Hard To Get To A novel by Antony Hammond
Chapter 1: A Normal Life?
Let me ask you a question. Is it possible to have a normal life as a teenager in the eighties?
Actually, let me extend that question; is it possible to have a normal life as a teenager at any point in history?
I mean, is it really?
I can bet you that teenagers in the 1880s had the same problems as teenagers do now in the 1980s, just maybe without the catharsis of MTV and McDonalds to bring them back to their distorted sense of reality. Now, I can’t speak with an official capacity on this as I don’t own a time machine and I’ve done absolutely zero research, but I would bet that a teenager in the 1880s had to deal with similar issues that we have to deal with now.
Perhaps they didn’t have to put up with going to high school with bullying jocks flushing their heads down the toilets. They probably never had to try to talk to hot girls without blowing their cool either. Maybe they had to put up with rounding up buffalo, defending themselves against fellow bullying cowboys whilst trying to talk cowgirls into sharing an ounce of tobacco with them, or whatever else teenagers ate in those days?
As I say, I’ve done little to no research to support my argument so please don’t take these thoughts and opinions as verbatim. Maybe my question is loaded incorrectly anyway, I mean, what is it that makes any life normal?
What components of regularity do you need to have your life labelled as ‘normal’ in the first place? Do you need a car? Or perhaps a stable, well paid job? What about a steady girlfriend for your troubles? You may want to be super-mature and find yourself a wife? And whilst we’re at it, what about children? And do you want to have just one child or do you try and build your own football team?
Okay, maybe that was more than one question, but these are just some of the ongoing issues going through every teenager’s head, and possibly every adults head too.
Some may have a better life than others, or so it seems from the outside, but every kid has the same fears and anxieties as the next. Every boy and girl asks the same questions about their own life but very rarely do they ask each other. If only they took the time to stop worrying and just turn around to another teenager and ask ‘Hey, do you think about this stuff??’, they might be surprised to find out they won't tell everyone that they're a complete freak but might actually reply, ‘Yes!! You too??’, but they don’t, they just sit in their bedrooms whittling their brains into a mush about the most unimportant decisions imaginable, like what clothes to wear, who to date, what music to listen to and what to do once they leave high school.
This particular question, amongst others, is one that is doing its best to infiltrate Daniel’s head as he lies on his bed trying to do anything but think about what he wants to do with the rest of his life.
Sorry, where are my manners? I should introduce you, shouldn’t I? Please meet Daniel Curruthers, or just plain old Danny to you and me.
Now, Danny is the type of kid that you might know from school or you could possibly even be that kid? You know the type, the kind of that could quite easily coast through high school without anyone ever realising that he was actually there, the kind of guy that turns up at reunion parties and people are like, ‘Who’s this guy?’. If it weren’t for the yearbook pictures with their photos and the exam papers with their name on them you could be forgiven for missing them completely and believing them to never have existed at all. They could quite easily walk around school all day everyday without ever being noticed.
It’s easily done; don’t get me wrong, he’s not some sort of strange ghost-boy that hides in the shadows peering upon his classmates like a ghoulish private eye. It’s just that he hasn’t done anything yet to warrant any attention, but that’ll change soon. At some point in a child’s life there comes a moment that will define them either positively or negatively. Every now and again you might be lucky and score a winning touchdown in a football game or have rich parents that like to buy you expensive cars to flaunt in front of your friends in an attempt to seem cool. For most teens though it is usually the negative effect. This comes as a by-product of the unfortunate culmination of inexperience and poor decision-making that will precursor the negative after-effect of the years of bullying that lie ahead for them.
We’ve all seen it; some kid decides in his finite wisdom that today he is going to style his hair differently, like the guys in those cool music videos on the aforementioned MTV (which although it appears as the knowledgeable father offering wisdom in the form of sexual prowess and Brylcreem, it often has its views and fashion sense misconstrued; leading to disastrous consequences). We think, ‘Those guys get all the chicks. If I style my hair like those guys, I’ll also get all the girls as they sit back in awe of my musical prowess and even more awesome new hairdo'.
