Nick Norwood 765 Davis Abilene, TX 79605 (915) 677-7862

The Boy’s Club

My father was shot to death one night in November on the gravel parking lot of a bar outside Nocona, Texas. This was in 1970, when I was ten. The man who shot him was the husband of the woman my father had been seeing. The man went to prison, I guess, but to be honest it was not something we ever talked about. My mother was working as a ticket agent for Braniff at the little airport there in Wichita Falls and she had already written my father off several years before that, had resigned herself to the fact that she would have to raise my brother and me by herself. She rented us a tiny frame house on Hollandale Street, on what she considered to be the right side of Windthorst Road. It was just barely on the right side, the first street in that better neighborhood, and even then ours was the sorriest house on the block, its pale yellow paint peeling away from the wood siding, the front porch a four-by-four concrete pad mounted by two steps.

That summer she left us home to take care of ourselves while she was at work. I was in charge since my brother, Timmy, was only seven. It didn’t take long to figure out this was going to be a boring arrangement. Eating pop tarts in front of the television, staring at the walls. One day Jackie and Troy, two friends of mine from down the block, asked me to go with them to the Boy’s Club. They’d been going since school let out. I’d heard them talking about it.

Shooting pool, playing ping pong and basketball, lifting weights, boxing. Norwood 2

“How are we going to get there—walk?”

“It’s only a couple miles,” Jackie said. He was twelve, two years older than me, wavy- haired, dark-eyed, with slightly prominent incisors that showed when he laughed.

“Shit,” I said. “That’s too far.”

“No, it’s not,” Troy said. He was nine, a husky kid with a burr haircut. “It’s not that far.”

“What are you going to do,” Jackie said, “sit around here with Timmy all day?”

I had to admit he had a point. In short, I went. Left Timmy there with the television, explaining that if he went out of the house or answered the door before I came home I’d give him the Chinese torture—an excruciating ordeal that involved my pinning his shoulders to the floor with my knees and rapping on his breastbone with the knuckle of my middle finger until he had a deep bruise that lasted a week. I had done this to him once when he was five and the threat of it kept him my slave from then until about the time he hit puberty.

We cut through my backyard, across the parking lot of a bowling alley, then stood waiting for the traffic to clear so we could cross Windthorst Road. Then it was some three miles through rundown neighborhoods on the other side, neighborhoods I had driven through with my mother when she took Timmy and me to the house of our babysitter, an old woman named Gertrude whose husband, Willard, was senile and drooled. Weedy yards and paint- peeling houses smaller and in worse shape even then ours, ugly dogs barking at us from behind cyclone fences. We stole pears from a tree in the side yard of a house about a mile from the

Boy’s Club, and, spotted by the old man whose tree it was, got fired on with a pump-action BB gun. Troy took a round square in the back, right between the shoulder blades. We continued Norwood 3 running until we were safely out of the old man’s range. Then, lifting Troy’s shirt, we saw the mark it left, a bright pink whelp the size of a dinner plate. It was still visible when we got to the

Boy’s Club.

The club was housed in a squat, cream-colored building made of cinder blocks, flat- roofed in front, with a higher roof in back over the gym. An American flag hung limp on its pole out front. A gray asphalt parking lot lay beside it, behind it a mangy playing field of red dirt and splotches of dry yellow grass already burning up in June. Above the door hung the crest of The

Boy’s Clubs of America, blue letters on a white field.

Inside some fifteen to twenty boys crowded the main room, shooting pool, playing ping pong, racing model race cars, or sitting in the mismatched armchairs near the front windows waiting their turn. Jackie, who was known for his mouth, started telling our story, the daring tale of our exploits as pear thieves. The boys in the club gathered around us. This was a good introduction for me, a kid brave enough to steal pears from a gardener known to be armed and willing, somebody who had actually come under fire. Troy’s fading whelp was presented as evidence. The other boys looked at us like we were exotics, “rich kids,” from the other side of

Windthorst Road. They at least seemed to be a lot poorer than we were, though in my case it was only because my mother had learned how to create a middle-class appearance, clean clothes from Sears that actually matched, canvas sneakers washed once a week. The boys I saw there reminded me of the mongrel dogs that had barked at us on our way through the neighborhood. Most of them wore dirty clothes and needed haircuts. They cursed in new and dangerous ways I’d never heard before. Cocksucker. This was a word I learned that first day.

