Land of Savages
Eddie and I were itching for a fight. For weeks we’d been psyching ourselves up, waxing poetic on blood and guts and glory. But no amount of talk was enough. Talking was like scratching, it only deepened the itch. It only spread the rash until it covered your entire body, until soars opened up and began to bleed.
It had been too long, Eddie and I agreed, since we’d bled. Somehow we’d latched on to the idea that if you went too long in between experiencing real pain, you might forget how to do it, or forget that you could. We worried that in the absence of physical suffering we had atrophied, that we’d become soft.
Sure, we’d spent countless hours trying to stay sharp, trying to hone our edges by building ourselves up: conditioning, lifting weights, sparring on the stale, sour-smelling mats in the gym. We’d voluntarily subjected ourselves to countless hours of exertion, to chronic muscle aches and fatigue, to the mind-numbing boredom and monotony of the same controlled movements repeated in exactly the same way, again and again and again. But had any of it worked? Were we tougher for it? More fit to survive? More importantly, could we call ourselves men? We couldn’t be sure. Not without testing it. And until we did, Eddie and I couldn’t shake the lurking suspicion that all that time and effort had been wasted, that we’d been deceiving ourselves. We worried that all of it had been mere vanity: a tactic to attract mates, a way to convince ourselves that we were making some kind of progress in the world. Though we didn’t come right out and say it, we both feared that in all that time we’d only been pumping up our egos, seeking to inflate ourselves with a sense of power and efficacy because in reality we had none.
Eddie and I felt the time for confirming or dis-confirming our doubts was rapidly drying up. Graduation was t-minus one week, and the majority of classes had already ended. What remained of the semester, of our college careers, was little more than a downhill slalom of non-stop partying until the university, like the bars at closing time, announced: you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here. This only added to our sense that it was now or never, that we had better clear up any lingering uncertainties about our merit as men, or else leave school, not as bachelor’s of science or of business, but as masters in regret.
It was saturday. Eddie and I began our night at a girl’s swim-team house party on Murray Street. The hosts were two girls who had lived on my floor freshman year and with whom I had stayed friendly, sometimes more than friendly. Eddie and I socialized. We played games: beer pong, flip cup, kings…all variations on the single theme of drinking excessively. The longer we stayed, the more we drank. The more we drank, the more we raised our voices, the more we puffed out our chests and bumped shoulders into anyone who came within range. But the crowd was a docile one. They were athletes. They were kids with scholarships, with NCAA careers, or well-to-do kids who had family connections, kids who already had cushy, lucrative jobs waiting for them back home. Both sets were kids for whom there had always been something to lose, and therefore a reason to play it safe, to follow the rules. Eddie and I had only the grim prospect of returning home, of entering a faltering job market in an economy that had just tanked and was still careening towards rock bottom. In the wake of the housing crash, the only job security our degrees conferred upon us was future employment as Starbucks baristas. There was no sense that we held any type of winning ticket, that we had some fantastic opportunity waiting for us that was not worth jeopardizing.
If we’d been smart we might’ve chosen a different arena in which to grapple those frustrations. They were legitimate concerns: impending adulthood — the reality of having to support ourselves, to make decisions that would impact the rest of our lives. The popping of that sheltered, four year collegiate bubble was fast approaching. But Eddie and I weren’t smart. We thought we were. We thought we were a lot of things. We thought we were brilliant and inspired, two tough guys worth their weight in salt, two warrior poets who had their finger on the pulse, communing with the raw rhythms of life. Looking back though, the only thing I can say we truly were, was delusional. Delusional and naive.
At the party, Eddie seemed to reach his limit first. He crossed some invisible tipping point of alcohol and testosterone and slid into a primitive state of unmitigated aggression. Somewhere between his seventh or eighth beer Eddie began openly pawing at his girlfriend, Tiffany, thrusting his hand into the cookie jar a little too forcefully and far too publicly for anyone’s liking. That was out of character for Eddie. Despite his baser instincts, Eddie normally treated women with a strict, albeit slight perverted, deference. He took pleasure in playing the role of humble servant, in worshiping them, in composing crude poetry in their honor. When an attractive woman passed by Eddie would heave a great big sigh and intone, solemnly, that he’d “drag his balls across a mile of jagged rocks just to sniff her ass.”
