Joey hid his drawings in a spiral-bound pad high up in the farthest reaches of his clothes closet. He knew better than to hide things under his bed, the first place Mike the Pest would look, the first place his mother hit during one of her Search and Destroy cleaning missions. The comfortable smell of his own body would be wiped away. His dirty clothes would disappear, then reappear, folded on his bed for him to put away. He wondered if his mother noticed the stains. She must have, because she never said anything.
“Uh, this is Joseph Nicci from the Gotyou Collection Agency, calling for a Mister Donald Khors. Sir, it’s about your overdue credit charges. Please call me back.”
He knew both Dink and his mom would laugh. Mrs. Khors once complained that regardless of the credit card’s name, she could never discover what she spent it on. Dink would laugh, so Joey would laugh, but he wondered if maybe Dink’s family was rich, but in a different way.
By the time his mother and Sophia got home, Ricki Lake’s guests were discussing the ramifications of being a straight edge teen mom in a punk rock world.
Sophia had ripped a coloring book to pages on the floor, with all the blank sides up, swirling with three crayons at once in each of her fists.
“That’s it. Very nice. You’re gettin’ it,” Joey said as he knelt on his knees, watching her crayons rotate.
“We did a song and I got a bird in da book an we played on the swings and I fell. Ya wanna see my boo-boo? It’s disgusting.”
“Sure.” Her pre-school adventures never ceased to amaze him.
The phone rang. His mother got it.
Sophia showed her knee, where barely a trace of a scrape had reddened her soft skin. Joey tried not to laugh at Sophia’s concern. His own knees had been scraped, his legs bruised, arms chafed in so many places since starting up wrestling again, they blended together to cover his whole body. He didn’t mind the pain so much. It told him he was there, a person, in his body, unlike the other times where he could feel invisible, nobody, alone. The pain was a dent, a reminder.
Joey played with Sophia awhile, then distracted her while he switched channels to the Smurfs. She abandoned him quickly. Joey took up her crayons, turning her little bubble creatures into Itchy and Scratchy.
During a break between commercials, one of those awkward gaps where some dozing guy in the production room forgot to put in a tape, he heard his mother in the kitchen talking on the phone to some other mother, by the sound of it. But her words were hushed, and he heard just one sentence: “If he became one of those, I’d kill myself.”
Joey cringed on the floor, stilled. It must have meant what he thought it meant. No way could he tell her. No way.
Sophia blithely watched the tube, waiting for it to continue its barrage of cartoon images.
Waiting until he heard his mother finish on the phone, he limped to the kitchen, sat at the table, helped her unpack the groceries, prepare dinner. She placed a big chicken on the counter, began running it under water in the sink. It dropped down with a heavy plop. She was always working, cooking, running the kids from one place to another. Maybe that was why she never had time to look nice like Mrs. Khors, who was always “showing a home” or “going out.”
“You stir my sauce?” She inspected a box of something, unsure where to put it, or why she bought it.
“Yeah.”
She put the box down. “Chicken and shells, and salad. I hope that meets with your approval.”
“Sounds fine.”
“You want something now?”
“No, Ma.” He thought this would be a good time to ask her, tell her, before she got to the point of really meaning what he thought she’d said. As she cooked, he helped put stuff away. That would work. “Who ya talkin’ to?”
“No one. You bein’ nosy?”
“No, I just–”
“Mrs. Gambardello. You know her from church. She’s got that nice daughter, Cara. She’s in your grade, isn’t she?”
“Yeah.” She’s also good at dropping her pencil a lot to get my attention.
Mike marched to the kitchen doorway, halted to attention like a king’s guard. “I demand seven cookies, Madam, to pay your taxes.”
“You can have two.”
Mike dropped the military stance, moved the stool, leaning over the kitchen counter to tug the ceramic teddy bear closer. “We got ants.”
“Here.” She gave Mike a bottle of Windex. He took cookies out with one hand, shot ants with the other.
