Stiff Competition Thomas Burke          My friend Tom had a tape in with his cassettes that casually sat right next to the Fine Young Cannibals and UB40. The title of the tape was handwritten— For Thomas, My Love—by his mom in blue marker.          I wanted that tape, badly. Whenever I was over at his house and Tom was in the bathroom or talking with his dad, I’d want to slip it in the deck for a quick listen, or ‘borrow’ it and stick Funky Cold Medina in its case until I brought it back; I even considered outright stealing it and just playing dumb if he ever questioned me.          With everything we did back then— all the shared hideousness and stupidity—I never grew enough of that particular sort of pluck to invade that space of his. If anything was sacred back then, and, admittedly, very, very little was, the relationship between Tom and his mom took that title.          That being said, my best friend Tom and I were two irreverent, nearly-irreproachable misfits—fourth graders who lived like pint-sized merchant marines on weekend passes, always willing and always able to find something to stick our winkies in, metaphorically speaking. When we did things it was with little or no remorse; even then, we had a waning sense of morality.          We were the kids from down the street that mowed your lawn for five bucks; we were the small-framed dudes in the park smoking pipes of cherry Cavendish; we threw ninja stars at squirrels; and we were the townies that rode around Northwestern University’s campus yelling at coeds and stealing hood ornaments. We were mildly masochistic, substantially sadistic preteens with burgeoning, though powerful, sexual appetites.          We never really got caught doing anything, and even when we did, we were still prim and proper in the adults’ eyes; we would blink a tear, apologize, and go back to being like bleached sheets drying on the line. I suppose we flew below the radar of unmistakably demented behavior. Other people in our school consistently drew the attention of our superiors from us.          Joyce McCoy, for example, was one of the least grounded people I have ever known; she was the type of child authorities kept their eye on. Occasionally Joyce would work the ropes during one of my failed attempts at double dutch jump roping, but in the fifth grade, I knew Joyce best from sitting next to her in social studies—we were both in the last row by the windows, next to the radiators. In the winter, our school’s furnace would crank heat throughout the school, such that Mrs. Fischer—who was maybe juggling the early stages of menopause, forever talking about the temperature—made us keep the windows open.          So while Joyce and I watched snow drifts form on our textbooks and listened to Mrs. Fischer interrupt lessons with her “Aren’t all of you hot? My, it certainly is hot in here…” Joyce would take the ring off her finger and put it on the radiator, using the heat source like it was cast-iron hibachi. She had amazing patience, Joyce did, and she’d let it cook for almost an entire period. Then, in the middle of one of Mrs. Fischer’s sentences, she’d take two pens in her hand like chopsticks, pick up the suspiciously cool-looking ring, and drop it down the shirt collar of the poor, unsuspecting boy in front of her, who’d end up with circular third degree burns from his neck to the small of his back.          Joyce McCoy ended up in a juve home because of a stunt she pulled the summer after fifth grade. She stole a school bus and drove across Howard Street into Chicago. She was tiny, and because she couldn’t see to steer and press the accelerator at the same time, she crashed into a streetlight. That was brass, beyond our scope.          Even though Joyce was small, she could beat up all the boys, all of them except Bradley Jones, who was big and mature—he had a mustache when we left elementary school. Bradley said he’d had sex with Joyce in the boy’s room in the fifth grade—a story he recounted to our gym class in the locker room on several occasions while we changed into our polyester shorts and flung heavy, wet paper towel balls at each other.          Sex for Tom and me, in the fifth grade, wasn’t quite a reality. It wasn’t for lack of an entire library of videos and magazines at our disposal, to teach us—but we definitely weren’t getting any real action, not like Bradley was.          Tom and I spent a lot of time with a buddy of ours, Matt, who lived near us. Matt’s dad had a taste for pornography, which was great because Tom, Matt, and I did too. Tom and I spent, I would issue1, well over half of our fifth grade afternoons at Matt’s perusing movies and comparing raunchy letters to the editors.          Both of Matt’s parents were lawyers and worked late. Babysitters never lasted long, never spoke English very well, were always afraid of Matt’s misanthropic older brother and the family’s neglected golden retriever; basically, we had a house to ourselves to learn about sex.          