Essays by DAR

The Ace of Diamonds

(First published in obit-mag.com, Summer 2008)

At the beginning of junior high I was unexpectedly taken under the wing of the coolest kid in class. I didn’t know why he saw fit to choose me; all I knew was that my world opened – I suddenly became aware of all I had been dreamily oblivious to in grade school: that there was such a thing as popular and unpopular kids, that girls favored the popular ones, what power was. I had never paid special attention to anyone before, but I made up for lost time by understanding that Eric was of Swedish descent, a Viking hero, danger-headed and golden-haired, with transparent eyelashes; I was instantly moony for him, my eyes puppyish with love. I was like a rookie catcher from some dusty farm league, plucked by a star Big League pitcher to be his partner. Anointed.

In the rigid caste system of junior high, we were at the top, and under his Norse tutelage I was his second in some spectacular after-school adventures. We leapt off a rope swing into a canyon full of boulders and somehow – because he said we wouldn’t -- didn’t snap our ankles. We jumped onto ice floes and rode them out beyond the bridge. We tossed a coin for math class homework and astounded the class by getting heads 20 out of 20 times. We found an exploded dynamite casing from where they had blasted boulders to make Interstate Route 95. We were sprayed by a skunk and had to bathe together in tomato juice. We sat for hours in his tiny windowless converted closet of a bedroom -- the ceiling slanted to the floor -- that smelled horrifically of his baseball cleats, and it was here that we perfected a best friend’s slap-handshake routine that became the envy of our classmates, and here that he confided his secret wish to catch an atom bomb falling from the sky, which we both thought was the most heroic thing imaginable -- to make a final gesture as futile as it was noble.

To kick off the beginning of mid-winter break in a blaze of glory he even burst his appendix in school one morning without complaining, just stoically sitting in class until he calmly said, "I think I should see the nurse." He spent the entire break in the hospital, prohibited from seeing visitors, with no phone in his room, so the only way I could communicate with him was to send him an envelope. With wild hyperbole, but also with more simple thrilling dash than I would ever again have in my life, I enclosed only a single thing inside: an ace of diamonds, a wordless reminder that he would recover and continue being my hero.

One afternoon that spring, when he was back in full swing, Eric and I came up with the after-school idea of making a torch by wrapping old towels around the end of a broom handle and dunking it in gasoline. Then we went running down the road near my house yelling "Hail Methusah." When we got to the bridge, we turned and beheld a fragment of burning towel floating lazily behind us in the wind, landing in the island of cattails just off the road.

Instantly Heart's Island exploded. Like a dream that was both slow motion and fast motion at the same time, the flame went "woooomph." Right before our eyes a third of the island was engulfed in crackling, rustling, real-life fire that singed Eric's eyelashes and made my fingertips go cold. Stunned, we ran up the street and banged on the doors of unoccupied houses. Neighbors left their doors unlocked in those days, and we pushed one open and found the kitchen phone and yelled for the operator to connect us with the fire department.

The instant the connection was made, we heard the siren go up a mile away, and we ran outside to see one of the sights of our lives: a sheet of bright orange flame as high as the telephone wires. We waited with our hearts in our throats for the two or three minutes it took for the volunteer fire trucks to arrive, and with them what seemed like the entire town: babysitters pushing strollers while eating Milky Ways, kids straddling bikes and enjoying the show. It took a surprisingly short time to put out the fire, but our afternoon was in tatters. Our clothes and hair smelled like smoke. The firemen advised Eric and me to separate and go home; the chief would call on our parents that night.

My heart was enflamed. It had suffered so many emotions in such a short while -- excitement, panic, fear, relief -- that it felt like it had been soaked down with a fire hose and now was spongy with the next emotion: apprehension. What would my parents say? When the fire chief came to our house that night to make sure I wasn't a pyromaniac – and to offer the advice that a bed sheet would have worked better, because it wouldn’t have shredded -- my parents amazed me by consoling me. I was grateful, and even allowed my mother to stroke my hair that night with my head in her lap, one of the only times in my life we both were in the mood to let such tenderness take place.

