by Paul Theroux
Frezza laughed at this and then said, “Mannaggia, look at the knockers on her, Vito,” offering him a picture torn from a magazine.
Quaglia opened his mouth wider, as though to see the picture better, showing his chipped tooth.
“Where’s your fairy banana man friend?”
Though I was hot and anxious, I pretended not to hear, made myself small, and slipped away as he looked closer at Frezza’s picture of a woman in a tight sweater.
He meant Walter, who was bullied because he was new, because he was weak, and especially because the word got out that he went to church on Saturdays. “Your wacky religion”—he couldn’t go to soccer games on Saturdays. Everything about him was noticed: he couldn’t eat meat, didn’t drink Coca-Cola because of the caffeine, couldn’t go to dances; he was a little too tall, and his clothes didn’t fit. His ears turned red and he went breathless and silent when he was bullied, suffering it, his ears reddening even more, and hadn’t fought back when he was depantsed.
“Quaglia hocked a louie at me in the corridor,” Walter whispered in English class. “At the bubbler.”
“He’s a pissah,” I said. “Tell him to rotate.”
Vito and Frezza always sat at the back of the class.
Mr. Purcell said, “Jay, do you wish to share your thoughts with the class?”
“No, sir.”
“Then sit up straight and pay attention.” He was holding a book. “Has anyone finished the book?”
He meant The Human Comedy. I did not raise my hand. I simply sat, breathing through my nose. It wasn’t that I hadn’t liked the book; I knew the book was bad. I could not have said that of the previous book, Silas Marner, but this one was unbelievable, sketchy, sentimental, and written like a lesson. I knew the fault was with the book and not with me.
My certainty that it wasn’t good made my head hot, as though I had been told a lie. I could have written an essay on why I didn’t like it. Instead, all of us had to write about why it was good. That was another reason I hated school, finding it unfair. But my disliking the book was a secret that also made me feel powerful, superior to school, but also out of place, like an outlaw. I believed in Little Richard more than I believed in Homer Macauley.
“Do you have something to say, Jay?”
“The teacher calls Joe Terranova a wop in chapter twelve,” I said.
Quaglia slammed his loose desktop and said, “Mannaggia!”
“Quiet,” Mr. Purcell said. “But the teacher was reprimanded for it. And what did the principal say?”
I had said enough. I had only wanted to shock the class by using the word “wop.” I shrugged, as though I didn’t know.
Mr. Purcell was holding the book open. “He said, ‘This is America, and the only foreigners here are those who forget this is America.’”
“And go to church on Saturday,” Vito said in a harsh whisper.
In science, the next class, Mr. Hoolie showed us a large glass ball filled with water.
“I’m taking for granted that you read the assigned pages,” he said, attaching a rubber tube to the glass ball. “This will show us two things. What two things? Anyone?”
“Air displacement,” Corny Kelleher said.
Mr. Hoolie took up a piece of chalk and wrote Air displacement on the blackboard.
“And?”
The answer was lung capacity. But I merely sat, squinting.
“It was in your homework,” Mr. Hoolie said.
“Air temperature?” Kelleher said.
“Lung capacity,” Mr. Hoolie said, and wrote the words on the blackboard. “Who’s first? Evelyn?”
We watched as Mr. Hoolie inserted a mouthpiece into the rubber tube, and then as Evelyn Frisch took the tube in her dainty fingers and placed it between her lips, there were murmurs from the back of the room.
“Settle down, people,” Mr. Hoolie said. “Go ahead, Evelyn. Blow as hard as you can.”
Vito muttered something, making his friends laugh.
“Mr. Quaglia, one more word from you and you’ll be seeing me after school.”
Evelyn had finished. The water in the glass ball had slipped down. Then it was Walter’s turn. He did it, reddening from the effort, and gasped when he was done. The class laughed, and even Mr. Hoolie smiled.
Next Ed Hankey took the tube and blew, and the water level dropped sharply. He bowed to the class, making them laugh, then sat behind me and flicked my ear with his finger.
“Beat that, banana man,” he said into his hand, and the class bell rang.
