Knuckleheads

by Jeff Kass

  Oh, I say, that sounds good. But I’m thinking I will kill that dude. I will steal a bottle of expensive Zinfandel from his climate-controlled wine cellar and crack him in the head with it, then overturn his kayak and drown him.

  There’s no shuttle to Long Point. We rent bicycles because the dickhead told Calista that’s the best option. We hitch one of those moon-tent trailers onto the back of my bike for Jesse to ride in and he loves it, plus the in-case-of-every-possible-emergency-known-to-humankind bag fits neatly in beside him so I don’t have to carry it on my back. The ride to the preserve’s entrance is only about eight miles from Edgartown and it’s relatively flat and there’s a smoothly paved bike-path. I’m beginning not to hate the dickhead. The Superman is tucked somewhere in the vast reaches of the bag and I am happily anticipating tossing it into what’s been described as an idyllic freshwater pond, no waves, warm temperature, pebbleless sand. Calista and I will watch Jesse fetch it and I imagine that later we will pedal back to the mice-infested rental and he will nap and we will initiate our own kind of sprinting and plunging intimacy and our vacation will be saved.

  Except the road from the preserve entrance to the pond is four additional miles of soft dry dirt. After one half of one mile, my knee is fried. The bike spins and fish-tails and clouds of dust choke Jesse in his tent-trailer and he coughs and cries. Calista zooms ahead, yelling back that she’ll pick out a good spot on the beach. It’s ninety degrees and dead-ass humid. The wheels of my bike skid and sink in the sand. My knee is on its way to swelling to the size of a watermelon. I will wake up tomorrow morning in a kind of pain that will feel like someone whacked me with a crowbar. I estimate the number of ensuing days I will not be able to walk at three. I want to cough and cry like Jesse, but I don’t. It’s okay, I tell him. You’re getting out of there. Out of that cage.

  I stop the bike without braking because we are hardly moving, unstrap Jesse from his dusty prison, and hoist him onto my shoulders. He likes to ride up there and stops crying. He weighs forty-five pounds and my orthopedist has warned me against gaining weight because each additional pound I carry is equivalent to six pounds of pressure on the knee with the missing cartilage, six pounds of pressure on bone grinding against bone. I tell my son he’s going to have to hold on around my neck, thereby semi-strangling me, because I will need both hands on the handlebars while I push the bike. We begin to walk the remaining three-and-a-half miles.

  It’s awful, but I can actually lean some of the weight against the bike and it functions in similar fashion to one of those wheeled walkers old people use. The hardest part is keeping Jesse balanced, and sometimes, I have to hold one of his feet so he doesn’t fall off my shoulders as I simultaneously try to push bike and trailer with one hand. If I want to keep everything in sync, I can’t stop to swipe at the streams of sweat oozing into my eyes so I try to embody the sting and keep pressing forward, one foot after another trudging through the dirt. I ignore the howls from my knee and work to establish a kind of cadence. I will not lose to Calista this time. I will keep moving. I think about the dickhead who put me in this situation. I think about Cal Pulliam the plagiarizing moron. I plod forward. I will keep moving. I will not lose to Calista. Not now.

  Eventually, wondering where the hell we are, she pedals back to find us. When she spots the pathetic slow-moving sight of us, she hops off her bike. I’m sorry, she says. Here, let me push the bike with the trailer. You push this one.

  I do. The rest of the odyssey takes close to an hour. We don’t talk but I feel indebted. Jesse nearly falls asleep on my shoulders, and I have to keep shaking him awake so he can hang on around my neck. But I want to sleep, Daddy, he pleads. Please, Daddy, I want to sleep.

  At last, we round a bend and, about a quarter-mile away, what looks like an enormous garden of neon and pastel beach umbrellas sprouts into view. We park the bikes at a bike-rack and because removing Jesse from my shoulders at this point would be akin to peeling duct tape off the hairs on my thighs, he stays up there and Calista lugs the beach bag. The last quarter-mile nearly murders me, but we make it. The pond is as advertised. Exquisite and calm and surrounded by lush vegetation and soaring seafowl. We rush into it immediately. The water is fresh and soothing and, as Calista watches Jesse, I swim for a few minutes far from the madding crowd and I gaze up at a sky that seems happy to embrace every fucked up thing about me and I float and float.

