Punching Townsend
I punched Townsend because I snapped. I used to be a nice guy until the government got a hold of me and I became a newshound which meant I had to start hating real bad because of the stupidity that points to various things like fascism and shit. I’m not afraid of communism. Everybody knows that’s bullshit. Liberal, though, liberal all the way, but I gave that up too when I punched Townsend. Townsend is my second cousin on my mother’s side. Fuck it, I figured. Let the world go fuck itself.
There is one thing that all these people got that are screaming this or that on the news and it’s this: they’re getting paid. Hapless shmucks like me, formerly nice guys, are not getting paid yet reacting to all of the bullshit in the newspaper. When you get paid it is much easier to dedicate your life to goodness and fairness and the American way or to convolute it. It all makes sense at the end of the day when you are sucking down that Martini and eating that pasta salad on the sidewalk restaurant in front of hobos and people walking by wondering what it would be like. To eat the linguini, I mean, to have some sort of life. It’s too expensive anymore to have much of a life.
Hell, I do alright. Park cars on Main. Shit, the kids are everywhere. Where do they get that money? They must save up or else their parents keep them suckling on the card. Whatever it is, there is definitely reason to believe that the better looking you are, the more money you’re going to get. Age? Shit, age is the only religion left. Money is a shy God that you can turn from if you really want to through various methods, some of them could be drugs or alcohol or the standard God or nature, but the worship of the young is forever.
I’m 46 years old. If I didn’t have a job on this sidewalk parking for Luigi’s I wouldn’t be allowed to look at any of these kids. You’re not allowed to make eye contact with anybody under 40 out here. With the job and all, it’s sometimes okay, with the uniform and all that, but without the uniform? Forget it. You make eye contact with someone in their 20s and they’re likely to scream. What do you want! Do you want my youth! Are you a vampire! What do you want! Why do you stare at me! Everybody stares at everybody so nobody looks at anybody anymore. Women know if you’re looking at their behind from 30 feet away. People don’t need eyes anymore. We’re all one big eyeball making sure we’re not devoured by vampires or attacked from the side by werewolves. Werewolves and vampires, all the rage at the movies right now for a reason. This is who we are or at least our fearful selves think we are. We might as well be then. What the hell? Why not?
I park a car for this broad, this tough bitch, had to be 6 feet tall, tan dress falling over these golden skinny shoulders, obviously a fashion model type. L.A. is full of them. The beautiful and the young and how can you complain? This town was built around them to feed the beauty starvation of most of the rest of the country. So this broad, I call them all broads, it’s what my father would call them if he was still alive, this broad comes out of this Mercedes with this Italian suited gentlemen and goes into Luigis and there’s this hobo, I call them hobos. Why the fuck not? This hobo he‘s walking just up the street and goes “yeeeeeee” or some shit like that. She and Valentino go into Luigi’s and I’m thinking, “what kind of asshole would yell and disrupt such beauty as that?” Sure she’s gotten everything she has by laying on her back, probably anyway, sure, she’s only skin deep, to me anyway and anybody whose poor like me, but she’s beautiful. Let beauty be for its own sake. What if we all looked like this shit hobo whose walking up the street towards me still panting from his “yeee,” his eyes all googly, drunk as shit, so I think of Townsend, how when I hit him, his eyes spun around in his head before he hit the floor.
“Dude, have you no respect?” I say to him.
He stops and leans back and forth and looks at me. He’s sizing me up. He’s one of those crazy hobos who you think might hit you if you talk to him. Didn’t have a lot of that placid “I’m done” thing about him. He says nothing. Sizes me up. I’m in a monkey suit and I’m a big motherfucker. His James Bond is leaking out of his ass as he looks at me. He could attempt a big move on account of the monkey suit, but he couldn’t get past my size.
“That lady is going to lunch,” I tell him and he stops. “Dressed up all nice and you come along and spoil her romantic date. People like you make people like that hate people like you until they want to kill you guys, wipe you off the planet, then they make laws about you guys and pretty soon the only place you got left to go is up your mama’s ass, you friggin’ prick.”
I was about to lay the guy out. He’d really pissed me off. This guy with his wild white hair that I couldn’t tell was gray or blond and just filled with dirt. Then this guy looks at me and surprises me.
