Chapter 20
It was noon on Friday, September 7th. The bedroom was foreign to me. I rubbed my tired eyes and slowly came to my senses again. We had slept for two nights in the house where seven children had grown up, seven kids on the outskirts of the wild Kansas plain, with Kenny and Trent the only ones left at home now with their mother. All three of Luke’s older sisters had moved out, so there was no need to sleep on the couch or the floor here. Decky and I each had our own rooms. The wire spring pulled taut on the screen door as we walked out into the Kansas morning light. We were leaving again. There were new faces ahead. With winds blowing madly around us, we packed the car up with our scant hobo belongings; everything fit nicely into the neatly organized trunk. Then we said good-bye to two more people in our lives, Luke’s mom and his brother Kenny. Luke didn’t know when he would ever see them again.
“Stay safe!” Kenny yelled to us, with his mother beside him. She waved to us with her arthritic arm and clawed grip. She then smiled a half smile while Kenny put his arm around her and smiled too. She was happy for her son Lucas, but seemed to be also hiding a hint of deep worry that only a mother can feel. Her kids were adults now, and she had to let them find their own lives, even if it took great distances to do that; she knew that too well. It was only a few years before that her youngest, Nate, was taken from her on that Topeka plain. He was taken from her in the blink of an eye on a lonely Kansas road. He was just a few miles from where she raised him; he was on his way to work at the pizza joint.
The British New Wave band, Tears for Fears’ popular song “Mad World” played in the car as we pulled away. I heard the piano keys pounding with repetition after the chorus; key pads striking steel strings. I heard the ringing vibrations going down the scale in sequence at the end of that somber but catchy verse.
Thursday had become Friday, and my car on the dealer lot back on Beach Boulevard in Huntington Beach had a payment that was now two days overdue. I had to wait for the weekend phone rates to call my mother in Massachusetts to see if the dealer had notified her of any pending sale, and if not, I’d have to make a late payment to the bank on Monday. It was money that I didn’t have; money for a car and a life that was no longer mine. I wanted it all to go away.
On the way out of Topeka, we drove by Lucas’s childhood school. Lucas looked it carefully over and reflected on a time so innocent and simple in his life. Tecumseh Elementary was a school named after the Shawnee Chief Tecumseh, a British ally in the War of 1812. The chief was known for his strength and determination, but was killed by American forces in the Battle of the Thames in 1813. Tecumseh never gave up, Luke said to us.
We went to Anna’s gym to get one last workout in before heading to Kansas City, intensely working our chest, shoulders, and arms. I pushed out on the bench press, breathing hard short breaths; it felt like the weight of life itself. We all did overhead presses . . . four sets, and afterward, turned the curl bar inward, four sets again, for we really had to work our biceps.
From the gym we went over to Bennigan’s, a chain restaurant, where Anna and her good friend Clarence met up with us. Black Clarence was a notorious local bodybuilder and had even been Mr. Kansas. At the table inside during lunch, Clarence had just finished telling us how he was going to be getting married on Halloween when a woman from behind tapped him on the shoulder. I noticed that she was part of a large group, a big table full of middle-aged businessmen and women who were drinking and yelling with cantankerous bursts of laughter.
“Excuse me, sir, are you Mr. Kansas?”
“Yes, ma’am, I am.”
The table behind us immediately became energized with a roar of laughter as she turned to them all wide-eyed with a smile and nodded her head.
“I told you all!” she laughed.
“Can we have your autograph?” a few of the women then jumped up to join her, asking him eagerly.
“Absolutely,” said Clarence.
The whole group seemed to be desperately out of shape as they all smoked their cigarettes. They blew their soft clouds into the air around us and lined up at Clarence’s shoulder with their papers and pens, smiling and all happy. I watched as the little puffs of smoke curled in the air over our heads before dissipating far above. But Clarence didn’t mind. Like a politician with only public service in mind, he smiled, signed every one of those individual sheets of paper, then turned to us with hunched shoulders, shoulders of chiseled rock, and chuckled aloud.
“Comes with the territory, I guess,” he laughed, then added, “You gotta take it while you can, ’cause it won’t be here forever, boys!”
When we left the restaurant and were out in the parking lot of an early Topeka afternoon, Anna told us that she and Laird might meet up with us when we got to Kansas City that evening, but I could sense the trepidation in her voice. The problem was that the weekends were always so busy at the gym. She knew that this might really be good-bye, but couldn’t bring herself to say it.
We hugged her good-bye; there was a tear in her eye for her little brother and his crazy friends. Clarence, the rock of Kansas stood there beside her all the while, shadowing her soft frame and beautiful long, dark hair, consoling her as we pulled away into the blowing wind.
