Knuckleheads Read online

  “Mostly me. I pretend I’m different characters. I have some cousins in New Jersey. Sometimes they come here.”

  I was quiet, watching him. Pitying, I guess. Who wants to play with people from New Jersey? Everyone has cousins there, though. That’s the kind of state it is. A lot of traffic on the parkway. Suddenly, Eric got excited, more animated than he’d been all afternoon. “Hey,” he said, gesturing at the swords and shields. “Do you want to –?”

  There was no way I was going to play with Eric’s bullshit swords. “Maybe later,” I said. “Let’s work on the script and see how much time we have.”

  We heard a noise upstairs, someone entering the house. “My mother,” Eric said.

  She clattered around in the kitchen for a bit, putting bags of the missing Doritos into the pantry, I assumed. Then we heard her call downstairs. “Eric?”

  “Down here,” he said. “In the playroom.”

  Where else would we be? The boiler room? The kid disgusted me. His mom came down the stairs. Her heels made a knocking sound and from where I was sitting on the recliner, they were the first things I saw. Then legs. Muscular calves and the lower parts of thighs until they disappeared beneath the hem of a black business skirt. A thin waist was next, with a tucked-in blouse that tightened around breasts that looked like mountains.

  I was in fifth grade. I knew nothing about breasts. Nothing about mountains. Still, even before her neck and face descended into view, I knew she was going to be more beautiful than Hilary Smith. A lot more beautiful.

  Her hair was dark and thick like Eric’s, but not greasy. No dandruff. She was tall and athletic-looking, and she reminded me of Linda Carter, who played Wonder Woman on TV. Wonder Woman was a DC superhero, so Adam, Benji and I all had to agree she was a joke. But the truth was Wonder Woman was much less a joke than the Invisible Girl. We could see Wonder Woman. We watched her series every week. Her bracelets that were supposed to stop bullets, those were garbage, everybody knew that; but those immense legs thrust forward like pow, that low-cut golden bustier in your face like bam—all that skin—there was definitely something super-heroic going on when she stood tall in a dark alley, arms akimbo, daring evildoers to make their move.

  Eric’s mother seemed startled to find someone beside her son in the playroom, but she recovered quickly and extended her hand. “I’m Eric’s mother,” she said. “Nice to meet you.”

  Her hand was warm, but not in a gross sweaty way, and I could think of nothing to say, and anyway Daredevil was glaring at me, so I didn’t say anything.

  “This is Lawrence, from school,” Eric said. “He’s gonna be Captain America.”

  Eric’s mother had nothing to say to that, didn’t smile, kind of half-glanced at me as if she didn’t really believe I had the stuff to be a crime-fighter with integrity. A crime-fighter with heart. Instead of talking more, she leaned down and kissed her son—twice—once on the disgusting nest of his hair, and then smack in the middle of the acne morass on his chin. Neither time did she flinch. It was as if nothing about her son disgusted her at all. She pulled a handful of change from her purse and dumped it in the big bottle. “Are you boys thirsty?” she said. “I’ll bring you down some sodas.”

  But she never did, and that was the last I saw of her before I left the house. Eric and I forgot about the sodas too, once we began to work on the script. At first, we wrote separately, me on the recliner, he lying on his elbows on the disgusting rug. “Read aloud what you have so far,” he said after fifteen minutes.

  I started in on one of my scenes with Captain America and the Red Skull going at it in a submarine, and read to the point where Cap throws his shield and severs one of the Skull’s arms. “Cool,” Eric said, in the same I’m-just-trying-to-be-polite way he offered me Malomars. “Check out what I got.”

  The story that unfolded was riveting. Daredevil and Captain America were teamed up against Doctor Octopus, who’d already kidnapped Spiderman and drugged him into submission. Octopus proposes a trade. You can have Spiderman back, he says, if you both surrender. Spiderman, Dock Ock argues, saves more lives than both of you combined. He’s more powerful. I’ll let him walk free to do all that good work, save all those lives, as long as you two agree to be my prisoners.