Pee-shooter. That was another one. Norwood 4

While Jackie was still talking, one of the guys in the crowd introduced himself to me, a sort of muscle-bound kid named Mike Smith who had short reddish hair and freckles across his face. Mike asked me right then if I wanted to box. I had never really considered it—whether I was cut out for boxing—and, still high on my newly won fame, I agreed.

We went into the gym, where, at one end, stood a small ring, its canvas mat raised about six inches off the gym floor, surrounded by sagging cotton ropes. While we were putting on the gloves, word got around we were going to box and the crowd of boys moved into the gym and surrounded the boxing ring. Mike asked somebody to help me on with my gloves and while the kid was tying them I looked around at the faces staring back at me. Jackie’s was among them, grinning. When he wasn’t talking he was grinning. Troy, who stood beside him, looked scared, which I thought odd at the time. Our gloves tied, somebody rang the little bell they used to start and stop the rounds. Mike and I approached center ring.

I should say right here that I had never had on a pair of boxing gloves in my life, not even those blow-up balloon-toy gloves some kids had when we were five. I had never had any interest in boxing, until that moment, in the charged atmosphere of a new environment. Mike

Smith had asked me, and it seemed like a day for starting new things, a day to say “yes,” whatever the question. What happened next has been reduced in my memory to the smell of

Mike’s boxing glove. An old, musty, rank, gym-sweat smell that had worn its way into the leather of those gloves over many years and was not coming out any time soon, not ever. Mike kept the smell of it in my nose by repeatedly landing it there. I vaguely recall watching as he stood before me, like an idling race car, can still see his face, his stance. Then there’s just the blur of brown leather as his glove connected with my face, the blur and the smell. And that Norwood 5 smell is still the first thing that comes to mind, some thirty years later, if I happen to recall my experiences at the Boy’s Club. Mike, it turned out, was that year’s Wichita Falls Golden

Gloves champ for his age group—which was age eleven, a year above mine. We later became friends, but at that moment he was merciless. I asked him once why he’d had it in for me. He explained that he hadn’t but that he couldn’t get anybody else to box with him once they knew his record. He was just striking while the iron was hot, as they say.

It was only after he had bloodied my nose, cut my lower lip, caused great swelling to my left eye, that the Boy’s Club manager, John David Seale, arrived to stop the slaughter.

Mr. Seale was in his early thirties, average height, slim build, with light brown hair combed straight back from his forehead, his face bony, angular. I remember being vaguely aware of his presence as he came into the gym, moving deliberately through the crowd of boys and stepping into the ring. Without saying a word, he placed his hand on Mike’s forehead, pushed him—with one smooth motion—away from me, then turned and took my face in his hands. He held it first one way, then the other, assessing the damage.

“The girls’ll love you,” he said. He was originally from Cleveland—a point I would later learn—and you could hear it in his accent. “They go for that sort of thing.”

He grabbed my hands and jerked them up in front of my face, bent his knees a little so we were eye to eye. “Protection,” he snapped. “Keep your guard up. Always keep your guard up.” He glared at me a second for effect, to let it sink in. His eyes, at once intense and friendly, bore into mine. “Protect yourself,” he said again, still staring at me. Then he dropped my hands. “Now go to the locker room and clean yourself up.”

I nodded, looked for the nearest way out of the ring. Norwood 6

Meanwhile, Mr. Seale wheeled around and barked, “Jackie. Get the gloves on.”

Jackie played stupid, laughed. Who me?

“He’s twelve,” Mike said. “He’s not in my age group.”

“Yeah,” Mr. Seale said, “neither am I…and he’s closer.” He yelled Jackie’s name again. “Come on. Get in here.” Then he pushed me toward the ropes and told Troy to go with me to the locker room, to unlace my gloves and help me clean myself up, but he was concentrating mostly, I could tell, on this penalty bout he was arranging between Jackie and

Mike.

In the locker room, which smelled of piss and sweat, a little like that boxing glove, I looked at my face in the mirror. “Shit.”

“It’s not that bad,” Troy said.

“My mother’s gonna kill me.”

“It’s not that bad,” he said again. “Just wipe the blood off.”

