by Leo Furey
I’ll never forget Oberstein cursing all the way to the dormitory after Chapel, Bug trailing behind us, bellowing, “Mooooo.”
“What the hell am I supposed to do with a goddamn kimono and a fucken fan,” he shouts, tossing them both into his locker, where they lie for months, until one day he gives them to Father Cross for materials for one of his costumes.
14
* * *
ATTENTION, SUMOS! Leverage against force . . . The Japanese art of jujitsu was made famous by the samurai. Jujitsu uses the principle of leverage against force, redirecting an opponent’s energy and harmony of motion. There are fifty-one arresting devices to help you do so. You will learn them all, like the seventy sumo moves. The object of the exercise is to disable, cripple, even kill an attacker by using his own momentum and strength against him.”
Oberstein rolls his eyes. Bug cocks his head. Dark laughter.
“Today we will use mondo to discuss this subject. Mondo is Zen repartee, using questions and answers. It will replace Monologues and Dialogues. Now then, an attacker’s great advantage is momentum, force, power, speed. The victim, sumos, is aware of his attacker’s great strength. This awareness is his weapon. Leverage against force. In jujitsu, the attacked becomes the attacker. Think, sumos, you are on a dark street late at night. A car screeches to a halt. Your attacker races toward you with a hunting knife. What do you do, sumos?”
Silence.
“Kellys, fight or flight?”
Silence.
“Ryans, the knife is nearer. Fight or flight?”
“Flight, Brother.”
“Wrong!” McCann’s eyes bulge. He has fooled us again. “Arresting devices. You use an arresting device, Ryans. There are fifty-one in jujitsu. We will learn them all—tumbling, throws, restraints, chokes, kicks—all. First, you must learn to use your tumbling skills. You are all members of the Mount Kildare Tumblers?”
“Yes, Brother.”
“The hunting knife is coming toward you. The jujitsu sumo does not run. He is not afraid. He uses technique. What is your arresting technique?”
Silence.
McCann shakes his head. “It is simple, sumos. You use the first arresting technique. The tumble technique. You fall to your back, and at the last possible moment, if you are skilled, you take advantage of your attacker’s strength by kicking your feet upward into your attacker’s belly. Whose own force sends him crashing into his car, knocking him out. Or worse. It takes much practice, sumos, much skill.”
“Like in baseball,” Bug says, sucking up. “The faster a Whitey Ford pitch is, the more chance it has of being hit out of the park.”
McCann ignores him and claps his hands. “Tumbling, sumos, is what we will practice before the break. The first defense against weapon attacks. The first of the fifty-one techniques in the Japanese art of jujitsu.”
After the break, Yoko Loco—everyone calls McCann that now—appears in full sumo dress, his Pebbles hairdo off to one side. He is late. He waddles to the mats. Oberstein, who is the leader, the hancho, passes McCann a list of boys who are absent due to illness or who have assigned chores. McCann eyeballs the list and growls. “Kiotsuke,” he shouts, and we stand straight as arrows, holding our breath. “Keirei,” he screams, and we all instantly bow. Sometimes, if a boy doesn’t bow properly, McCann sends him to the dojo, the far corner, to practice bowing for the entire morning. It’s terribly boring. I had to do it once. Every second day, McCann orders Brian Carey to the dojo, and each time he calls Carey’s name, Oberstein whispers, “Hurry, Carey,” which cracks us up because hara-kiri is a form of Japanese suicide. Once, when Oberstein and I were in the dojo, Bug passed us a note: How do Larry and Moe like the dojo? And where is Curly Joe?
“Tear him for his bad verses,” Oberstein said, “tear him for his bad verses.”
“Sumos,” McCann barks. “Tenko,” which means roll-call. “Ichi . . .”
One of our favorite runs is a sprint from the Mount to the Bat Cave. It only takes about fifteen minutes. And we love hanging around the cave after we’ve run. On the way up, my running time is terrible, and Blackie really razzes me about it. “Your worse time ever, Carmichael. Gonna need good sprinters during the marathon. To run special assignments during the race. To protect Richardson and Ryan. You gotta improve your sprints or you’re out.” I lie that I injured my foot and promise to practice. I almost cry, it hurts so much to hear Blackie scold me.
Ryan has scabbed a bag of toutons from the bakery, and we pass them around. Kavanagh and Brookes are playing a game in which they take turns burning holes with a lighted cigarette in a Kleenex that holds a dime suspended over a glass.
