Playground, page 17
I’d gone out three times with a girl I knew from lifeguarding named Jill Simmons. There was something like sex involved. I told Jillie I was going to the U of I, and she laughed. She was on her way east, to Sarah Lawrence, where she’d been headed since the age of ten. College was going to be her ticket out of the Midwest forever. She told me that wasting my Saint Ignatius credential and college entrance test scores to go to a state school was worse than stupid.
I didn’t even bother arguing. Right before the holidays, we wished each other good luck and happy trails. It was a relief to us both, to escape our first relationship free and clear without any bloodshed. It all seemed very mature. We were still too young to know how maturity played out, in real life.
Rafi was fighting other battles. Much to my shame, it never occurred to me that merely going to college might throw his whole life into turmoil. He would have been accepted just about anywhere. But no choice he made would be accepted by all the other parties in his life. I should have seen that.
He had friends back in his old neighborhood on the edge of Pilsen that he never talked about with me. I don’t know whether he was ashamed of them or ashamed of me. Either way, he kept us separate. I didn’t even know their names. A couple of these friends were going to Richard J. Daley College on South Pulaski, a two-year community college and part of Chicago’s seven city colleges.
“Thinkin’ I will, too, dude.”
“Rafi! Are you out of your fuckin’ mind? Death by live burial. You’d be throwing your life away.”
He froze up like a broken spaceship air lock. “You have no idea what you’re talking about. White boy.”
I spent two increasingly heated weeks trying to argue him out of it. I was doing to him exactly what Jillie Simmons had done to me.
Rafi chose to stand with his homies. “It’s done, man. Back off. Besides, it’s not that big a deal.”
The choice shattered me.
Rafi’s mother gave her blessing. She herself had not gone to college. Small steps seemed right to her. She praised his choice to stay in the city. Moody Stepdad told him to do whatever he wanted.
Rafi took his decision to his father. If I had been appalled, his father was incensed. From what I heard later, the man was an inch from punching Rafi in the face. Donnie Young hadn’t poured a good portion of his salary for the last four years into an exclusive private school for his exceptional son just to have that advantage thrown away on a city community college. He himself had gone to Circle, where he had been humiliated, and later to Malcolm X, which he found pointless and exasperating. His son’s future was his own last hope.
Donnie Young had a contact at Virginia Military Institute. He lined up a letter of recommendation from a friend who had a seat in the Illinois House of Representatives, and he started the application process in Rafi’s name. Meanwhile, Sondra Young Johnson was sure that if her son disappeared into the savage heartland of Virginia and became a military man, she would never see him again.
Rafi came to me in despair. “They’re going to kill me, brother. Between the two of them.”
“Your dad wants you in the Army?”
“Naw, man. It’s just a threat.”
“For what? What does he want?”
“Nothing much. Just for me to save the Black Race by beating the White Man at his own game.”
“Huh. Sounds like he’s playing Go.”
Rafi’s laugh bore no relation to mirth. “He keeps giving me these books. Dick Gregory. The Honorable Prophet Elijah Muhammad. Like they’re proof that I need to go to a military academy and get ready for the End Times. He’s losing it.”
“Raff. Come down to Illinois. It’ll be close enough so your mother won’t freak. It’s ranked higher than VMI on almost everything, so it should satisfy your dad’s whole uplift thing. And it’s a state school, so your friends can’t accuse you of . . .”
A vicious smile tugged at his upper lip. “Of what, brother? Accuse me of what?”
I held up both palms. “Okay. I don’t know what I’m talking about. Go wherever is best for you.”
“Thanks for your blessing, massa.”
He applied to several places at the guidance counselor’s suggestions, places with good literature programs, including University of Chicago, Berkeley, Northwestern, and U of I for his safety school. He got into all of them. He put off accepting any for as long as possible. By Easter, he still hadn’t committed. But time was running out and he would have to leap soon.
