We waited for the whistle. When it came, we would charge up out of our crouches and one of us would topple in shame.
There were hundreds in the bleachers now.
They were chanting for him, for Brody.
They were sorry about Nagasaki, I guess. Babylon, Union City.
I was sorry my father ever found my mother, smelled her, found her.
Now I heard that little ball begin to rattle in the coach’s whistle and I knew the next thing I heard would be Brody falling, crashing.
I could always hear things. Smell, I couldn’t smell much since the cigarettes, but I could hear the quietest of things, things coming out of the quiet, sounds before they were sounds, names before they were shouted after me.
It took all the coaches to carry Brody to the nurse’s station. Word came soon of a concussion.
* * *
Brody was out for a week, and then it was winter break. I’d waited days to be treated like a hero, but no dice. I was a dick. I’d hurt the huge Christ.
I saw him at the mall a few days after New Year’s. He had a neck brace, a plastic halo fanned out behind his head. He waddled up in a version of my pants. A more benevolent color.
“Brody,” I said.
He shot me this look of brotherhood, as though together we could shoulder a great burden of sorrow. We could forget everything that had happened between us, enter the kingdom of kindness hand in hand.
I punched him in the gut. He leaned up on the wall, held his belly, kneaded it as though to push the sting out. Blood drained out of his face. I pictured him at home that night in bed, everything collapsing from a dead point in the center of him, dying like a star dies. Or maybe he would die right here, slide down dead against the wall.
I took up the rolls of his throat.
“Brody,” I said.
My arms quivered, and I noticed the hair grown back. A revolution in technique, its dividends.
“Brody,” I said, squeezing, squeezing.
“Brody,” I said, “you fat fucking fuck.
“Brody,” I said, “you’re killing me.”
I was squeezing and squeezing.
Our mothers approached, ladies from the ladies’ room, chatting.
the WORM in PHILLY
Classic American story: I was out of money and people I could ask for money. Then I got what the Greeks call a eureka moment. I could write a book for children about the great middleweight Marvelous Marvin Hagler. My father had been a sportswriter before he started forgetting things, such as the fact that he had been a sportswriter or the name of his only son, so my idea did not seem crazy. Probably it’s like when your father is president. You think, If that fuck could do it …
Why Marvelous Marvin Hagler? Why not? He was one of the best of his time, my time, really, meaning the time I was a boy and the world still seemed like something that could save me from the hurt, not be it. Why for children? Children were people you could reach. You could really reach out and reach them. Plus, low word count. That meant I’d get the money faster. I was experimenting with unemployment, needed to make rent quickly. I was no longer experimenting with drugs. I knew exactly what to do with them.
Thing was, I remembered certain facts about Hagler from my father’s boxing magazines, the ones my stepmother always groused about, stacks of them littering our house in New Brunswick. Hagler was tough and bald, for instance, perhaps the toughest, baldest fighter ever. I could begin with that piece of the story and just build out. Maybe my friends could help, though I’d never heard them talk about boxing, and most of them were hopeless drug addicts, good for only a couple of hours. I was hopeless, but prided myself on being good for more than a couple of hours. I still had what my father called get-up-and-go. Also, I was in possession of a positive outlook, which is just a trick whereby you convince yourself that the desolation of your world is a phase in your personal growth.
The weird thing is it works.
* * *
One evening a few of us got together in the apartment Gary and I shared. John and John’s cousin were there. John’s cousin went to divinity school. He told us about his fellow students, the gay guys in the closet battling their mothers and God, the brainiacs who approached faith as a physics equation, the bruisers groomed for ghetto heroics, the quivery social needs types. I stood, paced around the steamer trunk, which was cluttered with bleach and alcohol and glasses of water, bent spoons, cotton balls. I had a social need. I waited until John’s cousin nodded off, the dope overtaking his narrative imperative.
I wanted everybody to witness the fire in my eyes. I wheeled on them, announced my goal to write a children’s book about Marvelous Marvin Hagler.
Mostly when one of us spoke like this, by which I mean shared a dream or ambition or plan with the others, nobody would pursue the topic or even offer comment. The group would regard such an utterance with stricken silence. Then somebody would start in on something else entirely. It felt cruel at times, but served, I believe, to slightly check our plummet. Even as we sat around and measured, cooked, tied off, we would not indulge one another’s delusions.
But tonight when I mentioned the Marvelous Marvin Hagler children’s book, somebody spoke up. It was John’s cousin, the guy in divinity school. He was new, I guess, ignorant of our code.
“Hagler was bald, right?” he asked, rising out of his nod.
“Yes,” I said. “He was the first bald guy.”
“The first?”
“In the modern era.”
“Nobody was ever bald before?” said Gary.
“You know what I mean,” I said.
“I remember him,” said John’s cousin. “Dude was relentless.”
“Nobody would fight him,” I said. “That’s why it took him so long to be champ.”
“Like me,” said Gary, tapped the barrel of his syringe.
“But why Marvin Hagler?” said John’s cousin.
“He was relentless,” I said.
“Did he ever lose?”
“Just a few times.”
“I was robbed!” said Gary.
“Huh?” said John.
“I’m being Hagler.”
“He was, actually, robbed,” I said. “In a fight with Boogaloo Watts. But then they became good friends. That’s partly what the book is about.”
Nobody said anything, and I figured this would be the moment a new topic got introduced. I could see Gary doing the things he sometimes did when he was about to launch a rant, maybe about the cunning rhetoric of the soft left (he was the hard), or the immense number of people he believed had pancreatic cancer but didn’t know it, or how the smartest pop songs were by definition the dumbest, namely letting his head drop so that it was nearly in his crotch and doing some painful-looking thing with his shoulder blades and breathing super quickly, but then he didn’t lift his head or say anything at all, and it was John’s cousin who spoke, looked into my eyes, and said the oddest thing: “I can help.”
It turned out that the divinity student had an older sister in publishing. Children’s books, in fact. She kept an eye out for fresh talent, John’s cousin said. He’d be happy to write down her number.
“Oh, he’s fresh talent,” said Gary, his head still buried in his corduroys. “This motherfucker is fresh and juicy.”
* * *
The next afternoon, I called the sister.
“Yes, Leo said you’d be in touch,” Cassandra said. “He thinks the world of you.”
“Who’s Leo?” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“Oh, right,” I said. “Sorry. We have a different name for old Leo. A nickname.”