Assumptions about sex when I was in the fifth grade: it is unlikely, but possible, that if you order an extra large super bell pepper pizza, it will be delivered on roller skates by an eighteen-year-old blond in short shorts and a tank top who will be happy to provide oral sex before she is sodomized. It’s unlikely, but possible, that there are pay per view competitions where two women go to opposite ends of a boxing ring and have a blowjob competition to see who can make the man ejaculate first. Sure, we knew characters like Cynthia Silk Throat and Tammy the Tongue were just bits from a movie, but what if? If there was, surely the Don Kings of the industry would always be on the lookout for men willing to provide the apparatus for these women to compete with.          Exposure to such things made chronic masturbation a necessity, so I set up a little chamber in my closet in the fifth grade. It was crude, but one of the only personal spaces I could find; I shared a bathroom with my mom and the lock didn’t work. The closet was cozy—I had a soft cotton blanket sprawled on the floor—and I’d climb underneath my blazer and my parents’ nonessential garments, pick a season from my Victoria’s Secret catalog collection, depress three or four portions of intensive care lotion in my hand, and go to town. For the amount of time I spent in that closet, who knows what my parents must have thought. I haven’t yet asked their opinion in my search for insight in this matter.          I didn’t get my first kiss until a year later and— even though we were in, or at least on the fringes, of the popular crowd— Tom and I didn’t get much attention from the ladies. We were nothing special to look at: two pudgy, pasty kids with almost-cool hand me down t-shirts from our brothers and French-rolls on the cuffs of our jeans. We both had buzz cuts, Tom’s accented with long, skater bangs that he sometimes crimped, mine with a mouth full of steel correcting my gnarled smile, the result of an upside-down, backwards bicuspid.          But that we weren’t paid much attention to didn’t mean we didn’t pine over the girls to no end. We got to the point of writing our favorite young ladies in our class anonymous love letters. Love letters? Probably those girls, even today, wouldn’t consider any part of them romantic.          We used a typewriter to maintain anonymity, and our recently acquired expertise on talking sexy to women, vis-a-vis the XXX, to woo them. They were full of “I want to press your… and stick my… I want to shoot… grab handfuls of your hair… lots of foreplay before… want to eat…” And each letter ended, “Please don’t show this to anyone because then I’ll be too embarrassed to tell you who I am. Love always, your secret admirer.”          We thought it was great, wrote to six or seven different girls, staying after the bell to stick the envelopes through the ventilation slots in their lockers. Twice, before class started and in our presence, blushing girls meekly handed letters over to Mrs. Fischer saying that their moms had asked that they show them to her. Mrs. Fischer read the letters while she wiped the sweat off her forehead and neck with a handkerchief, but she never made anything of them. Those letters might have been a bit explicit for her to deal with, a bit too visual for our innocent classmates.          Mrs. Fischer and I had a decent relationship—I think she liked me, despite my lack of motivation. Starting with the first month of the fifth grade, I decided that I wasn’t going to do any homework. I didn’t do a single assignment in any class. There was a chart on the wall of Mrs. Fischer’s classroom that was supposed to help us monitor our missing assignments, and my column was empty. I got to the point of simply avoiding that part of the room, throwing out garbage in the hallway instead of using the trash bin on the carpet just under that looming poster board.          Matt never worked on the love letters with Tom and me, but Matt and I had those barren columns in common. There were the only two completely empty slots in the class, and they were ours—even Joyce managed to get her vocabulary work and history sketches turned in.          It’s easy to not do homework, but consistently avoiding homework responsibilities is work in itself. School systems have ways of dealing with underachievers, so Matt and I would compare strategies on deceiving our parents and teachers. We’d give each other the heads up phone calls when letters were sent home so that we could intercept them. We’d practice our somber, repentant responses for Mrs. Fischer: “Uh, yeah, Mrs. Fischer, they got that letter all right.” Sigh. “Yeah, they got the other letters, too. They said this time, though, I’d better really shape up. Shape up or ship out.” Sigh. “I’ll get the work in as soon as it’s finished; I’m grounded until I do.”          And after school, instead of hitting the books like we’d promised Mrs. Fischer we’d do, Tom, Matt, and I would go over to Matt’s house and feed our brains on The Confessions of a Teenage Nymphomaniac or Hot and Saucy Pizza Girls.          We devised ways to cheat on tests. Like on spelling quizzes we’d write the required list on a piece of paper, pressing our ball point pens down hard so that they embossed the sheet underneath it. We handcrafted elaborate crib sheets for math class and history tests. Sometimes we took notes down in light pencil on our enamel desktops, licking our fingers and smearing the evidence away as soon as we passed in our papers.          