"You worry too much." Our partnership had benefits for both of us that extended beyond the simple joys of friendship. As we advanced in school, my studiousness meant that I was able to help Jack with his assignments, which held little interest for him. He, in turn, was the buffer between myself and the social world of public school. Shy and awkward around other children, I dreaded the daily social interactions that Jack took for granted, in fact looked forward to. Popularity came naturally to him, where for me it was almost completely unimaginable. Yet due to my association with him, I was spared a number of humiliations that otherwise would have assuredly befallen me. In the cafeteria, I always had a place at his side, and when the time came for choosing teams for kickball, I was always Jack's first pick. Whether Jack was aware of what he was doing for me, I don't know. I think for him it was simply a matter of my being his best friend, and he was doing for me what best friends did for one another. Certainly we never spoke of it, any more than we spoke about how I did his math problems and helped him cheat on the occasional test. It was just the way things were, and the way they continued to be as year followed year.
I recall having only one fight with Jack during this time, in the summer we turned nine. It was over superheros. We were in Jack's bedroom, sprawled on his bed reading the latest issues of our favorite comics, which we'd just picked up from the drugstore, along with an assortment of sour drops, bubble gum, and licorice. Turning the pages of his Superman comic, Jack posed the question of who would win in a battle between Superman and Batman. "I mean, if one of them was a bad guy," he clarified.
"Batman would win," I said without hesitation.
"Batman?" Jack asked, clearly ready to disagree.
"Sure," I said. "He's smarter. Superman is strong and all, but he's not as smart as Batman." "You don't have to be smart to win a fight," Jack told me, shaking his head. "What a dope. Everyone knows it's more important to be strong than smart."
"What do you know?" I shot back, suddenly angry and not sure why.
"Don't get sore at me," said Jack, surprised by my outburst. "I just said Superman could beat up Batman."
"He could not!" I shouted. "Take it back."
I felt myself shaking. I stood up, hands balled at my sides. "Take it back!" I said again. Jack sat up and looked at me as if I was some new creature he'd never encountered before. "No," he said stubbornly. "I'm not taking it back." I threw myself at him, all fists and anger. He fell back on the bed, momentarily caught off guard. I was on top of him, pinning him with my knees. I raised my hand to hit him, but stopped. He was looking at me with a confused expression, making no attempt to cover his face or otherwise protect himself. I felt my heart beating wildly in my chest as I struggled to understand what I was doing. Beneath me, Jack's body rose and fell as he breathed, waiting to see what I would do. I scrambled off the bed and stood in the middle of the room, glaring at my friend. Jack didn't move. The comic book was crumpled at his side, the pages torn. At my feet, Batman's face looked up at me. My cheeks burned with shame and lingering rage.
"You go to hell!" I told Jack. His mouth fell open. Although Jack was proficient at cussing, I'd never sworn before, and the shock of hearing it must have taken him by surprise as much as my attack had. I could sense that I'd grown some in his estimation, and the knowledge thrilled me.
I turned and ran from his room, unable to look at him. Back in my own room, I shut the door and threw myself on my bed. Tears came hot and thick as I sobbed, letting out the emotions that roiled inside of me. Suddenly I didn't know who I was or what I was feeling. The world had turned upside down, throwing me off balance in a way that at the same time filled me with both fear and excitement. In Jack's room, for just a moment, our roles had been reversed, and for the first time I'd seen that perhaps neither of us was exactly what we appeared to be.
Eventually I slept, and when I woke, it was to hear my mother calling me for supper. I went down and joined her and my father at the table, where I ate my meatloaf and green beans silently while my parents talked to one another about their days. When I was done, I asked to be excused and slipped out the screen door to the backyard.
Jack was there, as I'd known he would be, sitting on the back steps of his house. He was holding a Mason jar in his hands and looking at a firefly he'd caught. I went over and sat next to him. "Hey," he said.
"Hey."
"Want to sleep over tonight?" he asked.
I nodded, watching the firefly blink on and off and wondering if its light would burn my fingers if I touched it.
"Sure," I told Jack.
