Boyhood: the two best 10-year-olds in Boston; the Jamaica Way crash; a hanger-on at Weston

pivotal · UNDATED (B.S.; Boys' 10's through E.T.A.'s founding)

• When: UNDATED (the boys' junior-tennis years, B.S., through E.T.A.'s founding)
• What: Bain and Orin meet "across the net" in metro-Boston junior tournaments as the city's two best 10-year-old males and become daily practice partners in a junior development program at the Auburndale Tennis Club in West Newton, their mothers driving them out every weekday afternoon. Then the event that shapes everything after: Bain's parents are killed on the Jamaica Way commuter road in the freak crash of a radio traffic-report helicopter — the letter later returns to each parent separately, the mother "decapitated by a plummeting rotorblade" (p. 1050), the father, smuggled into a hypothetical about unhandy sons, "crushed into aspic in a freak accident on the Jamaica Way" (p. 1050). The orphaned Bain becomes "a sort of hanger-on at the Incandenza house out in Weston" and, when James Incandenza founds the Academy, one of its first matriculants. Orin's later account to Steeply ties Bain's signature affliction to the loss: the compulsive sweat "started after his parents were killed in a grotesque freak accident" (n234). [Attribution note: Bain's own testimony, written years later; the parents' deaths corroborated by Orin, n234.]