Call to Arms

So we meet again. 
Old people fear the internet. And they should.
How else could this reunion happen?
And what terrible consequences will befall our enemies because of it?

I thought long and hard about posting a comment. But I see you understand the crucial fact, the central reality which the international community failed to understand at the Nuremburg trials. They put the leaders on trial, the  official “war criminals” who created policy and carried it out. But that global calamity would have been unthinkable without the agreement of the ordinary people, each ordinary person. Everyone who participated with a secret smile, everyone who could have helped a single Jew and decided it was safer not to, everyone who looked away – they all deserved to be put on  trial and convicted along with their overlords. British author John Fowles put it best: “The tragedy of Nazi Germany wasn’t that one man had the courage to be evil. It was that ten million men didn’t have the courage to be good.”

You understand the culture of cruelty that tormented us. So I respond. You’ve earned it.

I suspect this is the first comment you’ve ever gotten on your blog, or any blog. You cry into the night without even an echo returned to you. Well, my friend that long silence has ended.

My own war with Edward K. Delavane began long before you ever came to NHS, long before the day you saw him trip me in the dining hall. And all his chums and chattel participated. Years of ongoing low grade ridicule Monica Terwilliger’s “Fish Face” nickname that Ed took credit for, … the endless pranks … salt in the sugar dispenser, “keep away” with my math text book; the same fake friendliness and invitations that trapped you in the Heads or Tails debacle. The offer to “star” on one of Mark Toland’s movies… which turned out to be a ten minute documentary called American Loser. I mentioned my stupid trivial obsession with reebok 629 running shoes …And Toland bought five pairs, sneaked into my house, taking all the right foot shoes, leaving him with all left-footed sneakers. “Always said he had two left feet.”

But that was all before. The highlights, the greatest hits reel. My time as a victim. Then I decided to fight the culture of cruelty and its pug faced leader.

I started by trying to get Delavane arrested for selling drugs.

But he was too cunning, he covered his tracks too well, for any charge to stick. He had never sold to a narc, never been seen completing a transaction. No one even knew his source. Someone was growing weed, somewhere in the moors – that was all anyone could figure out. And he never flashed his cash or made suspicious purchases. I knew where Ed’s money ended up, as you know, far too well. I’d  followed Delavane out to Coatue and seen his stash with his own eyes.

You saw it too, that night.

This is what I did. I showed up at the ramshackle Delavane house, made small talk with Delavane’s mother, picking my way through the tilting piles of hoarder’s plunder – broken push-rakes, piles of ancient magazines, stacks of frames without pictures, pile of pictures without frames, broken grandfather clocks, mold-eaten sports memorabilia, checkbooks and ledgers from the 1970s, rusted fishing lures, coils of wire –  and up three flights of worn-down stairs to Ed’s weirdly neat bedroom under the eaves.

When Ed came home from football practice that day, he found a large white cardboard box taped to the apex of the ceiling, with a string dangling from the flaps that held it closed. A note, written in bold caps with a sharpie and taped to the string, said simply:

DO NOT PULL!

Who could resist that that challenge? Most people, probably, but I guessed sensed  that Ed Delavane wasn’t one of them. I had laboriously filled the box with the little bits of computer paper that detached when you pulled the perforated edge off the printed sheets. Remember those? When Ed pulled the string the little room was inundated with home-made confetti. Apparently, it took two hours to clean up, even with brother Billy pitching in.

Ed retaliated by stealing my book bag and dumping my Social Studies final essay and all the notes for it in the paper chute at the dump. I managed to retrieve everything by sneaking into the container and crawling around in the masses of discarded newspapers and magazines for the better part of a Saturday morning, with old documents and (poetic justice) reams of computer print outs, cascading down on me as they burrowed through the heaps of rubbish. I never told you about that. I keep my humiliations private.

My response? Escalation.

Months before he had purchased a National weather Service surplus 3000 gram meteorological balloon. It cost almost three hundred dollars. I remember you asked why, and I said “It might come in handy someday.” You had no idea what I was talking about. Did you think I was planning a career as a TV weatherman?

Hardly.

The appeal of the balloon for me was the five pounds of talcum powder inside it. Delavane understood why when he got home a few days later and saw the bulge of inflated latex blocking the door to his room. He  must have thought, “Oooo, smart idea, keeping me out with a fuckin balloon”, and promptly punctured it with his Swiss Army Knife. He talked to our own Goebbels,David Trezize, about what happened next, when the propaganda minister was writing his article about us. To refresh your memory: The resulting explosion of talcum powder blinded Delavane for a few seconds and sent him reeling back toward the stairs. He grabbed the bannister and saved himself from a bad fall, but the blizzard of fine white dust took considerably more than two hours to clean. His Nintendo 64 video game console was destroyed along with the used Sony Trinitron his parents had handed down when they bought the a newer model. And he never fully removed the fine powder from his space heater or the shag carpet.

Ed’s next move surprised me: he offered an olive branch. It wasn’t hard to understand. He knew when he was beaten. He had been out-witted – “out coached” he called it, and he wanted a truce. “I don’t want to find out what other crazy shit you’ve got up your sleeve” was the somewhat artless way he described his predicament.  He seemed sincere. And his peace-offering was hard to refuse.

