Knuckleheads

by Jeff Kass

  Under that desperation was Danny Rowton.

  We called him Danny Rotten. He called himself that too, and bit the alligators off chests of preppy golf shirts worn by kids whose asses he could kick. Which was pretty much every kid who wore that kind of shirt. Which was pretty much why I never wore that kind of shirt. In front of a lunch-line of sixth graders, he once broke the arm of Timmy Anders—a semi-retarded kid—snapped it like a wish-bone, apparently for no other reason than he wanted to hear the sound it made when it splintered. Word had it that, at thirteen, he stole a car when he was drunk and crashed it through a police roadblock, killing a cop and shattering his own collarbone. Whether or not the story is true, it’s why I joined wrestling. So I could learn how to apply pressure to Danny’s already once broken collarbone and, if he ever tried to mess with me, crack that fucking thing all over again.

  Under that fear was the paralyzing notion there were two sides of town, and I lived in the wrong one—the soft cheese one. The other side, where Danny lived, was Battle Hill, so named for the bravery of George Washington, who allegedly held the high ground there and beat the Redcoats back to their tea and crumpets. Perhaps in that tradition, perhaps because of its proximity to the train station, kids who lived on Battle Hill grew up tough and restless in cramped homes with well-worn rugs and the only television in the living room, the only telephone hanging on a wall in the kitchen. Kids from Ridgeway—my side of town—attended Hebrew school and played ping-pong in their spacious and finished basements. But not me.

  Under our living room, the uncarpeted dampness held a light bulb without a fixture and a beat-up bench-press. I calloused my hands there, banging my head to AC-DC and Zeppelin, ten sets of ten every other day until no wimp-ass alligator shirt could contain my bulging pectorals. Shoulder-blades pushing into the bench’s sweat-stinking vinyl, I shaped my vision around the bar cutting into my hands, a cold iron line that blocked my view of the ceiling. The only sight I could conjure as I breathed in and out through my reps, was Danny, hand over hand, scaling the rope in our middle school gymnasium, pulling himself all the way to the top where—incredibly—he held on with one hand, and with the other inked his name onto the support beam with a Sharpie.

  He scrawled his name everywhere at that middle school—just the first name, Danny, in five aggressive capital letters, the Y at the end winding backward beneath the two Ns and terminating in a downward pointing arrow so it looked like the tail of the Devil. Danny on the backboards in the parking lot. Danny on the heating and cooling vents. Danny on the drinking fountains and bathroom stalls. Danny on the fire-alarm boxes and Danny on as many desks in as many classrooms as he could possibly inhabit. It was art and it was vandalism and it scared the shit out of the rest of us who believed Danny could be anywhere, at any time, ready to ink his name into your face with his fists and to add to his legend by kicking your ass.

  He was fond of wearing a black t-shirt, emblazoned with the slogan “Death to Disco,” a sentiment I could not understand back then, a year before AC-DC, Zeppelin and the bench-press. I was immersed in the gleeful throes of just discovering disco, celebrating the fun of its party-hard back-beats with an unconquerable ear-to-ear grin. I boogied down at Bar Mitzvah receptions, my penny-loafered feet spinning like propeller blades. My clip-on tie whipped back and forth with the crazed energy of a boy who knew Danny would never be invited to the Jewish kids’ dance, and who also was beginning to understand that those bra-straps bumping out of the backs of the strapless dresses the girls wore portended something wondrous, some glorious hint of a future worth knowing.

  Danny disappeared for a year after seventh grade, a vanishing that birthed the rumor of the stolen car, broken collarbone and dead cop. I spent the mysterious interval of his absence convinced he’d return any minute, feeling him like a ball of jagged teeth lurking in my head, ready to pounce and chomp on my chest. I discarded Donna Summer for Eric Clapton and pumped up in the basement, wanting to take full advantage of every moment Danny wasn’t ubiquitous with his Sharpie. I got busy growing amusement-park dizzy on first kisses, and trembling a little too much to let my fingers do anything but graze the outside of the beckoning bra-straps.

  Even now, I shiver thinking of it, the thrill.

