Born on the Fourth of July Read online

  In the spring of that year I remember the whole class went down to New York City and saw the movie Around the World in Eighty Days on a tremendous screen that made all of us feel like we were right there in the balloon flying around the world. After the movie we went to the Museum of Natural History, where Castiglia and I walked around staring up at the huge prehistoric dinosaurs billions of years old, and studied fossils inside the big glass cases and wondered what it would have been like if we had been alive back then. After the museum they took us to the Hayden Planetarium, where the whole sixth-grade class leaned back in special sky chairs, looking up into the dome where a projector that looked like a huge mechanical praying mantis kept us glued to the sky above our heads with meteor showers and comets and galaxies that appeared like tremendous snowstorms swirling in the pitch darkness of the incredible dome. They showed the whole beginning of the earth that afternoon, as we sat back in our chairs and dreamed of walking on the moon someday or going off to Mars wondering if there really was life there and rocketing off deeper and deeper into space through all the time barriers into places and dreams we could only begin to imagine. When we got on the school bus afterward and were all seated, Mr. Serby, our sixth-grade teacher, turned around and in a soft voice told us that someday men would walk upon the moon, and probably in our lifetime, he said, we would see it happen.

  We were still trying to catch up with the Russians when I heard on the radio that the United States was going to try and launch its first satellite, called Vanguard, into outer space. That night Mom and Dad and me and the rest of the kids watched the long pencil-like rocket on the television screen as it began to lift off after the countdown. It lifted off slowly at first. And then, almost as if in slow motion, it exploded into a tremendous fireball on the launching pad. It had barely gotten off the ground, and I cried that night in my living room. I cried watching Vanguard that night on the evening news with Mom and all the rest. It was a sad day for our country, I thought, it was a sad day for America. We had failed in our first attempt to put a satellite into orbit. I walked slowly back to my room. We were losing, I thought, we were losing the space race, and America wasn’t first anymore.

  When we finally made it into space, I was in junior high school, and right in the middle of the class the loudspeaker interrupted us and the principal in a very serious voice told us that something very important was about to happen. He talked about history, and how important the day was, how America was finally going to launch its first satellite and we would remember it for a long time.

  There was a long countdown as we all sat on the edge of our seats, tuning our ears in to the radio. And then the rocket began to lift off the edge of the launching pad. In the background there was the tremendous roar of the rocket engines and a guy was screaming like Mel Allen that the rocket was lifting off. “It’s lifting off! It’s lifting off!” he kept screaming crazily. All the kids were silent for a few seconds, still straining in their chairs, waiting to see whether the rocket would make it or not, then the whole room broke into cheers and applause. America had done it! We had put our first satellite into space. “We did it! We did it!” the guy was screaming at the top of his lungs.

  And now America was finally beginning to catch up with the Russians and each morning before I went to school I was watching “I Led Three Lives” on television about this guy who joins the Communists but is actually working for us. And I remember thinking how brave he was, putting his life on the line for his country, making believe he was a Communist, and all the time being on our side, getting information from them so we could keep the Russians from taking over our government. He seemed like a very serious man, and he had a wife and a kid and he went to secret meetings, calling his friends comrades in a low voice, and talking through newspapers on park benches.

  The Communists were all over the place back then. And if they weren’t trying to beat us into outer space, Castiglia and I were certain they were infiltrating our schools, trying to take over our classes and control our minds. We were both certain that one of our teachers was a secret Communist agent and in our next secret club meeting we promised to report anything new he said during our next history class. We watched him very carefully that year. One afternoon he told us that China was going to have a billion people someday. “One billion!” he said, tightly clenching his fist. “Do you know what that means?” he said, staring out the classroom window. “Do you know what that’s going to mean?” he said in almost a whisper. He never finished what he was saying and after that Castiglia and I were convinced he was definitely a Communist.

  About that time I started doing push-ups in my room and squeezing rubber balls until my arms began to ache, trying to make my body stronger and stronger. I was fascinated by the muscle-men ads in the beginnings of the Superman comics, showing how a skinny guy could overnight transform his body into a hulk of fighting steel, and each day I increased the push-ups, more and more determined to build a strong and healthy body. I made muscles in the mirror for hours and checked my biceps each day with a tape measure, and did pull-ups on a bar in the doorway of my room before I went to school each morning. I was a little guy, back then, and used to put notches with a penny on the door of my room, little scratches with the coin to remind myself how tall I was and to see each week whether I’d grown.

  “The human body is an amazing thing,” the coaches told us that fall when we started high school. “It is a beautiful remarkable machine that will last you a lifetime if you care for it properly.” And we listened to them, and worked and trained our young bodies until they were strong and quick.

  I joined the high-school wrestling team, practicing and working out every day down in the basement of Massapequa High School. The coaches made us do sit-ups, push-ups, and spinning drills until sweat poured from our faces and we were sure we’d pass out. “Wanting to win and wanting to be first, that’s what’s important,” the coaches told us. “Play fair, but play to win,” they said. They worked us harder and harder until we thought we couldn’t take it anymore and then they would yell and shout for us to keep going and drive past all the physical pain and discomfort. “More! More!” they screamed. “If you want to win, then you’re going to have to work! You’re going to have to drive your bodies far beyond what you think you can do. You’ve got to pay the price for victory! You can always go further than you think you can.”

