Jake popped the chrome-plated handle on his locker and it whined open. A folded lined three-hole punched piece of white paper floated down to rest between his shoes. He bent and retrieved it, carefully looking from side to side to see if anyone was watching for his reaction. He opened and read it.
Jake,
Thanks again for the pass. You’re so sweet.
Don’t ever change.
Sincelery,
Jo
Jake thought that “Sincerely” being misspelled in no way diminished the feeling of the letter. In fact, he actually thought it added a depth of human frailty to the note. Here was this girl, obviously grateful, opening herself up and letting him know how much his gesture touched her. Jake folded the letter back up carefully and put it in his front pocket and headed off to English.
Jo Canton was a plain looking girl, average in most every way. Jake could see himself asking her out if he could assure that Eddie would never find out. He felt bad about judging whom he’d be seen with based on Eddie’s approval. Jo was a nice person who, although sometimes too talkative, had a great many good qualities. She was always willing to do things for other people regardless of their station in the social hierarchy, sometimes to the detriment of her own place in that system.
Damnit, she’s generous of spirit and if they can’t recognize that as something noble then fuck them. Ask her out. Who gives a flying fuck at a rolling donut what Eddie thinks.
He was determined now to ask her out. He had missed his chance with Jodi. Well, perhaps missed is not the correct term. Blew is probably more towards the point. Agonizing over whether she was sincerely interested in him or just Eddie’s willing shill, prostituting herself to brighten, if only for a moment, the life of some pathetic rotund Weeble-Kind, had perplexed him into a state of inertia. From this, he was powerless to break free. Ever the pessimist, his decision came down on the side that caused the least pain. If he called and she said she’d skated with him as a joke, he would be devastated for months. Never calling would cause him only slight pain and for a very short time. The Path of Least Resistance was the only choice for him.
There was laughter coming from inside the classroom. Long trailing rounds of wicked laughter rolled down the hall from Miss Waltham’s door. The laughter was broken by a few shrill girls’ voices saying ‘That’s sick. That’s just sick’. Jake assumed that someone had just pulled a practical joke on someone else much to their discomfort and annoyance. He imagined it was Thad Wilson, the trickster sophomore who had been forced to retake freshman English. He had probably picked his nose and wiped it across some poor geek’s glasses. Or, perhaps he was halfway through his famous all belch rendition of “Mary had a Little Lamb”.
Jake couldn’t have been more wrong.
He appeared in the doorway and the laughter erupted anew. Faces turned red and eyes brimmed with tears. If Jake had been able to turn off the sound to this scene it could’ve almost passed for a moment of great sorrow, the emotions of some classmate’s death wrenching the kids’ bodies and puffing their cheeks. Richie was standing in between two rows near the front of the class, his face patchy with red from laughing. Eddie and Morris were in their desks at the rear smiling silently. Jake looked at Alex and Scott. Alex’s head was down on the desk and his back was heaving up and down. Jake thought he was laughing with them until he raised his head to wipe his tears from his eyes. Scott was behind his brother sitting, arms crossed, his jaw set, eyes peering straight out the window at some unseen thing. The rest of the kids began pointing, half of them at Jake, the other half at the chalkboard at the front of the room. Jake entered slowly, cautiously, as if someone had planted landmines somewhere beneath the institutional tile. Turning to face the chalkboard, he finally set eyes upon what everyone had found so funny.
Spread across almost half of the chalkboard were three crudely drawn chalk figures engaged in carnal knowledge of each other. The two thinner ones were standing facing each other and the fatter one was on all fours, dog-like between them. There was a cartoon bubble coming from the head of the figure on the left moaning “Ohhhh, Yeaahhhh!!!”, its eyes just slits, its back arched in the throes of physical ecstasy. The other upright figure was hunched over slightly, his three-fingered hands gripping the waist of figure in the middle. Out of the round circle of his mouth came the bubble stating, “Das ist Gut”. The figure in the middle was just silent apparently because he had learned never to talk with his mouth full.
Jake’s first reaction, besides the fact that he could’ve drawn it better, was to giggle at the picture. That was until he saw the names written across the bottom of the picture. From left to right he read, ‘Scott’, ‘Jake’ and ‘Alex’, each name attached to an arrow pointing accusingly toward the figure it named. Jake looked at the drawing again and centered on the fat figure in the middle. Its eyes were closed, in what others would see as utter enjoyment, in what Jake saw as shame.
