the destroyer > reviews > You Go First / Lawrence Lenhart
While others play flag football or bounce balls into deflation during the Queen of Angels parking lot recess, we play Jackass. One of us names a witness (“Tierney”), and the other names a stunt (“chew a fistful of grass”). We flip a coin; the loser must approach the witness and perform the stunt. Over the course of weeks, it becomes spectacle (“hump [witness]” or “bite [witness]” or “chew a fistful of glass”). A volunteer mom eventually relays our antics to the principal. In detention, one of us suggests we save Jackass for the weekends.
It becomes immediately clear that you’re Johnny Knoxville, and I am one of the other guys: more a tripod maneuverer or bandage getter than a jackass proper. Don’t try this at home, we are routinely warned, but you are always about to move to Utah anyway. Your house is more way station than home, shit always packed up in boxes in case your dad’s transfer goes through. “You want something for breakfast?” you ask after a sleepover, and I try to keep it simple. “Toast? Butter?” You’re hurdling boxes labeled Appliance, peeking through cardboard flaps until you spot the toaster, needle in the hay.
You’ve got blueprints and inventories in your mind. You point to brick abutments and gutters, lift drainage end caps by rigging your garage door track to the slots. Paint stirrers? 9-mm screwdrivers? Bath salts? You’ve got a stash in the drawer next to finger skateboards. Given the time, you’d turn the entire house into a Rube Goldberg Machine, an automated assembly line initiated by the winding of a tiny mainspring.
After breakfast, we film the stunts. We imagine the physics of each stunt by depicting a stick figure on graph paper. When the time comes, I say, “You go first” with coward’s deference.
You talk about Salt Lake City like it’s just another county in Pennsylvania. When your dad is all but certain that the transfer will go through, though, I finally scrutinize the classroom map of the United States and locate Utah above Mrs. Skoretz’s right shoulder. You start taking snowboard lessons on the weekend at Seven Springs, and I’m left behind, designing stunts we’ll likely never perform.
One weekend, when the Somerset snow is light, you invite me over. In a drawstring bag, I bring a dozen censored CDs and a dozen blank CD-Rs. One by one, you burn the explicit version of Sublime, Blink-182, Powerman 5000, Rob Zombie, etc. I flex the censored discs until they crack and throw the shards in your wastebasket. You even print a sheet of to-scale parental advisory labels for me, and give me scissors and glue to attach them to the faces of the CD booklets. Your sisters peek in (the music’s way loud), and you tell them they have shit for brains.
Rather than videotape the stunts the next afternoon (we can’t find the charger), we use a roll of film. When the photographs are developed, I imprecisely snip two photos to wallet-size. One is a portrait of you wearing a Spitfire skater cap, a cartoon logo with a haircut of flames. The other is a pile of dog shit we found in the cul-de-sac. I glue their white backs together and slip it into the plastic photo holder insert in my wallet. In school, I show you the two-sided photo, revolving it in my fingers, whispering, “Hey, shit for brains.”
Your going-away party feels like a birthday party. There’s pizza. There are presents. I give you a snowboarding t-shirt, and I promise I’ll visit. Nobody mentions goodbye until the very end. Because I’m last to leave the party, I watch from a distance as you say goodbye to each friend. I watch the queue of people waiting to hug you, to remind you of an inside joke, one last chance to sear it in the mind. I begin to question the robustness of our friendship. Even though we are closest, our goodbye is least sentimental: “Later, shit for brains,” and “Later, jackass.”
Only, you don’t go. You’re absent on Monday, but appear again on Tuesday. You’re confused as you tell us how your father’s transfer fell through. Sam jokes that the going-away party was just a ploy to get presents. “Fuck off,” you bark at Sam.
One evening, we make a Poltergeist Piston. With 1/8” drill bits, we sizzle holes through the garage plaster walls and the adjacent backs of the kitchen cupboards so that when a three-foot steel round is fed through the hole it can push open the cupboard door a few inches from the inside. When the rod is retracted to the invisible interior wall, the door claps shut (Poltergeist!). We hide in the garage for over an hour as your sister sobs. Your nostrils are hot on my forearms as you try to hold back the laughter. The next afternoon, the stunt you have in mind is less inspired—not mechanical, but primal.
We sit staggered in pews waiting for the confessional. There is a left-to-right, right-to-left coiling sequence gradually sneaking up on the last of us. Before we graduate from Queen of Angels Catholic School, we must endure penance one last time. It comforts me to think that Father Bob will hear your sins first and think of mine as relatively innocuous. As each of our friends enters the confessional, I involuntarily recall him at his most sinful (snapping girls’ thongs, taking God’s name in constant vain, amassing pornography troves, stealing money from parents’ wallets). Each walks out with a smirk on his face—Sam then Derek then Kurt. As you enter the confessional, I meditate, try to order my sins so the largest one is flanked by those of least moral consequence. Instead, I am imagining you kneeling on the prie-dieu, your cheeks shadowed by the partition’s lattice.
Because I never saw you leave the confessional, I am confused when I’m asked to enter. They want us to confess together? I step inside and see that you’ve already vacated it. We don’t see each other for years.
I drive Route 130 and Clark Farm Road looking for your debris. I search the ground-level view of Google Earth, half-expecting a satellite image of a cross, fake flowers, some tinsel. After a long hiatus, I force myself to log onto Facebook for evidence of you. On the five-year anniversary of your death, a mutual friend calls you an angel. Your little sister pastes a link: “9 Ways Brothers Protect Their Sisters.” And someone has uploaded a photo from a middle school capture-the-flag party. It’s probable our Jackass films have been thrown away, along with the graphs of stuntmen stickmen, even the finger skateboards with your skin cells clinging to the grip tape. On your Facebook page, though, we still line up to say goodbye as if you’re just going to Utah.
1 Lyric from Slipknot song “Disasterpiece,” unbeknownst to L in woods