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A LEMON IS LIKE A MOON

Willie lived across the street from me and was my best friend growing up and he still is. He was called ‘Weird Willie’ but no one could agree on why. Oh, there were lots of theories. Maybe Billy O’Sullivan or Sully for short was right. He had a bush of red hair and lots of freckles. Some called him ‘Silly Billy,’ but never to his face—he was the biggest kid around. He was sure it happened when we were in third grade when Mrs. Zamitsky who had gray hairs coming out of her chin, was talking about the moon and the tides. Well, Willie stood up on his desk, said, “Ya wanna see a moon?” pulled down his pants and mooned the class. Or maybe as Tony Maloney aka Tony Boloney who reminded me of the Pillsbury Dough Boy said, it was the time when we were playing baseball in the park and Willie climbed up on the backstop to announce the game as if he were Red Barber doing a play-by-play over the radio. I go with Sully’s theory but no one really knew for sure when or how he acquired the title. We called him WW for short. I still do.

As kids we’d play in the empty lots around the corner, at least as long as they remained lots. It was just after WW II and they were throwing up houses all over the place. Our houses had been built only a few years before—all sheet rock and 2x4s held together by chewing gum and unreliable promises from the builder-- ticky tack as Tom Lehrer would call them a few years later. They were all the same: white ranch houses with black shutters and gray roofs with three small bedrooms, a car port and a plot of weeds front and back which our fathers labored to turn into grass. The joke was that people had to look at the numbers to make sure they were going into their own house. Hadn’t Tony’s father come home early from work, walked into the wrong house only to find some naked guy walking into what he thought was his bed room. He yelled, “Clara (his wife’s name) “what the hell is going on here?” —as if in his mind that wasn’t painfully clear. The naked guy ran in the bed room to put on his pants then came out to throw Mr. Maloney out of the house. The woman in the bedroom turned out not to have been the naked guy’s wife. Now that was worth a year’s juicy gossip right there.

Willie was a pudgy kid with freckles and straight brown hair that kept falling in his eyes making him look like one of the Beatles who would became popular only later on. On the day when we had our class picture taken, his mother combed his hair into a big pompadour using Wildroot Crème Oil to hold it in place. With his round body, his polished face and shining hair he looked like the front grill of a Buick Roadmaster. Fortunately by ten o’clock just after the pictures he was back to normal—his hair in his eyes, and his shirt tails out.

Willie was my best friend meaning we did everything together except fight. It got so that his parents and mine talked about how they each had two sons even though we were both only children. We took the bus to school together, were in the same class, ate lunch together, usually tuna fish or peanut butter and jelly. Our mothers packed either Oreos or Lorna Doones so we had to flip a coin to see who got the Oreos and we never argued about the outcome. We slept over each other’s house at least once a week--I think we both had Superman pajamas. We never got into fights with one another and by the way, he never got into fights with anyone—when he was mad at me or someone else, he’d simply walk away—no yelling, no argument, no discussion, no nasty come-back, no nothing.

One time I betrayed him and still feel ashamed even though it must have happened nearly fifteen years ago. We were all out in the school yard playing ball and one of the other kids started pushing Willie because Willie almost hit him with a pitch accidentally. The other kids were baiting him by calling out, “Chicken Willie, Chicken Willie afraid to fight!” because they knew he wouldn’t fight. I was pissed off at him for not letting me copy his homework—he was such a straight arrow—so I stood with the others around home plate making fun of him. At first I didn’t say anything but soon found myself calling out, “Chicken, chicken, cluck, cluck Willie.” I still remember how he ignored the others as if they weren’t even there but stood still looking right at me for what seemed like forever, then closed his eyes for a minute, put his head down and walked away slowly. I felt so badly for him and ashamed of myself, I never did it again.

When we were eleven we rode our big heavy Schwinns with the long handle bars bent like the horns of cattle, around the corner. We’d decked them out with playing cards held on with clothespins so they’d flap on the wheels making motorcycle sounds—at least they sounded like that to us especially when we added ‘vroom-vroom’ sound effects. He had streamers coming out of the ends of his handle bars while I had a raccoon tail coming out from my seat. By the way, my parents took my bike away for a week for using their good deck of playing cards. They weren’t interested in hearing that only the new cards really flapped on the spokes. 

Once we got to the lot, Sully and Tony and some other kids from our street—Johnny and Steve and Billy Burp (nobody ever burped louder after drinking a whole bottle of Mission orange soda) would show up and we’d play soldiers among the ruts and mounds of junk the builders threw there, pretending to land on Omaha Beach or plant the flag on Iwo Jima. Once they started to build we’d run among the foundations and framing before they were closed in and did house to house combat to recapture an imaginary French town, pretending that people came out to cheer, wave French and American flags and pretty girls threw flowers at us. We wouldn’t yet admit to the fantasy of the pretty girls although when we were teenagers we all fantasized that the girls threw themselves at us. That remained just a fantasy.

