by Rick Kempa
What we had in common were our
differences from everybody else: he was the heaviest kid in our school, and I
was the smallest. In a high school of over 1,600 boys, these distinctions
mattered. Our lot was to bear their taunts and nicknames. Thanks to a cruel gym
teacher, I became known as "Peanut," a name especially galling
because it suggested not only my size but the root of all my troubles at that
time, my prepubescence. Eddie, too, shuffled back and forth between classes
with his head down, dodging nicknames.
One year ahead of me, he was initially
my older brother's friend, with whom I hung around by invitation only when they
needed more bodies for the hockey games that were played in his backyard. (To
lure friends over, his father and he had sculpted a miniature ice rink, piling
up dirt embankments in the fall and diligently flooding it all winter long.) In
Eddie's eyes, I was of the same low rank as his younger brother Joey, a sixth
grader. In fact, I was inferior to Joey because I couldn't skate. Thus I was
always the goalie, my mission not only to keep the puck from entering the
makeshift goal, but from smacking their back door. A fearful sight it was, to
see Eddie advance like a mountain in motion and then loom above me, poised to
strike! But I had three things going for me: agility, a goalie stick big enough
to guard my groin, and a fierce, almost suicidal hunger for respect. I lived
for the sound of being cussed out when I stopped a breakaway.
Winter was not half over when the hockey
season abruptly thawed out. For my brother and the rest of the gang, Eddie's
thirty‑by‑thirty‑foot rink, with its no‑slap-shot rule and his smiling mom
always in the window overlooking us, suddenly became claustrophobic, and they
began instead to hang out in someone's garage. I was not invited, and neither
was Eddie.
No greater misery exists than to come
home from the school halls full of laughter, shouts, and promises of phone calls
and to have nothing better to do than watch cartoons. For two sad weeks Eddie
skated slow circles in his backyard, a hockey stick dangling from a gloved
hand. Then he called. He asked first for my older brother, knowing full well he
was out, and then he informed me curtly that if I wanted to come over and shoot
the puck around for a while, I could. And so out of sheer need our friendship
was born.
Our routine that winter involved two
games, pinochle and chess. Always we played at his house, huddled over a card
table in his unfinished basement. His mother would unfailingly appear with milk
and cookies. A transistor radio, its antenna pointed towards the one square
shaft of light, would be tuned to top forties. In time we were comfortable
enough with each other to croon along with the songs that held no literal
meaning for either of us: "Honey, Sugar Sugar. You got me lovin’ you.”
Pinochle was Eddie's forte, chess mine,
and so alternating the games meant switching roles of champ and underdog. Eddie
kept a record of the pinochle results, arranging the data in as many ways as he
could think of: won‑lost record and percentages, total points scored, average
points per game. These tabulations were posted on one of the basement beams,
open to the world, had the world cared to see. I kept the chess records in my
diary, along with blow‑by‑blow accounts of the games.
When the weather broke, we added a third game
to the repertoire, one‑on‑one basketball on Eddie's backyard court. In this we
used our physical traits to full advantage. I would run like mad, side to side,
back and forth, until Eddie dizzied and I could break for the hoop. Eddie's
main move, infuriatingly unstoppable, was to back in towards the basket,
guarding the ball with his body and fending me off with his elbows, until he
got to a certain familiar crack in the driveway, whereupon he would whirl and
unleash a hook shot. Swish!
And so my first year in high school
swung from worst to best. Having an upperclassman for a friend raised my status
immeasurably, at least in my own eyes. The heckling probably didn't diminish
any—it may have in fact intensified, to celebrate the sight of the two of us,
Biggest and Smallest, together—but I was newly deaf to it. As for what our
coupling did for Eddie, what I lacked in terms of status I made up for with raw
devotion. I was like a cute pet. His mother could've saved herself a sack of
sugar that winter. Had she fed us bread and water instead of cookies, I
wouldn't have gone anywhere.
When the locker next to Eddie's became
vacant and Eddie helped arrange for me to move into it, our happiness was
complete. As often as our schedules would allow, sometimes for just a few
seconds, we would meet there. At last we could add our own spirited voices to
the babble of sound! We belonged.
