Jack Houghteling’s excerpt from the novel Sunnyside

Excerpt from the novel Sunnyside — Jack Houghteling

Joanie-Hutch might have jokingly called him Ichabod on a fire-leafed day at Lyndhurst or Untermeyer Gardens. But he was. He was an Ichabod that worked out: rocky, slender, bow-legged, short-strided. He talked like water - a fragmentary cantabile. He flew from one piece of cultural felt to another, cutting himself off mid-sentence like the sun had blocked his Broca region.

YAZZO

The nurse told me her name was Angela Martinez. Then, small-eyed, brows sharp and kind, she asked for mine.

“Really?!”

“Yes, Angela,” I said with a deprecatory grin. “It is.” She folded the fluted cotton under my parasympathized body as I thought about how I liked my name very much. It had taken thirty years to feel this way. And now, at thirty-five, I’m only further gone. Singularly, I hope, I am finally becoming him: the baby that Joanie-Hutch named under a wordless, glare-faced Dad (his mind in ratiocination and ready to spritz out a Dahnny or Pawl) - and for little reason other than liberality, than worship for the primacy of the musical moment, than is being is - Montague Yazzo.

It was a name only Mom could have come up with, and a perfect one had I attended the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, wearing tight-fit black shirts like I was a fleshy, hair-ample Sondheim or sweating amid my New Orleanian six-pack like Brando. But that had not been me (Carefully, I refrain here from saying that’s not me, for what Jamesian, what Heraclitean can so finally determine that?). I never wore a justaucorps, breeches, garter.

No. I wore nylon and mesh. I ran. I caught. I even had a play where I threw a fifty-yard post on a reverse waggle, which we’d saved for several years before using it in a late-State playoff game. It worked – my pass was right in the padded numbers.

Why had I chosen the path of the sportman? I never had a shrink-ready verbalization for this question – the story started and ended so quickly, I think back now, from a time of stillness, intrigue and dubiety – other than that I was six-three two-ten before lifting, ran a four-four forty, had good spatial-emotional wherewithal – loose yet firm, calm yet knowing – and, unlike my bello, sure-brained father, had sight both near and far.

Also, my legs came up to my chest. One of my pee-wee coaches who liked Saratoga and went every summer with his fuckface Säufer friends called me Haflinger.

And so existed Montague Yazzo, muscles long, talent, or so I treated it – and why, maybe, I sit here, organizing and levigating past particles – a fortuity of humor.

I recognize this is not fair. Not fair to the kids-of-cops-and-contractors. Not fair to those who passionately and diligently curse the trophyism of the fragile and educated and sensitized while working – hard as they can, with square hips and oval calves, with the power and explosivity of vegetable oil – to overcome sinking bodies. Most of those guys would have marched on Russia in January to have been two-time Class C New York State Player of the Year, and to them I would have happily, at a competitive bargain, sold off my noumenal-phenomenological goods.

But ability and desire mark different biotic seams. And, much like Michael Jordan growing up in coastal North Carolina, I was both a prodigy and an incompetent, destined for metricized greatness as I was prone to get sued out of existence – caving roofs, three-legged tables – had I ever built houses.

The difference was that unlike James Jordan, who laughed at his sky-jumping son like he was Ted Williams dreamily swinging his phantom bat out in a green-enclosed left field, Dad said nothing. He just looked at me with his dark-irised In these eyes I know and feel and understand, but I say nothing mien. I don’t even think it was hostile or contra. He just didn’t care much for suppositional existence. Why loiter and onanize in the brains and lives of others? He had his own experience. He had his ways of measuring the distance between his experience and that of others.

Joanie-Hutch, meanwhile, was a fellow prodigious incompetent. She talked things into existence when she couldn’t do them, and the things she could say and conceive but not do: they were many and everywhere.

She was who she was. She had what she had: the mezzo, the upward-slanting body – that was her normal ambulatory posture, like she was climbing the hill ahead, the one no one else saw – the non-expert but impressively correct erudition, the lite alcoholism, the estimating, philosophizing and constructing – the root, in the shadow of Freud, of all her beautifications and inventions - the subsequent and contending delight in problem-pondering rather than the many aphorisms of problem-solving, the naming of her son a Norman first name and a Campanian last.

