Rules for Becoming a Legend

by Timothy S. Lane

  The Flying Finn complains. “After all I done for this kid . . . I’s the one to buy the shoes and give the tips . . .” he says. “Who are we to listen to a kid anyway?”

  “Just listen to the game and shut up, old man, you’re banned from the Brick House anyway.” This had come about long before. Something to do with a stuffed animal and pantyhose.

  “I like to see them try and keep me out!”

  But they are both smiling—happy that Jimmy is speaking up and happy that he is playing well. They are never allowed to make the drive to away games, so just being in the parking lot of the Brick House has juice. They can almost see the old, red gym flex with the energy from within. On especially dynamic plays, the rapturous cheers of the Fishermen Faithful can be heard all the way outside, competing with the tinny version playing over the van’s speakers.

  • • •

  Sometimes, on his way into a game, Superintendent Berg will stop by Todd’s window, knock on it. Todd will roll it down, smell the exhaust, wave to frightened Mary, the old man’s new wife, standing just over Berg’s shoulder.

  “Seems to me all the Fishermen need is Jimmy.”

  “Yeah, well, you never know.”

  After they leave the Flying Finn will use the same joke he always uses after these encounters. “Why don’t you two just put the ring on and kiss the lips? You loves each other now.”

  “Don’t be intolerant, you old goat.”

  What happened after Todd found out the identity of who was behind The Missteps blog, and right around when Superintendent Berg, Principal McCarthy, and Coach Kelly were deciding if Jimmy should play, was he drove straight to the big, white house on the hill where Super Berg had moved after being promoted from principal to superintendent. Todd parked his squealing van at the bottom of the drive. He went to the back door and rapped three times. He noticed the shed door cracked open. He peeked the fancy riding mower inside. He wondered, Does Superintendent Berg mow his own grass?

  The old, flabby man answered the door, but opened it no wider than the crack the security chain allowed. Through that small gap, wearing yellow-tinted John Lennon glasses for some reason, a desperate grab for youth through fashion Todd guessed, Super Berg spoke.

  “Now I’ve already called the cops, Todd, so don’t do anything crazy,” he said, the darkness of the big house behind him pairing with the outside daylight to create an odd glow in his eyes. “I’ve only ever tried to be a father figure to you. It’s more than most men would have done.”

  “You wrote that opinion piece back when? And now this blog too?”

  Super Berg scoffed, didn’t bother denying. “Todd, it was for your own good. How can you not see that? You really are egotistical.”

  “What do you know about Jimmy being able to play or not? He’s my boy.”

  Super Berg snorted. “Now, Todd, you really think Jimmy is ready to play again? Be under that pressure? His emotions are obviously too fragile. As a father, you should be thinking about this.”

  Todd laughed sadly. He looked at the chain keeping the door open just a crack, nothing more. He understood that this man, the father of his one-time best friend, actually thought that he could hurt him. It was beginning to seem funny, how far off this town was in their perception of him. Made him want to be violent, this expectation of violence. It was ironic, or some other college word. He coughed. Turned halfway away. Maybe he should just slam back into the fucking door. Shake the whole house, rip the security chain out, tear off the siding, and go around to each window, one by one, and punch out every pane. Of course he’d been thinking about whether Jimmy was up to being on the court again. It sat perched at the top of a list of things keeping him up at night. Here’s the thing, he didn’t know what to do. His son wanted to play again, that was a fact, and for once he was going to listen to what his son wanted rather than do what he thought was best.

  Todd turned back, hands clenching, unclenching, like his heart was his hands and they were pumping blood. “Well, even if he shouldn’t play, that’s for me and Jimmy to decide. Nothing to do with anyone else. Your blog brought everyone else into the conversation.”

  “No, Jimmy and the wall, Jimmy and the goddamn Nine Games did that. Here’s what’s the matter with you, Todd: When the attention’s on in a good way, it’s just dandy, but when it comes around, you can’t handle it. Look at you and James. You threw a fit when he finally took just a little bit of the spotlight.”

