My father always ran the neighborhood kids away from our house. I was
told not to play with them but I walked down the street and watched them anyhow.
“Hey, Heinie!” they yelled, “Why don’t you go back to Germany?”
Somehow they had found out about my birthplace. The worst thing was
that they were all about my age and they not only hung together because they lived in the same neighborhood but because they went to the same Catholic school. They were tough kids, they played tackle football for hours and
almost every day a couple of them got into a fist fight. The four main guys were Chuck, Eddie, Gene and Frank.
“Hey, Heinie, go back to Krautland!”
There was no getting in with them . . .
Then a red-headed kid moved in next door to Chuck. He went to some kind of special school. I was sitting on the curb one day when he came out of his house. He sat on the curb next to me. “Hi, my name’s Red.”
“1m Henry.”
We sat there and watched the guys play football. I looked at Red. “How come you got a glove on your left hand?” I asked.
“I’ve only got one arm,” he said.
“That hand looks real.”
“It’s fake. It’s a fake arm. Touch it.” “What?”
“Touch it. It’s fake.”
I felt it. It was hard, rock hard. “How’d that happen?”
“I was born that way. The arm’s fake all the way up to the elbow. I’ve got to strap it on. I’ve got little fingers at the end of my elbow, fingernails and all, but the fingers aren’t any good.”
“You got any friends?” I asked. “No.”
“Me neither.”
“Those guys won’t play with you?” “No.”
“I got a football.”
“Can you catch it?”
“Straight shit,” said Red.
“Go get it.”
“O.K.. ..”
Red went back to his father’s garage and came out with a football. He
tossed it to me. Then he backed across his front lawn.
“Go on, throw it . . .”
I let it go. His good arm came around and his bad arm came around and
he caught it. The arm made a slight squeaking sound as he caught the football.
“Nice catch,” I said. “Now wing me one!”
He cocked his arm and let it fly; it came like a bullet and I managed
to hold onto it as it dug into my stomach.
“You’re standing too close,” I told him. “Step back some more.”
At last, I thought, some practice catching and throwing. It felt real
good.
Then I was the quarterback. I rolled back, straight-armed an invisible
tackier, and let go a spiral fly. It fell short. Red ran forward, leaped,
caught the ball, rolled over three or four times and still held onto it.
“You’re good, Red. How’d you get so good?”
“My father taught me. We practice a lot.”
Then Red walked back and let one sail. It looked to be over my head as
I ran back for it. There was a hedge between Red’s house and Chuck’s house and I fell into the hedge going for the ball. The ball hit the top of the
hedge and bounced over. I went around to Chuck’s yard to get the ball. Chuck passed the ball to me. “So you got yourself a freak friend, hey, Heinie?”
It was a couple of days later and Red and I were on his front lawn
passing and kicking the football. Chuck and his friends weren’t around. Red
and I were getting better and better. Practice, that’s all it took. All a
guy needed was a chance. Somebody was always controlling who got a chance and who didn’t.
I caught one over the shoulder, whirled and winged it back to Red who leaped high and came down with it. Maybe some day we’d play for U.S.C. Then I saw five boys walking down the sidewalk toward us. They weren’t guys from my grammar school. They were our age and looked like trouble. Red and I kept throwing the ball and they stood watching us. Then one of the guys stepped onto the lawn. The biggest.
“Throw me the ball,” he said to Red. “Why?”
“I wanna see if I can catch it.”
“I don’t care if you can catch it or not.” “Throw me the ball!”
“He’s got one arm,” I said. “Leave him alone.”
“Stay out of this, monkey-face!” Then he looked at Red.
“Throw me the ball.”
“Go to hell!” said Red.
“Get the ball!” the big guy said to the others. They ran at us. Red
turned and threw the ball on the roof of his house. The roof was slanted and the ball rolled back down but managed to stick behind a drain pipe. Then
they were on us. Five to two, I thought, there’s no chance. I caught a fist
on the temple, swung and missed. Somebody kicked me in the ass. It was a good one and burned all the way up the spine. Then I heard a cracking sound, it was almost like a rifle shot and one of them was down on the ground holding his forehead.
“Oh shit,” he said, “my skull is crushed!”