The Klub members who aren’t in training for the marathon are sharing cigarettes. Rowsell’s clicking his Zippo as he smokes, his moon face turning beet red with each puff. His big oily brown eyes could easily belong to a calf. He’s tall and thin, a string bean. We’re all teasing him about the bowl cut Bug gave him. “You got broom hair,” Kavanagh says, “like Moe in The Three Stooges.” He squints and says, “Gosh, guys . . . Do I really?” He’s always squinting and grinning. He’s from Ship Cove, on the west coast. His father and mother were Salvation Army ministers. They were drowned at sea. According to Rowsell, they used to travel by dory to a hundred little outports like Ship Cove to do God’s work, as he puts it. Rowsell’s kinda religious. Not as religious as Father Cross, but almost.
“One morning, they got into the boat and rowed away. And that evening they never came back.”
Rowsell was alone for two whole days, living on peanut butter sandwiches, until a neighbor brought him to the social workers in St. John’s. The social workers brought him to the Mount.
Rowsell’s a really bad reader. He says the letters keep jumping on him, the same way as the numbers in math class. He says he reads the Bible once in a while in honor of his parents. He’s a really naive guy. He believes everything in the Bible is 100 percent true. And he gets really upset if you tell him something’s not really true. If you tell him, for example, that Jonah probably wasn’t swallowed by a whale.
“Oh, it’s true,” he says, his calf eyes bulging. “It’s true. Yeah, Jonah was swallowed by a whale. If it’s in the Good Book, it’s 100 percent true. My mother and father told me if it’s in the Good Book, it’s the word of God, and you must believe it.”
He’s so naive you can get him to do just about anything if you keep at him. Bug sends him on a wild goose chase almost every day. If Rowsell’s telling you the simplest thing, like the canteen’s open or Blackie’s calling a meeting, his big brown eyes get bigger and he stutters with excitement. And when you ask him a question, he beams and leans toward you and strains his skinny neck as if trying to see inside your brain. One day, we used Oberstein’s power of positive thinking on him. We kept telling him he was getting a bone-on until he got one.
We knew he was really naive when Bug tried to teach him to blow farts, and he said, “Gosh. Gee, guys . . . I don’t think I can possibly do that. Mother wouldn’t . . . Oh boy . . . She wouldn’t approve of my doing that.”
There are two ways to blow loud farts. Well, three if you count the normal way. But you can’t control that. You can create a loud farting sound by blowing on the bare skin of your arm, and you can create a really loud fart by cupping your hand under your armpit and pumping your arm like you’re playing the Irish bagpipes. Bug couldn’t even get Rowsell to blow a fart on his arm. When we all started in on one of our fart contests—softest fart is out—Rowsell covered his ears with his hands and repeated, “Gosh, guys, golly, that’s really loud.”
Murphy hands him a touton and says, “I don’t believe you ever read the Bible, Rowsell. You can’t read.” He winks at us.
“Oh, yes. Gosh, golly. I can so. It’s true. Father and Mother taught me to read when I was only four years old.”
“Don’t believe it, Rowsell. Reading a few words in the Bible every now and then is not really reading. Let’s see if you can read from a book you’
ve never seen.” Murphy pulls a paperback out of his pocket. The cover has a black-and-white sketch of a man in a top hat and cape chasing two housemaids. Stamped at the top in Gothic red letters are the words Sam the Ram from Notterdam. “Here, start reading from the top of page seventy-eight.” Murphy passes Rowsell the paperback and winks at us as we crowd around Rowsell’s chair.
“Okay. Sure, sure. From the top of the page . . .”
“Top of the page,” Murphy says. “Read, Rowsell, read.”
Rowsell reads:
Sam bristled at the thought of the housemaid, Louise, telling Lady Wentworth of their secret meetings. But he pushed the thought to the back of his mind and replaced it with a picture from the previous evening—the first time his eyes drank in the sight of her . . . ample naked bosoms . . .
“Ahh . . . Gosh, guys. Gee, gosh, I dunno if I can read this. Oh, boy . . .”
“Sure you can,” Murphy says. “You’re a good reader, Rowsell. You can do it. Can’t he, guys?”
“Sure. Yeah. Of course. Read, Rowsell.” The voices can barely contain their laughter.