In actual fact what usually happens is that the child in question often gets dragged, by his new haircut, through the mud of the sports field where he is severely pummelled to what feels like an inch of his life whilst hearing a barrage of brutal and acerbic references to him being a ‘faggot’ and a ‘weirdo’. All of these wonderful experiences have yet to happen to Danny and who knows, maybe he will be lucky and skate through the whole of high school without such events curtailing his later neurosis, after all, he’s made it this far without any complications.
So, let me try and describe Danny to you a little better. He’s neither cool enough nor rich enough to be as popular as some of the over privileged kids at his high school, but he’s not poor or geeky enough to be a daily incumbent of victimisation either. Strangely enough his blandness is a positive source of protection whereas, in most other walks of life, dullness is not an attractive quality, unless you’re a politician.
At high school the right amount of insipidness goes a long way. He doesn’t find himself chastised as being a ‘nerd’,not over participating in activities that might pigeon hole him such as aspiring to be a chess grand master with hour after hour spent fraternising in the Chess Club improving his Rook-to-Knight skills.
Equally, he doesn’t find himself zealously joining an after school book club to deliberate over the complexities of War and Peace. No, that’s not our Danny, he’s more your creative type. Give him a sketch book and pencil and WHAM! A whole evening could disappear, sacrificed for the chance of recreating a near perfect copy of a picture of a celebrity in a magazine or a still life of the fruit bowl that always occupies the breakfast table.
Danny once spent a whole Saturday trying to draw next door’s dog, a French Poodle delightfully named ‘Muffy’, but the damn thing never kept still long enough for him to draw, which caused Danny to waste half a sketch pad of paper and innumerate sharpening of his favourite pencils trying to capture the energetic pooch on paper.
All his Dad kept saying was that ‘patience is a virtue’, which made absolutely no sense to Danny at all, unless ‘patience’ was the name of a canine tranquilizer.
It was late Sunday evening and Danny sat relaxed on top of his bed covers dressed in a white T shirt and shorts sketching aimlessly into his art book while intermittently watching TV. As the minutes passed by Danny found himself less interested in his doodling and more concerned with the incessant ramblings. Not that there was much to catch the imagination, just the usual bland, run of the mill efforts found on every channel every day of the week, every week of the year for every year of his life.
There was never anything on TV especially not on the few channels his parents could afford! Still the urge to watch the lack lustre and boring was great, a gene past down from generations of television viewers perhaps? Danny tried hard to kick his late night viewing habit and forced his eyes from the small 14 inch goggle box back to his sketch book. Making an effort to concentrate he started to tap his pencil to a musical beat in his head, possibly one that had penetrated his subconscious from an advertising jingle heard moments before without realising.
His room is like a typical teenager’s, so cluttered and messy that it's hard to tell where the bedroom starts and the mess ends. But it is carried out with such beautiful attention to detail that it could only truly be appreciated by the teenager, or perhaps a connoisseur of modern art, but most definitely not by the parents, who are for the large part Philistines. They obviously cannot appreciate the intricacies of an unmade bed nor a discarded pizza box lovingly placed beneath it. There is a great deal of talent required to create such a masterpiece.
First, you need to take some magazines and throw them across the floor in such a way to look naturally entangled, pages flipping and flapping haphazardly, a crease here, a fold there. Maybe even a tear or two, just to add a little authenticity. Throw in a hint of sports sock, so delicate as to be missed by the untrained eye, and voila. To the uninitiated it might seem like absolute chaos, confusion or just clutter. To Danny it is an extremely well oiled, fully operational, state of the art teenage bedroom to be proud of.
He relies on its order to allow him access to absolutely everything he owns at any given time. His Mom will often comment that she is amazed how he can find anything at all underneath the mess, but Danny knows the precise coordinates of every object in that room. So much so that if just one discarded and screwed up piece of paper or sweaty tee shirt were moved slightly, shifted a little bit or nudged this way or that, then the whole room would most probably fall in on itself and implode into a void leaving just a small cloud of slightly pungent soiled ether behind as evidence of its existence.