Young and with prided difficulty, I took these many inheritances and put them in my pocket, like a stereo stretching into denim: that Doric and sinuous, that physical and emotive, were cohabitable; that tension – to Mom, just another question - was not confusion.

Around that time there was a superlative baseball player named Alex Rodriguez who, when he came to bat, wore in his lower face a certain kissy-facedness. People thought it effeminate - which, in a certain branch of American reactionary culture, worshipping as it is of the unmoving, the solitary, the already-rendered, made him unpopular – and this despite the fact that with a single wrist, forearm and shoulder blade he could push the ball five-hundred feet to right-center field.

I identified with that downiness - with playing the weight of the feather. And once I’d established myself as a player – once, as a sophomore, I’d won my first state championship and earned my first All-State honor – I took care to stay extra-lite. I practiced my falsetto. I grabbed padded asses. I said I love you, you’re beautiful, or Wanna take it over to the dummy shed. I targeted the kids who I knew were made uncomfortable - the ones whose Dads used words like faihry and tuff and sawft.

And if they took exception? Try tackling me, Joe. Try blocking me, Pete.

At birth they picked Joan Hutchinson Lefevre. Her Mom was born in Fall River, Massachusetts - her parents from County Kerry. Her Dad - as was she - was a New Rochellian: they’d grown up in the same Tudor on Bon Air Avenue (A design agnatic – and much like in Pelham, Mount Vernon, Scarsdale, Forest Hills - to tics in Lyme).

She knew less about the Lefevres; they had stories – prospectuses, possibilities - but because of their temporal concavity they were hard to verify, harder, certainly, than County Kerry or Italy.

There was one story in which, their rights re-revoked, the Lefevres fled Louis XIV near the end of the seventeenth century (“Except that unlike the Sun the piece of motherfucking shit diied, he’s dehd”). There was another of a people who knew the music had stopped after the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre – that there lived one hundred years between the two theories Mom thought incredible, tragic and marvelous; a century and continent’s worth of feeling and occurrence was, to her, an epistemic calorie - and fled, first to England, then to America and, when Virginia denied them, to New York.

Neither was fully provable. Had Joanie-Hutch run for president perhaps the contending opposition team would have hired a social historian to put her down for good.

Still, she wasn’t a mere exaggeratory amateur.

She knew shit – tons.

She also retained an associate professorship at City College.

More viscerally, she saw herself, privately and socially (characteristically, without shame or unnecessary humility), as a silk square on the empiric web: the wife of a small business owner; a descendent, maternally, of the immigrant working class; paternally, of a privilege that had brought forth more than one familial-generational cycle of wealth and wealth lost: an entrepreneurial mind gives birth to a moral-intellectual mind gives birth to an artistic mind gives birth to a deadbeat mind gives birth to an entrepreneurial mind.

A view, long and broad, which nurtured the righteous, performative air of cultural and civilizational tension. Sir John Bell and Thomas Paine were her friends; Louis XIV and Oliver Cromwell were her enemies (That their zealotry was perpendicular, one Catholic, one Puritan, made it an even deeper endeavor, more secular, more democratic, more authentic, more radical).

Who cares, then, with such verve, with such a loving stake, if her genealogical journalism had added or subtracted a century? Did that matter as much as curiosity? As connection? What’s life if all you are is the daughter of Guy Lefevre and Nora Kerrigan? What’s story without inference, surmise, belief? What does it matter if you adjust the knives and forks?

Guy and Nora had met on the performance circuit - what had once been known as Orpheum - in its last and unlucky days. Things had changed. Gone With the Wind had already made three-and-a-half billion dollars. The names tossed around the community were all old, the clearest and most ancient sign of a medium’s collapse: Jolson, Tanguay, Fields. Vaudeville itself had become an idea of limitation, your talents tinned into whatever cornered or curved room in which your voice came, revolved and went.

Like her daughter, Nora was a mezzo, her voice meditative, long, pellucid, encumbering. Guy was a talented raconteur and mimic. Both were dissociative and unreliable, an errancy which taught their eldest daughter a notebook of negative lessons: the head always stays up, the eyes and face focused; the voice – the neuronic voice, not the sonic, stripped-from-subject result - should emit firm, rather than fiery, confidence; without regimen, the juice of creativity is wasted before it is then fully lost.

