Chapter Five: The Tide Is High
After the Yankees eliminated the Red Sox in the fall of 1980, it took time for conditions to improve. I read comic books, sorted my box of “commons”, baseball cards featuring third string utility players for the New York Mets or the Chicago Cubs, and watched The Dukes Of Hazzard religiously. I must have done a little homework, but it wasn't intentional.
Soon my attention centered on trying to impress Kurt and Cristo, friends I'd made at Bone Harbor Elementary School. This was harder to do than breaking into the school and, for example, crapping on the teacher's desk, writing swear words on the wall or other Ironbury gang initiation rituals. Extreme sports like skateboarding and BMX bike jumping, which were well established in my Ironbury neighborhood, took five more years to become accepted by the Richards Ave. Gang in Bone Harbor. Shoplifting, practically a way of life in Ironbury, brought swift punishment in Bone Harbor. I learned that Pyromania was not, I repeat, not an after-school program. And, as I've already mentioned, Bottle Rocket bazookas, breaking windows, and detonating high pressure cans of spray paint, ranked up there with torturing pets. Did these hicks really believe Foosball and Croquet could take the place of a massive, uncontrolled explosion? Apparently so. Considering the adjustments I had to make, it often felt like I, not Mork, had left my home planet of Ork only to crash-land on Earth. I had to stand tall before the man more than once.
When I was told the closest train to flatten pennies and cans under was in Queensland, fifteen miles away, and that it only rolled by twice a day, I gave up. By mid-October I was completely out of amusement ideas. What else was there to do except go to baseball games and shoot cars with bottle rockets? And if we couldn't smash bottles, flatten pennies, or collect aluminum cans to sell for money to buy spray paint, then what good was living? Did our parents really expect us to sneak into the movie Airplane for the twentieth time? Even a nine-year-old has a limited tolerance for sex puns and jokes about air-sickness. What was there to do after the Red Sox season had ended that was fun and didn't involve a teacher or a long list of rules?
Jordan Wynter was the first to invite me to join him in the fall of 1980, training me in the rural ways of battle. Jordan's step-brother Mack sat near me in my reading class. Mack was chronically sick, but he still managed to join us when it wasn't raining. Before the Jones Avenue dump was condemned and closed, the Our Gang of Bone Harbor, New Hampshire would gather there to play Capture The Flag. On the outskirts of Bone Harbor, among the piles of incinerated garbage, shells of black and white televisions, old washing machines, scraps of tires and toaster ovens we deployed in a fashion of War.
During the short October evenings, before the liberty of summer had faded completely with the arrival of pumpkins, forbidden candy corn, and black and orange paper cats, I prepared for war as any soldier would. After 4th grade vocabulary homework, and after feeding my hamsters, and after updating my Christmas Wish List, I would grab my painted wooden rifle from the closet and my survival knife from where I had hidden it under my bed. Then I would jog a block down Lincoln Avenue to Richards Ave. After buying or stealing a pack of gum from The Little Store on the corner, I would jog two blocks east to Jordan and Mack's house near the sheep and geese grazing in a big yard on South Street. Sheep and geese? The only time I saw sheep and geese in Ironbury was when I was eating lamb chops as a flock of geese flew overhead. Now, two blocks from my bedroom, were live geese and grazing sheep. Naturally, I thought “What kind of crazy people live in New Hampshire?”
I would have ridden my bike to the Wynter household, but for my regular and violent accidents on the two-wheeled gadget. When my bike was out of my favor, as it was in the Fall of 1980, I did what any Ironbury raised pyromaniac would do: cover it with illegal explosives and burn the paint off the motherfucker.
When I arrived at the Wynter household, Jordan's mother would feed me cookies and Kool-Aid while we waited for the rest of the crew to arrive, racing the sea fog from the east. Bugsy “Buggy” Kindle would come out when the weather was nice, though mostly to show off his grandfather's vintage W.W. II binoculars. Oly “Fingers” McEagan would join in when his father didn't need him on the lobster boat. Elias “Scoobie” Hertz trailed behind the group with Kurt “Flash” Forester, but they usually vanished an hour after the war started. And despite the fact that he was crippled by a birth defect, Cristo “Sticky” Patanikolous followed me when he didn't have to roll dough at his father's pizza parlor on Fisher Cat Island. Chatham “Lick” Border also joined in, but he mostly sat on a tarp, rolled joints, and smoked them in deep silence as he watched the traffic cross the Sagamore creek bridge on Route 1. We all knew each other from Camp Gundalow swim class, Bone Harbor Elementary, the Little Store arcade corner, or else from the stone Unitarian Church on Court Street downtown. Kurt, Mack, Elias, Cristo and I were two years younger than Jordan's friends, a fact we did our best to hide by swearing as much as possible.
Other neighborhood kids like Gordy “Clutch” Clutcher, Evan “Squid” Squidly and JoJo “Stretch” Locke weren't interested in capture the flag. They liked to shoot hoops at the South Mill Pond basketball courts until the lights went off or else play Whiffle Ball in the cement courts by the JFK Recreation Center. But I decided that if Yaz and Dewey could take a few months off from baseball then so could I.
Capture The Flag demanded patience and silence and strategy, traits I considered essential for not getting called on in Math class. CTF provided roles to play, sides to earn our loyalty, hardships to test our flesh and spirits, and enemies to plot against. The Americans fought against the Communists. The Red Sox united against the Yankees. Right prevailed over wrong. It was simple. If JoJo and the others didn't want to play then they were just sissies. Real men played War at the Jones Avenue dump. It was the only war to fight in 1980 since Vietnam had taught the government to disguise or deny any military engagements. Besides, Carter had promised the hostages in Iran would be released soon. America had won!
