local high school. I’m conflating characters and scenes, you understand, in order to spare
certain parties bad publicity. It was rainy. It was June. That intersection at Four Corners was, and is still, noted for scofflaws
trying to make it to the station before the local train pulled out. Bobby and his policeman were locked in a kiss at a stoplight,
a devouring kiss, and I would like to think that in spite of my robust heterosexuality I could render that kiss for you. The
instant eclipsed all the years of Bobby’s woeful adolescence. It was
interstellar.
It was
pantheistic.
He wanted to see Meineke’s locker, at the police station. He wanted his own dog-eared photo of Meineke as a little boy.
However, as they were sundering themselves from this embrace and preparing for its duplicate, Joey Kaye’s father, who was
coming home impaired from a nearby tavern, was trying to catch the tail end of a yellow traffic signal. Joey’s dad:
thirty-eight miles per hour on a street zoned for thirty.
In a Honda Civic. He struck the passenger side of Meineke’sOlds, and was uninjured, since drunk. Meineke, except for a few hematomas and his reputation, was also intact. Not so Bobby.
Lots of witnesses could corroborate this account. Melissa Abdow, for example, was on the corner, eating mint chocolate chip
in a sugar cone (it was dripping badly). She told me the next day. In math class. She had a sequence of images lodged in her
brain, she said, like evidentiary photos:
Bobby in the front seat of the car, smiling, then Bobby curled around the mashed engine of the Olds, which was right up in
the front seat of the other car. Then the Jaws of Life.
I didn’t visit him in the hospital, since, like I say, he couldn’t stand me. But I should have visited him, because instead
I was spending weeks in my room, gorging on remorse. I lay awake nights, debating with the dead white people of philosophy
about
my prophecy.
Could it be true? Did language, when you petitioned with it, cause such devastations as Bobby’s crash? Did the stuff you
mumbled on a bad day in chemistry class despoil a family of a policeman
who happened to like boys,
but who hadn’t yet told his wife, and was then undeservedly pulled mostly uninjured from the detritus of his car alongside
the paralyzed body of an underage flute-player? Did I cause all that? It was supposed to be a
joke!
And, besides, I said
motorcycle crash!
If only I had played football, if only I had worn shoulder pads, worn that war paint of football players, if only some hulking
alcoholic wife-batterer in the Pop Warner League had cared enough about me to make me feel like I was more than a barnacle
at New Rochelle High, then I wouldn’t have had to do what I did; if only I had played football, and had heard, at the line
of the scrimmage, the crunch
in which my own
neck buckled,
in which the ether above me gave way and the songbirds blew the play dead for now and always, if only I had heard the hoarse
commands of stretcher-bearers.
Once I told my mother she was going to inherit a lot of money from an aunt in Lithuania. What did my mother know of Lithuania?
She was raised in New Jersey and she had an Irish surname. Maybe I was trying to get
attention,
as guidance counselors had it then. Maybe I had an
active imagination.
Maybe I was trying to best my charming, handsome brother in the competition for her affections. Maybe it was because my dad
had absconded at the first opportunity, back when I was in single digits. Of course, by virtue of my forecasting gift, I realized
that my old man had another wife and family elsewhere, in Moline, Illinois, if you’re interested. I could see their shrubs
and annuals, Siamese cats, sugary breakfast cereals,
it just dawned on me.
I had known this just as I knew that the 1974 Mets would win no more than eighty games. Some days in my room, when I had
exhausted a stack of pulps and
The 4:30 Movie
was a romantic comedy not to
certain parties bad publicity. It was rainy. It was June. That intersection at Four Corners was, and is still, noted for scofflaws
trying to make it to the station before the local train pulled out. Bobby and his policeman were locked in a kiss at a stoplight,
a devouring kiss, and I would like to think that in spite of my robust heterosexuality I could render that kiss for you. The
instant eclipsed all the years of Bobby’s woeful adolescence. It was
interstellar.
It was
pantheistic.
He wanted to see Meineke’s locker, at the police station. He wanted his own dog-eared photo of Meineke as a little boy.
However, as they were sundering themselves from this embrace and preparing for its duplicate, Joey Kaye’s father, who was
coming home impaired from a nearby tavern, was trying to catch the tail end of a yellow traffic signal. Joey’s dad:
thirty-eight miles per hour on a street zoned for thirty.
In a Honda Civic. He struck the passenger side of Meineke’sOlds, and was uninjured, since drunk. Meineke, except for a few hematomas and his reputation, was also intact. Not so Bobby.
Lots of witnesses could corroborate this account. Melissa Abdow, for example, was on the corner, eating mint chocolate chip
in a sugar cone (it was dripping badly). She told me the next day. In math class. She had a sequence of images lodged in her
brain, she said, like evidentiary photos:
Bobby in the front seat of the car, smiling, then Bobby curled around the mashed engine of the Olds, which was right up in
the front seat of the other car. Then the Jaws of Life.
I didn’t visit him in the hospital, since, like I say, he couldn’t stand me. But I should have visited him, because instead
I was spending weeks in my room, gorging on remorse. I lay awake nights, debating with the dead white people of philosophy
about
my prophecy.
Could it be true? Did language, when you petitioned with it, cause such devastations as Bobby’s crash? Did the stuff you
mumbled on a bad day in chemistry class despoil a family of a policeman
who happened to like boys,
but who hadn’t yet told his wife, and was then undeservedly pulled mostly uninjured from the detritus of his car alongside
the paralyzed body of an underage flute-player? Did I cause all that? It was supposed to be a
joke!
And, besides, I said
motorcycle crash!
If only I had played football, if only I had worn shoulder pads, worn that war paint of football players, if only some hulking
alcoholic wife-batterer in the Pop Warner League had cared enough about me to make me feel like I was more than a barnacle
at New Rochelle High, then I wouldn’t have had to do what I did; if only I had played football, and had heard, at the line
of the scrimmage, the crunch
in which my own
neck buckled,
in which the ether above me gave way and the songbirds blew the play dead for now and always, if only I had heard the hoarse
commands of stretcher-bearers.
Once I told my mother she was going to inherit a lot of money from an aunt in Lithuania. What did my mother know of Lithuania?
She was raised in New Jersey and she had an Irish surname. Maybe I was trying to get
attention,
as guidance counselors had it then. Maybe I had an
active imagination.
Maybe I was trying to best my charming, handsome brother in the competition for her affections. Maybe it was because my dad
had absconded at the first opportunity, back when I was in single digits. Of course, by virtue of my forecasting gift, I realized
that my old man had another wife and family elsewhere, in Moline, Illinois, if you’re interested. I could see their shrubs
and annuals, Siamese cats, sugary breakfast cereals,
it just dawned on me.
I had known this just as I knew that the 1974 Mets would win no more than eighty games. Some days in my room, when I had
exhausted a stack of pulps and
The 4:30 Movie
was a romantic comedy not to
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