It probably was that bad, but mostly I forgot about my injuries after I went back into the gym and saw Mike and Jackie going at it. Jackie, who couldn’t keep from laughing, was trying to run away. But Mr. Seale had stayed in the ring. Grabbing him by the shirt collar, he turned

Jackie toward his opponent, giving Mike a chance to let him smell the glove. Then Mr. Seale actually came up behind Jackie and put his arms around him, took hold of his wrists and began throwing punches at Mike. Walking Jackie toward him, he backed Mike into a corner and threw rapid fire punches at his face. Mike, for his part, tried to cover up, to protect himself like

Mr. Seale had told me to do. Using Jackie’s fists, Mr. Seale went for Mike’s body, then, when Norwood 7

Mike gave him an opening there, back to the face, landing blows and keeping after him right up to the point where it seemed Mike’s nose might start bleeding like mine. Then he stopped.

“All right, tough guy,” he said, releasing Jackie and pushing him out of the way. “Go cool off. And from now on I decide who fights.” He tapped his own chest with his middle finger. “Got it?”

Mike slipped out of the ring, cursing Mr. Seale under his breath as he moved through the crowd at ringside. Most of the boys were replaying the fight—mine and Mike’s, I think— fainting punches at one another, trying to stick a fist in another kid’s face, let him smell the glove.

Mr. Seale, still standing at center ring, hands on his hips, turned and scanned the crowd until he found me. He studied me a second, smiled. “Your old man’s gonna be proud of you tonight,” he said.

Later that afternoon, on the way home, we tried to think up a good lie to tell my mother, to explain what had happened to my face. Jackie suggested I say I fell off my bike, Troy that I ran into a parked car playing catch in the street. He had a cousin who did that once, he said.

I was just frustrated with all of it because the Boy’s Club seemed like a deal I wanted in on and I had gone and ruined it the first day. “Cocksucker,” I said.

“Who is?” Jackie said.

“Huh?” Apparently I wasn’t using the term correctly.

In the end I opted to just tell my mother the truth, after waiting, of course, to confirm that she was going to notice how something had been done to my face. It took her about two seconds, right as she came in from work. Norwood 8

“All right,” she said, “what happened?”

“I boxed the eleven-year-old Golden Gloves champ,” I said. “It wasn’t even close.”

She grabbed my shoulders and dragged me into the kitchen, studied my face a minute, pressing her thumb against my chin to hold my swollen mug at a good angle to the light. “Who said you could box?”

So I told her the story, while she dabbed at my lower lip with the wash cloth. Her reaction came as a surpris. Releasing me, she strode toward her bedroom, stripping off her airline uniform as she went. I followed her.

“Well, the Boy’s Club is probably a good place for you,” she said. “From the looks of it you could stand to learn something about boxing. I knew this arrangement wasn’t going to work, anyway.”

This sounded promising.

“I’ll call Gertrude,” she said, standing before the closet in her panties and bra. “I’ll see if she can keep you and Timmy in the mornings, then the two of you can walk to the Boy’s Club in the afternoon. I’ll pick you up after work.”

“Really?”

“You’re going to have to take Timmy with you every day,” she warned. “You’ll be responsible for keeping up with him.”

“No problem,” I said.

She called Gertrude that night and the next morning the three of us loaded up in her big

Oldsmobile so she could drive us over on her way to work. Timmy, who sat in the back seat by himself, whined about the idea, saying he was afraid of Willard. I turned to look back at Norwood 9 him and, resting my arm on the back of the seat, curled my fingers into the fist I used for the

Chinese torture, made a menacing gesture with my face.

We spent the morning in Gertrude’s dark, old-people-smelling house, watching television with her and Willard—the drooler. That afternoon we walked the few blocks to the

Boy’s Club. I got Timmy interested in the car racing right away. Little matchbox-size model cars sizzling around a plastic race track and flying off into the room when you took the corners too fast. This left me free to engage in whatever sport the other boys were playing. Some eight ball and ping pong, but mostly more physical games, outdoors. This quickly became our summer routine, though Timmy, who was less athletic than I was, didn’t seem to enjoy it as much. I had to hold the Chinese torture over him anytime he threatened to complain.

