by David Leite
“Go to hell, you bastards!” echoed off the walls.
Everyone watched, mouths hanging, as Mr. Souza dragged me behind him like a broken kite, crashing through the cafeteria doors, and deposited me onto the lobby’s wide stairs. His mammoth jaw was jammed to the side, like it always was when he was angry. I explained to him through sobs what had happened, and his face softened. “It’s okay,” he said. He motioned with his head. “Go on, go out to recess.”
No one bothered me the rest of the day. Even Billy Meechan, who tormented me endlessly, and had once tackled me so hard on the asphalt that one of the teachers had to rush me to the nurse for huge gashes in my elbow and knee, left me alone. I spent recess by myself, watching from the edge of the playground, near the woods. Knots of kids swelled and shrank as they ran shrieking across the yard. Big red rubber balls ricocheted off heads, backs, legs, as some sixth graders played dodgeball. Choruses of the syncopated “Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack, all dressed in black, black, black” flitted in the wind. I stood there wringing my hands and begging God to fix me.
I’ve got a surprise for you!” my mother said after school a few weeks later.
“We’re not going to a movie, are we?” It was more a verbal projectile than a question. I’d overheard my father saying the best way for me to get past this was to see House of Wax again and again until it carried no emotional charge.
“No. We’re going to lunch.” I must have looked at her cockeyed, because she put her hand on her hip. “Lunch,” she repeated. “You know, what you eat in the afternoon, Banana?”
“I know what lunch means, Ma.” My confusion was over the fact that until that moment, my family had never gone to a sit-down restaurant together. My father liked only Portuguese food, and there was no reason to go to a Portuguese restaurant when, as he liked to say, “I have the best Portuguese cozinheira right here.” And with that he’d usually wrangle her in a hug, and she’d laugh, then sashay out of his grip, slapping his hands in mock protest saying, “Manny, stop it!”
She pulled up to China Village, in nearby Somerset. Inside, she clasped her purse to her chest and peered through the elaborately carved gold and red filigree. Not a soul eating. Crossing that archway meant being caught up in a different culture, one that used chopsticks and smelled divinely of fried foods. No matter how bad I felt, I wasn’t about to pass that up. I stepped into the room so that the lone waitress could see us before my mother lost her nerve.
Up until then, the only Chinese food I’d ever eaten was chow-mein sandwiches Dina had picked up at the joint on Brightman Street. They were pillowy hamburger buns filled with noodles (not the long, supple ones I had years later, but short, crisp twigs) that were mixed into a brown, snotty-looking sauce studded with hunks of celery and onion and specks of ground pork or, if someone was willing to spring for it, shrimp. Barry and I would howl as we dug into the sack, because they were so hot. Even the sandwich wrappers were damp and shapeless because of the steam. I could pack away two, easily.
My mother and I slid into a red booth at the rear wall of the restaurant. She kept tugging her coat closed and smoothing the side of her hair.
The bored waitress handed us scuffed plastic-covered menus. My mother let me get a pupu platter, even though neither of us was sure what it was. I tittered at the name when I ordered it. “And can I have chopsticks?” A short time later, the waitress returned with what looked like a lazy Susan and two plates. My mother started to protest, but gave in and let the waitress slide a plate in front of her. I spun the platter like a roulette wheel, waiting for luck to tell me what fried wonder to eat first. I stabbed a crispy wonton with a chopstick and dunked it in something called duck sauce. It was sweet and fruity, but mostly sweet, and the wonton crackled, then gave way to a soft belly of some kind of marvelous meat.
“Son,” she said, leaning in.
“Uh-huh?” I skewered another batter-coated, deep-fried bite.
“Do you think you can tell me what’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” I said, reaching for another. “I’m just scared all the time.”
“Scared of what, though?”
“Everything.”
“What do you mean, everything?” A little veneta began etching her voice.
I confessed to her that I had stopped watching the news. Everything from Richard Nixon, with his enormous hound-dog face, to the eviscerating gunfire of the Vietnam War terrified me. As far as books, I refused to read anything unless it was for school.