  We stay at the beach for hours. For much of the time, I lie half-reclined in the water, my legs submerged, which seems to mitigate some of the knee-swelling. Jesse splashes next to me and builds shapeless sandcastles. Calista massages my shoulders. Somehow we are a family again. We are having so much fun we don’t even pull out the Superman until late afternoon. We will be leaving soon and Calista says, Do you mind playing with Jesse for, like, fifteen minutes? I just want to finish this book. Ten more pages.

  No problem, I say, and I mean it. And when, after a couple dozen throws, I heave the figurine too long and it plunks too deep in the pond and Jesse comes bawling out of the water saying he couldn’t get it and Superman’s gone, he’s gone forever, and Calista’s eyes panic and initiate a rapid boil because this is the one emergency she’s not prepared for—we don’t have a Superman duplicate or even a Batman and the toy was a gift in the first place and we don’t know where to get another one—I say again, No problem, I’ll find it.

  It’s important to know I am in love with my son’s bushy eyebrows, the curves of muscle in his back and legs. I also adore the pair of birthmarks beneath Calista’s bottom-left Achilles tendon. The two of them, my son and wife, are the most wondrous sights on the beach, more picturesque than the pond, the birds. When I threw the Superman too far, I was not trying to relive my masterpiece throw or attempting to demonstrate the continued existence of my arm strength. I swear it. Nor was I distracted because Long Point, populated not with college girls but with young mothers like Calista, is a far more sexually dangerous place for me, and that hovering not twenty feet to my right was a particularly attractive mom in a bright orange two-piece with a stomach flat and sun-baked, and that just when I was cocking my arm to throw she happened to be bending over and packing her own family’s overstuffed bag. No, when I overthrew the Superman, I was, in fact, pleasantly bored watching seagulls loop-de-loop, and the thing just slipped.

  I plot my search as if it’s a child who’s disappeared, drafting in my mind a thirty-by-thirty foot grid in which somewhere Superman lies below the surface. Methodically, I pick my way across the grid, raking every square inch of sand with my fingers. I am confident, but careful too. Even as Jesse, inconsolable, curls up in Calista’s arms on a towel, I try to avoid the creation of upsurging plumes of sand, clouds that will obscure my vision of everything below. The process is worrisome because I don’t have all night. There is still the perilous hike back to the main road, the eight-mile bike ride after that. There is still the fact that tomorrow morning my knee will feel nine months pregnant and I will not be able to walk for three days, yet I relish this challenge.

  Calista is stroking Jesse’s hair and they are counting on me to accomplish the rescue. I will not fail. Superman, invulnerable Kryptonian that he is, may nonetheless remain underwater too long for his lungs to continue breathing. He may not survive this debacle, he may drown, but I will not leave him here for some other kid not nearly as magical as Jesse to find. I will not abandon Superman to be preserved in ice when the pond freezes over in the winter, his rubberized eyes wide and staring.

  I am not leaving until I recover this body.

  The woman in the orange bathing suit heads back to the parking lot, but my eyes do not follow her. I can hear my son sniffling on the beach as I peer into the saltless water. I walk gingerly. I won’t make clouds. I focus my vision and tune out the gulls, feel for the current to tell my fingers where to search next.

  Somewhere, the hero is here.

  BASEMENTS

  MIKE D'S: We invent ourselves here, and try again when we fuck up.
We are the offspring of our parents’ migrations to the suburbs and we orbit around New York City, claiming it and afraid of it. In our homes, we are moles, living for the rooms underground. We inhabit them and stake them as ours, pieces of our parents’ dreams we want to own for ourselves—the mildewed foundations of our houses. The primary piece of furniture in Mike’s basement—a bumper-pool table—becomes our altar. We circle it and play the angles. The Yankees strum a symphony on a TV with a busted color tube. Everything in the game looks green. Sparky Lyle’s face looks green. Phil Rizzuto’s sports jacket. This is where the first and only hickey takes place, on a school night, on a vinyl couch with a mohair blanket. The cushions squeak. Mike D wrestles with his girl Lizette on another couch five feet away. The TV is not on and we are listening to music low on the stereo, a Jackson Browne album. The record pleads for someone to stay-ay-ay just a little bit longer in a voice squeakier than my little sister’s. Claudia, who has narrow breasts and sports a faint mustache above her upper lip, whispers, I’m going to mark you.

