Everything Is Wrong with Me (19 page)

My dad preparing me for gang warfare. Four hours later, I had stolen a car stereo and shivved three Dominicans.

As I got older (or as he got crazier), my dad was less concerned with concealing his weapons from my siblings and me. After my parents’ divorce was settled, just after my family and I moved back into our house after living with my grandmother for over two years, my dad moved out and around a lot, going from one seedy neighborhood to another. He must have changed apartments four times in three years, but there was one thing he always had wherever he lived: his elephant gun.

The elephant gun was a giant, single-shot rifle that stood as tall as I did, weighed as much as my little sister, and used bullets the size of a grown man’s middle finger. My dad said that it was used to hunt elephants, so my brother and I called it (naturally) the elephant gun. This was always kept behind whatever couch my dad had in whatever living room he was living in. For some reason (possibly marijuana-induced), my dad allowed my brother and me to play with the elephant gun. But don’t go saying that my dad was an irresponsible parent; he made sure to unload the gun before every visit. Except that day when I spent most of one lazy afternoon aiming the gun at my brother, Dennis, who was then six, before my dad took it from me, because, I can only assume, I was being obnoxious. When he did so, he realized that there was a bullet in the chamber. Oops. This remains one of the only times I’ve ever seen my dad rattled. His face turned pale and after a moment of reflection, once he recognized what a mistake he had made, he asked us not to tell our mother. We obliged. Looking back, if I had told my mom about this, at this delicate time in their divorce, I may have never seen my dad again.
*
Instead, now every time I get drunk, sleepwalk, and piss in my dad’s hallway, I only have to say, “Remember when I almost killed Dennis because you didn’t unload your gun?” and I get a free pass.
**

My dad finally settled into a place on Beulah Street. There, behind a hutch that was designed to hold china but instead housed bottles of Smirnoff and Courvoisier, stood some sort of samurai axe. Also tall, though not as big as the elephant gun (the axe was about the size of my brother), it was a double-sided axe with a bladelike spear on top. I have no idea how my dad got this or why he had it, but my brother and I were allowed to play with this, supervised of course, as well. But in my dad’s defense, I seem to remember the blades looking pretty dull, so I’m sure if would have done only minimal damage to my brother’s neck/shoulders/arms/balls if I struck him with it.

The ever-present danger and the fact that my dad had guns only made me want them more. I carried a cap gun on me constantly until about age ten, partially to feel cool, but partially because I believed it really protected me. When I was old enough, I graduated from toy guns to “real” weapons. In seventh grade, my friends and I started carrying around “blackjacks.” These were made by breaking off one of the long, thin pieces of wood under the chairs of our school desks. We’d take this piece, which looked like a shorter, thicker wooden ruler, and pile pennies along the length of it, four pennies high in a row of seven. Then, using black hockey tape, we’d tape the pennies down to the piece of wood, first lengthwise to secure them, then by wrapping the tape around the wood. The end product was a mobile but effective weapon that could easily be hidden down one’s pants or in one’s waistband. Theoretically, we carried the blackjacks in case we got jumped. We believed that this was a constant threat in the neighborhood—that a group of kids from another corner would grab you and fuck you up.
*
If you were going to get jumped, there was very little you could do to avoid it. You had two options: either name-drop like a mother fucker, saying your brother/cousin/sister’s boyfriend was [insert badass dude here] or call out one of the guys in the group about to jump you and offer to fight him one-on-one. However, rarely was there so much thinking involved and you just got beat the fuck up. So essentially the blackjack was useless, as it did almost nothing to combat getting jumped. Sure, you might be able to brandish it, but when a half dozen or a dozen kids are descending on you, there isn’t much you can do, blackjack or not. But hey, at least the blackjacks made us feel cool.

A pair of brass knuckles was my next step up from the blackjack. I don’t know how I came across a pair—I’m sure it must have had something to do with someone’s older brother who got them from someone else but who was now selling them for money for beer/weed/pills. I used them, of all places, on my paper route, which was two blocks away from my street and one block away from my church. I guess I wanted to be prepared in case any thugs came out of the ten o’clock mass looking to start some shit.

