Jake, Reinvented

  “Not that!” She dismissed the bulb shower with a wave of her hand. “A bunch of freshmen just tried to get in here! What do they think this is—gymboree?”

  I led her into the kitchen and stood her by the garbage can while I brushed her off with a dishtowel.

  She turned it into a sexual situation. “If you’re trying to push my buttons, there are better ways to get the job done.”

  If only. But I had other things on my mind. “What’s Didi’s problem? Is she with Todd, or with Jake, or what?”

  “She’s with Todd, obviously,” Jennifer told me. “This Jake thing is just, you know, a hobby. Like you’re a lawyer for your job, but you play golf in your spare time.”

  “Who does she think she is—Tiger Woods?” I exclaimed. “She was here all week! Does Jake know she’s golfing, not lawyering?”

  “He’s getting quality beyond his wildest dreams,” she pointed out. “He’s probably over the moon.”

  I didn’t argue with her. Jennifer wasn’t the warm and fuzzy type, but, as usual, her analysis of the situation was bang on.

  Aloud, I just said, “I don’t think that’s the way Jake sees it. He’s really head over heels.”

  She shrugged hugely. “Life’s a big, cruel, scary thing, Ricky. We’ve all got our problems. Do you hear me complaining because all men are jerks?”

  I let that one pass. No conversation went very long before turning into the World According to Jennifer. To use her words, it was all about her.

  She did have one more thing to comment on. Jake and Didi: “You think Didi doesn’t know how Todd is when she’s not around? Maybe some of this is payback.”

  “Get out of the way!” came a bellow.

  The kitchen was invaded by a stampede of senior girls, carrying their boyfriends piggyback. I was astonished to see Melissa with the six-foot-five, two-hundred-sixty-pound Nelson up there. I thought of her and Todd sequestered in the bathroom. I wondered if Casanova realized that he could have more to fear from her than from Nelson.

  With a thud that was audible even over the pounding music, Nelson’s forehead made contact with the light fixture. The big lineman went down in a shower of plaster, bringing with him Melissa, the other piggybackers, and half the people in the kitchen, myself included. The light went out. The fixture hung by a single wire. By the time I managed to get up again, Jennifer had melted away into the throng.

  I tried to escape into the hall and found it jammed. The party was approaching critical mass. You couldn’t have crammed another body in there with a shoehorn. Some guy was playing tonsil hockey with the captain of the girls’ tennis team. Not far away, a gaggle of his friends had formed a half circle, and were spitting at the back of his neck. From what I could see, they had found the range. Foam dripped down the back of his shirt. He must have been clammy and miserable, but he never stopped for a breath, never gave an inch for fear of letting the girl get away.

  It was standard issue for a Garrett bash—the kind of semi-funny, semi-moronic stuff that had been going on for weeks in this house. Yet there was something different and vaguely unpleasant about it tonight. I took a good look at the slack-jawed, laughing faces. I didn’t know these guys. They weren’t from F. Scott Fitzgerald High. Word of the parties had begun to travel around town, and crashers were beginning to show up. They weren’t ax-murderers or anything like that. They seemed to be pretty much the same pinheads that Fitz was turning out, and their entertainment choices were no shallower than ours. But there was a peculiar ugliness about strangers acting this way, rather than kids from our own extended family. I noticed a lot of other unfamiliar faces around the house. And while they weren’t doing anything different from our homegrown rabble, they filled me with a sense of unease.

  “Hey, baby—” Jake sidled up to me. His J. Crewness seemed to have been restored after his wrestling match with quantum physics. “Jennifer said Didi was here. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You seemed pretty stressed about that essay.”

  “That doesn’t apply to Didi.” He was talking to me, but his eyes were scanning the room and beyond.

  “Listen, Jake,” I said, “did you invite all these kids? There are people here I’ve never seen before in my life.”

  “Fresh blood,” he explained absently, making his way to the stairs. The place was so crowded that he was never going to be able to spot Didi unless he gained some altitude.

  I followed him up the first few steps. “Fresh blood is one thing,” I argued. “But these guys could trash your house and not even have to look you in the eye on Monday morning.”

