Tyrone Green and The Flame
By
C.R. Boucher
I had one of those upbringings that make folks exhale in surprise once the entire story is told. Dysfunction was not a word that was used back when I was a kid, love was expressed differently, but then as usual, I get off my track. That one is not a story I’m ready to tell. It has nothing to do with my point so much as it has to do with my point of view. I will tell you that I do have good memories. They are tucked between the ones I usually keep to myself. This story is mixed with both kinds memories, memories of monsters and angels, and it is time that I shared them. I hope my indulgence is forgiven.
As I remember it, I was walking to the small corner store at the top of the hill on Elm Street with my best friend Tyrone Green. He was a black kid, and while his color was not very important to me, it was important to a lot of people around us who should not have been the least bit affected by our friendship. It was nineteen sixty-seven, a few years before bussing kids to school became violent. Two years before the summer of love, one year before Tyrone was killed, and the very year the Red Sox almost pulled of a miracle. They came close in seventy-five and eighty-six, but it never held as much magic as it did that summer for Tyrone Green and me. When they did win in 2004, it got me to thinking about my old buddy again, wishing he could have seen that series against the Yankees.
I remember the heat as we walked toward that store; I think it was called simply Jerry’s Store. We wanted to buy some penny candy, maybe some barbequed Fritos, and a couple of bottles of Mountain Dew. They had a lion for a logo back then. Why do we remember simple things like that, while the name of Tyrone’s mom remains only Mrs. Green? Her first name is gone forever, and her face will forever be the one the newspaper splashed on the front page. Her tear stained face, streaked and distraught, burned away all other images of her in my mind, and the words in bold roman type, “Navy Chief’s Wife Weeps For Dead Son” floating in bold black ink just below the image, that continues to float with the jetsam of my enduring grief.
The small transistor radio that Tyrone carried rasped with the play by play. Remember when the ballgames were played in the afternoon, before they moved them to evenings and higher ad revenues. The game was pure. Yaz was at the plate. As I sit here thinking of Carl Yastremski, I also remember Ted Williams’ son had done something abhorrent to his remains. I think about the three left fielders for standing guard in front of the green monster, for over thirty years, only three. Jim Rice is often overlooked, but that mistake was correctected this year, as he will go to the Hall. He was one of three consecutive heroes that stood as guardians of the green monster. For all of the times the Sox have lost the big ones, they have done some amazing things for baseball. Now, with Lester on the mound and Youk on first, I watch the games on NESN and remember names like Kenny “Hawk” Harrelson, Rico Petrocelli, and Mr. Tyrone Green, the best friend I had through my entire childhood.
We stepped through the heavy red door and stepped into Jerry’s. The light was dim and it took a few seconds for our eyes to adjust. A big fan in the back corner pushed the heavy, hot air around the small shop. The paper bags wrapping the loaves unsliced of bread fluttered and flapped in the breeze. Jerry stood behind the counter, his distrustful eyes glaring at us with silent accusing commentary. He had thin white hair and a long shabby white beard. The way he looked at us was his way of making us feel like thieves just for stepping inside. There was a cleaner, newer twenty-four hour store four blocks up. That one was well lit and took back empty bottles and paid back the deposit without question. They sold beer and wine there too, and most of the time that was the store we went into, but it was a hot day and Jerry’s was right here, just that much closer. So the two of us ignored that ignorant stare and stepped closer to the cooler. Tyrone opened the lid and I reached into the ice water fishing for our bottles of Dew. I found my choice under the Orange Crush and the root beer; I think it was Hires back then.
Tyrone dropped the lid and we searched the shadows for the chips. No Fritos, but there were Salvo’s salt and vinegar, always our second choice. Both brands were made in town. The penny candy counter was right in front of Jerry. His poor, stupid, weary eyes never left us. Tyrone found the liquorish twists he loved, while I found fireballs. We put all of it on the gray linoleum covered counter. Jerry pushed a few buttons and pulled the lever on his old cash register. The numbers popped up in the small window at the top of the big brass contraption. “Fifty-five cents,” he barked angrily. We paid him, mostly in copper and watched as he counted every coin, twice. Then we left.
“That man needs to get high,” Tyrone whispered as we stepped into the sun.
I lost my self in a mad rash of giggles, the way only a boy can and a man can’t. I’d like to giggle like that again, but I know too fucking much now.
“He needs to suck a boner,” Tyrone continued, and so did my giggling.
We crossed the street and walked half way down the long block and sat on the curb in the shade of a giant old maple tree. Our bare feet were in the street making piles of salted sand and the spreading those piles out again. We ate our chips, drank our sodas and listened to the Red Sox and the Yankee bastards play ball. Three, two in the fourth, Red Sox led and Hawk was at the plate. Why do I remember that? Because I remember what followed, and sometimes we remember things in groups and when we remember things like Kenny Hawk Harrelson at the plate, it’s because it was the first time someone calls you a nigger lover.