But one of the physical games we played at the Boy’s Club, just as an example, was a form of dodge ball the boys there had invented I guess and which featured two kick balls rather than the standard one. This version boasted an exciting play wherein a guy skilled and lucky enough to take possession of both balls at once lofted one of them into the air—a dangerous move normally, since a high fly was easier to catch than a bullet, and if someone caught your ball you were out of the game. Except that, the skilled and lucky player, with the spare ball at the ready, could wait until some poor sucker made the mistake of trying to catch that first ball— angling into position, eyes skyward—and plaster him right in the unsuspecting face. A perfect shot meant the first ball fell harmlessly to the ground and the other bounced off your opponent’s chin and right back to you. He was out, since you’d hit him, and you had another ball to throw.

It was delectably vicious and as luck would have it I excelled at it right away. Norwood 10

Mr. Seale took notice. “Hey, Bobby, you’re getting pretty good with that. You’re gonna knock somebody out some day.”

One could only hope.

Mr. Seale showed me a Sports Illustrated article about a major league player seriously injured by a bean ball. The Boy’s Club had a reading room, a little nook off the main room with waist-high bookshelves crammed with dog-eared books and magazines, including about ten years worth of Sports Illustrated. But Mr. Seale kept this issue, the one with the story and pictures about this serious beaning, in his own room, where he lived, just off the gym—a ten by twelve cell with a bunk bed, sink, tiny refrigerator, hotplate, tv, and one chair. That was it. A little room off the corner of the gym. The bean ball had hit the player right in the eye, cramming his eyeball deep into its socket.

“Another half inch and it would have hit his brain,” Mr. Seale said.

We were sitting on the lower bunk, the magazine open across my lap. Mr. Seale pointed to the player’s mugshot. His whole face was swollen, black, purple, blue, a sickening shade of yellow.

“What would it do?” I said, looking up at Mr. Seale. “I mean, if it hit his brain?”

Mr. Seale gazed back, showed a faint smile, and raising one hand in front of our faces, snapped his fingers.

I had become one of Mr. Seale’s favorites, which I knew by the fact that he’d taken me into his private quarters to show me this special issue of Sports Illustrated. He had other favorites and everybody knew who they were. Mike Smith, for instance. It was like getting selected for the Pro Bowl. One of the things Mr. Seale liked to do was organize games of flag Norwood 11 football out on the ragged playing field behind the building. He lined us up and chose the teams himself, explaining that this was the only way to make sure if was fair. Equal teams. But it seemed pretty clear what he was up to. Mr. Seale had his enemies too, guys who, for one reason or another, never made it to become one of his favorites. Wise asses mostly, or whiners, or just neighborhood punks who told Mr. Seale to “kiss off” sometimes without the proper tone, the lilt in your voice that said you were kidding and that Mr. Seale was somebody you looked up to, more than anybody else probably. There were some decent athletes among them. He put all these guys on one team, picking them seemingly with careful consideration, as if this was a line up he’d just thought of for the first time. The other team included the select ones, filled out with a smattering of runts and also-rans Mr. Seale showed pity on because they weren’t wise asses or whiners. The teams chosen, Mr. Seale became the sole referee and blew his whistle to start the game. Our team always received the lion’s share of special instructions on what plays to run, tips on how to handle other team’s players, blocks and pass routes and man-on-man coverage. We also got all of the close calls, and some not so close.

I found that, just as in dodge ball, the thing to do was catch a guy blind side. On a kick off, for instance, when you were on the receiving team blocking for the runner, the opposing team’s players would come streaming toward you, their eyes on the ball carrier, looking right past you, completely oblivious to you really, even though you were just a few yards away and closing. Bam! It was like blasting wide-open through a wet cardboard box. It struck me at the time as something sweet and beautiful life had to offer, there for the taking.

Though it was flag football, with no pads or helmets, and full-out blocking and tackling were not technically permissable, Mr. Seale accepted my waylays as part of a young man’s Norwood 12 training—the other young man’s, I mean. He’d trot over and help the kid up, saying, “All right now, all right. How you doin? Let me look at you. Got your plow cleaned, didn’t you? You gotta keep on the lookout. This is football, for Christ’s sake. You gotta protect yourself at all times.”

