home from school along Trichester Avenue, past the University practice football field. It was a beautiful warm day and I was thinking up a strategy for writing a midterm paper for Dennis Hobbs about "The Founding Fathers and Our Basic Freedoms". It seemed to me that most of our freedoms revolve around money, the freedom to earn it, to keep it or to spend it as we wish. You could write anything you wanted but it meant nothing unless some people invested money to publish it and other people spent money to read it. You could say anything you want but it was pointless unless you had the money for TV or radio time to make people listen. This sounded like a good theme to me and I was working out the expected paragraph formats in my mind and didn't notice the guy walking towards me from the other direction. I didn't see him until I nearly bumped right into him.
He stood in the middle of the sidewalk and refused to let me pass. I dodged one way, and then the other, and he moved to block me every time. I looked up at him, and was about to ask him what his problem was when he said,
"Want to wrestle?"
"No", I said. "I don't want to wrestle."
"Too bad", he said, and he lifted me up by the armpits and threw me down the small hill onto the football field. Before I had a chance to even get up, he was on me, pulling me one way, pushing me the other, pinning me down by the shoulders, and shouting,
"Come on, wrestle."
This guy was maybe a year or two older than me, but much, much bigger, probably eight inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier. He was dressed much as I was, regular school attire; decent pants, shirt, nice shoes. I kept saying,
"I don't want to wrestle!” and he kept saying,
"Too bad! Come on, wrestle."
It was a pathetic fight. The more he insisted, the angrier I got, and the angrier I got the more I tried to get up and get away. The more I tried to do that, the worse it got for me. As I fought harder, he fought harder. He was hardly breaking a sweat by the time I was frantically struggling for my life. I could barely budge the guy but I was putting everything into it soon enough.
I don't know how long it went on. It seemed like hours but maybe it was only ten or fifteen minutes. We rolled around on that field and by the end I was bleeding all over; my face, my legs, my arms. My pants were torn. My shirt was ripped. One of my shoes was broken apart. I was crying, sweating, cursing and this boy, this creature, just got up and walked away like nothing had even happened.
I could only think one thing as I staggered to my feet and shuffled home.
"It sucks to be me."
I didn't want to be me anymore.
"There's got to be a way", I told myself. "Maybe I could get somebody else to be me for a change. Or maybe I could just stop this me altogether."
I remember glancing over in the direction of the railroad tracks where Alan Belew used to make me risk my life for no reason except his boredom. I could wait for a train and jump off that bridge, or just run right out in front of it. That would put an end to that. I couldn't understand how someone could be so unlucky, that the devil himself couldn't resist a good kick. It was hard, but I realized it couldn't go on that way forever. I could blame everything and everyone but the real problem was, I was only fourteen. My true enemy was time. It could make me wait and there was nothing I could do about it.
Glory
The summer in which I turned fifteen was the longest summer of my life. It began and ended in the loneliest house in the world, my home. My sister left for college in May, and after that there was only me. I lived on various combinations of raisins, peanut butter, bananas, carrots, cream cheese and white bread toast. My every meal was made of these, with an occasional apple and orange soda thrown in. I hardly ever saw my parents, and they hardly ever saw each other. My father was always "working late" and my mother was busy with her women's clubs, and it was a long time before I came to know that the both of them had other lovers and nearly complete alternative lives on the side. This was none of my business, and none of each other's, for that matter. They had long since tired of the whole 'family' thing. My sister and I had known it, and more or less looked after each other, but now she was gone, and I was left to deal with the wreckage.
At least the year at school had slipped by without too many problems. All of us were small fry now; even Fripperone and Jockstrap were as lost in the enormous regional high school as I was, and I almost never crossed their paths. The same was true with Dennis Hobbs. These giants were now relegated to the junior varsity squads, and made to run through rookie gauntlets by the older boys who lorded over them. Secretly I snickered at this change in their fortunes, and lurked sometimes after school near the practice fields to see them being put through their paces. Of the whole gang only Rags retained a sense of self-respect that year. He never said much, and didn't have to. He had a look in his eyes that no one was going to mess with, as if they sensed that any bread they cast upon those waters would certainly come back to haunt them times a hundred.
My only agony was Annie Barkowicki. I know, I know, her family had changed their name to Barnes years before, but she was still, and always would be Annie Barkowicki to me. I don't remember exactly when it was I first fell in love with her, but it could have been as early as age six, when we were thrown together in the first grade and were actually friends. We played a lot in those days, sometimes just the two of us, and sometimes with others. She came over to my house. I went over to hers. We ran around in the fields and on the playgrounds, climbing trees, exploring creeks, playing make-believe pirates, Annie always leading the way with me always tailing along. It often seemed my early childhood mainly consisted in listening to the sound of her voice, barking orders. This lasted well into the fourth grade, up until the day my family moved away for a year. When we returned, everything was different, especially Annie Barkowicki, who had become Annie Barnes in precisely that period.
I should tell you what she looked like. Shortish, straw-blond hair, pale blue eyes, short and thin and strong as a little girl, but tall and thin and strong as a young lady. While we had been the same size at six, she towered over me in the sixth grade, and by the ninth grade, the differences were far greater. She was never beautiful, but she had one of those temporary bodies that some young women seem to get; perfect in every way for one or two years, and then, a total transformation, generally not for the better. That year, ninth grade, was one of the years of her glory. And yet she was still a tomboy who mostly hung around with guys, played tackle football even, to the sheer amazement and delight of every young man in the neighborhood. She didn't act like she was even aware that all their touching and grabbing had little to do with trying to bring her down. She was elusive, though, and quick; even at that age she was faster than most of them.
There was always something to admire about Annie Barkowicki. She was friends with almost everyone. She didn't belong to any exclusive group, and seemed to be above the whole in-crowd mentality. Girls who tried to put her down found themselves suddenly very unpopular with the boys, who all wanted to be on her good side. She wasn't the smartest kid, but she tried hard in every class and truly earned every B and C that she got. She wasn't the best at any one thing, but she was always cheerful, and never gave up. There was really only one person in her whole world she had absolutely no use for, and that, of course was me. I never knew why it was that way. I didn't know why she had stopped being my friend, or why she never did want to be my friend again, and I couldn't work up the courage to ask her. She didn't exactly shun me. It was nothing like that. If I did manage to say 'hello' on occasion, she always returned the greeting, and then quickly moved on. I had the feeling that I had somehow wronged her without knowing it, and there was nothing I could do to make it up. I only wished I kn
ew what it was!
My great misfortune of ninth grade was to share a class or two with her every day. English and Spanish, too, my least favorites. I was so bored in those classes, being far more interested in science and math in those days, that I would sit there and literally fill up pages and pages of notebook paper with tally marks, one for each second that slowly ticked away on the big round clock on the wall above the teacher's desk. I was in the third row, two rows behind her, and while my hand was making those little tally marks, my eyes were on her hair, on her head, on her back, and imagining her face looking straight into mine, way up close, with a nice big smile and a romantically friendly look in her eyes. Those classes were sheer torture, and I would rush out of them at the sound of the bell just as fast as I could, racing away from any contact or sight or sound of her. Once I was safely in another room, I could look around and, not seeing her, breathe a little again.
Did I tell you she lived next door? Right next door, and as my bedroom window faced the street it was constant temptation to go stand there and look, and see if maybe, just maybe she was out there, and I could see her. As the summer approached, I knew this was going to be my suffering. I had to think of a way to force myself out of it. My best idea was to get a job. Get a job and wake up early every day and go
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