“What’s the story about?” asked Matt Dershowitz.
“Dragons. Hey Andrius, are there dragons in Lithuania?”
“I don’t think there are.”
“What about ice dragons? Like a wyrm or wyvern?”
“…”
“Maybe I should ask your mom.”
Behind Andrius, a cross sparkled with green and gold gems, and on the refrigerator, a cross magnet held a picture of Silas on a bicycle in what looked like the desert—maybe Tatooine or Iraq. In fact, the entire kitchen and living room were covered in doves and crosses and pictures of Jesus.
“Hey Mr. B, where do you get your holy water?”
“Um… I don’t understand the question, Victor.”
“If I drink holy water, will I get powers?” asked Jeremy Finklestein.
“If you drink holy water, you’ll go to Hell!” shouted Pierce Stone.
“Hey! Why is that?” asked Matt Dershowitz.
“Because you’re Jews!”
“… do Jews know where Hell is?” I leaned over to ask Kader.
“Okay, boys, enough of this talk.”
“Wait, Mr. B. I wanted to ask if you use the same holy water as Tom Jones Cleaver.”
“You… you know Tom Jones Cleaver?”
“Because he says that his holy water makes you death-free, and my Mum Mum is old and always falling over from drinking Dewar’s with Bill Clinton and I don’t want her to get hurt. But I don’t know if she has a mortgage. The black African-Americans are always using the holy water to be dead-free and get rid of their mortgage. So if I can use some of your holy water, it will keep her dead-free and I’ll make sure she shouts ‘Hallelujah!’ after so it works.”
“Jesus…”
“He helps Mr. Cleaver too.”
“Alright, boys, if you want more pizza I can get it for you later. Go downstairs and have fun.”
We crashed back down into the basement with a resonating mirth that only emits from a band of twelve first-graders stuffed with pizza and with a night of loose supervision ahead of them.
I was afraid Pierce Stone was going to clobber me when I wasn’t looking, like an ambush or blitz—I needed armor, not a weapon—and was constantly against a wall so he couldn’t sneak up from behind. I wished Karl were there. Karl would always fight with me in battle; it didn’t matter if we were fighting a dragon or orcs or Pierce Stone. I could outrun Pierce Stone easily—I could outrun some of the fifth-graders, even—but that didn’t much help in a basement stuffed with couches and beanbag chairs and foosball tables.
“Did you guys know,” started Paxton, “that if you cough, sneeze, burp, hiccup, yawn, and fart all at the same time you explode?”
Uproar.
“Is that true?” I asked Kader, who was spinning his row of red foosball players in perpetual aimless backflips.
“It’s unlikely.”
“Okay, thanks, Kader. Hey, how come Louis wasn’t invited?”
“I’m not sure about that.”
“Hey Silas, how come Louis Martino wasn’t invited?”
But before Silas could answer, Pierce Stone popped up from the couch like a soldier in a trench and shouted, “Because he’d eat all of the pizza!”
Uproar.
“I don’t think you’re a typical guinea, Ferraro. Most guineas actually know how to eat pizza.”
“Guinea?” I remembered seeing that term come up on the maps in my father’s atlas when I was searching for islands in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean. There was a Guinea near Indonesia (I liked that one because it was an island, too) and different types of Guineas in Africa.
“Look at him, he doesn’t even know when I’m making fun of him.”
“I’m a guinea?”
“Yes…”
“So am I an African-American?!” I got excited because my favorite football players were African-American, like Jerry Rice and Deion Sanders.
“No, dammit, Ferraro!”
“Oh.”
“‘Guinea’ is a bad word for an Italian,” said Kader, leaning across the foosball table.
I was confused: Why would anyone have a bad word for an Italian? My dad said that Italians gave the world civilization and that the Romans were the most powerful empire to ever exist. He said Italians made the greatest artists and scientists and inventors, and we even had this framed list of “Prominent Italians” hanging above the wet bar in the basement: “Da Vinci, Alighieri, Fibonacci, Fellini, Ferrari, Verrazano, Galileo, Donatello, Vespucci, Polo, Garibaldi, Vivaldi, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Botticelli, Modigliani, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Pavarotti, Raphael, Caravaggio, Puccini, Marconi, Aquinas, Bernini, Titian, Columbus, and Ferraro. No other people can make this statement.”
