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inspired me to ask Michael to explore the canyon with me. I was, admittedly, a kid who was easily shaken. I wished I could be as fearless as my dad, but I seemed to have a different biological makeup when it came to courage. Michael was the only kid I knew who wasn’t afraid of that canyon.
    “So are you cool with going into the canyon with me?” I asked.
    “I guess. If you buy me a Slurpee. Don’t try and touch my dick, though.”
    One seventy-nine-cent stop at 7-Eleven later and we were walking toward the Little League field. The closer we got, the more I could feel the pit of nerves in my stomach tightening.
    “So you’ve never gone really far into the canyon before?” I asked, trying to calm myself.
    “Why are you so gay for the canyon?” Michael asked.
    “I’m not. I just want to go in, look around, then come back out before practice.”
    “Are you retarded? You can’t just go into the canyon and not know where the coach is,” he said. “What if he gets to practice early, then sees us coming out of the canyon?”
    “So what do we do?”
    Michael quickly laid out a plan that seemed foolproof and tossed his thirty-two-ounce Slurpee container into a bush as we arrived at the empty field.
    Sure enough, he was right about Coach. He’d arrived early for practice, and would surely have caught us sneaking out of the canyon if we’d opted for my plan. The rest of the team straggled in soon after. My friend Steven, who I always warmed up with, grabbed a ball and walked up to me.
    “Ready to warm up?” he asked, popping a ball in and out of his glove.
    “Not today. Go warm up with a big dick,” Michael said to Steven, grabbing my arm and dragging me to the far end of the field. I glanced back at Steven and winked, assuming he’d understand that something was up and he shouldn’t take it personally.
    Michael and I started playing catch in the outfield. At any moment, Michael was going to say the code words and it would be go time. The anticipation was unbearable. I could barely hold on to the ball, my hands were trembling so badly with excitement. Suddenly, Michael’s face hardened. He looked at the coach who was helping another kid about fifty feet away, then looked back at me and uttered the code words: “My dog peed in the house yesterday.”
    I took a deep breath, reached my arm back, and hurled the ball at least ten feet above Michael’s head. It shot well past him and deep into the darkness of the canyon behind him.
    “Coach!” Michael yelled.
    Coach looked up from the lesson he was giving to another kid.
    “Our ball went into the canyon. We’re gonna go look for it, okay?”
    “Fine. But if you can’t find it quickly, come back up,” Coach replied.
    We nodded and jogged through the outfield and down the twenty-foot grass embankment that led to the canyon. At the bottom of the embankment we looked up. It was impossible for anyone on the field above to see us.
    “Okay,” said Michael.
    “Okay,” I replied.
    “Okay what? This is your thing, shithead. What do you want to do?” he asked impatiently.
    “Oh. Right.”
    I looked into the canyon, now just ten feet or so away. I could see past the first layer or two of tree branches and bushes, but beyond that it dropped off into darkness. I took a deep breath. There is no Patrick Swayze in an aquarium, I thought to myself. There s no Squidman.
    “Okay. Let’s go in through that part right there,” I said, pointing to a small path that crawled through two trees.
    Michael took the lead, and within twenty seconds we were deep enough into the canyon that when I turned to look back in the direction we had come from, all I could see were trees. The floor of the canyon was covered with dead leaves and some garbage: a few candy wrappers, a few empty 7-Eleven cups, which I strongly suspected had been hurled there by my comrade. My nerves were slowly subsiding. The farther we went, the less there was to look at. Just more trees, dead branches, and