  Her teeth poke my neck like the tines of a fork, digging bloodworms from my skin. Moonlight sifts through the window we propped open so the girls could sneak in, and Claudia unbuttons my pants and says, You’ve never done this before, have you? I lie but she doesn’t buy it. Her fingers are gentle. Lizette giggles from the other couch and I wish it were a different night, a weekend, wish there were more of us. I wish I could hear the clack and plunk of sticks and balls. I wish I could hear Johnny trash-talking and Lennie saying he’s full of shit and the underlying bass-line of green baseball games.

  Everyone is too young to drive but Mike D. steals his father’s car because Lizette and Claudia need to get home and nobody has money for a taxi. For our initial getaway, Mike puts the car in neutral and Lizette and I push it out of his driveway so it won’t make any noise. While this happens, Claudia urinates beneath a hedge of blooming forsythia. I’m still feeling the tattoo of her fingers and her teeth and other than during a sixth grade camping trip—when any girl who had to piss hid deep within a grove of trees with at least one other girl keeping guard—I’ve never known a female to relieve herself outside. None of us are drunk and when we hit the road we drive fourteen miles-an-hour and don’t get caught.

  The graffiti Claudia leaves on my neck takes the shape of two purple welts. Mike D. calls them rope burns. She lives at the bottom of a neighborhood called Battle Hill. I am not afraid to go to Battle Hill, but we don’t talk on the way to her house because everybody’s worried Mike will plow into another car and injure us for life. I am relieved when we drop her off at the curb. While Lizette whispers something to Mike in the front seat and touches him somewhere, Claudia stands next to the car and says to me, I’m glad I’m the one who did it. I’m glad I’m the one who cleaned your pipes.

  I wonder what this means and Mike D. releases the brake and nudges the car forward while Claudia’s still standing there waiting for me to respond. The rear tire rolls over her foot and she screams and screams and screams.

  Johnny A.M. to the P.M’s: For boys, it is a post and pre-dancing era. We are Italian mostly, and Irish, with a Jew here and there. We will never admit it, but for years John Travolta was our hero. He wore a T-Birds jacket with the collar high and sharp and he nailed Olivia Newton-John after she instructed him to, Tell me about it, Stud. He pulled a bunch of other lesser-known chicks too, in that other movie while he was wearing a ridiculous white suit. We could never figure that out, but it doesn’t matter because disco has wheezed its final breath and older kids who at one point memorized The Hustle don’t want to admit things like that ever happened. Hip hop is an exotic woman with crazy hips we want to flirt with. Her mouth is sexy and bold. It is not enough for us to put on a record and sit on a couch. Not enough for us to pretend we are potheads and say, Dude, this is so cool.

  We make a pilgrimage to Fordham Road and buy two turntables and a mixing board, carpeted speakers with bass woofers the size of globes. We look like idiots when we try and stuff them into Johnny’s mother’s station wagon. It’s forty minutes of tying other shit to the roof and folding down seats and sweating like tourists and people on the street looking at us, three very white and clueless stooges begging to get our asses kicked. We all crowd into the front for the drive home and Davey has to sit on my lap. I can’t help breathing into his neck and we are embarrassed and sweating and broke, and we will never tell anyone this story.

  Purchasing electronic equipment in the South Bronx requires balling up our allowances in our socks and shopping at electronics stores that look like pharmacies. Nothing will have price-tags. Everything will be cheaper if we agree to buy items without boxes or paperwork. Johnny will be the one who will urge us to turn our backs and walk out of the store if we don’t like the price. If we make the journey at night there will be hookers in abundance who will be a lot prettier than we imagined they would be. Johnny will describe how he tried to get a blowjob from one of them in the backseat when his brother was driving the station wagon but it didn’t work out. Why not, someone will ask, blew your wad in your jeans? Fuck you, Johnny will say. No one will believe he ever even made an attempt.

