I looked at my mother. She didn't move. There was that way she used to sit in these situations, right, I remember now. I said, “I didn't get into a fight today.”
He looked at my mother and then he looked at me. He said, “Your mother said some boy called you a nigger at school today.”
Oh, he was talking about
that
. A week ago, during snack break, Tony Reece had done something weird to me. It was Tony Reece's first year at our school. His father was a bigwig at the French embassy. The headmaster and founder of our school was French and a number of French dignitaries sent their kids there, which meant that we watched a lot of François Truffaut movies and we celebrated Paris Day once a year, where we ate croissants and pain au chocolat while the French teachers shared some motherland tales, like childhood reminiscences about watching collaborators get their heads shaved. They snatched the hair from the ground as souvenirs. “You Americans were so shocked at Watergate,” our music teacher Madame Mamelock told us one day. “We have never believed in the powerful. The powerful are liars.” I was six.
Tony Reece only lasted a few years. He was a skinny little boy with dark eyes and a sinister up-curl to the left side of his mouth. On his first day, he ate his lunch on a white handkerchief that he unfolded delicately and placed on his desk. We all laughed at him and he never did it again, but he was constantly en garde from that moment on, fearful of these hot-dog-eatin' heathens and their New World cruelties.
The day my father was asking about, a bunch of us were goofing around during Snack. Andrea Rappaport had just come back from Saint Thomas and her face was pink, brown scales withering on her nose. We hadn't been on spring vacation—she'd gotten her school-work for the week in advance and done it in between trips to the pool. That's how her family rolled. There was a discussion about tanning while on vacation, the pros and cons, the various theories of how much was “too much tanning,” from which I abstained, and
then Tony Reece reached over to my face, dragged a finger down my cheek, and said, “Look—it doesn't come off.”
He snickered, the right corner of his mouth curling up to complement the left, and I didn't get his meaning and then I realized, given the context of the conversation, that he was talking about my brownness. The other kids looked at one another, and what do fourth graders know about things, I don't know, but they knew wrongness when it happened right in front of them and Andy Stern who was my friend said, “Shut up, Tony
Reece”
and shoved his shoulder. “Where's your hankie, Frenchie?” Everybody laughed at Tony Reece. The bell rang for Social Studies, and we returned to our desks. I'd told my mother about it an hour or two before I was called to the living room, something to kill the time while she tossed pepper on the pork chops.
I said, “Oh, that was last week.” To get the facts straight. This was a misunderstanding. “He didn't say that.” I related my version of the incident.
My father looked at my mother and then he looked at me. “‘It doesn't come off,’” he said. “He was calling you a nigger. What did you think he was doing?”
“I don't know” slipped out of my mouth and I knew I had messed up because he hated “I don't know.” There was no purchase there. Actually, I think maybe he liked “I don't know” because then he got to pry you open.
“Why didn't you punch him like I told you?”
“I don't know.” I said it again, I couldn't help it.
“You were afraid he was going to hit you back.”
I couldn't say no and disagree with him. So I decided to agree with him. “Yes.” Surely if I stopped struggling, trying to wiggle out of this, I'd quickly be Greedo again.
“Like this?” His fast fast hand struck me across the face and iron rolled around in my head and my cheek pulsed with heat and felt like it had swollen up to twice its size. When I looked in the mirror later, it looked normal, if a bit red, but that's what it felt like. I heard Elena and Reggie close the doors to their rooms, but how could I
hear that really, because they were too far away, but I just knew that's what they did because that's what we always did. In these situations.
“Can he hit you harder than this?” he asked, and he swatted me again, harder.
My eyeballs bobbed in their water. In the corner of my vision, my mother uncrossed her legs. I said, “I don't know.”
He swatted me in the face again, harder. This time I was ready and I told myself, don't fall over. “Can he hit you harder than that?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Then there's nothing to be afraid of.” A pause. I was breathing a lot through my nose. “Don't you cry now,” he said, so I didn't. “Who's going to protect you if you don't do it? Me? Your mother? The world's not going to protect you. That's what I'm trying to teach you.”