“Music, though, is the worst.” I told her how the sounds could drag me under, as if the notes were weights attached to my feet. I couldn’t listen to the dirgelike “A Horse with No Name,” or Roberta Flack’s mournful “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” two songs that looped endlessly that spring, without setting off a magazine round of panic. She listened quietly, shredding her paper napkin. Every once in a while she nodded, or lifted her head to speak, then stopped herself.
We sat for a long time in silence, until I pushed my plate away.
“Do you want to take this home?” My mother pointed to the mostly uneaten platter. I shook my head. She said something about my eyes being bigger than my belly.
“Can I have these, though?” I asked, holding up the chopsticks. She nodded, then motioned for the waitress and pulled out her wallet.
While my mother’s attempt at a solution was communication, my father’s attempts were all action, and since that required manual labor and didn’t include food, I was predisposed not to like them. On Saturdays and on the occasional weeknight, he took me along on some of the carpentry jobs he did on the side: building new bathrooms, refinishing basements, adding decks that overlooked pools. I stood alongside him, a lump of flesh, handing him nails, fetching tools, holding two-by-fours steady while he sawed. He tried to engage me by making me think logically—at my best, something I wasn’t very good at—and then think logically backward. From the finished project to the last step to the step before that, and so on, until finally we backed into that singular step that would begin this chain reaction, so that I could understand what needed to be done first.
“Imagine it’s like a movie going in reverse,” he said, encouraging me. Pointing to a sink still in its crate, or a wall of studs, or a sliding glass door with a six-foot drop on the other side where stairs should be: “What’s the first thing we need to do here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think!” He said it as if by his simply ordering me, the neurons in my brain would suddenly clasp tendrils on command, making a chain of impulses that would thread itself through my head, into my mouth, along my tongue, and out would come the answer.
“I don’t know!” I shouted.
“Ay, paciência,” he hissed under his breath. Translation: Give me patience. It’s not that my father wasn’t patient with me; he was. More so than my mother, actually. He was just unable to understand how a life could come to a slamming halt, drained of all enthusiasm and color; I was the walking dead, muscle and skin hanging on bones but no longer with a recognizable personality or purpose. What made it worse for him was he was ripped up inside because he, the one man who was supposed to protect me from harm, couldn’t.
“Can I wait in the van?” I said flatly. He jerked his head in the direction of the street as if to say, Go.
Sitting there, I watched fat raindrops splotch the windshield. They created, for just a moment, glassy-eye reflections of streetlamps, red taillights, lampposts, before bleeding down the window. Every once in a while, I turned on the ignition so the wipers would smear them away, but more rushed to take their places. There was something so incalculably sad about those winking, starbursted raindrops. Their rhythm thudding on the van’s roof was chilling. It heightened, orchestrally, my sense of isolation. I was alone. My mother couldn’t help me; my father was at a loss.
Eventually, my parents called Dr. Herring, our family physician. I didn’t like him much. He treated everything as minor. Everything, that is, exc
ept my weight. Until then, I’d always considered myself a three-piece Kentucky Fried Chicken dinner away from husky (which to Portuguese mothers, grandmothers, and aunts translated as “too thin”). Dr. Herring, on the other hand, preferred to describe me as standing on the threshold of fat. He liked to point to a weight/height chart on the wall that had a rainbow curving from the lower left to the upper right. “Normal” cut a swath of cheery green through the middle. Above, in yellow, was “overweight,” and above that, in ambulance red, was “obese.” Every time I stepped on the scale, he’d plot my weight and height and tap the intersection—which always fell just north into yellow—then make little tsk sounds, as if his tongue were wearing tap shoes. This time, though, he nodded his surprise. I’d dropped several pounds from having lost my appetite.
After I explained to him what had happened, he leaned against the metal cabinet in his office and shook his head in exasperation.
