Chapter 7

Did Alisa and I leave similar involuntary tracks – like the slimy trail of a slug - on the way to our first encounter in Mr. Nelson’s High School Math class? Did she suffer at the hands of her classmates as much or almost as much as I did? She was a whole year younger than me and from West Belmar, so I had no way of knowing what she might have endured up until the time I had asked to borrow her shitty bowling pencil. I had assumed that she must have been brutalized by her peers. After all, she was fat, smelly, and Mexican (Puerto Rican.)

            Did they treat her the way they treated me? Better? Worse? The same?

JANUARY 1993:

            I bit into a “bloody cunt.” That’s what we called the jailhouse cherry Danishes.

            Wall Intermediate School sold them by the bushel.

            It had been over two years since I had first and last witnessed the Divine in feminine form: Joe’s Daughter. We didn’t visit Grandma J very often. When we did, the meetings were brief and perfunctory. No opportunities to see (let alone interact with) Joe’s Daughter presented themselves. And even if I had seen her, how would I have properly interacted with her whilst in the presence of mother?

            In the space of that time, I had graduated from Wall Central Elementary School and entered the 6^th Grade of Wall Intermediate School, a town-wide consolidation of kids from the other elementary schools: Allenwood, Old Mill, and West Belmar.

            “Enjoying your bloody cunt?” asked Dustin Kozinski.

            “Oh yeah. As always!”

            “Sick fuck.”

            Dustin chewed on his Honeybun. What should we call that one? A “shitty ass”? Prison food for a prison environment. Middle-class kids like Dustin and I had money for cafeteria commissary.

            “I would drink a woman’s period blood,” I said. “Especially Amanda Goldstein’s period blood.”

            (I grew up to detest menstrual blood, but what did I know at the age of 12?)

            “How do you know if you’ll like it? You’ve never even seen a pussy in real life other than the one you came out of!”

            Dustin often spoke in monotone, the edge of inflection dulled through habit or intent. Staid, stoic, and rational, he complemented me: the Apollo to my Dionysus.

            Dustin’s thin, pink lips ripped bread from the whole of his shitty-ass honeybun.

            “I’ve never seen an asshole in real life either, but I would eat Amanda Goldstein’s shit!”

            “Stop! That’s so foul! I’m eating!”

            “What are you faggots talking about?” asked Pat Mullaney as he placed his tray on the table and took his seat across from us.

            “Will is telling me his disgusting fantasies about eating Amanda Goldstein’s shit.”

            “Will is reminiscent of the French nobleman and insane asylum author The Marquis De Sade. You should read him – he’s fun!”

            Pat enjoyed dropping dumps of precocious erudition. The “useless” information (what we called knowledge sans potential for financial gain) dripped over the greasy, pock-marked travesty of a pizza on Pat’s tray, a food item decidedly more disgusting (as far as I was concerned) than anything that could have fallen from Amanda’s ass (she would have effected an alchemical transmutation of base cafeteria pizza into brown gold.)

            “Maybe you should have been French,” said Dustin.

            “Maybe he should have been,” said Pat. “The French are the best cocksuckers on earth.”

            How would Pat know? The bullies called him “Fats” or “Fat Mullaney.” Short and round, he looked like a pre-teen version of Drew Carey or the Big Bopper, but with a whiteboy fro.

            “I think the only cocksucker here is you,” I said. “You never talk about girls unless someone brings it up first.”

            “Unlike you, I don’t need to talk about girls to disguise my latent homosexuality.”

            This was our daily “locker room” talk, bathroom banter, and barbershop-like joshing. What the three of us had in common was that despite our foul mouths and harsh ribbing of one another, we had never picked on or bullied anyone else. What we said to one another came from a place of love, fellowship, and bonhomie. We were “nice kids” who never bothered anyone – and that’s why we had to sit with each other. The rest of the cafeteria was too socially treacherous. Like a small group of Neo-Nazis in a California prison, we had to band together against hordes of potential enemies and assailants.

