Knuckleheads

by Jeff Kass

  The Gaynors had a skimmer, an automatic vacuum cleaner they left on while they were sleeping. It whirred around the pool like a spaceship, spitting chlorine and clunking into floating apples and pushing them toward the filter. We emptied the filter-baskets under the stars, dumping the apples near the trunk of the tree by the fence as if that’s where they’d naturally fallen. Sometimes we fished frogs and turtles and drowned mice out of filters too. If we could do good deeds like that for the owners of the pools we trespassed in, we did them.

  The night G-Lover came with us, the water was caressing us like some hot chick’s soft lips, everything lush and warm and still, our baseball dirt dissolving in the water and getting sucked up by the whirring vacuum as it scooted around the pool. This is fucking beautiful, G said. Your mother’s fucking beautiful, Johnny said. G laughed loud like we were on the back of the bus after trouncing some weak squad of hitless wonders and Davey hissed to shut the fuck up but it was too late.

  The sliding glass doors opened and Leslie’s fat father yelled, Who’s out there? What’s going on? I’m calling the police.

  We had a plan for that kind of situation, which was to morph into Saturday morning cartoon characters and duck our heads underwater. Hold our collective breath for forty-five seconds and then raise our eyes just above the surface and hope whoever thought he heard something would start thinking it was all in his head. He needed to stop smoking that cheeb or to get more sleep, and then he’d go construct a sophisticated salami sandwich with gourmet deli mustard to calm himself down and everything would be chill again. Except G-Lover didn’t know about the plan. As soon as he heard Leslie’s fat father yelling, he took off. Bounded out of the pool and scurried up the tree and over the fence. Fuck, Johnny yelled because he knew we were all busted. Everybody scrambled after G and Leslie’s pops was spitting and sputtering and erupting like a huge and loud volcano: I see you! I see you kids! Get the hell off my property!

  G sprinted like the ghost of Gayle Sayers and we all ran back to Lennie’s house and hustled down to the basement and laughed our asses completely off the continent. Then we heard an engine tune down as a car pulled into the driveway. Shit, Lennie said, Kill the light, and he climbed up to the casement to look out the window. He said it was Gaynor, fuming, huffing out of his stupendous marshmallow white Cadillac with the dog towel in his hands. Damn, G, he said, you left your towel?

  Man, I wasn’t thinking about a towel. I was thinking about not getting shot by that fat dude.

  Lennie shook his head in the gloom and I thought he was about to start talking about Jews negotiating again, but he seemed too nervous for that. That’s an old towel, he said. I had it back in day-camp. My mom sewed my name in there.

  Fuck, Johnny said. Why’d you run anyway, G?

  I’m not white like you, man. They could hang me from that apple tree.

  If Johnny were about to make another mother joke, he didn’t. I thought about G in center field, calling Johnny off on balls in the gap, sometimes when he couldn’t reach them. How they’d roll to the fence and our coach would rail at him, smack his palm against G’s temple and say, Use your head, for crissakes, use your goddamn head out there. You have one, right?

  We heard the doorbell ring.

  Everyone be quiet, Lennie said. No one move.

  It was dark and damp. Cold cement floor. Nothing to shelter us but one beat-up couch and the bench for the bench-press. Our shorts were still wet and we were shaking. Johnny turned on the TV to create a little more light, but muted the sound. The doorbell rang again and we heard Lennie’s father clomp down the stairs from his bedroom and say, Hang on, hold your horses, hang on. He opened the door and then the voices were muffled, but we could tell Gaynor was pissed. We watched Janet Jackson dance provocatively in silence, our ears straining to pick up what was happening outside the front door. She was wearing something vampirish, black, rubbery-looking and low-cut. It was enthralling. I stopped listening to the muffled voices. G-Lover didn’t.

  After a few minutes, we heard the door slam and Lennie reported that Gaynor, towel-less, was headed back to his car, muttering. He drove off and Mr. Ross opened the door to the basement, began to walk down the stairs. Yo, I’m gonna bust out, G said. I’m going home.

  Just chill, bro, Johnny said. We’ll be all right.

  You’ll be all right.

  We could feel G vibrating, itching to run again, but he didn’t. Everyone stayed quiet. Janet Jackson opened her mouth to moan and it was spectacular. The round hole of it in the dark. Len, turn on the light, his father said.

