Tuesdays with Johnny

I haven’t seen Johnny on a regular basis since the days of Cornwall Street, a lifetime ago. We endured very different existences. He battled his demons and I mine. I have never doubted his love for me, or his loyalty. It’s been a long established truth. I was sure to see him once a year, always at a wake. We’d bid farewell to a fallen comrade and reminisce about our time together. I had recognized his conspicuous decline, first into drugs, then, crippling illness. Huntington’s disease. It had taken his mother at a despicably laborious rate, ultimately rendering her unable to swallow. She eventually starved to death.

Johnny watched as she whittled to nothing. Helpless.   

I don’t know how John first learned his fate. I assume he discovered it as a result of a hospitalization for drug abuse or from one of his multiple incarcerations. He told me a dozen or so years ago, at a wake.

His closest living friend, Sonny, had died from an overdose. Sonny had been in jail for six months and was reacquainted with his long incarcerated cousin, Milton. Milt was at the end of a twelve-year jaunt for aggravated assault and rape. No one had missed Milt. Fatefully, Sonny and Milt were released on the same day. Milton took Sonny out to celebrate their newfound freedom. Sonny was dead within three hours. He didn’t see his kids, his family, his friends, just Milt and the dope dealer.

Johnny was inconsolable.

I arrived at Sonny’s wake just as the police were leaving. A fight had erupted when a strung out Milton tried to make his way into the funeral home. Unwelcome and met by a mass of mourners, armed, literally, they attempted to tear him limb from limb. I had gratefully missed the fiasco. Still, several hundred people milled around the parking lot, smoking cigarettes, drinking, smoking pot, laughing, crying, arguing; a middle-aged keg party.

I scanned the faces looking for John.

The last time we were together was when his stepfather died, a serendipitous meeting. There was a rumor that a man was to arrive, shackled, with a police escort. I saw John from my office window. He hopped out of a van in an orange jumpsuit. It was a spectacle. We made eye contact instantly. I was as stunned to see him, as he was to see me. He flushed with shame. He was put in a wheelchair and brought to his father’s room. He was standing outside looking into the room when I stepped off the elevator.

“I knew you would come. You’re a good girl.”

“I work here,” I smiled.

“I’m currently unemployed,” he winked.

He shuffled to his dad’s bedside. I knew he was humiliated. He looked haggard. He had been in jail for nearly two years. It had obviously eroded him.

He cried.

He cried at the sight of his dying stepfather, his ravaged, tremor-ridden, mother, and, the girl who saw more in him than he was ever able to see in himself. I stayed with him as he said goodbye to the only father he knew, the only father he loved. He buried his face in my neck and sobbed, restrained from holding me in return.

His familiar whistle drew me from my recollection. There he was, smiling. I could have been sixteen again, a time when his smile sustained me.

     “I knew you would come. You’re a good girl. I waited. I didn’t want you to go in alone.”

A knot came to my throat in an instant. My eyes filled to their brim. He looked terrible. Drawn. Addicted. Lost.

     “Don’t cry, Heather. I’m ok. I look worse than I am.”

     “John, what are you doing?”

     “Doing?” he laughed. “Dying. I’m dying. Same as mom.”

I was speechless. I could tell he was terrified. We waited in the long receiving line. I cried the whole time. Johnny held my hand. We never spoke of it again. There wasn’t anything to say. We both knew what awaited him. It was the saddest I had ever been for another human being to date.

Over the next ten years his decline was rapid and vicious. When the tremors took over his body more ferociously, he refused to see me. We spoke on the phone the day his mother died. After that he stopped taking my calls. I finally forced myself on him bearing a box of old pictures. He was a sucker for nostalgia and I knew it. The only ties he had to his former self existed on film. He missed who he once was. Seeing pictures reminded him of when he was whole. Free.

It was the worst I had seen him. He had no control of the convulsive, abrupt movements that plagued him. He had hurt himself on several occasions from the uncontrolled thrashing, including putting his arm through a plate glass window. He tried to hide how ill he had become. He attempted to jump out of his bed to kiss me. He tried to be the sixteen-year-old boy I was once in love with. He tried to feel good in a body that had turned on him so maliciously. But, there was no denying what was to become of him.

