because Rottweillers weren’t yet fashionable as a home safety item/child killer in the suburbs, yet. Past the bikers’ house with the big motorcycles in various states in disrepair littering the inside of the open garage. Periodically one or two of the boys would be goaded on a dare into running up and touching the fender or handlebar of one of the hogs, immediately upon which everyone would run, fearing the big leatherclad man-beasts that lived there. Past the Baptist minister’s house, his wife seated with her knitting on a green strap and aluminum lawn rocker, a stadium blanket spread across her ample lap. Past the Hanlon’s whose whole front yard had been trampled into a mass of mud by their giant Siberian Husky, Thor, who lay quietly panting; waiting for the children who would stroke fist-sized clumps of hair from his thick coat.
It was past Thor when Jake walked right into a trap. A trap set by David Polks and his Uber-Kommandant, Jack Goff.
Jack Goff, perhaps because his name was a homonym for masturbation, was a certified Badass. He had to be. With a name like that, you either fought your way through life or you laid back and took whatever it gave you. Or, you committed suicide. Apparently his father, John, wanted to name his son after him, but he wanted his son to have a separate identity apart from his father. However, he didn’t take into account the sound of his child’s name. Maybe, he was thinking that Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue” made quite a lot of sense. Give the boy a fucked-up name and he just about raises himself. Whatever the case, Jack was always referred to by his first name or Mr. Goff. Only the teacher said his full name. And, when she did, no one laughed. There was dead silence in reverence for the boy who had been so cruelly named.
With the moniker forced around his neck like a “Kick Me” sign, Jack rose in the ranks of the suburban fascist demagogues. He ruled his neighborhood block and a few of the other kids blocks, with an iron hand and an unquestioned loyalty from the children who lived in his realm. By the time he reached the sixth grade, he had beaten up a ninth grader, a feat that no one ever before achieved. He had a scar above his right eye and he was the first to wear a muscle shirt to school. Couple that with a huge black pocket comb with a handle that protruded from the pocket of his supertight Levi’s bell bottoms, the untied white Adidas hightops, and the perfectly feathered butt-crack parted hairdo, and you had one bonafide motherfucker.
David Polks, a slightly smaller, preppier version of Jack Goff looked back towards the kids following him and his eyes fell on Our Jake. Jake thought it was a recognition that he had arrived as an Accepted One, but Jake was sadly unaware that that glance was a sign; a Judas Kiss that singled him out as the weak animal of the pack; singled him out for the takedown and the kill.
Jack Goff was standing, leaning against a Maple its prematurely turned leaves blazing blood red in the afternoon sun. Jack was talking to Shelly Geller, the petite--most of the prepubescent sixth grader girls were petite--brunette who would later bear the bastard child of the high school football coach. David Polks’ nod forced him to break off his convo with the future Miss Promiscuity and start his imposing swagger toward the mass of boys.
About six feet from the Polks entourage, Mr. Goff barked the following phrase:
“Nice Hat.”
Everyone stood still. All talk ceased. It was an interminable silence, like the beginning of Sergio Leone’s “One Upon A Time in the West”. Several of the boys were wearing hats. They looked at each other, terrified. The boys without hats forced the breaking smiles from their face for fear of being singled out and beaten down.
“You with the Lions Hat.”
That narrowed it down to only Jake.
“I’m gonna steal your hat.” In one move, he swiped it from Jake’s crown and he twirled it on his index finger.
“Watcha gonna do? Hunh?”
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Unless he goes so far as to call me a...
“Faggot.”
The word clanged in Jake’s ear like a cast iron gauntlet. He was now at great risk of losing any standing he had in the complex web of social strata that supported him. He was on the precipice of dropping through and being exiled to walking home alone everyday, eating lunch alone and eventually, wading into a large crowd of strangers with a high-powered automatic weapon and mowing them down before he turned the gun on himself.
Suddenly, in Jake’s nostrils, it smelled like Summer.
* * *
It was a warm day in August when he was only 10 years old. His older brother, Craig was home from a long day at the Shell Gas station on Main Street. He was lying across the burnt orange burlap sofa dragging on a Vantage Menthol watching Kid Creole on the tube because it was Elvis Week on the Four O’clock Movie. He was still wearing the grey uniform with the gold Shell on the breast pocket. The sleeves were rolled up showing the large fierce eagle tattoo on his left upper arm. Bulging from the roll was the rectangle of the hard pack of smokes. In one hand was an eraser pink rag deepened to almost red in the center with oil. In the other hand was the dismantled remains of what Jake would later find out to be a two-shot 25 caliber Beretta. In accordance with their Mother’s wishes, both workbooted feet were firmly planted on the floor.
Jake had come in, sweating profusely, face red as hothouse tomatoes, hands balled into neat fists. He intended to charge to his room, slam the door, throw himself on his bed, bite his pillow and scream into the fiberfill until he fell asleep from exhaustion. He was halted mid-charge by his brother’s nonchalance as he cleaned the pistol. Up to that point, Jake had only heard about the gun like he had heard that the Miners’ dog had contracted rabies and had to be put down; it was accepted as fact but it was never really verified as truth.
“Who was it?” Craig’s question struck Jake full in the chest.
‘How could he know’?
“Carlo Peroni”
“That fucking guinea? Italians are tough, kid. They’re born fighting. And, if they ain't fightin', they're fuckin'.'”
Jake made his way toward his room.
“You want some advice?” Craig was sitting up now and he had placed the gun back in its box. He wiped his hands with the rag, using the oil on it to pull the gas station grime from his nails. Jake could see his knuckles, callused in equal amounts from grinding them into car underbodies when the wrenches slipped as from grinding them into the Hai Karate-scented chins of “those candyassed Squares”. These “Squares” turned out to be Mack and Jay, brothers of both Mr. Goff and Mr. Polks, respectively.
“Come with me”.
Jake followed Craig to the side door and soon they were standing in the driveway between the house and Craig’s olive green and gold metal flake 1970 Plymouth Duster. The vent to the drier downstairs pumped moist hot air out of the side of the house. The steam ran through Jake’s legs, making him sweat even more.
“Look at me.”
Jake locked on his brother’s eyes. He respected him, nearly as much as his father, perhaps more so because while Jake was sure his Dad could kick some shit, Craig actually had, in recent memory, kicked a great deal of shit and was very good at it.
“When you got a guy, looks like he’s not gonna back down...it looks like you’ll actually have to get down to fighting instead of that pussy shoving match bullshit the fags in high school do...the first thing you want to do is get the jump on him. You need the first punch. Because when all the shit’s done. Nine times outta ten, it’s the guy who threw the first punch that everyone says won the fight. You got me?”
Jake nodded.
“Now. This is how you get the jump on the guy.” Craig stopped and looked over Jake’s left shoulder at someone coming up the driveway. Jake turned in the direction Craig was looking and saw no one. When he turned his head back his gaze was blocked by Craig’s scarred fist not two inches from him face. Jake could see the thin white whirls of scar tissue wending their way across the terrain of his brother’s knuckles. Jake could also see his brother’s point.
* * *
“The fuck you looking at, Kid.” Jack Goff’s voice was a grinding teenage mess of high and low tones that raised the hairs on Jake’s neck. Mr. Goff started to turn his head to where Jake was staring.
Jake’s small fist turned it the rest of the way.
He had done it. He got the jump on him and now he was in the shit. He had connected with the chin of the Great Jack Goff and he felt the rush of what that meant. He watched him stumble backward slightly, try to catch his balance and collapse clumsily to the pavement.
Jake had no time for reveling in the fortuitous moment. His opponent was up in a nanosecond and gripped the hat between two hands. He growled a cub-like grunt and pulled his hands apart. In one hand was the hat and through the fingers of the other bunched claw peeked the Honolulu Blue and Silver pom-pom.
From somewhere deep inside Jake’s chest there issued forth such a hideous sound that later, after the skirmish, the people who actually heard it, went hoarse trying to recreate it in their retelling of the fight. The sound exited his mouth in a bent howl as he charged at the hand holding his beloved Lions hat.
