Knuckleheads

by Jeff Kass

  Sylvia’s a beautiful woman, if a bit less so than when I first met her, cheeks more hollowed now, neck still elegant but beginning to hint at places where skin will eventually flap. When she reads though, she’s stunning, her face a portrait of deep devotion, as if the words on the page were written expressly for her. Maybe she knows this, how stunning she looks, the mid-morning light from the lone waiting-room window bronzing her. She reads and her hand brushes her teacup, teasing it with her fingers as if she’s petting a dog.

  It’s not a long article and Sylvia reads quickly, much faster than I do, so it’s less than two minutes before the spell of my watching her is broken by her sharp intake of breath. She’s reached the part where The Naked Guy—Andrew Martinez, the article says—suffocates himself in a jail cell with a plastic bag. “Damn,” she says. “Whoa.”

  I’d like her to stop holding the teacup at this point and to reach for my hand, but we haven’t touched each other in weeks so I don’t expect it, and it doesn’t happen. When she finishes the article a few seconds later, she hands the magazine back to me. “I didn’t know about the rocks thing,” she says. “Did you ever see that, what the article says about the rocks? I never saw piles of rocks anywhere.”

  “No,” I say. “I didn’t either. I don’t remember anything that happened to him after he got kicked out. I didn’t even know his real name.”

  “I did,” Sylvia says. “Andrew. I remember that.”

  For a moment, I’m jealous, as if Sylvia had something going with him back then, but the feeling passes quickly. It was a long time ago when The Naked Guy was famous, when the fuzzed-out pictures of him wearing just a backpack as he walked to class were regular features on the national news, and now, right now, our son’s getting interviewed to see whether he’s beyond redemption. I drum my fingers, quietly, exaggerated and in slow-motion, against the plastic chair, and pray that in addition to the YMCA gestures, that at some point I taught Josh to sit up straight, to make eye contact from beneath that greasy mat.

  Sylvia and I both knew The Naked Guy. Or, at least, we saw him a lot. We were students at Berkeley in the early nineties and met in a class that The Naked Guy was in too. It’s true what the article says, he was very polite about his nakedness. He used to spread a sweatshirt out—a red hooded one that said Lifeguard—on the seat in the lecture hall before he sat down. That’s what grossed Sylvia out the most about him, the sweatshirt.

  “He better wash that thing, like, every day,” she wrote to me once in a note during a lecture. “Which thing are you talking about?” I wrote back, even though I knew what she meant. She laughed and almost spit out her gum and the professor glanced up at us from his lectern and Sylvia’s cheeks turned red too. I wanted to kiss her right then, and did later that night, for the first time, after we went out for Indian food. “Spicy,” she said, one hand patting the collar of my shirt.

  The class was a strange one, the professor trying hard to be odd, but actually winding up fairly standard-copy for that campus. A couple hundred people were in the class, including The Naked Guy. It was called “Man and His Legs: A History of the Evolution of Military Transportation,” and it was definitely one of those only-at-Berkeley classes, propagated on the idea that the less we as a species had to use our legs in military combat, the more capable we became of killing each other in mass numbers. The hippie professor clearly floated the agenda that we should all surrender our material possessions and spend our days strolling Thoreau-style through the woods. Then we wouldn’t be able to sit on chairs in the cold caverns of nuclear submarines and launch missiles with the press of a button that could vaporize thousands of people instantly, our own legs inert beneath gun-metal desks.

  “Think about that,” the professor repeated about a billion times. “Here is Man stationary. He no longer has to use his legs to run from his enemy because he’s far enough away that his enemy cannot strike him. He just sits there and kills. He could be legless and still cause massive destruction.”

  I thought the guy was naïve. Sylvia mostly was steamed he kept saying “man” all the time. “What about women?” she’d say to me, sometimes with a wink if she were in a spicy mood. “Don’t we have legs too?”

  “Thank God you do,” I’d say back. We both loved the irony of a class called Man and His Legs that featured an actual man-student who attended class with his long, bare legs—the whole vast landscape of them, from hip-bone to toes—angling out from his seat. You’d have thought the professor would have appreciated The Naked Guy, how he was a living, breathing example of someone rejecting materialism, but he seemed nearly as irritated with him as he was with Sylvia’s laugh. When The Naked Guy raised his hand to comment or ask a question—which was surprisingly often—the professor would cut him off after barely a few words. “Yes, yes,” he’d say. “But, no, no, you don’t have it quite right.”