On the Monday after spring vacation, I drove him back up with me to Evanston for a sleepover and as much Go as we could fit into one evening. During the heady rush of that final spring semester, we hadn’t played much. We were letting life get in the way of our diversions.
In the car, Rafi dropped his bombshell. “I’ll be seeing a lot of your ’hood next year. Can I just have your room while you’re away?”
“What? Serious?”
“Goin’ to Northwestern. Wearin’ my Saint Ignatius blazer and learnin’ how to succeed without really tryin’.”
I was thrilled that he’d escaped from the pull of Richard J. Daley Community College. But Northwestern seemed a little rich for Rafi’s blood. I wondered how he and his atomized family were going to pay for so expensive a school. That’s how messed up I was.
“Who am I supposed to play Go with next year?”
“Fifty thousand students. Fifteen percent Asian. Mostly engineers. You’ll find someone.”
“We could play by mail. Or road trips. It’s only three hours.”
“You just concentrate on your coursework, young Freshman Todd.”
So there it was: our futures, diverging. Deflated, I congratulated him, and all the way up Lake Shore Drive we talked smack about each other’s future paths. I couldn’t shake my sense of betrayal, and I wanted to retaliate. I chose my point of attack for maximum irritation.
“By the time we finish school, a computer will be writing poems that pass for human.”
“That is such a crock of shit. Maybe bad haikus and broken limericks.”
“As far as I can tell, half the poems in the New Yorker are already being written by a machine.”
“Ah, the joys of illiteracy.”
“By the time we die, all our arts will be handled by artificial intelligence.”
“How can a relatively smart human spew such shit? Listen to yourself! Listen to what you’re saying! You think creation is all just . . . ?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
He opened his mouth to rebut me, but incredulity stopped him cold. Little machine-gun sounds of astonishment caught in his throat. He threw up his hands in capitulation and began tugging at his tiny goatee. “Whatever, Hal.”
We got off Lake Shore Drive and turned onto North Sheridan. I felt how much I was going to miss him, even if only for the arguments. More than any other childhood friend, he was going to leave a hole in my life, like the space of a captured stone.
In another few blocks he rallied and turned invulnerable again.
“Young Todd Keane, heading down into the cornfields to be ordained as a novitiate at the temple for supercomputing . . . where he gonna teach . . . confuters how to write podems!”
“Rafi Young, attending Little Harvard by the Lake, where he hopes to study literature that will evade the coming hostile takeover of the humanities by our digital overlords.”
“I like my odds in this game.”
A few weeks ago, we had laid ourselves bare to each other. Now I felt him disappearing again.
“You serious about wanting to live in my room?”
His head recoiled from the idea. He’d already forgotten his little joke. “Aw, naw, man. I wouldn’t do that to Maestro and Mammy Keane. A black man living in their house who they weren’t paying an hourly wage? It ain’t fittin’. It just ain’t fittin’.”
We cut over to Chicago Avenue and then Sherman, alongside the diagonal of the railroad tracks. Cars around us slowed and thickened. Lights flashed up ahead.
“Lookie there!” Rafi marveled. “The popo . . . are arresting . . . some white folk!”
Someone had run into the central pillar of the underpass at Greenwood. The cops were blocking the turn while furiously waving traffic on Sherman to keep moving. Of course, that only made the gapers’ block worse. We were half a block north when my brain realized what it had seen.
My hands lost their grip on the wheel and my voice went spectral. I aimed the car toward the curb and slowed. “Oh, shit. Shit. Shit.”
Rafi bolted forward and gripped the dash. “What . . . ? Hey—Todd? You okay?”
The car that was wrapped around the concrete bridge pylon—a Silver 450SL convertible—had the vanity plates PIT BULL.
“That was my father.”
We left the Audi half-parked and ran back to the accident. The police wouldn’t let us through, even when I screamed at them. An ambulance pulled up slantwise under the viaduct. The paramedics took the crumpled-up body out of the car and angled it toward the waiting stretcher. My father was in no pain.
