by Tom Perrotta
“You think Wendy's home?”
“Now?”
“It's not even nine o'clock.”
“What about the curfew?” I asked.
He started the engine. “What about it?”
Wendy and her mother lived in a big rundown house with crumbling front steps and a weedy lawn. The neighbors (my parents included) considered it an eyesore, but they understood it more as a sign of misfortune than neglect. Wendy came to the door holding a book, wearing a pair of rumpled men's pajamas, white with blue stripes. Her hair, which she usually wore in a pony tail, hung loosely around her shoulders. She gave me a look that most people reserve for vacuum cleaner salesmen and Jehovah's Witnesses.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“My friend wants to meet you,” I said.
Rocky stepped forward and introduced himself. He held out his hand. Wendy hesitated, then reached out and shook.
“We're going for a ride,” Rocky said. “Would you like to come?”
“Where are you going?”
“Nowhere special.”
Wendy's brow wrinkled. She looked down at her baggy pajamas.
“I'll have to change.”
Rocky smiled; it was like a gift he gave to certain people. He had smiled at me in exactly the same way when he had decided to be my friend.
“Take your time,” he told her.
We waited in the living room. Rocky examined the bookshelves while I studied the pictures on the mantelpiece. There was an old black and white photo of Mike pulling Wendy in a wagon, Angel trotting behind. All three of them wore birthday hats, the pointy kind with elastic chinstraps.
As soon as we got in the car, Rocky and Wendy began to talk nonstop. About the Pledge of Allegiance, about the possibility of ever really knowing someone, about places in the world they'd like to visit. Then they got onto religion. I was sitting by myself in the back seat, listening to the song “Operator.” I'd heard it a hundred times, but had never realized how sad it was, that when Jim Croce said there was something in his eyes, he was talking about tears.
“If God loves everyone,” Wendy said, “then what's the point?”
“Don't even try to figure it out,” Rocky told her. “Religion's just another form of mind control.”
We were heading west on Route 22. Neon martini glasses and bowling pins flashed in the roadside darkness. I loved the feeling of driving at night, the edgy combination of security and adventure. You were safe; anything could happen.
“What about you, Buddy?” Rocky asked.
“Do you believe in God?”
“Sure. Somebody created the world.”
“Not necessarily,” Wendy said. “It could just be this big chemical accident.”
“Yeah, right,” I said.
Rocky turned off the highway onto a narrow two-lane road. We passed a series of signs for the VA Hospital, and finally the hospital itself, this bright hulking complex in the middle of nowhere.
“When my brother was shot,” Rocky said, “my mother felt the pain. We were sitting at the kitchen table eating supper and all of a sudden she screamed and grabbed her shoulder. She almost fell off her chair. ‘My God,’ she said. ‘Chuck's been hit.’”
“Come on,” I said. “That didn't happen.”
“I believe you,” Wendy told him. “A year after my father died, I saw him on Truth or Consequences. He was sitting in the studio audience, waving at the camera. And it wasn't just someone who looked like him, either. He was wearing a sweater I gave him for Christmas.”
“Jesus,” Rocky whispered.
My scalp tightened. If anyone else had told me these stories, I would have laughed at them. But Rocky and Wendy were different. Things had happened to them that hadn't happened to me. I had the awful feeling they were telling the truth.
The car labored uphill through Watchung Reservation, past the water tower I'd climbed a long time ago with my cub scout den. You could see the Manhattan skyline from the observation deck, which had been closed for a couple of years now, ever since a kid had thrown himself off, an honor student. We followed the bumpy road until it petered out in a gravel parking area not far from Surprise Lake.
We walked in single file down a moonlit path. The night air was cold and still. We stood together on the shore and stared at the quivering silver surface of the lake. I picked up a rock and threw it in the water.
Saturday was crisp and sunny, a perfect day for football. Rocky was supposed to pick me up at ten, but he didn't show up until quarter after. He was grinning like an idiot, his hair still wet from the shower.