Our war was fought at the dump and we took it seriously. We fired wooden guns and planted Frisbee land mines and lived and died on the honor system. I begged my father to buy me a camouflage coat and a pair of forest green field pants from an Army surplus store in Greenfields, and Jordan often painted his face green in the summer and brown in the fall to better blend into the fickle New Hampshire forest. When the game began, I became the cautious hunter and the terrified hunted. There were fatal and heroic consequences to each action, causing my heart to throb in my chest like when Dewey fielded a ball near my seat in the right field grandstands of Fenway Park. Our primary objective: capture the enemy's hidden flag without being shot or captured, while protecting our own flag from capture.
The year was 1980, twelve years ago. I was nine and a half years old. I loved baseball and I loved the Boston Red Sox and I loved Capture The Flag.
After we had sat around Jordan's house playing Blip or watching Dukes of Hazzard while others arrived, we then collectively walked the winding mile through the South Street Cemetery to meet any stragglers in the dump. Once within the fenced borders of the dump, we quickly picked teams and dispersed into the crinkled forest landscape. Our driving cause even in fourth grade was that a man only became a man after he had defended the land he loves. We would pick our territory, plant our flags, and die defending it. Then we would be men.
One afternoon in late October, 1980, I had elected to guard our flag rather than lead the assault on the other team's flag. I planted our prize near the edge of the dump piles by The Cliff of Death, so named for a ghostly hobo who hunted through the garbage, presumably for aluminum to sell. He would stagger around the piles groaning, “It's here. I know it is. If I can find it then my Buddy can live. I only need to find it.” That, I thought, is dedication to your occupation. Not even in my most cupcake-deprived days had I hunted aluminum with such intensity. Our theory was that the Hobo was a kid who had played capture the flag a hundred years earlier and had fallen off of the cliff and gone crazy. As childhood theories went, this was pretty plausible.
A note on the Sagamore River that ran along the eastern edge of the dump: When the moon was positioned just so, the river pushed inland and under a narrow bridge on Route 1, next to the Dinnerhorn restaurant. At some point The Sagamore technically became a creek and some natives would claim it was never a river, but to my eyes it ran deep and was mysterious as a river should be. Otherwise, The Sagamore flowed east from the dump, passing the tree and toad seacoast communities of Langdonville and Break Island, eventually emptying into Bone Harbor, my town's namesake, near my elementary school. There the Sagamore River merged with the Chickanoosuc River and, again depending on the tide, either rushed west beneath the Memorial Bridge, past Fisher Cat Island and then into Great Bay, or else was sucked east into the Atlantic Ocean between Marshford, Maine and Fort Stark on quiet Break Island, New Hampshire. In any direction it vanished into an unexplored fog only explored in comic books and my father's National Geographic magazines. These forces meant that the Jones Ave. peninsula of rubbish was sometimes only open to attack from one direction, the west, when the cliff dropped into the cold tide.
Since we were at the Jones Avenue dump, the piles that acted as our battlefield were enormous hills of incinerated waste, black and sooty, created by 300 years of occupation and the need to consolidate and bury the waste of our community. The English settled Bone Harbor in 1680. The Chickanoosuc River offered easy access to the interior of New Hampshire and the abundant, unprotected Colonial forests. The Plymouth Pilgrims to the south could keep their rock, their haunted swamplands, and their log cabins; residents of Bone Harbor knew a good thing when they saw it. Great Bay had all the benefits of London's Thames, with easy access to the sea like Cardiff and Liverpool. Ma and Pa Quaker said, “Kids, unpack the bible. We're staying,” or words to that effect. A little known fact is that the Puritans were also the first Red Sox fans.
Every Saturday the good Puritan folk would gather before evening church service and play baseball near the Strawberry Banke swamps, swamps that by 1980 were filled with dirt so kids like me could play football each October. Anyway, those community members whose piety was in question because they had not lost a limb, or at least a finger, from manual labor that week, would wear red sox and, get this, agree to lose. The loss and subsequent abuse from the pious was supposed to bring them back into the fold of the forgiving Lord. This is the adapted version of history I learned in Bone Harbor Elementary's afternoon American History class, or at least what I could glean between long sessions trading Star Wars cards with Cristos and Gordy Clutcher in the back of the room. Three centuries later, the Red Sox were still losing and the Jones Ave dump piles overflowed into the Sagamore River.
I elected to plant my team's flag on the huge piles of trash above the river for strategic and aesthetic reasons. Rising 60 or 70 feet above the river and offering a commanding view of the battlefront, my flag-keep also overlooked a placid estuary and forests rising above exposed granite hillocks. To the north of the dump lay the weaving roads and tight neighborhoods of Bone Harbor with its sprawling South Street cemetery, and the vacant Leary Field. Bone Harbor Elementary and The Bone Harbor Junior High School near the south mill pond and the downtown court house were weekend-silent. The hills and fields of Langdonville tilted east toward the ocean at Pirates Cove and Langdonville Beach. To the south along Route 1, a forestry lab of spruce and pine trees spread out across the street from Woodland Park. To the west blazed the red WHEB radio tower light near the tempting Dippy Donuts and the Bread Box sandwich shop/gas station. Bone Harbor High School stood less than a mile from the dump to the west through the young trees and over the town's only official football field. In 1980 I was five years away from high school and six years away from witnessing the 0-2 pitch to Ray Knight that would overshadow and subsequently shape everything that happened to me in an entire decade. I believed that the Sox would win the World Series, that it was my destiny to witness this victory that Dwight Evans had promised me. In 1980 I looked forward to the fulfillment of my dreams.