He couldn’t stop his progress after Mr. Goff stepped aside and jerked the knit cap out of his reach like a matador. Jake bulled right into the dark bark of a large elm tree, his head striking the side with a dull thud. He fell to the grass beneath him and rolled to his back. He was vulnerable now, but he didn’t process this because his head was playing the very end of It’s A Wonderful Life, the glorious giant bells clanging gleefully away, loudly and proudly. Above him the tree’s bare woody fingers swam into and out of focus as he tried with desperate intensity not to barf up the macaroni and cheese and limp hotdog he had for lunch. The bells were replaced in an excruciatingly long crossfade with children’s laughter. The loudest of all the children being David Polks.
When he opened his eyes, Mr. Goff was standing over him, the pom-pom fist cocked back for a bone-jarring blow to the eye.
“You leave that child alone, do you hear me?” It was the angelic Ms. Grey, the minister’s wife, hollering at the height of her soprano voice.
“You Goff boys have been nothing but trouble. Get away from him. Haven’t you got better things to do than beat up on poor kids”.
This well-timed reprieve embarrassed Jake more than the headlong dive into the tree. More than any pummeling Mr. Goff could administer with his bony hardball-sized fists. It embarrassed him because she didn’t say it like “...on poor kids” But, more like “...on poor kids”.
Mr. Goff turned back to Jake, snorted like a prize-winning hog, spit his slick, pale-green treasure into the Lions hat, crouched and forced it down around Jake’s throbbing head. He then took the pom-pom and stuffed it in Jake’s mouth. Jake could see the feet and knees of the children walking around him, away from him as he struggled to his feet. He steadied himself against the tree that caused his near-concussion and waited for balance to slosh back into its proper position inside his head.
Only Scott Carson and his twin Alex looked back, stopping just enough behind the group to check if Jake was okay before hustling back into the throng.
News of the fight would spread through the school like the flu through a daycare center. The story would go like this:
Mr. Goff had pulled the cool “spit-the-hat-and-make-him-wear-it” move, but Jake had the cajõnes to take the first punch. Once the dust sifted back down, the edge would go to Jack Goff because it was the more believable story. David Polks would stop his incessant pestering and belittling of Jake shortly after the incident. Jake thought it was because David now had a newfound respect for him. Alex and Scott Carson would say it was because he didn’t want Jake to kick his scrawny ass.
“Are you okay?”
Jake turned to face Ms. Grey who was standing with one foot on the porch and one foot on the top step, ready to run to Jake if he passed out.
Jake’s eyes burned. His breathing caught in his throat. He bark-sobbed at Ms. Grey.
“Why’d you have to call me poor?”
Jake turned and slowly walked home to where his Mother would stuff him with Dolly Madison snack cakes -- they couldn’t afford Hostess yet they could still afford these waxy and grainy substitutes -- and slightly-turned orange juice from concentrate to assuage his raging self-loathing. She would wipe his face with a cool, wet, sour-smelling washcloth and wrap ice in the washcloth to put on the lump that would form on his crown. She would then retire back to the bedroom to finish the latest romance novel by Violet Whinspear or Janet Dailey and “put her feet up”.
Jake would sit alone in the cool of the afternoon kitchen holding his throbbing head and cursing the short straw life had drawn for him.
The buzz of the latest in Fall fashions was not relegated only to the runways of Paris, London and Milan. Every child in the public school system of Clayton went through the anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance of the subtle negotiation that took place every Fall when it was time for their weary parents to buy their kids new school clothes.
Mid-August came and parents carted their progeny off to Hudson’s, J.C. Penney’s, or, if the kid was poor, Montgomery Ward or, worse, K Mart. Crammed into a convection oven of a car, they’d bitch and moan about sticking to their sweaty sister or to the napalm-hot vinyl seats. Sibling would smack sibling, parent would try to cover yet somehow still silently communicate their rising dread that this shopping jaunt will end badly. Sadly, the drive to the Mall was the most pleasant thing about the whole trip.
One would think that the cool air-conditioned womb of the department store with its calming musak would’ve settled the hot, palpable friction between parent and child, but it had the opposite effect. The change from blistering hot parking lot to supercool manufactured air effected the very checks and balances in the human psyche. Pleasant society broke down. The family unit divided against each other and in a public place no less. Oh, yes, there was more fun to come.
Every child’s:
“Mom, can we get this?”
...was met with a stern look and a slow shake of the head:
“No”.
This led to a cold:
“Fine”
... and then a mumbled:
“You never let me get anything cool”.
“What did you say young man/lady?”
The trenches were dug. The Battle was on.
The Dad or Step-Dad would go AWOL almost immediately, throwing his hands up in the air in disgust and heading off toward the tools, tossing a “You deal with it. He’s your son” back as a parting dagger. This left the Mom, face red, eternally sad look on her face as if to say she never signed on for this shit.
The dance that ensued took all of two hours. Each side conceding points to their advisary in hopes that it all would end quickly. Each side took the concessions as further attacks and reboubled their efforts. It was as if the combatants had regressed to a more primal state where communication was just a series of grunts and nods.
The Boys wanted stuff with sports logos all over it. Didn’t matter what it was, could’ve been underwear, as long as it had a football team logo on it. And, jeans. Calvin Klein, Sergio Valenti, Jordache. Anything but Levi’s. Unless they were “Movin’ On” Jeans. Nothing else. And, Adidas, Converse, Nike or Pumas shoes. Mom, on the other hand wanted her boy in chinos and a nice broadcloth buttondown. She wanted her little boy to dress like the man she should’ve married.
The Girls, like the boys, wanted jeans in all the aforementioned brands, adding only Gloria Vanderbilt, Sasson and Chic. They had to be tight. So tight you had to put them on wet and blow them dry on your body, risking being late or a yeast infection, whichever came first. The process would mean getting up at 6 a.m. every morning. These jeans were the 1980’s version of the corset, forcing young girls to suffer greatly for their beauty. Tight skirts, too. So tight that they would cause hip displasia. And, short. So short that any passing boy could almost make what day of the week underpants the girl was wearing. They also wanted tee shirts. These were also tight. The girls wanted to dress like the sluts they knew the boys liked. Mom wanted her little girl to dress like, well, a nun. Long skirts and turtlenecks were the preferred choice. In Momland, all the girls in the school should pass for Martha Graham. Eventually a bargain would be struck somewhere in between and the girls would plod off to school in knee-length skirts and short sleeve blouses; looking a bit like backsliding Mormons.
It took a public confrontation to put the whole shopping thing into perspective for the young ones. Commands were barked so the sales clerk could hear or the Moms would feign leaving the store saying firmly, “I’ll be in the car”. If this didn’t get them moving, they would resort to the closer. An arm would be grabbed tightly and jerk to within earshot, then in a firm, low whisper came:
“Do you want me to take your pants down in front of all these people and give you a lickin’?”
This had less to do with oral sex than with getting your ass whupped.
A weak but bitter “No” was issued by the broken child and the battle was over.
Things were picked out hastily and paid for. The ride home was as silent as a morgue in slow season. Alone in their misery, the children would plot. They would by the stuff they really wanted, the short skirts, the black concert t-shirts, and keep it at a friend’s house. They would dress to please their mothers at home, and dress to please themselves on the way to school. Anything else they really wanted, but was too expensive, would wait until Christmas.
As it was with Fall, likewise the post-Christmas Fashion show delighted with all its alpine flair and cozy ski-lodge softness of acrylic blend ski sweaters and wide wale cordorouy. But, that was merely a prelude to the Spring fashion show that heralded the coming of Summer Vacation. Kids itchy for summer and made unstable by being penned up in the tiny aluminum sided faux-clapboard houses lining the bleak treeless streets were jonesing for warm weather. These kids, pink with Spring Fever would come to school in shirtsleeves and shorts when the snow was all but gone. The boys looked like adolescent flashers with their three-quarter length winter coats completely obscuring the fact they were wearing shorts. These kids, quite certainly, were children of single parent families because, as the teachers would mumble aloud during their Recess smoke break.
“No self-respecting Mother would let her children leave the house dressed in Bermudas, a Starsky and Hutch shirt and green, metal shank rubber boots in Mid-March.”
