Knuckleheads (2 page)

I may have even half-extended my hand to help Christian from the ground, but he grabbed it, tried to twist my arm—what did they teach these football players—and at that point there was no stopping. The momentum of the fight had claimed us: me, Christian, our cheering fans, even Susie. Christian’s grip on my arm was weak, his hands sweaty, and even though he probably outweighed me by forty pounds, I knew I could repeat the toss of Daniel Meyers and flip Christian face-first into the brick wall a half-dozen feet behind us, his nose splattering blood like a perfect strike into the middle of the painted rectangle we used to play stickball.

But Susie’s half-ambiguous nod had sucked the venom out of my desire to hurt Christian. What was the point of fighting if she didn’t want me to? Christian wasn’t a bad kid. Chunky, hairy, a bit slow, but we’d once killed an hour throwing rocks at a stop sign as we waited for our mothers to pick us up after detention. We hadn’t spoken much, but we’d established a measure of comradeship, our rocks arcing toward the stop sign, occasionally bouncing off it with a metallic clang.

Now all I wanted was for the fight to be over, for everyone to go away and forget about it, for Susie not to hate me, for Christian not to break a cheekbone or a clavicle bumping into something. I let him headlock me. For whatever reason, he seemed happy to hold me there and halfheartedly aim a few punches at my ears, all of them missing. We stayed like that for maybe a minute, the crowd growing bored as he gripped my head and sort of punched while I wondered when an assistant principal would show up so Susie could at last unwrap her brownie.

When one did show up, he marched Christian and me down to the office, where I promptly advised him to send Christian back to the cafeteria. It was my fault. I’d challenged Christian to the fight. He’d just been stupid enough to accept. The principal, flummoxed by my willingness to absorb the entirety of the blame, let both of us go, adding only that he intended to talk to the wrestling coach about recruiting us for the coming season.

Back in the lunchroom, I tried to make it up with Susie by buying her another brownie. She seemed touched by the gift and broke up with Christian that evening over the phone. We dated for a week-and-a-half, after which she began to wear Michael Slauson’s hockey jacket. Christian and I went out for wrestling. He quit in high school to work on cars and spend more time with Susie’s younger sister Hannah, who had larger breasts. I got braces on my teeth in tenth grade to correct a slight overbite, didn’t smile or kiss anybody for two years, and became a top seed.

There are few more blissful states than the moments immediately following winning a wrestling match. Having proven yourself stronger than some other kid who weighs the exact same you do, there’s nothing left but to kick back—your muscles bulging in triumph—and spread yourself out in the bleachers as if you own them, while you imagine how shitty your opponent feels as he hurriedly pulls his sweats on in order to hide his naked loser skin.

Winning in the semifinal round of a tournament is even better. If you win in the semis, you can lounge in the bleachers for the whole afternoon, even nap in them while just about everyone else in your weight-class beats each other up with the hopes of, at best, earning third place. You are not part of that consolation quagmire. You’re going to the finals. Your name will be announced later, at night, after the whole gym has been cleared, and the National Anthem has been played, and people have paid additional admission to watch the house-lights dim and a spotlight shine while you latch up your headgear and battle for the title. After you’ve sufficiently owned the bleachers for a while, you can head into the locker room, shower and change into street clothes just so everyone in the gym knows you’re in the finals. It’s like you get to wear a sign that says,
I’m the nastiest badass at my weight in this whole damn building
, but it’s just your clothes, just your beat-up blue jeans and sweatshirt, your work boots, so you’re not even being obnoxious about it, just practical. Just everyday comfortable because that’s who you are, everyday badass.

Stubble-face fuckboy with his fake injury ruined the whole deal. The referee blew his whistle to signal the injury time was over and then bent to ask the kid if he could continue. Punk shook his head as if there were truly nothing more tragic than the way his body had refused to allow itself to be tortured for an additional four-and-a-half minutes. When the ref raised my hand in victory and stubble-face leaned into his coach as he limped off the mat, as if he couldn’t carry his own weight, as if the double arm-bar had somehow wrecked not only his arms, but also his legs, I gnashed my teeth. Hard.

Not only did the injury disqualification knock the kid out of the tournament, meaning he wouldn’t have to wrestle all afternoon, but there was his adorable girlfriend wrapping an Ace bandage around an ice-pack on his shoulder and, with her other golden hand, tenderly rubbing his knee.

