Knucklehead Read online

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publisher.

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2018 Adam Smyer

  Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-292-6

  eISBN-13: 978-1-61775-603-0

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017936110

  First printing

  Akashic Books

  Brooklyn, New York, USA

  Ballydehob, Co. Cork, Ireland

  Twitter: @AkashicBooks

  Facebook: AkashicBooks

  E-mail: [email protected]

  Website: www.akashicbooks.com

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  Copyright & Credits

  Begin Reading

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Part 4

  Part 5

  Part 6

  Acknowledgments

  About Adam Smyer

  About Akashic Books

  For Malcolm

  ~

  and for Dee

  But this ain’t the eighties, brother, it’s the nineties!

  And shit’s a whole lot more intense.

  —XB

  Drop Squad (1994)

  Once, when I was very young, I did an experiment. I was at my grandmother’s house upstate. I found a moth stuck to some flypaper hanging near the screen door out back. It was still struggling. And I prayed. I said to God, God. I know that You can hear me. I need You to do something. I am going to take the matches out of my pocket and I am going to set that moth on fire, unless You stop me. I know that You know I am telling the truth. I’ll do it. Please stop me.

  Nothing happened. I stuck my hand into my overalls and pulled out the little box of wooden matches. I know You saw that, God. I know that You are watching. I need to know that You wouldn’t let this happen. Please. Stop me from doing this. Nothing. I lit a match. I have to actually do it, God, because if I don’t then I was bluffing, and You will know that I was bluffing. I need You to know I am not bluffing. Last chance, God. Stop me. Please stop me.

  The match was almost out by then, but I tilted it downward and touched the tiny triangle of flame to the tip of the moth’s wing. It burned like paper.

  I

  A Slight Relapse.

  Monday, September 12, 1988

  “Everybody needs to move the . . . fuck . . . back!”

  Frat boy in a suit at the front of the bus. It was obvious from his giant red baby head that six months ago this kid was crippling quarterbacks and raping cheerleaders on some campus. Now he was here, on his way to a job his daddy got him, and mad at us about it. It was barely 7:00 in the morning and we were all getting yelled at. Not to mention, we were packed in pretty tight back there already; there was noplace else to go.

  “Move!” He actually put his hands on the man closest to him and pushed him into someone else. I tried to watch the fight, but there was none. This bus is full of sheep.

  “GOD . . . DAMMIT! Listen! You people need to get to the back of this . . . fucking . . . bus!” The herd quivered.

  I told myself that I was trying to be funny.

  “Looka here, chief,” I called to him. The sheep froze. “If you got off the bus, it would be a lot less crowded. A lot.” Laughing, I looked around for support and found none. “That’s what you want, right?”

  I’d expected us to banter more. I was going to suggest that, if he was having trouble getting to work on time, he consider taping Letterman, or eating breakfast the night before. But instead Frat Boy asked, “Why don’t you get off the bus with me?”

  We thudded to a halt. In the middle of the street. The doors snapped open and, just like that, everyone but Frat Boy had their backs to me. Cut from the herd!

  “OK. Let’s go. You and me are gonna sort out this city’s bus problem!”

  I scootched toward the back door. “Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” I bade those around me. They made room.

  I worked my way down the little stairs. Frat Boy was already on the sidewalk. The bus peeled out, doors still hanging open. “Let’s go,” he said over his shoulder as he headed up the street. For a moment, I wondered if maybe we really were going to find a café somewhere and sit down and figure out what the mayor needed to do about mass transit. Then I looked ahead and saw that he was just leading me over to a little alley down the street for my beating.

  I followed him toward the alley. I followed him closely. He had his back to me.

  Frat Boy wasn’t dumb. And he was fast for a big guy. He spun around as soon as he heard something. But what he heard was me pulling my collapsible baton out of my bag and telescoping it open to its full length. So when he turned around, all he got to do was watch me hit him in the neck.

  The baton was made of thick metal wire, coiled into progressively narrower sections about three feet long end to end. I swung it as hard as I could. The coil was stiff, but as it flew across that short distance it curved into almost a semi-circle. The middle of the club smacked him in the large muscle over his left shoulder. Then the thing wrapped itself around the back of his neck, and the little metal ball on the tip hit him in the throat.

  I took a step back. Frat Boy’s hands went up to his neck, but otherwise he was still. He stared into space. I wouldn’t have thought his face could get any redder.

  For a minute we just stood there in the early morning, me with my arms at my sides, him doing the universal sign for Some Motherfucker Just Hit Me in the Throat With a Fucking Baton. I thought about hitting him again, but he was done. I collapsed my club and put it back in my bag and walked away.

  When I got where I was going, I pulled out a pen and my notepad, and flipped it open to the back page, the one that had the heading “DAYS WITHOUT AN INCIDENT.” I crossed out the “73” that had been written last on the page. And under the crossed-out “73” I wrote “0.”

  Q and A–hole.

  Tuesday, October 11, 1988

  Professor Lakin stood over me. I held still and pretended to read. But he wouldn’t leave, so I looked up.