Jake started for the chalkboard but Richie’s foot halted his progress. Jake flew forward catching himself for a second on the chalk-tray ledge attached to the board. This momentarily slowed his decent to the hard tile floor. He stood up and whacked the back of his head on the chalk ledge that had saved his from a headfirst dive into the wall. This brought gales of laughter up from the kids’ throats. He turned toward the class, oblivious to the fact that he was now standing directly between the two upright figures on the board. He looked at Eddie, who had sat up in his desk and reached into his pocket. Pulling out the two pink Fast Times at Ridgemont High passes Jake had given the Twins, he waved them in front of his widely grinning face.
“Hi, Miss Waltham”, a girl in the front row said loudly.
The laughter stopped. Richie bolted out of his desk and pulled down the map of the United States that hung above the chalkboard. As he pulled it into place, it perfectly covered the entire drawing.
“What are you boys up to?” , Madge said as she shuffled her way to her desk, clutching a steaming hot cup of tea in her bony right claw.
“I was showing Jake where San Francisco was”, Richie replied. The room burst into new laughter. “He’s thinking of moving there”.
Jake shoved past Richie, driving his crotch into the corner of Sara Etanger’s desk. He bumped Miss Waltham who spilled a drop of scalding tea down the front of her purple caftan. He barreled into the hall slamming into one of the lockers standing across from the door.
As Jake ran down the corridor, he could hear Madge’s cracked howling voice trailing after him.
* * *
“Why didn’t you erase it?”, Jake asked Alex who was seated across the table from him sucking down a Hardee’s chocolate shake.
“I couldn’t. I was too embarrassed.”
“What about you?”, Jake accused Scott who had just returned from the counter with two Big Cookies.
“I tried”, Scott replied as he bit into his first cookie. “Richie stopped me and when I tried to shove him out of the way, Eddie came up from behind and jabbed me in the shoulder with his pencil”.
Scott put the cookie down and pulled up the sleeve of his J.C. Penney Hunt Club polo.
“The lead’s still in there”.
Jake examined it more closely and saw a sliver of black beneath a translucent layer of skin.
“I gotta get it out. I’m gonna die of lead poisoning”.
“It’s graphite”, Alex added. “They haven’t made lead pencils since forever.”
Other kids began to file into Hardee’s for lunch. A bunch of them went straight for the tables, saving them for their respective groups, while the others ordered for them. A few of them would look over at the three boys and then lean into the ears of their friends, telling them the story of what happened in third period. The listeners would laugh out loud and turn to look at Jake and the Carson boys with a mixture of disgust and pity. This action spread like a, well, a rumor, until everyone in Hardee’s was stealing glances at the boys and giggling under their breath. Jake couldn’t take it anymore and got up to leave. As he stood shoving scraps of waxed paper and cardboard boxes on the brown plastic tray through the door marked ‘Thank You’, he was met face to face with an upperclassman who had turned around in his booth to ask Jake a question.
“Hey, tell me somethin’. Do you spit or swallow?”
The upperclassman’s eyes narrowed to slits, his lips pulled back, baring his crooked nicotine stained teeth. He barked his smoke scented guffaw into Jake’s face. Jake looked at the upperclassman’s table and saw the rest of the guys seated around it, all of them miming oral sex. They rhythmically plunged their invisible penises into their mouths poking into the side of their cheeks. It was a horrific display of ridicule. Jake dropped the tray into the trash and ran out into the parking lot.
Alex and Scott caught up with him near the split in the fence that led back to school.
Jake turned to them and screamed, “How did he get the passes?”
Alex and Scott looked down at their shoes.
“The passes. He had them. How’d he get them?”
“He threatened to sic Sean Logan on us”, Scott replied.