            “Will’s probably bi,” said Dustin. “He’ll fuck anyone or anything.”

            “Just Amanda Goldstein! I’m a one-woman man!”

            “You’re a no-woman man!”

            Dustin cracked a wry half-smile. As with many dry people, he possessed an acerbic sense of humor - the Argentinian Malbec to my blended sangria.

            Our physical appearances reflected our contrasting personalities. Tall, thin, pale, and freckly, Dustin could have passed as the treasurer of a Polish-American bowling league. His hair shimmered as strawberry-blonde as that of the later Trump (the 1993 Donald Trump had brownish hair.) His vivid sheen signaled, in the manner of a Buddha’s mudra: “Come hither, I will not harm thee…” Pure redheads are evil and so a “nice kid” like Dustin was not fire-red nor carrot-top orange, but a patch of “Wild Strawberries” in a “Winter Light.”

            “Maybe he’ll be a never-woman man,” added Pat.

            “Then you’ll really be fucked because I’m hotter than you!”

            I was a good-looking kid. Taller than Pat, but closer to average height than Dustin. Some called me “Somalian-thin,” but that was the result of hormones and anxiety. I had a quasi-Mediterranean look. Many pegged me as just another worthless Italian or half-wop, of which the Jersey Shore had many. But I didn’t fit in well enough to be Italian or even a guido mix. Italians – especially the males of the race - are usually raised by loving, supportive mothers. Maternal worship of olive oil babies spawns cocky, silky-voiced boys and men.

            Handsome and greasy-looking or not, I loved my hair. As an idolater of Axl Rose (the one ginger I liked), I wanted my hair long and thick, as close to my shoulders as mother would allow. Axl’s mop-top was too long for mother’s approval, so I would settle for Izzy Stradlin’s length. After months of growing it out, I was almost there:

            Anything would be better than short hair.

            Guns N’ Roses (GN’R) was already about two years past their prime by ’93 (they peaked in ‘91 with the masterpiece “Use Your Illusion” double-album), but I still lived in their music (which made me both behind and ahead of my time, as usual) and found gritty solace there. Even the mean streets of L.A. seemed more compassionate than Wall Intermediate School. My fellow freaks lived on Hollywood Boulevard. In “the jungle” they would mug me but not make fun of me. And Los Angeles was warm (or so I thought.)

            Speaking of various climates, a cold wind blew in from an open window on the other end of the lunch room. It tousled my almost-long hair and slapped the back of my neck like an overzealous Sicilian barber (though wasn’t it warm or warmer in Sicily?) Some asshole always opened the window regardless of how the January drafts chilled the brittle bones of the more sensitive.

            Six inches of snow covered the front lawn of W.I.S. Another cold, gray, sub-freezing day, one of many that frigid year. At least Amanda Goldstein also lived in the frozen, frosty pit of Hell. Her vaporous breath blew from her mouth and drifted to the ice-laden clouds when she talked (did that mean she was human too, just like me?) Florida and California seemed like better places, all right, but she wasn’t there. She lived in New Jersey, where even the dead could not be excavated from the frozen ground. She would be dead someday too. As would I. Did that make us human? Maybe we could die together and rot in the same coffin. I was a Gothic Romantic in the haunted house mold of Edgar Allan Poe.

            Amanda wore fuzzy sweaters that accentuated her “features.” And too-tight Levi jeans. A suede jacket sheltered her from the cold of our half-heated school bus (yes, she was on my same North Wall bus route.) What a bizarre world that Amanda, like the rest of us, endured the indignity of a school bus ride. Did Cindy Crawford or Kathy Ireland (what a period piece this is turning out to be) take the school bus? No model or movie star compared to Amanda. Not even Whitney Houston (her sexy-bitchy character in “The Bodyguard” sort of semi-looked and fully-behaved like a black version of Amanda.) But Amanda, though darkish, was not black. She perhaps looked like a Jewish version (what was it with me and Jew broads?) of Alannah Miles, the singer of that much-covered song of the south, “Black Velvet”: 

            Amanda/the-Alannah-Miles-lookalike was about as close as I could get to a Puerto Rican/Joe’s Daughter in our all-white 6^th Grade class; an olive-complected “dusky jewel” as exotic and mysterious as the Orient itself; a Jasmine (dazzling enough to lounge in any bejeweled harem) who would actually love an Aladdin-esque pauper like me (and I was certainly a peasant magic carpet jockey, at least in terms of popularity.)