We were just sitting there and right out of the blue, the powder blue Mustang convertible drives down the street and takes the time to stop just inches away from our bare toes in the sand of our blacktop beach. The man in the drivers seat was nearly forty, which is no longer very old to me, in fact, it seems quite young right now.
“Nigger Lover,” he screamed, “you better hope to learn better!” He screamed above the noise of the ball game on his own radio just as Hawk hit a home run and drove in two runs. Then he put the car into gear and spun his tires on the sand of our imaginary beach.
Tyrone sat silently for a moment then he turned to me, his face as serious as I ever remember him being.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
Imagine that, even now I swallow hard.
“Sorry, for what?”
“That.” He pointed toward the cloud of dust that marked the wake behind the Mustang and the bullshit it had spewed.
“You got nothin’ to be sorry for. If being your friend makes me that, then that’s what I am.”
Now, I did not really know the extent of hatred that backed up statements like that. I learned that later when the news was filled with people fighting over the bussing laws. On that afternoon I only knew that my best friend had been hurt, and apologized to me for his own hurt. I was still too young and ignorant to feel the hurt that was aimed toward me. Kids are kids, and when I was a kid we got to be kids for a while longer than that happens now. What’s astonishing is the source of the spewed hatred; I’ll get to that, and the way of the road he traveled. I did not know we had passed through a doorway in that moment and was on my own road that would force me to leave my childhood behind.
“Let’s go work on the bike,” he said. That simple sentence put the sour moment behind us.
Together, we had been building a bicycle from scavenged parts. We had found a frame and two wheels at the start of the summer. Someone had simply tossed the parts into a trashcan. Tyrone suggested we rebuild it ourselves, and for the next two weeks we searched out trashcans and friends for all the spare parts we could find. In the end there were enough pieces to build two bikes, but it was “The Flame” we were interested in.
Tyrone’s dad was a CPO in the Navy, Chief Boatswain’s Mate. He knew how to do anything.
“In the Navy, when nobody can do it, they call the Bos’n.” He told us. And he told us how to build that bike. We learned to sand it down and feather it smooth. We sprayed primer on the bare metal, and sanded down the runs, we painted more primer until we had a good smooth coat of paint. Then, we applied the four glossy finish coats. We polished the chrome, we oiled the moving parts, and we found just the right seat and a tall sissy bar for the back. We found a racing slick for the back and a nearly new tire for the front. Chief bought us two new inner tubes and a speedometer for the front handlebars. During the eight weeks of that summer we built a bike together that could not be bought in any store for any price, and we called that bike The Flame. It was bright orange and red. Everything on it, except the tires and chrome, was red or orange. On that day, the bike was still primer gray, and still needed to be sanded a bit more, so we left the horrid moment in our past as we walked toward the bike that would be called The Flame, and the rest of our days.
Two days later, we got word the Chief was shipping out soon. He was stationed on a Navy destroyer out of Newport, and it had been decided that his ship would be a part of the buildup in South-East Asia. He would never come back, but that too is another story entirely. I think now that it is a part of the hurt that lasts so long. We worked so hard on The Flame because we wanted to show Chief what good Bos’ns we were. The fact that Tyrone died first doesn’t matter as much as that he died on The Flame, and Chief knew about it before he too had died. He was lost at sea, fell from the back of a launch while transporting Navy brass from one ship to another in the middle of the night. No one ever saw him fall, they only knew he never made it back. In fact, he was listed as MIA for a while, though I’m not sure why.
Now, I started by saying this was a good memory, and it is. Back then it did not feel great, loosing my friend and his dad, but I’m really talking about what happened before and after, and to dwell on the pain of that loss makes as much sense as dwelling on the rage of a man who shouts epithets at two young boys who really don’t even know the difference, but then that is sort of how life evolves. We don’t turn pages and chapters like a storybook. We blend one event into another, like colors in a rainbow. You never do really see where one color becomes another, it just does. Boys don’t simply become men, they evolve, and as much as death can be instantaneous and surprising, I think we evolve toward that too. Every step we took that summer led us toward the inevitability of the following summers events.
We finished our Dews and chips and started for Tyrone’s apartment. We lived in a housing project. Sometimes I say the sentence in shame, it can be a bit humiliating to admit. Some of the preconceptions are true, drugs, poverty, disease and crime all exist within those communities to a greater extent than is acceptable. Sometimes I say the same sentence with pride, almost as a badge of courage, for I have overcome those barriers built by ignorance and indignity. Tyrone would have overcome had he the chance, and this is where the good comes of remembering, because I’m not at all certain I could have, or even would have tried to overcome had Tyrone not been part of my life as a boy. His valor and dignity were instilled in him from his proud father. A man cannot earn the rank of Chief by being adequate. He must excel. By that example Tyrone excelled and would have been a great man to have as a friend.
