Warm Up

There was this kid in my neighborhood named Andy K. He lived with his big Irish family in a rented house two down from us, on the other side of the walkway that led to the park. The house had green shingle siding and a carport covered with corrugated green plastic. When it rained, tines of clear water streamed down evenly along the length of the carport. From the window of my attic bedroom I watched this phenomena, captivated by its perfect uniformity. Then my mind always drifted to life within Andy's house.

His father listened to the opera and drank a big glass of red wine before dinner. His sister was a beauty queen who had been a finalist for Miss Michigan and held herself apart from life in the neighborhood. In the basement Andy had a Coleco Vision game system which I thought inferior to Atari but which I nevertheless condescended to play from time to time, mostly in hopes of glimpsing his sister in her rapid passages to and from her bedroom.

Andy and I were famous in our neighborhood for our series of fights. We'd been fighting since the day after my arrival in the neighborhood, and after each bout we'd agree on a winner and then mentally tabulate the overall score of the series and agree on that as well. Sometimes we fought over a disagreement, but as he was a polite boy and I was a polite boy we rarely disagreed, so we would agree to fight just to keep the series going. We always fought in his back yard. I remember the way the impact of his fist made a "chock" sound in the bones of my face, the stunning blast of pain when he bloodied my nose, and the groaning rolling clutches in the snow and the grass. He was a polite fighter and so was I. We really liked one another and always let up when the other was beaten. We were both very proud of our series and reported on it to our parents and grandparents. In all my letters to my grandmother I mentioned the latest battle and the overall score.

One day we stopped fighting. I don't know why; maybe we were too old, or too emotional now in puberty to trust that our friendship would survive, but the irony was that without the fights we had no real basis for friendship, and so we drifted apart. I became bookish and withdrawn and Andy K. began to avail himself of his brother's weights, put on fifteen pounds, and joined the football team. Andy went to the Catholic high school and I went to a Christian school but I followed his football career in the local paper. One day I saw him outside and congratulated him on his successes and he shook my hand in a massive and calloused hand and I was glad then, feeling his hand and looking at his powerful build, that we'd stopped fighting.