Athletic Shorts (9 page)

I searched more than an hour and was finally ready to leave and try again tomorrow night—I wouldn’t face Elaine again until I found Neal—when I saw a dim light between the slats of the wooden bridge. I walked to the edge and started down, not believing there was a chance….

“Neal?”

He looked up dreamily, eyes glazed. His mom was right about the drugs. The light from his flashlight reflected off the steel bridge beam, casting his face in a gauzy yellow haze. He said, “Who is it?”

“It’s me. Lion.”

He sat hard on the dirt, dropping his head to his hands, then gazed back to me. His words slurred. “Lion. I killed your mom and dad, man.”

“Listen…”

“And your little brother.”

I said, “Yeah. Look, Neal, I’m not over this yet, but we need to talk.”

“No, man, you were right—”

“No, man,
you
were right.”

“I was just gonna ski,” he said. “I just wanted to ski before my mom and dad—”

“Pack your shit,” I said. “I’ll get the Jeepster. I was gonna give myself a day off school tomorrow anyway. Maybe you and me oughta go fishin’.”

Racism speaks volumes about those who hide behind it, says exactly nothing of those at whom it is directed.

A seventeen-year-old friend of mine, Justin Thomas, understands that truth as most adults in his life don’t. Following a summer league basketball game last year, Justin laughingly told his mother the player he’d been guarding called him a “dirty nigger” shortly after he had slapped the third shot into the bleachers. With African, Native American, Norwegian, German—and smatterings of Chinese and French—blood coursing through his veins, Justin could well be the United Nations poster boy
.

“What did you do?” his mom asked, a little worried about what he
could
do at six feet five inches, 235 pounds, and catlike reflexes, but Justin only smiled and
said, “Just what I’d been doing. Get a guy talkin’ like that, you can wipe up the court with him
.”

Racism speaks volumes about those who hide behind it, says exactly nothing of those at whom it is directed.

Telephone Man, from
Crazy Horse Electric Game,
is a racist. He’s a racist because he has no tools to elevate his status in the world without putting others down, at least in his mind. He has been schooled by a fearful, insecure father to believe he is superior because of nothing more than skin color and place of birth. It is easy to imagine his ignorance was passed to him through generations
.

I have fears in writing a story about racism. In fact, there are a significant number of people who don’t understand the simpler truths about bigotry in the same way my friend Justin does and who don’t believe that basic lessons are best taught by reflecting the truth. Those people believe when I use the word
nigger
or
spic
or
beaner
or any other of a million slurs, I am condoning the use of those words. They think kids should not be exposed in print to what they are exposed in their lives
.

But I believe what I believe, and so I write my stories
.

If they think I don’t know they think I’m weird,
they’re
crazier than they think
I
am. I’m not crazy, though, I’m really not. And there’s nothin’ wrong with my nose, either, except for maybe it gets some pretty big zits on it. People just say that to make me mad. Mostly it’s the niggers. They’re the ones. Except sometimes it’s the white kids, too, and every once in awhile a spic or a Chinaman or one of them Japans, but I bet they get the idea from the niggers. Dad says they’re the worst.

Dad says he’s sorry he had to send me to another nigger school, but it was the only one he could get me into after I had trouble at my regular school; that’s Oakland High, which is a nigger school, too. It wasn’t my fault, though. It was because everybody teased me, and then I’d get real mad and do things I don’t
remember too good, like they said I tried to bash my face through the door to the boys’ rest room, and I don’t remember that at all. Except they must of been right, I have to admit, because when I started remembering things again, my face was all bloody and my nose was broken. There’s nothing wrong with my nose, though, except for maybe a few pimples. Anyway, next thing I knew they were telling my dad to send me to this special school. Only they didn’t call it that. They called it OMLC, and it’s a lot smaller than Oakland High; but it’s still a nigger school. They said I’d get “specialized attention” because there’s no more than twelve kids in a class, and that’s supposed to be good for kids who are “eccentric”—along with kids who should be in prison. “Eccentric” is what the teachers at Oakland High School call kids they think are crazy. They use words like that so people like me won’t know what they’re really saying, but I been hearing that word as long as I’ve been alive because it’s what everybody calls my dad. My dad is a fencer—you know, like he teaches people to sword fight—and he’s a great guy, even if a lot of people call him Zorro. I don’t know why they call him that. He never wears black clothes, and he’s not a spic, which the real Zorro was. But he could sure carve a Z in you quick enough. He wouldn’t,
though, because his name’s Carl, so it would probably be a C.

There’s a few people I’d like him to carve
something
in, which are mostly the niggers and other colors of people that give me a hard time about my nose—which there’s nothing wrong with, I think I already said—or my telephone equipment, which is the most important thing I have. Around this school they call me Telephone Man, which is one of the few things I like, even though I know they think I’m a dork for wearing telephone equipment strapped to my hip. But without it, I feel like how the Duke must feel when they make him check his six-shooter at the saloon door. I feel bare naked. I heard the Duke say that.