But Eddie’s obsequious reverence was absent that night. I don’t know if it was because he was more drunk than usual, or that his dwindling time as a student had lifted the governor that normally checked his behavior. Whatever the reason, Tiff was having none of it. She was immediately annoyed, disgusted even, by what she considered his simian behavior. She kept slapping his hands away and baring her teeth. She reprimanded him under her breath. You could tell she didn’t want to cause a scene; she wasn’t an attention-seeker in that way. But when it became clear that Eddie was incorrigible, and that I wasn’t interested in interceding on her behalf, she exited the party in a huff, leaving us, as she put it, to our own cromagnon devices.
Eddie and I stayed on for a little while longer, but our interests in the party waned. We were happy to indulge our hedonistic urges, but we weren’t content, as most of our peers seemed to be, to merely drink and drug ourselves into thoughtless oblivion. That was lame, we thought, and uninspired. Besides, we’d tried that. We’d spent the last four years and the bulk of our teenage lives doing that — scorning the vague carrots of our “potential” and our “future” that parents and teachers were always dangling in front of us. We rejected their offers, and their conservative, fear-based values. Instead, we opted for rebellion, for promiscuity, for bouncing back and forth between getting low and getting high. But the appeal of that rebellion had worn off. It no longer felt satisfying to temporarily escape reality, to attain that sweet forgetfulness of existence beyond the next drink or the next smoke or the next orgasm in a string of unfulfilling sexual exploits that only left one feeling more depraved and forlorn. Eddie and I felt that we were moving on from all that, that we were graduating. We were entering a new realm, we said, one of genuine personal discovery. We were no longer running away from our “potential.” Now we were rising to meet it. And we were convinced that there was something particularly special out there for us — not the square, pre-packaged meals of maturity that our parents and teachers had offered, but something deeper, something more arcane, something we couldn’t articulate but that seemed to beckon us, to lure us in with the sweet scent of some delicious confection baking in the room next door.
Tiff had gone and nobody wanted to fight. Eddie crushed his beer can.
“Time to go,” he declared.
“Yea,” I agreed. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
I chugged what remained of my drink and we departed.
Outside, the night was warm and velvet. It was that time of year when the air and your bare skin are perfectly calibrated, when you no longer shrink away from the cold, but are not yet pinned down by the thick, meaty summer atmosphere. Eddie and I had spent the last six months bundled up and on guard, engaged in a constant battle against the cruel, northern elements. Now, suddenly, the elements had switched sides. They were our allies now, supporting us, caressing us with their warm breezes and agreeable temperatures. We welcomed it. We celebrated it and abandoned our socks for the season. But there was always a sense that it was too good to be true, that the carefree feelings it inspired were not to be trusted. At any moment, we thought, the elements might conspire against us, pull a Benedict Arnold, bring down some violent, malevolent storm.
At that moment though, all was well. The night was ours. It belonged to us. It’s purple darkness draped around us like emperor’s robes, conferring authority and power.
We turned onto Beethoven street. We were already sloppy. Our steps on the pavement were clunky, all drunken momentum and zero grace. Despite our illusions of being elevated above the petty quests of our peers, we were headed for another party, identical in form and function to the one we’d just left. Somehow this did not strike us as hypocritical. Though we claimed to be looking for something beyond the mere pleasures of sex and drink, we were still operating as if that were the only game in town. What else was there? We had suspicions. We had ideas. But we weren’t brave enough, or clever enough to figure them out. We could only talk about it, scratch at it, and keep scratching.
Eddie and I were from the same hometown. We’d grown up together, played baseball together, drank and smoked and chased women together. He and I had been forged in the same fires of foolish antics and roughshod culture that defined our small, upstate stomping grounds. Our college friends called it the land of savages. They’d given it that nickname after hearing our stories, and then witnessing first-hand the constant brawling, prankish mayhem, and general carnage that ensued whenever our buddies from home came up to visit. We took pride in their designation, and our history of violence. Yes we were savages. But we felt it gave us more character, that we had backbone and that growing up under those hard conditions had been an advantage. Eddie and I felt superior to all those students whose upbringing on Long Island and Westchester had been soft and privileged. They’d never experienced the grittier side of life, we told ourselves, and they were weaker for it.