  At the onset of high school, Danny was back. Like me, he was beefier than before, none of it fat, and a scar that stretched across the front of his right hand looked like it could have been a knife-wound. We were assigned lockers in the same cul-de-sac, though I’m not sure why Danny needed one. He rarely carried books or wore a coat. Still, he checked in at his empty locker every day, opening and closing it with violence, turning to hiss at me: “Ross, you’re a pussy.”

  I never said anything back, pretended I didn’t hear and hoped Danny wouldn’t decide to shove me, to cross over into the physical where I’d have to test my bench-pressed strength and the techniques I’d learned in wrestling practice. I could see my response developing, visualize it like golfers do before they hit their shots. He would lunge at me and I would grab his right wrist with both my hands, tie him up in a Russian two-on-one so I could leverage his head toward the ground. He would resist, trying to push back up, and I would use that momentum, rise with him so I could drive his wrist behind his back and fold it like a chicken wing. He’d react by jolting forward in an attempt to break my hold and when he jolted, I’d let go with my left hand and circle it around the top of his head, yanking his neck backward and—pop—there would go his collarbone, neatly split at its most vulnerable point.

  It never came to that and I almost never wanted it to, until Danny stopped slamming his locker and used it instead as a surface he could slide his girlfriend against as he leaned in and sucked on her tongue. He was surprisingly tender toward her, holding her face with both hands as he kissed her, moving slow, talking quietly. I’d pretend to organize my textbooks, or to dig for homework, and watch them. I’d imagine she was a positive influence on him, would tame him enough to curb his desire to beat the piss out of me. When the warning bell sounded for first hour, he’d place an arm around her shoulder as if she’d break if his touch weren’t light enough, and massage circles onto her back. Then he’d turn his head and mouth to me, “You’re still a pussy, Ross. Always will be. A pussy supreme.”

  Whatever. I was used to ignoring his taunts. But I couldn’t ignore his girlfriend, who was tender toward him as well, ruffling her fingers though his hair as they kissed, or slipping her hand into the back-pocket of his blue jeans as they walked. Danny Rotten’s girlfriend was Caroline Haas, and I’d been in love with her since elementary school. Half-Filipina, half-Dutch, gorgeous. Athletic, she slid through the hallways like a dancer and starred for the cross-country team. Smart, she took all accelerated classes, labored through reams of homework, and earned a four-point. She had huge brown eyes, long dark hair that curtained across her forehead, soft round lips and a way of breathing that lifted her chest and made me want to bang my face against the corner of my locker-door until I drew blood. It was her bra-strap I’d always focused on most at the Bar Mitzvahs. I had no idea why she was dating Danny Rotten.

  For the most part, upon reaching high school, he’d stopped writing his name everywhere. One morning though, I arrived at my locker to find it covered with his scrawl—a huge heart and several smaller ones surrounding it like satellites. Each was filled with his aggressive handwriting. Danny loves Caroline. Danny loves Caroline. All over my locker. I felt like I was staring at my tombstone. What had died was whatever sense of manhood I’d been trying to cling to. My pussification was complete.

  That afternoon after class, as I stuffed my backpack with homework assignments it was doubtful I’d ever get to, and made ready to hustle down to wrestling practice, he showed up at the lockers, leering.

  “Hey, king of all pussies,” he said. “What’re you doing? You want to come hang out with me and Caroline? I got beer.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, dumbass, she’s got a cousin from th
e city who wants to hang out. We need another dude to make shit even.”

  I didn’t drink beer. The whole thing could have been a trap. Danny wanted to take me somewhere off school grounds so he could beat my ass without getting suspended. Plus, I had practice, and we had a match in a couple days against New Rochelle. But New Rochelle blew. It didn’t matter who they’d try to run out there, it would be quick—forty-five seconds, a minute at most. Nothing fancy. Circle, shuffle, feint, shoot a double-leg takedown. Arm-chop to knock him from his base. A simple half-nelson to turn him over.

  A simple half would do.

  I looked at Danny. He was a devious fuck, but his face looked open, pleading. He had a serious problem. If he couldn’t find another dude, his afternoon with his girlfriend might get ruined. Maybe he’d stop hassling me if I helped him out. Maybe Caroline’s cousin would look like her. I threw my backpack into my tombstone locker and followed him.