CHAPTER 2
For those of us born at the dawn of a new decade, life can take on the feeling of being trapped in the ever-advancing undertow of an unstoppable time line. Tied inexorably to the zero year of whatever period we happen to have been born into, we enter (or are dragged kicking and screaming into) each successive stage of life just as the world around us discards one worn-out cycle of years for a shiny new one. While amusing when one is young (how exciting to be in one's twenties during the Roaring Twenties, say, or to turn 30 just as 1969 passes into 1970), this can quickly grow tiring, particularly in the later stages of life when many of us prefer not to be reminded that as civilization's weary past is exchanged for the thrilling potential of a new decade, our own journey is winding down to its inevitable conclusion. (I imagine it is particularly vexing for those unfortunate enough to be birthed along with a new century, as the obvious challenge to live at least into the first year of the next one must be overwhelming indeed.) Still, it is a remarkable experience to accumulate years hand-in-hand with the society in which you live. And it's most interesting, I think, for those of us born, as Jack and I were, during a time when the world was on the verge of being completely upended. Born in the first year of the '50s, we, along with every other citizen of the planet, were about to be plunged headlong into a period of extraordinary change that none of us could have foreseen.
The year Jack and I left the single digits and reached the magical age of 10, the adult population of the world had its attention fixed first on Fidel Castro, the charismatic yet worrisome Cuban leader whose willingness to purchase oil from the U.S.S.R. was causing more than a few sleepless nights in Washington, and later the spectacle of a sickly Richard Nixon debating fresh-faced John F. Kennedy in the first televised presidential debate. For those of us just completing our first decade, the year's highlights were somewhat less historic, although to us just as memorable. For Jack and me, it culminated in meeting Chief Halftown, the star of our favorite daily television series, at the Buster Brown shoe store one perfect Saturday afternoon. After an hour's wait in line we came face-to-face with our hero and he presented each of us with a personally signed photo and made us honorary members of his tribe. For weeks, we went nowhere without the eagle feathers he'd given us as tokens of our brotherhood, and we talked endlessly of leaving our terminally boring neighborhood and joining the chief and his painted braves in their secret western encampment.
The world seemed to only get more and more fantastic, with each passing month bringing new adventures for two boys with few worries. We felt like Tom Swift, whose encounter with the Visitor from Planet X and battles with the Asteroid Pirates I read aloud to Jack in all their dramatic glory as soon as I could check each new book out from the library, the two of us safe inside the fort we constructed—badly but proudly—from scraps of lumber my father picked up for us. Jack, in turn, perfected his impersonation of Roland, the pale vampire host of Philadelphia's own Shock Theater , which we watched religiously during sleepovers in the family room of his house. "Good night, whatever you are," Jack would intone ghoulishly, imitating Roland's trademark line as the credits rolled forth Creeping Hand or whichever spine-tingling movie we'd just watched. A makeshift cape over his shoulders, he would advance upon me in my sleeping bag, eyes widened in a hypnotic stare. I obliged by feigning enchantment, maintaining my composure until Jack's teeth were almost grazing my neck, at which point we would
both collapse in hysterical shrieks, pleased beyond words. Those are the mile markers of that time for me, those seemingly small memories that have remained in the files of my mind while others have been discarded. The events more commonly noted on official time lines—the Bay of Pigs invasion and the resulting days of fear, the shooting of the first person trying to cross the Berlin Wall, the death of Marilyn Monroe—were things I heard my parents talk about. To me, they happened in another world, not the one I lived in, and therefore were of no consequence. The exception, perhaps, was the launching of the first man into space. What boy—what child—isn't captivated by the magic of the stars? Who among us hasn't stood gazing up at bodies whose silver light reaches us from millions of miles away, and wondered what secrets are cloaked by the darkness of frozen, swirling galaxies? Even now, waiting for Sam to finish his last voiding of water before bed, I sometimes stand in the yard beneath the spreading arc of night and imagine the worlds beyond worlds waiting to be discovered.
