I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (21 page)

Our guy glides up behind Leclair. He runs the toe of his
stick’s blade overlong his head, ear to ear. “Now or never,” he says. Leclair pivots into a backward skate, spits, and smiles.

He has an inch or two on our guy, as well as a shovel chin and a forehead lined deeply from squinching while punching. His hairline is in deep retreat, so he’s shaved his round skull clean. He looks, like most bullies, obtuse.

He and our guy toss sticks and gloves well clear at center ice. Being both righties, they circle counterclockwise. They hold their left hands out and open in front of them, snatching at the air as if after a fly. Leclair lunges, and because of his extra reach is able to grab our guy’s jersey where it rests over his right shoulder. He’s bringing back his fist for a punch when our guy reaches out and takes hold of the fabric around Leclair’s right elbow. Our guy tries to deflect Leclair’s right, but it comes in over our guy’s left arm and lands on the crown of his head. Leclair throws a few more glancing blows while our guy attempts to shake his right arm free.

Neither man is angry. They are, in fact, in an almost ecstatic state, agape, as though finally able to relieve themselves.

Our guy’s trying to land rights, but whenever he throws one, Leclair pushes his own jersey-gripping hand deeper into our guy’s shoulder, tethering his range. Now Leclair is popping our guy in the jaw with a few rabbit punches delivered by that jersey-gripping left hand. He rears back as if to come with another overhand right, but instead slides underneath our guy’s guard and shivers him with an uppercut.

A male chorus is howling around them. Teammates, coaches, fans, fathers and sons—each of us is singing his release. We’re urging or critiquing a fighter, cheering or hissing, pushing him to give more of himself or ridiculing him if we think he’s holding back. We’re a bizarro panopticon, thousands of guards overlooking our captive.

It’s us our guy has to bend and comply to; us who hold his
life in our hot little hands. We each think meanly of ourselves and how we’ve shaped up in the eyes of one another, so we have our guy play the part we decided was meant for us.

We watch him, weigh him, judge him—we made him! He’s a tough guy, but he’s a tough guy only so long as we say he is. We conferred his status; we’ll take it away if he fucks up once.

Together, we are a petulant god, as vindictive as a sewing circle. And we will cut out heart after heart until we get our perfect sacrifice.

Our guy butts his lowered head into Leclair, causing him to lose his grip on our guy’s right arm. They seize each other around the collar. They open up.

They turn away their faces and reel off punch after punch as though burning through a currency about to go defunct. They hold each other upright, counterbalanced, and spin with blows. They are gusto, vigor, and virility, or else they’re the recurrent problem of civilization. They beat on all the more fiercely because, in another world, they might’ve been friends.

With each hit, their fists bloat and soften, sponge. It’s been forty-five seconds; they’re almost empty. No clear winner, they try now to wrench each other off their feet, style points going to the guy landing on top. They torque. They make awful strangled noises,
hnnnghh!
s. They’re forehead to forehead, swapping respiration. Our guy watches as one and then another drop of blood blots the ice. He doesn’t know if it’s him or Leclair who was cut in the punch-up. They spin one last time, skate blades spraying red shavings. Then the linesman steps between them, saying, “That’s it, boys! You’re done.”

Our guy glides arm-in-arm with the official. From behind him comes the sound of both teams drumming the boards with their sticks, thunderous recognition. He doesn’t need to look to know the kid is one of them, nodding as he does so. If intoxication means going too fast from feeling worthless to worthy—
so
be it. Everything else might go to shit, but this is something I can count on.
He feels relief wash over him like helicoptered water dropped on a wildfire.

And we just clap and holler, happy to have seen it played out. The official closes the door on our guy. Sealed in the box, he does whatever a rung bell does after the sound fades.

A lovely young nursing student from Uganda came and prepared meatballs, steamed vegetables, and perfect scoops of whipped potatoes for dinner.

“You get drunk again last night?” Brophy asked, a half-chewed olio in his open mouth. The student looked seriously flustered. Then he added, “Na, I’m just funning.” Under everything was the absent respirator’s puncture/​sibilance/​gasp/​puncture.