I have a deal with André, the guy who runs this place. He’s a nigger, but he’s not so bad because he makes deals. When I first got here, I went right into his office, real toughlike, because I saw through the outside window on my way in what color he was and I knew you have to shoot first and ask questions later. So I walk straight in there with my dad right behind me, looking good in his white fencer’s suit and his mask under his arm, and I walk right up to that André—only I don’t know that’s his name yet—and I say, “I don’t want to go here.”

He looks at me and sort of smiles and says, “So why are you here?” and I says, “Because I have to be.”

He looks some more and shakes his head real slow and smiles and says, “No, you don’t. You don’t
have
to be anywhere,” and I figure he probably don’t know the truth because he ain’t white, but already I like the way he’s thinking except I can’t think of anything to say back, so I turn around and look at my dad.

My dad says, “Good morning, sir, I’m Carl Simpson. This is my son. He’s Jack. I apologize for his rudeness.” My dad says lots of things about niggers behind their back, but when he’s talking right to them, like to their face, he acts like there’s nothing wrong with them. He says that’s the only way to get by if you’re a man of peace like he is. So anyway, my dad just comes right out and tells old André I’m being rude when all I was doing really was getting the jump on him. But André says, “That’s quite all right. I like a man who speaks his mind,” which confuses me because that sort of puts the nigger on my side and Dad on the other side, and that’s not usually how it is, and I’m thinking maybe this André got the jump on
me
while I wasn’t looking.

And then, instead of talking to my dad some more about how rude I am, André turns back to me and says,
“So, Jack, if you don’t want to be here, why are you here?”

So I tell him, “Because they make you. I’m here because they make you,” and André says, “Really? How do they do that?” and I’m thinking this is a
dumb
one if he doesn’t already know, but I just tell him what’s true, which is they’ll put you in jail.

But André shakes his head again and says, “No, they won’t, Jack. Who told you that?” I start to say it was my dad, but when I look around at him, he’s sort of hanging his head and his face is a little red, and I don’t want to get him in trouble even though he’s the one that really told me. “My teacher at Oakland,” I say, and André says, “Well, your teacher at Oakland was wrong.”

So now my head’s getting hot and my hair feels all prickly, which is what happens just before I get mad, which I do when I know something’s right and somebody tells me it isn’t, and I say, “No,
sir
!”

André smiles and starts to put his hand on my shoulder; but I can’t stand it when somebody touches me, especially one of
them
, and I jump away. He says, “Take it easy, Jack. What do you think would happen if they put every kid who doesn’t go to school in jail?” and I don’t get it, so I just stand there feeling my hairs in my
head, and André says, “They’d have to build a lot more jails really fast, which would cost a lot of money, and that’s the reason you don’t go to jail for not going to school,” and then real quick he asks me about my telephone stuff. I want to tell him how he’s wrong about them not sending me to jail, because it’s really my dad who told me that and I know my dad doesn’t lie; but I can’t do it without getting Dad in trouble, and besides, I don’t like to pass up too many chances to tell people about telephones.

“I can fix any telephone that a regular telephone man can fix. I can fix it if the people on the other end can’t hear you or if you can’t hear them. And if you have more than one phone in your place, I can set them up like walkie-talkies, if they have the right stuff in ’em. See, there’s lots of wires inside your phone that you don’t get to use because you don’t pay for them, but they’re there in case you get the money. It wouldn’t make much sense if every time you wanted some stupid little thing changed, the telephone company had to bring out all new phones, would it?” and André shakes his head like he thinks I must be right. “So see, it’s all in there, but it’s dead unless the telephone man wakes it up. That’s what I can do.”

So André asks me if I want to be a telephone man
when I grow up, and I tell him I’m a telephone man right now, and he says, “Indeed, you are. Maybe I can get you a scholarship, seeing you can fix our phones and probably save us a lot of money.”

Well this must not be my dad’s day because the next thing he does is ask André if that isn’t illegal (my dad says most other colors are experts when it comes to what’s illegal, especially niggers), and I think my chances of going here are shot; but André just smiles and says, “I suppose it probably is,” but he doesn’t say he wouldn’t do it, and the next thing I know, my dad is filling out papers and I go to this school. Right before Dad signs the last one, André turns to me and says, “Jack, I want you to know one thing,” and I ask him what it is, and he says, “You and I both know nobody can make you do anything if you don’t want to bad enough, right? Nobody’s making you go here, okay?” and I don’t get it, but I say okay anyway because even though it’s a nigger school, this is the first place where nobody told me to shut up when I told about telephones.

When I asked Dad later about what André said, he said, “André was wrong, Jack. The law is making you go there. Certain kinds of people don’t always pay very much attention to the law.”

