Boy Wonders

by Cathal Kelly

  Some people are smooth. I am not one of them.

  I began to realize the point of entry was to get someone interested enough in you that they wanted to talk to you. You didn’t want to do this in front of other kids. Someone was always watching and recording. Your best option was the home telephone.

  You didn’t need to ask for a number. Everybody I knew was in the phonebook. You also didn’t need to ask permission to call. That request was implied when their mother picked up the phone and asked, “Who may I say is calling?”

  If a girl didn’t want to talk to you, they’d say that to their mother, who would in turn portentously tell you, “I’m afraid Lourdes can’t come to the phone right now.” You’d know you’d miscalculated and would never, ever call again. It was a less simple time, but probably better. There were multiple gatekeepers meant to protect feelings on all sides.

  This all implies that I made these calls myself. In fact, I just thought about what it would be like to call a girl, what I would say and how it would go. Poorly, I supposed. Sometimes I’d dial six of seven numbers on a rotary phone, knowing full well I would not complete the task.

  But I enjoyed the terrifying idea that my finger might slip mistakenly into the correct slot and accidentally pull it 180 degrees and find myself unable to take the receiver from my ear because static electricity had welded it in place. And then what?

  The first woman who showed actual interest in me didn’t roll onto the scene until I was in high school—Sabrina—who, on reflection, schooled me in many disciplines. “Interest” may be too strong a word.

  She was awfully aloof and often ignored me entirely in the hallways, so our relationship was conducted on the phone in the evenings. There were hours and hours of that. Whole nights spent talking about nothing. Once, Sabrina went off and sat down to dinner with her family while I waited on the line. This was an early lesson in power imbalances and how not to handle them.

  Sabrina had her own separate phone line—a wild extravagance. I had to pull the communal phone into my bedroom and lean against the door. Every ten minutes or so, my mother would come by and yell through it, “Are you still on the phone?!”

  I’d say, “I’m almost done!” She’d stomp off and then we’d do it again. It was our thing.

  My mother bought a second telephone for our line, and she’d pick it up at terrible moments—“Do you really like the way I do my hair? Really?”—and breathe into it for a while. The three of us—my mother, Sabrina and I—would sit there silently waiting for my mother to lose interest and hang up. I was always on guard for the “click” that meant someone was listening.

  It was like East Berlin, but stupid.

  I spent a lot of time as a teenager trying to imagine what certain things would feel like. I wanted to know how it would feel to live alone, or have money, or drive a car, or do heroin. I enjoyed spending long hours lying in bed casting myself forward in time to random ages and envisioning what life would look like. The highest I could ever get was thirty-five, at which point my life would either be settled or in disarray. I could see it going both ways. The idea of love, or passion, or fixation, did not come into it. It wasn’t that I didn’t think it possible. I couldn’t think of it at all. Of course, there was a woman somewhere in this scenario, but she was obscure to me.

  There wasn’t much to model on in this regard. My mother never remarried. For a few years, my brother and I prepared ourselves for the possibility that one day we’d come home and there would be a strange man there fixing something in the basement or whatever it was normal fathers did, but when it didn’t happen that vague anxiety faded.

  My mother was my mother—a solitary unit, usually to be found lurking around a corner like a home invader, waiting to confront you about some chore you’d forgotten to do. She existed, as best I could tell, in just two states: out in the world working; or at home waiting.

  This commitment to solitude did not seem, on its face, a wrong way to exist. All three of us could be in the house together, not interacting in any meaningful way, for hours at a time. It was often a serene place. And when it wasn’t, matters could escalate to extreme “Get off the phone, now!” volumes.

  So when I met Liz at the age of fifteen while we were both toiling at a downtown movie theatre, it was clear she was going to have to do the bulk of the work.

  There is a trick of the brain that reduces all distant memories to either happy or wry ones, but I believe I did have remarkable good luck in first falling in love with someone like Liz. Though the same age as me, she was nominally my boss at the theatre. She was the thing that is most attractive in someone else—competent. She had her shit together in a way fifteen-year-olds are not supposed to. In Liz’s world, all problems had solutions. In my world, all problems were the thin, precarious barrier separating you from even worse problems. If I was generally morose, Liz was cheerful. Relentlessly positive. Actually magnetic. The sort of person who seems an inch off the ground at all times.

  She had the thing I had never before encountered in my interactions with the people closest to me—warmth. She was delighted to see you each and every time. She’d come rushing up to grab hold of you. When she talked, she reached out to brush her hand on your shoulder, or push you gently when she was amused. She was not afraid to embrace people—literally or figuratively—an idea which confounded me.

  Liz was my gateway drug to intimacy in all forms. I would never be entirely like her. She was born with what she had. But I could be a little more like her. It didn’t occur to me that Liz could like like me. That was still the word we used for such things—like. Not love, or want, or is interested in, which are all marketing terms. Someone liked you—a modest, reachable goal. Even once we had started dating—I’m not sure how that happened, it just did—I did not realize we were dating. We were just going places together and occupying the same proximate space for some duration.

