Cardboard Ocean

by Mike McCardell

  “Great boxer,” Matty said.

  “Yeah?” Then I added, “Yeah!” as I meant to say.

  “I liked him better than those fancy fighters. He came from the streets.”

  “Pretty strong, right?”

  “Very, and you want all this stuff in a bag?”

  I nodded. A bag meant you weren’t a kid. I stepped out of the store and started off for school, but then turned around and walked home with the rumble of the elevated train behind my head and the thought of iron arms in the paper bag in my hand.

  The trouble was, I could barely read. I got through the first few sentences, then opened the soda and the candy and ate and drank and got through the next few sentences. Then I fanned the rest of the book. There were a lot of pages.

  For the rest of that week I left for school but stopped at Matty’s for a cream soda and a Three Musketeers, then turned around and went home. I read all day long, sometimes only getting a few pages done.

  What I learned was Rocky Graziano was a street punk whose father made him box his older brother to entertain his father’s friends. Rocky always got beaten until he pretended he got knocked out. It was the only way out of the fight.

  He was not Rocky Marciano who was a heavyweight and was fighting around the same time. Marciano was famous. Graziano was called a bum.

  At the end of the first week the mailman brought a postcard from the Board of Education to my mother saying that I had not been in school for five days. It said she should write a reason for my absence on the back and sign it.

  This is the candy store where we got our pretend cigarettes and Cokes, and I bought a book with a picture of a boxer on the cover and stayed home from school for two weeks to read it.

  I wrote, “Michael is sick,” and signed it as best I could in my mother’s handwriting. I wrote “Michael” because that is who it said was absent.

  By the middle of the second week of cream sodas and Three Musketeers I learned Rocky made up his last name from the Italian wine his father drank. His real name was Barbella. But what I really liked was that he got in the best shape of his life when he was shadow boxing while in jail.

  I started shadow boxing. And I got another postcard.

  “Michael has been absent eight days. Please explain his absence.”

  “Michael is still sick.”

  And I signed it in my mother’s handwriting.

  By the end of the second week I had learned that Rocky’s secret punch was just to hit the other guy so hard he knocked him out.

  And I got another postcard.

  “Michael has been absent for two weeks. Please explain why.”

  “Michael is very sick.”

  I was getting good at signing my mother’s name.

  By the end of the second week I had bought ten cream sodas and ten Three Musketeers and I was starting to love reading. I learned that Rocky’s favourite saying was, “Ahhh, don’t worry about it.” He said that every time something bad happened.

  While we were having dinner one night, the doorbell rang. I ran to get it. A man in a dark suit was standing there.

  “Are you Michael?”

  I nodded.

  “I would like to speak to your mother.”

  “She’s not home.”

  I could hear her moving behind me.

  “Who is it?”

  “I am the truant officer,” said the man in the suit.

  “What do you want?”

  The two of them were face to face. I moved back down the hallway trying to find a shadow.

  “Your son has not been in school for two weeks.”

  There was a very loud sound. It came from my mother. It sounded something like “WHAT???!!!!” followed by “MIKE!!! COME HERE!!!”

  I stepped out of the shadow.

  “What have you done?”

  She was holding several postcards.

  “This is terrible. It doesn’t even look like my writing.”

  I tried, “Ahhhh, don’t worry about it.”

  That was when I learned that Tommy had no idea what he was talking about. I went to my bed with my cheeks stinging from my mother’s hand slapping across them.

  The next morning the man in the suit was standing outside my door.

  “You don’t have to be here,” I said.

  He folded his arms across his chest.

  “I have a knockout punch,” I said.

  He shook his head with a look of pity.

  I held up my fists like Rocky did.

  “I don’t need anyone to take me to school.”

  He grabbed the front of my jacket and lifted me off the ground.

  “Don’t try to be tough with me,” he said.

  “You don’t scare me,” I said.

  He slammed my back into the wall behind me. My feet were still off the ground.

  “US Marine Corp,” he said. “You want to be tough, be a Marine. Now we will go to school.”

  When he put me down, I went on my way to Miss Johnson’s class.

  “Where have you been?” she asked.

  “Reading,” I said.

  “That’s good because we are going to spend today reading,” she said. “Who wants to take over with the sheet called ‘Country Life’?”

  She handed out mimeographed papers. You could hear the mimeograph machine cranking out one page at a time when you passed the principal’s office. Usually some kid who had done something bad had the job of turning the handle that turned the wheel that produced the papers from one stencil page. The only trouble with that was the pages were so blurry you could hardly tell what was on them.

  “We will start with the first person in row one reading the first paragraph,” said Miss Johnson.

  “Country Life” did not have any boxing in it. What’s the point of reading, I thought?

  The Party

  “We’re going to have a party in Johnny’s cellar.”

  “How?” asked Vinnie.

  “Because no one’s going to be home,” I told him. “Johnny told me. Friday night.”

  Vinnie was gleaming. He had never been to a real party before. Not one where we could have a party because no one was home. Neither had I but I wasn’t going to tell him that.

