Knuckleheads Page 8

  Back in school, Danny was cool with me after that. He stopped hanging out at our lockers, and never asked me to chill with him and any other girls, but he didn’t mess with me either. Every once in a while—at a chance encounter in the hallway—he’d offer a nod of respect toward the accumulating number of safety pins on the sleeve of my wrestling jacket. Once, when we were seniors, and long after I already knew what college I was headed to, he asked if I’d help him study for the SATs. I said I would, but he never followed up, and it never happened.

  Caroline went on to med school and married an orthodox Jew. I don’t know what happened to Danny Rotten. Maybe he got married too. Maybe he’s fat and happy and sells carpets. Maybe he has kids who steal cars and break into snack-bars. Maybe he’s dead, or in prison. Maybe he leads wilderness trips for at-risk teenagers, and hasn’t eaten a french fry in years.

  The only thing I know for sure is his name’s still on top of the gymnasium, black ink staring into history, devil-tail “Y” pointing to the floor. And under that, is me, the middle school wrestling coach, looking up, hungry, wondering if I can still react quickly to a whistle, chop an arm, break another kid down.

  CAPTAIN AMERICA

  IN FIFTH GRADE, ERIC FINDLEY WANTED A FRIEND. We wanted to be superheroes, and we wanted a movie about superheroes. Specifically, we wanted a movie starring us as superheroes. Marvel only, of course, none of those DC losers like Batman or Superman or Green Lantern. What kind of wimpy crime-fighter needs a lantern? Ooh, let me illuminate the villains with my green ray of light? Please. Take that thing on a camping trip and scare some mosquitoes, all right?

  I was going to be Captain America. Adam Beneroff would be Mr. Fantastic, our brainiac leader. Benji Davis, a redhead, the Human Torch. Hilary Smith, the prettiest girl in the fifth grade, would be the Invisible Girl. She didn’t know she would be the Invisible Girl. In fact, to her, it was we who were invisible. But that didn’t matter. The thing was, if she were going to be invisible, she didn’t actually have to be in the movie. We could just pretend she was on the set. No one would see her anyway.

  Eric wanted to be Daredevil, the coolest superhero of them all. Blind fearless ass-kicker. It was understandable why Eric wanted to be blind. He was the ugliest kid we knew. He rarely showered and dandruff and grease stuck to his hair in tapioca-like clumps. The acne on his face was urban sprawl. His teeth were straight but filthy, caked with a cheese-colored gunk. His breath stank always of Doritos. We imagined his mother in the supermarket pushing several carts full of economy-sized bags of them, their crinkly foil announcing her arrival at the cash register with a continuous cracking sound, like ice breaking on a not-frozen-enough lake.

  Eric was pudgy too, and not very tall; and we didn’t want him in the movie.

  We practiced karate-kicks during recess and back-flips off the monkey bars, landing on our feet ready to slash our fists at whichever overconfident evildoer smugly thought we’d already been vanquished. This, we knew, was the essential weakness of villains. They underestimated the good guys, always believed we were finished when we weren’t. All we had to do was dig into our unlimited stores of courage and heart, replenish our battered muscles with the fuel of our fundamental goodness and wipe the cocksure grins off their collective wily faces. We were always one karate kick away from beating ass. Eric, never a karate kick away from anything but an infected zit, stood off to the side watching, occasionally shadow-punching the air around him, or walking on the ground-level balance beam and closing his eyes to practice being blind.

  “My uncle’s a Hollywood producer,” he told us. “I wrote a script and sent it to him. He said he might be interested.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Adam said. “Your uncle’s a loser, like you.”

  There was logic in that assessment, biological certainty, yet somewhere in us, we clutched at the dream. What if Eric really did have an uncle in Hollywood? What if he had written a script?

