How do you know, Philly?
He gave it to me.
Sure enough, at the nationals in Chicago my father gives me a pill. Hold out your hand, he says. This will help you. Take it.
He puts a pill on my palm. Tiny. White. Round.
I swallow the pill and feel OK. Not much different. Slightly more alert. But I pretend to feel very different. My opponent, an older kid, poses no challenge, and still I carry him, drag out points, hand him several games. I make the match look tougher than it is. Walking off the court I tell my father I don’t feel right, I want to pass out, and he looks guilty.
OK, he says, rubbing his hand across his face, that’s not good. We won’t try that again.
I phone Philly after the tournament and tell him about the pill.
He says, I fucking knew it!
I did just what you told me to do, Philly, and it worked.
My brother sounds the way I imagine a father is supposed to sound. Proud of me and scared for me at the same time. When I return from nationals I grab him and hug him and we spend my first night home locked in our room, whispering across the white line, cherishing our rare victory over Pops.
A short time later I play an older opponent and beat him. It’s a practice match, no big deal, and I’m much better than the opponent, but once again I carry him, drag out points, make the match look tougher than it is, just as I did in Chicago. Walking off Court 7 at Cambridge—the same court on which I beat Mr. Brown—I feel devastated, because my opponent looks devastated. I should have tanked all the way. I hate losing, but I hate winning this time because the defeated opponent is Philly. Does this devastated feeling prove I don’t have the killer instinct? Confused, sad, I wish I could find that old guy, Rudy, or the other Rudy before him, and ask them what it all means.
4
I’M PLAYING A TOURNAMENT at the Las Vegas Country Club, vying for a chance to go to the state championship. My opponent is a kid named Roddy Parks. The first thing I notice about him is that he too has a unique father. Mr. Parks wears a ring with an ant frozen inside a large gumdrop of yellow amber. Before the match starts, I ask him about it.
You see, Andre, when the world ends in a nuclear holocaust, ants will be the only things that survive. So I’m planning for my spirit to go into an ant.
Roddy is thirteen, two years older than I, and big for his age, with a military crew cut. But he looks beatable. Right away I see holes in his game, weaknesses. Then, somehow, he fills in the holes, papers over the weaknesses. He wins the first set.
I talk to myself, tell myself to suck it up, dig in. I take the second set.
Bearing down now, I play smarter, quicker. I feel the finish line. Roddy is mine, he’s toast. What kind of name is Roddy anyway? But a few points slip away, and now Roddy is raising his arms above his head, he’s won the third set, 7–5, and the match. I look into the stands for my father, and he’s staring down, concerned. Not angry—concerned. I’m concerned too, but damned angry also, sick with self-loathing. I wish I were the frozen ant in Mr. Parks’s ring.
I’m saying hateful things to myself as I pack my tennis bag. Out of nowhere a boy appears and interrupts my rant.
Hey, he says, don’t sweat it. You didn’t play your best today.
I look up. The boy is slightly older than I, a head taller, wearing an expression that I don’t like. There’s something different about his face. His nose and mouth are out of alignment. And, the capper, he’s wearing a fruity shirt with a little man playing polo? I want no part of him.
Who the fuck are you? I say.
Perry Rogers.
I turn back to my tennis bag.
He won’t take a hint. He drones on about how I didn’t have my best game, how much better I am than Roddy, how I’ll beat Roddy the next time, blah, blah. He’s trying to be nice, I guess, but he’s coming off like a know-it-all, like some kind of Björn Borg Jr., so I stand and pointedly do an about-face. The last thing I need is a consolation speech, which is more pointless than a consolation trophy, especially from a kid with a man playing polo on his chest. Slinging my tennis bag over my shoulder I tell him: What the fuck do you know about tennis?
Later I feel bad. I shouldn’t have been so harsh. Then I find out the kid is a tennis player, that he was competing in the same tournament. I also hear he’s got a crush on my sister Tami, which is undoubtedly why he talked to me in the first place. Trying to get close to Tami.
But if I feel guilty, Perry is pissed. Word spreads along the Vegas teenager grapevine: Watch your back. Perry is gunning for you. He’s telling everyone that you disrespected him, and the next time he sees you, he’s going to kick your ass.
