On Wednesday evening, two days before I hit Dakota Clay with my head down, I met Joey Derossi after practice at a McMansion on Bluffton’s north side, out by the golf course. It was supposed to rain the next day, and Joey had to finish cleaning gutters on the place before the owner got home from vacation. Joey had klieg lights aimed up at the roof. We worked into darkness on two ladders.
He was in a quiet mood, which meant he was talking quietly (not in the loud, boisterous way he normally went on), not that he was failing to talk.
“Sometimes, I don’t think I live right, man,” he said. “You know, I gather all this shit up in the barn to make stuff, make art or whatnot, but I don’t ever make the art, I just keep finding scraps and trash to use when I finally decide to make the shit. But where’s the damn art I’m not making?”
“In your mind?” I said.
“I do have the materials. I just don’t know what to do with them because I really don’t know what I’m about.” The old barn on his family’s property was really junked up, filled with weird objects Joey had collected through the years.
“You’re about living a good life. About being a good person,” I said.
“Maybe?” he said. He climbed down the ladder. Moved it six feet to the left, then climbed back up and started digging in the gutter again. “But I’m not moving forward. Feels like I should be moving forward. Like, I’m not that different from you, right? I’m my own kind of lonely, isolated monk boy. I spend most of my time in my own head. Like you, dude. You’re a sports monk with pretend friends.”
“I like Riley and Twiggs. That’s not pretend. They’re real friends.”
“Whatever. They’re not on your plane. But I’m not either. You know why? You know what you are, and you do specific stuff that proves it. I don’t. I just talk about everything out there in the world. Talk, talk, talk. Meanwhile, you don’t say shit half the time, but you get all these specific things done, all moving in one direction. I was thinking, maybe your monoculture is right? Maybe being focused on one thing—like you’re doing with football—is good? Practicing deeply, not widely, even if you risk becoming a ghost town.”
“I am worried about that, though. I don’t want to be a ghost town.”
“Of course it’s scary, man. You’re risking all your other possible futures, and for what? A violent, hyped-up kids’ game.”
“Ouch.”
“Not ouch. Quality. You play a violent hyped-up kids’ game with great quality. That’s something.”
“Okay?” I said.
“Don’t you feel it? Don’t you get something meaningful out of practicing deep, practicing that same football monk shit over and over?”
“I don’t know. I love the game, but I don’t know if being good at it is the biggest reason I do what I do.”
“Why else would you practice so deep, if not for the sake of quality play?” Joey asked. He whipped a bunch of gunk down on our tarp below, then looked at me.
“I practice hard at this thing because I’m afraid of the opposite of practice.”
“What do you mean the opposite?” he said. “What’s the opposite?”
“I prefer working out to not working out,” I said.
“What’s not working out? Lying around?”
“No. I’ve never been able to sit still. It’s more to be . . . idle with myself, alone with myself and my random thoughts. That’s bad for me, for real.”
“Maybe that’s what I am? Idle with myself?”
“I can’t be idle. It’s not only football. I study hard for school. Read stuff about the stuff we’re studying in school, because I don’t get enough context from classes.”
“Right. That’s practicing deep.”
“Maybe? It’s just not being idle with myself.”
“What does idle mean to you, though?”
“I don’t know. It’s the trembling void.”
“Dude. You are so bad with your verbalization. Like your mouth doesn’t do shit, sometimes.”
“I have to think. Should I write?”
“Fine. Write. Let’s get this damn gutter done. I need to be with my drums.”
Joey had bought a three-piece cocktail drum set after he saw a jazz combo play on a street corner in Madison. He hoped to learn to play, even though he wasn’t taking lessons. The truth is, he didn’t need drums. He has plenty of things to do. He just never gets good at any one thing, I guess? Anyway, that night, I wrote this for him in my green notebook.
The Opposite of Practicing?
Before, he was antsy. He was anxious. He couldn’t sit still. He was itchy on his insides. Before his sister died, he felt like a cartoon character stuck in a human world. In first grade, in the middle of quiet work time, he had an itchy voice in his head that told him to stand on his chair. He told the voice no. He told the voice he didn’t want to stand on his chair. He told the voice he didn’t want to get in trouble again. He begged the voice to leave him alone.
