by Mark Salzman
My dad’s approach seemed to lie somewhere between a Zen master’s (“Come to think of it, this broken leg allows me to experience a new kind of physical sensation, and presents new challenges for mobility!”) and my own (“That’s it; if my life doesn’t get better RIGHT NOW, I’m going to shut down entirely and spend the rest of my life letting EVERYBODY ON EARTH know what a shithole the world really is”). My dad hoped for the best, but when the worst started to happen instead, he rarely struggled against it. He would stare right at that flat tire, repair estimate or threatening cloud and stand very still while the frustration first appeared as a little dot between his eyes, then spread like india ink through tissue paper, meeting no resistance at all. He could stand still only because he knew that the frustration would eventually spread thin enough to fade away, and it was best to just get the whole process over with as soon as possible. If you clung too desperately to the hope that you could turn things around, you would merely prolong the suffering (making it all the more painful when you finally did give up)—or worse, become pathetic, like obviously guilty criminals who insist on their innocence long past the time when such protestations can do them any good.
At that time I felt that Dad’s policy of nonresistance toward fate, though it had certain virtues, also had one major unacceptable weakness: if a golden opportunity to turn his life into his dreams come true ever did present itself, he would not recognize it for what it was because it would undoubtedly come to him heavily disguised as possible misfortune. Every teenager knows that great victories, intellectual or otherwise, only come after great sacrifices and risks. In fact, teenagers know this better than any adult; when we are between the ages of thirteen and twenty-one, we are biologically designed to wonder how anyone could possibly choose the road of moderation and stability, with its unavoidably bland scenery, over the risky but incomparably superior path of taking things to extremes. Because we know which path is superior—every biography ever written tells us so—we cannot imagine that we could ever suffer consequences that would make us regret trying to break on through to the other side. Bad things undoubtedly happened to some of us along the way, but they would always happen to other, stupider, weaker people. The classic example, of course, is that every teenager drives recklessly on occasion. He knows that the faster he drives, the higher his chances of being in an accident, but he is also completely confident that he won’t have an accident because he honestly believes the statistics will be fed by some other kid, some idiot with bad reflexes, a bad sense of timing or some as-yet-undetermined flaw.
As you get older your perspective changes. It’s not that you want to avoid risk altogether; it’s that your sense of being connected to other people and even objects expands over the years, so that you feel you have more to lose; the risks come to seem riskier, while the potential gains come to represent less and less of a dramatic improvement over what you already have. Until you do get older, though, you crave drama, and your metabolism practically guarantees that you’ll create some. All I could think of when my dad told me to get used to things like not being able to “die well” was, if instead of going into the tent at the sight of that cloud he had jumped into the car and raced up the coast at ninety miles an hour instead of his chronic fifty-five, he might have found a patch of clear sky and seen that eclipse, and think of how different his life would be today! Why couldn’t he see that?
I had tried and failed to become enlightened, and knew somehow that my days in the lotus position were behind me, but that didn’t mean I had to abandon my quest for perfect happiness, I just had to try a new approach. Just after entering the ninth grade I made a new friend, and he provided me with that new approach.
5
No longer able to practice kung fu in the basement, and wanting more privacy than the front yard could afford, I settled on a clearing in the woods a mile from our house. It was perfect: a patch of hard, level ground next to a small lake with no road access, so I almost always had it to myself. One afternoon, as I was practicing the Three Tiger Forms—shadowboxing routines that include a special kind of punch known as the tiger’s claw, a blow with the open palm followed by a downward tearing motion with the fingers—a boy my age appeared out of the woods and marched purposefully toward me. As he got closer, I saw that it was Michael Dempsey, the most feared boy in our school, whose father had died when he was very young and who had been trained since infancy in the arts of helmetless tackle football, blackjack, boxing, Greco-Roman wrestling, broomstick fencing, archery and darts by his four older brothers. He had learned to drive by the age of five (on a power mower), knew how to aim a Roman candle by the age of seven and had broken both his legs when he was eight trying to pole-vault over a picnic table, lengthwise, using a five-foot length of copper pipe as a pole. His pedigree was phenomenal; by the time he entered the public school system, his four older brothers had already achieved mythical status in our town. Each one had proved himself, through exploits both famous and infamous, to be daring, resourceful and virtually indestructible. Together, the brothers were described variously as the Immortals, the Golden Horde (the name of the Mongol army at its peak) and, as once overheard at a Beer Garden event, Hell’s Eagle Scouts.