“What's with you?” I asked.
He closed his eyes, shook his head in slow motion, the way my father sometimes did in the middle of an especially good meal.
“It happened, Buddy. I fell in love.”
“Gimme a break.”
“I'm serious,” he said. “Wendy's an amazing person.”
He turned right instead of left on West Street, just so he could circle past Wendy's house.
“There she is,” he said.
Incredibly, she was standing on the front porch in her pajamas, holding a coffee mug. Rocky honked as we drove by; Wendy smiled and waved. I should have been happy for him, but I was vaguely annoyed. I wanted to tell him that he could do better than Wendy, that there were lots of normal, pretty girls who would have gone out with him in a minute.
“You just met,” I said. “You hardly know her.”
“After you went home, we stayed up talking until three in the morning. I feel like I've known her all my life.”
“Three in the morning? Christ, Rock. I hope you're ready for this game.”
“I'm ready.” His voice was quiet and confident.
“You really think we can win without Randy?”
“Absolutely.”
The rest of the team wasn't so sure. The atmosphere in the locker room was almost unbearably tense. Starters were lined up three and four deep in front of the bathroom stalls, waiting for a chance to puke up their butterflies. Other guys were sitting half-dressed in front of their lockers, mumbling to themselves. My stomach was in a complicated knot.
We took the field for about a half-hour of warm-ups, then returned to the locker room. While Coach Whalen gave the pep talk, one of his assistants, Coach Bielski, wandered through the room, smearing black goop under the eyes of the important players. My heart raced as he approached; I had the strange feeling that today, for the first time, he was going to reach down and blacken my eyes, initiating me with that simple gesture into the inner circle of the team. But he just walked on by, as usual.
On paper, Whalen said, Pine Ridge had all the advantages. They were bigger, faster, more experienced. They had nicer uniforms and a better marching band. Their parents made more money than ours did. But that was just on paper, and paper didn't win football games. Heart did. And the rich boys from Pine Ridge didn't have the heart to beat us, especially not on our home field. As far as we were concerned, they were foreign invaders, and we were to treat them accordingly. From the opening kickoff to the final whistle, it was our job to make them suffer, to make them good and sorry they'd ever heard of Warren G. Harding Regional High School. Because tonight, when it was all over, they were just going to be a bunch of beat-up rich kids. We were going to be State Champions. He paused to let that sink in, then led us in our customary pre-game prayer.
I always felt close to my teammates when we prayed, all of us on one knee, heads bowed, listening to Whalen ask God to prevent serious injuries and grant us the strength and wisdom to prevail, amen. When the prayer was over, he said something that surprised me.
“Men,” he said. “What does Jesus Christ stand for?”
No one answered.
“Come on,” he coaxed. “Don't be afraid.”
“God?” someone suggested.
“Miracles?”
“Eternal life?”
“Those are good answers,” he said. “But Jesus also stands for something else
. He stands for forgiveness.”
You didn't have to be a genius to see what was happening. Whalen motioned toward the corridor, and Randy Dudley stepped into the room. The tension in the air dissolved like smoke. There he was, Big Number 56, rescued from oblivion. I felt like I had just witnessed a neat magic tricky like Whalen had pulled Randy out of a hat.
“Men,” he said. “Randy has something to tell us.”
Randy tried to keep a straight face as he spoke. It wasn't easy. “I'm sorry I let the team down,” he told us. “What I did was wrong.”
Whalen draped his arm around Randy's shoulder pads. A smile blossomed on his normally stern face.
“What do you say, men? Will we let bygones be bygones?”
My head was nodding along with the others when I heard the voice.
“This is bullshit.”
Whalen's head jerked to one side, as though he'd been slapped.
“Who said that?”
Rocky stood up. He looked fierce with the black war paint underlining his dark eyes.
“I did.”
Whalen stayed calm. He glanced around the room to make sure he didn't have a mutiny on his hands. Since we had a difference of opinion, he said, our only alternative was to take a vote on whether or not Randy should be forgiven.