            Amanda even wore the same jeans as Alannah Miles (minus the leather chaps):

 

            Pat and Dustin continued with their chatter as I took my mind to where it wanted to be - with Amanda.

            In my fantasies, we hid together from my ogress mother and most other ogreish adult authority figures (think of the Tommy James and the Shondell’s song “I think We’re Alone Now.”) The Amanda ecstasies took on a positive quality, an affirmation of what life could be beyond our mere survival in a frightening and oppressive world of parents and teachers (most of whom were sagging, wrinkled, balding, grotesque, carnivalesque embodiments of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” quote – that’s how adult authority figures are seen through the eyes of most 12-year-olds, just so you know.)

            We loved in the confines of my then-very-limited frame of pop culture reference: dates to the movie theater, holding sweaty hands, a yawn and my outstretched arm around her fuzzy-sweatered shoulder; milkshakes at the malt shop (did malt shops still exist?); making out in an air-conditioned computer room full of Rubik’s cubes and science posters (the nerd made good with the most popular girl in school – Amanda Goldstein); an all-expenses-paid trip to Disney World (little did I know that non-Rock-Star adults succumbed by necessity to evil banality for the relatively exorbitant price of a Disney package); we climbed the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse together (I would wrap my arms around her and watch the bucket contraption lift chlorinated water from the plastic-rock waterfall) and make out with her in one of the caves on Tom Sawyer island (which is sometimes visited by alligators and poisonous snakes, a natural, coldblooded, prehistoric and primitive penetration of joyful, postmodern hyperreality – the most romantic artificial plane of all; the critters swim right over the underwater automated tracks.) The air-conditioning still works back at the resort (though Amanda and I would sweat up the room with our sweet lovemaking.) Maybe a lizard would climb up through the toilet and bite her flawless ass. Don’t think that. Don’t think that. Don’t think that.

And, of course, we would enjoy naughtier dates/vacations to deserted islands and other clothing-optional locations; make love on the sand and under both scrubby and verdant palm trees for hours, days, and weeks at a time. Live in a Maine cabin when tired of the warm weather; nothing but a potbellied wood stove to keep us warm (if that); share the same sleeping bag; keep each other warm with body heat; snuggle, cuddle, love…

I would have died for her (and I was then, as now, damn scared to die.) But a “Young Guns” sense of honor and chivalry had not yet been fully teased, trained, and beaten out of me by women who wanted their own degradation at the hands of a skater-kid mutant who somehow knew how to fit in with everyone else (and other various varieties of “douchebags with hot girls” who would appear, disappear, and reappear in the future.) I still lived by Don Johnson’s immortal words from “Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man”: “It’s better to be dead and cool than alive and uncool.”

Who can really live by those words? Maybe a Navy SEAL, but everyone else eventually becomes as banal as the cologne of a Wall Intermediate School algebra teacher. If not for my writing, I would have also morphed into just another grotesque adult. My arrangement of words brands me as a literary outlaw, a verbal runaway slave, a jingle Django, an American Bad-Ass of bad – and not so bad – puns.

I lifted my love fantasies and moral code from pop culture. Any of several Stephen King t.v. miniseries specials (the ones talked about the next day at the water cooler or the Wall Intermediate School lunch table) taught me of the eternal struggle between good and evil. I built heroic worlds of right and wrong from this material, but not in a spirit of cheekiness or snarkiness, the no-longer-affected pose (smug practice makes perfect deflatedness) of a tired, culture-jaded hipster.