The lesson was, Don't be afraid of being hit, but over the years I took it as, No one can hurt you more than I can. The same end result, really. The next morning I went up to Tony Reece and punched him in his face and sent him flying against his desk. No repercussions.
SUMMERS WE BRAWLED
. We were hungry for slight, for provocations big and small, and when one didn't appear, we trumped up charges. Turf. The more whole you were, the more turf you had. You could tolerate the occasional trespass. But if you had so little turf that you felt like you barely had any air? You told someone they had crossed a line they didn't know existed. Then you punched them in the face.
The first equations of manhood. Generally you punched someone younger and smaller. Common sense. A more even match was sometimes unavoidable. The standard fight was brief and awkward. A quick blow to the face sent you into your favorite stance, one that cannot be found in any boxing primer in the land, or sent you searching after a cherished martial-arts movie pose, Praying Mantis, Turtle Position. The traditional epithets were offered, strange personal
oaths muttered, and things quickly degenerated into a slap fight, and then the inevitable pinning to the ground by this day's favored son. The other guy flopped in headlocked futility, dirt mashed into Afro and scalp that would take extra fingernail scrapes in the shower to remove, and we stepped in to break it up.
You never fought unless there was an audience. On the sidelines we picked our boy and heckled. “Oh, shit!” “He fuckin' whopped that nigger!” “Rope-a-dope!” Last week's throw down with one of the fighters came back in a flash—sunlight reeling as your head was knocked back, the arena lights through the leaves—forcing you to root for his opponent. Beefs and disagreements from years past perverted the conventional betting wisdom. We laid our bets based not on speed, weight class, or fighting record, but grudge. In August 1978, Nick broke the fin off Clive's Air Rocket and refused to pay for the damages. Hence Clive's insistence that Bobby “Beat that nigger!” during the Bobby-Nick Pugilists in Polo series of bouts in the summer of 1980. Marcus ate my last Twizzler during a matinee of
Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo
, on purpose even though he denied it, and this was the backstory when I served, metaphorically, as Clive's cut man during the Showdown of '81. But short-term memory entered in as well. Spend a satisfying round of hanging out the previous afternoon with someone, and you were in their corner if something popped off, broken toys and stolen Twizzlers be damned.
The winner was generally whoever wanted it more, and generally that was someone who'd had a bad weekend or knew they had a bad weekend coming up, the Dreaded Impending. Damage reports came in: a ripped-open elbow already scabbing, a torn shirt that would lead to questioning from parental authorities. They dusted themselves off, saying, That was nothing. Losers cast aspersions on their opponent's technique (“He has long nails like a girl”), and winners overex-plained their mercy (“I coulda wailed on him if I wanted, but it wasn't worth it”). The mob dispersed, dissecting the fight in smaller groups until some new escapade bulldozed it all. Next time, next time was plotted out that night in bed when the fighters were alone at last, without an audience, under the chilly night breezes of regret.
As we got older we stepped in to break 'em up instead of hooting ringside. Break up someone else's fight and they might return the favor later. Then on universal order we stopped fighting altogether. We were relieved. For one thing, we got bigger, and could do some damage. Sam and TT, two older kids who were brothers, fought one day and Sam whipped TT's face with a piece of electrical cable and the skin on his temple was raw the rest of the summer like a warning. We honed our verbal dexterity instead, learned to signify, studied the uppercut of the quick remark. Discovered that we all had glass jaws and went down like a sack of potatoes at the right combo of words. Also—puberty. That infamous culprit. Hormones rechanneled stray energy toward the groin, and how to use that body part as opposed to the fists. (One day, God willing. All-Powerful Being, Most Merciful, Who in His Kindness might throw a brother a bone every once in a while.) In fact, in the telling it becomes clear that puberty rearranged my brain so thoroughly that this period belongs to another kid's history. What happened to him, Ma? Turned out he was this other boy. He doesn't come out anymore.
I must've liked it, up and hitting someone for no good reason, something stupid. For those few years. Ten, eleven years old. It gave it a place to go. It was somewhere to put it. Our father gave Reggie his own instruction, individually tailored, and on those nights it was my turn to close the door to the room, but when Reggie instigated with someone bigger, I stepped in and fought for him, that was my job, and I got knocked down or I didn't. Sometimes he instigated because he knew I was there to step in, but that was okay. We were in it together back then. Friends became enemies for a day or two and then the boredom was such that you forgot. You needed someone to play with. Or else you were alone.
