Come to think of it, “Light My Fire” is a really lousy idea. It can only get me into trouble. So drop it.
Craig McKenna
Room 311
BECKLEY SCHOOL
TARRYTOWN, NEW YORK
Travis says that if I ever get a handle on “Light My Fire,” I’ll own humanity for the rest of my life. Sometimes talking to him is like reading my fortune. In Chinese.
So it turns out I had Brigadoon pegged all wrong. It’s really about making miracles happen with your heart. When Tommy falls in love with Fiona and the whole village comes back to life even after it’s disappeared for a hundred years, it’s the same as me pushing Fenway Park a block and a half with my little pinky. But Tommy had Fiona, and I don’t. Sigh.
Tonight Smerko and I sat next to each other in the wings listening to Kerry sing “Almost Like Being in Love,” and for the first time I felt the kind of high I usually only get from (a) Clapton, (b) grass, (c) baseball, and (d) people who hitchhike to Scranton. Either we’ve been hanging out with the chorus boys too long, or else Kerry’s actually figured out how to put a song across. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. It only took him fifteen minutes to learn a slider.
But that was just the warm-up act. The same buzz kicked into fifth gear during the middle of the night when Smerk and I were cramming for our English finals.
Vocabulary Review
(with a little help from Travis)
incandescent
Radiant, glowing; think of a football diamond during a night game when the lights are all on and everybody’s looking at you.
redoubtable
Formidable, fearsome; Carlton Fisk in 1975; you in a couple of years, after you’ve won your first hundred cases.
cavalier
Chivalrous, noble; remember when the guy in the Pacer called you an asshole? That wasn’t cavalier. Remember when you pretended to lose the coin toss so I could be Smerko? That was.
empathetical
Sympatico, compassionate, knowing somebody inside and out; romance isn’t just about roses or killing dragons or sailing a kayak around the world. It’s also about chocolate chip cookies and sharing the Grateful Dead and James Taylor with me in the middle of the night, and believing me when I say that you could be bigger than both of them put together, and not making fun of me for straightening out my french fries or pointing my shoelaces in the same direction, and letting me pout when I don’t get my own way, and pretending that if I play Flower Drum Song one more time you won’t throw me and the record out the window.
anomaly
Paradox, enigma; imagine two disparate people who turn into best friends.
disparate
Us.
ubiquitous
Craig.
I looked up from my notes and glanced over at Travis, who was scrunched behind my desk reading King Lear for the third time—like he didn’t know it by heart already. But his forehead was frowning again, so I knew if I asked him what “ubiquitous” really meant, he’d only throw a raisin at me. That’s how—at 2:18 in the morning—I wound up opening a dictionary for the first time since Lyndon Johnson was president.
ubiquitous
Omnipresent, all-pervasive, spiritually sustaining; see
Siddhartha.
“Smerko?”
“What?”
“Siddhartha was ubiquitous too.”
“So?”
“So shouldn’t you be praying to me?”
We got into a raisin fight anyway.
Before he went back to his room we took a shower together. Partly because we smelled and partly because it’s the only place I can talk him into singing the “Miles and Miles and Miles of Heart” song for me.
“No.”
“Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeease?” I whined, soaping up his back. Usually that’s enough to change his mind, but now he had another card to play. Without even turning around, he rinsed the shampoo out of his hair and glanced over his shoulder in an out-and-out challenge.
“Only if you sing ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ first,” he demanded (with his make-believe redoubtable face). So I put on my best Dylan and pretended I’d lost the round—even though we both knew he’d have caved in anyway. How could he not? Nobody argues with ubiquitous.
He called it a football diamond. (Grin.) Maybe I could move Fenway Park with my pinky.
Things to Do
___ Your groundwork. Never let him know that you always figured “If I Had a Hammer” was about construction workers. (What the hell were you thinking?)
___ Teach Travis how to play baseball. He definitely has the body for it.
Travis Puckett
Room 214
BECKLEY SCHOOL
TARRYTOWN, NEW YORK
THE PUCKETT/DUBOISE DEBATES
GORDO:
Stop sneezing on my half of the room. You’re contaminating the mold.
TRAVIS:
I think I have a fever.
GORDO:
So who told you to stand under a freezing cold shower at three o’clock in the morning? Didn’t he notice your lips were turning blue?
TRAVIS:
You just don’t understand.
GORDO:
Don’t I? Travis, if you’d taken Trig with me like I asked you to, you’d know by now that it doesn’t matter if you like boys instead of girls because the formulas are all the same.
TRAVIS:
I never said I like boys!
GORDO:
Ever beat off to Penthouse?
TRAVIS:
No.
GORDO:
Ever collect baseball cards?
TRAVIS:
No.
GORDO:
How old is Barbra Streisand?
TRAVIS:
36. Three weeks ago.
GORDO:
What do you need—a fucking blueprint?
Craig McKenna
Room 311
BECKLEY SCHOOL
TARRYTOWN, NEW YORK
According to Travis, I’m not allowed to eat lettuce or grapes (exploited migrant workers on the West Coast), canned salmon (lousy living conditions for Filipino packers in Alaska), or those little peas that look like green BBs (forced labor in central California—in 1930!). So far, no problem. I mean, he hasn’t come down on Junior Mints yet, so I’m okay.
