Imperfections (4 page)

I caught all of this after the metallic
ping
sound of the Champion Sports Rhino Skin® Dodgeball faded from my head and from between my legs and before I hit the pavement in the courtyard behind the school. The sound had faded but the red rubber sting remained.

Leonard squeaked again.

I hoped he pissed himself.

Only two things were endearing to me about Leonard at that point. The first was that he still wanted to hang out with me though he was two years older, which I thought was pretty cool even if I had to tolerate a certain amount of abuse and embarrassment. The second was that Auntie Maggie and Uncle Tony always had the best stuff. They had just sprung for a Commodore 64 and I had a horrible addiction to fighting grues and zorkmids in the great underground empire of
Zork
.
Zork III
would be out next month and I was dying to play.
 

These were subconscious thoughts, though. They ran behind my active thoughts and tempered my reaction to the current situation. I wasn't mad. I just felt like throwing up as I lay on the pavement clutching my nuts. There was that and there was also me wishing Leonard would piss himself laughing in front of the crowd of kids that started to gather. Mind you, Leonard would find some way to make pissing himself look cool. He could do that; he was that good. To remain friends with Leonard at that age required taking the occasional hit, such as a simultaneous strike to the head and the nuts by Champion Sports Rhino Skin® Dodgeballs thrown by him and a buddy.

I was crying, I guess, because all of a sudden I was able to let out a howl and I could no longer see through the tears. All my muscles clenched as if I was trying to squeeze out of the world and slip into some dark unknown place in the universe. I know it seems a bit over the top but it just hurt that much. Even so, I don't know what was worse, the sting on the side of my head, the throbbing, sickening pain radiating up from what I protectively clutched between my legs or the fact that I was bawling in front of a growing crowd of my peers.
 

There was no hiding it, no saying it was sand in my eye or anything like that. I was a tight spasm of twitching little boy on the ground, bawling with abandon, snot flowing out of my nose and down my cheek, strings of gob sliding from the side of my mouth, tears streaming and falling from my face making wet dots on the sand and pavement where I lay on my side, fetal and rocking slightly in the grit.
 

There was no way to make that look cool.

That was the kind of thing that stuck with you.

That was the kind of thing that earned you nicknames that followed you well into high school, nicknames like “Dodge Balls.”

That was the kind of thing that shapes your life and either makes you strong or turns you into one of those black trench coat-wearing kids who is always reading mail-order catalogues for throwing stars and talking about buying a sword.

Another nickname for someone who is clutching his nuts in public. “Ricky Ricky Grabs His Dicky.” This one was particularly clever given that it incorporated rhythm, rhyme and my name. Though, my dicky wasn't the problem.

“Man, that was radical.” Leonard finally calmed down enough to wipe his eyes and cough out a few words. He straightened up and stumbled closer, oblivious to the gathered crowd of kids. Leonard didn't need an audience to be cool.

“Seriously,” Leonard laughed. “Are you okay?”

Leonard got down on one knee beside me, put a hand on my shoulder and curved his body into a
C
shape in order to line up his face with mine.

I made a loud
whaaaaap
sound as I breathed in a gulp of air between sobs. A glob of snot dropped from my cheek, making a sugary puddle in the sand and pavement.

“Come on, people are watching.” Leonard's smile faded and it seemed the seriousness of scrambling my eggs sunk in. “You want me to go get the nurse?”

“Whaaaaap,” I said and shook my head. My cheek brushed the sandy snot glob and it strung up from the ground.

Someone in the crowd giggled.

Another muttered, “Big baby.”

Leonard spun around to see who it was. Everyone respected Leonard and the main ingredient for that respect was fear. This is something every six-year-old understands. The law of the jungle applies nowhere more than in the schoolyard at recess.
 

Leonard demanded respect. He had been held back a year and was still a grade ahead of me. He was eight, we were six and at that stage, age was not so much a number but a size. He was two years bigger than us. He could be mean, he could be unpredictable and more kids had him to thank for a bruise or a black eye than any other.

Remember earlier when I said there were two endearing things about Leonard? I just thought of a third. He was on my side.

I managed to sit up, one side of my face looking like a sugar doughnut and the other red from the Rhino Skin bitch slap. Both sides were wet with embarrassment. I forced myself to stop crying. I took a deep breath. I wiped my face on my shirt sleeve and got sand in my eye, which caused it to well up again. The snot from my cheek left a glaze on the fabric.

Leonard was prowling around the crowd, looking kids in the eye as if he could intimidate them into the suicide of admitting they had slighted me. Kids were nervously trying to break from the group without being noticed but, like in the wild, there was safety in numbers. The larger the group, the less likely you were to get singled out. Common practice was to wait until Leonard had passed and then try to make your way to the back of the herd before slowly breaking for the school doors.

Don't make any fast moves, it attracts attention.

Nice and slow.

Leonard turned his attention back to me once the crowd had cleared sufficiently. He smiled and helped me up, draping one of my arms across his shoulders and snaking his arm around my waist. He walked me over to a nearby bench.

I felt like limping, so I did. Anything else still hurt too much.

“You coming over after school?” Leonard asked after he settled next to me on the bench.

“Rad,” I wheezed. “I think my parents are coming over for supper anyway.” I clutched my nuts once again, it seemed like the thing to do as a bit of pressure eased the pain slightly.

Auntie Maggie and Uncle Tony had a satellite dish. The previous night Leonard and I had watched MTV and wandered around dumbly for hours playing air guitars and making stupid guitar-player faces.

“We can play
Zork
or watch TV or something.” Leonard clapped me on the shoulder and I winced.

The recess bell buzzed and Leonard popped off the bench.

“You still got snot on your face,” he said and ran to line up to get back in the school.