“She’s pretty,” he says. He then lowers his head, realizing that I might pummel him, which I wouldn’t because I didn’t want to lose my job, then starts mumbling to himself. She’s pretty. He said it like a baby boy. Like a kid looking at a picture of his mama. She’s pretty. So, this broad held so much for this guy, so much love and joy and everything good that he yips at her and scares her half to death, makes her date think of going for his tiny, silver revolver that he probably kept in his shoe, and me want to slam him in his head with my knuckles. All because he had an impulse as innocent as a child wanting a fucking balloon. She’s pretty. And he walks away mumbling.
This is L.A., the rich and the poor, the beautiful and the ugly, the old and the young, the seen and the un-seeable, the vampires and the werewolves. This is where the dreamers come, and rightly so, because there is an industry here for them. This is where the dreamers die, too. It’s everything there is all thrown together. It’s a good thing, really, because otherwise you’re stuck in a no name shitsville town somewhere hated by people who are just like the people in L.A., no different.
Everything is all this everywhere else too, except you don’t get a chance to realize it, because things are cleaner everywhere else. Things are stuffed away a lot nicer there. Here you can see it so even guys like me, no education, full of hatred for the society for the most part, can understand and come to grips with the unfairness of it all. Having life’s ugly realities right in front of your face all the time is like having a 24 hour shrink telling you why you’re nuts. After awhile you get it and it’s not that bad anymore.
Anyway, I punched Townsend. He said to me that Sarah Palin was going to be the president and God hated fags and Muslims and Glenn Beck was a prophet and I told him that his corporate theocracy was going to fuck everybody. Then he told me not to curse, that God didn’t like it and when he realized his child was there he got a little too close and I punched him. One for the devil, I guess. I feel bad about it. I ain’t got nobody anymore. I’ve alienated everybody I’ve ever known. Got no family, got no love of any sort, sleep in a room I rent from an old lady, barely making it on my car-parking job. I used to fancy being more than this, but the newspaper sort of fucked me over. You see, I was a good kid. My mother was a good mother and my father a good father, I like to think for the most part anyway, it’s just that they were uneducated and scared. They didn’t know what to tell me and when push came to shove I didn’t have it in me to go rub shoulders with the people I needed to rub shoulders with to make it in the world. Simple as that. I was scared.
I’m rubbing my face right now in the way that you do when you’re just flabbergasted at the notion of what you’ve become. Do people do that? Do other people just rub their faces and then look up like a lizard around them and realize that they’ve missed the boat, that the God of age appropriateness has smitten them from ever making it in the realm that they fancied themselves to belong when they were a kid? I did. I just did. I rubbed my face and thought that, looked out at the street and thought that.
I came to L.A. in 1990. I was a big guy, always a big guy. Back then being a big guy was a good thing. Being 25 and a big guy can get you a job bouncing in bars or allow you to fuck scared girls, the kind who like big dogs and would eventually go on to drive big cars paid for by guys, unlike I ever became, with big wallets. Big used to be good. Now big is bad. Big is very bad, because everybody is scared. Anyway, I started selling cars back in Michigan when I was 22. I ended it when I was 25 because I always liked the movies and since I fancied myself a big seller and I read this magazine article about a money guy who secured big money for movie projects, I moved to L.A.
Shit didn’t work out. I could never get anything going. I was somehow always wrong for everything out here. Little guys didn’t appreciate the threat of terror that I could impose through my demeanor. This worked in Michigan. You stand there, puff out your chest a little bit, make sure they know you’re a tough guy who’s decided to be nice to you because you’re special, you’re their friend now, you’re their ally who’s going to put them into a nice model and beat the shit out of anybody who gets in the way of their happiness.
It’s the same way out here, but they don’t use the muscle as much. A little guy with glasses can do just as much as long as his hands are soft. It’s the other way around out here. Personality counts out here and style. You can be big, but there’s something else. It’s almost as if people can smell whether or not you come from a Brady Bunch home. If you didn’t, like I didn’t, they’re a little bit scared, but they don’t say it. They try to match your innate ferociousness with their own copy of it, but it just makes them feel uncomfortable and they don’t want to work with you. They don’t want anything to do with you. They want to work with someone who’s got what they got, or they think they got: class. Never really considered myself to have class, but that’s what they want; class and lots of it.