After reading what I’ve written so far, I need to interject here for a moment and clear something up. While I may sound like a little “street tough,” walking my paper route with my brass knuckles close by in case any shit went down, nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, I was a chubby twelve-year-old who had only kissed one girl and spent most of his disposal income on comic books and most of his time exploring the new and wonderful world of masturbation, slathering himself up with moisturizer and going to town. It was a charmed life, really. But perhaps that is why my friends and I were so into weapons. The lure of the weapon, the desire to possess the weapon, and the longing for others to know that you possessed the weapon was a universal truth in my youth. Guns and our other weapons represented a power that was otherwise out of our collective grasp as stupid kids.

But we were just that. Stupid fucking kids.

I had a kind of love/hate relationship with my buddies Phil and Vic. On the one hand, they were two of my closest friends. We did almost everything together, although admittedly “almost everything” consisted mostly of sitting around the Park, hanging out, and waiting for some friends to get in a fight over a pickup basketball game. Then there was that week when we were catching and blowing up mice with my leftover firecrackers. That was pretty cool.

But they were unconscionable ballbusters. Phil was a great basketball player and never hesitated to tell you about it. Though he had a good sense of humor, he was a tough and competitive kid and could be abrasive, to put it mildly. As a twelve-year-old, Vic weighed almost two hundred pounds and had fists the size of Easter hams. He was considered a gentle giant with an encyclopedic knowledge of classic rock, but at the same time he seemed like he could go off at any moment. And god
damn
he was a big dude. Then there was me. I didn’t play any sports (didn’t play any sports well, at least), was chubby but not intimidating, and spent my time talking to the girls, desperately trying to make them laugh, and by extension, desperately trying to get them to let me touch them under their bras. The former I was good at; the latter, well, not so much.
*

Therefore, as the “weakest” member of the three of us, I was often the victim of Phil’s and Vic’s bullying tendencies. It seemed like every time it snowed, I was the one who got whitewashed (held down and packed with snow) first and most maliciously. We used to pillow-box, wrapping pillows around our fists in place of boxing gloves, but it seemed like the pillows slipped off Phil’s and Vic’s hands more when they were fighting me than when they were fighting others, leaving me bruised up and sometimes with a fat lip.

[Note to reader: The following paragraph should be read in the style of Ray Liotta, reprising his role as narrator and protagonist Henry Hill in
Goodfellas
.]

Yet I didn’t mind. I was still in the crew. There was me, Phil, Vic, Floody, Jimmy the Muppet, Eclipse, and Screech. Then there were guys like Ernie Bubble, Hutt, Brown Eye, Eddie C., Chad, Kruzer, Doc, Renzi, Robbie C, Patty K., Adam, Coast to Coast Steve Trusko, Big J., Beaver, Large, and the Wigs. We may have disagreed with each other and had the occasional fight, but we were a family.

[Here ends the Ray Liotta/Henry Hill voice.]

An occasional whitewash wasn’t a sign of disrespect and didn’t mean I wasn’t part of this extended family. We busted the balls of our friends; we
picked on
people outside our circle. Like Danny Kramer, whom we covered so thoroughly with ketchup and creamer from Burger King that he started crying. So we locked him in the bathroom of the local pool hall for an afternoon. And there was Shitty Brian, so named because he got the Shit Nose. On his way home from karate, a group of my friends grabbed him, held him down, and the nastiest of the bunch put their bare asses on his face, thus proving once and for all that karate is for pussies—he wasn’t karate chopping any blocks of wood when he had ass on his face. Snow in your ears was not a big deal. Shit on your face was. This was an important distinction.

I dealt with Phil and Vic being dicks every once in a while because we were boys. I knew that I wasn’t being disrespected, it wasn’t something that was constant, and there was no real physical pain, so I didn’t think much of it. Or maybe I’m just rationalizing their abuse because I was (and still am) a total pussy. That could be true, but then there’s also this: fuck you.