How Eddie and I had made it out of our town to join this other, softer world — how we avoided criminal records, and the various dead ends that claimed most of our friends — was somewhat of a mystery. I suppose Eddie and I always wanted just a little more. We were not above the rough pursuits or simple pleasures of upstate living — guns, booze, playing mail-box baseball and setting whatever we could on fire — but we had a secret pension for the world of books and ideas, for immaterial things, for things that could not be held down or pummeled into submission. Late at night, when everyone else had passed out drunk or gone to bed mildly concussed from a night of ritual headbutting, we’d stay up, we’d talk out Socratic dialogues, or read passages from Bukowski. We recognized in each other a spiritual hunger, an insatiable seeking. I think that’s what spurred us to leave when so many others were satisfied to stay, to find a girl, steady work, and call it a day.
Eddie and I were still lumbering along Beethoven street, feeling charged by the mixture of alcohol and biological imperatives surging within. On the corner of Chestnut Street Eddie stopped to shadow box the air.
“I feel good!” he howled.
“Well you look like a dog’s asshole,” I said.
Eddie looked pleased by the taunt. He wooted. He jabbed at the night air, then turned and threw a left hook my way that only narrowly missed my cheek. I returned fire, skating over the top of his head with a flat palm. For a minute, we weaved in and out of each other’s reach, now and then making contact with a friendly open hand. Bobbing and weaving, limboing backwards and forwards to avoid slaps to the face, I recalled a boxing match that took place back in tenth grade. Eddie and I were at a keg party, in the cornfields out between 209 and the old rail trail. Someone had brought two pairs of boxing gloves to the party and within minutes, an impromptu ring formed. Eddie was a small guy. He was solid, with a tremendously thick neck and disproportionately large hands, but he was short, and he had a kind of Napoleon complex to show for it. It made him take bigger risks. He liked to be known as the guy who wasn’t afraid. He grabbed the first pair of gloves and called for a challenger. Our friend Stick answered. Stick had been given that nickname because he was a close talker who, once engaged, would stick to you. Mostly, Stick was a sweetheart, but he was a wrestler, and an absolute physical monster. At sixteen he was pushing two hundred pounds and all of it was muscle, a good half of it residing in his forearms alone. Eddie and Stick suited up and wasted no time. They fought like rock ’em sock ’em robots, each one of them trying to decapitate the other. Neither had finesse or strategy, had any strategy beyond seek and destroy. It was a simple war of attrition, a competition of who could endure more abuse. Watching Eddie take blow after blow I marveled at his tolerance for pain, and his absolute unwillingness to admit that he might be outmatched.
That was one image I carried of Eddie’s toughness. The other image was Eddie’s notorious brush with death.
Back home, as soon as the rivers and the mountain streams thawed in the spring, we took to the local swimming holes, plunging in with reckless abandon. We hit everything within a twenty-five-mile radius. Sometimes the swimming holes had poetic names, like Fawn’s Leap or The Rat’s Nest. Other times they were laughably simple, like Big Deep or Deep Hole. Cliff jumping was a pastime for us, like little league minus the adult supervision and the polyester uniforms. But cliff jumping was more than a game. It was a rite of passage, a ritual testing of one’s courage and bravery. In many ways it was not unlike a martial art, a discipline in which you worked your way up through the different floor exercises and belts. The beginner’s belt — the colorless, honorless white belt — equivalent to merely entering the frigid mountain waters. Yellow belt was a measly five to ten foot hop from a boulder. The higher the jump the closer to black belt, to respect and glory. It was not unusual to plunge fifty, sixty, or even seventy feet, without considering it any type of spectacular feat. There were some who were naturally more acrobatic, and they tended to perform their dives with impressive aerial maneuvers, but height was the ultimate bench-marker of achievement.
Eddie was a particularly avid jumper. He composed exhaustive lists of the various jumping locations, documenting their approximate heights, water depth, average temperature, and how popular or how crowded they were likely to be. Sometimes he even generated maps, hand drawn trail guides for the holes that were lesser known, or the ones that he had personally discovered and so were not well trodden.
During senior year of highschool Eddie had worked up and promoted a unique plan. He made it known that on the last day of school he was going to cliff jump every spot in the area, in ascending order of height and difficulty. He would end the day, he said, by taking The Leap.
