One Good Punch (3 page)

SECTION B

LIFESTYLES and OBITUARIES

Anxiety Has Negative Effect on Performance, Report Finds

I
DIDN’T SLEEP TOO WELL
but managed a few hours and then woke up suddenly raring to go. The sun is shining, and it doesn’t look too cold out at all.

My parents have already gone off to church—I make my appearances there on Christmas and Easter—and I’m not in any mood for conversation anyway. So I eat some toast and an orange and lace up the running shoes and head out, figuring some easy miles will calm me down and give me some perspective.

The first few miles are very low-intensity, no effort at all because I’m still thinking hard about the situation and what it might cost me. But I’m starting to heat up now, feeling better.

I’m following part of the course for the Steamtown Marathon, which they hold every October. The course starts out in the woods, then makes its way through Carbondale and the valley and eventually finishes here in downtown Scranton. The running magazines and Web sites consider it one of the best smaller marathons in the nation. I’d like to run it someday, but probably not until after college.

I can see the high school in the distance, and I know there’s no better therapy than to get on the track, to hammer out a few 200-meter segments and prepare myself for the spring. I’m all warmed up and ready to roll, so I head down the hill and through the parking lot and through the gates of the stadium.

There’s a strong wind—there’s always a wind here, since the bleachers on either side funnel it right along the homestretch—but fighting that can only make me tougher.

I stop and stretch for a few seconds, take a deep breath, then hear the crack of the starter’s pistol in my head and race into the first turn, picturing the crowd of runners and hearing the yells of my teammates and my coach and the spectators. You have to get out fast in an 800, establish yourself as the guy to beat, the one who has the balls to say, “You want it? Just try to take it from me.”

The 800 is two hard laps—maybe the hardest event in track and field. It’s close to an all-out sprint, but nobody on Earth can really sprint the whole thing. It’s a test of your resolve, actually, how close you can come to holding that speed for that long.

So as you move onto the backstretch of the first lap, you’ve taken the lead and fought your way to the inside lane, and your elbows are riding high because you’re not afraid to use them to keep your position, and your eyes are set straight ahead, but you’re aware of who’s around you, who thinks they can hang with your pace.

And you’re running hard toward the 200-meter mark, knowing how you’ll surge on the next turn to string out the runners behind you. The pace is steady and fast. You’re just outside your comfort zone, but you’ve prepared for this so many times that it’s become second nature.

I reach the end of the straightaway and slow to a jog. I’m not doing a full 800-meter race today; the point of practicing it in segments is as much psychological as physical. So I’ll run an easy half lap between each segment, envisioning the second fast 200-meter interval as the completion of the first lap of the race. The third one is the first half of the second lap; the fourth one takes you to the finish.

There are a couple of joggers in the outside lanes, but they’re not in my way, so I couldn’t care less. The American flag outside the school is flapping like crazy in the wind.

Start the second one and get right into your zone—almost relaxed but moving at a good clip. The runners with you are contemplating their strategy—let this guy set the pace or try to take over? Put it to him now or wait for a finishing kick?

Relax your shoulders; lean slightly into that turn. Then move out from the rail on the straightaway, to the middle of the lane, forcing anyone who has the nerve to try to pass you to move out even farther. But hold that lead; don’t let them by. Make ’em try to move past you on the turn if they dare.

Run smooth on the straightaway. Pick up the pace as you’re heading into the second lap. Let everybody know you’re just getting started.

My heart is beating hard and my breathing is quick as I slow down again, but my body feels good. The blood is really pumping in my arms, and my legs feel light and springy. It’ll be a great season ahead. The best of my life.

I’m focused now, and this pattern of racing is being recorded and embedded in my soul. The third one is crucial—anybody can hang on for a lap, then muster something at the end for a kick. But the 800 is won or lost on the third 200 by the one who’s strong enough and tough enough to keep the pace going and then has enough left over to sprint.