“Well, gosh. Okay, guys.” His big eyes bug out as he reads: “‘He remembered how her . . . cleavage had caused him to stiffen.’ Gosh. Gee, guys, I dunno.”
“Read, Rowsell, read.” Murphy leads the chant, and we all join in. A loud chorus. We are in stitches.
“Gosh, okay, guys. ‘Her hard brown . . . nipples . . . reminded him of bullets.’ Oh, boy.”
“Read, Rowsell, read!”
“Gosh . . . ‘He could feel his member . . . throbbing again . . .’ Omigod . . . ‘as it had the night before . . . when he . . .’ I dunno about this, guys. Oh, boy.”
“Read, Rowsell, read,” howls the chorus.
“‘When he buried his head in her . . .’ Golly . . . ‘bare bosoms.’ Gosh, I don’t think I can . . .” Rowsell’s face is turning really white. He doesn’t know whether to laugh, shit, or go deaf.
“Enough, Rowsell,” Blackie laughs. “Rowsell reads better than all of us.” He takes the paperback from him and tosses it to Murphy. Too late. Our laughter is out of control. Ryan and Bug are on the ground. Bug’s about to have a seizure.
“Gosh. Golly, guys,” Rowsell repeats, his big innocent eyes growing wider than ever.
We’re all having a pretty good time laughing it up, and Blackie settles us down by asking Oberstein to interpret a dream. Oberstein started dream analysis, as he calls it, after reading the story of Joseph and the coat of many colofrs in the Old Testament. He just loved the part where Joseph tells the pharaoh that the seven lean cows eating the seven fat cows means seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. Every time he tells someone about it, his eyes turn into big blue saucers. When he finishes, he shakes his blond hair like crazy and says, “I had no idea there was another world you could go to. One more real—and safer, more reliable—than this one. The world of dreams.” He wants to know every detail of everyone’s dreams. He’s even analyzing one of Rags’ dreams about meeting President Roosevelt.
Oberstein is going on about how Bug’s dream of being stuck in an elevator with Marilyn Monroe, which we all know is a lie, didn’t have anything to do with Marilyn Monroe.
“Had to,” Bug insists. “She’s there in the elevator with me. Plain as day.”
“Dreams don’t usually mean what they seem to,” Oberstein says. “In fact, they usually mean the opposite, or something very different.”
“Tell me mine, Rabbi,” Blackie says, and goes on about how he’s in Africa in his dream, training to become chief of an African tribe, and the medicine doctor who’s training him dies from drinking one of his own potions. “What’s it mean, Rabbi?” Blackie asks. “And it better be good, or it’ll be just like in the movies. Off with his head.” Blackie flashes a cutthroat grin and karate chops his neck.
“I’ll need some time to think about that one, Blackie,” Oberstein says. “Straight off, it sounds like it might have something to do with the marathon, a warning maybe.” He looks at Blackie, and Blackie’s eyes bug out. “Or it could be an omen of some special scheme you’re gonna dream up. Let me chew on it for awhile.”
I know they’re up to their secret talk again, but I don’t let on. Then Oberstein asks him a bunch of questions about his dream, all the little details, like what color clothing is the medicine man wearing and what time of day is it and did he hear anything or smell anything or taste anything. Oberstein is really big on the small details. He carries around a little spiral notebook and writes down everything he can about every dream he’s trying to figure out. Practice makes perfect, he says. Except for Bug’s dreams, we all take his interpretations seriously because once he told us that O’Grady’s dream about looking for his little sister in the forest meant she was going to die. A few weeks later, O’Grady found out that his sister had leukemia.
“I have another one besides Marilyn Monroe in the elevator,” Bug says.
“Shoot!” Oberstein says.
“I’m lying in a hospital bed, and all these old doctors—they are all about a hundred and fifty years old and they look like Japanese sumos, but they have long white beards—they’re examining my lizard, which is world famous ’cause it has grown down to my knees. And it keeps growing, like Pinocchio’s nose. One of the doctors is laughing and showing the others a headline in the newspaper that says ‘World’s Most Famous Hot Dog.’”
Blackie laughs so much he falls off his throne. We all howl pretty hard.
“That’s an easy one to interpret,” Blackie says. “A case of wishful thinking.”
“Did it grow when you told a lie?” Oberstein plays along.
“Nope, only when I went to confession,” Bug says.
Even Oberstein laughs now.
