Standings
My given name, Jeon-Gi, with a hard “G,” was one that some of the kids in my apartment complex enjoyed deforming. Chun-ky, Chun-ky. As kids do, they were weaponizing a truth, for I was a chunky child, bordering on fat thanks to my one-a-day habit of a large Snickers bar. My mother would stock boxes of these for me as long as I ate the food she made, which I happily did. She and I were a tight pair that way, co-conspirators in a plot to insure that my whims were fully indulged, as I was her firstborn and her only son. In the ensuing years, I would become uncomfortably aware of the expectation behind that spoiling—to be No. 1 in my studies, in my sports, even in my citizenship, such as being elected class president—all of which I wanted very much to realize for her and lavishly envisioned for myself but could never achieve, given my natural laziness and lack of resolve, let alone talent. But back then, in the spring of 1976, a couple of months away from turning eleven, I had no idea that it might be tough to get there.
Cove Gardens, where my family lived, was a sprawling red brick rental complex built after the war for the light-industrial, service, and clerical workers who were saving up for their own houses in a better area. Our neighbors were Blacks and Puerto Ricans, working-class Irish and Italians, and some Jews who hadn’t yet moved on, plus the legions of us new immigrants, from Asia and Eastern Europe and the Caribbean, who’d ended up in this commuter town north of New York City. The whole diverse lot of us, before diversity was an operative notion, made a mix that seemed natural and right, despite how tense and fraught it could sometimes be. Was our gang all “friends”? I suppose we were. We were mostly boys and young enough—we ranged in age from eight to twelve—that the bonds felt fierce, like in a tribe, tourniquet tight, yet our tribe was fuelled by constant disagreements, contentions, sometimes outright bloodletting, which made everything seem dire and fragile. I rarely saw anyone’s parents or guardians, or ventured into their apartments, and it was easy to believe that we somehow existed on our own.
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Our apartment-complex alpha, Cleon Washington, was a handsome, tall, soft-spoken kid who had his own devoted crew and was a champ at every sport and game, and although he didn’t always join in, we couldn’t help but saunter in his way and speak in his laconic style and attempt to impress him with our physical zeal, if not skills. He often sported a pick in his perfect halo of an Afro, and my mother was perplexed by my request for one, which she bought me anyway, and which I’d futilely try to perch in my limp, straight hair. A totem to ward off the others. To be a kid, though, was to be bullied. No exceptions. Even Cleon had to deal with his much older brothers and their crew.
But when it came to my family, to life with my parents and my younger sister, Ella, I knew only a princely feeling, its weekend herald my mother’s velvety voice calling from our kitchen window, which looked out onto the playground and abutting patch of field.
Jeon-Gi ya! Jeon-Gi ya!
Wa-suh chum-shim muh-guh!
Come and eat lunch!
On Sundays, my father would often drive us across the Whitestone Bridge to a Gothic-style Presbyterian church in Flushing, Queens, that leased the afternoon-service slot to a Reverend Hahm for his growing ministry. My parents were happily secular people, but they badly craved hearing their native language, even if it came in sermons and hymns, and eagerly awaited the post-service tea hour.
While our parents socialized, my sister and I played out in the parking lot with the other kids, all recent Korean immigrants like us, and although you’d think we’d instantly bond, there was always a momentary whiff of contempt before the start of our games, all of us sizing one another up to determine who was fresher off the boat, more foreign and weird. These were fine discernments, often coming down to the strangeness of some kid’s sneakers or shirt or haircut. I don’t recall any of the sort of taunting and name-calling we had at the apartment complex, but there was patent discrimination, the ones who couldn’t yet speak any English usually picked last for dodgeball or stickball, at least until they’d proved their skill. The friendships were fleeting, necessarily occasional, as there were always church newcomers and samplers and people moving away. I could never keep track of the other kids’ names, and I was always reminding them of mine.
But back home at Cove Gardens, without even realizing it, I had completely acculturated to the tumult and machinations of our gang, even if that meant suffering the not so random bouts of terror and misery.
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Listen to Chang-rae Lee read “ Standings.”
Along with Cleon and his running mates, there were the Irish-heritage kids and the Italian-heritage kids and the Jewish Joshuas, plus a gaggle of other kids whose names I can’t quite remember. I am grouping us now as I grouped us then, which is loosely by ethnicity or ancestry, the only ways that made any sense to me. I would have been happily grouped with another Oriental—the only polite term by which I knew myself—but there were no others around my age, and so I had to bear alone any diatribes, epithets, stereotypes, all flung about with great bluster and ignorance in the context of our bristling group friendship. The few times that being Oriental was to my benefit were when there was a question of numbers (like the comparing of individual batting averages in baseball teams’ starting lineups, which I studied daily in the sports section of the newspaper) or doing real math, which I was assumed to be good at. To be honest, I was only ever good at basic math but was swift in my calculations and recall, and this helped me gain the confidence of a popular boy, Paul Dipinto, a cheerful, voluble kid who still used his fingers to figure out three plus four and entrusted me with his one-dollar or two-dollar or sometimes five-dollar bill (his dad owned a deli and regularly gave him cash) to pay the Good Humor man for the two of us. I would add the twenty-five or thirty-five cents I owed for my ice-cream bar and then give Paul the change, but one time I accidentally shorted him by a dime—I found it on the sidewalk after he skipped away obliviously scooping at his Screwball—and after that I would slip ten or twenty-five or even forty of his cents in my back pocket. I liked Paul and Paul liked me, but because I loved ice cream and because I could, I skimmed him almost every time.
