Joey
By Robert Fulton
Joey was the littlest one of us and I was the smartest and the fastest. We all came from pretty poor families, working
class, although the new affluence of the Reagan Era had changed things for some of us. Chris’s family had come
up from Boston and bought a new house, one of the ones built of particle-board and vinyl, built big with four
bedrooms and two and a half baths in one of the old farmer’s fields that the contractors were buying up on
speculation for subdivisions. In those days that kind of house was considered big. It could be accessorized with a
garage door opener and any two newish cars and the result was a spoiled kid that thought he was part of some new
elite. I never knew what Chris’s parents did for a living but I got the feeling it wasn’t quite aboveboard. His house
had the feel of corruption. It had too many mirrors, the furnishings were gaudy, and nothing seemed to have any
sentimental or personal value, nothing that penetrated beyond the glimmer, the price tag. There was no art, nothing
that even resembled art. Chris was the richest. He thought he had to contend with me over that, but I was too
innocent in those days to know what kind of money my father made. I was a sheltered kid and I had that sort of
innocence. I didn’t care or worry over how much money my father made. We had just bought a new house too, a
bigger one, and there had been some changes. There was soda in our house and we had an extra freezer that was
stocked with popsicles in the summertime, and we didn’t have pancakes for dinner once or twice a week anymore,
and my parents could meet together for lunch occasionally at a pizza restaurant, and we were allowed to order
Sprite instead of water. Other things were the same. We still slept three to a bedroom and rushed out the door to
church every Sunday. Of course the bedrooms were bigger and we also had two and a half baths instead of one,
and we started stopping for donuts every Sunday, and each of us were allowed to pick two. My father relaxed for a
little while. He worked nine to five, took some days off and drove us halfway across the state to the beach. We went
up to the mountains once. And then finally he got things back to where he could understand them, ripping one of
the bathrooms apart for renovation and suspending it in disuse for fifteen years until all of us were out of the house,
deciding too, that the mechanics he finally had the money to pay couldn’t do good work and spending his weekends
lying under the car in puddles of oil or break fluid with the skin scraped off his knuckles in the cold of February.
Joey’s family lived in a little house, a ranch, down a long road with a double yellow line. There was no front yard
really, and I didn’t know if his father was in or out of the picture. Joey was a sweet kid. He might have been a
momma’s boy. He had beaver teeth and stringy brown hair and he joined the army after high school. I never heard
from him after that. For a little while I worked at a filling station and his mother was my boss. She was a good,
trusting lady, a natural mother with the same ready smile as her son. She told me Joey was doing well. I told her
what a good kid he was, and it was true, but still, I was smitten with guilt. His mother worked the day shift and I
worked at night and in between us there was a younger kid that I didn’t know. I used to steal from the place, not
outright, but I’d put gas in friend’s tanks, pocket packs of cigarettes, eat candy bars, and occasionally a friend would
come to hang out and we’d scratch through a ream of lottery tickets hoping to hit it big, and we never did. We’d end
up owing a hundred and twenty dollars to the register that we couldn’t pay and I’d have to cover it up by taking a
false inventory. Eventually the young kid who worked the shift before mine was fired because, though I hadn’t
intended it that way, all the covering up I was doing made him look either guilty or stupid. I told Joey’s mother that I
was convinced it was the latter
“That kid would never steal,” I said.
“I don’t think so either,” she said, “I think he must have been making mistakes with the change.”
“I talked to him a few times, and I can tell, he’s an honest guy.” I said. “He wouldn’t be stealing.”
“Well, we looked through the inventory-sheets,” she said. She looked up at me with such trusting and bewildered
eyes that I felt a momentary sting of shame. “All the money was being lost on his shift, so what could we do? We
had to let him go.”
“It’s too bad,’ I said, ‘he seemed like a really good kid.”
And then, of course, I had to stop the stealing which made his guilt undeniable. Every now and then I would take a
few packs of cigarettes, a candy bar, a few scratch tickets--no more than ten--enough to make my own self look
fallible and as much as I thought I could get away with, and of all the awful things I’ve done in my life this one doesn’t
cost me any sleep because it was so un-malicious and innocent, and probably because I imagined it didn’t cost the
young guy any tears.
By the end of seventh grade Chris was drinking and taking pills with all my old friends. My friends weren’t the ones
they should’ve been, the ones my Catholic mother wanted for me, the smart ones who were heading to college and
straight, good jobs, the ones my brothers and sisters seemed to find. My friend’s were the outcasts, the daring
ones, the ones with too much juice in their veins and no idea how to use it. They had access to worlds I didn’t know
and which seemed romantic to me, worlds of divorce and abuse, where hard lessons were learned, and where sense
was whatever was left over. I had an idea that people like that knew the true meaning of friendship, of loyalty, a
popular myth that I had read about plenty and was determined to live out. Chris had plenty of access to alcohol.
