“Of course,” he said, in the way kids need to hear lies. “It’s just out of our hands. Understand?”
“I think so.” Joseph stared down, digging his thumb along the edge of the coach’s desk, trying to push off the quivers. He was very good at not crying in school, but this wasn’t like school. It was private, a special place. At one time he’d felt himself lost among every guy on the team, comfortable enough not to worry about himself.
But that wasn’t happening. He felt shudders, stammers escaping him, felt Fiasole move toward him, hugging him, a rush of tears, warmth. He gripped the man tightly, not wanting to let go, rocking side to side, feeling big hands on his back. He pressed hard into the man’s chest, the clean sweatshirt, feeling his chest muscles tighten, backing away as Joseph’s erection pressed against his leg.
Joseph pulled back a little, looking up into Fiasole’s reddened eyes, arched his face up, just to see if he could kiss him, but Fiasole’s chin got in the way. He was so tall, his lips so far away. “No, please,” Fiasole sputtered.
“But I thought–”
“Don’t. Look, let’s just talk.”
His handsome coach used words like “survivor’s guilt,” “grief,” “questioning sexuality.” The man told him things that would help, but then other guys starting coming in, and most of it evaded Joseph, except the basic underlying ‘No way ever, kid.’
On his way out, he banged his fist against the metal wall, scraping a finger against the pushed-out slats. He had to stop in the hall, suck his finger to stop the sliver of blood.
He ran from the school, left his gym bag in his locker. His arms felt naked without the bundle over a shoulder weighing him down, keeping him tied to the earth.
The streets were quiet, softened. He could cry all he wanted while he reconstructed what he wanted to have happened with Fiasole for the nights to come, the nights in bed where in dreams they would touch slowly, differently.
The house was locked. He didn’t want to go next door to Mrs. DeStefano’s. He walked around, looking for a way in, until he tried the side garage door, shoved it open.
The old pick-up lay still in the garage. Yet another engine problem had consigned it to dormant status. His father had been getting rides or walking to his nearby office, riding in company trucks to construction sites. Sometimes he took the Bronco, but his mother more often had an errand that took priority.
Joseph ran his hand over the cold metal front door where his father had painted over Nicci Plumbing, followed by their old phone number. The letters still pressed out in script-shaped bumps. Joseph opened the door, hiked himself up in the driver’s seat. Pens, a dusty notebook, old billing sheets, a soda lid cluttered the floor. Joseph lay on the seat, unbuckled his pants, held himself.
He and Dink burnt votive candles in the engine room of the Starship Nosedive, looking up dolefully at Muscue Larry, played by a naked Assistant Coach Fiasole, who was strung up on some girders, just trying to smile. Hunter and Bennie lay in alien sleep cribs with plastic on top and red sirens going off and they looked totally dead and Anthony floated around in space outside the window, saying without moving his lips, “Come on.” Joseph floated through the cabin until the pressure busted, the window breaking into splinters, and he and Dink and the candles and the sleep cribs hurled out into a purplish black nothing full of
The garage door rumbled open. He jolted up, caught himself in the truck’s rear view mirror. The seat left him with a strange face print. He decided to play it calm as his mother and Sophia got out of the Bronco.
“What are you doing in here?”
“I got locked out.”
“Why didn’t you go to Irene’s?”
Sophia scampered around him, into the truck, calling out, “Sleepyhead.”
“I forgot.” He sat, unmoving.
“What. What happened?” She noticed Joseph eyeing Sophia, then sent her inside.
He told her, his voice groggy. His mother stood by him, listened.
“So, I’m off the team an’ I gotta stay home the next three school days. I can call in my homework assignments, but I forgot to bring my books home.”
“We’ll take care of that later. I’m gonna call the school.”
“No, don’t.”
“I’m gonna call the school and talk very patiently with this, what is his name?”
“Staypuf.”
“What?”
“Shrike. Some pig name.”