We sifted through the images of our shared youth, our lost friends. We told each other stories we both already knew. We laughed. It took everything I had to keep myself together. I cried the whole way home.

He didn’t allow me to visit often. He was difficult to understand and would get frustrated with his inability to communicate everything his mind raced to articulate. It was painful for him, for us both. He still consumed alcohol at a staggering rate and was prone to violent outbursts. Timing was everything with John. A lesson I had learned a million years prior.

When I heard he was in the care of a state run nursing facility, the same he would visit to feed his mom ice cream when she could no longer swallow solid food, my heart broke. Penny Manor has a lackluster reputation, housed in a shitty neighborhood. The first week I went to see John I sat in my car for nearly an hour. Dejected. It was dilapidated, filthy, with broken windows and overgrown landscaping. I couldn’t bring myself to go in.  

I went back a week later, more courageous, less venal. The interior was not nearly as cheerless as my imagination had suspected but far from ideal conditions for anyone, let alone the terminally ill.

I walked into the television lounge and found John.

He is emaciated, only capable of tolerating liquids, no longer able to swallow solids. He is strapped to a wheelchair for his own safety. He spotted me the instant I turned the corner.  A broad smile peeled across his face.

     “I knew you would come. You’re a good girl,” he smirked in his arrogant way. “You could never resist my charm.”

He laughed at his own absurdity. I pushed him around Penny Manor. I teased him about his hair. Completely gray and buzzed short revealing a tattoo of a swastika on the crown of his head. I had never seen it before, nor had he ever once uttered a racist remark in my company. I slapped it.

     “Nice tattoo, jackass.”

     “Don’t pass out in prison,” he laughed.

Sound advice.

“Will you come see me again?”

“Absolutely.”

“You can write about me.”

“Gee, thanks. Not exactly Tuesdays With Morrie, John. What story should I tell first? The shootings? The multiple stab wounds? How about the stints in jail? Or the time you got arrested in your underwear? What about when you cracked that kid across the nose with the tire iron? Or when you stole your mother’s car on Christmas Eve to come to my house for ‘midnight mass’? Like anyone believed we were going to midnight mass. I guess if we were going to church it would be in a stolen car.”

“I almost forgot you were funny.”

I stuck my tongue out at him.

 “You can write whatever you want. I can’t read it. You wrote me letters. Remember? I was afraid if you knew you you’d stop. I loved them. I looked at them for years. You could have written ‘go fuck yourself’ over and over and I wouldn’t have known.”

“Some of them did say that.”

“I figured,” he laughed.

He is still in there. A glimmer of the boy he was. Mischievous. Sarcastic. Quick-witted. Loving. Sentimental. Crazy.

“By the way, I heard the prom story, wise ass. Would it kill you to not make me look as bad in the next one?”

“You asked for it.”

 “Beside the point. What about that time with Tippy?”

“You got drunk and threw Tippy off a roof!”

“True story!”

That Morning

I heard my mother answer the phone. I could tell by the grogginess in her voice it was before her early, which in some cases, overlapped with my late. I didn’t have to open my eyes to know it was still dark. I could feel it in the pit of my stomach. I have never been a successful morning person, to this instant the thought of functioning before eight in the morning makes me nauseous.  Anyone I have ever been acquainted with has known this to be true. By way of fair warning or an unpleasant experience, didn’t much matter, it was nearly folklore.

Something had to be wrong.

My mother yelled up the stairs.

“It’s Lisa.”

Lisa hadn’t spoken to me for nearly a year, until that morning. A year I would give anything to not have wasted on petty bullshit. I can’t even recall, with any certainty, what we had fallen out over but I am confident it wasn’t worthy of silence, especially for such a long period of time.

“Edward’s dead.”

She said it just like that. Flat. As if it wouldn’t kill me.

It couldn’t be true. I had talked to him hours before. He was packing his stuff. He said he wouldn’t be late. I could barely fall asleep, too excited to quiet my mind, knowing Wally was struggling identically in his bed across town. I had missed him terribly. Edward joined the Navy, regardless of my tantrum. He was no sailor. I was uninterested in his contention that the uniform was a chick magnet. I had begged him, tears and all. He went anyway. He loved that uniform and looked handsome, like Gene Kelly. None of that mattered anymore. All of that was behind us now. He was coming home.

