Born on the Fourth of July (6 page)

Castiglia and I saw
The Sands of Iwo Jima
together. The Marine Corps hymn was playing in the background as we sat glued to our seats, humming the hymn together and watching Sergeant Stryker, played by John Wayne, charge up the hill and get killed just before he reached the top. And then they showed the men raising the flag on Iwo Jima with the marines' hymn still playing, and Castiglia and I cried in our seats. I loved the song so much, and every time I heard it I would think of John Wayne and the brave men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima that day. I would think of them and cry. Like Mickey Mantle and the fabulous New York Yankees, John Wayne in
The Sands of Iwo Jima
became one of my heroes.

We'd go home and make up movies like the ones we'd just seen or the ones that were on TV night after night. We'd use our Christmas toys—the Matty Mattel machine guns and grenades, the little green plastic soldiers with guns and flamethrowers in their hands. My favorites were the green plastic men with bazookas. They blasted holes through the enemy. They wiped them out at thirty feet just above the coffee table. They dug in on the front lawn and survived countless artillery attacks. They burned with high-propane lighter fluid and a quarter-gallon of gasoline or were thrown into the raging fires of autumn leaves blasting into a million pieces.

On Saturdays after the movies all the guys would go down to Sally's Woods—Pete and Kenny and Bobbie and me, with plastic battery-operated machine guns, cap pistols, and sticks. We turned the woods into a battlefield. We set ambushes, then led gallant attacks, storming over the top, bayonetting and shooting anyone who got in our way. Then we'd walk out of the woods like the heroes we knew we would become when we were men.

The army had a show on Channel 2 called “The Big Picture,” and after it was over Castiglia and I crawled all over the back yard playing guns and army, making commando raids all summer into Ackerman's housing project blasting away at the imaginary enemy we had created right before our eyes, throwing dirt bombs and rocks into the windows, making loud explosions like hand grenades with our voices then charging in with our Matty Mattel machine guns blazing. I bandaged up the German who was still alive and had Castiglia question him as I threw a couple more grenades, killing even more Germans. We went on countless missions and patrols together around my back yard, attacking Ackerman's housing project with everything from bazookas to flamethrowers and baseball bats. We studied the Marine Corps Guidebook and Richie brought over some beautiful pamphlets with very sharp-looking marines on the covers. We read them in my basement for hours and just as we dreamed of playing for the Yankees someday, we dreamed of becoming United States Marines and fighting our first war and we made a solemn promise that year that the day we turned seventeen we were both going down to the marine recruiter at the shopping center in Levittown and signing up for the United States Marine Corps.

We joined the cub scouts and marched in parades on Memorial Day. We made contingency plans for the cold war and built fallout shelters out of milk cartons. We wore spacesuits and space helmets. We made rocket ships out of cardboard boxes. And one Saturday afternoon in the basement Castiglia and I went to Mars on the couch we had turned into a rocket ship. We read books about the moon and Wernher von Braun. And the whole block watched a thing called the space race begin. On a cold October night Dad and I watched the first satellite, called
Sputnik
, moving across the sky above our house like a tiny bright star. I still remember standing out there with Dad looking up in amazement at that thing moving in the sky above Massapequa. It was hard to believe that this thing, this
Sputnik
, was so high up and moving so fast around the world, again and again. Dad put his hand on my shoulder that night and without saying anything I quietly walked back inside and went to my room thinking that the Russians had beaten America into space and wondering why we couldn't even get a rocket off the pad.

It seemed that whole school year we talked about nothing but rockets and how they would break away into stages and blast their satellites into outer space. I got all the books I could on rockets and outer space and read them for hours in the library, completely fascinated by the drawings and the telescopes and the sky charts. I had an incredible rocket I got for Christmas that you had to pump compressed water into. I pulled back a plastic clip and it would send the thing blasting out across Castiglia's lawn, then out onto Hamilton Avenue in a long arc of spurting water. Castiglia and I used to tape aluminum-foil rolls from Mom's kitchen to the top of the plastic rocket then put ants and worms in the nosecone with a secret message wrapped in tissue paper. We had hundreds of rocket launchings that year. Though none of our payloads made it into orbit like the Sputniks, we had a lot of fun trying.