  Eric was horrid, but he could write. We’d all seen Hilary Smith look up from her perpetual note-passing to Tricia Foster—the second prettiest girl in the fifth grade—when, in Language Arts, Eric read his story aloud about a lonely grasshopper. We thought it was embarrassing, how the bug’s legs sawed a plaintive tune that made the attendant blades of grass sway with melancholy. It was disgusting, putrid in every sense, but Hilary had reclined her head against the rim of her chair, her waterfall of blond hair splashing on the windowsill behind her as she gazed dreamily upward at a cluster of pencils stuck in the ceiling. We would never forget how her mouth opened slightly, how her lips pursed as her fingers spread out long and slender on the skin of her jeans under her desk. Perhaps she thought her hands beneath the desk were invisible, but to us they were glowing, as if Eric’s story had transformed her from the undetectable Susan Storm into Jean Grey, the fiery Phoenix, an aura of flame rising from her skin, and we were the ones bathing in her heat.

  Every time we back-flipped off the monkey bars, the girl we were saving from certain death as she plunged off a collapsing bridge was Hilary Smith. Every time we aimed our karate kicks into the air, we were going for the throat of the heinous villain who held a shotgun to Hilary’s cheek and threatened to blow her beautiful mouth into the tennis courts. Of course, if Hilary were home sick, our kicks were trying to save Tricia Foster. If both of them were home sick, then we were split on who should play the Invisible Girl.

  Adam felt that Karen Watson, a Japanese girl who’d been adopted by an American family and basically raised white, was the next prettiest prospect. While we all agreed she was talented at being invisible, Benji argued that another Karen, Karen Hitchcock, who wore her hair exactly the way Hilary did, was prettier. While Karen Watson was definitely cute, he insisted her parents’ whitening left her in a perpetual state of confusion. We’d often notice her trying to catch her reflection in a windowpane as she picked at the wings of the horrible Farrah Fawcett blowback her parents made her wear and tried to imagine what she’d look like if she could just comb it naturally straight. We tried to imagine that too, but reiterated to Benji that if Karen Watson were invisible, it wouldn’t matter what her hair looked like. Benji countered that Karen’s invisibility was irrelevant. We were superheroes. We’d be able to sense her confusion. Then, in a tight scrap, we wouldn’t be able to trust her. A smart villain could exploit that weakness.

  If Eric had an opinion about which girl we should try to save when both Hilary and Tricia were sick, he never offered it. Or if he did, we never cared enough to listen. I sided with Adam and we won the argument when I pointed out that if Tricia were absent and Hilary weren’t, then Hilary would pass notes to Karen Watson. “That must say something,” I said. “Hilary clearly knows who’s pretty, because she’s pretty. She’s the expert.”

  Benji was probably right when he said Hilary preferred Karen Watson only because she didn’t like how Karen Hitchcock tried to imitate her hairstyle, but Adam ended the debate when he said, “Who made you the expert on hair, Flamebrain?” causing Benji to be self-conscious about his own unruly crop, and to stand next to Karen Watson at the windowpane tugging despondently at the ends of his floppy orange curls.

  We were all big on rankings in that school. We ranked the girls, who ranked us, or maybe not us, but probably other boys. The teachers ranked everyone. It was their consensus that Eric Findley was not only the best writer in the fifth grade, but also better than any writer in the sixth grade. Adam and I agreed that was bullshit too, not so much Eric being better than the older kids—we also thought the older kids were lame, nearly lame enough to be DC superheroes—but we disagreed that Eric was a better writer than me.

  I’d already, after all, sent half-a-dozen story proposals to the immortal Stan Lee at Marvel. Most of them centered around Captain America battling the Red Skull on a submarine deep in the North Atlantic, or Daredevil waging war against the Kingpin in Hell’s Kitchen. I thought fighting sequences were my biggest strength. I could always write the heroes into a place where it seem
ed like the villains were about to win, and then, somehow, Cap or DD would dig into those limitless reserves of heart and courage and throw the perfect elbow jab to save the day. All my proposals got rejected, but on one of them—a strange effort where Captain America actually lost a battle to the Red Skull and wound up floating on his shield in the middle of the Atlantic, barely alive, beaten and depressed, wondering if good could ever truly triumph over evil—a guy who signed his name Morris Balmer, Intern, wrote a short personal note on the form letter. “Not bad, Lawrence,” the note said. “Keep at it.”

  Adam was excited when I showed it to him. “See,” he said, “this proves the shitbrain teachers don’t know what they’re talking about. You’re definitely a better writer than Eric.”