  It was a horrible equation. It made me wonder what I’d do if I had a choice to go out with either Hilary Smith or both Tricia Foster and Benji’s so-called girlfriend Karen Watson. In Eric’s version, Daredevil wants to make the deal but Captain America doesn’t. “I may not save as many people as Spidey,” Captain America says, “but I’m a national symbol. I stand for something.”

  “I don’t know about this,” I said. “Captain America seems too scared, like he’s wimpy.”

  “But that’s what makes it interesting,” Eric whined. “If the hero always does the right thing, it’s boring. If the hero always wins, it’s too predictable.”

  I knew he was right. The note from Morris Balmer, Intern, which said “Not bad, Lawrence,” when I wrote about Cap floating half-dead on his shield, proved his theory. Still, did I really want to play a weasely Captain America?

  “Listen,” I said, to change the subject. “Doctor Octopus seems like he’d be a really complicated costume with those titanium tentacles. I mean, we’re gonna have costumes, right? Like your uncle’s gonna hook us up with some really cool costumes?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess so, if he likes the script. Yeah, sure we’ll have costumes. Not the Invisible Girl, of course.”

  “Right, because she won’t need a costume.”

  “Right, because no one will see her.”

  Maybe it was the realization Eric actually was a better writer than I was that made me say what I said next. Maybe it was the recognition that Hilary Smith and the shit-brained teachers knew the truth.

  I heard his mother clattering some more above us, and I wanted her to come down again, but I knew she wouldn’t.

  “Maybe your uncle can give you, like, a sample or something,” I said. “Before the week’s over, just, like, part of a costume. Then you can use it as proof so Adam won’t kick your ass.”

  Eric looked doubtful. I glanced at his plastic swords and made a slashing motion with my hand as if I were actually thinking about playing with him, actually thinking about pretending to be some kind of character. “I don’t know,” he said. “Yeah, okay, maybe.”

  That maybe was all I needed.

  “Eric says he’ll have part of a costume for us before the deadline,” I told Adam the next day. “That’s what he said the proof will be.”

  “You’d better not be lying, Fuckbrain,” Adam said to Eric when he found him shadowboxing by the balance-beam.

  “If you don’t have something to show us by Monday, you know what you’ll be eating,” he added, pointing to his Incredible Hulk lunchbox.

  The weekend plowed by in relentless fashion, faster than I wanted it to, like that evil mutant The Juggernaut who busted through any wall in front of him and just kept moving. I wanted The Mighty Thor to ring the heavens with his hammer and create a storm violent enough to wash away the next week of school. I wanted Dr. Doom to poison the water supply to Eric’s house so he’d be out sick a few days and Adam would forget the whole thing, or at least decide who was next in the rankings to be threatened, even if that turned out to be me. I wanted Eric’s father to return triumphantly from where Mephisto had imprisoned him in an underground cave, wanted him to clutch his son in his burly arms and speed him away to California so we’d never see him again. I thought about Eric’s mom a lot too, especially after watching Wonder Woman on TV on Sunday night.

  I stayed up late after that, doing push-ups in the family room until my arms felt like flag-poles.

  Unfortunately, Eric showed up on Monday. Before he opened his backpack, he warned us. “Remember,” he said, “this is just a prototype. A model. It’s not what the real costume will look like.”

  “It better be good, Fuckbrain,” Adam said.

  It was the saddes
t thing I’d ever seen.

  It was navy blue and in the shape of a ski mask, the kind bank-robbers wear, with two uneven cut-outs for eyes, except it wasn’t a ski mask. It was made from stretchable material, not wool. Some kind of nylon. Maybe it was two pantyhose knitted together. Two triangles, white ones, were sewn to the sides. They looked like mouse-ears. Stuck to the forehead region with a safety pin was a piece of a white pillowcase, cut into the shape of a star. “What is it?” I asked, but I already knew.

  “Well, remember, it’s just a prototype,” Eric said, “but this is Captain America’s cowl.”

  “This is such bullshit,” Adam said. “Captain America’s mask is light blue, like ocean blue, not navy blue. And he has wings on it, Fuckbrain, not panda ears.”

  Later I would wonder why Eric chose my superhero to try and create a costume-part for, and not a Daredevil billy club for himself, or even a stretchable glove for Adam. Maybe it was because for five minutes I’d swung plastic swords with him in his playroom. Maybe he thought I wouldn’t betray him.

