A music store with a big lit-up quarter note stood right off of a traffic roundabout. It was there that I saw Lloyd Goodyear, probably twenty years old by now. He had hair down to his belt buckle. Lloyd leaned against a wall, smoking a cigarette. He was alone. Next to him on the wall, in spray paint, were the words U.S. OUT OF NORTH AMERICA!
I thought of pulling over, telling him who I was, but instead I kept driving. I didn’t know what I could tell him.
In my fifties, someone from our grade school told me that he thought Lloyd had died, probably from the diabetes, but he wasn’t sure. It might have been from something else.
* * *
My father liked to watch a television show entitled My World and Welcome to It, which was a situation comedy loosely based upon the works of James Thurber. It starred William Windom as John Monroe, a cartoonist and author, and Lisa Gerritsen as his daughter. She wore a night brace. The family owned two dogs, one of which was a bloodhound.
One night, my father and I sat in the den in the Newtown Square house, watching the show on our black-and-white television, Playboy at his feet. The episode we watched that night was about the death of the bloodhound. Neither Monroe’s wife nor his daughter understood the depth of the emotion that the man was feeling. When I turned to look at my father when the show was over, I was shocked to see that tears had rolled down his cheeks and that he was silently crying. I had never seen my father cry before. He wiped his eyes.
“Well,” he said. “It’s sad.”
Sixteen years later, when he was dying of cancer, I saw him cry again. We were watching the film My Dinner with Andre. “A baby holds your hands,” said Andre Gregory, “and then suddenly there’s this huge man lifting you off the ground. And then he’s gone. Where is that son?”
* * *
One spring day I’d been standing under a tree on the playground at the Alice Grim Elementary School when an arm wrapped around my neck and a moment later I found myself in a headlock, held fast to the hip of a boy named Brandon Coogan. “Let me go,” I suggested, flailing. But Coogy wasn’t leaning that way. He dragged me, instead, around the playground for fifteen or twenty minutes, as if I were some kind of northern pike and Coogy the world’s luckiest fisherman.
In conclusion, Coogy threw me onto a kind of merry-go-round device on the playground, a flat circle that spun around an iron hub, where dear Mickey Lupin was patiently waiting to take things up to the Next Level. I don’t even remember exactly how it happened, other than that I was trying to get away from Mickey, from Coogy, and in some awful way from my own self, but somehow I wound up under the spinning merry-go-round. This was good in the short run, since no one could get at me under there, but bad in the long, since once I had rolled under the thing, the only way out was through the space between the blacktop and the merry-go-round, where the legs of children dangled off the edge. Each time I tried to escape, the rotating series of booted feet were there to kick me back, boots whose impact was amplified by the speed with which the merry-go-round over my head was turning. In the end, I made good my escape, but only by enduring the kicks of what I came to see was virtually every member of my class, including the girls. Coogy was standing there as I finally crawled back to the daylight of the Grim School’s playground. He took a good look at me and then said a single sentence, by way of summarizing the things that had come to pass.
“That’s what you get,” he said.
My father came into my room that night and inspected the damage. I had a torn lip and what would shortly blossom into a world-class shiner. “Thought you might want these, old man,” he said. In his hands were a pair of small boxing gloves. They’d been his in the 1930s. The gloves were embroidered with the word CHAMP on the outside.
“When I was a boy,” my father said, “people used to mess with me.”
I looked at the antique baby boxing gloves in my hand. Learning how to