t 3:15 p.m. on the last day of eighth grade at Holy Redeemer School, the doors of the ugly red-brick rectangle building explode open with the screams of a thousand escaping schoolchildren streaming toward the sound of summer’s freedom bell.
Amid slaps on the back from schoolmates, I amble across the school’s asphalt jungle—where for almost a decade we’d played tackle football and tag, flirted foolishly with girls, et cetera—toward the school bus and thought of all the years I’d spent here starting with Sister Jodi, my first-grade teacher. Hell, I’ve grown up here.
A pack of graduating girls from my class gather in a huddle in their identical plaid skirts, crying their pretty eyes out because they know this phase of their life is all over. Margaret Spindle, Patty Plaisik, Carmen Lazario, Brenda Simpson … eight years of memories flash through my brain. Their waterworks stop me in my Hush Puppies. I might not see any of these girls I’ve grown up with once I get to high school and beyond because Catholic High is an all-boys school.
A kickball-sized tear forms in my eye like the one on the cheek of that American Indian in the spoiled river commercial. At the edge of the parking lot, I dump my books in a trash bin hauled in for the occasion and hope like hell no one spots me teared up, especially Nick Lund. But there’s no worry about that because I spot the Fantastic Four leaping into a cream-colored Mercedes station wagon, headed to a graduation party at Peter Lattimore’s house to play air hockey and pinball in his basement. My invitation must’ve been lost in the mail, but Fat Albert bragged he’d gotten one.
On my last bus ride home, Reagan Paulson, a famous local kid actor, plops down into the seat next to me. Kate’s friend Vicky Fontaine pinkie swore he gets a check for $79 every time he sings “onion burger, onion burger … you’re sooo good … give me more onion burger, onion burger … topped with gooey cheese … onion burger, onion burger … you’re sooo good” in the local Hamburger Heaven TV commercial. He normally wears his trademark suede suit coat over his blue turtleneck and arrives at school in a brand-new Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Today he’s wearing red corduroys, a black leather jacket, and a Tony Baretta-style newsboy cap.
I speak up first. “How did you get your big break?”
Reagan flips open a mirror case, eyeing a tiny pimple on his nose. I figure he hadn’t heard me, so I gaze out the window at the cloudless sky. Kids hang their heads out the windows, inhaling the summer scent like that doomed, stranded, tethered cosmonaut seeking oxygen in his capsule after the first spacewalk. A riot breaks out in the rear backseat. Our bus driver, Gus, doesn’t seem to care a whit that his riders have transformed into zoo animals. It’s the last ride of the year on this godforsaken bus, and the last ride of my life—thank the Lord!
Reagan finally answers. “Television or stage?”
He snaps me out of my last-day-of-school fog. “Hamburger Heaven.”
Reagan closes his mirror case. “Caddying.” Perhaps he’s misunderstood what I said. Before I could think of what the hell he means, he continues. “I started caddying at the country club and carried a bag for a cinema producer.” At first I think he said “cinnamon producer,” then I figure out he means movies, not spices.
“Anyone I’d know? McQueen, Redford, Clint, Pacino, Stallone? Burt Reynolds?”
He shakes his head. “Producer, not actor. Ever heard of The Towering Inferno? The Poseidon Adventure? Lost in Space?”
Duh. That producer’s a genius. Rocket and I have seen just about every movie that came to town for free—even a few R-rated ones. Rocket has a trick for sneaking us into the new Berkshire Mall theater by sticking two matchbooks next to a hinge of the back door as the previous movie is letting out, and we just waltz into the dark theater as soon as we hear the beginning credits coming on.
“Anyhow,” says Reagan, “he told me I could be the next Mickey Rooney. At first I thought, what a sick perv, but his creds checked out. He got my foot in the door, hooked me up with a New York agent. The rest is his-store-eee.”
“Huh. So it all started with caddying?”
“All the players in town belong to Kensington Hills Country Club. It’s got a world-famous golf course.” He fishes his makeup case out again, does another quick pimple check as if two minutes could have changed things, and tucks it away again.
I know the private country club because they have a fireworks display every Fourth of July. If not for that, you couldn’t get near the place without a royal escort. “Golfers?”
