Knuckleheads Read online

  KNUCKLEHEADS

  by Jeff Kass

  Dzanc Books

  1334 Woodbourne Street

  Westland, MI 48186

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 2011, Text by Jeff Kass

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Some of these stories have appeared in various forms in Current, Bull Men’s Fiction, Unsquared: Ann Arbor Writers Unleash Their Edgiest and Stories, and Writecorner.

  Published 2011 by Dzanc Books

  06 07 08 09 10 11 5 4 3 2 1

  First edition March 2011

  Print ISBN-13: 978-0982797518

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-1936873227

  Printed in the United States of America

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Don't Mess

  Parent-Teacher Conference

  On the Case

  Scramble

  Under Danny Rotten

  Captain America

  Mylar Man

  Drowning Superman

  Basements

  The Naked Guy is Dead

  Acknowledgements

  For Karen, patient host of long-time knucklehead-in-residence.

  DON'T MESS

  NOBODY HAD EVER IMAGINED CHEERLEADERS FOR A WRESTLING TEAM BEFORE.

  Certainly, nobody had imagined cute cheerleaders for a wrestling team, girls with hair styled neatly, side-wept, sweet-smelling. Girls who floated through the stench and chill of the gym like an alien fog, mystics in saddle-shoes. Confused, my teammates and I watched them, and smelled them, and were stunned by them. Nobody understood how to act because, yeah, we knew about girls—sort of—but girls who would surrender an entire Saturday, from 8am to 11pm, to clap their hands and stomp their feet at a wrestling tournament?

  Nobody had ever heard of something like that.

  None of our coaches had heard of mouth-guards either, though now it seems obvious. They should have known where to get a kid some molded plastic to protect his lips and gums from the braces girding his teeth. Seems like they could have suggested a sporting goods store, or ordered something from a catalogue, but they never did.

  They did know about top seeds, how to pluck spindly anonymous boys from the high school hallways and sculpt them into thick-muscled names Magic-Markered onto the first line of tournament brackets. Three hours of daily grueling practice. The moment we slouched, their whistles screeched in our ears, shrill and continuous, like the high-pitched cries of colicky babies. From whistle to whistle we feinted and spun and pushed and grabbed, our coaches sure we learned the holds that hurt. They worked their knotted forearms into the backs of our necks so we’d understand the pain we were capable of instilling. They knew how to fight for those top seeds too. How to speak up in pre-tourney meetings, grim and certain—“My guy’s gonna roll through this weight-class,” they’d say. “Trust me, he’s tough.”

  So I was. Tough. Able to snap back the head of a kid who stole from my locker the forty dollars I’d saved to buy a birthday present for a girl I wanted to like, and to bounce his skull off an aluminum doorframe. Tough enough to stare down a different kid in a parking-garage with a tire-iron gripped in his palm, saying only, “That’s not a good choice for you now, is it?”

  Tough enough too to be named top seed at 138 lbs. in the Peru Tournament in Plattsburgh, a cold farmtown with a locker room so cold we could see our breath when we stripped to our boxers and weighed in on an enormous cattle scale. We were a handful of miles from the Canadian border and we were freezing. We wanted to hurt people and get back on the bus and get the fuck home.

  I took that responsibility seriously. With two quick pins engraved on the bracket chart, I did my job with efficiency, easily reaching the semifinals against the fourth seed. He looked tough too. Shoulders thick like turkeys. More unshaven stubble on his face than I’d be able to grow for another decade. One of the cute cheerleaders, maybe the cutest cheerleader, stroked that stubble as she tongue-kissed him minutes before our match; her fingers crawling across his cheeks, her legs somehow tan in the middle of winter, her dark hair thick and curly, like a soft cloud on her back.

  That was some bullshit.

