Boy Wonders

by Cathal Kelly

  I heard the police cars coming into the station at speed, sirens going, tires skidding.

  I remember thinking, “What poor bastard are they after?”

  I didn’t turn to look, so the hand on my shoulder took me by surprise.

  Since I hadn’t seen him yet, it didn’t register that this was the law. The cop spun me around. As he did so, I swung instinctively. As with most punches, it didn’t come anywhere close to the target. The blow glanced off his shoulder.

  But he was not happy with me. Once I saw the uniform, I went slack. He was bigger than me, adult, much stronger. I could tell that from his grip. He dragged me over to the hood of his car and threw me across it. That didn’t hurt. Then he picked me up by the collar of my jacket, marched me back a couple of steps and tossed me into the door. That one hurt.

  When you are fighting, everything blurs into a haze of fear and rage. Mostly fear. You’re not thinking anything. That’s the difference between people who can fight and people who can’t—the ability to overcome panic.

  But when you are in the midst of a beating, your mind slows and things get clear. You surrender.

  Years later, when I read Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club—a celebration of a particularly masculine type of ritual suffering—it registered deeply with me. There is something freeing about absorbing punishment.

  You don’t take a beating. You endure it. That can be strangely satisfying.

  The cop didn’t go so far as to punch me, but he was intent on running me into a bunch of things until he got tired. They wedged the three of us in the back of their squad car and left us alone. Without saying anything to each other, we began emptying our pockets. We shoved dozens of hood ornaments and several tools down the back of the seat.

  None of us had ever been in a police car, and so didn’t realize the rear seat cushion is removable. A different cop took us out of the car, pulled out the cushion, nodded at the pile of metal and said, “Whose is this?”

  We all shrugged.

  Coursing with adrenaline, I wasn’t scared.

  Two more cars arrived. We were split up. As one of my friends was being hustled into a different back seat, he shouted, “Don’t tell them anything.”

  Like we were gangsters or something. This was turning into criminal fantasy camp.

  My cops drove me around for a bit. They pretended to be angry. At one point, the car stopped suddenly and the cop in the passenger seat got out, flung open the back door and poked at me with his nightstick while I cowered against the door. We were both play-acting. I nearly laughed.

  They asked where I’d done it. Was it this car? Or this car? Were you here? Was it your friend who did it? Which one? Just tell us, and you can go home. One of your friends already told us it was you.

  Then I did laugh. Did this ever work?

  First, I’d taken the beating like a man. Now I was going to be able to truthfully tell people at school that we’d been asked to rat each other out, and had refused. These cops were gifting us a massive reputational boost.

  Finally, they brought us all to the station. It was late now. I’d missed curfew.

  They processed us, took fingerprints. We were put in holding cells. They brought us out and took down our information. Our names were written on a greaseboard. Beside mine it said, “Assaulting an officer.” Even that didn’t bother me.

  Then a cop said to me, “Your mother will be here soon.”

  “You didn’t have to call her.”

  “Yes. We did.”

  Now I felt fear.

  They brought me out through a loading bay. My mother was waiting there. The sight of her emboldened me.

  “These guys hit me,” I said, sounding a lot less tough than I’d have liked.

  My mother—a tiny woman—looked up at the cop and said, “Is that true? Did you hit him?”

  The cop still had me by the arm.

  “He struck a police officer,” he said.

  “I don’t care,” my mother said. “Did you hit him?”

  The cop smirked at me and let go of my arm. I don’t blame him in the least. I was an insufferable little prick hiding behind my mother’s skirts.

  My mother chested up to the cop. Her chin was just above his belt.

  “Did you hit him?”

  “Well, I didn’t,” the cop said.

  “What’s your name?”

  We were all in the parking lot by now. The cop backed away from us until he was inside the bay and hit the button that drew down the garage door.

  As we stood there in the cold alone, it occurred to me that my mother had walked here. She’d have got up to a ringing phone and then left my eleven-year-old brother alone in his bed. There were no buses at this time of night. She had no car. It was well below freezing. It would’ve taken her an hour or more to get there.

  “That was great,” I said, meaning it.

  She threw me a look I have never forgotten. It was something beyond disappointment. It was resignation. Like she was seeing me for the first time and realizing she didn’t like me very much.

  “If you ever do this again, don’t call me,” she said. “You can figure your own way out of it.”

  She didn’t ask me if I’d done it. She knew I had. We walked home without speaking.

  There were charges—public mischief. I suppose the assault bit was never filed.

  As a young offender, I was granted a lawyer. I spoke to him once at his office. He was in a hurry and didn’t explain anything to me. I never did ask. I didn’t care to know.

  I went back to school on Monday and made a meal of the story, playing down the key beats in the hopes people would think me modest and more dangerous.

  A few months later, we all had to go to court. I’d been told to expect probation and community service. It didn’t register. I had detached myself from the process. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen. Why worry? What did it matter in the grand scheme?

  After the arrest, the three of us stopped collecting hood ornaments. I went home and threw out the ones I had (I guess I thought the house might be raided). With a third of its financial community having gone bust, our small hood ornament economy collapsed. Nobody cared about them anymore. In short order, no one could remember why we had in the first place. It had been tulip mania, but much stupider.