I was constantly afraid he’d confront me, but he never did. And the funny thing about it was that I ended up thinking him pitiful because of what I was perpetrating—I saw him as being too trusting and weak, saw that he had no idea of how things truly were, not in the way I did, and was thus doomed to being taken advantage of again and again. Even as his esteem of me grew I began to despise him.
My problem with Joshua Messing was somewhat related, as it stemmed from the general perception that he and I were the smartest kids in our gang, which certainly wasn’t true (Cleon Washington was the smartest, in every way, including, it was known, by his report card), and this notion somehow cast us as rivals despite the fact that very few of our Cove Gardens activities had anything to do with brains. Joshua Messing was admired for his ballsy, aggressive style of play and for the many jokes he told and puns he made in his distinctively husky voice, which sounded almost like a grown woman’s. We couldn’t help but pay attention to him, if not heed him, which was usually fine because he told funny stories and enjoyed deploying anatomical insults that we loved learning, as in “Your smile is like a rectum.” He had older sisters and so could extemporize with brio about various types of tampons and bras, and he could belch and fart at will.
I didn’t want or need to be rivals, nor did Joshua, but the idea of our tangling for supremacy wormed deep into his head and he began insulting me, though without the usual verve. He’d make good-natured fun of my sometimes “garbage can” breath (if I had eaten kimchi at lunch) and the “pukey colors” of my trousers (an inexpensive Sears brand my mother bought me called Toughskins, which came in scar red and pus yellow and death-mask blue, and which were decidedly not tough skinned, as I eventually split every pair in the crack), but one day during a water-fountain break I saw him mugging antically for a couple of boys while making slanty eyes with his fingers. Then they saw me and snickered, Joshua turning and facing me for a long second before dropping his hands.
I planned to ask him about it the next day, but when the time came I couldn’t, mostly because I had convinced myself that he wasn’t specifically targeting me, and thus it didn’t matter. Besides, I could almost understand why one wouldn’t want such eyes, for who really would? I’d been asked both innocuously and maliciously whether I could see through mine. It had happened enough that I once spent an entire afternoon opening my eyes as wide as I could, to see if that made any difference, and succeeded only in giving myself a bad headache. A few days later, in the middle of a three-on-three basketball game, I forcefully nudged Joshua under the hoop to give myself space to shoot, and he shoved me hard and knocked the ball from me, crying, “Offensive foul, chinky chow!”
The game stopped. Joshua appeared as surprised as any of us, craning around as if the words had been blurted by someone on the periphery. I was struck silent, as I still am when challenged. I’d been called names before, but always by someone outside our gang. We’d all done it to other unfamiliar kids. A present-day onlooker would be appalled by the infinite variety of racist and ethnic slurs we lobbed at each other at that tender age, terms that we didn’t fully understand but employed with the most casual élan.
Yet to have one lobbed at me intramurally, and by a good buddy like Joshua Messing, made my gut feel as though it were packed with wet sand, too heavy even to vomit. Finally, Cleon, who’d been flipping baseball cards with Berto and Juany courtside, picked up the loose basketball and zipped it to Joshua and muttered, “Just play the game, punks.” John Wayne would be Cleon if John Wayne could ever imagine being that cool.
After a brief interlude of distracted play, the game got vigorous and testy. When either of us had the ball, we drove ferociously to the basket, shoulders and elbows leading, ankles flared to trip the other, and tried to score right away. Thrilled by our warring, our respective teammates took up the vibe and kept feeding us the ball, and by the time I scored the decisive basket the contest had become so intense and consuming that Joshua and I couldn’t help but slap each other a hearty low-five, albeit with our eyes averted. He seemed to have got the message that he had crossed the line. But I wasn’t ready to forgive him. Instead, I felt the compulsion to act upon my little world and thereby alter it, whether for better or worse. So, when Joshua asked me if I’d form a fresh squad with him after mine lost our next game, there was no hesitation.
“Sure thing, kike.”
I’d never uttered such a word before, though apparently I was aware of it. I had no idea what it meant. But you could tell by Joshua’s expression, one I instantly recognized, that a special button had been pushed, a button that powers everything down, momentarily untethering him from gravity and time so that he was floating distressingly free, to be batted about like a cheap party balloon. It simultaneously pleasured and frightened me, to see such raw, just-birthed astonishment in someone else.
“What’d you say?”
“Nothin’, kike.”