Sean Logan was the redheaded boy who, in ninth grade, already had a full mustache. Not one of those thin, cheesy, as Eddie called them, “Dick Ticklers”, but the full Billy Dee. On top of that, he towered over the other kids. His copper colored locks came away from his scalp like a tangle of weeds. He wore a black jean jacket with the back emblazoned with “Eddie” the walking dead bloodlusting satyr that was the mascot of the thrash metal band Iron Maiden. Jake thought that he would’ve given up the passes with that threat, too. Hell, he’d’ve given up the coveted watch pen his aunt had bought him for Christmas and his Ron LeFlore rookie card.
“Are you going back to class?”, Scott asked.
“Aren’t you?”, Jake returned.
“Oh, yeah, I just didn’t get enough humiliation yet. I need more”, Alex said. “Fuck that noise”.
Scott and Jake turned toward Alex. Alex never swore. It was obvious that today’s events had pushed him beyond the point where his Good Catholic Upbringing could reach him. It had pushed him into the red. He was boiling hot and gave no signs of cooling down.
“The fuck I am, too” Scott said, turning to Jake. “That’s bullshit”.
The Twins walked toward the bike racks. Jake stood, one foot on the grass, the other on the first step to the South entrance to the school. He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. He weighed the possibility of skipping the rest of the day. He could see the look on his Father’s face as his Mother told him of the phone call from school that had woken her out of her mid-day snooze. He could see his Father unbuckling his belt and pulling it from his waist. He could feel the sting of the thick leather slamming against his buttocks and the backs of his thighs. He wanted none of it. He opened his eyes and walked through the bright orange doors.
By 2:45 p.m., he wished he hadn’t.
* * *
He had endured it all. The whispers. The catcalls. The whistling upperclassmen, grabbing at their crotches and yelling ‘I got something for you to suck on’. Girls would point and turn away. People gave him wide berth when he walked down the hall as if his humiliation reeked from every pore of his body like a rancid stench. He was shoved into the girls’ bathroom twice, to calls of ‘That’s the right bathroom, Fag.” To his credit, that act had presented him with the opportunity to see Tracy Dunham, the most popular girl in school, naked from the waist down for a split second as she pulled up her skirt. However, the sight in no way diminished his crushing shame and embarrassment.
Between fifth and last period, Keith Smythe, the plump diminutive son of the Born-Again Christian pastor that ran the Liberty Congregational Church, sidled up to Jake to tell him to “Turn the other cheek”, that “This too shall pass”. He wanted to let him know that he would pray for him and that God would see him through the darkness. Jake had slammed his locker door and looked at Keith, shaking his head in amazement.
“There is no God”, Jake spit the words into Keith’s cherubic face.
Jake walked off as Keith bowed his head to pray.
The worst by far was the last bell. Jake thought that he had endured the full brunt of human humiliation. He had come through the fire, singed and sore, but not completely burnt. Jake’s spirits began to rise as he started out the West doors. He was headed home to lick his wounds and drowned his sorrow in a box of Screaming Yellow Zonkers and a big 2-liter of Faygo Red Pop. The sugar high would wash away the bad thoughts and the eventual crash would lull him into a restful, dreamless sleep. Jake smiled at his plan as he pushed the heavy orange door open and was immediately grabbed by a trio of upperclassmen.
They pulled his pants down to his knees, which was easy because, being cursed with his Mother’s body type, he had no ass. The front of his Dad’s old shirt covered his bits and pieces and the tail covered most of his crack. The upperclassmen then picked him up and threw him face first into the muddy football practice field. Jake had tried to get up, but every time he tried one of the guys stuck his Adidas high-topped foot on his butt and forced him down.
“Fuck the mud, Fuck the mud, You Fat Faggot”, he said shoving the heel of his shoe into Jake’s tailbone.
The football coach, Coach Zaslavskaia--Zazz for short--blew his whistle and the upperclassmen dispersed. The coach helped Jake up and asked him if he wanted to use the shower in the locker room to clean himself up. Jake just pulled his pants up and walked away.
The ride home was worse than any he’d ever endured, because he now felt outside what he had been feeling inside; filthy, disgusting and in utter despair. The mud soaked into his underwear and onto his thighs. With every pedaling motion, he felt his thighs sliding together, the friction eased by the slick film of wet mud. Dark stains rose up on the front of his paints. As the mud dried, it began to itch. He spent the last few blocks, walking his bike and scratching his crotch to stop the itch, dried mud falling in scabby flakes out the legs of his pants.