“Homework,” Mr. Hoolie said. “The principles of the light bulb, chapter five.”
Walter was hit by a spitball in history class. The teacher, Mr. Gagliano, was asking about the Louisiana Purchase, the previous night’s homework, and called on Walter, who was wiping the back of his head where the spitball had hit.
“Can you tell us about the Louisiana Purchase?”
As Walter shook his head, Mr. Gagliano turned to me. “Jay?”
Thomas Jefferson. 1803. The French sold it after they failed in Haiti. Slavery. Napoleon. Fifteen million dollars. I said, “Nope.”
Something at Miller Baldwin, a caged and hung-up feeling, and a jostling, and a gummy taste of failure I could not explain, made me wish to be mediocre and anonymous, and to hide my head from the ferocity of the school. It made me want to live in a foreign country. While depending on a hidden strength for no one to know me, I succeeded in keeping myself at Walter’s level, though the assaults were worse for him than for me. The rest of the day was the same, the routine of avoiding eye contact, or any contact, threading my way through the students without calling attention to myself. We sat with Burkell over our sandwiches at lunch at a far table, and at recess we stayed by the fence. We knew we had to keep ourselves apart.
The end of the day was the worst class of all, phys ed—Mr. Gagliano also taught phys ed. The embarrassment of changing in the locker room among the shouting boys; the pushing, the actual nakedness, the towel snapping; then the run to Hickey Park for soccer. Two times around the track, and then kicking. The other boys, especially Quaglia and his gang—Frezza, Hankey, Zangara—were fast, deft, accurate in their kicks. Nervousness made me stumble, took away my coordination, and when two teams were chosen and the game started, I sat on the bench.
Gagliano liked the boys who were good at soccer, the Italians especially. Instead of teaching us the moves—passing, kicking, heading, stopping the ball, he yelled at us to do them, and blamed us when we failed. For the games he chose the good players.
I watched the boys on the field, and Gagliano shouting, and just wanted it to rain—thunder and lightning—anything to end this; for someone to be seriously hurt, someone to die.
After the game, two more times around the field.
“Pick up the pace, Jay!” Gagliano screamed at me.
Another awful day at school. Homework tonight, then the same thing tomorrow, a whole day of hiding the fact that I was afraid, afraid of being exposed, mocked, bullied. I was weak—I was reminded of it every minute. Walter was weaker, but that didn’t make me feel any better. I was picked on because I was his friend. I slightly disliked him for being geeky and helpless, for depending on me, for not having a girlfriend, for not realizing his religion was weird.
“What’s wrong with you?” my mother asked me on Friday afternoon.
“Nothing.”
“What happened at school?”
“Nothing.”
Saturday—a game day—Walter had to go to church. But neither of us was on the soccer team, so when he got home from church at noon, we went for a hike, usually a long hike, eight miles to the Sheepfold, to make a big fire at the campsite there. We sat and watched the ragged flames licking at the smoke, the fire like an expression of our anger.
“Weenie roast.” I sharpened a stick with my jackknife and jammed a hot dog on it.
“You wouldn’t believe the crap they put in those things,” Walter said. “They’ve found human
shit in some hot dogs. And thumbtacks.”
This was his Seventh-day Adventist denunciation of meat. Another one was that pork gave you worms, and that coffee was like poison. He ate peanut butter and baked beans and nut cutlets and cheese. He was holding an aerosol can of Cheez Whiz, spraying the stuff on a cracker, as I cooked the hot dog over the fire.
I took the can from him and read the label. “‘Contains cheese product. Salt. Artificial coloring. Emulsifiers.’ This is crap, Walter.” He started to laugh. “‘Do not incinerate. Do not use near fire or flame. Dispose of carefully.’” Walter was smiling. “I’m incinerating it. Because you’re too chicken to do it.”
“No, I’m not. Give it to me. I hosey.”
“It’ll explode, you crazy bastard.”
“Think I give a rat’s ass?” He snatched the can and in the same motion flung it into the fire. We ran behind a tree, crouching, awaiting the explosion.
