Paddlehands Pt. II
I thought ping-pong was just a game. That all changed when I joined the Bayonne High-School Ping-Pong Club.
Read the first part of this four-part story.
Before I go forward, I must take you back in time. You must understand who Eddie Finck was and what he did to me in the ice rink gymnasium at Bayonne High School all those years ago. Because without that knowledge, what comes next seems like the pathetic plotting of a pitiable fool. And I may be many things, but a fool I am not.
Though I’m sure we passed each other in the hallways once or twice, Finck and I hadn’t spoken before senior year. Boys like us tended to keep our heads down when we walked. We didn’t want to risk attracting undue attention. Out in the open plain, bullies and thugs singled out twerps like us who strayed too far from our larger, distinct packs of weirdos. Just as Mickey, Jeremy, and I offered each other false protection against embarrassment or physical harm, Finck had his minions, too, who kept him safe until the bell rang and he transformed into the baddest kid in school.
Bayonne, which is among the most densely populated cities in the most densely populated counties in the most densely populated state in the U.S., has a single public high school. Students are funneled to it not from middle schools but from a dozen K-8 elementary schools, each with their own distinct population and culture.
Mickey, Jeremy, and I had come from PS #14, a magnet school on the border of the east side. Unlike Midtown, Mary J, and Henry Harris, which pulled students from their respective neighborhoods, PS #14 was a tiny, artificial community consisting of snobs, brainiacs, and a preset number of Black, Hispanic, and Asian kids to make it seem like the administrators at least tried to reflect the broader demographics of our city.
Just as the school had its pros—students received the best free education in Bayonne—it also had its cons. The most obvious was that the lack of ruffians in the hallways or competitive sports in which we excelled (besides chess club and Quiz Bowl) had made us soft. The majority of my classmates stayed in their idyllic bubbles after graduation, going off to private schools in Jersey City or New York, never to be seen again. Mickey, Jeremy, and I were among only a handful of Jaguars who arrived at BHS, directly into the honors program or second-year courses, ensuring that other kids made fun of us for being nerds.
Finck came from Lincoln School on the east side. Today, that area of Bayonne is unrecognizable from the one we knew as boys. Where crooked politicians and wealthy, out-of-town developers have installed large shopping centers, luxury condos, a cruise port, even a golf course built on top of a landfill that Donald Trump flies into via helicopter, there were abandoned buildings, factories, and toxic waste. Few children I knew were brave enough to cross into the east side except for birthday parties, since Lincoln had the largest indoor pool in the city, with a high diving board I once bellyflopped from, landing so close to the edge that I still have nightmares of shattering my skull on its ceramic tiles. On the way to those parties, the rumors we heard were substantiated by our very eyes. Oil and sewage really lined the streets of boarded-up homes. Stonefaced criminals sold all kinds of illegal contraband, from bootleg DVDs to exotic animal skins, on the street corners. From the safety of our parents' cars, we observed everything from knife fights to cock fights to drunken scraps between small children and the ghosts of ancient Dutchmen.
This was the land from which Finck came.
Like those Dutchmen who first settled in our city, Finck was a ghost to me until my friends and I joined the Ping-Pong Club at the special invitation of our gym teacher, Ms. DeMaria. As I shared in a recent story about Jeremy’s superhero alter ego, our trio treated senior year like grandparents with pensions or 401ks treat retirement. We could recline in the luxury of being the big kids on the block for once. With few academic requirements left to fulfill, we took easy electives, wrote for the school newspaper, started our own after-school clubs—Jeremy, BHS’s first Christian club; Mickey and I, its first (and last) Seinfeld Club—and aligned our schedules so that we had nearly ever class together, including P.E.
Because our graduating class had more students than many towns have residents, seniors had to pick from one of at least seven gym options and rotate out after each marking period. Those options included ice skating, golf, basketball, weightlifting, tennis, volleyball, and ping-pong. Figuring we should try something new, that first marking period, we selected ping-pong. A month in, Ms. DeMaria noticed how quickly and passionately we took to the game she loved, wielding our paddles with dignity and respect as we demolished our disinterested classmates. We were ready for the next level of competition.
“What do you guys think about joining the Ping-Pong Club?” she asked as we handed in our paddles at the end of a class in late September 2006. We’re down to clown, we told her. She explained that the club met three days a week after school. “There are some pretty serious players in there, but you guys should do just fine,” she said. “Come prepared.”
