“Coach!” Michael yelled.
Coach looked up from the lesson he was giving to another kid.
“Our ball went into the canyon. We’re gonna go look for it, okay?”
“Fine. But if you can’t find it quickly, come back up,” Coach replied.
We nodded and jogged through the outfield and down the twenty-foot grass embankment that led to the canyon. At the bottom of the embankment we looked up. It was impossible for anyone on the field above to see us.
“Okay,” said Michael.
“Okay,” I replied.
“Okay what? This is your thing, shithead. What do you want to do?” he asked impatiently.
“Oh. Right.”
I looked into the canyon, now just ten feet or so away. I could see past the first layer or two of tree branches and bushes, but beyond that it dropped off into darkness. I took a deep breath. There is no Patrick Swayze in an aquarium, I thought to myself. There s no Squidman.
“Okay. Let’s go in through that part right there,” I said, pointing to a small path that crawled through two trees.
Michael took the lead, and within twenty seconds we were deep enough into the canyon that when I turned to look back in the direction we had come from, all I could see were trees. The floor of the canyon was covered with dead leaves and some garbage: a few candy wrappers, a few empty 7-Eleven cups, which I strongly suspected had been hurled there by my comrade. My nerves were slowly subsiding. The farther we went, the less there was to look at. Just more trees, dead branches, and bushes. The unknown was quickly becoming known.
Michael was about ten feet to my right when he waved me over. “Whoa. Check this out,” he said.
I hopped over a fallen tree and made my way over to him.
Michael moved aside, pulled back a couple branches, and pointed to what lay behind them. As he stood there holding it open for me, my mind started racing. I do not want to look inside that hole, I thought. Yes, I do. I should look inside the hole. There’s nothing there.
“Hey. I’m not your branch-pulling guy, asshole. You gonna check this out or not?” Michael sniped, still holding back the brush as he waited for me to make a move.
I leaned forward and stuck my face into the opening Michael had created for me. Just past those branches lay a clearing, much like the ones I had seen in my dreams. Except this time there was no Patrick Swayze. In his place was a dirty sleeping bag and several blankets surrounded by garbage.
“I think somebody lives here,” Michael said.
I could hear myself breathing in and out as my hands began to tremble once again, this time in fear.
“We should go back to practice. Coach is probably wondering—”
“Coach can suck a dick,” Michael snapped.
He nudged me out of the way, pulled the branches farther open, stepped on the trunk of a fallen tree below him, and in one motion hopped through the small hole he’d created for himself. The branches snapped closed as I stood on the other side of the clearing. I could hear Michael walking around but couldn’t see him. I stood motionless, hating myself for being frightened. Then the small window of branches reopened and Michael popped his head back through. “Are you seriously going to be a bitch?”
He grabbed my shirt and yanked me into the clearing. As I stumbled onto the other side of the branches, I realized that more than one person might be living here. There were piles of clothes caked with dirt, and empty cans of beer were strewn everywhere. Michael approached the sleeping bag surrounded by the trash pile.
“I think this is a bum cave,” he said, nudging a couple of empty cans with his foot. Then something in the pile of trash next to the sleeping bag caught his attention. He knelt down beside it. Suddenly his head whipped.
“HOLY FUCKING SHIT.”
“What?”
“It’s the mother lode! Look at all this porno!” he shouted, shoving his hands into the pile like a pirate who’d found a trunk full of gold doubloons. With a look of pure ecstasy, he held up two handfuls of the dirtiest porn I could have imagined. There must have been a hundred more pages at his feet. I picked a few up and fanned them out in my hand. I had never seen so many pictures of beautiful women, let alone naked ones. I pumped my fist in the air like I’d just hit the game winning shot in the NBA Finals. This was my greatest accomplishment. The adolescent equivalent of landing on the moon.
At the time, porn magazines were like Lamborghinis: You knew they existed, and though you’d never seen one in person, you were sure you’d have one when you got older.
“I can’t believe this. I just—man, we did it. We did it!” he screamed.
There was only one problem: What were we going to do with it all? Leaving it behind was not an option. After a few minutes of brainstorming, the best option we came up with was shoving the pages into our pants and keeping them there till we were through with practice. Michael shoved a trial page in his pants, then took a step forward and backward, as if he was trying out a new pair of sneakers.
“It’s too itchy,” he declared. “New plan.”
Eventually we decided the only option was to carry as much of the porn as we could out of the canyon and hide it beneath some leaves at the bottom of the embankment next to the field. After practice we could come back and get it. We started sorting through the loot, trying to decide which pages were must-takes.
Suddenly I heard a crack of a branch, as if caused by the weight of a foot. I jumped back, ready to run. We both looked around, but saw nothing. The silence was eerie.
“What if we just came back and got it later, or tomorrow, or next practice or something?” I said, fear creeping into my voice.
“Man, I like you pretty okay, but you’re sort of a pussy. Just go wait outside the canyon and yell the code words if you see Coach. You remember the words, right?”
“My dog peed in the house yesterday,” I muttered.
“Yeah.”