The fire was the end of my friendship with Eric, however. Because just after the siren went off and while we were waiting for the fire trucks to arrive, something awful had happened. Eric started whimpering -- just a tiny noise that rose from his gut with the sound of the siren. I wanted to whimper myself, there on the street hearing the fire trucks get closer. But I wouldn't tolerate it. "Buck up, Eric," I told him.

I had no idea where those words came from. I didn't even know the expression "buck up," and I was mystified as to where I found the brute authority to speak it. Shocked, Eric obeyed. He cut off the whimper mid-snivel. We got through the fire, we survived the reprimands from teachers and the congratulations from classmates the next day in school. But our friendship was doomed. Eric and I stabbed at it a few months more, but he never forgave me, and by the next year he hated me.

Who was "Methusah?" It wasn’t until the end of our teenage years that I realized our cry of "Hail Methusah" was incorrect. It should have been "Methuselah" -- the oldest man in the Bible, the grandfather of Noah who lived to be 969 years old. I would have liked to consult Eric as to why a couple of glory-starved children would choose to mangle a biblical name as they burned down an island of cattails, but by that time we were not only not friends. Eric’s body had decided not to live to the age of Methusaleh, or anywhere close. He was dying of leukemia at the age of 19.

I went to see Eric in his hospital room shortly before he died. We had gone our separate ways after the fire. He hated me for continuing with advanced placement courses while he dropped to the middle, for starring in the senior class play while he was a stagehand, for scoring high on my French SATs even though I had just gone down the rows, filling in dots at random. His shame defeated us. Where once we had performed a best-friend’s slap-handshake routine in the hallway, by the end of high school we passed without nodding.

But he was wounded and I had to reconnect. On a visit home from college I went to his room in the local hospital. He looked like a fallen hero in his white bed, a slain gladiator. He was still so charismatic that he had gotten his nurse to fall in love with him, which struck me as neat a trick as catching an atom bomb falling from the sky – making one final act of heroic futility.

There was so much I wanted to talk to him about. In our quest for glory, did we maybe fudge the coin toss a bit for that math homework; maybe it was time to own up to the fact that there were a few tails in the mix. I had found out that Heart's Island wasn't a real island after all; it was a peninsula. I wanted to talk to him about how peninsula was such a sad word. One time in fourth grade the only kid who knew its definition was someone who had stayed back. Mrs. Wilson was startled. "How did you know that word?" she asked. "My father taught me," he said. And the whole class had been touched and sad, picturing Jay with his father sitting around with a map at night, the father trying to teach his slow-learning son something. And succeeding.

Eric had been there, in that fourth grade class, and I wanted to talk to him about that; and other equally sad heroic things that I knew the junior-high schooler in him would appreciate, maybe even about his leukemia, if we could. Was it the cleat-reeking airlessness of his boyhood closet bedroom that made him sick? Was it our fire that had somehow scorched his blood, or my unforgiveable words that had so deeply shocked him? Mostly I wanted to tell him that I had figured out why I had said the thing I’d said, that I had borrowed his grandeur to say it, that it really came from him! -- what I had learned being his puppy dog, how I imagined he would have acted in that situation -- even though it happened to be me who was granted the wherewithal to voice it.

But we couldn't. We didn't. There was nothing to say. We who had once sat jabbering together naked in a tub of tomato juice now sat silent in his over-dry hospital room. He asked me how his hair looked after the chemotherapy and I told him it looked cool. Because it did. Even dying, Eric couldn't not look cool. He was glad to hear that, but again we fell into silence.

We strengthened each other by being there together; we also weakened each other. We were old friends who knew things about each other no one else knew, yet we weren't friends any longer at all. I felt like an imposter; I felt like his only ally. We were uneasy and awkward and phony with each other; at the same time we were relaxed and true. We consoled each other, and made each other disconsolate. Our silence was profound.

After a few minutes it was apparent that it was time for me to go. I got up and approached his bed. We both knew it would be the last time we would lay eyes on each other. I reached into my pocket and pulled out an envelope for him. Inside was a single thing.

His eyes filled with tears. It was the only time I ever saw my Viking cry.

"Bye Danny," he said.

"Bye Eric," I said.

He tucked the ace of diamonds under his pillow as I left.