It did catch up with me though, the not doing homework, and one day my math teacher—unimpressed with my failure to achieve greater things after even a fourth letter home—called my mom and had her come to school for a three-party conference. I don’t think my math teacher, to her credit, brought up the letters, and neither did Mrs. Fischer; I sat at home the following weekend and caught up on half a year’s work in seventy-two hours. Matt never had his parents called in; maybe my ill fate had rattled his conscience, or maybe it was too difficult for them to take off from work.          But as much as Matt was a part of Tom and mine’s lives, Tom and I never quite ceded our duo for a trio. Tom and I were TNT: ready to explode! (and yes, it’s nauseating to say, more gut-wrenching to know we actually yelled it out from time to time). Matt felt left out sometimes—Tom and I made a point of ostracizing him daily.          One of the idiosyncrasies of Matt’s and my relationship, for example, was that every day when we walked home from school, I pushed him into a patch of pricker bushes. I outright tackled him on some days, caught him off guard on others, but no matter the means or circumstance, he ended up writhing awkwardly in the core of the same thorny bush.          He’d seethe, no doubt about that. And Tom and our other friends would stand around laughing. He was defenseless against me. His older brother, Michael, was an inept oddball, whereas my older brother, Alex, was a dexterous and strong adversary. I learned a lot about distributing pain from Alex.          Alex taught me about charley horses: any leg-numbing blow to the thigh. He was merciless; sometimes he’d use his fist, which would hurt; other times he got fancy and used a technically difficult elbow jab, which was an effective, if not impressive, maneuver; most often, though, he’d rear his leg back and explode his kneecap into the flesh of my thigh- the most painful, the most debilitating, and the sneakiest move in his arsenal.          Notwithstanding my own aversion to being the recipient of Charlie horses, I passed them out with wicked abandon, usually during gym class so that we could all—because of our gym shorts—watch for the signs of nascent bruises that would eventually blossom to the size of a softball, change the skin to deep blues and the color of spilled coffee on paper. I once gave Tom a monster Charlie horse ten minutes before our required half-mile physical education test, for which he has never forgiven me.          Again though, we’d get away with it. In the middle of a field where we were supposed to be playing super soccer, we’d circle around a guy who was rolling around on the ground gripping his thigh, tearing from pain and embarrassment, and the gym teacher wouldn’t take notice. The creepy gym teacher would be telling raunchy, tasteless jokes to the girls in our class, oblivious and uninterested in our endeavors.          We’d booty-bop each other in gym class, too: pick an unsuspecting victim about twenty yards away and fall into an all out sprint. Stutter step as you approach, face the back of your victim as if he’s a high jump pole, then leap into the air, twist your torso, and let your entire body weight fall from your butt onto their shoulder blade. If all goes as planned, the victim will crumble to the ground, have mild but instant injuries, and be short of breath. Cheers of reverence and adulation from different parts of the sports field will fall upon you.          Not everything Alex taught me was as innocuous though. He taught me claustrophobia, that feeling of helplessness that accompanies being pinned or confined against your will, sometimes for long periods of time. I’d squirm and kick my legs to try and free myself from Alex’s grip, but with those three years he had on me, he was always too big for me to contend with.          One time he and a friend were playing Atari in our family room, and I sat down on the floor to watch. I suppose their heated session of shuffle puck wasn’t engrossing enough, because they turned their attention to me. As per the normal sequence of events, they pinned me down and roughed me up a bit. Then they got creative. They were thinking in terms of TV’s inventive, never-at-a-loss icon Macgyver: What’ve we got? This old blanket, that couch, a television, the Atari, and a kid? They unfolded a thick, scratchy blanket, put me horizontally at one end—one of them pulled my legs straight while the other yanked my arms up over my head—and rolled me up like a tight cigar. They tore the cushions off the couch, tossed me onto the loose change and gum wrappers, piled the cushions back into place, sat on top of me, and idly resumed their game of shuffle puck with a screaming, hyperventilating kid underneath them.          