  “You think I took away from James?” Super Berg was pushing it. Todd’s throat tightening up, but he didn’t want to care. “I loved James, like a brother. He’s the only one kept me feeling like a person, you know? He’s the only one didn’t treat me different.” Todd took a step closer to the door. Super Berg flinched and the security chain snapped. “I could’ve been drafted by the New Jersey Nets, you know? Make a million dollars. I didn’t though. I was going to play ball for the University of Oregon Ducks. Bring James and Coach along.” He laughs, sadly. “I didn’t want to take anything from James. At least I don’t think I did. I was just a kid. Remember? You didn’t have to go and tell Coach Kelly on me. Could have just asked. Or told me. ‘Get James the ball more so scouts can see,’ and I would have. I would have passed up every shot so he’d get his. Swear to god.”

  “Todd, I don’t think this needs to be—”

  Todd punched the door frame and Berg flinched again. From somewhere in the house a withered woman’s voice called, “Honey? Honey?”

  Todd stepped back, rubbing his hand, already regretting that he’d let even this little bit of violence seep out. “I’m sorry, Mr. Berg, I’m so sorry,” he said. He turned away, walking back to his van. He’d messed this up too.

  Then, a break. He heard Super Berg call out. “Todd, wait!”

  Todd turned. He called up the driveway. “I’ll be better to James. And you be better to Jimmy.” He looked down, examining the knuckles of the fist he’d just used to punch Super Berg’s door frame, smiling. “You know on Jimmy’s birth certificate, it says James. He’s named James. I named him for my best friend. Because listen. Even though my whole basketball life ended that night, I didn’t drive. I didn’t crash, I didn’t die, or worse yet kill someone. After losing Suzie, after knowing what that’s like, I couldn’t have lived with myself if I’d driven that night and hurt someone. I’ve been alive these years to meet my three beautiful children all because of James.”

  Todd got in that old van that vibrated so much while running it could burst at the seams. He knew he’d gotten to Super Berg. Jimmy, his son, would be allowed to play. He peeled off.

  Rule 20. When You Do Talk, Have Something to Say

  Summer, 2005

  JIMMY KIRKUS, FIFTEEN YEARS OLD—ONE YEAR AND FOUR MONTHS UNTIL THE WALL.

  Being at home all day was simply unbearable. Jimmy couldn’t be sure, as he hadn’t talked with him since the fight with Pedro, but he was fairly certain Dex hated him. His little—big—brother acted like he didn’t exist and every chance he got, he ran off with Pedro. Left a hole Jimmy was too proud to just point-blank ask about. Like You sided with him over me? Meanwhile, the Flying Finn spent June going on incessantly about calories, hydration, and training for his senior cycling circuit; his mom was always in the process of just leaving or just coming home; and his pops was increasingly becoming a drunk poltergeist banging around the house, always knocking something over in the next room, denying he’d done it, shouting stupid things like “WE’LL SHOW THEM,” an embarrassment.

  So Jimmy needed out. He needed to get out of the house, but away from the basketball courts. Couldn’t be Jimmy Kirkus, didn’t want to be Jimmy Soft. He saw a help-wanted ad in the Columbia City Standard. Phrases like “Must be able to lift forty pounds” and “Large amounts of lawn maintenance” appealed to him. He imagined himself with a bunch of guys, drinking pop after mowing fields. All of them laughing at some joke, the same joke, together, the sett
ing summer sun alighting on their shoulders. Nudging each other with their elbows. Iconic. He applied for a job working the seasonal crew for the school district under Mr. Berg. Berg didn’t even call him in for an interview. He was hired.

  The reality of the work was a bit different from what he’d imagined. Each morning he and a crew of middle-aged men and one college-aged guy home for the summer met Mr. Berg in a small room at the back of the high school to be assigned their tasks for the day. While they waited for Berg to show up the old guys traded stories of hot girls. Who fucked who where and how. Who saw who sucking who and when. Stuff that always started with “Hey, I probably shouldn’t be saying this but,” and ended with “And I was like damn!” Jimmy started to tell his own story about Naomi once, but stopped halfway through when he noticed how quiet the room got. Wouldn’t go on no matter how the men pressed. So they filled in the blanks for him and he felt disgusting. After that it was all elbows to the side and “Jimmy knows what I’m saying.” He was better than all these men. Fucking go-nowhere townies.