Joey’s mother continued talking about Mrs. Gambardello and her daughter “and the car they just bought had something wrong with the transmission.” Her only new friends were other Italian women, like their neighbor Mrs. DeStefano, who sometimes babysat Sophia and Mike. The few women in town she’d come to know were all Italian, as if they all spoke a secret language nobody else knew and she wouldn’t dare befriend anyone else. “You hungry? Are you allowed to eat tonight?”
He smiled. “Yeah.”
“So here, eat.” Carrot sticks again. He nibbled one just to please her.
“When did you meet Dad?”
“Why you wanna know?” She cut tomatoes on the counter. It must have been for the salad, because the sauce bubbled slowly in the immense pot that rarely left the stove.
The smells made his stomach growl. He got up, grabbed a piece of bread, dipped it in sauce. “I dunno. Jus’ curious.” The sauce almost burned his tongue, but it tasted good; salty, sweet, everything he loved about food. He got another piece of bread.
“Well, it’s not a very romantic story,” she said. “Your father was with a bunch of his buddies at a school dance and he just walked right up to me and said, ‘I’m Dino. You want a soda?’ and we started dating.”
“Dating,” Mike mimicked, pointing the spray gun at his brother.
“Don’t even.”
“Michael, put that down. Go inside.”
Mike dropped his weapon, marching out in retreat.
“When was that?”
“What?” His mother kept chopping.
“When did you meet Dad?”
“In the fall, in seventy-seven, our senior year in high school.”
The year before his birth. He imagined the young version of his father picking his mother out in front of his friends like a dare. “So, you got married pretty soon, huh?”
She scooted him away from the stove, giving him a suspicious glance. “You wanna know if you were conceived before we were married.”
“I’m not. . .” He tried to block the image of his father and mother having sex out of his mind, even though it seemed nice. They must still love each other, since they didn’t fight. They argued about things, but they always settled it by laughing or going off together to their bedroom. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “You have to promise never to tell him, but yes.”
“So I guess I’m a bast–”
“No.” She held the knife up, put it down, folded her arms. “I don’t wanna hear that talk in my house. I love him and we love you. I love all my children.”
“Awright. Awright.” He watched her resume chopping, then dump the tomato bits into a bowl. “Were you in love with him?”
For a moment he could see the same woman in the picture albums, the young girl with the sweet face empty of worries.
“Of course I was in love with him.”
Joey thought this would be a nice way to tell her now, say, That’s great. You know what? I’m in love too! But she stood still, a bit dreamy-eyed, not seeing where he hoped to lead her. She said, “He told me it didn’t matter. He would have married me anyway.”
“That’s nice.”
“What are you asking me all this for? What, you got a sweetheart you not tellin’ us about?”
Sure. He weighs 130, most days. We’re a perfect match.
Ever since a seventh-grade coatroom epiphany with Giovanni Rodriguez, who was a bit of an exhibitionist, Joey had a rather complicated idea about desire, if not anatomy. Some of what he heard or read seemed so
misinformed he didn’t like to think about it. The news articles were good for facts, or what people argued as facts, but he had so few real pictures, including an image of a guy in a leather jacket, with a handlebar mustache, a pink tutu. He’d seen it in a card shop in Newark. All they showed on the tube were guys in dresses or people screaming in the streets or dying of AIDS, or else it was cartoons, screaming fags. Hated it.
Of course he did have his Melissa Etheridge tape, and the k.d. lang tape. They were nice, and there was Martina, and Madonna, who was called a lot of things, but she was definitely on his side.
That guy on Melrose Place was a bit of a dope, he heard, but the one time Joey got to watch the show, he wasn’t on it much. “Too much sex and violence,” his mother said. “You should be studying.” He’d heard about Pedro Zamora on The Real World. Joey had swiped a picture of him, another of Dean Cain from a magazine before his mom threw it out. It lay in his little box with some other pictures, souvenirs.