But although we rubbed elbows all day
long, we would not make after‑school plans in the hall; we had a more delicious
way to do that. We lived just two blocks apart, but took separate busses. I
would race home to drop my books and change my clothes. Then, just as I was
getting my sneakers laced, without fail every day the telephone would ring and
Eddie would nonchalantly ask, would I like to come over for a game? Oh the sweet
shrill sound of that phone! The respectful gaze of the younger brother!
The following year, Eddie was the first
of any in his class to learn to drive, which restored to him the status of the
backyard hockey days. This was especially so because he drove a car befitting
his size, his uncle's Monte Carlo. He steadfastly refused my brother's
overtures to be the chauffer for the Friday night dances, but he was soon
recruited for the week night "open gyms," those three‑hour‑long
orgies of pick‑up basketball. You'd think Eddie would not bear up well in such
a scene, but he did fine. Sure he was slow, but he was a master at positioning,
a true force beneath the boards, and even without cracks in the floor to guide
him, a deadeye.
His only problem came when, playing with
guys who did not know him, he would end up on a "skins" team, the
ones who were supposed to play without shirts. Eddie would flat‑out refuse to
take his off, pretending not to hear the other's orders, turning his back on
their snide remarks. Finally he'd bark, "You know who I am. Let's play.”
With his fleshiness and my persistent
hairlessness, the locker room continued to be a place of shame for us both and
so we conspired to avoid it. At night's end, when the gym moderator would herd
us all off the floor, Eddie and I would dawdle at the water fountain or stare
into the trophy case, until we were sure that the other boys were safely in the
shower. We'd then hurry to our lockers where, back to modest back, we'd shed
our gym suits for street clothes.
The rate of change in high school is
phenomenal. Weeks are like years, while each school year, punctuated by the
infinity of summer, is a lifetime. And in each new life, the allegiances shift
as easily and quickly as in an evening of pickup basketball.
In my third year, Eddie's fourth, the
luster was gone from our after‑school routine. We still enacted it a couple of
times a week, when I wasn't involved in one of the after‑school clubs I'd
joined. (He knew my schedule; the phone still rang on cue.) But pinochle and
chess were definitely "uncool," and our one‑on‑one basketball games
were serious affairs, in which winning, or as we said it, "owning"
the other, began to matter too much.
The truth was Eddie was
"uncool" too. For me, all kinds of welcome changes had occurred. I
had worked my way into a clique that specialized in all‑night poker games. I got
a driver's license and ventured out on a date or two. But the best development
by far was physical: I had begun to grow, an inch at a time, and had finally
sprouted body hair. Eddie, meanwhile, seemed to stay the same, a big relic from
an earlier, darker age.
There came a day when, to his phone
invitation, "Whattya say to a game of one‑on‑one?" I answered, too
proudly, "No thanks, I'm going over to some other guy's house." In
the few seconds of stunned silence, his breath came fast and wheezy. Finally he
muttered "no problem" and hung up. From then on his calls were
studiously irregular, and his voice, when he did call, had a fierce don't‑care‑if‑you‑do
tone to it.
In fact, Eddie was doing his own
desperate best to belong, venturing out with my brother and me to the Friday
night dances, where he'd plant himself stoutly at the fringe and pretend it
wasn't agony to be there. We would drop in on him between our forays out to the
parking lot to swill more apple wine. But as our alcohol‑levels climbed, our
visits grew more infrequent and less genuine. It became possible to forget
that he was there.
Dropping him off at his house at the end
of one such night, we indulged in one of those mindless fits of cruelty that
can come so naturally to young people. As Eddie was walking up the driveway in
the glare of our headlight beams, his shadow looming against the garage door
suddenly struck us as funny. My brother began to flash the brights on and off. He
revved the engine, inched up close behind Eddie, so that the shadow was
immense, and we began to chant, mimicking, I suppose, his mother,
"Eddieeee! Eddieeeeee!" He fled inside.