“Erin?”

I had to be dreaming. I was overcome with a numbness; a terrible fog that would plague me again and again.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes.”

I hung up the phone. I got back in bed.

“Is everything ok?”

I couldn’t speak.

“Erin?”

“Edward’s dead.”

I remained in bed for hours and stared at the ceiling. The phone rang incessantly. I heard when Wally called. I could hear my mother comforting him, distraught, herself. He called repeatedly. I couldn’t talk to him. I couldn’t hear the reality in his voice. It was unbearable in the abstract, let alone in actuality.

By noon Wally was at my door. I could hear his choking sobs as he made his way up the stairs to my room.

“We have to go see his mother. Eddie would want us to.”

“You can do whatever you want.”

“Please.”

His voice cracked.

I got up, brushed my teeth, and, put on a baseball hat. My mother was standing at the bottom of the stairs when we came down.

“Erin, do you think you should go over in your pajama’s?”

I shrugged and walked out the door.

Edward’s house swarmed with people.  I felt confused, light-headed, as if I was visiting an alternative universe. I walked from room to room. I knew there was noise. I could see the twisted faces of grief in every corner. The kind of grief that is accompanied by wailing but I couldn’t hear it. His mother clung to his most recent portrait, one that possessed the same smirk, as all of his portraits held. He loved having his picture taken. It was remarkable how pleased he always was with himself.

People spoke to me, hugged me, shook their heads in disbelief, patted me on the back, I knew they were acts of condolence but I could only see their lips move. The house felt hot and heavy. I needed to get out.

I sat on the front porch and stared at the house across the street. My old house looked back at me. Still, white in color with dark shutters, innocuous looking to the untrained eye. The site of my earliest and most vivid recollections, the headquarters for all of our adventures and, the last place I had ever felt whole, the place I was originally broken. I was barefoot, wearing sweat pants and a Grateful dead t-shirt, so worn they were barely worthy of pajama’s. I felt my chest tighten and my stomach turn. I leaned between the balusters and vomited in the front bushes. People milled around as if it were a cocktail party. I’m sure they wondered if I had cracked, literally and figuratively.

“You want to go?”

“Nah, I’m okay.”

“Really? Cause you just barfed in the pachysandra and look like a homeless hippie. Your mom dropped off some stuff.” He smiled, sadly. It was the first time I had actually looked at him all day. He had aged overnight, as I’m sure I had, and he had a suit on. I burst out laughing.  

“You’ve had that suit on all day? It’s ninety fucking degrees out! I hadn’t noticed how spiffy you were looking!

“Says the shrub-puking, bag lady! Fuck you. And a Sox hat? You know he’s a Yankee fan."

“Fuck him.”

“Yeah. Fuck him.”

We almost laughed. What we could muster.

I took the stuff my mother left and went up to Edward’s bedroom. We joked that it had become a shrine since he had left for the Navy. He was the youngest and the favorite, in that “absence makes the heart grow fonder”, kind of way. I looked at all of the things he had collected over the years. His rainbow suspenders hung from the back of his open closet door. Boy scout badges, posters, drawings, decorated his walls, rocks, seashells, a diorama of Rome he had been particularly proud of from 5^th grade, condoms, phone numbers, matchbooks, ashtray, occupied the top of his dresser.  A crucifix resided over the bed.

Pictures were tucked into the wood frame of his dresser mirror, various girls, but mostly picture of the three of us. Our high school portraits, the wallet size, of both Wally and me, the three of us from Lisa’s graduation party, me and Wally dressed as hobo’s for Halloween when we were ten. Edward and me at our eighth grade graduation from catholic school, the three of us, smiling, after making a seeming fortune, before we got in trouble, for caroling for a fake charity, Edward’s going away party, the three of us in front of his house, him in uniform, smirking. A Polaroid of Wally and Edward that I took before they left for Boy Scout sleep away camp. I told them I was taking it to remember them because I was sure they were to be eaten by cannibals, when in truth, I just wanted to scare them into staying home, afraid they would have more fun without me and never come back. I don’t know how he ended up with it. Stolen is my best guess. He had total access to everything I owned and rifled through it often.

