Born on the Fourth of July (7 page)

I looked in the medicine cabinet for the little metal thing that my sister used, with tiny openings on each end that you were supposed to press against the pimples and pop them out of your skin forever. So I pressed it up against the blackhead real hard like I was going to take my head off, until it finally oozed out of the pore like a tiny white dot. I kept popping those things all year, and I finally broke down and bought that filmy crap, and started to put it on my face too.

It was about the same time I started to get these ugly hairs under my lip and up in my armpits. I was getting these things all happening at once, and I couldn't stop them, no matter how hard I tried, they all kept coming. I put some Nair under my lip one night because one of the guys in boy scout camp had said that if you shaved with a razor it would grow back twice as fast. So I put on this underarm stuff I found in the closet, it was the stuff that was supposed to take the hair off your legs. Well, I put it under my nose and waited about an hour and then I wiped it off, leaving a big red rash. It looked like a huge gigantic red mustache and I went to school the next week using a handkerchief, trying to hide it and making believe I had a real bad cold. Most of the year was like that, with the pimples all over my face, and by the time the spring came all sorts of other difficult things began to happen.

I felt strange feelings in places I had never discovered before. The part of me that had just been there like everything else now began to get hard and excited every time I looked at a pretty girl. I had never felt anything like it before in my life. That thing, my penis, was getting hard, every time I watched the girls on “American Bandstand” or saw them walking down the streets. They'd even be in my dreams at night. I'd wake up in the mornings with the whole sheet soaked. I felt guilty at first. I actually thought I was committing a sin, dreaming it, thinking it, just watching them. But then one afternoon I crawled on top of a Rawlings basketball in my bedroom and did it for the sheer pleasure of doing it. And it felt good. It felt so good that I did it again after that, and again, and again—with teddy bears in my bed making believe they were Marilyn Monroe, in the bathroom in the bathtub, in the basement laying the side pocket of the pool table seventeen times, in the back yard against trees. I did it everywhere. And no matter how hard I tried I couldn't stop. It got so bad after a while, I started saying Acts of Contrition after doing it. I asked God to forgive me for feeling this thing and then I couldn't understand why I'd be asking God to forgive me for doing something that felt so good.

For some reason Mom and I just didn't get along back then. I was being sent to my room for punishment almost every night after dinner. “Take a bath,” “Clean your room,” “Take out the garbage.” … It was always something like that, and after battling it out with Mom in the kitchen and getting hit with the egg turner I'd be back in my room cursing her out under my breath as she'd be shouting, “God's going to punish you, Ronnie! God's going to punish you!” Later she'd come in and tell me she was sorry for yelling at me and I'd give her a big hug and tell her I was sorry too for making her so angry.

Mom always wanted me to be the best at whatever I did, especially at school. “If you fail any subjects this year,” she'd tell me, “you're not going out for any sports.” I kept telling her I was trying to do my best, but the only thing I could think of was baseball and instead of doing my homework every night I read every sports book I could get my hands on. For hours I'd swing the baseball bat in front of the mirror in my room. I still wanted to play for the New York Yankees more than anything else in the world.

I joined the track team in the spring. I wanted to be the greatest pole-vaulter in the history of the school and so I worked out every day until dark on the parallel bars Dad had built the summer before in the back yard. I remember Mom in the kitchen cheering me on, turning on the porch lights so I could work out even more. I loved those bars and when my brother Tommy was home from school, we'd both get on them together. We'd call Mom and Dad out to watch us perform, doing handstands together, back to back, with both of us touching each other's feet. “The amazing Kovics,” I'd shout to Mom. “Ladies and gentlemen, the amazing Kovics are about to perform their death-defying feats.” I can still remember both of them standing below us with pride in their eyes as we turned and balanced on those bars. I'd swing my body back and forth, back and forth, until I had swept myself into a perfect handstand, my body in a strong beautiful arc above my back yard. I'd look out around me, holding the handstand as long as I could, and swing down, dismounting with a beautiful twist, thumping onto the ground, stinging my bare feet. It was perfect, I'd say to myself, beautiful, just beautiful.

I was a natural athlete, and there wasn't much of anything I wasn't able to do with my body back then. I was proud and confident and there was always a tremendous energetic bounce in the way I moved. I knew what it was to walk and run and I loved it. After climbing the ropes in school, I'd go out to the track. I remember the feel of the long, lightweight, fiberglass pole in my hands and the black Permatrack beneath my feet; even in the meets I'd jump without shoes. I'd start running from the very end of the long track toward the pit, with the sleek pole gently vibrating up and down in my hands and my face full of determination. I'd hit the hole with the end of my pole, swinging like a pendulum, then kick high into the air, twisting, clearing the bar by inches, falling into the pit on my back, looking at the bar still up there.

As I got older Mom would kid me a lot because I wasn't interested in girls, but I was still dreaming about them all the time. I thought constantly about Joan Marfe, the girl who'd sat next to me in sixth grade, but I was too shy to ever ask her for a date.

I'd heard a priest at some kind of church conference warn us how a thing called petting could lead to sin. Kissing was all right, the priest said in a serious voice, but petting or heavy petting almost always led to sex, and sex, he said, was a mortal sin. I remember listening to him that day and promising myself and God I'd try never to get too close to a girl. I wanted to do all the things the guys in the study hall whispered about, but I didn't want to offend God. I never even went to the senior or junior prom. I just wanted to be a great athlete and a good Catholic and maybe even a priest someday or a major leaguer.