The wind on our way out was blowing so hard that the stop signs on the street corners were wildly twisting and dancing askew. They stressed the steel posts they stood on, bending them back and forth, just like a scene from the Wizard of Oz. Good-bye, Topeka. As we drove, the surfboard was suddenly blown to the side of the roof in a fresh burst of wind. We fishtailed down the highway a bit before trying to pull over. It was like driving stolen cars on winter lake ice. I remembered the day when my old friend Ray Champeaux took that Pontiac out onto Lake Mascuppic with all of us rolling around in the back as he turned donuts out on the frozen glass. In Kansas, I jumped from the Fairlane with the car door almost blowing off its hinges, the wind trying to bend the door the other way. I moved the board back and tightened the cord with one more knot to make it more secure and jumped back inside. We then traveled on in the crazy wind, a boat on the river of life, weaving our way all of the thirty minutes to Lawrence. Once in Lawrence, we quickly detoured off of Interstate 70 in order to cruise the University of Kansas, the school where Luke had gotten his engineering degree from.
Lucas graduated from KU in 1982. I knew the university for its basketball team, the Jayhawks, who, with their little blue and red bird cartoon mascot (the kind that resembled a baby version of Foghorn Leghorn), had garnered a lot of national attention throughout the seventies for winning several Big Eight Conference Championships. At first appearance, the campus itself seemed to have a lot of hills and trees, then chiseled rock, sculptures, and clean, beautiful architecture, old buildings, and finally, loads of pretty girls. School had just started up again with a new semester, and all of these beautiful coeds were everywhere, milling about around us with their books in crossed arms, talking, crossing our path, staring at us as we stared at them. We were old guys out of place with a surfboard atop of our vehicle; I sensed that some of the girls might even have felt sorry for us as they quickly looked away. After all, we weren’t Big Eight basketball stars; we were telltale gypsies who just seemed to be passing through. And it was there in that very moment, from my seat inside of the moving bubble, that part of me wanted to be back in college again, even back at UMass, not for the academics, but just to be there amongst them all again, with no worries anymore. Anxiety flourished in America’s heartland; I wanted to jump out of the car and get lost in the campus. There were hundreds of beautiful girls! And there was always something about that first week of school where no one was in their element yet and just about anything could happen. Blind impulse raged in the campus air, I could sense it. Good things were out there, nothing was routine yet; and for a surreal minute, I was with them all, forever happy in this artificial world.
But we had to go, we couldn’t stay. We were moving across America and had to meet Luke’s sister Faith in Kansas City by nightfall. It would be another forty minutes on Interstate 70 to Kansas City though. It was 6:00 p.m. by the time we arrived at Faith’s apartment in the city. Faith, beautiful, with jet-black hair, just like her sisters, had just gotten home from work and greeted us with that constant smile and endless energy; she was ready to take us out into the night.
And then we were out and driving the city streets with Faith and Lucas. While we cruised, Decky sang “Kansas City” in the backseat next to me. He sure was a happy guy.
Faith took us down Stateline Drive, where Missouri and Kansas stared down at each other with polished mansions on either side of her lonely street. Although times were different now, these houses still harbored the divided memories of the Civil War. Stateline Drive was the epicenter of America, where the East meets the West, where the North meets the South. It had been called Bleeding Kansas a long time ago. Her quiet mansions with empty windows reflected nothing but the setting sky now. The windows looked back at us with sadness, as if to remind us that every story needs to be told for history’s sake, lest it repeat itself. The houses so reminded me of Andover Street in my hometown of Lowell.
Andover Street was in Belvedere, on the hills overlooking the bending Merrimack River, where the wealthy mill owners had built their mansions back in America’s own pre-Civil War Industrial Revolution. Lowell was one of the planned cities where American industry began, we were told. She was built where the Concord and mighty Merrimack rivers met; she was built on the backs of immigrant workers—men, women, and even children who tried to dig their way to a better life. There, they lay down an entire network of locks and canals in order to harness the water power that raged down from the Kangamangas. The flowing water had powered the giant turbines that ran the cotton looms. It was twelve-hour days for the workers, over and over again. They had to bring their sweat, strength, and determination if they wanted to get paid a measly wage. There was timeless resolve in knowing that some part of me had descended from these very workers. The Irish immigrants that worked alongside the Greeks, the Italians, the Portuguese, and the French Canadians; all of them had been an integral part of this ever-evolving great melting pot of industrialization that called itself Lowell, Massachusetts.
Here in the Midwest now, Stateline Drive turned into a street full of museums, fountains, horses drawing timeless carriages, buggy whips, trolley car buses, and clean, ever so clean, side streets.