I had stood flag guard for half an hour, vigilantly pacing the ashen ground, when I turned around to admire the view of the silver river, deep blue skies and plush forests in the slow process of annual decay. I gripped my gun and announced my loyalty to my land and my people. You shall live free or you shall die, I declared. My land breathed back approval. It was an empire of filth, a kingdom of waste, a battlefield of trash, and in 1980 it was all mine. The Sox will be victorious. Bring on the dragons. My subjects shook with vigorous applause. Then I noticed that someone had tied a rope to the trunk of a small tree struggling to grow through a patch of refuse thrown over an abandoned area of the dump at the edge of the Cliff. Cautiously, breathlessly, I approached the tree until I discovered the rope was jerking the weak tree trunk. What?! I was being attacked from the most unlikely flanks! Someone was climbing The Cliff of Death with a rope they had secured earlier. The siege had begun. Awesome!
On my belly I crawled, close enough to smell the decay rising from the decomposed garbage, and peered over the cliff. Vance Larsen was making a rare appearance in his father's baggy camouflage coat. He struggled hand over hand and step by step up the near vertical slope with his wooden gun hanging from a belt strap around his shoulder. He must have waded through the water to sneak up behind me. Vance liked to gain an advantage by showing up after the teams were chosen and making a secret treaty before attacking his enemy from a blind side. Old tires and television sets and rusted fencing provided small footholds for Vance to make the climb, and he had dutifully tied knots in the rope every five feet for grip. The tide had advanced over the rocky shore and a beach breath from the east brought heavy sea smells and gull echoes. He hadn't noticed me yet so I retreated to the base of the tree and pulled my authentic stainless steel camouflage survival knife out of its genuine leatherette sheath.
I had purchased the beautiful knife partially with money embezzled from my disastrous neighborhood paper route with Kurt and partially with quarters stolen from Kurt's father's coin operated laundry machines. Two weeks earlier I had taken the bus out to the flea market in Greenfields, where I normally traded Red Sox Baseball cards with old Ed Twombley, and purchased the blade from a table of folding butterfly knives, assault swords, and gleaming Ninja throwing stars.
The survival knife was irresistible. It came with the aforementioned leather-like green fabric sheath that fit around my belt, and a sharpening stone in its own little plastic pocket on the sheath. A grommet allowed me to lash the sheath to my leg with string in a military-like fashion. The compass on top of the camouflage handle was more or less accurate if I stood very still. As a secret bonus, this compass screwed off and the grip was hollow and advertised as waterproof. I kept matches in the grip cavity wrapped in plastic and, in later years, fishing twine--just in case I tore a gash in my arm jumping from a cliff like Rambo. I spent many afternoons sharpening the blade and watching Dukes of Hazzard or Diff'rent Strokes on television before my Dad came home from work and made tacos or ordered pizza for my brother and me to fight over. Next to my Sox cap, my baseball glove, and a 1930 silver dollar bolo tie, this knife was my most treasured possession. The knife promptly became the envy of my Capture The Flag team and was often the difference in being chosen second or third.
I slid the survival knife out of the sheath on my belt. The blade gleamed in the fall sun, like Excaliber drawn from the stone, as I proceeded to cut the rope of my enemy. I hardly applied any pressure at all to the rope before it snapped and slithered over the edge with a hiss. Then I gleefully sheathed my knife and crawled to the edge of the cliff to gloat at Vance. What a fool for trying to sneak up on me! What a geek! He was no match for my craftiness. Didn't he know how attuned to my battlefield I was? Why, I'd been in a street gang in Boston and had spent my weekends detonating cans of hairspray in a 40-gallon drum. Capture The Flag was kids stuff.
My malicious grin dissolved into a frown as I peered down the jagged slope. Vance was lying face down in the river, motionless. His right leg was bent at the knee and lay across his left leg. The white rope floated in the water near the shore. Ripples made by Vance's impact, like those made by a duck landing in the South Mill Pond, were still splashing on the stony shore. On Route 1, across the flat salt marsh, the Episcopalian church bells by the Dinnerhorn rang five times. At that moment I wanted nothing more than to eat a Bar-B-Que Chicken sandwich with Onion Rings.
The cliff was too steep to navigate without a rope, so I reluctantly abandoned the flag and ran toward the road yelling for help as I passed the hobo.
“Hey, Man! My friend's hurt. I cut...I mean he fell. Hey!”
The hobo scratched the surface of a mound with his fingers.
“Can you help me look for something,” he asked. “I need your help, son. I lost something special.”
What the hell? I wasn't going to help a bum hunt for “special” aluminum while Vance drowned. I continued my mission of mercy, crossing paths with Jordan who was prowling nearby and came into a clearing with his gun pointed at me. We were both confused, ready to kill, ready to die. He had probably been part of an organized, precision attack on my flag. Oh Heartless enemy! I brought my gun up to shoot him before I realized my role had changed. My identity was no longer fixed.
“Vance is hurt, Jordan. He fell off the cliff,” I yelled in my high voice, holding the wooden rifle in my left hand and pointing toward the cliff. I hid my knife sheath with one hand and tried to lower my voice to make it sound more grave and assured as though spoken by a stone statue.
“I think he's hurt.”
The sound of my own voice echoed through the thin forest, lush with velvet leaves, and returned to me morphed into manhood. Soldiers yelled for Medics; they were my brothers of the battlefield now and the forest knew our secrets, understood our fate and our fears. Given the chance, I could have freed the hostages from Iran. It was an easy thing to do with a sharp survival knife.
