A schoolyard-grade set of playground equipment—geodesic dome jungle gym, monkey bars, carousel—was straddling the lawn that had once borne the halfpipe, and Triple-J was using it to stage surprising feats in front of an audience of adolescent males. Between this scene and the one described in the section above, the parallels were no less glaring to me than I imagine they are to you, dear reader, and, for a moment (a not-so-brief moment), I was troubled by the feeling of having entered an experience that, pavement stains aside, had, without my foreknowledge—much less my understanding of its author’s, or authors’, motives (Triple-J’s, presumably, perhaps Jonboat’s as well)—been curated for me. Though a feeling that hadn’t ever troubled me before, it was one I’d imagined any number of times while reading any number of disappointing novels; a feeling I’d believed any number of purportedly human protagonists should have been troubled by—and yet were never troubled by—during any number of the analog-brimming, tritely juxtaposed episodes their bumbling authors kept jamming them into.
But then I lit a Quill and got ahold of myself.
I was a guest. I was the guest. Why shouldn’t the scene have been curated for me? One puts one’s best face forward for guests. One goes out of one’s way to. Plus I wasn’t just any guest: the host looked up to me. No Please Don’t had been important to him. He was likely more invested in securing my admiration than he would have been another, more typical guest’s. And what, in the eyes of an adolescent boy, could ever be more admirable than the capacity to draw an admiring audience of adolescent boys? The capacity, you say, to bed adolescent girls? Okay. Maybe. But that capacity was pretty strongly implied by the having of the audience, was it not?
In any case, what was hinky here wasn’t so much that Triple-J would, when I arrived at the compound, be demonstrating either or both of those capacities, but rather that his father had been doing the same the only other time I’d arrived at the compound. And yet as I continued to smoke and reflect, I came to see how even that wasn’t really so hinky. The father, after all, had raised the son. And what a father to have. A billionaire astronaut. What son wouldn’t, if even he had the choice to begin with, absorb such a father’s psychosocial MO?
What I should have been feeling is flattered, not troubled. Not only right there, in 2013, but back in 1988 as well. If anything was hinky, that thing was me, my emotional intelligence, my handle on basic human motivations. Up until this second visit to the compound, it hadn’t once occurred to me that Jonboat might have, when I’d arrived the first time, sought my admiration. To be certain: he’d found it. He’d impressed me no end, aloft on his Redline. He’d had my admiration. But I hadn’t ever thought that he’d cared either way, let alone cared enough to orchestrate a whole spectacle to get it.
(And yes, maybe “orchestrate a whole spectacle to get it” overstates the matter, assumes too much: too much in both cases, ’88 and ’13. The orchestration of the spectacles may very well have happened in advance—and independent—of my corresponding invitations to the compound. Even if that were so, however, the overstatement would only be slight, would only assume just a little too much, for either Pellmore-Jason surely could have invited me to visit on a day when I wouldn’t, on arrival, have witnessed his spectacle.)
Flattered I should have been, so flattered I became, flattered that anyone—let alone any two Pellmore-Jasons—would want to impress me, and, once flattered, I was able to relax, to try to do the gracious thing: to try to be impressed. And I did, and I was.
I somewhat was.
It’s not that I wasn’t.
It’s more I just couldn’t—perhaps unfairly, yet perhaps unavoidably—help but to reflect on how much less impressed I was there, in ’13, than I’d been in ’88. Less impressed not only because I’d realized twenty-five years sooner that the person impressing me wanted to impress me, but because, apart from his having drawn an audience, what that person was doing to impress me (and that audience), though certainly difficult, wasn’t also beautiful.
* * *
—
Unlike those his father had performed on the halfpipe, Triple-J’s surprising feats required little athleticism, and zero daredevilry: they were feats of endurance like the one in the “Flick&Look” clip—sweaty, sure, and a little bit twitchy, a little bit trembly, but otherwise barely even kinetic.
He and the other Yachts, when I’d first arrived, had been hanging one-armed from the jungle gym’s monkey bars, each holding in his dangling hand a Curio. The idea was to maintain one’s grasp on one’s bar while squeezing one’s cure just enough to make it painsing. This was, I soon gathered, harder than it looked.
Chaz fell to the ground in under a minute, and then, in succession, Lyle dropped his cure, Bryce squeezed his to death, and Chaz Jr.’s went quiet. The four of them stood beneath the bars from which they’d hung and, sucking air, red-faced, watched Triple-J.
Eventually, Triple-J let go his own bar, landed on his feet, and did a twisty kind of back stretch while Burroughs, who’d been reffing, held high a stopwatch and announced to the audience, “Three hundred seconds—five minutes on the nose. A new Hangstrong record. Lowman was Chaz at fifty-seven seconds.”
“Beat fifty-seven seconds, you’re in, you’re a Yacht,” Triple-J told the audience. “Beat five minutes, you’re captain of the Yachts. Who wants the game ball?”
Cheers. Raised arms.
Triple-J pitched his still-living cure into the audience.
“Next up is what?” he said. He headed stage left a few steps, to the carousel. “Is this what you want?” he said, and boarded the carousel.
Cheers. Clapping.
“Ulysses it is,” he said.
Louder cheers. Wilder clapping. And that was another thing. The audience itself, despite being twice the size Jonboat’s had been, was also less impressive, its members less…menacing. Granted, I’d grown taller in the intervening years, gained a few dozen pounds, and become, I’d like to think, less easy to intimidate, but there was more to it than that. Whereas the kids who’d watched Jonboat spin in the air sought authenticity (or at least posed as if they sought authenticity), and were (or claimed to be) sensitive above all to inauthenticity—ever chomping at the bit to spot it, to be the first to name it (sellout, poseur, wannabe, etc.)—those watching Triple-J and the Yachts perform appeared instead to seek out the laudable, and to want, moreover, to be the first—or, failing that, one of many—to applaud it. On top of all their clapping and cheering, they winked and they back-slapped and high-fived and -tenned, pressed their fists to their chests and solemnly nodded, Fonziethumbed while eyebrow-hiking, seeming, at first, like they were only responding to subtle exhibitions of Hangstrong prowess (exhibitions I figured my Hangstrong virginity kept me from being able to appreciate), but their applause continued once Hangstrong was over, while we waited for Ulysses, whatever that was, and I came to understand they were applauding one another no less than the Hangstrong spectacle itself, and, because all they’d done was applaud and spectate, I couldn’t help but conclude they were applauding one another for applauding the spectacle—and also, perhaps, for applauding one another—which in turn made me think that they must have been, at least in part, applauding in order to receive applause.