I wasn’t always a pushover though. I was a fighter, got scrappier after each torture session. Like after the couch incident; later that same day my brother was picking on me on the front lawn. I was pinned down—his knees on top of both my wrists and shoulders at once—and he was flicking my ears so that they stung. He was dripping a thick stream of mucus-infused saliva from his mouth towards my face and slurping it back up before it filled my eye socket. Incidentally, he’s let it drop on a few occasions. Frustrated, I did the only thing I could—I opened my mouth, heaved my face at his crotch, and bit what I caught between my teeth for all I was worth.          He wailed, shrieked, screamed bloody murder, hopped off me, and ran around the yard like he was possessed. I was oddly satisfied. My mom, at the shrieks, ran out the front door to see what was the matter. She took my brother inside and made him show her the marks, I issue1 to see if he needed to go to the hospital. He didn’t.          My parents scolded me. Alex was disgusted, kept asking me how I could conceive of doing something so horrific, how I could not understand the unspoken off-limits always respected during male to male combat. It was an awkward feeling, but I knew it’d be a little while before he did anything to me again. And it was. Not forever, but for a short time; at least, I suppose, until he was no longer reminded of my inner strength every time he peed.          As much as Alex beat the hell out of me, he was still my older brother and had brotherly duties. He protected me from a bully once, said he’d take care of him, and did. As fate would have it though, years later I made friends with that bully in high school; he died about a month after our re-acquaintance, when he was a senior in high school, during a drunken drag race gone horribly sour.          On another occasion, Halloween in the fifth grade, Tom and I—dressed as Bob and Doug McKenzie from the TV show SCTV and the movie Strange Brew—were confronted on the street by six older boys. These guys were dressed, very convincingly, as thugs: ski masks, baseball bats, dark shirts, lengths of iron chains, sawed off broomsticks with grip tape on the handles. They circled us and pulled us off the sidewalk into the walkway between two houses, and told us they wanted our heavy pillowcases full of candy. We whimpered and pleaded, like pussycats, but then one of the guys said, “Hey, that’s Alex’s little brother. Hey, kid, we were just messing with you. We don’t really want your candy.”          Tom’s older brother, Franz, is the same age as Alex, but none of those guys recognized Tom as anyone’s younger sibling. Not that Alex would have necessarily been roughing up youngsters—other than me—for candy, but I issue1 he had a wider ring of friends than Franz, was less constricted. Franz had a different relationship with Tom, was in a much different place. Rita died on Sunday at Evanston Hospital after a five-year battle with cancer. She is survived by her loving family: her husband, Eberhard, a German chemist who teaches at Northwestern University; her sons, Franz-a 7th grader at Haven Middle School, Thomas- a 4th grader at Orrington School; and her daughter, Catherine- a 1st grader at Orrington School. Services will be… Tom’s family lived near Evanston Hospital, which has one of the best cancer treatment centers in the world—the place his mom died the year before. His house, to be exact, was directly across the street from the automobile entrance to the emergency room. One day during winter break from fifth grade, Tom and I decided to make a snow fort on his front lawn so we could throw snowballs at passing cars. The hospital entrance is on a busy street, which meant lots of moving targets; and because the emergency room was right there, cars would slow down and sometimes stop while they were turning in, and we’d nail them.          We made about a hundred ice balls and started flinging the things at every car that passed. It wasn’t the brightest plan, as our fort concealed nothing but our faces. But “TNT” had a blast with all the ducking down, the laughing, and the high fives. It was great, until an oversized sedan that we’d pegged with almost a dozen ice balls stopped just after turning into the hospital’s driveway. An old man in a ragged fox fur cap jumped out, stormed at us, stomped down our fort, and told us his wife was very sick and that we ought to be ashamed of ourselves. He asked whether the house we were in front of was ours? “Uh, no. We live a few blocks down and towards the lake.” He mumbled something, then ran back across the street and gunned it towards the emergency room.          We ran off, and in case the old man came back to get us, we doubled back through the alley and hid out in the crawlspace under Tom’s porch with their black lab, Shadow, picking through the hay bail insulation that made Shadow’s home.          When we went into the house, Franz was watching television, and he was excited to hear the details as they poured out. Franz was very kind. Alex would never have been as anxious to know about our little accomplishments, but Franz, he was the supportive older brother; a few years later, he’d be the one to buy us beer until we got fake IDs.          