As I walked out of the clearing, I was overwhelmed with shame. I had gone into the canyon to defeat my fears, but here I was, leaving the canyon because I was too afraid to stay. I stood there thinking, eyes downcast, till I heard Coach’s voice.
“Justin. What are you doing?”
I looked up and saw him standing at the top of the embankment.
“I told you guys: Don’t spend all day down there.”
I froze for a split second, but then recovered.
“MY DOG PEED IN THE HOUSE!” I yelled.
“What?” Coach said.
Then, from behind me, I heard the rustle of bushes and the sound of heavy breathing. Oh no, it’s Michael, I thought.
“MY DOG PEED IN THE HOUSE!” I yelled in that direction, terrified that Michael was about to walk out carrying a huge stack of pornography.
“What are you talking—”
Coach never got the chance to finish his sentence. In a flash, Michael burst through the bushes, running full speed ahead and clutching the porn to his chest like a woman holding her infant as she fled an explosion.
“RUNNNNNNN!!!!” he screamed in terror.
He ran right past me, and without giving it another thought I sprang into a full sprint, hot on his heels.
“What in the heck is going on?!” Coach yelled as we rushed up the embankment toward him.
I turned to look behind me.
There, hightailing it out of the canyon, came two bearded homeless men, each of whom looked like Nick Nolte rendered in beef jerky. I had never seen homeless guys move so fast and with such a sense of purpose. The last thing I saw on Coach’s face as we blew past him was the look of a man who had no idea how the next fifteen seconds of his life were going to transpire.
The other players on the field turned to watch, mouths agape, as Michael and I sprinted by them, followed by Coach and the two homeless guys. Michael slowed down just a touch so that I could catch up.
“Take some!” he shouted, shoving a handful of pages at my chest. “Go right! I’ll go left. They can’t catch both of us,” h
e said between breaths, gearing back up to a full sprint.
I could hear a chorus of shouts behind us. I’m guessing it was one of the homeless guys and not Coach who hollered “Gimmie back my titties!” but I was too scared to look back and confirm. When I reached third base, I took a hard right turn and ran off the field and across the street. I didn’t look back until one mile later, when I rounded the corner of my street and headed down the hill to my house. My legs were on fire and sweat poured down my face.
There were no cars in the driveway, so I made my way to the side of the house, unlocked the gate to our backyard, entered, then slammed it behind me, and for the first time in about ten minutes I stopped moving. I took the stack of porn, some of it now stuck to my chest with sweat, and placed it on the ground. I leaned over, put my hands on my knees, and gasped for air. I looked down at the bounty that lay at my feet, but my joy was soon displaced by fear. What the heck am I going to do with all this? I thought.
Then it hit me: like thousands of thieves before me, I would bury my loot. I ducked into my house, grabbed some newspaper, grabbed a shovel from our shed, and started digging in the corner of our backyard. After I’d dug a hole about a foot deep, I gathered every scrap of porn and placed the pile gently in the ground, as if I were planting a seed whose fruits I needed to feed my family. I placed newspaper over the pages and then filled in the hole.
Hours later I sat in front of the TV, wondering what had happened at practice, whether Coach had called my dad, and, most of all, what awaited me in those buried pages. I had gotten a quick look, but I wanted to pore over those pictures like they were evidence in a crime I was investigating. Eventually my dad got home from work and set his briefcase down.
“So. How was practice?” he asked.
“It was good. Why? Did you hear it wasn’t?” I said, trying to keep my cool.
“Son, no offense, but you play Little League. It’s not the Yankees. I don’t get daily reports about who’s hitting the shit out of the ball.”
When I went to bed that night, all I could think about was those buried pages. I had worked hard for them, and I was determined to enjoy the fruits of my labor. I woke up in the middle of the night, and before I even opened my eyes, I thought, The porno! I hopped out of my bed, still in my underwear, and snuck out into the living room, through the back door, and into the backyard. I went to the shed, grabbed the shovel, found the spot with the freshly turned earth, jammed the nose of the shovel’s blade into the ground, and started digging in the moonlight. My shoulders burned, but I kept digging.
“Son. What in the fuck are you doing?”
I shrieked, dropped the shovel, and turned to see my dad standing behind me in his robe, holding a hot toddy.
“Oh my God, you scared me,” I said, completely forgetting that I should offer up some kind of excuse for what I was doing.
He clicked on the flashlight he was holding and shined it in my eyes, then down over the rest of my body.
“Please explain to me right now why you’re in your underwear digging a fucking hole in my backyard at three-thirty in the goddamn morning.”
There was no way out of this. I exhaled in defeat, then told him everything: about going into the canyon, finding the porn, running away from the homeless guys, then burying my loot.
He waited for a moment, processing everything, then quietly said, “All right, here’s the deal.”
Calmly but firmly, he instructed me to take all that porn out of his backyard and fill in the hole pronto. The next day, he explained, I would carry the magazine pages back to the entrance of the canyon and leave them there.
“Why can’t I just throw them out? I don’t want to go back to the canyon,” I said.
“Bullshit. Someone spent time collecting this shit. What if I threw out your baseball card collection? That wouldn’t be right.”