  You don’t make out with your girlfriend, no matter how cute, when you’re seeded fourth and you’re about to face the top-ranked wrestler in your weight-class. Not when he can see you making out and he’s warming up in that arctic drafty gym, bouncing from one foot to the other, shaking his arms loose, seething. Because what he’s thinking is that you don’t respect him. He’s the top seed and you’re treating him like he’s some guppy you’re going to flop onto his back. What he’s thinking is he’d like nothing better than not only to beat you, but to humiliate you in front of your hot cheerleader girlfriend. He wants you on your back, his breath thick on your neck, you squirming, hoping you’re still going to get some—maybe—after your girl sees you weak, pathetic, beaten.

  It’s difficult to measure rage.

  There’s no scale that plots your x and y coordinates at 7.7 pissed off when your dad grounds you for wearing your basketball sneakers in the snowstorm and you miss the party where Cara—the saucy girl who sold them to you at the Footlocker—said she’d meet you; 8.2 pissed off when you fail your first driving test after parallel-parking your rear bumper into a fire hydrant; 9.5 the Monday after the party when you see Cara in the hallway holding hands with your teammate.

  When that whistle blew, I flew at the fourth seed like a rabid raccoon. Sucked his leg to my chest as if I were prepared to eat it for dinner, tripped his other leg and plummeted him onto his back. Maybe I bashed my face into his knee. I don’t know what I felt. My mouth stung and there was ripped skin and blood and I swallowed some but I kept surging. Straight through him. The whole thing could have been over in thirty seconds, but that would have been too easy. He could have told his girlfriend it was just one move, I got lucky. Fuck luck. Luck was not part of this equation. I punished the kid on his back, let him squirm and breathe my hot stink, then let him scramble to his knees so he could think maybe he had a chance.

  There’s no way I could have distinguished any specific voices in the roar of that moment, but I like to imagine I did hear one—the cheerleader with the dark curls yelling, “C’mon Sweetheart! You can do it!” All the while I’m thinking, No, Sweetheart, you can’t, and I’m grinding my forearm into the back of his head, trying to crush his face into the floor so he’s inhaling sweat and shoe-bottom dirt, and there are easier ways to turn some arrogant fish with turkey shoulders onto his back, quicker ways, but this situation called only for the most painful way—the double arm-bar.

  Imagine you’re lying face-down in the street and some roid-ripped police officer’s got his knee jammed between your shoulder-blades. Then he takes his nightstick and hooks it beneath one of your arms so it’s nestled inside the crook of your elbow, then he pulls backward so it feels like your rotator cuff is being yanked through your skin. While you’re dealing with that blast of pain, he proceeds to thread the other end of the nightstick under your other arm, so he can wrench both your shoulders from their sockets.

  Imagine he twists the nightstick.

  Imagine he walks out to the side of your body so his entire weight leverages your torso, spinning your neck and head, until you’re driven onto your back, both your arms knotted beneath you, your shoulders digging into concrete.

  That’s the double arm-bar, and the kid deserved it.

  His half-swallowed yelps only made me lock his arms up more tightly, only made
me spike my chin into his upper back and extend myself so the maximum amount of pressure could be applied to his shoulders and neck. Then, too fast—putting someone away with an arm-bar was not only painful, but slow—I heard the slap of palm on mat. Except, it wasn’t the referee’s palm, it was his palm—the stubble-faced kid—signaling he wanted the match stopped because he was injured.

  More bullshit.

  I’d hurt him, sure, he deserved to be hurt, but no bones had snapped. No ligaments had popped. He wasn’t injured. He was faking, pretending he was damaged so he could spare himself the indignity of being pinned; so he could confess to his girlfriend that his shoulder had been hurt before the match. He went in hobbled and tried valiantly to soldier through. That’s why he lost.

  I tried to stay loose, sloshing the spit and blood around in my mouth, tasting it, bouncing from foot to foot, shaking my arms as the referee waited the requisite two minutes to see if the so-called injured wrestler could continue. I felt a hot orange wave, then a black one, scraping like a cheese-grater across my forehead, tightening the muscles in my thighs. I pushed down hard with my feet, tried to shove them through the floor. People were shouting at wrestlers in other matches, urging them to break free from a hold or to lift somebody in the air and slam him. I couldn’t do anything. I ran in place.

