Sting-Ray Afternoons



That was last winter, a lifetime ago. This is summer, a vast hole to be filled, an hour at a time. Kevin Sundem has older sisters, old enough to have a record collection in which there appears, sometime in June, a double album by the Beach Boys called Endless Summer, which is what we have on our hands: a ninety-two-day weekend, a three-month recess, a single afternoon that lasts until all the moms of South Brook call in all South Brook’s sons and daughters for supper in September.

September, like mortality, is an abstraction, too distant and theoretical to comprehend.

In the morning, with no bus to bundle us onto, and Dad in Tokyo for two weeks, Mom banishes us from the house with “Go play.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere.”

“But there’s nothing to…”

“Find something.”

A bicycle circumnavigation of South Brook turns up other kids flushed out of their houses and also circumnavigating the subdivision in search of Something to Do. We circle one another like dogs, try to sniff out a plan, ride our bikes in silence to the playground at Hillcrest Elementary.

The sun is already burning the dew off the metal slide. The few remaining drops are sizzling like batter droplets on a griddle. Climbing the ladder to the top, I imagine myself to be one of the cliff divers of Acapulco. I’ve seen them on Wide World of Sports, the men who swan-dive in electric-yellow Speedos onto the frothy shoals of the Pacific. Dad says they’re “pazzo,” and I agree.

There’s a high dive at the city pool at Valley View. Viewing it from the bottom of the ladder, I cannot fathom even climbing up, much less diving off. But now I force myself to the top of the slide at Hillcrest and look down.

Its angle of descent is roughly the same as that of the laundry chute that drops straight down from Mom and Dad’s bedroom closet to the laundry room a floor below. When Mom’s out of the house, Tom and I use it as an intercom system, shouting echoing messages to each other. We’d be dead meat if we were ever caught in this closet, which acts as a repository of hidden Christmas presents, unopened cans of tennis balls, walnut-handled back scratchers, long-stemmed shoehorns, dry-cleaned dresses, rolls of dimes, but not—upon thorough inspection—a single magazine featuring photographs of naked women.

At the top of the slide, I close my eyes and surrender to a scalding descent, braking halfway down with the soles of my gym shoes, though doing so risks my tumbling over the low edges and falling a dozen feet to the ground below, which is a mosaic of broken-bottle glass, cigarette butts, and used Band-Aids.

The stand-up merry-go-round next to the slide is more terrifying still. Four of us take up our positions on its perimeter while a fifth, older kid, whom I don’t recognize, volunteers to spin it. He jumps on once it gets going, like a hobo onto a moving boxcar. When the merry-go-round is spinning at sixty miles an hour, I redouble my death grip on the handles and lean back to look up at the sky, which has become a whirling tie-dye of white and faded denim.

All the while, I’m aware that the playground engineers have left just enough space between the bottom of the merry-go-round and the asphalt beneath it to accommodate the skull of any eight-year-old who’s been thrown free from this gyrating monstrosity.

Fresh from this experience, I lie on a patch of grass and watch the sky pinwheel. It’s in this state of happy nausea—stomach churning, head spinning—that I ride my bike on a drunken slalom over the little footbridge across Nine Mile Creek.

It rained yesterday and the creek is running fast through the narrow concrete tunnel that passes under the bridge. One of the Davis brothers is standing in the raging water, holding on to a rope he’s tied to the rickety fence that halfheartedly guards against children falling into the creek and being swept away like a bobbing cork.

“What are you doing?” I ask in a tone of disapproval. I’m afraid he’ll die—or, worse, get in trouble. Or, worse still, die and get me in trouble for failing to tell my mom to tell his mom to tell her son to stop it.

“Water-skiing,” he says, and, by God, he does appear to be water-skiing, standing still in the rapids of a swollen creek. For a moment I envy his lack of inhibition or brains.

Even when Jim and Tom aren’t tucking their fists into their own armpits and flapping their elbows at me while making bwok-bwok-bwok sounds, I recognize myself as a chicken. Those earliest childhood fears, of swallowing my tongue, have never left me.

Whenever a wide receiver steps out-of-bounds instead of taking two extra yards and a hit, Dad winces at the TV. “Look at this pansy,” he says. The last thing any of us wants to be is a pansy, scaredy-cat, candy-ass, or wuss—especially now, in the Summer of Evel.

The summer won’t end until September 8, when Robert Craig Knievel attempts to jump the Snake River Canyon in Idaho. In the three months until then, every son of South Brook is attempting his own daredevil feats, jumping great distances on a bicycle while trying to stick the landing. This has induced in me an especially pernicious form of pansy-ism: the Rooseveltian fear of fear itself.

At Mike McCollow’s, we build bike takeoff ramps of plywood propped up on logs. We jump full trash bags, a row of soup cans, and each other. One night when I’m not there and the McCollows are hosting Father Zheel-bair and the associate pastor, Father Larry, for dinner, Mike shows off by hastily assembling a ramp and trying to set a new soup-can record. But the ramp has too much pitch and he doesn’t pull up hard enough on the handlebars and lands so hard on the front wheel of his grape Sting-Ray that it snaps off and his fork sticks in the wet ground like a Jart. By then, Mike has been thrown between the handlebars, as if Freddy the Foot had kicked him through the goalposts. He lands on his face.

“Father Zheel-bair gave me last rites,” Mike says the next day, his face striped like a badger’s. “I’m not even exaggerating.”

So I learn how to jump without really jumping anything, how to catch a pass and stay inbounds but to fall just before contact, to stray far from the boards in hockey so as never to check or be checked, and generally to give the appearance of physical bravery without ever having to be physically brave.



From the park I ride my bike to Kevin’s house, where I ring the doorbell. His mom sweeps the door open, yells “Kevin!” and returns to the kitchen.

Out pops Kevin. All I say is “Garage?”

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