Rocky was my friend, but even so, there wasn't much of a choice. I wanted to be a state champ. I wanted to stay on the right side of the coaches. And I wanted that jacket with my name on it. The idea of betrayal didn't even enter into my calculations. When the time came I made sure not to look at Rocky. I just raised my hand along with everyone else and voted yes, in favor of forgiveness.
The game itself turned out to be pretty boring. The score was tied 0-0 until late in the fourth quarter, when Rocky's replacement, a slippery junior named Tim LeMaster, ran forty yards for what turned out to be the winning touchdown. When the game ended Coach Whalen cried and led us on a victory parade through the streets of Springdale. Hundreds of people lined the route, cheering us on.
There was a wild celebration that night at Eileen Murphy's. People were drinking grain alcohol mixed with Kool-Aid. The music was louder, the dancing crazier than usual. It was like that picture from the end of World War II: you could grab any girl you wanted and kiss her on the lips. I saw Randy Dudley and Janet Lorenzo making out on the couch. He had his hand inside her sweater. Her black eye had almost healed. In a day or two, I thought, no one would even remember it.
I left around ten and walked across town to Rocky's house. His brother, Chuck, answered the door. The resemblance was striking, even though Chuck had straight hair and a beard streaked with gray. I tried not to stare at the empty shirt sleeve tucked neatly into the pocket of his jeans.
“Is Rocky home?”
Chuck shook his head. “He's at his girlfriend's.”
I headed back to my own neighborhood. Wendy's house was dark, but I saw with relief that Rocky's station wagon was parked out front. I climbed the steps, took a deep breath, and rang the bell, already rehearsing my apology. The door creaked open. Wendy put her finger to her lips before I could speak.
“We're having a seance,” she whispered.
“I didn't mean to interrupt,” I said.
“Don't be silly. We were hoping you'd come.”
A single candle was burning in the middle of the kitchen table. Shadows trembled on Rocky's face as he watched me walk past the refrigerator and sit down across from him. I was nervous at first. I had never taken part in a seance and wasn't sure about the procedure.
It's not that complicated. You hold hands. No one makes a sound. You try not to smile.
A Bill Floyd Xmas
Every December, my father and I went up to the attic and carried down a big cardboard box with the words “NONFLAMMABLE XMAS TREE” printed on all four sides. We opened the box in the living room and removed the paper bags stacked inside. The bags were numbered and contained branches made of green bristle and twisted wire. Off the tree, they looked like something you would use to clean a toilet.
It was easy to build the tree. First we screwed two green dowels together to make a trunk, then stood the trunk upright in a red metal stand. Starting from the bottom and working up, we inserted branch stems into holes drilled in the trunk. After my father set the tree's cactus-shaped crown in place, my mother joined us to hang the ornaments and string the tinsel garlands. We wrapped a glittery cloth around the base, then fastened a blinking angel to the top branch. When we were through, it was hard to believe our tree had come in a box.
This tradition lasted until 1977, my junior year of high school, when I came home from the deli where I worked, and found an immense new tree in the living room. It was bare of ornaments and powerfully sleek, like a green rocket about to blast off through the ceiling. A short distance away, my father sat in his usual spot on the couch, reading the newspaper.
“You could have waited for me,” I said. “I would have helped you put it together.”
He brought the paper slowly away from his face. It took a few seconds for my words to register.
“Nothing to help with.” He got up from the couch. My father wasn't a small man, but he looked small standing next to the tree. He tugged on a branch to demonstrate that it wouldn't detach. “Nope,” he said. “This one's a unit.”
“Where'd you get it?”
“Bill Floyd.”
“Why'd Bill Floyd give you a Christmas tree?”
“His mother passed away this summer. He says he's not in the mood for Christmas.” My father shrugged. “I jumped when he made the offer.”
Just then my mother came down the stairs, a stack of ornament boxes loaded up to her chin. I took half of them off her hands.