A framed picture I had made for each of us sat on his nightstand. Us three. Sharing a hammock and a cigarette the Thanksgiving prior. The last time we would see him; our very last moment.

I lied on his bed and held his pillow to my face. I closed my eyes and breathed him in, as much as I could tolerate; a vain attempt to fill a void that would forever exist, Edward, my first penis, my first cigarette, my best friend, my first terrible fog. 

The Lunch Lady

It was a day like any other. Wally, Edward, Peanut, Sal and I were busy building a Big Wheel ramp of stolen cinderblocks and plywood. It was not our first attempt to fly on our bikes, but a new design was necessary, one we hoped wouldn’t result in Wally getting stitches in his lip, like the last time, even though him talking like Fat Albert never got old. It would be near impossible to get him to test the upgrades but I tried to coerce him nonetheless. While I begged him to tryout our new device, with the amended safety features, we were overcome by the sound of sirens, fast approaching. We did what any other band of unsupervised seven year-olds would do. We hopped on our bikes and headed in the direction of whatever drama was unfolding. Nothing exciting ever happened in our neighborhood, especially in broad daylight, and we weren’t going to miss it.

The last time something almost exciting happened the fire department had to come help Mrs. Harrison, who was a million years old, out of her bathtub. Hardly earth shattering but traumatic since we could have lived our whole lives without catching a glimpse of Mrs. Harrison’s saggy ass.

Sal still brings it up with the same sense of dread and wonder he had in that moment.

    “How can someone’s ass look like that? It couldn’t be just age, right? She must have been in a fire or something.”

It didn’t matter. From the sound of it this was a much bigger issue than Mrs. Harrison’s ass-flesh. Well, maybe not for Sal. We peddled as fast as we could. Even Peanut, the last to sport training wheels, was curious enough to keep up. We arrived to the top of the hill and were frozen with shock. Completely unable to process what scandalous event must have been taking place inside the Owen house. Our jaws slack. Fire trucks, police cars, neighbors milling around, obviously distressed.

The hearse.

We had seen the hearse before when Wally’s great-grandma had died after she went crazy. Wally and I saw her through the screen door peeling potatoes naked just a few days before. Mrs. Janesky waved her bottle at us, told us to get lost and called us “nosy little fucks”. Wally said he didn’t think he would ever eat potatoes again and doubted his ability to play with his new egg of silly putty. Which required no explanation.

This was different. This was serious.

Mr. Raymond, the man who picked up old lady Janesky, came out of the front door with a body, covered in a sheet, on a stretcher. We all knew the Owen family. Patty was in Peanut’s class, first grade, same as us. She was a sweet, quiet girl with pigtails, who always wore a dress. I didn’t play with her. She was too well behaved for the likes of me. Her mom was our lunch lady, a vibrant woman who had a breezy, carefree attitude. Mrs. Owen looked like a character from The Mod Squad.

    “Someone must be dead,” Edward offered.

    “It’s like being with Kojak himself,” Sal sniped.

    “I’m just saying.”

    “Who’s Kojak?” Wally inquired.

    “Duh. A famous detective? On t.v.?” Sal was nine and the worldliest of the bunch.

    “My mom only lets me watch Sesame Street. Sometimes the Electric Company, until the black guy comes on. Then she turns it off. She says Jimi Hendrix doesn’t belong on t.v. . Who ever that is. And, Zoom? Pffft! Out of the question!”

    “Wally! Stop babbling.”

    “I’m scared. I think we should go home.”

We were terrified with good cause. Patty and her two brothers stood in the picture window and stared blankly at the ensuing chaos.

    “Hey! Look! It’s Patty! Hi Patty! It’s me, Peanut! Patty!” Peanut attempted to procure Patty’s attention as she was put into the back of a police car.

    “Aw, man! She’s lucky! I wish I could get a ride in the back of a police car!”

I was sick with envy. Then her brothers were put in the same car. She never looked in our direction even though Peanut waved at her like she was in a parade.

    “Who’s in that car?”

