He was an average kid filled with average stupidty and reasonably clear skin for being in 8th grade and I didn’t really give a shit about him. His sister was in the grade below us and I couldn’t stop thinking about her: white puffy sleeved blouses, full lips and dark brown hair on a creamy face. I wanted to fuck her under the bleachers during a football game and leave her quivering without my load, declaring her unworthy of my seed. I’m not sure why. She never said anything to me and I never even got to know her. I felt a little guilty for imagining that about her.
But she’s unimportant, afterall, I never stabbed her. It was her brother that started the whole mess. George fucking Harrington had a knack for instigating a violent reaction and appearing the martyr. I’d seen it several times. Anyway, most of this is unimportant, except that I wound up stabbing him in the hand with my pencil and then hitting him across the head and body by swinging my desk into him. It wasn’t that big a deal; the pencil went right through and except for a little bleeding from the skin tearing, it missed anything important and left mostly a bruise, and the desk was more visually effective than anything else, since I hadn’t gotten a good enough swing by the seat back and the angle was awkward so that it more glanced than belted.
So there I am again, in my 2nd or third fight at the new school where no one actually faught and I had been required to sign a declaration of non-violence and visit a counselor who deemed me decent enough to continue on in the mainstream of acadamia. My father was impressed until they off handedly mentioned that George Fucking Harrington was in some kind of special education program for retards. At least that’s how my father interpreted it. From then on, it was me picking on the slow kid.
"Where’s that fuckin boy uh mine?" He was loud as hell and I woke up with a gasp. I looked at the clock and it was about three AM or so and pulled the covers over my head. The bedroom door flew open and the beam of light lurched drunkenly into the room and cast a glow under my covers. There was going to be a hole in the wall where the door knob hit.
My father was a real son of a bitch. Except my grandmother always seemed nice to me. I could never find a correlation. As far as I could tell, my father met with the Devil and promised an unholy allegience for no reason that I could even begin to concieve of; he was as arbitrary as he was predictable. I could predict that any interaction would tumble into utter chaos and I would be the on the losing end of siding with order. The severity of the impression was unfathomably arbitrary: a concusion on the morning after he had slept with two 19 year olds, public humiliation at McDonald’s on the eve of a fight with his wife. The introduction of irrationality in my life did not, however, begin with him. That fundamental construct came soley from my mother and the world at large. Never has a god damn thing made sense that the world has done. Not one tiny thing.
"What the fuck is your problem? Are you some kind of cock sucker?" The covers came off of my head and my hair was pulling me to my feet. I think I still had my eyes closed. "What kind of Faggot beats on the retarded kids? Are you some kind of Faggot? You like to pick on the slow kids and poke ’em?" I was standing on the bare linoleum tile of my bedroom floor, with the door wide open, stuck in the wall, with my dresser in front of me – hideous green from a thrift store in Mt. Vernon that my grandfather had gotten me so that my clothes wouldn’t be in neatly folded piles on the floor – the disgusting orange carpet leaning out at an angle to the front room, where the guests were seated nicely, legs crossed and jackets buttoned, as comfortable as babies on their mother’s tit, and at that moment I became keenly aware of my underwear and the look of my cock underneath the breifs – bikini briefs for men that my mother had gotten me after I begged not to have to wear the tighty whities anymore because they weren’t cool with the girls – so I reached for a pair of pants that was in the chair near the desk that had somehow been aquired for my studies. I didn’t make it and the men’s black bikini briefs that held my pre-pubecent little thirteen year old dick were my only protection from a total stripping of my dignity.
I vaugely knew of my father’s hatred for those that pick on the underdog. I know he bet on the underdog to win the superbowl and lost most of the time, and on the world series and on the stanley cup. I know he had been fucked with when he was a kid cause he a cleft pallet and got sent to "retard schools" because of his speech. But really, most of this I picked up after George Fucking Harrington. That was, afterall, only about six months after I’d met him and lived with him. After I’d been suspended, there was work to be done – mow the lawn with an "Armstrong Mower" he kept telling me as he drove me back from the meeting with my middle-school principal and the teacher who assesed me as a real monster who might assault this unfortunatly under-skilled young boy. I had no idea what an "Armstrong Mower" was. Until he showed back up with it and I saw a cylinder of curved blades the same diameter as the wheels with a wooden handle that went up into a tee shape, so that as you pushed, the blades would turn being connected to some gearing with the wheels. That was the first work to be done. After that it was sweeping the dirt and mud driveway, clearing cob-webs from under the house and splitting about 3 cords of wood; arbitrary and predictable. Somewhere in this was a lesson to be learned.
I saw the burgundy Tony Lama’s that were his favorite costume piece as I stumbled head down on into the front room where my head found the breakfast counter seperator to the kitchen with a dense thud. "Hell boy, you like pickin’ on slow kids so much, take a look here; I’m slow!" He barked while he pounded his chest insisting on eye contact. "I can’t believe that your mother gave me this! A faggot who picks on retards." He turned for approving looks all around, the woman on the couch I’d never seen chuckled and smiled a bright white smile and wore her puffy nylon shit-brown vest with pride over her flat chest, while her man, holding hands with her in a romantic tryst to the bull fights sat bolt upright, old as dirt and foul spirited skin draping his awkward skeleton in his denim jacket with cheap cotton tee-shirt under it, unable to fully cover a bloated belly, laughing hystericly at the theatrics I found myself plunged into. "Dance!" he screamed and began a swing with his leg that was destined for my balls so I swung my hips forward, away from the counter, but towards his on comming kick and mananged to catch the toe of his boot firmly in the ass hole. Balls saved, I’m not sure how far it went up, but the sheer agony seemed not worth the effort. I think I pissed myself and was sent to the bathroom to clean myself off, but it’s hard to say … there’s not much of that night left. I wanted to cut my cock off.
George Fucking Harrington, I heard, was eventually convicted of raping his sister repeatedly over a period of years which he manuvered into a mental thing and wound up in a hospital. I have no idea what happened after that. That mother fucker was never slow; just calculating. My father on the other hand was not only slow, but could not calculate a tip at a restaraunt. I always wanted to appoligize to his sister for thinking that about her, after I heard what happened. I bet she’s as fucked up as me.