Dunk’s father worked at the Bisk, too. Chips Ahoy line. Our dads carried the smell of their lines back home with them. It became a forever quality of their clothes. It crept under their skin and perfumed the sweat coming from their pores. I used to keep score at the Bisk’s company softball games; after a while I knew the batting order by smell alone: first up was Triscuits, second was Fig Newtons, third was Cheese Nips. The mighty Nutter Butter batted cleanup.
My father wasn’t ambitious by nature—a more
aww, shucks
man you would not meet—but he was willing to work his ass off, had a supportive wife and a working-class chip on his shoulder. That chip was a familiar accessory on a lot of Cataract City men, but unlike other guys my dad didn’t nurse his grudge impotently over beers at the Double Diamond. He looked at the men above him—
literally
: at the Bisk, management offices were glassed-in boxes overlooking the factory floor—and said to himself:
Why not me?
He studied nights and by the time I was eleven he’d earned a business degree. He rolled this into a job as line supervisor, which led to a promotion to day-shift super.
Years later I asked him why he worked so hard to get that degree. He said: “I didn’t want to smell like a Nilla Wafer in my coffin.”
I wasn’t a popular kid. I wasn’t popular at any age, but in elementary school I’m not sure it mattered. The schoolyard hierarchy hadn’t quite solidified. If anything, I was human wallpaper during those years. Whenever I grafted onto the edge of some group I’d get looks that said:
Oh, Dutchie—how long have you been standing there?
I was such a non-entity that I wasn’t even teased.
On my report cards teachers wrote:
Dutchie seems quite thoughtful
. They didn’t mean I was selfless—more that I often appeared to be absorbed in thought. Which wasn’t really true. I had very little to say was all.
I first met Duncan Diggs when I was ten. We both lived on Rickard Street and went to the same school but had never spoken before. Dunk shared my loner spirit; he usually haunted the edge of the schoolyard by the tetherball poles in a jean jacket covered with iron-on rocker patches.
The day we met I’d been walking across the soccer field at recess when Clyde Hillicker tackled me from behind. Hillicker was a big dumb kid who’d grow up into a big dumb man, but at the time he was just puppy-clumsy and outweighed me by forty pounds. His fingertips were always stained Freezie-orange.
I crashed down with Clyde on top. My face hit the ground and my teeth gritted on a plug of dirt dug up by the aerator machine.
“Just lay there, Dutchie, okay?” Clyde said, all chummy. “I want to show Adam something.”
He was with his friend Adam Lowery, an anorexic-looking boy with a ginger bowl-cut. Clyde sat on my back and grabbed at my helplessly kicking legs.
“Don’t move,” he whined, as if I was ruining his good time.
“Get
off
!”
“Hammer him,” Adam said. “Hammer his face off!”
Clyde refused. “Bruiser Mahoney never punches. Bruiser Mahoney doesn’t
need
to punch.”
He grabbed my feet and tucked my ankles under his armpits. I lay face down with my body bent like a fish hook. A textbook Boston crab. Naturally, I screamed.
“Give up?” Clyde said.
“
Yes!”
“He’s still fighting!” Adam hollered.
“Are you still fighting?” Clyde asked.
“
No!
”
“Get off him!”
This was Duncan. He shoulder-checked Clyde hard enough that Clyde landed on his hands and knees, scraping up his palms. I gasped and curled up like a potato bug.
Clyde held his bloodied palms out to Dunk as if he was displaying stigmata. “We were just playing,” he said. Dunk shrugged and kept his body in front of mine.
“We were just
plaaayin
’,” Adam said in a singsong voice. “Come on, Clyde. These babies don’t know how to have fun.”
After they left Dunk didn’t help me up, just hovered over me the way a lion does over a dead antelope. I dragged myself up and inspected the grass stains on my knees.
“Jeez. Mom’s going to kill me.” I didn’t say thanks. Was this something you thanked a person for? “You like Twisted Sister?” I said, pointing to a patch on his jean jacket.
“It’s my brother’s old jacket. A hand-me-down.”
“Cool.”
I couldn’t tell if he was amused or figured I was a shithead for thinking his twice-used clothes, which he probably hated, were
cool. His T-shirt was old and there were holes along the hem as if mice had nibbled it.
Even though we were too young to have sorted out the true tough guys in the pack, Dunk struck me as someone you didn’t want to tangle with. He wasn’t big or strong. If anything, he was a bit skinny. But something in his eyes said whatever you started, he’d finish. Even if it took all day and left him a mess, he’d keep coming at you.