  He was holding the dog-towel. I don’t want you guys trespassing anymore, he said. It’s dangerous. I lied for you, Lennie. Told Bob Gaynor you were upstairs sleeping. Had been for hours. Said we sold the towel at a garage sale years ago. Got seventy-five cents for it. Know why I did that?

  No one answered. Johnny respectfully turned off the TV.

  Because Bob Gaynor’s a jerk. Said he saw a Black kid in his pool. That’s all he said, a Black kid and a gang of hoodlums. Said if he’d had a gun, he would’ve fired it. Would’ve been within his rights. That’s bullshit, but one of you could have been dead. Probably G, because that’s where he would have aimed.

  G nodded.

  This nonsense stops, Lennie’s father said. It stops tonight.

  He threw the towel at Lennie. If you want to swim, Mr. Ross said, go to the club. Better yet, go to Jones Beach. That’s where the girls are anyway.

  He went back upstairs. Lennie and Davey began to lift weights. Prince danced and so did Madonna. Stevie Nicks in her hippie sandals. Give me a spot, G said, throwing more weight on the bar than any of the rest of us could lift. Don’t let this shit fall on my chest.

  Davey’s: As a crew, we only spend time there once. After a hurricane, his yard floods and nine inches of water seep through the floor. Six of us join Davey and work for five hours moving furniture and rolling up sopping wet rugs. They weigh excessive amounts that challenge our hamstrings. We pull and grunt and manage to drag them outside so we can spread them in the sun to dry. Mop an ugly grey river out through the garage. There’s no snow anywhere and not even the idea of it, but Johnny asks if he can borrow a pair of cross-country skis Davey hasn’t touched since middle school. There’s an unfinished collection of about twenty license plates from different states decorating a wall that also features a poster of Don Mattingly lining a base-hit. Since Davey’s dad is dead, his mom tells us what to do. She’s purposeful and driven. Nobody slacks off and, afterward, she buys us sodas and burgers from McDonald’s.

  The thing only I know about Davey’s basement is that there’s a double ceiling. Davey’s dad built it when he was still alive. He died when Davey was twelve. He was forty and it was an unexpected heart attack. No previous problems and he was in good shape, golfed all the time, worked on the house when he could, so it was a messed-up situation. Davey heard one grunt while his father was sitting in the living room reading the newspaper in a big chair, and that was it. Dude stopped breathing. A fucked-up shock like that. The summer before, he’d covered the exposed pipes around the perimeter of the basement with a layer of sheetrock, and now the ceiling looks like an upside-down kiddie pool without any water in it. In front of the wall where the Mattingly poster and license plates are tacked, there’s a line of halfway hammered-in nails jutting from the sheetrock, each nail spaced about eight inches from the next.

  The secret aspect is that I’m the only one who knows Davey put those nails there. He found an old practice net his father used to set up in the backyard to hit golf balls into, and he banged in the nails and hung the net from the sheetrock. Now he smacks baseballs into it. Every night. A thousand swings with the lucky bat he won in a raffle at the team banquet. He’s got an adjustable tee he stole from the equipment trailer at school and he sets it up so he can swing at two hundred pitches down and in, two hundred up and in, two hundred belt high over the middle, two hundred up and out, two hundred knee-high on the corner.

/>   I only know about the net and the tee because one night after a game when he went oh-for-five, Davey felt his hands were too slow on pitches high and tight, like they were dragging through the zone. He called me up and told me to come over and I went because Davey never invites people to his house. When I got there, he made me sit on a milk crate and soft-toss balls to him so he could smash them into the net. Over and over. Bang bang bang. Chin high, he said. Put the ball right here toward my neck. I thought we’d do it for ten minutes. We didn’t. We did it for an hour-and-a-half. Toss him the ball—smack. Toss him the ball—smack. I was so numbed I felt like I was in Social Studies listening to Mr. Patterson talk about immigration quotas during the Industrial Revolution. Just a few more, Davey kept saying, tears streaming down his face, hands blistered and bleeding as he ripped one toss after another into the net. Gotta get it quicker, damn it. Just a few more. Gotta get quicker.

