“You’re about living a good life. About being a good person,” I said.
“Maybe?” he said. He climbed down the ladder. Moved it six feet to the left, then climbed back up and started digging in the gutter again. “But I’m not moving forward. Feels like I should be moving forward. Like, I’m not that different from you, right? I’m my own kind of lonely, isolated monk boy. I spend most of my time in my own head. Like you, dude. You’re a sports monk with pretend friends.”
“I like Riley and Twiggs. That’s not pretend. They’re real friends.”
“Whatever. They’re not on your plane. But I’m not either. You know why? You know what you are, and you do specific stuff that proves it. I don’t. I just talk about everything out there in the world. Talk, talk, talk. Meanwhile, you don’t say shit half the time, but you get all these specific things done, all moving in one direction. I was thinking, maybe your monoculture is right? Maybe being focused on one thing—like you’re doing with football—is good? Practicing deeply, not widely, even if you risk becoming a ghost town.”
“I am worried about that, though. I don’t want to be a ghost town.”
“Of course it’s scary, man. You’re risking all your other possible futures, and for what? A violent, hyped-up kids’ game.”
“Ouch.”
“Not ouch. Quality. You play a violent hyped-up kids’ game with great quality. That’s something.”
“Okay?” I said.
“Don’t you feel it? Don’t you get something meaningful out of practicing deep, practicing that same football monk shit over and over?”
“I don’t know. I love the game, but I don’t know if being good at it is the biggest reason I do what I do.”
“Why else would you practice so deep, if not for the sake of quality play?” Joey asked. He whipped a bunch of gunk down on our tarp below, then looked at me.
“I practice hard at this thing because I’m afraid of the opposite of practice.”
“What do you mean the opposite?” he said. “What’s the opposite?”
“I prefer working out to not working out,” I said.
“What’s not working out? Lying around?”
“No. I’ve never been able to sit still. It’s more to be . . . idle with myself, alone with myself and my random thoughts. That’s bad for me, for real.”
“Maybe that’s what I am? Idle with myself?”
“I can’t be idle. It’s not only football. I study hard for school. Read stuff about the stuff we’re studying in school, because I don’t get enough context from classes.”
“Right. That’s practicing deep.”
“Maybe? It’s just not being idle with myself.”
“What does idle mean to you, though?”
“I don’t know. It’s the trembling void.”
“Dude. You are so bad with your verbalization. Like your mouth doesn’t do shit, sometimes.”
“I have to think. Should I write?”
“Fine. Write. Let’s get this damn gutter done. I need to be with my drums.”
Joey had bought a three-piece cocktail drum set after he saw a jazz combo play on a street corner in Madison. He hoped to learn to play, even though he wasn’t taking lessons. The truth is, he didn’t need drums. He has plenty of things to do. He just never gets good at any one thing, I guess? Anyway, that night, I wrote this for him in my green notebook.
The Opposite of Practicing?
Before, he was antsy. He was anxious. He couldn’t sit still. He was itchy on his insides. Before his sister died, he felt like a cartoon character stuck in a human world. In first grade, in the middle of quiet work time, he had an itchy voice in his head that told him to stand on his chair. He told the voice no. He told the voice he didn’t want to stand on his chair. He told the voice he didn’t want to get in trouble again. He begged the voice to leave him alone.
The voice said, “Do it now.”
No, he said.
“Do it,” the voice said.
No.
“Do it now!” the voice said again.
And so, he slowly stood up, slowly climbed onto his chair and spread his arms out like Jesus on the cross. Everyone, all the little kids, looked up at him with their eyes wide. Mrs. Johns, his teacher, shook her head back and forth fast. Her mouth opened.
He locked eyes with her. He mouthed, “Sorry.”
“Get down off that chair, Isaiah Sadler.”
He fell off the chair and broke his wrist.
This itchy voice didn’t go away. It was part of him, too. Do it, the voice said. Everything is stupid. People are stupid. Show them you don’t care, because you know how stupid this whole world is.
Do it.
And after his sister died, the voice lit a short fuse on a bomb. He and Reid broke all the windows at C & J Seed Company one night. By himself he took apart all the stalls in the eighth-grade bathroom. He took a knife and cut bike tires in the middle school bike rack. Nobody knew he had a hand in any of that.
Often, though, when the bomb went off, he was caught. He, Ben, and Reid set fire to five Christmas trees in Smith Park. Ben and Reid ran away. He couldn’t until it was too late.
And he didn’t want the bomb to go off ever. He cried after the bomb went off. But his itchy voice remained. “Do it,” the voice said. Everything is stupid, and you have to show them.
The life of the football monk didn’t silence the itchy voice. Still, today, the voice sometimes tells him, “Do it.” But, now, he doesn’t do it. Before, if he tried to disobey the voice, he would find himself sitting by himself, bouncing up and down, thinking about “doing it,” feeling so itchy, sweaty, desperate, afraid of himself, because he knew at any given moment his body might take off and he’d see with his eyes his own out-of-control hands hurling rocks at passing cars.
That is the opposite of practice to him.