He pushed me hard, and I pushed him hard back, and then he jumped me, clawing at the back of my neck and ear. Kids were shouting, “Fight, fight!,” and I could hear Berto and Juany cackling as we flailed and tangoed in our clumsy baby-cub tussle. Finally, someone pulled Joshua off me. It was Cleon.
“You gotta settle this right,” he said, holding Joshua by the collar with one hand and stiff-arming me with the other.
“Let’s get ’em in the Ring!” Juany suggested, and it seemed everyone else cried out in assent.
“You want to do this?” Cleon asked us. “The Ring” was a kind of fight club that Berto and Juany would arrange for kids who had serious beefs with each other or maybe just felt like fighting, with Cleon serving as the referee. Fighting with Joshua Messing was not something I could decline with everyone standing by, and especially with Cleon asking.
I nodded, as did Joshua, both of us unable to muster any new slurs or brave words.
“Juany will set it up,” Cleon announced. “You punks, be ready.”
Tommy Reilly wasn’t part of our gang, or anyone else’s. But he, too, was troubling me. He lived in the uppermost building of the apartment complex, in C, which we referred to as the Fort, as it was perched on an exposed granite rise that had a commanding vista over the grounds. I underscore where Tommy lived because that’s how I mostly saw him, positioned on high, gazing down at the rest of us as if we were mere crawly creatures that were riddling his realm. Something was profoundly wrong with him, I can see that now, but back then the many ornate ways that he was haywire appeared to constitute a pure, hard menace. He was frightening enough that he seemed to be more a wraith than an actual person, let alone a stocky, baby-teeth-missing, ginger-haired kid just one grade above me.
I first met him at our elementary school, which happened to be only an eight-minute walk (or a three-minute sprint) from the west side of Cove Gardens, the route passing through a man-size tear in a cyclone fence that opened onto an often marshy stretch of cattails that then bordered the baseball field of the school. The U-shaped school building framed the baseball diamond, and before and after the school day there was usually a group of us running around the bases, vying for the fastest lap, the time kept by a kid who had an official stopwatch, lanyard and all. I never won but I regularly came in third or fourth, sometimes second, which stung less than you’d think because (if he was there) the winner was always Mehm, a wispy Turkish kid who ran in these rhythmic, almost slow-motion-looking strides that kicked up no dirt, his fisted hands held high in front of each shoulder.
Anyway, it was very lightly raining that day so most of the usuals, Mehm included, weren’t there. It was just me and Stopwatch Stu and a couple of tubby younger kids I knew I could beat. The dirt-only diamond was loamy and soft and home plate was totally submerged in a muddy puddle, a tributary of which also snaked down the third-base line. With a stick, Stu drew a plate in the mud alongside the puddle. The little porkers huffed through their laps, their footing giving way at various points, and then I ran mine, vigorously but prudently, slowing and widening my turn before each base so I wouldn’t slip and fall. When I touched Stu’s triangular home plate I knew there was no contest.
Then this kid who was my height but much more muscular appeared in the backstop. “My turn now,” he said, wiping his nose with his wrist. His orangey hair nearly matched a color in his brand-new Miami Dolphins jersey, the number thirty-nine spangly and bright. He got down like a sprinter on the blocks next to the puddle and dropped his bluejeaned knee right in the muck. Stopwatch Stu squeaked “Go!” and he bolted, his back sneaker gouging a foot-long trough in the mud. It seemed certain that he would spin out, but his stockiness and short, powerful strides centered him as he pounded around the bases. He kept gaining speed and, as he turned for home, I knew I had no chance.
I expected that he’d skid on the drawn plate or maybe slow down and triumphantly stomp on it, knowing he had time to burn. Instead, he kept coming, low to the ground, rocketing down the third-base line as though a catcher were there with the ball already in his mitt and had to be bowled over. And whatever any of us had in mind was instantly erased by how he finished, which was by sliding chest first into the submerged home plate, sending out plumes of brown water like a ferocious little seaplane landing in a swamp. I don’t know if Stu ever clicked his stopwatch, because nobody bothered to ask. We were stupefied, watching this kid hop to his feet as if nothing had happened, the front of his new jersey and his jeans thickly mortared with infield mud.
Stu asked him with hushed awe what his name was, and Tommy simply cracked a grin and like a prizefighter stuck his nose in his own armpit while tapping at the bulge he was making of his biceps.
Afterward, he came up alongside me while I was walking home. The late-spring sun had broken out and his clothes were still sodden—you could smell the live funk of wet earth on him, as though he’d crawled up from the depths. He didn’t say anything until we passed through the opening in the fence onto the Cove Gardens property.
“Where are you from?” His voice was harsh and nasal, delivered from the throat, like a kid version of the Burgess Meredith portrayal of the Penguin in “Batman,” which was my favorite TV show.
I pointed to Building A. I didn’t have to ask him where he lived, as I now recognized him as the kid who hung out on the rocky crags of the Fort.
“I mean, where do you come from?” He peered hotly into my face. “Are you Chinese?”