  Neither the net nor the tee is present the day we help deal with the flood. Just the nails in a jagged line sticking from the sheetrock. I’m betting Davey hid the rest of the stuff in his bedroom. I don’t know why he doesn’t tell anyone how hard he works on his swing. He practices all year long. Winter too. It’s how he keeps his weight down for wrestling. A thousand swings makes me lose three-quarters of a pound, he told me. Makes my grip stronger too.

  You absolutely do not want Davey clamping on your wrist. His fingers will squeeze your bones like pliers.

  Davey’s like Archie who can’t decide which girl he likes better, Betty or Veronica. With Davey, the question is baseball or wrestling, which one merits top priority. Even though he’s baseball captain, I’m betting it’ll be wrestling. Davey likes to control shit and baseball has too many variables. You can smack the blood out of a ball and some fucker on the other team can still dive and catch it. Wrestling’s more elemental, a one-on-one battle. Two bodies push against each other, flesh on flesh. One body folds.

  Davey doesn’t like folding.

  Maybe it’s because it’s too sad to chill there with his dad gone, but nobody ever hangs out at Davey’s house, except occasional girls. The rest of us pretty much only stop by his front porch. Pick him up and bring him wherever we’re going, like Mike D’s or Johnny’s. There was a rumor once about Davey and Maria Louisa. That’s bullshit, Davey said, a rumor only. But I had a feeling it was true.

  Stacey’s: Girl had a basement bigger than my house. Like twelve rooms and a bathroom she called a changing room. People used it to get out of their bathing suits after swimming in the pool in her backyard. Her yard was surrounded with a wrought-iron fence with metal spikes and we’d never pool-hopped there because nobody wanted to risk his family jewels climbing over it. Swimming with her at night felt like pool-hopping though, like it was a scam to use the luxury pool because Stacey was overweight and her nose was too skinny, sharp like a broken bottle. I dove into the deep end and glided under the surface in the manner of a sleek penguin and when I came up she made jokes that were provocative and there was no reason anyone had to know about it, so we ended up kissing in the hot-tub portion of the pool. Her tongue was surprisingly soft and skilled, and she turned on an underwater red light so the episode glowed like a diabolical porno movie.

  Her parents were home but never ventured downstairs and we continued to kiss in the changing room. Her breasts were large and plump and popped out of her swimsuit like two fat grocery-store muffins. Nobody ever had a problem with Stacey’s breasts. We migrated into the TV room and inserted a movie in the VCR, a comedy with Richard Pryor. It was funny, but laughter wasn’t what we were thinking about. The air conditioning was freezing but its hum was atmospheric and the blanket we huddled beneath was a down comforter that weighed eight hundred pounds and covered us like a promise that was not broken. Afterward, she baked chocolate chip cookies in the basement kitchen while I flipped through a picture book about tragedies that had befallen the original cast members of Saturday Night Live. The kitchen had linoleum tiles in a pattern of blue and yellow flowers. The cookies tasted buttery, better than anything my mom or my grandmother ever fed me.

  Mike D’s: Twice a month on Friday nights, we covered the bumper pool table and played cards. The Yankees were still green on television. Our game was seven-card stud, deuces wild, but sometimes we played anaconda—deal seven cards, keep four, pass two to the left, one to the right, start betting. Five-of-a-kind beat a royal flush. Quarter ante and no buy-in. Beer if we could get it. Potato chips, original flavor or barbecue.

  We never invited G-Lover when we played cards. Probably we thought he didn’t have any money. Johnny bet high and bluffed and tended to lose big early. Ended up watching green baseball games from the vinyl couch with Mike’s little brother Christopher. Davey accused Lennie of cheating every week. Two wrestlers who liked to beat the shit out of each other. You’re a scumbag, Lennie would say, and Mike D. would cut it off right there. Go out to the yard, he’d say, make each other eat grass.

  They would and we’d follow. Normally it didn’t get bloody. Christopher and Johnny liked to speculate, made bets neither had intentions of paying off. Lennie had more moves and was a better athlete, bigger too. Davey was more vicious. Would bite your wrist if he had to, or squeeze somebody’s nuts to win. It was uncomfortable watching them fight outside where the only place to sit was on a rock wall near the forsythia bush Claudia had urinated on three years earlier, back when we were still kids.

