Games were
real
when money was involved—or marbles—when loss was possible or pain. Not otherwise. A girl who was not agonized when we played catch with her doll got her doll back rapidly. Another game, played in boredom but sometimes played in high spirits, was jumping with both feet together or hopping on one foot or simply stamping on each other’s feet while trying to dodge and using one’s elbows or hands as fenders or to straight-arm the opponent. The oddest version of a hurt-the-feet game was one a Tom Sawyerish-looking boy I liked a lot
thought up: we stood facing each other and first he dropped a brick on my toes from about knee height, then I dropped one on his toes; we both were wearing shoes; then he dropped his brick from higher on my feet; and I yowled, and dropped the brick from as high on his feet as he had on mine. Meanwhile there was a lot of quibbling about whether the brick was dropped from the right height. The first person to writhe and not to be able to stop writhing lost. I remember covering our shoes were rags and pieces of cardboard cartons so they wouldn’t be too badly scratched by the bricks, so our parents couldn’t figure out what we did.
Everything we did hinged on pleasure and on some kind of gamble or contest involving a fall into humiliation or an escape, or an escape from humiliation with great honor. Once, where a new house was being built, my Tom Sawyer friend suggested a game of leaping from a second-story window onto a pile of sand. And I was afraid. There were five of us, two girls; the other four sailed off, arms spread; I could not make myself do it. No. I did it once and could not make myself do it the second time.
I started a fight, a wrestling match with my Tom Sawyer friend in front of everyone then and there; the others pulled me off him; I was stronger than Tom Sawyer and so the bout wasn’t fair; but also perhaps I ran things with too hard a hand too much of the time; and it was not my turn to be on top for a while; and my friends liked having me at a real disadvantage. I suffered.
In everything we did there were moments when we measured cowardice or skill or strength: a Catholic church with a high steeple was being built, and we climbed the scaffolding, not the ramps but the scaffolding, and the children who dropped out were treated with a perfect friendliness indicating their unimportance until they reestablished their importance in playing marbles or by riding a bicycle freehanded down the street with legs and arms outspread.
This measuring was sometimes joint—all of us were tested—and sometimes relative, each of us against the other; and the moments of triumph or of humiliation were so heady, and so heavy with throbs of nerves or beatings of the heart, that it seemed there were entire neurological festivals our systems waged, as rampant with noise and ceremonial—with blushes or silence or modesty or sudden acts of cruelty or of tenderness—as when the Doge married Venice to the sea: sometimes the implication of physical pleasure, the whiff of life, that rank smell, that force, that outward pressure in us nearly inundated the identity—
the body would seem to be on the verge of leaking or melting. The scaffolding we climbed left marks on my hands, deep reddened gouges, small callused ridges, a blister; into the sensation of having hands half my spirit flowed after I climbed down from the scaffolding having gone the highest of anyone, having gone to the top. I did not have to smile. I did not have to mention what I had done. I merely found it hard to focus my eyes; my eyes stared off into the distance; and some odd feeling—I would call it contentment but it writhed and rose and changed shape and taste (sometimes it was dry, sometimes moist and half sweet)—filled me to the brim, filled me, oddly, with admiration and love for my companions that they did not necessarily feel back toward me, the winner on that occasion.
Winning was like standing at the edge of a really nice view of reeds and water and pretty light in the sky. A handsome world. More dangerous was winning in a certain way, ruthlessly, too willfully: everyone objected if you won that way; they did not necessarily avoid you; you were considered, though, a wolf among children. Character and perseverance were O.K.; but this other was shocking, as was trickery; but nearly everyone used trickery. Not me. I was too Olympian for trickery except when others asked me to invent a trick for them. But the focused will, the naked appetite, as opposed to the hidden will, the indirect appetite, was shocking, shocking even to experience when it was one’s own focused will, the panting, odd-eyed (as if one’s eyes were on stalks and not in one’s skull) concentration and brutal power of forcing someone to do something: to squeeze them until they begged for release; or to twist an arm or use a headlock or box them into submission, into having them do what you wanted them to do.
