Farrah Guber's butt crack reached out of her Gucci's as she leaned forward on her desk straining to solve the riddle of the X's and the Y's. I leaned forward behind her, further and further, until I heard Mr. Haguel scream my name.
- Fischman!
He was behind me with a look I'd come to recognize.
- Go to the chair and tell Mr. Spangle what you've done.
The chair was the big yellow chair in Miss McCranley's office. She served as secretary to Principal Spangle, who attended Harvard with George Washington, the father of our nation who cut down the cherry tree and never told a lie.
- But what did I do, I asked.
Evelyn Rand's hand shot up in the back of the room.
- Mr. Haguel, she said, may I be excused? I don't feel good and I have to go to the nurse's office.
Evelyn was a quiet girl, with straight dark hair, who always seemed shocked when called on in class.
Mr. Haguel excused her, and on our way out, Evelyn asked me if I was really going to go to Miss McCranley's office to sit in the yellow chair or would I rather walk with her to the gym where we both know there wouldn't be a class during first period.
I never knew the girl could speak, but now I noticed that Rand had the beginnings of what could someday be a great set of tits. Sure, they were nothing like Kelly Seldon's, who was the first and only girl in our class to wear a bra, but there they were -- they existed -- and it occurred to me that if I played my cards right, I might find a way to brush up against them.
While Evelyn thanked me for holding open the door to the gym, I made my move -- an ugly, ungraceful piece of work that involved me hurling my body against hers as she passed so that my elbow would rub against her chest.
- What are you doing, she asked.
- I don't know, I shrugged, honest as the father of our nation.
- I think I know what you're doing.
We were alone in the gym.
- Do you want to go behind the bleachers, she asked.
It was dark behind the bleachers. Filled with dust and sleeping Dominicans hired by the school to fix all problems related to plumbing.
I followed Evelyn Rand behind the bleachers, deep behind the bleachers, into the cramped, darkness where we were alone.
- Do you want to see it, she asked.
I nodded, yes, yes, and God yes, and there, behind the bleachers, Evelyn Rand revealed to me the wonder that was her vagina.
It was a strange organ. An exposed cut in the flesh at the base between her legs. My first thought was the impossibility it presented to the overall design of the body: with a hole in the bottom, how is that everything doesn't fall out?
Evelyn lowered her panties until I backed away in fear. Then she raised them so I could regain the fortitude necessary for a closer look. She lowered and raised them. Lowered and raised, pulling me back and forth like I was attached to some strange system of pulleys and rubber bands that pulled and repelled me with each raising and lowering of her Hello Kitty briefs. We played this game for the rest of first period -- me watching, her lowering and raising. Lowering and raising. I was mesmerized.
- Tomorrow, I'll let you touch it.
The next day in Mr. Haguel's class, I threw a book at Jesse Krones, the class spaz, for no reason other than to get kicked out.
- Julius Fishman, yelled Haguel. To the chair!
I waited outside the door of the classroom. I stood for five minutes, staring in through the widow, but Evelyn Rand just sat there, twirling her pencil and avoiding my gaze. I made angry, evil faces in the window, until Mrs. Hild caught me in the hallway and dragged me to see Mr. Spangle.
I served detention that day at recess, which meant I had to sit in the corner while everyone else did their thing. There was Jessie Krones, heaving a kickball into the air then failing to catch it on its way down. Bobby Federman was the class bully, 10 years old and already close to six feet tall -- he and his crew were playing "asses up," a sadistic game that lacked defined rules but always seemed to end with one kid standing against a wall while everyone else wailed tennis balls at his genitals. The "Ara's" - Farrah, Tara, Jara, and Sarah -- engaged in their usual cruelty of finding a girl who wanted to join their clique, inviting her in, then tormenting her until she ran from them in a fit of tears. And in the center of it all, of course, was Matt Strunker, juggling a soccer ball up and down, alternating between his knees and able feet, golden locks bobbing in the air as his admirers admired on.
No sign of Evelyn Rand though. Not until I spotted, way across the other side of the gym, Parnell Walker Coleman walking out from behind the bleachers with a big goofy grin on his face. Sonofabitch, I thought. He's got my girl.
Parnell was the token negro in our class, and beside myself, the only other kid in the fifth grade at Horace Mann who was attending on a full scholarship. He had already cornered the market in stolen goods -- clothes, baseball cards, and electronics -- which he liberated from lockers and book bags then traded for comic books and candy. Now he was moving in on the Evelyn Rand show.
I confronted him after recess.
- You stay away from my girl, I said.
- Or else what?
- Or else we take it outside.
We took it outside, exiting the back door of the gymnasium into the narrow walkway that snaked around the school like a moat surrounding a castle. It was cold and snowing in the Bronx winter and between our threats and insults, we heard the gentle calling of laughs and giggles, the hymns of the sirens emitted from an air vent that separated the walkway from the girl's locker room. We were tall enough now that we could stand on our tip toes and look inside. We could see through the vent, but by some miracle of refraction and diffusion, those half-nude angels were unable to see us.
To me, the air vent was a secret treasure, something to be enjoyed between Parnell and me, a fortunate discovery like the finding of a genie lantern or a ring that bestowed upon us a great power - the power to see the Ara's in their panties.