  “Parties are fun,” I said. “That’s the time when you get to be real close to girls and maybe even dance with them. Slow.”

  Vinnie’s eyes went down.

  “I don’t know how to dance.”

  “You don’t have to know,” I said. “You just dance, like they do on American Bandstand.”

  We had seen it at Dorothy’s house. Her parents had a television, ten inches, black and white, in a dark wooden box on its own special table.

  “Look, that’s the way they dance in Philadelphia,” she said.

  “I can’t see anything,” said Johnny.

  “Move the antenna around,” said Dorothy. “When a train passes, sometimes it slides off.”

  Johnny moved the rabbit ears back and forth and the picture got clearer, then it filled with television snow, then he moved it and it was clear, like magic.

  “Stop. Stop moving it,” said Joey. “You got it.”

  Then a train went by and the antenna moved and the picture went fuzzy again.

  Johnny asked Dorothy for some tape and fixed the antenna and sealed it down and we watched the girls in wide skirts and the boys in neat shirts and ironed pants. They were amazing. They all knew how to do it. None of us had ever stood next to a girl before and moved in anything except our dreams.

  But a party it would be like American Bandstand. We would dance. We would hold girls close. We would swing them around and they would come back to us like they did on television.

  We did have a party once before. Judy had it. We almost never saw Judy because she lived on the corner near the bar and her mother kept her home most of the time. But she invited us to a party and we went.

  When we told our mothers that we were going to a party each mother told us we had to have a clean sh
irt. That was step one on how to ruin a good night. A clean shirt felt so stiff. That was because our mothers put starch in the wash and the shirts did not bend and how could you have fun in a straightjacket?

  When we got to the party there was Judy and Eileen, who was a year younger than most of us, and Dorothy and Vanessa and a couple of other girls from school who were in Judy’s class.

  Standing behind them was Judy’s mother, and coming into the room was Judy’s father who drove a moving truck. We said, “Hello, Mrs. Tracy,” because we were all polite. But we were thinking, “Would you please go into the next room for a while, Mrs. Tracy?” But she never did. She disappeared only for a minute at a time to get more soda and potato chips and what can you do in a minute?

  We also wished for slow dances so we could snuggle and breathe deeply, but Mrs. Tracy seemed to have organized the records so that only fast music came out of the record player, and the girls were the only ones who could dance to that. So the boys just stood around talking about baseball and the cars we hoped to own.

  But Friday night at Johnny’s would be different. No parents. The cellar with the old coal bins that had never been cleaned out would be the party room of our dreams. It had a bare concrete floor, and bare light bulbs and an overflow sewer drain that had overflowed several times and then dried. But it didn’t matter. Girls would be there without any parents.

  We got a six-pack of Rheingold.

  “How’d you do that?” Tommy asked me.

  “My mother always drinks Rheingold. They let me have it at the deli.”

  The girls started arriving shortly after dinner. They had told their parents that they were going out for Cokes with their friends and six of them showed up. We had been waiting like hungry puppies, wrestling and falling over each other and talking about what we hoped would happen.

  “Are you sure your mother’s not home?” Vanessa asked.

  “We could run around naked and no one would know,” said Johnny.

  “Who would do that?” asked Vanessa, in a tone that left Johnny wishing he had just said “no, my mother’s not home.” But he had said something that would probably make Vanessa not talk to him for the rest of the night.

  The girls brought a stack of records and we had a 45 rpm player with a three-inch speaker on the side. It would make music we could squeeze by. We were aching, then the girls put on Bo Diddley.

  “Hey, we can’t dance to that,” Tommy tried to shout over the music, but the girls were already dancing, ignoring us.

  We stood by the coal bins with our hands in our pockets.

  “The next one will be slow,” said Vinnie. “They’re just burning off their excitement.”

  But the next record was “Maybellene.” “Why can’t you be true?” Chuck Berry shouted across the cellar.

  “Can’t you put on a slow one?” Vinnie yelled, but the girls didn’t listen and didn’t stop dancing. Vinnie and Tommy looked through the records, flipping them down like a deck of cards. “Fast, fast, fast, fast.”

  Then Tommy’s hands stopped. He pulled out a record and held it in the air like a trophy. “Hey There,” by Rosemary Clooney.

  When “Maybellene” finished he quickly put on Rosemary. “Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes.”

  It was music to hug and grope and get excited by until there was a scratch in the record and the words repeated over and over. You hugged, groped, hugged, groped, hugged. Am I hugging or groping? I am still not excited. Music is hard to understand. Then Tommy pushed the needle forward but you forgot if you were groping, or hugging, or just wishing.

  “I think I hear your mother upstairs,” said Jimmy Lee.

  “No, that’s the mice. When I’m up there they run around down here, when I come down here they run around up there,” said Johnny.

  Then came the beer. It was warm. We had to carry it one can at a time inside our shirts in case someone spotted us, so when we opened the first can it had already travelled a block squeezed between a belly and a belt and got shaken with every step.

  When the can opener went in, the beer came out, up to the ceiling and down over Judy’s hair.

  “Aaahhhgh!” Judy did not like beer on her head. “Oh God, I can’t go home like this.”

