I made a right onto Chicory Place—the two-block stretch (later called Jason Terrace) the compound’s pair of cul-de-sacs banded—where someteen older boys leaning on day-glo Haros and Dyno Compes watched as Jonboat, in helmet and knee pads, launched a white Redline up and down the slopes of a fiberglass halfpipe that spanned the front yard of the northernmost trilevel. Six feet over the halfpipe’s lip, he’d punch his handlebars and set them spinning, or stretch his body like Superman in flight and get the whole frame to revolve beneath him. Even as I witnessed them, these tricks seemed impossible.
I rode a two-speed Murray Street Machine, a badly manufactured BMX-slash-mountain-bike hybrid so famously heavy and deeply uncool that, as soon as Jonboat dismounted the halfpipe, three of the boys standing nearest to me—without a single word or glance exchanged—got in my face, struck high-fisted, hair-metal-balladeer poses, and sang the orgasmically overemoted Street Machine advertising jingle’s tagline:
Muh-ray
moves you
fast-uh!
Jonboat rolled up and clapped me on the shoulder. “Belt Magnet,” he said to the kids who’d sung at me.
“Who? Him?”
“The psycho kid?”
“The swingset murderer?”
“Wait. Hold on. He is that kid. You are that kid. I saw you at the Strumms’. That shit was the tits.”
“Thirty-eight double motherfuckeny D-cups!”
“Best night of the year.”
“You need a new bike, kid.”
“You’re better’n that bike.”
“You’re the swingset murderer.”
“I like Belt’s bike,” Jonboat told them. “Besides, it doesn’t matter. He’s not into freestyle.”
“Still.”
“Still what?”
“He deserves a cool bike.”
“A cool bike to do what on?” Jonboat said. “Belt’s no poseur.”
“I never said he was a poseur.”
“I think Jonboat’s saying if Belt had like a Kuwahara or something, and all he did was ride around on it, then he’d be a poseur, but since his bike’s a piece of shit and all he does is ride around on it, it’s actually kinda cool that his bike’s a piece of shit.”
“You know what? That’s true,” the jingle-singer who’d insisted I deserved a cool bike said. “I’ve completely changed my mind now. Your Street Machine’s the D’s. It’s rocknfuckenroll.” From his pocket he produced a rolled-up pouch of watermelon Big League Chew shredded bubblegum. “Here, man,” he said, “have some.”
I took a fat pinch. The others did, too. We all stood there, chewing. I looked over at the halfpipe. A boy on his pegs did a grind on the lip, hopped on the ledge.
“So you gonna do another murder soon, or what?” asked the singer who’d unpacked Jonboat’s assertion that I wasn’t a poseur.
“No,” I said.
“Well why the fuck not?” said the one who’d supplied the rest of us with gum.
“I promised my mom,” I said.
“So what?”
“She’s gone, now,” I said.
“So she’ll never find out then.”
“Dude, I think that he’s saying she died.”
“Oh man, he is. I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Me too, Belt.”
“Yeah, sorry, Belt. I’m sorry.”
“But then at the same time, you know, I think: still.”
“Still what, dude?”
“Still I think maybe why not do a murder soon? She’ll never find out.”
“You’re fucked up, dude.”
“Since when is that a bad thing?”
“You’re a motard, dude. Hey, Belt, man, ignore him, he’s a huffer and a motard. What I want to know’s where’s your robot thingy, huh? You got one, right? I heard you got one.”
“I don’t like to bring it out,” I said.
“But you should, man, you should! I’d kill to get my hands on one of those fuckers.”
“I know,” I said.
“So then how come—”
“Yeah, like—”
“So we gotta get going, guys,” Jonboat told them.
“Oh,” they said. “Alright,” they said. “We thought…” they said.
“Why the long faces?” Jonboat said. “You don’t have to go. You can use the halfpipe as long as you want.”
Two of the singers sent up a howl. The third bent forward, clutching his abdomen, and blasted the green wad of gum from his mouth, suggesting, I supposed, that Jonboat’s generosity had struck him with the force of a kick to the torso. The singers who’d howled both followed suit, spitting their gum out into the street, then one fell down, pretending at a seizure, and the other two, without missing a beat, dropped to their knees and pretended to roll him for his wallet and shoes.
* * *
A quarter-century later, when I showed up for brunch, the spat gum was still there, in the middle of the cul-de-sac, three black near-circular stains on the pavement before which I paused, overcome by a memory, a long-lost memory: first sensory, then narrative: a breathtaking recollection of my mother. Of my mother in profile. My mother’s left temple. She’d had a trio of birthmarks (that’s what she’d called them—my father’d called them beauty spots, I’d called them freckles) that you could see only one of unless she tied her hair back. Like those gum stains, her birthmarks were arrayed in such a way that, were you to connect them—as I (I suddenly remembered) once had; I’d used an eyebrow pencil—they’d form an obtuse, scalene triangle.
That’s all. That’s it. That’s what took my breath away. Recalling my mother had three birthmarks on her temple, and that, one day (the first time I saw them?) while she was taking off her makeup (after coming home from work?), she allowed me to connect them with an eyebrow pencil. Perhaps it sounds minor, but not since her death, and probably not for a while before it (she didn’t like her birthmarks; hardly ever tied her hair back) had I thought of (much less pictured) her birthmarks, let alone remembered having drawn lines between them. What a thing to forget, right? Or maybe what I mean is: what a thing to remember. What a thing to have forgotten for so many years, and then suddenly remember right then and there. I was happy to remember it, elated in fact, and, normally, I would have lingered with the memory, would have made sure—while the memory was fresh, before my brain could rehearse it to death—I would have made sure to close my eyes and stare, to sniff around and listen, to push at the spatio-temporal borders (what inspired me to ask her to draw on her face? how long did she leave the birthmarks connected? did she show my dad? did he say something funny?), but I just wasn’t able. Features of the immediate environment encroached, commanding my attention.