Victor Lavalle - Slapboxing with Jesus

But they were silly tears and I had the erection to prove it. I wanted to thank her. She’d thought that sending me here was a punishment, as though I were banished. I never wanted to go back to Flushing.

— I want to hear you promise me, she said. Promise you won’t be Malik’s friend anymore.

Each night, going to bed, I remembered why I hated home, the response that had been trained into me: expect the awful, revel in it. In Trinidad I was another boy, not so quick to be venal and petty. I cared some. But when my mother arrived the reality that I would have to return was exhausting, made me panic. In the theater I tried to think how I might stay longer, even a day, an hour. If she was content here, felt at ease, I thought she might relax into this island, quit her job and stay. Here, she wouldn’t be the woman who’d ask a ten-year-old for such a pledge. I hadn’t asked about Malik those three summer months. I never mentioned his name. I didn’t want to return and find out, though I missed him enough that I could cry. I thought, How can I make this woman happy? — That’s not too hard, I told her.

— You don’t think so? she asked, so much hope in her voice, dying to be convinced.

I told her, — It’s nothing. I conceded, Malik is just a faggot anyway.

Olisa said she loved me and she’d eat glue to prove it. In sixth grade she went around saying she wanted a boy who was like her and that left only me and this African kid, we called him Ojigatoo but that wasn’t his name. So really, in our school, that left me because the only thing anyone did with Ojigatoo was chase him, throw rocks and call him an African Bootie Scratcher. And when I say anyone, I mean everyone.

Me and her weren’t friends. In school or out. With her short afro like mine, she came up to me in the schoolyard, told me and the world how she felt. They all heard, from the wall where boys played handball to the fence where girls jumped rope.

— What? I asked again, surprised.

She repeated herself. — I said, I love you.

— Who the fuck are you? I screamed, more for the crowd. I didn’t want to admit I’d ever seen her, knew her name.

Other kids laughed. Someone called out, — That’s one ugly bitch, and I thought, she sure is. I’m not talking plain, but the kind of ugly where you wanted to slap her parents for having fucked. She smiled like I should be happy too. I thought that if an ugly girl liked me that meant I looked as bad as she did, that ugly people stuck together like the middle class.

— Leave me alone, I said. Probably it sounded a bit like begging.

— No. Single-family homes surrounded our school; they had porches bordered by wobbly iron railing painted white, black or green. I expected people to come out and gaze at us from there, a show for the world. So I did what an eleven-year-old boy does, I ran.

She came after me. She was slower, so the farther I got the louder she screamed my name, — Anthony! Anthony!

Even the older women who played monitor during lunch and in the mornings came to see us running around, a traveling coon show right in their town. Ojigatoo was perched in his lonely corner, laughing. I wanted to stop long enough to throw a rock at his ass, remind him of the hierarchies and his awful position within them. Finally she couldn’t run anymore. I passed near the sidewalk outside our gated schoolyard, my reflection revealed in a car window. My expression.

Some little kid gets me thinking about Olisa. The memory comes as easy as a cookie with your tea. In a pizza parlor, me inside the bathroom, his seven- or eight-year-old hand twisting the doorknob on the other side. I shook my dick off, called to him, — I’ll be done in a second. Stepped out, rubbing my hands on my jeans because there were no paper towels by the sink. I looked down at the boy’s face: beautiful, brown like mine; his eyes grew wide as he moved backward, could have broken into a run in an instant, to his father who was placing a little green jacket on the back of a chair. A pair of red gloves hung from the sleeves, connected to each other by a red string that ran inside the arms and across the back so he would never lose them. — I don’t need to use that bathroom anymore, Papa.

The father was surprised, tired and angry. He looked up to find me staring, the object of his son’s disaffection. The kid snaked himself between his father’s legs, looked like he would have crawled right up his dad’s asshole if he could. Anything to get farther from me. — Kids, the father muttered to me. He was trying to play it off and I appreciated the act. He had a mustache and a beard going gray in small amounts. His hands were thick, he gripped his chair tight, then released. He and his son wore an expression I’d seen before.

I pictured this man writing a letter to his family back in Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic, telling them how cold it gets in February here in New York City, not thinking to mention how crazy the boy acted one afternoon getting pizza when confronted with some kokolo who could have easily been a cousin. Why explain to them what they already knew? The father wiped his expression away because by that age you know how, but his son was unable to hide and I thought of me and Olisa. And Nancy, her too.

Now you want to talk about beautiful?

Then you had to discuss Nancy Salvino. There was no one prettier in school. Loved by every boy from first grade to sixth. I would watch her on my own; sometimes fellas got together to stare.

— I would fuck the shit out of her, Mark said, fingering that messed-up tooth of his, the one that bent in slightly and had gone brown. It had happened after a very bad fall; he’d run away from a beating, so fast he lost his footing close to his home.

Sanjay, who hardly hung around us, stood there rapt, said, — She’s so pretty. I wish she were my girlfriend.

I stopped, pointed and announced sincerely, — You are one big fag.

Not just for that statement did I call him that, also he was a milk monitor once a week, stationed at the end of the lunch line by the big refrigerated metal milk mausoleum. He took it serious. He wore a mustard yellow vest over his button-down shirts every day. He wore slacks. After he’d handed out all the milk, he had to wipe down the insides of the apparatus with a rag; he’d lean into corners and conscientiously scrub. When he did we’d run up on him, push him inside, pull down the top and shove a pen in the space meant for a lock. He would be inside yelling, banging, while we kicked the sides of the box, screaming, — Sanjay! You fucking Hindu!

Later, after his release, he’d come to us, explaining, — You know, I’m not a Hindu. Hinduism is a religion.

Our standard response to all intelligent assertions was a barrage of punches in the shoulder or chest.

In class we learned of the Untouchables — lowest caste in India. Miss Bernstein showed us slides: images of people bathing in a river and wonderful country-sides, a whole family of blue-black Untouchables standing before a tiny hut. Kids laughed at that sight, but I stared at the old man smiling wide and looking like my grandfather.

After that lesson, we would chase Sanjay on the days we weren’t friends, screaming after him that he too was an Untouchable, laughing as we said it. When we did this I’d imagine Sanjay in the bathroom, at his mirror, running hands across his skin, wondering why he was dull brown and not a lighter shade. I thought, Why should I be the only one asking myself that question? Sanjay did not hang out with us too much.

After her announcement, the days with Olisa were awful. She wouldn’t stop, reminded me incessantly of what I had not at all forgotten. I expected a break only in Gym, when we had to change and guys swarmed into the locker room. In there I thought I was free of her, but then One-Eyed Chuckie asked, — So, Anthony. You got a girlfriend?