by Gordon Lish
Killing Steven Adinoff—there is no sense in not saying so, there is no reason for me not to say so—killing Steven Adinoff was one of the best of these things.
Not that there were not times when the colored man must have seen me in the sandbox. Because it stands to reason that when he came out back to hook up the hose, or to get it back off of the spigot, that the colored man could have seen me doing different things in Andy Lieblich’s sandbox, he could have looked up and seen me in the middle of doing something which not just any boy could.
The nanny, however, there was not an instant when she herself was not always there, keeping an eye out for us as regards our behavior, keeping an eye out in relation to how we were playing, to the whole question of if whether we were behaving ourselves and playing nicely enough and not letting any of the sand get out of the sandbox and get out into any of the Lieblichs’ grass back there, and meanwhile keeping herself busy with the thing she always had of rolling up and down a wristfiil of rubber bands on her wrist, actually rolling them up and down over her wristwatch, so that the rubber bands kept rolling over on themselves, kept twisting, kept winding up too much and then untwisting and making all of these sounds of unwinding and snapping, which you could hear, which you heard going on all of the time when you were playing something in the sandbox.
I’ll tell you one of the worst things in my life. This is one of the worst things in my life—a day when the nanny said that I couldn’t come over and play but one when she went ahead and changed her mind later on and said that I could actually do it—and then it started raining just a little bit after she’d said it, like just instants, just instants after she had given me her blessing—and then for the whole rest of the day, all the rest of that day after Andy Lieblich went in and the nanny went in with him, I sat down inside of our garage and kept feeling funny and out of the ordinary, like as if I was in some kind of trouble and that certain things which I did not exactly know about yet were probably dangerously unfinished, lying lopsided somewhere and being dangerous, and it made me feel a terrible wildness, this strange feeling, it made me feel like as if I had to feel the wildness if I was ever going to get rid of the strange feeling, which I think, to my way of thinking as a child, was the worse one, the feeling before the feeling of wildness, the feeling of incompletion and of chaos, a feeling of things getting started and of never getting them over with, of parts of them being impossible for you to ever get them totally taken care of yourself.
In a halfway sense, I think I can say that the day I killed Steven Adinoff, that it, that that particular day—but only in this halfway sense of things which I have mentioned—was a day like that. On the other hand, now that I have said that, I think it is only fair for me to say that I have the feeling that I am making too much out of the thing, that I am probably not really remembering anything.
I should be skipping the feelings and be sticking to other things, anyway. To what I remember because I actually heard it or saw it or so forth and so on—I should be sticking to things like this before things start getting too mixed up.
I heard the water going.
The whole time I was killing him I heard the water getting out of where the colored man had it hooked up to the Lieblichs’ spigot—the water he was using for the Buick, the whole time the other thing was happening, the water for the Buick was sizzling or was crackling or hissing from where the fit between the hose, on the one hand, and the spigot, on the other, was a little bit loose, even though it was the colored man who had hooked it up and who—next to me, next to me—was the world’s most watchful human being in the whole wide world.
Even afterwards, even when I was going home, it was still going then, the tiny hissing was, like a sizzle, like the way a frying pan with some drops of water in it will sizzle, or make a sizzle, or sound like it’s sizzling.
The nanny saw it. Andy Lieblich saw it. So did Steven Adinoff himself. We all saw it. We all watched. Steven Adinoff watched just as much as anybody else.
That’s the thing about it—you watch.
That’s the unbelievable thing about it—that you watch it even if it’s you yourself that’s getting killed.
He watched himself get chopped up.
To me it looked like he was interested in just lying there and watching it. Because isn’t it interesting to watch it even if it’s happening to you? That you’re the one who’s getting it doesn’t make any difference. Actually, if my own personal experience can be counted for anything, that part of it—my opinion is that that part of it is the part of it which just makes you all the more interested in it.
But maybe he did not understand what was going on anymore, what connection there was between him getting killed and the hoe anymore, between what was happening to him and what I myself was doing to him with the hoe anymore. Maybe the thing was that Steven Adinoff was probably thinking of something else.
I don’t know. Maybe that’s what you do—you think of something else. Maybe you can’t even help it. Maybe you can’t even stop yourself from just going ahead and thinking of something which doesn’t have anything to do with the thing that is happening to you, except I myself don’t think that’s it, that that explains it, no.
But I don’t know what does, what would. I can’t even begin to guess, except for the fact that I think it’s got something to do with a nice feeling, with having a nice dreamy sleepy very special, very sleepy new feeling.