I shook my head, knowing from experience how this exchange would go: he would now ask if I was Japanese; I’d say no; then what was I, he’d wonder; “Korean,” I’d say; he’d ask, “What is that?,” to which I’d offer, “Kind of in between,” not knowing exactly how or why or what that meant, to which he’d murmur, “Korean,” usually in a confused, skeptical tone.
Tommy, however, did none of this.
“Uh-uh,” he grunted, touching his dirt-caked knuckles to my chest. “You look Chinese.”
“I’m not,” I protested, if weakly.
“I already figured that you are,” he said, and then with his thumb he pushed me, not hard, not angrily, but squarely enough on my sternum that his force radiated through the rest of me.
“Later, alligator,” he said, without a speck of friendliness or irony. He walked away, then bounded up the concrete steps that led to his building, taking them in twos, then threes, his exhalations whistling through his missing teeth.
Once I got home and my mother asked how the school day had been, I told her nothing much had gone on. In fact, I blocked out this very odd boy, stress-napping during “The 4:30 Movie” on Channel 7 despite it being “War Week,” featuring Second World War films like “Flying Leathernecks” and “Air Force.” I loved those movies for the very reason they were made—namely, because they highlighted American war machinery and the righteous fight against tyranny, even if some of the maniacal “dirty Japs” piloting the opposing Zero fighter planes looked like my father and my nightmares had him grabbing at his face with black blood gushing between his fingers after getting shot up by a square-jawed American ace.
While I kept my eye out for another appearance by Tommy, I began to hear rumors about him from kids in the playground. Someone knew someone’s brother who dated Tommy’s second cousin who lived in Building B. It was true that he had no friends in the complex. He’d only moved into Cove Gardens the year before, and never came down to play, at least with others. His parents (or maybe grandparents) owned several gas stations and were always out dealing with their employees and picking up large volumes of cash, which was why Tommy was kind of wild, having essentially raised himself, and why he wore expensive pro-sports jerseys and brand-new Pumas and had cool stuff like a medieval battle-axe, with which Gregory Fluss swore he saw him splitting a pumpkin up on the ledge.
It was the heart of spring, a couple of months remaining in the school year, and I was occupied enough by homework and chess club and piano lessons and Little League practices and my extra reading—my teacher and my mother and I decided I would participate in as many reading competitions and library groups as possible, to make certain that I fully mastered English—that my after-school playtime shrank to brief games of catch or flipping baseball cards with some of the Cove Gardens gang. I was also getting ready for my fight with Joshua Messing, jumping rope, shadowboxing, doing sit-ups and pushups, even staring at myself in the mirror and picturing my face bruised up but steely and valiant. The fight, though, kept getting delayed. We both had plenty of excuses. He had Hebrew school on Saturdays, on Sundays I went to Queens, we both had birthday parties and family outings, and there were rainy days when nobody wanted to do anything.
One day after school, just as I had emerged on the Cove Gardens side of the cyclone fencing, I heard a rustling behind me in the chronically neglected, weed-choked grounds. Then something ticked to the side of me, closer. I scanned the thickets of crabgrass and clover, listening for any movement, but I could hear only the tiny sawing of bumblebees alighting and hovering. I took a step, then another. Suddenly I felt a sting on the back of my calf and then watched as a fat drop of dark-red blood emerged from the center of a fresh welt.
Another tick in the grass, and almost simultaneously a cracker-size shard of stone ricocheted up from the hard dirt and glanced off my hip. I instinctively flashed with anger for Joshua, but I looked up and saw Tommy positioned on one of the rock ledges. He was bent on one knee, in a shooter’s pose, exactly like that of some of my green plastic toy soldiers, and was pulling back the long band of a slingshot, smiling wide. I wanted to run but I couldn’t; it seemed I had no limbs. Then he launched it. The stone, a little white-hot comet, flew in a tight, mean line across the expanse. It must have been a pure animal reaction, because something instructed me to tip my head slightly to the side, and I tracked the stone as it travelled soundlessly past my temple, a disturbance registering only in my deepest inner ear.
“That’s dangerous!” I wailed, this sounding of my own fear finally prodding me to scramble, that and Tommy’s gargly cackling at my panic. I ran half crooked, my neck and back tensed against an imminent strike. When I got home, I went straight to the bedroom I shared with Ella, who was playing teatime with her dolls. I told her to get out. She protested, saying that everything was already set up, but I shouted at her and she calmly collected the teacups and plates and fake cakes in the straw tray she kept it all in and left, her face soured.
That evening, after dinner, my mother came into the bathroom while I was brushing my teeth and sat on the seat of the toilet. She checked my hair to see if I needed to wash it and casually asked me if something was wrong. I shook my head, keeping the toothbrush working vigorously and long enough that she simply kissed me good night and left. I had nightmares that I couldn’t remember but which made my heart thump me awake. As for Tommy, I was obsessing not so much about him as about the staggering potential of what he’d done. What if one of those sharp-edged stones had hit me directly? I could have been blinded or worse!
