The Tragedy of Dane Riley

by Kat Spears

  A waiter rushes over to help me but I’m already on my feet. Chuck, Mom, and Eric are all staring at me. Mom and Chuck both stand to help me, but not Eric, who isn’t even trying to hide his amusement.

  “Dane, what’s the matter?” Mom asks, her voice screechy, adding even more drama to the situation.

  “The oysters are still alive,” I say, trying to explain myself while at the same time realizing that I can’t. There’s a painful throb in my shin from my conflict with the chair and I want to touch my leg, to look at my injury, but people in the dining room are staring and I’m afraid that by drawing attention to my injury I’ll shine a spotlight on my humiliation.

  Mom and Chuck exchange a knowing look.

  “It’s okay,” Chuck says to the waiter who has just finished righting my chair. “Thanks. Everything’s okay.”

  “It’s not okay,” I say. I can feel the sweat of Chuck’s palm through the fabric of my sleeve and I shake his hand away in disgust.

  “Dane, you’re making a scene,” Mom says, and she’s right. I am making a scene. The Ingram family is staring at us. Just a few minutes ago we were discussing Dave Ingram’s colon, and now the Ingrams are discussing my frontal lobe and poor impulse control.

  Chuck holds my chair for me and signals for the waiter to come and take the oysters away. The salty smell that reminds me of blood still lingers even after the oysters are gone.

  “Wow,” Eric says as Chuck takes his seat again. “Was that crazy, or is it just me?”

  “Just don’t worry about it,” Chuck says. He glances at me and gives me a tight-lipped smile. Part of me wants to thank him, but I can’t bring myself to do it. It’s like I’ve been sworn to a code—a Chuck-and-Mom-hating code—and my pride won’t let me back down.

  Somehow I make it through the rest of dinner. Mom and Chuck are doing their best to keep the conversation going. We’ve exhausted any discussion of Dave Ingram’s colon, and school and end-of-year activities are not safe topics, so they seem at a loss to find something to talk about. When Mom does speak to me, her voice is a soft coo, like she’s speaking to an injured dog.

  As Chuck is signing for the check I’m already halfway to the door. For once Mom doesn’t try to stop me or to talk to me about anything. I make it all the way to the car before the tears come. Once I’m inside the Mercedes, the display of my phone is a blur as I type out a message to Dad.

  This sucks this sucks this sucks. I don’t know how to stop feeling this way. When is it going to stop?

  Radio silence.

  I throw my phone so hard against the dash that it ricochets off the windshield and ends up in the passenger seat. Another cracked screen. Mom has only recently stopped bitching about the last one.

  Just then I see Mom and Chuck walking toward me and I hurry to start the car and back out before they have a chance to wave me down or try to stop me.

  The ride home is dangerous because I can’t really see through the tears. I think that maybe I’ll run off the road or end up in an accident because I can’t see. When the cops come they’ll think I’m drunk but I’ll say, No, officer, I’m just under the influence of sadness. That thought makes me laugh and now I am crazier than ever while my face is puffy and sopping wet, and I’m laughing through my snot.

  * * *

  On Sunday I leave the sanctuary of my room by climbing through the window onto the low-pitched roof over the front porch. It’s only about a ten-foot drop to the soft pine mulch of the flower bed below. I’ve snuck out of the house this way so many times that there is a smooth place at the edge of the roof where the shingles have broken under the weight of my hands.

  I hurry to fire up the Mercedes and pull away from the house quickly. After I leave the pristine streets of McLean, I ride on waves of potholes through north Arlington, to the neighborhood where the Extreme Sports Asians live. The neighborhood is not a bad one, but the houses are all of modest size, and close together, with midsize Japanese- and Korean-made sedans in every driveway—most of them gray. As if the very existence of everyone in the neighborhood is gray so they drive cars of the same color.