“Child Protection Services should be notified”, another would say as they tipped another Marlboro Light from their leatherette combination cigarette case/coinpurse.
These kids, boys mostly, looked more like clam diggers in the mudflats of Cape Cod than pimply-faced Midwestern sixth graders. These were the same kids that brought cold Government cheese sandwiches and an occasional apple to lunch to avoid eating the dread and embarrassing “free hot lunch”. These were the students that Our Poor Jake tried desperately not to make direct eye contact with for fear they’d recognize one of their own kind trying to pass himself off as middle class and out him.
The other children, the ones with good Mothers or, at least, Mothers who pretended to care, wore thick woolen mittens, scarves and hats, which were, perhaps, even handmade. The girls wore pastels and the boys wore a myriad of bright primary and secondary colors, except yellow and pink. The down coats and vests, the Moon boots, even the mitten or glove clips were gender specific. Everything was as it should be. Boys on one side, girls on the other. They could wait ‘til junior high to start the awkward dance toward each other and discovery.
The boys favored sports paraphernalia because the cool girls favored the boys who favored sports paraphernalia. Ring binders, folders, pencil cases, pencils to go in the pencil cases, erasers and book covers. Pictures of players with nicknames like, “White Shoes”, “Sweetness”, “Bubba”, “Spiderman”, “The Snake” and “Mean Joe” graced every inch of the school supplies. Football was the sport of choice for the school year. Sure, spring would bring a few very muddy games of baseball before the Summer Recess, but Football was king of the playground.
And so, our little boy Jake had been ushered, by the most meager of Good Fortunes, to the threshold of acceptance into this status symbol-oriented world by a chance gift of a Football hat from his father. With silent expectation of the glories to come, he sat in the split bucket seat of the shit-brown Dart, his breath puffing opaquely across the safety glass. This was finally his turn down the runway.
He never had new Fall clothes; none that he cared to show off anyway. His Mother had always packed him and his older sister up in the shitmobile to buy clothes at Montgomery Ward, Monkey Ward they liked to call it, to by their Fall clothes. At the time, these were places you’d buy your tools, your lawnmower, a major appliance or perhaps a fake Christmas Tree, not, for the love of all that is good in the world, school clothes. This past year, his older sister had begun working as an assistant to the florist at Tuxedo Floral and thus would be buying her own clothes this year, clothes that would allow her entré into the Glittering World. Jake, however, was still forced to brave the stiff-legged, deep blue Toughskins with the polyurethane re-enforced knee and the velour zip-up sweaters with the big ass metal zipper rings. Or, God please forbid, the boot-cut (he would never be allowed to wear bell or elephant bell cut) crushed red corduroy, or worse polyester, pants with the white piping on the ass pockets. He had worn this horrible garment, these trousers from the 5th circle of Fashion Hell, to school once and after nearly killing himself with embarrassment, he purposely-by-accident fell into the oilpatch that slicked the middle of his driveway, permanently ruining the pants.
“Aww, look what you did to your pants. I just can’t buy you nice things. Take ‘em off, they’re going to the Good Will”
“Great, Mom, like the poor aren’t ashamed of their plight enough, you have to dress them like rodeo clowns, too?” This he said to himself for he never sassed his Mother. Not until he had, at least, started lying to her about where he was going and that was years away.
But, now, seated under the warm dry Lions hat, he was about to be lifted from the mire of his existence and be placed on probation in the Kingdom of Suburban Culture. How he acted today would forever change how he was perceived. He would be noticed, maybe for the first time, as a sexual being, or at least what passed for sex in the sixth grade.
He stepped into the brisk air and into the world awaiting him.
* * *
It had gone famously. He strolled the short hall to his room with an easy grace, approaching full swagger with a hint of shyness. All heads turned when he entered with the hat on his head. Even Matt Lark, the man-boy forced to sit in the corner behind the medical clothes changing screen because he “had a problem concentrating”, was enthralled enough to look. Matt suffered from what would be later termed as “Attention Deficit Disorder”. Ms. Garter called him a “Mr. Fussbudget” which warranted such quarantine.
This kind of ridicule was standard behavior throughout the public schools of Clayton. Not one of the Oakland County Teacher of the Year recipients ever came from Clayton’s school system. Clayton’s tax revenue didn’t allow the school system to hire the cream of the education crop. Ms. Garter was more of the chaff of the crop than anything else. Just picking up a check while gleaning enjoyment from destroying young lives by issuing forth casually caustic remarks from her mentholated cigarette-smelling piehole.
He had gone through recess and was now waiting patiently in his seat for the last bell to ring, coat and hat on like everyone else, except Matt Lark, who always had to stay after class and help Ms. Garter “clean up”.
This meant let her molest him.
Once, a few of the boys had pretended to walk home and doubled back to catch her putting her hand down the front of Matt’s pants. He saw them and smiled a smile that wasn’t as much a smile as it was a bitter recognition that the position he was in was enjoyable yet frightening. They asked him later if he wanted them to tell the principal, but he said no. Because that would get Ms. Garter transferred, not fired, just transferred to another school in Clayton. And, Ms. Garter seemed to be the only teacher that really cared about educating the man-boy Lark.
Jake was walking home with the rest of David Polks’ entourage or ‘gang’. They would walk by the Thomas’ big black fence, from behind which came the feral and unnatural barking of the big black Doberman. The Doberman was the fiercest dog that the children knew because Rottweillers weren’t yet fashionable as a home safety item/child killer in the suburbs, yet. Past the bikers’ house with the big motorcycles in various states in disrepair littering the inside of the open garage. Periodically one or two of the boys would be goaded on a dare into running up and touching the fender or handlebar of one of the hogs, immediately upon which everyone would run, fearing the big leatherclad man-beasts that lived there. Past the Baptist minister’s house, his wife seated with her knitting on a green strap and aluminum lawn rocker, a stadium blanket spread across her ample lap. Past the Hanlon’s whose whole front yard had been trampled into a mass of mud by their giant Siberian Husky, Thor, who lay quietly panting; waiting for the children who would stroke fist-sized clumps of hair from his thick coat.
It was past Thor when Jake walked right into a trap. A trap set by David Polks and his Uber-Kommandant, Jack Goff.
Jack Goff, perhaps because his name was a homonym for masturbation, was a certified Badass. He had to be. With a name like that, you either fought your way through life or you laid back and took whatever it gave you. Or, you committed suicide. Apparently his father, John, wanted to name his son after him, but he wanted his son to have a separate identity apart from his father. However, he didn’t take into account the sound of his child’s name. Maybe, he was thinking that Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue” made quite a lot of sense. Give the boy a fucked-up name and he just about raises himself. Whatever the case, Jack was always referred to by his first name or Mr. Goff. Only the teacher said his full name. And, when she did, no one laughed. There was dead silence in reverence for the boy who had been so cruelly named.
With the moniker forced around his neck like a “Kick Me” sign, Jack rose in the ranks of the suburban fascist demagogues. He ruled his neighborhood block and a few of the other kids blocks, with an iron hand and an unquestioned loyalty from the children who lived in his realm. By the time he reached the sixth grade, he had beaten up a ninth grader, a feat that no one ever before achieved. He had a scar above his right eye and he was the first to wear a muscle shirt to school. Couple that with a huge black pocket comb with a handle that protruded from the pocket of his supertight Levi’s bell bottoms, the untied white Adidas hightops, and the perfectly feathered butt-crack parted hairdo, and you had one bonafide motherfucker.
David Polks, a slightly smaller, preppier version of Jack Goff looked back towards the kids following him and his eyes fell on Our Jake. Jake thought it was a recognition that he had arrived as an Accepted One, but Jake was sadly unaware that that glance was a sign; a Judas Kiss that singled him out as the weak animal of the pack; singled him out for the takedown and the kill.
Jack Goff was standing, leaning against a Maple its prematurely turned leaves blazing blood red in the afternoon sun. Jack was talking to Shelly Geller, the petite--most of the prepubescent sixth grader girls were petite--brunette who would later bear the bastard child of the high school football coach. David Polks’ nod forced him to break off his convo with the future Miss Promiscuity and start his imposing swagger toward the mass of boys.
About six feet from the Polks entourage, Mr. Goff barked the following phrase:
“Nice Hat.”
