The only kid in the neighborhood who couldn’t find a way to fit in was John J. Misteli, who lived down the street. I don’t know why we knew his middle initial, but we did.
He didn’t go to public school like the rest of us. None of us knew which one he went to, just that it wasn’t ours. It wasn’t a crime or anything, and it never would have stopped us from including him in our games. There was just something so odd about him. He didn’t know how to play.
Even the way he dressed was weird. He’d come out to play in his school uniform, so soon as he showed up, he automatically didn’t fit in. Didn’t his parents know to have him put on his play clothes? How can you play if you can’t get your clothes dirty?
To be fair, we tried including him, but it was just too hard. And being clever, talented little bastards, we made up a chant to sing when he wasn’t there, though I think he could hear us from inside his house. We’d chant: John J. Misteli, the greatest name in history! It was stupid and made no sense because it sounded like we were paying him a compliment — which we weren’t. It was catchy and rhymed (sort of), so it stuck.
Not that I was so kind, either. I went along with it and certainly never tried to get the other kids to stop. To me, he was just too strange to pick on. Something was wrong with him.
I once saw him watching us play kickball from his window. I waved to him, but he disappeared. Weird, right?
I guess he thought I was his friend, or he wanted to be friends. So, one day, his mother called my mother to invite me over for lunch. Even that was weird, this formal invitation, for lunch. With anyone else, you’d be playing with your friend, and when it was lunchtime, you just went inside, and their mother would make sandwiches, because you were already there.
My mother stood in the kitchen with the cord stretched across the table saying yes, of course he can come. It’ll be fun. Yeah, right! Fun? No way! I went because I’d never been inside his house. Nobody had. If nothing else, that would be a reason to go. Like an undercover mission.
I went to his house at the designated time and rang his doorbell. His mother answered, and John J. Misteli was standing next to her in his school uniform and his geeky, horn-rimmed glasses. His mother said hello, invited me in, and I followed her to the dining room table. Not the kitchen table, where kids usually eat lunch. We sat at the nice dining room table, which was by definition uncomfortable. The chairs were too big, and there was a tablecloth and nice plates, and silverware. Silverware? Was this going to be a fancy dinner? Would President Johnson be having lunch with us? John Glenn? Mickey Mantle? Lucy and Desi?
His mother brought out a plate of tuna fish sandwiches. Tuna fish! Tuna fish is gross, especially when they put things in it, like celery, pickles, or olives stuffed with those weird little red things. It’s bad enough without making it worse. Thankfully, this tuna fish only had celery in it, which was the least offensive thing to add, so I ate it to be polite.
Oh yeah, she gave us Hawaiian Punch to drink. That was the only not-weird thing about it. Hawaiian Punch — red, sweet, delicious.
After lunch, we went downstairs to play in their rec room, where they had a TV, a sofa, a big wooden chest in front of it. John opened the chest. Inside were his toys. Lots of toys. So many toys! Pretty good toys, too. We looked at them for a minute, then he said, “Those are my toys,” and closed the chest.
How weird is that?
Then he turned on the TV. An exercise program was on. Jack LaLanne. We didn’t even look for something better. We just sat there watching it and didn’t even do the exercises. We didn’t play with his toys, we didn’t do anything fun, or even talk, until his mom came downstairs and said it was time for me to go.
The next day, everyone gathered round to hear the important intel I had gathered on my mission. They too found it strange that his mother had to call my mother to make a plan to eat lunch, disturbing that we ate at the fancy dining room table, and hilarious that he opened his chest of toys and said, “those are my toys.” To my surprise, most of the kids actually liked tuna fish regardless of what’s in it, so I didn’t get any traction from that. Hawaiian Punch is universal, so they agreed that at least something normal happened at John J. Misteli’s house.
It was a few months later, on a Sunday afternoon, when I walked out my front door, like always, and looked around to see who was playing and where. There were kids down the street. As I approached, I could see they weren’t exactly playing, but were huddled together, having some sort of discussion. One of the kids waved me in.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Should we tell him?”
“Yeah, we have to tell him.”
“Tell me what?”
One of the older boys took a breath and slowly announced that John J. Misteli… was DEAD.
“What?”
“He was killed.”
“Killed? Like, murdered?”
“No. He was hit by a truck.”
“Hit by a truck?”
“Yeah, a Mack truck. Last Sunday morning. Early. Out on Farmington Avenue.” Farmington Avenue was the main street that ran all the way through town and out to the less suburban, rural towns.
“That’s what my mother said. He was riding his bike, alone, way out on Farmington Avenue, and was hit by a truck.”
“A Mack truck,” someone’s little brother repeated for emphasis.
“It was still dark,” another boy added.
“He was riding his bike, alone, in the dark, out on Farmington Avenue?”
A different boy stepped forward. “No, it was getting light. That’s what my father said. He was riding in the dark, but the sun was coming up. That’s when he got run over.”
“By a Mack truck,” the little brother said again.
“OK, we got it!” said the kid’s older brother. “It was a Mack truck.”
We wondered how the boy’s father knew how dark it was when John J. Misteli was hit by a truck.
I had this awful feeling that this weird kid with weird parents and no friends, woke up one day, decided he’d had enough, and ran away…left his home, his neighborhood, and while he was at it, the world.
“Do you think he was running away?” I said out loud.
“That’s what I was thinking!” said one of the boys.
There were two girls listening from the edge of the group. One started crying. The other took her hand, and they walked away with their heads down.
We boys stood there discussing it endlessly, trying to figure out the gory details. We’d have gone on longer, but it was getting late, and we had to get home for dinner. In the end, nobody knew much of anything, except that John J. Misteli, the greatest name in history, was dead, hit by a truck (a Mack truck!) while riding his bike, alone, way out on Farmington Avenue on a Sunday morning at dawn.
The neighborhood felt different after that. We still played together, but it wasn’t the same. I’m not sure any of us felt guilty, exactly. I mean, we tried to be friendly to him, sometimes. But he was just so strange. Even his name was weird, and we’d teased him for it, and now he was dead. It was horrible to think about. Crushed under the wheels of a truck, his bicycle, mangled there on the side of Farmington Avenue with the sun coming up.
It wasn’t like other deaths you hear about on TV — Vietnam, the race riots, or all those college kids in Texas who were shot by some guy from the roof of a building. We knew this kid. He lived on our street. This death had a face on it. John J. Misteli’s weird little face, with his dumb-looking glasses, broken on the side of the road next to his sad, lifeless body.
It wasn’t even on the Evening News.
We heard about it from our parents for weeks after, shaking their heads in disbelief. “That poor boy,” they’d say at dinner, while passing the potatoes.
And then it was summer, and we were playing after dinner, and it was getting dark, and there it was! This big, greenish-yellow fireball moving slowly across the twilight sky, with a greenish-yellow tail. I thought it was a comet. But one of the kids said it was probably a meteor, but bigger and further away than the ones that zip across the sky, so it looks like it’s going slowly. And the greenish color was because of what it’s made of. And some other kid said it was a piece of space debris, or a busted satellite, burning up in the atmosphere.
Whatever it was, our game stopped and our eyes followed its strange light, as it cruised slowly across the heavens. I had the most eerie feeling, the kind you can’t really talk about, that it was John J. Misteli, the greatest name in history, looking down on us, watching us play. So, I waved to him, and he was gone.