Read Online Born on the Fourth of July by Ron Kovic - Free Book Online Page B

Castiglia’s house shouting that I had made the tryouts, I chickened out when the morning came to leave for the station. I decided I didn’t want to go after all. Richie and Bobby Zimmer were all over me for weeks, and I was sorry I’d ever told them anything. I still played after that, but it was different. I was thinking about other things, other things I wanted to be.
    By that fall it seemed the guys on the block were almost grown up. In the halls at school we still gave each other the old Woodchuck Club signal we had started in sixth grade, sticking our hands under our chins, moving our fingers up and down, shouting, “Woodchuck, woodchuck.” It was crazy but it kept us together. And we went from class to class just waiting for each day to end so we could get back home and play touch football out on the street after our homework. Still everything was different. Castiglia was still talking about being a priest or joining the marines, but we weren’t seeing as much of each other anymore. Bobby Zimmer told me one afternoon that Richie was growing his hair long and smoking cigarettes with Peter Weber in some abandoned cement tunnel in the woods at the end of the block.
    Bobby’s hair was long too. My mother said he had a pompadour just like Elvis Presley’s. Whenever I saw him in the hallways, he had a pretty girl by his side and he was the first one of the guys on the block to get a driver’s license. I was still shy with girls. While I’d be waiting at the bus stop every morning with Kenny and Mike Lamb, Bobby Zimmer would drive past honking the horn of his car with one arm around his girlfriend. He’d turn the corner on Hamilton Avenue, roaring off down Broadway to the high school, leaving the rest of us still jumping up and down at the bus stop trying to stay warm. Peter Weber and Castiglia also drove to school every morning or got rides with their new friends.
    I remember for a long time Mike and Bobby Zimmer were a lot taller than me and Castiglia. Then all of a sudden I was taller than all three of them. We’d stand back to back over at Kenny’s house as his mother checked to see who was the tallest and it was so good for little guys like me and Castiglia to be taller than the other guys. And when we weren’t trying to see who was the tallest, we’d be out on the lawns still playing tag and wrestling on the grass.
    Steve Jacket was still throwing screwdrivers into his front lawn across from Pete’s house on Hamilton Avenue, telling us all he was going to become a TV sports announcer just like Mel Allen, and Pete was still coming over to my house every once in a while after school to steal beer out of my father’s locker in the garage. Little Tommy Law was hanging out with Billy Meyers, trying to stay out of trouble and graduate from high school like the rest of us.
    High school was just about over for me and the rest of the guys. We had been on the block together for almost twelve years, running and moving from Toronto Avenue to Lee Place to Hamilton Avenue. No one could remember how we all first got together back then, but we had become friends, “as close as real brothers,” Peter told me one afternoon, and we wanted to believe it would always be that way.
    President Kennedy got killed that last year and we played football in the huge snowdrifts that had settled on the Long Island streets that afternoon. We played in silence, I guess because you’re supposed to be silent when someone dies. I truly felt I had lost a dear friend. I was deeply hurt for a long time afterward. We went to the movies that Sunday. I can’t remember what was playing, but how ashamed I was that I was even there, that people could sit through a movie or have the nerve to want to go to football games when our president had been killed in Dallas. The pain stuck with me for a long time after he died. I still remember Oswald being shot and screaming to my mother to