So I hold my form—make sure my shoulders aren’t hunching up and my stride isn’t getting too short. Keep working; don’t fight it, just relax if you can and keep running.

And the fourth one. It’s only 200 meters now; I’ve run that distance a million times. They’re chasing me, cursing in their heads and reaching as deep as they can, but I’m pulling away, I’m crushing them. It hurts like hell, but I refuse to fold. Harder and faster, right through the finish line.

I am exhausted. I am in pain. But I can’t wait to start racing for real. I can’t wait. I can’t wait. I can’t wait.

Thomas M. Kerrigan

Thomas M. Kerrigan, 51, a lifelong resident of this city, has not died yet. He is an associate professor in the Classics Department at the University of Scranton.

He attended Scranton schools and graduated from Addison College in Boston. He later earned a master’s degree at Marywood University and a Ph.D. from Temple.

Friends and relatives would describe Dr. Kerrigan as a rather stiff and humorless individual. He has no hobbies to speak of, but he delights in subtly demeaning the speaking faults of those around him. He finds slang and abbreviations particularly distasteful but will stoically endure them with only the most minor complaints.

His son, Michael, recalled a recent exchange between Dr. Kerrigan and his beloved wife, Catherine.

“Honey,” said Mrs. Kerrigan, “would you please take the burgers out of the fridge?”

Dr. Kerrigan cleared his throat and replied in an even tone, “Yes, I will gladly take the
ham
burgers out of the
refrigerator.
”

Also surviving is Dr. Kerrigan’s mother, Ann Kerrigan, of Scranton. He was predeceased by his father, Daniel Kerrigan, in 1991.

Dr. Kerrigan is a parishioner of Saint Anthony’s R.C. Church, Scranton, and makes the effort to attend at least once a month.

Expert Links Cheating to Maturity Level

“H
EY
, S
PORT
,” my dad says as I enter the house. He’s got the
Observer
and the
New York Times
spread out on the kitchen table, and he’s listening to National Public Radio.

“Just reading some of your work,” he says, bending the paper toward me to show me the obituary page.

“Some fine pieces of journalism, huh?”

“Excellent,” he says. He sets the paper down. “It
is
good work. Really. I expect that the admissions departments will take note of that.”

“Hope so.”

I’m waiting to hear from Penn State and a few of the smaller Pennsylvania colleges, and my dad keeps reminding me how much he loved the little private school in Massachusetts where he got his undergraduate degree. Great school for creative writing, he says. But I checked Addison online, and the track program is terrible. So I applied there to make him happy, but no way I’m going.

I could also go to the U, as he frequently reminds me. But they don’t even have a track team, and I don’t want to spend four more years at home.

My dad has tufty gray hair and a habit of squeezing his eyes shut quickly before he speaks. He says he had absolutely no interest in athletics until I started competing in track, and even now I don’t think he gets it. So he can’t understand why it’s the most important item on my where-to-go-to-college checklist. His priorities for college and graduate school were strictly about academics. Makes sense, I know. But it’s my life, and I plan to enjoy it.

I should mention that despite his lack of interest in sports and his alleged noncompetitive nature, he tends to cheat when we go bowling. We only bowl about twice a year. He doesn’t directly fix his score—you can’t really do that with the automatic scorers—but he regularly takes a half step or so across the foul line. (They only turn on the lasers for leagues, so there’s nothing really to stop you from taking those extra few inches, except, perhaps,
ethics.
) And if he’s got a tough spare to convert, he’ll go a full step or two over.

If you question him about it, he just denies that it happened. I would never cheat in a game or a sport. Why lie to yourself? If you aren’t good enough at it, then either accept that you aren’t or work harder.

“So where are Mom and Grandma?” I ask.

“They stayed after church for some meeting about buying new Bibles or something,” he says. He gives me an ironic smile. He’s about as enthused about church as I am, but he goes regularly to keep peace with my mom and his. I think they go more for the community feeling than the religion. I mean, we’re spiritual, but not exactly true believers.

