squirts, willya?’ Teddy asked, and Vern laughed, finally understanding that he was
getting ribbed.
‘Go screw.’
Chris turned to me. ‘That train scare you, Gordie?’
‘Nope,’ I said, and sipped my Coke.
‘Not much, you sucker.’ He punched my arm.
‘Sincerely! I wasn’t scared at all.’
‘Yeah? You wasn’t scared?’ Teddy was looking me over carefully.
‘No. I was fuckin’ petrified.’
This slew all of them, even Vern, and we laughed long and hard. Then we just
laid back, not goofing anymore, just drinking our Cokes and being quiet. My body felt
warm, exercised, at peace with itself. Nothing in it was working crossgrain to
anything else. I was alive and glad to be. Everything seemed to stand out with a
special dearness, and although I never could have said that out loud I didn’t think it mattered–maybe that sense of dearness was something I wanted just for myself.
I think I began to understand a little bit that day what makes men become
daredevils. I paid twenty dollars to watch Evel Knievel attempt his jump over the
Snake River Canyon a couple of years ago and my wife was horrified. She told me
that if I’d been born a Roman I would have been right there in the Coliseum,
munching grapes and watching as the lions disembowelled the Christians. She was
wrong, although it was hard for me to explain why (and, really, I think she thought I
was just jiving her). I didn’t cough up that twenty to watch the man die on coast-to-
coast closed-circuit TV, although I was quite sure that was exactly what was going to
happen. I went because of the shadows that are always somewhere behind our eyes,
because of what Bruce Springsteen calls the darkness on the edge of town in one of
his songs, and at one time or another I think everyone wants to dare that darkness in
spite of the jalopy bodies that some joker of a God gave us human beings. No… not in spite of our jalopy bodies but because of them.
‘Hey, tell that story,’ Chris said suddenly, sitting up.
‘What story?’ I asked, although I guess I knew.
I always felt uncomfortable when the talk turned to my stories, although all of
them seemed to like them–wanting to tell stories, even wanting to write them down…
that was just peculiar enough to be boss, like wanting to grow up to be a sewer
inspector or a Grand Prix mechanic. Richie Jenner, a kid who hung around with us
until his family moved to Nebraska in 1959, was the first one to find out that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up, that I wanted to do that for my full-time job. We were
up in my room, just fooling around, and he found a bunch of handwritten pages under
the comic books in a carton in my closet. What’s this! Richie asks. Nothin’, I say, and try to grab them back. Richie held the pages up out of reach… I must admit that I
didn’t try very hard to get them back. I wanted him to read them and at the same time
I didn’t–an uneasy mix of pride and shyness that has never changed in me very much
when someone asks to look. The act of writing itself is done in secret, like
masturbation–oh, I have one friend who has done things like write stories in the
display windows of bookshops and department stores, but this is a man who is nearly
crazy with courage, the kind of man you’d like to have with you if you just happened
to fall down with a heart attack in a city where no one knew you. For me, it always
wants to be sex and always falls short–it’s always that adolescent handjob in the
bathroom with the door locked.
Richie sat right there on the end of my bed for most of the afternoon reading
his way through the stuff I had been doing, most of it influenced by the same sort of
comic books as the ones that had given Vern nightmares. And when he was done,
Richie looked at me in a strange new way that made me feel very peculiar, as if he