by Ethan Hawke
I couldn’t bring myself to turn the car off or pull up closer. I just watched. Christy was staring at me. I could feel her concern hot on the side of my face.
Julian was in the process of selling my father’s old Martin guitar. The lower half of the instrument was scorched black. I could still vividly remember the night my dad set it on fire. Until I grew older and could compare him to other people, I never realized the level of eccentricity my old man had reached. When I was five he was all I knew, and his chaotic antics were the norm. We were sitting on the basement floor by a dim little table lamp painting miniature plastic cowboys and Indians that we’d bought at this upscale toy store. Not your ordinary fare, each guy was unique, made with precise detail and with individual and specific belts and guns. It was late at night and we’d been painting with my model paint, watching sports for hours. I don’t remember where my mother was but she was out. Eventually my dad got bored, busted out his guitar, took some paint thinner, and poured it over the bottom half of the body. He said he wanted it to look like Willie Nelson’s. Apparently Willie has a Martin that’s mangled, and my dad wanted his to be like that. With paper matches he lit the guitar on fire. Right away he started waving it around, trying to put the flames out before it got too badly damaged. Well, of course the more he waved the damn thing the more it flared up. Finally he ran out the back door with it and rubbed it around on the grass. The fire burned a small hole through the bottom of the base, but basically the idea worked. The guitar now looked wicked cool, and it even had a unique bass lilt in the sound that was appealing.
I shifted in my seat as that pipsqueak Julian with his dragon pants sold the instrument to a middle-aged housewife for what looked like fifteen bucks.
“That’s my dad’s Martin,” I said out loud.
“Let it go,” Christy said. “Do you think you can?”
I watched items I recognized and things I didn’t get passed around and sold. I took several long deep breaths and realized how profoundly fuckin’ pissed off I was at all these people. I missed my father, but the one question I probably most wanted to ask him was one he wasn’t the right person to answer: What am I supposed to do with all this anger? What’s the right way for it to manifest? God knows I was getting sick and tired of tripping all over it.
I pressed the gas, revved the engine about three times, and pulled the Nova around sharp in a quick U-turn. Walking down the middle of the street was that oafy woman with my father’s Martin. She carried it from the neck like a dead chicken.
Three quick rights and I was back on the interstate. And I’ll tell you something about that afternoon. I’ve seen my mom lots of times since, but that was the last time I ever tried to go home.
CRAZY HORSE
I was sitting all bundled up on top of an old weatherbeaten wood picnic table watching Jimmy shoot a basketball. He hadn’t brought any sneakers, so his feet in their clumsy black military boots clomped on the cracked asphalt court. Clouds were thick, heavy, and low above us. The air was cool and wet and smelled like evergreen. There were scattered patches of snow spread around, but the grass was mostly visible, steaming slightly like a warm lake on a cold morning. To our right was an empty children’s playground. The seesaws, swings, and jungle gyms looked lonely and abandoned in the afternoon mist. Miniature metal horses, unicorns, and mermaids were standing, erect and unused, on thick metal springs. With my baby’s cells multiplying exponentially inside my womb, these toys looked different to me now.
This was Jimmy’s community rec center, where he first learned to swim over in the pool directly adjacent to the parking lot. The pool was closed; a giant plastic blue tarp covered the whole concrete area to protect it from the cold. There was a changing house painted barn red with a door on either end, the left marked BOYS and the right GIRLS, in white hand-painted letters. Jimmy fingered Heather Moore over on the grass behind that pool house. I don’t know why he told me that. It was his first time “getting to third.” His father’s grave was in the cemetery just over the fence, which we did visit, briefly. Jimmy sat in front of the tombstone for about three or four quiet minutes. The wind made my throat cold as I stood behind him. A tiny American flag by the headstone marked his father’s service in the Vietnam War.
After those few moments of quiet in the cold cemetery grass, Jimmy said, “You know how Crazy Horse got his name?”
“The Indian?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“No,” I said, trying to maintain a respectful air.