Jordan was three years older than I me. I left it to him to decide what to do next. I had done my job by alerting an elder. Jordan quickly registered that I wasn't trying to deceive him so he ran past me down the dirt trail used by the high school cross-country track team. His boots slipped on the gravel and he raised his arms for balance. It looked so dramatic I tried to imitate it when I followed him. Bugsy and Oly had been aroused by my cries and joined us as we reached the river and looked south down the cliff for Vance's body. Cristo appeared paralyzed by fear near the east end of the trail and watched with growing anxiety from behind a pine tree, biting his nails and bouncing on his one good leg. The others had been too far in the woods to hear my call. As I reached the water Jordan was already wading toward Vance's body with Bugsy and Oly. I was the last in line so I could imitate their reactions. Episodes like this were supposed to happen in slow motion like on C.H.I.P.S, but everything was going so fast. I was breathless but tried to look composed and serious as Jordan turned Vance over in the gray water.
Divided between Flesh's fragile nature, the source of Vance's pain, and the prospect of liberation, I froze. My body had been given to me without instructions but I had assumed it was invincible. Every example of my body's yielding such as Vance's fall, my self-clubbing, and the chain-link scars had to be crammed into the “Exceptions to the Rule” folder of my understanding. But Vance's injury had caused this folder to burst presenting me with a sudden choice. Though the soul was permanent, the flesh could, on occasion, be damaged. Flesh or Spirit? I now suspected that the two were not equivalent and I could only serve one of them. Would I stand like Cristo, consumed by my body's faults, or would I hover nearby like Kurt, aware of my limitations but embracing my equanimity? This struggle of allegiance was too great to understand as I stood in the Sagamore River, but I felt its presence nearby. The struggle was an ocean of debate while I had hardly mastered my own small mill pond of experience. Maybe there were forces present in the world besides the one that enabled Luke Skywalker to shoot a laser into a portal the size of a newspaper. If this was true then why didn't my Ninja magazine describe them?
Vance was wet but alert as Jordan pulled him from the water. His right shoulder hung in limply his coat and his right arm fell to his side.
“He's alright,” said Jordan more to reassure himself then for any other reason.
I had to piss so I pinched my genitals and whimpered softly as I approached the circle in the shallow river. Gripping my gun with my right hand I had to tell myself again that my role no longer called for defense against the enemy. We were no longer war orphans. The war had been postponed. We were back to being neighborhood kids from Bone Harbor, New Hampshire. The war is no more. The war is no more, I whispered to my own distorted reflection. War is no more.
My feet were cold but I noticed no one else seemed to mind, so I didn't whine. Was that part of the role of being a soldier or part of the role of being a neighborhood kid? The War is no more. The War is no more. Would a soldier cry? My lips were dry from mouth breathing. Would a soldier lick his lips? The War is no more.
“I'm alright,” Vance said. “Don't tell my mom. Friggin rope broke half way up.”
Vance pointed up the cliff. I was the only one who didn't look.
Mack Wynter was standing nearby now, panting and sweating, his teeth gleaming like giant Chicklets.
“What happened?” he asked. “Some stupid idiot fall down and get wet?”
I turned on him.
“Shut up, Wynn, you fag.”
“Why should I? Who died and made you Darth Vader?”
“Your mom did.”
The fact that his mother was in no position to make me Darth Vader was the least of my statement's inaccuracies, but when insulting mothers was concerned there were no rules.
“You mean your mom is so ugly that a cop told your dad to put her on a leash?” Mack cackled.
“Well,” I quickly replied. “Your mom's the one I watched win the Kentucky Derby. Does she still have the marks from when the jockey hit her?”
“Oh, yeah?” asked Mack as he searched for another insult. “Well, you’re the one all wet. You look like a duck out there. Do you have webbed feet, Oggy? Ha! You’ve got webbed feet. I’m gonna call you Webby from now on. Look at your webbed feet.”
Mack pointed at my feet. I naturally stood with my feet forming a ninety-degree angle. I thought it made me walk like Clint Eastwood, but it just made me walk like a penguin.
“Look at the duck with webbed feet,” said Mack. “Hey, Oggy the duck!”
“Shut up, Wynn. Shut your big fag mouth.”
“Or what?”
“Or else.”
“Or else what?”
“Or else I’ll make you and your shit-mouth shut up.”
“Oh, yeah? You and what army of storm troopers?”
“Just shut up.”
“Yeah, Wynn,” said another voice. “Shut your mouth, fuckhead.”
Kurt said this as he sat on a nearby rock, apparently appearing from the ether, skipping stones across the river with an easy flick of his wrist. I loved Kurt for coming to my rescue with delicious swear words that raised eyebrows all around.
Mack pouted, “Why are you mean to me, Flash? I didn't do anything to you.”
“Because, you're a fuckhead,” said Kurt with another flick of his wrist.
While Mack considered this logical conclusion, Cristo's chubby chin was quivering from all the drama. He had limped down from the end of the road and was currently hiding behind a Maple tree, too afraid to get his pump-up Converse sneakers wet. He suddenly blurted out his pent up fear.
“I once had a dog and he got eaten by a shark and he died and the shark got shot dead too. I swear. You can ask my dad.”
I looked at Cristo and shook my head in disappointment. His lies reflected badly on me since I had invited him. Normally such outbursts wouldn't be tolerated and would earn a pummeling but, since Cristo's dad owned the Marshford House of Pizza located between Bone Harbor and Maine, he was considered a valuable asset. I was tempted to make fun of his deformed right leg but held my tongue rather than draw attention to myself. Also, I had more important things to think about: If Vance died, I thought, I knew a place we could bury him where no one would find his body.