Dad sticks a finger in his ear and starts twisting it around to kill an itch. Then he studies the nail on that finger before looking up at me with a start.

“You’re all sweaty,” he says, just noticing now that I’m in running gear.

“Yeah. I’ve been working out all morning.”

“On a Sunday?”

“Every day.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know how you do it…. Or why.”

I shrug. “Can’t explain it,” I say. “It’s just something that I have to do.”

I
can
explain it, though, but only to myself. When I’m racing, there is no place to hide from a lack of determination, no way to rationalize that I’m doing my absolute best unless I really am. My faults are right there to feel. It’s all a result of how hard I’ve worked, or how hard I haven’t.

Racing produces one significant outcome: it forces you to be honest with yourself.

Shelly Ciotti

Shelly Ciotti, 17, a senior at East Scranton High School, will certainly live for many more years. It seems highly unlikely that she will return to the Scranton area for any length of time after she breezes through Bucknell University, beginning this fall.

Born in Olyphant, she moved to Scranton just in time to begin third grade at Jefferson Elementary School. For years, she was the fastest runner and best jumper in her grade, and she once beat up two boys in the same week. In junior high school, she was captain of the girls’ basketball team and a district champion in the hurdles. She did not pursue sports in high school.

She has a gift for intentionally saying stupid, punny things that make her best friend, Michael, laugh. Recently they discussed driving to Florida for spring break, but the cheap-ass friend lamented that “it would cost us three hundred dollars for gas alone.”

“It’s gaso
line,
genius,” Shelly replied.

Rumors of Shelly’s alleged sexual orientation began as early as sixth grade, when someone scrawled SHELLY IS A LESBEAN inside a stall of the boys’ bathroom at Jefferson. The rumor stuck, despite no hard evidence of its truthfulness. (The rumor originated because she had shouted, “I hate boys!” in class after being teased for several days about her complete lack of breasts by Lenny DiPiazza and Jimmy Colaneri. The teasing itself had begun the day after Shelly struck out Lenny three times in a Little League game.)

In recent months, Ms. Ciotti has seemed determined to assert her heterosexuality, with only a moderate degree of success. Even Michael is left unconvinced, though he has a hard time explaining to himself why it should matter.

Shelly is a big fan of
The Honeymooners, I Love Lucy,
and
The Andy Griffith Show,
all of which were filmed way before she was born.

Also surviving are her parents, Joseph and Joanne, and an older brother, Phillip.

Courtship Rituals Tied to Primitive Need for Attention

I
GET TO
S
HELLY’S HOUSE
way too soon for the movie, and she’s not ready. She answers the door in a T-shirt and running shorts. She’s got bare feet.

“You’re, like, an hour early,” she says. “I was just going to take a shower.”

“No problem. I’ll wait.”

Nobody else seems to be home, so I follow her upstairs and sit on her bed, turning on the radio, which is tuned to classic rock. I try to keep my room sort of contemporary, changing the posters once in a while at least, but hers is more like a museum of girlhood (except for the dumbbells on the floor). She’s got a framed photo of a horse over her bed, a Gerry McNamara bobble-head on her dresser, and a row of dolls lined up by the window. I’ve never really thought of her as the doll-playing type, though.

The dumbbells are the vinyl-covered kind. Orange for the five-pounders, yellow for the eights, blue for the tens, and black for the fifteens.

She grabs some fresh clothing and steps across the hall to the bathroom. Soon there’s lots of steam coming out of there, since she didn’t quite shut the door all the way. I imagine her in there under the shower, lathering up, but I push that out of my head in a hurry.

Shelly thinks she knows everything about me, but how could anybody know everything about somebody else? She knows the basic things, like how I look and what makes me laugh and what gets me pissed off. She knows a lot of the inner stuff, too, like how I believe in past lives and how I want to express myself creatively in ways that go beyond writing obituaries and term papers. And she keeps secrets when I tell them to her; she’s the only person in the world who knows I sometimes listen to Barry Manilow.