Sometimes they jumped up, or you jumped up, or I did, when I’d been forced to the ground and forced to admit I was a pig’s ass, say, and you took it back and ran. Or you struck back in another way. Girls were particularly vengeful; grown-up ones, too; sometimes it seemed to me that girls never moved except in vengeance or love; otherwise they just sat on their asses, but they always had to get up to get even with some boy or some girl or their parents or who knew what. Small boys were like that, too. My Tom Sawyer friend, if his mother was nice to me, invariably suggested we play paper-stone-scissors: he had strong fingers and could make my wrist sting more than I could make his sting. Power, bits of power, lay everywhere; sometimes it was as if some Red Indian daimon possessed us, oversaw our play, made us peculiarly American.
Or we were frontier children, half Indians, half religious fanatics. But so hungry for life. The suburb sat baldly on wild ground; beneath our feet, beneath the lawns, the real ground was close, tall grass, sunlight, silence. One thing more than any other guided us, boy and girl alike, in our play, and that was an affinity for our fathers and a funny enmity toward our mothers, an enmity that had nothing to do with our furious loyalty: the one truly certain way to provoke a fight was to insult someone’s mother; but still we were guided in our play not only by the Indian daimon but by another, paler Spirit, an intellectual spirit of deduction: we were fascinated by and wanted to play whatever we knew would upset our mothers most if they knew we were doing it; we had to do,
had
to, whatever they forbade or disliked; it was as if there was a law that said whatever there was that was pleasurable, we could be guided toward it by thinking of what would trigger our mothers’ embarrassment and disapproval.
My mother said often it was no joy to be a mother, children enjoyed tormenting you. And in a complicated way that was true. We enjoyed what tormented them.
Sometimes older boys went on rampages—four or five tougher boys, not necessarily poorer, would go tramping through the streets, making trouble; sometimes a squadron of older boys came in on bicycles from other suburbs, sometimes from a richer one, sometimes from a poorer one, like Vikings, and they tormented who they could: they were miserably unhappy; they seemed starved—and violent—somewhat incomprehensible.
If
they caught you, you might be fastened by your belt to the back of a bicycle and forced to run behind it while the boy, bicycling with a shamed closed face, turned to watch you from time to time. They had seen this in the movies. Or they’d take your pants off, or they’d toss you in their arms until you screamed. Sometimes they twisted your arm and made you kneel and say their suburb was better than yours. Or they might make you say your mother was dirty. Or a whore. Sometimes the invaders were accused of sexual molestation, of exposing themselves in driveways, or to women afraid to get out of their cars, or of making some small boy do something faintly obscene. But it was a polite suburb and such things were hushed up.
As relatively small boys we admired the magnetic fields of the emotional power and projection of women—a woman could stand on her porch and look stern or nice, or come to school and look sure of herself and awe you. We admired women’s tempers—not their hysteria. I am
not certain, but with a lot of girls and women everything but their temper seemed sappy or calculated to us. And precarious and out of reach. Their temper was familiar. And permitted a sort of reality. And so it was warming.
In men we admired chiefly muscles and large hands. A really generously muscled man awed us even if he was bad-tempered. I didn’t know anybody (although such existed) who failed to admire the shirtless heroes of comic strips and the narrow-hipped, masked do-gooders in certain kinds of movie romances. Casually we expected physical perfection, but our eyes were generous and perhaps saw more perfection than there was. An older boy named Stanley, who had an acne-pitted face and who was known as a troublemaker and sullen at that, was discovered one day when he was exercising in his backyard to have a remarkable body, with squared off, three-quarters-of-an-inch-thick muscles on his chest and other muscles everywhere. It was a body much grander (although small on the whole) than that of any other boy in the neighborhood that year, and often when he exercised in his backyard, some kid would scout around and gather a gang, and we would go and watch Stanley and observe his muscles while he did things to encourage them to get bigger yet.
My friends put me up to asking him how he got his chest muscles and Stanley said push-ups had done it. About nine of us, like some new species of panting crickets, promptly began doing push-ups in imitation of him. A herd of crickets.