  We walked through the hallways and headed toward the gym area where the wrestling room was. I stayed behind Danny and kept my head down, hoping none of the coaches or any of my teammates would see me. We slipped out a side-door and Danny started jogging toward a tree-line about a half-mile away. “Hurry up, dude,” he urged. “We gotta grab some food before they get there.”

  Outside was grey and about forty degrees, but I’d broken a sweat by the time we reached the woods. It made me feel loose and happy. Yeah, I was skipping practice, but I was getting some conditioning in anyway. We kept jogging in the woods on a small footpath I hadn’t known existed and I was surprised at the kind of shape Danny was in. I knew he was strong, but I hadn’t known he had endurance. He seemed hardly tired and I picked up the pace to see if he could keep up. “Good,” he said. “Yeah. Let’s move.”

  We ran faster. My lungs and legs were fine, but my stomach yowled in hunger. I hadn’t eaten anything all day but a piece of dry toast for breakfast. The pangs worsened when the sound of automobile traffic linked itself to fumes bearing the telltale grease of a fast-food restaurant as we neared the edge of the woods. The path dumped us into a Burger King parking lot. We slanted past the drive-through line, slowed, and walked in. “I’m gonna get Caroline and Alisa some burgers and fries,” Danny said, holding the door open for me. “What about you? Want anything?”

  It was strange, this kindness. Maybe he knew there was no way I could eat anything like that and maintain my weight. I shook my head and tried not to breathe, not to smell anything as he stood on line and then ordered, but I couldn’t take it, felt the words pushing toward my teeth to say hey, on second thought, I’ll have a milkshake, vanilla, so I slinked outside to wait. He emerged after a few moments with a couple of bags and handed me one to carry before starting to jog back toward the woods. “Wait,” I said, angling a thumb toward the market across the road. “I thought you said you had beer, or were getting it, or something like that.”

  “I do, dumbass, don’t worry.”

  Again I followed Danny Rotten into the forest—each of us holding a paper bag of steaming burgers and fries—and this time, after we’d jogged a few minutes back on the path toward school, he veered left onto another trail I hadn’t known existed. Who was he? Freakin’ Ranger Rick? A couple minutes later, he turned and spoke. Finally, his breath seemed uneven. “Caroline would be kicking our ass right now,” he said. “Girl can run forever. She’s a fucking mutant.”

  I nodded because, yeah, she was a mutant, but not because of her running. Because she was beautiful and smart, and yet somehow attracted to this idiot. At least I knew how he got into the shape he was in, and how he knew how to navigate the forest. Clearly, he’d been running with Caroline, and these trails must be where her team trained. That depressed me for some reason—the two of them running together—as if their relationship might be deeper than just making out by my locker.

  A few more minutes and we were out of the woods, this time opposite a chain-link fence I recognized immediately. It was the out-of-bounds barrier behind the fifteenth green at Flintmoor, my parents’ country club. I’d played the hole dozens of times, and caddied it dozens more, but I didn’t say anything when Danny led me to an opening in the fence, shushing me as he peeked through to see if any nutcase members were out in the fairway, braving the cold. It felt moronic to sneak onto property I could’ve walked onto through the front door, but there was no way I was going to mention that to someone known for biting alligators off golf shirts.

  Nobody was around—“no Jewbags,” Danny said—so we strolled boldly across the green and a couple hundred yards down the middle of the fairway, before cutting into the rough. Next, we headed toward a grove of trees that I knew hid a pond notorious for swallowing wayward slices from the tee-box. We trammeled through a layer of brush and then Danny led me on yet another thin trail, deeper into the woods and around to the back of the pond where I was stunned to see what looked like the ruins of an old stone house. Part of it had sunk into the brack at the pond’s edge, leaving a roof that looked like a mound of dirt about six feet off the ground. We clambered up easily, put our Burger King bags to the side, and sat looking over the water. “It’s from the revolutionary war,” Danny said. “Soldiers hid supplies.”

  “No shit?”