His parent’s cabinets were stocked and they turned over fast. The other Chris, the one we called Ragu, after the
pasta sauce because of his Italian name, had plenty of access to pills, pain killers, tranquilizers, all sorts of downers.
His mother wasn’t well. She was a hysterical woman at the least. And judging by how Ragu turned out eventually,
wandering around muttering to himself and sleeping in the woods, I think hysteria was probably just the tip of the
iceberg. There was also Jim, whose father was an alcoholic, and Sean whose father was an ex-professional soccer
player, an Englishman, but who made his living bottling for Coca-Cola. Steve was probably my best friend of the
bunch. He was an Italian kid too, but he had a German name he’d taken from his father who was gone. His mother
knew I was Catholic and, though she wasn’t a churchgoer herself, it mattered to her. She was a terrific woman, a
single mother right out of one of the books I’d read, doing her best, smoking too much, worrying about her kids,
trying to censor their music, working two jobs, taking on boarders and cooking, trying to hug her big son now and
then. And that stuff rubs !
off, I could see it sometimes in the way Steve treated animals or the way his head would roll back just before he did
something good. His mother loved me, and trusted me, and to this day she’s the only mother who ever did, and she
was on to something because, like I said, that stuff rubs off.
We were like apes with our alliances. They were really terrible friends and Chris was the worst of them. They
destroyed people. They destroyed Sean because his father had been something special. They tore him to shreds
for being poor, because he kept his clothes in a cardboard box, because he only had two pairs of pants, and
because the family car was rusty and old. Thinking I was teasing innocently I helped in that, and Sean never
forgave me because we both loved soccer and his father had coached me, and I of all people should have known
better. By the time we reached high school Sean’s father’s coaching ability had been recognized. He was the
varsity head coach and he coached a regional all-star team, and the family bought furniture and a new car. But, to
Sean, the damage was already done. He had a challenging, almost sadistic look in his eyes and I would pass him in
the hall talking to teammates about women, making rabbit jabs with his hips. He would turn to me and wink and I
would shudder at what he had become, at what we had done to him.
Others were wounded worse. There was a nice kid named Jeff who was bigger than all of us but was gentle like a
cow. He lived close to Ragu and had been a childhood friend, fishing and skipping rocks. One day everyone got
stoned and took pills at Ragu’s house and while Jeff was screwed up and defenseless the other guys stuck their
cocks in his ears and slapped him in the face with them, taunting him. I wasn’t there, but I heard about it in whispers
that week. Jeff changed. He started having delusions that he was the devil incarnate and then one day he
approached me and showed me a hunting knife inside his jacket.
“I’m going to kill Chris today,” he said.
“What?”
“I’m going to kill Chris in the bathroom, right now.”
His eyes were glazed and they stared blankly toward the bathroom where the tough kids were lingering, looking for
someone to torment.
“Jeff,” I said, “don’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll go to jail.”
“So.”
“Jeff, you’ve got people who love you. You can’t do it.”
“But Chris deserves to die.”
He asked it like a question to himself. It seemed to break a spell.
“Chris has people who love him too Jeff, he’s got parents, a brother. Don’t kill him today. Think about it.”
“Okay.”
He walked off toward the bathroom and I followed him. Chris was leaning up against the sink with a thuggish, stupid
kid. The thing to do in those days was to pull the ink out of a Bic pen and push pins through wadded up paper to
make blow-darts and the thuggish kid put one of those up to his mouth and aimed it at me and I swatted it across the
room. He charged at me and pushed me to the wall between the urinals and Jeff grabbed him by the collar and
threw him back at the sinks. That was as far as it went. We walked out of the bathroom and went on to class and
Jeff never killed anybody and we never talked about it again and we weren‘t even very good friends. Years later,
though, during a college summer, I dropped some LSD with a couple of high school friends, good friends, and Jeff
was the designated driver and guide, taking us along scenic roads, stopping for cigarettes and drinks, and finally
taking us up to some cliffs far above a nearby city. I hadn’t expected to !
see him, but he was there with his big red beard, his long hair and shy smile and soft, gentle voice. I could feel our
unspoken bond when we greeted each other, and then later up on the cliffs when my trip went bad and I was deathly
afraid I might hurt myself his gentle presence and soft voice soothed me and he protected me from myself the same
way I had done for him.
