by Frank Conroy
My bike had grown rusty from neglect. I oiled the pedals and the seat springs, crammed cup grease into the axles, and pumped the tires to sixty pounds. To hell with Chula Vista! It was only seven miles to town, and nine to the beach. I went into the house and put on a shirt. Stealing sixty cents from my mother’s change purse seemed the most natural thing in the world, although as far as I can remember it was my first theft. I did it dreamily, automatically, as one cleans one’s nails.
Pedaling down the empty coral road toward the highway I swerved in and out to avoid potholes, or jerked the front wheel in the air when forced to cross them head on. The fenders rattled constantly, making a tremendous racket, but I knew they wouldn’t come off. It was a strong, well-built bike, a lightweight with thin tires, designed for speed. I didn’t bother to look up the side roads for rabbits. At the highway I turned right, savoring the sudden smoothness of the asphalt, and bending over the handlebars to cut wind resistance, settled down into a slow, steady rhythm.
The road cut straight through the woods for about a mile, without a single curve or landmark. I marked my progress by familiar sights—a rusted-out mailbox half buried in the sand, a peculiarly twisted pine tree, or an old tire. Halfway to the railroad tracks a Dr. Pepper sign hung crookedly from a telephone pole, its peeling surface pock-marked with .22-caliber holes.
At the crossing of the Atlantic Coast Line civilization began. The man who tended the barrier lived in a small frame house close to the tracks. Set down in a slight depression, it had a peculiar fascination after the long ride through the pine wastes. Lush tropical plants with wide, dark-green leaves surrounded the building. Shade trees closed in from three sides and hung over the roof, hiding everything in unnatural darkness. Burst seedpods and fallen vegetation stained the dingy white walls, dripping down the clapboard like ivy in streaks of green and black. Beads of moisture clung to every surface. Very rarely the wife could be seen moving about on the lawn with a hose. She was fat and gray-haired and never looked up as I passed, as if deafened by the trains. It was vaguely sinister.
The tracks themselves were crossed in a single fender-rattling instant. Trains were rare. If one came I’d always wait and watch it go by, sometimes placing a penny on the tracks to be flattened, or a stick between the ties to be knocked over. When the train had gone stillness would reclaim the world. I’d look down at the rails, gleaming in the sun, perfectly static, and the sand on the ties, and the flattened penny till it seemed impossible the train had ever existed.
A short spur led to the deserted factory, its cantilevered loading platforms hanging empty and weatherbeaten over the rusty tracks. I’d explored it many times, climbing in through some loose boards. There was nothing inside but a few piles of burlap bags and the smell of chemical fertilizer.
Now the road began to curve and houses appeared on either side—houses with lawns, driveways, and hedges. Sprinklers turned, throwing spray into the air and dark half-moons on the sidewalk. In the quiet and coolness pedaling seemed easier. Sitting straight I followed the smooth curves effortlessly, my arms hanging at my sides. A group of kids playing on the sidewalk stopped to watch me go by, automatically falling silent until I was past. They took me for a redneck. I heard their voices starting up behind me once I was out of sight.
Mile after mile of well-kept houses slipped by. At the first gas station I stopped for a Coke and checked the tire pressure. I liked gas stations. You could hang around as long as you wanted and no one took any notice. Sitting on the ground in a shady corner with my back against the wall, I took small sips at the Coke and made it last.
Is it the mindlessness of childhood that opens up the world? Today nothing happens in a gas station. I’m eager to leave, to get where I’m going, and the station, like some huge paper cutout, or a Hollywood set, is simply a façade. But at thirteen, sitting with my back against the wall, it was a marvelous place to be. The delicious smell of gasoline, the cars coming and going, the free air hose, the half-heard voices buzzing in the background—these things hung musically in the air, filling me with a sense of wellbeing. In ten minutes my psyche would be topped up like the tanks of the automobiles.