  I pull up in front of Joe’s, a two-story brick house where he lives with his mother and father, two brothers, his grandmother, and his great-aunt. His great-aunt makes me uncomfortable. Her smile is more crazy than happy and she always makes me feel as if she knows things about me that even I don’t want to know. Her mind is still in the Philippines, where she lost it, before the family came to America. She lived through a war, Joe told me once, but it isn’t a war in our memories or in our textbooks. Joe was born here, in Arlington, and his family has been here since his mom was young, but you wouldn’t know it by going inside their house or eating dinner with them. The house always smells like the exotic spices his grandmother uses for cooking.

  Joe is riding his skateboard slowly down the front walk, then flipping the deck between his feet so that it spins once and lands on the wheels again. He hops in the car with his deck resting between his knees, and we drive to the trailhead at the end of a dead-end residential street to wait for Mark and Harry.

  The Wall is a legendary skate site, hidden deep within a wooded area that borders Great Falls Park. We call it “the Wall” because the guy who originally introduced the Extreme Sports Asians to the site called it that. Maybe the name had started as a reference to the Pink Floyd album. Nobody still using the name has any memory of where it came from, but it’s been handed down over the years.

  The Wall is an old bent that once supported a bridge span, with a brick arch that now supports nothing but the sky. The bridge was demolished long ago to make way for a massive overpass, but the old bridge support remains and is a perfect bank for executing tricks.

  The guy who introduced my friends to the Wall when they were in ninth grade has since graduated from high school and disappeared into adult life. And now the Wall is like a lost city, or a pharaoh’s tomb, shrouded in legend.

  The site was first discovered and modified by skaters in the early eighties, their names and graduation years etched into the crumbling bricks, their spirits haunting the cool quiet under the arch. Over the years, new generations of skaters have dragged metal plates, concrete blocks, and hundreds of other pieces stolen from construction sites or salvaged from dumpsters. Most of the wooded area that is outside the protection of the actual park is a dumping ground for beer cans, rubber tires, and any other trash you can imagine, but the area around the Wall is pristine, like a skater conservation area.

  It’s crazy to imagine that the original skaters, those guys who first discovered the site and struggled under the weight of those abandoned construction materials, are now old enough to be our parents. But we don’t think about them that way. They are preserved in our minds like the Lost Boys, living out eternity as skate rats with uneven haircuts, listening to Louder Than Bombs and 40 Oz. To Freedom, and putting new layers of stickers on their decks.

  I park the Mercedes on the dead-end street and roll down the windows before I cut the engine. There is a six-pack of beer in the trunk, which I grab and put on the console between us as we sit in the car waiting for Harry and Mark.

  The beer is warmer than I expect it to be—hot, in fact, from being in the trunk of the car. Joe doesn’t take one of the cans for himself, so I offer him a drink from mine. He sips only enough to wet his throat and makes a disgusted face as he passes the can back to me.

  “You get cancer from drinking out of these,” he says. “The lining of the can. It’s some kind of plastic that gives you cancer. You’re just going to get cancer sooner by leaving it in the trunk to get hot like that.”

  “Where did you hear that?” I ask idly, wishing for a cigarette but knowing I can’t ask Joe for one. He’s down to the last few packs of his carton. He enjoys each of the cigarettes so much so that you would think he is quitting heroin. I can’t ask him for a cigarette. But I want to.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I guess I read it somewhere.”

  �
�Well, how do you know it’s true?” I ask.

  “I just know. I told you, I read it somewhere.”

  “Everything gives you cancer, if you use enough of it,” I say, dismissing the threat. Cancer at some unknown future date doesn’t sound so terrible when you are ambivalent about living. Cancer takes choice off the table. Besides, people our age just accept cancer as an anxiety-inducing inevitability, like climate change or a dying ocean. “Ophelia told me her grandma smoked for, like, forty years.”

  “She die from lung cancer?” Joe asks, and his question makes me smile.

  “Nah. She got hit by a bus.”

  “Shit,” Joe says, not catching the joke. It is funny, that. Ophelia is really fucking funny. She gives you the story and, you think, the punch line. But then there it is. The bus. Waiting in the wings. I miss Ophelia right then and wonder where she is and what she’s doing.

