The Keeper, Blog#1: A Cupcake for Duck

When I was eleven or twelve, I engaged in my last-ever exchange of fisticuffs with a neighborhood friend who insisted that what I’d perceived from my vantage point atop a local pitcher’s mound as strike three had been ascertainably from his more reliable position at home plate ball four. As he started up the line to take his base, I ventured off the mound to intercept him, my understanding being that, as he was headed away from, instead of back to, the bench, some assistance with vector recalibration was called for. Verbal posturing ensued, which gave way to physical posturing, then to a shove or three, then to a flurry of punches—some of which landed—before the other guys pulled us apart and told us to shut up so we could finish the game. Inasmuch as my friend—his name was “Duck”—had a trickle of blood ribboning out of his left nostril, I felt justified in my assessment that the victory had been mine. Inasmuch as my lip happened to be split, however, I knew Duck might be justified in claiming the same honor for himself.

In any case, a do-over was decided upon, and when Duck hit the next pitch down the line for a double, prompting Joe Neep to try to score from second base, the play at the plate was so close that the ensuing controversy over whether he had been safe or out was pig-headedly protracted on all sides. As a result, the game never re-commenced, some of us eventually having to get home in time to clean up and go to Saturday afternoon confession at the parish church. Duck and I, living as we did on the same block of the same street, trudged home together, stopping along the way at a local convenience store for bottles of Yoo-Hoo, a watery but sugar-packed chocolate drink in fashion among us at the time.

The reason Duck was called Duck, by the way, his real name being Eddie—Edward during the school day—had a lot to do with the fact that Buck Scutty, whose Christian name was Scot, was called, well, Buck. He lived around the block from us and shared with Duck—whose patronymic was Durkee—the misfortune of having developed a pronounced overbite, or, as we always called it, buck teeth. Buck’s disfigurement had begun to manifest at an earlier age, so he’d been dubbed with a ‘B’ long before Duck’s similar dental arrangement had become apparent enough to require disparaging commentary. Additionally, Duck suffered from the misfortune of having splayed feet, so he waddled a bit. “Buck,” then, being taken, “Duck” had seemed to all, including Buck and Duck, a perfectly adequate alternative by way of a street handle.

Neither of them resented his particular moniker, in spite of the fact that it referred in each case to a physiological embarrassment. Looking back, I’d guess that this was because, like every one of the rest of us, neither cared about his appearance, being still young and narcissistic enough to believe that, no matter how others saw him, he still looked more or less as rugged, even as handsome, as, say, Steve McQueen or Sean Connery. Besides, having a street handle gave one caché, even if, as in Buck’s case, it bore reference to a facial disfigurement of the kind that can become, later in life, cause for existential anxiety, especially regarding one’s prospects with women.

In the convenience store I’d found a crinkled-up dollar bill in my pocket instead of the usual quarter or two, so I’d felt myself in a position to purchase along with my Yoo-Hoo a package of cupcakes, two to be exact. Afterwards, as Duck and I sat outside on a small mound of rubble along the store’s side wall sucking desultorily at our drinks and staring at a couple of dogs across the street snarling at each other, I absently pried open the package of cupcakes and extracted one. I finished it in a few bites and washed it down with more chocolate water. Glancing over at Duck sitting there with his bottle already half-consumed, I thought I caught a sort of a hungry look on his face. To be sure, Duck always had a sort of a hungry look on his face, and it wasn’t always because he was hungry. In fact, it had something to do with his overbite in combination with gaunt, drawn cheeks, elevated cheekbones, and gloomy grey-green eyes overhung by a spiky unibrow.

At this particular moment, however, Duck’s characteristic look brought together a number of disparate feelings I’d been curating since our brief set-to along the first-base line. Prominent among them was a vestigial but still strong and primal urge to finish out the whole affair with him right then and there. This was in spite of the fact that on our way to the store we had jointly chosen to focus our conversation on Neep’s loud-mouthed obstinacy about being safe at home plate. This topic had allowed us to avoid re-litigating our own dispute and united us a bit in our shared disapproval of Joe’s always-difficult personality.