I DON’T REMEMBER MUCH about the rest of that spring. Anterograde amnesia, my brain erasing all traces of what had just settled over my life. That, plus the medications the shrinks put me on for months afterward. My mother was even more traumatized than I was, and she hadn’t seen the paramedics dragging the man out of his beloved car like a sandbag. The twenty-year game of mutually assured destruction she had played with her spouse was over, and they had both won.
We didn’t have a funeral. We took my dad’s boat, and along with his estranged sister and a pair of dutiful trader friends of his, we brought his ashes out onto Lake Michigan and spread them on the swells.
Surrounded by water, so far out that Chicago and Gary were just brown smudges on the horizon, I remembered how I once knew I would grow up to be an oceanographer. Nothing but life underwater had been large enough to shelter me from this man’s relentless and abrasive escapades. Now the water had him.
On the way back to the marina, I told my mother, “Me, too. Bury me at sea.”
She said, “Fine. Find some state that will let you compost me.”
ALMOST RIGHT AWAY, CREDITORS began to circle the Castle. Scrambling to grasp what was happening (although some part of her surely knew), my mother sifted through the check stubs and credit card statements for the last several years, something she’d always had the luxury of leaving to her husband. She found hundreds of receipts from pharmacies all over the tri-state area, as well as prescriptions for oxycodone from at least four different doctors. Only then did I seriously consider the hundreds of orange and white plastic pill cylinders my mother and I had overlooked for so many years, dutifully facilitating the wreck of the man who still ruled our lives.
What wasn’t to be found anywhere in the paperwork my mother combed through was money. Micky Keane, working-class South Sider, trophy child of the Jesuits, self-made multimillionaire, endower of scholarships, steel-nerved virtuoso of trading-pit brinksmanship, audiophile, pilot of tiny planes, had died a drug fiend and left his codependent family deep in debt.
In quick succession, my mother auctioned off the collection of oils, including a choice Jamie Wyeth that my father had bought to celebrate my first birthday. Dad had already sold the Cessna without telling my mother. No trace of the proceeds. The 450, of course, was worthless.
Mom put the Castle on the market, and it sold four days later. Before I knew what was happening, we started moving into a tiny apartment in Rogers Park. In the chaos of my new life, I finished high school borderline suicidal. My father’s ghost came into my bedroom at night, sat on the foot of my bed, and asked if I’d like to play tiddlywinks.
I saw little of Rafi, except in classes. I had no desire to bring him up north with me after school ever again. He was solicitous, coming by my locker during passing periods, as if by accident.
“Hold on,” he said. “Small steps.”
In early May, he sought me out in the cafeteria at lunch, sitting down across the table with his sack lunch that he always brought from home. He seemed way too casual.
“Got a roommate for fall?”
The question irritated me. “It’s a lottery, if you don’t request one. They tell you who you match with, over the summer.”
“I know how they do it, bro.”
I stopped eating and studied him. It was always a game, with Rafi. Or maybe that was me.
“What’s this about?”
“Well, brother. Turns out Northwestern already has its quota of five black boys for next year.”
“What are you saying? You changed your mind?”
He shrugged, shoulders too high, the way that made him look like a comedian. “Same education, at a quarter of the price. Math’s not my strong suit, but it seems like your little land-grant school might be a better deal. Man of the people like me don’t need no more private, elite institutions on the résumé. Gets suspicious, after a while. Besides, I know some folks who are going downstate.”
My mood cleared and my spine straightened like a plant growing in time-lapse. I didn’t know what had made him change his mind. It wouldn’t occur to me for a long time: He was seeing me through a dark time. He’d chosen to keep an eye on me, as a brother does.
Dr. and Mrs. Mannis, combing the tide pools just west of Malibu.
They came up for a conference at UCLA, where Evelyne spoke on cleaning stations in the Coral Triangle. The talk was a hit, as Evie’s talks always were. She was goofy and ingenuous at the podium, a guaranteed crowd-pleaser with her still-colorful English and her little-girl’s awe, backed by exotic Ektachrome slides that she clicked through using a carousel projector.