Sometimes we’d hang out with Franz like he was one of us, and he never let on that he was embarrassed to be with guys three years younger. Franz was cool because he had nun chucks, a samurai sword, throwing darts, Soldier of Fortune catalogs, a collection of hatchets, b-b guns, and sixteen inch survival knives that he’d let us play with. He would demonstrate how to properly throw a ninja star at a target, which was often a picture of a supermodel taken from a fashion magazine that was stuck into a tree with a buck knife.          A live animal had a fifty-fifty chance of survival if it found its way into the backyard during a target practice. If the thing lived, it wouldn’t have been because of a lack of effort.          Franz was the one who showed us the pleasures of riding our bikes through the Northwestern University campus. For some reason, many of the buildings on campus—the ugly ones that were postmodern at some time—were constructed with long, steep ramps instead of stairs: perfect for fearless preteens to rush down, fun for weaving in and out of daydreaming college students on, great for whipping around blind corners and nearly colliding with pedestrians at reckless speeds.          But it was peaceful there, too. The landfill extends the campus out into lake Michigan, and there’s a bike path following the shore that we’d ride on when the weather was nice. Once, Tom, Franz, and I were taking a breather on the boulders that made the landfill’s breakwater, looking out on the lake—sitting, as we always did, next to the rock with the painting of a naked, well-proportioned woman on it—and some older kids from school rode over and took Tom’s and mine’s bicycles. Tom and I looked immediately to Franz, and he had this helpless expression on his face. But he got on his bike and pedaled after them. Tom and I ran to catch up.          When we got to where Franz had caught up with the three guys, they were calling Franz a stupid, white mother fucker. The tension was foreign to me, and to Tom, too. Franz just kept asking for the bikes back, angry but scared. “Just give them their bikes, man. Just give them back.” One of the guys unfolded the blade on a small Victronox pocketknife and said, “Take your fucking bikes, white boy.” Then they got on their own bikes and rode off.          None of us said anything, just started riding home. Franz, though, began to sob, and then he became enraged. “Man, those fucking niggers.” It was the first time I’d ever heard someone use the word nigger. He was grimacing, crying, shaking his head back and forth, standing straight up on his pedals and riding hard. “Those fucking niggers, man. Those fucking niggers. Why the fuck do they have to do that?” Tom tried to say something encouraging and loving to his brother, but Franz was inconsolable. I was confused, and at the time I chalked Franz’s racism up to his German background—the asinine notion that all Germans still had some genetically unalterable Third Reich tendencies.          Franz sometimes hung out with Michael, Matt’s older brother. Michael is the misanthrope babysitters feared. We feared him too, but in a different way. We feared him for his strangeness. Michael hated his parents. He would walk around the house spitting on the carpet and cursing wildly as he rubbed in the wet spots with his heavy combat boots. He’d barge into our porn viewings, unwrap one of his dad’s condoms, blow it up like a balloon, then forcefully, though awkwardly rub it all over Matt’s face and mouth until one of the metal edges of Matt’s braces would pop it. He’d expound on the affairs of the government, call us faggots, sometimes he’d kick their dog, Kate, in the head, and other times he’d wiggle around on the carpet with her like they were lovers.          But Matt, and especially Michael, had it bad in that household. Their dad was a large man, with a huge, swollen belly, and he intimidated with his size, voice, and diction. He treated us like we weren’t kids.          Matt had a sleepover birthday party in the fifth grade. Tom and I were there, Michael invited Franz so he’d have a friend, and Matt made the gutsy move of inviting five or six boys from a slightly higher social echelon to join us. The party was fun, pizza and basketball, and as the night got later, we hyped ourselves up on Jolt Cola and Now & Laters to prepare for the eight hours of movies we’d rented. After The Goonies and Revenge of the Nerds, at about midnight, we started flipping through the cable channels. Late night Cinemax was showing an interesting film. It was soft-core porn, lighter than the stuff we were used to, but still pretty good.          A naked man had lifted and was holding a naked woman up his arms—a kind of backwards piggyback ride—and they were doing it that way when Matt’s dad barged into the room. “Jesus Christ. All right, Matt, give me my goddamned videotape.” Ten pale faces shot back and forth between Matt and his dad.          “It’s not your tape, Dad. See? It’s not a tape.” Matt pressed eject on the VCR and the tape chamber popped up empty. “See Dad, it’s on TV.”          “Jesus fucking Christ.” And Matt’s dad left, slamming the door behind him, and leaving us to continue our research on typical sexual positions.          I’ll admit though, that what confused me the most at the time—what was the most disconcerting about the situation—was that Matt’s dad didn’t recognize that the movie wasn’t from his library. I would have known, right away, that it wasn’t; I knew almost every scene of every movie he owned.          