Boy Wonders

by Cathal Kelly

  I’d long since graduated. I gave my brother the same advice our mother had given me—hit back. But he was smaller and there were more of them.

  My mother caught me in the middle of one of these useless pep talks. I may have been trying to show him how to throw a punch (as if I knew myself, which I didn’t).

  When my brother left, my mother got right up on top of me, chin in my chest, and said, “What are you going to do about this?”

  I had no idea. What was she asking?

  “I want you to find them and hurt them.”

  Stupidly, I went back to the “this’ll mean trouble” excuse.

  “He’s your brother. You have to protect him. That’s your job. Find them and get them.”

  Well, I thought, as long as I have parental permission.

  I wrangled up a bunch of my friends, who were delighted at the prospect of constructing some sort of ambush. My brother gave us the route. As Dino once had, my brother’s tormentors regularly followed him home. We skipped our last class and waited around a corner for Brendan to arrive. Five minutes after the bell, he came steaming around the bend, eyes wide, voice cracking, close to tears.

  “They’re coming! They’re coming! Right now!”

  I was stunned at the sight of him. I had never seen him scared or vulnerable.

  Of course, he and I fought. We fought constantly, like cats in too close a proximity. On a couple of occasions, we’d really hurt each other. But there was no fear in it. Both of us understood our fights had limits. They would end and life would resume as normal. When you are afraid, you can’t see that. You think the worst is always just about to happen. That sort of fear corrodes your soul.

  Seeing him infected with it enraged me.

  The plan had been to shake these kids up, shoot a little scare into them. They were two or three years younger than us, weaker. It wasn’t a fair fight. But as they came around the corner—a little posse of four or five of them, smug looks on their faces, predatory—I lost control. I ran up and smashed the first one I saw in the face. He fell. The others froze, confused. My friends, working on my cue, descended on them like wolves. They were all on the ground, writhing, within seconds. Getting the boots. Having their backpacks opened and the contents scattered about. People on top of them screaming in their faces.

  One of them was wearing a coonskin cap—an anachronistic touch even back then. My friend Jimmy took it as a trophy and afterward wore it often. When I see him now in my mind’s eye, it is impossible to do it without picturing that ridiculous hat tipped over his right eye.

  The bullies were down on the ground, whimpering, begging. One wet his pants. My brother was standing off to the side, gulping air.

  “Which one is in charge?” I asked him.

  My brother pointed to the biggest kid. The little prick was crying. His lips were caked in snot. I picked him off the ground, got hold of his hair, turned his face toward Brendan, leaned in so that we were cheek-to-cheek and said, “That’s my brother. If you ever touch him again, I will find out where you live and come there and kill you.”

  And that was that. They didn’t just stop bothering my brother. He told me later that he’d never seen them again. They’d found another way to get home. It was an awful thing to do and I don’t think I’ve ever felt as proud. This was family. This is what it meant to be together in something. Really, truly together.

  My mother never asked about it. As ever, she knew without having to ask.

  In high school, fighting had become sport for us. It was a way of testing ourselves and each other. I think we did it so that we had something to bind us together. It was a military impulse that had no outlet in the civilized world of school or work. Four or five of us would have a bunch to drink in a park and strut up and down Bloor Street after dark, longing for someone to look at us funny.

  I’d spend the week looking forward to these late-night prowlings.

  We were thuggish, but we weren’t bullies. We didn’t single people out. We wanted an even fight with someone who was up for it. Even when you’re sixteen, that’s not easy to find. The resulting skirmishes were rare and didn’t amount to much.

  We’d run into an equally numbskulled band of teenagers. Someone would say something as the groups passed. Everyone turned to eye each other. There would be a bunch of “What the fuck are you looking at?” and “You want to go?”

  Another fight lesson—the guy who is doing most of the talking is going to lose. Because he doesn’t really want to fight. He’s hoping that tough talk is enough to spare him his blushes.