Wally pointed to a lone police car, lights flashing. We snuck a little closer. A man sat in the back of the car with his head hung. We got close enough to see it was Mr. Owen. He looked up at us. He had blood all over one side of his face and on his shirt and tie. There must have been a terrible accident, a terrible accident. The sight of the bloodied Mr. Owen sent us home faster than the songs of the sirens had drawn us. Mr. Owen had turned into a monster. We were convinced of it as we breathlessly piled into Fran’s studio.

    “Fran, you won’t believe what we just saw!”

    “Why does she call him that?” Sal asked Wally.

Wally shrugged.

Fran didn’t look up from his drawing board as we told our tale. The sirens. Mrs. Harrison’s saggy ass. The hearse. Old lady Janesky peeling potatoes. Mr. Raymond. The body. The free rides in the police car.  Mr. Owen covered in blood. All of it, the whole sordid story.  I could see Fran’s jawline pleat, in and out, in and out. I knew he was thinking or getting annoyed, same jawline betrayal.

“I’m going to take a walk. You stay here.”

“Aw, c’mon, Fran!”

Fran shot me the look. You know the old saying about a face being able to stop a clock? This was similar. We sat on the curb in front of my house and anxiously awaited his return.

“What do you think happened?”

“Maybe Mr. Owen got into fight.”

“It had to be an accident.”

“Maybe he owed the mafia money. My Uncle Jack owed them money and they came to his house and cut off his thumb. He says he can only hitchhike in one direction now.”

“That’s stupid, Sal. Why would Mr. Owen get money from the mafia?”

Sal shrugged.

“Who’s the mafia?” Wally inquired.

“Ask my Uncle Jack.”

Finally, we saw Fran breach the hill. He was white. We ran in his direction to see what he had found out. We barraged him with questions. He said nothing. He held my hand while we walked home. It was then I knew it was bad. Fran told the boys to go home and to tell their parents that he would be calling them.

Once alone I peppered him with questions in my subtle, wily way.

    “Well?”

    “I have to call the Janesky’s. I can only hope the old man picks up. I hate talking to the mother.”

So much for my investigative skills, I sat on the studio stairs and listened to him dial the phone.

    “Sue? Fran. Wally tell you I was going to call? Yeah. They told me the same story so I took a walk. I don’t know why they didn’t come tell you, maybe because you are half in the bag by noon. Does it make a difference? Charlie Owen went crazy and killed Kathy. How am I supposed to know? Maybe he was half in the bag too. Stabbed her. In front of the kids. Charlie Jr. hit him over the head with the fire poker. That’s all I know. I’m sure you will tell it much more colorfully than I will. Feel free to call the henhouse. Save me the trouble. Yep. Bye.”

Stabbed? To death?  In front of Patty? Fran rounded the studio stairs.

    “World has gone crazy, huh?”

It certainly had.

Fran drove us to school the next day. The car was silent. Our usual, rousing, rendition of the Popeye song didn’t even cross our minds, let alone our lips. We all knew the horrible truth. Well, what we could process of it.

By lunch I had almost forgotten about Patty and Mr. Owen’s bloodied face and the body. Wally and I made our way to the lunchroom. At a table in the far corner we spotted Patty eating her lunch, a wide berth surrounded her. I don’t know what compelled us to sit with her. We had never done so before and would never again. She looked through us just as she had the day before. Wally and I took out our lunches.

    “I guess your mom can’t be our lunch lady anymore cause you’re dad killed her, huh?”

It seemed reasonable commentary to my seven year-old mind. Blunt. Unedited. Detached. My adult self remains horrified. Patty focused on my face for a brief moment but said nothing.  I never heard Patty utter another word in our long acquaintance. It could have been a profound retreat from reality or a deliberate silence for a select insensitive few. I have yet to forget Mrs. Owen’s kindness or the carelessness of my seven year-old self towards her daughter.

Mr. Owen was released from prison after serving thirty-eight years for killing his wife, our lunch lady.  

I don’t know what became of Patty and her brothers. 

Dom: The Early Years

I hated Dominick DePaulo. I don’t use that term lightly or often, if ever. When I heard Dom had been found dead, wrapped in a tarp and stuffed in an old refrigerator, I felt relief. A crushing weight that I had carried for decades sloughed off me, like sodden sleet from a rooftop. I realize the cruelty of such a statement but that is how I felt. Exactly. I understood why someone would beat Dom to death with a fairway wood. I had fantasized about it a million times.

