Land of the Blind (11 page)

We had enough kids for six teams of ten. Mr. Leggett picked five “normal” kids to be captains, and then one of the special ed kids, a stuttering overweight mess of a boy named Hank. The captains picked their teams. Hank picked me first—“Cl-Cl-Cl-Clark.” When Hank’s second pick came around my friend Tommy Kane from the basketball team was still available and I pointed at Tommy, but Hank picked his own classmate, Louis the dwarf, instead. Then he picked Curty the blind kid, who may have been—my apologies to the other guys in the class—the worst battle ball player in the history of that cruel game. When his next pick came around, Hank took Repeat, and as we stood in the gym I did the math and realized that our team of ten was going to be me and the nine misfits. Eli was the last one taken, and he shuffled over to where our team was wheezing and muttering and smelling and he shrugged at me as if he were sorry that I had to be drawn into his nightmare.

My friends in the class doubled over in laughter to see me on the SpEd team. It could have been my friendship with Eli that got me on with the Special Eddies, or the fact that I was a class officer and therefore well known and approachable to everyone, but more likely it was the fact of my glass eye, which must have seemed familiar to them. I wonder, as a member of the football and basketball teams, as a guy who dated the occasional cheerleader and got A’s, but also someone with a prosthetic eye, if I might not have seemed like something they could aspire to: one of
them
made good.

We divided the gym in half and the teams spread out and began drilling each other with these hard rubber balls. The first game my team lost in four minutes, all nine of my teammates thrown out on the first try, their palsied legs knocked out from under them, their thick glasses knocked off. I let a soft throw hit me in the foot and we were done. Mr. Leggett called us girls.

By the very next game I noticed something odd: even though we were getting killed, Eli loved this game. His face reddened as he concentrated, trying to dodge the balls—he rarely did—but while battle ball was a nightmare
for most of the SpEds, it seemed to engage his imagination, like the tug-of-war game from elementary school, and the tanks he drew. It wasn’t long before Eli was the best of the infirm and slow.

Even with Eli’s improvement we played battle ball all week, and I doubt there was a more complete rout of a squad than ours in the history of war or physical education class. Pop, pop, pop. The balls would slap against the pale skin of the SpEds, and they would trudge over to the side to examine their welts. The real skill in the game wasn’t hitting another player with a ball, but catching one of the other team’s throws. No one on my team ever caught a ball to allow a teammate back into the game, and in the end there would always be ten grinning, bloodlusting high school kids against me. I’d jump and fall and sidestep until finally I was hit too.

Eli got progressively better, as good as his crooked legs and scoliotic back and twitchy arms would allow, and by week’s end he and I stood side by side against the wall, while the rest of our team compared bruises on the sideline.

The worst and most realistic aspect of battle ball was that once your side began to lose, it was nearly impossible to come back. The other side would fling the balls, and if you didn’t catch one, they’d bounce off the wall directly behind you and come back to their team, so you not only had fewer men, but your diminished ranks were without ammunition, and you spent the whole time dodging until you inevitably tried to catch a ball and were put out. That was the situation Eli and I faced. All ten balls were on the other side, where all ten of their players were still alive, shifting and stalking in their gray PE shorts and shirts. Their leader was the lanky pitcher on our baseball team, Erskine Davies, the Rommel of battle ball. He paced behind the lines of his team, staring at Eli and me, trying to figure how to get us out while inflicting the most pain and humiliation.

“Chili! Chili! Chili! Corn bread and carrots! Sunrise Jell-O!” yelled Repeat, who, when keyed up, would yell out that day’s lunch menu.

And I don’t know what it was, but something about standing next to Eli there, against the wall, facing down that firing squad of ten coordinated and binocular kids, led by the cannon-armed Erskine Davies, made me angry, made me want to win. Or at least not lose so badly. “We need to catch one,” I said.

Eli looked over at me, a look of inspired and resolute determination on his face. Catching a single ball wouldn’t win us the game, of course, but it
would accomplish something we hadn’t done in a week of battle ball: it would get one of our pathetic teammates back into the game. It would mean progress. And that was something.

The other team stood across from us, ten strong and preternaturally threatening, a cast photo from
Lord of the Flies
. They smiled and exchanged knowing glances and then Erskine said, “Now!” and they delivered a full throttle, the throwing of all ten balls at once. I ducked, and Erskine’s throw hit the wall behind my head like a gunshot. We sidestepped and dropped and rolled, and when the balls had finished careening off the wall and back to their side, Eli and I were still alive. Of course this pissed them off; for the next two minutes they fired indiscriminately, and we dodged every throw.

That’s when Erskine whispered to one of his teammates, and then they both smiled like dogs in a gravy parade. Erskine took the kid’s ball, stepped forward, and gave us the old up-and-under.