Later, we started B.B. Buyers High School together. By that time Willie had gotten a crew cut, thinned down, always wore neatly pressed shirts with crisp creases in his pants and become very strong from working weekends loading boxes of linoleum tiles at his father’s store. Tony who was on the football team kept trying to get him to arm wrestle, “I’ll pin you in 5 seconds and I’m not shittin’ you.” When Willie would brush him off with, “Not interested,” Tony would mock him, “What’s the matter, chicken? Tell you what I’ll do.” He took his wallet from the back pocket of his jeans and removed a $5 bill, “This says I beat you in five seconds. How about it?” Willie ignored him and Tony was left to mutter, “Chicken shit.” Later I asked Willie, “How come? You could have made an easy $5?” He just shrugged, “I’m just not interested and I don’t want his money.”

Willie had stopped doing weird things; in fact no one even called him “Weird Willie,” any more, just WW—a title whose origins remained a mystery even to Willie. Once a bunch of us were walking down town complaining that there was nothing to do and that nothing ever happened. Tony saw a VW bug and led us over to look at it. We’d heard about them but had never seen one before. It was parked at the curb out in front of the Tivoli movie theater—I think they were showing, “On The Waterfront.” Tony said it looked so puny that he was sure we could pick it up and immediately told us to grab hold of the bumpers and carry it to the side walk. Willie told everyone to leave it alone and when we bent to pick it up, he walked away. Tony wanted to push it into the lobby of the theater but we talked him out of it, so we left it on the sidewalk with a note under the windshield wipers which Sully, whose uncle was killed at Normandy , wrote, “Take this Nazi toy home!”  When we caught up with Willie who was waiting at the next corner, Tony and Sully teased him, “Come on Willie, what’s wrong? We were just having a little fun.” Willie just shrugged without answering and the others dropped it.

Tony who was still stocky but now a block of muscle was on the football team, Sully who’d always been big was now 6’5”and I, at a mere 5’10” but with a good jump shot and sharp elbows, played basketball. Willie lettered in fencing. I asked him once, “I thought you didn’t like fighting.” “Fighting?” he looked incredulous, “it’s all nuance and grace. All we do is touch with the foils and every move is very carefully controlled. You get angry and lose control: you lose. Besides, you play basketball and that has lots of pushing and shoving. I’ve seen Sully push guys out of the way and you with your elbows and big feet, hell, you’re downright dangerous under the boards. It’s a lot more violent, a lot less controlled than fencing.” He along with the fencing team would practice on the edges of the gym while we practiced on the court. Sometimes during a break I’d watch Willie and see how he was always charging and it seemed that he would rather lose than retreat. The others looked like they were dancing back and forth across the strip, brandishing their foils in a series of thrusts and parries with the foils moving so fast I could never even see them touch one another.  I once asked him if he was sure he really wanted to be on the fencing team, “With those outfits, your left hands up in the air and all the fancy footwork, you look like a bunch of fags.” He looked at me for a moment, his lips pressed so tightly together that they turned white, his eyes narrowed, his hands became fists, his whole body shook. He slowly turned away and stood with his back to me for a moment, then turned and looked at me with tears in his eyes and walked away so slowly it seemed to take forever. We never talked about it but every time I think about it, the shame of that moment gnaws at me.

When we graduated, Willie and I went to different colleges. He went to Redmont Tech and became an engineer while I went to Beaumont College and became a social studies teacher. We kept in touch those years although we didn’t see one another except occasionally when our school vacations coincided. Mostly we’d meet some of the old gang –Sully and Billy (who was no longer called Burp) when we’d play two-on-two basketball at the high school court. Willie, who learned to appreciate the joys of playing basketball, and I were a team and had all our routines worked out. I’d stay in the keyhole while he moved under the basket; sometimes I’d pass to him and he’d do his spectacular hook shot; other times he’d pass back and I’d throw a bomb from around the line. He always had to have a plan and follow it. He’d even take me over to the side and draw the play in the sand. “Remember,” he’d say, “control, control, control. No matter what happens, stick to the plan.” Result: we were deadly.

When we both graduated we got apartments.  Mine was above a dry cleaners on 6^th Avenue but the smells from the local Burger Train, which used electric trains on the edge of the counter to deliver huge hamburgers to waiting customers, seemed to seep through my walls even in winter. Willie had the second floor of a two family house across Broadway from me on Jay Street . He didn’t have much furniture but the place was always neat. He never left dishes in the sink and the dish towel was always carefully folded over its bar next to the sink. His engineering magazines and Time were arranged neatly on the coffee table in the living room right in front of his easy chair.

At night we’d sometimes go to the Tivoli for a movie or over to Sonya’s Bar where a lot of the old crowd hung out. We’d go up to the bar and get a couple of draft Gennies but I never saw him drink more than one beer—said he never wanted to feel out of control.  I on the other hand could put away 4 or 5 or more in an evening. He was always great about getting me home.