  At most, there’d be pushing and shoving, a few punches that didn’t connect, people running toward each other like a flock of swallows diving toward ground, then pulling back at the last instant. After a few seconds, we’d use the first distraction—an over-interested passing adult or the sound of a siren in the distance—as an excuse to back away, taunting each other from a distance. This childish pantomime made us feel tough. We were ridiculous.

  One of us was tough, though—Isaac. He was that prototypical little guy—maybe five foot six, 140 pounds. He had a wild rage in him that, once released, could not be contained. His adoptive parents had put him in taekwondo as a way to channel his relentlessness, and Isaac put those years of practice to use on the street. He moved well, with economy. Fast, disciplined people often look like they’re going slow, because they know where they’re headed. He didn’t waste energy. Mostly, he didn’t believe he could lose. So he didn’t.

  I once saw him kick a guy five inches taller than he was square in the side of the head. The guy dropped like a tree and we ran off.

  Isaac was a good guy, gentle and funny. He laughed a lot. I never once saw him treat a friend with anything but kindness. But if you made the mistake of asking for it, he would give you a lot more than you expected. I wanted to be that. More to the point, I wanted to be seen that way—as someone who could but chose not to.

  I developed a theory about fighting as it applies to men—that once in your life, you should very badly lose a fight, and on another occasion, very handily win one. The first teaches you humility; the second gives you dignity. Having done both, you can move on to a life without violence.

  In the best case, it would happen in that order—lose, then win. I worked it the other way around.

  The fight I won was on one of those tipsy marches. Three of us were walking down Jane Street. A car reversed too quickly out of a laneway behind the subway station, nearly hitting my friend Ned.

  Ned was holding a can of pop. He threw it at the driver’s side window. The car stopped. A guy hopped out of the passenger seat.

  “Who the fuck threw that?”

  Ned was not particularly tough, but he was enormous. Six foot five, 250 pounds. Huge.

  When Ned said, “Me,” that didn’t seem to rattle this guy. He was in his twenties—an adult. Not big or small. Not remarkable in any way, except that he did not seem worried about the fact that there was one of him and three of us. The driver didn’t say anything or move to help. He advanced the car so that it wasn’t straddling the sidewalk and sat there.

  “You wanna fucking go?” the guy said to Ned.

  “I’ll go with you,” I said.

  Fights happen fast. You don’t get a chance to think about them. That’s what the talking is—a way to delay the action so that your good sense can catch up to current events.

  This guy was all business. He led me back into the alley. It was dusk on the street, but already dark in there.

  “I’m going to hurt you so bad. You’re going to fucking regret this,” he said as we walked.

  I was bigger than him. Why was he so sure of himself? There was a woman in the back seat of the car. She had her head stuck out the window, yelling at my opponent.

  “Just leave it,” she said. “He’s a kid. Just leave it.”

  She sounded more annoyed than upset. Like she knew how this was going to turn out. I’d had far too long to think about this. I was awash
in fear.

  We got deep into the alley. We turned toward each other and squared up.

  Then he turned back toward the car and started to say, “Make sure the other two don’t fucking…”

  And I kicked him in the balls. It was dead on target. It was the sort of blow that, in the normal course of events, would put you down on the ground until someone took pity and dragged you to an emergency room.

  He folded, but he didn’t stop. He rushed me, hitting me at waist level and taking me into a wall. That was a poor decision on his part. My hands were free and he now had no way of protecting himself.

  Fuelled by terror, I began striking him in the side, in his ribs. Big, weighted hammer blows. The first two took the remaining fight out of him. As I landed the third, I heard a snap and my fist sank sickeningly into his side. He let go of me and puddled to the floor.

  The woman was now out of the car, crying, running toward him.

  I was shaky but managed to walk back to the sidewalk without stumbling. I didn’t feel heroic. What I felt was better than that—the thrill of having survived.

  It would be useful information for the fight I lost.

