Land of the Blind

by Jess Walter

  As I said, I smoked pot nearly every day in junior high school, but then quit suddenly before my sophomore year of high school. Two things happened that summer: My former friend and supplier Everson moved to Sacramento, and I woke up one morning six feet tall and 175 pounds. With the sudden physical change I decided, the way teenagers decide, that from that moment on I wasn’t who I had been. I was now an athlete, in spite of the lung damage caused by three years of pot smoking and the even more daunting disadvantage that I couldn’t see a thing out of the left side of my head.

  Most coaches, it turns out, will make room for the early-developed on the offensive and defensive lines in football and on the bench in basketball, so I managed to make teams and even start a few games and figure in their outcomes. But I doubt that I distinguished myself in anyone’s memory of those games—except once. That moment took place during my senior year, against our hated basketball rival in their packed, raucous gym, when the player ahead of me fouled out early in the fourth quarter and the coach sent me in to kill time, hoping that I would do nothing to ruin our chances.

  I didn’t. Instead I had my best game ever in those six minutes of that fourth quarter, pulling down a couple of rebounds, hitting a jump shot and two free throws, until we had managed to tie the score with about a minute left, at which point our team got a steal and we began to run up the court for a three-on-one fast break. I had duly filled the left wing and was sprinting toward our basket, looking to the point guard in the center of the court, playing out all sorts of athletic fantasies in my mind, when I strayed slightly out of bounds, bearing down on a cheerleader for the opposing team who was just then kicking up one leg on my vast blindside. There was a gasp and a clap of thunder. I hit her square, with the whole left side of my body. They found her three rows deep, unconscious and bleeding from her nose. The referees blew their whistles and met at center court to see if I could be whistled for a foul for killing a cheerleader. The game stopped, the fans threw programs and Coke cans, and the coach pulled me out for my own safety. We lost by six points. The poor cheerleader, I found out from the newspaper story, had a broken collarbone. And I never scored another point in basketball. That experience, with its long rise and sudden fall, as much as I can trace it, describes the arc of my high school life.

  For Eli high school was by no means perfect but was at least bearable, a drastic improvement on the earlier grades. He spent four periods in regular classes and two periods a day in special ed, and he began to outgrow a few of his afflictions, leaving his leg braces and corrective shoes behind. As we got older most of the bullies and dickheads dropped out or were arrested or they spent their days so stoned that they couldn’t muster much antagonism, even toward a shit magnet like Eli Boyle. We eventually caught Matt Woodbridge in eighth grade, and left him there when we moved on to ninth. For all I know he’s still in eighth grade, forty years old, firing spitwads, looking up “fornication” in the library dictionary, and demanding to fight some kid at lunch. Pete Decker turned out to be too small and skinny to be an effective bully once the rest of us hit puberty. He and I never spoke about what he did to my eye. In fact, we rarely saw each other after that except for the few occasions I saw him walking in the neighborhood and found myself amazed at how small he’d become. He’d ask about some sport I was playing, or which girl I was going out with, and then we’d go our separate ways. He became less and less real to me, and I can’t even say that I hated him. It was more like I stopped believing in him. I never had any sort of confrontation with Pete; none of the kids he terrorized ever came back to wreak Hollywood vengeance. Pete just stopped coming to school and eventually faded away, into the big willow tree, into the bad dreams of children.

  With the slow extinction of our classic bullies, Eli’s torture in high school came from a less dangerous but far more insidious place: the culture of boys and girls and make-out parties, of dances and football games, of going out and going steady and going all the way, of the complex system of bases—first and second and third—a world ruled by sex in which few of the inhabitants were actually having it, but all of us were always daydreaming and working toward it, hoping that something we did or said would lead us to a beanbag chair with a girl in it beneath a black light, fumbling around, hands down tight pants, desperately trying to figure out what to do with the stuff we found in there.

  Eli, obviously, was not getting much stuff.

  On his best days in tenth and eleventh grade, he was invisible—ignored or tolerated, safely in place at the bottom of this hierarchy. On his worst days he slipped on ice and his books flew across the lawn, or he sneezed and covered his desk in snot, or he wore a black coat that was two-toned by his abiding dandruff. He had been the target of our mockery for so long that by this time the whole thing was starting to feel like nostalgia, and even with his slow improvement a true Eli moment could still be counted on to elicit waves of laughter.

  But not from me.

  He had saved my life. So as quietly as I could—my own social status being constructed of such fragile material—I helped Eli. I picked up his books and offered him a Kleenex. I wiped the flakes from his coat. I sort of became his sponsor in those days, and if we both understood that a kid like Eli needed a sponsor to live among the athletes and clean complexioned, we were also careful to adhere to the rules of such a relationship and the rigid caste system that meant we didn’t talk much at school.