Matt’s dad had an long cherry red ’68 Chevy convertible that he loved to drive us around in with the top down, that is, on the few occasions that he did. He took Matt, Michael, Tom, and me out to dinner in that car once in the fifth grade, and I knew from the beginning that the night was going to end badly, even before we left. We were all in the driveway, sitting in the car waiting for Michael, and his dad became impatient. He honked the horn repeatedly, obnoxiously. Then he yelled at the house, as loud as he could. “Michael! Get your fat fucking ass down here! You’ve had time to jerk off three times and take a shower! Now get the fuck in this car!”          Dinner was tense, but the food was good. We were at an expensive steak house. Conversation was stiff, and even then I knew there was something completely different about Matt’s dad, the way he didn’t ask Tom or me questions like other parents did, the way he swore at the table and degraded his sons in front of us. Michael stormed from his seat at the table twice, and his dad didn’t let him finish his dinner.          When we got back from the restaurant, Michael immediately hopped on his bike and took off, and Tom, Matt, and I went up to the third floor to where Michael’s and Matt’s bedrooms were. As we often did, especially when we knew he wouldn’t be back for some time, we began to snoop through Michael’s stuff. Matt’s dad yelled for Matt to go downstairs, and when he did, Tom and I found a Penthouse under a pile of Michael’s dirty laundry.          It pleased us, held our attention, got us to mill around for ten minutes and drool like morons, anyway. But when we got to the centerfold, the pages had been plastered together with the dried remains of one of Michael’s pleasure sessions. So Tom and I, knowing full well the brilliance and rarity of such a revolting item, decided to put it to use.          When Matt came back up, I got on the weightlifting bench and pretended that I was too weak to bench press the bar with no weights on it. I struggled, swore that the steel was too damn heavy. Just as I’d hoped, Matt started to taunt me.          “You can’t lift that? You pussy.”          “Let’s see you do it. You can’t do it; this fucking thing is heavy.”          “Get out of the way.”          Matt started to bench press the bar, over and over, very quickly, laughing, smirking, reminding me what a weakling I was. But that’s when I bent over him and put all my weight on the bar, on his chest, holding him firmly in place. Then Tom came in from the other room, flipped the magazine to the soiled centerfold, and rubbed it all over his face. Then the two of us bolted, lunged down the stairs, busted out the front door and ran all the way to Tom’s house. As we twisted around the banister at the third floor landing, we could hear Matt piecing things together: “What the…? Huh? Oh, God!”          Matt’s dad called Tom’s house ten minutes later, and even though the receiver was to Tom’s ear, I could still hear the strings of profanity and disgust being dealt our way. “What an asshole,” Tom and I giggled after he hung up the phone. But we did still feel badly, for Matt.          There were really good people in my fifth grade class, too; they weren’t all doing the things Tom and I were, I don’t think. A girl, Rebecca, was one of them. She was kind, and pretty, and thoughtful, and always did her homework, and was smart, and wore pressed blouses with ruffles, and of course we resented the hell out of her. Rebecca and I also went to Sunday school together, and she was the one student who seemed to really believe.          We went on a school field trip in the fifth grade to Camp Timberlee—a Christian camp in the summer, mostly secular for our purposes—for a week of outdoor adventure and bonding.          Rebecca had cancer. At first it was just in her right foot, so they cut that off. Then it sprang up in her right thigh, so that went too, and she used crutches and wore a prosthetic appendage. By the time we were off to Camp Timberlee though, Rebecca had stopped going to school. The cancer had spread down her left thigh, and she was just two arms and a torso rolling around in a wheelchair. Then it was spreading into her organs.          Even though Rebecca wasn’t attending classes, she came on the trip anyway. Her mom drove her up separately, and when Rebecca joined us at lunch on the first day, she repeatedly told us about the prank she and her mom had pulled on the way up: they’d paid the toll for the car behind them at the tollbooth, and the driver of that car had been so shocked that they sped past Rebecca and her mom on the highway, waving and honking their horn.          Apparently, Rebecca was the kind of girl who dies of cancer when she’s in the fifth grade.          It was raining on our fourth day at Camp Timberlee. A group of us were walking to dinner, and we were being smart asses. “Mudder Fudder” we were saying. “That guy’s a mudder fudder! Mudder fudder, mudder fudder, mudder fudder!” Then I got bold and said, loud enough for the entire group to hear, “It’s not mudder fudder, it’s mother fucker, you mother fuckers!”          