The Delavane family owned a parcel of land off South Shore Road. Set amid two acres dying pine trees, spiked brambles and poison ivy, the single structure on the property was a three story gambrel-roofed barn. It was  guarded by a school bus on concrete blocks, five rusting lawnmowers, and a tilted RV with cardboard windows, along with a scaling array of ancient washing machines, three cannibalized snow-mobiles and one half-rebuilt one repaired from  the scavenged parts, plus generators, outboard motor engines, compressors, coils of wire, and a teetering pile of broken air conditioners, all strewn about in the high weeds like a  silent battlefield after the war with the machines.

Inside, the barn held three floors of mildewing ancient junk – torn moldy chairs and couches, shattered desks and dressers and tables, piles of twelve light window sash, most of them coming apart at the joints, priceless piles of  150-year old antique glass that someone once intended to re-glaze into the frames, a load of paint-peeling doors, stacks of heart pine lumber, Belgian block and crumbling bricks, drifts of rotting books, and more than fifty mirrors, most of them cracked probably representing several centuries of bad luck

In short -- all the junk that couldn’t fit into the Delavane house, but might “come in handy” some day.

And among that deranged clutter, under a filthy rolled rug, or stuck into the warped drawer of a legless bureau, was a single small shiny object of real value – at least to someone like Jane Stiles, and therefore absolutely to someone like me who desperately needed a gift to win her over.

In 1986 The New York Giants beat the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXI. It had been a long awaited triumph for old Mr. Delavane, and he purchased a commemorative pin as a memento. Since then, in the long slog of the 1990s, the Giants had faded once more. He wound up following head coach Bill Parcells to the New England Patriots -- and several near miss shots at the big game. The pin was forgotten, at least by the “fair weather turncoat”, as Jane Stiles’ father called him. Tom Stiles was true blue. He had sat in the freezing cold watching Gant games at the Polo grounds, he would eventually wind up cheering them through two world championships, and he had passed his fervor on to all three of his daughters. For Jane it was the best way to spend time with her taciturn and introspective dad, bouncing off the couch at a pick six, shouting down a bad call, or reading doom and gloom into the body language of the team as they trotted out from the locker room.

Jane wanted that Super Bowl pin. Delavane knew she wanted it.

He told me: “If you can find it in the barn, it’s yours.”

That Saturday morning, I met Delavane at the barn, as they had agreed, punctually at eight a.m. Of course, Delavane didn’t get there until eight thirty. That gave me time to get creeped out, waiting for him in the overgrown haunted post-apocalyptic yard. … with good reason, as it turned out. There were no ghosts in the old building. There didn’t need to be.

In his own slow thuggish way, Delavane was just as devious as I was. He knew how to bait a trap, and the Delavane family storage barn was the biggest trap on Nantucket, especially if the potential victim happened to have respiratory problems. A unpatched roof leak more than a decade before had turned the place into a cave of black mold, and the plywood battens covering every window, blocking any whisper of fresh air, just made it worse. I could smell it as soon as Ed pulled open the big sliding door. The glass had been replaced by some kind of dense cloudy plastic and the white metal edging was crumbling with rust. A raw caustic bulge of stale air billowed out of the darkness and I took a quick step backward.

Delavane held out a blue-paper face mask. “Wear this. It’s pretty rank in there.”

“It’s pitch black! How am I supposed to – ”

He stepped past me, reached inside and flicked a switch. After a hesitant flicker, the banks of fluorescent tubes snapped on and the place was flooded with cold harsh light. “There you go. Good luck. I got some shit to do. See ya later.”

He pushed me inside and shouldered the big door shut. It groaned on its tracks and then the silence closed in, almost as suffocating as the mold. I felt a quick plunge of fear. I didn’t want to be alone in this place. For some reason I had assumed that Ed would stay with me, help me find the pin. But he was already walking away. Of course he was.

The stink of mildew draped the air like spider webs and there were plenty of those, too, sticky against my face as I picked my way between the unsteady piles of ancient furniture, careful not to knock over the lamps and bottles that cluttered the wooden floor. I tried a few desk drawers, but half of them wouldn’t open and the rest were empty. Other desks beckoned across a nightmare landscape of upended couches, bed frames, bookcases, and splintered chairs. I tried climbing over the heaps of jagged wood and torn pillows but everything shifted under me and he lost my nerve.

I scrambled back carefully and lowered myself off the edge of a massive veneer-peeling credenza, until he felt my toes touch the floor. The heap of junk rocked alarmingly. I could feel the breath tightening in my chest. Delavane had grabbed me in a wrestling bear hug once -- the pressure on his lungs felt exactly like this. It occurred to me that Delavane had done it again, this another bear hug, but that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the mission. I had to find that pin.

So, I made my way to the stairs, which had missing treads and no risers. The place was a death trap! Curling water-stained posters for old Theater Lab productions lined the high walls above the steps, along with hanging signs and quarter boards for long-extinct Nantuket businesses – Cy’s Green Tea Pot, Robinson’s 5 &10, Patisserie Marti, Preston’s. – victims 0f high rents, changing times, and fire. I coudn’t help thinking, this place could use the arsonist’s touch. You were always talking about burning things down. This would have been a good place to start.