The bastard lofted that ball in the air, as soft and as high as he could, barely over the line to our side. Before I could warn him against it, Eli left our wall and began running toward the gimme. I think of this moment in slow motion—Eli leaving the foxhole while I yelled out, “No-o-o-o!”—but such was Eli’s lack of speed and coordination that I may be remembering in real time, the ball sailing up sweetly against the gymnasium lights, Eli clattering out slowly toward it, knees knocking, arms outstretched, black glasses looking straight up.

The other nine boys, of course, were cocked and loaded as Eli ran toward them, his eyes on the ball floating down from the ceiling.

“Eli, wait!” I yelled. But in battle a man’s true nature emerges, and I unhappily admit that I did not leave my spot against the wall as my comrade ran bravely to his battle ball death. I suppose, in my defense, that there was nothing I could have done anyway. Eli was a goner as soon as he pulled away from the wall. Even the SpEds on the sideline could see what was going to happen. “Corn dog! Corn dog! Corn dog!” yelled Repeat. “Cottage cheese!”

Eli ran forward until he was only ten feet away from the firing squad, his eyes straight up on that ball in the air. Erskine Davies took a step forward, his back twisted and torqued, the rubber ball behind his head. The other boys followed. And the next thing I remember is a sound like popcorn. Nine hard rubber balls hit Eli in the space of a half second, knocking his legs out from under him, blowing his glasses off, pelting his arms and legs and nuts and
lofting him straight into the air and onto his back, his broken glasses skidding to rest a few inches from my feet.

Eli lay on his back on the hard gym floor, eyes bleary, nose bleeding, but still concentrating on that first cruel ball—lofted up as nothing more than a trap, a lure, an insult to his intelligence and coordination falling to the ground beside him, and as an afterthought perhaps, or maybe with his last bit of strength, Eli reached out from his back with one hand and caught it, the ball settling in his hand like a bird in its nest. And while the rules were unclear on what this meant, to catch a ball after being so completely pummeled, we all stood there reverently and the gym—and maybe the whole world—went quiet for a second.

I am not overstating this. Imagine what it takes to turn a whole gymful of high school boys—however briefly—into human beings. This is what happened: the world changed. Nothing less.

And from his back, in this new world he had just then created, Eli Boyle pointed defiantly to the sideline, where Louis had already taken a tiny step onto the court.

“Louis,” Eli said. “You’re in.”

T
he least unhappy, I once read, are those who never attempt what is beyond men. I think this must be true—what else would a failed politician say?—but I also think such an idea assumes the same boundaries for all men.

This is not the case.

So it didn’t matter that as soon as Eli stood up that day, another ball took his legs out from under him and he was put out of the game. It didn’t matter that as soon as Louis ran into the game, Erskine Davies threw a ball that thwacked against his little shoulder and sent him sprawling. It didn’t matter that as I stood against the wall, stupefied by what I’d seen, a hard rubber ball racked my ’nads and my team was officially, brutally, put out of yet another game of battle ball.

It didn’t matter because we’d all seen something amazing, seen it with our own eyes, an act of such superhuman coordination and concentration, it would have seemed unlikely in the hands of the great prematurely bearded quarterback Kenny Dale. From a hunkering SpEd like Eli Boyle? It was a fucking miracle.

For days the story was told all over school—by the SpEddies as a kind of fable, the story of what could be accomplished with hard work and faith, and by the rest of the kids as a rich and impossible tale, a Ripley’s moment, the world’s largest fungus, the beard of bees, the stream of water running up a pipe, the twenty-six-foot-long tapeworm, the man who fellates himself, the dog who flies a Cessna, the turnip with a map of the world on its surface. The mildly retarded kid driven into the air in a game of battle ball, hit by nine balls at once, who still managed to reach out with one hand and catch the tenth.

In spite of everything, children know a miracle when they see one.

And so, if for the SpEds Eli’s athletic moment was magically inspiring, for the rest of us—worshipers of entertainment—it was supernaturally funny, so entertaining it became meaningful. Who knew the SpEds could be so
much fun! People talked about transferring into the mainstream PE class in the hopes of seeing something similar—Curty the blind kid catching a football, Louis the dwarf dunking.

I think we forget sometimes the halting sameness of high school: each day is like the day before it, six periods of class break in all the same places, lunch at the same table, the same jokes and asides and greetings from all the same kids, the same clothes and songs and dances, and if school is truly preparation for life, it is mostly in this way, gearing us for the rigid schedule, the stifling patterns, the lack of variation that an adult strives for so that he can resent it the rest of his life. How much money do we pay for an education that will allow us to loop our necktie the same way each morning, to be given a regular parking spot to park our BMW every day, to buy a summer home so that even our vacations become routine? We are drilled in this unending sameness in high school, and only the insane and the inspired ever get past it.

