Boy Wonders

by Cathal Kelly

  We had a nice routine down—three full days from initial fight to eventual conversation. In the interim, we ignored each other entirely. I had to bend early in order to borrow the suit money. I can still recall my mother’s look as I made my approach. She had the decency not to smile, but her eyes widened in triumph. We never again spoke of it, but it was understood that I had lost. In perpetuity.

  There were many wonderful moments of growth and discovery at the Cumberland, but what I enjoyed most were the fist fights. There is something about a crowded movie theatre that pushes reasonable citizens toward insanity. A theatre is essentially a series of lines—the line for tickets; the line for snacks; the line to get into the auditorium. Often, by the third line, people are ready to snap.

  There were fights in the alley; fights on the escalator; but most often there were fights at the door to the theatre. That’s when people had reached their limit and wanted very badly to hit someone.

  One guy dumped a box of popcorn over my head outside a matinee showing of Music Box. He was trying to very unsubtly jump the line and took offence when I blocked his way. He lacked the courage to hit me. Hence, the popcorn. In the movies, people are constantly hitting each other right in the nose. This is a pernicious fiction.

  The head moves quickly. Your fist has a long way to travel, so, often, you end up hitting an ear, or the empty space where the head was when you started drawing your arm back.

  But Popcorn Man could not believe that I would actually hit him. Even as my arm was coming forward, he continued in this delusion. He remained stock still as I nailed him right below the eye, knocking him flat on his back. It remains the best punch I’ve ever thrown.

  He said he would he call the police. But I was the guy in the suit now. I offered to walk him to the phone. I gave him my mother’s smile. He gave up and left.

  Another time, some complaining schmuck looked over my shoulder and bellowed, “I want to talk to the manager.”

  What may have been the sweetest three seconds of my then short life passed before I said, “Sir, I am the manager.”

  I think “drunk with power” covers it.

  Childhood can be an extended exercise in powerlessness. You don’t do things. Things happen to you, often without any explanation. At best, this creates resilience. You learn to adapt to changing situations. At worst, it enfeebles you. You grow used to allowing life to run you over.

  The Cumberland mattered because it was the first place in my life where I was in charge of what went on. If the money was short, that was my problem. If someone had a complaint—and there were a lot of complaints—that was also my problem.

  At first, I tried to solve people’s problems. But it dawned on me that that wasn’t really what they wanted. What they wanted was a chance to moan, to a captive audience. What they wanted was someone to listen to them.

  I’d always been more of a listener than a talker. I could spend an hour listening to someone complain about the poor sound quality in Cinema 3. Direct eye contact, a slight tilt of the head, an occasional nod. In exceptional cases, I’d reach out and lightly brush a shoulder reassuringly. We’d agree that this—whatever “this” was—was a travesty that could never happen again. If it was going to happen again (like, I couldn’t rewire the sound system for kicks on a Sunday), we’d agree that the corporation was rapacious and evil and we were both its victims. Then I’d give them free passes and we would part friends. I found these interactions immensely satisfying. While other things in my life were going wrong, they sustained me.

  The spoils of the work were not quite as fulfilling. I made six bucks an hour, which is just as bad as it sounds now. I blew most of it on…well, I have no idea.

  An enormous amount of cash passed through my hands. On a given night, it was many thousands of dollars.

  Since I had no real life outside the theatre, I was often the last man in the building. Just the money and me.

  The head manager was a decent sort and exceptionally lazy. Many of the things he should have been doing himself he delegated to me.

  I followed him to a larger theatre, the Uptown. This was the jewel of Toronto theatres, a capacious venue that was more of an auditorium than a movie house. It was so vast there were feral cats living backstage.

  One day, the manager instructed me to rid the place of them. They’d grown bold and were now hassling people during showings. I thought they added character to the place. I was overruled. I followed one into its lair—a large wooden tube laid behind the screen to aid in sound distribution. Once I got in there on my hands and knees in the pitch black, the cats attacked en masse and set me to shrieking flight. I told the manager that if he wanted to get rid of the cats, he ought to think of buying a flamethrower.

  I continued to work small scams. At the time, tickets for the Toronto Film Festival were sold off a roll, like carnival ducats. While I worked the door, it was a simple business to pocket a few at one venue, walk a few blocks to another, sidle up to people in the ticket buyers’ line and offer them the chance to jump the queue. I learned not to be greedy about it and I didn’t think of it as theft. I preferred to see it as a yearly bonus. Plus, this was a service. These people wanted to see an incomprehensible Czech movie about manically depressed dockworkers and I could make that happen for them. What a mitzvah.

  But the biggest event I worked at the Uptown was the opening of the original Batman film. The hype was astronomical. The crowds were frothing. It was a mad weekend, shows from early morning to late at night, all of them rammed with people.

  There were two safes on the premises—a “petty cash” safe in the manager’s office and a main safe in the atrium of the theatre. The main safe was in a public space for the sake of security—no robber could break in and trap you with it. This had happened before, with awful results.

  Cash was counted in the manager’s office and a small amount of it was held aside for the sake of change and cash-register floats. The bulk of it was taken upstairs to the atrium for deposit.