“Hi, Buddy,” she said, examining my eyes for signs of drug abuse. “How was work?”
“Slow. So how do you like the new tree?” “Well,” she said, kneeling to set down the boxes, “it sure is bigger than the old one.”
After supper I headed out to band practice, my regular destination on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. I played lead guitar in a band called Rock-head. Music had filled the void in my life after I quit the football team at the beginning of my junior year. The band seemed to offer all the rewards of football—teamwork, dedication, the promise of glory—without any of the drawbacks, such as coaches, pain, and smelly uniforms.
Halfway down the block from Ed Kelso's house, I could already hear music blasting from the basement. I let myself in through the side door and headed downstairs, the wooden steps throbbing beneath my feet. Ed and Dirk nodded when they saw me, but kept on jamming. They sounded hot together, so hot I was grateful just to be present. They were real musicians, playing on a level I could only dream about. I knew a few fast licks, but I was just a beginner. I didn't even have my own amp.
My friend Ed was the brains behind the band. He was a great rhythm guitarist and the only singer around who could hit all the high notes in a Zeppelin song. He was also overweight and extremely shy, with a bad habit of falling desperately in love with girls he'd never met, and becoming furious when they acted like he didn't exist. To cheer himself up, he would get drunk and break some windows. It was an exhausting cycle.
Dirk was a wildman drummer, the only one of us who really looked like a rocker. He had stringy blond hair and a wardrobe of patched jeans and loud dashikis. He claimed to have been stoned since 1974, and although I'd only known him for a few months, I had no reason to doubt his word. He lived in Cranwood and knew Ed from the Minutemen Drum & Bugle Corps. I couldn't imagine Dirk in a lame outfit like that, with tri-corner hats and personalized windbreakers, but he assured me it was totally cool—the girls in the piccolo section really knew how to party.
We only knew eight songs, so practice didn't last very long. When it was over, we made our usual run to the ice cream store in Cranwood where Dirk's girlfriend worked. It was only eight-thirty when we arrived, but Sally flipped the sign on the front window from Open to Closed and locked the door behind us
.
“Doesn't matter,” she said. “All they can do is fire me.”
We followed her into the back room. Even at work, Sally dressed in Deadhead clothes: tie-dyed sweatshirt, peasant skirt with long Johns underneath, work boots with orange laces. She had long straight hair and bluejay-feather earrings that dangled past her shoulders. When she reached for the radio on top of the soft-serve machine, she stood on tiptoes with one leg curved behind her, like a ballerina.
Dirk rolled some joints on a stainless steel table cluttered with stacks of cups, cones, and cake boxes. While we smoked, I told them about my family's new Christmas tree. Dirk and Sally weren't familiar with Bill Floyd, so I had to explain that he worked with my father and was known around town as “Toupee Ray” because of his hairpiece.
“It looks like there's an animal on his head,” Ed said. “A squirrel parted on the side.”
Sally took a hit off the roach and spoke with her breath held in. “So why do you have his tree?”
“His mother died. He didn't want it anymore.”
Dirk scratched his head. He looked like he was taking a hard test. “So wait a minute. How old is this guy?”
“I'm not sure. Maybe like fifty.”
“This guy is fifty years old and living with his mother?”
Ed laughed. His eyes had narrowed to the size of dime slits. “His mother's dead, asshole.”
“But when she was alive he lived with her, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“So why'd he wear a toupee?” Dirk seemed baffled by his own question.
Ed tapped on his skull. “Are you brain-damaged, man?”
“You guys are stoned,” I said.
Sally banged on the table with an ice cream scoop, like a judge calling for order.
“I just made a tub of Rocky Road. Anybody want some?”
When I got home, Bill Floyd was in the living room with my parents. The TV was going, but no one was watching it. Bill Floyd had the recliner swiveled to face my mother, who was sitting in an easy chair that had been moved almost into the hallway to make room for the tree. My father was out cold on the couch, snoring like a cartoon character.