Always she defended - even when not fully existing within - these caryatids. She’d learned them autodidactically, rescued them, with a cumulative, compositional seriousness, from the rotting wood, cracking paint and mildewing sheets of her home on Bon Air Avenue.

Still she cherished the importance and inevitability of inheritance - the fluvial and improvisatory, the Vaudevillian, possibility of the soul; latent conceptions which she pursued at New Rochelle High School, where, when she visualized the seriousness of her municipal predecessors, Kazan, Doctorow, Sherwood, she was able to transcend the linoleum, steel, paper and plastic. She was a brilliant reader and writer, a grain silo when it came to the facts of history and society, an un-talented but curious science mind, an apologetic math student.

Near graduation - near departure - she sought collegiate schooling that was odd and independent. She eyed and visited colleges in Massachusetts and Oregon that didn’t have traditional grades – this was Joanie-Hutch the idealist and ideologue, the bellwoman - but ultimately chose instead a ride down the Cross County Parkway to Sarah Lawrence, where, when she was a senior, she took an elective with a freshmen named Lucy Grealy (Her mind, Mom later said, had the perfect union of fire and rain).

But barring a dinner gathering’s worth of warm, intriguing, productive interactions, she swam against the other fries: unlike Dad, she’d happily populate the life and soul of another, conceptualizing a challenge ignored or evaded here or a corner cut there. In a school of writers, she chose the social sciences. In a school of boarders, she lived at home, meditating - as do egos seeking to defend made decisions - on the class implications of boarded versus commuter study.

It was a family decision. Guy was skinnying and idling, his hepatic situation worsening, his cognitive storms intensifying: resentment spun one way, apology the other. But staying home for Dad, as things sometimes did, became defending the teachers, public administrators, carpenters, cabbies, secretaries, nurses, cops, firefighters and fishermen of her hometown, much in the same way she’d likely have defended the artists and dissident journalists – the George Carlins and Barbara Ehrenreichs - had she grown up in Garden City or Rossville.

After years of thinking that what she’d needed was an oasis of acommittal, of non-responsibility, she’d changed her mind. Proud and tilt-headed, she read Max Schactman, wishing she’d gone to City College. She read Selby and Algren. She listened to the late Paul Robeson, to Pete Seeger. She got a job at a diner on Columbus Avenue in Mt. Vernon, far enough from home and campus each.

There, she met a tall, lean coworker. He had a handsome, serious physiognomy, beautiful olive fingers, lighter-colored Springsteenian Levi’s (His model in many ways, he was nonetheless nothing like Bruce, useful where his idol was useless, spare and solitary where his idol ever-appeared to be attempting to further life’s horizons by way of emotional heart surgery, by a superior numinous burden).

He worked in the kitchen - in the hotter months sleeveless and bandana’d. He was two years behind her but executed his vowels and had the physical independence and air of an older sibling. He cared and thought about physical space, about presentation, about life and how it works and how it might work.

In those early years I pictured and hoped him more veering, surprised, startled, hopeful, affected, opened. If not, why had Marco Yazzo moved boroughs? Why had he attended Iona when he could’ve studied Economics at Queens College or St. Johns?

She was twenty-five and he was twenty-three when I was born in May 1985. He was twenty-six when he opened The Yaz, the blue-bannered deli on Ashford Avenue in Dobbs Ferry that sat just up the stone steps from Gould Park. Of course he dominated, all he had to do was run down the stairs! and Casa è Casa and all the other many benignant and garrulous and coltish and maudlin utterances came from this initial costermongering decision, which he paid for by being gifted with the legs of proficiency, with the hands of stewardship.

Christian was born in 1988, the year The Yaz opened, and where, as an infant, he sat with his stern, quiet glances - big head and face, small eyes - above the provolone and mortadella as I ran around loose-legged with my long, thick, straight, bouncing blonde flow, carrying a soccer or basketball or a rusted New Rochelle-sat Tintin.

He’d derived his name from the simple fact that Mom got one name and Dad the other.

