Knuckleheads

by Jeff Kass

  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.

  PARENT-TEACHER CONFERENCE

  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.”

  “Sorry to hear that. Have a seat.”

  “Yeah, freak thing. Took my kid fishing in Florida two summers ago and we were cruising upriver, going maybe twenty knots, and a sturgeon jumped out of the water and smacked into my chest. I almost died.”

  A chronic chest injury from a sturgeon?

  What kind of bullshit is this?

  This, Mr. Bassoli, is my classroom, my home field. My desks that I polish each afternoon with Windex. My laminated posters of parts of speech, of what kinds of infractions constitute plagiarism, of Malcolm X. I called you in, sir, to talk about your son’s inappropriate behavior, not to hear some fish story.

  “Nah, for real,” he says, gesturing with his blubbery fingers. “Thing was a monster, like two hundred pounds. Knocked me unconscious. I was lucky as hell I didn’t die. Fell backward into the boat instead of the river. Ronnie had to get us to shore and find the harbormaster to call an ambulance. Damn fish broke three ribs and bruised both lungs. I can hardly walk now. Got, like, a dent in my chest. I got a tattoo though to cover it, of a big leaping sturgeon. Want to see?”

  I do. Yeah, very much.

  Want to see the dude’s brilliant fish tattoo on his fat hairy chest. I mean, how often do you get to see something like that?

  Guy stands up from the desk where he’s been sitting, a tricky maneuver since he’s so bulky, and unzips his jacket. He’s wearing a turtleneck and it takes him a minute to struggle out of it, like he’s trying to pop the meat of an avocado out of its skin using only his thumbs. With the shirt at last over his head, he stands before me with a chest creamy and off-white and dented, a barrel of stomach-flesh jiggling over his belt. The tattoo is phenomenal. An eighteen-inch masterpiece of luminous blue and green and silver, its tail an arrow of muscle, its mouth open and fierce with sharp teeth. It is leaping in the way only animals in the wild can leap, free and glorious, celebrating the miracle of its own sleekness.

  Anthony Bassoli stands in my classroom, wheezing, proud and shirtless, for at least a minute. He stretches his arms over his head and the fish appears to leap higher, to lunge for the sky through the watery flesh of his chest.

  “That’s amazing,” I say. “That’s the greatest tattoo I’ve ever seen.”

  He doesn’t smirk. Not once. Just pulls his turtleneck on and sits back down.

  “I can’t hardly walk no more,” he says. “My breathing hurts like somebody rapped me with a two-by-four. Damn right I better get something out of that fish.”

  I almost feel sorry for him, think about shaving the left half of my head and getting my own tattoo on my scalp. A dark black baseball with red stripes and orange flames around it, maybe swords or daggers spinning out of its hide, a storm of blood and broken bones dripping from the laces. His son Ronald smirks. Often. In ugly sneering fashion. He’s the worst kid in all my classes. None of the other students like him.

  When he strutted into my classroom day one, I knew he’d be trouble. He was his dad’s height and exactly what people mean when they use the word wiry. His hands were big and thick like his father’s, but the rest of him was one straight line of frenetic energy. He couldn’t stay seated. Got up every five minutes to throw a crumpled piece of paper in the trash can, or to make a hocking noise in his throat and spit out the window. Sometimes to sharpen a pencil he never seemed to actually use. I looked up his profile on the computer, found lousy grades throughout his freshman and sophomore years. A bunch of art classes that hinted at an offbeat interest or a different learning style, but D’s and F’s in them too. Attendance issues. Anthony Bassoli listed as his father. No contact information for any other parent.

  “Forgive my asking,” I say to Anthony, “but Ronald’s mom?”

  He waves his hand in dismissive fashion, like an umpire who’s signaling an obvious ball four. “Nah, not around.”

  “Does he have problems outside of school? Does he ever talk to you about what’s on his mind?”

  “He talks all the time. He’s a good talker. Works for me at the garage. Cleans the vehicles. The taxis, I mean. I got a fleet. Crusader Cabs. You seen ‘em?”