The bonding effect, although it didn’t exactly cancel my more primary energies, did encourage me to remember that Duck and I were friends of long standing, having been what adults called playmates since the days when we had not been allowed to stray off of one or the other’s front lawn to retrieve some toy that had been jettisoned to the curb. Not allowed, that is, without knocking on the door to get an adult, or at least an older sibling, to give us permission and then watch us do it. I liked Duck well enough—I always had—so the mystery of why I had suddenly wanted to fix his overbite was one of stark contradiction such that, somewhere in the muddle of impulses and dispositions that characterized my boyhood self, I wanted to find a key that would de-muddle them. 

The key that had begun to reveal itself—vaguely, of course, and not at all systematically—was the recognition that I had been already sort of mad at him before the incident had taken place. This had had to do with what I perceived as a subtly superior attitude he’d begun adopting with me recently, especially when the question of relative intelligence, of judgment, of being obviously right or wrong, had come into play during our conversations. That is, in my mind, Duck had begun coming across as a know-it-all, whether it had to do with the categorical assignation of whales (mammals or fish), the merits of my favorite TV show (a spy spoof called “Get Smart”), or the relative quality of Cadbury’s vs. Hershey’s chocolate bars with or without almonds.

I had noticed, too, that I was the only one with whom he seemed to adopt this tone, and that he often marked it out by addressing me as “Irish”—as in, “Well, Irish, actually, you know . . .” or “It doesn’t take much to impress you, does it, Irish?” I’d begun to imagine it was by way of reminding me that he was of English extraction and that English history was suffused with all sorts of glories, one of the most refulgent of which was its success in maintaining dominion over the unruly Irish, who without the iron rule of Albion all those centuries would certainly by now have slit open one another’s throats every last one and several times over. It was clear from Duck’s tone at such times that he took it as a given that, instead of resenting the English for their troubles in keeping the Irish off one another’s gullets, my people should be thanking them for their administrative benevolence, even if it did mean the steady extraction of Irish wealth.

Most of my boyhood, you see, was spent in a neighborhood of second- or third-generation European-Americans, the sons and daughters of immigrants still humble enough lifestyle-wise to be worried about the question of innate inferiority as compared to the wasp-y Rock Hudson- and Grace Kelly-type characters they saw at the movies. We kids were especially obsessed with our position vis-à-vis one another. At issue were the relative intelligence or athletic ability or pugilistic prowess, or, being, most of us, Catholic, the comparative moral comportments of Italians, Germans, Pollacks, and “Micks.” The prejudiced humor or debasing theoretical assessments we put forward on a daily basis about one group or another were generally by way of establishing ourselves in the ethnic pecking order. As a correlative, though there weren’t many English kids in the neighborhood, the ones we did know of seemed at a bit of a remove from these questions of relative ethnic worth, as if, after all, they had nothing to prove. At any rate, it probably goes without saying that the slurry of cruel stereotypes, anecdotal apocrypha, and mutual derision that characterized our banter came directly from our parents, especially our fathers, who had to earn their livings—and ours—side by side with one another in atmospheres of anxiety and often intense competition. Such easy formulae for dismissing the worth of their competitors were, perhaps, of the nature of verbal bromides to be agreed upon by all and sundry in their family fiefdoms, and especially by their compensatorily admiring kids.

It so happened that during the sixties and into the seventies the Irish were taking a good number of hits in the media as a result of the military-political activities of the IRA, who were perpetrating demonstrations, riots, bombings, and occasional pitched battles in Belfast and elsewhere throughout the north in order to unify Ireland under one banner. The burning issue in my neighborhood in this regard, as it trickled down to us from the adults, was not so much why the Irish were so bumptious as, simply, that they were. The common assessment was that the Irish were but an unruly people, reactive, stupid, vicious, and drunk. To expect refinement of feeling, taste, or intellect from “Paddy” was tantamount to thinking one might successfully preach the gospel to a kennel of dogs.

