My perpendicular neighbors

One lot over and to the right from being directly across the street from us was the green house of my childhood friends Mike and Mark Shea. Their father Jim had once served in the navy on a submarine and Mark told me one afternoon that his father on occasion while still asleep would run through the house and down into the basement yelling as he went, "Dive, dive, dive." Mr. Shea owned an older black Volks Wagon and every Saturday afternoon regardless of the season he washed, waxed, and buffed that car with an attention that bordered on the erotic. One glorious Saturday after he had serviced his bug my younger brother reached out and touched the gleaming body. Mr. Shea as if he kept constant vigil instantly burst from the kitchen door yelling, "Don't you dare." My brother retreated in tears and after Mr. Shea called my parents to complain my brother sobbed in his own defense that he could not help himself. Such was the power of that shine.

Mike and Mark shared the same birthday and were born exactly one year apart. Mark was my closest friend and when it came time for me to be confirmed in the Catholic faith I chose Mark as my confirmation name. His family was of another faith and the day in catechism class that I was informed by a nun that every one not Catholic was going to Hell to suffer for eternity I began my fall from faith and a notion of a just and loving God. How could I pray to such a deity who condemned to eternal damnation anyone unyielding to Catholic faith or the pronouncements of His representative on earth the reigning Pope?

The Sheas and I used to go to the YMCA on Saturday afternoons in the nearby city of Springfield, Mass. It was virtually our first exposure to African Americans. There was at the time only a handful of black families residing in our town and none had children attending our grade school. That would change in junior high. In the meantime however through the Y we were exposed to a culture unlike our own. And it was as if we were of two different clans. We got along somewhat wearily. But we did beyond the racial awkwardness and disharmony have a grand time. There was basketball, dodge ball, trampoline time, and free swim periods. Afterwards we would shower and Mike Shea would comb his pubic hair and pet and talk to his penis which he called by a name that escapes me now. One afternoon after a workout in the gym I was down in the boy's dressing room hurrying to get ready to go for Mrs. Shea was due in moments to pick us up. I ran over to the heavy wooden door leading to the stairwell with the intentions of calling out to the dawdling Mark. I kicked it open. The door stopped abruptly with a thump and a cry. For in kicking the door open I had cleaved Mark's forehead down his center. The gash took a dozen stitches to close.

Down the end of our street was the proverbial sand lot where we played pick up baseball games. One morning Mike diligently cleared away all the brush and sticks and other impediments to a clean playing field. Later that same day for some perverse reason as if in undue retaliation I littered the field once again with all the debris Mike had painstakingly removed. In utter confusion upon discovering my deed Mike erupted in a guttural cry. Never before had I heard such pure animal anguish.

Mrs. Shea was a heavy drinker who played piano for a local church based theatrical group. One of the three bedrooms in the Shea household had been turned into a music studio with a black upright piano and a voluminous collection of sheet music running the gamut of broadway show tunes. At one point Mrs. Shea attended an AA meeting under the misconception that the organization would teach her how to drink reasonably. She was aghast to learn that they advocated complete abstinence. She never returned. A couple years later on an afternoon when I was eleven or twelve I stood in the doorway of their backyard sheet metal tool shed with a throbbing erection. I was at that moment enticing a neighboring girl of four or five to step inside the shed and relieve me carnally in ways I did not as of yet fully understand. Mrs. Shea who happened at that very second to look out her back window let go with a horrified shriek as she called out my name. Shocked into fear the little girl ran away in tears.

It was through Mark that I learned of another power, one that was more mysterious than lust. We were down in his basement when it happened. The afternoon before a television repairman had deemed the family black and white set beyond hope. Rather than toss the television out Mr. Shea had relegated the set to family basement with the thoughts he would later prove the repairman wrong. The back of the set was off and Mark and I had plugged it in. We stared transfixed at the glowing tubes and hot wires. I had a screwdriver in my hand and Mark as if in the guise of a straight man delivered his line, "What ever you do don't touch that wire." And I completing the joke replied, "What this one?" As I said it I touched the wire with the screw driver and a jolt of electricity mule kicked me some six or seven feet through the air. From that day forward I had a reverence for all things electrical.

When Mark and I were fifteen we each took a hit of Purple Haze and the world turned fantastical. Such visions we saw. I spent the night at his house and as we lay awake listening to the plaintive calls on a radio talk show I was convinced I heard beyond those voices a spaceship land atop his house. It was a night that passed for me in religious awe.

Shortly thereafter my family moved to neighborhood miles away. Mark and I went through changes in temperament and we drifted apart. I went on to strike up new friendships. And on melancholy afternoons I sometimes pulled out my collection of snapshots from earlier years. In one of them the Shea brothers and several other kids and I were supporting each other while forming a human pyramid. Were you naive enough you could almost convince yourself that we had the strength to hold one another aloft forever.