the big ballyhoo

chapter 9

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“I love this house,” Mrs. Goodspeed said to no one in particular as we brought our bags inside to the foyer of the lake house. “I got my legs under me again here, got sober.”

Mr. Goodspeed grunted as he hauled in the bags of groceries we had picked up on the way (all from Big T’s Grocery, of course).

“Tim! Kathy! Tommy! Two more Big Ts for the big 7/4!” said the old man who greeted us, a greyer version of Tommy’s dad with bushier eyebrows, a man whom, in the next moment, I would realize was Theodore ‘Ted’ Goodspeed IV, current patriarch of the Goodspeed grocery clan, Tommy’s grandfather.

His wife was there as well, a petite old woman with a bush of grey hair like Barbara Bush, who was Tommy’s grandmother and, coincidentally, named Barbara. “And who’s this?” Grandpa Goodspeed asked, turning to me. I learned from Tommy that the best thing to do in these situations was to extend my hand for him to shake.

“He’s the Big J, reporting in!” Tommy said, which made everyone laugh.

The rest of the extended Goodspeed family arrived before noon.

First was Travis (Tommy’s uncle, his dad’s brother) and his wife and their kids, Maddie and Maggie, whom I had met before on our trip to Six Flags Lake George.

Then Tyler (Tommy’s dad’s other brother) with his much younger kids, an impatient and quite frankly intolerable seven-year-old girl named Brittany and a cranky four-year-old boy also named Theodore, making him Theodore V, presumably because they couldn’t think of any more ‘T’ boy names.

Last came Aunt Liz, the clear black sheep, whom Mr. Goodspeed called the ‘blue sheep’ because of the blue streak she’d dyed into her hair. She was a full twelve years younger than him and the youngest of them all, the only one who had escaped the grocery business, either by simply being female and not having a name that started with ‘T’ or having the bravery to set out on a career as an academic in the biochemistry field. Judging by her confident air and clear disdain for the corporate scheming of her brothers, I guessed the latter. She arrived late and without a significant other as, apparently, she did not have one.

The day was a fantastic heat mirage of kicking the soccer ball around, taking the little kids into the lake on the canoe, drinking seltzer, and clumsily flirting with Maddie and Maggie. We threw the ball for Waldo and watched him swim out into the lake and retrieve it, and I wondered if he was part retriever, even if Tommy claimed he was a terrier/pit bull mix.

We had the clam bake, and I found I did not care for clams. I would have much preferred one of my dad’s rare steaks.

We also had the first bite of our Chicago-style hot dogs, although mine was sparse compared to Tommy’s as I did not like raw onions or tomatoes or pickles, but his was stuffed to the brim of the bun, so much so he could barely wrap his mouth around it as Bruce sang, “Born in a dead man’s town!” I couldn’t help but think of Veddersburgh.

“You know this song isn’t really like…patriotic,” I pointed out. It was something my dad always said when Bruce Springsteen came up. Tommy and I were on our own down on the dock that harbored their pontoon boat.

“Oh, I know,” Tommy said between mouthfuls. “My family doesn’t seem to care. I mean, it sounds cool, but really, it’s about a guy who gets sent to Vietnam to kill poor people! And then he comes back to the USA and is basically treated like crap and is poor himself. I don’t know if they just think the lyrics are ironic or what, but it’s pretty sad. ‘Dead man’s town,’ doesn’t that make you think of Veddersburgh? I mean, I wasn’t born there, and you weren’t either, but it’s definitely a dead man’s town. Or maybe, like, it’s a working man anthem, and my dad and my uncles and my grandpa, they think they’re working men, right? But they’re kind of not. I don’t know, it’s a weird tradition, but man, I love Chicago-style hot dogs. Maybe I should move to Chicago.”

“Definitely,” I said, one word to Tommy’s many, the usual ratio of our relationship.

As the sun began to set, Tommy and I joined the rest of the family around the fire pit in the circle of Adirondack chairs and folding camp chairs. I tried my best to sit next to Maddie (or was it Maggie?) but somehow Tommy ended up between us. A silence cut the group and, for some reason, the conversation turned to me, the token outsider.