As we stood waiting for Vance to recover, Mack and Kurt glared at one another. No one else even acknowledged Cristo's blubbering. I tried not to look at the rope, which had been tossed absently into a pile by the cliff. Jordan reassured Vance that he would be alright and helped him stand up. That was the role of the medic and the friend as once again the roles overlapped. The war is no more. Jordan clumsily tried to push the shoulder back into place. Vance yelped in pain and caused Cristo to cry out in alarm for no reason. Mack looked over at him.
“Why don't you go play with your Chewbacca dolls, Cristo?
“Cause I don't have one, Wynn.”
“Yes, you do, fag.”
“No, I don't, super fag.”
“Do too. I saw it. Queer.”
“I don't. I gave it away. It was stupid. You Queer fag.”
“Yeah? Well, who got it?”
“I gave it to Ogden. Ask him.”
I heard my name and wheeled around.
“What?”
Mack said, “The cripple says you got his Chewbacca doll. You like to play with dolls, Oggy? You're a gay fag.”
“No,” I countered. “You're the one who likes to play with dolls. Not me. Sticky wears his sister's panties. Everyone knows it.”
My face felt hot. I spit into the water and shrugged my shoulders. If The Red Sox had won 15 games in a row like I'd predicted then I'd be watching them get ready to play in the World Series. Now I just wanted to get a root beer float at the drive-in restaurant in Marshford. I'd get onion rings and a root beer float. That was all I wanted.
Vance yelled again as another attempt was made to relocate his shoulder. The sound echoed off the cliff and skipped like a stone over the water into Langdonville.
“Don't tell my mom,” he said through squinting eyes. “Maybe it'll just get better.”
He walked past me and I smiled. The war is no more.
Jordan gestured at me.
“Oggy was the one who heard you fall. Who knows what would've happened if he didn't. You could'a drowned. Man, that would've sucked. Your parents would have been pissed.”
“My dog got eaten by a shark,” said Cristo again, but no one was listening.
“Thanks, Ogden,” groaned Vance. “I owe you one.”
Again, the roles overlapped. Vance was grimacing in pain but he was as sincere as a soldier. He had no idea I had cut the rope so I was faced with the decision to tell the truth and expose myself to punishment or let everyone believe I was a hero. I decided that a soldier would not deprive them, these young wood warriors, of a hero. It would just cause more trouble to tell the truth.
Cristo blurted out that he could hear his mother calling him from two miles away and limped away to watch Happy Days alone.
When the shock wore off, Vance begged to be taken home. On our way to his apartment we decided he would tell his mother that a car had hit him and the car had driven away. There had been no witnesses. It wasn't his fault. We all agreed it was foolproof story and one we could easily back up. Kurt suggested we explain why his clothes were wet by saying he had been knocked off the Sagamore Bridge into the river. Good old Kurt could always be counted on in a pinch. The alibi was solid. Why would Vance's mother ask any more questions? The plan was perfect and, most importantly, no one would ever know about my survival knife.
We walked Vance home to his mom's apartment by Bowl-O-Rama on Route 1 and then we quickly split up again as soon as Vance's mother asked, “How did a car hit you in the shoulder?”
As I walked down Lincoln Avenue under a canopy of richly colored maple leaves beating the breeze, I thought of Ron Guidry. If he was so good then why didn't the Red Sox trade Steve Renko to the Yankees for him by pretending Renko was a better pitcher. Why hadn't I thought of this before? Just lie.
The evening after Vance's fall I lay on my carpet sorting some baseball cards that Brooklyn had mixed up and patiently waiting for “Xanadu”--now played only once a day--or my new favorite song, “Another One Bites the Dust”, to come on the radio so I could record it. I was startled by a crowd cheering at a High School soccer game at Leary Field. The crowd knew something I didn't and that bothered me. Events were taking place without me, such as the Red Sox being eliminated from the postseason, and that meant my presence was not important to everyone. Why wasn't it? I had secrets too. I would go places. I would have stories to tell, stories like the time I cut the rope and...I then remembered the rope at the dump. What if there was an investigation? The FBI would be able to tell the rope had not snapped but had been cut, cut by me, and they would take away my survival knife and punish me in ways that involved classrooms and lectures and money taken from in my Red Sox baseball bank. They might even take away my television so I couldn't watch Three's Company. This was a sobering consequence to my crime so I got up and quietly hid the knife behind all my socks, vowing to never let them take it without a fight. Then I decided I would need to go retrieve the rope, to hide it, burn it maybe, and thus eliminate all evidence of my deed.
I left the house after telling my father, who was watching Taxi with his new girlfriend, that I was going to go play basketball with Cristo “Just for a few minutes. Please.”
“The game is on in half an hour,” he said in reference to the World Series.
He didn't have to tell me. In the Series against the Philadelphia Phillies, Royal Dan Quisenberry had became a sandlot hero's name with his wacky sidearm pitching, imitated by every baseball playing American boy in their winter dreams and spring try-outs. So far, ‘The Quiz’ had pitched in every game of the World Series for the Royals. American League MVP George Brett was proving his solid regular season was no accident, while Amos Otis and Willie Aikens channeled Babe Ruth in the Postseason hitting over .400 apiece. But Bob Boone and Mike Schmidt of the Phillies appeared poised to win Game Six and clinch the championship. Pete Rose, the Sox killer from '75, was in the middle of every Phillies rally, hustling around the base paths with abandon and becoming a worthy role-model for millions of sports fans. His name was synonymous with winner.
