War and Watermelon

Ryan knocks on my door, which is open, then steps in. “You wanna hear something cool?” he asks. He’s wearing a baggy Giants jersey with the sleeves torn off, so you can see his entire bony arms.

We go in and shut his door tight. The black light is on; the Day-Glo posters are shimmering. Skippy is sitting on Ryan’s desk with the window wide open, looking squirrely and blowing smoke out through the screen. I can see lightning bugs hovering over the yard in the darkness.

Jenny gives me a big smile. She dyed her hair blonde this summer, and it’s pulled back in a long ponytail. I get the impression that she was one of the cool ones back in junior high school, but she’s really nice now. She graduated from high school with Ryan a couple of months ago.

Ryan holds up a Beatles album cover—Magical Mystery Tour. “Hello Goodbye” is playing on the record player.

“They say Paul McCartney is dead,” Skippy says, flicking some ashes into a Coke bottle. You can tell he hasn’t spent five seconds in the sun this summer; his skin is as pale as an eggshell.

“People. They’re trying to hide it, but there’s like a million clues in this record.”

It’s a hundred degrees in here, but Skippy is still wearing his black leather jacket.

Ryan puts up his hand for quiet. We listen to “Strawberry Fields Forever” until that weird instrumental ending comes on. Ryan turns it to full volume and says, “Everybody shut up.”

When the song has nearly faded to silence, you hear this faint, moany voice saying something like “Ah bwuwy bawwwww.”

“If you play some of these songs backwards there’s all sorts of stuff that comes through,” he says excitedly.

Ryan stares at the record player for a few seconds. He shrugs. “I guess not,” he says. “But somebody did it. They have proof.”

“Look at the names of these songs,” Skippy says, pointing to the album cover. “ ‘I Am the Walrus.’ You know what being a walrus means?”

“It’s a symbol for death in some Eskimo language or something. So Paul’s basically saying, ‘I am dead.’”

Ryan tries to clarify things. “He sang it before he was dead.”

Skippy gets a smug look on his face and points at me with his cigarette. “But now he is. Dead, I mean.”

I go back to my room and listen to the last inning of the Mets game, then sit through nine songs on WMCA before “Get Together” finally comes on. (“Come on people now . . .”)

The Mets lost again. Third straight to the Astros. I don’t know why I bother listening. They just kill you. I can’t sleep, so I go downstairs around midnight to get a drink and find Ryan in the kitchen with the bottles of food coloring on the counter.

“You making Easter eggs?” I ask. I’m serious; that’s the only thing we’ve ever used that stuff for.

“Watch this,” he says. He holds up a white T-shirt and spreads it over the sink. Then he picks up the red bottle and squeezes a few drops onto the shirt. He takes the green one and holds it a bit higher. “Got to make it splash a little.”

When he’s finished with the yellow and blue bottles, he holds up the shirt. “Tie-dye,” he says. “At least it looks like tie-dye . . . kind of.”

He takes the shirt into the cellar and I follow him. We’ve got a clothesline down there, reaching from above my dad’s workbench to a hook above the washing machine. He hangs the shirt there, and a few drops of blue and red drip onto the cement floor.

“Should be good to go for the concert,” he says. “You been hearing who’s gonna be there? Canned Heat. The frickin’ Grateful Dead. They even think Dylan might show up, but you can never count on him.”

Bob Dylan I’ve heard of, but not most of the other groups Ryan’s been going on about the past few days. Still, I am definitely looking forward to this. Just hanging out with Ryan at a thing like that will be awesome.

He picks up a green rubber ball—maybe half the size of a basketball—bounces it once, then shoots it at the hoop we’ve got nailed to the wall. The ceiling is only six and a half feet high, so it’s tough to do anything but dunk the ball. We used to play one-on-one basketball down here for hours at a time.

The thing is, as far as I can remember, Ryan was just as much of a dweeb as I am. He didn’t get cool until recently. I think he knows where I’m at in life, because he’s been there. So he includes me in a lot of things, but it’s never just me and him anymore.

The hoop is a miniature, half as wide as a real one. It’s got a bell attached beneath the rim that’s supposed to ring anytime a basket is made. The bell works maybe 10 percent of the time.

We’ve got a piece of electrical tape on the floor about two feet from the opposite wall, for the backcourt, so there’s about a nine-by-nine area for game action. Fouls are legal, unless you actually grab your opponent or draw blood. That happens a lot.

It’s also legal to pass to yourself by bouncing the ball off any wall.

Ryan beats me two straight: 20–12 and 20–16. We’re laughing and making quite a bit of noise with the passes off the wall and the dribbling and the grunting.

We hear the cellar door being yanked open, then Dad’s voice. “Creepin’ Jeebus! What is going on down there?”

We look at each other. Ryan breaks into a grin and says, “Yeah.”

“You’re both out of your minds,” Dad says. “Get some sleep. So I can.” He shuts the door hard.

Ryan hands me the ball. “Game point,” he says. “For the title.”

I take two dribbles, make a big step to the left, then dodge under his arm and leap for the basket. He gets a hand on the ball and knocks it toward the furnace. “That’s out,” I say.

I grab the ball, make a juke to the right, and send a line drive over the clothesline and directly into the basket. The bell rings. Ryan puts his hands on his hips and stares at the ceiling. I raise my fists and say, “Yes!”

I carefully move past the shirt—it looks more like polka dots than tie-dye—and smack hands with him. “Champion,” I say, patting myself on the chest.

“Mr. Clutch,” he says. “Best in the basement, for sure.”