Standards of Measurement

1.
Every single sunny day we skated, the neighborhood boys, at the end of my street. We played hockey until the sun went down. We skinned our knees. We bloodied our lips. We fought one another as cars rolled by, as neighbors sat grilling dinners, until the darkness forced us in.

2.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, “Everyone believes in his youth that the world really began with him, and that all merely exists for his sake.” We knew this in our bones when we skated in for game-winning goals, when we thrust our hands toward the sky to celebrate. Not even rain could stop us, though our rollerblades slid uncontrollably over the pavement. Every one of us swore at the cars coming down our street.

3.
We never carried our fears with us. Not when we were crashing to the pavement without helmets or when we were knocking each other’s teeth out. Everything we conquered, every tooth we lost became a story, became our boyish way of lasting forever.

4.
One at a time, we took up cigarettes. All at once we got girlfriends. We were trying not to be boys anymore, all of us with our fables about women and sex. My friend Lesh claimed, “They call me the Captain when I tap that shit.” On the rare days we still skated, between smoke breaks and arguments, I saw that none of us knew much about anything. Hockey in the street might have been it.

5.
Walking around late at night with six packs in our backpacks and cigars dangling from our mouths, we’d find ourselves running from what we thought were police. It was Lesh who said, after four hours of hockey and a six pack of Red Dog, “Dude. It’s the cops. The car has two headlights.”

We ran.

We ran because we couldn’t stop our sides from aching with laughter. We ran because he had. And then later, when we left Lesh at his house, he handed Ralph and me a coat hanger, saying, “Carry this just in case.”

I liked to think we were brave, but like all boys we secretly knew our limits and rarely shared them outside our circle. I tossed the coat hanger at a car when we were a block away and Ralph and I ran until our lungs felt like hot air balloons. We splashed beer all over ourselves on the way home. We knocked things over and sang and pissed on random things. Shopping carts and stop signs and people’s front yards. We pissed rivers.
I didn’t know much then, but I knew this: “Two headlights. It’s a cop!”

6.
When our buddy Joe’s father Butch died, every one of us showed up for his funeral. Even the guys we hadn’t seen in years. In the year of our seventh-grade summer, Butch coached our hockey team and came every day to watch us as we practiced in the street. Huddled in hallways at the wake, we could be heard telling bad jokes Butch had told us during practice. One time he literally grabbed a clump of freshly cut grass and pretended to smoke it, lighting it on fire and saying: “Ya like smoking grass, do ya?” We all signed the hockey stick they put in his casket and bowed our heads when his grandson sang. Most of us had visited him in the months he stayed at home dying of cancer without health insurance, but we hadn’t come together like this since middle school. None of us got close to the casket. None of us touched anything.

7.
“So what’s next?” I asked. We’d been out all night. Joe drinking, all of us drinking, our collared shirts wrinkled and dirty and wanting off. The diner we’d landed at, open twenty-four hours, was packed at that hour from bars just closing. I remembered the nights we’d come here when we were younger, on dates, or after school dances.

“We gotta sell the house,” Joe said. “My mom can’t make the payments on it.”

Later I found out Butch had lost most of their money-not that there’d been much- gambling in Atlantic City, the place where he was “always winning.”

“She’s got some trailer lined up for us somewhere in the boonies.”

We all lowered our heads and shut our mouths, sipped at coffees, and occasionally threw creamers at one another. I remembered the first time Butch had coached us, showing up and bringing Mountain Dew and Honey Buns. He’d hit it big that summer and bought all of us new jerseys and pants, bought me my first chest protector. I could see him now, faded work boots covered in pine and maple chips from his job removing trees. His front teeth were missing, and when he invited us over for team gatherings, we marveled at how he wolfed down chicken wings without them. He didn’t know one thing about hockey, but he bought us new outdoor pucks and paid one of the neighborhood kids five dollars a day to chase the shots that missed the net.

All around us that night the diner buzzed, metal silverware on plastic plates, coffee splashing into cups for refills, high school boys loudly jockeying for the attention of girls at another booth.