If you were to look at the walls they are like a post modern, apocalyptic collage of posters and pictures of the stars of the day from the worlds of sport and screen mashed together like road kill. They all appear to be randomly dotted over a crudely designed wallpaper of multi-coloured, geometric shapes on a grey background that had once been chosen by Danny at an age when he thought that such a design was extremely cool. To be honest, and to be fair to Danny, the wallpaper was most probably the choice of the majority of children his age at the time. It turns out that he and all those other children were quite clearly wrong.
An amateur cover up job ensued accumulating over the last few years in lieu of his parents wanting to stump up the cash to redecorate (his Dad’s business not going as well as it should).
In amongst the flotsam and jetsam of glossy photography is a small, plastic basketball hoop with backboard. Scribed across the backboard are two words vividly exclaiming that Danny should ‘Slam Dunk!’, although not too hard as it may rip the entire structure from off the wall, and possibly some of the awful, geometric wallpaper too. Below the ring there is a woven red string net dangling from the hoop in a lop-sided fashion waiting in vain to be repaired. The mini plastic orange basketball that belongs with the set is somewhere deep inside the belly of the beast that is Danny’s room. It is probably lodged somewhere underneath Danny’s bed, which is where it usually ends up after a very heavy thirty minute-or-so daily session of one-on-none basketball that Danny likes to do to unwind in the evenings and weekends. He does this until he is completely shattered or until his Mom tells him off for making too much noise and ‘banging around upstairs like an Elephant’, to which Danny usually replies, ‘Oh but mom, I was just trying to tidy up my bedroom’.
When he can get away with it, most sessions are heavily energetic in which he will regularly exert every ounce of sinew to push his flexible teenage frame through a passionate and exhausting training program of various shots, lay ups and of course, high powered dunking just like his hero Julius Erving, better known of course as Dr. J.
The TV is still on, but with the sound now turned down low it remains a blur of flickering images. The screen casts shadows with a bright, fluorescent light intermittently shining across the room the same way an old street lamp might illuminate a passing stranger in the night, walking along a once vibrant but now abandoned and quiet city street. The TV is positioned on top of a wooden chest of drawers which has three empty plastic drinks beakers placed on it. On the bed side table is a completed Rubik’s Cube and yet another plastic drinks beaker, although this is part filled with some sort of flavoured soda water which Danny has been sipping for the last hour or so. He did ask for Coca Cola but his Mom forgot to buy any so all they have left is flavoured soda water which Danny is none too keen on, hence the pace of his drinking and why the remainder of the substandard drink will probably find its way down the drain later on.
The air in the room is suffocating. Yet another stiflingly hot night, just one more in a long line of stiflingly hot nights that have followed over three months of scorching hot days, the longest and hottest summer in Brooksville’s history. The last drops of rain landed so long ago people were starting to forget what it looked like and the local farming community was on its knees both financially and literally, praying for rain. There is the trace of an ever so gentle wind that the room graciously receives courtesy of an open window, the subtle gusts of slightly cooler air cause the curtains to unceremoniously billow and flap quietly away from the window frame, yet another visual distraction for Danny to overcome. Every now and again the breeze will subside and the curtains begrudgingly fall back and rest somewhere close to their original positions. When the breeze collides with Danny it comes as a welcome relief which he greets with a small sigh and a closing of the eyes.Still holding the pencil in his right hand, he lifts his hand up to his face and wipes his forehead with the back of his forearm, producing a patch of thick, pungent sweat on it. He pauses for a moment to stare deeply into the patch of sweat, mesmerised by the reflection of his bedside lamp. He considers licking the area to discover its taste but opts to wipe it against his t-shirt instead.
He sighs again and then tosses his sketch pad to the end of his bed along with the pencil where they both land neatly on the covers next to each other. Sitting watching the images on the TV screen for a moment, bored, Danny decides to reach down the side of his bed and begins searching for something with his right hand. After a few seconds his hand appears with a small, squidgy, orange, plastic basketball. He turns his head and eyes up the hoop held aloft on the far wall. Just like a pro-baller, leaning forward with poise, he allows himself a moment of utter focus for a split second. He lifts his right arm up and bending his elbow towards the ring, swiftly raises his right arm in a smooth arc, straightening his elbow with a click and throws the ball up towards the ring. As the ball seemingly hangs in mid flight, Danny, talking only to himself but with the affected voice of a sports commentator, whispers “He shoots”, the ball then strikes the edge of the plastic hoop with a plastic-on-plastic thud. The ring droops momentarily under the force before propelling it high into the atmosphere, before plummeting back down and plunging itself deep into a pile of dirty laundry lying nearby on the floor.