  That turkey-shouldered kid knew the code. Had to know it. He was fourth seed, out of sixteen. You don’t get there without rolling a bunch of kids on their necks. He knew where the line of truly injuring someone was, and he also knew we hadn’t crossed it. I shook my arms, licked the bands on my teeth, waited.

  The thing about strength is that it’s gritty.

  I first understood I was strong in third grade. On a steel-grey day when Daniel Meyers cut in front of Susie London in the four-square line. That was against the code too, cutting the four-square line, sneaking in when a horde of other kids had been waiting patiently for the chance to star on the asphalt stage, to batter the ball from one chalked box to another until someone missed. There was a rhythm to that anticipation—the running from the lunchroom to claim a spot toward the front of the line, the waiting as the ball bounced from square to square searching out which kid to send hangdog to the rear.

  It was wrong to mess with that rhythm, wrong to cut into the line as if your hands battering the ball were more important than anyone else’s.

  I don’t remember moving, but I remember what happened when my hand gripped the hood of Daniel’s sweatshirt and pulled. He careened backward and smashed into the school’s brick wall. The four-square line, quiet, watched Daniel stumble to his feet and rub the back of his head, then lick the blood from his fingers where he’d scraped his knuckles. I wasn’t surprised I’d tossed him like that, that he’d flown into the wall, only that it had been the slight against Susie London that had provoked my wrath. What was it about this shy girl that had sparked this quick stretch of hand to sweatshirt hood, this ferocious grip and pull?

  Susie seemed thrilled too, excited that a boy would send someone sprawling on her behalf, and became less shy around me, even agreed to wear my velour sweat-jacket during lunch hours, to let it swallow her when she was cold.

  By junior high, Susie London had grown less shy around a lot of people and, to stay warm, wrapped herself in the St. Bernard’s football jacket of a brutish kid named Christian Morris. At thirteen, he had a hedge of hair above his top lip and a square and sizable head, like a small microwave oven. On the day report cards came out, with my piss-poor behavioral grade in Mechanical Drawing sure to provoke a month-long grounding, I funneled all my bitterness into an arrow of sound—You’d better stay away from Susie London—and challenged Christian to a fight.

  He sort of half-sung, the words pushing out rounder than I’d expected from his square head, come on then, and we trooped out of the cafeteria and down the stairs to the blacktop, a river of raucous classmates cheering behind. They hooted around Christian and me as we circled each other, wondering who would charge first. In the midst of one shuffle-step, I caught Susie’s eye. She didn’t look thrilled, or even scared, more like she was annoyed she’d been interrupted from finishing the half-eaten brownie wrapped in cellophane she held between her hands like a prayer-book.

  You don’t want me to do this? I stage-whispered, like a moron, as if anyone would. She nodded her head, which I took to mean she was answering, yes, I agree, I don’t want you to do this, I just want to finish my brownie. Briefly, I considered taking the advice of the After-School Special preachers and walking away, but then Christian made the decision to rush me, to initiate a clumsy tackle by winding his arms around my legs. I shoved him away easily, my hands sliding aside the flat top of his head as if closing the drawer of a file cabinet.

  Somehow, I was still thinking all this didn’t have to happen. Maybe I could pick Christian up, shake his hand, tell him, sorry, you don’t actually have to stay away from Susie London. I was kidding. I have a bad grade in Mechanical Drawing. My parents are going to ground me. She’s all yours.

  I may have even half-extended my hand to help Christian from the ground, but he grabbed it, tried to twist my arm—what did they teach these football players—and at that point there was no stopping. The momentum of the fight had claimed us: me, Christian, our cheering fans, even Susie. Christian’s grip on my arm was weak, his hands sweaty, and even though he probably outweighed me by forty pounds, I knew I could repeat the toss of Daniel Meyers and flip Christian face-first into the brick wall a half-dozen feet behind us, his nose splattering blood like a perfect strike into the middle of the painted rectangle we used to play stickball.