After he became a football monk, when he disobeyed the voice he did so with a concrete activity. “Sorry, no time to throw rocks at cars, I have to lift weights so I’m ready for the next obstacle on the football field.” Or, “Sorry, no time to do shots of schnapps. I have to complete a chemistry assignment before bed so I’m ready to meet Riley for gassers in the morning. He’s depending on me. . . .”
Being a football monk always provides an answer for the voice. He doesn’t “do it” because he has work to do. And because he repeatedly does this important work, he finds himself being asked by people who have learned to trust him to do more important work. Finishing important work, doing it well, never makes him cry (like breaking all the windows at C & J Seeds made him cry). He is no longer a destroyer. He is a builder. And the construction work he does always feels like a beginning, not an end. Each brick he adds to the building takes him higher. He will build the biggest tower in the world because he can always tell this voice that tells him to “do it,” sorry, no, I’ve got so many other things I’d rather do than destroy.
He doesn’t know why building a tower feels better. He doesn’t know its purpose. Practice doesn’t tell him where he’s going but tells him he’s going somewhere good.
After Joey read it, he stared at me for a second, then grabbed the top of his head with both hands. “Your brain, man! You have competing brain modules working against each other. I totally get it.”
“Yeah. Definitely. Like a good angel and a bad one inside me.”
“Your ancient lizard brain shouts and your evolved human brain says no thanks, lizard dude. I have the same thing to some extent. I mean, I have conversations with myself a lot. My calm self is always telling my wacked lizard self to calm the hell down.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That.”
“I always figured you were running away from something and you were running scared.”
“I’m running away from the lizard void.”
“But there’s the other half. There’s something even more important.”
“There is?”
“You don’t know where the running will go, but yo
u know it’s leading someplace better, so you keep running.”
I thought for a second. I thought about the dreams I was having with Hannah, trying to stop her from getting in the car with Ray Gatos. “What if all the running actually doesn’t lead someplace better, though? What if I get tired of running? What if the lizard void catches up to me? Like, the pickup truck is coming, you know? It’s going to hit the car at some point.”
“No. Just keep running, bro. Keep up the practice. Keep on trucking. Keep the faith and never do the opposite,” Joey said. “You’re building a big, beautiful tower!”
“We’re working a lot of metaphors here,” I said.
“We’re making life mean something, man!” Joey said.
CHAPTER 19
OCTOBER 4: THURSDAY NIGHT
I went home after school and took a nap for three hours. In doing so, I missed the traditional night-before-the-game dinner at Steve’s Pizza.
For the last couple of falls, every Thursday, day before game day, after the team walk-through out on the practice field, Twiggs, Riley, and I went to Steve’s Pizza. Every Thursday we each ate an entire large pizza.
It probably wasn’t good for us, physically. But it was good for our spirits. We’d talk about football and school and sometimes Twiggs and Riley would talk about girls (and I’d listen and smile, but say nothing about Grace). It worked for us. Since moving to varsity sophomore year, we’d only lost six games. Five were when we were sophomores, and just one, the state semifinals, last year.
Eating pizza at Steve’s the day before a game was part of our victorious tradition. I broke it.
Where the hell are you? Riley texted.
Why didn’t you tell us you had a concussion, dude? Twiggs asked.
Sorry. I don’t know. I’m resting up. I’m a little messed up.
Neither Riley nor Twiggs replied.
I lost my breath. I stared at the walls of my bedroom. It was getting dark, sun going down.
My phone buzzed. I looked at the screen, hoped it was my friends. But it wasn’t. Coach Conti from Cornell wrote:
How about tonight? Are your parents home? Let’s get you set up for your visit!
Then, all at once, two other texts blew in. The first was from a number I didn’t recognize.
I saw you watching me. Why? Don’t answer. Ask yourself.
I knew who it was from. Her identity was confirmed a second later.
I got this message from my dad:
Are you available tonight? Grace Carey is concerned about your behavior. Could you come over, please?
Grace Carey? What the hell did Dad have to do with Grace? She was at Grandma’s house two days ago and now Dad was texting me on her behalf? What the hell was that about?
Yeah. Okay. I’ll be over.
Mom stays at work late on Thursdays to meet with clients who can’t meet during business hours. So I didn’t have to explain why I was going to Dad’s place or, conversely, to lie to her about going.
Unfortunately, Mom had taken her car. I went into the garage and climbed on my old, barely used eighth-grade bike and made my way across town. The rusty heap creaked underneath me. Dad lives in an efficiency apartment above his engineering department colleague’s garage. The place is a couple miles away, across the street from campus.
I could’ve thought of many things while biking. Riley and Twiggs. Coach Conti and Cornell. Mom, Coach Reynolds, or the physics test I was supposed to take the next day. But I didn’t think of any of that. Instead, I felt good, pumping the creaking pedals, the wind blowing around me, picking up speed. Movement makes me calm.
I hid my bike under the rickety staircase that leads to Dad’s place. I climbed the stairs, entered without knocking. Dad sat on the couch, watching MSNBC, eating Kraft Macaroni and Cheese (he has the taste buds of a fourth grader). There were engineering texts and student assignments on graph paper covering the coffee table in front of him.
