Patrick and Me

The strange question.


Patrick and I had been friends, if you could call it that, forever. For as long as I could remember. Patrick had been there, living just a couple of houses down. The strange thing about our friendship was that a lot of it was fighting. The second I let down my guard his fist would suddenly come crashing into my shoulder or face. And it was the same the other way around. If he wasn’t looking I would just crush him. Then we’d go to it, punching, wrestling, kicking. It was harmless enough when we were little kids but as we got bigger we began to do some damage. Now, we didn’t fight because we were mad at each other. On the contrary, I never felt better about my buddy Patrick than when we were both sprawled on the ground, lips bleeding, eyes puffed up, laughing our asses off. For most of our childhood we looked like shit and our parents were always embarrassed when Miss Patterson, our school principal called them in. Patrick and Bobby were at it again. When we got a little bigger we began making some real scars, breaking both our noses and generally whacking the shit out of each other, while, believe it or not, grinning like total assholes. Take my word for it, you can hit each other damn hard in fun.
Now this wasn’t the only thing we did. We were like other kids and played baseball, basketball and stuff. But this fighting was what we really liked. We grew up in the old derelict town of H__ with everything around us falling apart. It would have blown away completely if it weren’t for the college that someone had founded there in better days. I guess it just couldn’t move away. Anyway the money these college kids spent was all that was keeping H__ afloat in those days. Patrick and I were both working class and our parents slaved away at shittier and shittier jobs to try to keep the families afloat. Other kids in our neighborhood were pretty much in the same boat and we never thought of ourselves as deprived or anything like that. If it wasn’t for my sister, Julia, a royal pain in the ass, life, I believed, would have been perfect. She was always going on about Patrick and me and how we embarrassed her. But that was minor shit.
Of course we didn’t just fight each other. Patrick, especially would just haul off and whale on just about any guy who rubbed him the wrong way. Or the right way for that matter. Then I’d have to help him out. There was nothing he loved more than trouble, and I was pretty much the same way. When any other guy was involved it was always Patrick and me against the world. We had other friends, and all together we used to fight with “the Danny kids,” Danny Hamilton’s gang that included Danny’s little brother and the scary John Thompson a kid two years older than us who used to hang out with Danny and his brother and the other kids who hung around with them. We had a couple of guys on our side, too, McShane, Becker, and a couple of others, but they came and went and it was usually just Patrick and me. We really couldn’t count on anybody else.
Then one day I was alone for some reason and the Danny kids jumped me. There wasn’t much I could do and pretty soon they were holding me down. Now, you might think that I was going to get the shit kicked out of me, but the Danny kids weren’t like that. Nobody just ganged up on some outnumbered guy. Instead they put me to the test of courage. Danny had set up this whole test of bravery for his gang. We ran around all over town jumping off rooves, running the gauntlet, swinging on vines between cliffs, diving into the river. It was a Danny kids thing. When I had done all that they let me go. Well, after that the war between us and the Danny kids just wasn’t the same and it kind of petered out.
As you can imagine, Patrick and I weren’t the best looking kids on the block. That kind of fighting doesn’t leave you unmarked and we both had faces that showed it. I guess it made us scarier that it didn’t matter much if our noses got broken. Most of the other kids in school gave us a pretty wide berth, though in our neighborhood fighting wasn’t all that unusual.
As I said, we did do other things, and when Pollack, the guy who ran the Y, got up a Pony baseball league, Patrick and I went out. We had just turned fourteen so we were the right age. We played our games at old Briarly field that, like the rest of H__ had seen better days. It actually had a few stands on the baselines and a backstop, but no one had taken care of the infield for forever and it was more like patches of dirt around the bases then the nice circular space you find on a real field. Somehow Pollack had gotten the city to mow the outfield once, but they didn’t go all that far out and there was tall unmown grass not that far behind third base. If you hit it over the outfielders head there was a hell of a good chance he would lose the ball and maybe that would be the end of the game. For Pollack only brought one ball to every game. A pop foul usually ended up in the creek behind the first base line and the ball got soggier and soggier as the game went on. But we knew no better and just thought that was the way things were.