In the spring of the year before I graduated I actually wrote a letter to the New York Yankees management telling them I would give anything in the world for a tryout at the stadium. Castiglia's sister Arlene typed it up for me and for weeks I walked around in a daze waiting for an answer, daydreaming about how Dad and Castiglia would drop me off at the Long Island Railroad station that day and shake my hand and wish me luck. I'd be looking at them, pounding my fist into my new baseball mitt: ‘'I'm gonna make it. Don't worry about it, Castig. I'm gonna make it.” Then there'd be the great moment after the tryout when one of the coaches would come up to me: “Well, Kovic, you really looked good out there today. We think you've got what it takes.”

It never happened that way. Even though the letter from the Yankees finally came in the mail and I ran over to Castiglia's house shouting that I had made the tryouts, I chickened out when the morning came to leave for the station. I decided I didn't want to go after all. Richie and Bobby Zimmer were all over me for weeks, and I was sorry I'd ever told them anything. I still played after that, but it was different. I was thinking about other things, other things I wanted to be.

By that fall it seemed the guys on the block were almost grown up. In the halls at school we still gave each other the old Woodchuck Club signal we had started in sixth grade, sticking our hands under our chins, moving our fingers up and down, shouting, “Woodchuck, woodchuck.” It was crazy but it kept us together. And we went from class to class just waiting for each day to end so we could get back home and play touch football out on the street after our homework. Still everything was different. Castiglia was still talking about being a priest or joining the marines, but we weren't seeing as much of each other anymore. Bobby Zimmer told me one afternoon that Richie was growing his hair long and smoking cigarettes with Peter Weber in some abandoned cement tunnel in the woods at the end of the block.

Bobby's hair was long too. My mother said he had a pompadour just like Elvis Presley's. Whenever I saw him in the hallways, he had a pretty girl by his side and he was the first one of the guys on the block to get a driver's license. I was still shy with girls. While I'd be waiting at the bus stop every morning with Kenny and Mike Lamb, Bobby Zimmer would drive past honking the horn of his car with one arm around his girlfriend. He'd turn the corner on Hamilton Avenue, roaring off down Broadway to the high school, leaving the rest of us still jumping up and down at the bus stop trying to stay warm. Peter Weber and Castiglia also drove to school every morning or got rides with their new friends.

I remember for a long time Mike and Bobby Zimmer were a lot taller than me and Castiglia. Then all of a sudden I was taller than all three of them. We'd stand back to back over at Kenny's house as his mother checked to see who was the tallest and it was so good for little guys like me and Castiglia to be taller than the other guys. And when we weren't trying to see who was the tallest, we'd be out on the lawns still playing tag and wrestling on the grass.

Steve Jacket was still throwing screwdrivers into his front lawn across from Pete's house on Hamilton Avenue, telling us all he was going to become a TV sports announcer just like Mel Allen, and Pete was still coming over to my house every once in a while after school to steal beer out of my father's locker in the garage. Little Tommy Law was hanging out with Billy Meyers, trying to stay out of trouble and graduate from high school like the rest of us.

High school was just about over for me and the rest of the guys. We had been on the block together for almost twelve years, running and moving from Toronto Avenue to Lee Place to Hamilton Avenue. No one could remember how we all first got together back then, but we had become friends, “as close as real brothers,” Peter told me one afternoon, and we wanted to believe it would always be that way.

President Kennedy got killed that last year and we played football in the huge snowdrifts that had settled on the Long Island streets that afternoon. We played in silence, I guess because you're supposed to be silent when someone dies. I truly felt I had lost a dear friend. I was deeply hurt for a long time afterward. We went to the movies that Sunday. I can't remember what was playing, but how ashamed I was that I was even there, that people could sit through a movie or have the nerve to want to go to football games when our president had been killed in Dallas. The pain stuck with me for a long time after he died. I still remember Oswald being shot and screaming to my mother to come into the living room. It all seemed wild and crazy like some Texas shootout, but it was real for all of us back then, it was very real. I remember Johnson being sworn in on the plane and the fear in the eyes of the woman judge from Texas. And then the funeral and the casket. I guess all of us, the whole country, watched it like a big football game. Down the street the black horses came and his little boy saluting the way he did, the perfect way he did. Soon after he died there was a memorial picture of him that went up in the candy store down the block. At the bottom of it it said he had been born in 1917 and had died in 1963. It stayed up in the candy store on the wall for a long time after we all went to the war.

That spring before I graduated, my father took me down to the shopping center in Levittown and made me get my first job. It was in a supermarket not far from the marine recruiting station. I worked stacking shelves and numbing my fingers and hands unloading cases of frozen food from the trucks. Working with Kenny each day after school, all I could think of, day after day, was joining the marines. My legs and my back ached, but I knew that soon I would be signing the papers and leaving home.

I didn't want to be like my Dad, coming home from the A&P every night. He was a strong man, a good man, but it made him so tired, it took all the energy out of him. I didn't want to be like that, working in that stinking A&P, six days a week, twelve hours a day. I wanted to be somebody. I wanted to make something out of my life.

I was getting older now, I was seventeen, and I looked at myself in the mirror that hung from the back of the door in my room and saw how tall and strong I had suddenly become. I took a deep breath, flexing my muscles, and stared straight into the mirror, turning to the side and looking at myself for a long time.

In the last month of school, the marine recruiters came and spoke to my senior class. They marched, both in perfect step, into the auditorium with their dress blue uniforms and their magnificently shined shoes. It was like all the movies and all the books and all the dreams of becoming a hero come true. I watched them and listened as they stood in front of all the young boys, looking almost like statues and not like real men at all. They spoke in loud voices and one of them was tall and the other was short and very strong looking.