I wasn’t so good to Joey. Somewhere along the line I went bad for a while, I lost my way. I suppose they wanted to
take my goodness from me, my innocence, the same way they took Sean’s pride, Jeff’s gentleness, the same way we
took Joey’s timid sense of security, the privilege he had by virtue of being so unthreatening. Joey and Steve and I
resisted the drugs and the alcohol for the first year. We missed out on all those first sadistic rites. But eventually,
each for our own reasons, we cracked. One day over the winter break I got drunk at Chris’s house and then we all
stumbled around in the woods until we were sober enough to go home. A few weeks later I smoked pot with the
other guys in the woods behind the school. Walking home, I spotted my mother’s car and I ducked into the woods to
avoid her. The innocent days were over. My poor mother, all her fears were coming home to roost. The drugs, the
sex, the violence--my friends had it all down. They brought girls !
from Ragu’s neighborhood over to his finished basement and did things somewhere in between molestation and
playing doctor. The girls were always willing, or so I heard, but one has to wonder after what they did to Jeff and
everything I saw them do, the way they treated people in general, one has to wonder what went on. As a kid, an
innocent kid, I never thought about the things that went on behind the closed doors and blinded windows of my
friend’s houses, behind the doors of the houses of the easy neighborhood girls, but being older now, I can surmise.
I can imagine a lot of things I couldn’t imagine back then. It’s not so hard. As rich as he was, Chris, the tough one,
was just a poor little kid, abused, humiliated and Jim, the cool one, lived in fear. Sean, I don’t know about, but Joey,
Chris and I were kids who were loved and we didn’t ever belong.
There were always some half built vinyl and particleboard houses to drink in when everyone’s parents were home
and the weather was too cold to drink outside. They were going up everywhere. There was a tract of land not too
far from my parents’ house that was being developed into upscale condominiums and they were available in all
stages of development. I was going to provide the alcohol one day and I suggested that we drink there. I poured
some liquor from each of my fathers bottles-- bottles that had sat unused in the cabinet for years, that had moved
with us to our bigger house--into an empty, plastic liter bottle of Coke or Sprite, shoved it inside my jacket and
walked down to meet my friends. They were all waiting. Ragu had filled a bottle of Wishbone Italian salad dressing
with his mother’s rum at the last moment, and they had already started in with that. He had some pills too, and we all
took a few of those. Some of the workers had stayed late at the condo’s,!
so the guys were down below in the woods with a little fire. We sat around and swigged out of the bottle of salad
dressing, smoked some pot, and then some cigarettes and then started in on my kitchen-sink mix. It was awful.
Everyone was gagging and choking it down. The weather wasn’t too bad. There was only snow in the shade, but
where everything had been torn out beyond the woods there were patches of mud and water that would swallow you
up to your ankles and when anybody went stumbling out beyond the fire they seemed to find one of those holes.
Chris went out to get some wood, crossing the little road roughed in and left ruddy by a backhoe. On his way back
with an armful of wood he tripped on a root and fell face first into the mud. He made a grunting sound when he went
down and everybody watched for a moment in quiet. Jim stood up and looked on as if ready to help. Then Chris
stood up, his whole front side caked thick with mud and Ragu, with his insane and uncontrollable sense of humor,
spit out a mouthful of liquor and coughed and hacked in laughter. I started laughing at Ragu. Joey who was lying
unconscious against a tree looked up, saw Chris and pointed at him, uncomprehendingly at first and then lost
himself in hysterical laughter. Anyone else could have laughed at himself and let it go there, but Chris was the
tough one and he didn’t want to play the fool. He wiped some mud from his sweatshirt and flicked it at Joey. It
splattered in perfect brown circles across Joey’s face.
“Joey looks like he needs a beating,’ he said.
There was a strange game we played, chasing each other through the woods with sticks like angry chimps. Nobody
had ever been badly hurt, and the point seemed to be just to cause fear—to give chase, to see one cower apart
from the group. And then to leave it there, leave the person alone to walk away or to come make amends, rejoin the
group in his reduced social place or leave. I never minded the game, because I was the fastest and I couldn’t be
caught. I could get away, hide, make my way back, spy from some nearby place until they called for me. I was good
at the game. I liked it.
“You look like you need a wash,” Ragu said. Ragu would never run. He was slow and weak and anybody could
catch him.
I laughed. I laughed so hard I had to lean against a tree. Chris picked up one of the sticks he had brought for the
fire and struck it against a tree.
“You better run Joey,” he said. Joey looked up, frightened.
“Just forget about it, Chris,” Jim said. “Everyone got muddy.”
“Everyone didn’t fall on their face,” Ragu said, “You need a hose-down.” He started laughing again and I had to
lean against the tree.
Chris broke the stick he was holding over his knee and threw the smaller half at Joey. It struck him on the thigh and
he winced and pulled his leg up to his chest.
“Come on, Chris,” he said.
“You better run Joey, ‘cause I’ve got plenty of sticks.”
“Just run Joey,” Steve said.
“Yeah Joey,” Jim said, “just run.” He picked up a handful of dirt and threw it at Joey and it hit him in the chest.