  There was nothing physical between us because, despite her touchiness in most situations, Liz was, like me, shy and inexperienced. Also, she was Greek, which is like a whole different species of human. More ancient and advanced.

  Eventually, Liz’s older sister, Betsy, who also worked at the theatre, had to take me aside for an excruciating talk.

  “She’d like you to kiss her,” the sister told me.

  “Kiss her? Really? You’re sure?”

  “She told me.”

  “She told you how?”

  “With words. Like a person. You should do that.”

  “Do what exactly?”

  “Kiss her.”

  Betsy was dating a guy who was also Greek. He would often roll by the theatre at night to pick her up. He was built like a linebacker, had thick, ringleted hair that stretched down to his ass, drove a Camaro and was named—I am not even kidding here—Hercules.

  Reasoning that someone who was dating Hercules must know a lot of things, I did as I was told. It was not my first kiss, but it was my first real one. It happened outside the theatre late one night, as Liz was about to leave, after a long and portentous lingering during which she knew what I was doing, and I knew that she knew what I was doing, and on like that, panoptically. I had felt this before, but never with another person. This was genuine intimacy. Time stretched interminably and I found myself considering the act as it was happening. You get only a few of these “falling off a building” experiences in life—where the act is so monumental that it starts a scroll reel in your mind of everything that led into it and a small, enlivening terror of what comes next. I suppose this is as close to pure Zen as any one of us gets. We are truly living in a moment.

  My relationship with Liz was not mediated from a distance because I could not call her on the telephone. Her family was traditional Greek Orthodox and would not have appreciated a Catholic leching around their youngest daughter (this bush-league “forbidden love” trope made things that much more exciting).

  Liz had about a dozen older brothers, and Betsy delighted in telling me how en
thusiastically they would hospitalize me if they ever found me with Liz. I imagined Hercules fighting his way into and then back out of the living room every time he picked her up.

  When I was feeling particularly emboldened, I’d tell Liz that I was just going to pop by one day and take my licks. I hoped she would see that I was brave. Like—and I just can’t stop myself from writing this over and over again because it’s that amazing—Hercules. I imagined her frantic, begging me not to take the chance.

  But she would only say, “Don’t do that.”

  “What’s the worst they could do?”

  “I once saw Spiros [or Mikonos or whatever this one especially vicious brother out of the bunch was called] break a guy’s arm.”

  So I didn’t do that.

  Because we were forced to engage each other only in person, our relationship took on an oddly adult cast. We’d make dates to see each other for only a few minutes, outside subway stations halfway between our homes. I’d come to her after-school volleyball games and sit there with the other kids’ parents.

  We weren’t playing at this. We had a life together. I was dependent on her attention and opinions, as I believe she was on mine. When I told her I was in love with her, she laughed and said, “Of course you are,” and the way she said it was so much better than anything John Hughes had taught me to expect. Nothing dewy or affected. No need for Molly Ringwald tears. Liz’s reaction was real.

  My mother thought most of my friends dull-witted buffoons (like me, they were), but even she liked Liz. The first time they met, Liz hugged her, and my mother froze like an animal under attack. I’d never seen anyone hug my mother. I had certainly never seen my mother hug anyone else. Not a hugger in any way, shape or form. An active anti-hugger, my mother. But Liz blew right through her reticence. That was a part of Liz’s magic—she assumed everyone wanted to be loved and touched and made to feel special. And all of us do.

  One day, my mother put a framed picture of Liz up in the living room. Not a picture of Liz and me. Just Liz. (It did not occur to me until later that there was no picture of me up anywhere.) Unlike all my mother’s other relationships, her connection to Liz was nothing but lightness. Occasionally, I’d come home and Liz would be there, unannounced, sitting in the kitchen with my mother. Standing in the foyer untying my shoes, I could hear my mother laughing. She never laughed. A part of me supposed I should be jealous—either of Liz loving my mother so much, or of my mother feeling the same way. But the feeling never took. As happy as I was for myself, I felt a different sort of satisfaction in bringing something so different and good into my mother’s life. It may even have been the better of the two feelings, because it was generous.

  This golden stage went on forever in terms understood by fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds—a year and a bit. Of course, it ended poorly and it was my fault.

  I got a different job at a different theatre and Liz and I saw each other less. I began to realize that I was a person unsuited to intimate connections, no matter how much I depended on them. While craving closeness, I also chafed at it. I suppose (well, I know) that had something to do with the manner in which I’d grown up, and I could get all Freudian about it, but each person is like the universe. It is logically impossible to accurately consider a system of which you are a part. You cannot separate yourself from it in order to do the considering, because that would also be a function of the system. You are a closed loop of behaviours and, given time, you will always circle back to your base setting. Mine was “flee.”

  The ending was painful and, unlike every other part of our relationship, dramatic. I came armed with a Hughes-ian script taken from Sixteen Candles about moving on and doing what was best, but Liz didn’t want to hear it. She wasn’t just angry with me, exactly, though she was that. Mostly she was confused by this person I had turned out to be. That was worse.

  Since we had no good reason to run into each other—she lived on the other side of the city—we rarely saw each other again and never truly spoke. She married young and I trust is happy in her life. She was better than me in that way, and most others.

