LAMBERT FLEMING WAS BARELY fifteen years old—and trying very hard to fit in—on that bright, sad afternoon in October when he suddenly became invisible. I was about the same; fifteen years old and trying hard to fit in, that is. Not invisible.
It happened on the basketball court, and the scene must have replayed itself a thousand times in my mind since then—and that’s not counting the dreams. Sunlight streamed down through a row of high, narrow windows along one wall of the gym, striping the air with bright rivers of light, each river teeming with clouds of swirling, rising bits of dust, like millions of tiny, panic-stricken fish trying to swim their way up and out to somewhere else.
Lammy had known he had absolutely no chance to make the basketball team. He wasn’t even really interested. But I’d encouraged him, thinking I was doing him a favor, and he came to tryouts only because of me. Then, probably because the coach thought Lammy was my friend and I seemed like a possible future star, Lammy ended up as a team “manager.” That meant he gathered up sweat-soaked towels and counted balls and became a handy target for a constant barrage of hauntingly cruel taunts from most of the players.
Lammy wasn’t handicapped, exactly, or even unintelligent. He was just a sad-faced kid, rounded and plump and soft all over, without the slightest clue about how to relate to other human beings. He reminded everyone of that giggling Doughboy in the Pillsbury ads, except he never laughed and his mannerisms seemed a little more feminine than the Doughboy’s. So most of the kids called him “Doughgirl.”
I called him “Lammy.”
On the first day of school, the alphabet had put us together—slump-shouldered Lambert R. Fleming in the homeroom desk just in front of the big new kid, me, Malachy P. Foley. I was a sophomore transfer to Saint Robert’s, a small, coed Catholic high school on the northwest side of Chicago, and I’d started talking to Lammy before I really noticed how greasy his hair was and how his grimy fingernails were so long they curled over the tips of his fingers. Pretty soon, though, I noticed that he hardly ever talked to anyone, and nobody ever talked to him.
I was in a miserable, angry mood those days, anyway, mostly because of the way things were going at home. So even after I found out how uncool it was to treat Lammy as anything other than the outcast that he was, I made it a point to keep on talking to him. Not that I really liked him. I understood much later that he was just a convenient way to tell everyone else they were jerks and I didn’t give a damn what they thought.
But by that October afternoon, when the coach left us alone to run twenty laps while he went back to lock up his chem lab, things had already started changing for me. Basketball was my sport, and I was strong and fast and tall for my age. In a school with no football team, those were perfect credentials, and I’d started making friends. That meant giving up my lone-wolf facade and adjusting my behavior to match what the other kids thought. I did give a damn, which was unfortunate for Lammy—and for me.
Things went bad that day when all of us finished our twenty laps before the coach got back. Someone got the extremely funny idea that Doughgirl ought to run laps, too. It probably would have blown over if Lammy had had the sense, or the strength, to flat-out refuse. But maybe he was afraid, or maybe he actually thought it would earn him some respect. Anyway, he got up and gave it his best, chugging around the perimeter of the gym in his manager’s shirt and his baggy gray sweatpants with elastic around the ankles.
Most of the players—about a dozen—gathered in a group, laughing and shouting and clapping their hands rhythmically to the beat of the soles of Lammy’s cheap basketball shoes slapping flatly against the wood floor.
Their shouting quickly turned into a chant. “Dough-GIRL! Dough-GIRL! Dough-GIRL!”
I stood off to the side with a couple of other guys who didn’t have the heart to participate in the ridicule, but lacked also the courage to do anything about it.
Lammy himself made a sad, hopeless attempt to join in with the humor. Waving his hands above his head and waggling his butt as he ran, he grinned as though enjoying this wonderful opportunity to entertain the troops.
The clapping and chanting grew louder. “Dough-GIRL! Dough-GIRL! Dough-GIRL!”
By the time he finished only two laps, Lammy was already winded and he tried to sit down. This, of course, simply stirred his audience to new heights. They pushed him back onto the floor. Barely able to sustain a trot, he stumbled along, gasping for breath.
“Dough-GIRL! Dough GIRL! Dough-GIRL!”
Foolishly, he kept trying to pretend he was part of their game. He shook his behind more provocatively and even twirled around once, clumsily. He couldn’t have done anything worse.
Because the chant changed then, became meaner, more ominous.
“Dough-GIRL! Take it OFF! Dough-GIRL! Take it OFF!”
I moved farther away, pretending to concentrate on stretching my leg muscles. But I couldn’t take my eyes off Lammy. I felt sorry for him, embarrassed by him, furious at him—all at once. Finally, in his own ever-increasing stupidity, he accommodated the stupid chant, pulling his sweatshirt off and twirling it above his head while he kept moving, in scarcely more than a walk now, his belly and chest one plump mass, heaving beneath a thin white T-shirt.
