Scorpions

Stuart was a carpenter, come to give me an estimate for redoing a section of the basement. It was the section of the basement, the workroom, where I had spent some time as a youth. It was the dilapidated counter covered in a three-inch layer of tools and screws, with the little red vice where my dad taught me to saw. The kids’ saw was really an adult saw, efficient if you were strong enough but flappy if you were a kid. What I made with those scraps of sawed wood didn’t amount to much, some abstract sculptures, the hint of a ship.
Here he came, whistling down the stairs, this Stuart, chipper guy in his 20s with a lightness I must have once known too. He was improvising his own lyrics to the hit of the day, Alanis Morissette’s “One Hand in my Pocket,” singing, “I got one hand in my pocket, the other holding a soc-ket wre-eench.”

In a corner of the workroom was the door to our old clubhouse. It was once someone’s idea for a bathroom, though no plumbing was ever installed. My sister had either set up some benches made of plywood balanced on cinder blocks or gotten our dad to do it. One day she bequeathed the clubhouse to me and the club of which I was self-appointed president, the Scorpions. No longer did we have to meet under the stairs after sliding through a crawl space.

The new clubhouse was creepy and murky and damp and would flood with a foot of water in heavy downpours. Potato bugs would curl themselves into the Scorpions’ official notebooks, which contained minutes of meetings, lists of activities and records of votes on what activities to do. Blind man’s bluff or explore the woods.

When Ted Groupenhoff moved to town, something had to be done. Wherever he came from, this Aryan was a man among boys. Muscles on his blond-haired arms and a chipped front tooth, he seemed destined to take over the Scorpions and make subjects of us all. We had to come up with something. We passed a new law that in order to become a member, you had to beat me in the sport of your choice. You could choose from the standard American list of soccer, basketball, baseball or football. All games were one-on-one, full-court or –field. I didn’t know what I’d do if Ted chose football. It would be like tackling Larry Csonka. But he chose soccer, and I beat him handily.
One day after school in his basement bedroom, he said, “Watch this,” and put on a football helmet and drove his head through the wall. By the time his mom came downstairs, he had put a poster over the hole.

He was a bully even by school standards, not just in neighborhood standards. These were two different worlds for me; the neighborhood was like home and the school a couple miles’ bus ride away was a planet of aliens. Something about school distanced me from myself, slowed me down and silenced me, as if my blood and limbs couldn’t move at their regular pace through the fluid of its atmosphere. I, for example, could have beaten up the majority of Scorpions but would not stand a chance against any of the chief figures at school. Ted did. He not only stood a chance; he challenged everyone at school to fights. The first day of 5th grade, after Ted moved to town, he walked into the classroom and said, “I can beat anyone here in arm-wrestling.”

One Eric Zuelke, himself a recent transplant from Seattle, didn’t take kindly to Ted’s bravado and the two fought their first of a series of brawls. This one ended up with both roughed up, a draw, with Ted sitting on a file cabinet licking the blood off his fat lower lip. The young reporters were asking him, “Are you going to fight him again?” and he kept saying, “As soon as my lip gets better.”

Two different worlds. I was pathologically shy at school, had skipped first grade, was usually about the third smallest kid in the class. I never uttered a peep at school but was a babysitter’s nightmare. I never tried out for school football teams but was a terror in the schoolyard across the street, which was called Rock Creek Forest. Fathers complained that I tackled too hard.

I felt pretty dominant in any sport in Rock Creek on most days. But sometimes the two worlds would blend. Waves of immigrants would roll through our neighborhood, kids like Ted who had moved from who knows where, California maybe. Ted was so goofy at baseball that he would swirl around after missing, and once he actually hit the ball by accident on his second rotation. He didn’t have great hands in football, and I had long before banned handoffs, but if you could get him to catch a short pass, no one was going to take his Teutonic ass down. I only remember one time he went down fast, and that was the sheer luck of a chubby kid with breasts named Hobie sticking out his arm, so that Ted’s neck ran right into it for a picture-perfect clothesline tackle.

Some guys and I had finished a game one afternoon, and we were just lying back in the grass tossing the ball into the sky. It was a gorgeous spring day and the schoolyard which usually was empty but for 80-year-old Mr. Turner doing laps, today had that alien feeling of being packed with kids we didn’t recognize, some of them little ones playing four-square on the blacktop. Ted strolled across the field toward us with two older kids, teenagers perhaps. He pointed to me and Dave Chen and said, “I can beat him up, and I can beat him up.” I was still trying to figure out how this aggression had sprung from such a beatific spring day, when the elders chose Dave Chen. Dave was a half-Chinese guy from the other side of the tracks who got in fights a lot, once in the hallway on the first day of Leland Junior High, and he immediately started punching back when Ted charged him. It was a tie. Dave showed up at my apartment on his motorcycle 20 years later when I was in grad school in San Diego. He was a pharmacist in a black leather jacket and had brought his girlfriend with him from Houston. She was the first person I ever heard say, “Well, I was young, dumb and full of come.”

I don’t think Ted’s candidacy for membership in the Scorpions really ended with the one-on-one soccer game. I think it ended one day after school when we were hanging out in my bedroom. On some level I was probably still scrambling for a policy on how to deal with Ted’s colossal power. I don’t remember what the little issue was that erupted on my floor into an imminent threat, but I remember whacking him in the shin with my baseball bat, the alarming hardness and sound of his bone. He cried and went home. It felt a bit weak to have to use a bat, but at least the threat was over.

Now that I think about it, he also cried on the lip of the schoolyard near the pine tree when Michael McDonald, who was just as big as Ted, hit him with his patrol belt. It made me feel better about having used a bat on Ted to see big Mike McDonald use his patrol belt. I was never a patrol, but my understanding is that a patrol belt is just an orange strip of plastic that you wear so you can tell kids on the bus to keep their toes out of the aisle. I don’t think there’s any metal on it, except for the aluminum shield, and that must have been what caught Ted in the face for the way he screamed so loud. I couldn’t believe I was watching mighty Ted walked home in that slow-motion crying walk where your torso’s at a 45-degree angle to the ground. It’s kind of weird, that Ted cried twice like this in the private neighborhood world, when he never cried on the big stage, at school. He fought, he won, he got cut, licked his wounds, but he never cried.

Ted never made it to our high school. He burned his house down before that and had to move away. Now he leads environmentalist kayak tours in Hawaii.

At some point when Stuart the carpenter was singing away between his truck and the basement, and I was wandering around the house that would soon no longer be my home and sometimes staring at corners like the clubhouse that still had its red metallic “Keep Out” sign stuck to it, Stuart asked if I had a job. I didn’t know how to tell him that this was my job, that giving up one’s childhood home is no easy task, and that walking around trying to remember things is one of the hardest and most beautiful jobs I ever had.