“You’d think it was because he tamed some wild stallion, right? Or maybe ’cause he was fearless like a deranged horse might be.” He didn’t look at me, and I didn’t answer. It was a peculiar trait of Jimmy’s; he was a fanatic about history.
“But it was just his dad’s name. That’s all.” He paused. “He was actually Crazy Horse Junior.”
The wind blew through the short bristles of his hair.
“I’m sorry about all this, baby,” Jimmy said to me, still sitting in the damp earth around his father’s headstone.
“What do you mean?” I asked. I was cold. I wanted to go back to the car and get my coat.
“This must be a downer for you, you know?”
“It’s OK,” I said, slightly bewildered. “I want to be here.”
“This is my baggage. I hate to make it yours, you know?”
When Jimmy’s nervous or uncomfortable, he talks a little too loud and he always says, “You know?” We sat there another couple of minutes, and then Jimmy abruptly stood up and said he wanted to go shoot some baskets. He keeps a basketball in his trunk, along with a tent, some blankets, and other miscellaneous emergency junk. Now, only fifteen minutes later, he was dancing around the pavement and tossing the ball, trying to impress me the way you imagine Tom Sawyer might, pretending he was some famous athlete. He’d ask me to count down the final seconds of some fictional game so he could let fly a buzzer winning shot and then jump and cheer for himself like a stadium of frenzied fans. Enjoying it all only because I was watching, he clomped around on his boots, talking quickly, his breath steaming from his nose and mouth like a teakettle. I sat there, bundled up in my jacket, watching him.
“I think Michael Jordan sucks,” Jimmy said, as he ran and jumped toward the basket, spreading his legs wide in a spastic imitation of a sensational move. “He’s not my hero. I don’t relate to him.”
“Who is your hero?” I asked. I wasn’t really listening to him. I was fiddling with my engagement ring, spinning it in circles around my finger. The wind was blowing wet and clean, gently brushing my hair out of my face. I was glad to be out of the car. We’d been driving for sixteen hours. Jimmy hadn’t slept at all. I didn’t understand why, but he almost always found a way not to let me drive.
“John Starks, baby, that’s my hero.” Jimmy is a tireless New York Knicks fan. Shooting a long jump shot, he shouted, “Glass, boom!” The ball bounced off the shimmering sheet-metal backboard and dropped through the hoop and into the chain netting.
The Nova was parked right up on the grass; he’d left the car on and the doors open so we could hear the music. The Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Main Street” echoed out into the Ohio plains.
Two kids, maybe thirteen and fifteen, were shooting on the other half of the court. I could tell they were irritated by the music and by Jimmy’s boisterous shouts, exclamations, and general demeanor. They were sniggering and throwing scowling looks back at us.
“Don’t you want to talk more about your father, Jim?” I asked, patting the picnic table and motioning for him to step over and sit by me. It was important, I thought, that we try to communicate more deeply with each other.
“I don’t have anything more to say about the subject. I told you everything last night.”
“Are you angry at him?” I asked.
“No,” he said calmly.
“Are you angry at me?” I tried to smil
e.
“No,” he said, dribbling the ball. He was wearing a navy blue baseball jersey with his name printed on the back over a gray hooded sweatshirt; he always wore the two together. It’s funny, the absurd teenage quality of every outfit he owned. He and his intramural baseball teammates each paid an extra fifty bucks for those jerseys. They wanted their names printed on the back. HEARTSOCK was on his in white letters above the number 34; he said it was important. The jersey couldn’t help but remind me of his father’s headstone.
“I’m just worried about your not really addressing it,” I said, and I was.
“I have addressed it,” he said, bending down and tightening his bootlaces. Immediately after the suicide he’d seen a psychiatrist for four months, but it didn’t have much impact. I’m sure Jimmy just entertained the shrink with BS.
“I know you pretty well,” I added, trying to maintain a friendly tone, “and I don’t think you have. I’m sitting here watching you, wondering when the other shoe is gonna drop.”
