...pummelled...

There is always the nasal buzzer, a half-sneezed olfactory clang releasing the students between classrooms. My day begins at five til seven with early bird PE (which, second semester will be superseded by a class simply marked Health, where they show us how to unfurl the aquatic laytex tube sock commonly referred as a rubber, coronating the halo on germ-riddled metallic phallus). There is the wading between classrooms as morning arrives. Coach Ricca, ferrying his running backpack fraught with gear, a thermos of coffee, marching like a sentinel, his mathematical brain brimming with geometric configurations and extrapolations as he walks in a brisk gait down the same linoleum hallway we will fly over later in the afternoon. There is a waft of bodies as students slip into the building out of the almost illuminated squint of morning; hands grappling nylon bags wrinkled over shoulders as they march in a dream cavort in to the morning light of pubescent consciousness, ambling with a soporific sway tilted into their gait—the hard overhead light of the hallway feeding them surrogate energy, the wallowing blue of the stairwell gulping their bodies, shuffling them into discrete vectors of the school. The elder clank of metallic joints opening and shushing into echoes close, each locker a welded seal of possession and slopped errata—less than a week earlier Clinton has taken office. Mom offering prayers for the return of what she considers a more god-like patriarch to usher this country into the breeze of the late nights, late autumn of the century.

 

The first day back to classes I wear my Manual jacket. I wear my boots. I am walking through the hallways of Manual high. I feel reborn.  I feel that things are happening.

Aron Rothman is behind me.

“So, I heard that your friend Pam is leaving Manual. That he went out to be with all those other hicks at Limestone.”

 

Patrick will be leaving after finals come one week time. I will be on my own this coming semester.

Aron says why does your coat looks so funny. I ask him what he means.

 

“Most school jackets don’t have numbers that large in the left had corner. Your does. Your isn’t an official school jacket."

I tell him it is. He shakes his head again like his some sort of an authority

This isn’t an official school jacket, It may look a lot like an official school jacket from the side only it is not. Rothman doesn’t need to be starting this shit. The only reason he is fucking with me is because Patrick is no longer here and he has no one else to mess with. 

 

 

I am pissed. I am beginning to curse.

 

Rothman pushes me. I place my coffee cup down next to my boots.

The only reason your folks made that jacket as a Christmas present for you is because you are fucking poor. She could have purchased a better jacket from Aldi’s.  Your mom is a fucking cunt.

My mom made this jacket. She busted her ass making this jacket. I think she did a fucking good job. Who gives a shit if she went out to Joanne Fabric to buy the material.  It’s bona fide. I’m wearing the year of my graduation on my sleeve and the sport I love.

Bowman pushes me. He asks if I still have my Gideonbible in my front pocket. I push him back. I tell him that that is none of his fucking business. I tell him to get on top of his fat girlfriend and spread her legs so that the congregation can rise for the reading of the gospel although it may smell like ham.

He explodes. He charges at me. The first class period of 1993 has yet to have officially begun. We are still in first semester because, unlike Limestone, we don’t have finals until the second week of the new year.

 

As Aron pushes me I thump against a locker. I see Beano walking down the opposite side of the hallways. Instead of jumping in and helping Beano makes a jab insinuating that the FROSH captain Dave is buttfucking do to the position of our scuffle. Several other juniors point and begins to laugh. I get up, Instead of my bible my notecards from the pending Young Columbus contest falls on the floor. As Bowman reaches for them I charge him again with everything I have. Somehow I hear a snapp and Coach M is on the sideline and I see movement from across the horizontal bar in front of my vision. I lounge in his direction, tackling Bowman. The notecards I have been using spill up as if in a cartoon. Aron’s head hits the floor with a solid thump.

 

For a second I am almost sure he is bleeding. Beano and Tony Boone are quiet. Bowman scrunches his eyes together like gnashed walnut. All I need is a fucking crying kid to send me to the office and issue me an expulsion. All I need days before the Young Columbus is risk my future trip overseas because of some dumb shit who has gotten away with fucking with me for the last five years. The juniors have their hands over their mouth as if they have a cold and are trying not to be contagious. They are saying that dave docked him. They are saying that dave docked his ass.

 

I stand up. There is no blood.

 

I turn to Beano.

 

“Look, there is nothing to see here and you guys didn’t see anything anyways.”

 

For a second time in less than week it happens. For a second time in the last three days everything melts around the periphery of my vision I swear I see Superman getting the ever-living shit kicked out of him. I swear if I squint hard enough I can make out the dyed egg-shell whites of the comic book frame. The lockers are melting resembling carnage of Metropolis, Aron Bowman is resembling an overstuffed albino turd, there are wisps of smoke everywhere. Somehow I am battling an adversary I have never known before whose ethos is to destroy   everything around me

 

.

 

Before I know what I am doing I am swinging my foot back. Before I know what I am doing I am pointing my right boot in the direction of Aron’s forehead. Before I know what I am ding I am looking at his skull like it is an elementary soccer ball and I corner kick and I ready to explode.

 

Before I know what I am doing I turn and see Coach Mann. He is walking the way he always does with his semi-strutted out as if he is a drum major.

He looks at the situation. Beano and the fellow Juniors who were goading me early I the fracas have completely dissipated, shooting off in different direction.

 

Bowman’s eyes look like he is going to spill tears. I don’t know what to do. Coach Mann could easily hit us both with a detention for clowning around in the middle of the hallway.

Coach Mann is toting a green thermos of coffee. He has not lost a beat. His countenance is placid and calm.

“David I heard what sounded like a scuffle. Is there a problem I can be of assistance with?”

 

Coach Mann was in the classroom the day after I went into the front of the classroom to give a report on Last of the Mohicans and ended up slipping.  He was there when Bowman picked up my diminutive bible and began mock-reading passages outside to the front of the class much to my adolescent chagrin.

 

“I’m sorry Coach. Steve just slipped and I was helping him out and because these floors are always so eaxed over break I slipped too.”

 

I offer my hand in the direction of Aron, my enemy, the person who two years earlier placed a shit-fraught jock strap on my head like a bonnet not once but twice.

 

I give Aron a isn’t that what happened look.

 

He grabs my hand. I hoist him up in front of Coach Mann and let go.

 

There is a pause. I have kicked is ass after he instituted a war. Had Coach Mann no fortuitously arrived their was no clue on what I might have done.

I was in route of kicking his head. I was going to kick him at least twice for every time he put the jock strap on my head and smeared human feces on my face and then one time for every day he has made me feel like a complete and sentient fuck-up as a human being and then one day for every time Patrick talked about killing himself because all Aron every did was bully him and get away with it because he played parochial basketball at a Lutheran grade school I attended which was basketball obsessed; the twelve apostles dressed in Harlem Globetrotter garb

When Aron gets up he is having a hard time breathing. Surprisingly Coach Mann doesn’t ask if Aron is okay.

“Be careful on these floor. The janitors always do a superlative job over holiday break cleaning them.”

Coach Mann continues down the hallway whistling what sounds like battle hymn of the republic

I nod. I tell him thank you. Bowman is looking at me as if he is going to explode. Just as he is reeling his arm back to toss what looks like a punch or a one handed prayer Coach Mann turns.

Oh, and David, I just wanted to compliment you on your sharp attire .That is a fine looking jacket.  I love how you have the words of your vocation and love on the back.”

 

Aron hand falls down limp at his side.

 

“Wear that jacket with pride.”

 

Coach Mann says, as he turns and walks the opposite direction. The bell to first class is about ready to sneeze.

 

A new year of classes is ready to begin.

 

Somehow the rest of the semester I am on my own.