I finished my foosball match with Kader and snuck over to the VCR to replay Jurassic Park; I guess I had overcome my dissatisfaction for the chronologically incorrect title. When I turned around, Pierce Stone was standing right behind me. He didn’t hit me or anything and I realized I didn’t need armor, because Pierce Stone wasn’t a typical bully like in those movies Britney watched, the kind of bully that’s always a big doofus who hurts people. No, Pierce Stone was a Short Hills bully, and that meant he clobbered you with words about things you couldn’t control—like your arm hair or your lunchbox. Sometimes I wished he would just hit me instead; at least those bruises went away.
It got so hot in that basement that I sought refuge outside in the biting February frost. Lenny and Andrius came out with me and we pretended to smoke cigarettes, putting our two fingers together, dragging in the cold air, and exhaling the warmed breath like it was a contest.
“Hey Andrius, you didn’t have to do that, ya know?” said Lenny.
“No?”
“Did they confuse you? Did you understand them?”
I had no idea what they were talking about and was busy molding snow into perfect spheres just in case they wanted to throw snowballs at cars.
“Hey Vic, did you see what they were doing in there?”
“No. Who? I was watching Jurassic Park. Did you know that Tyrannosaurus Rex didn’t even live during the Jurassic period? And they say that Brontosaurus is really just Apatosaurus, but I don’t believe them.”
“Vic, Paxton and Pierce made Andrius show them his penis.”
“His pisciali?” (Translation: penis, dick, wiener.)
“His what? They made him show his penis. They were laughing at him.”
“What’s funny about a pisciali?”
“They say it have the turtle-neck.”
“Turtle-neck?” Lenny and I said simultaneously.
Mr. Badenhorst slid open the glass door with a steaming slice of ameriganz in hand. “Hey, you boys, what are you doin’ outside? It’s cold, yeah?”
“We’re okay, Mr. B. We were just talking about Andrius’s pisciali.”
“Pisciali? Okay, just come in soon.”
Back in the basement, Kader was asleep on a beanbag chair and the Barriston brothers were pounding on each other with inflatable boxing gloves. Behind the stacks of boxes that had rommel written in Sharpie on the sides, I could see Paxton, Matt Dershowitz, Jeremy Finklestein, Maine Ogden, and Pierce Stone gathered around Silas—the birthday boy—laughing and jeering and telling him to “tuck it back.”
“You see? You see? Now they’re doing it to Silas.” Lenny pointed.
I marched behind the stacks of boxes like I was an authority on the subject and saw Silas pulling back a layer of skin on his pisciali and tucking it behind the mushroom cap head.
“Hey Silas, what is that?” I asked.
“Whoa! Vic, we didn’t see you there,” said Paxton.
“I thought everyone’s looks like this?” Silas said, looking at it in his hand like it was a wounded bird.
“Nope!” shouted Pierce Stone. “Just t
he freaks!”
“But… my dad’s looks like this, and my younger brother…”
“You know what their penises look like?!”
“We shower together sometimes. Or we used to.”
I felt bad for Silas and wanted to defend him, because I showered with my brother too. And sometimes, especially when we were younger, my dad would shower with us, and we would look in the mirror and flex our muscles as we sang: “Macho, macho man!” I didn’t think it was weird at all. But Pierce Stone wasn’t clobbering me with his words this one time, and it felt good not to be the focus of his verbal blitz.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if Ferraro had a turtle-neck in his pants too. All these foreigners and their freak dicks.”
“But I am American. I wish I was born in Aruba or Bermuda, or MartInik, but I was born at Saint Barnabas. It’s in Livingston, where my cousin lives and lots of Jews live. Maybe you know them, Matt… Jeremy?”