  Did I feel my own stock rising during this time? I can’t say. I knew I was striving for that thing we called popularity, and I doubt there was a more aggressive and eager-to-please teenager than me. I sought out the best parties and most popular girls and joined and followed and dressed and hung out and made out as if my life depended on it, as if redemption lay in becoming homecoming king. I joined every club and ran for office in every club I joined. I’ve heard (secondhand, actually, from a mental-health professional by way of my angry ex-wife) that my desire to belong comes from a deep sense of personal fraud—the feeling that I don’t fit in—a situation I fought by joining more groups that I didn’t fit, thus increasing my feelings of fraud and pushing me to join more groups, causing more fraud, and on and on until I found myself president of both the French and Spanish clubs, without speaking a word of either.

  In the same way, I dated dozens of girls, not really because I liked them, but just to see if they actually would date me. I ascended a sort of social ladder, finding that if Anita Wallace would go out with me, then it was okay for Sheila Kerns and then Wendy Bellig, and as long as I didn’t try to skip too many steps, it was only a matter of time before the Amanda Rankins of the world parted their pom-poms for me.

  My tireless pandering and joining and self-promotion may have prepared me for my later political life, but it didn’t allow much room for Eli or anyone else during high school. And yet the distance between us wasn’t entirely my doing. We didn’t have a single class together in high school until the beginning of our senior year, when we ended up, implausibly, in the same physical education class, during the last period of the day. It was an experiment in what was then called mainstreaming, working developmentally disabled and other special education students into “normal” classes with their “normal” peers in the slim hope they would someday pass for “normal.” And so every day the loopy and infirm and blind and drooling made their way from what was euphemistically called the Resource Room to the gymnasium, because some administrator had decided their usual daily humiliation wasn’t enough, and they would be well served to have footballs bounce off their faces, have golf clubs sail out of their hands, crack one another in the shins with floor hockey sticks, while the “normal” kids stood back and laughed.

  I still see the terror on Eli’s face that first day in class, the terror on all their faces, nine boys who’d been pushed aside and discounted and beaten up and ignored and loathed for as long as they could remember. There were fifty of us senior boys and nine of these special cases, each suffering from some manner of retardation or dw
arfism or water on the brain or who knew what else—what afflictions and defects might have caused those lax mouths and blank stares. Eli existed as sort of a bridge between the two worlds. Most of his classes he took with us, but since he was in the Resource Room two periods a day, he was still, undeniably, one of them.

  They dressed silently in a separate corner of the locker room, eyes on the floor. A few of my classmates lobbed insults, feeling them out, but it was halfhearted. We all emerged into the gym in the same gray sweat shorts and shirts, us joking and laughing, them staring at the ground. “Pencil! Pencil! No no no!” yelled the kid we called Repeat, who may have had a form of Tourette’s before it was called that. “Go home go home go home! Please please!” he screamed as we lined up in front of the first-year PE teacher, a guy in his twenties named Mr. Leggett, who had one of those throbbing veins in his forehead and who looked on his new charges with deeper disdain than any of us felt.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “looks like we’re gonna have to play a lot of dodgeball.”

  And we did play dodgeball, or rather an even lower-skill variation called battle ball, in which two teams stood on either side of the gym, against the walls, and simply pelted each other with hard rubber balls. The rules were simple and barbaric: You threw a ball at the other team, and if you hit someone, that person was out of the game and his team had one less member. If you somehow caught a ball thrown at you, then one of the people on your team who had been put out earlier got to come back in. You threw balls at each other until one team was wiped out completely.

  We had enough kids for six teams of ten. Mr. Leggett picked five “normal” kids to be captains, and then one of the special ed kids, a stuttering overweight mess of a boy named Hank. The captains picked their teams. Hank picked me first—“Cl-Cl-Cl-Clark.” When Hank’s second pick came around my friend Tommy Kane from the basketball team was still available and I pointed at Tommy, but Hank picked his own classmate, Louis the dwarf, instead. Then he picked Curty the blind kid, who may have been—my apologies to the other guys in the class—the worst battle ball player in the history of that cruel game. When his next pick came around, Hank took Repeat, and as we stood in the gym I did the math and realized that our team of ten was going to be me and the nine misfits. Eli was the last one taken, and he shuffled over to where our team was wheezing and muttering and smelling and he shrugged at me as if he were sorry that I had to be drawn into his nightmare.

  My friends in the class doubled over in laughter to see me on the SpEd team. It could have been my friendship with Eli that got me on with the Special Eddies, or the fact that I was a class officer and therefore well known and approachable to everyone, but more likely it was the fact of my glass eye, which must have seemed familiar to them. I wonder, as a member of the football and basketball teams, as a guy who dated the occasional cheerleader and got A’s, but also someone with a prosthetic eye, if I might not have seemed like something they could aspire to: one of them made good.

  We divided the gym in half and the teams spread out and began drilling each other with these hard rubber balls. The first game my team lost in four minutes, all nine of my teammates thrown out on the first try, their palsied legs knocked out from under them, their thick glasses knocked off. I let a soft throw hit me in the foot and we were done. Mr. Leggett called us girls.

  By the very next game I noticed something odd: even though we were getting killed, Eli loved this game. His face reddened as he concentrated, trying to dodge the balls—he rarely did—but while battle ball was a nightmare for most of the SpEds, it seemed to engage his imagination, like the tug-of-war game from elementary school, and the tanks he drew. It wasn’t long before Eli was the best of the infirm and slow.