After he’d been working for a few years he bought a new car—a blue Ford Fairlane, automatic transmission, radio, vinyl seats, even air conditioning—all the extras for those days. It turned out to be a lemon. The car wouldn’t get out of 2^nd much of the time. I would follow him to the dealer in my old six-year-old Plymouth Fury so he could leave his car and hope they would fix it; then I’d take him to work. This took place about once a week for a month or so. I’d go in with him to the service manager, a tall thin man with a blond crew cut, and at first he was polite, explaining the problem, then he got increasingly more insistent, then I could see he was gulping air, trying to control himself.

Yesterday, after the fifth time we’d brought the car in, I drove Willie to pick it up. He told me that he didn’t know what he would do if they didn’t fix it then—he couldn’t sell it and he couldn’t afford to buy another one. He felt like he was out of options. I tried to encourage him by telling him that I was sure they’d take care of it, “After all, they don’t want to see you any more than you want to go there.” He told me to wait at the dealership while he took it for a test drive. While I waited for him I stood leaning against my car by the front door of the show room looking out at the shiny cars out by the curb and wondering when I could afford to get something new. I was startled by the squeal of tires and someone leaning on a horn and looked up to see Willie speeding into the parking lot as fast as he could go in second and drive the car through the window of the show room, showering the place with glass and crashing into a black Mustang on the showroom floor. He then got out, grabbed the tire iron from the trunk and ran after the service manager until he trapped him behind the counter. Willie kept swinging at the counter, beating it up, smashing the cash register so that coins, bills and pieces of metal scattered along the floor. I ran in, grabbed him from behind and he finally let me pull him away. By that time the police came and Willie was taken in to custody.

Later that night I arranged bail for Willie. I couldn’t believe it—him of all people. I brought him back to my place, sent out for pizza and we sat eating at the Formica table under the harsh fluorescent light in my kitchen. Willie was quiet, his face furrowed with frowns. The only sound was of us eating and the sink faucet dripping. Sometimes he closed his eyes in thought, trying to figure things out. I felt a little awkward like maybe I should have just dropped him off at home so he could be alone. Finally, after throwing the few remaining crusts in the box, I leaned forward and said quietly, “Willie,” he looked up, “It’ll work out. The lawyer will sort it out. But…” I hesitated and asked softly, “What happened? Those bastards just wouldn’t…but…I couldn’t…I’ve never…” I stopped, picked up my nearly empty bottle and drained the last bit of beer. Willie took a breath and let it out slowly, leaned forward on his elbows, “I don’t know,” he shook his head sadly, “I just don’t know. I…I couldn’t see them doing anything and somehow at that moment I didn’t see that anything I could do would make them fix it…” he shook his head, “I don’t know…something snapped.” He shuffled in his chair and leaned back, “Look, I could have called the Ford rep; I could have called a lawyer but at the moment all I felt was frustration and rage.” He shook his head, “I’ve never felt anything like that before.”  He was quiet as if silenced by his own confusion. The blare of a car horn invaded the apartment from the street. I got up and put the pizza box in the garbage, went to the fridge and took out another Coke for him, “Want another?“ “Sure.” I handed it to him and took a beer for myself, then sat down.

 “You know,” I reached over and put my hand on his arm, “I’ve seen you get really angry but you’ve always held it back. It was like you had to stuff it back in the can and hammer the lid on before it exploded.” I leaned back. He looked puzzled and I reminded him of the time just a few weeks earlier when we were at Sonya’s, just standing at the bar shooting the breeze with some girls we’d just met, and some oaf spilled beer on him. Willie turned around violently, his eyes flashing, his hands turned into fists, his mouth set hard and he just stood there for a moment shaking with anger, then with tremendous effort forced himself to turn away.

After I finished relating the incident, I watched as Willie’s face relaxed a little. He took a breath and shook his head, “I suppose…” then shrugged, “Maybe you’re right…that’s…what I do. I’m not sure.” He looked away.

 “You know,” I smiled trying to lighten things up, “this isn’t the only outrageous thing you’ve ever done.” He looked at me with just the beginnings of a faint smile. “When was that?” I pushed back my chair, crossed my legs and took a sip of beer, “Remember we were, what, was it the third grade, when you mooned the class?” Willie smiled weakly, took a sip of his Coke, “God that was so long ago, I’ve tried to forget it.” “Why? “I laughed, “it was one of the high spots in my education.” “You know,” he leaned forward, “it seems funny now but afterwards I was so embarrassed that I vowed never to do anything like that again.” He smiled, “But it was fun at the time, and, you know what,” he stopped to think if he wanted to go on, “I hate to admit it,” his face turned serious, “it felt good this time too, but it was the worst thing I’ve ever done,” and with a quick stifled laugh he raised his eyebrows, “still and all it felt good at the time.”