Then we settle down again for a while and everyone is quiet. Just lazing—“cronking,” Rags calls it during rehearsal breaks—and looking at Blackie nodding his head and twirling the speaking stick and surmisin’, as he’s fond of saying.
Suddenly, out of the silence, a small voice says, “I have a dream sometimes.”
We all look at Nowlan, who rarely says a word he is so shy and so sad all the time. When he sees us all looking at him, he lowers his pointed face.
“Let’s hear it,” Oberstein says.
Nowlan starts describing his dream. It’s Hallowe’en. It’s dark. There’s only a night-light on. He’s in bed in the infirmary. Someone, a man, is dressed really weird; he’s wearing a wig and red lipstick and a long black dress. Like a girl would wear, Nowlan says. And he’s putting makeup on Nowlan’s face, powder and lipstick and eye shadow. Then the light goes out, and there’s only the occasional glow from the blinking Celtic cross. And the weird man sits on his bed and waits for a long time. What seems forever, Nowlan whispers. Then he removes his dress and leans over the bed and babbles something, and starts coughing and drooling like he’s sick. He’s wearing a black bra and white panties. Girl’s clothes, Nowlan says.
When he finishes describing his dream, Nowlan’s eyes light up as he waits to hear Oberstein’s interpretation. There is a long silence before Oberstein starts going on about how the dream means that Nowlan is going to make a lot of money running a clothing store, or a costume house, or maybe even a restaurant. But we know that Oberstein is feeding him a crock. We all look at Blackie and then at each other. And everyone in the cave knows we’re all thinking the same thing. That it’s no dream.
To avoid saying any more about the dream, Oberstein starts to sing. He’s so good at improvising. He’s always taking songs like “Tumbling Tumbleweed” and “Camptown Races” and sticking in someone’s name, so we all have a grand old laugh waiting for the next guy’s name and to hear what Oberstein will make up. Oberstein’s amazing voice just gets better and better. No wonder the brothers always pick him to sing solo at funeral Masses and Christmas and holy days of obligation.
Kelly starts making a feed of roasted spuds. A few boys have started playing cards, a few others stones—our
name for jacks, because we use five smooth stones—when Blackie asks Oberstein to make up a new song. Oberstein starts singing a beautiful song called “Wilde Mountain Thyme,” which we always sing whenever there’s a concert. There are always a lot of requests for it. Only, Oberstein changes the chorus from “Will you go, lassie, go?” to “Will you glow, Blackie, glow?” We all perk up pretty fast. Everyone has the same thing on his mind. How will Blackie react? We all wonder if he will get angry, and maybe punch Oberstein. But he just laughs and says it’s pretty funny, but not as funny as Oberstein’s “Panis angelicus, don’t pee on your mattress.”
Blackie asks him to sing the chorus again so we can all join in. He says it will be a nice song to sing on special occasions. “Gonna make it our Klub anthem,” he shouts. And as Oberstein booms out the chorus, Blackie stands up and takes a stick from the woodpile and starts directing us just like Brother Walsh does:
And we’ll all glow together,
Through the wilde mountain thyme
All around the bloomin’ heather
Will you glow, Blackie, glow?
Blackie looks very funny, and everyone sings and has a really good time of it. And the singing is right on key. And it gives us a big lift to be singing so powerfully. We smile to beat the band and have a grand old time watching Blackie mimic Brother Walsh as he directs us with his stick. And we sing as loud as we can and laugh like crazy even though it’s a sad and mournful song.
After the singing and a feed of roasted spuds, Blackie changes the subject to girls. I pray Oberstein hasn’t told him about Ruthie Peckford. Only Oberstein knows I like her. We only know a few girls. The Doyle sisters and Ruthie Peckford and her friends. They all hang out Saturdays at a planned spot, Bannerman Park or Quidi Vidi Lake, waiting for us with pop and chips and cigarettes. We have a lotta fun with the Doyle sisters. Blackie has even promised to let them come to one of our Klub meetings. Karla is the prettiest, tall and soft with dark eyes, and she loves to go grassing down by Quidi Vidi Lake. But her hair is always like a birch broom in the fits. Cathy is slim and stiff with golden hair, and she is always sniffling. Jane is different. She has the tiniest worm-shaped scar on her lower lip, the color of lightning. She is pretty, but short and fat with gorgeous brown hair that curls at her shoulders.