Chris picked up another stick, a sapling, and it whispered through the air and cracked against Joey’s side. Joey
winced again and then stood up and ran with everything he had.
“Get him,” Ragu yelled.
His voice was like a bugle call. All of us started running after Joey, and I was the fastest. He made for the open
back field of the condominiums and I headed him off, keeping him in the woods. The other guys were picking up
sticks and handfuls of mud and hurling them and I joined in. Joey made some distance in the other direction, cut
through Ragu but then got caught in a tangle of fallen trees he was too drunk to negotiate. He fell once and cried
out, pushing himself back up with his hands. Steve threw a handful of mud and it struck him on the cheek, and we
both broke out in a burst of sick, mean laughter. I picked up a long, soggy stick and hurled it like a spear, never
thinking it would hit him, but landed just in front of him and broke into pieces which bounced up and splattered him
with earth and wet leaves. There was another burst of laughter. The guys were around him like wolves and he
made a desperate run for it but tripped again in the tangle of branches !
and boughs. He screamed.
“Stop! Stop!”
“Get him,” Ragu yelled.
“Stop guys,” Joey yelled, “I think I broke my ankle.” He started to cry.
“Hold on,” Ragu said, “He might really be hurt.”
Chris threw a last handful of mud and stalked off toward the fire. “What a sissy.”
Joey pulled himself up and limped out of the tangle, covered in mud and leaves and Steve went over to help him.
Ragu and Jim walked back toward the fire. Chris was already sitting beside it, smoking a cigarette with his gloved
hand. Joey began limping away and Steve walked over to me shaking his head. By the time we got back to the fire
Joey had made his way through the back field and I could see his limping, sad little body with his long shaggy hair
and his Levi’s jacket, the same one all of us wore, making its way toward he road.
“He okay,” Chris said.
“He hurt his ankle,” Steve said. “He’s going home.”
“What a little momma’s boy,” Chris said. “He’ll be all right.”
“Never saw the him run so fast,” Jim said. He laughed and took a drag off his cigarette.
“You went crazy Dave,” Ragu said to me, “I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“That last stick was huge. I was just throwing mud,” Jim said.
“I didn’t mean to hit him. Do you think his ankle was hurt bad Steve?”
“He said it was broken. I don’t know.”
“It’s not broken,” Chris said, “he wouldn’t even be walking.”
We drank some more and the sunlight, orange and too beautiful, settled the color of fire behind the trees. There’s
about an hour that I only remember in flashes. I remember Ragu holding his bottle of Wishbone and sticking his
finger down his throat and a stream of brown vomit hurling out in a perfect arch.
“That’s what you gotta do,” he said. I started laughing and he repeated himself, “That’s what you gotta do.”
Chris and Jim got into a match, whacking each other on the shoulders with sticks. The sun got lower and the air
cooled and orange light blazed behind the trees, fading. I heard the sound of two stroke engines and a couple of
older kids approached the fire.
“What’s going on here? Alcohol, cigarettes, should we bring them in?” The big one said. They were playing some
charade, pretending to be cops.
“We’ll have to take that stuff from you.” They took the plastic, liter-bottle from Jim, and the smaller of the two sniffed
it, capped it and put it in his coat.
“What are you doing,” Chris said. “That’s ours.”
“Not anymore,” the big one said. “Unless you want to take it.”
“Should we get the cigarettes too,” the other one said, “their parents wouldn’t want them smoking.”
“Do your parents know you’re out smoking and drinking?”
“Screw this,” Chris said to Jim, “Lets go.”
He walked off and Jim and Ragu followed. Steve and I were sitting a little deeper in past the fire. The smaller one
approached us. He was maybe seventeen and I’d seen him around the neighborhood now and then. I think I’d
raked leaves for his grandmother. He picked up a stick and poked at the fire.
“Nice friends you guys got,” He said.
“Come on,” the big one said. He revved the engine of his bike. “Let them be.”
“Don’t let me catch you guys down here again,” he said.
After they left we broke into one of the finished condo’s that was being used as a show model and wondered about
Joey before passing out on the carpet. When we woke it was dark and we went our separate ways. Walking back, I
could hear the neighborhood kids riding up and down the street on their bikes. Porch lights were on, garages were
open. Everyone was happy about the spring. I walked into my own house, told my mother I was too tired to eat,
showered and went to bed. I couldn’t sleep.
Joey had a cast on his foot the next day. He had walked a mile and a half when his mother spotted him on her way
home from the filling station. He shrugged it all off, but there was something icy in both of us. I remember his cast,
new and white, and that he looked good, well rested. I thought about the late night at the hospital with his mother
and I was surprised that he made it to school at all. I never signed his cast.