  Even with Eli’s improvement we played battle ball all week, and I doubt there was a more complete rout of a squad than ours in the history of war or physical education class. Pop, pop, pop. The balls would slap against the pale skin of the SpEds, and they would trudge over to the side to examine their welts. The real skill in the game wasn’t hitting another player with a ball, but catching one of the other team’s throws. No one on my team ever caught a ball to allow a teammate back into the game, and in the end there would always be ten grinning, bloodlusting high school kids against me. I’d jump and fall and sidestep until finally I was hit too.

  Eli got progressively better, as good as his crooked legs and scoliotic back and twitchy arms would allow, and by week’s end he and I stood side by side against the wall, while the rest of our team compared bruises on the sideline.

  The worst and most realistic aspect of battle ball was that once your side began to lose, it was nearly impossible to come back. The other side would fling the balls, and if you didn’t catch one, they’d bounce off the wall directly behind you and come back to their team, so you not only had fewer men, but your diminished ranks were without ammunition, and you spent the whole time dodging until you inevitably tried to catch a ball and were put out. That was the situation Eli and I faced. All ten balls were on the other side, where all ten of their players were still alive, shifting and stalking in their gray PE shorts and shirts. Their leader was the lanky pitcher on our baseball team, Erskine Davies, the Rommel of battle ball. He paced behind the lines of his team, staring at Eli and me, trying to figure how to get us out while inflicting the most pain and humiliation.

  “Chili! Chili! Chili! Corn bread and carrots! Sunrise Jell-O!” yelled Repeat, who, when keyed up, would yell out that day’s lunch menu.

  And I don’t know what it was, but something about standing next to Eli there, against the wall, facing down that firing squad of ten coordinated and binocular kids, led by the cannon-armed Erskine Davies, made me angry, made me want to win. Or at least not lose so badly. “We need to catch one,” I said.

  Eli looked over at me, a look of inspired and resolute determination on his face. Catching a single ball wouldn’t win us the game, of course, but it would accomplish something we hadn’t done in a week of battle ball: it would get one of our pathetic teammates back into the game. It would mean progress. And that was something.

  The other team stood across from us, ten strong and preternaturally threatening, a cast photo from Lord of the Flies. They smiled and exchanged knowing glances and then Erskine said, “Now!” and they delivered a full throttle, the throwing of all ten balls at once. I ducked, and Erskine’s throw hit the wall behind my head like a gunshot. We sidestepped and dropped and rolled, and when the balls had finished careening off the wall and back to their side, Eli and I were still alive. Of course this pissed them off; for the next two minutes they fired indiscriminately, and we dodged every throw.

  That’s when Erskine whispered to one of his teammates, and then they both smiled like dogs in a gravy parade. Erskine took the kid’s ball, stepped forward, and gave us the old up-and-under.

  The bastard lofted that ball in the air, as soft and as high as he could, barely over the line to our side. Before I could warn him against it, Eli left our wall and began running toward the gimme. I think of this moment in slow motion—Eli leaving the foxhole while I yelled out, “No-o-o-o!”—but such was Eli’s lack of speed and coordination that I may be remembering in real time, the ball sailing up sweetly against the gymnasium lights, Eli clattering out slowly toward it, knees knocking, arms outstretched, black glasses looking straight up.

  The other nine boys, of course, were cocked and loaded as Eli ran toward them, his eyes on the ball floating down from the ceiling.

  “Eli, wait!” I yelled. But in battle a man’s true nature emerges, and I unhappily admit that I did not leave my spot against the wall as my comrade ran bravely to his battle ball death. I suppose, in my defense, that there was nothing I could have done anyway. Eli was a goner as soon as he pulled away from the wall. Even the SpEds on the sideline could see what was going to happen. “Corn dog! Corn dog! Corn dog!” yelled Repeat. “Cottage cheese!”

  Eli ran forward until he was only ten feet away from the firing squa
d, his eyes straight up on that ball in the air. Erskine Davies took a step forward, his back twisted and torqued, the rubber ball behind his head. The other boys followed. And the next thing I remember is a sound like popcorn. Nine hard rubber balls hit Eli in the space of a half second, knocking his legs out from under him, blowing his glasses off, pelting his arms and legs and nuts and lofting him straight into the air and onto his back, his broken glasses skidding to rest a few inches from my feet.

  Eli lay on his back on the hard gym floor, eyes bleary, nose bleeding, but still concentrating on that first cruel ball—lofted up as nothing more than a trap, a lure, an insult to his intelligence and coordination falling to the ground beside him, and as an afterthought perhaps, or maybe with his last bit of strength, Eli reached out from his back with one hand and caught it, the ball settling in his hand like a bird in its nest. And while the rules were unclear on what this meant, to catch a ball after being so completely pummeled, we all stood there reverently and the gym—and maybe the whole world—went quiet for a second.

  I am not overstating this. Imagine what it takes to turn a whole gymful of high school boys—however briefly—into human beings. This is what happened: the world changed. Nothing less.

  And from his back, in this new world he had just then created, Eli Boyle pointed defiantly to the sideline, where Louis had already taken a tiny step onto the court.