The arrangements worked well for both him and I. Or, Punkt Kontrapunkt, do such arrangements construct destiny? I’m more for the first. For somehow, I get the sense that Christian would have been a shitty Noah or Adrien, or some other name befitting a kid in khaki shorts, leather shoes and wool argyle, counting the cobble stones in Garches or Issy-Les-Molineux or inhabiting some other nebula of history or consciousness - sawftness. Not Christian. He was destined to sit on counters in hot-stoved delis. He was made to drive through potholes. He was made to shrug shoulders – and shoulder-shruggers get shoulder-shrugging names.

(Contending stances of temperament and being that marked a parietal two-two divide in the family between talker and anti-talker, and which led to forward, twenty-teen-unfriendly jokes that Joanie-Hutch directed at Dad and his chest of secrets, jokes like Who’s the mick now? At the time it sounded more like an assertion than a joke, but that’s how kids interpret fictionalized tension - the sanctity of the castle, of wholeness: that above all is a child’s dream - rather than as mediations on the quiddities of blood and human character, as adult entertainment, Dad thick and able enough to absorb jocularity and insouciance in a way that I, on behalf of him, could not.)

When I’m up into my fast, hot brain, when I’m flicking – my most stressed, dangerous, estival, humored moments - I picture late-eighties baby Christian fictitiously in the attire of fifteen-year-old Christian: high-topped Jordans or Timbs, Yankee hat, white tee, mesh shorts, sweats, jeans the opposite of tight. I picture his minimized speech – soft quick consonants, long e-sounding vowels.

At fourteen I recall coming into our sunroom-like entertainment chambers, built into the green hill of our backyard - delicate, white-painted wood squared the glass - as Christian sat on the loose-padded suede couch with a Mughal cover design, looking like he’d been kidnapped by hippies. He was only eleven but already he wore a flat brim. He planted it diagonally like Jadakiss.

He watched MTV. A concert was taking place in Rome, New York on a Hadean weekend. On screen in a red silk robe came Kid Rock, who, when he undressed himself down to his wife-beater, looked out and proclaimed to the sea of dickheads, “Monica Lewinsky is a ho and Bill Clinton is a goddamned piiiiiimp.”

I flick into another vision, compressive rather than specific. I’m a senior and enter, my blonde-haired quads bellying out of tight cut-short corduroy, into his freshman class. He’s in the back talking shit. But the shit’s not funny – not to me at least. It’s mean. It’s nescient. It’s in the language of what he always lovelessly was to me – all war no treaty, all defense no flourish (Could or should such love – familial, aspirant, un-arrived - be killed or saved? This is what I hope to learn in the back half to two-thirds).

Keep the second earring in to fend awf the doods.

Wanna hear a joke? Women’s rights.

Name the year.

92: Scored thirty-seven in a CYO game against Annunciation.

93: Broke it to my coach, mouthing Mom, that I was not a papist, but a humanist - still he let me play, occupying the spot annually filled by the secular, but balling, Jew.

94: My first year in Dobbs pop warner. My arms dangling. My jersey, dirty and untucked. But, despite my size – my being yet-big - I still had that long-legged step, running with the freedom of David, playing smartly and in exploitation of my full spirit, yard-chasing, burying cleats to sand as I rolled shoulder to shin.

99: Scored my first high school TD, a jet sweep into the corner of Maple Street and Park Road.

99: Had sex.

00: Scored twelve more TDs. Second team All-State.

01 Another eighteen. Class C New York State Player of the Year.

02. Army All-American.

What had I learned in that first decade, that Chapter One?

What you play is not what you are.

Who you play with is not necessarily who you’re like.

If you get to the sideline first you will score.

I should have been more reticent about this final truth. It wouldn’t always be true. One day I would get to the sideline and there would stand a defensive technocrat, talented as I, who’d hit or tap or angle me out of bounds. The gliding path discontinues. Ascendancy becomes (if you’re strategic, effortful) a float or (if you’re heedless, sciolistic) a fall.