To me, he said nothing, until after the game, when he caught me, say, shooting pool or thumbing through Sports Illustrated in the reading room. Then he might tousle my hair and wink at me, saying, “He’s a young lion, this one. He’s a man eater.”

Before long, Mr. Seale had me lifting weights and sparring with Mike Smith. He got

Mike to flex his muscles for me one day so I could see his biceps. A significant bulge, like a small mammal in the belly of a python. He’d had Mike on a weightlifting program for several months. Now he had me on one. As members of the select group, Mike and I received one- on-one coaching in the boxing ring, weightlifting instruction with our own personal trainer. We got to see other special issues of Sports Illustrated Mr. Seale kept in his little room off the gym. Like the one with a picture of Y.A. Tittle, the New York Giants quarterback of the fifties, sitting on his helmet on the sidelines with rivulets of blood trickling down from the top of his bald head.

But even among the select ones, I came to realize that not everyone was equal. I found this out late in the fall, at the end of football season. I played for the team from the other side of

Windthorst Road. We had a so-so season. But the Trojans, the tough, scrappy team from the neighborhood around the Boy’s Club, were the Wichita Falls city champs. In addition to the trophy and bragging rights, the whole team and its coaches got an expense-paid trip to the

Cotton Bowl in Dallas to watch a Cowboys home game. Mr. Seale was to go along as the Norwood 13

Boy’s Club representative. One day I came into the gym for basketball practice and he waded in among my teammates, tapped me on the shoulder, and said, “Come here, Bobby. I’ve got something to show you.” I followed him to his office, where he opened the drawer of his desk and pulled out a pair of Cowboys tickets, laid them out in front of me.

“Know what those are?”

I shrugged.

This he seemed to love even more, that I was apparently oblivious to my good fortune, that—at the Boy’s Club, at least—things just fell into my lap. The select of the select. He tapped me on the shoulder, grinning. “This boy,” he said. “What a piece of work this one is.”

There was permission from my mother to be obtained, but how could she refuse? On the appointed Sunday, she dropped me off at the Boy’s Club early in the morning and we loaded up in a chartered bus, the Trojans—wearing their red and gold jerseys over their street clothes—their two coaches, Mr. Seale and me. It was a long ride. The other guys clowned around, told dirty jokes, held bouts of slap boxing. Mr. Seale and I sat side by side, midway back in the bus. He had brought along a sack full of junk for us to eat. Sodas and moon pies and cheese crackers. He kept a fresh soda in my hand even when I didn’t want one. When he saw I was bored, he told me stories.

“Who you think’s gonna win the game?” he said. The Cowboys were playing the

Washington Redskins, who didn’t have much of a team that year, not compared to Dallas anyway.

“The Cowboys,” I said, shrugging. Norwood 14

“The Cowboys,” he repeated, like it was a naive thing for me to say. “Who’s the

Redskins’ quarterback?”

I shrugged again.

“See,” he said. “You don’t know about Sonny Jurgensen.”

I did know, but I had forgotten.

“Take it from me, Bobby. Keep your eye on Sonny Jurgensen. Anything could happen when you’ve got a quarterback like that. Best pure passer in the game. A natural.”

But on that day in the Cotton Bowl, it was, as they say, all Dallas. This was late

November, and it was sunny but cold. Mr. Seale and I sat huddled up together, that great shallow bowl of a stadium spread out around us, with its white and blue seats and fading natural turf and sixty thousands fans. Mr. Seale seemed to be having the time of his life, glad my team was winning but continuing to remind me, before Washington’s offensive snaps, “All right now,

Bobby, keep your eye on Sonny Jurgensen. Watch him.” And Jurgensen did show signs of his old brilliance, managed two touchdown passes. Mr. Seale kept feeding me sodas. Hot dogs.

Whatever I wanted. Or rather, whatever he wanted me to have.

On the way home I was spent. I appreciated what Mr. Seale had done for me. He’d had one free ticket to spare, and he took me, when he might have taken, say, Mike Smith. I had kept up with him as best I could all day, with his storytelling and sports trivia, trying to be a good sport myself. But I was out of gas. I couldn’t keep the smile on my face anymore. Mr.