“I know, Dad.” I said. “Steve Carlton is pitching today. I'll be wicked quick. I'm only going a block away.”
“Did you finish your homework?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said while thinking, sure, and Steve Renko is as good as Ron Guidry.
The Pater said, “I'll give you ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes?” I whined. “It takes that long to get to the court. I have to beat Cristo since he beat me this afternoon.”
Where were these lies coming from? It was amazing how one led to another until I couldn't say for sure if Cristo had beaten me or not that afternoon.
“Half an hour,” he conceded, “and that is it.”
Outside I turned east toward the dump instead of toward the sports court. I ran up Elwyn Ave past Gentle Gena's house. Depending on her mood, Gentle Gena might burst through her front porch screen doors and attack a pedestrian with her neon plastic whips, or she might just pelt you with plastic war figures from her bedroom window. She often assaulted school kids walking home from school, so we had learned to pass her house with caution, as if a wild troll lived there. I crept past holding my breath until the night grew so quiet that I could hear cargo planes lifting off from Pease Air Force base in Greenfields. Gena was safely behind the locked door so I ran up south street, past the grazing sheep and geese, through the sleeping South Cemetery, by the duck pond, diving over the rusty burial plot bars, the moon man watching over my shoulder. Breathless, I leapt over the adorned white headstones, lonely and ancient, and vaulted the cracked stone wall on Sagamore Road, darting across the road like a Ninja in the long shadows from the streetlights to Jones Avenue. I ran past Mason Felix's house and Karen Simpson's mysterious and erotically shaded bedroom window. I sped past The Clipper Home for the Elderly and past the fearful Denniford Family Scrap Yard with the grumbling guard dog, and finally past the dark gates of the dump and down the shadow road to the river.
Once inside the dump property I clung to the shadows. The hobo's campfire reflected off the trees to the south so I crept through the woods directly to the river's edge, quietly enough to hear the hobo singing strange songs to fan the flames. The tide was high upon the cliff when I arrived but I plunged into the cold water to hunt for the rope that could convict me. Though I searched the shore and the cliff I could not find it. My feet and legs shivered in the murky tide. I suddenly found myself alone and in a dark place, surrounded by shadows, no rules or guide, with a secret no one could know.
Rt. 1 lay in the distance to the south, with the lights of cars appearing over a hill by Yoken's seafood restaurant. The Golden Arches glowed near a car lot. WHEB's radio tower blinked against the orange sky to the West. The last summer wind shifted the leaves above and strange noises came from the trash piles. Was that a psychotic killer behind that tree? Was that a shark in the water?
To turn and flee was my initial urge but a stronger force made me stand still and tighten my chin. The War was no more. Though I could escape this nameless fear now the time would come when I would be alone and in the face of a dark unknown with fierce weather on all sides and strangeness my only guide with secrets I had to guard. I knew a time would come when I would have to face these fears as Yaz and Dewey had done and my courage would then be tested. I shivered in the cold breeze and was assailed on all sides by my hidden foes.
From the east over Langdonville galloped Loneliness riding a wild steed. From the south over Whaleswood crept Darkness on stealthy long limbs safe in the shadows. From the north, over Maine, swept the unknown cloud of my future, terrible and swiftly approaching with dead reckoning. Though I shivered, I did not retreat. I will not retreat. Because from the west came a longing for all these visions and more. I felt this longing cloaked in mystery and in velvet fame and in silky fortune. Was the war no more? Did my role as a soldier end when the game ceased? Will the Red Sox win the World Series in 1981? The west would answer these questions.
I longed for the status Vance had earned from his injury. I had seen the envious eyes of Chuck, Ian and Jordan as they scanned The Cliff of Death down to the water where Vance lay. They were impressed by his fall, humbled by his strength, and I was also taken by his weary thanks and mature acceptance of pain. I longed to wear his pain on my face. It would look far better on my high cheekbones and defined chin. I longed to be set apart by pain and so I began to hate Vance for stealing what I felt was mine. I hated him for reaching the milestone first. I wished I had cut myself instead of the rope. If only my blood had fed the soil and filth of the Jones Avenue dump then I would have earned the respect I was owed, the respect I deserved. It was mine alone.
My foes, Loneliness, Darkness and the Unknown were conquered for the moment since I was stronger than they were, but Longing from the west still called to me, strong as a fall gust tearing through the fragile forest as I made my empty-handed way out of the Sagamore river and slowly back up Jones Avenue in the direction of Bone Harbor. The song I heard in the trees was sweet and full of promise, like a Carly Simon ballad, and I could almost mouth the drifting lyrics: Though I might fill my life with companions, faithful and loyal, with secret sunshine and a familiar touch, Longing would still call to me in the sound of the tide lapping the rocks, the wind in the forest branches, the cheer of a distant crowd, or in the holy gong from the North Church. Too, could I smell my Longing for a Red Sox World Championship--a throne to defend--in the salty sea fog and in the smoky grease of fried dough on Market Square Day near the Gillies hamburger cart. These words, “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away” were written in the stars as they had appeared on the screen three years earlier. What galaxy could rival my own?
The Moon Man of October, mute and glowing, gazed down on my kingdom as I crossed Sagamore Drive and jumped over the stone cemetery wall. The three stars of Orion's belt hovered above me near the four stars of the Big Dipper. They guided me through the shrouded cemetery, winding through a broken forest of graves, past the sheep and geese near Mack's house, past Gentle Gena's lair, back down Elwyn Ave to my Red Sox posters and Game Six of the 1980 World Series.