  “He’s rude,” Sylvia wrote. “The Guy’s already naked. Does he have to be humiliated too?”

  I thought it was probably the professor who felt humiliated. He’d probably never signed on to have a guy with no clothes ask him questions. Sylvia said he was just jealous, that The Naked Guy was practicing what he only had the guts to preach. “Hypocrite!” she wrote another time.

  It could have been, though, that the professor was irritated because The Naked Guy always spent the first ten minutes of each lecture eating. Nothing particularly wrong with someone chowing down in class, but the guy was nude. We tried to be nonchalant about it, but we couldn’t help but be fascinated by everything he did. Half the class would watch him eat. He had a wide mouth and huge bright teeth, and the event was a complicated process. In the same careful way he’d spread his sweatshirt on his seat before sitting down, he’d retrieve a paper bag from his backpack and unpack his lunch. It felt like elementary school, the same thing every day, an apple, a carton of milk, and what looked like a homemade peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He’d eat them in the same order too, as if he were superstitious about it—half the apple first, then the sandwich, then the milk, then the rest of the apple.

  “I bet he can’t buy food anywhere,” Sylvia wrote. “It’s one thing to go to class naked, but a restaurant can just kick you out. A restaurant can just say, hey, we don’t want any naked people in here.”

  “Health hazard probably,” I wrote back.

  “I bet he’d like a burrito,” she said. “Can you imagine going to school in Berkeley and not being able to buy a burrito?”

  I tried and grew immediately, intensely sad. There were four burrito shops on every block in Berkeley, all of them delicious. Not being able to go into any of them felt something like not being able to date any of the beautiful women on campus. That too was a matter of much speculation. If The Naked Guy did date anyone, it wasn’t another Berkeley student. He was an attractive dude but, face it, who’d want to be seen giving a goodbye kiss to a naked person on the quad before class? What if the kiss grew passionate and something started to twitch?

  The guy was basically an ambulatory statue—a conversation piece, not a person.

  “Let’s buy him a burrito,” I wrote. “Let’s get here early one day and drop it off for him.” We knew he’d be sitting in the same place. Once The Naked Guy staked out a seat in a lecture hall, it was his for the rest of the semester. Sweatshirt or not.

  The next day Sylvia and I met for lunch at El Guapo, and, after we finished eating, returned to the counter to order a burrito to go. “What kind should we get?” I asked.

  “Grilled veggie,” Sylvia said. “Guy won’t wear clothes because he thinks it’s immoral. He’s gotta be a vegetarian.”

  “All right,” I said, then waved her money away and paid for The Naked Guy’s burrito as if I were some kind of gallant knight. We left it for him on his seat with a note that read, “This one’s for you, Naked Guy. It’s a veggie burrito. Thought you might like it. From Greg and Sylvia in the back.”

  We were giddy when he walked in and placed his backpack on the floor, th
en went to spread the sweatshirt. He seemed to pause for a moment as if he didn’t know what to make of the package on his seat, as if he wondered if maybe someone else had decided to sit there, but then he saw the note and read it. Next he picked up the burrito and examined it, squeezing it tenderly in his big hands. His expression was skeptical, as if he feared someone were playing a joke on him and, for a moment, we worried he wouldn’t eat it. But then he unwrapped it from its foil, sniffed it, and bit into one end. We watched him chew. It didn’t seem to matter that he was breaking his tradition of eating the contents of his homemade lunch in a particular order. He gobbled the thing in about five bites, wiped a glop of sour cream from his chin, and turned around with an enormous little kid smile and proffered a thumbs-up to the back row. “Good call on the veggie,” I wrote to Sylvia. “Looks like you made The Naked Guy happy.”

  “I have some experience with that,” she wrote. “Making naked guys happy.”

  I could hardly disagree, not then or later, after we made love in her apartment that night before watching David Letterman. It was probably the greatest moment in my life so far when she grinned at me and whispered, “You’re a better naked guy.”