Seale recognized it. He put his arm around me, let me rest my head on his shoulder. “That’s it,

Bobby,” he said. “You just lay your head down right there and go to sleep.” Norwood 15

When we got back to the club, after midnight, a cold and windy night, he put me in the front seat of his Ford Fairlane and drove me home, escorted me to the door. My mother came out onto our little porch to greet us, wearing a sweater, her arms wrapped around her torso.

“Hey there,” she said in a cheerful voice. “How was the game?”

“Great,” I said.

Mr. Seale was all politeness. He stood on the walk, his hands clasped behind him like a soldier.

“Was he good?” my mother asked him.

“Yes mam,” he said. “Always. That’s a fine young man you’ve got there. You should be proud of him.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m glad you think so. We’re lucky to have you at the Boy’s

Club. And I appreciate you taking Bobby to the game.”

“Oh, it was my pleasure, mam.”

My mother and I went inside and Mr. Seale drove away. The next day was Monday, which meant school, and so she hustled me off to bed. And the funny thing was that after all I’d been through—driving across North Texas in a bus, the ball game, the crowds, trying to please

Mr. Seale, or at least not make him sorry that he’d brought me—suddenly, I couldn’t go to sleep. I guess I had slept myself out on the way home. And I had to pee. The cans and cups and bottles of soda were lining up in my bladder. I’d get up and go into the little bathroom in the hall and stand there with my pee-shooter in my hand, push, push, push, trying to get the last of it out. But the last of it would never seem to come. Frustrating. I could never reach that final push. Each time I had to settle for less, flush, go back to bed. Only to lie there still unable to Norwood 16 sleep, hearing the cold wind blowing against our little paint-peeling house. And a half hour later, up again, standing over the john. Push, push, push. Always another dribble.

As I lay in bed, I started thinking about Mr. Seale, at the Boy’s Club now, asleep on the iron bunk in his little cubbyhole of a room attached to the gym. He was a different man from the one my father had been, what I’d known of my father—different in a way, in a way very much like him, though I couldn’t quite say what it was. It was something, and I lay there thinking about it. I thought back to the scene of my father’s shooting, the way I had always imagined it. He’d just opened the car door for the woman he was seeing, the man’s wife, and then closed it after she sat in the car. And then her husband had appeared, with every right to have it out for my father, a sorry lowlife who couldn’t control himself. And my father had just stood there, knowing all this was true about him and failing to protect himself. Bam! And I continued to think about it, and about Mr. Seale, until the sound of the wind, and the sense of its being blustery cold outside, overcame me, and I huddled up in my covers for warmth and fell asleep.

But, at the Boy’s Club, suddenly and for no reason I could explain really, my enthusiasm waned for most of the activities I’d taken part in. Flag football, basketball, boxing, even dodge ball—these were out, requiring too much energy for too little gain. What did it matter that I smashed some punk’s face with a kick ball? I was into body building now, had begun to see the results of it. After I finished a day’s lifting, I walked around pumped up, my muscles taut, tightly coiled, like springs. When I first started lifting weights, I worked out with

Mike Smith. He was on the same sort of program and he was somebody to talk to. But the problem with Mike was that he stunk. Literally, I mean. He couldn’t have bathed more than a Norwood 17 couple of times a week, wore the same gym clothes for two weeks running. The more I was around him, the more he reminded me of the smell of that boxing glove. Rank, like the smell of dirty underwear. The smell of the glove, of Gertrude’s house, the locker room—whatever it was about that side of town, it smelled bad.

I started finding times to lift when I’d be by myself. I spent ours at it. Bench presses, military, forearm curls. Afterwards, I’d check my progress in a mirror mounted on the wall of the weight room, flexing my muscles and assessing how much they’d grown.

All of this seemed quite all right with Mr. Seale. He’d come in to spot me and to talk me through my workouts, encourage me to add weight, increase my reps. When I looked at myself in the mirror, he’d stand behind me, smiling, admiring the sculpture of my new bulk.

He’d run his fingers over the contours of my biceps.

“It’s paying off, Bobby,” he might say. “Look at you. Ten years old, built like a brick shithouse.”

He’d have me stand in body building poses before the mirror, flexing my leg muscles, for instance. Then he’d run his hands over my thighs and calves. “Yep,” he’d say, “they’re coming along. Coming right along. What a specimen, this kid.”