Everyone stood still. All talk ceased. It was an interminable silence, like the beginning of Sergio Leone’s “One Upon A Time in the West”. Several of the boys were wearing hats. They looked at each other, terrified. The boys without hats forced the breaking smiles from their face for fear of being singled out and beaten down.
“You with the Lions Hat.”
That narrowed it down to only Jake.
“I’m gonna steal your hat.” In one move, he swiped it from Jake’s crown and he twirled it on his index finger.
“Watcha gonna do? Hunh?”
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Unless he goes so far as to call me a...
“Faggot.”
The word clanged in Jake’s ear like a cast iron gauntlet. He was now at great risk of losing any standing he had in the complex web of social strata that supported him. He was on the precipice of dropping through and being exiled to walking home alone everyday, eating lunch alone and eventually, wading into a large crowd of strangers with a high-powered automatic weapon and mowing them down before he turned the gun on himself.
Suddenly, in Jake’s nostrils, it smelled like Summer.
* * *
It was a warm day in August when he was only 10 years old. His older brother, Craig was home from a long day at the Shell Gas station on Main Street. He was lying across the burnt orange burlap sofa dragging on a Vantage Menthol watching Kid Creole on the tube because it was Elvis Week on the Four O’clock Movie. He was still wearing the grey uniform with the gold Shell on the breast pocket. The sleeves were rolled up showing the large fierce eagle tattoo on his left upper arm. Bulging from the roll was the rectangle of the hard pack of smokes. In one hand was an eraser pink rag deepened to almost red in the center with oil. In the other hand was the dismantled remains of what Jake would later find out to be a two-shot 25 caliber Beretta. In accordance with their Mother’s wishes, both workbooted feet were firmly planted on the floor.
Jake had come in, sweating profusely, face red as hothouse tomatoes, hands balled into neat fists. He intended to charge to his room, slam the door, throw himself on his bed, bite his pillow and scream into the fiberfill until he fell asleep from exhaustion. He was halted mid-charge by his brother’s nonchalance as he cleaned the pistol. Up to that point, Jake had only heard about the gun like he had heard that the Miners’ dog had contracted rabies and had to be put down; it was accepted as fact but it was never really verified as truth.
“Who was it?” Craig’s question struck Jake full in the chest.
‘How could he know’?
“Carlo Peroni”
“That fucking guinea? Italians are tough, kid. They’re born fighting. And, if they ain't fightin', they're fuckin'.'”
Jake made his way toward his room.
“You want some advice?” Craig was sitting up now and he had placed the gun back in its box. He wiped his hands with the rag, using the oil on it to pull the gas station grime from his nails. Jake could see his knuckles, callused in equal amounts from grinding them into car underbodies when the wrenches slipped as from grinding them into the Hai Karate-scented chins of “those candyassed Squares”. These “Squares” turned out to be Mack and Jay, brothers of both Mr. Goff and Mr. Polks, respectively.
“Come with me”.
Jake followed Craig to the side door and soon they were standing in the driveway between the house and Craig’s olive green and gold metal flake 1970 Plymouth Duster. The vent to the drier downstairs pumped moist hot air out of the side of the house. The steam ran through Jake’s legs, making him sweat even more.
“Look at me.”
Jake locked on his brother’s eyes. He respected him, nearly as much as his father, perhaps more so because while Jake was sure his Dad could kick some shit, Craig actually had, in recent memory, kicked a great deal of shit and was very good at it.
“When you got a guy, looks like he’s not gonna back down...it looks like you’ll actually have to get down to fighting instead of that pussy shoving match bullshit the fags in high school do...the first thing you want to do is get the jump on him. You need the first punch. Because when all the shit’s done. Nine times outta ten, it’s the guy who threw the first punch that everyone says won the fight. You got me?”
Jake nodded.
“Now. This is how you get the jump on the guy.” Craig stopped and looked over Jake’s left shoulder at someone coming up the driveway. Jake turned in the direction Craig was looking and saw no one. When he turned his head back his gaze was blocked by Craig’s scarred fist not two inches from him face. Jake could see the thin white whirls of scar tissue wending their way across the terrain of his brother’s knuckles. Jake could also see his brother’s point.
* * *
“The fuck you looking at, Kid.” Jack Goff’s voice was a grinding teenage mess of high and low tones that raised the hairs on Jake’s neck. Mr. Goff started to turn his head to where Jake was staring.
Jake’s small fist turned it the rest of the way.
He had done it. He got the jump on him and now he was in the shit. He had connected with the chin of the Great Jack Goff and he felt the rush of what that meant. He watched him stumble backward slightly, try to catch his balance and collapse clumsily to the pavement.
Jake had no time for reveling in the fortuitous moment. His opponent was up in a nanosecond and gripped the hat between two hands. He growled a cub-like grunt and pulled his hands apart. In one hand was the hat and through the fingers of the other bunched claw peeked the Honolulu Blue and Silver pom-pom.
From somewhere deep inside Jake’s chest there issued forth such a hideous sound that later, after the skirmish, the people who actually heard it, went hoarse trying to recreate it in their retelling of the fight. The sound exited his mouth in a bent howl as he charged at the hand holding his beloved Lions hat.
He couldn’t stop his progress after Mr. Goff stepped aside and jerked the knit cap out of his reach like a matador. Jake bulled right into the dark bark of a large elm tree, his head striking the side with a dull thud. He fell to the grass beneath him and rolled to his back. He was vulnerable now, but he didn’t process this because his head was playing the very end of It’s A Wonderful Life, the glorious giant bells clanging gleefully away, loudly and proudly. Above him the tree’s bare woody fingers swam into and out of focus as he tried with desperate intensity not to barf up the macaroni and cheese and limp hotdog he had for lunch. The bells were replaced in an excruciatingly long crossfade with children’s laughter. The loudest of all the children being David Polks.
When he opened his eyes, Mr. Goff was standing over him, the pom-pom fist cocked back for a bone-jarring blow to the eye.
“You leave that child alone, do you hear me?” It was the angelic Ms. Grey, the minister’s wife, hollering at the height of her soprano voice.
“You Goff boys have been nothing but trouble. Get away from him. Haven’t you got better things to do than beat up on poor kids”.
This well-timed reprieve embarrassed Jake more than the headlong dive into the tree. More than any pummeling Mr. Goff could administer with his bony hardball-sized fists. It embarrassed him because she didn’t say it like “...on poor kids” But, more like “...on poor kids”.
Mr. Goff turned back to Jake, snorted like a prize-winning hog, spit his slick, pale-green treasure into the Lions hat, crouched and forced it down around Jake’s throbbing head. He then took the pom-pom and stuffed it in Jake’s mouth. Jake could see the feet and knees of the children walking around him, away from him as he struggled to his feet. He steadied himself against the tree that caused his near-concussion and waited for balance to slosh back into its proper position inside his head.
Only Scott Carson and his twin Alex looked back, stopping just enough behind the group to check if Jake was okay before hustling back into the throng.
News of the fight would spread through the school like the flu through a daycare center. The story would go like this:
Mr. Goff had pulled the cool “spit-the-hat-and-make-him-wear-it” move, but Jake had the cajõnes to take the first punch. Once the dust sifted back down, the edge would go to Jack Goff because it was the more believable story. David Polks would stop his incessant pestering and belittling of Jake shortly after the incident. Jake thought it was because David now had a newfound respect for him. Alex and Scott Carson would say it was because he didn’t want Jake to kick his scrawny ass.
“Are you okay?”
Jake turned to face Ms. Grey who was standing with one foot on the porch and one foot on the top step, ready to run to Jake if he passed out.
Jake’s eyes burned. His breathing caught in his throat. He bark-sobbed at Ms. Grey.
“Why’d you have to call me poor?”
Jake turned and slowly walked home to where his Mother would stuff him with Dolly Madison snack cakes -- they couldn’t afford Hostess yet they could still afford these waxy and grainy substitutes -- and slightly-turned orange juice from concentrate to assuage his raging self-loathing. She would wipe his face with a cool, wet, sour-smelling washcloth and wrap ice in the washcloth to put on the lump that would form on his crown. She would then retire back to the bedroom to finish the latest romance novel by Violet Whinspear or Janet Dailey and “put her feet up”.
