One in Every Crowd (3 page)

My cousin claims he invented the game, but I swear it was me. You need what they call a rat-tail comb, one of those plastic ones you can buy at the drug store; they come in bags of ten. They have a comb part, and then a skinny plastic handle, which, I suppose, is where the name comes from.

You take the comb and heat it up over an element on the stove so you can bend a curve into it, like a hockey stick. Then you get a ping pong ball, or one of those plastic golf balls with the holes, and there you are. Comb ball, we called it. Let the game begin.

The game was invented to be played in a long, narrow hallway, so a mobile home is the perfect stadium. You close all the bathroom and bedroom doors, and each opponent gets on their knees at either end of the hall. Kind of like a soccer goalie, only shorter. Whoever has the ball goes first.

You hold the handle of the comb in one hand and bend the comb back with the other, and let go. The ping pong ball rebounds off the walls and floor at speeds approaching the sound barrier, and the other guy tries to block the ball with any part of his completely unprotected body.

A ping pong ball striking naked skin at the speed of sound is bound to hurt. So there were the obvious injuries: circular welts about the face, neck, and arms were common. There were other hazards, too: carpet burn, bruised elbows and knees. Once, my sister leapt up to block a shot and smashed her head on a door handle and just about bit the tip of her tongue off. My cousin sprained his wrist trying to flip himself back onto his feet for a rebound.

My aunt stepped in, in an attempt to reduce the casualties. She tried to ban comb ball altogether, but was met with such a united front of dismay and pouting that she was forced to compromise. We were only allowed to play until someone cried. And we had to scrub off all the little white marks the ping pong balls left on the wood panelling.

We were only allowed to play until someone cried. Of course, this added a masochistic element to the game we all enjoyed. I would take a stinging shot to the lower lip and kneel motionless in the hallway, breathing deep through clenched teeth. Everyone would stop, searching my face for any sign of moisture, which would signal the end of the game. “Doesn’t hurt,” I would whisper bravely. “It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t hurt. Let’s go. My shot.” Everyone would let out their breath and continue.

Whoever cried ended the game. Whoever cried sucked. My aunt would march in and grab our combs, and send us outside to play. “It’s a beautiful day out there. Quit killing each other in my hallway and go get some exercise.”

Playing outside was okay, but there was nothing like a rousing, bloody match of comb ball. We would compare scars afterwards, like soldiers. “Took the skin right off, bled all over the rug too,” we would brag, our striped shirts pulled up over our elbows. “And not one tear. Kept right on going.”

My cousin Christopher ended it all the day he broke his thumb. This required a trip to emergency, and a splint. He forgot to try not to cry, and the combs were confiscated for good. For a while we were impressed with his sling, and his need for painkillers, but then reality set in. No more comb ball. Christopher was a wimp, and prone to accidents. Remember, he got that concussion that one time and they took the tire swing away? We all mourned the loss of the greatest game that ever came to the trailer park.

We came up with a version of cops and robbers that satisfied our bloodlust for a while. It involved riding around on our bikes and wailing on each other with broken-off car antennas, but it wasn’t the same. Crying while playing outside was a different story, because you got to go back into the house. The stakes weren’t as high. There was nothing to lose.

I worry today, about my friends’ kids. Nothing hurts when you play Nintendo, not even when you die. What are we teaching our children? I still utilize the skills I learned playing comb ball. Just the other day, I fell off the back of a five-ton truck helping my friend move. I leapt up immediately, exclaiming, “It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t hurt.” And a couple of weeks later, it didn’t. Just like the good old days.

IT SEEMED LIKE A FINE IDEA AT THE TIME. Of course, now I look back and count my ten fingers and toes, my two legs and arms that still function properly, shake my head that sits on top of the neck I have never broken, and thank my guardian angel that I still possess these blessings. But it seemed like a fine idea at the time.

My father is a welder, and his shop was located in the middle of a large and potholed industrial section just off the Alaska Highway on the edge of town. It came complete with snarling guard dogs and broken-down bulldozers, and even had its very own forgotten car and truck graveyard. If you looked up from the dusty ground and buckets of used oil, out behind colourless mechanics’ shops and the skeletons of scaffolding, you could see the whole valley stretched out, the Yukon River sparkling blue and snaking through the painted postcard mountains. If you looked up, which I rarely did. There was too much to do.