But for a moment during my senior year, Eli Boyle introduced an entire high school of jeans-clad lemmings to the world of the insane and the inspired, to the idea of transcendence. And again, if you think I am overstating a fluke play in battle ball, ask yourself what get passed along as miracles these days—weeping statues, brief remissions from cancer, hazy pictures of Jesus on the stumps of trees. How little it takes for people to quit their jobs and move to compounds in Montana and New Mexico, to put on robes and eat macrobiotic foods. How badly do we want a miracle of our own? How much would we like to open the front door and, just once, find God standing there? Or vintage Angie Dickinson?

No, Eli’s catch that day was a miracle, plain and simple, and it grew, as miracles are known to, in the days afterward, and with each telling. Eli was knocked unconscious. He had a concussion. He flew fifteen feet in the air and a shard from his broken glasses jutted from his forehead. He rolled twice and caught the ball in his fingertips and then rifled it at the other team. He single-handedly brought the ’tards back.

It wasn’t long before Eli’s simple break in the monotony sparked an even more compelling and dangerous concept, an idea that came from the only teenage desire even close to our desire for sex: our need to flout authority.

Open rebellion.

The Eli Movement started slowly but spread exponentially. It was based on a simple idea that had never occurred to the school administrators who
decided to combine the Special Ed class with ours. The idea was simply this: what if the SpEds won?

Clearly, the administration had decreed that Special Ed kids be mainstreamed “for their own good,” so that in the powerful currents of high school normalcy and conformity, their defects and debilitations might be diluted and they would rise to meet the lowest expectations and eventually blend in. It was as if the administration saw these kids as effluents that we could wash away downstream.

But what if it worked the other way? What if we learned from them? What if they—happily slobbering and babbling their way through life—had it dicked, and the rest of us, with our vain anxieties and ambitions, were the fools? What if we not only failed to raise the SpEds to our level of mediocrity and conformity but giddily fell to theirs?

This idea caught on the way everything catches on in high school, first as a goof—one kid allows a Special Ed guy to hit him in battle ball—and then as a kind of fashion. During one battle ball game, our opponents elbowed each other out of the way to try to get hit by a ball thrown by Curty the blind kid. After battle ball we played football and Hank, our captain, picked the same group of misfits and me, and while Mr. Leggett stewed and paced and yelled, our football team rolled to victories over the other teams, whose non–Special Ed members ran the wrong way and fell to the ground and faked spasms and fits and stumbles and crashed into one another as my teammates, Repeat or Curty or Louis or Hank, ran through their lines for touchdown after touchdown. It became an art form, a contest to see who could give up the most points to the SpEds.

My team won the football league and the floor hockey league and we won the basketball championship, and Mr. Leggett fumed until I thought he’d explode. He made other kids captain and still the teams came out the same way, with the freaks and me on one team. He pulled noted athletes like my friend Tommy Kane aside and challenged their pride, but he underestimated the Eli Movement. Tommy, for instance, responded to Mr. Leggett’s challenge by playing an entire game in his jock, with his shorts around his ankles. It was wonderful. The Special Ed kids were now the first ones dressed down for class and the last ones to leave, high-fiving and whooping and talking a kind of trash to their non-Special opponents. “Ha-ha-ha! Goulash goulash goulash!”

Everyone seemed to enjoy the new order except Eli, the one who’d inadvertently started it, but who knew it to be just another kind of joke. He stood off to the side, refusing to have any part of these new games and their condescending rules. Eli believed it was wrong to mess with the rules of games, any games. These were sacred to him. In fact, I don’t know who liked this new world less, him or Mr. Leggett. I guess Eli would rather have a beating than this condescension. And Mr. Leggett simply wanted beatings.

Word of this extended prank spilled over the banks of our PE class and flooded the school, and for a brief month or two during the fall quarter of high school in 1981 Special Ed kids had an odd social cachet, a sort of mascot cool. Jocks and motorheads and stoners high-fived the SpEds as they walked down the hall (they low-fived Louis), signed Curty up for driver’s ed, and relied on Repeat to tell them what we were having for lunch. Girls pretended to swoon when Hank, our captain, thundered down the hall. A few kids even overdid it and began wearing pocket protectors and black-framed glasses and hemming their pants three inches above their shoes.

For just that one moment Special Ed kids were cool. And they ate it up.

All but one. One Saturday afternoon in February, I was sitting in my room listening to the new Styx album when there was a knock on my door. I took off my headphones and found my mom standing at my bedroom door, looking confused. “There’s someone at the door for you.”

My brother Ben stood in the hallway. He shadowboxed me. “Good luck,” he said. “And remember, stick and move. Use your jab.”

I walked to the back door and opened it. There stood Eli Boyle, staring at his black shoes. It occurred to me that although he’d saved my life he’d never been to my house, and I hadn’t mentioned him to my family since the day of our fight.

“Clark?” he said, and I realized too that he’d never called me by name.

“What is it, Eli?”

He looked up. Then he looked past me into my house, which I’d always thought of as small and modest—a one-story, three-bedroom war-era starter—but which must’ve seemed lavish compared with his mother’s trailer. Eli pushed up his black-framed glasses and looked down at my shoes. “Do you think you could help me?”