“Joey.” She leaned in to hug him. Her touch hit the button on his bawl machine. He started up again, embarrassed.
“Why am I so bad? Why is this all happening?”
“Shhh. Shhh. You’re not bad. It’ll be okay.”
He wanted his father to be upset, to scream at him, to shove him around, flatten him. But at the same time, he felt a calmness. He knew once he explained why he did it, how he knocked the Miller kid down, his father might be a little proud.
He waited in his room, tried to draw. But it was too warm in his room. His mother had been blasting the heat all winter. It was dry, not like the practice room, the heat from bodies.
He put on some extra sweats, took his cassette player, plugged his earphones in, descended the stairs.
“Where are you going?” His mother called out.
“Just outside.”
“Good. Maybe you might wanna get some of that ice off the driveway while you’re out there.”
“Okay.”
But he just sat shivering on the porch, headphones humming away in his ears, blocking out the street silence, what the choir at the Christmas assembly had sung about, a winter wonderland.
Through the trees, he imagined distances. To his left was the school, about a five-minute run. Behind him, the woods, seven minutes. Somewhere north, that way, Totowa. He thought of running it, figured it would be a good twenty minutes. But it would be under highways he didn’t know. He’d get lost. As much as he considered intentionally getting hit by a truck, he would have preferred to do it in his good running shoes.
Joseph dropped his head, hunched down low. By the porch, the little orange sign, HOME of a COLT!, inched out from the shrubs. He plucked it from the snow, thought of tossing it in the garbage can, but instead hid it in a pile of gardening tools.
He heard them “discussing” inside, more about his mother not consulting his father before doing anything. But it was still about him. It started to get a little loud, but then it stopped, short. Joseph heard the back door. He peeked around the house, saw his father walk out into the yard. A cloud of smoke rose from his head, then he turned back with a cigarette in his hand, the first one in years.
Joseph spent his first day of suspension staying up late, crept down to the living room, switched on the tube, volume low, then into the kitchen for some potato chips. He also fixed a cold meatball sandwich from the leftovers.
He flipped channels, having missed the end of any music videos, shows, infomercials. Nobody’d bought or rented a video since New Year’s. He’d never seen half the groups on MTV, so he didn’t know who was cool.
The Spanish channel featured a cute guy, but trying to understand it got tiring. After late boring news, down to the sports, he knew he’d missed anything that might be about Anthony, something else to add.
He found an old rerun of some show with tacky little sets. Charlie Sheen’s dad was in it, about twenty, not all crazed like in Apocalypse Now, which he and Dink had watched one night. This Charlie Sheen’s dad was doubtful, like Father Scanlon, one of many teachers Joseph remembered affectionately. Wearing a tight turtleneck, then a priest’s collar, Sheen’s eyes burned with a holy intensity.
He had to laugh with his mother the next day after they both realized how silly it sounded, Joseph asking if he could please go to confession. When she stopped laughing, she hugged him.
“I’m sorry honey, but it’s just–”
“I know, but I really think it would be good for me.”
“I’ll drive you in one hour. Then we got h
alf an hour to pick up Soph at preschool, then I gotta get a roast for tomorrow. Yeah, that’ll work.”
While he waited in his room, he tried out a new prayer. In practice he’d felt his body toughen up, as if every hold were his best, every bruise and sore spot made holy, like muscular stigmata. He wished his soul could be so tough.
“Our Father, who art in heaven, please let me back on the team and I will wrestle for Jesus.”
The doddering old usher who sat in front of him nodding his head to everything, the priest’s rock star portable microphone, the way Sophia deliberately repeated all the Amens just a moment too late so she could hear her own little cherub voice echo through the church, not even the woman who rushed in late during the homily, scattering the contents of her purse on the pew near him; nothing would sway him from attempting a direct link.
He tried to hear where to put his voice during the hymns, but it came out tinny as always.