There were any number of stupid and dangerous activities to pass the day with, untold numbers of rusty edges to tear your skin and clothes on, a myriad of heavy metal objects to fall off of or get pinned beneath. I don’t remember whose idea the tires were. They were not just any tires; they had once pounded dust under earth movers, or dump trucks. They were monsters, and they were everywhere. It took the whole pack of mechanics’ kids and welders’ daughters and crane operators’ sons to move them; getting them up and onto their sides was a feat of team effort and determination, aided by crowbars we pinched from the backs of our dads’ pick-ups when no one was looking. Rolling them to the edge of the power line without being noticed involved lookouts and quick action. We knew they would stop us if they found out; we didn’t need to ask. The covert element of the operation only added to the thrill of it all.

Only two of us could fit in at a time, which was okay, because we had all summer and plenty of tires. Three or four kids would hold the tire steady, teetering on the edge of the cliff at the top of the power line, and two would climb inside. Kind of like gerbils on one of those exercise wheels, except you would face each other, arms and legs pushing out into the inside of the tire to hold yourself in. Gravity pretty much took care of the rest.

It was better than any roller coaster, not that any of us had been on one. It was the random element of the tire’s path that did it. There was just no way to know what that tire was going to bump into or off of, and the only thing more fun than the roll down was when the tire started to come to a stop at the bottom, and did that roll-on-its-side, flip-flop dance at the bottom of the hill, kind of like a coin does when you flip it and miss and it lands on the linoleum. Only this was a huge dump truck tire with two dirty kids inside, laughing hysterically, laughing until tears ran and our sides hurt the next day. Only one of us ever puked: the heavy duty mechanic’s oldest daughter lost her lunch all over her brother one day, and so we never let her ride after that, just sent her into her dad’s shop to distract him while we rolled tires past his big bay doors out front.

I think it was the smell that finally gave us away. My mom kept asking me what the hell had I been up to that day while my dad was at work. There is something unmistakably foul about the smell of the inside of a tire, a cross between pond water and cat pee, I would venture, and my mom couldn’t quite pin it down, but she got suspicious.

It was a bright August morning, the day it all ended, and we had a beauty of a big tire all loaded up and ready for take-off when we heard a noise inside our heads, a skull-piercing shriek that stopped our blood. We all froze in our tracks. My mom appeared from out of nowhere and it dawned on me that the noise was originating from her mouth, the words becoming slowly recognizable as she bee-lined toward us, her face all veins bulging red, and the whites of her eyes all you could see: “
What the fuck are you stop right now stop that stop it stop
…” and so forth.

There was really no explaining our way out of this one. What else could we possibly have had in mind? More damning, of course, was the pile of tires already situated at the bottom of the power line; we couldn’t even argue that we were just thinking about climbing inside one and rolling it down the hill, but were just about to prudently change our minds and go help our fathers sort bolts and sweep up.

An ad-hoc committee of irate parents was called immediately, and our dads did what any fathers would have done when catching their child about to engage in activities which could only result in grievous bodily harm: they spanked us all senseless. Nothing like pain to remind you of how much you could have been hurt. It was, after all, the seventies. I was also given plenty of time to mull over my decisions for the next two weeks: I was grounded, and spent the rest of the summer inside at home, watching the Seventh Day Adventist kids safely ride their bikes on the road. What could you do? Like I said, it seemed like a fine idea at the time.

