Winning the City Redux

by Theodore Weesner

  Toughness and smoking in the locker room. Sharp clothes. The taking of no flak. All of it exudes from Lucky and makes him, as word has it and as his ‘ask your sister’ reply appears to confirm, the heartthrob of Emerson Junior High and of Little Missouri itself. “Rough and tough, and hard to bluff . . . can’t get enough of that wonderful stuff!”

  # # #

  JOINING LUCKY IN the front line are Chub Coburn, the team’s biggest player, an oversized, burly center who can dance on quick toes while ripping rebounds from the board, and lanky Grady Devlin, the other forward, a boy who smiles with flawless white teeth and imminent good humor on the way to everything he says, however ominous his smiling words. Hillbillies. Lucky smokes Marlboros from a box while several others smoke Camels, Dale’s father’s brand. On being offered a cigarette by Grady Devlin at half-time—grinning with his teammates at the outrageous defiance of the offer—Dale feels confident enough with the kids who, like him, are connected to the south, to shake his head no thanks . . . to no apparent disapproval.

  “Wheel’s a serious ath-a-lete,” Lucky tells the gathering there between the dark green metal lockers. “Otherwise I wouldn’t a’ taken him.”

  Closing his eyes, steeling himself before they return to the floor, Dale keeps feeling he has returned home, is finding himself, and hopes the feeling will help him get back into being the star player he knows he is.

  CHAPTER 26

  THE GAME IS A LAUGHER, AS WILL BE MOST OF THEIR GAMES in the Emerson district. Each district has a dominant team—the Flintstone Truckers will dominate Walt Whitman—and maybe one or two competing teams here and there will have to be taken seriously. With a couple of good players and maybe a father who knows his stuff, a lesser team can put up respectable fights but can never overcome the size and talent of players like Sonny Joe Dillard and Hal Doyle, Chub Coburn and Lucky Bartell—Dale himself, for that matter—and the talent and experience they bring to glossy floors throughout the city.

  Dale draws but one shout from the stands during his first game. Riding the bench throughout the first eight-minute quarter and into the second before being inserted on a finger-point from Lucky, the shout from the bleachers is, “Lucky, who’s the new guy?”

  Lucky ignores the question until Dale happens to take an inbounds pass and fires a baseball throw the length of the gym into Chub Coburn’s leaping hands for an easy lay-up. “That’s who the new guy is . . . Flying Wheel . . . came to deal!” Lucky shouts to the bleachers, drawing titters from teammates and a snicker from Dale himself. The Flying Wheel came to deal for sure, on a new current of old hoop excitement traversing Dale’s eager heart.

  # # #

  BUSYNESS IS LESS present than at Walt Whitman, and in the locker room after the game there is hanging around, storytelling and myth-making to which Dale listens, smiles, laughs, and with which he feels at ease. “Sumbitch looked at me like he thought I’se subject to some fear of death in his eyes,” Lucky says, storytelling fashion, referring—Dale isn’t exactly sure—to a teacher, a bus driver, a girlfriend’s father . . . ? “Tell you what I did. Smiled at that motherfucker, said to him ‘zat a fact?’ made as if to turn, came around, nailed that sumbitch. Knocked him out cold! Hit’s true. Ask Grady, he’s there. God’s truth, ain’t it, Grady? Dropped that sumbitch like a pig in a slaughter house taking a bullet to the brain.”

  “Guy may still be out.” Grady’s soft words and grinning ivories make it so.

  Dropped that sumbitch like a pig in a slaughter house taking a bullet to the brain. The phrase is one, Dale thinks at once, he might pass on—for its color and originality—to Miss Furbish herself. Dropped that sumbitch like a pig in a slaughter house taking a bullet to the brain.

  LEAVING THE GYM, Dale goes on to Chub Coburn’s father’s gas station down Corunna Road for more hanging out, thinking of the Flintstone Truckers arriving at about that time at Bothner’s horse farm in their parent’s cars for tubs of fried chicken and more home movies of the Nationals at Akron. Meanwhile the treat at the gas station, from Chub’s greasy mechanic father, is the triggering of an old pop machine that allows each player to slide a bottle through ice water and lift it dripping into the air without having to insert any coins. Selecting a Hire’s Root Beer, Dale says, “Thank you, Mr. Coburn,” to which Chub remarks, “Better not call him Mister, he’ll get all important and start making us pay.”

