Part 19 (1/2)
”Jimmy . . .”
”Like, is it a good place? And if it is, then its fine to like, be happy again, right? Cause then theyre happy, wherever they are.”
”Ive seen a few people die in the hospital, Jimmy, and let me tell you, its neither as good or as bad as people make it out to be, it just is.”
Next he calls Carla.
”h.e.l.lo?” her voice is soft, tired. He imagines her under the covers, in bed. He imagines her speaking across a pillow to him.
”You ever think about where you go when you die?”
Rustling. Maybe shes sitting up. It is a strange question, and coming from him, will just make him seem even weirder.
”I mean, just wondering,” he adds.
”No, I dont think about it.” Then she breathes in. ”Maybe well never die. Maybe well be the first people to never die.”
Jimmy laughs-shes trying to be funny, he guesses-but what she said also makes him feel so much better.
Rule 18. If Push Comes to Shove, You Do the Shoving.
Friday, March 17, 2006.
JIMMY KIRKUS, FIFTEEN YEARS OLD-ONE YEAR AND NINE MONTHS UNTIL THE WALL.
Coach Kelly loaded his team onto the bus for the annual post-season pizza party at Fultanos. ”Come on, come on!” he shouted.
It was raining, and the players were p.i.s.sed off. ”What we got to celebrate?” Joe Looney asked aloud. Then he tilted his head up like he was talking to G.o.d. ”Huh? Why is a 7 and 13 record reason to celebrate?”
”Oh zip it,” Coach Kelly said.
On their way to the bus, Ray put an arm around Jimmy. ”Hey do me a favor,” he said. ”Grab my jacket? Its in the gym. Bottom bleacher seat.”
”Sure, Ray, sure,” Jimmy said, voice so low it may as well have been groundwater.
”Whats that?” Ray said, overloud. ”Speak up, Freshman.”
”Im going, OK?” He turned, headed back to the gym. Ray f.u.c.king Atto. Since Jimmys meltdown against Seaside, the Fishermen hadnt won another game his freshman season. He was labeled as a soft player, and his nickname came to be Jimmy Soft. He was benched, and Ray, with his slow-down, draw-fouls, ugly style of play, became the focal point of the team.
Jimmy, meanwhile, became scared of his own shadow. h.e.l.l, he was scared of the thought of his own shadow. The flash, the buzz, the glamour were long gone. Other teams, all thanks to Shooter Ackley, had him dialed in. Put a little body on the kid, whisper in his ear, and boom, he couldnt find his shot. Jimmy Kirkus wasnt so hot after all. Worst part of it all was Jimmy knew it and blamed himself. He did errands for Ray and the other uppercla.s.smen without a second thought because everything in this world seemed penance.
As Jimmy scoured the bleachers he thought about this last week of practice. Whole season down the drain and most of the other players just messing around for fun. Hed been pus.h.i.+ng himself, though. Over-practicing, if anything. And he was doing what he thought he should do. Getting on himself for every missed shot. Yelling, throwing up his fists, cussing. And none of it helped. He was still too jittery to make even simple pa.s.ses, his shots inelegant knuckleb.a.l.l.s pitched toward the hoop. His touch was gone and now all his extra practice, all that being hard on himself, hadnt amounted to anything. Hed been benched the whole season. He was sore and slow and everything hurt, and Rays jacket was nowhere to be found. When he got back out to the parking lot, the bus was gone.
Jimmy wasnt angry at being left behind. By that point he was used to it and hed slipped into a state of mind that told him he deserved everything bad that happened to him. Half-frozen lunchroom chicken fingers, Mr. Jacksons bad breath, and the never-ending rain that soaked Columbia City at least nine months out of the year: all a direct result of him losing his basketball grace.
Jimmy was so down on himself, he didnt wonder why there was no jacket where Ray said thered be one, he just felt he had failed at finding the jacket like he failed at basketball, like he failed at life. He didnt get that it was both better and worse than that: he was just the b.u.t.t of Rays cruel joke, excluding him from the end-of-season celebration.
With nowhere else to go, Jimmy walked to Pedros house. He couldnt bear going home to his pops and Dex and the always jabbering Flying Finn. When they asked him why he wasnt at the teams pizza party hed have to tell them he was left behind. That he was so forgettable, the team didnt notice he wasnt there. Then his pops would do something embarra.s.sing in the new sloppy version of himself. Ever since the game against Seaside, the man was a stereo with a broken volume k.n.o.b. Always at ten. Hed taken up drinking again, which was the main thing, but he also didnt seem to care about what anyone else thought. Would openly glare at people in public he thought had wronged him, park his van diagonally across two, three spots at the grocery store, not shower on the days he had off-coffee on knee, eyes pinned to the gray horizon across the bay, as if something better would come out of there, but if he blinked, hed miss it forever. Tell his pops about this and the man might drive down to Fultanos and make a scene.