Heading to school in the morning, I took a different route to the hole in the fence, widely skirting the playground and basketball court, all the while scanning the airspace and ledges of the Fort for any suspicious movements, projectiles, ginger-hued hair. Nothing. If anything, it was scarier not seeing any signs at school of Tommy, whom I didn’t happen upon that day in the building. After dismissal I didn’t stick around. My mother was surprised to see me back home so early but she didn’t show any outward concern. Instead, she fixed a snack for me and my sister, a salami-and-pickle sandwich, and watched as I idly nibbled at my half.
“You don’t want to go play?” my mother wondered aloud as she was dusting the TV.
“I don’t know. I have a lot of long division to do.”
I was glad that the next day was a school day, as I could simply run there and back and in between keep my head down during class. I was planning a repeat for the next day, Friday, and was relieved to hear from my mother at breakfast that we would be spending the weekend in New Jersey with our family friends the Lims (even though I didn’t like having to play with their too friendly, babyish kids), but after school, just as I passed through the hole in the fence, a voice called out.
“Bruce!”
It was Tommy, standing at the base of the Fort.
“My Bruce!”
There was no one else around, but even if there had been, I’d have known he was addressing me. Periodically I’d get called Bruce by friends and strangers alike, in both friendly jest and as a taunt. It was pointless to try to correct them about Bruce Lee’s roots versus mine, plus sometimes it was advantageous to allow them to attach to me the spectre of deadly inborn skills; my hero Cleon even once took me aside and asked if I was good at kung fu. I smiled and didn’t answer. With Tommy, though, it was different. I desperately wanted to flee, but everybody knows you shouldn’t run from an aggressive animal—in fact, you had to make yourself bigger somehow and stand your ground or even advance on the beast. Was that still true if the animal had been patiently waiting for you?
He tossed something that landed near my feet. I froze, simply trying not to look at him.
“Come on, champ, pick it up.”
It was a brushed gunmetal ninja star, five-pointed and surprisingly heavy, the kind martial-arts actors hurl at their foes. This throwing star was especially sinister; it could feature in a sadistic underworld rite, the knife-sharp inside edges of its hollow star-shaped middle painted a glossy blood-red.
“You’ve thrown ’em before, right?”
I tried to shake my head, but my body was vibrating with what it already understood would happen next: Tommy held up another ninja star and waved it.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said, taking a step toward me. He lifted his shirt. His torso was just like a G.I. Joe’s, hard-looking and defined, not to mention a pale putty color. “I’ll let you go first.” He touched a point of his star to his heart. “If you get me right here, you could kill me instantly.”
I don’t know what frightened me more, the imminent duel he was proposing or the spellbound tone of his pronouncement.
Tommy advanced another couple of yards, the distance between us maybe the span between the mound and first base. He set his feet, taking up his notion of a hero’s stance, his bared chest puffed out, his teeth clenched, ready to be spiked up on the cross of his own dark design.
“Hey!” he yelled. “Let’s go!”
“I don’t want to,” I peeped, hardly audible even to myself.
“Yeah, you do!” he commanded.
In my panic, I began to curse, not at Tommy but at myself, in Korean no less. I cursed from the position of my father, who never actually got cross with me when I committed a genuine wrong (and instead sat me down and soberly explained why he was disappointed in me), but would merely faux-scold and gently noogie me with his index knuckle.
Of course, Tommy had no idea of what I was saying, or why. He let his shirt fall back down. The foreign sounds made his face crimp, as if somebody right next to him had farted. I could see the disgust building in him, this stiffness in his brief stretch of thick, terrierlike neck, and although I might still have been gibbering, I had bent my head low in full submission to my fate, this last dazed moment in the abattoir.
“What you standing there for, little man?”
It was Cleon, accompanied by Berto, heading for the court with a shiny new red-white-and-blue A.B.A. basketball under his arm. I started to whimper and reached out to Cleon as if for a lifeline, but Berto barred me from him as though I had the plague.
“Yo, don’t let him touch the ball! Punk is bleedin’!”
I quickly scanned myself, and, to my shock, there were a couple of drops of bright-red blood on the white rubber toe cap of one of my sneakers. I crumpled to the ground, listing against my book bag. Tommy had nailed me and nailed me good.
“Hey,” Cleon said softly, kneeling by my side. “What you got there? Come on, now.”
I would have hugged him around the neck right then, as if he were the solicitous, protective big brother I always longed for, but Cleon flinched at my momentum and firmly grabbed my wrist with one hand and with the other carefully pried the ninja star from my fingers.
“Damn, J.-G., what the hell you doing with this?”
For some reason I cried, “I found it!”
He tested the points with his fingers.
“This shit is sharp.”
He wasn’t complimenting me; I had been gripping the star so tightly that I’d cut my index finger on one of the edges. I looked back toward Tommy, but he’d disappeared. Cleon slipped off his red terry-cloth wristband and had me press it against the weeping slash.
“I’m sorry,” I blubbered. “I’ll get you a new one, I promise.”
“No sweat, slick,” Cleon said. “We’re cool. Just heal up.” He gave the star to Berto, who inspected it closely before slipping it into the back pocket of his jean shorts.