But the shit really hit the fan at 7:26 this morning when he caught me drinking orange juice.
* * *
Aryan Nation
MEMBERSHIP APPLICATION
NAME: Anita Bryant
ADDRESS: c/o Florida Citrus Commission, Florida State Capitol
CITY: Tallahassee STATE: Florida ZIP: 32399
REFERENCES: James Earl Ray, George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, Adolf Eichmann (deceased), Lester Maddox
QUALIFICATIONS: Former Miss America, popular crooner, and spokeswoman for Florida oranges. When I sing “God Bless America,” people listen.
STATE BRIEFLY WHY YOU WISH TO BECOME A MEMBER OF ARYAN NATION: I got rid of all the homosexual teachers in Miami, didn’t I? Wait till you see what I have on deck for the blacks, the Jews, and the handicapped.
Signature
* * *
“Why do I have to do this?” I whispered in the middle of a jam-packed study hall, three days late with a biology paper that really needed me to give at least a flying fuck. “This is forgery!”
“Penance,” he whispered back, with two curls of smoke still trailing out of his ears. “Besides, I already signed her up for the Symbionese Liberation Army. Somebody might recognize my handwriting.”
“I’m going to flunk biology!”
“But at least you’ll have a political conscience.” Right around then, Mr. Denning glanced up from the proctor’s table at the front of the room and glowered a little in our direction. Since he only wears black suits and nobody’s ever seen him smile, there’s a rumor going around that he sleeps in a crypt underneath the chapel. So me and Travis shut up and began passing notes back and forth instead. Who needs
a pair of fangs in their neck?
Smerko, if you had to make a list of all ten thousand important things in your life, would I be on it?
Yes. Right between Rosa Parks and Annie Get Your Gun.
So I signed “Anita Bryant” (whoever the fuck she is). I know when an inning’s over.
Travis Puckett
Room 214
BECKLEY SCHOOL
TARRYTOWN, NEW YORK
Beckley was trailing Stony Brook 4–2 at the bottom of the ninth, with two men on, two out, and Craig at the plate with an 0–1 count. Sound familiar? It should. Same setup as the one Bobby Thomson faced on October 3, 1951. Same results, too. Craig swung on a high and inside fastball, there was a crack and a gasp, and then I was on my feet screaming, “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”—just like Russ Hodges did on the radio twenty-seven years ago. Craig heard me as he was rounding third and hesitated long enough to grin in surprise. It hadn’t even occurred to him.
“October 3, 1951.”
“Twelve days before I Love Lucy premiered and thirteen days before Judy Garland opened at the Palace.”
“Not in this universe. Try again.”
“Mazeroski hit the home run?”
“Smerko, you’re not paying attention. Come on.”
“Wait! Bobby Thomson. Dodgers and Giants. The Shot
Heard ’Round the World.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere.”
The only other time I’d been down to Beckley’s baseball diamond was the night I snuck across it on my way in to New York to see Pacific Overtures ($11 I could have put to a lot better use if only Mack and Mabel hadn’t closed). Except for the prospect of Craig in form-fitting pants with the black stripe running northward from his feet to the Promised Land, I never would have gone near it again—especially considering the risks that I already know so well.
During my first two years in this joint, I was tripped, kicked, slugged, arm-locked, pummeled, egged, pissed on, spray-painted, and thumbtacked. I was also called “faggot,” “queer,” “cocksucker,” “cornholer,” “schmuckface,” and “douchebag” so regularly, I no longer answered to my own name when spoken by anyone other than Gordo. Worst of all, I routinely found myself serenaded in the hall at least three times a week by a smirking quintet of singing assholes who’d mock me with the second chorus of “Hello, Dolly”—so badly executed, they still owe Carol Channing an apology.
But two months into my junior year (and after a lot of hard work hiding out in libraries and Broadway mezzanines), I finally achieved what I’d been gunning for since I was 14: absolute invisibility. And I wasn’t about to rock the boat by getting anywhere near an athletic field—the one place where these people generally prefer to nest.
“Hey, faggot!” Here we go…
I was sitting nervously in the front row of bleachers on a blazingly blue Tarrytown afternoon, ready to bolt at a moment’s notice if I had to, when most of the sun was suddenly blocked out by all 200 pounds of smug, orange-haired Vincent Sutter—the one who came up with the thumbtacking idea two years ago, and who’s apparently still as gracious and hospitable as a yeast infection.
“Hey, Vinnie,” I mumbled, staring at my feet and turning beet-red in the process.
“What’s with the ‘Vinnie’?” he leered, grabbing me by the back of my shirt. “You wanna blow me or something?”
Throughout most of this incandescent exchange, my best friend and his pants were warming up at shortstop, neither of them aware that I was about to be exterminated—but in reaching for a pop-up, Craig turned just in time to catch Goldfinger pouring a 16-ounce Coke over my head. Without wasting a move (and in true Bobby Thomson style), he pivoted to the right and aimed directly for Sutter’s shoulder. And accuracy is one of the reasons Craig McKenna won the Victory Cup.
