Davy Croquet

David Sunrise Allender wasn’t much. Just overweight enough to be made fun of for it, but not so much so that anyone would come to his defense and tell the other kids that their jeering was mean. Bad at sports, but had a decent punt, so was never last-pick. Not particularly smart, but Cs kept him above the special attention bracket. The handful of friends he had were of similar inconsequence, but were at least polarized by their academic failings or cliché social degeneracy. Really, David’s most notable trait was the silly middle name that his ex-hippy hashhead father had managed to convince his late-life baptism conservative mother to allow on the birth certificate. It’s hard to say how couples like that ever end up getting to the point of conception, but I’d guess it was either David’s dad trying to “enlighten” his mom, or her trying to rebel against some suburban family convention she’d been weighted by for so long by marrying the first man she could find whose dank patchouli stench overpowered her parents’ potpourri. In any case, the union was predictably short-lived, and David found himself in one of those preposterous court hearings where who a seven year-old boy chose to live with had as much legal weight as the parental credibility of either of his options. So Davy grew up a momma’s boy.

As with most people that find themselves in similarly bleak and unremarkable situations, Davy wasn’t very widely known. Which, on one hand, is too bad, because I’m sure he was just as interesting as any human can be when given the opportunity to explain his or herself. On the other hand, however, being popular in one’s mediocrity can foster a lasting humiliation I doubt someone like Davy would’ve had the strength or basic gusto of life to shrug off. I’m not about to claim to’ve been close to him, as people often do in effort to shake whatever irrational guilt they find themselves weighted with, but I did spend a fair amount of time with him. It was during these hangings-out that he would eagerly divulge as much of his life story as I had time to hear. Of course I didn’t think much about it then, but I’m relatively certain that almost anyone who gave him an afternoon was privy to similar confession. A highschool counselor’s menial psychology degree would probably credit Davy’s openness and sensitivity to the lack of a legitimate father figure in his life. In the three years we were acquainted, Davy mentioned speaking with his dad only a handful of times, maybe half of which were in person, and even then, deliberately fleeting.

I met Davy in a bland corporate bookstore through a mutual friend. Erica was nondescript in her own way, but enjoyed marginal social cushion leftover from her freshman year as a majorette. Most of her girlfriends had gone on to be cheerleaders, and she probably could’ve, but seemed to prefer a plainer agenda. I was never told how the two had met, but the complete lack of overlap in their friend circles pointed to forced seating assignments in a lab class or something. How the two first found themselves romantically entangled, I also do not know, but can only suspect it was under equally uncomfortable and awkward circumstances.

But entangled they were, and for that three months, I exchanged little more with Davy than nods or minimal salutations as we passed in the halls between classes. Unlike most adolescent relationships, the nature and details of theirs weren’t under the slightest scrutiny. No gossip whatsoever. And I always kind of admired that. More than likely it was just because neither of the two were hot topics on their own, so their sum was of little ripple, but even that is its own poetic cliché in the isolated satisfaction they seemed to find in one another’s company. But, considering how things eventually transpired, the affection may’ve been heavily lopsided.

Croquet is pretty hilarious. Of all the ninny games of upper white British society, why did croquet (and badminton) have to survive in tennis’s shadow? It was this, and how the game had managed to trot its way into our P.E. “curriculum”, that accounted for me being knee-deep in ponder when Davy trudged out of the gymnasium onto the field fifteen minutes after the rest of us. So quizzed was I by the absurdity of whacking wooden balls with wooden mallets through seemingly arbitrarily-placed metal goals that I didn’t notice that he was completely flushed until halfway through the period. Had we been playing soccer or basketball, a sweaty, red-faced Davy would’ve been no oddity, but that he was so physically defeated and that his brow was so furrowed by a game even a Lady could play was a point of curiosity among my teammate (we played in teams because the school could only afford so many wooden balls and wooden mallets and metal goals) and me.

Even though I was on casually friendly terms with him, it was a while before I gathered the nerve to intrude on Davy’s game and ask if he was feeling alright. Something told me his afternoon consternations were deeper set than my own (though that’s not to undermine the utter preposterousness of spending two weeks’ worth of P.E. on a game so akin to crochet, both in phonetics and debasement of pubescent masculinity). He shrugged off my inquiries and continued with the game, growing progressively more serious and competitive, eventually refusing to allow his teammate any turns, insisting that he would “Only fuck things up.” So we all backed off as much as possible, offering forfeit. Voice cracking, Davy insisted that we finish the game, because, he said, we never finish anything.

The more people you meet and experience the less surprised you find yourself when you see someone in a state alien to that which you’ve come to expect of them. At sixteen, however, it’s easy to forget that you and your closest friends aren’t the only ones knelt before the desperate whim of hormonal entropy. Davy was soft-spoken, agreeable, and passive. So when Davy was not soft-spoken, agreeable, and passive, I’d no idea how to approach or interact with him. The most I could muster were weak congratulatory remarks when he’d whack the wooden balls with the wooden mallet in a direction I guess must’ve been the right one. As his emotional condition further manifested itself, the game seemed to slow. The more his tears traced the runs from his sweat, the more carefully he plotted his angles. The more his nose ran onto his lip, the more deliberately he took his shots. When he’d reached his goal, or whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish in the game, he practically barked that he’d finish my team’s game for us. Fumbling for words, we gestured towards our balls in compliance, still trying to settle a balance between ignoring his throes and feigning understanding and commiseration.

Davy finished the game and almost immediately reverted to his demure self. His mom took a job somewhere in the Midwest six months later. We weren’t close enough to keep in touch.

Erica had broken up with him that afternoon in the break before our P.E. class. Supposedly he’d spent that fifteen minutes throwing up on the floor of the locker room, but everything was cleaned up by the time we went back in to change.

To attempt qualify something as impossibly intangible as real-life experience and revelation is not only tryingly trite, but also a little too assuming. It assumes that, because his parents got divorced, Davy lost faith in love, and so that, when he thought he’d found it, to lose it and have his doubts confirmed was exponentially more difficult than it would’ve otherwise been; than it was for Erica, whose parents were not divorced. It assumes that, because he was raised by, and held a close relationship with, a conservative single mother, he was overly sensitive and susceptible to an emotional dependency that most boys of his age were spared by a more prominent patriarch. While these are valid conclusions to draw, they’re too simple and easy. They seem to undermine everything else in Davy’s life that may’ve contributed to the importance of that game of croquet.

So maybe it’s more honest, or at least more encompassing, to evaluate how things don’t affect you. How they don’t change the way you see things. How they don’t distort or pervert your concepts and perceptions. How when Davy hanged himself in his mom’s house two years later and detailed the entire event and the croquet game in his suicide letter, it meant absolutely nothing to me.