He shakes his head in slow motion. “Nooo, man. Play-ers. Bigwigs. Auto execs.”
“Right … right.” I had no i-de-a.
Reagan fishes black Ray-Bans from his coat pocket and perches them above his freckled forehead. “I carried for the actor Robert Wagner. He’s Jonathan Hart in Hart to Hart, and he’s from Detroit. Terrible slicer. You should check caddying out. Worst case, you get a free ride to college if you stick it out for a few summers.”
I perk up at this news. A paper airliner zooms over my head and is sucked out the window in the seat in front of me. “Come again?”
He flips his sunglasses over his eyes. “They call it the Chick Evans Caddy Scholarship.”
Two fifth graders play tug-of-war with a blue tie in the aisle. The bus screeches to a halt, and I fall forward into the back of the seat in front of me. “Who’s Chick Evans?”
He dismisses the question with a flip of his hand. “How should I know?”
I ask him why he’s riding the bus today, wondering why he isn’t in the backseat of his Coupe de Ville instead of slumming it with the blue shirts. He trails his finger along his lips. “I’m in character. Why else would I be wearing these clothes in this cheese wagon?”
Good question. “What’s the show about?”
“What’s with the third degree, man?”
A quarter mile of awkward silence follows.
“After-school special,” he says eventually. “Cloris Leachman plays my mom, and she’s royally pissed I’m getting shipped to a desegregated school.” The bus comes to a snorting stop. I get up, and Reagan Paulson gives me a hearty goodbye salute. “Good luck this summer.”
Break a leg.
My encounter with the kid actor spreads optimism dust on my brain. If Regan Paulson could rocket his way to local fame from caddying, why couldn’t Ford Quinn? On my walk home, after doing the hustle through the Denisons’ backyard, I decide to take Reagan’s advice and nab a caddying job this summer. Maybe I could get that Chick Evans college scholarship, although Reagan said you have to caddy for four summers to qualify, which means I have to start this coming season.
Pop doesn’t have the money to send me to college, unlike most of the Kensington Hills families. My dream is to become an astronaut or astrophysicist, which requires a ton of college courses in math, physics, and astronomy—and cash. Except for Rocket, I’ve kept it secret that I’m an astronomy nerd, hiding my telescope in the closet on the remote chance a Lund Gang member is bored enough to come over to my house. Telescopes are about as cool as a stuffed Chewbacca in your bedroom, but I’ve been trying to catch a glimpse of the SolarMax satellite recently launched by NASA to monitor the flares of the sun. There’s a whole universe for me to explore out there beyond the Earth’s surface—let alone beyond the one-mile orbit around Dorchester Road, Holy Redeemer, and uptown, which I’ve barely scratched—and hope I don’t get burned.
That afternoon, I find Virginia, a.k.a. Mom, standing in front of our living room mirror in her house dress, reciting some self-help drivel from her beloved book, Mensa-Netics, by Osmond P. Peabody. My sixteen-year-old sister, Kate, watches her from the couch. In the midst of her self-image affirmation, Mom spots me in the mirror and wheels around.
“Ford, I’ve been reading in my book about the importance of goal setting for positive development, and I have a goal for you this summer.”
It’s too late to employ the Jupiter 2’s force-field f
ence against the Mensa-Netics’s robot; she’s breached the perimeter. “Virginia, I’m not spending my summer vacation selling vacuum cleaners.” She sells Rainbow vacuum cleaners door to door.
“No, no, much better.” Her eyes light up like she’s discovered the secret recipe that makes Kentucky Fried Chicken finger lickin’ good. “Mr. Doyle from down the street is sick. He’s now in a wheelchair. Can’t even make it to the toilet seat.”
Mr. Doyle does daily laps around the block while being pushed by his three-hundred-pound wife. “What in God’s green acre does that have to do with me?”
A heavy, disappointed sigh from Mom. “Mrs. Doyle’s got a new job. She needs help taking care of him, and she’ll pay good money. It will make you feel more productive and give you better inner development!”
“No way, Virginia. I can’t stand to be around sick people; they make me ill.”