Berto said, “You still gonna fight, right? Get in the Ring? Or you gonna pussy out?”
“I’ll fight,” I insisted, though my words sounded as if they were someone else’s unconvincing promise. “I’ll heal up. I’ll be ready soon.”
“Go easy, champ,” Cleon said, as he and Berto headed to the courts. “Peace.”
When I got home, I went directly to the bathroom and dabbed on the antibiotic ointment my parents always seemed to be plying us with and put a bandage around my finger. As much as I wanted to keep it, I threw the bloodstained wristband in the wastebasket, covering it with tissue paper. While my mother served me and my sister an after-school snack of Danish butter cookies and milk, she asked what had happened and I said I had accidentally nicked myself with the paper cutter at school. She used the occasion to remind me that I should be extra careful in everything I did, as usual expanding on the precept that we were alone in this country, that we couldn’t count on anyone to help us. I kept turning through the possibilities. What if Cleon and Berto hadn’t been on their way to the basketball court just then? What if Tommy had launched, as he had with the slingshot, an unannounced first strike? How would I have shielded myself, or struck back? All I had was my pussy Batman book bag with its matching plastic pencil case and batwing-shaped rubber erasers.
Meanwhile, Ella was explaining to my mother why the teacher had sent a note home with her and recounting how her friend Stacy had played kitchen with a new girl during free time at school and allowed Ella to join them only for the cleanup part. All of this was driving me mad; I had my own troubles.
Finally, I snapped at Ella, telling her that she should just forget about Stacy.
“She’s my best friend!” Ella hollered back.
“What kind of best friend is that?”
“She can braid my hair!”
“Wow, that’s super.”
“You don’t know anything about anything!”
“Yeah, I know you’re not Stacy’s favorite.”
Ella shoved me, making me spill some milk on the table. For her, this was practically homicidal aggression. Our mother yowled—she reviled every kind of mess—and ordered me to do my homework. She and Ella would walk to the nearby convenience store for a loaf of bread.
“When we get back, you’re going to clean up your bedroom together,” she decreed. “And if you do a poor job, you’ll clean the bathroom as well.”
Ella stuck her tongue out at me, and as they left the apartment, I covertly flipped them the finger while I crossed my arms, a move I’d learned from an unruly kid in my class. I felt sordid and foul and instantly wanted to take it back, but once I was alone the shame hardened into an ingot of rage, rage not toward them but toward the situation with Tommy, which, in addition to petrifying me, revealed the truth of how little control I had over my own life. I might as well have been one of the ants or beetles that my friends and I regularly surveilled with a magnifying glass, the articulations of their antennae and joints and the filigreed armor of their bodies wondrous enough to make them seem sacred and yet they were nothing under a hard thumb or the lasering ray of the lens, the scent of burnt carapace vaguely fishy and grim to inhale but quickly gone.
I picked through my bin of sports equipment in our closet to see what I could use against Tommy or to protect myself with. The most useful thing would have been my football helmet and shoulder pads, but I certainly couldn’t walk to school suited up like that, or stroll into class wielding a baseball bat.
I headed to the kitchen. I often found myself there, because I was hungry or bored or simply wanted to watch my mother at work; her shapely hands were always purposeful, efficient, artful, or ruthless depending on the task. I knew every tool she stocked. In the drawer next to the utensil drawer was where she kept it, beneath a large serving spork and a pie spatula. The Knife. She had other knives on the counter, a typical chef’s knife and a filleting knife and some small paring knives she used for fruit, but the Knife had to remain tucked away, I always thought, because it was especially dangerous. It was a stainless-steel carving knife with a cream-colored plastic handle and its own cardboard sheath (illustrated, in fact, with miniature drawings on its use and care). The blade was at least ten inches long and double-edged, honed on one side with a wavy scalloped finish, the other a jagged toothing like a lumberjack’s saw. I’m still uncertain what one was supposed to cut with such acute serrations. Cords of gristle? Hides and bone? The first time I saw it, when my father brought it out for our inaugural Thanksgiving celebration in this country, I startled, being afraid both of and for him.
I had furtively handled the Knife before, the blade throwing sunlight about our kitchen, its menacing flash suspending my breath. I’d place it back exactly as it had been, shivering ever so slightly. Now my mind was ratcheting, torquing the screws of a thousand rageful thoughts as I unsheathed it. The Knife was in fact quite cheap, surprisingly bendy and light. I gripped the handle tighter and tighter as I pictured pressing it against Tommy’s freckled, stout neck. Would he wail and shake? Or would he beg for mercy, knit his hands together or bow his head? The main question was whether I wanted him to be scarred for life or simply dead. Regardless, he needed to suffer in some profound way. Soon I couldn’t sense any distinction between my sweaty palm and the plastic handle. I slashed and stabbed at the air. I could almost taste the dense tang of blood, the evil syrup that was fuel for my fury.