My borrowing of pop culture tropes for the construction of a tender inner world was sincere, heartfelt, and all I had to work with (not that there’s always something wrong with watching the same shows and movies as everyone else.)

A steady diet of late 80s/early 90s “nerd makes good and gets the cheerleader” films fueled my delusional (in retrospect, but even back then my deepest self knew I was delusional) belief that Amanda Goldstein – the most popular girl in our class – would somehow break rank with tradition and date an outcast like me. And Amanda wasn’t even a cheerleader. She “sorta” looked and acted like a raspier-voiced version of the Marisa Tomei character from “My Cousin Vinny”: 

 

Yet she was more popular than any stereotypical suburban WASP cheerleader. The Betty character from “Revenge of the Nerds” and Elisabeth Shue’s character from “The Karate Kid” had nothing on her in terms of microcosmic social status (but wouldn’t the macrocosm have worshipped her just as much if it had known her?)

“Hey! Hello!”

Dustin waved a hand in front of my face.

“Earth to Will! Wake up! The bell just rang.”          

The bell hadn’t rung. It had bloomed. “Bloom… Bloom… Bloom…” – like James Joyce obsessing over one of his most famous characters. The tone of a soft machine. Some psychologist had determined – through several blind studies - that the old-fashioned school bell jarred young ears. Our kind and gentle totalitarian overlords beeped and “bloomed” at us. Either way, we all stood up from our seats like the trained Herd Animals we were (the banal grotesques had us marching in lockstep, much like the “Metropolis” workers sacrificed to Moloch.)

            As my butt rose from the seat, I thought I sensed someone a little bit too close to my back, but I couldn’t be sure. In prison environments – and the social dynamics of WIS made San Quentin seem like day care – the inmate grows eyes in the back of his head. My aft eyeballs thought they had detected something, but they weren’t confident enough in the shadow image to send the alert to my brain. What happened (and I did not yet know what had happened) might have been like getting bit by a rabid baby bat; an almost-imperceptible attack, but one with devastating consequences.

            Like all the other boys and girls, I walked down the hall to my next class (gym, in my case.)

            A tap on my shoulder. I turned around. It was Billy White, an acquaintance from the 5^th Grade of Wall Central School. Though a step or two above us in popularity, he remained stuck about 100 leagues below the most “elite” circles. All in all, he wasn’t that bad of a “fella.” He had never fucked with me (and in a place like WIS that alone made him a decent sort of chap.) He looked like a pubescent Captain Kirk. I was a Trekkie, so his appearance disarmed me.

            “Hey Will! John Dyne just put a big wad of bubblegum in your hair. You should know because it was a lot. You better get to the nurse’s office and try to get it cut out or something. I just wanted to let you know. Sorry, dude. John Dyne is a dick.”

            “John Dyne put gum in my hair?”

            “Yes, I saw him do it just now. You better get it out quick before it dries.”

            Panic! My beautiful hair! It had taken me so long just to grow it out to an Izzy Stradlin’ length.

            Would I have to go to the nurse’s office? That would be almost as humiliating as keeping it in my hair. I would look in the bathroom mirror first and see if I could remove it with some soap and water.

            My heart beat in my head as I ran-walked to the bathroom, slammed my body through the swinging door, stroked my hair, and looked in the mirror.

            My face flushed.

            I would have to go the nurse’s office.

            I looked like a Punk Rock Alfalfa:

           

           

            The only difference was that my bubblegum “cow-lick” was bigger in the three dimensions of height, width, and depth; more a unicorn horn, a keratin growth, than a stray hair or two.

            I looked more like this guy than Alfalfa:

           

            A part of me had always wanted to be a mythical creature and now I was one. A humiliated Satyrcorn (at least Satyrs had two goat horns.)

            I worked up my courage (mostly because I had no choice in the matter) and walked across the hall to the nurse’s office.