“Did you know that there are more fountains in this city than any city in America?” Luke asked rhetorically.
“Really?” I was impressed.
“I think it has the second most in the world, with only maybe Rome having more,” he said. “Kansas City was designed and built as a sister city to her.”
Before going to the Royals game that evening, we parked the car at a hotel in the city and wandered into a grand party called The Last Summer Bash of Three Years Past. The place was stacked with hordes of people packed into two hotel banquet rooms, with the divided walls on hinges collapsed like an accordion and rolled back on ceiling runners, making two rooms into one grand party. Faith talked our way through the two ladies taking tickets at the door and was able to get us all in for free. The room immediately opened up to crowds of drunks with a lot of white shirts and loose ties. Everyone danced to the disco music of a hired DJ in the corner, with several portable bars set up at different posts. There was free draft beer for all of us! At one of the portable bars, Faith introduced us to three girls that she knew; two were teachers, one was beautiful, but our conversation in the loud banquet hall was impossible. In the noisy silence, we all at once felt uncomfortable and out of place. It was so reminiscent of those Huntington Beach disco clubs that we had so desperately tried to get away from. I suddenly realized too how we were beginning to lose all touch with the working world. Even free beer didn’t have enough substance to keep us in the conversation anymore.
“Let’s get out of here and go to the Royals game!” Luke screamed above the din.
The Royals were playing the Mariners. The score was tied 1 to 1 when we got to our seats in right field during the middle of the second inning. As I sat down, I immediately took in everything around me; the comfortably reminiscent incredible smell of baseball in the air; hot dogs, beer, and in the quiet distance, the imagined smells of the powerful Missouri spilling watery air from the hills of the upper Midwest into Kaufman Stadium. Yes! It was the weekend, and people everywhere were all happy again. I saw that several small groups of fans celebrated amidst the showers of fountains in the middle of center field. Everyone around us was bubbling with leisure and baseball. These gifts of recreation and camaraderie were the eternal springs that continued to feed weary spirits and helped to keep the working class sane.
Decky discovered that eight cute Gamma Phi sorority girls from KU sat in the row of seats behind us. They were Poly Dollies for sure! And the beer from The Last Summer Bash of Free Beers Past (Decky called it this) helped us three get up the courage to talk to them all, uninhibited, as Faith laughed with us, and we started to tell them about our adventure across America. But we were sadly interrupted by the standup metachronal wave, an infectious round-about stadium event that supposedly originated at an Edmonton Oilers hockey game or an Oakland A’s game or a Washington Huskies game, depending on who you believed or which of those three cities you were from. After everyone eventually settled down again from all of that standing up and waving of the arms when the wave subsided, I wasn’t sure if the girls were even interested in our story anymore, but we sure were, so we carried on. It sounded so good to me because the ending hadn’t even been written yet.
Back in Boston, the Red Sox were having a dismal year, so baseball was falling off the radar and the focus was shifting to football and the Patriots. But here at Kaufman, everyone seemed so excited because the Royals were still in it all. I went back and forth, rack focusing at times, trying to zoom in on the big picture around me; everything was happening at once in the stands and on the field. George Brett wasn’t playing due to injury, so by the fourth inning, the Royals were sadly missing his presence. Seattle went ahead 2 to 1 off of an Al Cowen’s home run; then 3 to 1 in the fifth with a sacrifice fly by rookie Alvin Davis. Matt Young was still pitching in the sixth for Seattle, but the Royals’s own rookie Steve Balboni, who came to the plate all taped up around his chest, crushed Young’s slider with two men on, sending it deep into the left field seats.
“Why’s he got all that tape around him?” I asked a guy who seemed to be into the game keeping one of those baseball scorebooks in front of me as Balboni rounded the bases.
“He injured his ribs,” he told me as he quickly turned back to his game.
The final score was 5 to 4 Royals, with a Quisenberry save, keeping the Royals in a first place tie for the American League West with the Twins.
Everyone in the stadium was high fiving, even us. And then we all started for the exits. In front of me, I watched moving groups of people flow in every direction from the concrete encampment, all at once. It was a departure of the moving masses, not unlike a colony of ants on a melted piece of candy on a hot summer day, disturbed by divine intervention, a stick knocking it away. It was mayhem. We all moved in different directions just to get away from that stick.
By that time, on that day, the Red Sox back home had already been beat 4 to 2 by the Yankees, and although they had acquired Bill Buckner from the Cubs, they were ultimately destined to finish their season fourth in the American League East. Faith’s Royals would go on to the AL Championship series against Detroit that year, even though that’s as far as they would get.