Downtown the streets were crowded with shoppers. I cut in and out between the slow-moving cars, enjoying my superior mobility. At a red light I took hold of the tailgate of a chicken truck and let it pull me a couple of blocks. Peeling off at the foot of Los Olas Boulevard, I coasted up to the bike rack in front of the Sunset Theater.
It cost nine cents to get in. I bought my ticket, paused in the lobby to select a Powerhouse candy bar, and climbed to the balcony. The theater was almost empty and no one objected when I draped my legs over the seat in front. On the screen was a western, with Randolph Scott as the sheriff. I recognized a cheap process called Trucolor and hissed spontaneously, smiling foolishly at the empty darkness around me afterwards. Except for the gunfights the film was dull and I amused myself finding anachronisms.
The feature was better, an English movie with Ann Todd as a neurotic pianist and James Mason as her teacher. I was sorry when the house lights came on.
Outside, blinking against the sun, I left my bike in the rack and wandered down the street. Something was happening in front of the dime store. I could see a crowd of kids gathered at the doors and a policeman attempting to keep order. I slipped inside behind his back. The place was a madhouse, jammed with hundreds of shrieking children, all pressing toward one of the aisles where some kind of demonstration was going on.
“What’s happening?” I asked a kid as I elbowed past.
“It’s Ramos and Ricardo,” he shouted. “The twins from California.”
I pushed my way to the front rank and looked up at the raised platform.
There, under a spotlight, two Oriental gentlemen in natty blue suits were doing some amazing things with yo-yos. Tiny, neat men, no bigger than children, they stared abstractedly off into space while yo-yos flew from their hands, zooming in every direction as if under their own power, leaping out from small fists in arcs, circles, and straight lines. I stared open-mouthed as a yo-yo was thrown down and stayed down, spinning at the end of its string a fraction of an inch above the floor.
“Walking the Dog,” said the twin, and lowered his yo-yo to the floor. It skipped along beside him for a yard or so and mysteriously returned to his palm.
“The Pendulum,” said the other twin, and threw down a yo-yo. “Sleeping,” he said, pointing to the toy as it spun at the end of its string. He gathered the line like so much loose spaghetti, making a kind of cat’s cradle with his fingers, and gently rocked the spinning yo-yo back and forth through the center. “Watch end of trick closely,” he said smiling, and suddenly dropped everything. Instead of the tangled mess we’d all expected the yo-yo wound up safely in his palm.
“Loop-the-Loop.” He threw a yo-yo straight ahead. When it returned he didn’t catch it, but executed a subtle flick of his wrist and sent it back out again. Five, ten, twenty times. “Two Hands Loop-the-Loop,” he said, adding another, alternating so that as one flew away from his right hand the other flew in toward his left.
“Pickpocket,” said the other twin, raising the flap of his jacket. He threw the yo-yo between his legs, wrapping the string around his thigh. As he looked out over the crowd the yo-yo dropped, perfectly placed, into his trouser pocket. Laughing, the kids applauded.
I spent the whole afternoon in one spot, watching them, not even moving when they took breaks for fear I’d lose my place. When it was over I spent my last money on a yo-yo, a set of extra strings, and a pamphlet explaining all the tricks, starting from the easiest and working up to the hardest.
Walking back to the bike I was so absorbed a mail truck almost ran me down. I did my first successful trick standing by the rack, a simple but rather spectacular exercise called Around the World. Smiling, I put the yo-yo in my pocket and pulled out the bike. I knew I was going to be good at it.
8
A Yo-Yo Going Down, a Mad Squirrel Coming Up
THE common yo-yo is crudely made, with a thick shank between two widely spaced wooden disks. The string is knotted or stapled to the shank. With such an instrument nothing can be done except the simple up-down movement. My yo-yo, on the other hand, was a perfectly balanced construction of hard wood, slightly weighted, flat, with only a sixteenth of an inch between the halves. The string was not attached to the shank, but looped over it in such a way as to allow the wooden part to spin freely on its own axis. The gyroscopic effect thus created kept the yo-yo stable in all attitudes.