The second floor was worse than the first – tipping platoons of rolled-up, dust clogged carpets, clunky old televisions, hundreds of broken lobster traps and a slouching crowd of battered grandfather clocks, all telling different times, some with no hands on their faces. The floor was strewn with beer cans and cigarette butts, old magazines and greeting cards stamped with ancient muddy footprints, unmatched shoes and boots and a batch of old 8-track tapes. No desks, no drawers.

I saw a giant aluminum bowl, probably scavenged from some long-closed bakery, full of random junk – marbles, vitamin bottles, pens and pencils, china animals, rings and bracelets. There might be something valuable in there – maybe even the Super Bowl pin. It was my first flicker of hope. I rummaged through the junk for a few minutes but found nothing, and I finally dumped the bowl out onto the torn seat of an old arm chair. The mess I created looked perfectly natural in that uncurated museum of crazy, but there was no trophy pin in the pile of debris.

I was about to give up when I saw a glint from under the big leather couch that blocked the stairs to the third floor. I got down on my hands and knees, crawled through the dust, lowered myself on one elbow and reached under for the hidden treasure.

The stab of pain made me rear back, hitting my head on a jutting column of shutters. The two jolts brought me to tears for a second – tears of surprise and anger more than anything else. What was this fucking place? It was like some kind of feral biting animal. I looked at his wounded hand and my heart sank. The object under the couch was a fishing lure, and the curved hook meant I couldn’t just ease it  from the heel of my palm like a pin. It would tear as it came out. But the thing was filthy, I couldn’t leave it there. I felt the tears coming again and shut my eyes hard to stop them. Then I gritted his teeth and pulled. I squealed with the pain. How could something that small hurt so much?  And it had barely budged. How was I ever going to get it out? But there was only one way, and I knew it.

I yanked again, as hard as I could, and shrieked as the barb ripped a jagged chunk out of my palm. I stood there immobile, pressing my hand to his shirt, feeling the warm blood against my chest, sobbing and wheezing.

BTW -- the mask wasn’t helping. That was the other problem – I could barely breathe. I tore the scrap of paper off his face and noticed the label inside. I held it up to the light: “Does not provide NIOSH approved protection. Protects from non-toxic particles, household dust and cut grass.” My first thought – typical Delavane move! Penny-pinching islanders, chronically, cheap. Dangerously cheap. Of course they would get the least expensive dust mask available, even if it was essentially useless … and said so, right on the label!

Then I realized it was worse, much worse. The mask wasn’t a stingy token gesture of protection, it was part of Delavane’s trap, meant to lure me into a false sense of security. One more trick, and Delavane had known I’d fall for it.

I was wheezing badly by then. I knew I had to get out, I needed fresh air. The windows were impossible, boarded up from the outside and barricaded by unstable heaps of junk. The only hope was the front door. Fighting to pull the dusty air into my lungs, he staggered down the stairs and over to the sliding door. I grabbed the wooden handle and pulled, but after an inch it wouldn’t budge. Something was blocking the track from the outside.

I was locked in!

Claustrophobia pulled tight across his chest. I remembered that horrible life-saving class at the swimming pool the summer before, trying to yank my t-shirt over my head in the water, going under the surface with the fabric pressed against my face, unable to get my head free, thrashing and kicking my feet and drowning until someone pulled him out and dumped me on the tiles, choking and gasping. And all the kids laughing “Fish Face can’t swim!

I was drowning the same way now, drowning in the air, drowning on dry land. I pounded on the sliding door, whimpering and crying out “Please, somebody help me, please, I can’t breathe, help me,” until Delavane appeared on the other side, grinning. He was holding the Super Bowl pin in his hand.

“Guess I had it after all. And right in my pocket!”

I could barely hear him. The blood was roaring in my ears and the plastic muffled sound. But he saw the evil grin on the wide flat inhuman face. I will never forget that grin. It would become my beacon, the light that led me through the next twenty years back to Nantucket, so I could twist that ugly smirk into a rictus of terror and despair. “I’ll get you for this,” I whispered to my shoes, so Delavane couldn’t read my lips. But he had already turned away.

Then my throat closed for the final time, and I fainted.

They said I almost died that day. They’re wrong. I died and I came back to life. The old Sippy tried to please. He tried to fit in. He believed people were basically good, and happy endings were possible. The new Sippy didn’t give a shit.  He understood that people were bad, and happy endings happened in the middle of the story because smart story-tellers know when to shut up.

“Happily ever after” was my parents’ marriage video. It wasn’t their marriage. You saw enough of that cage match to know exactly what I mean. Maybe that’s why I was in the hospital the day your mother died. Maybe I was meant to be there. Maybe it was a message, for both of us. Our stories are connected. They’re one story. Don’t let it stop in the middle. You say it’s time for action. Let’s act together. There’s work to do! Let’s work together. You want a High School Military tribunal?

 Let’s make one.

Together.