  The main safe had two mechanisms—an outer door that was opened via combination lock and an inner door that required two keys, one held by the head manager and the other by Brinks. There was a slot in the inner door through which you could push envelopes of cash.

  Usually, we carried the envelopes up in a plastic shopping bag. But usually, the theater calmed at night. On this heaving weekend, there were people in the building from daybreak until after midnight. No one wanted to take the chance of bringing the cash up and losing an envelope in the crush. So the money piled up in the petty cash safe downstairs.

  Very late on Sunday night, there were only two of us left—the manager and me. He should’ve done the business himself but, as usual, he wanted to get home. He asked me to tidy and take up the money from the petty cash. Then he left. The night cleaners hadn’t yet arrived. I was alone in the building. When I opened the petty cash safe, it was like a Scrooge McDuck fever dream. It was the size of a shallow bookcase. And it was full of money. Absolutely full.

  I put it all in shopping bags. There was so much, I couldn’t get it all up in one trip. I also couldn’t leave any money lying around in either spot and didn’t care to take most of it back out of the bags and replace it in the safe. So I dragged it all up the winding stair in short stages. When it was finally piled in front of the main safe, I sat down cross-legged on the filthy carpet in front of it. Close to $250,000. I’d need to work twenty full years to make this much money.

  It was Sunday night. Brinks didn’t arrive until Tuesday morning. Until Brinks came, no one could know the contents of the safe. It was Schrödinger’s safe until then.

  It’s possible that Brinks wouldn’t even notice the discrepancy until they’d reported back their counts (the money was expected to match up with slips deposited through the same slot—slips I was now holding). I wasn’t scheduled to work again until Thursday, so no one would miss me. I’d have a thirty-hour head start at least.

  I was seventeen years old.
I didn’t have a driver’s licence. I couldn’t remember where my passport was. I had no idea where I would go, or why, or what I would do there. Even in the moment, it occurred to me that a teenager walking around with a duffel bag full of loose cash in small denominations might be a little suspicious. I’d almost certainly be caught.

  But I sat there and thought about it for a long time.

  Then I put the money in the safe and went home.

  I told my mother that story in abundant detail, concentrating on the part at the end about my deliberations. I suppose I wanted to be congratulated on having done the right thing. What was the point of doing good if no one saw you doing so? And what could be more salutary than a teenage idiot giving up hundreds of thousands of dollars for the sake of The Law?

  “You were right,” my mother said. “You shouldn’t steal. Not for less than a million dollars. There’s no point if it’s less than a million dollars.”

  “It wasn’t a million dollars.”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” she said, annoyed now. “You were right.”

  “So it would have been okay if it was a million dollars?”

  “Well, I suppose that’s for you to say.”

  “And then you’d never see me again or I’d go to jail?”

  “I’m sure you would have been fine,” my mother said.

  It was becoming clear to me that while she didn’t think I should have taken the money, she was just a little disappointed that I’d lacked the steel to do so.

  I went on to work a lot of bad jobs—selling encyclopedias door to door, landscaping, phone sales, data entry, on the line at an auto parts plant. For the last few years, I’ve had some very good jobs.

  Beyond the money, one never struck me as any more important or rewarding than any other. I’ve never quite understood the concept of “finding out what you are good at.” You can be good at anything. So do that. The problem is that we have been sold the idea that only a few jobs are worth being good at. It’s a regrettable scourge of our gilded age and probably results in more low-grade misery than any other thing.

  My mother taught me that the only value of work is that it’s work. You do it because you have to and because, if you do it right, it gives you some small sense of purpose. That’s the reward. If you need more, you will be either enormously successful or, far more likely, enormously disappointed.

  I consider myself lucky. I reached that understanding early.

  NOTRE DAME

  IN THE NORMAL RUN OF A LIFE, a sports team is something you inherit. Your father rooted for a particular side and so do you. Or your older brother did. In this sense, it’s like a career in law or Communism—you do it without thinking too hard because everyone else is doing it. Maybe you don’t agree with every little thing about this team. Maybe they’ve screwed up the draft for ten straight years. Maybe you’re not on board for most of it. But there are cool uniforms and you had to pick, so there it is.

  Contrary people pick a team for the opposite reason—because it’s the one everybody they care about hates. That’s the purest sort of sports love, one expressed in abeyance of good sense and in the full knowledge that it will make you a pariah in your own home. That’s commitment, but once you’ve gone down that path, it’s hard to come back. You’re going to turn into “that guy,” the guy who will argue that while climate change is almost certainly happening, scientists have been wrong before and it’s important to keep an open mind.

  Once you’ve made your decision, fandom becomes an infection. Like syphilis. You catch it from over-proximity to others, it takes control of your nervous system and eventually it drives you insane.

  I was not cut out to join things. Joining means you are on a team. You’re of one mind. Which I have some issues with straight off. You’re looking around the room thinking, “Okay, that one over there. He looks all right. I’m fine with him. But that one? No. That’s not going to work. I’m not with him.”