Oh, well. I don’t go around crying. Wasn’t as good a salesman as I thought. Tried to get some money for this guy I met at a bar once. He said he had a great film and I told him I was a producer and he said “yeah!” and he was all happy and he went on and told me about this story about this guy who rides this giraffe across the Mojave desert. I thought about that. A giraffe might be expensive, but I called around and found out that you could actually get a giraffe for a price, but you couldn’t ride it. Turns out you could ride an elephant for a price though and the writer guy changed his story to riding an elephant across the Mojave desert. It was easy and would only cost a few million to shoot. I was still under the impression that since films could go for much more than a couple million to make that getting this amount of money was something totally do-able. I was on board. We had the script. The writer would direct. He would find the cinematographer and the crew and all that and I would find the money.
Well, I looked for the money. I made phone calls and more phone calls and more phone calls. I went to a dentist’s convention because that’s how I heard some guys got started. I was happy to be an independent. I didn’t need the big studios. All I really wanted was to be one of those people who can afford to eat linguini in these patio restaurants and leave the leftovers on the bench for hobos. Didn’t work out that way. Time after time I got flat out different variations of the flat out No. Not interested. Hard times. Can’t help you. All of our money is tied up now. Can take a proposal, but can’t guarantee anything. I wrote out a long proposal. The writer wrote a nice long treatment. I took a meeting with maybe 20 people, but every time there was that something, that nameless something that ties in with vampires and werewolves and soft skin and Michigan tough. They thought I was a hack off the street, a player, and I guess I was because I had nothing, really, to back it up. I had no education, no contacts, no L.A. history. I was just another guy coming into town to play the game. They could see it in a second. I would have to play the martini game and play it well if I were to do that, but when I tried I always fell flat. I ended up sitting at the bar drinking an imported beer waiting for some shmuck to sit next to me which was perceived as a trap. Talk to me and you die. They could see me from a mile away. So I quit.
I didn’t quit right away. I kept trying. I kept the elephant story around for dumb luck’s sake, but dumb luck didn’t like me either. I took on a few more stories by luckless writers over the years all while working stupid jobs until finally I ended up parking cars in 2000 and have been ever since. A few years ago I decided that even though I killed my own dream after awhile, making believe that everybody was a piece of shit and the world was a piece a shit, I would try something new. I would try to write my own story. If I was to make it in this town I would have to do something else and what can you do at that age, 43, that didn’t take beauty or money to make you legit in the eyes of others? I thought about it. I always liked that giraffe idea, but it couldn’t get made. The thing’s back is too curved to ride. But what if you took a giraffe and made it a baby giraffe and gave it a little kid to take care of it and then the end of the world would come, a big bomb or something from bin Laden and the zoo would go crazy and this kid would find the giraffe and since everybody had left the remains of the city there would be this giraffe and this boy and they would move through the world together? I started writing about this giraffe and this boy and it made me feel good. I was doing something again. I walked a little taller day to day. I was going to make a statement about something that I’d all but lost over the years, goodness, just plain, innocent goodness and light.
The news had made me crazy over the years, although I didn’t know it then. I’d become a student of current events because it gave me a sense of purpose, but I needed something more. I started writing my giraffe story and when I was finished I put it away and started writing another. The next story was about a man who thought that he could fly, jumped out of a window, broke every bone in his body, but when he healed he found that he was perpetually lifting up off of the ground. I had him flying around the neighborhood, looking into windows, flying over New York City. Everything. It was a flying fest. He got shot with b.b. guns. They wrote articles about him. Everything. But he still couldn’t get a date. He was too weird. Then one day this one chick decides that she can accept a flying guy and they fall in love. It was a great story. I put that one away and I started another one. Number two. The next one was about a war guy who shoots up this Vietnamese village, decides that killing babies isn’t a good thing for his conscience so joins the other side and kills other guys like him, Americans, who shoot up innocent little babies. This one scared me a little bit because I thought they might come after me, what with bin Laden and all, but I wrote it anyway. I stuffed it into my drawer and felt that same pride again. Three.
After number three I took the screenplays out of my drawer and had copies made. I wrote up some good treatments on each one of them and paid this lady to correct them. After the revisions I started making phone calls and sending what they call “query letters” to agents and producers. I was back in the game. I wrote five more screenplays and got hundreds more rejections.