“Dough-GIRL! Take it OFF! Dough-GIRL! Take it OFF!” gave way to a simple “Take it OFF! Take it OFF!”
But by then Lammy was completely exhausted. With a hapless wave toward the chanting group, he stopped, looked around, then turned and cut diagonally across the gym floor … and straight toward me, for God’s sake.
His taunters had turned into a teenage version of a lynch mob—hooting and mindless. The only boy on the team bigger than I—a mean kid with a face every mother loved, but the conscience of a hyena—ran out and grabbed the bottom hem of Lammy’s T-shirt and yanked it up over his head and off him.
The group cheered. “Take it OFF! Take it OFF! Take it ALL off!” they howled, clapping and stamping their feet.
Grinning slyly, the hyena bowed low to his audience, then spun back around and yanked Lammy’s sweatpants down to the floor before he ran back to join the crowd. Lammy just stood there then, his pants puddled around his ankles, a fold of soft fat half-covering the wide white elastic waistband of his jockstrap. He clasped his arms across his pale, hairless chest. He was hugging himself, all alone at mid-court. His forced smile had turned into a grimace. Tears ran down his cheeks—and he kept looking straight at me.
I wanted to do something. But I was just one of the guys. I looked everywhere around the gym, except back at Lammy. Where was the coach, for God’s sake? I was just one of the guys, damn it. It was Lammy’s fault that he’d acted so stupid, not mine. What did he expect me to do about it?
What I did was turn my back on Lammy and the rest of them, and walk off the floor and into the locker room. As I pulled my street clothes on over my practice uniform, I discovered I was crying, too.
I ran all the way home. But there was no comfort there, no one to talk to. My mom was busy starting supper and talking on the telephone. My dad was in the basement watching TV. He was still with the police department at the time, working midnights behind the desk, sitting around and drinking too many Old Styles whenever he was home. There was no help for me there.
I never asked anyone how it had ended. If the coach caught them, or what. A week or so later I got into a fight over nothing with the big kid who’d pulled down Lammy’s pants. The coach had to pull me off him because I had him down and was pounding the back of his head on the tile floor of the locker room. The coach made me apologize and the hyena sneered at me when I did, and I hated him. But of course that had nothing to do with Lammy.
Lammy never showed up at practice again. He became invisible. Sometimes I’d know he was nearby, shuffling through the cafeteria line with a tray full of desserts, or standing all alone against a wall somewhere, hugging himself and staring down at the floor. But I never looked at him. I never saw him.
And I never told anyone how much of a coward I was.
* * *
THAT WAS OVER TWENTY years ago.
Now I was standing in a stuffy, noisy corridor outside Branch 66 of the Circuit Court of Cook County, at Twenty-sixth and California, about eight and a half miles south of where Saint Robert’s High School used to be before they tore it down. Lambert Fleming was there, too. I saw him. He was backed up against the wall, breathing hard, hugging his soft body, and staring down at the floor. Ten yards down the hall, sheriff’s deputies were pushing back a group of about a dozen angry people.
The little mob was shouting at Lammy—chanting actually: “Filthy pervert! Lock him away! Filthy pervert! Lock him away!”
Lammy’s lawyer, Renata Carroway, took one of his arms and I took the other and we led him away from the crowd. Renata and I had laid low until after his bond was set. The judge never dreamed that a loser like Lammy, a maintenance worker at an animal shelter who had lived with his mother all his life on the second floor of a two-flat, could hire private counsel, much less come up with bond money. Otherwise, with that crowd in the spectators’ seats, he’d have set a higher bond. No one had been more surprised than Lammy when we showed up.
But about a year or so earlier I’d been drinking brandy with the Lady in front of the fireplace at her home on the lakefront in Evanston. She’s old enough to be my mother and she has a name—Helene Bower. But everyone calls her “the Lady.” She’s great to talk to, and that evening, although she hadn’t asked, I’d been trying to explain—again—why I acted the way I did sometimes, and I’d spilled the whole sad Lambert Fleming story.
The Lady’s the sort of person who actually hears what you’re saying and remembers an awful lot of it. She must have remembered Lammy’s name, anyway, because she’d cut an article about his arrest out of the Chicago Sun-Times and left it at my door with the supermarket coupons she clips for me every Thursday. No note. Just the newspaper article.
So now Lammy was free on bond and I’d hired one of my favorite criminal defense attorneys for him. He even had his own private investigator now, to help his lawyer find out what had really happened.
Because this time, damn it, I wasn’t going to walk away on him—no matter what. Although I sure hoped I wouldn’t help his lawyer find out he was really as guilty as everyone thought. I was going to help him this time, but I certainly didn’t want to learn that Lambert Fleming really had exposed himself and sexually assaulted that cute little girl—like she said he had.
Renata and I walked Lammy out to her BMW and I watched as she drove away with him. He hadn’t said one word to me. He acted like he couldn’t even see me.