  The lawyer came out to explain what would happen in court—a short trial and a quick judgment. He left.

  He came out again and took my mother and me to the side. Things had changed. The charges were being dropped.

  What luck. I was relieved, smiling.

  The lawyer looked over at me and curled his lip. I realized that he did not like me.

  He explained that the reason the case had been dropped was because there had been only one witness, a man who’d seen us stealing hood ornaments that night and called the police. In the intervening months, he’d seen us again. And again. We were hard to miss—big, loud, a lot of black leather, always moving in a pack. We walked by his house often. We hung out at a Harvey’s just up the road. We didn’t know who he was, but he knew us.

  If he came to court, that would change. He’d thought better of the whole thing. In the end, he cited fear as his reason for backing out. My lawyer made sure I knew that.

  There was a brief proceeding in court as the matter was ended. It was all very routine. Everyone looked busy and bored.

  As we left, I caught up to my lawyer as he rushed off, and said, “Can you tell that man that we’re sorry.”

  He stopped, turned and for the first time gave me the full weight of his attention.

  “You’re not to go near him,” he said. “That would be very serious. That would be jail. Do you understand that?”

  I said I did and he left.

  My friends were skulking away with their mothers. We left without speaking to each other.

  I never did find out who that man was. I’d see people on the street and think, “Him? Him?”

  We would have nothing in commo
n, he and I. But I knew what it was like to be scared. The worst part is the anticipation. Thinking that it’s not going to happen today, but knowing it will happen at some point. Fear is corrosive. It’s far worse than whatever you’re afraid of.

  I stopped walking down the usual streets and went the long way around. Reconstructing the night in my mind and what happened when, I could make a rough guess which of twenty or thirty houses was his. I didn’t want him to see me and think that I was stalking him.

  I started to dress differently, wearing colour again. Part of this was the occasional shedding of skin that is such a large part of growing up, but I also wanted to appear different in case he saw me. At best, he’d no longer recognize me. At least, I might seem less threatening.

  I would like to have met him and apologized. Not for the cars or the crime. If I’m being honest with myself, that didn’t seep through. I’d done it, just barely got away with it and learned my lesson. Not that it was wrong to do, but that it was monumentally foolish. I never did anything like that again.

  What I wanted was a cleansing. First, to free him from worry. And then, to receive his absolution.

  I never did get what I wanted. Just as well. I didn’t deserve it.

  WORK

  WE ALL LIVE IN THE GREY, but at some point you have made a decision about whether to point in the general direction of darkness or light.

  My incipient criminality wasn’t hindered by any moral code. It just happened that I was very bad at it. I was the muppet who always got caught.

  When we were teenagers, the cops would often stop us on the street for a speculative chat. We had that look.

  One night, aged about fifteen, I had a very large bottle of vodka in my backpack. I was headed somewhere—doubtless, a park—with my friend Ned.

  Had I played it cool, it would’ve been fine. I could not play it cool. When one of the cops asked what I had in the bag, I instinctively jerked it off the ground where I’d laid it protectively between my legs and threw it over my shoulder.

  “Nothing,” I squealed.

  Of course—of course—I’d forgotten to close the top of the pack. As I swung the bag round, the bottle launched from it like a cruise missile. It was thrown with sufficient force that it took a good two or three seconds to arc through the air and then shatter on the sidewalk twenty feet away. It made a very unsatisfying “pop.”

  The cop looked at me. I looked at the cop. The cop looked at his partner. His partner looked at him. Ned looked at me. I could not look at Ned.

  Then the cops started laughing, bent-over, hands-on-knees, gasping-for-air laughing.

  It went on like that for a while. People walked by and joined in. Ned and I shifted from foot to foot. The cop finally recovered and put a hand on my shoulder to nudge himself back up to vertical.

  “Go home,” he said.

  They left. We did not go home. We went to get more vodka.

  One of the joys of being a teenager is that you have no sense of proportion. Everything you do, you do too much.

  My moment of greatest temptation arrived when I was seventeen years old.

  I had always worked. It was an expectation in my house that you had a job. I delivered the newspaper in grade school. In high school, I thought I could take a little breather. The day I announced that I’d made the football team was the day my mother rejoindered that that was going to get in the way of my as-yet-undiscovered after-school job. I quit football and got a gig on the fry line at a burger joint.

  In the course of a year, I lit my hair on fire, cut myself constantly and suffered numerous contact burns. No amount of showering could rid me of the smell of being singed. My minimum-wage salary was largely spent on cigarettes, alcohol and painkillers.

  The next summer I got a job at the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame, housed at a sprawling lakefront amusement park called Ontario Place. This job was less dangerous. They had a batting cage (where you ducked swinging bats) and a pitching installation (where people insisted on throwing while you collected the balls).

  It cost a couple of bucks to throw five balls and test your velocity against a radar gun. Most of the suckers who had a go were young guys trying to impress girlfriends or middle-aged guys trying to impress their kids. This often ended poorly.

  I’d try to help.