After awhile I realized that it wasn’t the answer and I quit. I started drinking and smoking pot. I’d sunk to the lowest I’d ever been. I started hanging out with the guys on Venice Beach on my days off. My face got darker and darker and the circles under my eyes deeper and deeper. I’d had enough. Work didn’t know about my becoming a hobo on my days off and after work. Sometimes people from work would see me out there, sitting with the gutter punks, but they also knew I was a writer because I kept up the charade. I told them I was working on some real Bukowski-type shit. There eyes would light up and they would go “oh.” That’s all I needed, that little “oh” and I could keep on drinking and keep my job.
There are guys with a lot of money who hang with these guys. They’re from the street and made it big so they like to hang because it keeps them grounded. They go home to sirloin though, not chuck. It keeps them young. I guess I was the same way. In a way, I found the only people who really understand me. Don’t get me wrong. These hippies are really no different than anybody else. They’re all age-ists. You can’t take that away from anybody. They all judge on beauty. Rank will never go away. If you talk to one of these guys today, they’ll walk past you tomorrow without a word. Nobody trusts nobody. But I took a little human companionship here where I could without expecting anything back. Like with the rest of the world, I stayed on the surface. By this time I believed that there was nothing else. I’d come to accept this shit circumstance of existence, how everybody is afraid of everybody, how everybody is a lie to everybody else and truth only happens one on one in extremely lucky circumstances; like the kid with the giraffe and the woman who loved the flying guy. I accepted it. I accepted everything and with it, I accepted my age and the fact that the only way to go is down.
I was the flash guy. I was the guy who talked a lot when I drank. I was the yip guy like I was talking about, that’s why I got so mad at that guy on the street. The yip guy’s got no boundaries and all in the name of freedom, man, freedom. Yip, yip, yip, yip! Be a vampire, let the girls rub their noses and mothers herd their children. Hey it’s all in the animal nature. We’re all zoo animals and some of us have been released to the streets. The drink did this to me. It worked out fine, too, because I worked in the day. Come four o’clock I was sipping my vodka and Gatorade on the boardwalk. This L.A. thing was working out after all. But then I punched Townsend. Why did I punch Townsend?
When we were kids, Townsend and I were friends. We played in the neighborhood together and walked to school together since our families lived practically next door to each other. Townsend was the “Timmy” of the neighborhood. He was a small kid. I was a big kid. One time this group of girls came by and surrounded Townsend and wanted to kick his ass because he was little, no other reason. They were older than him, too. He was just about to get the shit beat out of him when I came along. I stopped the beating even though these girls were tough and could have taken me. I stood up to them. They were really just pussies, as most girls are, afraid of spiders and the future and just about everything else. Human nature, man, human nature.
Me and Townsend would be taken to Tigers games by our fathers together and eat ice cream and get plastic helmets and ice cream in plastic helmets. We both got pennants for our rooms and we would spend time together playing games and just being kids together. Then we grew up. Townsend went on to become a manager at a discount store, then a regional manager and then even further up than that; a real good spot in a corporate office in Detroit. I sold cars then moved to L.A. I was the hero. When Townsend came out to L.A. we met up and then I punched him.
I’ve thought over and over about it, the reason I punched Townsend in front of his wife and kid, and can come to only one conclusion: God is dead. It just hit me as Townsend recited his game plan for the universe, starting with the United States. First God would take over with the help of the corporations. Then God would make sure that people like me never got to be me in the first place. He would take away all the alcohol and all of the sinful dreams. He would make sure that the dirty and poor were stashed carefully away out of sight so as not to disturb the dreams of those little innocent children that Jesus begged to come to him. Flowers would start to bloom. Everything would be great.
The newspaper had soaked into me. This was my only claim to adulthood, the fact that I followed the news. But the news had seeped so far down into me that I had been poisoned by it. All of the unfairness of everything based on human nature itself was mixed up like a witches brew by the perpetual insanity of what was happening in the political realm.