WEEKS LATER TAMI SAYS the whole gang is going to see a horror flick, all the older kids, and she asks if I want to go along.
That Perry kid going?
Maybe.
Yeah, I’ll go.
I love horror movies. And I have a plan.
Our mother drives us to the theater early so we can buy popcorn and licorice and find the perfect seats, dead center, middle row. I always sit dead center, middle row. Best seats in the house. I put Tami to my left and save the seat to my right. Sure enough, here comes Preppy Perry. I jump to my feet and wave. Hey Perry! Over here!
He turns, squints. I can see he’s caught off guard by my friendliness. He’s trying to analyze the situation, weigh his response. Then he smiles, visibly releases whatever anger he’s been holding. He saunters down the aisle and slides down our row, throwing himself into the seat next to me.
Hey Tami, he says across me.
Hey Perry.
Hey Andre.
Hey Perry.
Just as the lights go down and the first coming attraction starts we give each other a look.
Peace?
Peace.
The movie is Visiting Hours. It’s about a psycho who stalks a lady journalist, sneaks into her house, kills her maid, then for some reason puts on lipstick and pops out when the lady journalist comes home. She fights free, and somehow gets to a hospital, where she thinks she’s safe, but of course the psycho is hiding in the hospital, trying to find the lady journalist’s room, killing everyone who gets in his way. Cheesy, but satisfyingly creepy.
When scared, I react like a cat thrown into a room full of dogs. I freeze, don’t move a muscle. But Perry apparently is the high-strung type. As the suspense builds, he twitches and fidgets and spills soda on himself. Every time the killer jumps out of a closet, Perry jumps out of his seat. Several times I turn to Tami and roll my eyes. I don’t tease Perry about his reaction, however. I don’t even mention it when the lights come on. I don’t want to break our fragile peace accord.
We roll out of the theater and decide the popcorn and Cokes and Twizzlers weren’t enough. We head across the street to Winchell’s and buy a box of French crullers. Perry gets his covered with chocolate. I get mine with rainbow sprinkles. We eat the donuts at the counter, talking. Perry sure can talk. He’s like a lawyer before the Supreme Court. Then, in the middle of a fifteen-minute sentence, he stops and asks the guy behind the counter, Is this place open twenty-four hours?
Yup, the counter guy says.
Seven days a week?
Uh-huh.
Three hundred sixty-five days a year?
Yeah.
Then why are there locks on the front door?
We all turn and look. What a brilliant question! I start laughing so hard that I have to spit out my cruller. Rainbow sprinkles are falling from my mouth like confetti. This might be the funniest, smartest thing anyone’s ever said. Certainly the funniest, smartest thing said by anyone in this particular Winchell’s. Even the donut guy has to smile and admit: Kid, that’s a head-scratcher.
Isn’t life just like that? Perry says. Full of Winchell’s locks and other stuff you can’t explain?
You said it.
I always thought I was the only one who noticed. But here’s a kid who not only notices, he points that stuff out. When my mother comes
to pick up me and Tami, I’m sad to say goodbye to my new friend Perry. I even find myself less annoyed by his polo shirt.
I ASK MY FATHER if I can sleep over at Perry’s house.
No fucking way, he says.
He doesn’t know Perry’s family from a hole in the ground. And he doesn’t trust anyone he doesn’t know. My father is suspicious of everyone in the world, especially the parents of our friends. I don’t bother asking why, and I don’t waste my breath arguing. I just invite Perry to our house for a sleepover.
Perry is extremely polite with my parents. He’s agreeable with my siblings, especially Tami, though she’s gently discouraged his crush. I ask if he wants a quick tour. Sure thing, he says, so I show him the room I share with Philly. He laughs at the white stripe down the middle. I show him the court out back. He takes a turn hitting with the dragon. I tell him how much I hate the dragon, how I used to think it was a living, breathing monster. He looks sympathetic. He’s seen enough horror flicks to know that monsters come in all shapes and sizes.