In the spring of that year I remember the whole class went down to New York City and saw the movie
Around the World in Eighty Days
on a tremendous screen that made all of us feel like we were right there in the balloon flying around the world. After the movie we went to the Museum of Natural History, where Castiglia and I walked around staring up at the huge prehistoric dinosaurs billions of years old, and studied fossils inside the big glass cases and wondered what it would have been like if we had been alive back then. After the museum they took us to the Hayden Planetarium, where the whole sixth-grade class leaned back in special sky chairs, looking up into the dome where a projector that looked like a huge mechanical praying mantis kept us glued to the sky above our heads with meteor showers and comets and galaxies that appeared like tremendous snowstorms swirling in the pitch darkness of the incredible dome. They showed the whole beginning of the earth that afternoon, as we sat back in our chairs and dreamed of walking on the moon someday or going off to Mars wondering if there really was life there and rocketing off deeper and deeper into space through all the time barriers into places and dreams we could only begin to imagine. When we got on the school bus afterward and were all seated, Mr. Serby, our sixth-grade teacher, turned around and in a soft voice told us that someday men would walk upon the moon, and probably in our lifetime, he said, we would see it happen.

We were still trying to catch up with the Russians when I heard on the radio that the United States was going to try and launch its first satellite, called
Vanguard
, into outer space. That night Mom and Dad and me and the rest of the kids watched the long pencil-like rocket on the television screen as it began to lift off after the countdown. It lifted off slowly at first. And then, almost as if in slow motion, it exploded into a tremendous fireball on the launching pad. It had barely gotten off the ground, and I cried that night in my living room. I cried watching
Vanguard
that night on the evening news with Mom and all the rest. It was a sad day for our country, I thought, it was a sad day for America. We had failed in our first attempt to put a satellite into orbit. I walked slowly back to my room. We were losing, I thought, we were losing the space race, and America wasn't first anymore.

When we finally made it into space, I was in junior high school, and right in the middle of the class the loudspeaker interrupted us and the principal in a very serious voice told us that something very important was about to happen. He talked about history, and how important the day was, how America was finally going to launch its first satellite and we would remember it for a long time.

There was a long countdown as we all sat on the edge of our seats, tuning our ears in to the radio. And then the rocket began to lift off the edge of the launching pad. In the background there was the tremendous roar of the rocket engines and a guy was screaming like Mel Allen that the rocket was lifting off. “It's lifting off! It's lifting off!” he kept screaming crazily. All the kids were silent for a few seconds, still straining in their chairs, waiting to see whether the rocket would make it or not, then the whole room broke into cheers and applause. America had done it! We had put our first satellite into space. “We did it! We did it!” the guy was screaming at the top of his lungs.

And now America was finally beginning to catch up with the Russians and each morning before I went to school I was watching “I Led Three Lives” on television about this guy who joins the Communists but is actually working for us. And I remember thinking how brave he was, putting his life on the line for his country, making believe he was a Communist, and all the time being on our side, getting information from them so we could keep the Russians from taking over our government. He seemed like a very serious man, and he had a wife and a kid and he went to secret meetings, calling his friends comrades in a low voice, and talking through newspapers on park benches.

The Communists were all over the place back then. And if they weren't trying to beat us into outer space, Castiglia and I were certain they were infiltrating our schools, trying to take over our classes and control our minds. We were both certain that one of our teachers was a secret Communist agent and in our next secret club meeting we promised to report anything new he said during our next history class. We watched him very carefully that year. One afternoon he told us that China was going to have a billion people someday. “One billion!” he said, tightly clenching his fist. “Do you know what that means?” he said, staring out the classroom window. “Do you know what that's going to mean?” he said in almost a whisper. He never finished what he was saying and after that Castiglia and I were convinced he was definitely a Communist.