We didn’t know anyone who had taken The Leap. It was rumored that one guy, a former navy seal, had done it, but that was unconfirmed. We threw rocks from the top of the gorge and used a stopwatch to calculate how long they took to hit the water, discovering that there were indeed practical applications for the physics we’d been forced to learn. We estimated The Leap was somewhere between one hundred and one hundred twenty feet high. That put it a whole head and shoulders above any other spot we were accustomed to jumping.
There were more than a few people who tried to dissuade Eddie, but Eddie was determined. I wasn’t worried. I’d seen Eddie perform countless acts that I was sure would be his undoing, but he always came through more or less unscathed, bathed in a revelatory glory. This, I imagined, would be no different. And it was much the same. He executed every jump flawlessly, and when he approached The Leap he was brimming with confidence.
It was a long way down. It seemed to take Eddie twice as long to fall as it had taken those stones. It took so long, in fact, that in his free-fall Eddie’s body turned a full one hundred and eighty degrees so that when he struck the water with a horrendous smack, it was his backside, his ass, that made most of the initial contact. The doctor explained what happened by stacking one fist on top of the other and telling us to imagine that it was Eddie’s spine. Then slid the top fist down so that his knuckles were side by side.
Even now, when I recall Eddie’s screams as he emerged from the water — and then miraculously swam back to shore — I shiver. Not a single one of us knew what to do. None of us had prepared for misfortune. None of us had imagined any outcome other than triumph. When the reality and gravity of the situation finally broke through the fog of our disbelief, two of us took off at a dead sprint for help, for the nearest house or telephone.
There were no in-roads by which an ambulance could navigate, or a pair of husky EMTs might wheel out a gurney to the stream’s edge and rescue Eddie from his agony. We were forced to wait, impotently, for help from above. We watched as Eddie writhed, as he tried in vain to find a position that wasn’t absolutely excruciating. Hold on buddy, we told him, they’ll be here any minute. Finally there was the deafening sound of the chopper, it’s violent, graceless flap-flap-flap echoing mercilessly in the tight channel between the gorge’s walls. The first responders peppered us with questions: Eddie’s age, height, weight. They wanted to know how long he’d been out of the water, if he had any allergies. They asked us, point-blank, if anyone had contacted Eddie’s mother or father. No, we responded shamefully, we hadn’t. We lowered our eyes from their accusatory stares. We watched, dejected and useless, as the responders set to work, as they belted Eddie onto a human-sized splint and loaded him aboard the chopper like a piece of cargo. Then he was gone.
The doctor said that it was the thickness of Eddie’s neck that saved him. That and luck. Lots and lots of luck. To see him in that state though, in his neck brace and hospital gown — with the steel rods and the metal hardware protruding from his upper half like spokes from the hub of a mangled wheel — luck seemed like something you were better off avoiding.
That was the second image of Eddie that I carried. Four years earlier I had seen him defy death. I had been witness to his slow and grueling rehabilitation. I knew the stuff he was made of, and so I had faith in him — even if I didn’t have half as much faith in myself.
We were only three blocks from our destination, three short blocks from what could have been an altogether different outcome. Since our mock bout, Eddie and I had been motoring along the streets in relative silence, our noses pointed ground-ward, as if sniffing for clues, for a whiff of that sweet scent that would indicate we were on the right track, headed towards that elusive, intangible thing we were hunting. Over the steady clomping of our drunken footfalls, I heard a voice call my name.
“Gene?” it rang out cheerfully.
I looked for the source. It was Noelle. Noelle from film class. She and a small band of people were sitting on the steps of a house we’d just passed. I stopped. I raised my hand to say what’s up and Noelle bounced off the steps towards me. We made small talk. We flirted. Noelle was cute, in an alternative way. She had short hair (when it was not cool to have short hair) and to my knowledge she had never worn a pair of ugg boots or leggings, a single fact that distinguished her from every other girl I encountered in my four years at the school. I asked Noelle what her plans were for the rest of the evening. She motioned her head towards the house.
“Just drinking here with some friends,” she said. “You guys wanna come in?”
I did. All that stuff I said about being above sex. Total bullshit. I wasn’t. And if I’d been alone I would’ve followed her in. But I looked over at Eddie and he made a not-so-subtle nod towards the direction we’d been heading. Somehow that was enough to dissuade me.