As Danny throws himself back against his pillows in frustration, the door to his room opens. The door is covered from the inside much like his walls but with stickers and smaller posters. One of the stickers reads ‘Parental Advisory Explicit Lyrics’, another says ‘Do Not Enter’. They are all placed at different angles from each other and they all surround the smaller posters dotted all over the doors surface. The light from the hallway forces itself suddenly into the darkly lit bedroom like a sustained bolt of bright lightning. There standing at the door to his room is Danny’s Mom, Elaine.
Elaine is in her mid-to-late thirties but has not lost any of her looks and is still amazingly glamorous for a woman of her age. Extremely elegant and beautiful, she has soft blonde locks of hair that fall down past her high cheek bones and around her perfectly conceived face. She often prefers to dress in long skirts and loose fitting sweaters, with either a pair of pumps or loafers, especially if just shopping for groceries in town or meeting friends for coffee at the local coffee shop ‘Fratelli’s’. Elaine is the type of woman who makes sure to keep good relations with her neighbours, often inviting them around for a slice of her famous, homemade chocolate cake, accompanied by drinks and gossip.
A very proud mother and devoted wife, she likes to keep her home spotless, fussing over the slightest crumb or spillage that might find its way to the floor or a table surface. Many a time she can be seen waving a cloth in Danny’s face and pointing dejectedly at a stain that he has made.
She has been married to Danny’s dad Charles for almost twenty years, which is ‘a lot of cleaning up after one man’, Elaine will often remark as an ongoing joke between the two of them, a joke which Charles finds hilarious.
Leaning against the door frame and poking her head around the door, Elaine has a troubled look on her face.
‘Daniel,’ she says ‘Let’s have that TV and light off dear. It's time to go to sleep now Honey.’
Dan dislikes it when his Mom refers to him by pet names such as ‘Honey’ or ‘Sweetie’ or some other sort of cute reference. Often she will do it in front of his friends and embarrass him, although not intentional and although it comforts him in some way, it still riles Danny an unhealthy amount every time she does it.
‘Mom,’ Danny looks incensed. ‘You can’t just walk in like this.’
‘Okay Sweetie.’ She says ignoring him.
‘I’m 15 years old.’ He continues.
‘Yes I know Honey.’
‘I’m practically a man now.’
Elaine rolls her eyes and sighs deeply. ‘Yes okay Dear. Now look, tomorrow’s your first day back to your final year at High School. Just try and get some sleep and I’ll see you in the morning, bright and breezy.’
‘I know but, didn’t you just hear wha…’
‘No buts now young man.’ Elaine snaps, losing her temper slightly. ‘You can’t go to college if you don’t work hard.’
‘But...’ Danny tries to interrupt.
‘And you can’t work hard without a good night’s sleep.’
Danny sighs.
‘Okay,’ he says deciding that it is futile to try and argue, ‘okay, I get it. Night Mom.’
A satisfying smile slowly materializes across Elaine’s face.
‘Night, night now, and don’t let the bed bugs bite Sweet...’ she corrects herself, ‘sorry, Danny.’
‘Thanks’ Danny smiles back.
Elaine closes the door behind her. The light from the hallway diminishes and the darkness returns.
Danny reaches over and turns his light off. He then picks up a yellow tennis ball from off the carpeted bedroom floor and hurls it across towards the TV. The power and accuracy of the throw delivers the ball with uncanny perfection to collide with the ‘off’ switch located on the bottom right hand corner of the TV set.
‘That’s a three for Erving!’ he shouts.
With a flicker the TV goes blank, leaving an almost undetected vague, white blur of energy in the middle of the screen.
This catches Danny’s eye for a second and he stares at it intently, attempting to focus on its central point but failing to do so he
lies down on his bed exhausted and hot.
In what seems like an enormous effort of exertion, he turns over onto his side and slowly closes his eyes and attempts to drift
into a deep sleep ready for the day ahead.