He never asked why I had quit hanging around with the other guys at the club. In fact, he seemed to recognize that I now saw myself as different from the others, an idea he’d been partly responsible for anyway, I suppose. He’d come into the reading room, where I sometimes went to be alone, thumbing through old copies of Sports Illustrated, and tell me that

Mike or some other guy was finished with the weights and they were free, speaking in a conspiratorial way, looking over his shoulder as if to make sure nobody was there to hear him. Norwood 18

Finally, he asked me if I’d like to come in after hours, after eight o’clock, when the

Boy’s Club closed. That way I’d have the whole place to myself.

“Sure,” I said. “Except how will I get home? My mom likes to pick me up on the way home from work.”

“I can take you home,” he said. “Let her pick up Timmy and leave you here.”

So I cleared it with my mother, told her it was safer this way since I wouldn’t have to worry about one of those street urchins—this was her word—from the neighborhood dropping weights on me. They were always goofing around in there, I told her. This clinched it. I knew it would.

So every other night, I was in the gym from seven to eight, lifting weights. At first Mr.

Seale would go about his duties, rousting all the other boys out of the place, shutting things down, locking the doors and turning out the lights. All but the lights in the weight room, which was off the gym, the opposite end from his little room. Then he’d come in and spot me— always talking me up, making sure I kept checking my progress in the mirror at the ends of the sessions, going through the poses. This was important, he said, because it kept me motivated.

Then we’d go out of the weight room, through the dark gym, the only light coming from the street lamps outside and shining through the high windows near the gym’s ceiling, wide bars of silvery light angling across the pine floor. Into the showers, where Mr. Seale would wait outside, throw me a fresh towel when I came out, then use another one to dry my hair while I was toweling myself down. “Gotta get the hair dry,” he’d say. “Don’t want you catching pneumonia out there. In that cold night air. Your mother’d have our ass.” Then we’d go out Norwood 19 and climb into his little powder blue Fairlane and he’d drive me home, across Windthorst Road to Hollandale Street, the bare yellow bulb shining above our little porch.

But one Friday night, Mr. Seale asked why I didn’t just stay with him.

“You’ll be right back up here tomorrow,” he said. “Why not just stay the night.”

I considered it a moment.

“It’s cold as hell out there anyway,” he said. “Who wants to go out in it? I’ll fix you something to eat.”

I called my mother. She didn’t seem to mind.

What Mr. Seale fixed me to eat was a can of ravioli, heated up on his hotplate and eaten out of a Melmac bowl with a plastic spoon while sitting on the edge of his lower bunk.

The top bunk, a bare pinstriped mattress, was piled high with junk. Dirty clothes, assorted magazines and books, one of those cheap plastic trophies they gave you in Boy’s Club League painted gold to look like the real thing, his prize baseball bat, which, as his story went, he had used to hit a late-inning home run in junior college. Mr. Seale lay on the bed behind me, his back against the wall, his head propped on his hand, watching me eat. He had already stripped down to his t-shirt and boxer shorts. I didn’t know whether to turn half around and try to face him or go on staring at the opposite wall as I ate my sorry dinner.

Through the open door, I could see out into the gym, dark and empty but for the rhomboids of street light angling across the floor, coming in through the high windows. I was suddenly very cold, and getting up to put the half-eaten bowl of ravioli in the sink, I turned to look at Mr. Seale, shivering a little, holding my arms at my sides to keep warm. Norwood 20

“Where am I going to sleep?”

“Right here,” he said, patting the mattress in front of him. “We’ll keep each other warm.”

I looked at him doubtfully.

“Come on,” he said. “There’s plenty of room. You’re still a little guy.” He pulled back the covers and slipped his bare legs under them.

“Go ahead and take off your clothes,” he said. “Just lay them there on the top bunk.”

When I had stripped down, standing there on the cold floor in my underwear, I saw that he was holding back the covers for me.

“Turn out the light,” he said.

I was freezing at this point, a cold draft swirling around my ankles. I switched off the light and climbed in beside him. He pulled the covers over me. Then I felt his legs against mine.

“Jesus!” he said. “You’re as cold as a well digger. Come here. Let’s huddle up and get warm.”

He put his arms around my chest and drew me toward him.

It did feel better, there for a minute, to share someone else’s body heat. I could smell his deodorant, feel the bur of his whiskers against my neck.