A halo-bald Irishwoman in a tartan skirt, tartan blazer, and tartan bib sat next to Brophy and told indecipherable but really ribald-seeming jokes. Everyone but him guessed politely at her punch lines. (“Tea?” “Brie?” “Who took high tea?” “No, we don’t have any Hi-C.” “
Bees??
”)

Then the others chatted hopefully about a Jodi Arias execution while I watched Brophy struggle to feed himself. He could shovel the food just fine. But the nearer to his face he lifted his spoon, the higher the frequency of the tremors in his hand. Again and again he’d scoop some succotash; and again and again it would shake free on the way to his mouth. I could see the rage trapped in his dead eye, all pupil and a thin ring of iris, this black-and-blue Saturn. On the cheek below it was a keloidal blossom from who knows what. A bite, probably. Looked like a cauterized kiss.

“You really want to know why those guys offed themselves?” Brophy asked, putting down his spoon. “It’s because of
now. They came up one way. They were told that they were great scorers; they got trophies and mentions in the newspaper. All that bullshit. Maybe it was true, to some extent. But then it turns out that to get to the next level they had to change. Lower expectations. Play their part. They had to stop with the Gretzky shit and fight. They thought they’d make it as Charlie Bourgeois!

“So they do it, but they don’t like it. But they still have to do it. And they try to cope. Tell you the truth, they’d be better off if they’d grown up with it, instead of having to change. Nobody plans for being a fighter anymore.”

After dinner, we watched a horse race on TV. I was slow in leaving, but when I did say goodbye, I said, “Mr. Brophy, you’re a legend.” What I meant was, It’s a shame you’ll disappear from life before you can see yourself become a myth.

He said, “How I saw it, I fought, or I disappeared. And if I wasn’t playing hockey, I knew I was going to die.” Then he smiled with his whole face, leading with his chin.

The Bay Area is
nice.
Mom and Dad’s apartment is
nice.
Nice in the way that any place that is not your home—that you will be leaving directly, and are not responsible for—can be
nice.
The new technocrati hovering above us in app-chartered helicopters—I’m sure that if the capability is extant within their slouched physiques and posthuman, delphine psyches—they, too, think it’s
nice.

But it would be incorrect to say that I miss the big old house. You couldn’t pay me to spend a night there alone. Even (especially!) if it somehow reassembled itself like the House of Usher in reverse. I wouldn’t so much as lay my head on the now-empty lot. You know, take away the headstones—it’s still burial ground underneath.

We called it “Russellhaus.” I have no idea why. We liked the musty, ancestral connotation, I think. Vaguely mead hall-y. A warm place to hunker down, wait for Grendel.

It stood in a hammock, which is an environment where things live and die so quickly and often that they create solid land out of swamp. At points in its history, our neighborhood—the Grove—was favored by key deer, Bahamian laborers, hippies, and drug lords. The roads aren’t straight, they knot neuronally,
and the place is forever shagged with fronds, ferns, and nooseless braided vines. A golden grout of sunlight makes it through the fretwork, but you can’t see the ground for the crushed berries. There are no sidewalks.

The last time I visited, I saw that our street had only four listing old-Grove houses left. I went around and counted. The rest were now-typical Miami homes, gated and garishly painted. Their yards were defoliated, as if to keep clear the owners’ lines of sight. Aside from leased luxury sedans, these homes are the smallest units of what the city’s made up of, its atoms. If public life depends on sympathy, and if sympathy means being able to say
Your issues are not my issues, but I want to understand what they are, and respect them,
then I cannot say there’s a lot of public life, or sympathy, in Miami.

At the end of our street was a small park that fronted the water. This was where Dad and I would play ball, sometimes for an audience of Miccosukee who had come to the park’s freestanding chickee hut to get lit. After October, migrated midwestern vultures would roost in the trees, like committees of bald scholars blackly hunched. Every other month, we’d find a beached, makeshift raft there. These inspired Karen and me to attempt our own escape. Amid some spousal tiff one day, the two of us inflated a pool lounge and took covered tennis rackets for oars. We made it as far as the channel marker a hundred yards offshore before our craft sprung a leak. A single gull was sitting on the marker’s piling, and a skipjack flashed out of the water, chased by some predator. The waves pushed us back.

When the sea returns for Miami, that park is where it’ll start. The end of our street also happened to be where, through some quirk of meteorology, people’s celebratory New Year’s bullets rained down. I’d find the flattened shells in the soft earth next to crab holes. I kept an old cigar box full of them, would scoop and tinkle them through my fingers like doubloons.