  “It’s probably a good idea to warm up a bit first.”

  Nobody wanted to warm up. Everybody wanted their initial effort to hit the red line.

  We are used to hearing what major league pitchers throw—mid-eighties at the low end. Those numbers are burned into the average man’s brain. A regular person cannot throw a ball eighty miles per hour. Not even close. But Christ did they try.

  A peculiarity of the pitching motion is that it works best when done loosely. The secret is mechanics rather than strength. Generally speaking, the harder you try, the poorer the results.

  Guys would get up there, give their kid a wink, wind up like Nolan fucking Ryan—knee up in the air, the whole bit—fire one in, look over at the gun and see the number “57.”

  It was at this point they’d say, “I think the gun is broken.”

  “No, sir. The gun is not broken.”

  “I know I throw faster than that.”

  What I should have said was, “And how, pray tell, would you know that? From your time in the New York Mets organization?”

  But I’d just shrug.

  They’d cycle from embarrassment to anger. That’s when they’d get hurt—the throw right after a 57.

  In a couple of months, I witnessed more muscle tears than a kinesiologist sees in a career. You could tell straight off. The body spasm. The off hand shooting up to the shoulder. The small dip in the knees and arch of the back. The panicked look over to the girlfriend/wife/son/daughter—did they see that?

  Of course they did.

  Were they ashamed?

  Of course they were.

  To a man, every one tried to play it cool: “Should’ve warmed up a bit more.”

  Some even finished their bucket.

  In one instance, there was an audible “snap” and a whole drama with paramedics and down-on-the-ground writhing.

  There was a chalkboard alongside the register where we kept track of the fastest throws of the day and the season. The best I ever saw was a young guy who was clearly an actual ballplayer. He bought ten buckets of balls. He lobbed the first nine of them in like he was shooting free throws. On the tenth, his arm stroke didn’t look much different. But the gun was now up in the mid-eighties.

  As I put his number up in the marker, he gave me a little nod and left. He’d come in alone.

  On many days, the top aspirant was a woman. Because, like the actual pitcher, they weren’t trying so goddamned hard to impress anyone. They just did it. This was the Nike motto evidenced in life. I made a mental note.

  I couldn’t help but notice something else as well. When you’re handing over small change in return for a bucket of balls, no one expects a receipt. You can punch in “No sale,” the register opens, you take the money, but no transaction is recorded. Eventually, it dawned on me that this was a business opportunity. For every five dollars I took in, one began making its way into my pocket. Who’d know?

  Well, everyone.

  I hadn’t the sense to keep a mental tally of my illicit gains and make one withdrawal late in the day to decrease my exposure. Every time I made five dollars, I took the dollar.

  At first, I was careful in how I managed the theft. Gradually, I got less careful. By the end, I was cheerily opening the register with a crowd around and helping myself.

  The crucial thing I lost sight of was that the open-concept facility had two levels. I worked on the main. My boss worked on the second. The door to his office exited onto a walkway that directly overlooked the pitching station.

  After too many weeks to credit, I was called up for a meeting. The boss asked if I was stealing. I admitted it straight off.

  He hadn’t been prepared for
that. There was a long moment of silence.

  “Then I guess I have to fire you,” he said. “I really wish I didn’t have to do this,” he said.

  “No, no, it’s okay. I understand.”

  “I hope you’re not angry with me,” he said.

  “No, not angry at all. I’d fire me too. Seriously. It’s fine. I’m fine.” (It was becoming clear that he wasn’t going to get the law on me, and I relaxed.)

  Then he started to cry.

  He was a gentle guy I’d always liked.

  When you are young, everyone around you seems old; when you get older, everyone seems young. His name was Boyd. I imagine him now having been in his fifties, but he was probably much younger. I was a goofy kid with silly hair, but he’d treated me like a fully functioning human adult. I appreciated that. And now this.

  He cried without embarrassment.

  In my world, people smouldered when they got upset. They didn’t weep or apologize. They didn’t submit. The whole production deeply unsettled me. I left him leaning against his desk and walked out without saying anything to my co-workers, all of whom seemed to know what was going on.

  I wasn’t too bothered about losing the job. It was a shit job. There were always plenty of shit jobs around. But I was bothered that I’d let someone down.

  I went home, told my mother I’d quit—“Why?” “It just wasn’t for me”—and got another job at a local movie theatre.

  It was the Runnymede on Bloor—the same place I’d had my Star Wars epiphany. It was an old, regal place. Red velvet furnishings, a balcony, double winding staircases. It had class.

  The professional life of the theatre (so-called) suited me. It may have been the first thing I was ever good at, and certainly the first thing anyone else recognized me as being good at.

  I switched the Runnymede for an art house downtown called the Cumberland. This is when work became my obsession—perhaps the only one that has ever repaid the effort.

  I went to school and I slept at home, but I lived at the Cumberland. I took tickets, worked the cash, swept the halls, cleaned the toilets, schlepped popcorn and settled disputes. Eventually, they made me an assistant manager. They told me to go out and buy a suit. I hadn’t the cash on hand to do so and was in the midst of one of my occasional silent periods with my mother.