by Chris Lynch
He went, and cowered from me like a gerbil in a cage.
I turned back to Evelyn. “Um, I was wondering if we might maybe actually do something now, like together. A date, maybe?”
She sighed, which didn’t sound good, but then said, “I don’t know...” which did sound good because of the way she let it drift off there at the end and because it was a whole lot more than I was expecting.
“We could do something, some kind of thing that you like to do. But not like a museum or anything. Something more like a real date thing. Whatever, what do you like to do?”
Losing ground because of my mouth again. She frowned, at the museum remark, I think. “I don’t like to do very much. I mainly lead a life of the mind.”
She said the last word real pointed at me, like I couldn’t possibly grasp that. I tried to consider all the possibilities there in that statement. It didn’t sound good. “A life of the mind. You mean, all the time?”
She covered her eyes with her hand, headache style, but beneath, her wide wavy mouth was smiling into a laugh. “I hope these boca loca things you say all the time are on purpose, because if they are, you’re the funniest boy I ever met. But if they are not... dios mio, we’ve got big trouble.”
I was so relieved to see her laughing at me, I joined in. “Hell yes, I’m funny all the time.” I turned. “Sully, come here. Tell Evelyn, aren’t I funny all the time?”
“All the time,” Sully repeated with all the humor of a state trooper. He didn’t quite get my Evelyn thing. Evelyn didn’t quite get my Sully thing, either.
The first bell rang, so we had to get to our classes. “We can talk later,” she said.
“Excellent. Later, we can talk then,” I called anxiously, like all this was all going to disappear if I didn’t nail it down. Like a very loud public beg.
“You’re embarrassing,” Sully said as we strode through the door of homeroom. “I’m gonna fix you up with my sister.”
I had to bring my absence note to the teacher, and Sully walked up to the desk with me. “Not Honey again, Sul.”
“What’s wrong with Honey?”
“Nothing’s wrong with Honey. Shut up a second, I have to hand in my note.”
The teacher, Mr. Gennatassio, Mr. G, if you were a jock, took my note without looking up right away from his newspaper. After reading the end of the article, his puffy lips moving slowly along with the words, he turned to my note.
“You were out a whole week?” he asked, closing one eye for extra puzzlement.
I shrugged. He shrugged. I went to my seat with Sully in tow. Sully sat right behind me, buzzing close into my ear.
“So what about Honey?”
“Nothing about her.”
“So then you’ll take her out.”
“No. Stop it, will ya. You talk about her like you’re lending me a baseball glove.”
“Nah, she likes ya, I know it. And she’s pretty available at the moment.”
“She’s eighteen years old, for god’s sake. I’m fifteen, Sul.”
“Kinda excitin’, huh?”
“No.”
“So you’ll get together with her then, right?”
“No.”
“Give ’er a spin. What do ya got to lose?”
“I got something, Sul. Y’know, I got something going here I think.”
Sully stopped leaning close. He pulled back, reclining in his seat. “Whatsa matter, Mick, you don’t like white chicks anymore?”
The loud bell clanged like a fire bell. Sully stood. I stood, wheeled, and blocked his path.
“First,” I said through gritted teeth, “we ain’t ever gonna have this conversation again—the color thing, I mean. Next time you open your fat mouth like that, I’m gonna close it for you.”
He nodded, blinked about a million times. “You know I didn’t mean nothin’, Mick...”
“Second, I don’t want to date your stupid sister because she’s dumb, Sully. Okay? She ain’t ignorant stupid, like yourself, I mean, she’s decent enough and I like her. But she doesn’t have a fully working human-size brain either.”
I turned and left him there, pondering. He had his pondering face on. “So? So what’s that, a bad thing all of a sudden?” he asked, tagging along after me.