By Robert Fulton
Joey was the littlest one of us and I was the smartest and the fastest. We all came from pretty poor families, working
class, although the new affluence of the Reagan Era had changed things for some of us. Chris’s family had come
up from Boston and bought a new house, one of the ones built of particle-board and vinyl, built big with four
bedrooms and two and a half baths in one of the old farmer’s fields that the contractors were buying up on
speculation for subdivisions. In those days that kind of house was considered big. It could be accessorized with a
garage door opener and any two newish cars and the result was a spoiled kid that thought he was part of some new
elite. I never knew what Chris’s parents did for a living but I got the feeling it wasn’t quite aboveboard. His house
had the feel of corruption. It had too many mirrors, the furnishings were gaudy, and nothing seemed to have any
sentimental or personal value, nothing that penetrated beyond the glimmer, the price tag. There was no art, nothing
that even resembled art. Chris was the richest. He thought he had to contend with me over that, but I was too
innocent in those days to know what kind of money my father made. I was a sheltered kid and I had that sort of
innocence. I didn’t care or worry over how much money my father made. We had just bought a new house too, a
bigger one, and there had been some changes. There was soda in our house and we had an extra freezer that was
stocked with popsicles in the summertime, and we didn’t have pancakes for dinner once or twice a week anymore,
and my parents could meet together for lunch occasionally at a pizza restaurant, and we were allowed to order
Sprite instead of water. Other things were the same. We still slept three to a bedroom and rushed out the door to
church every Sunday. Of course the bedrooms were bigger and we also had two and a half baths instead of one,
and we started stopping for donuts every Sunday, and each of us were allowed to pick two. My father relaxed for a
little while. He worked nine to five, took some days off and drove us halfway across the state to the beach. We went
up to the mountains once. And then finally he got things back to where he could understand them, ripping one of
the bathrooms apart for renovation and suspending it in disuse for fifteen years until all of us were out of the house,
deciding too, that the mechanics he finally had the money to pay couldn’t do good work and spending his weekends
lying under the car in puddles of oil or break fluid with the skin scraped off his knuckles in the cold of February.
Joey’s family lived in a little house, a ranch, down a long road with a double yellow line. There was no front yard
really, and I didn’t know if his father was in or out of the picture. Joey was a sweet kid. He might have been a
momma’s boy. He had beaver teeth and stringy brown hair and he joined the army after high school. I never heard
from him after that. For a little while I worked at a filling station and his mother was my boss. She was a good,
trusting lady, a natural mother with the same ready smile as her son. She told me Joey was doing well. I told her
what a good kid he was, and it was true, but still, I was smitten with guilt. His mother worked the day shift and I
worked at night and in between us there was a younger kid that I didn’t know. I used to steal from the place, not
outright, but I’d put gas in friend’s tanks, pocket packs of cigarettes, eat candy bars, and occasionally a friend would
come to hang out and we’d scratch through a ream of lottery tickets hoping to hit it big, and we never did. We’d end
up owing a hundred and twenty dollars to the register that we couldn’t pay and I’d have to cover it up by taking a
false inventory. Eventually the young kid who worked the shift before mine was fired because, though I hadn’t
intended it that way, all the covering up I was doing made him look either guilty or stupid. I told Joey’s mother that I
was convinced it was the latter
“That kid would never steal,” I said.
“I don’t think so either,” she said, “I think he must have been making mistakes with the change.”
“I talked to him a few times, and I can tell, he’s an honest guy.” I said. “He wouldn’t be stealing.”
“Well, we looked through the inventory-sheets,” she said. She looked up at me with such trusting and bewildered
eyes that I felt a momentary sting of shame. “All the money was being lost on his shift, so what could we do? We
had to let him go.”
“It’s too bad,’ I said, ‘he seemed like a really good kid.”
And then, of course, I had to stop the stealing which made his guilt undeniable. Every now and then I would take a
few packs of cigarettes, a candy bar, a few scratch tickets--no more than ten--enough to make my own self look
fallible and as much as I thought I could get away with, and of all the awful things I’ve done in my life this one doesn’t
cost me any sleep because it was so un-malicious and innocent, and probably because I imagined it didn’t cost the
young guy any tears.
By the end of seventh grade Chris was drinking and taking pills with all my old friends. My friends weren’t the ones
they should’ve been, the ones my Catholic mother wanted for me, the smart ones who were heading to college and
straight, good jobs, the ones my brothers and sisters seemed to find. My friend’s were the outcasts, the daring
ones, the ones with too much juice in their veins and no idea how to use it. They had access to worlds I didn’t know
and which seemed romantic to me, worlds of divorce and abuse, where hard lessons were learned, and where sense
was whatever was left over. I had an idea that people like that knew the true meaning of friendship, of loyalty, a
popular myth that I had read about plenty and was determined to live out. Chris had plenty of access to alcohol.