“If you’re worried I’m gonna go nuts, you can stop.” Now he was irritated. He stopped dribbling the ball and held it tight under his arm. “Don’t start backseat analyzing me, Christy, it makes me feel like a rat in a test cage or something.” Fear of insanity is the only reason Jimmy joined the military, I’m sure of it. He needed the structure.
Trying to stop myself from neurotically spinning the engagement ring, I started rubbing my knees. My joints are horrendous, and the long car trip hadn’t done them any favors. All my cartilage had begun popping and cracking with every shift of my weight. “What do you want to talk about then?” I asked.
“The 1994 NBA finals,” Jimmy said, dribbling the basketball again. “Coach Pat Riley calls the Knicks out for the season’s opening day of practice at exactly one minute after midnight.”
“Spare me, buddy,” I pleaded. He knows I really couldn’t care less about the finer details of professional sports.
“He tells them Michael Jordan has retired and gone to play baseball. ‘This is our year,’ he says. ‘We’re first in the NBA to step out on the court, and we will be the last to leave. When we do, we will be champions.’”
Jimmy spoke with an intensity about basketball that was almost never present when he talked about his own life.
“And they did it. The Knicks made the finals. They were playing Houston. Each team won three games before the deciding game seven. Starks played phenomenally. You gotta understand, John Starks was a Kansas boy who two years earlier had been stacking cans at the fuckin’ Piggly Wiggly. He was no first-round draft pick, no fancy-pants little Nike mascot.” Jimmy’s dad had loathed Nike. Apparently they don’t make any shoes in the United States and employ all sorts of underage Third World children. His father had taught him that to be wealthy was intrinsically evil, and that to hold on to so much when so many had so little should be a jailable offense.
“Let me make one thing clear. Starks wasn’t a basketball player,” Jimmy went on. “He was an artist. He played with feeling, like Mozart. You understand?”
I nodded, teasing him with a phony doe-eyed look of rapturous attention. It was my favorite kind of moody day, air so thick you felt you could see it. Pregnancy had given me an uncanny ability to space out, like being mildly stoned all the time. I was quick to cry, quick to laugh, and I must say I had a larger sexual appetite than at any other time in my life. A natural incentive to draw and keep a man close for birth, I figured.
“You mock,” Jimmy continued, “but at times he looked shabby, like he belonged in junior high summer leagues, and at other times the intensity level in his eyes would get so ice hot that opposing coaches in the league quaked with dread.” He said all this while dribbling the ball between his legs. “One minute the Knicks would be trailing by twelve points; the next thing you know—whoosh!—John Starks drops thirty points and the game is over. Bam! Knicks are on top.” Jimmy ran toward the basket and laid the ball in the net, his heavy boots all of an inch and a half off the ground as he leapt. In his mind he looked glorious.
The two younger boys across the court had stopped playing and were looking over at us. Maybe I project it, but I always see something dark and foreboding in the eyes of teenage boys. They all look like they’re capable of bashing your head in.
Above us on the hill, over the fence, the graveyard was still visible. The picnic bench was beginning to make my butt hurt. I stuck my hand under my jacket and under my shirt and felt the soft skin below my belly button. There was a thin dark line slowly forming on the skin of my abdomen, every day creeping up toward my belly button, the external measure of my growing uterus.
“Just so you know,” I told him, “you’re not playing into my fantasy right now.”
“So there he is, this grocery clerk from Kansas, John Starks.” Jimmy was so enjoying telling this story it would’ve been cruel to stop him. “The little train that could, Mr. I-Think-I-Can, starting in the greatest basketball game in the world: Game Seven of the NBA finals! And you gotta understand how deeply Starks loves to play. You can see it in the way he snaps off his sweats, like Clark Kent seeing a little girl in danger. And here he is, living the dream. The series was tied at three apiece, but the Houston Rockets were favored to win. They were playing on their home court, and no team in NBA history ever won Game Seven on the road.”