A big part of the friendship that Vic and I shared was our love for music. He had an older brother, and while the rest of us were listening to MC Hammer and Poison, Vic’s brother was feeding him a steady diet of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and the Grateful Dead. It was at Vic’s family’s house up the mountains
*
that I was first introduced to the
other
music of the Beatles. I had heard “Ticket to Ride” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” before while my mom cleaned the house. But when Vic gave me
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
to listen to in my brand-new portable CD player, I, like about two hundred million other people before me, had an awakening. From then on, Vic became my musical mentor, turning me on to all sorts of different stuff that wasn’t made by any former members of New Edition.

And Phil—well, girls liked Phil.

That Phil went to tennis camp was an anomaly. Tennis was not a sport played in the neighborhood. The only acceptable sports were basketball, football, baseball, and hockey. They could be played in different incarnations (that is, flag football, Wiffle ball, etc.), but these were the four sports. There was a brief flirtation with soccer when the World Cup came to the United States in 1994, but we’re talking very brief—it ended when the volleyball we were using as a soccer ball was lost.

Phil might have been on to something though, because what going to tennis camp meant was exposure to new girls. Frankly, we were all sick of the girls from the neighborhood.
*
The Second Street girls were divided into two groups, the Pretty Girls and the ASP. The Pretty Girls were, as the name implies, attractive. They were the first girls to start wearing makeup and high heels and bras and, I don’t know, whatever girls wear when they’re growing up and first learning how to manipulate their sexuality. The Pretty Girls were out of our league, preferring instead to date older guys (you know, like high school guys). Naturally, we resented them. ASP stood for “Ankle Sock Posse,” referring to the athletic short socks that the girls in this group wore to play basketball. The girls of the ASP preferred mesh shorts and ponytails to heels and makeup and had seemingly zero interest in exploring their sexuality.
*
But still, they were cool girls who could handle it when one of us walked over to them holding a piece of his scrotum in his hand from under his mesh shorts and asked, “Does anyone want a piece of Juicy Fruit? I chewed it up a bit, but it’s still good.” But romantically speaking, we lusted after the Pretty Girls, whom we couldn’t have; we hung out with the ASP, whom we didn’t want.
**

At tennis camp, Phil had a pipeline into new girls, who my friends and I automatically assumed were prettier than our girls and also more liable to put out. After the first summer when he returned from the camp, he regaled us with stories of the girls there, of discreet hand jobs (or at least knob rubs) in the woods and of campfire make-out sessions. But Phil being Phil, we didn’t know if this was true or if it was only his braggadocio talking. We treated his stories with the proper skepticism, asking for proof, which he not so surprisingly could not provide.

After his second summer at tennis camp, Phil returned with more of the same stories, but this time he came back with something else—a telephone number. It belonged to a girl named Adriana (such an exotic name!) whom he had met and made out with at camp. He told us first that she was hot and had large boobies, but also that her dad was a judge. (A judge! She must be rich! And rich girls put out! Probably!) The collective awe of the crowd was nearly audible.

Vic and I were eager to tap into this new resource. The girls of the neighborhood knew us and wanted nothing to do with us, but this, this was opportunity knocking. Perhaps I could meet a nice rich girl, get a bunch of hand jobs, get married, and then buy a house with a nice big pool. That would be nice. So it was Vic and I who were chosen to accompany Phil on a group date to the movies with Adriana and her girlfriends.
*
Chosen
might not be the right word, since from the moment he brought up the possibility of a group date, Vic and I badgered him about going. The plan was that Phil, Vic, and I would meet Adriana and her friends at the movies. Phil would pair off with Adriana while Vic and I would be left to go after her friends. After the movie, we’d all go get a slice of pizza. If it all worked out, we’d make out in the parking lot of the pizza place, which would be the most sexually advanced thing I’d ever done to that point by tenfold.