For many years I, along with many of the other boys in our elementary school, thought that the Dempsey brothers ate human flesh for strength and drank gasoline for stamina. I had been told that the three older brothers once kidnapped a kid who had been rude to their mother (she worked in the school cafeteria and everyone loved her), drove him out of state in the trunk of a car, stripped him naked, shaved his head and left him to walk home. Another story went that a high school dropout boy with no parents at all went to their house for a keg party and tackle-football game, during which he purposely tripped either the number two or number three Dempsey brother (this varied according to who was telling the story), was invited to have a look at their basement later that day and was never seen again.
I had spent a large part of my elementary school recess time either running away from Michael Dempsey or trying to prove myself worthy of being a member of his gang, the Ebers (a name he’d made up whose meaning was never revealed to me), rather than its favorite target. As early as 1968 my position with him was shaky. That year one of our teachers tried to encourage us to participate in democracy by having us choose a presidential candidate—Nixon or Humphrey—learn about him and then support him in a class debate planned for the morning before the election. I had chosen Humphrey and Michael had chosen Nixon, and it so happened that we were assigned to be debating opponents. I gave my little speech first, but when it came Michael’s turn his face reddened and he said, “I, uh … thought we were supposed to do this tomorrow,” leading the teacher to scold him in front of the class for not taking important tasks seriously. I was dead meat. Sure enough, at recess he enlisted the help of all the other preadolescent Republicans, dragged me out to the woods, tied me to a tree and wrapped me from head to toe in Nixon bumper stickers.
In the fifth grade Michael went through a gunpowder phase, grinding huge quantities of it with a mortar and pestle taken from one of his brothers’ chemistry sets. He was forever lighting piles of it in the school parking lot and showing everyone how the intense heat could actually melt asphalt or even concrete. Inevitably he came up with a more ambitious project, though: he announced his intention of making a large bomb. He needed a proper vessel, so I, hoping to ingratiate myself with him, gave him my old GI Joe doll. Michael accepted the offering and eagerly stuffed it from head to toe with his homemade powder. Then he drilled a small hole in the top of Joe’s head, put a fuse through it, and told everyone to meet him in the cattail swamp at the edge of the school playing fields.
Michael stood the doll up against a piece of driftwood and lit the fuse, then ran over to where the rest of us were crouched behind a large rock. The fuse hissed and spluttered; then the lit part of it disappeared into GI Joe’s head. There was a pause, and we all started to say “Awww!” thinking that th
e bomb was a failure, when all of a sudden a flash of light appeared over Joe’s head. In an instant the flash became a tremendous violent flame at least four feet high; instead of blowing up, GI Joe became something of an upside-down rocket, with his head acting as the nozzle. The intense heat seemed to act on the plastic all at once, and his standing figure melted instantly, like the Wicked Witch, leaving nothing but a huge cloud of white smoke and a pile of frantically bubbling sulfur on the ground. Everyone was laughing except Michael, who was once again red in the face with anger. The last thing I remember was his punching me in the stomach for ruining his bomb.
Later that year Michael went through a BB-gun phase. Every boy in our school had a BB gun, and every boy had promised his parents never to point his gun at a living thing, but of course in no time every boy was pointing his gun at birds and squirrels. It was Michael, however, who had the revolutionary idea of using the guns to shoot at other kids. It began with a game called Execute the Prisoner. I, along with two other boys who were also not Ebers, was the prisoner; Michael was always the executioner. As prisoner, you stood next to the executioner, and at a signal from a third person, you started to run as fast as you could. The executioner was supposed to count to five before pumping up his rifle and shooting you in the back.