The enormity of our crime dawned on me
at once. The look on his face had been more like terror than anger, as if we
might hit the gas and run him down. All night on the slow drift back to sobriety,
that look was fixed on me. Sometimes it shifted to one of reproach—how could
you do this on my own turf?—then
back to the blind fear of the hunted animal. These were not mere dream images;
he was lying wide‑awake in his own bed, I knew, and these were his eyes. I
wanted to race back over that very minute and beg forgiveness. The next day I
did go over, but a long leaden sleep had blunted my urgency, and I did not beg.
His mother did not smile, and Eddie would not see me. Not then, not ever again.
There is one more scene. It is near the
end of my third year, Eddie's last. I am up in the balcony of the gymnasium
with four hundred other boys. Down on the gym floor, a game of dodge ball is in
progress.
As with all forms of war, the rules of dodge
ball are few and basic: two teams of thirty or so boys, four soccer balls, each
team trying to decimate the other, either by smacking opponents with a ball or
by catching a ball and thus eliminating the thrower. There's a safety zone for
each team at opposite ends of the gym, a line which the other team may not
cross, and so, seen from above, the action is more wavelike, ebb and flow, than
it is chaotic.
The contest proceeds with the usual
quick attrition until on one team there remains four of the best and strongest,
while on the other team just one, and lo and behold it's Eddie.
It looks bad for him. Each of the four
guys has a ball, and Eddie is backed into a corner of his safety zone. The
crowd is laughing, yelling out fat-boy jokes, itching for a quick, fierce kill.
My ears are burning, my lunch flip‑flopping inside me. I'm afraid of the hurt
that is occurring, that is going to get worse.
The four unleash their throws all at
once, and as if he has an eye for each ball, Eddie twists and turns, like a
ballerina in slow motion, and eludes them all. He manages to capture one ball,
while the other three bounce back to his attackers. Again they synchronize
their throws, again he writhes away, and again captures a ball.
Up in the balcony, the tide is turning,
the insults snuffed out by a growing sentiment for the underdog. Twice more his
attackers throw, and now Eddie has all four balls, and, with two of them under
each arm, he is advancing.
The four are running backwards to their
safety zone. They don't have to retreat; instead they could surround
him, like wolves around a lone bull, and simply wait. In order to attack, he'd
have to put down one, maybe two balls; he'd have to turn his back on half of
them.
But a host from on high is pounding its
feet in unison, screaming in a rising frenzy, "Go! Go! Go!" It's not
one against four, it's four hundred and one. Against such odds, teamwork means
nothing. Each of the four is running for his life.
And Eddie is advancing. His bigness is
not fat, it's power. The four are not wolves, they're jackals scattering before
a lion.
When they can retreat no further, Eddie
puts down two of the balls. He paces back and forth along the edge of the
safety line. He singles out one of the four, glowers at him until the kid is
half dead with fear, then finishes him off with a scorching blow to the back.
The multitude is delirious. He does the same with the second guy, but this time
one of the survivors catches the ball on the rebound, and like any cornered beast
will do, he charges. Eddie scurries backwards, drops the ball he's holding, and
faces the kid head on, palms open. The throw gets him right in the belly and he
smothers it. The kid is out. Eddie then reverses himself, bears down on the
last guy, who is squating above one of the other balls. Smack! The
impact is heard even above our shrieks (for I am shouting now too). The kid is
sent sprawling, and Eddie is alone on the floor.
And now amidst our bedlam a new chant is
taken up. Soon the gym is rocking with "Eddie! Eddie! Eddie!”—a no‑nonsense
cry of adulation this time. In his person, every boy's fantasy has come true,
has been exceeded even. The anonymity that was his life before now is no
longer. He could be student body president. And I'm clapping and stomping with
the rest, but not chanting, because I'm too choked up. And I'm wondering,
Eddie, does this destroy the echo of that other chant?
He does not wave or even look at us. He
walks to the sidelines, to the back-slaps and high‑fives of his teammates and
to the locker room, where, finally, he too can shower with pride.
Rick Kempa lives in Rock Springs, Wyoming, where
he teaches writing and philosophy at Western Wyoming College. His most recent
books are the anthology Going Down Grand:
Poems from the Canyon from Lithic Press, which he edited with Peter
Anderson, and a poetry collection Ten
Thousand Voices, published by Littoral Press in Richmond, CA. Visit his website to learn more about his work.
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