It was a pretty uneventful return to school. The day dragged on the way days there always did. But there were differences. I think my notoriety wore off while I was gone, allowing me to return to my identity of Mr. Nobody from Nowhere. Which I had missed. But the classes, the things the teachers were saying, the stuff that used to pass me by and not bother me at all, were now making me angry. Geometry, Western Civ, English. Were these dinks for real? I couldn’t believe how much they were all wasting my time. Get your Romantic poets out of my face. Rhombus? Rhombus? Oh ya, there’s something I’m going to bring home and put up on the refrigerator with a cheeseburger magnet to show to my family. Hey Dad, wanna see my rhombus? Revolutionary art—those unfinished pictures of old George and Martha again, some second-grade-looking painting of Crispus Attucks getting whacked at the Boston Massacre. Ooohh, I’m glad I made it back in time for all this.
Part of the problem was my concentration—I was a little soft after lying around doing nothing for a week. But the bigger problem was the school itself. My school was old school. It was part of that whole scene—the neighborhood, the town, the people—that I wanted to change. It wasn’t the school’s fault, it was just that I wanted everything to be different now, I wanted to find myself in a changed world, and I couldn’t get interested otherwise. How could I last another month and a half till it was over?
Which was why I got my first detention warning for falling dead snorting asleep during history class just before lunch. The laughter woke me up. Mr. Murphy had filled out the little yellow jug slip, rolled it like a cigarette, and stuck it in my ear.
I couldn’t have jug. I couldn’t spend an extra hour in school. Detention was one of those things I was determined to leave behind. If they put me in jug for five minutes past that last bell, I’d throw myself out the window. I was getting out, moving up, making myself better.
Which is why I groveled.
“It’s my head, it’s my injury, it’s my medicine,” the mention of which gave me a little pang. “Please, Mr. Murphy, it’s just been hard for me to get readjusted, that’s all. I’m still having nightmares. I’ve never been so upset...Please, I’ll be better tomorrow.”
I could feel the warmth of everybody’s enjoyment of my ass kissing. Mr. Murphy certainly was basking in it. He wasn’t one to tear up slips, but he was beaming over this. I think if he could get everyone to react in this degrading way, he’d happily replace detention with boot-licking. Anyway, I was free.
Yet I found that freedom was a relative thing: I had eluded detention; I had retained Baba O’Reilly. He was in that history class, sleeping most of the time without anybody sticking anything in his ear. He punched me a greeting as I slithered toward the cafeteria.
“You was out a week, loser? You lyin’?”
“Cut the shit, Baba.”
“What shit? I didn’t know you was out no whole week. What happened ta ya? Ya get wasted or what?”
I kept walking, but looked up at his face to figure out what he was up to. His face was, as usual, blank. He wasn’t being funny, didn’t have the knack. The truth was he honestly didn’t remember knocking me out.
“You broke my head, you big fat load.”
He backhanded me across the shoulder with his big paw. “What? I never hit you ever, ya bony little rat. If I hit ya, ya’d feel it, I’ll tell ya that.”
“Duh. Like I didn’t feel it, in the goddamn hospital. Moron. Just get outta my face.”
I pushed through the big metal door into the cafeteria where a couple hundred students were already eating, the first of four shifts. Sully waved me over to where he was at a table on the far wall. As I slanted that way, Baba grabbed me and spun me around. “I don’t get outta nothin’ I don’t wanna
get outta, you understand me?” While he held my collar with one hand he snatched my brown-bag lunch with the other. He held it up in my face and squeezed, letting me watch as pieces of an orange, Reese’s Cups, and a tuna sandwich pushed through the soggy bag and oozed between his fingers. “I’ll kill ya. I’ll kill ya. I’ll bite yer pointy little face off. I’ll kill ya.”
His hard cheese breath was blowing in my face, making me squint. I didn’t do anything. He wanted me to do something. There were things I could do. In the past I would have done something, a kick, a gouge. Nothing that would make me win, of course, but just enough to make a guy remember that beating my ass wasn’t something you could have a good time doing. But I didn’t, wouldn’t do it. When I looked into Baba’s sickening trog face up way close, I saw things. I saw my life pass before my eyes. Not the way people say they see it when they’re about to die, which I may have been. More like, I saw myself from when I was in this situation before, or something a lot like it, like I had been many times. I saw myself act, and I saw myself lose. And I saw myself do it all again. So now I saw in Baba’s familiar ignorant mush, and my pale reflection in it, a loser.