  The other girls stopped dancing and huddled around her as if she were a wounded ally. They got paper towels from the roll we had next to the chips and tried to dry her hair, then they got water and tried to wet it. They scrubbed and combed and circled her, comforting her and talking about whatever it is that girls talk about.

  I could not hear what they said because I was on the other side of the room with the boys, talking about baseball and the cars we hoped to own someday.

  The next day when we sat on the curb watching the traffic, things were different. A failure? A bomb? No way.

  “What a party. Wow,” said Vinnie.

  “Wild,” said Tommy.

  “You know, when Judy had that paper towel on her head, she looked pretty,” said Johnny, “just like she was getting out of the shower.”

  And the best part was we could have another party soon because we still had five beers stashed behind the furnace. All we had to do was wait for Johnny’s parents to visit his mother’s sister again. The only potential problem was that Johnny overheard his father saying he couldn’t stand his sister-in-law. But if he changed his mind and the girls were willing and we could find a slow record and find a way to chill the beer, we would have a time that you couldn’t believe.

  Something else happened that night. We saw a picture of Elvis on one of the record labels. Over his pouting face was a magnificent pomp of hair. It hung almost to his eyebrows like a dark cloud.

  “Looks like poop,” Vinnie said. He told us he saw the girls aahing over it and decided he hated that kind of hair.

  But on this day after the night before while we were sitting on the curb watching the trucks go by, Vinnie stuck his fingers into the front of his hair and pulled it down.

  “Whatcha doing?” asked Johnny.

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re trying to look like Elvis,” said Tommy.

  “Am not.”

  “Are so.”

  “Not.”

  “You are,” said Tommy. “I want to look like that too.”

  “Me too,” said Vinnie.

  We chipped in to buy a tube of Brylcreem, which we squeezed out onto our fingers. It was thick and hard. Then each of us rubbed a blob into our hair, which made us look like ball joints ready to be slid into sockets. When we shook our heads our hair stayed glued. We all pulled plops down over our foreheads and asked each other if we looked like Elvis.

  No, we did not look like him. No sideburns. So we went to the barber, who told us we that we would not have sideburns until we had whiskers. “And you won’t have those until you start liking girls,” he said.

  “I like girls,” said Vinnie.

  “I mean really like girls,” said the barber.

  “What do you mean ‘really’ like girls?” asked Vinnie who had images of Vanessa almost naked in his mind.

  “If you have to ask what I mean, you’re not old enough to know what I mean and you’re not old enough to have sideburns.”

  This was one of the mysteries of life. We found a cork and burned it and the next day we all had sideburns. We spent the rest of the winter rubbing tubes of Brylcreem into our hair and running Ace combs through it with globs of cream packing up on one side of the comb like a snow plough and rubbing burned cork over our cheeks to make us look like we had sideburns even if Augie the barber said we couldn’t have them.

  “You look cool.” We kept saying that to each other to prove we did.

  Months had gone by and I noticed Vinnie and Joey were using less and less cork and both were spending more time talking to Vanessa. Joey and Vinnie were almost a year older than me.

  We never had that second party, and worse than that, when we went to look for the beer a few months later, it was gone. Johnny hadn’t take
n it and no one else could get into his cellar. Except he remembered that when his furnace broke down his Uncle Ted came to fix it. His uncle could fix anything and he was usually very fast at fixing things.

  But this time he spent a long time in the cellar and when he came upstairs he said he had to use the bathroom badly.

  “I like root beer better anyway,” said Johnny. So Jimmy Lee and Johnny and I got a can of root beer from Matty’s and sat on the curb under the El and talked about Elvis and girls and parties and we passed the can around, and none of us ever wiped off the mouth of the can before we drank. We didn’t have to. We were buddies who partied together.

  The Queen of Marbles

  Elvis came on big. He came on like we had never known anyone to come on like him. We had bubble gum cards with Elvis.

  “Do you think Elvis or Frankie will last longer?” Tommy asked but Vinnie was sitting next to him with a stack of comics. We were on the stoop of Johnny’s place waiting for Johnny to come out.

  Dorothy walked by.

  “Who do you think is going to last longer? Frankie or Elvis?”

  “I love Elvis. He sings great, and I love the way he . . . ”

  She stopped talking. She wiggled her bottom. I had never seen a girl wiggle her bottom. I thought I was going to explode. I thought that was the most wonderful sight I had ever seen. I was in love with Dorothy, and her bottom.

  “I love the way Elvis wiggles his bottom,” she said.

  “But will he beat out Sinatra?” asked Vinnie.

  Dorothy walked up the steps and stood in front of us. She was blowing bubbles with bubble gum. She had one leg on a high step and the other on a lower one. Her jeans were tight. I was going to die.

  “Frankie is old,” she said. “My mother listens to him. But I love Elvis. And I am going to listen to Elvis as long as I live so he will beat out Frankie.”

  I wanted to have a long life with her. I slid my fingers into the front of my hair and tried to pull it down lower over my forehead.

  “You think I look like Elvis?” I asked.