Jake would sit alone in the cool of the afternoon kitchen holding his throbbing head and cursing the short straw life had drawn for him.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
(one) The Origin of the Lions Hat
(Part One) The Lions Hat
“When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one! There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought. And, when I grow up, I’ll write one-”
-Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
(one) The Origin of the Lions Hat
For young boys, and maybe it's true for girls as well, there exists a time where everything that a boy posesses takes on a sort of talismanic power all its own. The child endows each and every object with a special and specific meaning. A baseball glove, for instance, has a whole regimen or ritual to its care and use. It must be purchased by the Male Role Model and given to the child in the initiation of the Mentor-Protege relationship. If the Male Role Model isn't going to take the time or has no intention of staying in Female Role Model's life long enough to transmit the game of baseball or even the simple pleasure of a game of catch to the receiver of the glove, he just shouldn't bother. Nothing aggravates a boy more than a glove and no ball, except a glove and a ball and no one to throw it to. Sure, there's always using the sloping roof of the house as readymade pitcher, but the act is not the soul benefit. If that were the case, everyone would masturbate and the Race would die out. No. The benefit is interaction with a fellow human. Just like sex. Sorta.
Anyway, there's a whole process to endowing the talisman. For the glove, it's the careful oiling, working of the creases, tying it up with the ball still in it so it breaks in just right. Few things reach this level, but when they do, they are guarded with the ferocity of a Doberman guarding her pups. The talisman must be protected from every source of ridicule or judgement. It must remain beyond reproach. If it doesn't, it loses its power and dies.
Thus enters the hat.
Jake, let's call him Jake, never had anything good. In 'good', I mean 'cool', 'neato', and ‘keen’, 'bomb-out', 'bitchin' or 'awesome'. He never had the flashy deep blue satin baseball jacket with "Tigers" written in orange script across the back. He never had the kick-ass Pony hightops with the fat laces untied flip-flopping down the hall to class like he was the King of the Freshman Class. He never had the Trapper Keeper with the Velcro Close with the picture of Billy Sims or Ken "The Snake" Stabler on the cover. The only thing remotely good he had was a beat up Lions stocking hat with the pom-pom ball missing.
To Jake, it was the Golden Fleece.
It was given to him, almost accidentally, by his father Big Jake. (This made Jake, Li'l Jake or J.R. not 'junior', never 'junior'.) Big Jake was every bit his name, large frame, barrel chest and thick peasant paws. His hair turned white around 1968, the year Li'l Jake was born. He did a cartwheel the day Li'l Jake was born; a full-blown cartwheel on the brown, nearly dead scrap of lawn in front of the grey shale and green trimmed bungalow he bought to shelter his large family. Thinking back now on the history of heart problems that were to strike him, nearly hobble him, less than ten years later, it was probably the last cartwheel he ever did.
He had two boys and two girls before Jake and apparently he wanted a boy to round out to an odd five. That meant seven people in a house that was built to sleep four. Anyone looking in on them would've thought they were Catholic by the size of the family, but Big Jake raised his kids laissez faire Northern Baptist. They were like Catholics without all the fun.
Jake nearly killed his mother coming into this world. Added to the fact that he was nearly a month late was that her diabetes hadn’t yet been diagnosed. Had the doctors known perhaps they could’ve done something. Maybe she would’ve talked it over with Big Jake and decided not to have the fifth kid. But, that was the way it happened. As it was, they nearly lost the poor babe when he didn’t breath for almost six minutes. Doctor said he’d probably have brain damage. They were surprised to find out he didn’t.
It was a very crisp biting Michigan October day, which meant 41º and blindingly sunny. Big Jake grabbed his son, waved good-bye to his wife and headed out to Meijer's Thrifty Acres to buy buttermilk, because it settled Mom's stomach, and a pound of ground beef. Right there Jake should've thought something was up, seeing that Big Jake always went to Farmer Jack's for the piddly shit like milk or coffee and held off going to M.T.A. until there was a list with more than five items. This was one of the many protocols that Big Jake had created so his life would work more simply.
"Besides", he had often told Jake, "No sense in being around that many people if it can be helped. The lower the number of shitheads you have to deal with the better".
Big Jake wasn't what you'd call a shopper. He was one of the many people that Free Market Economists hated; one that didn't hold up his end of the bargain when it came to browsing, impulse purchasing and the complete shopping experience. Big Jake was a buyer, plain and simple. Go in, find what you're looking for and get the hell outta Dodge.
This time he didn't.
He sent his son off to the toy aisle, something the boy's mother did often, while he ambled off vaguely in the direction of the meat department. This started Jake to worry. He was smarter than that to fall for such a ruse. He was probably smarter than his father, who hadn’t finish high school. Smarter than his brother and sisters, most of whom followed in the old man’s footsteps. Smarter than most of his friends, though in the end it did him no good because he had to “dumb down” in their presence. This knowledge hadn’t given him any advantage at all, for with the knowledge came paranoia. He had heard and read stories, myths really, about how this was the exactly way that all parents who didn't want their kids anymore got rid of them.
They abandon them in the supermarket or department store or mall, someplace big enough and filled with enough stuff to keep you occupied for a long time so you wouldn't know your dad and the rest of the family were tooling down the highway in a Winebago laughing their asses off about how they fooled that smart-mouthed little brat. Never liked him anyway. Serves him good.
Jake had read enough Roald Dahl books to know that when you're a ward of the state, an orphan, you have to eat bugs and trash and work 18 hour days and you're beaten every night so your exhaustion from work and crying acts as a sort of emotional Sominex; lulling you to sleep.
Jake, trembling with mild fright, headed for the toys.
It was a pity that Jake didn't know his Dad as well as other boys knew their dads. Of course, their Dads worked 9 to 5 not 7 to 6. They came home at lunch instead of eating in strange diners, served by women who were not his Mother. Jake's Dad, at least he thought so, was eating pie and drinking fresh-brewed coffee with strangers instead of chawing on another limp bologna sandwich and drinking expired milk in his instant coffee cause Mom was "resting."
Jake had wended his way through most of the toy aisle looking at stuff he'd never be like to own; Star Wars models, G. I. Joe dolls (the older big dolls with the "Kung Fu Grip" and the felt-like high-and-tight haircut not those lame 'action figures' they tried to pass off as the Real "Joe"), Commodore 64 computers and Atari 5200s. Jake was buzzing with a mix of the bright-eyed wonder of a burgeoning impulse consumer and the severe childhood depression that comes with the fact that he was born into a low social stratum. Okay, maybe it was more a combination of want/need/toylust and pragamatic sensibility. Maybe. He wandered to the end of an aisle that packed with rows of tiny green and orange plastic garbage cans filled with Slime and Slime with Worms, respectively. He turned to look back down the aisle before going on. That's when he saw his Dad.
He was talking with a large blonde woman wearing an oversized red vest and what looked like clown make-up. Jake squinted his eyes and made out that there was nametag pinned to her vest and that that was her actual carefully applied make-up. Big Jake turned, caught Jake in his field of vision and waved one of his patented 'nevermind' waves to the blonde as she visibly shrunk with the breaking off of the encounter with Big Jake.
Yes, Big Jake was handsome. Yes, he was an incorrigible flirt, with waitresses, stewardesses and in his later years, nurses. But, when it came down to the short hairs, he was loyal. Big Jake knew this. Jake's Mom knew this. The whole family knew it, but Jake.
Jake stood at the end of the aisle not knowing whether to wait there or start running. Jake really couldn't gauge his Dad. Was he mad? Of course not, he would've left your ass at the store and drove home without you. Well, if he wasn't mad, then what? As Big Jake padded down the aisle, Jake could see there was a barely visible smile forming on his face.
"Hey there, Little Fella. Gotcha something".
"What?" This came out of the boy's mouth like a poorly formed spitball; dropping sadly, hesitantly from his lips as if he had just gotten caught spitting it into the hair of the girl who sat in front of him in Miss Acker’s class.
"Close yer eyes".
He did. And, the fear tripled.