“That’s okay, man, you can keep that. I was gonna buy the hot lunch today anyhow.”
So that was my move, to just leave it alone. I tried then to pull away, to leave Baba’s grip, but he didn’t let go. It didn’t matter what I had decided, I couldn’t break away when I wanted to because the big grip wouldn’t allow me.
Frustrated, confused, aware of the crowd—physically still sitting at tables eating, but mentally gathered around us in a circle—Baba, being Baba, was forced to do something animal.
He took my smashed lunch and smacked the whole thing into my face. I was blinded as he twisted it, rubbing acidy orange pulp and mayonnaise into my eyes.
“How is it, is it good, rat?” Baba screamed as he jammed me. “You’re so cool now, rat, you’re so much better than me now. I really look up to your ass, Mick.”
I was on my back and Baba was on my chest. This had happened before, of course, probably a thousand times over ten years. But this time, for the first time, I was terrified. I didn’t know this creature on me, and it didn’t know me. I was actually praying when three teachers and about twelve students pulled him off, the kids kicking and whinging and pulling hair. Not that I was popular enough to rate passionate help. It was just the rule, the opportunity rule. Helpers are allowed to take their shots, blind, anonymous rips at a guy from behind, as long as they do succeed in stopping the fight. They let you do that here. Baba knew the rule, took it in stride, didn’t seem to care.
The thing that mattered to me, though, watching from flat on the floor, trying to rub clear my stinging eyes, was that the skinny guy with both arms wrapped around Baba’s head like he was wrestling a medicine ball, was the acknowledged king of the cowards, Sullivan. Those same thousand times over those same ten years, Sully had stayed on the sidelines. Now when I needed it, when I didn’t expect it, he was there.
The other thing that mattered was that I got jug.
I didn’t even do anything to get it. I was committed to not getting it. Baba decides to sit on me, and I get it. It’s like I’m shackled to the same old shit, stuck inside this useless school, stuck with idiot Baba because somewhere it says that I can’t be allowed to shake any of it.
Sully too. Not that I didn’t want him around some of the time, but there was a time and a place for him too. We weren’t kids anymore, spending every minute of every day inside each other’s shirt. I guess he missed me while I was out, because he followed me to detention after school. He was, in all likelihood, the first sap ever to want to get into the jug without being thrown in. And the monitor told him to scram. Pretty low, getting rejected by jug. He waited down on the sidewalk for me.
But Sully turned out to be about the only person who wasn’t in jug. Baba was there, of course, big red-eyed steroid mountain sitting in the back, drinking milk out of a cardboard half-gallon, pus white running out of the corners of his mouth. Ruben was there, Evelyn’s brother, his legs crossed, his feet resting on the desk across the aisle from him. I tried to give him a cool nod, figuring I should maybe start buddying up if I was going to be living with his sister. But in return he cracked open a book and stuck his nose in it—his version of “kiss my ass, junior.”
The regulars were all there, the gum chewers, the destroyers of school property, the food spitters, the groin grabbers. Then, about ten minutes late, Toy made his slinking entrance. Hat pulled low, he shuffled across the front of the room, slapped his slip down on the desk, picked up his new slip for being late, and poured himself into the seat just in front of me.
I was excited to see him, even happy to be detained for it. “Yo, compadre,” I said, shaking him by the shoulder.
He wriggled out of my grip, turned around slowly. “Com-what?” he growled.
“I said hey. It’s good to see you.”
He turned his back to me again. “So what? I saw you on Friday.”
“Ya but, you know, I’m back. And you’re back. We’re back.”
“Ya, you’re back. So where are you back from, huh, Mick? Mars? Middle Earth?”
“Jesus, Toy, lighten up.”
“I don’t hang with losers. You want to screw yourself up, just go do it. I’ve got no time. I’ve got no patience.”
I was getting nervous, like I was flunking something I really wanted to pass. Beer flashed through my mind, made my mouth water. I pushed it out. “I’m not a loser. I’m not like that.”
He let me squirm for a minute. “You do smell better.”