  We graduated in the spring and got engaged shortly thereafter. I asked Sylvia while we were hiking through the Tule Elk Reserve in Point Reyes. She was hungry and wondered if I would pass her some trail mix from my knapsack. “Only if you marry me,” I said.

  Is there a more glorious sight than the woman you adore, her long legs tanned and sweating, standing at the golden crest of a California hillside, looking down at a grazing herd of prodigiously antlered and endangered deer, ceremoniously spraying an entire bag of trail mix to the wind as if she’s spreading the ashes of a deceased loved one?

  “It’s eleven miles back to the car and that’s the only food we had,” I said.

  “Still want to marry me?” she said.

  “More than eating.”

  By the time The Naked Guy got kicked out of school, we were in San Jose and I’d begun working for Neil, another classmate who’d started Org.com, a company that developed software for on-line calendars and address books. Maybe it was then things began to fall apart for us.

  We read about the university’s ruling in the Mercury News. Sylvia was furious. “We should do something,” she said. “It’s not fair. The Naked Guy never bothered anyone.”

  “He bothered that professor.”

  “That guy was a prick. We need to do something.”

  “What?” I said. “What can we do?”

  “Protest. Be naked all day. Write a letter to the editor. Something.”

  “Can we be naked later? I have to go to work.”

  This is how it happens. Your wife suggests being naked and you decide to go to the office. You go back to Berkeley sometimes for football games or to buy used records or to get high and you never notice piles of rocks in the streets that The Naked Guy built to stop traffic and to arm himself because he thought the CIA was after him. Pretty soon you’re following Neil to Michigan because he says, look, everyone else is already in the Bay, there’s no one doing this in the Rust Belt, and you think maybe he’s right, and then here you are living in Canton and no one knows how to make a decent burrito and you never did anything, never even wrote a letter.

  You’ve never cheated either, but lately you’ve begun to think about it.

  There’s a new woman at the office. She’s eager and admires you. She’s fleshier than Sylvia, more bountiful. She drinks coffee, not tea: tall sugared drinks with clouds of whipped cream. She holds them chest-high and asks you about your family. Your average Midwestern tribe, you tell her. Pretty wife. Smart kid. Nothing special.

  Josh had a sophisticated system. If he had pills to sell, he’d wear his book bag slung over his left shoulder. Kids would know to meet him in the library during lunch. He hung out in the paperback area, in a corner hidden by a rotating kiosk of S.E. Hinton novels. He only got caught because it was middle school. Sold two tabs to a boy who went mentally airborne and broke up with his girlfriend in the cafeteria, in front of her friends. The girl was humiliated and, to get back at the boy, told the principal he was stoned. The kid ratted Josh out so he wouldn’t get expelled.

  I was annoyed when my secretary pulled me from the meeting. More pissed when she said Sylvia was on the phone, urgent. What the hell could be wrong now? But then Silvia was saying something about Josh and drugs, and when she told me we had to go to the police station, I thought she was delusional. When she began to cry, a loud rasp in my ear, I told her the whole thing was her fault. “Too damn permissive,” I barked.

  “How would you know?” she yelled back. “You’re never home. You don’t even know him.”

  It’s true. Before we searched Josh’s bedroom and found pills and about a dozen bags of marijuana, I hadn’t been in there for maybe two years. We have a big house. It’s down the block from Neil’s and not as big as his, but almost, and we have the same architect. Org.com donates ten percent of its profits to Green Tech research and both our back porches are built with recycled timber. We live at the end of a cul-de-sac. Our yard rolls down a steep hill and from our back bedroom it looks like we can see forever. Sunsets are majestic. For two years, I returned home after work and sat at my retro gun-metal desk in the study, my own long legs inert, and I didn’t set foot in my son’s room once.

  It almost seems too easy. Find a program, drop off your son, read in the waiting room, shake the doctors’ hands, go home. Maybe I wanted it to be harder. Maybe I wanted us to struggle for a while, maybe two weeks of missing work, of driving all over the damn place looking for answers, lost, unhappy, sick from fried road food. Lots of mud and gas stations and blurred vision and something that feels like an epiphany.