But Parnell wanted to run it like a business. Against my wishes, he opened the show to the public, charging two Jolly Ranchers a piece as the price for admission. One week in, the venture came to an end, when Parnell made the mistake of selling a ticket to Michael Hsu, the class rat, whose family owned a grocery store on the Upper East Side. No sooner had Parnell told Hsu about the air vent then a sting operation was set up by Mrs. Hild, and Parnell and I found ourselves squooshed together on the yellow chair with an appointment to see Mr. Spangle.
Haguel joined us in the conference that day, and it was he who argued that the scholarship program should be suspended before it lead to a lowering of standards for the entire school, all to accommodate a bunch of kids who didn't belong there in the first place.
- How much longer, asked Mr. Haguel, do we have to put up with this? For what their parents are paying, the children shouldn't have to put up with this.
Lucky for me, Mom was doing one of her stints at the hospital where she stayed from time to time in order to receive treatment for her allergies. Dad barely mentioned the incident at dinner that night where he, my brother, and I ate a bowl of pasta and canned tomato sauce that nobody bothered to heat up. In fact, Dad seemed less concerned with what I'd done then with how I'd gotten caught.
- Who's this Michael Hsu kid, he asked.
- The class rat, I told him. It was Parnell who put him on to it.
My father knew Parnell's father. Years ago they had been in business together. Something to do with vending machines that lost money.
- Parnell should know better than to open his mouth to a rat.
My father was a man of few words and that was all he had to say on the matter.
The next day, Parnell and I watched the Dominicans board up the air vent. We made the decision then and there that Michael Hsu was going to be dealt with once and for all.
- You mean you want to kill him, Parnell asked.
I showed Parnell some of the moves I'd learned from watching Kung Fu movies on channel five. I pinched an artery in his shoulder until he collapsed from a loss of blood. I squeezed his neck until his face turned blackish blue. I showed him how with one swift motion of my hand I could crack a man's nose into fragments and drive the bone spurs into his brain causing mental retardation and death.
- But in church they say it's wrong to kill.
- And what do they say about stealing, you fucking thief?
We came up with an alternate plan.
Hsu had a bottom locker and never took the necessary care and precaution one should take when dialing the combination on one's Master lock. With the locker room clear, Parnell and I emptied Hsu's book bag of its valuables and proceeded to relieve our bladders onto his clothes, his books, and everything else in his locker. The little Chinaman cried his eyes out when he saw what happened, and better yet, he was forced to go through the rest of the day shivering in his gym shorts rather than wear his piss-soaked clothes on this cold, sleeting day in the middle of an uncompromising New York winter.
Parnell and I were still serving detention for the air vent incident, still sitting in the corner of the gym while the other kids played. Our eyes watched over the whole room until they settled on Bobby Federman and his crew emerging from behind the bleachers, laughing and sniffing each others' fingers. They had discovered Evelyn Rand.
- Like animals, Parnell said.
- They have no respect.
We approached Federman in Mr. Haguel's class the next day and told him he had to cut it out. Evelyn Rand was our girl, and nobody could touch her but us.
- Or else what, nigger?
Parnell's face lit up.
- What'd you call me?
- I called you a nigger, Federman replied. You got a problem with that?
I had known about the N-word from an early age. I heard Sidonia say it after the cops shot Tasha and Ray Ray's uncle in Philly. Stupid nigger, she said. I heard Richard Pryor say it on the records my brother played on the stereo. I even heard it on the basketball court behind my building where my brother and I were the only white kids who ever played. One night at dinner, we repeated some of the things we'd heard:
- Gimme five, you jive-ass turkey!
- Here it come, nigger motherfucker!
Our mother beat us within an inch of our lives. She then sat us down and explained that she had marched with Dr. King in the '60's where she fought for civil rights and hid Black Panthers in our apartment to protect them from the FBI. She told us that she worked at a public school in Brooklyn because she wanted to help with urban blight. Over and over, she repeated that for reasons that were too difficult to explain, the word "nigger" could never, ever be used by white people, like ourselves, even if black people used it all the time. My brother and I had learned about Dr. King in the first grade. We knew all about the way black people were treated in the south and how America was the great melting pot where people's differences were subjected to fire and brimstone until they melted away and became a molten sludge dumped into the landfills of history. But more than anything else, we understood that if we ever used the word nigger again, we'd be beaten, if not by her, then by the black kids in the neighborhood, who didn't like us and were always looking for an excuse to cause us harm.
So it just made sense to me that when Bobby Federman called Parnell Walker Coleman a nigger, someone, somewhere was entitled to hand him a beating. Therefore, it was I who issued the first blow, a Mexican liver shot, and by the time Federman turned around to see what hit him, Parnell had climbed up on a chair and wailed him in the back of the head. The dumb brute didn't know what hit him, and before long, he was down on the floor, crying as he got kicked and stomped on repeatedly by the both of us. Michael Hsu ran to get Mr. Haguel who promptly carried Parnell and me off to the yellow chair.
Mr. Spangle seemed tired.
- Do you see, Mr. Haguel asked. It's every day. Every single day with these two.
Spangle asked Parnell what happened.
- Bobby Federman called me a nigger, he replied.
Spangle grimaced and looked over to Mr. Haguel, who blushed red as the red on the American flag that hung beside the door. Then they both looked at me.
- And what's your excuse, young man?
- I had to do it, I said. I'm a man of the people.
Posted by Judd Trichter at 1:38 PM