by Jess Walter
“Louis,” Eli said. “You’re in.”
2 | THE LEAST UNHAPPY
The least unhappy, I once read, are those who never attempt what is beyond men. I think this must be true—what else would a failed politician say?—but I also think such an idea assumes the same boundaries for all men.
This is not the case.
So it didn’t matter that as soon as Eli stood up that day, another ball took his legs out from under him and he was put out of the game. It didn’t matter that as soon as Louis ran into the game, Erskine Davies threw a ball that thwacked against his little shoulder and sent him sprawling. It didn’t matter that as I stood against the wall, stupefied by what I’d seen, a hard rubber ball racked my ’nads and my team was officially, brutally, put out of yet another game of battle ball.
It didn’t matter because we’d all seen something amazing, seen it with our own eyes, an act of such superhuman coordination and concentration, it would have seemed unlikely in the hands of the great prematurely bearded quarterback Kenny Dale. From a hunkering SpEd like Eli Boyle? It was a fucking miracle.
For days the story was told all over school—by the SpEddies as a kind of fable, the story of what could be accomplished with hard work and faith, and by the rest of the kids as a rich and impossible tale, a Ripley’s moment, the world’s largest fungus, the beard of bees, the stream of water running up a pipe, the twenty-six-foot-long tapeworm, the man who fellates himself, the dog who flies a Cessna, the turnip with a map of the world on its surface. The mildly retarded kid driven into the air in a game of battle ball, hit by nine balls at once, who still managed to reach out with one hand and catch the tenth.
In spite of everything, children know a miracle when they see one.
And so, if for the SpEds Eli’s athletic moment was magically inspiring, for the rest of us—worshipers of entertainment—it was supernaturally funny, so entertaining it became meaningful. Who knew the SpEds could be so much fun! People talked about transferring into the mainstream PE class in the hopes of seeing something similar—Curty the blind kid catching a football, Louis the dwarf dunking.
I think we forget sometimes the halting sameness of high school: each day is like the day before it, six periods of class break in all the same places, lunch at the same table, the same jokes and asides and greetings from all the same kids, the same clothes and songs and dances, and if school is truly preparation for life, it is mostly in this way, gearing us for the rigid schedule, the stifling patterns, the lack of variation that an adult strives for so that he can resent it the rest of his life. How much money do we pay for an education that will allow us to loop our necktie the same way each morning, to be given a regular parking spot to park our BMW every day, to buy a summer home so that even our vacations become routine? We are drilled in this unending sameness in high school, and only the insane and the inspired ever get past it.
But for a moment during my senior year, Eli Boyle introduced an entire high school of jeans-clad lemmings to the world of the insane and the inspired, to the idea of transcendence. And again, if you think I am overstating a fluke play in battle ball, ask yourself what get passed along as miracles these days—weeping statues, brief remissions from cancer, hazy pictures of Jesus on the stumps of trees. How little it takes for people to quit their jobs and move to compounds in Montana and New Mexico, to put on robes and eat macrobiotic foods. How badly do we want a miracle of our own? How much would we like to open the front door and, just once, find God standing there? Or vintage Angie Dickinson?
No, Eli’s catch that day was a miracle, plain and simple, and it grew, as miracles are known to, in the days afterward, and with each telling. Eli was knocked unconscious. He had a concussion. He flew fifteen feet in the air and a shard from his broken glasses jutted from his forehead. He rolled twice and caught the ball in his fingertips and then rifled it at the other team. He single-handedly brought the ’tards back.
It wasn’t long before Eli’s simple break in the monotony sparked an even more compelling and dangerous concept, an idea that came from the only teenage desire even close to our desire for sex: our need to flout authority.
Open rebellion.
The Eli Movement started slowly but spread exponentially. It was based on a simple idea that had never occurred to the school administrators who decided to combine the Special Ed class with ours. The idea was simply this: what if the SpEds won?