It was a ghastly sight. Horrid. Unjust. Yet, part of me remained hopeful. What if she was just feeling bad for him? I’d just destroyed her boyfriend, clearly illustrating what a dishrag he was, so maybe she was just taping his shoulder and rubbing his knee out of obligation. Maybe, as she helped him limp off to the locker room, she was going to whisper to me as she passed,
meet me in five minutes in the parking lot
. Maybe she was tired of her pathetic farmboy and intrigued by my downstate close-to-the-city mystery. Maybe we were going to brave the swirling winds and heat the tundra with our own tongue-kissing, her fingers crawling across my cheeks. Maybe my teammates on the bus would see it too, cleaning the fog from their windows with their forearms so they could see it better, and I’d be able to brag that I’d gotten her phone number.

It almost happened like that. As she helped her boyfriend fake-limp off, she turned, angling her thick brown eyes and sweet mouth to me and hissed, “You’re mean. You’re a mean person. Cocksucker.”

Yeah, so.

I was mean.

That’s what made me top seed. Some girls had to dig that. The dark-haired girl wasn’t the only cheerleader who’d been there to root on the turkey kid. She’d just been the only one kissing him.

In fact, three other girls were approaching me, smiling, a giggling gaggle slithering toward the area of bleachers now under my legal jurisdiction. They weren’t as cute as the one who’d called me a cocksucker, but they weren’t nothing. They were girls in cheerleader skirts with long clean hair and chewing gum and legs and breasts. One of them stuck out her hand as if to shake mine and said, “Hi.”

For the first time in two years, I smiled. Maybe all three of them would meet me in the parking lot. Maybe I’d have a trio of phone numbers to brag about. I opened my mouth to talk, to charm them with my wit, but then all that blood from where my braces had butchered the inside of my lips streamed down my chin and dripped onto my arms. The girl with her hand stuck out pulled it back in and grabbed the wrists of her friends. They ran from the bleachers as if I were some vampire, some horrible ghoul.

I was. I was some ghoul.

Some ghoul going to the finals.

My coach handed me a towel, and a lime-flavored sports drink in a squeeze-bottle. I swirled it in my mouth, mixed it with my spit, my metal, my blood. Everything that was left.

Guzzled.

ANTHONY BASSOLI'S PUT ON CLOSE TO A HUNDRED POUNDS.

Twenty years ago, when we were in high school, he was a big kid, maybe six foot, one-eighty, a little puffy already. Now he’s a blimp. The bottom part of his chin is rubbery and thick, an overcooked meatball falling farther with each moment he ages.

I can hear him wheeze as he walks toward me, a slow offbeat lumber, and there’s nothing in his eyes that says he knows who I am. That’s good, I guess, if a little insulting. We’re the same age, but he could be fifteen years older. I’ve stayed in shape. He hasn’t. Not even close.

He went to St. Regis High School, where I teach his son Ronald now. I was at Eastchester Central, and they used to beat us in baseball like we’d gotten drunk and crashed the family car and they were the furious father waiting with a strap. Our senior year E.C. had the best team I’d ever been on—finished second in our league—and there could have been an intense rivalry if we were even half as good as St. Regis, but we weren’t. Anthony was just the third best pitcher on their squad—the Hunter brothers were both better—but he made us look like Little Leaguers. He only had one pitch, a fastball, but it was heat, and he could control it. He’d lace it on the corners, up and in or down and out, and send us muttering back to the bench as if our girlfriends had cheated the night before, inviting his steak-slab hands to paw their shirts in his Camaro. I could hit him because I ate fastballs, especially when I knew they were coming, but no one else on E.C. could.

When he faced us late in the season, they whacked us up and down the field. With our team down fourteen-zip, I stepped to the plate in the last inning pissed off, determined to rope another of Bassoli’s heaters, to hit it hard somewhere and walk away with a perfect four-for-four day. To that point, I’d had our team’s only three hits. I’d been vocal too, all game long trying to live up to my captain status and rally the troops. From my perch in left field, I’d machine-gunned a continuous barrage of
heywhaddayasaynows
and
nosticknows
and prior to leading off that last inning, I’d told my teammates—“Hey, we still have a chance. We can make history. I’ll get on base and you keep it going. One little bingle at a time. Fourteen runs to tie, fifteen to win. Let’s do it.”