This worked OK for a while; the distance you gained by running meant that when the BB hit you, it burned as if you’d been stung by a wasp and left a welt, but was bearable. Unfortunately, Michael was the sort of person who got bored easily. One day we were playing Execute the Prisoner and he managed to pump up his gun beforehand without anyone’s noticing. When the signal was given and poor Donald—thankfully, it wasn’t me that time—started to run, Michael instantly lowered the rifle and shot, hitting Donald in the back of the thigh. Michael was delighted with the results, but Donald was not—he never played with us again—so it was decided that in order to always have a fresh supply of prisoners, we had to make the game more fair. That was when Michael, who loved all things related to battle, opened his eyes wide and said, “BB-gun wars! Why didn’t I think of it before!”
Michael was a bit of troublemaker, but he was a creative and, thanks to the examples set by his older brothers, a highly organized troublemaker. He loved regulations and strategies. Over the next week he worked out the rules of combat (which he adapted from his favorite board games The Battle of Britain, Dunkirk and Sink the Bismarck), scouted a perfect location, drew a detailed map of it and worked out a battle plan for how he and his Allied Forces could surround and crush their enemies. To my dismay, when the time came for picking teams, I was assigned to the Axis army.
Michael had chosen the Allied and Axis teams not on the basis of any aptitude any of us might have for leadership, running speed or stealth, but according to how strong our BB guns were. The Allies had the good guns, operated either by pump action or, in one case, a CO2 cartridge semiautomatic, whereas the Axis powers wielded “My Very First BB Gun” Daisy spring-type rifles—in other words, pieces of shit. If I was lucky enough to hit one of the Allied soldiers, my BB would bounce off his nylon windbreaker without even raising a welt. When one of the Allies hit one of us, on the other hand, everybody knew it from the sound of our wretched squealing.
We held these war games on weekends, usually six boys to a team. Our most serious mishap occurred when one boy attempted a daring flanking attack by sneaking across an ice-covered lake behind enemy lines. Peeking over the wall of our fort, we watched him as he moved stealthily across the lake in a half crouch. One moment he was there, the next moment we heard a crack, a splash, and he was gone. He managed to get himself out of the water, but lost his gun and nearly froze to death when his captors insisted that he stay locked in “prisoner-of-war camp”—an abandoned Chevy Nova—until the battle was over. That was when I first discovered that people really did turn blue when they were cold.
Fortunately, before any of us lost an eye or worse, the commander in chief of the Allies developed a new interest. One of his brothers had brought home a .22 pistol, and that was where the rest of us bowed out. I saw Michael only once during this phase of his development; the Golden Horde had found an abandoned station wagon and driven it out to one of the lakes for an adventure. I’d heard about it beforehand at school—most Dempsey events were publicized well in advance—and got to the lake just in time to see them driving the station wagon, by now shot full of holes, at full speed over ditches and into boulders. In a rare display of concern for safety, they were all wearing football helmets. The finale came when they got out of the car, pointed it at the lake, placed a cinder block on the gas pedal and jammed it into gear. To this day, fishermen get their hooks stuck on its submerged body.
My next series of encounters with Michael occurred in the sixth grade, when I heard that he and his brothers were building gas-engined model airplanes and solid-fuel model rockets and sending them off into space from their back porch. Once again, hoping to become friendly with Michael, I made a sacrifice: I persuaded my parents to buy me a small model rocket, which I worked on for several days. When the last fin had been glued on and the last decal had dried, I took it over to Dempsey headquarters, and sure enough, three of his brothers and a whole bunch of older boys were spread out on the grass in lawn chairs, drinking beer from a keg and using an electric launchpad to send the rockets up. I handed my rocket to Michael and he laughed. “This dinky thing? Come on, let’s give it to Frank. He’ll customize it.” He banged on the door of the garage, and when it opened there stood the fourth Dempsey brother, Frank, who had long black hair and a Zapata-style mustache, and who could bench-press over three hundred pounds. He must have been sixteen at the time. Frank was the brother who could tell you from memory virtually anything about any major European battle occurring within the last thousand years. Michael handed him the rocket and I swelled with pride. It was my first personal audience with one of the Immortals; I felt like a buck private having his rifle examined by General Patton. Frank looked at my rocket solemnly, ran his fingers over his mustache and finally said, “This’ll never reach Berlin, gentlemen. The free world hangs in the balance—we must act immediately.”
