In an old, stupid life I rose too high; for almost a year I sat in the middle of the caf, on display beside girls poured into Jordache jeans and boys who smelled like smoke. They weren’t the most adored kids; those perfect fuckers were so out of reach, I can’t even remember their position in the grid of banquet tables. And they weren’t the rats, the hard rebels in denim and leather. But in the tired, shockingly white, suburban hierarchy that The Breakfast Club would soon glorify, for a thin bore like me to have been recruited to the ranks of the cool was miraculous. When my fall came, the shifted scales slid me toward some freshmen misfits. Facing a blue cinderblock wall, with my back turned to what stood for humanity, I wasn’t surprised to be there. I got the concept of justice; realized that, as far as crashes went, mine wasn’t that bad. But with treason in my heart, I fixated on a favorite image, King Tut’s stylized death mask, the placid gold face of a defined, untroubled soul. I didn’t love kings; I wanted to hate American dreaming. My weakness tricked me into thinking I’d be up for some noblesse oblige, but I didn’t deserve it. To be done with falling, and content again with obscurity, would have been heaven enough.
The nice kid I’d hung with in elementary school had let me sit beside him. An Italian girl, who got Haffenreffers and vodka after school and smelled like Love’s Baby Soft, had almost erased him from my memory. He’d been cast out from better groups, I guess, for ubiquitous acne. A smug, dead-eyed stranger across from us seemed to bask in his freedom from the jocks behind me, the drinkers I’d offended, and those disheveled specimens labeled bookish. He was intellectual, good at baseball. That’s the secret reality of the grid-life: each block is defined by an emphasis on a dominating trait. But jocks drank, rats read, kids with zits played hockey, drinkers smoked pot, girls caked in makeup wrote the same love poems as the plain and ponytailed, and we all, at the time, had teeth. But Dead Eyes kept chanting to a grinning buddy beside him that my overbite made me eat like a rabbit. I took it. I thought of him as speaking for the universe. The movies never made the price for rising clear enough. Besides, I found him as ugly as I found myself, after all the beauty cosmic bounty had granted me.
*
For months I had endured vicious denouncements for my treachery. Girls changed their seats in class. Boys pretended I was invisible. I was straight, white, a little poor, fatherless, but so conventional I was slavish; too unremarkable to have inspired real ire—if I’d stayed low. It wasn’t exciting urban struggle, but your life is your life. Whether you’re a Buddhist or a Rugged Individual, it hurts, and leaves scars on internalized strata. If pride beats out despair, overcoming the jeers and enduring the exclusion become intoxicating. Ostracism feels like independence. I’d signed up for Babe Ruth Baseball as the worst abuse waned. I blamed a Styx song, “Fooling Yourself (The Angry Young Man).” Alone in my room I sang: “Get up, get back on your feet, you’re the one they can’t beat and you know it.” At fifteen, you should turn rock stars into oracles, read purpose into clouds—because the universe relentlessly exudes American signs that you matter. At tryouts I overthrew balls, fouled off pitches, and almost tore my groin apart sliding into second base. The Cubs selected me. They had sky blue uniforms. I soon heard they were predicted to be the best team that year. A few of the most renowned jocks in the city, who sat diagonally behind me in the cafeteria, were Cubs. They’d been nodding at me since I joined, as I skulked by toward the lost, with my wreaking grinder or mushy American chop suey.
*
The belittling began when the season started. Keats got kicked out of little league for throwing so slow. He never hit. I didn’t turn around. I prayed the beauties and the smokers had gone deaf. The Cubs will pay for their charity tonight, with him pitching. I spaced out, ate gross food voraciously—proudly hardened. And that dick across from me, made giddy by the smell of my metaphorical blood, got going on the buck teeth again. It makes you sick to watch him eat! I didn’t think I could stand it, and then a thundering “Hey” disturbed everything—a Hollywood “Hey,” a familiar but unbelievable “Hey.” It was Mercer, a freshman linebacker on the varsity football team; wider than tall, all muscle, like a modest, sheltering wall. Anthropologists might worship him. Moralists would wince and cringe. Lore fixed him as ferocious. His mouth hung open a lot, emphasizing hungry, backward aggression. At practice he roped screaming balls into the sky. But he studied people. That open mouth had started to signify vague, vulnerable capacity. All I knew for sure was that he was my teammate.
“Remember this tomorrow,” he roared from the head of his table. “Remember when he strikes you all out!” And he sat back down.
Oh no. Please don’t. I actually spoke those words before I closed my eyes, noticing that the bucktoothed insults had stopped. I think I started musing that my hideous teeth hadn’t bothered that impossible blonde, the first time I drank Haffenreffers, when she knocked us backwards off a rock in the woods, nibbling and sucking on my neck with enough vigor to leave purple marks. I wore a turtleneck the next day. The High Ones descended to mock me. She’d told them we made out. Such an injustice caused them to lose their cool. They typically mirrored the theoretical universe: balanced, deceptive, exacting. Pillars of regularity, they sinned a little, conformed enough, and competed with discretion. And if they crossed a line—had a fistfight, got too drunk, let passion turn to lust—they justified their exceptional breach, or had people cover it up. What was harder to conceal was their condescension toward the uninitiated. What they gave in the wrong degree was real mercy. But they didn’t matter because booze had made a queen go blind and crazy, and I rabidly devoted myself to the consumption of it, and to suffocating in Love’s Baby Soft and pop songs and fruity shampoos. Screw agonizing over right and wrong. Screw dull pals with acne. Screw the time-consuming demands of Honors English. You’d have to kill me to make me relinquish this heaven.