Clearly, the administration had decreed that Special Ed kids be mainstreamed “for their own good,” so that in the powerful currents of high school normalcy and conformity, their defects and debilitations might be diluted and they would rise to meet the lowest expectations and eventually blend in. It was as if the administration saw these kids as effluents that we could wash away downstream.
But what if it worked the other way? What if we learned from them? What if they—happily slobbering and babbling their way through life—had it dicked, and the rest of us, with our vain anxieties and ambitions, were the fools? What if we not only failed to raise the SpEds to our level of mediocrity and conformity but giddily fell to theirs?
This idea caught on the way everything catches on in high school, first as a goof—one kid allows a Special Ed guy to hit him in battle ball—and then as a kind of fashion. During one battle ball game, our opponents elbowed each other out of the way to try to get hit by a ball thrown by Curty the blind kid. After battle ball we played football and Hank, our captain, picked the same group of misfits and me, and while Mr. Leggett stewed and paced and yelled, our football team rolled to victories over the other teams, whose non–Special Ed members ran the wrong way and fell to the ground and faked spasms and fits and stumbles and crashed into one another as my teammates, Repeat or Curty or Louis or Hank, ran through their lines for touchdown after touchdown. It became an art form, a contest to see who could give up the most points to the SpEds.
My team won the football league and the floor hockey league and we won the basketball championship, and Mr. Leggett fumed until I thought he’d explode. He made other kids captain and still the teams came out the same way, with the freaks and me on one team. He pulled noted athletes like my friend Tommy Kane aside and challenged their pride, but he underestimated the Eli Movement. Tommy, for instance, responded to Mr. Leggett’s challenge by playing an entire game in his jock, with his shorts around his ankles. It was wonderful. The Special Ed kids were now the first ones dressed down for class and the last ones to leave, high-fiving and whooping and talking a kind of trash to their non-Special opponents. “Ha-ha-ha! Goulash goulash goulash!”
Everyone seemed to enjoy the new order except Eli, the one who’d inadvertently started it, but who knew it to be just another kind of joke. He stood off to the side, refusing to have any part of these new games and their condescending rules. Eli believed it was wrong to mess with the rules of games, any games. These were sacred to him. In fact, I don’t know who liked this new world less, him or Mr. Leggett. I guess Eli would rather have a beating than this condescension. And Mr. Leggett simply wanted beatings.
Word of this extended prank spilled over the banks of our PE class and flooded the school, and for a brief month or two during the fall quarter of high school in 1981 Special Ed kids had an odd social cachet, a sort of mascot cool. Jocks and motorheads and stoners high-fived the SpEds as they walked down the hall (they low-fived Louis), signed Curty up for driver’s ed, and relied on Repeat to tell them what we were having for lunch. Girls pretended to swoon when Hank, our captain, thundered down the hall. A few kids even overdid it and began wearing pocket protectors and black-framed glasses and hemming their pants three inches above their shoes.
For just that one moment Special Ed kids were cool. And they ate it up.
All but one. One Saturday afternoon in February, I was sitting in my room listening to the new Styx album when there was a knock on my door. I took off my headphones and found my mom standing at my bedroom door, looking confused. “There’s someone at the door for you.”
/>
My brother Ben stood in the hallway. He shadowboxed me. “Good luck,” he said. “And remember, stick and move. Use your jab.”
I walked to the back door and opened it. There stood Eli Boyle, staring at his black shoes. It occurred to me that although he’d saved my life he’d never been to my house, and I hadn’t mentioned him to my family since the day of our fight.
“Clark?” he said, and I realized too that he’d never called me by name.
“What is it, Eli?”
He looked up. Then he looked past me into my house, which I’d always thought of as small and modest—a one-story, three-bedroom war-era starter—but which must’ve seemed lavish compared with his mother’s trailer. Eli pushed up his black-framed glasses and looked down at my shoes. “Do you think you could help me?”