  That one started out as so many of our phony gang fights had. A few of us, a few of them, kids we didn’t recognize. Not locals. Passing on the street. A sneer or a look that someone didn’t like. Words exchanged.

  But, crucially, no fight started. Instead, we kept jawing. There were five of us and maybe the same number of them.

  The two groups began to move in unison, down a pathway that led into Jane subway station. We roamed through the bus terminal. There were more of them now. Ten or twelve. Where were they coming from? It wasn’t possible to say. Guys were materializing from hallways and off the street.

  By now, we were in the road where the buses entered. It was late. There wasn’t anyone else around. We were surrounded. Twenty of them now to our five.

  Someone on my side had the good idea that only two people would fight—one of them and one of us. Shades of the Siege of Troy.

  I volunteered. The first guy to put his hand up from their group was obviously overcome by irrational exuberance. He was half my size, scrawny. Not a tough little guy. Just a little guy.

  Looking back on it, I should’ve thrown that fight. It might’ve calmed the situation before it got out of hand. I certainly should not have begun banging his head into a phone pole once I had the upper hand. And I most certainly should not have picked his baseball cap off the ground, put it on my own head and begun taunting the rest of his gang once he crumpled. That’s when they fell upon us.

  Yet another thing they don’t tell you about fights—they are timeless.

  I can’t say how long that beating went on. It moved a considerable distance. By the end, we were up on Jane Street, two or three blocks from where it had started. That must’ve taken a while. The five of us were trying to make an orderly retreat, jogging backward like a football drill.

  There were more of them now. I couldn’t tell how many, maybe twenty or thirty. One of them had a mini-crowbar. I saw him flash it. Another had a length of chain. I didn’t catch sight of that, but afterward you could see the marks it left across my back, flaying the t-shirt I was wearing.

  We managed to escape only so far. They were after me. My friends—Ned, Ronan, Brian and John—could have run off. But they stayed to protect me, trying to act as peacemakers. There was no point in fighting back.

  I moved off the sidewalk and into the middle of the road, on the theory that this could not continue with cars driving by. But it did. Nobody stopped. They only slowed before driving past. They were coming in from all angles now, hitting me from behind.

  The guy with the crowbar struck me across the side of the face, cracking my jaw. Once I fell, they got on top of me, a half-dozen of them, kicking and punching. Brian tried to lie across my back, yelling, “He’s done. He’s done,” but someone pulled him off and it started again.

  No one was coming to save us.

  Ned found the way out. He peeled off from the mob, grabbed a garbage can off the sidewalk and hurled it through a front window. That got someone to pick up the phone.

  How long was I down there on the ground? A minute? Ten? I had no idea.

  It ended when we heard the sirens. They ran off. We ran in the opposite direction. I couldn’t see straight. Brian was dragging me up the street when the first cop car—an unmarked cruiser—mounted the sidewalk.

  A pudgy guy in a t-shirt and jeans came screaming out and grabbed hold of me. A good thing, because I couldn’t stand on my own. My shirt was ripped completely down the front. I was covered in blood. Strangely, the first thing he was interested in was my teeth. He stuck his fingers in my mouth to check that I still had them.

  I reached to pat him on the sides in a reassuring gesture and felt the gun on his belt.

  “You’re a cop?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m not pressing charges.”

  It must have been the stupidity of the comment that caught him off guard. He got back in the car and left.

  I walked home. I looked like I’d been put through a windshield, but I had no sense of that. All I wanted now was revenge.

  The front door of our house opened into the living room. My mother and brother were sitting on the couch watching a movie when I came in. My brother yelped. My mother was pinned to her seat.

  “Where’s my baseball bat?”

  Nobody spoke.

  “The bat? The aluminum one? Have you seen it?”

  Still silence.

  “Oh, wait. I think I left it in the basement.”

  I went downstairs, got the bat, came back up. They were still frozen on the couch.

  “I’ll be back soon,” I said, and left again.

