Pins: A Novel Read Free

a few months later, Joey had already begged his father to give him money to buy special shoes, sweat pants, a sweatshirt, a jock strap. He’d almost taken a wicked pride in asking his father, saying “jock strap” aloud. He grinned with his dad. His father had put down his newspaper, dug in his pocket, gave him five twenties. “Keep the rest,” he’d said. Joey wanted to hug his dad, who just patted him on the butt. “Don’t tell your mother.”
    It was a secret at first, between Joey and his father, who’d come with him, waited outside, how he got on the team after a few days of tryouts.
    “There’s never been an athlete in the family,” his mother had said at dinners with Grandmama, Aunt Lilla, everybody, who were all proud, but a bit unfamiliar with even the basic rules. The conversation usually switched to other topics, taller people.
    “Well, he’s our first,” his father had said with a combination of quizzical pride and astonishment.
    That first season, full of stumbling defeats, confused exhausting practices, Joey knew he wouldn’t quit, in spite of –or because– one of his ‘former’ friends back in Newark calling wrestling “a fag sport.” Joey didn’t have to defend himself. He’d just ignore anyone who didn’t appreciate it. He was becoming a jock on his terms. Other guys on the team, some of them real characters, knew they were a different breed.
    For Joey, it was his comfort. He got to touch guys for a reason. Even though some of them were ugly or smelled funny, he got to end his winter school days warmed by the burning tingle of contact. Learning how to clobber guys, if necessary, helped, too.
     
    The garage door rumbled beneath his feet. Joey rose from the spread-out pile of schoolbooks on the floor, darted to his parent’s bedroom window to watch his father’s Bronco pulled up, Dino Nicci walk up the driveway. His mood looked promising. Joey felt the gasp the house made as the kitchen door opened.
    He listened from above, heard only soft mutterings from downstairs between his parents, some rustling sounds, then his father’s shout, “Yo, animals! Food’s on!”
    Joey’s father waited patiently for Sophia’s tale of “a princess and she went up some stairs and found a cat and it had a magic button and it took them to a balloon …“ to dwindle down to something like an ending.   Joey could watch Sophia for hours, fascinated by her animation. He’d watched Mike grow into The Pest. Sophia seemed different, enchanted.
    “Very nice, Soph,” his father said. “Now eat your dinner.”
    In a pause filled by the sound of gulping, forks on plates, Joey glanced at his father, who wiped a bit of food from his mustache. The rest of Dino Nicci’s face followed close behind with a thick stubble that made Joey worry if he would someday be so hairy, but that hadn’t gotten going yet.
    Joey could manage a scribble of a goatee, but his mother always made him shave it by Monday morning, or Mass, if they went, which wasn’t too often since they’d moved. Even though Mike went to St. Dominic’s Prep, it seemed church lay unpacked in a box in the basement with votive candles, that picture of the Pope. That was one reason he feared his father sometimes. He had to keep his questions about church on a low flame. His dad didn’t believe in it, so he never explained things. Joey just kept his prayers to himself.
    Since they moved to a not-so Catholic, not-so Italian neighborhood, it seemed he wanted to push it all aside, act more like the regular people with names like Johnson, Ferguson.
      “So.” Joey’s father looked at him. “I hear you have some good news for us.” Joey liked the sound of his father’s voice with everybody at the dinner table. It made him feel secure, with everything warm, this constant circle for him to come home to. Maybe his voice would someday sound as strong as his father’s, if he practiced.
    “I wanna jacket, too,” Mike blurted.
    Joey rolled his eyes.