About that time I started doing push-ups in my room and squeezing rubber balls until my arms began to ache, trying to make my body stronger and stronger. I was fascinated by the muscle-men ads in the beginnings of the Superman comics, showing how a skinny guy could overnight transform his body into a hulk of fighting steel, and each day I increased the push-ups, more and more determined to build a strong and healthy body. I made muscles in the mirror for hours and checked my biceps each day with a tape measure, and did pull-ups on a bar in the doorway of my room before I went to school each morning. I was a little guy, back then, and used to put notches with a penny on the door of my room, little scratches with the coin to remind myself how tall I was and to see each week whether I'd grown.

“The human body is an amazing thing,” the coaches told us that fall when we started high school. “It is a beautiful remarkable machine that will last you a lifetime if you care for it properly.” And we listened to them, and worked and trained our young bodies until they were strong and quick.

I joined the high-school wrestling team, practicing and working out every day down in the basement of Massapequa High School. The coaches made us do sit-ups, push-ups, and spinning drills until sweat poured from our faces and we were sure we'd pass out. “Wanting to win and wanting to be first, that's what's important,” the coaches told us. “Play fair, but play to win,” they said. They worked us harder and harder until we thought we couldn't take it anymore and then they would yell and shout for us to keep going and drive past all the physical pain and discomfort. “More! More!” they screamed. “If you want to win, then you're going to have to work! You're going to have to drive your bodies far beyond what you think you can do. You've got to pay the price for victory! You can always go further than you think you can.”

Wrestling practice ended every day with wind sprints in the basement hallways that left us gasping for air and running into the showers bent over in pain, and I honestly wondered sometimes what I was doing there in the first place and why I was allowing myself to go through all this.

The wrestling coach was very dedicated and held practice every day of the week including Saturdays and Sundays and I can even remember having practice once on Thanksgiving. I came in first in the Christmas wrestling tournament. There's still a picture of me in one of the old albums in the attic that shows me with two other guys holding a cardboard sign with the word
Champion
on it. I won most of my matches that year. When I lost, I cried just like when I lost my Little League games and I'd jump on the bus and ride back to Massapequa with tears in my eyes, not talking to anyone for hours sometimes.

I was very shy back then and dreamed of having a girlfriend, or just someone to hold my hand. Even though I was on the wrestling team and had won all those matches and wore my sweater with the Big M on it, I still dreamed of the day I could have a girlfriend like all the rest of the guys. I wanted to be hoisted aloft in the arms of other young men like myself and carried off the field for scoring the winning touchdown, or winning the wrestling match that brought the championship to my school.

I wanted to be a hero.

I wanted to be stared at and talked about in the hallways.

“Hey look,” said one of the kids. “There goes Kovic!”

I was the great silent athlete now, who never had to say anything, who walked through the halls of Massapequa High School, sucking the air deeply into my chest and pumping up the blood into my arms.

“There goes Kovic,” a pretty freshman said. “Boy, he sure is cute.” And as I walked through the crowded halls I was sure everyone was noticing me, staring at my varsity letter, and looking at my wrestler's shoulders.

And it was also during my freshman year that I started to get pimples on my face. I remember coming home from school and seeing what looked like a tremendous blackhead on my forehead. It was right smack-dab in the middle of my forehead and it was just like the things that were all over my sister Sue's face. The more I looked in the mirror, the more scared I got. Stevie Jacket's face was covered with the things, he had the worst case of them of anyone I ever knew in my life. In gym I saw him once taking a shower, and his face and neck, all over his arms and back, his whole body was covered with blackheads and whiteheads and thousands of pimples. And now I was catching them, I was getting them just like Stevie Jacket and my sister. There it was, right in front of me in the mirror, a big goddamn blackhead, and after staring at it for almost an hour, I still didn't know what to do. I remembered this girl in the sixth grade who used to have them all over her face and it looked like somebody hit her with a rake. It was awful and she used to put this disgusting filmy cream on, to try and hide them, but it looked worse.