In the past few weeks, for the first time, she’s been wanting to get closer, always rubbing my shoulders or trying to hold my hand. Now I can see her through that half-inch opening in the doorway, totally naked but not in focus.

She’s either way too comfortable around me or trying to drive me wild.

She’s mostly dressed when she opens the door, and she smiles when she sees that I’m staring at that space. I think she blushes a little. “Mirror gets fogged up if you shut the door tight,” she says.

“I can imagine.”

“Very steamy,” she says, and she sort of wiggles her shoulders at me and smiles with her teeth showing.

Shelly’s already been accepted at Bucknell, and with her parents’ two good incomes—her dad is a banker—there’ll be no problem paying for it. She says she can’t wait to get on with it; high school is so lame. But she keeps hinting that we could have a lot of physical fun over the next six months before she leaves. It could probably happen right now if I reached up and grabbed her. I start to reach, but I stop.

She looks at my arm, frozen there in space. “So, did you bring any joints?” she asks.

I frown and put my arm down. “Nope. Didn’t get any.”

“You said you were definitely getting some on Friday.”

“Yeah. But the guy stuffed them into my locker, and I didn’t know it until that night.”

“Is that why you wanted to get into the school yesterday?”

“Yeah.”

She’s disappointed. The one time we smoked a joint together—about a week ago—was one of the few times we ever made out. Down on a bench in front of the courthouse after hanging out at the Steamtown Mall.

I’ll admit that she’s got a nice body, maybe a bit too lean. She’s the type that orders only a salad and a cranberry juice when we eat at Mother’s, which is a dinery place a couple of doors down from the Observer building. (It’s run by a short, round Italian guy; there’s no mother to be seen.) Then she’ll eat half my fries. That’s okay by me. She needs ’em. She’s got those taut muscles and almost no fat, even where she could use some more, if you know what I mean.

Halfway through the meal, I always ask for a second order of fries, which we share.

“Guess we should get going,” she says. Then, as if responding to my earlier thought, she adds, “My parents will be home anytime now.”

So we walk the six blocks to the Cultural Center, which is actually a huge old Masonic temple on North Washington, about two blocks up from the courthouse square.

Despite its size, you’d barely notice the building—there’s no sign and few lights—so these films and other performances are never well attended. Several times a year, they’ll bring in a traveling Broadway company or a concert that fills the main theater, but mostly it’s small-time artsy stuff in the side rooms.

Tonight it’s an Iranian documentary with subtitles called
The Color of Love.
We’re a half hour early, so I look into the theater and see that it’s empty. We step over to the refreshment stand.

Chrissy is a jolly lady with curly hair, maybe about forty, who’s always here selling soda and candy bars and chips and glasses of wine. I order a can of root beer and ask her if she knows anything about tonight’s movie.

“Oh, it’s great,” she says, making a sweeping gesture with her right hand, which is holding the soda can. “We watched it this afternoon. Very interesting.” She turns slightly to face Shelly, pointing at her with the soda. “You think it’s tough meeting a great guy around here, honey? Wait’ll you see what it’s like over there.”

I reach for the soda, but she’s still using it as a prop. She waves it in my direction and continues speaking to Shelly. “
This
is a good guy. You know that, don’t you?”

Shelly smiles, almost a laugh. “He’s all right.”

“You know it.” Chrissy sets the root beer down hard on the counter. “And what would you like?” she asks Shelly.

“Maybe an iced tea?”

“Sure.”

I look at the can, knowing that there’s no way the soda won’t spray all over the place if I open it, even if I wait an hour. And I’m thirsty now, so I say, “You know, maybe I’ll have iced tea instead.” I don’t really like iced tea much, but it’s not carbonated, so it’s probably safe.

We take seats in the third row. There are only eight rows of seats set up, six on each side of the center aisle. About five minutes later, an older couple comes in and sits directly in front of us. I look at Shelly and roll my eyes. She just smiles. I say, “I need to use the bathroom,” which I don’t, but it’ll give us a chance to take a different seat. We both get up and walk out of the room.