            The “nurse’s office” was not really an office, but an alcove, a pocket, a glorified broom closet, a cubbyhole that contained nothing other than a portable First Aid kit, a desk, two rolling chairs, and a sterile bed for kids who faked bellyaches to get out of class.

            Two women lounged in the rolling chairs, the school nurse Mrs. Palumbo and her aide Mrs. Martin.

            Mrs. Palumbo browsed through a People magazine, another article about Mel Gibson, Patrick Swayze, or Tom Cruise. How lucky they were to be far away in L.A.

            Mrs. Martin chuckled and talked about some trivial adult matter, her husband’s worries about the value of their house or some such matter as that. She must have said something funny because Mrs. Palumbo rocked back, folded her magazine, and laughed.

            Mrs. Palumbo looked up at me. A bleached platinum-blonde “mom hairdo” framed her kind but overly made-up raccoon face.

            “How can I help… Oh my God! Who did that to you?”

            “I don’t know…” I wasn’t no snitch!

            “Oh my God! Sit down, honey. Please sit down.”

            Mrs. Palumbo stood up and offered me her rolling chair.

            “You don’t know who did this to you?”

            “No.”

            “Oh my God. This is awful.”

            She directed Mrs. Martin by her first name.

            “Mary Anne, can you please stand in the doorway so that if anyone passes by they won’t be able to see what I’m doing?” Then she turned to me. “I would close the door if I could, but I’m not allowed by law to close the door to this office. So, Mrs. Martin is going to block the entranceway until we get you taken care of. We’re not going to let anybody see you, so don’t you worry about it, honey. Oh my God.”

            Mrs. Palumbo turned her head left and toward her sentinel Mrs. Martin. Mrs. Martin, a big and butch woman, covered most of the entrance.

            “I’m telling ya’ Mary Anne, it makes me sick to my stomach every day, working in this school. Seeing how these little assholes treat each other. How cruel they are.”

            “I know,” said Mary Anne/Mrs. Martin. “It’s disgusting. One day they’ll grow up and realize what jerks they are.”

            Well, I didn’t know about that. Some people are cruel or sociopathic for life.

            “Make sure you block that door really well so nobody will see him if they happen to pass by. I would close that damn door if I was allowed to.”

            Mrs. Palumbo fumbled in her first aid kit. She pulled out a steel lice comb and a miniature spray bottle.

            “I’m going to see how much I can get out with this comb. Okay, honey?”

            She scraped the top of my hair-horn.

            Ow it hurts! Ow it hurts! Ow!

            Tears flowed to my eyes (the eyebrow-pluck sort of tears), but I held them back.

            She pulled at my Satyrcorn horn.

            Ow… It hurts… It hurts… Oh, Amanda… Amanda…

If only I were as free as a mythical creature. Any world, dimension, or alternate universe seemed better than the one I inhabited. I had already spent so much of my life wishing to be anywhere other than where I was – and now I had Bubbleyum in my hair.

            “Okay, I got a little out. Let’s see how much more I can do. I’m so sorry this happened to you.”

            “That’s okay,” I said. “Thank you for helping.”

            I was such a polite kid.

            “That’s my job.” She turned to Mary Anne aka Mrs. Martin. “He seems like such a nice kid too. And this happens to him. These little fucking assholes. Excuse my language, sweetie, but that’s what they are.”

            Amen to that! I appreciated her kindness toward me.

            Mrs. Palumbo worked centimeter by centimeter toward the base of the horn. Each pull hurt as much as the one before.

            “Oh my God! Whoever did this twisted it in there so it would be even harder to get out.”

            “Oh, it just makes you hate them,” added Mrs. Martin. “It wasn’t cruel enough just to put it in there. They had to twist it in there to really ruin his hair.”

            She dug deeper into the hard, sticky goo.

            “Okay, I’m sorry sweetie, but I’m going to have to cut some of it. It’s just in there too thick.”