  It’s funny: In high school, you’re a kid. In college, you are almost no longer a kid. Then in law school you’re a kid again. Calling us all “Mr.” and “Ms.” only reinforced the point.

  “Mister Hayes,” Professor Lakin boomed down on me. Then, softer, “You did a remarkable job yesterday. Thank you.”

  All I did was get you off of me, I thought. Apparently I said it out loud as well.

  He smiled a bit. “That’s what I needed. A little back and forth. It engages the others.” Law school is one of the worst, last bastions of the Socratic method, possibly second only to boot camp. “You made my job much easier. Again, thank you.”

  I nodded and tried to smile. It seemed like I’d gotten some capital out of it, at least. Professor Lakin nodded back and finally went away.

  A few minutes later, class began. “When last we met, ladies and gentlemen, Mister Hayes was good enough to educate us on the finer points of the tort of Tortious Inducement of Breach of Contract. Today we will look at the related torts of Tortious Interference with Prospective Economic Advantage, and Tortious Interference with Contractual Relations.”

  Professor Lakin began his annoying habit of pacing slowly back and forth across the stage at the front of the classroom while staring straight up and talking at the ceiling, like he was dictating the Constitution or the Torah. It was excruciating. “Now, obviously, what distinguishes these two torts is that the latter is a disruption of an existing, ongoing contractual relationship, whereas the former is a disruption of a relationship that contains only the p
otential for future business. The cases that you were assigned to read—and that I assume you all have read, carefully—make that clear.” He scolded us with his eyes.

  “The real question,” he continued, “is what distinguishes Tortious Inducement of Breach of Contract from Tortious Interference with Contractual Relations?”

  We fidgeted.

  “Mister Hayes!” he shouted, whirling around. “Can you give the class concrete examples that distinguish these two torts?”

  “Probably not.”

  Professor Lakin oozed up to his little podium and leaned over it and showed me his teeth. “Oh, come now, Mr. Hayes—surely something comes to that razor-sharp legal intellect of yours.” He blinked expectantly.

  Everybody was staring at me. “Alright. So, the time Spacely Sprockets signed that big contract with Mercury Rockets, and Cogswell Cogs tried to mess it up.” All I got were blank stares, but there was no way people my age didn’t know exactly what I was talking about.

  “Yeah. Cogswell builds a robot that looks like the president of Mercury Rockets, and he sends the robot to go have dinner at Mr. and Mrs. Spacely’s house. And the robot disses Spacely in front of his woman and tells him that Mercury Rockets is backing out of the contract. That’s tortious interference of contract.” Fewer blank faces now.

  “But, if Cogswell had built a robot of Spacely instead, and sent it to the president of Mercury Rockets’ house to diss Mercury until he backed out of the contract, that would be inducement of breach.”

  Now everybody was staring at him. “And why, Mr. Hayes? Why is that?” I wondered if he thought I couldn’t explain my own example. Maybe he was actually asking me why.

  “Well . . . because, in the first situation—where the Mercury robot disses Spacely—the reality is that the parties are still in contract. At the end of the night, actual Spacely still wants to do business with Mercury. And actual Mercury is somewhere still wanting to do business too. But in the second situation, there’s a real repudiation of the contract, by a real party, when actual Mercury dude gets mad at the Spacely robot and says, “Screw you guys and your contract.” Even though it’s all a big misunderstanding, induced by fraud, there’s been a repudiation—a breach—by an actual party, and not a robot.”

  I couldn’t read the silence, so I talked some more. “I mean, the damages would be calculated the same either way. But it could matter, down the line, if the date of the breach became relevant.”

  More silence.

  “Depending on the facts.”

  Finally, Professor Lakin spoke. “Thank you, Mr. Hayes.” A smirk. “And kudos on reading ahead in the syllabus. We don’t get to the tort of ‘dissing’ until next semester.”

  The class bathed in Professor Lakin’s smugness. I didn’t get it. All around me, these people were forgetting English as fast as they could, trying to sound “lawyerly.” This is why people hate lawyers. Me, I was going to talk to juries. These chuckling snipsnaps wouldn’t be capable of talking to anyone but each other.

  Then he moved on to someone else and left me alone for the rest of class. But once class ended and Professor Lakin left and we were all wearily packing up our stuff, Carolyn Hirsch, some judge’s kid from Long Island, speed-walked up to my desk and barked, “I saw that!”

  Sometimes I get a hard-on when I fall asleep in class, so I said, “Saw what?”

  “I saw him give you the answers!” Her face was quite red. “Before class. I saw him approach you and tell you the answers to the questions he asked you!” A crowd started forming around us. Some of the faces looked confused, but most looked angry.

  “You’re joking.” I took another glance at the mostly mad faces. “You’re not joking.”

  “He prompted you!” She appeared to be seconds away from angry tears.

  I almost could have laughed, except that I was mostly mad myself by then. “What? OK. Just so we’re clear,” I said to the jury of my peers, “you are saying that the exchange I had with Professor Lakin today in class was scripted.”

  “Yes!” It was the shrill kind of tone that can, by itself, get a brother arrested. Or worse. Carolyn was attacking me. We were fighting, she and I.