Sometimes I wish Hawk wouldn’t of saved me from the China kids. I used to call Chinamen chinks because that’s the name Dad gave me for them, and it was a good one because they don’t like it much. But then I found out my dad must not be as smart as I thought because he told me the Japans were chinks, and so were Vietnams and the people from Korea. But see, I was listening in my history lecture about how a lot of times the Chinamen and the Japans and different ones from all those other countries like that don’t always like
each other
. Now I’m pretty sure all of ’em wouldn’t go around using the same name for the people they don’t like as people call
them
because that just wouldn’t make sense. I like to pay attention and get things right, especially when it comes to words, because words are communication and communication is my business because I’m a telephone man, and my dad says whatever you do, you got to know your business. And he ought to know, because he’s a pretty good fencer, which is his business.

Anyway, I was telling how sometimes I wish Hawk wouldn’t of saved me from the China kids because it confuses me, and I hate that most of all. When a nigger goes saving you from Chinamen, it throws you off because everyone knows niggers are the worst. It all
happened on one of those days when I just don’t think. That’s what my mom and dad both say: “Jack, most of the time you get into trouble because you just don’t
think
.” I got up late that day, and it looked like I would have to go to school without breakfast again, which happens about every other day. When I do get up in time and wake my mom up, I have biscuits and strawberry jam. A guy needs a good breakfast. Well, Mom was still in bed and the bus was coming in about four minutes and I looked through the cupboards and I couldn’t find anything except there was the Bisquick. Well, I knew that’s what Mom made biscuits out of, and I figured, hey, even if they don’t taste as good not cooked, they have to be just as good for you, right? I mean, your stomach doesn’t know if they’re cooked. Everything turns about the same temperature pretty quick down there anyway. There wasn’t any strawberry jam in the fridge, so I just ate the Bisquick right out of the box, which it was pretty dry. But then, when I was in the bathroom trying to blast off a pimple from my nose that looked about like a spaceship or something, I saw this strawberry stuff sitting on the bathtub, and I didn’t know why it was
there
; but I did figure it was no big deal if I ate it
after
the biscuits because like I said before, it all ends up in the same place anyway and your
stomach would never know which order you ate it in. Right?

I think it should be against the law to make soap or shampoo that smells like jam and has pictures of strawberries on the front. I mean, it was red and it was thick, and even though it didn’t have clumps of strawberries in it and it tasted funny, it looked like syrup, which is close enough to jam to drink when you’re in a hurry and just want to get something close to your regular breakfast in you.

Well, what went on inside me probably would of made a good science lesson, I bet. I didn’t know how many biscuits you can make out of one box of Bisquick, but I found out later it’s a lot. And I also didn’t know what happens when you get soap inside you. It’s like if you got a lube job.

I was in history when it hit. There was this sort of rumbling inside me, and all of a sudden I knew I had to get to the bathroom really quick, so I just ran for it. I was lucky enough to get my telephone stuff off and up high out of the way, but right after I did that, I started feeling like a balloon that you just let go of the end. I wanted to save my clothes, and I got my shirt off, but my pants got stuck down around my knees right when my butt just turned into a cannon and I was shooting
biscuit stuff all over the whole room. It didn’t help that I got my clothes almost off. Willie Weaver, the crippled kid that found me—he’s the one that cleans up the place after school—said the bathroom looked like a whipped Jell-O factory blew up in there.

I was really scared, even though I never told anybody that. By the time he found me I was curled up in the corner bare naked, because I couldn’t tell if I was all shot out or if I was just building up for more rounds, which had already happened twice. I sure didn’t want to put my clothes back on till I was all done, and I was also really sick. Anyway, Willie went and got me some clothes out of Lost and Found and snuck me out of the building so nobody would know who did it. When people tease you as much as me, you don’t need them knowing you just spray-painted the bathroom out your butt with strawberry shampoo and Bisquick. Willie’s a pretty good guy for a crippled kid. Anyway, I was feeling better by the time he got me up, and I begged him not to tell anybody, not even André, and he said okay and that I should take the bus home and change my clothes real quick and if I started feeling bad again, to go to the doctor, but if not, to come back here. He was going to tell everyone my pants ripped and I just went home to change them.

So everything would of been okay except on my way to the bus I ran into the China kids. Now the China kids have been hanging around outside our school for a long time, and if you try to go home alone, they might stop you and take what you’ve got, like your money or your book bag or your telephone stuff. And I knew they might be out there, but I thought maybe not because it wasn’t the end of school, where you might catch somebody going home and take their stuff if you’re a China kid, so I took a chance because I didn’t want to stay around school and have everybody find out what I did.

Well, there’s these steps that you have to go down from our street to the street down below if you want to catch the bus that goes close to my house, and if you don’t take that one, you have to walk three blocks farther, and then it takes two transfers to get home if you take that one, and maybe you’ll be late if you have a certain time you’re supposed to be there or if you’re just in a hurry.