Since Perry is a fellow connoisseur of horror, I’ve got a surprise for him. I’ve scored a beta copy of The Exorcist. After seeing him jump out of his skin at Visiting Hours, I can’t wait to see how he reacts to a genuine horror classic. After everyone’s asleep we slide the movie into the machine. I suffer a minor aneurysm with every rotation of Linda Blair’s head, but Perry doesn’t flinch once. Visiting Hours gives him the shakes, but The Exorcist leaves him cold? I think: This dude marches to his own drummer.
Afterward, we sit up drinking sodas and talking. Perry agrees that my father’s scarier than anything Hollywood can offer, but he says his father is twice as scary. His father, he says, is an ogre, a tyrant, and a narcissist—the first time I’ve heard this word.
Perry says, Narcissist means he thinks only about himself. It also means his son is his personal property. He has a vision of how his son’s life is going to be, and he couldn’t care less about his son’s vision of that future.
Sounds familiar.
Perry and I agree that life would be a million times better if our fathers were like other kids’ fathers. But I hear an added note of pain in Perry’s voice, because he says his father doesn’t love him. I’ve never questioned my father’s love. I just wish it were softer, with more listening and less rage. In fact, I sometimes wish my father loved me less. Maybe then he’d back off, let me make my own choices. I tell Perry that having no choice, having no say about what I do or who I am, makes me crazy. That’s why I put more thought, obsessive thought, into the few choices I do have—what I wear, what I eat, who I call my friends.
He nods. He gets it.
At last, in Perry, I have a friend with whom I can share these deep thoughts, a friend I can tell about the Winchell’s locks in my life. I talk to Perry about playing tennis, despite hating tennis. Hating school, despite enjoying books. Feeling lucky to have Philly, despite his streak of bad luck. Perry listens, patient as Philly, but more involved. Perry doesn’t just talk, then listen, then nod. He converses. He analyzes, strategizes, spit-balls, helps me come up with a plan to make things better. When I tell Perry my problems, they sound jumbled and asinine at first, but Perry has a way of rearranging them, making them sound logical, which feels like the first step to making them solvable. I feel as if I’ve been on a desert island, with no one to talk to but the palm trees, and now a thoughtful, sensitive, like-minded castaway—albeit with a stupid polo player on his shirt—has come stumbling ashore.
Perry confides in me about his nose and mouth. He says he was born with a cleft palate. He says it’s made him deeply self-conscious and painfully shy with girls. He’s had surgeries to fix it, and faces one more surgery at least. I tell him it’s not that noticeable. He gets tears in his eyes. He mumbles something about his father blaming him.
Most conversations with Perry eventually lead to fathers, and from fathers it’s a quick segue to the future. We talk about the men we’re going to be once we’re rid of our fathers. We promise each other that we’ll be different, not just from our fathers but from all the men we know, even the ones we see in movies. We make a pact that we’ll never do drugs or drink alcohol. And when we’re rich, we vow, we’ll do what we can to help the world. We shake on it. A secret handshake.
Perry has a long way to go to get rich. He never has a dime. Everything we do is my treat. I don’t have much—a modest allowance, plus what I hustle from guests at the casinos and hotels. But I don’t care; what’s mine is Perry’s, because I’ve decided that Perry is my new best friend. My father gives me five dollars every day for food, and I freely spend half on Perry.
We meet every afternoon at Cambridge. After goofing off, hitting a few balls around, we go for a snack. We slip out the back door, hop the wall, and race across the vacant lot to 7-Eleven, where we play video games and eat Chipwiches, paid for by me, until it’s time to go home.
A Chipwich is a new ice cream sandwich Perry recently discovered. Vanilla ice cream pressed between two doughy chocolate chip cookies—it’s the greatest food in the world, according to Perry, who’s a raging addict. He loves Chipwiches more than talking. He can talk for an hour about the beauty of the Chipwich—and yet a Chipwich is one of the few things that can get him to stop talking. I buy him Chipwiches by the dozens, and I feel sorry for him that he doesn’t have enough money to feed his habit.
We’re at 7-Eleven one day when Perry stops chewing his Chipwich and looks up at the wall clock.
Shit, Andre, we better get back to Cambridge, my mother’s coming early to get me.
Your mother?
Yeah. She said to be ready and waiting out front.
We haul ass across the vacant lot.