Copyright Antony Hammond 2012
Don't miss Chapter 2 coming this Thursday......
Actually, let me extend that question; is it possible to have a normal life as a teenager at any point in history?
I mean, is it really?
I can bet you that teenagers in the 1880s had the same problems as teenagers do now in the 1980s, just maybe without the catharsis of MTV and McDonalds to bring them back to their distorted sense of reality. Now, I can’t speak with an official capacity on this as I don’t own a time machine and I’ve done absolutely zero research, but I would bet that a teenager in the 1880s had to deal with similar issues that we have to deal with now.
Perhaps they didn’t have to put up with going to high school with bullying jocks flushing their heads down the toilets. They probably never had to try to talk to hot girls without blowing their cool either. Maybe they had to put up with rounding up buffalo, defending themselves against fellow bullying cowboys whilst trying to talk cowgirls into sharing an ounce of tobacco with them, or whatever else teenagers ate in those days?
As I say, I’ve done little to no research to support my argument so please don’t take these thoughts and opinions as verbatim. Maybe my question is loaded incorrectly anyway, I mean, what is it that makes any life normal?
What components of regularity do you need to have your life labelled as ‘normal’ in the first place? Do you need a car? Or perhaps a stable, well paid job? What about a steady girlfriend for your troubles? You may want to be super-mature and find yourself a wife? And whilst we’re at it, what about children? And do you want to have just one child or do you try and build your own football team?
Okay, maybe that was more than one question, but these are just some of the ongoing issues going through every teenager’s head, and possibly every adults head too.
Some may have a better life than others, or so it seems from the outside, but every kid has the same fears and anxieties as the next. Every boy and girl asks the same questions about their own life but very rarely do they ask each other. If only they took the time to stop worrying and just turn around to another teenager and ask ‘Hey, do you think about this stuff??’, they might be surprised to find out they won't tell everyone that they're a complete freak but might actually reply, ‘Yes!! You too??’, but they don’t, they just sit in their bedrooms whittling their brains into a mush about the most unimportant decisions imaginable, like what clothes to wear, who to date, what music to listen to and what to do once they leave high school.
This particular question, amongst others, is one that is doing its best to infiltrate Daniel’s head as he lies on his bed trying to do anything but think about what he wants to do with the rest of his life.
Sorry, where are my manners? I should introduce you, shouldn’t I? Please meet Daniel Curruthers, or just plain old Danny to you and me.
Now, Danny is the type of kid that you might know from school or you could possibly even be that kid? You know the type, the kind of that could quite easily coast through high school without anyone ever realising that he was actually there, the kind of guy that turns up at reunion parties and people are like, ‘Who’s this guy?’. If it weren’t for the yearbook pictures with their photos and the exam papers with their name on them you could be forgiven for missing them completely and believing them to never have existed at all. They could quite easily walk around school all day everyday without ever being noticed.
It’s easily done; don’t get me wrong, he’s not some sort of strange ghost-boy that hides in the shadows peering upon his classmates like a ghoulish private eye. It’s just that he hasn’t done anything yet to warrant any attention, but that’ll change soon. At some point in a child’s life there comes a moment that will define them either positively or negatively. Every now and again you might be lucky and score a winning touchdown in a football game or have rich parents that like to buy you expensive cars to flaunt in front of your friends in an attempt to seem cool. For most teens though it is usually the negative effect. This comes as a by-product of the unfortunate culmination of inexperience and poor decision-making that will precursor the negative after-effect of the years of bullying that lie ahead for them.
We’ve all seen it; some kid decides in his finite wisdom that today he is going to style his hair differently, like the guys in those cool music videos on the aforementioned MTV (which although it appears as the knowledgeable father offering wisdom in the form of sexual prowess and Brylcreem, it often has its views and fashion sense misconstrued; leading to disastrous consequences). We think, ‘Those guys get all the chicks. If I style my hair like those guys, I’ll also get all the girls as they sit back in awe of my musical prowess and even more awesome new hairdo'.