All I saw was a bad situation getting worse driven by people who supposedly wanted good in the world dictating to the rest of us, who loved only evil, how to live our lives. Then Townsend came along as this new philosophy was making headway and I snapped. I punched him. But it wasn’t Townsend that I punched. It was everything that I had become. It was everything that I thought that I was, but wasn’t. It was all of the realities that I had come to accept, but that had made my life darker by accepting them. I had laid claim to hard fact, embraced it just to survive. But it had made me bitter whenever I saw that hard fact was becoming harder and harder because of people who thought they were good, but were only being manipulated by the people who truly brought about hard fact; the monster corporations that just didn’t give a shit about anything but their bottom line.
So I punched him. In so doing, I punched myself. I realize this now. By punching Townsend it was revealed that I was on a suicide mission living day to day in this world of non-opportunity and bias. I was pouring gasoline on the fire by being the watchdog of a world that didn’t want to be watched. Current events gave long legs to my hidden anger about my circumstances that stretched longer and longer and finally rooted like a tree only to grow branches that were oddly dead even as they grew. Long dead branches. Long dead roots. The news was the water, Townsend was the gardener that day, and I snapped and I punched him. That left me with exactly nobody else. Nobody. I was utterly alone in this world.
So I quit the news. I quit the world. And funny, when I did, the tree immediately pulled up by its roots and fell. You know your life is fucked up when you must punch somebody to be free, but this is what happened. I owe Townsend an apology, and I think he will be back, but I owe him an apology and a thank you. Now my brain is free. It is being colored in again slowly, little veins of new color seeping into the rest of the brain that is dead gray, but at least no longer blackened. But it is happening, slowly but surely, it is happening. I am a baby again. I am new. I have regained my innocence by releasing the burdens of the world, by no longer trying to hold on to a semblance of rightness and goodness by fighting for it by reading the newspaper. Who will I become when I am filled in again? I am certain that it will be someone completely different from who I was before I punched Townsend. It will be an easier and lighter me. The hard God is dead. If there is a new God I think He will be kinder. He won’t want to be hard. In the meantime, I park cars. I got the giraffe screenplay out again the other day. I will call Townsend tomorrow. It’s been two weeks. Something just had to give.
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Special Bonus Story!
…compliments of The Fargo Kantrowitz’z Literary Campsite.
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pizza pizza pizza pizza
Johnny didn’t use his words very much. Some of the other kids would get Johnny to chase him and then he’d spit a little bit and they’d have to dodge it and he’d smile and stuff, but I’d stop them after awhile because Johnny didn’t know better and he got all goofy.
Sometimes I was Johnny’s buddy. The teacher gave Johnny buddies, kids who didn’t treat him bad and would look out for him. Sometimes we’d go out on the grass and walk around or Johnny would throw the basketball through the hoop. He was pretty good at throwing underhand and made a lot of shots and stuff. Mostly Johnny was just in his special class and sometimes in class with the rest of the kids so he could act like he was a normal kid. But normal was one thing he wasn’t. He was all retarded.
My brother last year told me that Johnny pooped his pants once at school and the teacher had to clean it up. I never saw that. I don’t believe that happened. Johnny always tried really hard to do good, but sometimes he couldn’t quite do it right. Last year was the last year I was with Johnny because I went to middle school and Johnny stayed back. But I still think about Johnny a lot, especially because I used to be the biggest blabber mouth all the time growing up and Johnny didn’t say hardly anything at all. But there was one time when he spoke and I’ll never forget it because it was the day when he saved me from getting beat up by these kids who called themselves the Master Blasters of Disaster.
I wasn’t scared of anybody last year, but these kids all thought they were cool and then they all started calling themselves the Master Blasters of Disaster and they started running up behind Johnny and one by one smacking him on the back of the head like he was a retard, which he was, but wasn’t. He was Johnny. He had Down Syndrome. One day I was playing basketball when I look over and see Johnny with his shorts down around his knees and this kid squirting a squirt gun at his dingie. I ran over there so fast and first pulled up Johnny’s pants and then hit that kid square on the mouth. He thought he was tough, but he wasn’t. You’re not supposed to let Johnny do stuff like that. If he’d of taken more time to figure out how to treat Johnny that kid would have known better. Well then this kid, the next day, he comes up to me when I’m eating my snack and he says to me that he calls me out, but this time he’s got four of his friends behind him. I’m not scared of him and I tell him okay so we go out to the grass, way out far by the fence and he throws a punch and then I throw him down and I’m on top of him when all these other kids jump on top of me. I fought the best I could, but I got hit a lot and it hurt and the only thing that stopped it was when the playground teacher blew her whistle at us.
