me they was flippin’ for beers and they came up a goocher just before they got into the car. And bang! They all get fuckin’ totalled. I don’t like that. Sincerely.’
‘Nobody believes that crap about moons and goochers,’ Teddy said impatiently.
‘It’s baby stuff, Vern. You gonna flip or not?’
Vern flipped, but with obvious reluctance. This time he, Chris and Teddy all
had tails. I was showing Thomas Jefferson on a nickle. And I was suddenly scared. It
was as if a shadow had crossed some inner sun. They still had a goocher, the three of
them, as if dumb fate had pointed at them a second time. Abruptly I thought of Chris
saying: I just get a couple of hairs and Teddy screams and down he goes. Weird, huh?
Three tails, one head.
Then Teddy was laughing his crazy, cackling laugh and pointing at me and the
feeling was gone.
‘I heard that only fairies laugh like that,’ I said, and gave him the finger.
‘Eeee-eeee-eeee, Gordie,’ Teddy laughed. ‘Go get the provisions, you fuckin’
morphadite.’
I wasn’t really sorry to be going. I was rested up and didn’t mind going down
the road to the Florida Market.
‘Don’t call me any of your mother’s pet names,’ I said to Teddy.
‘Eeee-eee-eeee, what a fuckin’ wet you are, Lachance.’
‘Go on, Gordie,’ Chris said. ‘We’ll wait over by the tracks.’
‘You guys better not go without me,’ I said.
Vern laughed. ‘Goin’ without you’d be like goin’ with Schlitz instead of
Budweiser’s, Gordie.’
‘Ah, shut up.’
They chanted together: ‘I don’t shut up, I grow up. And when I look at you I
throw up.’
‘Then your mother goes around the corner and licks it up,’ I said, and hauled
ass out of there, giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went. I never had any
friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you?
12
Different strokes for different folks, they say now, and that’s cool. So if I say summer to you, you get one set of private, personal images that are all the way different from mine. That’s cool. But for me, summer is always going to mean running down the
road to the Florida Market with change jingling in my pockets, the temperature in the
gay nineties, my feet dressed in Keds. The word conjures an image of the GS&WM
railroad tracks running into a perspective-point in the distance, burnished so white
under the sun that when you closed your eyes you could still see them there in the
dark, only blue instead of white.
But there was more to that summer than our trip across the river to look for
Ray Brower, although that looms the largest. Sounds of The Fleetwoods singing
‘Come Softly Darling’ and Robin Luke singing ‘Susie Darlin’ and Little Anthony
popping the vocal on ‘I Ran All the Way Home’. Were they all hits in that summer of
1960? Yes and no. Mostly yes. In the long purple evenings when rock and roll from
WLAM blurred into night baseball from WCCU, time shifted. I think it was all 1960
and that the summer went on for a space of years, held magically intact in a web of
sounds: the sweet hum of crickets, the machine-gun roar of playing-cards riffling
against the spokes of some kid’s bicycle as he pedalled home for a late supper of cold cuts and iced tea, the flat Texas voice of Buddy Knox singing ‘Come along and be my
party doll, and I’ll make love to you, to you,’ and the baseball announcer’s voice
mingling with the song and with the smell of freshly cut grass: ‘Count’s three and two now. Whitey Ford leans over… shakes off the sign… now he’s got it… Ford pauses…
pitches… and there it goes! Williams got all of that one! Kiss it goodbye! RED SOX
LEAD, THREE TO ONE!’ Was Ted Williams still playing for the Red Sox in 1960?
Absolutely not. But he was. I remember that he was very clearly. Baseball had
become important to me in the last couple of years, ever since I’d had to face the