  Dale laughs with the others at Chub’s defiance of his grease-stained father and, inserting coins for a Milky Way—candy isn’t free—hangs with his new teammates (for whom his affection and admiration are running rampant) to snack and sip and hear more yarns delivered in twangs that float easily among the oil and gas fumes and sound as if they were written by Mark Twain.

  # # #

  THEN A CRISIS out of the blue. As Dale takes up his gym bag to bid his new friends goodbye, to head along Corunna Road to catch the first of two buses into Lower Downtown and home, Lucky Bartell follows to the gas pumps and asks, “Man, you free tonight?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Hafta come back to Chub’s Parts and Service.”

  “What’s up?”

  “You’ll be up, man, that’s what’ll be up.”

  To Dale’s perplexed look, Lucky confides, “Chub’s gettin his old man’s Merc from the repair bay . . . we’re gonna gangbang Crazy Johnny to launch the season. It’s all set.”

  There is Lucky’s grin indicating the adventure, to which Dale grins in turn, saying, “Gangbang?”

  “She prefers the team approach.”

  “Crazy Johnny?”

  “Got knockers, man, like you wouldn’t believe. Fine piece of ass, believe me. Had better myself, of course . . . but you get her to squeeze her buns, can be somethin else! Seven p.m. We pick her up at seven-thirty. We’re not on time she’ll throw a tizzy. Gonna start the season with a serious gangbang! Rough and tough, hard to bluff . . . don’t be late, man, you want some of that stuff.”

  Going on his way, Dale realizes that he’s stricken with fear. Crazy Johnny? Is she part of a Huck Finn/Tom Sawyer tale he’s never read? Being a virgin isn’t anything he can admit to the Little Ms . . . but neither has he met anyone like them (or not like them!) in Mark Twain. (Zona Kaplan is the girl with whom he has imagined losing his virginity, not Crazy Johnny.) All the same, sex exerts a powerful call, no matter that the anxiety Lucky Bartell has raised has Dale by the throat with the intimidation of actually doing it at last.

  CHAPTER 27

  TENSION GRIPS DALE ON INTO THE EVENING. GANGBANGING a woman called Crazy Johnny? What of the smooth olive skin, the perfect features and beautiful expressions of Zona Kaplan, even, dear God, the breasts and tender smile of Miss Furbish herself? Those have been his dreams, not humping in a car in the presence of others. Nor can he play sick and not come off as the worst of new teammates . . . a chicken-shit snob from Walt Whitman. He’d lose all respect and be ostracized by the Little Ms, too. A guy who doesn’t smoke in the locker room is one thing. A guy declining sex with a willing woman is something else.

  As Saturday night darkness comes on, as his father shaves and dresses to go carousing—getting on a buzz by way of countless sips—Dale is thinking he has no choice but to do it. Maybe fake it. Still—on the other hand—an actual woman! Will it feel as good as everyone says? Will it make him more of a man, tougher and more daring than ever? Will it make him taller with girls and taller in fact, shaving chin whiskers in no time at all and looking grown up to his favorite teacher and most tantalizing female presence?

  The prospect of doing it with Crazy Johnny continues terrifying Dale all the same, and he knows in his better judgment that it isn’t what he wants to do. He can’t say yes. Nor can he say no. While something as vague as a breeze or a lyric from a song might give him one of a hundred boners a day, what if—on his turn—he isn’t up to it? What if Crazy Johnny ridicules him for not being big enough and he gets ragged by the Little Ms, too, and ousted from a team with which he had felt immediately at home?<
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  A hillbilly party is what it is, he thinks, while the Flintstone Truckers will be in Zona Kaplan’s fancy rec room flirting with girls from school, slipping into pairings of excited making out, experiencing infatuation, becoming boyfriends and girlfriends with hearts as blindly enraptured as his own genitals are now. If all had gone as it should have, he’d be on his way himself to making out with Zona, kissing her earthworm-colored lips, sliding his fingers over her budding breasts, getting her to ‘like’ the co-captain of Scholastic League and City League, too, for which he had worked, and as it was meant to be, since sixth grade.