We met when we were twelve, Dom and I. He was the kind of kid that would drift from neighborhood to neighborhood, terrorizing anyone too timid to defend themselves. A marauder. Deft. Cruel.  I was no stranger to cruelty for sport but Dom was no typical oppressor, his skills became as notorious as water boarding, and I wager, much more destructive. I have no idea what kind of home he came from nor have I tried to find out since. I have no desire to find empathy for him. He didn’t deserve any of my kindness. I doubt any witness has forgotten his crimes against humanity. His malice, in no small part, shaped who I was, who I remain.

I suspect I’m not the only one.

Wally and I rarely ventured beyond the six-block radius of our neighborhood. He hated change of any kind. Occasionally I could coerce him out of his comfort zone with the promise of Swedish fish or catching salamanders. Salamanders were not my idea of fun but it was my only way to escape the boredom of the neighborhood, with company.

I had finally talked Wally into venturing behind the office park where woods waited to be explored. It took months of begging and shaming to convince him. The woods had a reputation for hosting high school parties and harboring melon heads, a breed of freaks discharged from a local, long debunked, psychiatric hospital that may or may not have existed. The potential of melon heads was enough to incite a full-blown anxiety attack but I assured Wally that melon heads only came out at night, although I didn’t know that to be true.

My heart pounded with excitement as we rode our bikes down the path into the woods that first day. I could smell the must of rotting leaves and stagnant water. Trails marbled the terrain. I was temporarily carefree, an unusual place for me to be. The other shoe loomed. We stumbled upon him quite by accident. I knew in an instant he would prove formidable, even for me. I had learned to spot cruelty in people at a young age. Self-preservation, I venture.

“Who the fuck are you?”

Wally and I stopped in our tracks.

“Wally Janesky. We have gym together.”

“Wally? What kind of homo name is that?”

“Well, it’s my grandfather’s…” Wally trailed off.

“Your grandfather must be a homo.”

“I don’t think so. I mean, he’s been married to my grandmother for a really long...”

“Shut up, asshole. I could give two shits about your family tree. I’m sure you come from a long line of fags.”

“Who the fuck are you?” I chimed in or at least it sounded like me.

I could hear all of the air leave Wally’s body as his jaw hit the ground. Dom looked at me as if he hadn’t even noticed me until I spoke.

“Huh? Who do we have here? Did you just run, I mean, waddle, away from the circus?”

Fat jokes. Why didn’t that surprise me? I could tell Dom was stupid, but mean, ultimately a deadly combination, one that might force a person into a vacant refrigerator. Just saying.

“I’m getting called a freak by one of the lollipop kids? I’m not taking any shit from a fucking midget. Sorry, “little person”.”

I watched all of the blood drain from Dom’s face.

Dom was short, really short, teetering on yellow brick road short. It didn’t feel like breaking news to me but apparently no one had yet to mention it to him. I must admit to having a knack for fishing out one’s Achilles’ heel with relative ease. I have the nuns to thank for that.

“I didn’t know that Sasquatch’s could talk?”

Wally decided to speak up in my defense.

“I think you might be confused. Sasquatch are very hairy and tall. Erin is way to short, I mean, not as short as you, but too small for a Sasquatch. Even a baby one, I think.”

“Shut up, you fucking retard.”

Wally buckled.

As abusive as his parents were, and as awful as we all were to each other, Wally never seemed to acclimate to the dysfunction he endured. He was genuinely surprised when someone was mean to him. I never understood it. I planned on it. Even still, I hated to see him hurt. He had enough of that at home and didn’t need more shit from some little woodland troll with self-esteem issues.

“Look Dom, or whatever your name is, we’re just going to go. You can crawl back under your rock. You little putz.”

Wally and I mounted our bikes and rode away. Dom yelled after us.

“I’m not done with you and your pig girlfriend, Waldo.”

“Great. And he forgot my name.” Wally whispered to me as we rode off.

“That’s your takeaway, Wall? Wow.”