  Wrestling practice ended every day with wind sprints in the basement hallways that left us gasping for air and running into the showers bent over in pain, and I honestly wondered sometimes what I was doing there in the first place and why I was allowing myself to go through all this.

  The wrestling coach was very dedicated and held practice every day of the week including Saturdays and Sundays and I can even remember having practice once on Thanksgiving. I came in first in the Christmas wrestling tournament. There’s still a picture of me in one of the old albums in the attic that shows me with two other guys holding a cardboard sign with the word Champion on it. I won most of my matches that year. When I lost, I cried just like when I lost my Little League games and I’d jump on the bus and ride back to Massapequa with tears in my eyes, not talking to anyone for hours sometimes.

  I was very shy back then and dreamed of having a girlfriend, or just someone to hold my hand. Even though I was on the wrestling team and had won all those matches and wore my sweater with the Big M on it, I still dreamed of the day I could have a girlfriend like all the rest of the guys. I wanted to be hoisted aloft in the arms of other young men like myself and carried off the field for scoring the winning touchdown, or winning the wrestling match that brought the championship to my school.

  I wanted to be a hero.

  I wanted to be stared at and talked about in the hallways.

  “Hey look,” said one of the kids. “There goes Kovic!”

  I was the great silent athlete now, who never had to say anything, who walked through the halls of Massapequa High School, sucking the air deeply into my ches
t and pumping up the blood into my arms.

  “There goes Kovic,” a pretty freshman said. “Boy, he sure is cute.” And as I walked through the crowded halls I was sure everyone was noticing me, staring at my varsity letter, and looking at my wrestler’s shoulders.

  And it was also during my freshman year that I started to get pimples on my face. I remember coming home from school and seeing what looked like a tremendous blackhead on my forehead. It was right smack-dab in the middle of my forehead and it was just like the things that were all over my sister Sue’s face. The more I looked in the mirror, the more scared I got. Stevie Jacket’s face was covered with the things, he had the worst case of them of anyone I ever knew in my life. In gym I saw him once taking a shower, and his face and neck, all over his arms and back, his whole body was covered with blackheads and whiteheads and thousands of pimples. And now I was catching them, I was getting them just like Stevie Jacket and my sister. There it was, right in front of me in the mirror, a big goddamn blackhead, and after staring at it for almost an hour, I still didn’t know what to do. I remembered this girl in the sixth grade who used to have them all over her face and it looked like somebody hit her with a rake. It was awful and she used to put this disgusting filmy cream on, to try and hide them, but it looked worse.

  I looked in the medicine cabinet for the little metal thing that my sister used, with tiny openings on each end that you were supposed to press against the pimples and pop them out of your skin forever. So I pressed it up against the blackhead real hard like I was going to take my head off, until it finally oozed out of the pore like a tiny white dot. I kept popping those things all year, and I finally broke down and bought that filmy crap, and started to put it on my face too.

  It was about the same time I started to get these ugly hairs under my lip and up in my armpits. I was getting these things all happening at once, and I couldn’t stop them, no matter how hard I tried, they all kept coming. I put some Nair under my lip one night because one of the guys in boy scout camp had said that if you shaved with a razor it would grow back twice as fast. So I put on this underarm stuff I found in the closet, it was the stuff that was supposed to take the hair off your legs. Well, I put it under my nose and waited about an hour and then I wiped it off, leaving a big red rash. It looked like a huge gigantic red mustache and I went to school the next week using a handkerchief, trying to hide it and making believe I had a real bad cold. Most of the year was like that, with the pimples all over my face, and by the time the spring came all sorts of other difficult things began to happen.

  I felt strange feelings in places I had never discovered before. The part of me that had just been there like everything else now began to get hard and excited every time I looked at a pretty girl. I had never felt anything like it before in my life. That thing, my penis, was getting hard, every time I watched the girls on “American Bandstand” or saw them walking down the streets. They’d even be in my dreams at night. I’d wake up in the mornings with the whole sheet soaked. I felt guilty at first. I actually thought I was committing a sin, dreaming it, thinking it, just watching them. But then one afternoon I crawled on top of a Rawlings basketball in my bedroom and did it for the sheer pleasure of doing it. And it felt good. It felt so good that I did it again after that, and again, and again—with teddy bears in my bed making believe they were Marilyn Monroe, in the bathroom in the bathtub, in the basement laying the side pocket of the pool table seventeen times, in the back yard against trees. I did it everywhere. And no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t stop. It got so bad after a while, I started saying Acts of Contrition after doing it. I asked God to forgive me for feeling this thing and then I couldn’t understand why I’d be asking God to forgive me for doing something that felt so good.