  There was an old C.B. radio in the basement. If there were no baseball game on TV, Johnny and Christopher liked to monitor the truckers discussing the location of speed traps and the best prostitutes. Once, in the yard, Davey elbowed Lennie in the side of his face and his ear started to bleed, then wouldn’t stop, leaking like a hose someone poked a hole in.

  Mike’s parents weren’t home and nobody had a car. I held Lennie’s head against my sweatshirt to try and sop the blood. Davey cursed and kicked the rock wall. Inside, the Yanks rallied from three runs down and Johnny said into the radio, Breaker one-nine, breaker one-nine, can anyone take us to the emergency room?

  THE NAKED GUY IS DEAD

  SYLVIA'S IMPATIENCE IS A HOT ORANGE SHIMMER. She’s drumming her fingers against her teacup and she’d punch me in the face right now if she could, nail me right here in Toledo, in this god-awful antiseptic waiting room, scrubbed up in our prettiest clothes while Josh, our twelve-year-old son, is getting interviewed by the good doctors Weiss and Sutter. The doctors get to decide if Josh is an acceptable candidate for rehab. If they say, no, sorry, your son’s a lost cause, we’ll have to find another program, but this one in Toledo—Maple Ridge, with the lake and the ice-skating and the organic food—is supposed to be the best. Sylvia’s nervous. She wants Josh here, only an hour from home. If Maple Ridge doesn’t accept him, and if we can’t find somewhere else, Josh goes to juvenile detention.

  That’s what happens, the judge told us, his face a rusty anvil, when your son is arrested for selling Ecstasy at his middle school.

  Sylvia hates me for lots of reasons, but right now it’s mostly because I’m reading. We’re sitting in these unforgiving plastic chairs that smell like old milk and the good doctors are grilling Josh and he might go to jail. Our twelve-year-old son’s a drug dealer and I’m pissing Sylvia off because I’m somehow not zoned out and stunned into paralysis. I’m reading The New York Times Magazine, the year-end issue about all the famous people who died over the past twelve months, and Sylvia’s fed up because, really, how can I behave like this, as if life just goes on, as if we haven’t irrevocably screwed up our son by failing to raise him with the proper aversion to addicting his pre-teen friends to narcotics?

  Leaving aside for a moment the hypocrisy that Sylvia, despite the trauma, despite the stress and the this-can’t-be-happenings and the oh-my-Gods—leaving aside that Sylvia remembered to pack in her purse the special Raku green tea bags or whatever she’s addicted to drinking like she’s a registered and certificated Buddhist monk—leaving beside all that, who the hell is she t
o judge how I respond to a crisis?

  It’s not that I’m emotionless. I just don’t want to panic. I want Josh to believe I’m here for him. Panicking, finger-drumming on the teacup and all that attendant hostility, that will only freak him out more. Still, all I could think about the whole way here with him in the backseat, asleep or pretending to be, his long greasy hair tilted against the window and covering his eyes, is what did I ever teach this kid? In his twelve years on this planet, what wisdom did I, his father, impart to him?

  I could think of only one thing. When he was younger, four or five maybe, before he got skinny and acne and started wearing the black t-shirts, I’d take him to Michigan basketball games. I remember the time-outs, usually toward the end of the game when the idea was to hype the crowd to encourage the Wolverines to go on one final run, and they’d boom the Village People’s "YMCA" through the PA. This is the one thing his father taught his son, how to make his hands first into the “Y” spread out above his head, then to curl them into his shoulders to approximate the “M,” then the curved “C” to the right side, then above the head again, palms meeting to form the “A.” To spell YMCA with his hands—this is what I taught him. He’d practice it at home and we’d head to the arena pretty much just to anticipate the late-game time-outs.

  “Read this,” I say to Sylvia, handing her the magazine, which entails approximately the same risk as presenting her with a pistol and suggesting she shoot me with it. She rolls her eyes as she often does, basically growls, and returns to the process of rapping her fingers against her tea. “No, really,” I urge, but gently. “For real. Just read it.”

  Since it’s the first time in four days I’ve spoken to her without irritation in my voice, she heaves an enormous disgusted sigh and decides to glance at the story. “The Naked Guy,” she says, then starts to read.