“Ah,” I said, “we’re headed over to a friends. Maybe I’ll catch you later?”
It was not so much a question as an invitation, an understated indicator of interest. It was always a good idea to keep your options open, to have a back-up plan in case the night didn’t go as you planned.
“Maybe,” Noelle said. But her eyebrow raised a hair, and her voice was playful, her terse response coming across more as a formality, a practiced step in a ritual designed to manufacture mystery.
“We’ll probably end up at Murphy’s,” I said. It was another step in the ritual. I was letting her know where she could find me, but I wasn’t asking her, outright, to meet me there. It was a crucial detail in the game — making sure that you were never too direct, that you never seemed like you needed it, or even wanted it all that much.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” she smiled. She turned back towards the house.
I watched Noelle saunter back to the porch, admiring her shape and her style, the pomade in her hair, the sonic youth t-shirt hanging over her cut-off jeans and her black chuck taylors. As she approached the porch one of the guys seated there made a comment. I heard Noelle say, “shut up.” Looking back I wouldn’t say I asked for it, but I suppose my standing there, ape-ishly gawking at Noelle didn’t help. It certainly held the door open for trouble to come in. Before I turned to leave, one of the guys seated on the porch made eye contact, and I didn’t look away. He mumbled something. It sounded like faggot.
“You got something to say?” I said.
He made no pretense. He stood up. His voice was loud and emphatic.
“I said KEEP. WALKING. FAGGOT.”
It was so blatantly aggressive that it took a moment for it to fully register. When it did I glanced over at Eddie. He was several paces ahead of me, his figure partially obscured by the shadow of a maple tree, but even in the relative darkness I saw a glaze of pleasure wash over him, saw the corners of his mouth turn up into a hungry, predatory smile.
“What’d you just call us?” Eddie hollered, his volume and tone obvious moves towards escalation.
“You heard me,” the guy on the porch taunted.
In a snap Eddie’s whole body seemed to tighten, to bear down on itself, as if compressing a giant spring that it would then release and use to propel itself forward.
“You just fucked with the wrong guys!” Eddie roared, igniting. He took off at a gallop towards the steps, his fists already clenched and held out to the sides.
I had no intention of having Eddie fight my battles for me. But it happened so fast. For the first few seconds — seconds that seemed to unwind according to a whole different set of physical laws — I found myself stunned, gazing voyeuristically at the scene as if I were at home, staring into my computer screen, watching a slow-motion video of two male chimps coming to blows over contested mating grounds.
It was a sound that brought me back, that released me from my paralysis. Eddie had charged past me, hooting like some redneck geronimo. At the same time, with unfathomable speed, the asshole from the porch descended the steps, darted out like an angry wasp from its nest to neutralize the incoming threat. Their two bodies met, collided. But it wasn’t head-on. It was more like a T-bone. The asshole, the wasp turned raging bull, speared Eddie from the side and his momentum carried the pair straight into the passenger door of a parked car. It was that sound that brought me back — the metal and the glass buckling upon impact. It made the sound of someone stepping on a sealed bag of potato chips. First, a loud pop. Then a horrible crunch.
I knew it was bad. I knew it was bad from that sound, and from the way Eddie’s body seemed to immediately unfurl, to give up its shape like a tent without poles. Don’t just stand there, I chastised myself, do something! I ran towards them. The guy had Eddie mounted, and he was pummeling him with fists to his face and head. I heard the first few thuds before I reached them. They sounded wet, like heavy boots striking damp ground.