“My uncle lives in Livingston,” said Matt Dershowitz.
“My bubbe lives in Livingston,” said Jeremy Finklestein.
And my mom said they don’t all know each other.
“Yeah, so what?” said Pierce Stone. “Your family is still freaks, even if they are from here.”
“Freaks? Like goblins or ghouls or orcs? No, unfortunately we are the human race. Orcs are much better at wielding a battle-ax.”
“No. What? No, not that. Like your retarded sister.”
There was a heat in my face, like when I peered into the braciole simmering in marinara on the stove.
“Man, my sister can be a pain in the ass, but at least she’s normal.” They all laughed—but not as much as Pierce Stone—and it was all in slow motion, like molasses in January, like my father says, as Pierce Stone slapped the side of his hand against his chest and went, “Dehh, dehh, dehh dehh.”
Britney didn’t sound like that at all. A few of her classmates did. They would be making noises while I was reading to them about dinosaurs—okay, some were picture books, but I could make up the dinosaur stories, and isn’t that just as good as reading? And I didn’t mind; I knew they couldn’t help it. I knew they would never be able to tell their stories to anyone.
I didn’t hit Pierce Stone in the face even though I really wanted to hurt him, because my father says you also have to be defending yourself. That was the problem with getting clobbered with words instead of fists. The Short Hills kids were so good at wielding their weapons, and I didn’t have any armor and neither did Britney.
Life seemed to start over for me on the first mild day of spring, but I guess that’s the point, right? Ms. O’Donnell explained to us that spring started in March: “In like a lion, out like a lamb,” she said.
“March is like the cold pricklies turning into the warm and fuzzies,” she explained as we looked at the calendar with the month’s bubble letters in green—on every school calendar, even in my old town, March was always in green. I hated March. In New Jersey, it didn’t get warm until April, and on that first warm day, Karl and I would run around our conjoined backyards pretending we were the Knights of the Round Table fighting dragons and Saxons. We had been watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail every day after school (sometimes with the Offspring’s Americana album playing in the background) and could practically recite the entire movie line by line.
“Did you know he’s gay?” Karl said from his knees, acting as the armless and legless Black Knight.
“King Arthur?”
“No, Graham Chapman, the actor who plays King Arthur.”
“What’s gay, anyway?”
“It’s when boys like boys instead of girls.”
“But, I like boys instead of girls, at least most of the time.”
“No, not like that. Like the way you feel about Andrius’s mom.”
“Oh… How did you know that, Karl?”
“You stare at her whenever we see her walking Andrius to school. You can’t even say hello. Your face gets all red and…”
“Okay. I got it. But some boys feel that way about other boys?”
“Yes.”
“Are they supposed to?”
“I don’t know.”
Karl got up from his knees and banged his invisible coconuts for me as we rode up the driveway and back inside his house.
“Hey Karl, for my birthday this year my dad said we can go to Medieval Times. You’ve been there before, right?”
“No. George went with his friends once, though. He said one of the knights almost died.”
“I thought a lot of the knights died? They do fight with swords and axes and halberds.”
“Nah, it’s just pretend. Acting, like Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”
“Oh… well I guess that’s fine too.”
“Yeah, he sat in the Green Knight’s section. George said he’s the bad one.”
“Just like the legend of Sir Gawain…”
And for three months after that, I dreaded sitting in the Green Knight’s section. I read the pamphlet that George had in his room from when he went a couple of years ago. I studied the knights like I’d be tested on them. The Red Knight specialized in the joust, the Blue Knight was skilled with the broadsword, and the Red and Yellow Knight had the coolest armor. The Black and White Knight was the defender of the holy shrine at Santiago de Compostela (I think he was from Cuba) and the Yellow Knight was a master in chivalry. I would’ve taken any of ’em—anyone except for the evil Green Knight.
I pictured him galloping across the field behind Glenwood and crashing through the window on his green steed, grabbing me by the shirt collar as Ms. O’Donnell continued her high-pitched lesson on tipis or African-Americans. I would be defenseless because there was a strict no-weapons rule at school—those socks would get me killed!
