My stepfather opened round two with a quick series of hooks to my ribs and an uppercut to my jaw that made me see stars. I felt the room start to spin. I heard my dad’s voice: “Always know what you can use for a weapon.” I shook myself back to reality and peeked beneath my shirt, scanning the floor for
anything I could use to fight John off me. I guess John was doing the same thing, because when I slipped out the bottom of my shirt and lunged toward my hockey stick, he hurled my most beloved possession, my E.T. lamp, down onto my back. Shards of E.T. skittered across the room. I screamed and slumped to the floor. Then I rolled myself into a ball and I prayed.
John’s heaving breath was the only sound I could hear over the pounding of my heart. I could tell he was exhausted, but I knew he wasn’t finished with me. I’d let him corner me, and he wasn’t backing away. After a few seconds, I heard him moving into position above me. Something deep in my gut told me I was about to die. By then, I was ready; I just wanted it to be over. I drew in what I assumed would be my last ever breath and waited for his final blow. It wasn’t what I expected.
“That’s it!” John said. “You’re outta here! I fucking hate you! Your mother fucking hates you! I don’t want you in my fucking house no more! Pack your shit.”
John paced the hallway outside my bedroom door like a pit-bull in a run. I grabbed what I could. He was on my heels as I marched down the stairs, a duffel bag of clothes in one hand, hockey stick in the other.
My mom’s timing was too perfect to be accidental. She walked in the front door just as I stepped into the living room. She said not one word to me as I dialed the telephone. She wouldn’t even look at me. But I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Never in my thirteen years had I ever seen her eyes so hard or her scowl so callous. That’s when I finally understood who had been calling the shots.
“Mommy’s kicking me out,” I said into the telephone. Mommy. What a fucking word for me to call her. What a joke. Kind of like Daddy. But it’s what I’d always called them. “Can I live with you?”
A few seconds of silence feel like hours when you don’t know the answer you’re going to get.
“Of course,” my dad replied. He sounded drunk. I didn’t care.
As I walked out the door, John sneered at me. “So long, retard.”
My mom didn’t say a goddamn word. Neither did I.
The whole bus ride across town, I kept thinking to myself, “You ought to be really upset. You just got the shit kicked out of you. You just got kicked out of your own house. Your own fucking mom hates you.”
But I wasn’t upset. I was relieved. I was thrilled. I was free.
The Neo-Phyte
COLD SOBER, MY DAD COULD READ THE TRAIL OF ANOTHER fighter’s hooks and jabs like a Boy Scout could read a map. Of course, it had been a lot of years since my dad had been sober. Still, I knew he wasn’t going to buy, “It happened in hockey.”
“John shoved me around a little,” I said on my way in the door.
My dad eyed me suspiciously.
“It was nothing.” I lied.
If I’d confessed the truth at that moment, my dad might have gone after John. I like to think he would have if I’d told him. But how in the hell could I tell my dad the truth? That every precious afternoon with him at the bar had been a waste of time? That I hadn’t put even one of his lessons into practice to save my own ass? That I hadn’t looked to see where somebody might be hiding? That I’d let John attack me with my own goddamn lamp? How could I tell a 68th and Buist boy his only son had let himself be a prisoner of war and a punching bag for nearly three years?
He took me to the bar. Cha-Cha, Fat Mike, and the other guys sensed something was up; they left us alone in a corner booth. I sipped a Coke in silence while my dad worked his way to the bottom of a pitcher.
“So, youse wanna talk about it?” he finally asked me.
“No.”
He started to get up from the booth.
“I can’t believe she fucking kicked me out instead of him.”
I didn’t expect much of a response from my dad, maybe
not any response. What could he say? He didn’t know what John had been doing to me. He didn’t know John. Hell, he barely knew my mom. I wasn’t expecting him to give me some mind-blowing insight. But he did.
“She chose dick over you.”
That’s all he said, but it was enough. It knocked the wind out of me. It was so brutally, undeniably true. My dad knew my mom better than I did. And he knew I needed to see her for what she really was if I was going to make it through even my first night without her.