  “Yeah, man, you gotta know about stuff like this. Chicks love these fuckin’ places.”

  The smell of the fries overwhelmed me. Probably they were emitting a last steam of warmth before beginning to cool, like a pheromone. I felt like grabbing both bags, ripping them open with my teeth, and scarfing. Nachos, I chanted to myself. Just a few more days until the weekend. Hold out for the nachos. Then I wondered, after skipping practice, if I even deserved them.

  “I’m gonna get the beer,” Danny said, and rolled off the side of the roof, jumping to the ground. I watched him push up the sleeves of his sweatshirt and scramble to where a half-submerged log poked a branch out of the pond. With one foot on the bank, he stretched his other across to stand on the log, reached down to hold onto the branch and steady himself and, then, balanced precariously, dipped his other hand into the water and pulled out a six-pack of Budweiser, the cans attached to each other with plastic rings. It was an astounding feat of athleticism, and I began to doubt the wisdom of my busting-his-collarbone battle plan.

  He ducked inside the house on his way back up and ascended to the roof with the six in one hand and what looked like a ratty horse blanket in the other. “I steal these from a snack-bar over there,” he said of the beer, pointing in the direction of the halfway house between the tenth and eleventh holes. “And this is for fucking.”

  He unfolded the blanket and spread it next to him. “I fuck Caroline a lot here,” he said. “I mean, so many times. She’s good too. Alisa, yeah, you’ll get something off her. She probably won’t do you. Not on the first date. But you’ll get something. You can watch us though. You like that, don’t you? Watching me and Caroline?”

  There were stones on the roof. I grabbed one and threw it deep into the water. Heard the clunk. Watched the ripples. No matter what, I could always throw.

  “Nah, man,” I said. “That’s sick.”

  “Are you a faggot, dude? Seriously. ‘Cause you’re, like, ripped as hell. I mean, you look like you could bench a Buick, but I never see you with any females.”

  It was a legitimate question, one I can’t say I hadn’t asked myself. I’d loved dancing to disco, after all, but hadn’t been laid yet. It was as if I’d loved the dancing just for the dancing. I hadn’t treated it as a prelude to anything else. Too afraid to venture inside a bra, I hadn’t even made a serious attempt to get laid. There was the wrestling thing too. All the rolling around with other boys. Tight singlets. Group showers.

  “You want to touch it?” Danny said. “I’ll pull it out right now. I don’t give a fuck. Friction is friction.”

  I wondered if the girls were going to show up. If Alisa even existed. I threw another rock into the pond. Stood up.

  “We can do this right here,” I said. “You t
hink you can kick my ass? Let’s go.”

  Danny stood up too, a little annoyed it seemed, as if he had to handle an unpleasant task he’d rather have someone else deal with. He cricked his neck one time from side to side, then flexed. His forearms were taut and he was light on his feet, toes balled against the dirt roof. It felt then like the house had not been built for soldiers, but for us, for the tall leafless trees to ring us under the grey sky, right here, where he’d fucked Caroline Haas so many times.

  I was calm though. Maybe I was about to get my ass kicked, but maybe I wasn’t. Either way, I could no longer be called a pussy. I circled and focused on his hands, watching to see which wrist I could grab and twist.

  “Dude, chill,” Danny said. “This ain’t no WWF. I was just fucking with you. Have a beer.”

  I took one. I didn’t like beer, still don’t, and I knew the empty calories would mean twenty more minutes of conditioning. That didn’t matter. There was no way I wasn’t going to hit the basement bench for hours that night anyway, and there was no way I was going to turn down that beer.

  We drank and I asked him why he didn’t write his name everywhere any more, only on my locker. “In middle school, you want everyone to know you,” he said. “In high school, it’s like, fuck it, leave my ass alone. I got shit to do.”

  The sound of the girls’ voices—their clatter through the woods— it felt like a miracle. Or maybe a disappointment. “That’s so sweet,” Caroline said to both of us, when she saw the fast food.

  Alisa wasn’t as pretty as her cousin, but Danny was right, she would give me something. Or, more like—huddled in a sand-trap, far from Danny and Caroline—she would offer, and I would take. More than I ever had before.