He sat in his good pants and button-down shirt, feeling sure one of the pins was still stuck in it, knowing he wouldn’t move, even if punctured.
He stood silently, muttered the right prayers, knelt while Mike and Sophie fidgeted. Up, down. Between the padres and the saints. Ready for take-off.
He crossed himself, walked forward. His stomach rumbled. He wondered if Dink was having breakfast right then in Passaic, if he got to sleep in on Sundays. Were Bennie and Hunter sitting in their cells, plotting revenge on him?
Inside him, while the wafer softened on his tongue, he tried. He really tried. But he knew. None of it meant anything to him anymore. His was a new faith; Anthonianity. Anthonism. He couldn’t decide.
9
At first Miss Pooley didn’t understand Joseph’s sudden interest in her computer, until he “got an idea” since he had to write a letter and would she help him, maybe?
“Why don’t you let me type it,” Miss Pooley said, sipping from her big coffee mug that read DAMN, I’M GOOD. “I type a lot.”
“That’s okay, but I was–”
“Come on.” She sat him down on a little chair beside her computer. Joseph saw pictures on the wall above it, little snapshots next to a Kathy cartoon, pictures besides the baby photos Joseph’s mother had fawned over, a vacation photo of Miss Pooley in the sun with her glasses off, smiling, wearing a life preserver with some other women in a raft.
Miss Pooley looked over the page from Joseph’s spiral-bound notebook. His squared-off lettering wobbled up and down a few times, but was legible. “Now, how do you start the heading, Joseph, you remember? You must have seen enough formal letters recently.”
“Yeah, right, uh, tab left, the heading, the address.”
“And you have that?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, what?”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
Miss Pooley clacked away, her hooped earrings making a tiny chime sound.
Dear school board members,
You are possibly familiar with my name in
“What do I say there, ‘in the death of’? That’s gross.”
“In the recent unfortunate events?” Miss Pooley suggested, her fingers hovering over the keyboard, waiting.
“Yeah, put that.”
in the recent unfortunate events surrounding the death of my teammate Anthony Lambros. I was also suspended recently for being involved in a fight which actually began by an incident of verbal bigotry by another classmate but I want to apologize for those events and I did. What I am trying to do is convey my apologies for disrupting the peaceful educational environment that has come to be my school at Little Falls. My family had a lot of adjustments to make since we moved here.
I would like to ask that I be allowed back on the Colts Wrestling Team to return to my athletic endeavors. Wrestling is very important to me and I also feel that in light of the recent crisis the team is very short of athletes who can also help bring more fans to matches and bring up school spirit. I hope you read this and let me know as soon as you can about your decision.
Joseph leaned into the screen. “Can you print it out?”
“Just let me fix a few parts, okay? But you gotta mail it yourself. They’re real touchy about the postal meter.”
Like hibernating animals, in winter, most people eat more. The process had been reversed for his sport. He’d had to train, keep his weight within the borders of a few pounds, the rise and fall of numbers sinking low just before, jumping back up the day after each match. His energy and tension, attention span and fatigue, fluctuated.
Most days at home, he did neck-ups and stretches. He sporadically pumped up at the school gym, where Walt, the Shivers, some other jocks hung out, but that led to conversations which led to them inviting him to a prayer group, and Joseph reminding them he had plenty of that but in a different flavor.
Without wrestling, moving up in weight didn’t concern him. He ate, no matter what his mother’s, or her cooking’s, condition. This calmed her, which calmed everybody else in the family, which made her cooking better.
He put on more pounds, filling out, thickening. It gave him a feeling of solidity, something he always felt he lacked, being so small. It was a strange feeling at first, but he ate; pasta, roast beef sandwiches, big glasses of milk that made him burp, fruit, crackers with lots of funny leftover Christmas cheese with nuts on top. He ate a whole box of Oreos in one afternoon, watching shows, hoping to see a little bit of himself on the screen. Sometimes it happened.