After my mom left him, my dad spent several years jumping from one bed to another. His binge of one-night stands resulted in the birth of one child, one we know about anyhow, a little girl he barely ever saw. Then he married a woman named Sally who he met at his bar and became the stepfather to her three sons. The whole crew shared a glorified one-bedroom apartment in Southwest Philly with Cha- Cha Chacinzi, who made his bed in a converted closet.
The night I moved in, I didn’t have a clue about how many drugs my dad was on or how he had to use one to bring himself down from another. But after a few days, I saw enough to know without doubt he was an addict. I saw the white powdery residue on the table, the empty pill bottles by the sink, the little bags in the trash can, the cut straws on the nightstand where he always stashed his weapons. I wasn’t an idiot. The adults tried to hide the hard stuff from the kids, but they were too fucked up to pull it off. They didn’t even bother to hide their drinking or their pot-smoking. Beer was their water; joints were their Marlboros.
I still don’t know what went wrong when my dad signed me up at Pepper Middle School, but I somehow managed to jump from seventh grade classes to what felt like eighth grade on my bus ride across town. I had no clue what was going on in any of them, but I didn’t care. I had a bigger problem. Pepper was pretty far from my dad’s house, too far to walk, and there were
only two trolley stops anywhere near it. One was in front of one of the worst housing projects in Philly; between the second stop and the school stood a dense tangle of trees and brush where the local crack dealers did their business. I rode the trolley each morning with some of the Italian kids from my dad’s neighborhood. We got off at the first stop to avoid the crack forest, which meant we had to run for our fucking lives through four blocks of projects controlled by the gang called the Junior Black Mafia. We’d run in a pack, hoping there was truth in that old saying about safety in numbers. There wasn’t. The Junior Black Mafia got at least one of us every damn morning. I was usually pretty lucky. I was fast. But not always fast enough.
I hate to admit it, even to myself, but I came to appreciate John in a weird sort of way after I transferred to Pepper. After years in the ring with a full-grown boxer, I knew how to take a punch. Short of stabbing me or shooting me, there was nothing the gangbangers could do that I hadn’t already survived before.
THE ONLY PLACE I actually felt comfortable was on the softball field. I was the only white kid who made Pepper’s softball team that year. I was the shortstop. Softball didn’t thrill me like hockey or even football, but it served its purpose. I was a pretty good player, good enough I had a hunch my teammates would keep me from getting killed in a pinch, at least until after the season was over.
After practice one day when I hadn’t been on the team more than a week, I went back into the school. I was hoping the boys’ bathroom would be empty. There had been so many attacks over the years the authorities had removed all the doors from the stalls. At Pepper, you only got to drop a deuce in private if you were the only one in the john. Since it was after four o’clock , I figured I’d have the place to myself. I was wrong.
The hallway door no sooner thudded shut behind me when a voice said, “There’s another one.” Several guys, I couldn’t tell how many, were crowded into one stall. One of them was glaring
at me. I recognized him; I’d seen him before, hanging with the Junior Black Mafia. When he started moving toward me, I caught a glimpse of the kid on the floor. From the looks of things, the JB Mafiosos had wedged the kid against the toilet to keep him from sliding away when they kicked him. Blood poured from his nose and huge red welts scarred his cheeks. If I hadn’t ridden the trolley to school with that same Italian kid every morning, I don’t think I would have recognized him through the swelling. The JBM dude was almost on top of me when another voice echoed from the back of the stall: “Frankie’s cool.” The guy charging me stopped dead in his tracks.
DeShawn Cooper emerged from the stall with a big smile on his face. We looked like twins in our matching softball uniforms.
“You’re cool, aren’t you, Frankie?” DeShawn asked.
I knew what he meant.
I glanced down at the kid on the cold tile floor. He was shaking violently. Through the blood and the bruises and the swelling, his eyes begged me to do something, to get somebody, to do anything I could to save him. I looked back up at DeShawn.
“I’m cool,” I said.