Once we were back at the car, we headed to Kelly’s Westport Inn; it was an Irish pub owned by Randal Kelly, who supposedly was from County Clare. Looking at the old guy moving behind the bar, I wondered what city Randal was from; Ennistymon, perhaps, like Paddy? The crowd and the noise kept me from getting to Randal. It was probably best that I didn’t even ask him where he was from, for Randal and his crew worked nonstop all the while, trying to keep the screaming masses full and happy. As they worked away behind the long oak bar, everyone sang with them . . . “Whiskey! Whack for the Daddy-O! There’s whiskey in the jar!”
Luke ran into a guy named Joshua, an old friend from KU, and called Faith over with excitement to talk with them by the bar. Decky and I began yelling crazy things across the crowded room to see if anyone would pay us any attention, but at first, the noise was too much for anyone to hear a word.
“You’re beautiful,” Decky yelled out across the bar to a petite girl trying to get the bartender’s attention.
The guy standing directly in front of Decky turned around and looked at him with a confused look.
“Whoa, wait a minute.” Decky turned to me. “Never got that kind of reaction before . . .”
We tried other lines . . . Declan pulled out his empty pants pockets and at once exclaimed to some girls in front of him, “I’ve got money falling from my pockets, and I dare you to turn around right now and come out to the car with me!”
But nobody pretended to hear him. After a while, we gathered up Luke and Faith and left Kelly’s Westport Inn to walk the Kansas City streets with young people around us partying everywhere. This was a young people’s city, I felt.
“Buy some flowers for Jesus,” an earthy man on the street corner called to us with people spilling into and out of the bars around him.
“And what will Jesus do with the flowers?” I asked him.
“Come on, you guys!” Faith called to us. She didn’t want us to start any trouble with the poor guy.
“That’s right,” the guy looked at me, shouting as he stared me down, “Don’t be a wise guy!”
We continued to walk the streets like zombies, blindly following Faith until she took us up an outdoor stairway to another open rooftop grand party. The rooftop was packed with people and loud music. I recognized some of the same people from The Last Bash of Three Years Past, although they carried with them a deeper drunk than they had carried with them earlier. Everyone seemed more obnoxious now. Three girls walked over to us, recognizing Faith.
Ester, Estelle, and Patty hugged and greeted Faith and Luke warmly. We all pushed among the people to find a clearing where we could try to talk. Ester and Estelle were sisters. Faith whispered in my ear that Ester always had a thing for Luke. With this revelation, Decky and I slowly began to gravitate toward Patty, who was exceptionally beautiful too. But Patty, the cunning artist, evaded our ever-obnoxious advances and quickly excused herself to escape to other spaces in the big open room. Estelle was sweet, poor thing, so Declan and I left her with Faith and resolved to yell intangibles out into the anonymous crowd instead of harassing her. Our yells moved past deaf ears though, for it was getting really late, and they echoed off of the rooftop and clear across the distant Missouri into the darkness on the other side of night.
“You look like a nun who used to teach me piano in the fifth grade!” Decky yelled to a group of girls standing about ten feet away from us. Nothing worked. We were lost in America; lost in ourselves; somehow forgetting why we had left it all in the first place. We were too caught up in the drinking, putting the celebration of it all ahead of the experience.
“I think we’re back in Huntington,” I said to Decky. I looked up, and it was there that the stars of endless creation once again lit the vast open sky above. I looked out across the night as faint Polaris blinked at me. I once again followed her to the outer edge of the open pan of the Big Dipper. Venus still sat by herself alone in the western sky. The reflection off of this whole open canvas above, spackles of white paint on a dark blue-gray cloth, made me realize, once again, how infinite the universe truly was and how, even though I sometimes felt abandoned, that I never really was alone.
And now there was nothing left of the night, so we decided to head back to Faith’s. Once at Faith’s apartment, we were ravenous for food and ate a whole loaf of her banana bread that she had set out on the kitchen counter. After this, Decky began crawling around on the floor for a while and finally passed out on the carpet, right at the entrance to Faith’s roommate Tracy’s bedroom. Poor Tracy, who had long been asleep while we were out, had no idea that this type of evil lurked right outside her door.
I rolled on the floor laughing at the sight of Decky’s groveling antics outside her door. It was the last thing that I remembered that night. I woke up once in the middle of the night and found myself smack-dab in the center of the floor. Faith, like a nighttime fairy, had put a blanket over me and also put one over Lucas who was passed out on the opposite side of the room. Decky snored loudly under his own blanket at the entrance to Tracy’s doorway. Above us all, there was a whole empty comfortable couch where no one lay.