  We’re both silent for a few minutes, which is one of the nice things about having Joe as a friend. He doesn’t fill every silence with words.

  “Hey, Joe,” I say as a thought occurs to me. “You’ve been only smoking … what? Like three, four cigarettes a day, huh?”

  “Yeah. ’Bout that.”

  “So, you know, three, four cigarettes a day, that isn’t so bad. I mean, you could smoke that many cigarettes a day for the rest of your life and never get sick from it. Right? You’d be more likely to get cancer from drinking beer out of a can.” I hold up the can from which I am drinking in a mock toast to our inevitable deaths from cancer.

  “You know what that sounds like?” he asks. “That sounds like something an addict would say. An addict can make any justification, as long as he gets to keep doing the drug he wants to do.”

  “I’m just saying, if you can get by just smoking a few cigarettes a day, why not just keep doing that? You like smoking. So why do you want to give it up so bad?”

  “That ain’t the point, bro,” Joe says as he feels around in his pocket for one of his rationed cigarettes. Just talking about smoking is making him want to smoke. “I want to give it up because I don’t want to be a slave to cigarettes. If I don’t have to have them, that would be one thing. Like having a beer. I have one because I want one, not because I have to have one. Smoking is an addiction. It has power over me.”

  “I don’t see it like that,” I say. “When I have a beer or a bong hit or something, it makes me feel better. It makes me calm or makes me not give a shit about everything happening in my life. Sometimes I need that.”

  “Which makes you a slave to it,” Joe says with an emphatic nod. “Right? You feel better with it, can’t get by without it. Same thing, ma’fuck.”

  “I suppose,” I say. I feel like there is more I can say to prove my argument, but I lose interest in the subject as I settle back into the driver’s seat, my head resting where my shoulders should be. “Hey, Joe, do you believe in ghosts?”

  “Of course, dude. I’m Asian.”

  “Yeah? Is that a thing? All Asians believe in ghosts?”

  He thinks about it for a few seconds, squinting through the cigarette smoke that coils around his head. “Yeah, probably. My grandmother sees ghosts all the time. Usually she sees my grandfather.”

  “He died and then came back to haunt her?”

  “It’s not like that. You know, it’s like if a bird sits on the windowsill all day, hanging around the house, she’ll say it’s my granddad coming to check on us. Or she’ll misplace something and then later she’ll find it and say my granddad helped her find it. Like, subconsciously she knew where to look because he was telling her where it was.”

  “You think she’s crazy?” I ask.

  He takes a minute to think about my question. He goes through the smoker’s ritual of tapping his cigarette on the top edge of the window, blowing on the ember to clear it of gray ash. If Joe doesn’t think his grandmother is crazy for calling a bird on her windowsill his dead grandfather, then maybe me thinking my dad has been reincarnated as a coyote isn’t so nuts. Maybe if my family were Asian I would just be considered normal.

  “No,” Joe says finally. “I don’t think she’s crazy. I think she misses him. When I was a kid I thought it was weird. But now, I just think she’s lonely.”

  “I get that,” I say.

  * * *

  When Harry and Mark arrive on their boards we enter the trail together as a pack. Now, we are the Lost Boys, in a place where time has no meaning. A place where you will never grow up, and never grow old.

  It is a short hike to the Wall. Harry scats the opening lines of the Pink Floyd song as we wind our way along the trail. I never liked that song much. It makes me think of the older guys we run into down at the park sometimes, the ones who did too many drugs in high school and now live in limbo between the teenager and adult worlds.

  The Wall isn’t just a place where teenagers go to party. It’s a place where you can escape a shitty parent, or forget that you suck at school, or pretend like you are already grown and there’s no one to tell you what to do.

  Though we are surrounded by deep woods, there is always the reminder that people, and too many of them, are close by—the sound of planes overhead, and the distant hum of traffic on the clogged arteries that circle the city.