  Then Berg would come in and everyone stopped talking. He ticked off their tasks for the day. Weed-whacking, waxing the floors, moving furniture, replacing the high-up florescent bulbs using hydraulic lifts, and on and on. And then they were all out, split up into small teams. The crew worked so hard, Jimmy didn’t have strength for much else—and that’s exactly how he wanted it. Work all day just to come home and sleep.

  He got home the same time each day, dirty and tired, smelling of cut grass and gasoline, and went into his bedroom to lay face down and sweat through long naps with his windows shut. He’d wake up hours later, starving, when the rest of the house was asleep or gone, and eat cold soup straight from the can in a dark kitchen. Alive just enough to be hungry. Mind for once not thinking about his disintegrating life, just pleasantly fuzzy with sleep. He enjoyed the animalness of it.

  Still, no matter how hard he threw himself into work, there were some nights when he woke up for food and found himself giving in. He took his basketball, still scribbled all over with the names of his childhood idols, and walked down to Tapiola Courts to shoot under the weak light. It was surreal how he was pulled to the courts. Almost as if his body were a vehicle and he were only along for the ride. He wondered how, even when he was too tired for anything else, he could still do the dribble, dribble, shoot. He felt guilty about it and worried for some reason that he might be seen. With the wind coming in quick off the river to sweep the cement, he’d shiver and look around. A vague fear singeing the edges. He was distrustful of Youngs River, only an outlet pass away, like at any moment it might rise up. It’d happened in the past. It would happen again. The blackness just past the edges of his peripheral vision suspect too. Sometimes he swore there was something scuttling close to the ground. A fucking sand toad. He could turn as quick as he wanted, and still see nothing.

  And yet it was all worth it because on a few nights, alone, he was his old basketball self. Teeing off from all over the court, our kid Jimmy was vintage. A throwback to when everyone, including Jimmy, thought he was truly special. And it felt good. Good like his kid brother still adored him, like he still had his best friend, like roundball could still save and the haters didn’t know what they were talking about. Then he’d go home, sick and giddy with hope, only to fall asleep and wake back up in the world where he was still Jimmy Soft, still a basketball bust.

  Then, alarm blaring, he’d hump it to another day of work.

  • • •

  That summer, Pedro got a good weed connect from a guy he met online named Smokey Bear. He started hanging with some older kids, smoking cigarettes, chugging beer. Watch Star Wars with the rule that every time Luke whined, you had to shotgun a Miller. Drunk as a skunk before young Skywalker killed his first storm trooper. Wake up feeling sick with a need for life, spend an hour or two with his brother’s box of girlie magazines in the downstairs bathroom. Finally come out for breakfast feeling weak and disgusting. Roll one up. Get high. Do up a couple more for the road, for his friends, meet with the new crew he played tagalong with. Fuck Jimmy. Fuck basketball. He wanted to get laid. Or get high. Mostly get laid while high.

  Kids all around him had these stupid dreams. Stuff like wanting to be a music producer, a fashion designer, a business owner, but Pedro was the only one who knew the secret. All those people wanted those things so they’d have the money and time to chill out, relax, drink high-end scotch, and smoke tight, illegally imported cigars. He had a better idea. He’d just do it now. His dream was to have no dreams and unexpectedly, without Sunshine Jimmy and his ridiculous basketball hopes, he felt relaxed. Sad too, but he liked to linger on the relaxed part.

  Jimmy could be a real pain. He was always on about basketball. Like, did you see the Vince Carter jam from last night? No, no I did not, because we’re not twelve anymore and there’s bigger things in this world than hoops. Hoops leaving Jimmy served him right. Still, a part of Pedro felt for our kid. Jimmy with no basketball skills was like Taco Bell fajitas—shit just seemed fake.

  Sometimes when he sat at the top of Columbia City Column Hill with the other stoners, Pedro felt like his shortcut-to-happiness plan was really panning out. From his perch overlooking the entire town, pretending he was flying while he was flying, Pedro could really feel his body getting lighter, fast approaching the moment when it was light enough to take off. Made him smile, mouth the word “adios.”

  He tried to hang with Dex, but as the summer progressed this became more infrequent. Dex started running with kids too cool for Pedro and the stoner burnouts he’d glommed on to. Kids under the influence of being good-looking, talented, or rich—or some combination of all three. When Dex and Pedro did see each other, they bitched about Jimmy, complained about him acting like a little girl, remembered those times when he promised he’d ride the booster bus with them, but ditched last second.