Wrestling magazines, comics and his drawings were all he had to look at when looking at himself wasn’t enough. Joey ripped out pages from a pile of magazines in the bathroom at Dink’s, a page with a picture of Marky Mark in his underpants on a stage. In the article he said something about performing at gay clubs, sayin’ “It was cool.” Joey thought his music was cool too, remembering the Saturday he spent with Dink, learning the moves from the “Good Vibration” video. He could even do the move of bridging backward, flipping his legs up to land standing, but after they knocked over a lamp Mrs. Khors told them they had to do that in the yard.
Joey was fourteen when he saw two men kiss.
A news story on AIDS or gay rights or something. Fortunately Joey sat in the living room in Newark, with Aunt Lilla asleep at her babysitting post, so he could watch closely. He saw crowds of them, like at a party. It confused him. Why did they go in clusters like that? Why did they all live across the Hudson and over the bridge?
He’d seen a news story showed athletes preparing for a sports event like an Olympics, but not. Women ran a marathon, guys playing basketball, swam, played soccer. Drag queens flashed pom-poms.
The news guy blabbed away, but Joey heard himself gasp. Two men finished wrestling. A ref held up the winner’s hand. The two men hugged, which wasn’t unusual.
But then they kissed. Smack, right on the lips. The two men waved at the audience like they were Mickey Mouse and Pluto at Disneyland. He had to hold back a laugh, a warm feeling in his chest, not embarrassed, but hopeful. Someday, he was going to get a ticket, go there.
He chewed on carrots, a fingernail, watching his mother prepare dinner, waiting for a light to come in from the kitchen window, give him a vision of how to tell her why she shouldn’t be expecting grandchildren any time too soon. Although nervous about it, he felt as if he’d accomplished something with Dink. Something was going to happen. He wanted to share the feeling, but ended up talking about anything else.
They talked about his finicky diet changes since he’d begun wrestling again. She was bewildered when he pushed away cookies. “I never thought I’d have a son who asks for more spinach,” she joked.
Mike’s pouncing Glob Monsters entered. He waved them off. “I need carbohydrates, too, like in pasta, but I can’t have fat stuff, and sugar just…um, it depletes me.”
“Depletes you,” she echoed.
“Yeah.”
“Systems depleted,” Mike said in a robot voice.
“Okay. No sugar.” She made a mental note.
She seemed content, talked while she cooked, filling him in on her latest version of terror and scandal, how bad things were in the city. “Aren’t we lucky we moved out here to Little Falls, before anything bad happened, what with all those awful things going on in Paterson, Newark and, God forbid, New York, with all those sick people, homeless bums, maniacs shooting people dead on trains? I used to get so worried about you kids.”
Even after a bath, the leg spasm had switched to a single tight knot. His body told him to stretch, even if he was missing practice. He checked the source of his lingering injury by comparing it with the muscle chart on his wall by his closet.
“Semitendinosus muscle.” Pulling down his sweat pants, he fingered his right hamstring, as if by finding the particular muscle he might poke out the shred of pain. He looked down at his thighs, which had thickened in the last few years. When had they become so hairy, like he was another person down there?
His hand crept further up, groinward, when Mike barged in, growling like an old werewolf.
“Because, Brother, when you cross that line from my world–”
“What the hell are you–”
In his own voice, “It’s Hulk Hogan,” then, “When you cross that line from my world, brothah, the dark side of visionaries, you’re gonna get beat up real, real bad.”
Joey yanked up his sweats. “Get out.”
“No.” Mike jumped on his bed, rapt by the presence of his older brother, but feigning disinterest.
Joey walked over to his desk, thinking once again about what he might do someday, showing Mike a thing or two, what he probably really wanted to catch him doing. He’d been almost caught too many times.
On the nights when Mike slept with him, in the old house in Newark, while quietly massaging himself off under the covers, Joey had wanted to simply flop it out in the dark bedroom, as if he didn’t care what Mike saw. What was the mystery? He must have known. He should just show him.
But then he got a sick feeling low in his gut, figured Mike would probably tell on him a minute after he did it. It felt weird to think of Mike like that, since he looked so much like just a smaller version of himself, the dark wavy hair, the thin face, the brown eyes “the girls went wild over.”