“These movies,” he said to my father. “I’ve gotten more calls about Mark of the Devil in the past few weeks than any movie in years.” Mark of the Devil was playing about the same time as House of Wax. Barry had seen it and loved to terrify me by describing how they ripped out a woman’s tongue with a pair of pliers.
“But it’s been more than a month,” I said. “It hasn’t stopped. I’m scared all the time.”
He looked at me a long while, then up to my father, and sighed. “Well, I can prescribe a tranquilizer, if you want.”
“A tranquilizer?” my father asked, making some sort of a defensive move toward me.
I didn’t understand their exchange at the time, because I didn’t know Dr. Herring and my father had a long, hard history with tranquilizers. It had started a few years after my father came to this country. He felt restless, so he went to a doctor who, after hearing him out, looked him in the eye and said, “Manny, your problem is you can’t handle the pace of America.” Believing in the power and authority of medicine, especially in his new country, he accepted the doctor’s diagnosis and the prescription he handed him for phenobarbital. In time, though, he started suffering from a jackhammering heart and skipping beats. “You’re just too nervous, Manny”—and more medication was prescribed. This time, Librium. When he found he couldn’t go to work without the security of them stashed in his lunch box, my father finally went to Dr. Herring, who kept him on the drugs for two more years but advised that he give up caffeine. By the end, my father says, he was so crippled with heart problems and nervousness that one day he grabbed the bottles of pills, walked out behind the house he was building, and, howling like a wounded animal, flung them into the woods. It took more than a year, but his heart found peace. Few, including Dr. Herring, believed the tranquilizers were his problem. My father knew different.
What I did understand, sitting in Dr. Herring’s office, was that tranquilizers were pills Hollywood actresses and mothers with too many children took. Dina and the Sisterhood had talked about it. Judy Garland, they said, took them, and she was dead.
“I’m only eleven,” I said. He shrugged as if to say, So?
“Come on, Son.” My father cupped his arm around my shoulder, and we walked out. I was unfixable. For the first time in my life, I wished I was dead.
And then, it was over. Gone. Unlike its beginning, which is cauterized into my memory, the end escapes me. It was just there, a present left outside the front door that I was no longer frightened to walk through. I think because I didn’t have to analyze it—turn it over and over in my head like an artifact to be examined, understood, and cataloged—I didn’t hear its departure, didn’t sense its absence. All I remember is, suddenly, glinting summer days. A scavenger hunt for some kid’s birthday party. Standing around a rusty barrel at night, the flames inside licking at our marshmallows, all of us shrieking with laughter when they caught fire and began charring and melting on our twigs. The bitter taste of burnt, molten sweetness.
PART II
RAPID CYCLING
A TERM USED FOR PATIENTS WHO TRANSITION FROM DEPRESSION TO MANIA AND BACK AGAIN. SOME CYCLE OVER A PERIOD OF MONTHS, OTHERS OVER A PERIOD OF DAYS; STILL OTHERS YO-YO SEVERAL TIMES THROUGHOUT A SINGLE DAY. SEATBELT NOT INCLUDED.
9
IF YOU DON’T STOP IT, YOU’LL GO BLIND
The first time I was called a faggot, I was in seventh grade. I was running around screaming with some of the girls on the front lawn at Joseph Case Junior High when Billy Meechan pushed me against the bushes, out of the sight of the teachers, and drilled his forefinger into my chest.
“You know what you are, Leite?” I leaned back farther to relieve the pain and shook my head. “You’re a faggot.” He spat out the word, then hiccupped a disgusted laugh. He looked at the two bullies in leather jackets who framed him, and they all walked away.
I had no idea what the word meant. That night behind closed doors, I looked it up in my red clothbound Merriam-Webster dictionary: “a bundle of sticks.” Billy Meechan wasn’t smart enough to use such erudite language. “Faggot” clearly meant something else, and if his tone was any indication, it wasn’t a compliment.