What the hell is he doing? Who is this guy and why did I agree to go to the store with him? He frightens me with his shenanigans. Did I just use the word she--
He felt something go over his head and stop at the speedbumps of his ears.
"Well, what do you think?"
Jake opened his eyes and looked for a bright shiny surface in which to see whatever was on his head. He stepped to the gleaming chrome upright of the racks that held the Slime. In it he made out a very sad, squashed face of a boy dwarfed by a Honolulu Blue and Silver stocking hat with a softball size pom-pom and a Honolulu Blue silhouette of a lion pouncing on an unseen prey. It was a Lions hat.
Jake turned back to his Dad.
"Can I keep it?"
This was question was more loaded than most people might think. You see, it played into Jake's propensity for wearing things around the store in case he saw anyone from school. This way, he could actually have the trappings of Cool without having to buy them. Occasionally, this habit would end up with some little older woman or snot-nosed stockboy following him around telling him: "You know you have to pay for that, you know"; adding the second 'you know' as an apparent attempt at a witty riposte. Also, kids he did see at the store would ask him the next day at school:
"Hey where's your Tigers jacket?"
And, he would have to think fast and say:
"My Mom won't let me wear it to school. She's afraid I'll get jumped"
This would probably be true in both cases. She wouldn't and he would.
Jake took the hat off and turned it in his hands. It was awesome. It was the coolest thing he'd ever seen, not because the Lions were great. No. They sucked shit through a straw. 2-14 last year. 4-12 the year before. No. It was because his Dad thought it was cool, too.
"Can't go through winter without a good winter hat. Your Mom'd probably buy you one with snowflakes or deer or some shit like that."
Jake laughed at this. He enjoyed profanity. He enjoyed it even more when someone who never used it, used it.
"Can't have you walking around school with snowmen on your head. You'd get the shit kicked outta ya." Big Jake busted out a deep, barrel-chested laugh and his eyes narrowed to slits. To Jake, he looked like the Santa Claus on the side of the 8 packs of Coke bottles during Christmas time; fat jolly and generous.
"Let's go", Big Jake spun Jake around with a guiding hand and marched him toward the check out.
The boy was beaming with pride, not because he had finally broken the surly bonds of Nerd to touch the face of Cool, but because he had just been a part of an act of love from his father. In that moment, he was both jubilant and ashamed, jubilant in the fact that he now was closer to his Male Role model, ashamed of all the things he thought about his father prior to the Giving of the Hat.
Although the Dodge Dart blasted toasty air from its vents into his face, Jake kept the hat on the whole way home; alternately taking it off to look at the pouncing blue King of the Beasts and putting it on and scrunching down to catch a glimpse of the hat in the passenger side mirror. They turned the corner on their block and Jake saw a couple of his friends standing in one of the front yards playing catch with a lime green Nerf football. They all watched the car trawl passed. As they did, Jake sat up straighter to show off his hat in its optimum coolness. Big Jake killed the engine in the street and coasted to a stop in the drive; a trick Li’l Jake always liked because it felt like that was what it must feel like to be on a sailboat with nothing but the power of the nature and physics propelling the vehicle. It drifted a few seconds and edged to a halt. Jake got out of the car slowly, cautiously, trying to contain the obvious glee at the tiny fingerhold the Lions hat gave him on the sheer face of the mountain of acceptance by the Cultural Vanguards.
The neighbor kids ran up to him to complement him on his hat. It was “cool”, “neato” and one leaned into his face and said in a low voice “kick-ass”. David Polks, who at the time was the neighborhood Fascist-In-Training, came slowly, methodically sauntering up to where the others were. He was of average height, his face was a bit drawn and his eyes narrow. He looked, for the most part, like he was in a position to judge everything; he was the sole arbiter of things acceptable. He was the Kommandant who sent you to the either the barracks or the showers. It was him they feared.
The other children waited patiently for him to ring down his judgment.
“Nice hat”, he said flatly so it could be taken in any combination of ways. This boy was already a master of manipulation. Later, if he so chose, he could deny his acceptance by saying he was ‘goofing’ and that he couldn’t believe they fell for it. Keeping his underlings guessing was only one of the ways, which he kept tight rein on his sway over them.
The kids nodded in vague agreement as they started to pass the Nerf around again.
“I’d lose the pom-pom, though. The seventh graders’ll kick yer ass for that”, he looked into Jake’s face for some reaction to what he said, but Jake threw up an uncustomary stony facade that took all the strength he could muster.
“Gimme the ball”, Herr Polks yelled to the others as he ran to join them.
You will not alter the talisman. It was given to you by your Father. You must and will respect its power.
Jake replayed the whole Giving episode in his head, like a flashback, while he tried desperately to calm himself.
With his face flushed and his head warm, he rushed to join the others in a loud and rowdy game of Smear the Queer.
“When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one! There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought. And, when I grow up, I’ll write one-”
-Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
(one) The Origin of the Lions Hat
For young boys, and maybe it's true for girls as well, there exists a time where everything that a boy posesses takes on a sort of talismanic power all its own. The child endows each and every object with a special and specific meaning. A baseball glove, for instance, has a whole regimen or ritual to its care and use. It must be purchased by the Male Role Model and given to the child in the initiation of the Mentor-Protege relationship. If the Male Role Model isn't going to take the time or has no intention of staying in Female Role Model's life long enough to transmit the game of baseball or even the simple pleasure of a game of catch to the receiver of the glove, he just shouldn't bother. Nothing aggravates a boy more than a glove and no ball, except a glove and a ball and no one to throw it to. Sure, there's always using the sloping roof of the house as readymade pitcher, but the act is not the soul benefit. If that were the case, everyone would masturbate and the Race would die out. No. The benefit is interaction with a fellow human. Just like sex. Sorta.
Anyway, there's a whole process to endowing the talisman. For the glove, it's the careful oiling, working of the creases, tying it up with the ball still in it so it breaks in just right. Few things reach this level, but when they do, they are guarded with the ferocity of a Doberman guarding her pups. The talisman must be protected from every source of ridicule or judgement. It must remain beyond reproach. If it doesn't, it loses its power and dies.
Thus enters the hat.
Jake, let's call him Jake, never had anything good. In 'good', I mean 'cool', 'neato', and ‘keen’, 'bomb-out', 'bitchin' or 'awesome'. He never had the flashy deep blue satin baseball jacket with "Tigers" written in orange script across the back. He never had the kick-ass Pony hightops with the fat laces untied flip-flopping down the hall to class like he was the King of the Freshman Class. He never had the Trapper Keeper with the Velcro Close with the picture of Billy Sims or Ken "The Snake" Stabler on the cover. The only thing remotely good he had was a beat up Lions stocking hat with the pom-pom ball missing.
To Jake, it was the Golden Fleece.
It was given to him, almost accidentally, by his father Big Jake. (This made Jake, Li'l Jake or J.R. not 'junior', never 'junior'.) Big Jake was every bit his name, large frame, barrel chest and thick peasant paws. His hair turned white around 1968, the year Li'l Jake was born. He did a cartwheel the day Li'l Jake was born; a full-blown cartwheel on the brown, nearly dead scrap of lawn in front of the grey shale and green trimmed bungalow he bought to shelter his large family. Thinking back now on the history of heart problems that were to strike him, nearly hobble him, less than ten years later, it was probably the last cartwheel he ever did.
He had two boys and two girls before Jake and apparently he wanted a boy to round out to an odd five. That meant seven people in a house that was built to sleep four. Anyone looking in on them would've thought they were Catholic by the size of the family, but Big Jake raised his kids laissez faire Northern Baptist. They were like Catholics without all the fun.
Jake nearly killed his mother coming into this world. Added to the fact that he was nearly a month late was that her diabetes hadn’t yet been diagnosed. Had the doctors known perhaps they could’ve done something. Maybe she would’ve talked it over with Big Jake and decided not to have the fifth kid. But, that was the way it happened. As it was, they nearly lost the poor babe when he didn’t breath for almost six minutes. Doctor said he’d probably have brain damage. They were surprised to find out he didn’t.