“So, what do you think of Goodspeed Fourth of July so far, Jude?” Grandpa Goodspeed asked me.

“Love it,” I said, smiling. Smiling was always good to do when I didn’t want to talk.

“How did you and Tommy meet?”

“We met in sixth grade. We were both kind of new kids,” Tommy answered for me.

“Ah, so you go to Veddersburgh schools as well?”

“Yessir,” I said.

“But you’re not from there?”

“No sir. Moved from Albany.”

“And how do you like Veddersburgh?”

Mr. Goodspeed snorted at this question.

“It’s alright,” I said. A dead man’s town.

“It’s a shithole,” Mr. Goodspeed interjected.

“Dad!” exclaimed Tommy.

“What! It is. One of the poorest districts in the state. And the amount of…trash walking the hallways, I’m just glad Tommy became friends with you, Jude, and not anyone more…unsavory.”

“Uh, what do you mean by trash, Tim?” Aunt Liz, the blue sheep, asked. She was closest to the fire, leaning forward in a camping chair with beer in hand. Waldo had taken a liking to her and sat beside her, her hand continuously scratching the top of his head. “Because it sounds like you mean people, seeing as garbage doesn’t really walk around.”

“I do mean people, of course,” Mr. Goodspeed said.

“Okay, and what kind of people do you mean when you say trash? I want to hear you say it,” Aunt Liz pressed, pushing her strand of blue hair behind her ear.

“He means, like, scumbag Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. Place is overrun with ‘em,” Uncle Tyler said. His wife slapped him on the arm.

“Okay, great, perfect, just wanted to make sure you were all assholes still,” Liz said.

“Language, kids around!” Grandma Goodspeed chirped.

“I hate this fucking family,” Aunt Liz said, getting up. “If I didn’t study genetics, I’d swear it was impossible we’re all related.”

“You know, when I was your age, I had a kid and a wife already, Liz. What do you have?” Mr. Goodspeed called out. She flipped him off as she walked out to the dock on the lake. Waldo dejectedly plopped down next to Tommy.

“Get over it, Liz,” shouted Uncle Travis. His daughters tittered with bashful disapproval, and I loved Maggie (Madison?!) even more.

I watched Grandpa Goodspeed rub the grey stubble on his chin and share a look with his wife, which was her signal to get up and follow Liz, hopefully to comfort her. His eyes were slate. I felt there was some test here he wanted his sons to pass, but I couldn’t figure what it was. The moment of Liz’s departure passed, and then he asked: “So, young Mr. Jude, will you be accompanying Tommy to Albany Academy next year?”

It felt like a hush came over the group, but it really only came over me.

“Wait, wait?” I questioned. Grandpa Goodspeed’s eyes widened with regret.

“T hasn’t told you?” Mrs. Goodspeed said. I looked at Tommy. He was staring into the fire.

“I haven’t told him because I’m not going,” Tommy said.

“Goddamnit, like hell you’re not!” Mr. Goodspeed erupted. “Tommy, you’re going to Albany Academy for high school whether you like it or not!”

“No, I’m not,” Tommy said. I had never heard such a lump in his throat before. “You think Veddersburgh is so awful, but it’s not. It’s really not. You even said, I met Jude there, how bad can it be?”

“Bad, Tommy, very bad,” Mr. Goodspeed said. “No offense, Jude, but very bad. You can’t get the opportunities at Veddersburgh High School like you’d get at the Academy, you just can’t and—”

“But Veddersburgh is good in its badness, Dad. It has character, it has interesting people, diverse people, people from all walks of life, different places. Did you know it has more Ukrainians than anywhere else upstate? And more non-English speakers? And Jude and I, we would have never been friends if it weren’t for Veddersburgh.”

“You can still be friends with Jude. You can still live in Veddersburgh, as long as we got the store there. But you’re going to Albany Academy. Because if you don’t, you’re not going to get into a great college. And unlike me and Uncle Travis and Uncle Tyler and Grandpa and his grandpa before him, you aren’t going to have a Big T Grocery to work at. You need to use what Big T gave you on a first-class education so that you can go to school and be a lawyer and make your own way and—”

Tommy stood, clenched his fists. “I DON’T WANT TO BE A LAWYER!” he shouted.