  Talk to the wall. He was one-hundred-percent gone from me. I followed his gaze and spotted Didi talking with some of the girls’ volleyball team.

  Then she noticed him too. Their eyes locked, and I swear the lights dimmed for a moment from the power surge. They began to move toward each other. They were separated by thirty feet, tops. But a good four dozen revelers occupied the space between them.

  I don’t think Jake and Didi noticed. In their minds, they were the only two people in this jammed party house, and quite possibly the entire planet. Didi didn’t look to me like she was playing weekend golf. This was lawyering of the highest order, an appearance before the Supreme Court.

  As I watched them come together, I had a sense of two soldiers crossing an active battlefield to meet in the middle. Dancers gyrated, drinks spilled, play-fighters traded shoves, heavy bass shook the air. And through it all, Jake and Didi found each other on a Friday night in late September.

  They didn’t fall into a soulful B-movie embrace. In fact, they didn’t touch each other at all. But you’d have to be drunk, dense, or totally self-absorbed not to notice the magnetism between them.

  Todd was all three, but even he managed to figure it out. His face reddening, his scowl thunderous, he waded through the mass of humanity to confront the meeting at the bottom of the stairs.

  He grabbed his girlfriend’s arm. “Let’s go, Didi. This party’s boring.”

  A cherry bomb went off in the dining room, and a moment later, the student council vice president leaped high above the sea of heads, his dreadlocks on fire. It was out in a second, beaten down by a flailing pocketbook. But that didn’t stop someone from emptying the kitchen fire extinguisher in the guy’s face. Light, fluffy foam blanketed the remnants of seventeen pizzas.

  “I’m not ready yet,” Didi told Todd. “I want to stay.”

  He looked more surprised than annoyed. How often did Todd Buckley hear the word no? “Seriously,” he said. “Let’s get going.”

  “I’m having a good time,” she insisted.

  Jake put his two cents in. “I’ll see that she gets home, baby.”

  “I bet you would,” growled Todd. “Okay, we’re staying.” He stormed away.

  On the surface, it was a fairly innocent exchange, one that maybe a handful of people noticed over the music and the craziness. But to this observer, the meaning was undeniable: Todd was vulnerable, and he knew it.

  Jennifer appeared at my elbow. “You know what your problem is, Ricky? You don’t know when to mind your own business. So Todd’s a little bent out of shape. So what? I can’t think of anyone who deserves it more than him.”

  She was probably right about the minding my own business part. Was my appointment book so empty that I had to stick my nose into other people’s love lives to feel important? I was turning into the Mrs. Appleford of Fitz. Was it revenge against Todd that I was trying to savor—over what he’d done to me that day in the apple orchard? He’d stolen Jennifer, and justice required him to forfeit a girl too. If so, it was pretty sour revenge. I wasn’t enjoying the spectacle of Todd getting burned. No, I was observing this the way you’d watch two out-of-control trains careening inevitably together—with a mixture of fascination and dread.

  One thing was certain. I had never seen Todd “a little bent out of shape.” This was uncharted ground. So I kept an eye on him. For the next half hour or so, he did a tour o
f the party, checking in with old admirers to remind himself that he was still the man. Our first game was tomorrow, so it was a good night to rev up enthusiasm for the old snot-and-mustard. Todd had them bonking heads and biting sofa cushions to work up their hatred of Liberty. Judging from the number of players around the keg, my teammates were also working up raging hangovers, which didn’t bode well for game day. If Jake kept on having Friday-night parties, the really smart move would be to put money on our opponents all through the season.

  Melissa was part of a group that had staked out the space under the kitchen table. There were four of them, a guy and three girls, smashing Ritz crackers with a ball peen hammer. They had no purpose for the mounds of beige dust they were creating. Yet they wore grimaces of intense concentration, as if they were splitting the atom.

  When Todd found Melissa, I could almost see the lightbulb flashing over his head. It wasn’t a dance of seduction. He just reached under the table, grabbed her by the arm, and dragged her through the hall and up the stairs. He didn’t care who saw them. In fact, he was probably counting on word getting back to Didi. I don’t know if he even thought about Nelson. I sure would have. The last time I’d seen Nelson, he was down in the basement, trying to tackle the five-hundred-gallon iron oil tank that stood next to the furnace. Todd was probably safe on that front.