When did the breezy bipedal glide become the funicular’s glide? I have theories. My favorite one is this: I was a 5’9” seventh grader. Girls Varsity basketball was playing in a holiday tournament against Maria Regina, and at halftime I went out onto the line-painted parquet with a stray green volleyball, charging the near-side basket as I went up and dunked the stitched synthetic leather to the gasps and roars and jealousies and susurrations of familiar voices.

“You slaypped ohrange?!” Dad asked after someone had mentioned something.

An arbitrary capability. A joke upon the ego, always trying to carry around an agency or will that is, really, a child’s voice in the shadow of a powerful, unchosen, lucky fact: the weight of a car, the temperature of a furnace.

But human physical potential has become a major complex: for-profit schools in Orlando and St. Pete; towns in Texas descending upon one another in Friday night caravans of dray and buckboard like war, like a human population made bored by a want of war.

And me: a sybilline mix of circuitous and linear movement.

It’s Tzuian, really: either it’s a flexure or a line. Either you bubble or you cut. You bubble if he’s disrespected your speed with a traditional or unwitting alignment – this was far more common in my underclassmen years – and you cut when he’s cheated or over-contained you. Sometimes you zag your way across the vertical plane. But, in small-time, blue-state high school football, mostly you go in one direction. You flèche forth the rapier. You let the water fare down, the boulder thunder.

“This is your luxury,” Uncle Matty once said to me, generous, spiteful and wise: he disliked representing the un-talented - the non-best - but, fueling his reactionary dislike and disquiet, he’d acclimated to it.

For if anyone, he thought, was poised for the inevitability of greatness, for that union of advantage and fortune - which you can’t hope for yourself as much as hope that one person whom you’ve passed in the vital mist might have it (not even a sitting Bach, but a Telemann) – it was two-time NYSPOTY Montague Yazzo. This was both a compliment and threat.

But eventuality is hard to foreshow. Young, spare-bellied and penny-skinned grandpa, the first of the Marco Yazzos, knew this.

His father had been a calciatore. But he loved stuffing his knees with Heralds, Suns, Times’ and Journals. Nearly thirty years younger, he was twelve when fellow Campanian Vince Lombardi was hired by the Giants.

He was too small, however, to play at La Salle Academy. He wrestled and played second base instead. Like Vince, he was a sure-handed kid with glasses, running the train-cut plain between Sunnyside Gardens and Cavalry Cemetery much like Modernity’s settlers rode the flat-rate Subway from the Bowery (I’ll never go there anymore!) to west Queens as it turned from grass to something harder.

They were all there, Catholically, unthinkingly, special only in that the crystalline city of Now and of the future was the one in which they lived.

They didn’t think about any of it very much – this ancestor’s build, that’s bodily flow, that’s timing, that’s temperament – until out into the world came a nice, quiet, tough, poof-haired Yid from the neighborhood named Jimmy Caan. Jimmy Caan?! The adults recalled a boy who struggled to get his words out – “An inward-pointed mouth!” – handsomely encased in bafflement and accident. This wasn’t a Chrysostomos like Gregory Peck. This wasn’t a knight of destiny.

It made grandpa wonder, a lover of people and story: How did the chance few not only bend all’s reality to theirs, but convince them to light and televise it?

And when did those narrative plates slide, converge, subduct? Did it resemble motion, passage? Did it better approximate tool administration?

I wondered: had Dad ever pondered whether I had the transport or tools, the wit, the spirit?

How hard it was to determine whether he was reading and processing everything or nothing from his seat atop the bleachers, slightly offset to the right and twenty feet elevated like he’d paid for them. He sat there with other men, some football Dads, some friends (“friends”), some just kind of around, permitted as long as they didn’t fuck with his concentration. They drank from plastic souvenir cups. They yelled at our young, Bill Walsh-influenced offensive coordinator to “Run the bawl!” if they thought the play-calling too fanciful or technical. They refrained from eye contact, loquacity, soul-tracing – Desires, Beliefs – from glass-clear tea party bullshit. Their eyes were pointed to the field.

Intermittently, Mom forgot if it was the center or the quarterback that hiked the ball. But she was proud of me. She existed in the game less literally, more reflectively, like a local politician, in her sunglasses and color-laced Danners. She gestured to the “on-field matrix” as from time to time she’d locate, like a tiger at the Bronx Zoo, what she’d termed the Yazzo walk:

A lethal straightness of torso.