Recess was over.

In 1982, I was not aware enough to think of the bigger world and the progression of time. I was a kid. As Leonard and I walked home after school, the year 2000 was the distant future and, if it were to have crossed our thoughts, it would only have been as an abstraction. In the back of our brains, the year 2000 was a static of teleportation, jet packs and flying cars. It was a fantasy of robot slaves and laser ray guns. As far as we could comprehend, the future happened sometime after summer vacation, which was still three weeks away. After that, the world did not even register.

As I grew older, I would start to learn that the more I knew the less I really knew. I would learn that there are things going on all over the world that conspire, in time, to contribute to a moment and that connectedness of things. If you could follow all the details, they would comprise the anatomy of that moment, and could be used to predict the future. Leonard would figure this out in fourteen years or so; I would figure it out too late.

As for now…

I had no idea that in Hamilton, at the same moment Leonard pushed me from the sidewalk and into traffic only to pull me back just before getting hit by a car, a big, maroon Monte Carlo was rolling off the assembly line.
 

“Saved your life.” Leonard grinned and squeezed my arm hard.

The engine, a big, mean,
Mad-Max
ian, eight-cylinder engine under the hood was so clean that it shone on its own. The low-grade nylon carpet in the trunk had a plasticky new car smell. This car was being shipped to Toronto; a sixty-eight-year-old lady named Margaret Koshushner ordered it from Franco Popodini's Niagara Escarpment Pontiac Chev-Olds dealership with the inheritance money from when her husband died in a Pinto accident.

“Now I own you until you repay the debt.” Leonard's grin spread at the thought of having an indentured servant.

Leonard was always saving my life. I guess I had to be thankful.

Margaret Koshushner had little knowledge of the Grimshaw vs. Ford Motor Co. product liability case that had gone on in California, in which Ford paid over $6 million in compensatory and punitive damages because a Pinto exploded and someone died and someone else burned.

And why did Leonard own me?

“It's a Ninja Code thing.” Leonard lunged up the front stairs to his house two at a time. “I saved your life and now you have to be my servant until you save mine or one of us dies, whichever comes first.” He was big into ninjas.

I wasn't sure the Ninja Code applied if you almost killed someone just so you could save them so I couldn't argue the point.

Margaret Koshushner's husband didn't die in a Pinto explosion, though. He had been warming up the car when he died. He had just forgotten to open the garage door.

Leonard burst through the front door of his house calling, “We're home.”

Leonard lived in a new two-storey house on a cul-de-sac about five blocks from school. There was a garage attached on the side and a dusty gravel alley behind. My house was about another five blocks, past the 7-Eleven where we got Slurpees and across the soccer fields where we rode our bikes.
 

Mother and Father always drove over to visit Auntie Maggie and Uncle Tony. They never walked. They were already there, I could hear Father mumbling in another room and the tinkle of ice in a glass of something that would undoubtedly be amber-coloured. That would be Mother.

“Boys,” Auntie Maggie called from the back room.

Leonard led the way.

“Jesus Christ,” Father said. “Leonard, you get bigger every time I see you. Look at the size of that son of a…”

“Hi, Dad,” I said.

Mother sat at the end of a brown and tan paisley couch with a glass in hand. She was glazed, her eyes fixed on the sunlight coming through the window to the backyard.

“Shush, guys,” Uncle Tony said. He got up from his recliner and crossed the room to turn up the television.
 

The newscaster announced something about Pan-Am flight 759 crashing in Louisiana and killing everyone on board. There was a video of a panicked crowd and some wreckage and then a still shot of a hospital. Father and Uncle Tony sat on the edge of their seats, elbows on knees and beer bottles held in prayer between hands. They muttered at each other periodically.
 

“Sonofabitch.”
 

“Bound to happen every once in a while.”

“'Nother beer.”

Grunt.

“What did you get up to at school today?” Auntie Maggie asked us.

My face flushed red with the memory.

“Nothing much,” Leonard smiled at me. He was so obvious.

The newscaster reported that it had been over one year since the US Centers for Disease Control had begun officially monitoring a rare and persistent form of pneumonia seen only in patients with weakened immune systems, and an ever increasing number of cases in countries around the world had some calling this an epidemic.

“Here's your beer.”

“Thanks.”

“What I miss?”

“‘Nothin'.”

“When's supper?” I asked Auntie Maggie.

“Shush, guys,” Father said, got up, crossed the room and turned up the news.

“Why don't you go play out back?” Auntie Maggie said and beamed at us. “Barbeque and a slideshow later.”

The newscaster talked about the splash a new band was having. Metallica played in some sweaty club. Dave Mustaine whipped his hair around. The newscaster mentioned heavy metal, mentioned thrash.

“They look like girls.”

“Yep.”

“Whatever happened to ABBA? Now that was music.”

“Dunno.”

“Shame really.”

“Have I got a treat for you later…” Uncle Tony smiled and nodded to my father. His eyes were kind of glassy, maybe a little drunk already.

“Supper in about an hour,” Auntie Maggie called after us.

The sliding door shut, cutting off the television noise.

Leonard and I stood on the deck and surveyed the backyard, a little patch of earth squared in by weathered fences. A warm breeze, high up in the trees, rustled the leaves. The yellowing grass had brown trails worn into it, one led to the shed and the other led to a row of trees along the back fence. The trail to the shed was to get tools for tweaking the faucet in the kitchen or hammering in a nail to hang a new picture. The trail to the back alley was to take out the garbage in the cool evening air. It was not as well-kept as my backyard, the yard where I'd first met Leonard. Regardless, something was more attractive about the ratty, untrimmed bushes lining the fence and the weedy patches of thirsty grass. It was a living space full of history, stories and adventure.