I kept my eyes on DeShawn and his friends as I backed out of the bathroom. My footsteps echoed in the long, abandoned hallway, as I walked toward the exit, trying to look cool in case they were watching. But when I threw open the front door, I bolted. I ran all the way back to my dad’s house. I snatched off my filthy uniform and climbed into the shower. I reeked of sweat and something worse. As the hot water rained down on my body, I knew I’d never be able to scrub off the stink of how rotten I felt for leaving that kid on the disgusting bathroom floor. I knew I would never be able to wash away the memory of how degraded he looked when he locked his eyes on mine. We both knew I wasn’t going to go get help, because we both knew I couldn’t. I had to be cool, or I’d have been lying in a pool of my own blood, too.
I did not go back to Pepper the next day. I never went back again.
IN EARLY JUNE, a month after my fourteenth birthday, I called Uncle Nick and Aunt Catherine to see if I was still welcome at the farm.
“You don’t ever have to ask,” my mom’s sister said.
A few days later, Uncle Nick drove into the city to get me. Aunt Catherine was the only one home when we pulled in the rocky driveway. She mauled me with hugs, then told me to take my stuff to Shawn’s room where I’d be bunking. My cousin had redecorated since my last visit. The plain curtains that once covered the sliding glass doors had been replaced by two flags: a Confederate battle flag and a black swastika on a red background. The symbol of the Nazis. Newspaper clippings about skinheads wallpapered the room. I knew a little about skinheads, because there were skinheads on South Street, Philly’s alternative district. Every time my cousin Jimmy and I went down there on our skateboards to check out the punks, he warned me to watch my back around the skinheads. They were hardcore street fighters, and they didn’t like skaters, especially long-haired skaters like us. I’d seen the South Street skinheads around enough to know that you couldn’t tell who they were just by their hair. Most of them did have their heads shaved, but some just had their hair cut short. To tell if a guy was a skinhead, you had to go by how he was dressed. Skinheads wore matching flight jackets with suspenders and combat boots, unless they were going to the clubs; then they usually wore suits. They stuck out on South Street because they always looked so pulled together, and because they were one of the few groups in Philly that seemed completely integrated. Some of the skinheads were Irish, some were Italian, some were black, but no matter what, they were all tight, kind of like a corner, only they had all of South Street.
I had no clue why Shawn was taping up articles about
skinheads at the same time he was flying a Confederate flag. From what I’d seen, the skinheads on South Street were about as “Yankee” as you could get. I scanned a couple articles more closely and kept seeing the phrase “neo-Nazi.” I knew about the Nazis, and Hitler, and WWII from school and all but I wondered, “What’s a ‘neo’?” I figured I’d ask Shawn once he got home. The worst he could do was call me a “retard” for not knowing. If he did, I figured I could call him a “retard” right back for thinking the Civil War had anything to do with skinheads.
While I waited for Shawn to come home, I sat in the kitchen scarfing down a homecooked meal and talking with Aunt Catherine and Uncle Nick. They didn’t ask me about my mom kicking me out so I returned the favor: I didn’t bring up anything about the flags flying in Shawn’s room. Aunt Catherine warned me he was going through “a phase,” though. Then she said to me in that low voice ladies use when they talk about divorce or cancer, “The move was real hard for Shawn.”
A few hours later, Shawn clomped through the kitchen door and completely blew my mind. He looked like the skinheads on South Street. His head was completely shaved. His combat boots glistened. It was too hot for a flight jacket, but his narrow suspenders looked like the ones the skinheads in the city always wore, except his were red and I thought theirs were usually blue. My mouth dropped straight to the floor when I saw him. I couldn’t get over how different, how good, Shawn looked. It wasn’t just the clothes, either, or that he’d been lifting weights. Something in Shawn’s eyes looked different. He had this intensity I’d never before seen in him.
Shawn’s friends had the same look when they showed up later that night. They snuck in through the sliding glass door in Shawn’s room, careful not to snag either of the two flags on the cases of beer they were carrying. Bob Reynolds and Tim Kleinschmidt were both around seventeen, a little older than Shawn but a lot older than me. I figured they wouldn’t want a kid like me hanging around with them, but Tim tossed me a beer.
“I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, Frank,” he said, shaking my hand. “Shawn says you’re a stand-up guy.”
I blushed and glanced toward Shawn. My cousin was beaming at me.