  But Susie’s half-ambiguous nod had sucked the venom out of my desire to hurt Christian. What was the point of fighting if she didn’t want me to? Christian wasn’t a bad kid. Chunky, hairy, a bit slow, but we’d once killed an hour throwing rocks at a stop sign as we waited for our mothers to pick us up after detention. We hadn’t spoken much, but we’d established a measure of comradeship, our rocks arcing toward the stop sign, occasionally bouncing off it with a metallic clang.

  Now all I wanted was for the fight to be over, for everyone to go away and forget about it, for Susie not to hate me, for Christian not to break a cheekbone or a clavicle bumping into something. I let him headlock me. For whatever reason, he seemed happy to hold me there and halfheartedly aim a few punches at my ears, all of them missing. We stayed like that for maybe a minute, the crowd growing bored as he gripped my head and sort of punched while I wondered when an assistant principal would show up so Susie could at last unwrap her brownie.

  When one did show up, he marched Christian and me down to the office, where I promptly advised him to send Christian back to the cafeteria. It was my fault. I’d challenged Christian to the fight. He’d just been stupid enough to accept. The principal, flummoxed by my willingness to absorb the entirety of the blame, let both of us go, adding only that he intended to talk to the wrestling coach about recruiting us for the coming season.

  Back in the lunchroom, I tried to make it up with Susie by buying her another brownie. She seemed touched by the gift and broke up with Christian that evening over the phone. We dated for a week-and-a-half, after which she began to wear Michael Slauson’s hockey jacket. Christian and I went out for wrestling. He quit in high school to work on cars and spend more time with Susie’s younger sister Hannah, who had larger breasts. I got braces on my teeth in tenth grade to correct a slight overbite, didn’t smile or kiss anybody for two years, and became a top seed.

  There are few more blissful states than the moments immediately following winning a wrestling match. Having proven yourself stronger than some other kid who weighs the exact same you do, there’s nothing left but to kick back—your muscles bulging in triumph—and spread yourself out in the bleachers as if you own them, while you imagine how shitty your opponent feels as he hurriedly pulls his sweats on in order to hide his naked loser skin.

  Winning in the semifinal round of a tournament is even better. If
you win in the semis, you can lounge in the bleachers for the whole afternoon, even nap in them while just about everyone else in your weight-class beats each other up with the hopes of, at best, earning third place. You are not part of that consolation quagmire. You’re going to the finals. Your name will be announced later, at night, after the whole gym has been cleared, and the National Anthem has been played, and people have paid additional admission to watch the house-lights dim and a spotlight shine while you latch up your headgear and battle for the title. After you’ve sufficiently owned the bleachers for a while, you can head into the locker room, shower and change into street clothes just so everyone in the gym knows you’re in the finals. It’s like you get to wear a sign that says, I’m the nastiest badass at my weight in this whole damn building, but it’s just your clothes, just your beat-up blue jeans and sweatshirt, your work boots, so you’re not even being obnoxious about it, just practical. Just everyday comfortable because that’s who you are, everyday badass.

  Stubble-face fuckboy with his fake injury ruined the whole deal. The referee blew his whistle to signal the injury time was over and then bent to ask the kid if he could continue. Punk shook his head as if there were truly nothing more tragic than the way his body had refused to allow itself to be tortured for an additional four-and-a-half minutes. When the ref raised my hand in victory and stubble-face leaned into his coach as he limped off the mat, as if he couldn’t carry his own weight, as if the double arm-bar had somehow wrecked not only his arms, but also his legs, I gnashed my teeth. Hard.

  Not only did the injury disqualification knock the kid out of the tournament, meaning he wouldn’t have to wrestle all afternoon, but there was his adorable girlfriend wrapping an Ace bandage around an ice-pack on his shoulder and, with her other golden hand, tenderly rubbing his knee.