I do have a friendship with one boy, or something like a friendship. His name is Mikey, he lives two houses away, and although I like him he is retarded. My mother explains it’s not his fault that he’s different, that he doesn’t understand what other children do, though I can sense even in her defense a certain disdain, which has to do with the fact that Mikey grunts. He looks just like all the rest of the neighborhood boys—tanned from playing outside, crew cut sun-bleached nearly white at the tips, old shorts and T-shirt, only a little dirtier than the rest of us—but he doesn’t speak. Though he manages to express himself, if only for his own pleasure or satisfaction. I play with Mikey in the backyard, and he runs around grunting in the oleanders, a beast.

He is interesting for several reasons. First, he’s almost infinitely pliable. You can play all sorts of games with him, put him in any position, and it’s fine with him. You can say, Mikey, you are the mud puddle, and we are all going to jump in you and take a mud-bath, and he just laughs and loves the whole thing. You can say, Mikey, you are the dog, now wear this collar and drink from a bowl, and he does and laughs and grunts some more.

Second, Mikey is always available. Other kids have homework and things to attend to, develop animosities, practice piano or the new social arts of rivalry and exclusivity, but not Mikey. He’s around every minute, it seems, except when his mother calls him—“Mike-y, Mik-eey,” over the gray cinder-block fences, the oleanders and tool sheds of the backyards. All you have to do is look at him, and he’s right there next to you, your friend for life. Even if you don’t deserve it.

Third, there is some sweetness about him, a contagious happiness that’s hard to miss. Although of course it gets boring, the un-modulated pleasure, the fact that he’s all dumb delight. If Linda would draw herself tiny, and Astro-Boy draw himself huge, filling the page with the force and singularity of himself, what would Mikey do? He’s a blank screen, an open field, pure receptivity.

One day I have brought some scissors out of the house, and pretty soon I conceive a game of hairdresser, with Mikey as my client. He of course complies, holding still; I’m just going to give him the slightest trim, but before you know it I’ve botched it, there’s a big chunk out of Mikey’s already short hair. He looks like an accident victim, a fact not lost on his mother when he gets home.