We would pretend to stumble and we would then fall on the ground near an older girl and roll and try to look up her skirt—then we would report to each other: “Did you see anything?” We never did; we did not know what to look for; but it was exciting anyway. And necessary. When I did it I thought I’d recognize it when I saw it, whatever was remarkable under a girl’s skirt, but all that ever impressed me was the sullen silent splendor of the shadows and the hint of slightly stale, close air. And secrecy. We often spied on girls who were being visited by boys. We would run to stand outside the house of an older girl we’d heard was going to a dance: we loved to see girls all rigged out. It is hard to believe how moved we were by rich regalia on a woman: furs, jewelry, expensive clothes, special shoes. But everything was suggestive: leaves blowing, a thunderhead roiling up, the smell of a cellar. To coast downhill on a bicycle was to go slightly berserk with pleasure (no hill was long enough). Things touched the palms of one’s hand—concrete,
the wood of a porch floor, the roughness of brick, the rust-scarred handles of a bicycle. We streamed here and there on errands that mostly had to do with the obscene. Anger in men frightened us half to death; we tried to elicit it in women; only the most frightened children never teased a woman. We might stalk a girl, an older girl, throw pebbles at her, run wildly and laugh when she chased us through a weedy lot, laugh in a strange, weak, trailing, maybe overexcited fashion. We were often good children, passive and stern, but never for long. The obscene beckoned us. Boys and a few girls often got together to discuss the meanings of the dirty words that our sexual latency prevented us from understanding: fuck was explained to me at least fifty times by older boys, but I hadn’t the faintest idea what it meant. I drowned it all out. I agreed with another boy when I was six (and then, oddly, had no definition for fuck at ail, and did not see the oddity) that fuck must mean something like—because it upset mothers so—going peepee on your mother. We lived in a sensual and passionate immediacy, as if the suburb were a walled and gated garden; I was quite old before I guessed the suburb had not been beautiful. Our world was shadowy and violent and unclean. But decent because of our powerlessness. We knew even parental love to be a physical attachment: weren’t we loved and stroked, touched and bathed, and bidden to embrace our parents? We knew our parents lied to themselves about us; sometimes we tried to be as good as they thought we were; but it wasn’t so important usually—it was only terrible sometimes. We were used to hurting people. Not always, though. Some of us had an added element of self-consciousness—that’s all that virtue was then. Or that it came from. In some ways we couldn’t wash off in the flow of childhood some of the things we did. In some ways we could live our lives only at moments; in front of grownups I felt it necessary to have no life but to be an observer, a referee—of dreams, of expectations. Meanwhile I was a child. The children I knew hugged and seduced thousands. After a game in the snow, or in the heat, we might lie on the ground or the snow and roll over and over and then on top of each other, until our cheeks touched, until our eyes looked into each other’s eyes; we bartered our hugs or had them bartered for us; we spun and dropped and climbed into and out of perches and pockets, into and out of secrets, our secrets. We understood nothing yet. Only a few stubborn, maybe unreliable children were spared the primacy of the physical and lived in the realm of deprivation and loneliness and waiting to come into their intellectual and spiritual kingdoms. The rest of us
inhabited a garden, and we knew that no one was sympathetic unless you charmed them physically first. We were children, little whores—the whole suburb was a bordello—how could it have been otherwise, how can it ever be otherwise? Blood moved in us: the light came through the shattered jasper of the trees. Heat rose from the macadam of the streets. The snow triggered briskness, forced us to dance as if it were music, to frisk, to skip. Among the trees and the living, heated people, it has to be the same no matter how much they lie or how much they forget. It is a sensual wonder to be young. We are alive from a very early age.
T
HE BLUE JEANS
lie on the floor, the slightly smelly, stained sneakers, socks, the flimsy, discarded shirts, twisted, outspread, frail, their buttons like the eyes of fish. Other boys and I often undressed as part of playing Tarzan, or as part of playing Torture (but we did not always undress). Randolph’s mother is not home; what I am doing in part is baby-sitting. Randolph’s grandmother, a stern, half-crazy woman, is on patrol downstairs; I dislike her interrupting whatever I do with Randolph—she likes to open the door, come in, and check; and I have told her not to do that ever. Sometimes she peers from the doorway. Not now: Randolph has protested volubly to her (he does not like it when I am upset or bored) that she should not come in when his door is closed. On this occasion she has once or twice called out through the closed door, “What are you two doing? Is everything all right?” “We’re playing: go away, Grandma.” The old woman thinks ill of me, of anyone Randolph likes, and it is partly in careless defiance of her that I have taken off nearly all my clothes. There are toys near the door, and if the old woman tries to open the door, it will make a noise. I really don’t give a damn about her.