  I watched them from the bottom of the stairs. Their previous three-minute maulings had taken place in bathrooms and closets. But Todd meant business this time. He hustled her straight into a spare bedroom and slammed the door.

  I looked for Didi and Jake, but they were gone too.

  It hadn’t been much of a fun evening anyway, but that was the moment I stopped enjoying Jake’s parties for good. All the madcap silliness just seemed kind of brainless and hurtful. Jake was crazy if he thought it made sense to let two hundred people, half of them total strangers, lay waste to his house. Didi wasn’t worth it. Nothing was.

  The front door burst open, and the party improbably absorbed seven more guests. Connor was there to high-five the newcomers, one of whom was the delivery man from 1-800-4BAGELS. This invasion was from Atlantica University.

  “These girls go nuts for college guys!” Connor bawled. “Just show them your student ID and you’re golden!”

  There was a bloodcurdling scream from the basement, and a pack of Broncos burst up the stairs, faces shining with excitement and purpose. If they did to the Liberty defense what they did to the party guests as they bulled their way to the door, tomorrow was going to be a momentous day for Fitzgerald football. Kids were hitting the deck left, right, and center, including a couple of the A.U. guys.

  I was bewildered until I saw the pair of jeans tucked under Kendrick’s arm. And Dipsy was right on schedule, barelegged and humiliated in his fluorescent-blue skivvies.

  I couldn’t make out his exact words over the din. But since I’d heard them on two previous occasions, my mind easily filled in the blanks: “Come on, guys! Give me back my pants!”

  About fifty people rushed outdoors to watch the half-naked, pudgy Dipsy try to catch up to four athletes in peak physical condition. The Broncos piled into an ancient convertible Chevy Malibu and started the unmuffled engine. Spearing Dipsy’s jeans on the radio antenna, they pulled out into the street and began to inch along, the pant legs flapping like two flags on a diplomatic limousine. They rolled just slowly enough to keep poor Dipsy in the chase. He puffed along behind them, yelling, “Come on, guys!” at increasing levels of exhaustion.

  Someone winged a half-eaten s’more at him, missing his phallic cowlick by inches.

  The spectators were on the grass, rollicking with mirth. Some of them were laughing so hard that tears streamed down their cheeks. It was, I admit, one of the more hilarious sights I’d ever witnessed.

  I didn’t even crack a smile.

  chapter ten

  COACH HAMMER’S PEP talk was designed to raise the dead. Which was a good thing, because the dead were pretty much who he had in the collection of hangovers in the locker room that Saturday afternoon.

  Three-quarters of the team sat pale and stoic, like they were carved out of marble, while the coach ratcheted up his rhetoric in an effort to get a rise out of this statuary in shoulder pads. It wasn’t enough that the Liberty Lions didn’t respect us and thought we were pushovers. No, they were slashing our tires, urinating in our school halls, and burning effigies of our grandmothers. They were subhuman troglodytes who had to be snuffed out of existence for the good of all God-fearing people. And earth’s last stand against this menace would be made on the gridiron this very afternoon.

  “So I want you to get out there and fight!” Hammer rasped with what was left of his voice.

  We came roaring to our feet, and Nelson Jaworski’s simmering cauldron of testosterone reached critical mass. With a howl that could only be described as bestial, he picked up an eight-foot-long wooden bench and swung it at all our heads. We were alert enough to duck, and the blow struck a row of metal lockers. The bench shattered, and the lockers went down with a heavy clatter.

  Todd, Kendrick, and I grabbed Nelson, and he shrugged us off as easily as he might have swatted a fly.

  Still bellowing like a mad bull, he charged across the room and planted his helmet dead center on the chalkboard. The diagram of our pass defense disintegrated as the slate broke into hundreds of fragments.

  The look of horror on Coach Hammer’s face plainly said that this had never happened to him before. To rile a team to rage was something straight out of Coaching 101. But it had not occurred to him that the amount of emotion required to get an ordinary guy snarling and spitting would put a Nelson Jaworski over the edge.