He looked up. “The Republicans are no longer Republicans,” he said. “They’ve turned into goddamn fascists. All they care about is keeping the rich, rich.”
“Same old same old,” I said.
“The hell it is,” he shouted. “Everybody has to get their damn heads out of their damn asses, do you understand? Look at this!” He turned up the volume and the people on a panel spoke animatedly about whatever it was that had jacked Dad up.
I watched but didn’t listen. This is one of the ways my family had gone crazy. Politics. What’s stupid is they’re all Democrats but still hate each other. Mom hates Bernie Sanders as much as she hates Trump. Dad thinks the Clintons destroyed the party. Grandma loves Joe Biden but thinks all the other national politicians are bad for American business, which makes both Mom and Dad call her a fascist. This is another reason they have a hard time sitting in a room together.
I miss Grandpa John. He wouldn’t have put up with the family coming apart because of politics. He believed everybody has a “glass ass,” which meant a weak spot. Instead of kicking at a person’s glass ass, he said, we should remember that we’ve got one, too, and that someone might come along and kick ours if we’re not smart enough to know we’re not perfect ourselves.
“Hand out cushions for their glass asses. That’s one way to be a good friend,” he told me after he calmed a fight between Mom and Melinda one Thanksgiving.
Grandpa John was military and a cop and about as tough as a dude could be, but he was nice to the bone, too. He literally tried to do good.
Speaking of good. Maybe Dad was trying to do good.
I sat down on a beat-up office chair next to the coffee table. “You wanted to see me?” I said over the noise.
Dad looked up, stunned out of his TV trance. He reached for the remote and turned the volume down. “Yes I did. Why in the hell would you hide behind Dairy Queen and jump out at Grace Carey?” he asked. “What were you doing away from school? Why weren’t you at practice? What is going on?”
“I have a concussion. I can’t practice,” I said.
“You’re still on the team. You don’t leave the team just because you’re injured. Or are you quitting because things are tough for you for the first time?”
“Are you talking about tough in football or tough in life, generally?” I asked.
“Football!” he shouted.
He had quit my family, left me behind, started a new life, moved into a tiny apartment that made it impossible for me to stay overnight. I glared at him. He’d made my life tough.
“So? What do you have to say, Isaiah?”
I sniffed. Focused. “Coach Reynolds asked me to pick up his daughter from piano lessons, since I couldn’t practice with the team. I was early, so I went on a walk to kill time. I didn’t mean to scare Grace. I didn’t even know she was working.”
“Really?” Dad asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “It was just a weird situation.”
“Well, good. But . . . listen. So you know . . . there are just some things you should know about Grace,” he said.
“Why? I barely think about her now.”
“Good. She doesn’t want you to think about her.”
My stomach tightened. “That’s fine,” I said. “I don’t. Ever.”
“Then what in the hell made you hide behind a bush next to Dairy Queen?” he asked.
“I already explained that. What’s the deal with Grace? Why is it such a big deal?”
“Grace thinks of you as her role model,” Dad said.
My mouth opened, but no words fell out.
“The way you’ve turned your life around, Isaiah. What you’ve been able to do.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s nice.”
“It is. But I’m worried for her. I don’t have to tell you, Grace doesn’t come to the table with the same good cards you were dealt.”
“What good cards are those?”
“Don’t be obtuse, Isaiah,” Dad said. “You might have been beat up when you came to the table to play, but you had a great set of cards.
”
“My dead sister card? My murdered grandpa card? My parents who hated me? Are those the cards you’re referring to?”
Dad took in my words for a moment. His face reddened. “Parents who hated you?”
“You sent me away.”
“You needed help. We couldn’t provide the help you needed,” Dad said.
“Mom brought me home before I completed the treatment program.”
“She missed you, Isaiah.”
“Isn’t that selfish?”
Dad breathed for a moment. “Listen to me. Your mother had lost her daughter. She was wrecked. She’s still wrecked if you haven’t noticed.”
Is that why you left? I thought. Your wife was too damaged for you to deal with anymore? “I know,” I said. “I feel sorry for Mom.”
“I do, too,” Dad said. “But Grace’s situation is different than yours. There are bad things happening in that house. Ongoing, you know? An ongoing tragedy.”
I nodded. “Grace’s mom is a train wreck.”
“Nothing like that piece-of-trash stepfather of hers.”
“He’s bad. I know.”
“You can’t possibly understand how bad, Isaiah,” Dad said.
“Uh” is all I could muster.
“His presence in the house made it impossible for Grace to graduate from high school, right? It makes it impossible for her to be safe. That’s not her fault.”
“Yeah,” I said. How did he know this stuff?
Dad nodded, showing he knew more. “Grace has been on her own since she was sixteen. Do you know she bought her own groceries with her Dairy Queen money because these supposed adults in her house wouldn’t feed her?”
“I know,” I said. “We were friends then.”
“Lucky for Grace . . . somehow your fascist grandmother has seen fit to pay her well and to give her more and more responsibility and pay her better. That church you’ve started going to has given her an AA group to attend.”
“Grandma’s church. I just drive Grandma. It’s not my church.” This was sort of a lie. “Don’t worry.”
Cracking the Bell Page 8