As Jimmy walked he slipped into what was becoming a familiar routine for him. He imagined the Seaside game going differently, his streak as basketball golden boy continuing. He imagined a scenario where he was taller, stronger, and tougher than Shooter. Pushed him around all over the court. Then, back in the locker room, in this imagined world, he smacked Ray Atto in the mouth. The idiot would start crying, ask Jimmy to let up. And then later he and Dex and Pedro would go cruising to the beach-he could drive in these fantasies-and they had girls in the van, and they had a bonfire, and someone was playing the guitar, and he could feel that exhausted, emptied but somehow also filled up feeling of hooking up with a girl again.
On the way to Pedros, Jimmy ran into the Goth crowd behind the baseball field. There was David Berg and all his freaky friends. Jimmy hadnt had much contact with David since they were little kids. It seemed David had spent the years after the Ninth Shot and the Catch seething about one thing or another. Tinkering with little computer kits, taking apart radios, blasting out speakers. He had those slightly buggy eyes you see when people who never take off their gla.s.ses finally do. A puffy, sleepy vulnerability the lenses usually sharpen. Strangely, though, David Berg had never worn gla.s.ses a day in his life, at least not as far as Jimmy remembered.
David still played sports because his dad and grandpa forced him to but between cla.s.ses or at lunch, he snuck to the corners of school where Mr. Berg would not see him and put on a different sort of uniform. Black T-s.h.i.+rts with silver spikes embedded in the collar, thick, black eye makeup, and inky leather chokers. f.u.c.k the jocks. A freak uniform, Jimmy heard some people call it. Even during his junior varsity games David managed to apply eye makeup in the locker room during halftime. Drove his father and grandfather crazy in the stands when he came back onto the court looking like some effeminate rock star in gym shorts. Some kids called him f.a.ggy Berg. Rumor had it that he spent his time trying to conjure the devil, listening to Swedish death metal, and huffing things out of paper sacks or loose air-conditioning tubes. To Jimmy it always seemed David was ill-fitting no matter his environment. He couldnt fully believe the hard edge, but he respected his willingness to be different.
”Hey look, its a jock,” David said. Its the loudest Jimmy had heard him speak in eight years. Also, there was something strange in his voice: a giddiness that pegged him as high.
”A jock,” said one of his friends.
”Never seen a specimen outside its natural habitat.”
”Some sort of pygmy variety,” a fake British accent, ”extremely rare.”
It was strange to our kid: The jocks considered him a freak, the freaks considered him a jock, and the nerds and stoners didnt seem to consider him at all. Whered that leave him? Standing here alone, facing this crowd of kids who hated him for something he couldnt even be, close to tears once again.
Then a skinny girl named Kelsey with golden eyes-almost yellow, strangely-and a cigarette hanging between her fingers that she jabbed to punctuate on everything she said, started making gorilla noises and the whole blacked-out crowd laughed and closed in. ”Get it? Get it? Im doing his mating call!”
Ray Atto and Joe Looney were famous for tormenting the Goth kids-or any outcasts for that matter. Their morning routine included busting into the bathroom the Goths favored and p.i.s.sing all over the radiator. The corner of school theyd managed to carve out for themselves forever smelled of burned pee.
”Wait,” Jimmy said. He wanted to tell them that hed never done anything like what Ray and Joe had done. In fact, most of the guys on the team wouldnt talk to him anymore and frequently slathered his underwear in Icy Hot. ”Hey, wait.” He was closer to them than they thought.
One picked up a rock and threw it at Jimmy. Then another. Mob-think. Jimmy flinched and stared at David. David stared back. Then all of them were hurling rocks. Jimmy danced back, avoiding the poorly thrown stones-maybe they should have gone to gym once in a while-but he didnt run, stayed in range. There was a heady inevitability to it he couldnt break from-wouldnt break from. The prospect of being hurt felt like something to be leaned in to. A cleansing.
”The famous Jimmy Kirkus is all alone.”
”Hes Jimmy Soft now.”
”Hey, yeah, Jimmy Soft.”
”You think its cause he cant get it up?”
Big laughter all around. More stones, suffocating and too clouded to see through, to move past. Why didnt he run? He didnt owe it to these cigarette-stub kids to stay around and be the outlet for their closed-circuit pain. Calling him Jimmy Soft, what did they know? Still, he hesitated, the signal to flee all jangled up, the circuits gone haywire. Fight or flight and Jimmy was stuck in the limbo between.
”Um, dude,” Kelsey with the almost-yellow eyes said, pointing her cigarette, ”I think hes too stupid to run.”
They laughed.
”Makes sense,” David said. ”He is a jock, after all.”