“You got a booboo?” Mike mocked.
“Strained my hamstring.”
“I’m gonna see you wrestle next time.”
“No, you can’t. It’s past your bedtime, wiener.”
“Da said I could.”
“How you know he’s even goin’?”
“Said so.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“I’m goin’.”
“Next time, wiener.”
“Show me a pin.”
“No.”
“Come on.”
“No.”
“I’ll tell.”
“Tell what?”
“I know something.”
What could it be? That he had his pants down? The way Mike snuck up on him, always spying, it could have been anything. It was probably the drawings. But how could his little brother get up inside his closet to find them? He’d have to check later. For now, he didn’t want to know what it was.
“Sure you know somethin’. Assume the position.”
Mike jumped off the bed to the small carpeted floor, waited. Joey stood over him, ready to start. He lightly grabbed Mike’s arm, careful not to bump his groin against Mike’s butt.
“Readeeee, wrestle!” He put so little pressure on the frail limbs, yet he held him down. Mike grunted below him.
He gently showed him some moves, gave him a few pointers for when he would start Kids Wrestling, then the two lay on the floor as Mike tried prying him over, to no avail. Joey reached over, tweaked Mike’s nose, then tickled his belly. The squeaky laughter made him feel good, almost a man.
“Hey, what’s that? You made a mess.” Mike pointed to a wet line dribbling down Joey’s dresser to the floor.
So that’s where that first blast went. “Uh, I sneezed.” Joey stood.
“You gotta cold?”
“It’s pecker snot.”
“What’s that?”
Mike was shoved to, through, out the door. “You’ll find out in a few years.”
9
Hunter tugged his WRESTLING OR MY GIRLFRIEND? T-shirt up, wiped off a faceful of sweat, watched, waited, then threw his hands up at the lost cause before him.
“Ely, just. . .take his arm down. Lambros, at least try to br
idge.”
Unlike other sports, with a hard wooden floor for basketball or the bitter cold and rain of football fields, a sense of comfort filled the wrestling room. Sounds were absorbed in the private sanctum.
People rarely came to watch, except maybe the yearbook photographer every now and then. He was almost invisible. The principal came by a few times to talk to Coach Cleshun and Assistant Coach Fiasole, watch the team’s progress, until he got uncomfortable in his suit. Basically the wrestlers were a clan unto themselves. Other people didn’t know the way it worked. Other people didn’t know.
Except the quitters. The banner hung high along the walls of the wrestling room, displaying the Colts insignia, a leaping young horse. But what never left the practice room was a long white banner with a list of the 1993-4 names, including those who dropped out. Little lines cut through their names. Unlike the plaques and trophies, this was a list no team player ignored. It hung as a warning; Quit and everyone will remember you.
So when Anthony had been out for a few days (stomach flu, he’d said) dragged in practice upon his return, guys razzed him. Wimp. Pussy. Fag. The usual stuff.
Coach Cleshun shouted another demand that all the guys wear clean T-shirts for practice. The reek factor was rising.
Some wore shorts with jock straps, others the little Lycra shorts they all had to wear under their singlets in competition. Some wore kneepads. Brett Shiver wore the Jason mask since he had a cut on his eyebrow.
The boys had divided into groups of four. Everybody was supposed to go through short sit-outs into reversals, with the bottom guy going for an escape. Joey watched as Dustin flattened Anthony.
“Lemme show ya,” Hunter hissed. “Neech, get on me.”
Joey knelt down, wrapped his arm in a similar position. Hunter lay on his back. Joey nestled his head over Hunter’s shoulder, heard his voice next to his ear, humming into his chest. “Ya gotta press up from your hips. . .” Hunter’s gut shoved up against Joey, pulling him up off the mat. “Arch on your feet and your head–”
Hunter slow-motioned a bridge, poured Joey around his stout column of an arm until Joey lay shoulders down, legs high, his arms folded like a pretzel around his face, Hunter’s tie with his legs threatening to crunch Joey’s knee in just a hint toward permanent injury.
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