The guys back was to me when I began to unload. I threw punch after punch. Left, right, left, right, left, right. Some hit, some grazed. Some missed entirely. If I’d been more strategic, if I’d employed any of the techniques Eddie and I had spent night after night practicing, I might’ve brought him down, or at least inflicted heavier damage. But I wasn’t thinking. I was only reacting — and floundering in the chaos. It was as if I’d been thrown into the deep end of a pool and, in the shock of being suddenly displaced from air into water, had forgotten how to swim. In our naive fantasizing, Eddie and I imagined that engaging in battle would activate some hidden locus of power, that we would tap into a wellspring of vestigial, hunter-gatherer skill. But I tapped into nothing. My well was dry. And there was nothing profound or sublime unearthed down there. There was only something automatic, a pitiful level of consciousness capable of executing only the most basic commands: Punch. Punch Again. Continue Punching…
Despite my flurry of fists the guy remained fastened on top of Eddie. My assault seemed only to distract him, to slow him down, forcing him to bob his head from side to side in order to avoid the brunt of my punches. I leaned in. I tried to throw as much weight and force into each strike as I could, but still, I couldn’t unseat him. I don’t know how many punches I threw before I decided to try something different. Frankly, I don’t remember trying, or deciding anything. I wrapped an arm around him, settled his throat into the crook of my elbow, between forearm and bicep, and squeezed. It worked. I could feel his panic. I could feel his legs start to unclamp from around Eddie’s body. Then my eyes bounced against my own skull.
I’d been hit from behind. Someone else had come off the porch. Another wasp had emerged from the nest. Eddie’s assailant wriggled free from my hold. Needing to make sense of the bewildering pain that had sent my eyes reeling in opposite directions, I turned around. I saw a body. I saw hair and clothing and limbs swinging, but I saw no face. I did not recognize the shape as human, only as a thing, a thing which was coming closer, a thing which meant me harm and was disruptive to my aim, which was to get back to Eddie.
There was no time to get my bearings, to size up my attacker, or to devise some kind of strategy. I just went at him. We exchanged blows. I hit him below the ear, where the jaw terminates. I felt half of my fist sink into the softer muscles of his neck, while the other half rattled against bone. He collapsed a little, fell into me as boxers do when they get tired. Forehead to forehead we grappled. I could feel his hot breath. I could feel his desire to hurt me. I could feel our mutual desperation in the way our hands searched feverishly for leverage. I found it first. I managed to throw him to the ground. I turned back toward Eddie. The guy was still there, still mounted on top of him and raining down punches. I lowered my shoulder. I rammed him as best I could, sent him careening off to one side. Then I was flying.
I looked up from the ground.
“Why don’t you just leave, man,” the second guy said. He sounded almost casual.
“I will!” I shouted. “Just stay the fuck away from him.”
I was on my hands and knees. I looked for Eddie. Saw him, lying still, a couple yards away. I crawled over to him. There was blood smeared across his puffy, swollen face, and his eyes were rolling back in his head. His mouth moved. He was groaning, softly, almost inaudibly. He looked like a fish that had been kept out of water for too long.
The two-on-one onslaught I expected didn’t come. I hovered above Eddie, my arms and torso spread over him like some kind of protective blanket. I had the strange feeling of being left on stage, of watching, uneasily, as the actors walked off the set, and the painted backdrops were wheeled away. My eyes felt unnaturally open, fully dilated, as if I were taking in every speck of detail, seeing every photon of available light. I could feel my heart beating. I could feel the pressure of the blood as it pushed against me from the inside. But I couldn’t hear anything. My ears felt plugged, as if I were underwater, as if the air had turned into a viscous primordial jelly that was too thick and too heavy for sound to travel through.
I felt something graze against my bare legs. I looked for an insect crawling on me, but found none. I felt it again. I searched the ground around me. Then I saw the object, a glint of light somersaulting end-over-end in a long arc. I watched it make contact with the ground. I watched it spread out, violently, into shimmering pieces, like the scales of a fish. It was a beer bottle. And then another. Bottles, one after another, were being hurled from the porch and they were exploding all around me.
“You’re next, skinny bitch!” an angry voice shouted.
“It’s over asshole,” I cried out. “You fucking won.”
I stood up. I tucked my chin into my chest to protect my face. I hooked both hands under Eddie’s armpits, peeled his limp body from the sidewalk like a piece of chewing gum, and dragged him into the street as the bottles continued to rain down around us.
We reached the other side of the street. I sat on the small strip of grass between the sidewalk and the road, panting, trying to catch my breath from the exertion of having just dragged Eddie’s dead weight across the deserted street. My hands were trembling. The adrenaline was ricocheting around inside me, my stomach inverted, flipped over like a fried egg with its yolk punctured, oozing out a stream of nauseating bile. There was blood trickling from my knuckles and my shirt had been torn around the neck. It was stretched out in the arms and the tail. It hung awkwardly from my body, made me look like a child wearing their mother’s or their father’s oversized t-shirt as a nightgown.