  “The letter’s cool,” Benji said, “but don’t forget what Eric did with his grasshopper story.”

  We hadn’t. Benji’s reminder made all three of us pause for a second and envision Hilary as she ceased her note-passing and contemplated the pencils in the ceiling, how she lolled her head back and stretched her fingers against her thighs.

  “What if Eric really does have an uncle in Hollywood?” Benji said. “What if he did write a script?”

  Two days later Benji told us he was going out with Karen Watson. He said it when he was sitting in a heap on the ground, his lanky legs clumped over each other like dirty laundry. He’d fallen off the monkey bars and twisted his ankle. “I’m distracted,” he said. “I don’t know if I can be The Torch anymore.”

  “What are you distracted by?” I asked him.

  “I have a girlfriend now,” he said. “Karen Watson. That’s a weakness. A smart villain could kidnap her to get to me. I’m vulnerable.”

  “Bullshit,” Adam said. Even though we agreed Karen was, at best, the third prettiest girl in our class, still, she was way too pretty for Benji.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “You know how I sometimes stand next to her at the windowpane?”

  “Of course, moron, you’re not invisible,” Adam said.

  “Yeah, well,” Benji said, “this morning when I was standing next to Karen, she said she could sense I was a nice person. So I asked her out. Watch, I bet she sends Hilary a note in class to tell her about it. I bet Hilary reads the note.”

  Perhaps Adam could already sense that Benji didn’t really have the heart to fight evil, that in three weeks he wouldn’t bother coming to the Marvel Comics convention in Manhattan, that in four weeks he’d barely talk to us at all. Maybe that’s what made Adam so angry at Eric.

  For a long moment, he looked over at the four-square court where the girls—Hilary, Tricia and the Karens—gathered to talk, not even to hold a ball, not even to play anything. Then he stomped one foot against the dirt and seemed to gather a sense of purpose in his chin.

  “It’s time,” he said, his words slow and determined. “Time for us to find out if that loser’s been lying to us.”

  We marched the thirty feet from monkey bars to balance beam in a three-pronged wedge, Adam at the lead. It was our first mission and we could feel our reserves of courage burning our chests. Even Benji seemed to perk up. After months of back-flipping and karate kicks, we were itching to be heroes. Itching for truth.

  That Eric, as he plodded along the balance beam with his eyes closed, failed to hear us approach, was further proof he’d never cut it as Daredevil. “Hey, Fuckbrain!” Adam shouted and then shoved him roughly, knocking him off the six-inch high beam.

  To Eric’s credit, he landed on his feet, though in an awkward half-crouch, hardly an effective fighting stance.

  “Where’s the script, Fuckbrain?” Adam asked him.

  “I told you,” Eric said, “I gave it to my uncle. He said he had to show it around to people. And it’s not a script anyway. It’s a treatment, a proposal for an idea to write a script about.”

  “Treatment” seemed to slow Adam down for a few seconds. It sounded like the kind of authentic term people in Hollywood might actually use, and it felt similar to the Marvel process. First, you had to sell the idea to the people in charge, then you had to write it.

  “You are so full of shit,” Adam finally said. “I should kick your ass right now.”

  “No,” Eric insisted, practically crying. “I’m not lying, I swear.”

  He shook his head then, forcefully, as if he too were trying to summon some inner store of heart and courage. The net effect though, canceling out his repeated pleas that he was telling the truth, was that a nugget of grease-glued dandruff about the size of a piece of popcorn dislodged itself from his hair and fell to the ground. A flurry of ants scrambled immediately to eat it.

  “My God,” Adam said. “That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen.”

  It looked for a moment like Adam was about to kick Eric’s ass right there, like he’d punch his puss-filled face. Instead, he smiled. It was an overconfident villain smile, a leer. “You guys wait here,” he said to Benji and me. “Keep an eye on the loser. Don’t let him run.”

  Of course, Eric wasn’t going to run. He could barely stop his potato-sack body from shaking. Still, Benji and I had been charged with our first assignment. We were alert. We took our jobs seriously. “If you run, you’re dead,” I said, crossing my arms like a sentinel.