What made it even more anxiety-provoking was that his ambush seemed so arbitrary. Why, out of the entire school, did he choose to shove me into a corner? I’d worked hard to blend in. After House of Wax, my mother had asked Barry, who was now sixteen, to take me shopping for clothes at Sawyer’s Campus Shop. Over my protests, he had ditched my groovy orange Greg Brady pants and striped polyester sweater vests in favor of Levi’s bell-bottoms, colored T-shirts, and a Levi’s jacket. My mother smiled, but I thought I looked like a blueberry Popsicle. But now that I was swaddled in denim, the effect was immediate. Allison, the daughter of one of Vu and Vo’s neighbors, who had ignored me all that summer, suddenly began making excuses to stop by their house when I was around. I never told her, because I liked the attention, but I was revolted by her behavior. If all it took was a wardrobe change to win her affections, she was too shallow and common for me. And, as I convinced myself then, my reaction had nothing to do with her being a girl. That was merely a coincidence.
After dinner that night, while my mother was washing dishes, I asked, “Ma, what’s a faggot?”
The room immediately grew frosty. She turned to me, her fists jammed into her hips, which by this time were sizable again. “Where did you hear that word?”
“Um, in school.”
“Who called you that?” Her voice turned brusque and interrogative, like she was going to pressure me until I coughed up names, like a spy being tortured.
“Not me!” I lied. “Someone called Greg Martin that.”
She softened a bit and turned back to the sink. “Well, it’s a terrible and ugly word,” she explained, “and I don’t want to hear you saying it. Understood?” I shook my head. “Ever.” She slapped the wet dishrag that was in her hand against the counter. It was her way of whacking it dry, but whenever she used it as punctuation to her conversation, it meant a tide of veneta was rising. Then she stopped: “You know what? I have half a mind to call Mrs. Martin.”
“No! Don’t do that.” I tried to derail the plan that I could see was gathering momentum: “Think of how upset she’d be.” She wagged her head side to side, considering, then relented.
“But . . . Ma, what does it mean?”
“Outra vez!?” she asked, pure disbelief. Again? “MANNY!”
When my father ambled into the kitchen from the breezeway, she took to scouring the big copper-bottom Revere skillet so hard, I worried she’d scrub the copper coating clean off. “David has a question for you,” she said, head down, hands a blur. Jesus, she’s making me ask it again.
“Yes, Son?”
“Forget it.”
“Oh-ho-ho, no you don’t, mister,” my mother said, pointing at me. “You asked me, now you go ahead and ask him.” And she returned to her pot.
“Daddy . . .” I hesitated, “what’s a faggot?” He glanced over at my mother, then back at me. He cleared his throat.
“Wel
l, Son,” he exhaled hard. “It means someone . . . who’s a homosexual.”
That, I understood. And that explained Billy’s attitude.
“So it doesn’t mean ‘a bundle of sticks.’”
My mother stopped scrubbing, relief rippling across her face. “What are you talking about, Banana?” She shook her head and laughed. “Sticks,” she said to no one in particular, as she rinsed the skillet under scalding water. “Oh, Lord, where does he get these ideas?”
What I’d neglected to tell them was I’d become preoccupied with my body—“the downstairs parts”—and the bodies of other boys. Gym class did that. All throughout grade school, gym was just a bunch of boys and girls running around the schoolyard playing red rover and kickball and competing in races. We didn’t have to change clothes or shower. But suddenly in seventh grade, it was regulation gym shorts, jockstraps, and the naked bodies of boys I’d known all of my life.
I was mesmerized at the differences in our bodies. Some boys, like Arthur Antunes, were powerful, the muscles in their legs and, especially, their asses undulating as they roughhoused with each other. Antunes had to have been held back at least two times, making him about fifteen, because he towered over us and had fireworks of hair that set off from his crotch, wriggled in a ragged line up his stomach, and exploded across his chest. He took sadistic pleasure in embarrassing anyone who happened to drop his soap. “Look, [insert a random name] is open for business!” he’d shout. Desperate not to be his next victim, I softened my soap in the bathroom sink at home and dug my nails into it to create a grip. There was no way in hell I was going to drop it.