I understood then what I needed to do. Instead of putting it back, I replaced the other implements that had been atop it and shut the drawer. I re-sheathed the Knife and went to the bedroom, where I slid it between workbooks in my schoolbag. I shouldered the bag and stood before the mirror that hung on the back of our door, closing and opening the bag’s flap, startled, for a moment, to see what I looked like, this steely, dead-faced boy.
On the next school day, I carried my knife-laden book bag with the expectation that Tommy would accost me on the way there or back. It was a warm day in early May, but I had chosen a long-sleeved shirt to wear, some part of me seeking any measure of protection, and by the time I reached the main schoolyard filled with kids madly shouting and sprinting around before the first bell, I was perspiring so heavily that I had to blink away the sweat from my brow. I was breathing too fast and felt faint, and I realized that I was already spent, that I was beginning to lose my nerve.
I moved to the cooler, shaded corner of the asphalted yard. Unless he was tardy or out sick Tommy should have been there, but I couldn’t find his squat form in the mosh. It was then that a boy named Osvaldo approached me. It was his first year at the school, and I knew that he was clever and concerned about his image, but because he wasn’t very sporty or charismatic he wasn’t yet popular, though he desperately wanted to be. Like me, he was ambitious, but he could get pushy, constantly seeking any opportunity to better his standing. I was our grade’s playground monitor for that month, and he’d been lobbying me daily to choose him as one of the two kickball or dodgeball captains. I don’t know when or why this clearly flawed mechanism had been instituted by our teachers—perhaps there had been arguments, even physical tussles, over captaincy—but there it was, and Osvaldo, who detected something corruptible in my character, had begun bribing me with candies like sour balls or lollipops. Nothing was stipulated, nothing was promised, and like mobsters we inked the pact with an oblique look, a wrinkle of the nose. Osvaldo’s problem was that he couldn’t stop nudging, and even after I chose him to be a captain twice in one week, he kept on me, treats in tow, finally offering the newly available Bicentennial commemorative quarters, which I palmed for a few days without making him captain, in order not to attract scrutiny but also, I admit, to remind him who was boss.
“Hey, J.-G., check out these cool new ones I got!” Osvaldo displayed a handful of shiny quarters. I couldn’t have cared less. I could only focus on the background behind him, searching for Tommy. It was no longer that I wished to ward Tommy off, to scare or intimidate him. That now seemed an infantile idea. No. He had to be torn open like the odd raccoon or stray cat we sometimes found curbside after a foggy or rainy night, its belly garishly flared. I could almost feel the teeth of the blade tip chucking into the flesh of Tommy’s raised palm, the splintering of the hard point of his shoulder. And I saw it, as before, pressed against his bared pale neck, but this time the knife cut in, if bloodlessly, Tommy’s beady eyes disbelieving right up to the moment I held his detached head by the hair, just as the palace executioner had done with John the Baptist’s in a movie I’d watched with my parents.
“You can have all of them, O.K.?” Osvaldo said, trying to push the coins into my hand. I didn’t want them. I was going to make him a captain at recess anyway, but I didn’t say anything and he kind of freaked out and tossed them, the quarters weakly caroming off me and scattering on the asphalt.
“These are yours!” he cried, scrambling to pick them up. “I have some for Joshua.”
“Messing?”
From his knees Osvaldo nodded, his face crooked with long suffering. “He knows! He said he’ll tell Miss Stavros if I don’t keep giving him the same thing.” Miss Stavros was our teacher. “So if you don’t want them, I’ll just give him yours!”
I was livid already and hearing this should have been an accelerant, but just then I noticed Tommy entering the schoolyard. I felt some vast piece of me fall away, like an ice shelf calving. Was it seeing him now as quarry? Was this how a predator self-vanishes? For, as I drifted toward him, numb save my grip on the knife handle inside my bag, I was awed by the momentum, to be so utterly discharged from myself. I felt so pure and free. But who was this with him? There were the grownups beside him, a woman with blond hair thickly flowing down to the narrow waist of her flared bluejeans, a man with long hair, too, but curlier and dark, like his brushy handlebar mustache. Walking a half step to the side of them was a beefy older man in a crisp white short-sleeved dress shirt and slate-colored trousers, a cap tucked under his arm. He opened the metal entrance door for the couple—the woman’s face looked flushed, puffy—and, as he turned, I saw a holstered handgun studding his hip. Tommy kept his head bent low as the man ushered them into the building.
You would have thought that it was a vindicating sight, that I’d be thrilled to witness a cowed Tommy and his parents being escorted into school by a policeman. But for what? The very idea that there might be others—I hadn’t allotted room for anyone but myself to be a victim—somehow made my shame sharper, more caustic, and not because I cared an iota for them. It was that the mantle of my martyrdom had been stripped away, leaving me exposed in a foolish fantasy of revenge. Weapon or not, I was still terrified of Tommy and always would be. My plan was all an act, or more, an enactment of an act that would never be performed. I know. A coward revels in rehearsal. Still, I was shaking, and all I could do was walk away past Osvaldo, heading to the opening in the schoolyard fencing. I was ill and I had to get home. Osvaldo pushed at my back and without turning I batted him away.
