Funny, with all the adrenaline I had flowing, I was too fidgety to even go for my usual morning run. You’d think I’d have needed to blow off some steam, but no, my game face was on, and I was focused on one thing and one thing only.
“What if I have to actually, you know, fight?”
Let’s admit it. I was a runner not a fighter. Everyone knew that. My prior fighting experience, had been limited to:
(a) Adopting a tough-guy persona
(b) Having actually gotten beat up in gym class by a tall lanky jerk nicknamed “Lurch” who punched me in the eye
(c) Scuffling with a slow fat kid who tried to literally roll me over in a little league game at second base, resulting in a sucker-punch to my eye, and
(d) Having been paired against the nerdiest kid in gym class to wrestle, the match resulted in an embarrassing draw.
So, like I said; I was a runner, not a fighter.
But this felt different, very different. This time, I had something to fight for.
Tommy had instructed us to meet him at The Hut early, and to bring—just in case, mind you—any household implement that could potentially be used or modified into a weapon, strictly for self-defense purposes, should the unthinkable happen.
Searching in the house, I came up with a wooden baseball bat that could be sawed in half, a box of colored tacks which could be hammered into aforementioned baseball bat, A small, hand-held spade (quite rusty) from the garden, and a size twenty-eight belt I used to wear with a large metal moon for a buckle, which when sharpened could be wrapped around my hand and swung like a mace in the direction of any would-be attacker, I told myself.
So, I grabbed a quick bite to eat, my stomach already nauseous and bloated from nerves, and put my collective weaponry in a powder-blue pillow case (Ok, not tough, but hey, I couldn’t find anything else!) and hauled ass to The Club, yelling back to my Mom something about not expecting me till late as I ran…
“Just be home for supper, Jimmyrocketttttttt!” Knew that was coming.
There were a bunch of us, me, Tommy, Patrick, Ken, Rick the Stick, Dereck Shifter (his younger twin brothers and Jackie Junior were directed not to attend), Brian, and Cousin Owen. We were standing around staring at each other, not knowing exactly what to do, when low and behold who came meandering in but Stevie Bird, joining the boys in solidarity.
“Hey, man. Wow, you look like real actual dog shit know that, Bird?” Stick ribbed.
“Thanks for laying out the welcome mat, Stick,” joked Stevie, looking a bit banged up but otherwise sounding like his ever-annoying self.
“Ok, my band of brothers, pipe down. Today we settle the score for Stevie and all the shit those asswipes have been pulling since back at that first Road Race. Right, Jimmyrocket?” Tommy’s penetrating eyes locked with mine.
(Jimmyrocket, Jimmyrocket, why’d he have to call me out?) Oh shit.
“And I’ll tell ya right now, I don’t trust them Memorial Beach suckers one little friggin’ bit, so we better be ready for anything, and I mean anything. Now, let’s see what you guys brought.”
So, we laid out our supplies out on The Hut’s plywood floor, and started to prepare them for battle. The rest of that day was exhilarating as we told stories of fights and fighting, which led to favorite fighters and fight movies then war movies leading to monster movies and on and on it went, hour after hour, as we painstakingly ground tin and metal and other objects into their more dangerous counterparts. I spent most of my time using a rock to sharpen my belt buckle edges to fanatical perfection, my secret weapon of choice.
That’s when Tommy pulled out the pièce de résistance, a friggin seven-inch, sharp-as-all-get-out, shiny, stiletto switchblade knife! You know the kind that comes straight out at ya and can carve your eyes out in a millisecond? In unison we thought it was the absolute coolest thing any of us had ever seen. And to think, we thought Tommy was cool before. Wow. Once the secret weapon was unveiled, we spent the next few hours playing every dumb game of “chicken” we could think of. How no fingers or toes were lost in the process is anyone’s guess, as we started throwing the knife at anything and everything in sight!
There was something palatably different and special about that day, lost for hours and hours in our own world of fantasy and vivid imagination, teetering on the edge of reality. For that day we weren’t just a bunch of teenagers doing stupid things with newfound courage; oh no, we were the toughest of tough guys prepping for battle, we were: John Wayne in True Grit, Lee Marvin in The Dirty Dozen, Clint Eastwood in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and for me in particular, “Tony” in West Side Story, but hopefully with better results!
When you’re a Jet!
Of course, Mashnee being Mashnee, it wasn’t long before word spread on the much-practiced gossip wire about a bunch of teens preparing for a possible showdown with the Memorial Beachers. Most thought it was just kids being kids and nothing to worry about, but some knew better, including my sister, my cousins, and Mary Ellen Kramer, who each showed up at The Hut to see what was going on and try and convince us to “stop this fighting nonsense,” but we were men hell bent on a mission, and there was no stopping us.
We also got “a good talkin’ to” later that day by good old Betty O’Connor while we were inside The Club playing pinball, her sage advice was laced with an array of colorful expletives, but her message was abundantly clear: “Screw off, asswipes, and don’t you dare cause any shit, or I’ll shove a jar of peanut butter (which she just happened to be holding in a threatening manner at the time) so far up your be-hinds you’ll have it tomorrow for lunch.”
Ohhhh Kaaaaay, Betty, we’re outta here.
Our plan, if indeed we needed a plan, which I was certain we didn’t, was uncannily brilliant in its simplicity and deception.
Once somebody gave the high sign, we would emerge from the front parking lot, temporarily obscured by the large row of prickly hedges bordering the cracked, poorly paved lot and head to the beach en-mass, exactly one arm’s length away from each other, to confront our would-be invaders, while two of us strategically hid under a beached sailboat nearby, ready to come charging out like banshees to overwhelm our hapless victims, Jackson Brothers and all.
Even if they brought a boatful of kids, which they probably wouldn’t even, we’d get the jump, and there were eight of us (Well seven; Stevie was feeling so good and had already puked twice, but seven with Tommy felt like plenty.) plus we had home-field advantage. If that is, they dared come at all. Which I knew they wouldn’t.
Chapter 38
Rumble
Stick saw them first. You’d think it was because he was, by far, the tallest in our little clique (His head practically scraping the sky when he stood up.), but no, it was because there were so freakin’ many of them!
Initially, they were hard to see, the westerly late-afternoon sun reflecting off the Phinney’s Harbor’s penchant for late-day chop and associated whitecaps, ricocheting directly into our squinting eyes and making it hard to focus. The best we could tell, it looked like an afternoon boat rally, or something, with a large cluster of boats speeding fast and sticking unusually close together.
But then they came into a focus. My Gawd. There were six or seven boats making a beeline for our dock, The Mashnee Dock, in all its yellow-painted glory, and the boats were freakin’ packed with loud, rowdy, and presumably pissed-off Memorial Beach kids, who, by the look of it, had recruited every friend within ten miles, to join in, along with their brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, fathers, and girlfriends too.
There were an absolute shit-ton of them, and we were going to die.
At least, I was.
The scene was so disorienting, I felt inebriated, unable to process exactly what was going down in this suddenly bizarro world. The magnitude of speedboats and their occupants heading our way was, well, simply impossible.
I was in shock, thinking this simply cannot be happening, in concert with someone shouting out, “Holy shit, this can not be happening!” I think it was Stevie, good call.
Stunned beyond audible speech, our group of would-be tough guys weren’t feeling quite as tough, at least not tough enough to die.
It took the sound of Tommy’s deep-pitched, raspy, crackling, Cool Hand Luke voice to snap us out of our collective stupor, just as their boats started approaching the dock, hollering plenty as they did. This was fitting to be a massacre.