“Funny.” She shakes her head, and this is followed by a fierce finger wag. “You are not wasting your summer with Rocket on that silly skateboard of yours.”
Moms just don’t get skateboarding; it’s like horizontal parachuting.
I fight the urge to say to her: “Have you ever gone down Devil’s Dive at max g-force acceleration? If you had, you wouldn’t be asking such a moronic question!” But I only reply with: “Listen, I have a better idea.”
“There is no better idea,” she says. Mom’s been brainwashed by Osmond P. Peabody, and it’s made her stubborn and determined to chart my “life path.” “Do you know how much Mr. Doyle came through for us when your father was deathly ill?”
The Quinn nostalgia freight train’s rolling down the track, gaining steam. I close my eyes, hoping for an early derailment.
“Ford? Did I tell you that story?”
“Only a thousand times.”
“Sorry to tell you how you all almost lost your father,” she tells me. “The lucky thing is, the week before he got sick, we’d—”
“Just bought a disability insurance policy. Blah, blah, blah.”
She folds her arms against her chest, shaking her head in disgust. “Sorry. I guess I’ll never mention the worst time of my life ever again.”
Do you swear on a stack of your Mensa-Netics books?
“If you’d let me talk already, I could tell you about my plan for this summer,” I say. “To get a real job.”
Kate jumps up from the couch. “Bagging a few leaves doesn’t count.”
“Stay out of it, cyclops,” I say to Kate. “I’m going to caddy at the country club.”
“Caddy?” A loud hmm seeps from Virginia’s mouth.
“Yeah. It’s a real job, and it pays real money. I’d get to meet important people. Plus, you can go to college for free.”
Virginia’s head freezes in the mirror, and a light flickers in her eyeballs. “I’ve heard about that! You could be an Evans scholar!”
Yes, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Mom.
Kate scoffs under her sun-bleached hair. “Evans scholar? It sounds like a medical syndrome.”
I evil-smile at her, mouth the word “Theo,” and Kate knows to shut her trap-hole. I found out from reliable sources she’s been secretly dating Theo Nichols for the past few months. Theo’s known as a bad boy from the Hills who returned from boarding school this semester after being booted out of Catholic High for high crimes and misdemeanors.
The last straw was a drink bust at the homecoming dance last fall. The brothers pulled wasted and wobbly kids out of the gym and lined them up against the cafeteria wall for questioning and sobriety tests. Theo’d gone undetected by rolling himself up in an oriental rug in Brother Bernard’s office. Problem was, he’d slipped into a drunken coma and slept through the night holed up in his cozy rug, which was unfurled in the morning by an unsuspecting Jesuit janitor.
I toss a throw pillow at Kate’s head. “It’s a scholarship for the best caddy at the country club.” She returns fire, and I bat it down with my hand.
Virginia’s lips do a pretzel twist, a sign she is thinking hard. “Ford, I know, I know. The Walton kids got those scholarships—Bobby, Patrick, and even Suzy.”
“Girls can caddy?” I know squat about caddying, but I’m not worried about Kate caddying. She’d sooner shave her head than lug a golf bag around.
“Yes, girls can caddy! We can do anything you can do. Probably better!” Kate exclaims, rising again from the couch. Kate seems to be absorbing some of mom’s self-esteem claptrap.
“Of course girls can caddy,” Mom says. “Ford, I’m very proud of you. What a responsible young man you’re becoming. College is sooo expensive these days. The Babcocks had to get a second mortgage to send Oliver to Brown.”
“Didn’t he flunk out his freshman year?” Kate chimes in.
“That’s beside the point.”
My eavesdropping older brother, Billy, appears with the usual smirk on his face. I brace myself for the insults to come. “Virginia,” he says, “why don’t you invent something so we can make a million dollars and we don’t have to work or go to college?” Billy never disappoints and gets away with murder.
“I’m trying. Believe me.”
“Where’s Kate working this summer?” I figure I’ll call her bluff. “She can join me.”
Virginia places her hand on Kate’s shoulder. “She’s part of my Rainbow vacuum cleaners sales force.”