  How to get out of doing it with Crazy Johnny? Dale keeps wondering as his father heads into the night in a three-piece suit to roam in his endless search for the woman who dumped them both so long ago. To expose himself in the presence of an unknown woman, no matter being excited at the prospect of losing his virginity. How might he continue as the leader and athlete he has worked so hard and so long to be? He would lose Miss Furbish’s respect, too, if she were to find out. All because the Bothners decided to take as their own the marrow of a life he had worked like mad to call his own.

  CHAPTER 28

  RETURNING TO LITTLE MISSOURI BY BUS, DALE KEEPS HOPING that something, anything will happen to set him free. Equal parts frightened and excited, he leaves one bus and transfers to another, riding beside glass reflecting more within than without. Walking the sidewalk in suspended anxiety, meeting the others, laughing and joking self-consciously, he joins in the packing into the V-8 Merc that Chub Coburn, age fourteen, is able to remove from one of his father’s repair bays at the closed filling station. Life down south. Is this what it would have been like? Warm friendship . . . snatched cars and countrified snickers that would have Miss Furbish showing all of them the door? Running with a gang of friends?

  Rolling on, eight boys so packed into the low-slung Mercury that visibility from the rear is slight, limited, non-existent. Pulling over to where Crazy Johnny squirms into the back seat with an aroma of perfume. Dale’s anxiety lifts off like an airplane taking flight. “Hey I’m feeling some big tits, unless they’re Chub’s!” someone calls, setting off an explosion of nervous laughter, Dale’s included. “Stop pinching me or I’ll pinch your little pecker!” the woman replies, setting off an even greater explosion.

  Dale’s terror remains in flight as he senses a carnal urge burning like a fuse that can have no conclusion apart from failure, ridicule, disappointment. It’s the fate of not having money, horse farms, rec rooms, he thinks . . . not that any one of the Little Ms were other than proud of who they were and where they came from. In their loyalties to a code, they weren’t unlike Dale in his mission to be a leader helping him and his father make their way unto lives of substance and fulfillment. But why does it have to lead to an experience like this—losing his virginity—that he has dreamed of and knows he will never be able to undo as long as he lives?

  # # #

  TURNING INTO A dark field, dousing the headlights and disgorging into cool air under an autumn moon, a quasicommittee meeting proceeds among the leaders, Lucky, Grady, Chub, in which a pecking order is affirmed . . . based on who knows what? “Rough and tough and hard to bluff . . . time for a taste of that wonderful stuff,” someone hoots, only to draw the reply, “Taste?! You’re making me sick!”

  Dale can tell he isn’t the only one who is nervous but imagines he’s the only one who is tempted to bolt. As the last to join the team, he’s last in line, and feels cowardly and confused in the moonlight, sick in his stomach as they await their turns. Dale knows, too, that he will be charged as chicken! queer! phony! (the most devastating charges to be leveled against a fourteen-year-old) if he reveals in any way his desire to be elsewhere.

  He stands as one of a pack of dogs exhaling breath into moonlit autumn air, while anxiety coats his eyes. Some carry on ordinary conversations about free throws made and missed, homework due on Monday, blowing their hands for warmth. Apparently veteran gangbangers of Crazy Johnny, they might as well be in a cafeteria line waiting to select meat loaf or soup as one of them calls, “Hurry it up, I’m losing my boner!” triggering laughter as others trigger added tittering by stepping close enough to give the car’s hood some slaps, to rock the vehicle from side to side while a teammate is humping Crazy Johnny in the back seat. “Fire one!” someone shouts.

  Every several minutes the car’s rear door opens and a happy camper climbs out, saying, “Next . . . number five,” and a player in line says, “That’s me but my zipper’s stuck!” drawing anxious giggles from the next person in line to close the car door on his rear-seat encounter with Crazy Johnny. In the meantime, finishers gather at a distance and joke over having gotten her to squeeze, push, pump, the degree of slop and smell, the outlandish size of her opening wherein one notes having fit “like a weenie inside a pail,” while another says, “Gee . . . I fit in there like a glove.”

  Numbers six and seven. Each climbs into the unlighted space, closes the door, and their minutes pumping unto Eniwetok commence ticking away. Dale keeps wondering how it will go in the car and, as he waits, overhears finishers arguing at a remove over the acceleration rates of a Chevy V-8 versus a Ford straight 6.

  “Number eight . . . who’s bringing up the sloppy rear?”

  As if it isn’t known, Dale thinks. There’s no turning back then as he makes his move toward the dark space, all but sick to his stomach.

