Dwayne

Some memories stay fresh in our minds because they are so special or so amazing or so shattering that we play them over and over throughout our lives. Some memories, though, are hidden in the haze of our history and then surprise us by appearing when a random event triggers them. For instance, a couple of days ago I saw a bicycle and one of those hidden memories jumped out suddenly. I stopped walking for a second and carefully turned it over in my mind. Yes, I remember now—it really happened that way. I had completely forgotten. . . .

The Bike

I had picked out the coolest bike I’d ever seen from the all the bikes available in the bike store in little old downtown Fredericksburg. This was the era of Footsies, hula-hoops, Jarts, bell bottoms—and banana bikes.

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Banana bikes had a distinctively elongated seat. They were usually bright in color, with high handlebars decorated with tassels that flapped in the wind. At some point I put plastic clickers on the wheel supports so that the faster you rode, the faster the spokes clicked. (You could also make homemade clickers with playing cards, if you wanted to.) And a bell—a little silver bell shaped like the top of a toadstool and attached to the handlebars. And it rang when you jiggled the lever with your index finger.

Anyway, I had picked out the red banana bike, and every so often Dad would say, “Let’s walk downtown and put some money on that bike.” “We” (Mom and Dad) were paying it off a little at a time while it sat in the store window so I could pine over it any time I walked past.

“Let’s walk downtown and put some money on that bike. OK?” Dad said one evening as we were redding up after supper. Of course, I was all for that!

He and I walked downtown on a sunny Ohio summer evening, with Dad whistling most of the way. Dad was an accomplished whistler with a strong tone, an accurate ear, and a pleasing vibrato. When I became a young teen, I was mortified when he absent-mindedly whistled in public. (“Nobody else’s dad whistles like a canary in public! I wish I was dead!”) But at this time, I was too young to mind.

We went in the store—a very small, shoebox-like store with a front door that squealed and dark, oily floorboards that creaked out a reply—with bikes crammed into every conceivable inch of space—and Dad gave the proprietor some money. And then things changed. We usually said good-bye and walked back home. But this evening the man in the store went to the big plate-glass window where my bike sat—and he rolled it over to me. “Here you go!”

I wasn’t sure what was going on. I looked up at Dad. “Is it all paid for?”

“Yep. It’s your bike.”

What an unexpected thrill! I rode it the whole way home while Dad tried to keep up.

None of this has anything to do with Dwayne, who’s the topic of this memory. But, just like the bike memory, hidden for so many years, popped into my head unexpectedly, so did my memories of Dwayne. I hadn’t thought of him in years. And the memories were tinged with sadness.

I wasn’t very nice to Dwayne.

The Friend

Dwayne and I were in the same class starting in kindergarten. I remember because we all sat at tables in school. One table was a little higher than the others, and Mrs. Yarbrough called it “the tall people’s table.” And Dwayne got to sit there. So did Lisa, another friend, and later she and I discussed how I, too, should have been at the tall table.

It was my first school-related disappointment. But I’m pretty much over it now.

I didn’t argue the fact that Dwayne got to sit there, though. He was always tall, a little overweight, with that 1960s/1970s rather long hair. I remember when we hit our teen years, he grew his bangs so long that they would hang over his eyes. To fix the problem, he constantly flung his head to the side to flip them back. It was an annoying habit.

Dwayne wasn’t a particularly good-looking kid. He, like his siblings (and there were a bunch of those!) had a long nose that seemed to hang down too far over his philtrum. And his nose sounded stuffed up all the time, causing him to breathe through his mouth and struggle to say ms and ns. It seemed that people were always asking him if he had a cold, and he would shrug his shoulders and say, “It’s by adedoids.” That was a good enough answer for us kids. “It’s his adedoids.” It was an explanation, even if we had no idea what it meant.

As I think of him now, I realize what a good-hearted guy he was. When he laughed, his laugh reverberated through his ineffective nasal passages: “Hrrrrr hrrrr hrrr!” And I recall that he laughed a lot. He was generally just a happy guy. And, really, I did like him. But he was also an easy target.

A number of my friends had dads who scared me, and Dwayne’s dad was at the top of the list. He was one of those guys that, when you visited Dwayne, you hoped he wasn’t there. He would come in after work, scowling, an average-sized guy with a flat-top and glasses with thick black frames, and start ordering people around, always angry about something. He would stomp through the house and stomp up the stairs, chronically frustrated and angry at God for making his life the way it was. Dwayne’s mom, Juana [not her real name], was a thin, nervous woman who had been, I’m sure now, the victim of verbal abuse throughout the whole marriage.

Poor Juana. She was what Mom would call “a nervous wreck.” Her hands constantly shook, and she spoke tentatively, always overwhelmed by the chaotic whirlpool of life swirling around her, barely keeping her head above water in a house full of disobedient children and a bitter, domineering husband.

My mom was a true friend to her—Juana used to call Mom several times a week. Mom would take the call in her bedroom with the door shut, and I was commanded never to listen in on the extension. (I never did.) Juana would pour out her woes to Mom, who would sit quietly and listen and make sympathetic sounds every so often. What was Juana talking about? I suspect her husband was fracturing their marriage—was he unfaithful? Did he beat her or the kids? (I never saw any evidence of that.) Whatever was going on, she needed an emotional release and a friendly heart to talk to. Thank God for my mom, who never lectured her or gave unasked-for advice—she just listened and really heard Juana and empathized with her—and, I’m sure, prayed for her.