  He barked out a trite, “Let’s save it for the field!” But it was obvious, even to him, that Nelson’s reaction was far beyond anything mere football could arouse.

  The big lineman snatched up a forty-five-pound plate from the weight rack and flung it at the wall. Crack! It took a three-inch chunk out of the cream cinder block.

  Something must have told the coach that Nelson’s mental state was not reachable by threats of benching or even expulsion from the team. Being an old linebacker, he dove forward, catching his lineman behind the knees, and toppling him to the floor. Even then it took six of us to hold him down.

  “You’re benched!” the coach bawled in his face. “And if I see another outburst like that, I’m calling the cops!” He clapped his hands. “Now, let’s get out there.”

  We were afraid to let him up, but Nelson himself panted, “I’m cool! I’m cool!”

  Todd and I lagged behind with him as the rest of the guys took the field.

  Todd was brutal. “Way to go, nut-job! What the hell was that supposed to be?”

  To our absolute shock, tears began to stream down Nelson’s cheeks. “Melissa’s cheating on me!”

  Todd blanched, but he recovered quickly. “Melissa? No way.”

  “I know it!” the lineman sputtered.

  “It’s impossible,” Todd insisted. “That girl’s totally into you.”

  “She has a hickey!” Nelson wailed. “On her—” He thought better of finishing that last sentence and added, “And I didn’t give it to her!”

  For me, it was like watching a bad dream coming true. My free-floating uneasiness about Jake’s parties was starting to play itself out in real life.

  Todd didn’t blow his cool. “Dude, you were so wasted last night! You were all over Melissa. I saw you.”

  Nelson shook his head vehemently. “I don’t forget stuff like that. Not with her. I can’t play today,” he added, forgetting the fact that he was benched anyway. “I can’t face the field. To look up at the crowd and know that he could be out there somewhere—”

  “He’s not,” I assured him with a loaded glare at Todd.

  Nelson was angry. “How do you know, Rick? You don’t even have a girlfriend. You don’t know what it’s like.” He glared resentfully at Todd. “You neither. Didi would never cheat on you
.”

  That hit Todd right where he lived. The fact was, Todd knew exactly what it was like.

  Coach Hammer was standing at the end of the tunnel. “Come on, you three. Move it!”

  Nelson pounded onto the field.

  Todd grabbed my arm and held me back. “We’re on the same page, right? Not a word to anybody, ever!”

  “Right,” I confirmed. It was true. I would never betray him. But it wasn’t out of any sense of loyalty or obedience to the great Todd Buckley. What I’d seen in the locker room that day confirmed something I’d always believed: this was not just boys being boys. Nelson’s pea brain was incapable of comprehending, let alone controlling, his arsenal of destructive power. And the emotional forces set in play by Jake’s parties had put him over the edge.

  I didn’t intend to be responsible for his first murder.

  If the front row had been filled with college scouts and not a phalanx of potbellied dads, Todd would not have done himself much good that afternoon. Maybe it was his near miss with Nelson in the locker room; maybe it was the late Friday night at Jake’s; or maybe it was just the simple fact that he wasn’t all that good to begin with. None of us were. I can’t believe we won.

  Liberty wasn’t great either, but they’d put together a decent record the season before. And none of their former coaches were doing time.

  On the first series of the game, they marched effortlessly down the field and scored. It didn’t bother us very much—we were used to stinking. But it practically killed Dipsy, who had established himself a few rows behind the visitors’ bench. He had the section to himself and his popcorn and chips, because most of our fans knew to give him a pretty wide berth. There he sat, stuffing his face until it was time to cheer “RUN!” or “THROW!” or “HIT ’EM!”

  “WHAT ARE YOU, REF—BLIND, STUPID, OR BOTH? THAT WAS %@&!$*# HOLDING!”

  Perhaps I forgot to mention that in addition to a voice like a foghorn, Dipsy also had a mouth like a toilet.

  The pathetic amount of resistance offered up by our defense on the opening drive convinced Coach Hammer that he’d better unbench Nelson. So what if the guy had nearly converted our locker room to a pile of rubble? If all his anger could be chaneled into a tackle or two, it was worth the risk of putting him out among humans.