He led us through their garage and into a dark room known as the Laboratory, which held his weight-lifting equipment and explosives. He put my rocket on the workbench and pulled its solid-fuel engine out from the tube. “Mr. Von Braun doesn’t use these, you can be sure of that,” he said, tossing the tiny engine into a wastebasket. The man at the hobby shop who sold it to me had said it was the largest engine designed for that scale rocket. Frank opened up a wooden chest filled with rocket engines, gas-powered model engines, fireworks, M80s (quarter sticks of dynamite) and a few unspecified devices rigged with underwater fuses. Pulling out a huge rocket engine identified as Big Bertha, he attempted to insert it into my rocket but without success. “This will require a minor technical adjustment,” he said, grinning. He clamped my rocket to the desk and used a pair of heavy shears to slit open the bottom. He managed to stuff the huge engine inside, wrapped black electrical tape around the rocket to firm everything up, and then took it out to the launchpad.
The rest of the Golden Horde and their foot soldiers were sitting around the keg with no shirts on and big plastic cups full of brew propped on the grass next to them. “This is strictly experimental,” Frank announced. “Everybody behind the ramparts.” He was referring to a pile of old tires and garbage cans set up near the porch. Once everyone had found proper cover, Frank handed me the electrical switch that would ignite my rocket. “The young lieutenant will have the honor of sending his rocket into space,” he said with dignified gravity. There was one thing about the Dempsey brothers that you had to admire: they all had a terrific sense of ceremony.
“You mean blowing it to smithereens,” someone yelled out from behind the ramparts, but Frank didn’t crack a smile.
“Give us a countdown, Lieutenant,” he advised me, then took his place behind a car.
I counted down and pressed the button
. A huge flame shot out of the rocket—not unlike what had happened to GI Joe a year earlier—and the rocket blasted off the pad, but then, in a curlicue of smoke and fire about ten feet in diameter, hooked right over, dived into the ground and exploded.
“Heeeeehah!” the D brothers and their friends yelled, clinking their beer mugs together in a grand toast and moving back to their lawn chairs. I was walking over to the smoking hole in the ground that had only moments before been a carefully painted rocket when Michael rushed up alongside me, patted me on the back and said, “It’s too bad about that, but it was death with honor! Honor was maintained, even to the ultimate sacrifice!” Glad that for a change he was patting me on the back instead of punching me in the stomach, I decided the loss of the rocket was worth it.
At last I had won Michael’s approval, but was not able to enjoy it for long. Two days after the sacrifice of my rocket I rode my bicycle to his house and sat out on the back porch with him while he blew up a model tank submerged in an inflatable swimming pool. So that was what the underwater-fuse devices were for. Suddenly an older boy, with a shock of white hair and freckles, whom I had never seen before got on my bicycle without a word and started playing roughly with the gear lever. “He’s wrecking your bike,” Michael said. Realizing that I had to act or lose my new status as someone worthy of his company, I called out to the older boy, “Hey, cut it out!”
The boy stopped fiddling with the gears, sized me up and laughed out loud. “Big talk, little man,” he said, and, as if to show me how unimpressed he was, started moving the gears even more roughly than before. Against all better judgment, but emboldened by my new alliance with the youngest member of the Immortals, I shouted after him, “Big man, little talk!” I turned and smiled nervously at Michael, hoping he would be pleased, but he was pointing behind me. Before I could turn around I felt myself being lifted by the collar and being spun around. The older boy held me in the air for a few seconds, put his face right up against mine and said, “That was a big mistake, punk.” Then he threw me off the porch.