WE COULDN’T BELIEVE OUR LUCK THAT DAY as we walked into the Sally Ann and saw all those roller skates. Story was, they had just shut down an old rink, and about two hundred pairs of kids’ rental roller skates had been donated to the thrift store. The cool kind, too, where the translucent yellow wheels were bolted right to the soles of sturdy-looking running shoes that tied up with wide white shoelaces, not the dorky old-fashioned kind that you had to strap on over your own shoes and tighten up with a key that always went missing after a couple of days. They were all on sale for a buck fifty a pair, because there were so many of them they were clogging up the entire sporting goods aisle, overflowing from the shelves and piled on top of a moth-bitten street hockey net. Gran announced that she was going to buy all of us our very own roller skates, since they were a bargain, plus we had behaved ourselves all day so far. She told us we could go ahead and help ourselves to a pair that fit, but not to bother the poor lady behind the counter with it, she had enough on her plate as it was. We all raced forward, digging about for the best-looking pair in our size, almost climbing over one another, like you see nowadays when they have half-price stuff on sale at the Wal-Mart or somewheres. The only thing better than getting new stuff was not having to share it with anyone. A few springs back Christopher got a skateboard for his birthday, and we all had to take turns on it. Chris wasn’t exactly famous for sharing, and he knuckle-punched his brother for hogging it too long. My little sister ran into the house to tell on Chris and woke up my Uncle Kevin who ended up locking the skateboard in the trunk of his car, just so he could get some peace and quiet since he was working the night shift. Four kids, and a hundred pairs of roller skates to pick from. Mine were blue, with three white racing stripes down each side. They were practically brand new, the wheels were just a tiny bit scuffed. The laces even had the little plastic tips on them still, like shiny back-to-school gym shoes do for the first half of September. Carrie wanted the yellow ones, but they were too big so she settled on red, and Danny’s were a faded blue, at one time the same colour as mine, but now a little grey after being handled by a thousand different dirty fingers. Now all we had to do was find a pair that fit Christopher. The thing about my cousin Christopher was that he was extremely prone to misfortune. My gran once even crossed herself and said that Chris must have slept in the morning that the good Lord was handing out the luck, because nobody else had ever choked on the only quarter hidden in his own birthday money cake. It was like he was born with a little dark ball of wrong turns and close calls and mishaps that hovered in a tangled cloud above his head, I swear, you could almost see its shadow on the sidewalk beside him some days. When bad luck decided that something needed to happen to someone, it usually picked Chris, since he was never more than an arm’s length away from a catastrophe. Spilled milk, bee stings, and deep slivers followed him around like stray dogs. He couldn’t help it; it wasn’t his fault, he was just born like that. When he first started kindergarten his teacher thought he might be slow, and they almost put Chris in the special class, until my aunt had to go down to the school and give that teacher a piece of her mind. Just because a kid didn’t talk much didn’t mean he couldn’t count backwards from one hundred and already know his alphabet by heart. Not to mention how many slow kids could take a radio apart and put it back together when they were barely five years old and if that teacher had his head screwed on right he would know it. It turned out that Christopher was not part retarded (that’s what they called it back then), he was just mostly deaf, but by the time the doctor put the tubes in his ears, the bullies and bigger kids had picked up the scent of blood in the water and closed in on my cousin. He was quiet, and clumsy, and something about the way he blinked his eyes and chewed his bottom lip showed his fear and evoked cruelty in others. He was all awkward elbows and not quite right angles, and his feet and hands looked like they belonged on a much bigger body, like he had recently borrowed them from a boy twice his size. One hundred pairs of discount roller skates, yet somehow none that Christopher could squeeze his feet all the way into. His bottom lip swelled into a quivering pout, and his eyes filled up with tears. I knew it was a sin to hate your own cousin just because he was born with bad luck and big feet, but I couldn’t help it, and a sour ball of guilty spit got caught in my throat and refused to be swallowed. “No fair if everyone gets roller skates but me.” His voice sounded small, and broken. He picked at a scratch above his knee and rubbed one sock foot with the other. The rest of us stared down at the worn-out floor tiles and pondered this awful truth. Gran’s form of justice was swift, and thrifty. After enduring a brief bout of tears from all four of us, followed by a sobering sermon that included such topics as the mouths of gift horses, shoeless children from other countries, counting your blessings, and living on a fixed income, we were given two options. We could go home without any roller skates at all, or Gran would buy