His parent’s cabinets were stocked and they turned over fast. The other Chris, the one we called Ragu, after the
pasta sauce because of his Italian name, had plenty of access to pills, pain killers, tranquilizers, all sorts of downers.
His mother wasn’t well. She was a hysterical woman at the least. And judging by how Ragu turned out eventually,
wandering around muttering to himself and sleeping in the woods, I think hysteria was probably just the tip of the
iceberg. There was also Jim, whose father was an alcoholic, and Sean whose father was an ex-professional soccer
player, an Englishman, but who made his living bottling for Coca-Cola. Steve was probably my best friend of the
bunch. He was an Italian kid too, but he had a German name he’d taken from his father who was gone. His mother
knew I was Catholic and, though she wasn’t a churchgoer herself, it mattered to her. She was a terrific woman, a
single mother right out of one of the books I’d read, doing her best, smoking too much, worrying about her kids,
trying to censor their music, working two jobs, taking on boarders and cooking, trying to hug her big son now and
then. And that stuff rubs !
off, I could see it sometimes in the way Steve treated animals or the way his head would roll back just before he did
something good. His mother loved me, and trusted me, and to this day she’s the only mother who ever did, and she
was on to something because, like I said, that stuff rubs off.
We were like apes with our alliances. They were really terrible friends and Chris was the worst of them. They
destroyed people. They destroyed Sean because his father had been something special. They tore him to shreds
for being poor, because he kept his clothes in a cardboard box, because he only had two pairs of pants, and
because the family car was rusty and old. Thinking I was teasing innocently I helped in that, and Sean never
forgave me because we both loved soccer and his father had coached me, and I of all people should have known
better. By the time we reached high school Sean’s father’s coaching ability had been recognized. He was the
varsity head coach and he coached a regional all-star team, and the family bought furniture and a new car. But, to
Sean, the damage was already done. He had a challenging, almost sadistic look in his eyes and I would pass him in
the hall talking to teammates about women, making rabbit jabs with his hips. He would turn to me and wink and I
would shudder at what he had become, at what we had done to him.
Others were wounded worse. There was a nice kid named Jeff who was bigger than all of us but was gentle like a
cow. He lived close to Ragu and had been a childhood friend, fishing and skipping rocks. One day everyone got
stoned and took pills at Ragu’s house and while Jeff was screwed up and defenseless the other guys stuck their
cocks in his ears and slapped him in the face with them, taunting him. I wasn’t there, but I heard about it in whispers
that week. Jeff changed. He started having delusions that he was the devil incarnate and then one day he
approached me and showed me a hunting knife inside his jacket.
“I’m going to kill Chris today,” he said.
“What?”
“I’m going to kill Chris in the bathroom, right now.”
His eyes were glazed and they stared blankly toward the bathroom where the tough kids were lingering, looking for
someone to torment.
“Jeff,” I said, “don’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll go to jail.”
“So.”
“Jeff, you’ve got people who love you. You can’t do it.”
“But Chris deserves to die.”
He asked it like a question to himself. It seemed to break a spell.
“Chris has people who love him too Jeff, he’s got parents, a brother. Don’t kill him today. Think about it.”
“Okay.”
He walked off toward the bathroom and I followed him. Chris was leaning up against the sink with a thuggish, stupid
kid. The thing to do in those days was to pull the ink out of a Bic pen and push pins through wadded up paper to
make blow-darts and the thuggish kid put one of those up to his mouth and aimed it at me and I swatted it across the
room. He charged at me and pushed me to the wall between the urinals and Jeff grabbed him by the collar and
threw him back at the sinks. That was as far as it went. We walked out of the bathroom and went on to class and
Jeff never killed anybody and we never talked about it again and we weren‘t even very good friends. Years later,
though, during a college summer, I dropped some LSD with a couple of high school friends, good friends, and Jeff
was the designated driver and guide, taking us along scenic roads, stopping for cigarettes and drinks, and finally
taking us up to some cliffs far above a nearby city. I hadn’t expected to !
see him, but he was there with his big red beard, his long hair and shy smile and soft, gentle voice. I could feel our
unspoken bond when we greeted each other, and then later up on the cliffs when my trip went bad and I was deathly
afraid I might hurt myself his gentle presence and soft voice soothed me and he protected me from myself the same
way I had done for him.