One of the bible beaters who’d facilitated our trust walk that afternoon came over to us. “Who said that?” I was feeling some mettle, proud that I’d said what others had been afraid to, so I answered quickly and directly. “I did.” The man took me firmly by the collar and marched me to a bench. He sat me down, then sat himself next to me. There we were, sitting in the rain without coats or ponchos, and he began his speech, which I have no doubt he believed would change my life. His voice and demeanor suggested that his words would have that kind of effect.          “What you said back there, that’s a nasty thing to say. A really nasty, devilish thing.”          “I know.”          “Do you know what kind of creature says that kind of word? Do you?”          “No.”          “Rats.”          “Yeah?”          “Yes. Rats. Rats use that kind of language. And do you know where rats live?”          “Where?”          “Rats live in the sewer. Rats are dirty, dirty creatures, they live in the sewer, and they use that kind of language.”          “Oh.”          “Are you a rat?”          “No?”          “Do you want to be a rat? Do you want to live in the sewer?”          “No.”          “So are you going to ever use that kind of language again? Are you going to live like a rat?”          “No. I don’t want to be a rat.”          “That’s good. Very good.” Then he gave me a few pats on the back and sent me to the dining hall.          Seven words continuously resurfaced in my vocabulary over the next week, two of them more than the others: mudder, fudder, dirty, sewer, rat, mother, and fucker. I doubt that that counselor had any idea that his thoughtful discourse would turn into an excuse to curse even more.          There was one week of school between Camp Timberlee and spring break. On the Wednesday of that week, Tom and I got into a nasty fight. I was jealous of Tom, at that time, because he was going with Matt’s family to Sanibel Island for spring vacation, and I was stuck going to a family reunion in southeastern Indiana.          That Wednesday after school, Tom, Matt, and I were walking around our neighborhood bouncing a basketball and telling jokes with two girls—tomboys we’d grown up with, though they were on the verge of becoming gorgeous.          Somewhere along the way, I made a crack about Tom’s penis: “What’s up with that tic tac dick of yours, man?” Of course we all had tic tacs, relatively speaking, since our only exposure to the standard size of mature penises was through the donkey dong lens of Stiff Competition and Learning to Ride—the Hard Way.          So I threw out the insult, we laughed, the girls giggled and whispered to each other, and Tom picked up the basketball and flung it at me. He missed, and the ball sailed across the street and into some bushes. Matt yelled at Tom to go and get his basketball, and I made a few more comments about Tom’s penis while he was gone. Then, while I swaggered and chuckled, the basketball was suddenly bouncing off the side of my face, and my eardrum started to buzz, moan, then squeal like a siren.          There was a brief round of catch the wild turkey, but I managed to snag the back of his shirt with some of my fingers. I stopped him, put one hand on his waist and the other on his shoulder, and threw him to the ground as hard as I could. I got on top of him, and just before I started pounding, I stopped. I gave him a speech instead, talked about how I didn’t want to hurt him because he was my friend, that friends don’t do that to each other. With the super-fuel of my self-righteousness, I didn’t punch him even once.          But while I hovered over Tom and delivered my soliloquy, he was cringing, holding his shoulder, crying. I had this bad feeling Tom was really hurt. It turned out I’d broken his collarbone, and he spent his week on Sanibel Island with a big white air cast strapped around his torso, his arm completely immobilized. He wasn’t allowed to swim in the ocean, never mind those tan lines.          Meanwhile, I was in Indiana with my relatives. One night of that week, we were all in my grandparent’s hotel room, the adults drinking and the kids doing very little. I was watching my grandmother as she sat on the queen bed’s comforter, maudlin and smiling with her plastic cup of raspberry schnapps, so happy to be surrounded by her children and so many grandchildren.          My Uncle Ted, a geography professor at Northern Kentucky, came up to me that night and asked me about school. Uncle Ted was the kind of guy who wanted real answers, not the “fine” or “all right” that worked with some of the others. I was savvy enough to know that a vivid description of how I’d done zero homework for half a year wouldn’t have gone over too well, so I said that I liked all my classes.          “And what subject do you like the most?”          I thought about it, and told him it was writing, which was true.          “How about you write something for me? Would you be willing to do that?”          