He was handsome, or at least he would grow to be, and his mom let him wear his hair long. It swept off the side of his skull in dark wings.
“Did it hurt?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Clyde’s real fat.”
Dunk laughed. “You’re lucky. If Clyde put that Boston crab on the way Bruiser Mahoney does, you’d be dog meat.”
“Who’s Bruiser Mahoney?”
“Bruiser
Mahoney
,” he said, like I must not have heard.
I just stared.
“Oh my
god
,” he said solemnly, his tone that of a doctor who’d diagnosed my rare affliction: terminal idiocy. “Come to my house after school.”
That afternoon I followed him home. He took me to the room he shared with his brother and showed me the faded poster on his wall.
That was all it took for me to become enraptured with Bruiser Mahoney. It was also all it took for me and Dunk to become friends.
Inseparable. That was me and Dunk. We’d both been looking for a person whose company we preferred to our own and once we finally found that person we practically lived in each other’s pockets.
We’d have sleepovers, even on weeknights. Our parents, who’d likely been worried we’d go our whole childhoods friendless, indulged us.
I often ate breakfast at Dunk’s house, even though his mom bought powdered milk that tasted like wallpaper paste. At our house
we drank whole milk and ate real Corn Flakes. At Dunk’s house we’d eat cereal that came in a bright yellow box with “Corn Toasties” stamped on the label.
We’d stay up late in my basement reading comics. On Friday nights we watched the Baby Blue Movie on Citytv. These were usually in a foreign language where the men rolled their
r
’s and the women smoked stubby black cigarettes. On the upside, the women were often naked while they smoked. Or if not smoking, they were running around medieval castles with their apple-shaped asses hanging out. The point of any Baby Blue Movie, so far as I could tell, was to leave preteens all over Cataract City confused and slightly sweaty.
One kid who watched the Baby Blue Movie religiously was Sam Bovine. His last name was Italian, pronounced
Boh-vee-neh
, but everyone called him Bovine like the cow. A skinny boy with thin wrists and a too-big head for his body, for a while Bovine was best known as the Hair Lice Kid. Twice a year we’d all line up at the front of class while a Rubenesque nurse picked through our hair with a pair of sterilized chopsticks—and she’d always find them wriggling in Bovine’s hair.
“They’re practically building cities,” she’d say disgustedly.
Bovine enjoyed the attention but his folks were mortified. They bought special shampoo from the veterinarian that made his scalp smell like a freshly tarred road.
While no paragon of personal hygiene, Bovine
was
miles ahead of us in his knowledge of forbidden lore. He knew that if you spat on a hot light bulb it would explode in a shower of white glass and sparkling powder—which, Bovine claimed, would kill you if you inhaled it. He also knew that feeding a frog an Alka-Seltzer tablet would, in his words, “Make it blow up like a gooey green grenade.” Most carnal was his knowledge of women, their anatomies, and how to satisfy them.
“Did you see last week’s movie?” he’d ask Dunk and me at recess. “That girl who came out of the pond with her top off? Whoa! Some real humungoes.”
Neither of us knew what to make of Bovine. Being around him gave you that feeling you got after eating too much candy on Halloween: hyper and a little sick.
“You know what women with big bazooms like? If you squeeze them like kneading pizza dough. It drives them wild. They’ll rip all their clothes off if you squeeze their big knockers long enough.”
Our neighbourhood was small, but like most neighbourhoods possessed its fair share of mystery. One night we were watching the Baby Blue Movie when it started to snow. Dunk and I crammed onto a chair, balanced on our tiptoes, and peered out the basement window that overlooked my front yard. Big fat flakes fell through the street lights, eddying in the updrafts skating down our narrow street.
“Holy lick,” Dunk said. “
Look
.”
A woman was walking down the street. Slowly, with her arms upraised the way Pentecostals do in church. Not a stitch of clothing on her body. The naked woman walked upright as if the howling wind had no effect on her. For an instant I thought she was a ghost. She was as pale as chalk. She wasn’t shivering, either. My skin froze just looking at her.
Pressed together tightly on the same chair, I could see Dunk’s heartbeat through his wrist, hooked over the window ledge.
“That’s Mrs. Lovegrove,” he said. “She lives across the road, two down from me.”