Thankfully, his Mother was asleep. He pulled the muddy clothes from his body and shoved them into the laundry chute. He stepped into the warm shower and began to sob, head resting against the title wall, watching the brown swirls disappear down the rusting drain.
He replayed every taunt, every derisive comment as he lay, fresh from the shower, on is bed. His face was contorted in a crumpled mess and he held his arm over his eyes to block the light from the window. He had reached the bottom. He saw nothing but black around him, nothing but evilness and hatred. Eddie’s face swum into focus, his visage frozen in a permanent state of mischievous glee. Jake tried to block out the image by cramming his eyes shut and rubbing them hard until bright bursts and swirls of primary colors appeared in the dark. His sister Kay had called this phenomenon “Polish Fireworks”. He’d open his eyes and the patterns would remain for a moment, then dissipate.
Jake looked at his hands. They were plump peasant paws. Even though he’d taken a shower he still could see grime in the furls and rows of his palms. He rubbed them together and little balls of dirty dead skin fell into his eyes. He closed his eyes, brought his hands to his throat. He started to squeeze. The veins under his thumbs bulged out. He tightened his grip and concentrated. He could feel his face puffing up. He dug his nails into the sides of his neck. His face stricken with terror and determination was beet red, his eyes welling with tears. He began to feel light-headed. His head was thrumming with the sound of his quickened heartbeat.
Suddenly, a pain started at the base of his right thumb. He loosened his grip and the pain worsened, like a rusted shish-kabob skewer thrust right through the meat of his palm.
“Ow, ow, owwwwwww”, Jake cried as the cramp set in deeply, stiffening his entire hand and bending his thumb at an awkward angle. He lay there panting, his eyes closed, rubbing the rigor from his right hand.
His eyes snapped open.
He had reached an epiphany. He had gone through the blackness to the other side. He had risked death, or in the very least unconsciousness, to assuage the pain and now saw everything sparklingly clearly. All the pieces fell into place like some mystical game of Connect Four. Blaming himself for everything wasn’t the right thing to do. It wasn’t as if he had brought all this shame and degradation on by himself. It wasn’t him. He should be blaming his parents, especially his Mother, for raising him as a fat pansy egghead. He should be blaming her for force-feeding him Devil Dogs and Fluffer Nutter sandwiches every time he fell in the street or had a bad day at school. He could blame his Father for not being around to show him how to act as a boy. He had been forced to glean his image of boyhood from reruns of Leave It To Beaver, The Brady Bunch and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father--which he had stopped watching because of the title. It was their fault this happened. All their fault.
It was then he realized that it wasn’t their fault, really. All the fault could be laid at the feet of Mr. Eddie Stephens. He was the culprit. He was the mastermind behind the slow destruction and eventual demise of Jake’s self-esteem. Eddie had consciously taken credit for everything good that happened in Jake’s life. It was his way of gaining ascendencacy over him. Jake had turned into a sycophant, just like the rest of the boys, lobbying for approval in the master’s eyes. Eddie would ridicule each of them constantly, never offering words of encouragement. And, it was when the boys chafed at his power that they received the harshest punishment. Someone, Jake thought, ought to show him how it hurt, see how he liked it.
Jake bolted from his bed, ran down the stairs taking two at a time and crouched in front of the bookcase. He extracted The Story of America from it place next to Soul on Ice and riffled through the pages.
He flipped to the rear of the book and opened to a page with a black and white picture of a black 1939 Mercedes-Benz with a group of men standing around it. In the center stood Adolph Hitler, looking relaxed and at ease. The men looked happy, as if Hitler had just told a joke about a Minister, a Priest and a Goddamn Kike Rabbi. But, behind the smile on each face was a look of fear. A dread of the power that the little man in the trim wool coat and toothbrush mustache wielded over them.
Jake traced his finger down the page. He stopped and began to smile. He ran his index finger under the phrase ‘assassination attempt on Hitler’s life’. Jake read on to the end of the paragraph. He re-read the entire section, nodding his head at the craftiness and beautiful simplicity of his plan. But, clouded by his glee over his burgeoning plot, he completely missed the word ‘botched’.
No comments:
Post a Comment