“I’ve got to warm this boy up,” he said. “This boy’s as cold as a well digger.”

I was still shivering, my teeth rattling together as I stared out into the gym.

Mr. Seale began rubbing my arms and shoulders, like you might do for someone who’s just been fished out of the lake you’re trying to warm up. Then he moved his hands down my Norwood 21 back and legs, still rubbing. He kept at it for several minutes, saying, “That’s it, that’s it. We’ll get this boy warmed up. We’ll have him warmed up in just a minute.”

I kept staring out into the gym. I was thinking about the first day I’d come to the Boy’s

Club. I don’t know why. Something had suddenly reminded me of that day, the previous summer, arriving with our story about stealing pears, how all the boys had gathered around us like a scene out of some old movie. I remembered the smell of Mike Smith’s boxing glove, recalled it vividly. The musty stench. And I was still thinking about it when Mr. Seale moved his hand inside my undershorts. It took me a second to realize what was happening, and by that time he already had a hold of me. I remember thinking it was already too late. When someone reaches for your vitals, your instict tells you to withdraw, to cover yourself. But it was already too late.

“Bobby’s little pee-shooter,” he said. “He’s got a little pee-shooter.”

I don’t know how to explain what I was thinking then. I remember the smell of the boxing glove, the tinny taste of canned ravioli in my mouth, the warmth of his body. This went on for several minutes. I didn’t know what to do, what to think. I stared out into the empty gym, and, oddly I guess, thought of pears.

“His little pee-shooter,” Mr. Seale kept repeating.

After a while, he withdrew his hand, patted me on the shoulder.

“There, he’s all warmed up now,” he said. We’ve got him warmed up now. You go to sleep, Bobby Boy. You just go to sleep.”

I did eventually, after a long while. Mr. Seale lay with his body pressed against mine, quietly snoring. If I moved, he stopped, and I was afraid that if I got out of the bunk it might Norwood 22 wake him up. I lay there not moving at all, holding myself stiff, until I passed into a sort of trance, a sort of dullness, nothing to look at or to think about, the neighborhood silent but for the occasional car passing on the street.

The next morning, after I woke up in Mr. Seale’s bed and got up shivering in that little room, I pulled my clothes and went up to the front of the building, stood staring out the windows at the sorry houses along the opposite side of the street.. Mr. Seale got up soon afterwards and went about opening up the club, turning on the lights, unlocking the doors. He asked if I wanted anything to eat but I explained that I wasn’t hungry. I found that I couldn’t look at his face, that when he walked down the hall from his office to the gym, he reminded me of my father.

Soon the other boys started drifting in. It was a Saturday, always busy, the boys in the neighborhood turned loose by their parents, pushed out of the house and told to go find something to do. I sat in the front room, in one of the chairs against the wall, watched out the windows as they came along the street in ones and twos. They’d come through the door shaking off the cold and be surprised to see me sitting there, staring at them.

While Mr. Seale was in the boxing ring taking punches from Mike Smith, I stepped into his office and called home, wanting to tell my mother to come get me. She didn’t answer, no one was home. I was there most of the morning before I could get hold of her. When she did come, I was waiting, still there in the front room. I jumped up and made for the door.

The next Monday, I told my mother I didn’t feel like going to the Boy’s Club and that

Timmy and I would just walk home from school rather than riding the school bus to the club, which is what we had been doing. It saved her having to pick us up on her way home, and she Norwood 23 didn’t question why. It was a long time before I went back, six months or so. I expected Mr.

Seale to call and ask where I was, but he never did. Not to my knowledge. One day it occurred to me to look in the mirror, flex my muscles. I couldn’t tell whether my biceps was smaller than it had been, whether is was like it had been before, if there had ever even been any change or if I had just imagined my muscles were bigger when I was lifting weights.

Then one day I had to go to the Boy’s Club to renew my membership so I could play on the football team. Mr. Seale had always been the one who filled out the membership cards and I had to screw up my courage to go in there and see him. But he wasn’t there. In his place was one of the other coaches I had seen around the club months before, a basketball coach.

He knew who I was, and when I asked about Mr. Seale, he said, in a sort of official, memorized way, “John David Seale is no longer employed with the Boy’s Clubs of America.”