3 | DANA BRETT’S RACK
Dana Brett’s rack showed up one day that fall, out of the blue and at least three years late, as if it had been held up somewhere in shipping. By junior high school most of the girls who were going to have breasts had them, but Dana remained petite and girlish and generally uninterested in her own looks. So I lost track of her, as did all of the boys, until her rack just arrived one day our senior year, on picture day as a matter of fact, when Dana stepped out of her brother’s car wearing a kind of tube top beneath an open button shirt and, well, I don’t mean to sound disrespectful, but…Sweet Jesus.
That morning, like all mornings, I stood with some of the other football players in front of our low-slung open-corridor high school, hands in the pockets of our Levi’s and our lettermen’s coats, trying to effect nonchalance and having as much luck as a pack of ass-sniffing puppies. We joked around and made fun of one another, scoffed at the thin tires on Benny Fennel’s Javelin, rolled our eyes at the hood scoop on Eric Oliver’s GTO, and fantasized about Robert Muckin’s Corvette. But mostly we watched—watched young girls get off the buses, watched older girls arrive in cars, watched the two young female teachers at our school arrive for work. Minds that couldn’t retain a bit of Pythagoras or Plato or the periodic table easily held a full accounting of every pair of pants owned by every cute girl in school. “Amanda Rankin is wearing her double buckles,” Tommy Kane said, and we all turned, riffling our mental catalogs. Ah yes. The double buckles.
So you can imagine the commotion when on that morning David Brett’s passenger side door opened and out stepped two breasts that none of us had ever seen before, attached to his sister Dana.
“Holy shit,” said Tommy Kane.
This was, of course, the same Dana Brett I had fallen in grade-school love with, whose boots I had fantasized taking off. Dana was cute in grade school, but physically she’d never moved beyond that. While we began looking for “hot” and “foxy” and “stacked” she remained “cute” through junior high, and by the time we got to high school she hid herself in baggy dresses and jumpers and she fell into that strata of students we simply called brains. Most of the girls who’d exhibited grade-school brains pretended not to have them by high school and skidded into second-skin jeans and T-shirts and feathered Farrah Fawcett hair. But Dana only grew smarter as those other girls’ clothes got tighter. She devoured chemistry and psychology and advanced composition and became a valedictorian candidate, all the while staying in jumpers and baggy dresses, so that I never stopped thinking of her as a precocious fifth grader under all that fabric. And since there were so many other girls to date, the Stacy Bogans and Rhonda Parsons of the world, the Mandy Landinghams, girls who looked at us in long takes that seemed to promise some eventual business involving the removal of panties, I didn’t think of Dana Brett, except as my old grade-school friend. I spoke with her in class, but in the halls and at games and dances and “events” we existed in different worlds.
Even now, I diminish her by comparing her to the empty pairs of jeans that we pursued, by talking about her sudden breasts as if she were no more than them, but I am only telling the story the way it happened, telling the moronic alongside the miraculous, the mistaken as well as the inevitable. We didn’t know it, but Dana Brett was the class of our class then, both beautiful and genius; and yet, because we had no measure for female intelligence and reason, we missed it in the glare of ass-splitting jeans and two-scoop halter tops. We missed the dead-level power of her eyes, which could cut right through a high school boy, size him up, and dismiss him like just another problem. We missed Dana Brett, with her straight A’s and her straight hair, her baggy, frumpy jumpers, her pretty, makeupless face, and the plain sketchbook she carried around as a journal, her thoughtful conversations and incisive questions, the sadness that she seemed to own. There are many things I must atone for in this confession, but none hurts more than admitting that I went so long without seeing what was in our midst.
But if Dana Brett was nothing to us before, she was certainly something that day in front of the school—picture day, the day something finally coaxed her from her jumper into a tight shirt and new jeans, the day we saw what had developed beneath those layers of clothing, the day we saw that Dana Brett was not a girl anymore.
“Hot damn,” said Tommy Kane. “Who ordered the tit sandwich?”
As she got closer, the other boys fumbled greetings but most of them didn’t even know her name and she looked past them, to me, and I admit—here and now—being too stupid to realize that this transformation might be for my benefit.
“Dana,” I said simply.