I started at the beginning of the book and quickly mastered the novice, intermediate, and advanced stages, practicing all day every day in the woods across the street from my house. Hour after hour of practice, never moving to the next trick until the one at hand was mastered.
The string was tied to my middle finger, just behind the nail. As I threw—with your palm up, make a fist; throw down your hand, fingers unfolding, as if you were casting grain—a short bit of string would tighten across the sensitive pad of flesh at the tip of my finger. That was the critical area. After a number of weeks I could interpret the condition of the string, the presence of any imperfections on the shank, but most importantly the exact amount of spin or inertial energy left in the yo-yo at any given moment—all from that bit of string on my fingertip. As the throwing motion became more and more natural I found I could make the yo-yo “sleep” for an astonishing length of time—fourteen or fifteen seconds—and still have enough spin left to bring it back to my hand. Gradually the basic moves became reflexes. Sleeping, twirling, swinging, and precise aim. Without thinking, without even looking, I could run through trick after trick involving various combinations of the elemental skills, switching from one to the other in a smooth continuous flow. On particularly good days I would hum a tune under my breath and do it all in time to the music.
Flicking the yo-yo expressed something. The sudden, potentially comic extension of one’s arm to twice its length. The precise neatness of it, intrinsically soothing, as if relieving an inner tension too slight to be noticeable, the way a man might hitch up his pants simply to enact a reassuring gesture. It felt good. The comfortable weight in one’s hand, the smooth, rapid descent down the string, ending with a barely audible snap as the yo-yo hung balanced, spinning, pregnant with force and the slave of one’s fingertip. That it was vaguely masturbatory seems inescapable. I doubt that half the pubescent boys in America could have been captured by any other means, as, in the heat of the fad, half of them were. A single Loop-the-Loop might represent, in some mysterious way, the act of masturbation, but to break down the entire repertoire into the three stages of throw, trick, and return representing erection, climax, and detumescence seems immoderate.
The greatest pleasure in yo-yoing was an abstract pleasure—watching the dramatization of simple physical laws, and realizing they would never fail if a trick was done correctly. The geometric purity of it! The string wasn’t just a string, it was a tool in the enactment of theorems. It was a line, an idea. And the top was an entirely different sort of idea, a gyroscope, capable of storing energy and of interacting with the line. I remember the first time I did a particularly lovely trick, one in which the sleeping yo-yo is swung from right to left while the string is interrupted by an extended index finger. Momentum carries the yo-yo in a circular path around the finger, but instead of completing the arc the yo-yo falls on the taut string between the performer’s hands, where it continues to spin in an upright position. My pleasure at that moment was as much from the beauty of the experiment as from pride. Snapping apart my hands I sent the yo-yo into the air above my head, bouncing it off nothing, back into my palm.
I practiced the yo-yo because it pleased me to do so, without the slightest application of will power. It wasn’t ambition that drove me, but the nature of yo-yoing. The yo-yo represented my first organized attempt to control the outside world. It fascinated me because I could see my progress in clearly defined stages, and because the intimacy of it, the almost spooky closeness I began to feel with the instrument in my hand, seemed to ensure that nothing irrelevant would interfere. I was, in the language of jazz, “up tight” with my yo-yo, and finally free, in one small area at least, of the paralyzing sloppiness of life in general.
The first significant problem arose in the attempt to do fifty consecutive Loop-the-Loops. After ten or fifteen the yo-yo invariably started to lean and the throws became less clean, resulting in loss of control. I almost skipped the whole thing because fifty seemed excessive. Ten made the point. But there it was, written out in the book. To qualify as an expert you had to do fifty, so fifty I would do.
It took me two days, and I wouldn’t have spent a moment more. All those Loop-the-Loops were hard on the strings. Time after time the shank cut them and the yo-yo went sailing off into the air. It was irritating, not only because of the expense (strings were a nickel each, and fabricating your own was unsatisfactory), but because a random element had been introduced. About the only unforeseeable disaster in yo-yoing was to have your string break, and here was a trick designed to do exactly that. Twenty-five would have been enough. If you could do twenty-five clean Loop-the-Loops you could do fifty or a hundred. I supposed they were simply trying to sell strings and went back to the more interesting tricks.