“Big T,” his mother cautioned. Tommy’s uncles were watching with bemused smiles not unlike the one Tommy sometimes wore, his cousins with worried expressions at the drama played out before them.

“What the hell else are you going to do, Tommy? You don’t show any interest in anything remotely lucrative,” Mr. Goodspeed said.

“I want…I want…” Tommy started. He looked at me, and I could tell that from my visage, he was drawing some kind of strength into saying what he wanted to say next, as though he had never found a way to say it before. “I want to be a poet!”

Uncle Travis snickered. Grandpa Goodspeed shifted in his chair, still rubbing the trademark Goodspeed cleft jaw and watching Tommy like a major league scout might watch a pitcher’s wind-up.

“A POET! And I didn’t even know it,” Mr. Goodspeed said. “And why is that, my naïve son? Besides your mother’s influence, I mean.”

Mrs. Goodspeed stared into the fire, apparently unmoved by this snipe.

“Because life is about exploring the mystery of why we are here. And the way we try and figure out why we are here is through things like art and stuff. Through music and film and art and writing. And I like poems. And you know what? I don’t really care about money. If the world was the way it’s supposed to be, no one would have to work, we would just be free to pursue our creativity. And I’m one of the rare people in this world, one of the few who might actually have a chance to live like that, because of you, because of grandpa and his grandpa, and if I don’t, it’s a life wasted. I’m not going to live a wealthy life, but I don’t need one dad, I’ll be a starving artist, I’ll be a professor or something, I just want to write POEMS, and I want to be a POET!”

My body pulsed with admiration. He had said everything I always wished I could say but was too ashamed to admit, trapped between how the world worked and the way I wished it could be. Maddie and Maggie seemed in awe as well.

Really, what Tommy said was extremely naïve and very clichéd, but the poignancy lay in daring to say it.

“So, you plan to basically just live off our money then, forever, while you write little poems or whatever?” Mr. Goodspeed sighed. “You don’t know SHIT about what life is, you’re a kid.”

“I’M NOT GOING TO ALBANY ACADEMY!” Tommy concluded, and the first sinews of manhood carried his voice farther than any firework across the lake.

“ENOUGH!” Grandpa Goodspeed bellowed. He got up from his Adirondack chair with a grace a man of his age had no right to possess. “Tommy! Come with me, now,” he snapped. He looked at me and softened, realizing that leaving me behind with the rest of the Goodspeeds without Tommy after such a heavy conversation was an awkward fate. “Jude? Why don’t you come too?”

Mr. Goodspeed made a move to get up as well, but Grandpa Goodspeed forced him back down with a mere wave of his hand, making both Tommy’s uncles cackle with laughter.

We went into the lake house and up a set of stairs I hadn’t noticed before, into what must have been an attic.

More than an attic, it was a small studio with empty canvases, an easel, a stool, a myriad of paints, brushes, and—more than anything—paintings of food.

All kinds of food: ham, asparagus, an apple pie, a pear, an orange, all on plain fields of color, of all different colors, blue, green, red. I didn’t know much about art, but they seemed pretty good to me, if not original. They weren’t life-like, but painted well, with broad strokes of acrylic paint, all initialed with a cursive ‘T’ in the lower right corner.

“Whoa,” I said.

“Grandpa, what is this?” Tommy asked.

Grandpa Goodspeed smiled. “Do you like them? Which is your favorite?”

“I like the avocado one,” Tommy said. It was a tall, rectangular canvas, almost as tall as us, of a cut-in-half avocado on a field of sky blue, not unlike the cover of the eponymous Pearl Jam record that had just come out. The seed of it seemed to pulse like a soul.

“They’re great!” I said, looking around. “Did you do all these?”

“Yes, I painted them. I’ve taken it up over the past few years. I’m glad you like them; I’ve hardly shown them to anyone besides Grandma.”

“Why are you showing me and Jude?”