By this, she means two persons. Kate usually spends her summers playing tennis or tanning on the back patio next to Chimney. She normally wraps an album cover in aluminum foil and angles it above her face for maximum sun reflection in her pathetic quest for the perfect tan.
“How can Kate sell vacuums?” Billy interjects. “She’s a moron.”
“Pipe down, Billy. Kate will do fine. She’s been working on her positive self-image.” She nods at me. “Now, Ford, I think caddying is a great idea for you.”
Billy let out one of his phony Ed McMahon-style laughs. “Caddying? I caddied once, space boy.”—You can’t hide from your own family you’re a space nerd.—“Nightmare. Don’t let the ’rents talk you into it. Caddying blows. The bag weighs a ton, and it’s boring as hell watching men hit a stupid white ball.”
“Don’t start, Billy,” Mom says. Billy has a knack for starting volcanic fights in Quinnville.
“It’s the worst job I’ve ever had by a mile.” He limps around the room like a wounded orangutan, pretending a golf bag is weighing down his shoulder.
“It was the only job you didn’t get fired from,” Pop pronounces, strolling in from the den, holding a rolled-up newspaper. “They didn’t have time to fire you.”
Billy was fired the previous winter from his job at Little Caesar’s Pizza for mouthing off to the manager. Pop’s right. He’s basically been fired from every job he’s ever had, and he’s had scores. Busboy, Amoco gas station attendant, above-ground pool installer, fur store attendant (he delivered Aretha Franklin’s fur coat to her mansion and wore it on the way there “because he was cold”), car-drying man at Jax Car Wash, house sitter.
“Look who’s talking. What happened to you with your last job?” Billy says to Pop.
Pop stares Billy down. “Don’t worry about me, mister, and get your hands off your hips. You kids need to learn to stand up straight.”
“Both of you could use better self-images,” Virginia adds.
Billy and Pop both burst a laughter pipe. There’s one thing those two have in common: poking fun at Mom’s self-help pop psychology. I never dare. Every week she tacks up a new self-help goal of the day onto the fridge. This week: “You must believe in your own mental discipline—do not rely on outside forces for motivation. You can do it yourself! Today’s goal: Sell one Rainbow vacuum cleaner with an Aquamate accessory.”
Unlike Pop, Mom doesn’t just dream, she takes action. She sells bagless Rainbow vacuum cleaners. The va
cuums use water rather than air to remove dirt. Virginia told me once that the founder of the business got the idea while trying to sweat off a hangover with a cup of coffee in the wee hours of the morning in the French Quarter. A municipal street-cleaning machine hummed by and turned a beer-soaked puke-laden Bourbon Street into a shiny red-brick road. Virginia got sucked into the business when a salesman demonstrated the vacuum on our living room carpet.
“WET DUST CAN’T FLY,” the salesman had shouted above the vacuum noise. This new-fangled technology not only removed dirt and hairballs from the carpet but also airborne dust, which supposedly helped Billy’s allergies. But what really drew Virginia into the fold was the notion of becoming an “independent business owner.”
Finding out my brother had quit after day one, I know for sure I’ll caddy this summer. I’ll show Pop I’m not anything like Billy, a burden I carry around my neck like a weight, always trying to lift more reps. Luckily, my brother set the bar ankle low.
Virginia sticks two fingers in her mouth and wolf-whistles for a time-out. Chimney’s ears flatten, and she gallops out of the room. Mom’s whistle could wake you from a coma. “Enough from both of you two!” A light-year of hushed silence. “Ford’s caddying this summer.”
“Is that right, Fordo?” Pop gives an approving nod. “Maybe they can let you play, too. You need to work on your golf game if you want to make the golf team this fall.”
When did I say anything about playing golf, let alone trying out for the high school team?
Billy can’t resist. “He’ll never make it through one round.”
“Patrick Walton is your age and caddies.” Pop sits down and pops a Stroh’s beer can (he seesaws between Stroh’s and Pabst, but a Western beer called Coors is making a run for his money). “He can’t weigh more than a sack of flour.”
“You’ll wish you were dead after about three holes.” Billy slashes his throat with his index finger.
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