            Oh, my hair! I wanted to look like (and be) a Rock Star, a person fortunate enough to live far away from Wall Township. John Dyne had deprived me of my self-expression and robbed me of the little freedom mother had allowed me. 

            It had taken so fucking long to grow it!

            The scissors looked as sharp and surgical as any scalpel.

            The scissors chomped on my hair and worked toward the base of my scalp, wolves gnawing on the ligaments of a deer. My poor hair! I would have to shave it all off and start over again. Mother would have to make a hair appointment for me. How would I explain this to her?

            “Am I hurting you, sweetie?”

            “No,” I lied.

            She combed/cut at my hair again. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts.

            She cut, sawed, and combed for a half hour. She placed each bit of cherry-smelling debris in a plastic ear trough, a war surgeon removing tiny pieces of sticky buckshot.

            “Okay, I got most of it, honey. There’s still a little bit left, but it should come out when you wash your hair in the shower tonight. Just use a lot of shampoo. The more shampoo you use the better it will come out. And maybe ask your mom to get you a haircut just so it’s more even. I’m so sorry this happened to you.”

            “Thanks for everything you did,” I said.

            The bell bloomed… bloomed… bloomed… I had spent an entire 40-minute period in the nurse/barber’s chair.

            “No problem! What class did you miss, honey?”

            “Gym.”

            “Who’s your gym teacher?”

            “Mr. O’Hara.”

            “Okay, I’ll talk to him so you won’t get in trouble for missing class.”

            “Thanks.”

            I walked out of the nurse’s office and into the unforgiving hallways.

            “Oh, it just makes me sick,” I heard Mrs. Palumbo say as I turned the corner and scooted down the once-again-crowded hallway. I’m sure Mrs. Palumbo and Mrs. Martin went home to their husbands that night and told them another W.I.S. “war story,” one of many.

            “What the fuck happened to your hair?” said Mark Molson, a rodent-like little fucker. “You look like the lesbian singer K.D. Lang.”

            I ignored him and walked to the next period: Study Hall. John Dyne was in my study hall and I would have to “get” him before or after for the sake of my honor. Not that I wanted to. I would have much preferred to crawl under a stargate rock and into a rabbit hole, a path that would have led me to another dimension, one full of beautiful women who would love me.

            I repeated the loser’s lament to myself: I just can’t understand why people are so cruel to one another!

            The Study Hall met in the auditorium, an amphitheater, a brown tapered crater in the center of the school. For an inward person like me, it would have been the inner sanctum of a perfect world. A place to study all day before partying all night; working on physics (though I didn’t have the Math IQ to crunch numbers.) Rather, I would construct the philosophical backdrop of the new-new physics (the horror if we took it so far that there would be no place else to take it, but God installed paradoxes for that very possibility.) Oh, in a best of all possible worlds that Study Hall would have been a place to read and study all day; a library, but one with an even cozier geometry; an artificially hilly sanctuary. Us Mountain Goats of Abstruse Scholarship could labor and sleep on the folding chairs/desks/make-believe-rocks.

            But I lived in a fallen world where John Dyne was privileged the same right to sit in the various rooms of a public school. How unfair! He didn’t deserve to even live after what he had done to me.

            John Dyne sat in his assigned seat on the first row – the stage/ground level – of the cozy amphitheater. Only “nice” and somewhat morbid kids like me knew how to be cozy. The rest preferred the skuzzy feeling of campouts and sleepovers. Non-Inward bastards. Non-Privacy-or-Solitude-Needing fucks.

            John Dyne stood a foot shorter than me. And if I were Somalia-thin he was Eritrean-thin (and those Eritreans make Somalians look like Fat Albert.) Bullies are seldom the big brutes but usually the skinny and sawed-off skaters or scamps, the unlovable little imps of the non-perverse. Perversity is non-conformist and people like John Dyne were conformity-enforcers.