“No way, Jimmy, really, no team in history,” I teased. He was so enthusiastic I had to jerk his chain. “Unbelievable. But you and John Starks did it, huh?”
“I’m not done telling the story,” he said, holding his finger up like a history professor.
“Sweet Jesus,” I said.
“Hey, why don’t you shut your fucking trap!” shouted a thin young voice from a distance, shocking both of us. It was the younger of the two schoolboys. His buddy was behind him, choking, trying to hold in his laughter. “It’s bad enough the music you’ve got playing, but to have to listen to your diarrhea of the mouth is torture.” The kid was probably five-seven and obviously still growing. His arms and hands were much too large for his body. His face was scatter-shot with pimples, but you could tell he’d be handsome someday; he had high cheekbones, a sharp nose, and the physique of an athlete. He was wearing expensive purple sneakers, and his sweat pants were stuffed into his socks to show them off. MICHIGAN STATE was written across his chest, gold lettering on blue cotton, and a wild look of adolescent discomfort and anger smoldered in his eyes.
“What did you just say to me?” Jimmy stopped dribbling and turned around. His entire demeanor changed instantly.
“Jimmy, he’s just a kid,” I said quietly, drawing him back toward me. “Watch your language!” I shouted to the boy, thinking that as a girl I could somehow disarm any male posturing.
“Hey, pipsqueak,” Jimmy said, walking toward the two kids, “why don’t you go home and let your mom rub some lotion on your dick for you?”
“Jimmy, leave him alone,” I said.
“I’m not afraid of you, faggot,” shouted the kid, throwing his head back like he had antlers on top of his head.
“Can you believe this?” Jimmy turned around back toward me.
“Fuck you, dirtweed,” said the kid, and started walking toward Jim. But then he turned around instead, saying something inaudible to his crony. They both sniggered with their backs turned.
“What did you say?” Jimmy asked, exasperated, turning back toward them.
“Nothin’, faggot.” The kid scowled at the ground.
“That’s right you said nothing,” Jimmy continued. “Get out of my sight.”
“You wanna run one right now?” The kid was walking toward us again, his basketball under his arm.
“What, play basketball with you?” Jimmy laughed. “Are you nuts? I’m not gonna play some kid with a smart mouth.”
“I would destroy you,” the boy stated, now uncomfortably close.
This is w
here I first became aware that something terrible might happen.
“You have shit for manners, all right. Go home and play some video games,” Jimmy said. “Get lost. Scram!” he added.
“You chicken?” the boy asked.
Jimmy started laughing. “You got a hundred bucks? I’ll play you for that,” he challenged.
“You ain’t got a hundred bucks. Your fuckin’ car ain’t worth a hundred bucks.” The kid pointed to Jimmy’s Nova and motioned to the bumper sticker on the back. “What, you really in the army?”
“Yeah, I’m really in the army.”
“Nice job. What, no openings at the gas station?” The boy’s buddy busted a deep hardy laugh on that quip. The whole dialogue was obviously going nowhere constructive.
“My father was in the army,” Jimmy said, “and he’s dead up on that hill, so watch your mouth.”
“Your dad doesn’t need to be dead for me to feel sorry for you.” The kid was feeling confident now, hearing his friend’s laughter rolling across the basketball court.
“Go home, kid,” Jimmy said firmly. I was proud of him for not biting.
“I’m coming back with a hundred bucks, and you better have it,” the kid pronounced.
“What, you gonna steal it?” Only Jimmy’s back was visible to me, but I could hear a tightness in his voice.
“I’m gonna kick your ass,” the kid stated officially, grabbing his buddy’s shirtsleeve. They both pranced off across the rec field.
“I can’t believe that punk,” Jimmy said, turning back to me casually, but his lips were tight and angry.
“Let’s go, Jimmy, I don’t like this place anymore.” I began getting up from the picnic bench.
“No way,” Jimmy said, dribbling again. “Let’s stay right here.”
“You’re not gonna play that kid.”
“Nope, but I was telling you about John Starks.”