I nodded. His analogy made sense to me, and suddenly I felt a twinge of remorse, having deprived those men of one of their few—and probably most prized—worldly possessions. I bent down and lifted the big wad of dirt-covered porno out of the hole.
“Are you mad?” I asked, as I picked up the shovel.
“Nah. I don’t think this even cracks your greatest hits of stupid. But there’s one important thing I need you to know.”
I stopped shoveling and looked at him. He pointed at the pile of loose, grimy magazine pages on the ground.
“You will never screw a woman who looks like that. Understand?”
I nodded.
“Okay, good,” he said. He turned back and walked toward the house, then quickly turned back around.
“And women aren’t going to screw you in all those crazy ways, either. You got it? They don’t look like that and they don’t screw crazy. That’s what you’re taking away from this, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Come inside and fill in that hole tomorrow. I don’t want the neighbors thinking you’re batshit.”
I put down the shovel and followed him inside.
He sat down in his chair and turned on the small lamp next to him.
“The canyon was what I was freaked out about. That’s why I went down there, so I wouldn’t be freaked out about it,” I confessed after a moment of silence.
“Son, you’re a little on the jittery side. It’s okay. Don’t beat yourself up about it. It don’t mean you don’t have a pair of balls, it just means you’re more choosy when you use them. That’s not always a bad thing.”
He took a big sip from his hot toddy.
“Are you going to bed now?” I asked.
“No, but you are,” he said, turning off the lamp and filling the room with darkness. “I’m trying to get a damned minute to myself here.”
Sometimes You Have to Be Hurled off a Diving Board Against Your Will
I spent the first couple years of high school trying to go unnoticed. My goal was to be the adolescent equivalent of one of those Saturday Night Live cast members who never seems to be in any sketches but is always on stage at the end of the show smiling and basking in the applause. I didn’t start out so unambitious. Like most teenagers, I went in aspiring to be popular. But I realized that wouldn’t be easy at a party early in freshman year. When my best friend Aaron and I walked into the party, the first guy we ran into took one look at us, removed the Bud Light from his lips, and shouted over the sound of Tupac blaring out of a nearby boom box: “What are you fags doing here?” His face showed the same genuine confusion you’d feel upon seeing a monkey operating a forklift at Costco.
Among my 2,500 classmates at Point Loma High School, I soon learned, there were popular people, unpopular people, and everybody else. Even just a couple weeks into high school, “everybody else” started to sound really good. Sure, maybe the popular kids were going to parties and getting hand jobs, but at least I wasn’t being tormented. The key to becoming “everybody else” was to draw as little attention to myself as possible. I ate lunch with a small group of friends every day in the lobby of the English building, while the cool kids ate in the quad and the nerds ate in the drama building. I was a good student, but not so good that people noticed, and I spoke in class so rarely that during my sophomore year my history teacher pulled me aside and asked me if I was fluent in English in that loud, deliberate way people speak to foreigners. Although I excelled as a pitcher on the baseball team, few of my classmates cared about high school baseball or attended the games. And when the weekend rolled around, instead of going to parties, I would get together with Aaron and a couple of our friends, order in pizza, and watch ’80s movies. By the start of my junior year, I had yet to go on a date, or even kiss a girl. But the older, popular kids had left me alone, and that was a tradeoff I was willing to accept.
The one person who wasn’t so satisfied with my pathetic social life was my father. “You two are staring at that TV like you want to screw it,” he said to me and Aaron one Friday night when he came across us watching Die Hard in his living room.
“Well .
. . we don’t,” I replied, weakly
“Thanks for clarifying that, chief,” he said. He walked to the mahogany liquor cabinet next to the TV and poured himself a couple fingers’ worth of bourbon. “I don’t personally give two shits, but all I’m saying is, going out and drinking a beer and feeling a tit ain’t the worst goddamn thing in the world.” Then he padded back to his bedroom.
I shoveled another slice of pizza into my mouth and refocused on Bruce Willis, who was pulling broken glass out of his feet.
“Your dad’s right. We need to go to parties,” Aaron said.
“We’re not invited to them,” I replied, grabbing the remote control and turning the volume up.
We’d had this argument many times before. Aaron and I were now in our junior year and neither of us had been to a party since that very first embarrassment in ninth grade. Every so often Aaron would push me to go to a party or a dance, but it was as if there was a little sign in my brain reading, “It’s been this many days since the last time you were humiliated,” and I was determined to keep that number moving in the right direction. I had seen what had happened to some of my nerdier classmates when they dared to venture into social situations where they weren’t welcome. One had been pinned down while someone drew penises all over his face in permanent marker. Another had been pantsed in front of the entire P.E. class. And since nothing like that had ever happened to me, I had talked myself into thinking that I was perfectly happy with the way things were.
In fact, I had done such a good job of it that when I turned sixteen, making me eligible for a driver’s license, my parents had to force me to make an appointment to take the test. Unlike most teenagers, who long for the day they can get behind the wheel and drive with their friends to parties—or park somewhere and make out with their dates—I was indifferent about the prospect of getting my license. I lived less than a mile from school, and even closer to my friends’ houses. With everywhere I went already within walking distance, a driver’s license seemed like an unnecessary goal that could only be reached through an unbearably taxing process.