I was reluctant to call an ambulance. Eddie didn’t have insurance, and neither one of us had the kind of money to cover an out-of-pocket medical expense. I figured I’d get him home, he’d sleep it off, and in the morning we’d nurse ourselves back to health with some laughs about how we’d had our asses handed to us. That was my plan. It seemed reasonable. I just needed to get us home. Everything would be fine if we could just get home.
A group of buoyant pedestrians emerged from out of the darkness. I heard them laughing, talking animatedly as they headed downtown towards the bars. At first they passed us by, seemingly oblivious to the two of us lying there battered and defeated. But after passing they did a double-take, then swung back around. Was everything okay, they asked. What happened? Had the police been called? Had anyone called 911? What was I going to do?
They considered Eddie — lying there catatonic, producing strained, incoherent moans. They considered me — comparatively more alive, but disoriented and far-off, someone whose judgement was obviously unsound. Their faces projected a mixture of pity and disgust. I tried to explain my reservations about the insurance, about the cost. I tried to explain that Eddie was tough, that he’d be fine, that we’d be fine. We just needed to get home, I said. But my speech was rambling and disjointed, and the women in the group — those blessed, sensible creatures — they were unconvinced. They were adamant that an ambulance should be called. It’s not worth the risk, they kept saying. You have to. We’re calling.
Thank god they did call because Eddie’s brain was hemorrhaging. It was swelling up and expanding inside it’s hard shell, creating dangerous amounts of internal pressure. If I’d gone through with my plan there’s a good chance he would’ve died. Instead the ambulance arrived and for the second time I watched them load him up and carry him away.
They took Eddie straight into the ICU. They placed him on a breathing tube, injected him with steroids to ease the swelling, and made an incision in his head to alleviate the pressure. This I found out later, because I had not been there. I was left sitting on the median, that little patch of grass between the sidewalk and the street, contemplating the depths of our foolishness and stupidity. We’d been taught a lesson. We’d been deceived by the fallacy of the local maximum: places on the map that, relative to their surroundings, only appear to be the highest reachable state when in fact, just beyond what is immediately visible, there are true giants.
Eddie and I had been shown first hand that there is always someone out there who is stronger, someone faster, smarter, or more beautiful. Whatever you pride yourself on there is someone out there who can do it better, someone who will make you feel small and weak and insignificant. The world draws from an inexhaustible pool. And there’s only one spot at the top. One out of billions. You have to face that. Eventually you have to accept the reality that you are less than you wish to be. That you constantly overestimate your own abilities and underestimate everyone else’s. At some point you’ve got to own up to the fact that you’re bound to come up short, that the thing you seek, the thing you hunger for — to be superior, to be above constraint and limitation, to be as flawless as a diamond or a God — is not possible. You are you, in all your inadequacies. You are flawed and imperfect and subject to all the laws of nature, and all the laws of man. Once you realize that, you realize that there is no other game in town. There is no other realm. There is nothing sweet baking in the room next door. And even if there was, it probably wasn’t meant for you.
I don’t remember getting home. I don’t remember climbing the several flights of stairs to my apartment, unlocking the door, or crawling into bed. I came to the next morning, fully dressed, with my shoes still on. There were loud knocks at the door. Loud, repeated knocks. With each knock my head rang. Initially I thought I was merely hungover. I assumed I’d blacked out from drinking, which was not uncommon.
“One sec!” I yelled. I got to my feet, unsteadily. My whole body felt sore, particularly my hands and my arms. My fingers were swollen and stiff, curled up unnaturally like fat caterpillars. I peeled them back one by one,sending needling sensations all the way up to my elbows. It felt like I’d spent the previous day jackhammering concrete. I made it to the door. I opened it, shielding my eyes from the bright hallway light. There were two figures standing in the doorway.
“Stephen? Denise?” I said, bewildered. It was Eddie’s mother and father. I could not make sense of why they should be standing outside my door.
“Are you…okay?” Stephen asked, clearly disturbed by my appearance.
“Me?” I asked, perplexed.
“Eddie’s in the ICU,” Denise cut in soberly. “We’re here to talk to you about what happened.”