  “You are saying that—in plain sight of everyone—Professor Lakin walked up to my desk and said to me, ‘Today I am going to ask you to explain the difference between inducement of breach and tortious interference. Use that episode from the fucking Jetsons where Cogswell built a robot in your answer.’ You’re saying that.”

  I didn’t get a response, so I continued. “Did you hear him say that?” Silence. “Of course not, ’cause you sit way the fuck over there.” I waved the back of my hand toward her desk like where she sat was the ghetto. “But you saw it. You saw him tell me something. Right in front of everybody. So we are dishonest and dumb. Me and Professor Lakin both. We perpetrated a fraud on all of you, for no reason. Badly.”

  The mob now looked like it felt pretty stupid, but still I said it:

  “Either that, or some black guy is smarter than you.”

  We sat with that for a moment.

  “Hey—think what you want,” I said as I finished packing up my shit. “Believe whatever you need to believe. I wouldn’t want you all to go home and hang yourselves or anything.” I met eyes with each and every one of them as I said that. “You know, from the shame. You go and tell yourselves whatever you need to keep on truckin’.” I picked up my bag and turned back to Carolyn Hirsch and looked into her creepy green eyes. “You do whatever you’ve got to do.”

  I pushed my way out of the circle of classmates. “You people are crazy,” I said, to all of them, before I turned and walked away.

  Professor Lakin was standing right outside the lecture hall, off to the side of the open door. He’d been listening the whole time.

  “Well done, Mr. Hayes,” he murmured. His eyes danced.

  “Crazy,” I repeated. Then I left.

  The Study Supergroup.

  Friday, November 4, 1988

  My cockles warmed by my classmates, I decided to put together a study group and crush them.

  I had, of course, read the book One L as soon as I got accepted into law school. We all had. The genius of Scott Turow’s account of his first year at Harvard Law lies not in its compelling prose, although it is compelling; the genius lies in having written a book that is guaranteed to be read by a fresh crop of thousands every year. You have to read One L the summer before you start law school the same way you have to get a lap dance at a stag party. And One L tells us that once you are in law school you have to be in a study group.

  Ordinarily, the primary purpose of a study group is to study. I was starting a gang. Good grades weren’t enough for me anymore. I needed to run this place I had come to hate. We would get good grades. We would make it look easy. And we would laugh at them while we did it.

  I assembled my team with great care.

  I selected my first recruit, Rachel Katz, in Property class. Professor Tucker was introducing us to the idea of de minimis litigation. Basically, some disputes are too small or minor to be worth a court’s time. They are de minimis. But drawing that line can be difficult. “What about a boundary dispute?” Professor Tucker asked. “Between two neighbors, say. A little strip of land. How wide a strip should they have the right to sue over? Two inches wide? . . . How long a strip, then?” We went on like this for a while.

  Professor Tucker asked, “Ms. Katz—is six inches de minimis?”

  “Not on a Jewish man.”

  Impressive.

  After class, I touched her shoulder as she stashed her books in a huge Gucci bag. She glanced up through dark crinkly hair. “Hey. You’re pretty cool. Wanna be in my study group?”

  She did.

  The only person at NYU I was sure was smarter than me was Alejandro Velez. It wasn’t because he looked smarter than me, but he did. If Alejandro ever tired of the law, he could always have a career playing smart people in the movies. He looked like the scientist who discovers,
a bit too late, that the new supercollider is tearing a hole into another dimension. Except brown. He was a Puerto Rican Jeff Goldblum.

  Alejandro also had that constant low-level panic many high achievers seem to share. I had noticed this panic early on and resolved not to catch it. But it certainly didn’t disqualify him from conquering the world with me. He didn’t talk much in class but, when he did, his statements were information laden and agonizingly nuanced. I soon learned to replay his words in my mind a few times to try to get all that I had surely missed the first time. Before long I was writing down his comments verbatim. If I could understand something Mr. Velez said on a subject, then I understood that subject.

  I had to have him. The day after I got Rachel I rolled up on Alejandro after Contracts and followed my proven formula: “Hey. You’re pretty smart. Wanna be in my study group?”

  He did.

  I needed a fourth; all the best study groups are quartets. Pickings were slim. Most of our classmates were those “lawyerly” snipsnaps and/or Mayflower trash. But two days after I’d acquired Alejandro I was gathering up my books and turning to leave class and there were dimples in my face. I’d seen those dimples before. On soft brown cheeks flanking a tiny gap between perfect front teeth that lived beneath huge brown anime eyes peering out from under dark bangs.

  She was too cute to talk to. I don’t know how else to put it. The sight of her shut down my ability to form words. On more than one occasion I had walked up to her, opened my mouth, and walked away. Her name was Amalia Stewart.

  “Do you want me to be in your study group?” she asked, smiling.

  I did.

  Closer.

  Thursday, January 12, 1989

  There was a knock on my door. I’d been watching TV at the time, so it was a miracle I even got up. I squinted through the peephole. It was Amalia Stewart. I put on some pants and opened the door.

  “Whatcha doin’?” She peered past me into the tiny university apartment, openly scanning for intel.