The voice said, “Do it now.”
No, he said.
“Do it,” the voice said.
No.
“Do it now!” the voice said again.
And so, he slowly stood up, slowly climbed onto his chair and spread his arms out like Jesus on the cross. Everyone, all the little kids, looked up at him with their eyes wide. Mrs. Johns, his teacher, shook her head back and forth fast. Her mouth opened.
He locked eyes with her. He mouthed, “Sorry.”
“Get down off that chair, Isaiah Sadler.”
He fell off the chair and broke his wrist.
This itchy voice didn’t go away. It was part of him, too. Do it, the voice said. Everything is stupid. People are stupid. Show them you don’t care, because you know how stupid this whole world is.
Do it.
And after his sister died, the voice lit a short fuse on a bomb. He and Reid broke all the windows at C & J Seed Company one night. By himself he took apart all the stalls in the eighth-grade bathroom. He took a knife and cut bike tires in the middle school bike rack. Nobody knew he had a hand in any of that.
Often, though, when the bomb went off, he was caught. He, Ben, and Reid set fire to five Christmas trees in Smith Park. Ben and Reid ran away. He couldn’t until it was too late.
And he didn’t want the bomb to go off ever. He cried after the bomb went off. But his itchy voice remained. “Do it,” the voice said. Everything is stupid, and you have to show them.
The life of the football monk didn’t silence the itchy voice. Still, today, the voice sometimes tells him, “Do it.” But, now, he doesn’t do it. Before, if he tried to disobey the voice, he would find himself sitting by himself, bouncing up and down, thinking about “doing it,” feeling so itchy, sweaty, desperate, afraid of himself, because he knew at any given moment his body might take off and he’d see with his eyes his own out-of-control hands hurling rocks at passing cars.
That is the opposite of practice to him.
After he became a football monk, when he disobeyed the voice he did so with a concrete activity. “Sorry, no time to throw rocks at cars, I have to lift weights so I’m ready for the next obstacle on the football field.” Or, “Sorry, no time to do shots of schnapps. I have to complete a chemistry assignment before bed so I’m ready to meet Riley for gassers in the morning. He’s depending on me. . . .”
Being a football monk always provides an answer for the voice. He doesn’t “do it” because he has work to do. And because he repeatedly does this important work, he finds himself being asked by people who have learned to trust him to do more important work. Finishing important work, doing it well, never makes him cry (like breaking all the windows at C & J Seeds made him cry). He is no longer a destroyer. He is a builder. And the construction work he does always feels like a beginning, not an end. Each brick he adds to the building takes him higher. He will build the biggest tower in the world because he can always tell this voice that tells him to “do it,” sorry, no, I’ve got so many other things I’d rather do than destroy.
He doesn’t know why building a tower feels better. He doesn’t know its purpose. Practice doesn’t tell him where he’s going but tells him he’s going somewhere good.
After Joey read it, he stared at me for a second, then grabbed the top of his head with both hands. “Your brain, man! You have competing brain modules working against each other. I totally get it.”
“Yeah. Definitely. Like a good angel and a bad one inside me.”
“Your ancient lizard brain shouts and your evolved human brain says no thanks, lizard dude. I have the same thing to some extent. I mean, I have conversations with myself a lot. My calm self is always telling my wacked lizard self to calm the hell down.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That.”
“I always figured you were running away from something and you were running scared.”
“I’m running away from the lizard void.”
“But there’s the other half. There’s something even more important.”
“There is?”
“You don’t know where the running will go, but you know it’s leading someplace better, so you keep running.”
I thought for a second. I thought about the dreams I was having with Hannah, trying to stop her from getting in the car with Ray Gatos. “What if all the running actually doesn’t lead someplace better, though? What if I get tired of running? What if the lizard void catches up to me? Like, the pickup truck is coming, you know? It’s going to hit the car at some point.”
“No. Just keep running, bro. Keep up the practice. Keep on trucking. Keep the faith and never do the opposite,” Joey said. “You’re building a big, beautiful tower!”
“We’re working a lot of metaphors here,” I said.
“We’re making life mean something, man!” Joey said.