  But maybe the ride home is miserable enough. The empty back seat kills me. I feel like we took our cat to the shelter where they put animals to sleep and we’re returning home without his body. Like we cowered from the job and let the minimum-wage high school kid cremate him while we sat in the waiting room. Sylvia, her hair over her eyes, head leaned against the window, looks like Josh. I reach for her hand as we pull into our driveway. She ignores me.

  It’s dark now.

  Since we’ve been home, I’ve sat at the gun-metal desk. No sounds have left my mouth. Fingers numb, eyes glazed, I force myself to heave my legs from the chair and stumble upstairs. Each step is an absurd task, my feet like giant balloons filled with lead. I stagger into the bedroom, but I can’t get into bed. Sleeping near my wife seems like lying next to a glacier. She comes out of the bathroom and pulls back the covers. She’s holding a book but doesn’t open it. For a long time, she looks at me.

  I’m pathetic, a dead discolored monument. If the house fell down around me, I’d still be here, rooted, birds and rodents shitting on my shoulders. The hinges of my jaw feel like chains holding a ten-ton drawbridge that hasn’t opened for centuries. I can hardly push words out, but I want badly, so badly, to talk.

  “The Naked Guy is dead,” I say.

  Sylvia keeps looking at me for another minute before her eyes soften. I think maybe there’s some kind of opening. My fingers feel as if they’ve turned to stone, but I force them to move. I unbuckle my belt. It’s an effort because I’ve gotten so flabby, and because my fingers are thick rocks, but somehow I manage to wriggle out of my jeans and boxers, to pull off my shirt.

  My wife doesn’t look away, doesn’t turn to her book. At last, she swings her feet off the bed, walks toward me slowly and begins to unbutton her top. Then she steps out of her pants and underwear. We turn to the window. We don’t hold hands—there’s still a distance between us, that whole sonless drive back from Ohio—but we’re naked now.

  We stand in the cold and shiver, looking west.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many thanks to Steve Gillis and Dan Wickett for believing in these stories and to Matt Bell for making them sing (or grunt, or whatever it is they do). Much gratitude as well to David
Marshall Chan, Lewis Robinson, Lesléa Newman, Alan Davis, Mike White, Baron Wormser, Richard Hoffman, Joan Connor, Scott Beal, Karen Smyte and Sarah Andrew-Vaughn for helping me along the way and to Junot Diaz, Julie Orringer, Adam Mansbach, Steve Amick, Davy Rothbart and Laura Kasischke for showing me how to do the thing right. Constant inspiration comes from Roger Bonair-Agard, Patricia Smith, Kevin Coval, Patrick Rosal, Aracelis Girmay, Regie Gibson, Ross Gay, Tim Seibles, Ben Cohen, Jon Sands and Jeff McDaniel and, of course, all the students who bring dazzle to their own pages including, but not limited to: Angel Nafis, Maggie and Coert Ambrosino, Caronae Howell, Big Ben Alfaro, Adam Falkner, Molly Raynor, Lauren Whitehead, Gahl and Jon Liberzon, Mike and Chris Moriarty, Mike Kulick, Daniel Bigham, Aimée Le, Fiona Chamness, Paco, Matt Dagher-Margosian, Maggie Hanks, Erin Murphy, Courtney Whitler, Arhm Choi, Erica Rosbe, Claire Forster, Carlina Duan, Emma Hamstra, Emily Berry, Sara Ryan, Glenna Benitez, Anthony Zick, Kate Rogow, Beth Johnson and Allison Kennedy.

  Thanks also to invaluable friends and supporters: Pamela Waxman, Lisa Dengiz, Julie Cohen, JR, David Saxen and Nancy Puttkamer, Nancy and Drake Ambrosino, Kathy and David Falkner, Ken and Laura Raynor, Nina and Gary Rogow, Lori Roddy, John Weiss, Milt Liu, Michael Kim, Joe Eagleeye, Marty Shaffer, Brad Harris, Doug Petraco, Keith Goggin, Tracy Rosewarne, Ellen Stone and the Pi-Hi English Department.

  Big ups to Andy, Jimmy and Laura for growing up in the same circumstances, to Joan and Steve Kass for raising us and to Julius and Sam for willing to be raised.

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