But as spring bloomed into summer and my first year at Glenwood came to an end, I had managed to evade all attacks from the Green Knight and most of Pierce Stone’s verbal clobbering. He still made fun of my lunch—whether it was salami, prosciutto, or gabagool—and told me that my dinosaur t-shirts looked like something a poor kid would wear. I didn’t say anything back; just like pretending to be asleep, I had become excellent at pretending I wasn’t listening, like my father during a Giants game. But I was listening; I would’ve done anything to go completely numb. He never said anything about Britney again—I listened for it—because if he did, I would’ve broken that stupid rule.
We packed into the wood-paneled station wagon—Tony, George, Karl, and I sat in the back—and left for Medieval Times in the kingdom of Lyndhurst, New Jersey. George and Tony kept teasing me, saying that they called earlier and we were seated in the Green Knight’s section. But Karl said they never called and you don’t get assigned a knight until you get there.
I rushed past the king at the entrance and pulled my family in line.
“Don’t you want a picture with the king?” asked my mother as I bounced on the balls of my feet while attempting to peek over the shoulders of dads and sons ahead of us. At the ticketing booth, they handed out paper crowns signifying the color of your knight. I saw blue crowns, red crowns, and yellow crowns. I’d even be fine with the Yellow Knight—I didn’t care that it was my eighth favorite color: red, maroon, burgundy, purple, blue, cyan, turquoise, yellow.
“Relax, Vito. We’re almost there.”
“Dad, if we get the Green Knight I want to go home. I refuse to be in the Green Knight’s section.”
“Oh, you refuse, huh? Well, this place ain’t cheap, my friend. If we get the green one, you’ll sit in his section and you’ll like it.”
“I refuse!”
“Hi, what’s the name?” asked the young girl running the booth.
“Ferraro.”
“If you give us the Green Knight, I will refuse,” I said, standing on the tips of my sneakers and resting my arms on the c
ounter.
“Then you’ll go to the dungeon, Vito. Go ahead. Tell him. Tell him he’ll get sent to the dungeon.”
“Oh… I, uh…” stammered the girl.
“Tony, enough already,” my mother intervened. “The poor kid hasn’t stopped talking about this for months. Miss? Hi, is there any chance we can be seated in any section except for… which one has he been going on about?”
“Blue!” yelled my brother.
“Red!” yelled George.
“Green! No, no Green!”
“Okay, hold on, hold on. Ferraro… Ferraro… Okay, here it is. Good news. You’re not in the Green Knight’s section.”
“Hallelujah!”
“What’d he say?” asked my mother.
And she handed out black-and-white paper crowns to our party.
Black and White, the wild card. Yes, the Black and White Knight would do just fine. Although I was informed after my research that he was not from Cuba (Santiago de Compostela is in Spain—all of the knights were from Spain, actually), I was still content with the guardian of the cross being my champion.
Karl and I rushed to the gift shop, where my parents bought us wooden weapons (wouldn’t do us any good against orcs, but I suppose they’re fine for practice) and we smashed into each other’s shields with axes and swords.
We walked through the dungeon and I thought Hell—at least the kind of Hell Tom Jones Cleaver warned about—must be in Medieval Times. A cage hung from the ceiling in a bronze silhouette of a man, the kind of cage that made me subconsciously stretch my arms. A long saw that looked like something Paul Bunyon would use on a soaring pine hung on the wall. It was used to saw people—in half, upside-down. And as I passed the bed of nails with a bold-faced sign that read DO NOT TOUCH hanging from the dividing rope, I couldn’t help but imagine a helpless Pierce Stone lying on the serrated twin as my foot pushed down on his chest, slow, slow, slow.
“Vito, it says don’t touch, ya fidend.”
I entered the arena and saw the sand pit and felt like a Roman citizen in a domed coliseum. Weapons, like halberds, swords, and axes, lined the oval siding, and there was a set of thrones perched high above the audience, reserved for their majesties.
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