Johnny Folkes

Richard
Johnny Folkes
Starbucks, Jan. 12, 2008

Johnny Folkes was the most talented and graceful athlete at Humphrey Perkins. We were on the same teams for soccer and rugby in winter, cricket and athletics in summer, and basketball all year round. He had the well developed muscles of a man, not, like me, the slender physique of a fifteen-year-old boy. He was beautiful, too, with a fringe of curly blond hair that gave him the look of a Greek statue. The girls all eyed him, but he didn’t go out with any while we were school friends. Other people, even girls, hardly registered on him.

I don’t remember him bullying anyone off the sports field, but a streak of cruelty surfaced in competition. Playing soccer, he’d trip an opponent making a run, or grab a player’s shirt when the referee wasn’t looking. He’d attack the man not the ball. It was unnecessary. He had the skill and poise not to foul, but he liked to. He’d rise from a nasty tackle wearing a grin of malice, and it helped create a protective shield around him. No one wanted to be his target and wind up carried off on a stretcher. In the wilder game of rugby, he was even more dangerous. Routinely, he’d lead in points until the referee sent him off for gouging or stiff-arming. Mr. Williams, the sports master, would look despairing; he’d been handed the most gifted athlete he’d ever seen, but he was unable to reform him. Johnny couldn’t grant people space even in his reflected light.

He qualified in trials for the national teams in rugby, soccer, and cricket, but each time he’d miss the final pick or be dismissed early for unsportsmanlike conduct. I studied him, looking to carve a safe place in his proximity, and instead of giving him a wide berth as most did I became his friend. I passed to him so he could score. I specialized in events he disdained, among them, long jump and high jump. We were easy allies in sprint relays, and being Johnny’s friend meant I was protected, too. It wasn’t a calculation, rather a role I’d practiced while trailing my willful, older brother, Roy.

I didn’t question Johnny’s cruelty, rather treated it as a force of nature like his larger, stronger muscles. I would have avoided him if I could have, and my friendship, for that reason, felt inauthentic. I competed with him openly only in displays of wit, winning his confidence, in part, with fast putdowns of people he despised, i.e. everyone who appeared smarter than him, except me. Telling jokes about the teachers and talking out of turn earned me as many detentions as Johnny got. We bonded as kings of sport and fellow rebels, although I felt his cruel streak was a sleeping cobra that, once awakened, would strike. I was brought up in a family where physical violence wasn’t threatened. Even raising your voice was disapproved of. I was fascinated as well as repulsed by Johnny’s freedom to lose control.

It’s summer vacation, 1966, and out of the blue he invites me to spend the day in Loughborough, fifteen miles north of Syston. He’ll meet me at the bus stop by the market on Saturday morning. I feel flattered and obligated. I don’t wonder if he likes me, really, any more than I like him. I don’t wonder if he’s lonely. He has an impulse to reach out that matches mine to say okay. We’re boys, thinking with our reptilian brains.

He asks if I’ve got money when I step off the bus. I have a pound. It won’t be enough, he says, to buy beer and pie at the pub. We can go to his dad’s and he’ll ask for a fiver. It’s the first time Johnny has mentioned his family, the first I know he doesn’t live with his father. In the market, sellers hawk fruits and vegetables at open stalls. It’s colorful and noisy, a scene that has played in the square for hundreds of years. We turn onto a side street lined with red brick terraced houses. They lack gardens, and the front doors open directly onto the narrow pavement. Halfway down, Johnny stops and knocks loudly at a door, and after some time an angry looking man in his fifties appears. “What the fuck do you want?” The resemblance between father and son is unmistakable. This is how Johnny will look if a god in a machine doesn’t snatch him up to safety; Johnny’s looks were once squandered by the man with the blotchy face and body gone to flab. He wears a string vest. The fly of his trousers is unbuttoned. He’s been awakened from a drunken sleep, reeking of cigarettes and stale beer.

“I want a fucking fiver,” Johnny says, and their eyes lock.

“Fuck that.”

“You owe us, so ‘and it over.”

“I haven’t got it.”

“Don’t give me that, you bastard.” Johnny inches forward, his right hand balling into a fist. Next door a baby cries, and no one tries to soothe it.

The man looks back at his son and sighs. He’s too tired to fight, or he knows that Johnny could hurt him, or he has a change of heart. He digs into a pocket, withdraws a clip of bills, peels off a fiver, and hands it to his son. “Tell you what.” His voice is a bit softer. “Go down to the off license and get me some fags, and you can keep the change.” A half-smile crosses his face, or it could be a wince.

Johnny grabs the note and walks off, on his face the look of grim determination he wears on the sports field. He doesn’t turn as his dad calls, “Don’t forget. You promised.”

I’m invisible. Johnny doesn’t introduce me, and his father doesn’t ask who I am. I am a fly or a spy, and I’m excited and embarrassed, for I’ve never seen a father and son dare to speak to each other with so much raw emotion, and although part of my embarrassment is for having a dad who treats me kindly while Johnny has never known this, I can’t help wondering how it would feel to see my father in the grip of such emotion, to see him flare with feeling rather than stamping it out, like lit matches dropped on the kitchen floor, whenever someone cries or speaks with passion.

We don’t stop at the off license but spend the money drinking at the pub the next few hours before I board the bus back to Syston in a beer-infused haze. Thick as it is, I know that Johnny will never be picked for a national team—no god from a machine is going to lift him up. What will I become? Someone who neither shrinks back from violence nor feels entitled to explode. Along the way, I’ll encounter many violent people—Hell’s Angels, muggers, a pack of pub brawlers who follow me and a friend back to our flat—but somehow their full fury doesn’t come my way. Looking back at the boy on the bus, I see him discovering the unavoidability and poignancy of brutality in men’s lives—and finding a way to sail through it in one piece.