Carrie, Dan, and me each a used pair, and then we would take the bus to the mall and find a brand new pair that fit Christopher. Of course, we chose option #2. At the sporting goods store, the only ones we could find were the old fashioned kind that you strapped on over your shoes and tightened with a key. Gran told the salesman that it was highway robbery, what he was charging her for them, and he gave her ten percent off, even though there was usually no senior’s discount on sports equipment. It was obvious that she had almost had enough of the whole business, so Chris didn’t dare complain that his skates weren’t as cool as ours were, and we didn’t risk even a sideways gloat. The biggest patch of pavement in our neighbourhood was the parking lot beside the baseball diamond, about two blocks up the hill from our house. We wobbled and rolled up the road as soon as we got home, laughing and leaning on each other for balance. We stopped at the top of the hill for a minute to catch our breath. The street sloped down in a lazy curve and met the steeper road that led into the parking lot. Carrie went first, her bum sticking out and her feet spread too far apart, a squeal of glee trailing behind her as she picked up speed. Dan bent his knees and cannon-balled down the hill, almost overshooting the turn-off, and I followed just far enough behind to avoid rear-ending him. My eyes were fixed on the road, on the lookout for patches of dandelions that had pushed their way up through cracks in the chip-seal, and bits of gravel big enough to catch a wheel on. It dawned on me that none of us had spent much time practicing how we were going to stop before starting down the hill, and as the oldest, this was just the kind of detail I should have thought about. Carrie hit the scruffy lawn and fell forward, her arms and legs splayed in all directions like a starfish. She curled into a ball, clutching the crotch of her shorts since she was prone to peeing herself when she got too excited. Dan managed to grab a signpost with one hand and spun to a stop, and I safely bounced off the tired chainlink fence that sagged around the outside of the ball diamond. Christopher hesitated at the top of the hill. The afternoon sun burned like an egg yolk in the blue behind him, and the air rippled in blurry waves wherever the sky touched the pavement. The toes of his sneakers stuck way out over the front wheels of his skates, and his naked knees were glued together. It crossed my mind that maybe letting the younger kids learn how to roller skate in bare legs was not such a good idea, but it was too late. Chris careened towards us, his arms whirling in giant circles, backpedaling on his heels in a slow-motion slapstick of panic. He fell on his butt and skidded to a stop not even halfway down the hill. There was a breathless second of silence, and then his jaw dropped and an animal sound came out of his open mouth. I had never heard anyone screech like that, it was worse than when Danny burnt his leg on the exhaust pipe of his dad’s motorbike, even louder than the time I fell out of the tree and broke my wrist and got eleven stitches in my head. It was more of a siren than a scream, and he didn’t stop. My blood stood still in my veins for a moment, then I leapt forward, forgetting I had wheels attached to my feet. I broke my fall with the heels of both hands, tearing identical patches of roadrash into my palms. I ripped both of his roller skates off, and ran my stinging hands up and down his arms and legs, searching his body for blood or broken bones. I pulled him to his feet by one elbow and a belt loop, but he sunk back into a crouch when I let go of his arm, still wailing and spewing tears and snot. I couldn’t see anything wrong with him, he wasn’t bleeding or holding his ankle or wrist, but he was screaming like he was being skinned alive. When I knelt down beside him to wrap his arm around my shoulders, a foul smell filled my nostrils. He had crapped his pants, and the evidence had escaped his underwear and was smeared down the back of his right leg. I had to take him home, which meant I had to take everyone home, since it was 1981 and it wasn’t safe to leave little kids alone in a park in a big city, especially when there was a psycho on the loose and anything could happen. My sister wouldn’t touch Christopher because he had poo on him, so I made her carry the roller skates while Dan and I dragged him home in our sock feet. He was made of lead and rubber, and by the time we burst through the screen door on the back porch my knees were wobbling and my breath was burning in the back of my throat. “Gran,” I gasped, “Chris wiped out on the hill and I can’t see anything wrong with him but he pooped himself and won’t shut up or tell me where it is hurting.” Chris had stopped screeching, but his chest still heaved in great long sobs and his face was streaked with dirt and tears. He wiped his upper lip with a snotty wrist, and leaned against the laundry room door, which wasn’t closed all the way. It swung open with a squeak and Chris stumbled sideways and fell to one knee on the linoleum in front of the washing machine, leaving a brown streak of poop across the white ceramic door of Gran’s brand new clothes dryer. “You dirty little bird,” she squawked, hauling Chris back onto his feet by one wrist and dragging him toward the bathroom. “Knock it off with all this nonsense and get into the