In actual fact what usually happens is that the child in question often gets dragged, by his new haircut, through the mud of the sports field where he is severely pummelled to what feels like an inch of his life whilst hearing a barrage of brutal and acerbic references to him being a ‘faggot’ and a ‘weirdo’. All of these wonderful experiences have yet to happen to Danny and who knows, maybe he will be lucky and skate through the whole of high school without such events curtailing his later neurosis, after all, he’s made it this far without any complications.
So, let me try and describe Danny to you a little better. He’s neither cool enough nor rich enough to be as popular as some of the over privileged kids at his high school, but he’s not poor or geeky enough to be a daily incumbent of victimisation either. Strangely enough his blandness is a positive source of protection whereas, in most other walks of life, dullness is not an attractive quality, unless you’re a politician.
At high school the right amount of insipidness goes a long way. He doesn’t find himself chastised as being a ‘nerd’,not over participating in activities that might pigeon hole him such as aspiring to be a chess grand master with hour after hour spent fraternising in the Chess Club improving his Rook-to-Knight skills.
Equally, he doesn’t find himself zealously joining an after school book club to deliberate over the complexities of War and Peace. No, that’s not our Danny, he’s more your creative type. Give him a sketch book and pencil and WHAM! A whole evening could disappear, sacrificed for the chance of recreating a near perfect copy of a picture of a celebrity in a magazine or a still life of the fruit bowl that always occupies the breakfast table.
Danny once spent a whole Saturday trying to draw next door’s dog, a French Poodle delightfully named ‘Muffy’, but the damn thing never kept still long enough for him to draw, which caused Danny to waste half a sketch pad of paper and innumerate sharpening of his favourite pencils trying to capture the energetic pooch on paper.
All his Dad kept saying was that ‘patience is a virtue’, which made absolutely no sense to Danny at all, unless ‘patience’ was the name of a canine tranquilizer.
It was late Sunday evening and Danny sat relaxed on top of his bed covers dressed in a white T shirt and shorts sketching aimlessly into his art book while intermittently watching TV. As the minutes passed by Danny found himself less interested in his doodling and more concerned with the incessant ramblings. Not that there was much to catch the imagination, just the usual bland, run of the mill efforts found on every channel every day of the week, every week of the year for every year of his life.
There was never anything on TV especially not on the few channels his parents could afford! Still the urge to watch the lack lustre and boring was great, a gene past down from generations of television viewers perhaps? Danny tried hard to kick his late night viewing habit and forced his eyes from the small 14 inch goggle box back to his sketch book. Making an effort to concentrate he started to tap his pencil to a musical beat in his head, possibly one that had penetrated his subconscious from an advertising jingle heard moments before without realising.
His room is like a typical teenager’s, so cluttered and messy that it's hard to tell where the bedroom starts and the mess ends. But it is carried out with such beautiful attention to detail that it could only truly be appreciated by the teenager, or perhaps a connoisseur of modern art, but most definitely not by the parents, who are for the large part Philistines. They obviously cannot appreciate the intricacies of an unmade bed nor a discarded pizza box lovingly placed beneath it. There is a great deal of talent required to create such a masterpiece.
First, you need to take some magazines and throw them across the floor in such a way to look naturally entangled, pages flipping and flapping haphazardly, a crease here, a fold there. Maybe even a tear or two, just to add a little authenticity. Throw in a hint of sports sock, so delicate as to be missed by the untrained eye, and voila. To the uninitiated it might seem like absolute chaos, confusion or just clutter. To Danny it is an extremely well oiled, fully operational, state of the art teenage bedroom to be proud of.
He relies on its order to allow him access to absolutely everything he owns at any given time. His Mom will often comment that she is amazed how he can find anything at all underneath the mess, but Danny knows the precise coordinates of every object in that room. So much so that if just one discarded and screwed up piece of paper or sweaty tee shirt were moved slightly, shifted a little bit or nudged this way or that, then the whole room would most probably fall in on itself and implode into a void leaving just a small cloud of slightly pungent soiled ether behind as evidence of its existence.
If you were to look at the walls they are like a post modern, apocalyptic collage of posters and pictures of the stars of the day from the worlds of sport and screen mashed together like road kill. They all appear to be randomly dotted over a crudely designed wallpaper of multi-coloured, geometric shapes on a grey background that had once been chosen by Danny at an age when he thought that such a design was extremely cool. To be honest, and to be fair to Danny, the wallpaper was most probably the choice of the majority of children his age at the time. It turns out that he and all those other children were quite clearly wrong.