I saw those kids every day and they would say stuff to me and I would just ignore them most of the time except for when they fooled around with Johnny. Then they’d all look over at me. I knew that none of them wanted to try and take me by themselves so they’d leave him alone. I could see that they wanted to try and prove something with me. I didn’t care. I was ready when they were.
Those kids left me alone pretty much. Sometimes they’d ride by me real close on their bikes when we’d all walk home, but I never had any trouble. I was the second fastest kid in the fifth grade. They all knew who I was. At recess I just went about my ordinary business. Sometimes I was Johnny’s buddy at recess and we’d play basketball or Johnny would just sit down and dribble the ball. Johnny liked to dribble the ball until he got bored and then he just sat there staring at the ground.
I remember one time wondering what it was really like to be Johnny, so I sat down next to him and I didn’t say anything to him like I usually do. The teachers all want you to tell Johnny he’s cool and stuff all the time, but I get tired of that. I wondered, sitting there that day, what it’s really like to be Johnny, not The Cool Guy, but just Johnny. I’ve played at it a lot since then by myself, in my own mind, but I only played at it once with Johnny. It’s easy if you let your imagination run away with you. It’s like you open your mouth and let your eyes roll back in your head. It was like my body fell all loose and stuff and my tongue was sort of sticking out. Everybody plays like they’re retarded sometimes, but I did it then not to be mean but to find out what it’s like to be Johnny. I guess I thought a little bit that if I could feel what it feels like to be Johnny then Johnny would feel better being the way that he is.
So we sat there on the pavement and I looked off into the sky all spacey and stuff. Then I remember Johnny looking up at me all blank at first and then he smiled really big, like he knew what I was doing or, if he didn’t know what I was doing, he was happy that I was there or something. I don’t know. He just smiled and then went boo boo boo boo boo pizzapizzapizza. Johnny always said pizzapizzapizzapizza. He could do it over and over again. That was an easy thing to get him to stop saying because all you had to do was say “no pizza” and his eyes would light up and he’d realize that since there wasn’t no pizza around that he shouldn’t be saying pizza. Sometimes in class he’d lift his hands up and start twirling around a little bit or kicking a little bit or going “yeeaaahhh.” The assistant teacher lady would tell him to use his “inside words” which I guess was code for shut up. But he was mostly good in class. But he couldn’t speak very well. He didn’t have his words unless you really made him say them, then he’d spit and stutter them out and if he did you would have to congratulate him and it was all pretty stupid because you shouldn’t have to be congratulated just to say a stupid word.
But I did it too. Everybody did. Most of the kids were always really nice to him. It’s funny to think that someone can’t find their words. But when you think about how Johnny is, I mean, when you think about how it felt to, like, be Johnny, with your head all spinning around and your eyes all rollee pollee and stuff and your mouth open and feeling really stupid just like you’re retarded, then you kind of understand what it feels like not to have no words. When I sat on the pavement and played retarded with Johnny, he saw me and laughed at me. He didn’t need words to think something was funny. He laughs just fine. But I guess we all got to have words to make it in this life. I know it would be a lot harder for me if I couldn’t speak. They say that’s why he went poo on the playground, because he couldn’t tell the assistant teacher lady who was watching him that he had to go poo and because his brain is all rollee pollee all over the place all he could do was just go poo. So words are important. It’s just that you can’t get Johnny to say them much.
But none of that mattered much when the Master Blasters of Disaster cornered me in a vacant lot one day when I was trying to steal a pomegranate off this tree that everybody steals them off of. It was right across from the school. It was right before school started and I was walking to school when I cut through the vacant lot and climbed up the wooden fence just high enough to pull one down. Then I heard that kid Kenny yelling at me, the one I beat up, that I was stealing pomegranates. It was Kenny and Donny and those other two kids whose names I don’t know and one kid I’d never seen who was really big and I figured must go to the middle school already. But they all run up to me and I get down and drop my pomegranate and start to run, but these kids are chasing me. They’re yelling that they’re going to kick my ass and I know they mean its not them who are going to do it, but its the big kid who’s going to do it and I got real scared because he was big and I’d never seen him before and he was running faster than any of them. He was going to catch me if I didn’t run faster. I ran like I’d never ran and I was just about to get over the fence and into the school yard when I felt this hand on the hood of my coat and this big kid just pulled me backwards and I fell flat on my back.