            He had sandy-blonde spiked hair. Unusual for an early-90s skater scamp. In those latter days of the 20^th century, most of the rotten-mouthed bullies sported “bowl haircuts,” a shave to the skin up to the ears and a longish mop above the ears (wack-ass white motherfuckers.) The mushroom of hair over the eye line gave their heads the appearance of a circumcised penis. They looked like literal and metaphorical dickheads.

            White motherfuckers. No minority protester could ever hate “these people” – the children of the white petit bourgeoisie, alien others from the Caucus Mountains (and I was technically one of them) – more than I did. Any whitey-hating Afroed Activist would have to grow up with them as one of them and on their terms to know them and their evil. Malcolm X, for example, was a crybaby and a pussy. They treated him better than they ever treated me. They let him fuck white pussy. And they never put gum in his nappy-ass red hair. Malcolm Little (X) never knew true oppression. He was just a darker-skinned ginger brat.

            I waited through the period and steeled myself to pounce on John Dyne. Why was I nervous about assaulting him? I was bigger and stronger than him. My assault would have been justified and would have carried little more penalty than a two-day suspension. Even mother, given the circumstances, would have approved of my actions and maybe even rewarded my suspension.

            So why was I nervous? Was I a coward or an autist, a special needs kid on the autism spectrum, a poor soul more likely to be victim than victimizer? Noise, chaos, and conflict overwhelmed and shell-shocked my already-high-strung nerves. I “wasn’t no” school shooter. I barely had the guts to throw a first punch!

            But I still had to “get him.” Or at least try. Or at least make a face-saving (or hair-redeeming) show of it.

            When the bell “bloomed” I hovered and half-walked toward the exit until John Dyne reached the top floor of the concave auditorium.

            I crept up behind him, grabbed two fistfuls of his Vans tee-shirt (skater fuck), pulled him toward me, and then pushed him face first into the glazed cinderblock wall.

            He caught himself and softened the impact with both of his hands.

            “What the fuck? Why did you push me, asshole? I didn’t do it!”

            Do what?

            “Hey, hey, hey!” shouted Ms. Hoffman, the dyke gym teacher and Study Hall monitor. She inserted herself between us and extended her arms to prevent any further fisticuffs. “Why did you push that boy? He wasn’t doing anything to you!”

            “He put gum in my hair when we were at lunch today!”

            “I don’t see any gum in your hair! You shoved him for no reason!”

            “The nurse cut it out!”

            “Don’t talk back to me! I oughta send you to the Vice Principal right now. Nobody’s going to shove people in my Study Hall!”

            Ms. Hoffman ate pussy (dived for muff), but she was still “one of them.” Her sexual preference did not make her any less an oppressor, a guard, a “monitor” of their system, a friend to “them” and a respected member of the community. Those who are different (like me) are not different because of a politicized identity defined by race, gender, or sexual orientation, but because of an essential and impalpable difference; a difference deeper than the superficial characteristics celebrated at a march, rally, or sensitivity workshop. We can be white as a saltine, Christian as a crucifix, straight as an Eagle Scout’s arrow, and as male as a pair of steer testicles. None of that matters. We are differentiated by what Nietzsche or Deleuze would have called a “genetic” (as in genesis/origin) quality (even if we wear khakis and mow the lawn twice a week.) Even retarded and deformed people – botched human beings - fit in better than those of us who are differentiated.

            Ms. Hoffman’s tan, prematurely-aged face trembled with rage that I would assault one of her kind: a belonger and conformist, someone who somehow fit into the community.

            “You may be excused,” she said to John Dyne. “But you! Who the heck do you think you are to shove someone? We don’t do things like that to other people in a civilized society!”

Yeah, civilized. So, it’s okay to put gum in someone’s hair?

But I didn’t say anything. It wouldn’t have made a difference anyhow.

John Dyne, Ms. Hoffman, and Malcolm X all had one thing in common: despite their many outward differences, they were all the same kind of person. They all somehow fit into their society. Fake-oppressed neurotypical fucks… Wait… Am I casting my lot with the autist crowd? I don’t want to do that either! Those are some no-pussy-gettin’ mofos!