Uh-oh, Perry shouts, there she is!
I look up the street and see two cars cruising toward Cambridge—a Volkswagen bug and a convertible Rolls-Royce. I see the bug keep going past Cambridge, and I tell Perry to relax, we have time. She missed the turn.
No, Perry says, come on, come on.
He turns on the jets, sprinting after the Rolls.
Hey! What the—? Perry, are you kidding? Your mom drives a Rolls? Are you—rich?
I guess so.
Why didn’t you tell me?
You never asked.
For me, that’s the definition of being rich: it doesn’t cross your mind to mention it to your best friend. And money is such a given you don’t care how you come by it.
Perry, however, is more than rich. Perry is super-rich. Perry is Richie Rich. His father, a senior partner at a major law firm, owns a local TV station. He sells air, Perry says. Imagine. Selling air. When you can sell air, man, you’ve got it made. (Presumably his father gives him air for an allowance.)
My father finally lets me visit Perry’s house, and I discover that he doesn’t live in a house, in fact, but a mega-mansion. His mother drives us there in the Rolls, and my eyes get big as we pass slowly up a massive front drive, around green rolling hills, then under enormous shade trees. We stop outside a place that looks like Bruce Wayne’s stately manor. One entire wing is set aside for Perry, including a teenager’s dream room, featuring a ping-pong table, pool table, poker table, big-screen TV, mini fridge, and drum set. Down a long hallway lies Perry’s bedroom, the walls of which are covered with dozens and dozens of Sports Illustrated covers.
My head rotating on a swivel, I look at all the portraits of great athletes and I can only say one word: Whoa.
Did this all myself, Perry says.
The next time I’m at the dentist I tear off the covers of all the Sports Illustrateds in the waiting room and stash them under my jacket. When I hand them to Perry, he shakes his head.
No, I have this one. And this one. I have them all, Andre. I have a subscription.
Oh. OK. Sorry.
It’s not just that I’ve never met a rich kid. I’ve also never met a kid with a subscription.
IF WE’RE NOT HANGING OUT AT CAMBRIDGE, or at his mansion, Perry and I are talking on the ph
one. We’re inseparable. He’s crushed, therefore, when I tell him that I’m going away for a month, to play a series of tournaments in Australia. McDonald’s is putting together a team of America’s elite juniors, sending us to play Australia’s best.
A whole month?
I know. But I have no choice. My father.
I’m not being entirely truthful. I’m one of only two twelve-year-olds selected, so I’m honored, excited, if slightly on edge about traveling so far from home—the plane ride is fourteen hours. For Perry’s sake I downplay the trip. I tell him not to worry, I’ll be back in no time, and we’ll have a Chipwich feast.
I fly alone to Los Angeles, and upon landing I want to go straight back to Vegas. I’m scared. I’m not sure where I’m supposed to go or how to find my way through the airport. I feel as if I stick out in my warm-up suit with the McDonald’s Golden Arches on the back and my name on the chest. Now, off in the distance I see a group of kids wearing the same warm-up suit. My team. I approach the one adult in the group and introduce myself.
He flashes a big smile. He’s the coach. My first real coach.
Agassi, he says. The hotshot from Vegas? Hey, glad to have you aboard!
During the flight to Australia, Coach stands in the aisle, telling us how the trip is going to work. We’re going to play five tournaments in five different cities. The most important tournament, however, will be the third, in Sydney. That’s where we’ll pit our best against the best Australians.
There should be five thousand fans in the arena, he says, plus it’s going to be televised throughout Australia.
Talk about pressure.
But here’s the good news, Coach says. Every time you win a tournament, I’ll let you have one cold beer.
I win my first tournament, in Adelaide, no problem, and on the bus Coach hands me an ice-cold Foster’s Lager. I think of Perry and our pact. I think of how strange it is that I’m twelve and being served booze. But the beer can looks so frosty cold, and my teammates are watching. Also, I’m thousands of miles from home—fuck it. I take a sip. Delicious. I drain it in four gulps, then wrestle with my guilty conscience the rest of the afternoon. I stare out the window as the outback crawls by and I wonder how Perry will take the news, if he’ll stop being my friend.