Elsa Lovegrove’s body was similar to the bodies of other Cataract City women I’d unclothe years later. Her chest bones stood out like fingers under small breasts tipped with the dark rosettes of her nipples. She looked nothing like the women in the
Baby Blue Movie—those women’s lush bodies were built for cavorting. Mrs. Lovegrove’s body appeared to be composed of pure bone.
The wind whipped her long hair up to frame her face: it looked as if she’d lain down in a still pool of water. She may have been laughing or crying, I couldn’t tell. Her husband rushed down the road and draped a blanket over Elsa’s shoulders. Later we’d find out that her son had been killed that night in a late-season funny-car accident at the Merrittville Speedway.
On the weekends we would stay up to watch the
WWF Saturday Night’s Main Event
, with “Mean Gene” Okerlund and Gorilla Monsoon broadcasting the action from exotic ports of call like the Pontiac Silverdome or the pearl of the Pacific, Honolulu’s Aloha Stadium.
Dunk liked the high-fliers: Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka and Ricky “the Dragon” Steamboat. I liked the guys with a flexible moral code like Jake “the Snake” Roberts. He was flat-footed, wore a greasy T-shirt and carried a seven-foot python in a sack. He wasn’t friends with anybody, but he wasn’t a backstabber either. And when he cinched up his DDT move, your ass was grass and he, as Bovine would say, was the lawn mower.
Saturday afternoon wrestling was different. On those shows, you’d see marquee wrestlers matched up against jobbers—ham ’n’ eggers, as Bobby “the Brain” Heenan called them. Poor saps like “Leaping” Lanny Poffo, “Iron” Mike Sharpe and the Brooklyn Brawler would get squashed by main eventers. But Saturday
nights
, the Main Event? No jobbers allowed.
On Saturday nights we’d get Randy “Macho Man” Savage and Miss Elizabeth. André the Giant squaring off against King Kong Bundy—the irresistible force meeting the immovable object. Meddling managers like Jimmy “the Mouth of the South” Hart.
Scheming villains like “Rowdy” Roddy Piper. Otherworldly creatures like George “the Animal” Steele. Gorilla Monsoon saying: “This place has gone bananas!” or “Ladies and gentlemen, Madison Square Garden just literally exploded!”
The only wrestler we hated was Hulk Hogan. Mister “Train, say your prayers, eat your vitamins, be true to yourself and your country—be a real
American!
” How cheeseball could you get?
To Dunk and me, wrestling made sense in an elemental way. Everything was defined and sensible within that squared circle. There were your heels and your babyfaces. Cheaters would cheat, schemers would scheme, but ultimately you paid what you owed. We understood the crest and ebb of a match, its rising and falling action. Even at ten years old we could appreciate the perfect finality to it all. When the Macho Man launched his flying elbow off the top rope, it was over. When Hulk Hogan dropped the big leg. When the Brain Busters hit their spike piledriver.
One Saturday night my dad came downstairs in his housecoat. It was around the time he’d been promoted to supervisor. Our house had been egged the week before; there was a suspicion that some guys at work had done it, though I found it impossible to believe forty-year-olds would do such a thing. Dad sat with a sigh that seemed to come less from his lungs than his bones.
“Wrestling, huh?” he said. “Those fellas can sure fill out a pair of tights.”
Hulk Hogan was fighting “Mr. Wonderful” Paul Orndorff in a steel cage match. Hulk Hogan bodyslammed Mr. Wonderful, then cupped his ear to drink in the roar of the crowd. We cheered our guts out for Mr. Wonderful, even though he was the heel.
“The Hulkster looks unstoppable,” Dad said with a sly smile. “Something tells me he’s going to win.”
“Bruiser Mahoney would beat the crud out of Hulk Hogan,” Dunk said. “Bruiser would
eliminate
him.”
“This Bruiser Mahoney sure sounds like something,” Dad said.
“Mr. Stuckey, Bruiser Mahoney is the greatest wrestler who has ever lived,” Dunk said with a bone-deep earnestness that my father surely found funny. “He’s fighting in two weeks at the arena.”
“Can we go?” I asked Dad.
“Is your father taking you, Duncan?”
“Yes, sir. We’ll be sitting in the front row.”
Dad nodded. “Let’s go watch some wrasslin’.”
And so the first Saturday of every month became father-son wrestling night. When the lights dimmed and Bruiser Mahoney’s voice boomed over the loudspeakers—“You’re cruisin’ for a
bruuuuuisin’!
”—the place went electric.