Nothing happened for a long while, long enough for us to suspect that it wouldn’t blow. We got to our feet and tried to get a glimpse of the Cheez Whiz can discoloring in the flames, and as we peered, the can split with a disappointing pop, sending blue and gold sparks out of the fire pit, and an uprush of smoke and ashes.
“You’re a pyromaniac,” I said.
That pleased him. With pained eyes, his mouth twisted, his teeth clenched, Walter looked fiercely happy.
We were standing over the fire now, poking at the crater the exploding can had made in the fire pit. He jabbed his stick into the side of the split-open can and lifted it to admire it.
“I want to blow them all up,” he said.
Finished with the futile voodoo of running over bullies with Walter’s model train while listening to Little Richard sing “Rip It Up,” we made that our plan. But an aerosol can was not enough. We wanted to make a real bomb. But how?
“What about match heads?”
We tore the matches from ten matchbooks and snipped off the heads.
“‘Draw me,’” Walter said, reading the advertisements on the loose matchbooks. “‘Learn to write this winter. Make money in your spare time.’ It’s not working.”
The match heads fizzed and fumed, brightened and then shriveled black.
“Do I smell smoke?” Walter’s mother called out. “What are you two doing down there?”
“Chemistry,” Walter said, and frowning at the ashes, “This shits.”
There was no bang, no sound at all, just the brightness of the match heads, little pills alight.
“We need a detonator,” he said. “Not a fuse but something inside. A hot wire.”
Yet we were happy. It was the pleasure of being in the windowless basement, listening to Little Richard screaming, not being at school. School was disturbing in ways I could not put into words but could see clearly: the throng of reckless boys, the short-haired jocks, bigger boys, scrutinizing and sneering girls, the more beautiful ones the scariest, the loud boys, all of them like monkeys, even the teachers. Every day was a struggle, and the all-day occasions of ridicule made me hate myself for having to cope with them. What sustained me was that it was so much worse for Walter, almost two months into his transfer to Miller Baldwin and still being picked on.
The teachers picked on Walter too, especially Hoolie.
“Herkis, still biting your fingernails? Get over here. Let me see.”
He snatched Walter’s hand and made a face.
“Bitten to the quick. Sit down!”
Walter couldn’t help it. The more he was mocked, the more he chewed. He was mocked for not eating meat. Mocked for Saturday church. Mocked for not dancing. He was a freak. “You’re going to hell, Herkis! You’re probably not even an American.” And I was his friend.
We had quit the Boy Scouts. We now liked dissecting frogs and mixing potions, heating test tubes over the blue flames of Bunsen burners. The lab was the refuge of the geeks at Miller Baldwin, and we were the geeks. Science class was one of the classes Walter liked, and I did too. It was simple science, but it was smelly and involved bubbly liquids in heated test tubes, a bowl of mercury, dry ice. I liked the stink of the room, the tadpoles in the aquarium, the model skeleton hanging by its skull, the jars of chemicals with yellow labels, the brass microscope, the lenses and prisms. The slop of a purple mixture in a beaker, the hiss of the Bunsen burner, the drip of osmosis, and “It’s a bladder.”
Even the wildest boys in the class sat still and watched as Hoolie melted lead in a crucible. We were all in awe of the unexpectedness, the sizzle and smoke of an experiment, the surprise, the dazzle of science.
I wanted to be a scientist, not for the discoveries, not for money, but to make fires and boil flasks and liquefy metals in a clay dish, to stir green smoking chemicals in a big black kettle and mix explosives. That was my secret: science, with its riddles and surprises, was the nearest thing on earth to magic.
Hoolie was turning a crank today, making a big clear light bulb flicker.
“Why does a bulb glow?” Hoolie asked. “Anybody?”
It was the hot wire coil of the filament, tungsten, a hard-to-melt element on the periodic table, sealed and mounted in a circuit in the vacuum of inert argon gas in a bulb with no oxygen. Chapter five.
“Because the wire is heating up?” Kelleher said.
“Good. What do we call the wire? Anybody. Frezza? Zangara? Miss Frisch?”