The door to the men’s room is normal size, but you need to put both hands on it and push hard to get it open. It has one of those massive old pneumatic hinge devices, which probably weighs fifty pounds. Inside, the urinal is also huge, this bullish porcelain thing that’s ancient and yellowed.

Five more people have taken seats by the time we return to the theater, and two more hustle in just as the movie is starting. So there are eleven of us in the room, about average for a showing like this.

I turn my cell phone on after the movie, and there’s a message from Tucker. I call him back.

“Kerrigan,” he says, “I got some news on the drug sweep. You probably want to get in here.”

“You gonna be there awhile?”

“Yeah.”

I look at Shelly. I can’t just leave her to walk home alone, and I don’t want her knowing about this drug bust. So I tell Tucker I’ll be around in twenty minutes or so.

Shelly hears that and looks disappointed. “What was that about?”

“A thing at work. They can’t find some notes I made last night. I know where they are.”

“Can we just stop there and then hang out more?”

“Nah. I better get you home. This could take a while.”

She’d been stroking my arm during the movie and leaning into my shoulder. I’m sure she was hoping for a repeat performance on a courthouse bench.

Even if I was interested—and maybe I am—there’s no way I’d enjoy it with this thing hanging over my head.

“Soon,” I say, and start walking. “I promise. We’ll hang out again real soon.”

Let me say right here that I did make out with another girl once, the summer after sophomore year.
That
was great. But I feel relieved to be off the hook with Shelly for now.

Sometimes I don’t like myself very much.

I swipe my pass card and nod to the security guard, then walk up the stairs to the newsroom. I head straight for Tucker’s desk, where he’s talking on the phone and taking notes. He’s wearing a white shirt and a dark blue tie and has a cigarette behind his ear.

I wait until he’s done talking; sounds like a report on a fire in Moosic. He hangs up and looks at me kind of questioningly.

“What?” I say.

“Your name came up.”

I shake my head slowly. “About the school thing, you mean?”

“Yep.”

“Why?”

“You’re on the list, man.”

“What list?”

“The list of alleged offenders. Michael Kerrigan, age eighteen.”

I try not to swallow or look guilty, but I have to. “Why would I be on a list like that?” I ask.

Tucker looks around and starts drumming on his desk with his fingers. He lowers his voice and waves me closer to him. “I could get in big-time trouble for telling you this. They said they found pot in your locker. That surprise you?”

Frickin’ Joey.
I start thinking hard and stay quiet.

Tucker lets out a short, huffy laugh. “Dumb move, Mike.”

“It ain’t mine.”

“But you knew it was there?”

I take a good look around. Nobody’s nearby. “I
didn’t
know. Some guy put it there, and I didn’t find out until Friday night.”

“He just happened to put it in your locker?”

“He says he needed a place to stash it for five minutes, then forgot it was there.”

Tucker smirks. “You buying that?”

“The guy’s an idiot.”

“So you gonna turn him in?”

I let out my breath and say, “Shit!”

The newsroom is very empty on Sunday nights—a couple of sports guys, Tucker, and a handful of editors.

“He a friend of yours?” Tucker asks.

“Sort of. Yeah. Is
his
name on the list? Joey Onager?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Shit. Do you know how much they found?”

“In your locker, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

Tucker looks me over good. I suppose he’d get fired if anybody knew what he’d already told me. Probably get in some legal trouble, too. But he tells me more anyway.

“Four joints. In a plastic bag.”

“That’s not much,” I say.

“It’s enough, isn’t it?”

“You think I’ll get expelled?”

“Don’t know. Guess it depends how convincing you are.”

“About what?”

He raises his eyebrows. “Your
innocence.
Remember?”

“Yeah,” I say. “My innocence.”

“And how good a friend you want to be to this guy you say planted the stuff.”

“Right.”

“You might want to talk to a lawyer,” Tucker says.

I nod slowly.

I am in very deep shit.