Grandpa Goodspeed sucked in a breath and held it for a moment before answering: “Because I think you’re right, what you said, Tommy. All that stuff—it is what life is about. For the people who understand, anyway, and the people who have the privilege to live it. You’ve just realized it too early. I worked my whole life in the grocery business without even questioning it because that’s just what Goodspeed’s did. I thought that’s what life was, working in the grocery store, but it’s not. It’s about your loved ones and your passions. And someday your dad might realize it too, when he retires, and you’ve moved on, and he has little to live for either. He’ll find his own hobby.”

“I doubt it,” Tommy scoffed.

“Look, Tommy,” said his grandfather, grabbing Tommy by the shoulders. “Wanting to be a poet or an academic is well and good, but if you’re going to go to college, go for something useful. It’s hard to live a poet’s life. I don’t want to see that for you. Appease your father. Poetry is good, but it’s a hobby, not a career. Do something that makes money, good money. Create a life for yourself, build something big, have your kids. Then when it’s all over,” he gestured to his studio filled with food paintings, “you’ll have this. You’ll have your poems. You’ve only got to earn it first. You’ve got to play the game. And win it, if you can. Then enjoy the spoils.”

Tommy nodded a nod that did not convey an internalization of the theme his grandfather presented. He looked out the round attic window at the sun in the final throes of its setting over Kinderhook Lake. “Grandpa, I really don’t want to go to Albany Academy,” he said.

Grandpa Goodspeed looked at me, and we locked eyes. I knew he thought he saw in me the reason why Tommy was so adamant about not attending Albany Academy.

I don’t think I was it, though. Tommy didn’t just want to stay with me, he wanted to stay in Veddersburgh because if it was true that he wanted to be a ‘poet’ then it was also true that he was a romantic, and while Albany Academy was perceived to be romance-less, Veddersburgh was bursting with, at the very least, a dark sort of romance that made it ripe for plucking inspiration. He wanted to be a living man in a dead town.

“I’ll talk to your father,” he said. “Now, what do you say we go and do the big ballyhoo!”

We went back downstairs and outside to the fire, where I discovered that the Goodspeed method of conflict resolution was to pretend the conflict never happened and to not mention it, no matter what, in a way that was very fitting of the Goodspeed WASP-ish heritage. Aunt Liz and Grandma Goodspeed were already back with the group, and Uncle Travis was helping Mr. Goodspeed prepare the fireworks.

The rock they launched them from was a good rock of about knee height (compared to the six-foot Mr. Goodspeed) and slightly angled toward the lake, as if the glacier that brought it there millions of years ago knew it would be used for the purpose of shooting fireworks over the lake it had also deposited nearby, in celebration of a country of men that would someday inhabit parts of the land beneath its miles of ice.

“Alright, alright, let the biggest ‘T’ take over,” Grandpa Goodspeed said, stepping forward.

“It’s all set, Dad. Just gotta light it,” one of the brothers said.

And light it he did, with a woosh and sparkle that frightened me as it flew up and over the lake like a high, looping line-drive for a single, and burst with a boom I felt in my chest.

“Ballyhoo!” All the Goodspeeds cried out together.

I couldn’t help but think how bullshit this tradition was, yet somehow also quaint and idyllic in a way that shouldn’t be possible in our world of harsh realities. I made eye contact with Maddie (Maddie? Yes, it was definitely her, she was the one with the freckle, not Maggie) and tried to read some kind of nascent teenage eye-roll, but all I was met with was wild excitement, as though she were witnessing a religious rite of great importance.

Grandpa Goodspeed led the firing of more fireworks, in turn asking each Goodspeed to unleash a ballyhoo of their own. He had enough for each Goodspeed to enthusiastically take part. Even Aunt Liz bashfully let loose her own ballyhoo.

There were still some rockets left once everyone had a turn. Grandpa Goodspeed turned to me. “Jude, do you have it in you?” he asked.

I figured I had at least one ballyhoo in me. I let out a loud yell as Grandpa Goodspeed unleashed the final rocket of the night. Tommy laughed and slapped me on the back in congratulation.

I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, but as I watched the firework burst out over the lake and rain red, white, and blue fire, I somehow knew it was a high point for Tommy and me, not just in our friendship but in the breaking of barriers from boys to men, the moment just before which innocence was lost and everything was still pure and hopeful, the apex before reality came closing in.

We were ripe avocados who were still green and gone soft, but not yet brown on the inside.

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