Bart Mannis had sat near the back of the packed room, falling in love with his stranger wife all over again. He marveled at how unlikely a couple they were, how wildly incompatible. She was rangy, adventurous, naïve, fearless, irreverent, and crazy passionate, but only about the sea. He had grown more land-bound, practical, work-driven. He still chafed sometimes at her independence, once even demanding to know where the marriage was headed. But he was utterly, hopelessly besotted with her, and he had made his choice. He’d tried to walk away once and failed. Now, even when her waywardness grabbed him by the throat, when her coming and going left him bereft, he knew he would never again think of letting go of the potato. Everything came from the potato. Without the potato, life would be far bleaker.
In some ways, his existence was simpler than it had been. He worked as academic support staff at Scripps. He had his research and taught the occasional class. Evelyne stayed land-bound for almost eighteen months, completing her long-deferred doctorate. She had become an American citizen, and visas were no longer a problem. But with every old issue solved, new ones loomed larger.
Bart had learned much in their eight years together. First among those things was always to wait until she was in her element, wrapped up in the ecstasy of marine things, before talking about anything important. So he had put off for months all thought of broaching the subject that consumed him. He’d waited until this moment, with her entranced by a two-foot long, twenty-pound black sea hare crawling through the drowned basalt at Leo Carrillo beach. The tide was out, and everywhere the pools teemed with sea stars, anemones, mossy chitons, striped shore crabs, assorted tegulae, and hermit crabs pursuing their theft-driven home upgrades. Bart—the erstwhile Limpet—should have been as blissed-out as his wife. But once again it fell to him to keep the small craft of their marriage from being lost at sea.
“Anything you want for your birthday, sweet? It’s in three weeks, you know.”
“Hmmm? Oh. How about one of these?” She pointed at the sea hare’s waving rhinophores. “Can we bring one home?”
The word sounded bittersweet in the crash of the surf. She had been home so little in the last two years.
“This birthday is a big one, you know.”
“Big one? How?” She did the math and lifted her eyes from the slow-motion drama of the tide pool. “Argh. You mean the zero on the end.”
She sighed and stretched out on the pocked volcanic stone, looking up at the sky. He would have lain down next to her, to level the playing field. But the tide was creeping back in, each wave hurling itself closer, and one of them had to keep an eye out.
She pulled her stringy, strawberry hair out of her mouth and addressed herself to the sky. “Ach, I get it. You want to bring up the babies again.”
Bart bit down and swallowed his bile. “You told me to bring it up again when you turned thirty.”
“Hey! That’s not for another three weeks.”
In his silence, her hand flopped about like the strangest of sea creatures, until it found his.
“You must laugh at my jokes. Otherwise, I’m going to start thinking I’m not funny. Which we both know is not true.”
A little tubercular laugh came up his throat. “Which we both know is not true.”
Then it was just the surf, just the spray, the beat of the waves breaking up the ancient rock, the deep, slow subduction miles down grinding away at the edges of the tectonic plates. And farther out, the currents’ great upwelling.
She squeezed his hand. “Okay.”
The sound startled him. “Okay, what?”
“Okay, my sweet.”
He laughed again, less morosely. “Wait. You mean, you’re okay with it? With starting . . . ?”
He stopped, feeling her flinch a little. But his heart was soaring.
The timing was ideal—a window when she was land-bound, finishing up the coursework for the Ph.D. She had all her data for her dissertation: years’ worth, gathered over the course of three separate research trips, meticulously recorded and already half tabulated.
“Sure,” she said, into the salt air. “Why not?”
Months of anxiety dissolved in the spume. Bart wanted to shout. “Serious? Are you serious?” He knelt on the rock and covered her body in his. “Oh, I love you. I love you. You have no idea.”
She laughed as he tickled her, and gasped, “Some!” Professional success was making her so much more agreeable.