I saw Red and he was standing in the center of the lawn. He was holding
the hand of his fake arm with the hand of his good arm. It was like a club. Then he swung again. There was another loud crack and another of them was down on the lawn. I began to feel brave and I landed a punch right on a
guy’s mouth. I saw the lip split and the blood began to dribble down his
chin. The other two ran off. Then the big guy who had gone down first got up and the other one got up. They held their heads. The guy with the bloody mouth stood there. Then they retreated down the street together. When they got quite a way down the big guy turned around and said, “We’ll be back!” Red began running toward them and I ran behind Red. They started
running and Red and I stopped chasing them after they turned the corner. We walked back, found a ladder in the garage. We got the football down and began throwing it back and forth . . .
One Saturday Red and I decided to go swimming at the public pool down on Bimini Street. Red was a strange guy. He didn’t talk much but I didn’t talk much either and we got along. There was nothing to say anyhow. The only thing I ever really asked him about was his school but he just said it was a special school and that it cost his father some money.
We arrived at the pool in the early afternoon, got our lockers, and
took our clothes off. We had our swimming trunks on underneath. Then I saw Red unhitch his arm and put it in his locker. It was the first time since
the fight I had seen him without his fake arm. I tried not to look at his
arm which ended at the elbow. We walked to the place where you had to soak your feet in a chlorine solution. It stank but it stopped the spread of
athlete’s foot or something. Then we walked to the pool and got in. The
water stank too and after I was in I pissed in it. There were people of all
ages in the pool, men and women, boys and girls. Red really liked the water.
He leaped up and down in it. Then he ducked under and came up. He spit water out of his mouth. I tried to swim. I couldn’t help noticing Red’s half-arm,
couldn’t help looking at it. I always made sure to look at it when I thought
he was occupied with something else. It ended at the elbow, sort of rounded
off, and I saw the little fingers. I didn’t want to stare real hard, but it
seemed as if there were only three or four of them, very tiny, curled up
there. They were very red and each of the tiny fingers had a little
fingernail. Nothing was going to grow anymore; it had all stopped. I didn’t
want to think about it. I dove under. I was going to scare Red. I was going
to grab his legs from behind. I came up against something soft. My face went right into it. It was a fat woman’s ass. I felt her grab me by the hair and
she pulled me up out of the water. She had on a blue bathing cap and the
strap was tight around her chin, digging into her flesh. Her front teeth
were capped with silver and her breath smelled of garlic.
“You dirty little pervert! Trying for free grabs, are you?”
I pushed away from her and backed off. As I moved backwards she
followed me through the water, her sagging breasts pushing a tidal wave in
front of her.
“You dirty little prick. You wanna suck my titties? You got a dirty
mind, huh? You wanna eat my shit? How about some of my shit, little prick?”
I backed up further into the deeper water. I was now standing on my
toes, moving backwards. I swallowed some water. She kept coming, a steamship of a woman. I couldn’t retreat any further. She moved right up to me. Her
eyes were pale and blank, there wasn’t any color in them. I felt her body touching mine.
‘Touch my cunt," she said. “I know you want to touch it, so go ahead, touch my cunt. Touch it, touch it!”
She waited.
“If you don’t, I’m going to tell the lifeguard you molested me and
you’ll be put in jail! Now, touch it!”
I couldn’t do it. Suddenly she reached under and grabbed my parts and yanked. She almost tore my dong off. I fell backwards into the deep water, sank, struggled, and came to the top. I was six feet away from her and began swimming toward shallow water.
“I’m going to tell the lifeguard you molested me!” she screamed. Then a
man swam between us. “That little son-of-a-bitch!” she pointed at me and screamed at the man. “He grabbed my cunt!”
“Lady,” said the man, “the boy probably thought it was the grate
over the drain.”
I swam over to Red.
“Listen,” I said, “we’ve got to get out of here! That fat lady is going
to tell the lifeguard that I touched her cunt!”
“What’d you do that for?” Red asked.
“I wanted to see what it felt like.”
“What’d it feel like?”
We got out of the pool, showered. Red put his arm back on and we
dressed. “Did you really do it?” he asked.
“A guy’s got to get started sometime.”
It was a month or so later that Red’s family moved. One day they were
gone. Just like that. Red never said anything in advance to me. He was gone, the football was gone, and those tiny red fingers with fingernails, they
were gone. He was a good guy.