For a Switchblade

All the boys in the neighborhood wanted a switchblade. A switchblade meant you were dangerous, a shadow come from nowhere, the one in control. I thought the slim weight in the pocket of my jeans would be a good weight, a live weight, like a bluefish hooked but moving back to sea or the weight of a girl’s breasts on your chest when you kissed her. So after school let out for summer we dreamed of switchblades the way some boys dream of women in lingerie, roller coasters, or hitting homeruns. Those blood-pact days were filled with thoughts of switchblades. Mine would have an ivory handle and sound the ardent click. But a switchblade wasn’t something a boy could buy. It had to be a grandfather’s gift as a matter of trust like secret sips of whiskey behind the garage on Christmas Eve or a pornographic calendar. It had to be awed and respected, polished and put away in the dresser where the socks were, maybe close to a Bible or a pouch of chewing tobacco not often touched and never flaunted. A boy wants a switchblade, but there are obstacles. So Doug Guspodin stole one.

Doug Guspodin was the Eddie Haskell of our neighborhood gang. Polite to grown-ups to a fault, he possessed the deep capacity for mischief where none existed. The blood-pact was his idea. I remember the pen-knife slicing my palm, the tingle, the Huck Finn handshakes thereafter. I remember he was the one who decided that February morning after the blizzard passed through to throw snowballs at the cars on Tuscarawas Avenue. He packed his with egg-shaped rocks and howled when he cracked the windshield of a white Datsun. We scampered away through the snow and hid among the bushes in Mr. Armbruster’s back yard, listening for sirens and hardly breathing. He was bound to be the one, of course, to pocket it in aisle 7 of the K-Mart, buy a pack of gum for normal looks, and then high-tail it through the parking lot past all the moms with grocery carts who led unsuspicious lives. Bowling that evening, drinking light beer and gossiping about Laurie Bennet’s affair or Sue Martin’s exasperations with her husband, they wouldn’t even remember him. He was out of breath when he came back, having run the seven blocks from the Magic City Plaza to the secret place where we waiting for him. It glinted silver and blue; it glinted like a movie scene, the stolen switchblade.

“How good is that shit,” he said. “How good is that fucking shit.” Nobody had seen him, thank God. It was June 11, 1983, a Saturday, and thunderstorms loomed on the late-afternoon horizon. I agreed that it was a monumental accomplishment, one worthy of additional planning. That night couldn’t be our usual of stealing cherry tomatoes from the neighbors’ gardens or playing Manhunt. We had to figure out what to do with the switchblade, which was now a piece of stolen property. Doug Guspodin had become a criminal and we were accomplices. We met at 8 at Nofzigers’ pear tree (they were all at church). Everybody in the neighborhood was tuned into a rerun of Diff’rent Strokes on NBC or drinking beer in their backyards, unaware of the intrigue taking place nearby. We suggested hiding-places. Deano offered the glove compartment of his father’s antique Corvette. Easy in, easy out. I suggested the gas tank of my father’s snow-blower. Easy in, but not easy out. Doug said gas was corrosive, too, which would be the worst thing for a switchblade. It being his, after all, he said he’d bury it. We believed that was a beautiful idea.

It only took a garden spade and a plastic bag. It only took a minute, he said, the next afternoon as we lined up for a game of Blooper Ball. But between the outs and pop flies snagged the way Toby Harrah did back then, all the talk was on the switchblade. “What if animals get at it?” Deano asked. “What if your dad goes out to plant some flowers?” These unnerving, almost brutal questions, sent Doug Guspodin spinning toward his house. The house where we’d played Donkey Kong in calmer times. The house in which his mother had offered us Tang and a tray of sugar cookies and said be quiet while I meet my friend from church. Doug had winked then. Us boys knew everything. The maniac—I believe Deano called him that—was digging up the switchblade in broad daylight. When he finally got it, he put it in his shorts and strolled back to us. The proverbial cat that had once again found the proverbial canary.

“What should I do with this fucking thing?” he asked. A cop car went by. The cop inside was talking on a walkie-talkie to another cop who had a buddy who must’ve seen something. The switchblade was turning into a suburban fiasco. It was clearly visible through Doug Guspodin’s shorts, a hard-on not quite a hard-on but getting there. We were at a loss. If not burial, then what? “We’ll put it in a tree. No one looks in trees.” And soon enough a ladder was gotten, of course, and he was up there among the scurrying squirrels looking for the perfect hiding-place. I understood the imperfections of the plan, but acquiesced because I was the youngest of the gang. He was up there a long time. Long enough for me to consider consequences and potential outcomes. Long enough for me to have crazy ideas of my father up there, as well, with the long silver shears cutting back the limbs, smoking, announcing to the neighborhood he’d found a knife. There’s a thief among us, he might’ve said. Or a damn rapscallion pretending to be a thief. I didn’t want my father to find the switchblade. It belonged to to Doug and us. It belonged to our boyhood, what remained of it receding.

For the weeks that ensued—months in a boy’s span of time—Doug Guspodin buried and re-buried the switchblade countless times. He hid it where even forensic detectives never would’ve looked, and hid it again and again. He slept with it and cried with it. He grew weary of its gnawing at him. He was Dostoyevski’s Raskolnikov pleading for resolution. He prayed and whimpered. He loved and adored and hated and ultimately tossed it into the Erie Canal down by Davis Printing. There it remains, I suppose, a strand of rust now and the blue all gone. It probably no longer even looks like a switchblade. But it did once, when we were boys and sworn to conquer the world. It was a beautiful switchblade—I remember—and reflected our bodies when the sun shone just right. It could’ve opened a thousand castles, a thousand bedrooms, a thousand ways into the future. It could’ve done all the things we weren’t yet ready to do. But not then, for we were small and our desires were even smaller than us.

Carl Boon is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (The Nasiona Press, 2019). His poems have appeared in many journals and magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Posit, and The Maine Review. He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University in 2007, and currently lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at Dokuz Eylül University.