I wasn’t so good to Joey. Somewhere along the line I went bad for a while, I lost my way. I suppose they wanted to
take my goodness from me, my innocence, the same way they took Sean’s pride, Jeff’s gentleness, the same way we
took Joey’s timid sense of security, the privilege he had by virtue of being so unthreatening. Joey and Steve and I
resisted the drugs and the alcohol for the first year. We missed out on all those first sadistic rites. But eventually,
each for our own reasons, we cracked. One day over the winter break I got drunk at Chris’s house and then we all
stumbled around in the woods until we were sober enough to go home. A few weeks later I smoked pot with the
other guys in the woods behind the school. Walking home, I spotted my mother’s car and I ducked into the woods to
avoid her. The innocent days were over. My poor mother, all her fears were coming home to roost. The drugs, the
sex, the violence--my friends had it all down. They brought girls !
from Ragu’s neighborhood over to his finished basement and did things somewhere in between molestation and
playing doctor. The girls were always willing, or so I heard, but one has to wonder after what they did to Jeff and
everything I saw them do, the way they treated people in general, one has to wonder what went on. As a kid, an
innocent kid, I never thought about the things that went on behind the closed doors and blinded windows of my
friend’s houses, behind the doors of the houses of the easy neighborhood girls, but being older now, I can surmise.
I can imagine a lot of things I couldn’t imagine back then. It’s not so hard. As rich as he was, Chris, the tough one,
was just a poor little kid, abused, humiliated and Jim, the cool one, lived in fear. Sean, I don’t know about, but Joey,
Chris and I were kids who were loved and we didn’t ever belong.
There were always some half built vinyl and particleboard houses to drink in when everyone’s parents were home
and the weather was too cold to drink outside. They were going up everywhere. There was a tract of land not too
far from my parents’ house that was being developed into upscale condominiums and they were available in all
stages of development. I was going to provide the alcohol one day and I suggested that we drink there. I poured
some liquor from each of my fathers bottles-- bottles that had sat unused in the cabinet for years, that had moved
with us to our bigger house--into an empty, plastic liter bottle of Coke or Sprite, shoved it inside my jacket and
walked down to meet my friends. They were all waiting. Ragu had filled a bottle of Wishbone Italian salad dressing
with his mother’s rum at the last moment, and they had already started in with that. He had some pills too, and we all
took a few of those. Some of the workers had stayed late at the condo’s,!
so the guys were down below in the woods with a little fire. We sat around and swigged out of the bottle of salad
dressing, smoked some pot, and then some cigarettes and then started in on my kitchen-sink mix. It was awful.
Everyone was gagging and choking it down. The weather wasn’t too bad. There was only snow in the shade, but
where everything had been torn out beyond the woods there were patches of mud and water that would swallow you
up to your ankles and when anybody went stumbling out beyond the fire they seemed to find one of those holes.
Chris went out to get some wood, crossing the little road roughed in and left ruddy by a backhoe. On his way back
with an armful of wood he tripped on a root and fell face first into the mud. He made a grunting sound when he went
down and everybody watched for a moment in quiet. Jim stood up and looked on as if ready to help. Then Chris
stood up, his whole front side caked thick with mud and Ragu, with his insane and uncontrollable sense of humor,
spit out a mouthful of liquor and coughed and hacked in laughter. I started laughing at Ragu. Joey who was lying
unconscious against a tree looked up, saw Chris and pointed at him, uncomprehendingly at first and then lost
himself in hysterical laughter. Anyone else could have laughed at himself and let it go there, but Chris was the
tough one and he didn’t want to play the fool. He wiped some mud from his sweatshirt and flicked it at Joey. It
splattered in perfect brown circles across Joey’s face.
“Joey looks like he needs a beating,’ he said.
There was a strange game we played, chasing each other through the woods with sticks like angry chimps. Nobody
had ever been badly hurt, and the point seemed to be just to cause fear—to give chase, to see one cower apart
from the group. And then to leave it there, leave the person alone to walk away or to come make amends, rejoin the
group in his reduced social place or leave. I never minded the game, because I was the fastest and I couldn’t be
caught. I could get away, hide, make my way back, spy from some nearby place until they called for me. I was good
at the game. I liked it.
“You look like you need a wash,” Ragu said. Ragu would never run. He was slow and weak and anybody could
catch him.
I laughed. I laughed so hard I had to lean against a tree. Chris picked up one of the sticks he had brought for the
fire and struck it against a tree.
“You better run Joey,” he said. Joey looked up, frightened.
“Just forget about it, Chris,” Jim said. “Everyone got muddy.”
“Everyone didn’t fall on their face,” Ragu said, “You need a hose-down.” He started laughing again and I had to
lean against the tree.
Chris broke the stick he was holding over his knee and threw the smaller half at Joey. It struck him on the thigh and
he winced and pulled his leg up to his chest.
“Come on, Chris,” he said.
“You better run Joey, ‘cause I’ve got plenty of sticks.”
“Just run Joey,” Steve said.
“Yeah Joey,” Jim said, “just run.” He picked up a handful of dirt and threw it at Joey and it hit him in the chest.