Clinton Street ran along the back of left field and on the other side of it was Shay’s Tavern. Now when I say we lived in a working class neighborhood, it wasn’t one of those old tidy working class neighborhoods. It was a falling apart desperate more unemployed than working class neighborhood. Shay’s, like everything else around there, had seen better days. You could tell it had once been, not classy, but respectable. And judging from the size, which was pretty big, had been popular.
Pollack was a busy man and so the games didn’t start until late afternoon when he could get off from his day job at the Y. Even though they only went seven innings it was often pretty dark before the games ended. In the strange light and long shadows of summer dusk, Shay’s was already jumping, and everybody knew why. To stay alive Shay’s bouncers just winked at carding customers. Almost anybody could get in there and it had become the place to go for the underage college kids. I bet they liked the raunchy atmosphere too. Slumming I guess is the word. Anyway, when we turned away from the dusty field we saw all kinds of fancy convertible cars with girls riding in them pulling into and out of Shay’s parking lot. At fourteen years old this looked like heaven and completely out of reach.
Now, like most normal kids, Patrick and I had discovered girls, whom we experienced as completely incomprehensible. For as high handed as we were with any guy, girls terrified us. Neither one of us had any clue how to talk to them. Julia was absolutely no help. If we followed her advice we should both give up and commit suicide. “No girl is going to look twice at those ugly mugs,” she said with scorn. This didn’t give us any extra confidence and we were already as shy as deer. Shy is hardly the word for us. I would blush beet red if Dabby, a girl my fancy had somehow attached itself to, even glanced my way. I would rather have fought all the Danny kids at once than walk past Dabby and Karen as they whispered, giggled, looked back at me, and giggled again.
It became so bad that Patrick and I would sit around for long hours trying to figure out how to talk to girls. We had almost forgotten to fight with each other. I was pretty sure we had fucked up our lives with all this fighting. Let’s face it, we were ugly, even if we were the toughest guys in the school.
We spent a lot of time just staring at our droopy, miserable, ugly pusses in the mirror. Meanwhile Dabby was going out with this guy named Kenny who walked like Richard Nixon and scurried away whenever I got close. Patrick claimed he had read somewhere that girls didn’t care about ugly. They were looking for something else. But what that was he didn’t know. I knew he was full of shit because Patrick never read anything unless his mother made him.
At about this time a number of things happened. First of all it became pretty clear that Patrick could hit a lot harder than I could. It was like a fucking sledgehammer, and my ability to roll with the punches had to take a quantum leap forward. I had always been a bit faster than him and I got even better at that. But getting hit by him wasn’t as much fun as it used to be. So I did a strange thing. I went out for a play. Patrick and I had pretty much faced the fact that girls were beyond us and I thought that maybe hanging around them in the theater would give me some ideas. We knew Patrick would have no chance at this because no matter what he did, whenever something came out of his mouth it sounded like a threat. But I discovered that I had a knack for it. I got the part of Richard III in Shakespeare.
Well, what could be better? There was old ugly humpbacked Richard wooing Anne after just killing her husband. He was no pretty boy either. And he was a monster, like us. When I told Patrick about it he nearly went ape. He immediately started thinking he was an actor, but since he had no part in a play he just did it in real life. He would just walk up to some guy and say something like, “hey, did you make the drop?” as if they were crooks in cahoots or something. When other people were around it sometimes got quite a stir. Patrick was a whole lot better actor in real life than on the stage for some reason.
Unfortunately, the stuff Richard III used on Anne didn’t seem applicable in our situation and we still didn’t know what to say to girls. Playing little games with people in the street got old fast. The better we got at it the less interesting it seemed. Our last baseball game with Pollack came and we lost ending our chance to go to P__ for some playoff game. Turning towards home we looked at Shay’s lively parking lot.
“Let’s go there tonight,” Patrick said, a gleam I knew all too well in his eye.
”I hate to break it to you but we’re only fourteen.”
“They’ll never guess.”
At one point we had bought shades to make ourselves cooler. It hadn’t done much good since we were all tongue tied. But now Patrick was sure that wearing them would get us into Shay’s. We went home and cleaned up. We both had hoped that cool clothes would help so we had something to dress up with. I had these tight grey pants, snazzy boots, and a billowy white silk shirt. My taste wasn’t terrible even then. Patrick looked like a fucking fourteen year old pimp.