  The trees and undergrowth are not the pristine specimens found in the Shenandoah National Forest, only an hour’s drive west, a place where my friends and I go for hiking and camping trips or for snowboarding in the winter. The trees in this park are weary, and they struggle against the indignities inflicted upon them by humans. Their roots rise up against the immovable foundation of the old bridge and twist like coiled snakes above the eroded surface.

  The stream that flows just below the bent is about thirty feet wide and shallow. The water appears still; the only evidence of movement are the bits of trash that bob along the surface until they come to rest against piles of brush or rocks. The stream swells after a rain and leaves trash stranded as a marker of high water.

  “Hey, Joe,” Harry calls out as Joe and I climb to the top of the bent above the makeshift half-pipe. “You need a boost to get up there?” Harry stands below, grinning up at us, like he has been dying to use that line for a while.

  “Man, shut up,” Joe says. Joe has a pretty low threshold for tolerance of other people. The fact that he still hangs with Harry is a testament to how far back they go.

  I ignore my friends and their taunts of each other and scrabble my way up the steep incline to reach the top of the bank.

  When you practice tricks on a skateboard, you have to accept that there will be lots of failure. The majority of those failures aren’t even close to fatal. And even though I am an experienced skater, meaning I have my share of scars and mended bones, I never expect to get hurt. I suppose you could say that if a person gets on a skateboard and performs tricks that are potentially fatal, then that makes them reckless, or stupid. But the thing is—life itself is guaranteed to be fatal.

  That’s the way skaters think. Real skaters, anyway. If you aren’t living, really living, by taking risks, then you might as well be dead already. When I’m skating with my friends, it’s the only time when I feel like taking a risk is worth something.

  Get busy living, or get busy dying. That’s a line from a movie, though which one I can’t remember. And those words have stuck with me. Most people walking around are just living to die. But skaters … we’re dying to live. Each day of the predictable mediocrity of school or work is another life sentence. If that’s all there is … well, then that’s not enough.

  Joe and I take turns skating the length of the concrete cap of the bent and hopping the double-sided ramp perched in the middle. We practice the move over and over again. Each time my feet leave the board and I fly into the air, the edge of the bent rises up to fill my entire world. In reality there are probably only about two or three feet between my feet and the top of the structure during the hops, but it feels like a mile of air separates me from a solid surface.

&n
bsp; The prospect of falling makes my scalp tingle and my finger pads sweat. In normal people that would be called fear. The biological indications of fear still work, even if I don’t feel afraid.

  The human brain is wired to feel instinctive fear of heights, snakes, deep water—fear that comes in super handy at times. Even people who are too depressed to live feel instinctive fear.

  From our vantage point on top of the bent we can see through the trees to the winding path we walked from our cars. The trees have not finished forming their dense summer canopy, which makes it easy to see the scar of red clay earth.

  “Who the hell is that?” We all notice the movement of people on the path at the same time, but it’s Harry who speaks first.

  “Probably a bunch of amateurs,” Joe says, dismissing them.

  “Crap,” I say when I recognize one of the interlopers. “That’s Eric.”

  “Did you tell him you were coming here?” Joe wants to know.

  “Why would I do that?” I ask, directing my impatience for Eric at Joe.

  Eric and his friends arrive like a grenade detonating. “What up, losers?” Eric calls out to us, though we have done our best to pretend as if we didn’t notice their arrival until then.

  Joe’s irritated sigh is audible, but his expression doesn’t even flicker.

  Eric and his friends have a cooler full of beers and they settle down near the edge of the water.

  “Dude,” Eric says with a grin in my direction, “what was up with your little freak-out at dinner?” He turns to his friends to get them in on the joke on my behalf. “We went to the club and had raw oysters and this dude starts freaking out. Yo, he was like, ‘The oysters! They’re still alive!’” Eric’s voice rises to a falsetto as he mimics me.

  “Shut up,” I say, resorting to a childish comeback.

  “The oysters!” Eric cries again, as he knows now that he’s hit me in the soft underbelly and goes in for the kill. “You are truly nuts, Dane. Were you scared of them? Or you felt sorry for them?”