Chris picked up another stick, a sapling, and it whispered through the air and cracked against Joey’s side. Joey
winced again and then stood up and ran with everything he had.
“Get him,” Ragu yelled.
His voice was like a bugle call. All of us started running after Joey, and I was the fastest. He made for the open
back field of the condominiums and I headed him off, keeping him in the woods. The other guys were picking up
sticks and handfuls of mud and hurling them and I joined in. Joey made some distance in the other direction, cut
through Ragu but then got caught in a tangle of fallen trees he was too drunk to negotiate. He fell once and cried
out, pushing himself back up with his hands. Steve threw a handful of mud and it struck him on the cheek, and we
both broke out in a burst of sick, mean laughter. I picked up a long, soggy stick and hurled it like a spear, never
thinking it would hit him, but landed just in front of him and broke into pieces which bounced up and splattered him
with earth and wet leaves. There was another burst of laughter. The guys were around him like wolves and he
made a desperate run for it but tripped again in the tangle of branches !
and boughs. He screamed.
“Stop! Stop!”
“Get him,” Ragu yelled.
“Stop guys,” Joey yelled, “I think I broke my ankle.” He started to cry.
“Hold on,” Ragu said, “He might really be hurt.”
Chris threw a last handful of mud and stalked off toward the fire. “What a sissy.”
Joey pulled himself up and limped out of the tangle, covered in mud and leaves and Steve went over to help him.
Ragu and Jim walked back toward the fire. Chris was already sitting beside it, smoking a cigarette with his gloved
hand. Joey began limping away and Steve walked over to me shaking his head. By the time we got back to the fire
Joey had made his way through the back field and I could see his limping, sad little body with his long shaggy hair
and his Levi’s jacket, the same one all of us wore, making its way toward he road.
“He okay,” Chris said.
“He hurt his ankle,” Steve said. “He’s going home.”
“What a little momma’s boy,” Chris said. “He’ll be all right.”
“Never saw the him run so fast,” Jim said. He laughed and took a drag off his cigarette.
“You went crazy Dave,” Ragu said to me, “I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“That last stick was huge. I was just throwing mud,” Jim said.
“I didn’t mean to hit him. Do you think his ankle was hurt bad Steve?”
“He said it was broken. I don’t know.”
“It’s not broken,” Chris said, “he wouldn’t even be walking.”
We drank some more and the sunlight, orange and too beautiful, settled the color of fire behind the trees. There’s
about an hour that I only remember in flashes. I remember Ragu holding his bottle of Wishbone and sticking his
finger down his throat and a stream of brown vomit hurling out in a perfect arch.
“That’s what you gotta do,” he said. I started laughing and he repeated himself, “That’s what you gotta do.”
Chris and Jim got into a match, whacking each other on the shoulders with sticks. The sun got lower and the air
cooled and orange light blazed behind the trees, fading. I heard the sound of two stroke engines and a couple of
older kids approached the fire.
“What’s going on here? Alcohol, cigarettes, should we bring them in?” The big one said. They were playing some
charade, pretending to be cops.
“We’ll have to take that stuff from you.” They took the plastic, liter-bottle from Jim, and the smaller of the two sniffed
it, capped it and put it in his coat.
“What are you doing,” Chris said. “That’s ours.”
“Not anymore,” the big one said. “Unless you want to take it.”
“Should we get the cigarettes too,” the other one said, “their parents wouldn’t want them smoking.”
“Do your parents know you’re out smoking and drinking?”
“Screw this,” Chris said to Jim, “Lets go.”
He walked off and Jim and Ragu followed. Steve and I were sitting a little deeper in past the fire. The smaller one
approached us. He was maybe seventeen and I’d seen him around the neighborhood now and then. I think I’d
raked leaves for his grandmother. He picked up a stick and poked at the fire.
“Nice friends you guys got,” He said.
“Come on,” the big one said. He revved the engine of his bike. “Let them be.”
“Don’t let me catch you guys down here again,” he said.
After they left we broke into one of the finished condo’s that was being used as a show model and wondered about
Joey before passing out on the carpet. When we woke it was dark and we went our separate ways. Walking back, I
could hear the neighborhood kids riding up and down the street on their bikes. Porch lights were on, garages were
open. Everyone was happy about the spring. I walked into my own house, told my mother I was too tired to eat,
showered and went to bed. I couldn’t sleep.
Joey had a cast on his foot the next day. He had walked a mile and a half when his mother spotted him on her way
home from the filling station. He shrugged it all off, but there was something icy in both of us. I remember his cast,
new and white, and that he looked good, well rested. I thought about the late night at the hospital with his mother
and I was surprised that he made it to school at all. I never signed his cast.
New Hampshire Writers Short Stories
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