“The circuit?” I loved her lost tongue lisping in her pretty mouth.
“It’s part of a circuit. But what do we call the wire, and what is its chemical composition? Walter?”
Walter shook his head.
“Jay, can you help us?”
“No, sir.”
“This was your homework! I’m wasting my breath. Take out your notebooks.” Hoolie sighed and wrote filament and tungsten and conductor on the blackboard, and he sketched a light bulb, the wires, with arrows indicating the electric current.
Frezza put up his hand. “So why don’t the bulb explode?”
It was the question I would have asked, if I had asked any questions. I listened carefully to Hoolie’s answer, about the gas, the vacuum, the absence of oxygen, the circuit.
“This filament is a kind of bridge,” Hoolie said.
At recess, in the schoolyard, Quaglia flicked a Zippo lighter in Walter’s face and said, “Herkis, you pineapple, what’s the chemical composition of this?”
“He bites his fingernails,” Frezza said. “Herkis, bite my gatz.”
Walter flinched and backed away, and then Quaglia lit a cigarette and palmed it and puffed it, eyeing Walter. “What are you looking at, shitface?”
Zangara said, “Plus, he’s going to hell for his fucked-up Saturday religion.”
On the way home, Walter nudged me and took a fat envelope out of his pocket. He lifted the flap and showed me the bright yellow powder.
“Sulfur. I hooked it from the lab.”
It was important to Walter that we steal everything from Hoolie’s science lab.
“For the bomb.”
Later in the week, another awful day at school, Walter stole another envelope, this one containing gray powder. And a small jar.
“Powdered aluminum. Potassium permanganate.”
That Saturday at the Sheepfold we mixed the chemicals in a little mound and lit it with a slow fuse of match heads and got a sudden bright blaze that surprised us with its force, crackling in the air. We looked around to make sure no one had seen us. We packed some more of the mixture into a metal cigar tube and used another fuse of match heads to light it. It flared, melting the metal, but did not explode.
“The detonator’s crappy. It’s just a fuse.”
Later that day we went back to Walter’s basement and worked the trains, the usual game of running over kids from the school and killing them, the bullies, the snobs, the jocks, the teachers, almost everyone we knew. It had begun as an excitement, but now it seemed a sad pastime, reminding us we were geeks.
“We need a hot wire, a real det
onator, something to burn inside the tube. If it’s sealed under pressure, it’ll blow up.”
It was the feeling inside me, a wire that heated and burned and glowed and made me angry, reddened my face, made my hands damp. Walter had one inside him too, a hot wire, like a filament in a bulb that made him breathless and hot and tearful.
The train was going round and round, knocking down the little figures on the track, Walter twiddling the transformer.
“A fuse won’t work. We need to put a wire inside and somehow get it to burn.”
“Like a filament in a light bulb,” Walter said. “Connect a small wire to two thicker wires to make a circuit. The thin wire will burn.”
“How do we set it off?”
“Control the flow of electricity.”
Walter’s thumb was pressed against the handle of the transformer. He began to giggle, as he did when he was watching a bonfire, the times I called him a pyromaniac, the excitement that made me happy and scared John Burkell.
“Use the transformer. Or are you too chicken?”
“Up your bucket,” he said.
Walter detached the wires from the track. He snipped off a small piece of wire from a spool—the sort of multistrand wire we had on our lamp cords. He untwisted it and separated a single strand, then attached this narrow wire to the two thicker wires trailing from the transformer, connecting them, like the filament in a light bulb.
“Stick it on the floor,” he said.
He pushed the handle of the transformer and all the lights went out.
“Walter!” his mother screamed from upstairs.
We put a new fuse in the fuse box, and the next time we used a narrower wire, which glowed and burned like a bright strand of hair when he gave it juice.
“The bridge wire,” Walter said, poking at the ashes. “That’s our detonator. Thanks, Hoolie!”
We made another one, twisting the wires into a circuit, then slipped it into a cigar tube. Holding the tube upright, we packed it with the mixture of sulfur and powdered aluminum. When it was taped and thick, with the loose wire attached like a fuse, it had the look of a real bomb.