An amateur cover up job ensued accumulating over the last few years in lieu of his parents wanting to stump up the cash to redecorate (his Dad’s business not going as well as it should).
In amongst the flotsam and jetsam of glossy photography is a small, plastic basketball hoop with backboard. Scribed across the backboard are two words vividly exclaiming that Danny should ‘Slam Dunk!’, although not too hard as it may rip the entire structure from off the wall, and possibly some of the awful, geometric wallpaper too. Below the ring there is a woven red string net dangling from the hoop in a lop-sided fashion waiting in vain to be repaired. The mini plastic orange basketball that belongs with the set is somewhere deep inside the belly of the beast that is Danny’s room. It is probably lodged somewhere underneath Danny’s bed, which is where it usually ends up after a very heavy thirty minute-or-so daily session of one-on-none basketball that Danny likes to do to unwind in the evenings and weekends. He does this until he is completely shattered or until his Mom tells him off for making too much noise and ‘banging around upstairs like an Elephant’, to which Danny usually replies, ‘Oh but mom, I was just trying to tidy up my bedroom’.
When he can get away with it, most sessions are heavily energetic in which he will regularly exert every ounce of sinew to push his flexible teenage frame through a passionate and exhausting training program of various shots, lay ups and of course, high powered dunking just like his hero Julius Erving, better known of course as Dr. J.
The TV is still on, but with the sound now turned down low it remains a blur of flickering images. The screen casts shadows with a bright, fluorescent light intermittently shining across the room the same way an old street lamp might illuminate a passing stranger in the night, walking along a once vibrant but now abandoned and quiet city street. The TV is positioned on top of a wooden chest of drawers which has three empty plastic drinks beakers placed on it. On the bed side table is a completed Rubik’s Cube and yet another plastic drinks beaker, although this is part filled with some sort of flavoured soda water which Danny has been sipping for the last hour or so. He did ask for Coca Cola but his Mom forgot to buy any so all they have left is flavoured soda water which Danny is none too keen on, hence the pace of his drinking and why the remainder of the substandard drink will probably find its way down the drain later on.
The air in the room is suffocating. Yet another stiflingly hot night, just one more in a long line of stiflingly hot nights that have followed over three months of scorching hot days, the longest and hottest summer in Brooksville’s history. The last drops of rain landed so long ago people were starting to forget what it looked like and the local farming community was on its knees both financially and literally, praying for rain. There is the trace of an ever so gentle wind that the room graciously receives courtesy of an open window, the subtle gusts of slightly cooler air cause the curtains to unceremoniously billow and flap quietly away from the window frame, yet another visual distraction for Danny to overcome. Every now and again the breeze will subside and the curtains begrudgingly fall back and rest somewhere close to their original positions. When the breeze collides with Danny it comes as a welcome relief which he greets with a small sigh and a closing of the eyes.Still holding the pencil in his right hand, he lifts his hand up to his face and wipes his forehead with the back of his forearm, producing a patch of thick, pungent sweat on it. He pauses for a moment to stare deeply into the patch of sweat, mesmerised by the reflection of his bedside lamp. He considers licking the area to discover its taste but opts to wipe it against his t-shirt instead.
He sighs again and then tosses his sketch pad to the end of his bed along with the pencil where they both land neatly on the covers next to each other. Sitting watching the images on the TV screen for a moment, bored, Danny decides to reach down the side of his bed and begins searching for something with his right hand. After a few seconds his hand appears with a small, squidgy, orange, plastic basketball. He turns his head and eyes up the hoop held aloft on the far wall. Just like a pro-baller, leaning forward with poise, he allows himself a moment of utter focus for a split second. He lifts his right arm up and bending his elbow towards the ring, swiftly raises his right arm in a smooth arc, straightening his elbow with a click and throws the ball up towards the ring. As the ball seemingly hangs in mid flight, Danny, talking only to himself but with the affected voice of a sports commentator, whispers “He shoots”, the ball then strikes the edge of the plastic hoop with a plastic-on-plastic thud. The ring droops momentarily under the force before propelling it high into the atmosphere, before plummeting back down and plunging itself deep into a pile of dirty laundry lying nearby on the floor.