  While Adam was bashing Eric’s head against the tennis court fence and prying open his mouth so he could force him to swallow the dandruff ball and accompanying dead ants, I didn’t think about any of that. All it would have taken to stop Adam was one spinning kick to his chest. A well-placed karate chop to the back of his head. Instead, I looked over to the picnic table where Benji was absorbed with Karen Watson and a few feet away, where Hilary Smith stood, staring.

  I pictured Eric’s mother staying up late to sew the cowl—stitching maybe at the exact same time I was doing push-ups—how she must’ve grown too tired to do the star, how Eric was left to pin it on by himself. Maybe the pantyhose were hers. I decided that no matter what happened, I wanted that cowl. Wanted to press it between my fingertips. No matter what happened, I wanted, at least once, to wear that cowl on my face.

  MYLAR MAN

  THE MYLAR MAN CLAWS THROUGH THE SAND. His fingers dig and tug bits of balloon and balloon-ribbon and I walk next to him because the Mylar Man is my brother and I love the Mylar Man. But more than that, I love his wife.

  I’m a lousy brother. That’s not debatable. Yet, I’m walking next to the Mylar Man and most people are afraid of the Mylar Man because his back and shoulders have grown knotty and hunched from crouching and digging, and his fingertips are raw and dark and flaking. Only I call him the Mylar Man. No one else, except for his wife—except for Naomi—even talks to him. She calls him Warren, which is his name, and he calls himself Old Goat on his blog The Human Factor where he writes daily about the ravaging and pillaging of the environment. He lives in a slowly deteriorating house on a bluff on the southeast shore of Lake Michigan and he is not old, only forty-two.

  Naomi’s younger, my age, just thirty-seven, and she owns the house. It’s been in her family for a hundred and nine years. Old Goat has no job and doesn’t do anything except flail against humanity on his keyboard for several thousand words a day, and walk four miles on the beach after dinner in quest of balloon remnants.

  He hates latex balloons, which is what he mostly finds. At least those eventually decompose, he tells me. Maybe it takes six months, then longer for the ribbons, and it’s likely large numbers of birds and turtles die from eating them, but eventually they go back to the earth. Mylar balloons don’t. They never decompose. They float in the water looking like giant tasty jellyfish, or they make their way to the beach and nestle in the sand. Then they live there, like hermits, dead but alive too, until the Mylar Man finds them, and bags them, and throws them in the trash.

  “Look at this one,” he says.

  It’s heart-shaped, but little of the paint that once adorned it remains, just a few white frills and splotches of red. “What does something like this have to do with love?” he says. “This is a symbol of non-love. This is symbol of violence. Profess your love to your girlfriend by buying one of these, and you’re professing your hatred of your planet. This balloon is a death-sentence to your grandchildren.”

  “Don’t aim your Old Goat venom in my direction,” I say. “I didn’t let it go.”

  “You would have though,” he says. “If you had someone you were in love with, you’d do it. You’re romantic and stupid. I know you.”

  He does know me. And I am stupid, though not romantic. I wouldn’t give his wife a balloon on Valentine’s Day, just an earth-shattering orgasm that would make her forget her planet entirely. Naomi is short, under five feet, and a fireball of thick brown hair and compact muscular body that I know will just shake and shake and I wonder if my sand-clawing brother has any clue how to make her happy. She always seems happy, always laments the state of her falling-down house with a fond joke. Says, “Don’t sit on that side of the dining room, you might wind up bobbing in the lake,” and when she jogs barefoot on the beach she travels far away from her husband digging up balloons. Her gait is forceful and resolute. I want to catch her behind one of the dunes and hold her around her shapely waist and whisper to the top of her lush, rain-forest head, “I will not let you support me with your job teaching kindergartners while I rant and rave to either no one or maybe just a small pathetic cadre of other on-line whack-jobs. Together, we can save each other and your family-home and keep it from falling into the surf.”

  Naomi is friendly to me, but wary. She knows what I’m after, has always known it. I ask her why she teaches kindergarten instead of high school, why she wouldn’t want students who can challenge her intellectually, explore probing questions.

  “Do you know what a Word Wall is?” she asks me.