  Adam was gone less than a minute, the amount of time it took him to march back to the monkey bars and retrieve his Incredible Hulk lunchbox. He opened it and pulled out the plastic bag of carrots his mom had packed for him, then dumped the carrots on the ground, not far from Eric’s distressing dandruff clump. The ants failed to react to the appearance of the carrots. Apparently, to them, the dandruff clump wasn’t ugly at all. They would’ve ranked it highly.

  Adam turned the plastic bag inside out and shoved his hand inside it, then, in the manner dog-owners use to clean up after their pets, he bagged Eric’s chunk of popcorn-dandruff, sweeping up a huddle of ants with it and then pulling his hand out and sealing the zip-lock top. I wondered if the ants would be able to breathe.

  Do ants breathe?

  “All right, Fuckbrain, I’m not gonna kick your ass now,” Adam said to Eric. “You’ve got one week to prove you’re not lying about your uncle. One week. If you can’t prove it by then, not only will I kick your ass, but I will make you eat this disgusting shit too.”

  Adam put the baggie with Eric’s dandruff grease-ball into his Hulk lunchbox. I wondered if he’d keep it there for the whole week, if he’d be able to eat anything forced to share space with it, if he’d ever again eat anything, a single thing that came out of that lunchbox.

  That was the last time Benji hung out with us during recess. The next day he sat on a picnic table on the other side of the playground with Karen Watson. They didn’t hold hands, but they sat close to each other, legs touching. That’s when Adam got the idea I should go over to Eric’s house and co-write the script with him.

  “But he already wrote it,” I said.

  “He just wrote a treatment,” Adam said. “Plus, this way you can scout around and see if it’s bullshit about his uncle.”

  I wondered why Adam couldn’t scout around Eric’s house. He was sneakier than I was. I wasn’t much of a sneak at all, which was probably why Captain America ranked so high on my list of heroes. He wasn’t sneaky either. Just tough. Full of heart. Full of integrity. Still, I wasn’t going to argue the point with Adam. If he thought I was the best man for the job, I would accept the mission.

  I couldn’t help feeling a little pissed off a couple afternoons later, after school, when Eric led me into his house. It had to be a rare occurrence, his having a friend over, yet he seemed hardly excited. “Want a snack or something?” he said, as if offering in order to be polite, as if he actually preferred me to starve.

  I expected the kitchen to be filled with Doritos, but I didn’t see a single bag, couldn’t detect a hint of the fake cheese scent. There were a dozen boxes of Malomars in a large closet though, which Eric called a pantry. “Take as many as you want,” Eric
said.

  I loved Malomars. I opened one of the boxes and took six. “That’s a lot,” Eric said. “Don’t take any more.”

  We trooped down to the basement—Eric called it the playroom—which was finished and had a furry brown rug. I trembled to think what critters from Eric’s hair might have fallen into that rug and nestled there without ants to eat them, or Adam to scoop them up with sandwich bags. I sat in a leather recliner and pulled my feet off the floor. There were twenty or so plastic swords and several suits of fake armor scattered around and I wondered whom Eric played with in the playroom.

  In a corner, beneath a poster of Daredevil mugging with his billy club as if he were about to crack somebody’s forehead, a large plastic bottle, nearly four feet tall, was more than half-filled with change. There had to be thousands of pennies and several hundred nickels, dimes, and quarters. “Damn,” I said. “How much money is that?”

  “I don’t know,” Eric said. “My mom started it when I was little. Every time we go out, we come back and dump our change in there. She wants it to be my college fund.”

  I realized I could beat Eric’s ass and steal it. It would be heavy to carry, but I’d gotten strong from all the back-flipping and air-punching. I could buy a lot of cool stuff with that money, maybe enough to impress Hilary Smith, or Tricia Foster. I was too afraid to do it though.

  Maybe Daredevil scared me.

  “What about your dad?” I said. “Does he put change in there too?”

  “I don’t know anything about my father,” Eric said. “Not one thing.”

  It occurred to me then that maybe his story about the pathetic grasshopper had been less about his standing off to the side of Adam, Benji, and me, pretending we liked him when we didn’t, and more about his having fake sword fights with his invisible father in his basement. “Who plays with all this stuff?” I asked.