It was a very crisp biting Michigan October day, which meant 41º and blindingly sunny. Big Jake grabbed his son, waved good-bye to his wife and headed out to Meijer's Thrifty Acres to buy buttermilk, because it settled Mom's stomach, and a pound of ground beef. Right there Jake should've thought something was up, seeing that Big Jake always went to Farmer Jack's for the piddly shit like milk or coffee and held off going to M.T.A. until there was a list with more than five items. This was one of the many protocols that Big Jake had created so his life would work more simply.
"Besides", he had often told Jake, "No sense in being around that many people if it can be helped. The lower the number of shitheads you have to deal with the better".
Big Jake wasn't what you'd call a shopper. He was one of the many people that Free Market Economists hated; one that didn't hold up his end of the bargain when it came to browsing, impulse purchasing and the complete shopping experience. Big Jake was a buyer, plain and simple. Go in, find what you're looking for and get the hell outta Dodge.
This time he didn't.
He sent his son off to the toy aisle, something the boy's mother did often, while he ambled off vaguely in the direction of the meat department. This started Jake to worry. He was smarter than that to fall for such a ruse. He was probably smarter than his father, who hadn’t finish high school. Smarter than his brother and sisters, most of whom followed in the old man’s footsteps. Smarter than most of his friends, though in the end it did him no good because he had to “dumb down” in their presence. This knowledge hadn’t given him any advantage at all, for with the knowledge came paranoia. He had heard and read stories, myths really, about how this was the exactly way that all parents who didn't want their kids anymore got rid of them.
They abandon them in the supermarket or department store or mall, someplace big enough and filled with enough stuff to keep you occupied for a long time so you wouldn't know your dad and the rest of the family were tooling down the highway in a Winebago laughing their asses off about how they fooled that smart-mouthed little brat. Never liked him anyway. Serves him good.
Jake had read enough Roald Dahl books to know that when you're a ward of the state, an orphan, you have to eat bugs and trash and work 18 hour days and you're beaten every night so your exhaustion from work and crying acts as a sort of emotional Sominex; lulling you to sleep.
Jake, trembling with mild fright, headed for the toys.
It was a pity that Jake didn't know his Dad as well as other boys knew their dads. Of course, their Dads worked 9 to 5 not 7 to 6. They came home at lunch instead of eating in strange diners, served by women who were not his Mother. Jake's Dad, at least he thought so, was eating pie and drinking fresh-brewed coffee with strangers instead of chawing on another limp bologna sandwich and drinking expired milk in his instant coffee cause Mom was "resting."
Jake had wended his way through most of the toy aisle looking at stuff he'd never be like to own; Star Wars models, G. I. Joe dolls (the older big dolls with the "Kung Fu Grip" and the felt-like high-and-tight haircut not those lame 'action figures' they tried to pass off as the Real "Joe"), Commodore 64 computers and Atari 5200s. Jake was buzzing with a mix of the bright-eyed wonder of a burgeoning impulse consumer and the severe childhood depression that comes with the fact that he was born into a low social stratum. Okay, maybe it was more a combination of want/need/toylust and pragamatic sensibility. Maybe. He wandered to the end of an aisle that packed with rows of tiny green and orange plastic garbage cans filled with Slime and Slime with Worms, respectively. He turned to look back down the aisle before going on. That's when he saw his Dad.
He was talking with a large blonde woman wearing an oversized red vest and what looked like clown make-up. Jake squinted his eyes and made out that there was nametag pinned to her vest and that that was her actual carefully applied make-up. Big Jake turned, caught Jake in his field of vision and waved one of his patented 'nevermind' waves to the blonde as she visibly shrunk with the breaking off of the encounter with Big Jake.
Yes, Big Jake was handsome. Yes, he was an incorrigible flirt, with waitresses, stewardesses and in his later years, nurses. But, when it came down to the short hairs, he was loyal. Big Jake knew this. Jake's Mom knew this. The whole family knew it, but Jake.
Jake stood at the end of the aisle not knowing whether to wait there or start running. Jake really couldn't gauge his Dad. Was he mad? Of course not, he would've left your ass at the store and drove home without you. Well, if he wasn't mad, then what? As Big Jake padded down the aisle, Jake could see there was a barely visible smile forming on his face.
"Hey there, Little Fella. Gotcha something".
"What?" This came out of the boy's mouth like a poorly formed spitball; dropping sadly, hesitantly from his lips as if he had just gotten caught spitting it into the hair of the girl who sat in front of him in Miss Acker’s class.
"Close yer eyes".
He did. And, the fear tripled.
What the hell is he doing? Who is this guy and why did I agree to go to the store with him? He frightens me with his shenanigans. Did I just use the word she--
He felt something go over his head and stop at the speedbumps of his ears.
"Well, what do you think?"
Jake opened his eyes and looked for a bright shiny surface in which to see whatever was on his head. He stepped to the gleaming chrome upright of the racks that held the Slime. In it he made out a very sad, squashed face of a boy dwarfed by a Honolulu Blue and Silver stocking hat with a softball size pom-pom and a Honolulu Blue silhouette of a lion pouncing on an unseen prey. It was a Lions hat.
Jake turned back to his Dad.
"Can I keep it?"
This was question was more loaded than most people might think. You see, it played into Jake's propensity for wearing things around the store in case he saw anyone from school. This way, he could actually have the trappings of Cool without having to buy them. Occasionally, this habit would end up with some little older woman or snot-nosed stockboy following him around telling him: "You know you have to pay for that, you know"; adding the second 'you know' as an apparent attempt at a witty riposte. Also, kids he did see at the store would ask him the next day at school:
"Hey where's your Tigers jacket?"
And, he would have to think fast and say:
"My Mom won't let me wear it to school. She's afraid I'll get jumped"
This would probably be true in both cases. She wouldn't and he would.
Jake took the hat off and turned it in his hands. It was awesome. It was the coolest thing he'd ever seen, not because the Lions were great. No. They sucked shit through a straw. 2-14 last year. 4-12 the year before. No. It was because his Dad thought it was cool, too.
"Can't go through winter without a good winter hat. Your Mom'd probably buy you one with snowflakes or deer or some shit like that."
Jake laughed at this. He enjoyed profanity. He enjoyed it even more when someone who never used it, used it.
"Can't have you walking around school with snowmen on your head. You'd get the shit kicked outta ya." Big Jake busted out a deep, barrel-chested laugh and his eyes narrowed to slits. To Jake, he looked like the Santa Claus on the side of the 8 packs of Coke bottles during Christmas time; fat jolly and generous.
"Let's go", Big Jake spun Jake around with a guiding hand and marched him toward the check out.
The boy was beaming with pride, not because he had finally broken the surly bonds of Nerd to touch the face of Cool, but because he had just been a part of an act of love from his father. In that moment, he was both jubilant and ashamed, jubilant in the fact that he now was closer to his Male Role model, ashamed of all the things he thought about his father prior to the Giving of the Hat.
Although the Dodge Dart blasted toasty air from its vents into his face, Jake kept the hat on the whole way home; alternately taking it off to look at the pouncing blue King of the Beasts and putting it on and scrunching down to catch a glimpse of the hat in the passenger side mirror. They turned the corner on their block and Jake saw a couple of his friends standing in one of the front yards playing catch with a lime green Nerf football. They all watched the car trawl passed. As they did, Jake sat up straighter to show off his hat in its optimum coolness. Big Jake killed the engine in the street and coasted to a stop in the drive; a trick Li’l Jake always liked because it felt like that was what it must feel like to be on a sailboat with nothing but the power of the nature and physics propelling the vehicle. It drifted a few seconds and edged to a halt. Jake got out of the car slowly, cautiously, trying to contain the obvious glee at the tiny fingerhold the Lions hat gave him on the sheer face of the mountain of acceptance by the Cultural Vanguards.
The neighbor kids ran up to him to complement him on his hat. It was “cool”, “neato” and one leaned into his face and said in a low voice “kick-ass”. David Polks, who at the time was the neighborhood Fascist-In-Training, came slowly, methodically sauntering up to where the others were. He was of average height, his face was a bit drawn and his eyes narrow. He looked, for the most part, like he was in a position to judge everything; he was the sole arbiter of things acceptable. He was the Kommandant who sent you to the either the barracks or the showers. It was him they feared.