Steve Carlton dominated the Royals the entire game and the Phillies were able to scrape 4 runs together and were leading 4-1 by the top of the 9th inning. In the 9th, reliever Tug McGraw allowed a one-out walk, followed by two consecutive singles to load the bases. Down to their final two outs the Royals were mounting a comeback and were within a double of tying the game. Frank White of the Royals then popped up a foul ball in front of the first base dugout. This would be the second out of the inning. Pete Rose and Phillies catcher Bob Boone converged. I gasped as the ball popped out of Boone's mitt, but I cheered as Pete Rose made an unbelievably athletic play, catching the ricochet for the second out. I can not stress the rarity of a player who could make this play, in the top of the 9th inning of Game Six of the World Series with the bases loaded and one out. Rose had transcended himself, becoming a pure baseball player with no regard for the situation. He went 3-4 in Game Six, but it was this play that would be remembered. A clutch play would have been Boone making the catch. What Rose did was beyond clutch, beyond heroics, beyond baseball; It was legendary. Rose hustled for all 27 outs, and he had just caught the 26th.
When the next batter, Willie Wilson, struck out to end the game, I was able to imagine how delicious the Red Sox victory would be. The Royals near-comeback had simply made the win more exciting. Mike Schmidt thanked the fans of Philadelphia, which made me realize a Red Sox win would be my victory as well. I knew I only had to wait one more year for the Red Sox to get their chance. After all, Dewey had promised. Although the Sox hadn't won it all since 1918, when my ancient grandfather was sixteen years old, my nine-year old heart believed that they wouldn't let me down in 1981--This, I decided, was inconceivable.
As I lay in my bed that night, after being scolded for coming home forty minutes late, I listened for the North Church to cut the silence of my room with its hourly call. I only heard the desperate scratching of Teddy Ballgame, C. Fisk and Yaz in their nightly attempts to escape the plastic cage. Instead of “Xanadu”, WHEB played Bruce Springsteen's The Price You Pay. Since my brother owned a vinyl copy of Bruce's “The River” album there was no need to tape the song. Indeed, it was all I could do to get Brooklyn to stop playing the record for two minutes. This was just another reminder me that nothing, not adulthood, not championships, not fulfilled secret longings, comes for free.
Though I soon forgot about the piece of rope tied to the tree, Time, the greatest of all reset buttons, took care of it for me. It was soon buried under a load of incinerated trash and forgotten appliances. Our Capture The Flag games ceased when Bugsy, Jordan and Oly, who had gone on to Bone Harbor Junior High School, decided they were too old to hang out with Vance and I, who had remained at Bone Harbor with Cristo and Kurt and Mack. It was a gap we could not cross though this age difference turned out to be the least of our worries. Mack started to look like one of the extras from Night of the Living Dead and Kurt approached me halfway through November and asked, “Do you get sick when you drink whiskey?” I started to loiter near Karen Simpson's house for reasons I couldn't explain.
Meanwhile, Vance developed a limp when it proved convenient and soon learned to dislocate his shoulder as a party trick. Girls at Bone Harbor Elementary thought the cast on his arm was radical, while I considered it a badge of honor. Though the story about him being hit by a car and thrown into the river had not actually convinced his mother, it went over like a Johnny Carson monologue at Bone Harbor. Vance became the kid who survived being hit by a car and thrown off the Sagamore Bridge. Vance had earned his manhood while I still hunted the mosquito bogs near the peninsula of filth for my own medal.
For Halloween I dressed up as Carl Yastrzemski. Everyone recognized my plastic Sox batting helmet and the red number 8 on my white T-shirt and called, “Good luck next year, Yaz,” as they tossed small packets of gum and taffy and root beer sticks into my pillow case.
During Thanksgiving vacation I returned to the Jones Avenue Dump and found a dozen surveyor flags in the snow near the road. I pulled them up one by one and placed them near the hobo's wood pile by the River. It was my own hallowed battlefield.
Four score and seven weeks ago...that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.
Dim echoes of The War reminded me of something forgotten in the fallen forest duff, some desire that still lived.
The Winter of '80-'81 was full of broken promises. November clouds threatened to grant me a one-day reprieve from school, but Thanksgiving passed without a single flake on the brown landscape. This meant that the real winter had not yet arrived. The postponement of winter, in my mind, meant winter would never end. Better to get it over with, I thought, as the four months until spring training stretched out like a vocabulary pre-test. My red plastic shovel and cracked sled remained attached to the garage wall by a tapestry of white, season-old spider webs. Would anything interesting ever happen in this two-sheep town?
One early December afternoon my father arrived home from work as a psychologist. He looked at me gravely as I watched The Brady Bunch and leafed through the pages of a Sears catalog in an attempt to narrow down my Christmas demands. Obviously, I would have to have the “Pong” console to go with our promised color television. The new Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back action figures were so unbelievably realistic that I was torn between Han Solo encased in ice and the mysterious bounty hunter Boba Fete. The “Turbo-Jet Propulsion Snow Rocket”, on the other hand, was worthless without snow.
“Ogden?” my father said slowly, causing me to look up guiltily.
I was worried by the tone of my Father's voice. Had he learned about the time Kurt and I stole into three straight movies out at the Jerry Lewis Cinema? I was prepared to say Kurt had pressured me into watching Angie Dickinson in Dressed to Kill instead of Flash Gordon and that I had not taken even a small sip of Kurt's foul tasting “soda”. Or had my father discovered the secret stash of quarters I stole from his change pile when he wasn't home? Or, God forbid, had he found my survival knife and Ninja throwing stars? Knowing how fathers tend to get into trouble and discover things better left secret, anything was possible.
“John Lennon is dead,” he sighed.