I said sure, and he walked over to the bedside table, picked up a Four Winds pen and a Four Winds pad of paper, and handed them to me. I knelt down on the floor, used the bed as a desk, and started writing. Freddy Krueger… his victim on a table… got a sharpening stone… knives on his gloves sparkled… scratched his name in the mirror… cut her up…blood on his sweater… sliced her to pieces… she screamed a lot… he liked his work. “Well, Tom, this is a fairly unique style.” Then Uncle Ted laughed out loud. He walked over to my dad and showed the story to him. My dad laughed too, but I think he was embarrassed or concerned, and maybe he ought to have been both. All three of us decided it was best not to show Grandmother how I’d developed my writing up to that point.          When the school year ended—at about the same time Joyce McCoy was giving herself her first driving lesson—Tom, Matt, and I went on a YMCA camping trip together. We spent a week in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan hiking the North Country trail and canoeing the Big Two Hearted River.          What was so special about this trip was that we had an independence that we hadn’t known before. Sure, Ish and Walsh, our twenty-five year old counselors, were there to supervise, but they mentored more than disciplined. We finally had role models that were fun and cool, kind and realistic, physical but gentle, crass but dependable, shameless and honest, and completely accessible. The most important thing we took from that trip was that we were normal: our desires, dreams, faults, and peculiar interests weren’t strange. For a week, Tom, Matt, and I had loving older brothers, two of them. And we were good friends, weren’t thinking about anything but how damn nice it was just then.          Tom fell in love with that feeling the most; he fell for Ish and Walsh like they were some kind of narcotic.          Walsh had a weenie/marshmallow stick that he toted on his pack and in his canoe for the entire trip. At our last campfire, Walsh presented it to Tom as a kind of award for wrapping his canoe around a rock in one of the lazy rapids. Tom ran around the fire like a crazy man, and the heat of the flames seemed to harden an epoxy around his grin.          Part way back home to Evanston, our group merged with the main camp kids who’d stayed in Central Michigan at the main camp. Tom took his stick with him to his seat, for safekeeping, and I sat next to him, on the aisle. About ten minutes into the ride, the junior counselor working on our bus came back to check on things. When he saw the long stick resting between us, and before we could say anything, he grabbed it, and broke it in half, then into quarters. “Sorry guy, no sticks on the bus.”          It would be impossible to duplicate the sound that came out of Tom’s mouth—it was a cross between a pubescent choirboy doing vocal warm-ups and the noise a little girl would make if she was getting punched hard in the stomach. The counselor knew immediately that he’d done something awful, and I could see the regret, the shock, and the what-in-the-world-to-do-now? look on his face. Even so, Tom hated him, and I hated him, too.          To his credit, the counselor demonstrated how the stick was more useful now as a tool to poke people with two rows up on the bus. That softened the blow, but the swing had already connected.          “I’m sorry,” the counselor said. “I had no idea. I’m really, really sorry.”          Tom just stared out the window, didn’t bother to wipe his cheeks of the steady flow from his eyes.          “It’s all right, man.” I said to Tom. “The stick may be broken, but that doesn’t change anything about our trip. It’s just a stick anyway, right?”          Tom shrugged his shoulders, but kept his head against the glass, his eyes watching the cornfields.          “It’ll be all right,” I repeated. “It’s just a stick, man.”          For the rest of the trip home, I thought about the tape Tom’s mom had made him. I imagined that his mom had anticipated the situations that Tom would need a mother’s love, and spoken into a microphone about them. Maybe, instead of a song list on the tape’s insert, Tom’s mom had written down which part of the tape to listen to at certain times in his life: minute seventeen, a tip for your first date; minute twenty-nine, for when you get sick; minute thirty, advice for when you lose something dear to you; minute thirty-nine, something for when you get lonely; minute forty-three, the happy birthday song.          I still have no idea what’s on that tape. I’ve always hoped it held, among other things, the secrets of the world and an answer to the question of life. I used to think of the tape as a physical replacement for a person, his mom reincarnated into clear plastic; that idea was as stupid as it was genuine.          I figure that at the very least, Tom has a recording of his mom’s voice saying she loves him more than he could know, and in some ways I don’t know how much more he’d really want. I really don’t know.          When the buses pulled into the YMCA’s parking lot in Evanston, our parents were there waiting. I was showered with hugs that made me feel young and smothered and loved. Matt got hugs too, and he looked relieved to be back. As for Tom, he held on to his dad for a long time, crying into his dad’s chest. We were still young boys, despite all we had or hadn’t done and seen.