This kid lifted me up by my hood and pushed me up against the fence and put his face right up to mine and called me a pussy. Then he pulled me down and put his knee on my chest and started smacking my head. Kenny was yelling Pussy! Pussy! at me real loud from behind the big kid. The big kid was flicking my eyebrow really hard and then he started hanging a loogie over my face. Just when he did that I heard Johnny. I guess he’d saw me and come out to see me to tell me Pizza or something. He came up and just started yelling real loud “Pussy! Pussy! Pussy! Pussy!” And he was saying it over and over and over again all crazy like. He’d never done that to any other word I’d ever heard of except Pizza and now he was doing it to this kid who was big like a house and I’m thinking this kid is going to let me go and then jump over that fence like I was about to do and beat up Johnny. Instead, all of the kids just started laughing at Johnny from the other side of the fence, including this big kid.
“Look at the retard,” the big kid said.
All the other kids started spitting and saying “pizza, pizza, pizza” at Johnny and Johnny flung up his hands. He couldn’t get that word Pussy out of his head and this big kid had me by the neck and he was all the time pushing me harder and harder into the ground. Suddenly Johnny let the word go and he walked up to me and he put his finger through the fence and rubbed my cheek with his pointing finger. That’s the finger he uses to count with in class.
“Danny,” he says. I say “good!” completely forgetting about this big kid because Johnny had never said my name before and I was happy that he was using his words. Then this big kid, and I’ll never forget this, he hawked up this loog from deep down in his stomach and he spit it right in my face. It’s not a pleasant feeling being spit at. It’s about as gross a thing that can happen to a person. As I’m blinking it away out of my eyes I hear Johnny from behind me “pussy, pussy, pussy, pussy, pussy” and then “puh!” Johnny’s spit went right over my shoulder into the face of the big kid. And it wasn’t one of his weakling Johnny spits, which was like a sissy spit, but a real loog. A real one. I turned around and yelled at Johnny. “No spitting, Johnny!” Then he spit again, but this time he just spit on himself over and over again. He was getting crazy. He was losing it. I could see that even as the big kid threw me aside and started climbing the fence to go beat up Johnny. I jumped up and grabbed the kid’s foot and tried to hold him the best that I could, but he just started kicking and he kicked me in the head and I fell down. The next thing I knew this kid was on the other side of the fence standing there looking down on Johnny who had gone back to saying pizzapizzapizzapizza.
“Run, Johnny! Run. Run to class. Go!” I screamed this through the chain link, but Johnny just smiled and then looked up at the big kid who was getting another big loogie ready to spit into Johnny’s eye.
“Run, Johnny, Run!”
“Pizza, pizza, pizza.”
The big kid spit a loog bigger than the one he spit at me into Johnny’s face and then he pushed him down. At that all the kids got scared because they thought somebody was coming. The big kid jumped back over the fence in like half a second and he kicked me in the leg as he passed me.
“Jerk!” I screamed as he ran away, but he wasn’t listening anymore. All those guys were laughing and saying “pussy, pussy, pussy.” I looked over at Johnny and he wasn’t moving. He was just sitting there on the other side of the fence with his legs crossed looking down at the ground. He was maybe mumbling a little bit. I climbed over the fence and sat down beside him. This kid had hawked an ugly loogie all over his forehead and it just sat there and dripped down over his eye.
“Johnny? Johnny?”
But Johnny wasn’t saying nothing. Eventually he looked up at me and I didn’t know if what I saw was a tear or what, but it sort of looked like a tear, but I didn’t have a chance to tell because his face changed and he said “Pussy!” and for the first time I saw something in his eyes that seemed normal. For just a half a second I knew exactly what he was talking about because he’d shown anger as he said it and then looked away, looking, I know, for that big kid who’d done us both so wrong.
“Yeah, he’s a pussy,” I said. “Cool guy, Johnny. You’re the cool guy,” I said. Then we touched thumbs like the Fonz and walked to the bathroom and washed ourselves off.
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