  In a small miracle, nothing else happened that night. I wandered around until my head cleared a little. Then it dawned on me that a bat wasn’t going to do me much good against two dozen guys. So I went home.

  My mother was waiting for me, as close to frantic as she ever got (which was not very). She was too relieved to be angry. I went to bed. In the morning, one side of my face was so swollen I couldn’t open my mouth properly for weeks.

  For a long time, I kept the t-shirt I’d been wearing. It had been grey, but it turned black after being soaked through with blood.

  By the time I lost track of it, it was hard to remember the last time I’d been in a fight.

  TELEVISION

  MY MOTHER HIT ME only twice in my life.

  The second time was in mistaken self-defence. We were in the midst of one of the raging arguments that typified my early teenage years.

  Like so many of them, I couldn’t say what it was about. Where I’d been? Who I’d been with? The screaming match was moving through our small bungalow. I tried to storm off into the room I shared with my brother and I didn’t realize my mother had run in directly behind me.

  As I swung around to make a theatric “And one other thing…” gesture, she ducked under my raised arm, bobbed back up like Sugar Ray Robinson and nailed me in the chin with an uppercut. There wasn’t much force in the blow, but it was a square shot.

  I landed on my bed and lay there for a while. My mother was breathing heavily, shoulders curled, ready.

  “I wasn’t trying to hit you,” I said.

  “You better not,” she said.

  Hostilities ceased temporarily since, out in the hallway, my brother had burst into tears. We never mentioned it again.

  After that, our shrieking arguments shifted to a more civil, smouldering model, which involved fewer punches but more cutting comments, followed by long silences. In the fullest consideration, it wasn’t an improvement.

  The first time she hit me, she meant it. It was over television.

  If you were a kid in the 1970s, TV was a towering monoculture. You may have done other things, but TV was the only one of them that you knew to a certainty you shared with your peers. It was a chil
dhood lingua franca.

  It was also your gateway to the reality outside your house. You got all your news from the television. It shaped your taste. It armed you with all of your metaphors.

  I still understand romantic relationships with reference to The Flintstones. Because Fred and Wilma had a marriage that should not have worked. Yet somehow it did. That’s hopeful.

  Every episode was framed around some conniving on one or the other’s part, terrible consequences because of that, an unlikely solution and concluding exclamations of love and devotion. Every single episode. These people never learned anything, and yet never suffered for their pettiness and ignorance. Even at seven years old, this merited serious thought.

  Fortunately, the only thing you had to occupy your time when you weren’t watching TV was thinking about TV. Like, how would one patch the hull of a boat after crashing on a deserted shore? It was clear from the opening credits of Gilligan’s Island that the SS Minnow had two large holes in its undercarriage. Could we presume that there would be some sort of toolbox on board? Yes, we could, because the Professor wasn’t building those chemistry sets—complete with bamboo beakers—using rocks.

  Could we further surmise that materials for repair were at hand? Well, yes, because the Howells had constructed a cottage, complete with terrace.

  The expertise? It’s reasonable to assume that a skipper has some experience of boat construction. If not, what about a raft? Wouldn’t a raft do the trick? Like, I could build a raft. Right now. It’d take me a day. Two, max. They were on that island for years. They’d been on it as long as I’d been alive.

  Didn’t they want to leave? Why wasn’t that their only goal? Had they succumbed to despair?

  And surely you couldn’t survive forever on coconuts and gin fizz? Wasn’t scurvy a thing? Why weren’t they hunting? When would they go feral?

  We considered these issues without irony. They were honest problems with honest answers, if only you could figure them out. While we knew this was make-believe, we were still kids and hadn’t mentally graduated to the concept of whimsy. We couldn’t see that not solving the problem was a way of solving a different, far-more-important problem—how to keep a show with one flimsy premise and six jokes (skipper melts down; Howells befuddled; movie star pouts; farm girl ignored; professor book-learned and witless; Gilligan stumbles on solution) on the air for two decades.