How John Wayne helped to even the score between to twelve year olds
"Just throw me the ball," I begged. "Make it look like an accident."
And so, he did - the biggest, most obvious violation of his character imaginable.
The other kids in the schoolyard - those on the other side of the well-worn painted line, those now scrambling to get away from me as, armed with Jeff's mistake, I neared - groaned about the size of his gaff for what seemed like an hour, switching to gales of derogatory laughter when my shot, predictably, missed every one of them.
The schoolyard game of dodge ball went on, with Jeff soon getting his hands on the ball again, and soon doing what he always did: knocking off the members of the opposing team, my team, one by one, without one of us ever being able to catch one of his rocket-hard throws and have our shot at knocking off the competition.
Jeff was blond, muscular - surprisingly so for a 12 year old - and above all, cool. He had no problem with girls, academia, or sports, particularly sports.
What he had a problem with was his father.
Jeff's father was a nerdy, old-fashioned kind of man (Jeff's Nordic tough-guy looks definitely came from somewhere else), always in plain green shirt and the heavy horn rimmed glasses that had gone out of a fashion a few years before. Almost everything about him, in fact, suggested a clued-out introvert. But left a little room, and he could opine loudly, moodily, and definitively. In short, beneath his engineer's exterior raged a caged brute.
One Sunday, with another dodge ball game looming the next day, we decided to go to the movies. The film was McQ, JohnWayne's foray into the vigilante cop genre that had become all the rage with the successes like Billy Jack, Walking Tall and Death Wish. It was playing at the Fairview Theatre,the only movie screen within miles of our homes. Finally, we sighed, having had more than our fill of Disney; here was a movie sanctioned for our demographic promising lots of violence. We were thrilled!
And thrilled, still after the movie; we liked it so much, particularly that chase scene on the beach, that we decided to stay for another showing...
...unaware, however, that Jeff's tougher-than-John-Wayne father had decided to pick us up after the first show; that he had been sitting in the car, idling, for close to two hours
With the discovery of this intimidating fact - through a phone call after the second show to Jeff's mother - I saw my best friend shrink to, well, to just another ordinary twelve year old. In fact, he shrunk even more than that, looking, by the time he had hung up the phone, like a man condemned.
Back at his house, I watched, silently stunned, as Jeff, the toughest, coolest, most admirable and untouchable character in my entire life, was beaten, with me as the only witness, to tears, the volume of which I could not have even imagined, even from someone as perpetually easily to scare as myself.
"You can't tell anybody about this!," he begged me afterwards, still crying, his father gone. "Tell me that you won't. Tell me!"
A ball for a bawl.
