You’d take the lead hitting 18'10" on your next jump and there would be a spattering of applause coming from the white section high in the shade of the stadium. The announcer would declare that with one jump to go you were less than 6" from the long-standing national record. You’d be wishing he never said that. You would steal a look at Louis Rey who never flinched at the announcement, but looked at the knot of white spectators as they called encouragement down to you. Ten minutes later Louis Rey would accelerate to the board, hitting an approach speed that was simply faster than you could ever hope to run. He’d transfer that black velocity into a neat thud and plant into a vertical lift that suspended Louis Rey in the air for a beat and another beat, and your own internal timing would be feeling your body drop because any other boy in the world would have to be dropping by now. But Louis Rey would be holding his apex because he had come in with such speed and power that he was still hovering. The stadium full of people began to sense that something was happening, but not KNOWING like you did, and the energy would cause the universal turning of a few hundred heads focusing on the boy in the air who for this instant was stopping time. Sailing above the sand, freezing your reality, taking your breath away and pissing you off in the highest sense of compliment imaginable. Gradually he wound downward and blasted the sand in a spray that surged from under his body, which bounced silently with heavy impact at a distance that was just weird. Plain weird.
“Foul,” the official yelled as the red flag snapped into the air. You’d say under your breath, “Yeah, he did foul,” as you jogged lightly and with more speed and spring in your legs than you ever felt before toward the hole out in the sand. It was sad, it was just the slightest foul. You’d hear your voice demanding of the official to “Measure it anyway,” because you had to know. The official didn’t need much prompting. Louis Rey was on the grass holding his head with tears streaming down his face, the stadium silent. Just you and the official moving in slow motion, and your voice still echoing “Measure it anyway.” As they did, Louis Rey’s body started shaking like he was expecting to endure a beating, and he did when he heard the official, “Jesus Christ, 22 feet, 3 inches.” Louis Rey stood up and looked at you. You said, “You’ll have other days Louis.” Louis Rey thinking you were being mean said, “Shut up, you white motherfucker.” You just stood there and said, “Nice jump anyway.” He stared at you, and the girls started yelling, “Fuck him up Louis,” because if they couldn’t see a record they could at least hope for a fight. Louis Rey said quietly only to me, “I already did.” And I smiled. And he smiled.
SPHINX
If you were roasting in the desert, twenty-five miles from the nearest gas station, standing under the sun, shielding your eyes and watching a little dot making its way toward you, you would be struck by a major and a minor element. The major element would be the heat, and the fact that the solitary dot out there in the shimmering horizon is a junior high school boy. The minor element, the question: Why?
Pulling focus on the long lens of your imagination, you see him sweating in his shorts and T-shirt, crunching over the decomposed granite under his boots. Facing the blasting sun hanging low on the horizon, his three canteens riding the small of his back in the shade.
His boots are aptly named desert boots. They are perfect: tough tan leather, ankle high, laced in four holes on the arch to prevent hot sand and stones from falling inside, flexible thick gum soles. The boy loves those desert boots. The boots are almost the answer to our question.
Eddie feels trapped in the culture of Southern California. He is tired of the billboards offering him his own masculinity through tobaccco products. He hates the promises of confirmation of his sexuality and desirability from sports car ads on T.V. He is insulted by the assurance that he earns power and validity through the possession of this product or that, by the distorted and grotesque subliminal images promising him manhood, sex, heroism. He mistrusts the easy rites of passage supplied by his culture. He knows the commercial influences are wrong, threatening something akin to what used to be sacred.
He couldn’t have put any of this into words. He feels it, with the unique clarity and purest wisdom of adolescence. He had begun to think there was nothing he could do about it. The cultural bombardment was sneaky, constant, unavoidable. It took a gradual and relentless toll on his spirit.
Months earlier he had heard some embarrassed, uneasy laughter from his friends, and a faint voice calling him back to the school yard. “Eddie, Eddie. What the fuck, Eddie. What are ya starin’ at?” He was focused on his feet, and the feet of seven of his friends all standing in a circle. Five of those friends, including Eddie, were wearing desert boots. These boots were not used in the desert, and they suddenly seemed to him part of a uniform for pretenders. If he could have taken them off his feet and thrown them into the bushes surrounding the quad he would have. Instead he stared, stunned.
He felt like a complete fraud. A fraud who hung around with other frauds, being fraudulent. He thought of a lyric from a new song by one of his favorite bands . . . “and he can’t be a man ’cause he doesn’t smoke the same cigarette as me.”
The bell for class rang, scattering his friends in four directions. He lagged behind, sleepwalking his way to his math class, feeling contaminated by what a few minutes earlier had seemed like just a kids’ collective sense of style. He wandered to his seat late, his face blank, unconcerned as Mrs. Fields eyed him over her glasses while marking him tardy again. His heart began pounding wildly. He understood clearly, as each thought possessed him, that he was already on his way to the desert. He stuck his feet out in the aisle and smiled.
The next weekend via Greyhound and his thumb, he was out there. He loved it. He loved it so much he kept it a secret. Once every month for the next six months, right into the teeth of summer his boots became Desert Boots. Capital D, capital B. He progressed from walking out and back in an hour or two, to elaborate treks often to fourteen hours, each time feeling his spirit gaining strength as he lost sight of civilization. In the last two months he started out in the dark before dawn, heading out for a point to be reached before nightfall.
The sense of accomplishment upon reaching his destination was extended and reflected upon during the ride in the Greyhound back to San Diego, prolonged during his silent, noncommittal rides as a hitchhiker from the downtown bus terminal to the eastern section of town. Waving thanks and closing the door on the stranger driving, he’d cut across orangegroved back yards and along the floors of domesticated canyons, making his way up to his front steps. He’d swing open the screen door saying, “Hi Ma, ’say Dad,” and head for his bedroom.
Surging with secret pride at his accomplishment, and relishing the exhausting toll it exacted, he’d examine the dust on his boots, the sunburned skin, the burnt-straw shock of hair, the salt-caked clothes. He’d open his bedroom window, take off his shorts, pull off the T-shirt and slip off those scarred, durable boots. Yanking the cool sheets back on his bed, he lay in the darkened room looking out into a world which now had boundaries no one who knew him could imagine.
He’d see the tops of the apartments sitting in the canyon that bordered his back yard. He’d listen with amused contempt to the faint calling and laughing from the miniature golf course which sat — phony and fake, unreal and gaudy — at the end of his street. The yelps and hollers would grow fainter. The sounds of the people playing and flirting on the plastic grass and trick fairways would subside entirely. His breathing would change into a slow shallow rhythm, dropping like a stone down a well into deep sleep, splashing slowly into the sweet carnal dreams of early manhood.
After these weekends he relished coming back to school, standing with his buddies in the circle, looking down at these boots and the boots of his friends and saying nothing.
There he is, a tiny dot making his seventh desert excursion, swinging along in a comfortable walking