In the summer and fall of 1960, Jack and I spent hours discussing, with the unparalleled wisdom of 10-year-olds, the possibilities that awaited the first men to penetrate the vastness of the cosmos. NASA, created only two years before, could have benefitted greatly from the rich science of our boyish imaginations, if only they'd known we were available to them. Sadly undiscovered, we nonetheless outlined the dangers, enumerated the possibilities, and created, based on our knowledge (gleaned primarily from comics and the aforementioned Tom Swift novels), the best course of action for the lucky pioneers of the last frontier. When, on April 12 of 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, we celebrated his victory over gravity with Pepsi-Cola drunk from appropriately missile-shaped bottles and a recreation of the event in our very ownVostok I made from three O-Boy lettuce cartons and copious amounts of aluminum foil purloined from our mothers' kitchens. While our parents murmured unhappily about the Soviets' early lead in the space race, we knew only that Gagarin had fulfilled our dreams, and was therefore worthy of becoming our hero. He held the position for less than three weeks, when we unceremoniously dethroned him for our country's very own Alan B. Shepard. This time our relieved parents threw a backyard cookout in celebration of America's success. Rechristening our ship Freedom 7 , Jack and I gloried in the power that was NASA, lying side by side in the cramped confines of the boxes and soaring together toward the moon while our fathers drank beer and our mothers dished up potato salad and hot dogs. We dreamed of one day being chosen to lead the charge to Mars, or Venus, and promised one another that we would do it as a team. Afterward, we dashed around the yard holding sparklers bought for the Fourth of July but broken out early. Spinning them in crackling circles of silver and gold, we were two comets hurtling with carefree abandon on dizzying trajectories through the early spring evening. The friendship of boys is a powerful and mysterious thing. To the observer looking in from the outside, it may appear little more than a social contract, and to some extent it is. Boys, especially when young, form friendships based on nothing more than the proximity of their houses, a mutual appreciation of a sporting team, or even a shared enemy. Ask an 11-year-old boy why his best friend is his best friend, and you'll likely receive a shrug and an "I don't know" in response. Ask the same question of an 11-year-old girl, and the reply will be not only heartfelt but built around an extensive list of thoroughly-explored reasons. Despite the seeming simplicity of the bond between boys, the core of the relationship is as complex as any advanced mathematical proof. Even the boys themselves may not understand why it is they seek companionship with one another. "I don't know" is, in fact, an honest answer. Rare is the adolescent boy who will look at you and, with measured tones, say, "I guess he's my best friend because when I'm with him I forget about all of the millions of self-doubts and insecurities I have. Oh, and even though I don't really understand it, knowing that he likes me makes me feel good about who I am."
Jack and I were no different. We gave little thought to what we were to one another. We just knew that we were best friends, even if we had yet to define what that meant. And we were to have two more years of innocent bliss during which things just were, without reason or motivation. But a funny thing happens in the twilight time around 13. The skin of boyhood begins to feel a little too small, and the soul starts to itch as it expands and the body follows. As legs grow too long for the pants of youth and wrists extend beyond the cuffs of shirts that fit only a week before, the world takes on strange new shapes, as if only now are the eyes coming fully into focus. Seemingly overnight, what seemed safe and familiar is revealed as foreign and filled with perils.
We were no exceptions to this rule. As 11 turned to 12, and 12 to 13, the very molecules of our bodies rearranged themselves. Voices deepened, muscles thickened, hair and new scents burst forth from beneath skin suddenly teeming with mysteries. Changing for gym class, we and the other boys stole anxious glances at one another, searching for evidence that we were not alone. This, in turn, gave rise to new anxieties as we began to compare and contrast the shifting geographies hidden beneath our clothes. Seeing someone further along in the process of adulthood made us question our own progress, filling our minds with a host of doubts and imagined failures.
I say "we" because I have the benefit of looking back with the surety provided by more than half a century of life. Almost certainly we were, to a boy, in the throes of agony caused by the machinery of previously-dormant gonads thrown into production, of glands and ducts dripping intoxicating elixirs into our blood that turned us mad and betrayed us in terrible ways. It is the rare boy who escapes the deliciously malevolent torture of becoming a man, and although nearly unbearable at the time, the end results are almost always worth the hardships.