Ms. Hoffman relaxed a bit. Maybe she had gotten some good head the night before.

“You may go too. But I’m going to watch you from now on. You don’t put your hands on other people in this school.”

But he put his hands on me when he put gum in my hair.

***

            Bloom, like James Joyce’s corny Irish corn chowder Bloom obsession (I would grow up to prefer “Finnegans Wake.”)

            The last ooma-ooma “bell” bloomed for the day. Thank God (the one who was/is/always-will-be.) What a miserable day. A skater-scamp had deprived me of my long-haired Rock N’ Roller dreams. Even beating him from Ali pillar to Tyson post would not accelerate the growth of follicles on my mutilated scalp. Only time and biotin would ease my humiliation by imperceptible grades.

            I raised myself from my seat in Science class (if only I could have been as undisturbed in my life/thoughts as the eminent scientist Doctor Emmet Brown) and pulled a black woolen cap over my patchy dome.

            The route from the Science classroom to the front entrance/exit would lead me past Amanda’s locker. Though we were on the same bus, it always took her longer to gather her things and step aboard. Every day I walked past her and caught whatever glimpses of her I could. Those snapshots made up the woof and warp of every night’s reverie (chills, tingles, butterflies, and a whole lotta pillow-kissing!)

            Amanda was a different breed of butterfly: a social one. A raconteur and pretty wise-ass (with a nice ass), she usually talked to someone or another as she packed her books and other items. Most of her chatter companions were girls, but today a slight, slender male figure stood over her as she kneeled before her locker and slid slippery textbooks into her purple backpack. The scrawny male was none other than John Dyne.

            Why was she talking to him? Though they both belonged to society and were treated like human beings by others, I did not know them to associate.

            People like John Dyne have flat personalities most of the time (twisting gum in my hair was probably his most effervescent act of the day) and he did not alter his expressionless expression for Amanda’s sake (how could anyone stand before her in less than a state of awe?) His horizontal lips remained as inert as those of a macabre horror movie doll. Through what seemed more and more like the piehole of a papier mache sex zombie, he grunted a twangy word or two downward and toward Amanda. How dare he literally speak down to her?

            She glanced up at him from time to time as he muttered presumable inanities. That she would interact with him at all put him on a higher footing than me. But why? He had no personality other than a penchant for cruelty! Despite my shyness (especially around the opposite sex), my very being thrummed with an electricity – an undeniable charisma - greater than that of others who showed off or stayed quiet.

            Like many future Trump supporters, I believed in a strict meritocracy. The most talented/abled/intelligent/charismatic and generally “interesting” individuals should always receive the spoils up to and including fame, money, and women. The former two are mere dross compared to the love of a woman and/or women. Women are people and not trophies, of course, but they should – ideally – possess the good sense to favor the brilliant and extraordinary over the dull and mediocre.

            I do not think Amanda “liked” John Dyne “in that way.” Though he was more popular than me by several rungs, he did not reach the rarefied heights of her inner circle. He was in no position to date her.

            She seemed to regard him as a mere page (as in Medieval page) and slight nuisance, but then she laughed at a word or two that escaped the narrow exit between his rotten teeth. What the fuck could he have said that would have been funny enough to make Amanda Goldstein – of all people – laugh?   

            This was Amanda Goldstein, after all!

            And I was much funnier than him, but did not have the self-confidence to show it!

            I walked past them and toward the front doorway of the school, triply punched in the gut by a hateful world.

            At least I still had me.

            And at least I still had Joe’s Daughter. She would love me (even though I did not know her name or anything about her.) She was non-white and superior.

            I did not yet know that Alisa existed.

            So, I had no idea how "they" might have treated her.

            But I’ll bet they never put a wad of gum in her oily, jet-black hair! She deserves only a Bronze (if that) in the Oppression Olympics! I, on the other hand, have more Gold Medals than Caitlyn Jenner.

            My hair!