The witty nonsense of Eating Spaghetti, the surprise of The Twirl, the complex neatness of Cannonball, Backwards round the World, or Halfway round the World—I could do them all, without false starts or sloppy endings. I could do every trick in the book. Perfectly.
The day was marked on the kitchen calendar (God Gave Us Bluebell Natural Bottled Gas). I got on my bike and rode into town. Pedaling along the highway I worked out with the yo-yo to break in a new string. The twins were appearing at the dime store.
I could hear the crowd before I turned the corner. Kids were coming on bikes and on foot from every corner of town, rushing down the streets like madmen. Three or four policemen were busy keeping the street clear directly in front of the store, and in a small open space around the doors some of the more adept kids were running through their tricks, showing off to the general audience or stopping to compare notes with their peers. Standing at the edge with my yo-yo safe in my pocket, it didn’t take me long to see I had them all covered. A boy in a sailor hat could do some of the harder tricks, but he missed too often to be a serious threat. I went inside.
As Ramos and Ricardo performed I watched their hands carefully, noticing little differences in style, and technique. Ricardo was a shade classier, I thought, although Ramos held an edge in the showy two-handed stuff. When they were through we went outside for the contest.
“Everybody in the alley!” Ramos shouted, his head bobbing an inch or two above the others. “Contest starting now in the alley!” A hundred excited children followed the twins into an alley beside the dime store and lined up against the wall.
“Attention all kids!” Ramos yelled, facing us from the middle of the street like a drill sergeant. “To qualify for contest you got to Rock the Cradle. You got to rock yo-yo in cradle four time. Four time! Okay? Three time no good. Okay. Everybody happy?” There were murmurs of disappointment and some of the kids stepped out of line. The rest of us closed ranks. Yo-yos flicked nervously as we waited. “Winner receive grand prize. Special Black Beauty Prize Yo-Yo with Diamonds,” said Ramos, gesturing to his brother who smiled and held up the prize, turning it in the air so we could see the four stones set on each side. (“The crowd gasped ...” I want to write. Of course they didn’t. They didn’t make a sound, but the impact of the diamond yo-yo was obvious.) We’d never seen anything like it. One imagined how the stones would gleam as it revolved, and how much prettier the tricks would be. The ultimate yo-yo! The only one in town! Who knew what feats were possbile with such an instrument? All around me a fierce, nervous resolve was settling into the contestants, suddenly skittish as racehorses.
“Ricardo will show trick with Grand Prize Yo-Yo. Rock the Cradle f
our time!”
“One!” cried Ramos.
“Two!” the kids joined in.
“Three!” It was really beautiful. He did it so slowly you would have thought he had all the time in the world. I counted seconds under my breath to see how long he made it sleep.
“Four!” said the crowd.
“Thirteen,” I said to myself as the yo-yo snapped back into his hand. Thirteen seconds. Excellent time for that particular trick.
“Attention all kids!” Ramos announced. “Contest start now at head of line.”
The first boy did a sloppy job of gathering his string but managed to rock the cradle quickly four times.
“Okay.” Ramos tapped him on the shoulder and moved to the next boy, who fumbled. “Out.” Ricardo followed, doing an occasional Loop-the-Loop with the diamond yo-yo. “Out ... out ... okay,” said Ramos as he worked down the line.
There was something about the man’s inexorable advance that unnerved me. His decisions were fast, and there was no appeal. To my surprise I felt my palms begin to sweat. Closer and closer he came, his voice growing louder, and then suddenly he was standing in front of me. Amazed, I stared at him. It was as if he’d appeared out of thin air.
“What happen boy, you swarrow bubble gum?”
The laughter jolted me out of it. Blushing, I threw down my yo-yo and executed a slow Rock the Cradle, counting the four passes and hesitating a moment at the end so as not to appear rushed.