A countervailing imagery, of course, assembled itself around the somewhat degenerate idea America had of St. Patrick’s Day, characterized as it was by talk of rainbows and pots of gold, and by leprechauns dancing in store windows surrounded by four-leaf clovers. The Irish, that is, not being disposed to win anything by virtue of cleverness or hard work, relied merrily and enchantingly, and more often than not besottedly, on their beloved faerie avatars and meadow-sprung good luck charms to realize for them the possibility of happiness in the form of sudden and undeserved wealth.

So it isn’t surprising, looking back on it now, that I might have taken Duck’s recent tonal condescension with a measure of umbrage. At that moment, though, as I sat enjoying my packaged cupcakes under Duck’s famished-looking gaze, this back-bay of surging and counter-surging resentments suddenly gave way—as per the parting of some interior Red Sea—to a sense, for want of a more secular term, of communion with him. It was a feeling pure and simple, not any sort of quasi-philosophical conclusion based on explicit premises. It was more like an aperçu, an irresistible sense in this case of the futility of all the ethnic stuff—the posturing and arguing, the eternal jockeying for position, the underlying insecurities about self and identity that drowned the goodwill and mutual adhesion that had existed in those more innocent years when jettisoned toys were carefully retrieved and it was all about the fun we were having. I missed, of a sudden, those days long gone when games were finished or not in a spirit of relative unity and mutual satisfaction, and then we went in for our respective dinners. Or, if it was lunchtime, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were brought out on paper plates and we ate them together, shared them across even, if one was hungrier than the other. In fact, what I was suddenly feeling may have been a kind of longing for that innocence itself, a sense of our having lost something in agreeing to adopt the prejudices and resentments investing the various scripts that came down to us from the adult world.

With regard to these scripts, some elements of them came down below the radar, as it were. They often took the form of bracketed backstory material that got put together in areas of our minds that wouldn’t allow them to enter the dialogue, so to speak, since they violated certain strictures of what neo-classical critics used to call decorum. Duck’s hungry look, I think, seemed especially numinous and potent to me by virtue of the fact that his dad had the same look most of the time, but in a feral kind of way. Frequently seen with a bottle of beer in his hand, even on Saturday mornings when he thrust a push-mower up and down his patch-of-grass lawn, he wore his sleeves rolled up, and usually had a pack of L&Ms tucked into the rolled part just above a tattoo on his bicep of some mystical fire-breathing entity with very sharp teeth and plate-like scales. I knew also of a mother who often looked bruised and defeated and didn’t speak much—and of a little brother who, probably being what would nowadays be diagnosed as ADHD but in those days was thought of simply as “bad,” would suddenly and mysteriously show up on the sidewalk from time to time with a black eye, or a tooth missing, or with his arm in a sling. While it felt inherently dangerous to connect these data points and make of them something resembling a conclusion about certain private areas of Duck’s home life, they did make me feel that this hungry look of his was about more than food. 

I tried not to seem condescending in offering Duck the remaining cupcake, but he looked at me with genuine surprise. “Are you crazy or something?” he said. I may have been, I thought. It was a kind of a cockamamie thing to do, all told. It went against every article of a neighborhood code that valued self-sufficiency and self-reliance, vendettas in the face of unresolved conflicts, and most of all the disposition to retain what was one’s own for oneself and brook no mooching.

“You’re being stupid weird, Irish.”

“Take it,” I said. “I’m full.”

“What do you mean you’re full? You only ate one of ’em.”

“I’m full,” I repeated.

 Whereupon his features relaxed.

“Okay, then,” he said.

I waited.

“Okay, I’ll take it.”

And he did.

As I looked at the dogs, who were no longer snarling but sniffing each other’s private parts, he wolfed it down.