It hit me. The whole event resurfaced, re-inserted itself like a missing peg into the hole of my spotted consciousness. I hung my head, perhaps in shame, perhaps under the sheer weight and gravity of everything that had happened and that was now coming back all at once.
I did my best to give Eddie’s parents the most thorough explanation I could. I didn’t just replay the altercation. I gave them the whole background: our thirst for combat, our war-like preparations, all our misguided romanticism and hostile intentions. I felt they deserved as much. I’m sure they thought we were idiots, that we were reckless, and that perhaps we might even be slightly deranged. I could see that they struggled to comprehend why we — why anyone — would seek out trouble, would take such foolish risks. Though they didn’t say it, I could hear their pleading questions: Didn’t we value our lives? Didn’t we understand that we were not just hurting ourselves? Didn’t we see how utterly stupid and selfish our behavior was? Until that moment, until looking into their faces and bearing witness to the years of crippling worry, the years of fear and distress, the years of debilitating heartache that all of Eddie’s escapades had caused them, I had not understood. I’d never even considered it. How many more times, I wondered, would they have to go through something like this? How many more times would the phone ring, with the person on the other end of the line explaining, solemnly, that they had unfortunate news about their son? And how many more times would it be before there could be no more phone calls? How long did they think they had before their luck, or Eddie’s luck — if you could call it that — ran out?
Eddie’s parents wanted to press charges. They felt the other guys had gone too far. That was probably true, I agreed, but we had it coming. We’d started it, more or less, and certainly we’d been asking for it. Only we weren’t prepared for what we got. Stephen was disappointed, but he said he understood. He asked me, as a favor, if I’d hold off on making a decision until I’d had more time to consider. I agreed, but told them I wouldn’t likely change my mind. I apologized. Not only for not wanting to press charges, but for everything. It wasn’t right, I said, that Eddie had ended up so badly injured and that I was okay. Denise tried to comfort me. She assured me that she was glad that I was okay, that me being messed up wouldn’t have made things any better.
Denise thought I should still get myself checked out. She was worried about the cuts on my hands getting infected, and that I’d probably been concussed. I thanked her for her concern. I told her I would do that, but I was only being polite. I just wanted the conversation to end. I just wanted to crawl back into my hole of an apartment and hide in the dark until I could regrow a harder exterior than the one that felt like it had just been cracked open.
Before they left, Eddie’s parents said that if I wanted to, in a couple of days, I could go and visit Eddie at Albany General. “He’s back in his old room,” Denise joked morosely, though you could tell it was all she could do to keep from crying.
A few days later I went to the hospital. Eddie was wearing a faded gown that looked like it had been washed a million times. It was a shapeless thing, and it belied his well-defined physique in the same way that a mitten belies the details and the dexterity of the hand. Eddie’s head was bandaged. He had two black eyes the color of the sky before a thunderstorm.
Standing there in the room, with the incessant beeps of all the equipment Eddie who was hooked into, I felt uneasy. I wasn’t sure what to say. All I could think to do was to offer Eddie my open hand. I hung it out there, sure that he would reject it.
As our eyes met I felt flooded with doubt. Had I done enough? Had I let Eddie down? Had I dishonored myself? Should I have kept fighting? Should I have gone after both of them and taken my own merciless beating? Should I have gone done with the ship? My hand shook.
Eddie reached up. He wrapped his thumb around mine. His long fingers curled over my wrist and squeezed gently. His grasp was noticeably weaker than it had been only a few days earlier, but I felt relieved and comforted by it. It contained no ill-will, only the satisfaction of reunion with a comrade.
“Well, pal,” I smiled, “I guess it was you and I who fucked with the wrong guys.”
Eddie laughed. It caused him considerable pain, but it brought a healthy color to his face.
“You ain’t kidding,” he said.
The slack, medicated expression he’d been wearing when I came in lifted. It was replaced by a wide, shit-eating grin, but it didn’t hold. Eddie pulled his hand back and all my doubts returned.
“Listen Ed,” I said. “It should have been me. I’m — ”
“Stop,” Eddie said. He held up his hand to silence me.
We held each other’s eyes. I tried not to quiver. I tried to hold it all in.
“Don’t cry,” Eddie said.
I didn’t want to. But it had been so long since I cried. I guess I wanted to know if I still could.
