Summer sun compressed the neighborhood into a stillness between noon and 3 p.m., when I had to be home so that my father could sleep for his third shift. Until then, two silver Huffy bikes adorned the front walkway to my friend Antoine’s house, halfway between the sidewalk and the stoop where we sat swishing and clicking LEGO bricks for what felt like hours until we found the right pieces in the right color.
Elsewhere on our block in the Chicago suburbs, the occasional interlude: a basketball pulsed pavement then clunked on a rim. Bass gurgled from a passing car, vibrations wiggling windows in repeating patterns of home architecture. Then quiet again with the exception of the bricks clattering and scattering as we made our latest custom creations. On other days, we’d link up with Chris to stand sentry on opposite sides of the street and toss a football back and forth. Or maybe we were the ones thumping our hoop dreams into Chris or Antoine’s driveways, where they inched the rims closer to the sky each time to encourage our prepubescent bodies to stretch into a frame more fit for Jordan or Kobe, rock in hand, reaching toward the sun.
My imagination felt more grounded with the bricks spread across Antoine’s stoop. I wasn’t an athletic kid, much of that owing to not-yet-diagnosed chronic illness. As I pressed pieces together, I could envision another self, one worth building between our two bins of LEGO. With the arrival of the Star Wars prequel The Phantom Menace, Spider-Man, and other larger-than-life films, our minds were tethered to science fiction and crafting whatever worlds we could devise. Our cars included large wheels to crush hostile terrain. Our starfighters darted through the sludge of summer humidity, dogfighting in our hands. Our fortresses sported turrets, drawbridges, and other defenses to keep enemies at bay. No matter the setting or type of build, we fashioned ourselves as 1.5-inch LEGO minifigure warriors. The stoop served as the equalizer in its role as a platform for worlds neither of us could reach. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t dribble a basketball between my legs. It didn’t matter that Antoine wouldn’t get a growth spurt until he was halfway through high school. It didn’t matter that our models could muster their might only in our minds because of their rainbow liveries composed of whatever mismatched parts we could source from our inventories. On the stoop, flanking our bins, we could both be anything we wanted.
Not only did we share in this imagination, but also, we shared bricks without limits. Nothing sapped the hours in summer like a LEGO session when one of us was finally ready to dismantle a recent set, rife with parts unfamiliar to our current collections, ready to don teeth marks when our chewed-low fingernails couldn’t pry pieces apart. The exchange wasn’t equivalent. Antoine’s selection far exceeded mine in terms of quantity and variety. Often while sweeping bricks off the concrete and back into my bin, I’d ask, “So how many pieces do I owe you?” This would be after I had commandeered several of his specialized parts, including a large castle baseplate once. Summer and this kinship abided no accounting — at least for us. “Yeah, because you know them LEGOs cost money,” Antoine’s mother once said, easing us aside so that she could open the door.
I didn’t reply. When you’re a pre-teen boy and your friend’s mom is younger than all others on the block and painfully beautiful, few words trip and fall out of your mouth most of the time. Plus, Antoine and I knew we were good to settle up any discrepancies whenever. That’s how it is with best friends who will be best friends forever.
That’s also how it is with a friendship born out of a fight — if you could even call it that. Before Antoine and I spent hours building and baking in the sun on his stoop, we met at the playground at the elementary school where we went. I was there with my older sister and our childhood friend. When Antoine showed up, we invited him to a game of tag. Given my aforementioned deficiencies in the athletics department, I served a perpetual term as “it,” which prompted a lot of taunting from this new kid whom I had never seen on the block or at the playground before. My temper ignited. I charged at only him, but he juked my touch each time. He dipped, cut back, spun, weaved between the swings, sprinted beneath the monkey bars, soared up the slide. Another miss and another miss. My shoes dug trenches in the mulch as I slid right, with Antoine stutter-stepping left. We exchanged shit talk, and then the game ended when he took off on his bike with my running after him and hawking a loogie in his direction. He rolled back around a short while later, shotgunning insults and speeding off again past the playground.
Unamused with our posturing, my sister and our friend said, “If y’all gonna fight, then fight.”
I had never thrown a punch in my life. The only fights I participated in were the ones I conjured in imaginative play in which I could embody the feats of Tommy Oliver from Power Rangers. That day, no magical armor or expert martial arts skills would empower my blows. Antoine threw his bike down, and we stomped toward our open-air arena. In the field next to the playground, our bout likely resembled a waltz. With my hands in his, Antoine spun me around in circles. His fascination with WWF matches fumbled against my lack of fighting knowledge, and we danced for a few minutes until it was clear neither of us intended to swing. My sister, our friend, and I left, and my confusion and embarrassment amalgamated as my companions criticized the lackluster scuffle.
Those emotions melted into fear as a crowd of kids trailed and then surrounded us when we were halfway home. Apparently, Antoine was popular enough to summon a posse, and his supporters craved blood. They didn’t request a proper brawl; they growled, “Knock his bitch ass out.”
Antoine and I faced off. With his on-demand Thunderdome, my ineptitude for pugilism, and my lack of allies who would intervene, I felt sure that the next thing to happen would be me getting punched in the face. I braced for the blow, but Antoine kept his hands at his sides. Even with one kid screaming in his ear to do it, he just stared. The mob eventually got the hint and carried its champion away, grief-stricken by his mercy when they wanted to see some teeth fly but nonetheless assured of his victory by intimidation alone. Walking away still fearing retribution, I looked back to see Antoine walk through the front door of a house that I would soon run to every afternoon with a bin of LEGO shaking in my hands the whole way.
That day could have constructed a life-long feud between us. Yet it somehow led to summer afternoons with plastic bricks, a mutual fascination for Jedi, and a few years of stumbling through boyhood together. Our friendship dissolved when I started high school (Antoine was a grade lower than me), not long before I felt the pressure to give up all my toys for more adult interests. We both sank deeper into our respective tiers on the social hierarchy when he reached high school. He grew taller than me, made it to the basketball team, and kept attractive girls in his orbit. I joined chess club and the tennis team, was ostracized from and bullied by almost every social circle, and sank further into social awkwardness and inappropriateness. As I watched Antoine embody everything that I thought I wanted for myself, I missed those days when the only barriers dividing us were the bins, when I would run out to his house right at noon because my father had said it was late enough to go out and play. Those few hours produced a sense of belonging that I wouldn’t feel again until college. Just as we thought our latest fortress or hovercar creations were the best things that we’d ever made and that we’d never cannibalize for parts to chase a new idea, so, too, we once believed our friendship would remain unbreakable.
Today, a LEGO minifigure crafted in my likeness sits on my desk. Like his predecessors, he is a space-bound warrior. Like my younger selves, my real life comes nowhere close to the feats I’ve imagined for my 1.5-inch avatar. I wonder if Antoine, like me, found the hobby again in adulthood. Does he, too, have bins of bricks and models spanning dwindling shelf space? Maybe he has a minifigure that looks like him throttling the hyperspace engine on a spaceship that could speed right out of his own galaxy and into mine. Maybe they’ll meet in this other universe, find a stoop, and speak of all the valor that awaits when another brick clicks into place.
Image by City of Boston Archives on flickr.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
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