  “Of course.” Everybody knows about Crusader Cabs. An armada of maroon Cadillacs with ornate white crucifixes on the doors. Popular on Sundays. Shuttle people to and from church. Slightly higher rates but never late when bringing you to the airport.

  I’m a Jew. I call them all the time. “I didn’t know that was your company.”

  “Seven years now. Ronnie’s a good worker. Never gives me any trouble. Saved my life, that kid.”

  “Ever see him do his homework?”

  “He does his homework.”

  Not for my class, he doesn’t. Doesn’t do a damn thing. Just smirks and plays with his long fingers when I give the students an in-class writing assignment. I stare at him to let him know I’m noticing his lack of effort—my best I-see-you-and-you’re-not-cutting-it-young-man glare—but he just smirks more, then crumples the blank piece of paper on his desk and gets up and throws it in the garbage. In the midst of one trip back to his seat during a quiz about images of decay in All Quiet on the Western Front, he clamped one of his hands on Deanna Torrence’s shoulder, close to her neck, and whispered into her hair. She smiled uncomfortably and tried to move his hand, and he said something that made her suck her teeth and shake her head like a wet dog. Then he slapped her pen to the floor.

  “Ronald,” I said. “Outside, right now.”

  The most tangible thing I learned in teacher preparation school was never to give a disruptive kid an audience. That’s what the disruptive kid wants, the chance to show his classmates how much of a badass he is by challenging his teacher. He’ll never back down in front of his peers, so the thing to do is to isolate him, remove him from any situation where he’s on stage, and then disarm him by trying to have a civil conversation. First, you talk about something else to diffuse the tension. Then, after you’ve established the dynamic of a human-to-human discussion, essentially of two people having coffee, that’s when you work your way back to the issue and let the kid know what you want him to do.

  This second half of the equation, the disarming part, is nearly as important as the isolating part, and I’m generally pretty good at diffusing tension. I try to pay to attention to what extracurricular activities a kid’s involved in so when I get him out in the hallway, instead of scolding him right away, I can surprise him with how’s the hockey season going or I hear your band’s got a gig at the teen center, is that this weekend, but with Ronald, who’d been pulling his garbage for weeks, I did the one thing a teacher’s never supposed to do. I launched right into him and escalated the conflict.

  “You are flat disrespecting me in my classroom,” I shouted, my face six inches from his, my spit misting the air between us. “Your behavior’s immature and unacceptable. You need to shape the hell up right now, or you need to not be in this class. What’s your choice?”

 
He was taller than I was, with those long rangy arms and big hands, but I’d kept wrestling all through college, and in amateur tournaments for years after that. My forearms are hammers. “Well,” I continued, “what’s it gonna be? Got anything to say?”

  He didn’t. Or probably he did, but he was afraid to say it. He curled his lips into a snarl and his whole face began to twitch, the electricity of his live-wire body heating his mouth and below his eyes so the bottom part of his face looked like the narrow snout of a rat. He clenched and unclenched his right fist and his eyes fluttered and watered and I knew he wanted to hit me. He wanted to take a swing and I hungered for him to try it. I didn’t care about my teaching career. I didn’t care about Sandra at home relying on my income so she could keep studying for her masters. All I cared about was that smirking, snarling teenager and how if he swung, I would elbow him dead in his jaw, leg-whip him to the ground and pound the back of his head until he bled.

  Then Ronnie backed down, shook his twitching face, turned and ran off down the hallway. “I’m calling your father tonight,” I yelled after him. “You will not re-enter this classroom until you decide you know how to behave with respect.”

  “So, what’s the problem with my kid?” Bassoli says.

  The problem’s that he sports the same smirk you did on the pitcher’s mound. The problem’s that on hot afternoons when I’m walking across baseball fields, the left side of my head still throbs. The problem is I lost my lucky bat, turned to wrestling, and years later wanted your son to try and punch me so I could kill him. “The problem,” I say, “is that he’s disruptive in class and unfocused. Is there anything wrong at home? Something bothering him?’

  “Not that I know about.”

  We’re quiet. Behind Anthony Bassoli, the poster of Malcolm X stares at me. Those sharp square glasses and that enormous long finger pointed like a sword.