  I don’t.

  “My kids learn how to spell is. They lean how to spell of and the and and. They look at these words every day on a wall, the curves and lines and dots. They watch these words with their eyes and live inside them and spell them in the air with their fingers.”

  Naomi is stirring pasta salad when she tells me this. She discards the spoon and reaches into the bowl of cold risotto, kneading the mixture of grain and olive and tomato with her hands as if she’s a sculptor working with clay. Her hair is tied behind her head in a tight ponytail.

  “I’ve seen high school kids,” she says. “They don’t know what recess is. If you tell them to go outside and play, they’ll pull their phones from their pockets and start texting. I’m a patient person. I get nervous when I see that.”

  I watch her play with the pasta. She pulls her hands out then holds up an index finger and licks it. Makes a puzzled face. Digs back into the pasta, points the finger toward me. “Taste this,” she says.

  I lean forward.

  “No, don’t,” she says, pulling her finger back. “It needs salt.”

  “Look at this one,” the Mylar Man says, after he’s waded hip-deep into the water to retrieve a balloon that’s still partially inflated, his cut-off jean-shorts now soaked. “From Chicago, I bet. Some idiot let it go during a festival. Ate too many chili-dogs and didn’t give a shit about his grandchildren’s future and just let it fly.”

  The mylar is a familiar design, once a glowing yellow moon-pie with a smiley face, like a floating LSD tab, with two black dots for eyes and a slice of semi-circle for a mouth. Most of the yellow paint is gone, but the smiley face remains, looking like a leer now, a grin, more taunting and scary when its background is transparent.

  “I understand the impulse,” the Mylar Man says. “It’s fun to let go of things. To feel a sense of release when something you’ve been holding too long drifts away. Your load lightens. But here’s the thing, John.” He pauses for a moment to stare at me and he looks like a God, bronzed and unhunched, silhouetted by the sky’s pink embers. He is beautiful, my brother, always has been, a force of skin and beard and purpose. “John,” he says, “it’s an illusion. Life is never carefree. If you don’t care, you die.”

  I had a balloon exactly like this yellow one once, when I was after Rachel. She had an eight-year-old son named Micah, and I tried to fill my apartment with all manner of playthings like baseball
cards and Hot Wheels cars and plastic machine-guns and balloons so he wouldn’t mind when I spent significant time with his mother in the bedroom. Rachel dumped me for a guy who makes hinged models of teeth and sells them to dentist offices—Micah started a collection and likes to polish them to a sparkle with a toothbrush and shaving cream—and I don’t know what happened to the big yellow balloon. It wasn’t hard to let Rachel go. If she drifted to the clouds, growing smaller and smaller each time I looked until finally I could no longer find her in the sky—fair enough, happy flying. Land safely with the teeth-maker.

  Chicago—the idiot city, my brother calls it—is where I live. Not exactly plunk in the wind-battered big-shouldered heart, but in a bleak condo-town on the outskirts. My apartment, where I used to encourage Micah to cultivate imaginary friends as I investigated his mother below the belt, is characterless. The pool and fitness center in the condo-town clubhouse are poorly maintained; embarrassing, I’d say, so when my Dad travels out of town, which he often does for his consulting job where he draws shapes and arrows on legal pads, I borrow his Lincoln Park brownstone and bring women there. Always nice to fuck people on the four-thousand dollar leather couch where, when he’s not traveling, my father also fucks people while my mother is home sleeping with the over-sized hemp-filled penguin my dip-shit older brother and I mistakenly bought her one Christmas so she wouldn’t be lonely. She hates that stupid non-animal with its creepy glass eyes and bright orange beak. She hates all it mockingly represents, but she’ll never tell that to the Mylar Man or to me because she wants us to believe we harbor a modicum of essential goodness, which neither of us actually do believe, but when we’re home visiting, we’re willing to fake it to make her happy.

  That’s the kind of family we have, but none of that bothered me if the woman I was screwing on my father’s couch was attractive enough, or groaned audibly. Except that one night my father’s phone rang while I had a mouthful of breast and when the machine came on, one of my father’s many paramours left him a message that said, “Franklin, when you get back to town, call me. I owe you a back massage.”