  For some reason Mom and I just didn’t get along back then. I was being sent to my room for punishment almost every night after dinner. “Take a bath,” “Clean your room,” “Take out the garbage.” … It was always something like that, and after battling it out with Mom in the kitchen and getting hit with the egg turner I’d be back in my room cursing her out under my breath as she’d be shouting, “God’s going to punish you, Ronnie! God’s going to punish you!” Later she’d come in and tell me she was sorry for yelling at me and I’d give her a big hug and tell her I was sorry too for making her so angry.

  Mom always wanted me to be the best at whatever I did, especially at school. “If you fail any subjects this year,” she’d tell me, “you’re not going out for any sports.” I kept telling her I was trying to do my best, but the only thing I could think of was baseball and instead of doing my homework every night I read every sports book I could get my hands on. For hours I’d swing the baseball bat in front of the mirror in my room. I still wanted to play for the New York Yankees more than anything else in the world.

  I joined the track team in the spring. I wanted to be the greatest pole-vaulter in the history of the school and so I worked out every day until dark on the parallel bars Dad had built the summer before in the back yard. I remember Mom in the kitchen cheering me on, turning on the porch lights so I could work out even more. I loved those bars and when my brother Tommy was home from school, we’d both get on them together. We’d call Mom and Dad out to watch us perform, doing handstands together, back to back, with both of us touching each other’s feet. “The amazing Kovics,” I’d shout to Mom. “Ladies and gentlemen, the amazing Kovics are about to perform their death-defying feats.” I can still remember both of them standing below us with pride in their eyes as we turned and balanced on those bars. I’d swing my body back and forth, back and forth, until I had swept myself into a perfect handstand, my body in a strong beautiful arc above my back yard. I’d look out around me, holding the handstand as long as I could, and swing down, dismounting with a beautiful twist, thumping onto the ground, stinging my bare feet. It was perfect, I’d say to myself, beautiful, just beautiful.

  I was a natural athlete, and there wasn’t much of anything I wasn’t able to do with my body back then. I was proud and confident and there was always a tremendous energetic bounce in the way I moved. I knew what it was to walk and run and I loved it. After climbing the ropes in school, I’d go out to the track. I remember the feel of the long, lightweight, fiberglass pole in my hands and the black Permatrack beneath my feet; even in the meets I’d jump without shoes. I’d start running from the very end of the long track toward the pit, with the sleek pole gently vibrating up and down in my hands and my face full of determination. I’d hit the hole with the end of my pole, swinging like a pendulum, then kick high into the air, twisting, clearing the bar by inches, falling into the pit on my back, looking at the bar still up there.

  As I got older Mom would kid me a lot because I wasn’t interested in girls, but I was still dreaming about them all the time. I thought constantly about Joan Marfe, the girl who’d sat next to me in sixth grade, but I was too shy to ever ask her for a date.

  I’d heard a priest at some kind of church conference warn us how a thing called petting could lead to sin. Kissing was all right, the priest said in a serious voice, but petting or heavy petting almost always led to sex, and sex, he said, was a mortal sin. I remember listening to him that day and promising myself and God I’d try never to get too close to a girl. I wanted to do all the things the guys in the study hall whispered about, but I didn’t want to offend God. I never even went to the senior or junior prom. I just wanted to be a great athlete and a good Catholic and maybe even a priest someday or a major leaguer.

  In the spring of the year before I graduated I actually wrote a letter to the New York Yankees management telling them I would give anything in the world for a tryout at the stadium. Castiglia’s sister Arlene typed it up for me and for weeks I walked around in a daze waiting for an answer, daydreaming about how Dad and Castiglia would drop me off at the Long Island Railroad station that day and shake my hand and wish me luck. I’d be looking at them, pounding my fist into my new baseball mitt: ‘’I�
�m gonna make it. Don’t worry about it, Castig. I’m gonna make it.” Then there’d be the great moment after the tryout when one of the coaches would come up to me: “Well, Kovic, you really looked good out there today. We think you’ve got what it takes.”

  It never happened that way. Even though the letter from the Yankees finally came in the mail and I ran over to Castiglia’s house shouting that I had made the tryouts, I chickened out when the morning came to leave for the station. I decided I didn’t want to go after all. Richie and Bobby Zimmer were all over me for weeks, and I was sorry I’d ever told them anything. I still played after that, but it was different. I was thinking about other things, other things I wanted to be.

  By that fall it seemed the guys on the block were almost grown up. In the halls at school we still gave each other the old Woodchuck Club signal we had started in sixth grade, sticking our hands under our chins, moving our fingers up and down, shouting, “Woodchuck, woodchuck.” It was crazy but it kept us together. And we went from class to class just waiting for each day to end so we could get back home and play touch football out on the street after our homework. Still everything was different. Castiglia was still talking about being a priest or joining the marines, but we weren’t seeing as much of each other anymore. Bobby Zimmer told me one afternoon that Richie was growing his hair long and smoking cigarettes with Peter Weber in some abandoned cement tunnel in the woods at the end of the block.