To grow up there was to confront vitality and spontaneity, with all that that entailed. Every dead thing a sacrifice. Such a beautiful place.

What was
not
beautiful, however, was Russellhaus. Structurally, she was a single, narrow story that rambled down a hill (or what passed for a hill in Miami) like an architectural landslide. Quite the heap. There were three bedrooms, three baths, several small staircases of two or three steps. A pool full of dead leaves and water bugs. Tile
and
carpet. Wet bar in the master bedroom.

The façade was poured concrete, bunker thick, surrounded by a six-foot wall of same. Aerating it were a lot of poorly sealed plastic windows and French doors. There once stood tall iron gates at the end of the driveway, but these rusted off their hinges and were left to blanch in our trash-strewn backyard. We had no garage, but we
did
have the shed and the canopy. The shed was originally conceived and built by Papa as a seven-by-six playhouse for Karen and Lauren. They got to use it three times before Dad turned it into a dog food, lacquer, and scrap lumber repository, shot through with spiders the size of baby hands. The canopy was a tent designed to keep a van out of the elements. It was filled with tools and curios; then, over time, snakes; finally, a family of feral cats.

She was not watertight, Russellhaus. Rot caused the kitchen ceiling to sag to head height. Tree roots grew through walls, becoming structurally integral. When it rained, which was almost every afternoon, ochre water dripped into buckets at the rate of bagged saline.

“Character,” Dad reiterated whenever a newer house went up on the empty lots around ours. They were Mediterraneanrevival compounds, neo-eclectic superstructures, art deco mansions. Each bigger and more expensive than the last. “Whereas your home, it’s lived a life,” he’d say, roping down the American
flag that flew on a tall pole within our walls from sunrise to sunset. On the bus home, classmates would see this flag sopping limply in the humidity, and they’d wish me and my sisters
Adiós, Americanos.

Inside, the overwhelming sensory impression was: fungal. Russellhaus smelled like damp transmigration. Thinking back, I wonder—Is that why we took so many naps? Why we all staggered through adolescence, logy as fuck?
Black mold?

Whatever it was, it made me … imperceptive. With my close neighborhood bud Ricky, for instance. Ricky was a well-fed Panamanian with a mushroom cut and the eyes of a ruminant. We’d been fast friends since his family moved in up the block. We played in the same baseball league, shared a third-base coach who’d sing “Let Me Ride That Donkey” if you tripled. After school, we’d kill hissing invasive lizards with sticks. He seemed to have a million different uncles, these sallow-eyed, lipless men who’d take us deep-sea fishing.

But one warm December day in ’93, I found out he was moving. A thing he did often, apparently. He invited me to a combination housewarming/New Year’s party his family was having.

His new place had high walls topped with sharp fleurs-delis, and first-floor windows decoratively barred. Cocked quizzically above a steel door were two security cameras looking like air quotes: “Welcome.” Dozens of guests had already arrived. Everybody was in finery, kids included, in excellent gaucho boots and gowns that swooshed and riffled. The action was around the pool, fifty feet long with a swim-up bar at one end and a fake rock cliff at the other.

Normally, Ricky’s mother floated about the house in what now seems to have been a heavily narcotized state, bathrobe unbelted, ponderous fake breasts hard to ignore. Here, though, she was chastising the Incan-looking help in moneyed Spanish.

Ricky’s dad I’d never actually spoken to. I was told he worked as a salmon fisherman in Alaska. Now, though, he was across the pool in teak-colored lenses, laughing among a murder of brickish dudes in suits. He was beaming like the newly convalescent.

All the guests were smiling like that, like they’d just beat something. They seemed to have done it together, or at least were complicit. Everyone knew everyone and was toasting something—what it was, they weren’t saying. A DJ spun Grupo Niche salsa. The mood was such that people were jumping into the pool, shoes and all, and swimming up to the bar.

Later, Ricky’s dad smashed one of the caterers’ faces on that pool bar. Something about weak drinks, and not keeping up with demand. He swung over and started pouring generously. He clinked glasses with another of my friends’ dads, Roberto’s, a contractor who built all or part of the new house, I’m not sure. He was a real jocular guy, Roberto’s dad. Practically every time I stayed the night at his house, he’d have his associates and friends over, electricians and landscapers he slipped jobs to. They’d go into the den to drink and smoke cigars, fuck around, talk a little business—things I imagined I’d do as a grown man in Miami.