TARGET PRACTICE BEHIND THE PARK
was on a Wednesday I can't remember what happened the next day. Something bad probably happened to someone. On Monday we were back at the threshold of another empty week we needed to fill. We convened at our place that
night. I bossed Reggie around to help get the place in shape. He glowered at me, standard operating procedure that summer. I told him to straighten up our parents' room, since it was his turn to sleep in there while they were away. There was a phone next to the bed, allowing our friends to close the door and prevent us from hearing their bitch-ass responses if they called home and got chewed out for something or other. “Okay … okay … okay.” They emerged with excuses about why they had to suddenly break out. We didn't gloat. Gloat, and karma said next time it was your turn.
I was washing the dishes when he came out and said, “Benji—what do you think this is?” I glanced at it and wiped my hands off so as not to leave any evidence that I'd touched it. It was our mother's handwriting, on one of our father's old pads, the ones we used for scratch after he got his new stationery. It was bullet-pointed in her work fashion:
yells at me in front of my friends
mean/verbally abusive
drinks every day
blows up and then forgets about it the next morning
I told him to put it back where he found it. We didn't mention it again, according to custom, and when it was my turn in there next week, I looked for it but I didn't see it.
It was getting dark when they came over. Randy, Nick, Bobby, and Clive. Randy brought beer, a new but permanent feature that summer. The drinking age was nineteen, which made Randy legal and Clive and Nick tall enough to buy take-out six-packs at the Corner Bar unchallenged. One beer and I was buzzed; two beers, I was drunk. We asked one another “Which one are you on?” to see who was ahead and who was falling behind. Pointing at the empties for proof.
“Why don't you open the screen door to let the air in here?” Randy said.
“It's a screen door. The air comes through,” Reggie said. “Plus the mosquitoes will get us.”
“Then leave the lights out. They won't come in,” Randy said. “I'm hot.”
Reggie opened the screen door and we hunkered in the gloom. We got down to business. We had three days. Clive suggested night bluefishing off Montauk. Nick grumbled about the price, for his own reasons, but the rest of us agreed that it was too expensive to go more than once a season, given the realities of minimum wage, and we'd already been once. Reggie, who this summer decided that he was no longer afraid of the water, disavowing a key tenet of the men in our family, said that we should borrow Nick's uncle's motorboat again. But Nick said his uncle was having the hull refinished, plus he thought maybe his father and his uncle were having an argument, from the frequency with which his father was talking shit about him. Like, hourly. Brothers—what are you going to do? Bobby busted out that old chestnut, Ask Mrs. Carter if We Can Go in Her Pool, but Clive and Bobby immediately said no dice. Mrs. Carter's son had died five years ago. He'd grown up in Sag in a crew with Clive's father and Nick's father, and the last time they used her pool, she kept calling them by their fathers' names and it creeped them out. She saw the brown bodies underwater and thought she knew them. Then these faces surfaced to scream “Marco!” and “Polo!,” other boys suddenly up from the deep, and her brain misfired. Creepy, right?
Stumped, and it wasn't even August yet.
“Let's show dicks,” Randy suggested.
Cricket, cricket.
“Why the hell would we do that?” Clive asked, finally.
“To see who has the biggest dick,” Randy said.
“Next time we go to Karts-a-Go-Go, we should race for money and time ourselves to see who's the fastest,” I said, steering the proceedings like a good host. I wasn't much of a go-cart driver, but I thought the novelty of the scheme might appeal.
Bobby turned on his MC voice, “One Two Three, in the place to be,” and Reggie said, “Alright!” They started their routine and I rolled my eyes in the darkness. Bobby and my brother had memorized
the lyrics to Run-D.M.C.'s “Here We Go” and had to perform it at least ten times a day. Bobby was Run; Reggie was D.M.C. Bobby took the lead, Reggie side-kicking after each line like an exclamation point. Back and forth. Clive kept the beat with his hands. They'd been practicing, because they had it down pat, a real fucking duo.