A dangling liberty of the arms (Inefficient, but getting your body to perform foreign, non-connate movements: that is also inefficient).

A long step.

Like Dobbs Ferry, Edgemont was a school district in the Town of Greenburgh known for football. Unlike Dobbs Ferry, it was known for academic preeminence, professional preponderance and, most interestingly, most distinctly, its contribution to the Jewish football experience. They had an exceptional program; some said better than ours because “ours was just me.”

Always I struggled – and unlike World or family - to anger myself with football. But when I thought about Edgemont I coached out of me something hotter. I thought about their 1500 SATs. I took their perfect deadlifts and their angled thirty-yard corners and punt walls and their neatly tucked blue jerseys as disrespect.

All of it for which I’d later feel bad when I met them, adjusted, accommodating, sweet.

All of them except for Michael Gellhorn (and always he was Michael). He was okay too, neither a criminal nor a bully. He just wanted to be – far more than I did - the best player in the state.

Some contrarians did consider him the best player in the state – in part because he was a senior and I was a junior, and though fail we do in realization, we still idealize fairness and equality of distribution: for if he was the best player that year, I could be the best player the following year. But only them and he believed it. He was not. I was.

Still, he was an Ivy or Patriot Leaguer, 235 when he woke and 245 after a meal at Candlelight, with a talent for the competitive and the petty (and there is nothing quite as beautiful, small and distorted, as American, as worthy of Clint or Cooper, as the local sports rivalry).

It assured for him a certain baseline of success that comes with maximum application. But thirty-something construction attorney Michael would be the first to describe to you the texture of that malison, about not being able edit important from oblique, about life as joyless contest. He was saturnine. He got caught in acorns (strangely, it made him easier to beat, if not less fun to play).

In the summer of 2001, we both worked out with an ex-Jet in a black-glass office building on Central Park Avenue, and the whole of the time I watched as he mentally tabulated the barbells on my squat rack, trap bar, bench press. It is only once there’s nothing left that numerical axiom becomes victory, Michael! Love, Monty!

It was later that fall. The third quarter. Edgemont was down by a touchdown, had just pinned us on our own three on a lucky wobble of a punt.

The wind was thick and dry – weather to run the ball. I was skin-bare in my uniform and confused by the just-called play. Edgemont, film-prepared – in all our nearness and smallness, we still traded analog hardware in white envelopes - had successfully coached its outside linebackers to shoot up the field and lock once they saw the jet sweep motion, forcing me to prematurely cut vertically for six and eight yards at a time: to me, non-success.

And now, a jet sweep on our three? It felt not wholly unlike a batter turning around to swing into the backstop. But all things ready if our mind be so, I guess. I get the ball. I am running straight to the rightward sideline.

And there is David Stern, the fastest player in the county save for yours truly – we called him, obviously, Commissioner – closing in on the wide side contain, dutifully clogging off the vast and plentiful seam. I am now on the one-yard line.

But I don’t suffocate. And that is the foremost point: This – much like a humid city day clothed in the blows and blasts of Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Mandarin and Russian, much like concrete in summer - feels strange, difficult, fun and right. It feels like my time.

I look back to my inside. Daylight exists, but because of the game’s flow what was once daylight becomes jersey. And because this wasn’t a team of a typical over-pursuant testosterone – which you generally combat with spins, swims, leaps, stiff-arms and, of course, thought - I did what I rarely do: I violently bowled my head forward into a truck-stuck Commissioner. Then, pivoting inside, I caught Lowenthal, a dutiful lineman, in a slight and rare over-pursuit as he arm-and-neck tackled himself past me. I was now headed to the other sideline, down the field, my strides lengthening and slowing as they passed the 50.

And thar blows Michael. He’d forged a good and realistic pursuit angle, tripping up at the 20 before regaining his balance at the 10, now two lengths away - though he should, for a clean tackle, be half. He knows his final option is a dive-trip, which he attempts, catching useless Achilles as he foments the visual he knows he’ll regret, what he knows will endure on film, on YouTube, whenever the Yazzo-Gellhorn comparative invariably arises, like Gilgamesh and Enkidu, at a middle Westchester dinner table: the simple aesthetic act of him falling and my landing.