  We will pretend to rock parties until the break of dawn. We will pretend lots of the kinds of girls who think we are dull—the kinds who prefer lacrosse players who slant-park their Toyota hatchbacks and have parents who pay for SAT prep classes—will come to our blow-out bashes. They will mostly be blond and will dance with each other until they tire and then they will search for us in dark corners for groping and other activities of their own devising. We will prove we are not dull.

  In preparation, G-Lover will show us how to work the needles back and forth across the backbeat to make scratching sounds. We will all look very beautiful with headphones covering one ear only. Johnny will make out with my sort-of girlfriend at a New Year’s Eve party. He won’t be sorry, but I will forgive him and not her. Johnny’s mother will sometimes bring pitchers of lemonade downstairs and will say, Don’t do that to your records, that’s how you ruin them. Johnny’s sister Maria Louisa is very cute and says hi to me shyly in the hallways at school. It’s an extraordinary privilege to stand behind her at the water fountain, but that is as far as it will go. When I’m playing shortstop, I backpedal on pop-ups and Johnny comes sprinting in from left field and calls me off. I let him and that’s how we win games.

  The basement is well organized, its orange shelves filled with old children’s books and board-games like Trouble and Sorry. High up, two shelves are devoted solely to Johnny’s baseball cards. No one ever talks about them but one notebook is labeled Hall-of-Famers and there’s a mint Mickey Mantle in there from the early ’50s. It’s tempting to steal it. To fuck Johnny up on some tequila and slip the card out of its protective sleeve and into my pocket. Johnny said he played strip ping-pong one time with a snobby girl named Harriet from my chemistry class and that is bullshit. She is known for wearing paisley scarves and other pretentious accoutrements and he should pay for lying like that.

  There are two hockey sticks in the corner no one ever uses. The window is left open so the music can bump the whole neighborhood. One Saturday night, when other less worthy kids are crawling their hands toward crotches of girls who should have nothing to do with them, it happens just like G showed us. Record and palm connect like lovers and the beat revolves backward, then forward, then backward again. I release it graceful and free, yearning, like a rooftop pigeon—chikka-chikka-chik—right on time with the rhythm. Johnny’s mouth opens in wonder. The sidewalks outside vibrate. The streetlights bust a groove.

  Lennie Ross’s: He and Davey are the token Jews, but does that matter? It’s all about the bench-press. Lennie’s a goddamn animal. He will lift weights every day if no one tells him to cease and desist. Davey too. Freaks. They talk about girls as if they actually get them, as if it’s as easy as dunking on the eight-foot rim at the elementary school across the street. His house has a TV with cable and MTV videos are present, but it’
s background. Except for Aerosmith. Everybody stops for "Walk This Way".

  We all hid down there once, quiet with the videos on, but no sound. It was summer. We were pool-hopping, a frequent activity consisting of jumping a fence and sliding into somebody’s pool after midnight, hanging there underwater up to our necks, and whispering until we started shivering. We were wraiths, silvery phantoms in the dark. On Lennie’s street, the pools were heated. Sometimes we didn’t shiver for hours. Dogs barked far away and people watched late-night talk shows. We ducked and slithered into their pools and they never knew.

  G-Lover only came with us that one time. Skittery like a squirrel. I’m Black, he said, I’ll get shot. Jews don’t own guns, Lennie said. We negotiate. He snuck upstairs and got everybody towels from his mother’s linen closet. G’s was ugly, with a picture of a dog with its tongue hanging out. Don’t laugh, Lennie said, that used to be my favorite towel. I got laid on that towel at Jones Beach. Your mother got laid on that towel at Jones Beach, Johnny said. G-Lover laughed like it was the first joke he’d ever heard. He was running-back fast and played center field.

  We went to a house we’d been to a million times.

  The Gaynors’ was awesome because there was a corner of the fence that was wide open to accommodate an ancient apple tree. It was easy to monkey up the trunk and then drop silently from an over-hanging branch into the water. The pool was warm like a bath. We could chill there all night, listening to apples splash in the deep end. Leslie Gaynor was the hottest Jewish girl anyone had ever seen. We were always hoping she’d emerge from the sliding glass doors on her back porch, peel off a towel, and skinny-dip. Davey would later say he did her, but no one ever confirmed it.