Mentally, I ran through the Boston Red Sox roster for the past year. John Lennon was not among the names. There was a John Tudor who had pitched fairly well, posting an 8-5 record with a 3.02 ERA, but no John Lennon.
“Who?”
“John Lennon. He was a musician. You know? The Beatles? He was shot in New York last night. I thought you should know.”
My father was not shocked by the news. Nor did he seem deeply saddened. He simply reported it as a grim duty to his youngest son.
I imagined fathers all over the world saying, “Ogden Bleacher was shot dead in New York. He was a musician.” Would the children care, I wondered.
That night WHEB played a tribute set to John Lennon. I recognized all the songs, “Woman”, “Starting Over”, and “Imagine” though I had never imagined John Lennon wrote them. Unless they were sexy, like Blondie or Lipps Inc., or cool like The Village People, then I paid no attention to artist names. As Teddy Ballgame started his nightly exercise on the squeaky metal wheel, I put on my headphones. Tom Bergeron, my favorite WHEB DJ played the latest from Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, The Police, and The Who. It would be four or five years before I owned a nice Walkman tape player and could listen to the radio without needing a long coiled cord dangling across the room and threatening to pull out of the socket each time I turned over to play with myself.
I stared at the cracked ceiling and felt my stomach rumble. True, I shouldn't have eaten all the cookie dough my father had made to comfort me, but that wasn't the problem. The problem was that I felt cheated. First, I was forced to leave my Ironbury street gang, The Pyromaniacs. Second, the Red Sox lost their division to the Yanks. Third, Vance fell off the cliff and got all the attention. Now John Lennon was dead! My baseball world was unraveling and it seemed like everyone got lucky except me. I was stuck in Bone Harbor and had to go to school the next morning and turn in the book summary that I'd been working on for almost fifty whole minutes. Hey, you try to write a hundred words to summarize Louis L'Amour's latest Western thriller! “The good guy walked up to a ranch. The lonely, beautiful woman needed help raising her son and paying the evil landlord. The good guy killed the landlord and then left town on a black horse.” I still needed 64 words!
To make matters worse, It was almost 1981. Jeez! Anything could happen now. Pretty soon I would be ten years old, an astronomical sum. I was just eight! There would be no turning back after my tenth birthday, no getting away with shoplifting by flashing a cute smile, no more playing with dolls, and no telling the carnival ride operator that I wanted to get off; I was strapped in for the duration, at the mercy of The Man.
“Who are you? Who who? Who who?” sang the radio. I pretended I was singing the words silently in my bed, moving my lips over Roger Daltrey's lyrics. I even vocalized some of the guitar chords. Who was I,? John Lennon? Carlton Fisk? Fred Lynn? Carl Yastrzemski? Ninja Joe? There was a long list of identities to choose from. “Oggy Bleacher” was only one of many options.
“Who are you?” was the question to which I only had no answer. When Kurt visited his relatives in California he vanished for weeks and returned more worldly and exotic like he had an answer to Pete Townsend's question. Death was also like a visit to somewhere cool and John Lennon got to go. It wasn't fair. I didn't get to go anywhere and in nine hours I was going to have to navigate the bullies at the playground and defend myself against Ms. Buntrough's probing questions about American history. December 10th would be no different than December 9th. Death had to be better.
Who are you?
Longing promised me answers but Brooklyn was right: it would be over eight years before I could leave Bone Harbor in search of another velvet throne. Only then would the book reports cease along with the division problems and history reports. Then my dreams would come true. I could travel the country playing for the Boston Red Sox, side by side with Dewey, and I would spend my winters in deliciously warm Florida. I would wear my survival knife to bed if I wanted and go see Angie Dickinson movies whenever I wanted. I could sleep in late and ride my bike into a Monday afternoon. Who would stop me? Who who?
I couldn't wait to be through with school so I could pursue my own secret goals and longings. I would find out who I was. The war is no more. Only that much I knew. Who was I? Only this: A Boston Red Sox fan who believed 1981 would be The Year, the year every fan waits for and dreams of, the year all my dreams would come true.
Maybe John Lennon would come back from the dead to make Kenny Rogers stop recording music. Maybe the Hostages in Iran would be freed in time for Christmas morning. Maybe I could get Fisk to sign his rookie baseball card. Maybe Dewey would hit 62 home runs as the Red Sox won their first World Series in 63 years. Maybe I would get a horse for Christmas and be able to ride it through downtown Bone Harbor like Clint Eastwood or Jubal Sackett. Maybe I would earn a black belt in Ninjitsu and save Karen from attacking wolves. Maybe I would even get to die.
In between Plastic Ono songs, I heard the ticking of sleet on my windows. The first storm of the season had arrived. Winter was unleashed against my sanctuary, howling over the mill pond and the Basketball court, covering the Leary Field home plate with December's tears. How, I wondered, did the hobo at the dump live? Then it hit me: Maybe I would ask for that jet propulsion snow sled after all. Yes!
“Why didn’t McNamara visit the mound in the tenth inning? He never went out to talk to Schiraldi when Carter and Mitchell were on base. Knight was the guy they needed to get out but Mac sent Fisher out. Why? It's the bottom of the tenth inning in Game Six of the World Series. Can’t Mac see that now is not the time to be traditional? Everyone should have gotten on the mound and had a big rally session. I mean, the whole team should have gone to the mound and chanted. All of New England should have gotten on that goddamn mound and charged that baseball so full of juice that if would have burned a hole in Knight’s bat. There is a time for being timid and a time for taking the cat by the tail. You know what I mean, Sticky? Sticky?”