She smiled and said, “Hi, Clark.” We all watched her walk into the school.
There aren’t many opportunities for change in high school. Your peers know you too well, your habits and tics and weaknesses and strengths, and any variation is called out, pointed out as fraud. There are only two days on which real change is allowed, when a kid can remake himself. The first day of school. And picture day.
That Monday morning was picture day, and so kids sported new haircuts and clothes, entirely concocted visions of themselves. My younger brother Ben, a sophomore, began his two-week smoking phase that very day, wearing a blue blazer and carrying our grandfather’s pipe in the breast pocket. “You do realize,” he said through gritted teeth, “that these pictures could resurface when we are adults. Nothing wrong with looking sophisticated, Clark old man.” I still see his class picture from that year above our mantel, in that blazer, the pipe clenched in his teeth, like a tiny Noël Coward.
The same morning that Ben and Dana remade themselves, amid countless other new hairstyles and clothes, Eli got off his bus and made shallow eye contact with me. I nodded imperceptibly. He wore a pair of my old jeans, a tight, secondhand T-shirt that read THE HONORABLE MAYOR OF FUNKY TOWN, and a pair of my old tennis shoes. His hair was parted down the middle and dried for the first time ever with a blow dryer that we’d bought for him at the flea market in our neighborhood (when we fired it up and leveled it at his forehead, he looked like a comet, all that dead white skin tailing his head). His black-framed glasses had been traded—despite his mother’s protests (“Henry Kissinger doesn’t seem to think they’re embarrassing!”)—for the big, teardrop aviator lenses favored in sunglass form by navy pilots and the immensely cool California Highway Patrol. He wore an off-white jacket meant to lessen the impact of his dandruff, and about a quart of my father’s English Leather, which had proved the amount necessary to mask his various odors. As a finishing touch, I put a rattail comb in his back pocket, tail up.
He didn’t exactly look good, not yet, and he certainly didn’t look very natural. On him my pants looked stumpy, with their cuffs rolled up, and my expensive Puma tennis shoes pointed in slightly toward each other on his pigeon toes. And while his hair looked better, it was still thin and red and covering a complexion like the surface of the moon. But there was something there, something small and significant, and I think it was this: in one weekend, with one change of clothes and glasses and a small bit of coaching, Eli had managed finally to turn the corner, from one of them to one of us.
But like everything Eli did
, his timing couldn’t have been worse. He chose to leave them when the Special Ed kids were on the verge of being cool, though that didn’t matter to Eli, who could tell condescension from acceptance.
He descended the stairs from his bus and I nodded slightly, as nervous as he was. I moved my shoulders with his every step, mouthing to myself, Good, good, good. “Hey,” he said, without making eye contact with any of us, as I’d coached, and a couple of my teammates nodded in spite of themselves. I said nothing.
He walked the way I’d coached, one hand in his pocket, head back a little, ambling—like the “Keep On Truckin’” guy, I advised—as if he had nowhere to be. Just as I’d instructed in my nonchalance lessons, he chewed gum as he walked and kept his eyes half shut, as if he might fall asleep at any time. Luckily he was well past us when he walked into the flagpole in front of the school.
If Dana Brett’s newfound shelf had shocked the guys in the front of the school, they were totally unimpressed with Eli’s attempt at cool. He walked past us to the school, and it was only Tommy Kane who twisted his face, looked back at Eli and then at me.
“Hey Mason,” he said. “Is Boyle wearing your pants?”
In the split second after he spoke, I did the math, factored out where this would go if I confessed to spending my weekend helping Eli dress and walk and comb his hair.
“What?” I looked back at the door he’d just disappeared behind. “What the fuck you talking about, Kane?”
“Those star-back jeans. I got the same pair but yours have two stars. Boyle looked like he was wearing yours. You guys swapping clothes after PE now?”
The other guys turned. But I was ready for this. A one-eyed boy doesn’t make it through school without knowing how to deflect mockery.
“You know what I think, Tommy,” I said. “I think you’re spending a little too much time staring at dudes’ asses.”