‘Annnd. . . the Olympic judges give him . . . ALL TENS!’ Tony DeLucca called in a perfect sports announcer’s voice. It was the final touch; the place turned into bedlam on the spot.
Cards flew everywhere. Ashtrays spilled, and one of the glass ones (most were just those little aluminum Table Talk pie -dishes) broke. Someone fell out of his chair and began to roll around, bellowing and kicking his legs. Man, we just couldn’t stop laughing.
‘That’s it!’ Mark was howling. ‘I just drowned my Jockeys! I couldn’t help it!’ Behind him Nick Prouty was crawling toward the window on his knees with tears coursing down his burning face and his hands held out, the wordless begging gesture of a man who wants to say make it stop, make it stop before I burst a fuckin blood-vessel in the middle of my brain and die right here.
Skip got up, overturning his chair. I got up. Laughing our brains out, we groped for one another and staggered toward the window with our arms slung around each other’s back.
Below, unaware that he was being watched and laughed at by two dozen or so freaked-out cardplayers, Stoke Jones was still, amazingly, on his feet.
‘Go Rip-Rip!’ Ronnie began to chant. ‘Go Rip-Rip!’ Nick joined in. He had reached the
window and was leaning his forehead against it, still laughing.
‘Go, Rip-Rip!’
‘Go, baby!’
‘Go!’
‘On, Rip-Rip! Mush those huskies!’
‘Work those crutches, big boy!’
‘Go you fuckin Rip-Rip!’
It was like the last play of a close football game, except everyone was chanting Go Rip-Rip instead of Hold that line or Block that kick. Almost everyone; I wasn’t chanting, and I don’t think Skip was, either, but we were laughing. We were laughing just as hard as the rest.
Suddenly I thought of the night Carol and I had sat on the milk-boxes beside Holyoke, the night she had shown me the snapshot of herself and her childhood friends . . . and then told me the story of what those other boys had done to her. What they had done with a baseball bat. At fast they were joking, I think, Carol had said. And had they been laughing? Probably, yeah. Because that’s what you did when you were joking around, having a good time, you laughed.
Stoke stood where he was for a moment, hanging from his crutches with his head down . . .
and then he attacked the hill like the Marines going ashore at Tarawa. He went tearing up Bennett’s Walk, spraying water everywhere with his flying crutches; it was like watching a duck with rabies.
The chant became deafening: ‘GO RIP-RIP! GO RIP-RIP! GO RIP-RIP! ‘
At first they were joking, she had said as we sat there on the milk-boxes, smoking our cigarettes. By then she was crying, her tears silver in the white light from the dining hall above us. At fast they were joking and then . . . they weren’t.
That thought ended the joke of Stoke for me — I swear to you that it did. And still I couldn’t stop laughing.
Stokely made it about a third of the way up the hill toward Holyoke, almost back to the visible bricks, before the slippery-slop finally got him. He planted his crutches far in advance of his body — too far for even dry conditions — and when he swung forward, both sticks flew out from under him. His legs flipped up like the legs of a gymnast doing some fabulous trick on the balance beam, and he went down on his back with a tremendous splash. We could hear it even from the third floor lounge. It was the final perfect touch.
The lounge looked like a lunatic asylum where the inmates had all come down with food-poisoning at the same time. We staggered aimlessly about, laughing and clutching at our throats, our eyes spouting tears. I was hanging onto Skip because my legs would no longer support me; my knees felt like noodles. I was laughing harder than I ever had in my life, harder than I ever have since, I think, and still I kept thinking about Carol sitting there on the milk-box beside me, legs crossed, cigarette in one hand, snapshot in the other, Carol saying Harry Doolin hit me . . . Willie and the other one held me so I couldn’t run away . . . at fast they were joking, I think, and then . . . they weren’t.