8.
Later that summer, after Butch’s death, five of us worked a demolition job together. We swung hammers and dodged tiles as they splintered into jagged bullets and flew around the room. When the boss wasn’t around, we’d go out back to smoke Marlboros and talk about cold beer and women and the Sabres’ off-season trades.

“Can you believe these fucking rich people,” I said. “Look at that floor we’re ripping up. My mother would kill someone to have that floor.”

“No shit, right,” anyone would say, smoke floating from his lips.

9.
Our crew had a rhythm, the kind of rhythm you see in a man’s walk, can feel when he shakes your hand. A rhythm working men carry around with them. The pulsating throb of the sledge hammer over and over again. Joe laughing madly as the tiles smashed. Music on the “heavy duty” boom box, designed to fall from any height. Breaks for cigarettes, water, lunch, sitting on the rich people’s lawn and crushing it under our weight. You could time it, the arguments about who wasn’t working hard that day, the conversation about how stupid this task or that task was. The giggling, the creaking of our shoulders as eight hours came to an end. And all that work was on our hands-bloody and bent and dust covered.

10.
A few days before we wrapped up work, a roofer fell off the house next door. When we arrived that morning, his crew was on the ground, all of them looking baffled with their hammers tucked into their holders like toy guns. We sat out front that morning throwing empty wrappers and leftover food at the neighborhood.
Our boss had told us he’d landed head first on the concrete porch, the same design as the one we were “not getting paid to sit on.” And then we knew he had to be dead. There was no other way. The fall was at least 25 feet. The bricks jagged and solid and unforgiving. His head, someone speculated, had to look like meat from Taco Bell.

When breaks rolled around we said, “Fuck the boss,” and instead of slinking out back, we went and smoked and ate on the front porch.

11.
The things we tore out of that house: tile, the wire netting under the tile, dry wall so much like snow when its powdery insides flew into the air. Molding, nails, cabinets, railings…I think if they’d let us, we’d have stripped it down to the frame.

Our favorite tools: the boom box, our lunch sacks, steel toe boots, the sledge hammer…pocket knives, caulk guns, cigarettes…the paint that got two of the guys so high the boss let them lie down for an hour while the rest of us worked.

12.
“Dude, you’re bleeding everywhere,” Ralph said.

My finger was oozing blood, a piece of mesh sticking right through it.

“Where are the band-aids?” someone yelled.

“No band-aids on a construction site,” the boss replied. He grabbed my hand and looked at it. His hands felt crusty, carved. They were dark like they’d been dipped in motor oil and never washed, the dirt adding definition to the cracks in them.

“We just use duct tape,” he said. He took the silver roll and ripped off a huge piece. Once around, twice, three times. “Tape the tip just so you don’t get dust in there.”

“Sweet!” I marveled at it. It seemed so simple to me, as if band-aids were now obsolete. All of my buddies laughed.

“Nice. It looks like you fingered a robot.”

And the rest of our time there was like that. Cut. Duct tape. Bruised head from fallen board. Duct tape. Broke one of the hanger rods in the closet. Duct Tape.

13.
We learn slowly about numbers: sixteen inches on center, three feet to code, “Six feet down and you’ll find heaven,” our boss said.

14.
I’m sitting on a bar stool, years later, when these lines from Tony Hoagland run through my head: “We gaze into the night as if remembering the bright unbroken planet we once came from, to which we will never be permitted to return. We are amazed at how hurt we are.” This is the language of lonely men. Those boys we were don’t know this.

15.
We didn’t realize, not on those summer days with packed lunches and bloody fingernails, between being boys and being men, that more than our bodies were being crippled. It’s not until we’re no longer working together, some of us on unemployment, me away at school that we can say: we would give anything for what we had.

16.
Butch’s hands were one large callus. He walked dipped slightly forward like a blind man searching for home. He wore those wounds like armor, groaning when he moved from the couch, as he poured his coffee, when he put on his coat. All our lives we envied him. All our lives he told us, the guys on his hockey team, the guys who were working that construction job the summer he died, “Work only as much as you have to,” he said.

“Take care of your body.”

But we envied his sandpapered fingers. We desired his scars and stories. Our hands were soft and our bones were hard and we wanted so desperately to be men.