But the court proceedings against Bennie and Hunter had been delayed. People were mad, particularly the family and friends of Anthony. Mrs. Lambros had admitting her son was small, not perfect, but that it was no reason “to go and kill a boy.”
Joseph didn’t tape that show.
He would become a perfect student. He would become a strong athlete, again. He would volunteer for the Catholic Youth League. He filled every minute of his days with behaving properly, following the rules, holding his tongue, working out, waiting for people to figure out how to act with him. Nights were briefly met with measured time for some silent crying. He would remember to air out the pillowcases.
He began to awake at dawn without the help of his alarm clock, as if he were on patrol. Sleeping in on weekends or non-school days had been next to impossible in Newark, even on snow days, which they hadn’t had so much anymore, or teacher’s strikes, which they’d had more often.
There were no sounds to wake him. No dawn three-alarm fires, no off-ramp humming, no invisible Bottle Man rattling his shopping cart down the alley behind all the row houses. Sometimes, though, the quiet woke him up, the empty sound, pierced only by birds who stayed through winter.
He stood at the sink, peed, watching his morning hardon soften in the bathroom mirror. He flushed the unused toilet, then ran faucet water.
Downstairs, he drank some juice, but didn’t want to make any food. He wanted to enjoy the quiet. Outside, the town woke up, people, dogs, but there was so much more space between sounds. Joseph parted the curtain to the sliding glass door to the back yard. He pressed his face and body close to the glass, feeling the dawn chill push forward, his breath appearing and disappearing, blurring the view. He made a nose print.
To walk outside, feel the crunch of frozen grass breaking softly under his feet, was possible. He could. He could go out, keep walking, past the Whatsit’s tarp-covered swimming pool, past Mrs. DeStefano’s shrouded rose bushes, past the salt-stained streets, out into those woods, the branches like gray sponges, a model of a town.
He wondered if guys who never got married always got to have mornings like this, or if he could wake up with a boyfriend still in bed, and a dog, in some far off place. Portland, maybe.
10
Irene’s “boat,” a mint green Chrysler New Yorker with crushed velvet seats and little lights in the back that Mrs. DeStefano let Mike turn on and off and on until Joseph put him in a brief headlock, ambled through the few blocks back home after Mass.
“Boys,” their mother scolded. “She’s
trying to drive.”
Patches of greyish sludge clotted the streets. They felt impenetrable in the boat. Outside the windows, other cars looked puny.
“Why weren’t you singing, Joseph?” His mother looked back.
“I can’t sing. You know I can’t sing.”
“You should try.”
“You want me to try?” He grinned. “Okay,” then blurted out an hallelujah in the key of aluminum foil.
“Awright, awright!” She gave in, shaking her head. Mike and Soph cautiously unplugged their fingers from their ears.
“He proved his point,” Mrs. DeStefano said.
When they returned, his dad lay on the couch in sweatpants and a Denver Broncos sweatshirt. The house smelled of coffee. The kitchen table was laden with plates of eggs, toast, and sausage. The Lord said to rest on Sunday. His dad cooked.
“You kids, I told you, change first before you eat.”
Mike and Sophia altered their flight plan around the kitchen table back through the living room, where they dropped their coats on their way up the stairs.
There had been a time when Joseph sprawled out on the floor, fishing through The Bergen Record, The Star Ledger cutting out pictures, comics, art museum stuff, wrestling, if any.
Still half-asleep in his suit, Joseph sank down into the big chair with just the Metro sections.
“Nothing today,” his father sighed.
“Oh.”
He checked anyway.
After a few minutes, Mike came hurtling downstairs, his shirt on backward, bare feet and an old pair of Joseph’s jams hanging below his ankles like a skirt.
“Come and eat,” his mother said.
“In a minute.”
He trod upstairs, peeled off the suit, hanging it carefully, since he didn’t know when they were going to call him to court next, for an adjudication, or a preliminary counsel, a hearing.
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