At Manual teen pregnancy seems to be through the roof. My senior year an article will run in the paper about Manual having the lowest ISTAT scores in the state and the Highest Teenage pregnancy rate in the nation. Every fourth female that seemingly waddle passes you seems to be carrying something other than notebooks. It seems lie 20 percent of the junior class is in some stage of pregnancy. After the bell sneezes I am swallowed. Faces slide past me. Patrick is almost always by my aside bitching that he doesn’t have time to go outside and smoke cigarette he filched form his mom’s pocket book. Everyone is pregnant, including our masochistic algebra teacher Mrs. Peabody. She is chewing the class out after our first quiz. She is stating that this is remedial stuff we should have had as advanced seventh graders.
Aron Rothman has spent the last week water-torturing Patrick referring to him incessantly as PAM.
“Hey Pam, how’d you do on that first test PAM. Oh,
69. Well, at least that’s closet to getting laid you’ll ever get in high
school.”
Aron didn’t do much better. He got a 71. I got a 69
as well. The highest in the class was a 77.
Maybe it is just hormonal. Mrs. Peabody continues to
bark.
“Quit calling him that,”
Aron Rothmann just won’t shut the fuck up. He is letting Pat have it. The whole classroom is referring to him how as PAM. Both those who have graduated from St. Marks and those who have graduated from Christ Lutheran.
I feel like telling Aron that Pam is the name of the
woman who unearthed the garage door lids of my eyes to the world of the
arts. He is not paying attention. Every
time Mrs. Peabody’s back is turn to cater to an
oblivious Sherman he begins to emotional castigate my best friend once
again.
I want to raise my hand and tell her that, like cool
Joe Thomas, it wouldn’t fucking kill her to get in front of the classroom and
elucidate some of the proofs instead of incessantly lambasting us that we
should know this already.
“PAM, that really sucks PAM. You are such a pussy. Pam.”
I look back I
tell Aron to knock it off. He responds back by telling me to
shut the fuck up.
He mouths the word fuck so that Mrs. Peabody would
not hear.
In 7th grade Aron Rothman, in tandem with fellow
bully Mario Rutrherford pinned me down
in the corner of a locker room before a game with Concordia Lutheran placing a jock
strap fraught with human feces on my head like a three-corner cap. They laughed and pointed. I had human shit in
my eyes. IN my nose. On my lips. They did the same thing to my fellow cohort
Jeremiah. When I got up and pushed them out of the way they tackled me down,
removed the shit-strained bonnet from Jeremiah’s head and again, foisted it on to of mine like a crown
of thorns.
Mario is at Central. Somehow he participated in the
first young Columbus and was pathetic.
Aron just won’t shut up. When Mrs. Peabody’s head is
turned he is making motions like he is
sucking on a cock. He then points to Pat, addressing him as PAM, makes an
uncouth comment about his mom in reference to a sexual position.
Patrick’s face looks like a disco ball slowly
filling up with blood.
Without a word Patrick lifts up his Algebra book and
slams it down. The moment Mrs. Peabody rather caricatured neck swivels he
stomps out of the room. When peers look back at Aron pinwheels his orotund double- chin assays the
classroom and says the word what, feigning naiveté.
I follow Patrick out of the classroom.
The barometer of his facial features is ready to
explode.
**
Today, after Cool Joe Thomas BIO where he talks
about nothing at all I am asking Angelina Lighthouse to the Freshman mixer on
Friday.
I have made up my mind.
In the hall Patrick is hitting the locker as hard as he can. He
is kicking it. Vern McElfrsh who somehow helps out with track and field walks
out into the hallway and makes an off-with-her-head sign with the side of his
oblique palm sliced over his neck telling Patrick to cut it out. Patrick is
still red. Aron and Eric are walking the opposite direction to Coach Mann’s
class.
“FUCK!!!”
Pat man, dude man, calm down. It’s not the end of
the fucking world.”
“Sick of this shit. It was all this shit at Christ
Lutheran. Now. It’s here at Manual.”
“Dude, fuck him. He has one eyebrow. He looks like
Bert off of Sesame Street.”
Patrick kicks the side of a random locker again. Two
more teachers walk out in the hallway. I push Patrick in the nearest bathroom.
Before I realize it a Benson and Hedge he filched from his mother’s pocket book
is planted between his lips and he is firing it up.
“Pat man.”
“Dude I don’t fucking care anymore. I don’t care
about any of this shit.”
He looks at the mirror.
Two men are at the urinal. One is also trying to
smoke while being discreet. Patrick is looking at his craggily three-day no
shave cigarette toting visage in the mirror one second and the next second his
fist ejaculates from nowhere, pummeling his reflection back in the mirror into
a web of serrated triangles.
His knuckles are bleeding.
The two junior classmates zip up scampering out of
the bathroom.
Patrick is bleeding.
Dude, man, Pat you got to go see the school nurse.
Your hand is bleeding.
Patrick responds by telling me that he doesn’t give
a fuck.
“No Pat man seriously you got ta go. It’ll give you
an excuse not to see those assholes next hour in Coach Mann’s class.”