I smiled, relieved. I felt like a good boy. Though he didn’t turn right around, he seemed to hear me relax.
“But, Mick,” he said, finally showing me his face, or rather, his hat. “You know how many chances you get, to show me what you are?”
I shrugged. “How many?”
“I’ll give you a hint. You already used it up.”
A paper clip went zing off my ear, making it burn. I turned around to catch the guilty one. All of them, they were the guiltiest-looking bunch of people I ever saw in one classroom.
“Damn,” I said, rubbing my ear. “I can’t believe I’m here.”
Toy said, casually, “You want to not be here?”
I gave him a face. “Course I don’t want to be here.”
He started getting up. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m getting us released.” He grinned. “I got a little leverage with the man.”
I sat dumbstruck as Toy walked up, stood towering over the monitor, who looked up with a weird embarrassment on his pointy bluish face. “I’m sick,” Toy said, in a particularly healthy-sounding voice. He spoke just loud enough for the people up front—me and the monitor—to hear. “I have to go.”
The monitor nodded.
Toy pointed at me. “He’s sick too.”
The monitor gestured quickly for me to get up and out, then buried himself in papers again. Walking across the front of the room, I felt a surge of power as I watched every jaw in the place drop to the floor. Ruben’s eyes bugged. Baba’s narrowed.
“Hey, can he come?” I said to Toy, indicating Ruben.
Toy knew what I was up to. “Points?” he asked, mockingly.
I tried to be indignant. “No, I’m not trying to score points with anyone. Maybe I just like the guy.”
Toy actually snickered over that, as he walked back to the desk. “Ya, maybe you do,” he said.
“Cruz, get outta here,” the monitor snapped.
Ruben hopped out of his seat and made a grand exit, extra bounce in his step, big smiles, eye contact, and nods for everybody left behind. On the way out the door I took one more look toward the back of the room, where Baba was taking good long note of the three of us together.
“Jeez, Toy,” I said, “with that kind of power, why do you ever show up at jug at all?”
He refused to enjoy it, which drove me crazy. “You can’
t use something like that every day, or you lose it altogether.”
“So, give it up,” Ruben said. “Whatchu got on him?”
“Nothing,” Toy answered in his now familiar end-of-discussion deep rasp. “You can go back in there if you want.”
Ruben raised his hands, surrender-style. “I didn’t ask no questions. I don’t need to know nothing.”
When we opened the front doors, Sully was there, waiting for me on the corner. When he saw Toy and Ruben, he hung his head and walked off. I called him once, but he didn’t answer. I thought about chasing after him, but I couldn’t do that. Sully was going to have to come around to new stuff. He had to. I wasn’t going back, and he wasn’t going to hold me back.
Toy, Ruben and I went to the superette, sat outside on milk crates, and smoked little cigars like we did before. I sat back and listened as Toy and Ruben talked about Cuban cigars, which I had never had, and how much better they were than Dominican ones. They talked about some other stuff I didn’t know too, talked some of it in Spanish. I felt kind of foreign, and I felt kind of lost, but I figured it would pass.
El Micko
WE SLIPPED BACK INTO the old routine of meeting at the superette before and after school to smoke cigars. We hadn’t even discussed it, just found each other there at the right times again. Except this time there was no Sully, there was Ruben. He could have come, Sully, if he wanted to. The thing is he just doesn’t like new people, doesn’t like things to change, can’t deal with new stuff. Me, I needed new stuff.
My first new thing, besides Evelyn I guess, and besides Ruben, who was such new stuff he was frightening, was I got a hat. I went down to Walker’s, the one place in town that has all the hardest-core biker gear and all the real cowboy gear, which up close turns out to be pretty much the same thing. I looked the walls up then down, at high black square-toed mechanic boots, pointy gray snakeskin Acme cowboy boots, green lizard Tony Lamas, Dingos, spurs for jabbing your horse or motorcycle into going faster, T-shirts with big old Harley-Davidson eagles spread across the back and wolves or buffalo or mountain lions or black bears snarling on the front. There was a pair of size 14 elephant-skin boots. I felt like a better man just being there.