  CHAPTER 29

  STRUGGLING AGAINST VOMITING, TAKING IN THE AROMAS OF sex and semen, Dale utters “Hi” into the darkness.

  No response is forthcoming from the shadowed form sprawled before him.

  “Hi, I said.”

  “Get it over with.”

  “Where . . . is it?”

  “Jesus, you don’t know where it is?! What’re you, some kinda fairy?”

  Dale sort of does it, if not to her then to a phantom vessel that seems to receive him. Anticlimactic in every way, he more or less touches into wet, matted pubic hair and—bang bang, thank you, mam—fires his junior high school round while, eyes closed, he continues unraveling in regret, cowardice, defeat. Having no wish to linger, he climbs out.

  “Man, thas quick . . . you even do it?!” Chub Coburn demands as Dale wishes only to disappear into the darkened air.

  “Stinks,” he remarks, drawing—without having meant to—an outburst of laughter.

  “Whad you expect, she’s filled with about a gallon a cum,” one of the southern drawls lets him know.

  The sickness Dale keeps struggling to contain may be more existential than physical. Nausea. Filmed eyes. A dream of his life shattered. The love he knows he’s feeling for a mature woman with a lanyard around her neck and a look in her eyes, somehow violated.

  # # #

  ON THE RETURN to Coburn Parts and Service, Grady Devlin declares, “For service to the community! Keeping children off the streets! Johnny should get an award for community service,” to which, within their tittering, Johnny replies, “Grady, I keep you off the street anytime you like.”

  Releasing Crazy Johnny from the crush of the car somewhere along the way—while Dale, in lingering if lessening revulsion, keeps trying to believe his loss of virginity has not really happened—they soon unload and resume hanging around the darkened gas- and oil-smelling spaces of the station that has been closed by then for hours. Dale wants to get away, all while wishing not to call attention to himself.

  “Bet you kissed her on the lips . . . ?” Chub says to him.

  “Geez, didn’t you?” Dale replies.

  He feeds coins into a machine for a candy bar, and it is then, out of the blue, that a challenge come from Chub Coburn. “Wheeler . . . gotta tell ya. Don’t like somebody talkin like they is one of us, when he ain’t.” A mean smile visible on his face, Chub adds, “Form of ass-kissin is what hit is, and I don’t like people sucking up, you know, with a phony accent.”

  “Fuck you, what’s that supposed to mean?” Dale says, though he knows exactly what
it means and that it is accurate, that in his desire to belong he has been aping their speech, that Chub has hit the nail on the head by calling him a phony. The confrontation—what can he do with someone the size of Chub Coburn?—has his pride more undone with humiliation than had his put-down in the back seat of Chub’s old man’s V-8 Merc by Crazy Johnny. “Tell me what that means,” he repeats in what he knows is a cowardly tone.

  “Shoot, ain’t got no idea what hit means,” Chub mocks. “How ’bout you, Grady? You got any idea what hit means?”

  Grady, ever kind, grins while declining to pile on.

  Guilty as charged and feeling an onrush of panic, Dale has no idea what to say or do. He stands with his root beer, too overcome with humiliation to take another sip. To be called out. To be put down. To have no recourse. They were going to be his new best friends, and here he is stricken with embarrassment and having no way out . . . short of inviting Chub Coburn to fight out on the pavement, which big Chub, in his cruel taunt, has known all along he isn’t going to do.

  Swallowing an endless minute while the others gab about the game, about a girl named Darlene, about Crazy Johnny’s civic role in keeping children off the streets, Dale makes as awkward move to escape by touching base with Lucky—sucking up again, of course—saying, “Hope we meet the Truckers in the playoffs and blow them away.” Sick with awareness of his humiliating cowardice, Dale adds, “Gonna hit the road. See you guys.”

  A moment later, his personal defeat compounding itself as he walks past closed car lots, repair shops, plumbing supply outlets, Dale begins coming undone by what has happened and the status he had gained only to lose. Hurt is returning its knife blade into his chest, zapping his strength and pride just as it did a couple weeks earlier, when he walked crying from school into neighborhood shrubs and wanted to die.

  The prick! What did he ever do to him? Why pour water on him when he’s already drowning? The fat prick, Dale cries to himself as he pushes on, struggling against unraveling all the more. The mean prick, just when I was making my way back. Why?