And so we suffered in 1963, alone but together, the boys of the seventh grade class of James Buchanan Junior High School. Even our grade level was symbolic of our position, sandwiched as it was between the relative safety of the sixth and the restless excitement of the eighth, the springboard into what we believed (wrongly, we would find out soon enough) the total freedom of high school. Trapped in this limbo, we wandered the halls of a school named for the only Pennsylvanian to hold the highest office in the land. Buchanan, incidentally, was also the only bachelor president, a fact which might have comforted a few of us had we understood its potential significance to our own lives. At the time, we were too preoccupied with being embarrassed about everything to care. We were a group of little wolves, men disguised as boys, trying to both remain a pack and forge our own paths. We pretended to be ready to take on anything, all the while scared to death that we would fail. We staged mock battles in the guise of football games and science club experiments, fighting for the chance to be king, if only for a moment, the other boys our grudgingly worshipful subjects until it was their turn. Most of all, we rode the swells of our emotions up one side and down another, startled at the ferocity of our feelings.
In the midst of all this, on the afternoon of Friday, November 22, as we impatiently awaited the arrival of Thanksgiving vacation and the promise of pumpkin pie, the world came to a standstill with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. People of my age are frequently asked if they remember what they were doing when they heard that Kennedy had been shot. I do, of course, for more than one reason. It was a little past two o'clock, and I was standing in the locker room of the school's gym. I was looking, but trying not to, at the penis belonging to a boy with the unfortunate name of William Williams. We called him, of course, Bill. Tall and beginning to fill out with the muscles that would make him the formidable man he eventually became, Bill was the current frontrunner in the race in which we were all feverishly participating. I was pulling my T-shirt over my head, using the opportunity to peer from beneath its temporary shield for a lingering look at what hung between Bill's legs and comparing it, unfavorably, to what lay cradled in the cup of my jockstrap. It was the last class period of the day, the only thing standing between us and a week free from classes,
textbooks, and tests. There were two new Hardy Boys novels awaiting me at home, and for that brief moment even the looming threat of dodgeball and the victory of Bill's superior penis over mine couldn't bring me down.
Then Coach Stellinger walked in, his ever-present clipboard held at his side, and asked for our attention. We listened as, tears flowing from his eyes, he informed us of the death of the man who had promised to bring about a brave new world. School, he said in a voice shaking with unconcealed sadness, was to be dismissed early so that we could return to our families for comfort. We were told to get dressed and report to our homerooms as quickly as possible.
I walked home with Jack through a world that seemed to have come to a standstill. The policeman who waved us across the street had cheeks wet with grief, and even the dogs in the yards were quiet as we passed, as if they knew that life had forever changed. We stopped first at Jack's house and, finding it empty, went on to mine, where we discovered our mothers in the kitchen, teacups untouched as they awaited further news—any news—that would reverse time and make everything all right again. That night Jack was allowed to sleep over, and instead of our usual arrangement of sleeping bags downstairs, we shared my bed. In the darkness, the moonlight illuminating the model rocket ships that hung from the ceiling, we talked awkwardly of our feelings about the murder of a man we didn't know, but whose loss we understood to be great.
I don't recall the words we exchanged. What I remember is the feeling of Jack's body next to mine. We'd slept together before, but that night it felt like the first time. Perhaps, electrified by the nation's shared heartache, I was filled as with the Holy Ghost, my soul expanding beyond reason and amplifying every feeling. When Jack's leg brushed against mine as he shifted beneath the blanket, I held my breath, both wanting the moment to end and wanting it to go on forever. When he didn't move, the warmth of his skin seared itself into me. His words became meaningless, and mine back to him instantly forgotten. My head swam with feelings of loss coupled with a growing excitement I couldn't explain. Horrified, I felt myself growing hard, and was instantly ashamed. I shut my eyes and willed myself to think about the president, his head burst open and his blood spilling across the pink field of Jackie's lap as her screams rent the air. Like a martyr tempted and beseeching God for aid, I looked into her face and asked for forgiveness.
Michael Thomas Ford - Full Circle Page 2