When I opened my eyes, alive but freshly mauled in my exile, benign lunchroom chatter had started up again. I didn’t turn around until the bell rang. Mercer was gone.
*
I’d rejected literature, before the booze and the blonde, because of diagramming. Until I was forced to underline compound predicates and objective compliments and participial phrases, I got close to drunk on stories, and on language—on a musicality and a throbbing sense that I seemed to absorb instinctually. Dissecting them with slashes, emphasizing components and absolute rules, made me feel like Sylvia Plath’s fictional self in The Bell Jar, who was oppressed by the mathematical decimation of the natural world in physics. Rules were fine, as background. But diagramming was a graceless, frigid operation that murdered literary life. I became self-conscious about misidentifying. I doubted everything. I went blind looking for order. I got terrified, too, by the sleeping threat the process ironically nudged awake: the discovery of a black and empty core. By the end of the eighth grade, aside from Macbeth, I read almost nothing. I made due with low art, like the dreamy “Stairway to Heaven,” or the rackety “Freebird.” One of them might have been beautifying the weekday afternoon on which I committed my scandalizing crime against the Italian girl. We were at her house, with her boyfriend, drinking. He said I kissed her ass. She told me to prove it, and I kissed a jean-clad cheek. I laughed. She laughed. The boyfriend took her to another room to argue. Feeling suddenly filthy, I attacked an unattended brown bottle and stumbled a mile home. I guess I ratted out everyone, comrades and suppliers, to my brokenhearted mother, like the worst betrayer ever. She called the girl’s parents. I got labeled a pervert for the ass kissing that even to the sober me seemed harmless.
*
Having masochistically reentered group life, I sat on the bench to put on my cleats at the first Cubs’ practice. Then the sun vanished. A big kid I’d watched bash terrified children into the boards at my friend’s hockey games was standing over me—actually mountainous, actually roiling, actually named Lava.
“Christ. I heard this was the best team. How the fuck did we get you?”
I lowered my head. The sun reignited. Lava staggered absurdly, tripped over the bench and against a chain-link fence. I squinted up at Mercer, who was pressing forward.
“You’re so full of shit,” he said, leaning into the retreating giant, “you should sink! He’s on your team!” And he walked away. The coach called me over to the mound and put me in a small faction of pitchers. Mercer was there, mouth open. He nodded. I was shaking, but glad to be pitching, which wasn’t sane. Why would someone allegedly seeking peace and invisibility accept the most conspicuous position on the team?
*
After weeks of practice and Mercer’s extravagant, lonely defense of me in the cafeteria, I was on the mound in front of a dreadful crowd that overflowed the bleachers at the high school’s field. My warm-up throws hit the dirt. I felt eyes on me. I suddenly hated songs that told you to fight, and coddling coaches, and muscled-up fools. Banquo’s stinking ghost hovered around me. I was breaking apart. I had no identity. The first kid up at bat, a lefty, seemed shrunken and deformed, squatting and hunching. The strike zone was a needle’s eye. I walked him on four pitches. From center field, Mercer started yelling. He wasn’t encouraging. He wasn’t merciful. He was exasperated, exhorting me to focus, to remember what I could do. An infield umpire asked, as I paced around the rubber: “Who’s that scary bastard?” I stared at Mercer. He tilted his head and flung his massive arms out, pissed, expectant. I struck out the next three kids. Before darkness cut the game to five innings, I got eight more, including the most vocal lunchtime ridiculers. I threw hard to the target the catcher made of his glove. I didn’t know how to finesse the corners of the plate, or why you go high and low, to mess with the hitter’s vision. Weeks later I found out I was gripping the fastball wrong—I kept my fingers split on the seams, rather than across—so I was unwittingly giving the ball movement. Only this ignorance made me regret being fatherless, but for every strike I threw that evening, Mercer screamed complements with a ferocity I imagined as paternal.
He had raced by me, after the first inning, before I’d reached the bench. “I told you,” he said, with almost no tenderness. “You’re throwing harder than me.” I didn’t mind the lie, the polite betrayal of his primary appeal to me: disturbance. After all of his intercessions, I didn’t feel uplifted, or less lost. I felt right about how wrong he’d been to defend me. I was still a joke. I would let him down—but that night, I just couldn’t care anymore. I was genuinely sorry, but exhausted. Emotions felt instantly old, remembered. Fuck the crowd. Fuck the eyes—even Mercer’s. External support was blockaded. I was full, or empty. Even winning, in a way that was close to a lie, was irrelevant. The crowd would soon erupt in claps and cheers of approval; I didn’t care—that much. Mercer’s real power as an intolerant defender confident enough to detach himself from the tormentors, his rare capacity to be an independent terror, might have finally infected me. I was on my own, ready to be afraid, and then I wasn’t. I had been disturbed into isolated agency, into a competent self—I registered the cost of being alone on that mound—and had drifted back into a team. And that’s when I just threw. Mercer’s exaggeration of my ability was his attempt to erase his spectacular influence. I almost cried then. I almost cry now.