“Hey!”
But it was Joshua Messing, standing close enough that I could smell his milk-laced cereal breath. Osvaldo was behind him, if not allied with him, then curious about what might be unfolding.
Joshua poked me in the shoulder. “You think you’re so smart. You think you got it all going, huh?”
Maybe I did think those things, because I needed to, but I didn’t believe any of it.
“Well, I’m choosing captains today,” he decreed.
I started walking.
“And will until the end of school.”
I turned and faced him. “Fuck you, Josh.”
“Yeah, FUCK YOU, J.-G.!”
He punched me hard in the chest, knocking me back a step. For a second I couldn’t breathe, it was as if my heart stopped, but then a flash of paleness crossed his face. I had already leaped at him, grabbing him by his shirt collar. My head was exploding with the iciest cold. They say I screamed, in Korean and English.
You wanna die? Ju-gu-leh? You wanna die right now?
Apparently, I was wielding the Knife, holding it high. I can feel it still, sometimes.
To this day I’ve never seen a person so scared.
The Messings, to their credit, ultimately agreed that a social-rehabilitation program was the appropriate path for me. This was after their initial shock and outrage, and demand that I be detained for arraignment and trial and possibly held at a juvenile correctional facility, all of which I was legally subject to, for under the statutes of New York State back then, offenders as young as seven could be tried in the criminal-justice system.
No one could blame them for wanting me locked away. Although Joshua and I had been friends before we grew antagonistic, neither of us had ever visited the other’s apartment, so I had never met his parents; they didn’t know the first thing about me except that I had threatened to decapitate their only child with a ten-inch carving knife that I’d brought to school in my book bag. Joshua himself was unharmed, at least physically. I was immediately suspended from school for the rest of the year, and Joshua, I heard later, stayed at home the next school day and returned the following, but then didn’t want to go anymore even though he knew I wouldn’t be present. I found out from some of the Cove Gardens gang that he didn’t come out very often, and if he did would just play a quick game of H-O-R-S-E and maybe get something if the ice-cream truck came by, but at some point would slip away without a word. No one gave him trouble about it, you’d have to be a big jerk to do that, and in truth the rest of the gang was spooked by my actions, too, and likely glad that I was out of circulation. The only one who came to see me was Gregory Fluss, who lived one floor above me, and who was returning a G.I. Joe I’d let him borrow a month before.
“I thought you might want him back now,” he said, extending the action figure from where he stood on the far side of our doormat. He was examining me closely, as if checking to see if I was suddenly transformed, had maybe sprouted nubs of horns, or an extra eye. I took the G.I. Joe and thanked him, and Gregory’s expression softened, and I told him he should come over later if he wanted, as my parents hadn’t yet specifically forbidden that.
“I’m not sure,” he said, leaning back a half step. “I have to ask my mom.”
We stood idling for a bit. Before he left, he reached into his back pocket and gave me a piece of wrapped bubble gum. The gum, which I put in my mouth right after I closed the door, was misshapen and warm from being in his pocket, but I extracted every last molecule of its sweetness, chewing it long after it had turned hard and flavorless, this lump of useless putty that was more or less how my only society now viewed me.
The big question is why I never told anyone about Tommy Reilly, when doing so would surely have made my life less fraught and complicated in the aftermath. I can still see the reaction of the secretary at the first psychologist’s office, the reflexive tightening of her lips when she realized I was that boy from J.F.K. Elementary School. At any point I could have spoken up. Yet it seemed right to me not to disclose Tommy’s aggressions, even after it became known why he and his parents had been summoned to school that day: apparently he’d threatened two fifth-grade girls on school grounds, not with slingshotted stones or ninja stars but with an actual pellet gun, an air pistol that he shot into the trees and then aimed at them. Somehow, I was certain that I wouldn’t be believed, that I would be seen as simply claiming victimhood to excuse myself.
Was I remorseful? I felt bad for causing everyone such unhappiness, but whether I felt remorse for the act itself was unclear. I didn’t feel too sorry, if at all, about Joshua, for in my mind he deserved to have peed his pants just as he did right then in the schoolyard. In fact, I was almost liking him again, renewed by the idea that we were as allied as ever, now that we both knew what it was to fear so purely.
Tommy, it turned out, wasn’t wholly at fault, if at all. He was also suspended immediately and processed through a similar series of assessments and evaluations, but we heard soon enough that he was undergoing care for a serious anxiety disorder, which was merely the first indication of what would be diagnosed in his early teen years as full-blown schizophrenia, complete with paranoid thoughts and visions. In this regard we were all fortunate that he didn’t follow through with some truly harmful assaults.
Tommy, of course, must have suffered more than anyone. Years later, long after we’d moved away, when Tommy should have been working his first job after college, Paul Dipinto—whom I bumped into at a bar in the East Village—told me that he saw him pacing at a bus stop in White Plains, loudly haranguing no one in particular. Poor kid. But it’s like that sometimes for the rest of us, too. Waiting for a ride to where you want to go but never getting on. ♦