  My mother took this all very hard. Which is to say that when I told her, she said, “How could you do something so stupid?” and never brought it up again.

  She kept the picture of Liz up for months. When I once wondered about it—in the midst of an argument, of course—she barked at me that her pictures in her house were her business. But a few days later she took it down and I felt worse all over again.

  I did not regret anything about being with Liz, being chosen by her. She hadn’t taught me to love or anything so grand, but she’d given me the chance to prove to myself that I was capable of it. When you’re young, that’s something. You can build on that.

  But the manner of the ending nagged at me. This was an entirely new feeling—truly disappointing people. Not by screwing up, which I had done plenty of before. But by volition. By setting out to do it knowingly.

  Though you’d rather not, you take that with you, too.

  HOOD ORNAMENTS

  FOR CENTURIES, residents of the small Polynesian island of Yap traded with a currency they called rai. Rai are limestone discs. They look like calcified donuts. What makes the rai remarkable is its size. It varies, but tends toward enormousness. The biggest rai on record is twelve feet across and weighs four tons.

  Obviously, you weren’t going to drag your rai to the grocery store to buy cereal. The Yapese developed an oral tradition of possession. As long as everyone agreed that Jack’s gigantic stone donut had become Jill’s, it had. The stones were hard to come by and hard to carve with wooden tools, so the circulation remained low and value remained stable.

  It sounds like a fair system and it worked for a long time.

  Then a European sailor shipwrecked on Yap. He’d brought along iron tools, which made it much easier to carve new rai. That introduced a disastrous concept to the Yapese economy—inflation.

  All this to say that just about anything—no matter how cumbersome or ridiculous—can be a unit of exchange. The value of money is a delusion. It only works as long as everyone agrees to share in it.

  The guys I hung around with didn’t have much money. We all had part-time jobs, but we spent those earnings on essentials—hamburgers, drugs, cigarettes, subway tickets and liquor. Amongst my group of friends this created a pleasingly flat society. We didn’t prize certain brands. There was no new phone to obsess over. The only statement piece of electronics any of us had was a Sony Walkman, and everyone had the same basic model. No one person had more than any other. It was a stable micro-culture. So, like the sailor and the Yapese, we had to ruin that.

  One night at a bush party, someone showed someone else something they’d stolen on the way over—a hood ornament. It was the Chrysler emblem—a cheap, plastic, five-pointed star. He’d probably taken it off a K-car, which was ubiquitous at the time. It was the Honda Civic of its day, except gruesomely ugly and famously unreliable.

  In the mid-eighties, just about every vehicle had a hood ornament. We decided that we wanted them all.

  A good question here is, “Why hood ornaments?” And the only answer is, “It’s hard to say. We weren’t very bright.” I presume it had something to do with Public Enemy and Flavor Flav’s penchant for clock necklaces. Insignia were a big deal. That’s probably what we thought of these things as—medallions that could never be worn.

  And just like that, hood ornaments became the unit of exchange between a group of eight or ten of us.

  Plainly, this was both theft and vandalism. That didn’t bother us. These people had things we wanted—cars—and we did not. Why was that fair? This wasn’t crime. It was socialism in action. We were balancing the scales.

  We spent whole nights at this, prowling the side streets in and around High Park looking for new logos to expand our collections. We traded them amongst ourselves. We kept our own oral tradition of who had what, and who was winning.

  Some of these were easy to get
off—the K-car’s in particular. That was attached to the hood by a thin wire. You could yank it off with a strong flick of the wrist. One of my friends was so good at it, he could take the ornament off a car idling at a red light as he crossed, then run off before the driver realized what had happened.

  Others were emblems attached to the hood with metal hooks. You needed a knife or a pry bar to get at those.

  Some were welded on. Those required a metal file and a long time. After a while, we were going out on Friday nights weighed down with more tools than a carpenter.

  As your collection expanded, your status within the group increased. Once everyone had reached a critical mass, you needed prize pieces to stand out. My signature item was the metal ram off a Dodge pickup. It had taken me the better part of an hour, sawing at it in a driveway in the middle of the night.

  There was a rumour amongst us that someone on the Kingsway owned a Rolls-Royce that they parked on the street at night. Getting that winged angel would have represented the peak. We never could find that car, if it actually existed.

  Stealing the ornaments was a completely pointless thing to do, which even then I think we realized. But no one wanted to be left out of the gang, so everyone participated. We thought it harmless enough.

  One night, we were at it on one of the small streets that we took each day to get to school. There were three of us. It was winter. We’d been drinking. It was no longer fun. It was just something we did, mindlessly. We’d taken dozens that night.

  We made our way up to the bus terminal at Runnymede subway station. It was late-ish. Ten o’clock maybe. I always had my eye on my watch, since my mother’s midnight curfew was ruthlessly enforced. If I showed up late, the deadbolt was thrown and I’d have to spend the night on the porch.

  Working on the theory that nothing good happens after 12 a.m., it was an effective deterrent to letting a bad night drift into a disastrous one. But I still had a couple of hours. We were heading off to meet someone else.