Bastard smirked at me when I dug into the box. Smirked. Then he shook his All-State catcher off about five times. Shithead only had one pitch. Finally, he nodded, smirked some more. Practically giggled. Then the ball flew like a missile dead at my skull. No way I could duck it, and it cracked my helmet like a hard left hook. Bleary-eyed, I crashed to the dirt. The field was spinning and loud and quiet at the same time, but I clawed back to my feet because fuck them with their fourteen-nothing lead, and the bastard was still smirking, staring me down like, Yup, I threw at you, now what?

What
was me stalking toward him, not really sure what I was going to do when I got there but fuck him and his smirk and his team always winning, when All-State Catcher jumped on my back and tried to lock his arm around my neck.

Clearly All-State Catcher did not know I was All-State Wrestler. All it took was two hands to his wrist, a quick weight-shift of my hips, a shrug forward of shoulders, and he was flat and befuddled on the ground.

My teammates flocked from the bench, half of them wrestlers too. After being cranked all over the field, we were ready to crank some St. Regis punks into the field. Their bench-players and fielders roared toward us and we tackled them with double-leg takedowns. I was a fire burning through any log of flesh in a different colored uniform, my face and eyes demon red, but a mass of human debris piled up between me and Bassoli and I couldn’t reach him. Coaches, umpires and parents yelled at us to stop but we couldn’t. We kept hissing and yanking at limbs until, at last, giant Jonathan Van Runig rumbled over from first base.

We insects scurried because we didn’t want to get stomped. Jonathan was six-foot-nine and three hundred and seventy pounds. Too slow to play basketball, or even to anchor the offensive line for the football team, he could hit a baseball so far it’d get arrested if it weren’t carrying a passport. We all knew the Yankees had invited him to numerous try-outs and rumor had it his father Big Dutch was negotiating a contract. Nobody was about to shoot a double-leg takedown on Jonathan. It’d be like trying to tackle a tree. If he fell forward and landed on you, you’d die.

He was carrying a bat too, my bat, which I’d dropped when I’d fallen to the ground due to the baseball fired at my skull. I loved that bat. It was the lucky bat I’d won in a raffle at the previous season’s team banquet, the night my teammates voted me captain, and it had been good for a lot of line-drives into the gap. Now Van Runig was wielding it like a policeman’s riot baton and our second baseman Rupert Delfino panicked and took off running. Unfortunately for Rupert, his act of fleeing caught Van Runig’s attention and caused the mutant to chase after him, still waving my lucky bat. There was no way Rupert would ever get caught—he was quick and scared to death and Van Runig sprinted with the blinding speed of an iceberg—still the sight of that huge kid chasing anyone with a bat was so horrifying, so pregnant with the potential of battered bones and Rupert dead two weeks before prom that the rest of us stopped fighting.

For long moments Rupert scampered in manic figure-eights deep into right field and Van Runig lurched after him impossibly slowly, like one of those claymation monsters from the
Sinbad
movies. We couldn’t help but cheer—all of us, from both teams, except maybe for Bassoli—for tiny Rupert to escape. Three police cars zoomed off the street, sirens huge and round and echoing off the bleachers, and they flashed right past us, all of them speared toward right-center. They skidded and stopped in a circle surrounding Rupert and Van Runig, enclosing them like two coliseum combatants except Van Runig was the lion and Rupert wasn’t even a Christian, more like some Christian’s terrified pet rodent. The sirens switched off and we could hear one of the cops bellow through a bullhorn: “Put the bat on the ground, son. Put the bat down now.”

The big kid halted his chase, breathing hard like he was about to pass out, and laid my lucky bat tenderly in the grass. Rupert kept running. Slipped past the police cars and bee-lined across center field, hopping the fence and disappearing into the dark woods beyond. Big Dutch ambled out to right field to negotiate with the police—to tell them to go easy, his son had a shot with the Yankees—and one of the cops confiscated my bat. I never saw it, or three hits in one game, ever again.

Maybe it’s because I never had the chance to tackle Bassoli that he doesn’t recognize me now, and why I still have the urge to drive a fist into his doughy chin. I restrain myself and rise from my desk as he offers one of his pudgy pancake hands. “Excuse my wheezing,” he says. “I got a chronic chest injury.”