Townspeople went out of their way to say hi to me at Brick Oven Pizza or on the corner of Main and Cedar Streets as we ascended our way to the Dome in Syracuse for the second year in a row.

And though Mike Hart of Onondaga Central High School miraculously rushed for 300 yards that day, still we beat them after I strip tackled him at the end of the game and took from him his NYSPOTY before they moved up divisions the following year, permitting me a second one.

In the weeks after Syracuse I was admonished for not lifting. I drunkenly broke into The Yaz at 2am, disabling the SimpliSafe to microwave cutlets and sesame-seeded Arthur Avenue bread. I fielded a call from Boston College, who’d sent an offensive and defensive coach to Syracuse a few weeks before, apparent as they were with their hats, pencils (for what grown men carry pencils?), big thighs, bare calves, mesh maroon.

We met head on at a scrimmage in Greenwich after an eight-yard inside counter, after which I was pleased to feel nothing close to the ego-scooshing inconvenience of physical dominance – of one guy exsanguinating the other - but instead a calmly, perfectly, and competently executed mid-thigh tackle. We grabbed the other’s hand, and as we came up each of our free palms found the other’s ascending glute.

That’s the type of business Charlie Monfils ran, from his Mom’s impeccably maintained scatter-site home in Norwalk, sown in bamboo and wool-knit, to here, the city of stone-gated homes. We met on the sideline when the scrimmage ended, me prolix, him shy and kind, exchanging numbers on our Nokias as our team photographers sat and took pictures of us in our stale net uniforms. Both juniors when we won, respectively, the New York and Connecticut State Players of the Year. Both recruited by Boston College to play linebacker.

When I’m with him it’s always good, always great, but what can I say about Charlie: his innermost plane is Mom and football. His zone-drop and two-point stance – square and anticipatory enough to be tolerant of all offensive practicabilities, forward enough to not be dilatory - will always come first. This is why he doesn’t have to ever think about money again. He laughs at my jokes about the khaki and sheepskin-peddling shellfish-eaters with whom we went to college - not the BJ Rajis and Mathias Kiwanukas and Luke Kuechlys but the ones who went from college to a couple of pro camps to institutional sales. He laughs at my theory that had I not texted our friend Matt Ryan a pre-game congratulations on his MVP then perhaps Tom and Bill wouldn’t have scored all those points. He laughs at my insinuation that I’ll steal one of his pro bowl patches, for he only needs one; at my threatening to 3D print the Super Bowl ring.

I played an effortful, sometimes better-than-average special teams and utility linebacker the four years I was at BC, but I felt like a college football player just once, in a game against Notre Dame. Marco Sr. used to see them every year at Yankee Stadium. Of course.

Injuries had left our linebacking core depleted, leaving Charlie out there with a guy from Lakeland, Florida and a charismatic red shirt senior adored by all named Danny Michaud, once Vermont’s Mr. Hockey and far too slow to ever be drafted.

I still have a blow-up from that game, Charlie in 44 and I 43, numbers that somehow revealed everything, including our destinies: his clean and even, mine over-pursuant.

Charlie once admitted to me that our asymmetric advantage, our justification for participation, was about equal. The difference, he added – a word that was becoming increasingly used in the sport as it bureaucratized – was quality control.

“I don’t stray, man,” he said, like it wasn’t normal. I needed to understand that, to feel okay about my canorous notes – often, and unlike Charlie’s, they ran horizontal, across things, rather than vertical.

In that game, however, I was at my best. I had two behind-the-line tackles. I had an operatic third-down sack. Never had so many people been in orchestral tandem with a physical act of mine.

But that that allowance of emotion, that capacity for contentment, that perihelion to a singular act: it was probably the reason I couldn’t make it to the next level anyway. Moments that needed to be regular happened twice in a life, and when they did, I never left them. I sat within them like an eel in an ocean tank, like Nixon stress-appointing his next Attorney General. I took them with me like war medals.

***

Jack Houghteling grew up in Hastings on Hudson, NY and published his debut novel Goodman in 2022, which was longlisted for the Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction. Sunnyside is his second novel.