I went to Dwayne’s house twice. It was too small for a family of eight, and it was always cluttered and dirty. One time I was there because he had asked me to spend the night. He showed me around the house. When we got to his room, he showed me the double bed we would share. It looked awful—unmade, unclean, and, most alarming of all to me, the middle of the bed was a sinkhole, with a broken frame and the mattress sagging down. I had a sudden premonition of sharing that with Dwayne, both of us, thanks to gravity, cupped together all night in that hole. I couldn’t deal with it and made some excuse that got me out of the overnight visit.

I said earlier I wasn’t very nice to Dwayne. That was one of the times. I remember how excited he was to have me there, and then when I changed the plans, his face really fell. I had hoped he wouldn’t think it was a big deal, but he did. I remember asking him if he was disappointed. “Well, yeah,” he said as he looked at the floor.

The other time I was at Dwayne’s house was for his birthday party. When I heard how many kids he had invited and found out that his mom would be the only adult present, I knew, I knew it was going to be a disaster. And it was.

She could in no way control that houseful of elementary kids. She tried to get us to play games, but no one would listen. They were too busy running up and down the stairs, hollering, laughing—and Dwayne and his siblings were right there in the middle of it.

The combination of being a first-born and being raised in a home where rules were rules and parents were to be respected had already made me a huge proponent of plans, guidelines, and order. To this day, when I’m asked to participate in something involving lots of children, I back out. “Sorry, I don’t do chaos,” I say.

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Juana was constantly intimidated by everyone around her (My mom, on the contrary—nobody, but nobody ever intimidated her! Especially not a kid!), and I felt so sorry for her that day. She tried to organize a game where the child would stand over an empty milk bottle (quart sized and made of glass, of course) and drop wooden clothesline clips into the bottle’s mouth. Whoever could get the most in was the winner. I ended up being the winner because I was about the only one who cooperated. Later on Juana told my mom how well behaved I’d been at the party.

I do not tell these things to brag about myself. I tell them because that’s the way they were.

All Dwayne really wanted was for people to like him. He was one of those kids who does things just to get attention. And sometimes they backfired on him.

I sat in front of him in second grade. One day while the teacher was out of the room, he tapped me on the shoulder. “Hey,” he whispered while trying to keep from smiling. “P-I-S-S. That’s a bad word, isn’t it?”

Because I was self-righteous and also had a nice mean streak running up my rigid spine, I waited until Mrs. Younkin was back in the room and marched myself up to her. Doing my duty, I turned my friend in for “saying a bad word.” I sat down feeling the warm glow of schadenfreude. Just like a good little Nazi.

I don’t recall what punishment he received, but I do know that the teacher took it seriously and punished him somehow.

What a rotten thing to do. I knew at the time he hadn’t really said a bad word. And I knew he was just trying to be shocking and funny and get a laugh out of me. Little did he know how high and unassailable my moral standards were! But I taught him a lesson that day, yes sir!

Afterwards Dwayne was just as nice to me as before. His thinking seemed to be, “Well, I did do something I shouldn’t have done, so it was right for Steve to tell. He’s a good guy.”

We grew up together through elementary school. The summer after sixth grade our family moved away from Fredericksburg. By the time we came back I was in eighth grade in a consolidated junior high where kids from my old school were mixed with kids from other schools. I saw Dwayne from time to time, and we spoke, but we were never friends again.

He grew his hair out thicker and longer and kept flipping those bangs back. As we went into high school, we teens naturally broke off into cliques. You could be an Academic; you could be a Jock; you could be a Nerd. Or you could be a Hood. I was in the first group; Dwayne was in the last.

Academics never spoke to Hoods if we could avoid it. Hoods partied and smoked dope and drove loud cars that went too fast. They weren’t nearly the fine, upstanding citizens that we were. And, frankly, we were a little scared of them!

When you became a high school junior, you could finish your last two years at Waynedale, the high school we were already in, or, if you wanted to learn a trade instead of going to college, you could switch to the Joint Vocational School, aka “the Joint.” Oh yes, that name had a double meaning to us Academics. A lot of the kids who went there were kind of dumb losers, and most of them smoked pot.

By the way, I don’t know how choosing a vocation when you are sixteen or seventeen and then working to achieve success in that vocation makes you a dumb loser. There just might have been something wrong with our thinking in those days. . . .

Anyway, Dwayne went to the Joint, so our paths stopped crossing. He fades from my memory from that point on. Until—until a few years later when I was out of college, married, and a young father, and I saw on Facebook that Dwayne had died. He had a heart attack and died.

Wow. I thought. He was pretty young!

And then I didn’t think about him anymore till I was talking to my mom on the phone a few days later.

“I had a call from Juana the other day. Did you know Dwayne died?”

“Oh, yeah, I saw that on Facebook.”

“Well, she wanted to be sure that you knew.”

“Yeah, I saw it. So what have you and Dad been up to?”

My heart was so hard. Bad things happen all the time. We hadn’t seen each other in years. And anyway, he was a Hood.

But couldn’t I have said, “Be sure to tell his mom I’m very sorry.” Or said, “I’ll send the family a sympathy card.” But I didn’t. My former friend’s death never called forth from me any empathy or grief or tears. At least, not until now.

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