We warned the rest of the boys the second we returned from our unfortunate encounter.

“Erin pissed off Dominick DePaulo and now he is going to come looking for us!”

“I pissed him off? He was pissed when we got there! He called you a fag and a retard!”

Wally nodded. No need to deny the truth so close to our joint pending death.

“But you did call him a midget.”

The rest of the boys gasped in horror. They all began to mutter in a panic.

“Oh, my, God! You called him a midget? What is wrong with you? He’s going to kill us!” Sal shrieked.

“You don’t care because you are in catholic school. Public school is a zoo. We will be publically humiliated!” Peanut agreed.

The rest of them sat there like death row inmates, awaiting their collective fate.

“Don’t be such pussies,” my textbook response, regardless the conundrum.

“Great. Now we’re being called pussies by a girl.”

I knew it was only a matter of time before we came across Dom again. Wally had been staying off his radar at school and had his mother write a note saying he had ringworm so he couldn’t play gym for the rest of the semester. Two weeks had passed and we all started to feel a false sense of security. We went about our usual business of bike rides, relentless torturing of each other, cigarettes and minor pyromania. Then, when we least expected it, they came; breaking the horizon, steam still rising from the newly paved hill, like hell itself was coming. It resembled a scene from an old western where the cowboys appear out of nowhere and overrun the poor, unsuspecting Indians. I was no unsuspecting Indian. Being an Indian will cure you of that.

Wally spotted them first. A dread came over him in an instant.

 “What are they doing here? How did they find us?”

“Because we live two blocks away, Wall. Don’t freak out.”

“Don’t freak out? How can you say that? He’s going to make me eat dog shit! I know it! He made Bruce Warner eat dog shit and told him if he threw up he’d kick his ass and that is exactly what happened. Bruce ate it and puked and Dom and his friends beat Bruce up so bad he peed his pants! I know he is going to do the same thing to me! I know it!” Wally was in a complete panic, as Dom and his two sidekick flunkies, dropped their bikes.

“No he’s not. I promise.”

“You can’t promise things like that!”

“Sure I can. Do I need to get you a paper bag to breathe into? Relax. This is our park.”

Dom walked right up to Wally. I almost burst out laughing from anxiety. An inappropriate tick I still battle.

“Look who it is, fellas! Two ton Tilly and her fag boyfriend, Waldo.”

 “Uh, Wally and she’s not my girlfriend.”

Thanks.

“Why are you a faggot Wally? I think you are a fag.”

Dom pushed Wally.

“You said this wasn’t going to happen,” Wally pleaded to me.

Suddenly he was not so embarrassed being my friend.

“You can’t push him.”

“Really? What are you going to do? Sit on me?”

I’d like to say that his banter improved with age but he never progressed beyond that of an insecure, mean, cold, twelve year old.

“You can’t just show up here with your retard sidekicks and think you can push us around. We won’t stand for it.”

“Stand for it!” Dom cackled. He hated me for reasons I had yet to recognize but I knew why I hated him. He was a nun. Malicious, emotionally stunted, despicable.

“You can stand for it, sit for it, roll for it! I could care less what you think you fat, disgusting pig.”

I could hear the catch in Wally’s breath. He was hurt for me.

“Listen, I know you feel bad because you are a dwarf or a midget or whatever the politically correct term for mini-freak is and just because Pritzy Cook said you need a string to find your sad little pinky dick doesn’t mean you can take it out on us. See a doctor. Find a midget girlfriend. Whatever. Just fuck off.”

Silence.

All eyes were fixed on Dom. He was apoplectic with anger. I could tell he wanted to cry with frustration. He got on his bike. His moron minions followed.

He yelled, “I’ll be back, you fucking pig. You’ll be sorry!”

I already was but I had found his truest source of humiliation- a teeny, tiny penis. Karma at its finest.

“How do you know Pritzy Cook?” Wally asked.

“I don’t. I just hear you idiots talk about how hot she is.”

“Well, how did you know she saw Dom’s penis?”

“ I don’t!”

“You lied?”

“I should have let him make you eat dog shit.”

Dom would be back. I knew this was only the beginning. Dom was to be my life-long enemy, my antagonist, the at-home version, until the fairway wood.