Or else I am overdoing it or am anyway just wrong. Maybe he just wanted to see how getting killed looked. Maybe it didn’t matter to him who was getting killed. Because for a lot of the time he just lay there watching instead of trying to get up and fight back and try to kill me back—and then he finally did, finally did get up—except by then he was almost dead, except by then I think he was almost dead, even though he wasn’t actually acting dead, even though he just got up and started acting baffled and shocked instead of being sorrowful or mad at me. But I don’t think it was so much on account of someone having almost killed him as it was on account of his realizing how he’d missed the boat on this thing by getting distracted, by letting himself get distracted, and by not paying enough attention to it, or at least not to the part of it which really counted, until it was just too late and you felt silly for more or less being the center of attention of what’s going on but the last one to be informed as to what it is all about and means. I mean, I’ll bet it’s like finding out that you are the last one to get in on a secret which turns out to have been much more about you than you ever dreamed it was, ever could have, ever could have, in your wildest dreams, dreamed of or thought or anything.
To my mind, Steven Adinoff was just woolgathering and then caught himself at it and went ahead and woke himself up and then noticed he was almost dead.
Except that it was just probably only a gesture by then.
There were pieces of his face—there were all of these cuts which were deep in his head.
Not that he couldn’t actually get up when he tried. He got right back up on his feet again and went and got the rake again and then he walked around for a while, then he walked in and out around the sandbox for a while, stepping up to get in it and then stepping down to get out of it, and meanwhile saying these different things and looking in his pockets almost all of this time, but some of it, some of the time, looking at me again and trying to get me with the rake again before I myself got ready to really buckle down to business again and kill him again and then he fell over again almost as soon as I got busy on him again and really dug in.
Anybody could tell that this time it was for good. It didn’t matter if you were just a six-year-old boy.
Any six-year-old could have killed Steven Adinoff.
WE JUST HAD THE STRENGTH OF CHILDREN. We were not strong—believe you me, we really weren’t. As boys in general go, or as they went in those particular times, or in that town at that particular time, that is, in the town of Woodmere, we were not what you would have called the sturdy kind of boy or the rough-
and-ready kind of boy, the boy who is by nature husky in his body and hardy in his habits. You did not get muscles from the kinds of things which boys like us did, or just have them from the type of bodies which we were born with to begin with. We ourselves were not boys like that. We were actually the other kind of boy—the almost opposite kind of boy. We did not climb things, for instance, or go to any kind of camp, or run or do things which could make you fall down, or ever lift anything which was heavy up. There was no getting, you couldn’t get built up from the things we did—you couldn’t get a good start at developing a good physique.
Not that I myself was anywhere near as weak or as dainty or as delicate as was Andy Lieblich himself. In all actuality, I was even on the stocky side, or at least on the solid side, by comparison with him. Even if his skin, even if Andy Lieblich’s skin looked to me like as if it was not strong enough to do the job of just holding him in, it was on the other hand, it was always nice-looking and always smelled nice—very pale and very clean. He could even get his skin dirty, Andy Lieblich could even get himself absolutely filthy dirty from playing in the sandbox, and yet when you looked at his skin in comparison with looking at my skin, his skin looked much cleaner than mine did, even if I had actually gone out of my way to keep mine looking clean—whereas the bad thing about having skin like his is this—you probably could just almost touch it with something and it would just automatically split open or break or tear or turn black or start getting itchy-feeling.
For instance, the nanny always put citronella on him—she always had to always put citronella on him—she said she always had to coat him with it from head to toe even if he was only coming out for all of only a few minutes.
I thought that’s what rich skin was like, that it was skin like Andy Lieblich’s skin.
You want to know something?
It really is.
I am a father myself now, and I can tell you that there is no question about it—it really and truly is.
Plus the fact that it just costs more to have skin like this—just for the plain and simple reason that you need more things to keep it this way and to take care of it.
A nanny, for instance—if you had skin like this, you probably couldn’t have gotten along without a nanny to look after it for you, even if just to give it the time which would be necessary if you yourself were too busy, if you, the mother or the father of the child, were just too worn out from other things and too busy. If I had a boy who had skin like Andy Lieblich’s, I would spend the money on it, I can tell you—Florence and I, I can tell you that we would not hesitate for one instant. Skin like this, in later life, it’s a calling card, and don’t you think it isn’t.
I can’t tell you, I can’t even begin to tell you, what kind of skin Steven Adinoff had. In all honesty and sincerity, I didn’t actually pay that much attention to much other than just to his lip and to his buttons and then, later on, after it got going, to what the hoe itself was doing to him.
He was really a complete mystery to me. I hadn’t even seen him before the day when I actually killed him. There were certain things about him which I never concentrated on. Once he picked the rake up, this was the only main thing—and if you asked me what I chiefly had on my mind about him before this, then I would definitely but definitely have to say to you that it was his lip, his lip—whereas afterwards, whereas when it was actually happening, by this time it was entirely a question of only mainly three things—namely, where the trench was opening up, how his cheek looked on account of more and more of it which was coming away from his face, and the whole general question of why he seemed to be really interested in all of this and actually doing his best to probably give in to it.
I didn’t even know if he was the kind of a boy who had played rough games before this, or done things which were strictly out of bounds for boys like Andy Lieblich and me. On the other hand, I really did not know really the first thing about Steven Adinoff—and, in all frankness, I still don’t.