As Danny throws himself back against his pillows in frustration, the door to his room opens. The door is covered from the inside much like his walls but with stickers and smaller posters. One of the stickers reads ‘Parental Advisory Explicit Lyrics’, another says ‘Do Not Enter’. They are all placed at different angles from each other and they all surround the smaller posters dotted all over the doors surface. The light from the hallway forces itself suddenly into the darkly lit bedroom like a sustained bolt of bright lightning. There standing at the door to his room is Danny’s Mom, Elaine.
Elaine is in her mid-to-late thirties but has not lost any of her looks and is still amazingly glamorous for a woman of her age. Extremely elegant and beautiful, she has soft blonde locks of hair that fall down past her high cheek bones and around her perfectly conceived face. She often prefers to dress in long skirts and loose fitting sweaters, with either a pair of pumps or loafers, especially if just shopping for groceries in town or meeting friends for coffee at the local coffee shop ‘Fratelli’s’. Elaine is the type of woman who makes sure to keep good relations with her neighbours, often inviting them around for a slice of her famous, homemade chocolate cake, accompanied by drinks and gossip.
A very proud mother and devoted wife, she likes to keep her home spotless, fussing over the slightest crumb or spillage that might find its way to the floor or a table surface. Many a time she can be seen waving a cloth in Danny’s face and pointing dejectedly at a stain that he has made.
She has been married to Danny’s dad Charles for almost twenty years, which is ‘a lot of cleaning up after one man’, Elaine will often remark as an ongoing joke between the two of them, a joke which Charles finds hilarious.
Leaning against the door frame and poking her head around the door, Elaine has a troubled look on her face.
‘Daniel,’ she says ‘Let’s have that TV and light off dear. It's time to go to sleep now Honey.’
Dan dislikes it when his Mom refers to him by pet names such as ‘Honey’ or ‘Sweetie’ or some other sort of cute reference. Often she will do it in front of his friends and embarrass him, although not intentional and although it comforts him in some way, it still riles Danny an unhealthy amount every time she does it.
‘Mom,’ Danny looks incensed. ‘You can’t just walk in like this.’
‘Okay Sweetie.’ She says ignoring him.
‘I’m 15 years old.’ He continues.
‘Yes I know Honey.’
‘I’m practically a man now.’
Elaine rolls her eyes and sighs deeply. ‘Yes okay Dear. Now look, tomorrow’s your first day back to your final year at High School. Just try and get some sleep and I’ll see you in the morning, bright and breezy.’
‘I know but, didn’t you just hear wha…’
‘No buts now young man.’ Elaine snaps, losing her temper slightly. ‘You can’t go to college if you don’t work hard.’
‘But...’ Danny tries to interrupt.
‘And you can’t work hard without a good night’s sleep.’
Danny sighs.
‘Okay,’ he says deciding that it is futile to try and argue, ‘okay, I get it. Night Mom.’
A satisfying smile slowly materializes across Elaine’s face.
‘Night, night now, and don’t let the bed bugs bite Sweet...’ she corrects herself, ‘sorry, Danny.’
‘Thanks’ Danny smiles back.
Elaine closes the door behind her. The light from the hallway diminishes and the darkness returns.
Danny reaches over and turns his light off. He then picks up a yellow tennis ball from off the carpeted bedroom floor and hurls it across towards the TV. The power and accuracy of the throw delivers the ball with uncanny perfection to collide with the ‘off’ switch located on the bottom right hand corner of the TV set.
‘That’s a three for Erving!’ he shouts.
With a flicker the TV goes blank, leaving an almost undetected vague, white blur of energy in the middle of the screen.
This catches Danny’s eye for a second and he stares at it intently, attempting to focus on its central point but failing to do so he
lies down on his bed exhausted and hot.
In what seems like an enormous effort of exertion, he turns over onto his side and slowly closes his eyes and attempts to drift
into a deep sleep ready for the day ahead.
Copyright Antony Hammond 2012
Don't miss Chapter 2 coming this Thursday......