He led the way through the rows of two story square brick houses. Most of the apartments had open windows and no screens. I remember that you could hear arguments and discussion from almost every window. They blended. They were funny. They were vulgar, and they were constant. There are only a few names that pop into my memory these days, fewer faces or stories to speak of. Names. “Jordie The Flip” stands out. He was the son of an Irishman, a Navy cook, and his Philippine wife. She did not seem quite Asian or quite white, and Jordie seemed less of both with his thin eyes and bright red straight hair. He and Tyrone were friends too, but somehow I never really clicked with Jordie.
It was the same for me with the Sousa brothers. They were twins to a Portuguese construction worker and his non English-speaking wife. I remember these guys because Mr. Sousa and my dad would drink together, sometimes at a bar and often in front of the television. I can remember the two of them wrapping those old rabbit ears in tin foil hoping for the magic of a clear picture. He and my father would laugh and drink at our place and sometimes at his place. Until the day he saw Tyrone and I in the kitchen eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. He just stopped coming over. My father would go there, but never again was Mr. Sousa to come into our place. It was a long time after that I put that piece to rest.
His sons would ask why I had become a friend to Tyrone.
“He’s so different. What do you have in common?” They would ask, again, sometime later before that piece falls into place.
Do you see how the colors blend? It took me a lot of years to stop seeing the rainbow and see each color for itself. But Ted Williams is dead. Lester has retired twelve Yankees in a row so far, and my father is due to be released from Walpole State Prison by the end of this summer. The seasons humidity is nothing compared to the heat on my neck, imaginary or not, that I’m beginning to feel again. So I take myself back to a time before I learned to hate my father, to a time I shared with my best friend, to a time that held the last vestiges of my naiveté.
I still have The Flame. I restored it after his death. I could not let that bit of his life go. I needed to replace the bent rims, sand and repaint like a good Bos’n, and search out a new set of handlebars. The bike looks as good as it did the first time Tyrone and I rode together down Longhill Street. He sat on the front of the long banana seat steering. I sat behind him pedaling. We zipped down he hill like we had no cares, and a lifetime to chase. It was just days before Chief was to ship out and he stood at the side of the hill cheering us on. His fist pumping in the air, his smile seemed wider than his entire happy face. The man’s great pride showed brighter than the gold chevrons on his sleeve. Some say pride is a sin, and we should pay for it, but sometimes pride is a gift we should accept and cherish.
Indulge me just a minute before I finish, to talk about our mothers. They understood us. They even envied us to some extent. I think they wanted to be friends so bad. The Chief to his credit saw my father for what he was, but never held that toward me. His wife was like an aunty to me. Her great and giving heart never spared me a moment’s love. My mother treated Tyrone as I was treated. She never seemed to see his color, or the rage that color kindled in my own father. Our mothers would chat over the clothesline. Hanging our wet worn-out underwear on the clothesline to dry while exchanging bad jokes, they shared a small bit of what Tyrone and I had. That all ended after Tyrone died. My mother cried for days, at and for what, I still can’t separate. She clutched that newspaper photo in her hand and felt a mother’s pain, but there were other things to grieve as well.
I could not eat, sleep, speak or live for weeks. I had seen the entire event. It unfolded right in front of me and there was nothing I could do. I relayed my story as best I could to the police and that’s when I passed completely out of that safe place where a kid gets to spend some time. There would be no more innocent walks. No more carefree rides down Longhill Street, and I would never see the Chief smile in the grand way he did for us. My mother sat before me, the black lines of her mascara running along her pale white cheeks. Tyrone’s mom stood just behind her to her left. The color difference never seemed more at odds.
“Tell them every thing,” she sobbed. “The truth. A lie will come back and do you harm down the road. The truth will hurt like hell right now, but later the lie charges triple the hurt.” So after I told the truth my mother discovered recreational drug abuse. She did rehab four times before she died. My father never was charged in her murder, but he’s guilty of that one too.
“It was simple, like in slow motion. I saw the Mustang come around the corner. He was goin’ real fast so I didn’t think he was gonna call me a niga lover again. I was relieved. But he came so fast, Ty never even saw it comin’. I yelled ‘Tyyyy’, and then ‘DAAAD!’ But he hit him any way. Sent Ty flyin’ in the air. He fell on his face and it scrapped off. The blood was…”
That’s when my mother pulled me into her chest and held me. The Chief was gone, but it was him that I wanted. His strength, his pride, his power and his son, that’s what I wanted and needed. His wife turned in a great sweeping sob and walked out of the room. She walked alone to her empty home. That was when the picture was taken.
My father never said a word. He just went to jail. Twenty-five years to life, and it seems as if the state is going to split the difference. Three more weeks.
The Sox just won, and this could be the summer they win a third since 2004, who knows?
How can these be good memories? I can’t really explain, except that after all these years the power of that friendship, and the strength of the chief’s smile outweigh all of my father’s evil, and the fucking vision of him killing my very best friend. I cling to the good, and grow from the rest while life blends all of the colors of the rainbow together.
copyright 2009 C.R. Boucher