For one thing, he wasn’t from the block, he wasn’t from our block—and for another thing, I don’t know where it was that Steven Adinoff came from—he just showed up in the Lieblichs’ Buick is all I actually know—and I don’t even really even know even this—because I didn’t even really see him come in it—I was just putting two and two together when I thought it, this all being on the day in August when I saw the Buick come back and then later on, after lunch, Andy Lieblich coming out with Steven Adinoff right with him—not that it matters the least little bit one way or another, how Steven Adinoff got over to Andy Lieblich’s. The only point I really want to make is that Steven Adinoff wasn’t from our block, one, and that, two, when I first saw him, he was a brand-new boy to me, even though there was something about Steven Adinoff which made me think that there was an important way in which he wasn’t.
He could have been from Cedarhurst or from Hewlett or from Lynbrook or Lawrence or Inwood or from any one of the towns which were around there then.
I just realized something—namely, that I could not tell you where the nanny was from, either—in the sense of where the nanny used to live before she started living at the Lieblichs’. All I can tell you is the idea which she gave me specifically, that where it was where, that it was a place which was where all of the boys were stronger boys than we were, and were Christian ones, Christian.
She said that they were wild Indians, that they were rascals, that they were ruffians and scamps.
She always had her uniform on. I never saw her without her uniform on—or without those rubber bands which she always had on over the wristwatch on her wrist. You know what I can say about the nanny which will give you the exact feeling I had about her? I can say that she always felt like she was there even when I was just thinking about her.
King of the Mountain, Hide and Seek, Tag—maybe Steven Adinoff was used to playing games like those games. I don’t know. Builder or Gardener or Farmer—he could have thought these were just sissy games. In all honesty and sincerity, the nanny herself, maybe even she thought that, maybe all of the times when she was sitting there in the chair for her to keep an eye on us in the sandbox, maybe that’s what the nanny was really thinking of to herself, that we were playing a game which just a sissy would play, even though she was the one who more or less set the game up that way herself, who said, who always said, which three games she was going to give us to pick from, and then, and who then, after we did it, after we picked, who would not ever let us switch to something different, to another game, no matter what.
Right this instant I could vomit from just reminding myself of how he talked—right this very instant I think I almost could, although I suppose that this is just an exaggeration from me feeling so involved in the whole question of discussing all of this at all, or at least from just the feeling which you have when you finally actually start.
We didn’t even play games like Button, Button, Who’s Got The Button? Or the game of London Bridge.
She said the thing she had to always watch out for with us was somebody getting too overexcited or getting too overheated or getting too worked up, and then, before you knew it, before you know it, it is all at sixes and sevens and somebody has to pay the piper. She said that this was why there had to be rules—that the reason was to keep things from getting to be all at sixes and sevens for everybody.
I’ll tell you one of the things the nanny said the most.
She said, “A place for everything, and everything in its place.” This is something I agreed with then—and now that I am a man of fifty years of age, all I can say to you is experience has taught me to agree with it even more.
I think this was one of the reasons why Andy Lieblich was so lucky to have her. There were a lot of reasons why Andy Lieblich was lucky to have a nanny, but this one was one of the biggest ones—namely, the reason that the nanny kept her eye on things for you and taught you things which in later life could stand you in good stead, whereas in my particular case I just had a mother for her to
do this and not some extra person the way Andy Lieblich did.
To be absolutely truthful with you, I personally liked it when I had the feeling that there was a sense in which I was the nanny’s boy too—in the same way that Andy Lieblich himself was—that is, not her flesh and blood in the strict sense of the term of flesh and blood, but instead her job, the thing she was mainly supposed to be thinking about and looking out for throughout the course of the day.
Right then! Right there!—that’s exactly it, that was exactly it, my almost saying the livelong day, my wanting to say the livelong day—really feeling myself hardly able to stop myself from saying the livelong day—killing Steven Adinoff, it was the same feeling, the thing with like rhyming the sounds, or like rhyming the words!
Or like some, you know, some beat in me or something.
Imagine, what would I do if I had a hoe in my hands?
She probably thought to herself how could boys like this ever hurt each other? On the other hand, it was she herself who said that boys will be boys and that you could never tell a book by its cover.
It was so quiet when I was killing him.
Aside from the water sizzling and aside from her rolling them up and down, her rolling the rubber bands up and down over her wrist and her wristwatch. And make no mistake of it—I for one was listening closely, believe you me, I was a boy who was all ears.
That’s how I can tell you, that’s how I happen to know about it to tell you—about the overall sensation of sogginess.
Here’s the best way to say it—on the inside I was listening to myself, listening to the words—whereas on the outside I was all ears and didn’t miss, did not miss a peep.
Not words—but like words.
When there’s time, if there’s time, I’ll explain.
There was never any yelling or any screaming or even anybody saying “Stop!” or “Don’t!” Even he himself, even Steven Adinoff himself, there was not one time when he said anything like this. But you know what? Now that I know what I know, I can tell you that it all makes perfect sense, perfect sense—that it is not even funny how perfect or perfectly the whole thing fits.