“Sorry, Vince,” he called out sheepishly to a doubled-over Sutter, now groaning in pain by the foul line. “Guess it got away from me, huh?” As Sutter stumbled off the field looking for a Darvon, Craig threw me a covert wink—and I knew I was finally out of the woods for good. All I had to do was dry myself off and wait for the inevitable. It didn’t take long.
“Outta my way, you little queer. OW!”
“Hey, cocksucker. How’s about a—SHIT!”
“Hello, Dolly, well, Hello, Dolly, it’s—FUCK, THAT HURT!”
They got the hint. By the ninth inning, Vinnie Sutter was calling me Travis.
“October 16, 1969.”
“Miracle Mets.”
“October 1, 1961.”
“Maris hits his sixty-first.”
“Off of who?”
“Tracy Stallard.”
“Who was Eddie Cicotte?”
“Black Sox pitcher. I’ve got one for you. What happens on August 16, 2010?”
“I give up.”
“Craig McKenna’s inducted into the Hall of Fame.”
“You really think so?”
“Yeah, but only if I get to go with you.”
“I already bought your plane ticket. It was supposed to be a surprise.”
Tom Seaver once said, “There’s only two places in this league: first place and no place.” He must have learned that from Craig.
Craig McKenna
Room 311
BECKLEY SCHOOL
TARRYTOWN, NEW YORK
The Day That Changed Our Lives started out completely normal. We overslept, we missed breakfast, and the Tuck Shop was out of everything except onion chips and chocolate sprinkles. Which was a good excuse to cut French.
So we climbed into the gym through an open window, stripped down to our toes, dunked each other in the pool, and cut Ancient History.
Then we went to the library and read the first part of Catcher in the Rye out loud in whispers. That took almost an hour and we were running late—so we cut English, grabbed my guitar, and headed for the woods where nobody could hear us. This is where Capitol’s next A&R megastar gave his only public performance—underneath an oak tree—to his best friend and two squirrels. Travis didn’t know I’d been practicing for three days just so I could surprise him with “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and “Sweet Blindness”—and at first I couldn’t tell if he liked it or not. It was only after I’d finished “Light My Fire” that he sort of yelped and wrestled me to the ground (translation: he liked it). But I pinned him first. (Grin.)
After lunch—Ring Dings and Pepsi—we had Biology staring us in the face, so we decided to let Mr. King and his bryophytes wilt without us. Instead, we changed into our jocks and socks and hit the batting cage. Travis has a good eye and a pretty decent swing, but his stance sucks. I spent two hours positioning him and he still couldn’t get it right. What the hell. One athlete in the family is plenty. (Double grin.)
Then we took a quick shower, and while we were sitting around in our towels we calculated that by this time we’d broken roughly 61 percent of Beckley’s half a million rules. So we figured it was time to go for the gold. That meant getting dressed up in our blazers and ties, sneaking off campus by the service road, and catching the 5:24 into Manhattan. (Smerko’s done this so many times by himself whenever he’s gone AWOL to see Liza Minnelli or somebody else in a play, the conductors all know him by heart.)
At 6:18 on the nose, we hit Grand Central. We were 131 minutes away from the biggest thing that would ever happen to either one of us, but we didn’t know that yet. So we played tag on West 43rd Street and we snuck into a dirty bookstore on Eighth Avenue and then we got ticketed for jumping a subway turnstile at Lincoln Center by a cop with lousy handwriting whose name was either Victor or Viloy. After that we started getting hungry for just about anything that didn’t have chocolate in it, so Travis picked Beefsteak Charlie’s because it was right across the street from the Winter Garden Theater (The Unsinkable Molly Brown in 1960, Funny Girl in 1964, and Mame in ’66 for anybody not in the know). We had to muscle our way through a couple hundred tourists
who all remembered at 7:55 that curtain time was 8:00, but we still managed to find ourselves a table in the corner where we could shut out the rest of the world. Who needed anybody else?
“I’ll tell you something, Viloy,” said Travis, halfway between the buffalo wings and the prime rib. “Carlton Fisk is overrated. I mean, if you put him up against Johnny Bench, he wouldn’t know what hit him.” Already my blood was heating up in 10-degree installments, and even though I wasn’t sure if anybody’d ever gotten slugged in Beefsteak Charlie’s before, Travis was bucking to be the first in line. Of course it was my own fault for giving him the Baseball Encyclopedia—but who expected him to memorize it? Then I noticed he was wearing his Heathcliff-and-Catherine face, where he’s trying to look serious but the corners of his mouth won’t stay all the way down.
“Are you saying this just to yank my chain or because you mean it?” I demanded. “And think carefully before you answer, because the ass you save may be your own.” Travis hesitated, then tossed in the towel and grinned.
“You’re so easy,” he said. Then all of a sudden, the fork with the baked potato on it stopped halfway to his teeth and his skin turned snow white.
“Oh my God,” he breathed, pointing over my shoulder across the emptied-out restaurant. “Viloy, look!” Not knowing whether he was putting me on again but falling for it anyway, I turned around and looked.