  There’s a risk that you will realize too late that the whole thing doesn’t suit you. You didn’t want to be part of this in the first place (very like the final stages of Communism). But it’s too late now. You bought the jersey.

  Once or twice a year, my mother would take us to Maple Leaf Gardens with tickets she’d been given at work. Live NHL hockey in Toronto was a less bougie, more interactive experience in the seventies. The Leafs were unwatchable and so people had to find other ways to entertain themselves for three hours.

  By the third period, they were drunk, surly and bored, and would begin beating the hell out of each other. During one of our rare excursions, a fight got so bad in the stands that play was halted. Out on the ice, the players from both teams leaned their chins on their sticks and watched the brawl as the cops waded in.

  It was exciting and terrifying and I didn’t really want anything to do with it. I wasn’t that invested.

  I have only loved one team, a brief, intense and ultimately bitter love—the University of Notre Dame football team.

  I had no connection to that college, that place or its teams. Nobody in my family knew or cared about them. Nobody I knew played football or watched it. I didn’t understand even the most basic elements of the game until I joined my high-school team when I was sixteen. I’d just switched over to this school because it was closer to home and my best friend, Brian, went there. It was a “technical” high school, which meant it had an emphasis on trades. It had a much stronger emphasis on minding your own fucking business.

  One of my classmates was a convicted murderer. A guy on the football team was shot dead in a drug deal gone wrong. There was a notorious stickup gang that had deep roots into the student body.

  I don’t want to oversell this point. It was a rough school, but that roughness had an order to it. You didn’t go there every morning in fear. Unlike most other schools, which were filled with people pretending to be dangerous, these kids actually were, and so felt relieved of the burden to be constantly proving it. In its way, it was an idyllic ecosystem for a teenage boy. As long as you didn’t overstep or go out of your way to insult someone, you’d probably be all right.

  You could further insulate yourself from random violence by being part of a group. Obviously, you weren’t going to walk up to a bunch of guys on Day Three and say, “I’m with you now. Brothers ’til the end of time!”

  That’s what a football team is for. It’s a gang that has to take you.

  As a player, I was okay. Right in the middle somewhere. Though not fast or athletic, I was big. Football at the high-school level is forgiving of that type, at least in Canada.

  It’s a cerebral pastime, in the sense that you have to think about what you’re doing before you do it. I played on the offensive line, where there is little place for instinct. You are given plays and have to remember exactly where to go and in what order.

  I had no feel for this and was often lost during games. I’d limit myself to keeping track of the hut number, then rush out and hit the first person I saw. That usually worked.

  Occasionally, it didn’t. I was knocked unconscious twice, and both times by my own teammates. I’d gone the wrong way and caught a charging helmet in the side of the head. You’d get dragged off the field and sit out a series. The coach would come over after a while and grab you by the waist—an oddly romantic gesture—and say, “You okay?”

  There was only one right answer. It was a different time, and I’m not willing to say it was any worse. We were encouraged to feel like soldiers out there.

  What I loved about football was the tribalism. I’d been on hockey and baseball teams. Those were loose agglomerations of people who felt no real attachment to each other. They were hierarchical—the good players stuck together and the scrubs got ignored. You didn’t feel protected by those people. You knew your place and, as a result, didn’t invest yourself.

  Football wasn’t like that. The fear of getting hurt and the unspoken desire to hurt someone else stitched us together in a society without leaders.
We were a big, ugly mob. It was as close as I ever hope to get to war, and that is intoxicating. I’d never felt so much a part of something.

  The coach called us a family, and somehow that penetrated my cynicism. I didn’t know these guys, but out on the field I loved each one of them. I gave in to it as I have rarely given in to anything. It was surrender.

  We played on Fridays, but that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted more football in my life.

  I had to pick a team to support. The NFL seemed too obvious. So I went the college route. I don’t know why I settled on Notre Dame. It was probably as simple as the nickname—the Fighting Irish. This was in the late eighties. Notre Dame was a Catholic cult in the United States, a bulwark against the forces of discord and evil (i.e., the University of Miami).

  Sports fandom is like signing up for the military. You know from the outset that it will take you decades to advance through the ranks. You aren’t the conqueror or even a colonist. You’re an immigrant.

  I didn’t fall for Notre Dame. I jumped in. I’d made my decision and now this had to happen quickly.

  So I found a couple of t-shirts and a Joe Montana practice jersey. I bought a jacket with the team’s logo, a sparring leprechaun, emblazoned garishly across the back.

  And I studied. I taught myself the mythology—Knute Rockne, the Four Horsemen, Touchdown Jesus. I subscribed to the team’s monthly newsletter, Blue & Gold.

  This all happened within the space of a few weeks. One day, I was a casual fan of several teams. The next, I was a panting obsessive for just one.

  My brother, Brendan, would’ve been about twelve at the time. He was a golden child—good at school, great at sports, a bright light. He was at ease in the world. To Brendan, everything was going to work itself out.

  I was morose and cynical. I didn’t care about things, at least not in a way anyone could see. I got up, went to school, went to work, came home and did it again. My mother and I were most likely to argue when I was in the house, so I avoided being there. I was already grinding my way through life.