tub or I’ll give you something to cry about.” She launched him through the bathroom door with one swat across the sagging bum of his shorts. He let out a scream so loud that even Gran clapped her hands over her ears, and the dog bolted down the hall, skidded across the kitchen, and hurled herself under the table, knocking the butter dish to the floor. Not even my little sister could fake that kind of agony, and Gran lifted his limp body into the bathtub and pulled down his pants with a shaky hand. His bum was snow white, and between his poo-smeared butt cheeks bulged a giant purple egg. It was a horrible hybrid of a blood-blister and a bruise, and it throbbed and pulsed like a swollen creature from a science fiction movie. Even the nurse at the walk-in clinic in the mall claimed she had never seen anything quite like it, and said that she bet it hurt something terrible. Then she patted the sweaty curls on top of Chris’s head with a manicured hand, and gave him an envelope that had twelve real painkillers in it, not just orange-flavoured baby aspirin, and a frozen bag full of what looked like blue jello. Gran called us a cab from the pay phone outside of the 7-Eleven, even though the mall was only ten blocks or so from our house and we had no luggage or groceries. We were all acting super nice to Chris, since we felt bad for thinking he was being a big baby because it we had mistakenly thought he had barely wiped out at all because we couldn’t see any blood or wounds, but how were we supposed to know he had a giant purple lump in his shorts that hurt so much it made him shit himself? My sister even gave him her winning Oh Henry! wrapper she had kept folded up in her pink plastic wallet for weeks. She had been waiting for the right time to trade it in for the free Pepsi she had coming, saving it for a rainy day, she said, which really meant a day when the rest of us were broke. Carrie was like that, she used to hoard a good chunk of her Halloween stash every year too, just so she could haul it out a month later and eat it with dramatic relish in front of the other kids without sharing. But she gave her free pop to Chris, and Gran let him sit in the front seat of the cab alone, and she made him a jam sandwich right before dinner, just because. Chris was good about it all, he didn’t lord his injury over us able-bodied kids like some would, he didn’t make us get him stuff or hog the couch or fake a limp so he wouldn’t have to help with the dishes or go move the sprinkler. Gran watched him wince as he slowly settled himself onto a chair at dinnertime. He sat lopsided, perched painfully atop the blue ice pack, and laced his fingers together so we could say grace. Gran thanked God for the meal we were about to eat, and made the sign of the cross. Then she picked up her fork and shook it at the four of us, clucking her tongue like she did when she was about to say how something was a crying shame. “Look at him, poor little wretch. It’s a crying shame none of yous had enough sense to put on long pants before you went out fooling around on them things, just a crying shame. Count yourself lucky that nobody cracked their skull wide open, thank Gawd.” She looked up at the ceiling tiles, and crossed herself again. We sat with our hands in our laps and our heads bowed, just in case this particular crying shame needed any further explanation or perhaps an extra prayer. I mulled it all over in my head, wondering how long pants could possibly prevent head injuries, and whether or not Chris would still have got poop all over the dryer door if he had crapped in his jeans instead, and would any of this have happened at all if he hadn’t been born with giant feet that only fit into the crappy roller skates? And didn’t that mean the whole thing was in fact an act of God? I pressed my lips together to keep myself quiet. It was best not to ask too many questions, especially ones about the Good Lord Above. I was old enough to know it was a sin to blame God when bad
things happened, even things that could only be his fault, like floods or earthquakes or innocent children from good homes who died too young or babies who got born with a rare disease or a weak heart. It was blasphemy to question his will or his wisdom or the way he went about his business, to even suggest that God might have thought twice before burdening a boy with feet that did nothing for his self-esteem which was a big part of why he had to repeat grade two and go see the special ed teacher for extra help with his math and spelling instead of going to gym class with all the other kids and that is why he sucked at almost every sport except wrestling and sprinting and long-distance running which he had plenty of practice at from getting chased home or beaten up. The next day Gran took all four pairs of roller skates back to the Salvation Army and traded them in for a bat, three baseball gloves, and a grass-stained softball, even though Chris sucked at baseball too. The only fair thing to do was to give all of us something none of us wanted, and disappointing all of us equally was the only way to keep everyone happy. I knew it wasn’t her fault that we had gotten on her last nerve and she had to wash her hands of it all and teach us a valuable lesson so we would think twice next time before risking our necks when she had enough to worry about as it was. I couldn’t stay mad at Gran. I blamed God for all of it.