Captain Kangaroo!” Don announced.
I remembered the morning TV show.
A tennis court was in the front yard. Tall shrubs blocked most of the great big white house. We sat there for a minute or so staring at the house. What was Don thinking? Was he looking to show us that my mother’s family members weren’t the only ones with wealth? There was more of it out there.
“Look, there he is bouncing in the bushes!” Don exclaimed like a little boy. I looked but no one was there.
We laughed and my mother told him to get going.
9
HE WAS THE NEW KID at school with the pudgy face, dark skin, black curly hair, and big fierce eyes. I found Gene Muraco in the elementary school hallway crying his eyes out. He sat on the floor against the wall with his legs crouched up against him like a shield. The boy was hysterical. The boys had been picking on him for some time since he had arrived at our school, just as they had done to me when I had moved to the town. They had put me through hell— making me do pushups, chasing me around, having their older sisters wait outside, but unlike Gene, I never broke down, at least in front of them. I fought them with a vengeance or escaped out the back door. I had made it through, with the help of Steven, of course. Gene, though, was having a rough time on the road to respect, and so I had great empathy for him. This would be the foundation of our friendship.
Kneeling down next to him I assured him.
“Don’t worry, it’s going to be all right. They’re just messin’ around. They did it to me too when I moved here. They’ll stop soon.”
I told Gene to be strong and not to worry. I told him his frizzy hair could use a trim, but that it didn’t matter too much, even though I knew my new spiked haircut had made a world of a difference. I told him it was all right to me that he looked different. His dad was half Italian and half Hawaiian, his mom was Latino, so his skin was naturally a bit darker than what everyone was used to. He stuck out as the odd guy, but maybe we needed that. I told him I thought it was cool. I told him not to fret.
Months later, Gene was feeling more at home. He was wearing gel in his hair. I had told him about a cool barber I went to up the road and he started to go. He even started to attend my backyard wrestling tournaments, which were a huge confidence builder for him. These wrestling matches had also aided me on my road to popularity. All the kids liked a place to hang.
A group of us would gather in my backyard on Saturday and Sundays to battle it out. Sometimes we had as many as twenty kids in my backyard. Steven, who was the biggest and strongest, was the world champion, of course. The other big kid in our grade never showed up. Evan Klaus didn’t want the confrontation with Steven.
Battle royals were wild. A good twelve of us would rumble it out until there was one person left standing. All you had to do was stay within the boundaries and push everyone else over the line. I always eliminated kids with the use of foreign weapons: a 2x4, bulky snow boots, sand in the face, a TV remote control, a telephone cord, a folded steel chair. See any of those come out and you’re going to take a step back, right over the line of elimination. There were a few times I thought they were going to kill me after these stunts.
There were two boys who always lost. They were the equivalent of the washed-up guys on TV who never won a single match in their entire careers. They called them the jobbers because they enhanced the talent of the real superstars. We would dominate these boys— pulling their hair, hoisting them into the air, slamming them on their backs. We often sent them home crying, but they always came back for more. You have to respect their determination.
Gene Muraco was not one of the losers. He was big and could hold his own in the ring with the majority of us. Wrestling with the other guys in the neighborhood was a way of proving ourselves, and Gene did it well. He would punish the two losers with sheer enjoyment. There was one memorable day when he held one of the losers straight up in the air in an upside down suplex for a whole fifteen minutes before dropping the sick screaming boy on his back. We honestly all got roughed up from time to time; I remember seeing stars a few times while wrestling Steven. We’re lucky no one broke their neck.
Gene began to take on some of the other popular boys and began to make his mark on the scene. I took him on as a tag-team partner, and we went straight to the tag championship and dominated the scene for a while. Gene fought just as dirty as I did: choking, using weapons, holding opponent’s pants in pins. We both did anything we could to win our matches and enjoyed being the “villains.” Sometimes we would hurt someone so bad he couldn’t get back up. Then we’d double-team their partner until the match was ours. Sometimes Gene and I would come out with war make-up on our faces looking like the lunatics we were; this frightened the hell out of them.
Through time, Gene and I would come to battle each other in practice matches, always non-titled of course, and private so no one would ever know the outcome. Gene and I competed during the week in his backyard, since all of the other boys were off doing basketball or baseball. Some days he got the best of me and used his weight to his advantage. Some days I used my speed and skill to outmaneuver him. There were many draws where we both lost due to time expiration or double knock out. We’d lay there exhausted, sweaty, laughing at the sky.
One day during one of our private matches in Gene’s backyard, he did the unthinkable for a heavier wrestler. He perched the second ropes, which was actually a picnic bench, and he prepared to deliver a crushing elbow smash. As he leapt through the air, his big torso seemed to go into slow motion and freeze for a moment, hanging over me as I lay on the grass waiting to be crushed. Up went my foot, as wrestlers on television often do when they see a devastating elbow on the way. Gene flew at me through the air and came crashing down face first into my foot. But it wasn’t his face that hurt. He had landed the wrong way on his ankle and tumbled over. His ankle instantly swelled up like a mango. He lay there on the ground before me crying as he had done a year earlier in the hallway.
“Do you want me to go get your father?” I asked him.
“No.”
“Do you want me to call the hospital?”
“No.”
“Is it broken?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
After a half an hour of crying on the grass, he stood and limped his way inside his house and I went home. Gene was the type of person to never ask for help and never admit to having a crisis; instead, he’d lay there his whole life on the grass trying to fix it all himself. He hadn’t needed my help anyway; after all, it wasn’t broken. A minor sprain put him on the sidelines for a few weeks and the incident was never mentioned ever again.
$$$
We were like the ultimate rock band about to begin a tear in the heart of our hazy prime. Gene was part of it now— the popular crowd. His confidence had grown. Gene had become close with one kid named Ryan Bailey, who was a little red-haired boy with a wise sense of humor. Despite the time they spent together, Gene had a cruel way of talking badly about Ryan behind his back.
One day in the Kennedy’s basement, Gene ranted on how weird Ryan was and how his parents were nutcases.
“His father is a mad scientist. He lives downstairs and watches porn... His mother is a psychotic bitch and lives upstairs now that they’re separated... Ryan looks like a….”
After ten minutes of verbally destroying him, we let Ryan out of the closet where he had been hiding and listening to Gene’s rant. Ryan wouldn’t even look