  More and more though, Dex was separating from Pedro too—becoming his own force.

  • • •

  For Dex, it had been a punch in the gut to hear of Pedro and Jimmy’s fight. Much of his world to that point had been those two. And while it pained him, he would have taken Jimmy’s side, no doubt. Problem was, Jimmy just stopped talking to him after the fight. So he waited, scared his big bro was mad at him for some reason. Then Jimmy just kept silent like Dex was at fault in it too, and that scared feeling went sour in his belly, way past the expiration date, until he was pissed off. Then when summer really got going hot and bothered, he jumped on for the ride.

  Finally away from Jimmy’s pressure to play roundball twenty-four hours a day, Dex more fully inhabited his own personality. He ran with gangs of summerland kids, doing normal teenage stuff. A summer glued together with bubble gum and ripped to shreds by bottle rockets. He liked it, to be honest, just being normal. He got lit with Pedro and learned Spanish slang. Toilet-papered houses and shoplifted beer. Once spent an entire day sun burning “Fuck Off” onto his chest, only the third f didn’t really take. He ran around with “Fuck Of” instead. He and his friends turning it into a joke, an adjective. “You want a little fuck of me? Now that’s a fuck of a movie.” He went to bonfire parties on the beach and touched the sweaty, pebble-hard nipples of three different girls, felt their tongues mix him up with his mouth as the cauldron, had their hair in his eyes as the wind played interference.

  Sometimes Dex, on bored nights, went down to the courts in secret and watched his big brother from the shadows. Sipped tallboys he stole from pops and saw Jimmy just like he used to be. Smooth, fluid, and special. Here at Tapiola, it all looked so easy. Almost made it seem like Jimmy had choked on purpose. Dex watched, chucked the empty beer cans behind him, felt the blood pound in his temples.

  • • •

  With fall football coming on fast and the town getting ready for back to school, Jimmy and Mr. Berg were having lunch in the stands that overlooked the half-mown football field.

 
“Your Dad was like Dex, you know, all big and strong,” Berg said between mouthfuls of peanut butter and banana sandwich. “Holy cow. But he could shoot a little too. Nowhere near what you can do, but he could shoot a little.”

  Their pants were stained green where the mower had kicked up the juicy bits. Spackles of half-digested plant stuck in their hair and on their faces. The almost tart smell of cut grass hung in the air. Jimmy picked a disfigured leaf off his forearm. “Wasn’t small like me, huh?” he said.

  “Wasn’t quick like you.” Berg patted our kid’s arm. Jimmy flinched and Berg pulled his hand away. “Hey, he wasn’t quick, what I say? And he couldn’t light it up like you can. Jeez Louise, forget about it. All those chants about Daddy’s better, all that stuff? That’s ignorance right there, ’cause you’re just as special as him.”

  “Wish I could do it in a real game,” Jimmy said.

  “You will, you will. You’re special, just like your daddy. I remember my father pestering me about how come I wasn’t stepping up, making more plays, and I’d tell him, ‘Hey Dad, when you got Freight Train on your team, you feed him the ball. You don’t go around putting paint on the Mona Lisa and you don’t play a game of basketball with Todd Kirkus and not give him the damn ball. Plain and simple.’” Mr. Berg laughed. “Here’s the thing, though, Jimmy. If your dad was the Mona Lisa, then you’re the whole museum. You got all the keys to be great, I’m telling you.”

  A black sedan pulled into the parking lot. They quit their conversation to watch. The car stopped and shook slightly. Mr. Berg started talking again but the tone of his voice shifted. The words were decapitated by his breath. The door to the black sedan opened with that precise sort of quiet pop that only comes from very expensive cars. Out stepped Principal Berg—recently promoted to superintendent—in tan shorts and a loose button-up shirt. The promotion had taken his shoddy internal spring, ground down with old age, and put the bounce back in it. Jimmy had heard all the rumors. How Super Berg used the bump in salary to fuel a “midlife” crisis—coming full three quarters of the way into his life. He’d divorced his second and married his third wife, bought expensive toys, and took to wearing his silk shirts unbuttoned a few too many. He carried most of the change flabbily in his belly.