“I’m not going to Coach Mann’s class. If I go to Coach
Mann’s class, somebody is going to die.”
“Patrick man,”
He pushes me away. He sounds like a Pentecostal
minister as her pushes me away telling me to go.
He goes into a stall and bends down.
I try to stay. I can tell that Patrick doesn’t want
me to see him.
I go to Coach Mann’s class alone.
***
Years later my father will say that while watching
WITH HONORS he thinks that I look just like Brendan Frasier due to the method
in which I comb my hair. Dual decades
late when I am working as a facilitator for Wayward youth of the Stet we will
watch a modernized adaptation of Journey to the center of the earth with
Brendan Fraiser as the protagonist and the residents will think it I am making
a cameo as the lead.
Years later on a drunken whim I make love to an
older women on my paper route.
She is only a few years younger than my mom and her
husband has just died.
She tells me that she puts on The Mummy, watches
Brendan Frasier and masturbates thinking about me.
Touching herself, two fingers flapping, brushing together, as if wings of an unknown butterfly trying to make her body lift up and fly.
***
I see Patrick fifteen minutes after the bell rings
to welcome third hour. He has a pass excusing him to class. His face looks like he has been crying. Like a
Kool-Aid pitcher. He is seated three rows ahead of me. I ask him if everything is okay. He says he’ll tell me about it at lunch.
I am still concerned with asking out Angelina
Lighthouse to the freshman mixer. Today is the day. Her hair looks
exceptionally blown dried. She has been smiling at me. On her notebook where
she has been reading the 50 pages a night6 and taking notes there are little
hearts linked by what looks like an inky kite string.
Once again Cool Joe Thomas quickly asks if we have
any questions. After three seconds he says good, informing us that we have the
next 50 pages to read and take notes on. He then talks about what noticeably transpired in his
bowling league last night with some girl named Marge.
Two weeks in and Joe Thomas has not cracked open the
text or said a scientific term once.
Angelina Lighthouse looks at me. She continue to
caricature bulbous hearts on her notepad.
They look like hot air balloons.
They look like they can carry me someplace I have
never ben before.
***
After class I am stepping out of the scent of
Formaldehyde. I am leaving the pee-stain interior of the science hallway
behind. Once again I am close enough to
sniff her shampoo.
It is gonna happen. I am going to ask her to the
Freshman Mixer this weekend.
I am dancing in a field of baby shampoo and flowers
and angelic wreaths and the moment I step next to her, the moment I look at the
creature who doodles aortic blimps on the sheaths of spiral notebooks, the
creature I am salivating over, I am yanked back.
It is Patrick.
“Dude,”
“Dude.”
I was about ready to ask Angelina to the freshman
Mixer. I can tell that she is stalling. I hold up my pointer finger as if it is
a this-little-light-gonna-let-it-shine emblem and tell her one emblem. Tell
her just to wait one second.
“You okay bro,”
“Dude it was amazing!”
I utter an audible hmffff. Patrick’s hand is bandaged in cardboard paper
towels, self-medicated from the bathroom dispenser.
“It was so cool man.”
“What?”
“I stayed in the bathroom and just smoked the entire
period. When that weird looking cop open the door I just crouched on top of the
toilet. After the bell rang I went to Coach Mann’s classroom and apologized
for missing his class. The cool thing was, he looked at my arm, asked me to have
a seat and then inquired what happened.”
I look down I can see Angelina waiting. She is
chewing gum. She is looking down at her shoes. I know that Patrick needs me to confide in. We have
the next three periods together. I am trying to tell Patrick to wait. He yanks
my arm back even further and continues.
"The cool thing was, Coach Mann didn’t seemed pissed
in the slightest. He asked me what was wrong. He asked me if my hand was okay.
I then confided in him about all the shit that has been going on in Mrs Peabody’s
classroom and how those fucks from Christ Lutheran keep on fucking with me."
I look back. Angelina is talking with cheerleader,
as if being whisked away by a vicarious
“The thing is, and this is so cool, Coach Mann
didn’t really seem to care. He kept on inquiring about my hand. When I told him
that I felt I was being bullied he kept quoting all these old Historians. He kept
talking about courage. He kept talking about holding my head up when no one
believed in me. He kept going on and on and
Pat asks me if I would like to come over tonight and
just hang out.
“I’d be over but I have a meet?”
“????”
“Cross-country meet.”
“Another one.”
Patrick is tilting is head again in an irascible
manner.
“Yeah, I’ll be over later. This meet is in Pekin.
They’re a bunch of biggots but whatcha gonna do?”
The coolest thing was that after the class ended, he
didn’t even mark me absent. He said I was excused for that period. Then he
wrote me a note to be late to cool Joe Thomas’s class.
I don’t know what to say. When last I saw my best
friend he was ravaging mirrors and espousing vengeance.
“He then said next semester I should go out for
football because apparently I have the built of a kick-ass safety.”
Patrick strikes a Heisman trophy pose. I look ahead.
I have missed my opportunity.
Angelina Lighthouse is nowhere to be found.
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