Over that weekend, Mickey, Jeremy, and I went to Blockbuster and rented a documentary about ping-pong—which we learned, for the first time, was referred to as table tennis by the British and other self-important people in Europe and New England. We memorized the names of the moves and tactics while eating Chinese delivery from Tung-Hing. After we’d digested our fried wontons, we mimicked the movements in Mickey’s parent’s living room. Once the school bell rang the following Monday, we strolled into the gymnasium, ready to take on the world. We swung open the thick metal doors into the gym, and our eardrums were met instantly by a cacophony of sounds: voices shrieking, sneakers skidding against polished floors—like some middle-ground between an Olympic training facility and a dog pound.
The club’s membership was dominated by misfits and foreigners: mostly Arab and Asian kids, with some Slavic, African, and Desis sprinkled in. We scanned the crowd and recognized just one or two faces. Players huddled together, talking smack in their mother tongues as they stretched. Then Ms. DeMaria blew her whistle, and they scattered to select their tables for singles play. The rules were simple: play to 21, win by two points. The winner stays at their table, and the loser shifts to the right. That way, everyone has a chance to compete against the best and worst players by day’s end. Every member’s goal was simple: hold your ground the longest to earn the admiration of Ms. DeMaria and your peers.
Ms. DeMaria had the club members set up two rows of about a dozen tables. I scrutinized the players hovering beside them. They looked like us, with their pimply faces, bad haircuts, and poorly-fitted clothes. Not a single muscle was visible among them, and my guard fell. But I’d soon learn while they might not have been physical specimens on the outside, they were a special breed of athlete: lithe, nimble, calculating—copperheads disguised as pillow pets.
The first week, our trio was walloped from pillar to post. Among uninspired players in gym class, we only needed moderate levels of concentration, agility, and strategy to emerge as kings of our respective hills. But that didn’t work against Egys like Fady or Ahmad, who could chop the ball with gravity-defying spin, or the Koreans and Chinese, who’d tie you up in knots, striking hook loops to the far edges of the table that sent you diving like a goalkeeper helpless to save a penalty kick in the World Cup final.
It took days for me just to figure out how to get the ball back in play off a serve from one of these monsters. But by the third week, I was getting the hang of things. During a long rally against a Kenyan transfer student, I blocked one of his smashes with my backhand, sending a soft return down the middle of the table. It should’ve been an easy point for him had he struck it powerfully with his forehand. But instead, he dropped his paddle and stood up stiffer than a strand of dry spaghetti. “Masihi,” he muttered, staring toward the front of the room. “What?” I asked, perplexed. “That’s my point,” I said.
“Masihi!” he repeated, pointing toward the doors. “Do you see?”
I turned just as the metal door closed behind a tall, pale figure in dark shades and a leather jacket.
Eddie Finck stood there, looking like he’d just stepped off the set of Top Gun. He sneered detestably at the horde. A matching leather holster on his belt carried what I soon learned was the most dangerous weapon I’d ever meet in battle. The wooden handle of the paddle glistened as if freshly oiled. On the red rubber, shimmering cubic zirconia traced his initials in cursive.
“You’re late, Eddie,” Ms. DeMaria said, walking toward him as the room fell silent. Her agitation was obviously feigned. “We already started. Grab a table.”
“Sorry about that, Ms. D,” he said, pulling off his shades. “I’ll take that one.” He pointed a long, skinny finger to the last table in the second row. The Red Sea parted. The table's occupants locked eyes with Finck before scurrying away. As he sauntered straight-shot toward the back, a member of his entourage ran up, taking Finck’s jacket and standing off to the side like a ball boy at the U.S. Open.
Over my shoulder, I heard Mickey giggling. “Of course, Finck plays ping-pong,” he said. “What a weirdo.” I laughed, too, way too loudly. It echoed in the silence. An Indian kid at a nearby table shushed us. “Be respectful,” he said, gesturing that we shut our lips.
“Why is everyone being so weird?” I asked Jeremy, who stood just as mummified as the Kenyan had been minutes earlier.
“I’ve heard the legend of the one they call Paddlehands,” he whispered in an eerie monotone. Norbert, another Polish kid to Jeremy’s right, muttered an indecipherable string of consonants at my friend. “It can’t be,” he said. But the boy nodded in return: Grszwcwzjck, like the white noise on a television set. Grszwcwzjck.