*
I was undefeated that year, and got cocky; a little comfort, the slightest adoration, let the crowd back in. Not a lot changed in school. Mercer didn’t invite me to his lunch table. I still kept to myself. But my condition felt more chosen. And I didn’t resent the powerful as much anymore; not after a taste of inclusion: God bless America! Damn the blood of pharaohs, fatalism, and lifeless nirvanas! The Cubs’ coach might have got a little heady, too; he picked me for the All-Star team, which stirred up all the old mockery. I was shunned again, and never played. We won our district. We traveled to North Attleboro and stayed with host families. Mercer couldn’t help me. The kind people who gave me their son’s bed asked me over dinner why I was benched. I almost gagged. That night I pissed the bed for the first time since I was six, after my father died. I slept on the floor until we got knocked out of the tournament.
*
It looks like the universe rewarded Mercer with the right kind of American life. He’s even had some resurrected fame lately. One of his sons went to the 2014 high school Super Bowl in Gillette Stadium. It was the first time this sleepy city’s football team had gone since 1982, when he went and lost—the same year we lost the All-Star tournament, and blew the Babe Ruth championship. I’d never put all the failure together. I watched his son get beat, too, on television. He made violent tackles, but I was hunting for signs, as aging people will, of a kind of character I took for endangered. I feared that conventional reality, in a place where the emphasis on comfort was so profound, had worn Mercer down. The masses had always wanted him tamed. I was pitching once when a high fly ball went out between him and Lava. They kept calling each other off. Mercer bellowed from left-center: “I got the fucking thing!” My mother, who always sat in the bleachers with our coach’s Filipino wife, told me that a young, disgusted woman a few rows in front of them dragged her children away. Mercer got thrown out of our final playoff game for striding up to a retreating umpire and screaming in his face about a strike call. The in crowd diagnosed his raw, unpredictable exuberance as a flaw he’d outgrow.
*
Violence isn’t bullying. As a former member of the helpless, I’m against hurting the vulnerable, targeting outliers. But balance needs force; it is force. American dreaming is about making and smashing; it’s more destructive, in a way, than the regality we inherently reject. Selfhood, too, is progressive; it sloughs and swells and buries. As an aspect of balance, tolerance thrives; as a cleansing slogan, it can whitewash valuable struggle and buttress righteous veneers and detrimental shams. Bullies are never loners. They run in packs. Lasting, intelligent strength needs to gestate in a loneliness that’s either endured or sympathetically understood. Life inevitably hurts—not just in endorsed competitions that generate broken bones and concussions; not just in approved wars that necessitate warriors. Measure the casualties in a Henry James novel of the simmering urges throbbing within delicate bodies and civilized structures. The older I get, the less I endorse any specific case of physical aggression. But for a harried kid adrift between peopled hope and solitary despair, salvation must come from the example set by a threatening combatant adverse to the lordly, suffocating mob.
*
During our senior year in high school, I actually suspected the reduction of Mercer that I still want to deny. I was at a house party on a Saturday night, smoking and drinking beer at a kitchen table, with a new group—before another, greater fall. I had left baseball behind. I had grown into my overbite. Even a few sober girls now found my distorted facial structure attractive. Mercer tumbled through the front door, drunk, his companions said, for the first time. He waved at me before vanishing into bustling rooms full of people rubbing against each other. I was oddly offended at his indignity. I ignored him. For hours I sat at that table, laughing about nothing I remember. Van Halen or Huey Lewis blared. When everyone finally left, the host lost his mind because some comatose alcoholic had pissed on his couch, and the possibility of Mercer’s degradation became irrelevant.
*
Years of excessive drinking made my own bed wetting incident as an All-Star seem like no big deal. One buddy pissed in his brother’s sock drawer. One vomited in my car, another in my sleeping bag. And the people I’ve loved most have, from age and illness, done worse all over me. I didn’t care, as good parents laugh off the mess their babies make. Bucktoothed King Tut probably pissed himself. But in North Attleboro, another round of humiliation had almost made me want to die. I was still ashamed of my confusion, my errors, my lonely stink. Mercer asked me to stay until the tournament was over. We ate pizza slices and hot dogs in the bleachers among patchy clusters of strangers. My mother took our picture. He asked me why I got in with the drinkers. I said I didn’t know. I didn’t recommend the terrifying Macbeth. I didn’t warn him about alcohol’s ability to make what’s good in you rise into evil. He told me that if I ever felt lost again, I could come up to the East Side to play Wiffle ball or touch football. There was always a game going on. We both knew I’d never go. In that photograph his mouth is open, as if he’s forever yelling “Hey!” An untethered, fading aspect of my identity still resists that voice that felt designed just for me; a tormenting voice somehow assured of what a scathing journey of indefinite duration would require. But I do miss it.