The other children waited patiently for him to ring down his judgment.
“Nice hat”, he said flatly so it could be taken in any combination of ways. This boy was already a master of manipulation. Later, if he so chose, he could deny his acceptance by saying he was ‘goofing’ and that he couldn’t believe they fell for it. Keeping his underlings guessing was only one of the ways, which he kept tight rein on his sway over them.
The kids nodded in vague agreement as they started to pass the Nerf around again.
“I’d lose the pom-pom, though. The seventh graders’ll kick yer ass for that”, he looked into Jake’s face for some reaction to what he said, but Jake threw up an uncustomary stony facade that took all the strength he could muster.
“Gimme the ball”, Herr Polks yelled to the others as he ran to join them.
You will not alter the talisman. It was given to you by your Father. You must and will respect its power.
Jake replayed the whole Giving episode in his head, like a flashback, while he tried desperately to calm himself.
With his face flushed and his head warm, he rushed to join the others in a loud and rowdy game of Smear the Queer.
(zero) Prologue
It was the type of sleepy bedroom community that sprang up around thriving metropolae in the late forties, early fifties. The neighbor's house was the same as yours, mostly. Perfect cookie cutter, gingerbread three bedroom, one and a half bath, rec. room finished basement clapboard bungalow after bungalow slung neatly in rows, ad infinitum. The unusually verdant front and backyards, usually the same size, were bordered by gleaming chrome-painted chain link, sporadically dotted with lawn jockeys (most of them black), ceramic geese, plastic lawn aviary (most of it pink) and an occasional child's bike. It was what the citizens of this hamlet called "a planned community" which, in hindsight, was a code, a euphemism for "no foreigners allowed".
The cars were solid, dependable road barges. And, with an average curbside weight of just under two tons, they were surprisingly agile. They dodged out of the way of flying whiffle balls, Frisbees and other projectile toys, out of the way of boys, mostly. Perhaps a few girls ridiculed into either the role of tomboy or cheerleader. Out of the way of bicycles left in driveways and garages, tossed hastily aside by children with full bladders, empty stomachs or stricken with the fear of a swift, sweaty backhand across tender cheekflesh if they weren't "in the house this minute".
Everything, for the most part, was clean, white and ordered.
Outside.
Inside was a whole other kettle of fish. While the fathers and some of the more liberated and/or extremely poor mothers went off to become the bosses that sexually harassed their secretaries and the secretaries that tried to fend them off while desperately clinging to jobs they hated, the boys and girls of our sleepy village wrestled for purchase on the ship to adulthood. They tried with all the desperate effort and will they could muster to find their roles among the complex system of social strata that threatened to alienate and crush them. Such a system could be run only by the most charming, beautiful, talented, narcissistic, vacuous, vicious and superficial group of the cultural elite of this little burg. These were the Cultural Vanguards chosen by secret vote somewhere in the Machine who were entrusted with the further propagation and transmission of suburban culture.
Most were petty tyrants, greedily and sometimes unsteadily clutching at the trappings of their standing in the community: purple felt fezzes embroidered with Islamic symbols, ornate staffs, sashes and dinners for two at the local steakhouse run by the mayor. They would brandish these like those tiny plastic American flags on the 4th of July; clutching and waving them over their heads while simultaneously mouthing tropes of performed humility--"I don't deserve such an honor...", "I owe it all to my wife, Honey, come up here and say "hi" to everyone...", "If only my mother were alive today..."-- never once nodding to the obvious hypocrisy and irony oozing from their pores like flopsweat.
How do they ensure their way of life to the future? Progeny; little boys and girls that they raise--succeeding, for the most part-- to be just like them. You could see each and every little fascist-in-training in every less-than-humble 8 year old winner of the three-legged race at the local fair; he has just a bit too much swagger in his walk, she has too much beam in her smile. It’s like you can see them 10 years down the road on the day he completes the pass that wins the Homecoming Game or takes first in the Miss Suburb Contest. They are the Chosen Ones; they will be the ones having premarital sex on all their dates, the ones who'll transmit the culture.
If they can remember it.
You see, while they might be great at sports or sex or at using demagoguery to control others in their social group, they're also the ones who can't do long division, their own laundry or debate the relevance of Michel Foucault's work in the scheme of Social History.
They're idiots and they'll live their entire lives over and over again each Friday, Saturday and Sunday with the same people they hung out with in high school. They'll marry just outta school and be stuck with 2 kids in a--at best--loveless marriage to some shrew who starts drinking when her husband closes the door to go to work in morning or some neat freak body obsessed man-child who his wife'd swear has a boyfriend in the City. These are the Guardians of Culture. These are the leaders of Suburban Fascism. Pity them.
But don't pity the man we'll call Stephens. He's the Suburban Mussolini; too stupid to keep control of his power and too sane to rise to the rank of Hitler. Sure it wasn't beneath him to use Gestapo tactics, but the stupid are, in the end, only really dangerous to themselves.
The cars were solid, dependable road barges. And, with an average curbside weight of just under two tons, they were surprisingly agile. They dodged out of the way of flying whiffle balls, Frisbees and other projectile toys, out of the way of boys, mostly. Perhaps a few girls ridiculed into either the role of tomboy or cheerleader. Out of the way of bicycles left in driveways and garages, tossed hastily aside by children with full bladders, empty stomachs or stricken with the fear of a swift, sweaty backhand across tender cheekflesh if they weren't "in the house this minute".
Everything, for the most part, was clean, white and ordered.
Outside.
Inside was a whole other kettle of fish. While the fathers and some of the more liberated and/or extremely poor mothers went off to become the bosses that sexually harassed their secretaries and the secretaries that tried to fend them off while desperately clinging to jobs they hated, the boys and girls of our sleepy village wrestled for purchase on the ship to adulthood. They tried with all the desperate effort and will they could muster to find their roles among the complex system of social strata that threatened to alienate and crush them. Such a system could be run only by the most charming, beautiful, talented, narcissistic, vacuous, vicious and superficial group of the cultural elite of this little burg. These were the Cultural Vanguards chosen by secret vote somewhere in the Machine who were entrusted with the further propagation and transmission of suburban culture.
Most were petty tyrants, greedily and sometimes unsteadily clutching at the trappings of their standing in the community: purple felt fezzes embroidered with Islamic symbols, ornate staffs, sashes and dinners for two at the local steakhouse run by the mayor. They would brandish these like those tiny plastic American flags on the 4th of July; clutching and waving them over their heads while simultaneously mouthing tropes of performed humility--"I don't deserve such an honor...", "I owe it all to my wife, Honey, come up here and say "hi" to everyone...", "If only my mother were alive today..."-- never once nodding to the obvious hypocrisy and irony oozing from their pores like flopsweat.
How do they ensure their way of life to the future? Progeny; little boys and girls that they raise--succeeding, for the most part-- to be just like them. You could see each and every little fascist-in-training in every less-than-humble 8 year old winner of the three-legged race at the local fair; he has just a bit too much swagger in his walk, she has too much beam in her smile. It’s like you can see them 10 years down the road on the day he completes the pass that wins the Homecoming Game or takes first in the Miss Suburb Contest. They are the Chosen Ones; they will be the ones having premarital sex on all their dates, the ones who'll transmit the culture.
If they can remember it.
You see, while they might be great at sports or sex or at using demagoguery to control others in their social group, they're also the ones who can't do long division, their own laundry or debate the relevance of Michel Foucault's work in the scheme of Social History.
They're idiots and they'll live their entire lives over and over again each Friday, Saturday and Sunday with the same people they hung out with in high school. They'll marry just outta school and be stuck with 2 kids in a--at best--loveless marriage to some shrew who starts drinking when her husband closes the door to go to work in morning or some neat freak body obsessed man-child who his wife'd swear has a boyfriend in the City. These are the Guardians of Culture. These are the leaders of Suburban Fascism. Pity them.
But don't pity the man we'll call Stephens. He's the Suburban Mussolini; too stupid to keep control of his power and too sane to rise to the rank of Hitler. Sure it wasn't beneath him to use Gestapo tactics, but the stupid are, in the end, only really dangerous to themselves.
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