“That’s him,” Jeremy confirmed. “That’s Paddlehands.”
I’ll fast-forward here because you can put together what happened next. Finck dominated. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, he picked the last table in the back right corner of the gym, challenging everyone in the room to make him move. He seemed to take personal offense at the idea of having to walk across the floor and restart like the rest of us.
It was entertaining to watch Paddlehands from afar. His games ended quickly and savagely. Inevitably, his opponents lifted their bruised bodies and battered egos from the floor, and Finck would extend a limp hand, then call his minion to bring him a Yoo-Hoo or a bag of Funyuns to snack on as he waited for his next victim.
For my crew, Ping-Pong Club was fun when we rallied against friends like Danny Sautkin and Dave Aziz, who cracked jokes and didn’t take themselves too seriously. Sometimes we won, sometimes we lost. But against Finck, 21-0 games were the norm. And rather than be gracious and give you an easy point, let you rally a little bit before delivering his final blow, he’d smash the ball right at your chest on the first return. “Nice game, Finck,” I said, annoyed, after one particularly savage beating. He snickered back, “Yup, nice game. Maybe next time.”
In January, Ms. DeMaria announced that, just as every year prior, the club would host a Student-Teacher Tournament in April. She expected anyone who wanted to compete to find a teacher to serve as their doubles partner and sign up by the last Friday in March. The night after the announcement, we slept over at Mickey’s house, and, in between slices of Naples pizza, we plotted how we’d take Finck down. “Statistically, his strength should be weakened by a partner who’d indubitably be his inferior,” Jeremy said. “Does Finck even go to class?” Mickey asked. “How could he be so good? Does he have an exemption to just play ping-pong all day?”
The answers to our questions would arrive on the last day of registration. By then, we all had our partners. Jeremy had asked Mr. Szyposzynski, our European history teacher and the advisor of the Polish Club for which Jeremy served as vice president. But Mr. Szyp, an Army man who believed in hierarchy, elected to go with the club’s president, Tri Nguyen (yes, the president of the Polish Club really was a dude from Vietnam). Jeremy’s second choice was Mr. Broderick, the Irish-Bayonnean tennis coach who wore short shorts, a nylon tennis jacket, and a garnet-and-white headband through winter. Mickey selected his homeroom teacher, Mr. H, the Ukranianian junior orchestra conductor whose last name was even more complicated to spell than Mr. Szyp’s.
I didn’t know who I’d ask at first. But I was confident that to face Finck, I would need someone ruthless, heartless. A fearless warrior who’d forged fire in the tundra, drank shots of distilled whale blubber for breakfast, and wrestled polar bears for fun. By those conditions, my choice was obvious: Mr. Bryngeirsson, the Icelandic social studies teacher and assistant soccer coach. I had a history with Mr. Bryngeirsson that I’ll tell you later, but I knew that before the ice storm that was Eddie Finck, I would need him by my side.
The day’s matches were over, and the gym had cleared by 4:30 p.m. that final Friday. Mickey, Jeremy, and I waited and waited. For a month, we checked religiously after each meeting to see who Finck had put down on the paper. Nothing. The clock was ticking. Ms. DeMaria walked to retrieve the sign-up sheet one last time, and just as we bumped fists, slightly disappointed, knowing the victory would never be as sweet against inferior opposition, Finck raced into the room. He went straight to Ms. DeMaria and covered his mouth so we couldn’t hear. She nodded; he shrugged. “Okay, okay, Eddie,” she said. “I understand.”
“Dude, he’s out,” Mickey whispered, observing the exchange. “It’s highly improbable that DeMaria would give him an extension, and if so, we could protest,” Jeremy said. “Yeah, yeah,” I said. But I was nervous, tapping my foot on the floor and clicking my pen. Finck left the room. Ms. DeMaria stared into the nothingness beyond, weighing something heavy in her mind. And then she put her pen to the paper.
She clicked the pen off and dropped the hand that held the sign-up sheet to the side. We were too far off to see, so Jeremy rose and waved to get her attention. “Ms. DeMaria. Ms. DeMaria,” he said. She turned to him. “Please forgive me for intruding. But may I ask: is he playing? Is Paddleha—Finck going to compete.”
“Yes, Jeremy, she said. “He is.”
“But who will be his partner?” Jeremy asked.
“I will,” she said.
Read Part III of this four-part story.
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