Jón Gnarr - The Pirate

“I’m sorry.”

“Huh?!” he said harshly, like someone who has been deeply wounded and can’t imagine any way things will get better.

“I’m sorry I ruined your paintbrush,” I said, a bit clearer.

He thought to himself and wondered if he should forgive me, if he could forgive me. I waited. Then he extended me his hand. My breath was labored and my chest heavy. Why was it always like this? Why did my dad have to be this crazy? Why couldn’t he just be normal? Why couldn’t we just talk like normal people? I couldn’t bear this game, this damn script that our relationship was and had always been. Nothing was real. Suddenly I wanted to cry. Not over him or the brush. Not even over our relationship, but over having given up and managed once again to allow him to use me as a plaything in his crazy, sentimental drama. He looked up. His eyes flooded with tears. I barely caught my breath but squeezed out a smile. It was a polite, false smile of encouragement. I smiled like I was smiling to a bum who I feared was going to hassle me on the street downtown. Then came the embrace. He pressed me to him so that I was standing, half bent, over him.

“You mustn’t do this, my dear, dear boy,” he whimpered.

“No,” I said.

“Will you promise me that?”

“Yes.”

Mom didn’t tell him I’d started smoking. I didn’t tell him either. There was a tacit agreement between us that he didn’t need to know. I started smoking in my room. Dad was never in there. I also smoked before he got home. He never noticed anything.

Mom sometimes sent me to the shops for her. I never told her that I got beaten up all the time, and she never asked me anything about it. I went all the same, not least because I got to keep the change. There were several shops in the neighborhood, and I checked whether any annoying kids were around before I went inside. If some dickfaces were in the grocery store, or outside, I slunk off to the next store. One evening, I went the whole way up to Ásgard just to buy three bottles of Coke. The shop was empty, but as I was finishing shopping, two kids who often picked on me suddenly showed up. They were dribbling a basketball between them inside the convenience store. I tried to ignore them, though I could hear them whispering about me. I pretended not to see them and hoped they would leave me alone. When I walked out of the convenience store with the bottles in a bag, they immediately came after me.

“Hey dumbass, where are you going? Why are you so stupid?”

I pretended I didn’t hear them and hurried on my way. But they ran after me and blocked my path.

“Were you buying mixers?”

“Yes,” I muttered.

It was more cool to say that than to say you were shopping for your mom.

“You owe us booze.”

“I do?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Are you as stupid as you are ugly?”

I didn’t understand the question but answered it in the affirmative to please them.

“You owe us booze as protection. If you don’t pay, you get beat up. Understand?”

“Yes, I do.”

I tramped past them and walked off. Then one of them took the basketball and threw it so hard at my neck that I fell, dropping the bag; the Coke bottles all broke, and my glasses whipped off. I felt about for the glasses, thankfully located them, put them back on, and ran away. I cried all the way home out of fear and anger. Motherfuckers! What exactly had I done to them? I was nothing to them. Was there something about me that bothered them so much? I told Mom that I’d dropped the bag and broken the stuff. I felt ashamed. Maybe it was simply my own fault that I was always being teased. Maybe I was just calling it on myself. A man doesn’t run crying to his mother. What should she do? What could she do? Go and talk to the kids? It would just make matters worse.

From then on, the physical abuse at the hands of kids in my neighborhood got worse. They sometimes stopped me on school grounds, held me down, and demanded:

“Why are you so stupid? Why are you so ugly? Can I spit on you?”

Then they would punch me repeatedly in the stomach. Next they’d kick me. When I got away, they came after me and kicked me up the ass — you could say their shoes imprinted my ass — and then two or three of them together tried to kick my feet away from under me, push me, trip me. Ultimately, they’d succeed and down I’d drop. And still I always owed them booze on my shopping trips. One kid there was really big and strong, and somehow he’d arrived at the conclusion that I owed him some booze; I had no idea what had led him to that conclusion…maybe he just wanted booze. I adopted a strategy of not speaking at all because I soon realized that no matter what I said to them, it always went badly for me. I just remained silent, looked down at the floor and waited for them to do something else. Most of the time, some girl would come up and say:

“Oh, leave him alone. Stop teasing him!”

Usually they stopped as a result. But not once did an adult, a teacher or similar figure, get involved, though presumably they knew what was going on and saw it happening again and again.

Of all the boys who teased me, there was one I particularly feared. He was a brawler who was regularly involved in fights and who beat the shit out of people. He was the sort of kid who didn’t think twice about punching you. He was also a real weirdo. He was named Biggi, and people called him Brutal Biggi. And although he was not like the Morons, he was friends with them. The Morons didn’t exactly beat you up; they just messed about with you. If, for example, I left my bag lying about somewhere, tthey would take it, dunk it in the toilet, and flush it until it was soaked through. When I was walking home with a drenched bag, they would point at me and laugh. When I was walking home with a drenched bag, they would point at me and laugh.

“Hey ugly, why do you have a dripping wet bag?”

“He had to pee in it.”

“Are you so stupid that you piss in your schoolbag?”

The two boys who were on my case the most always hung about together and were called Black and White. They got their nicknames because they listened to ska: Madness and Specials. They were friends with Biggi. One time when they were tormenting me, I tried to push them away from me and shouted out, “Black and White — fuck and fight.” That pissed them off, and they told Biggi to punch me. He walked swiftly over to me and punched me straight in the face with a clenched fist. I had never been punched so powerfully; I was terrified, totally paralyzed by fear. A short time later, he beat up Dóri for no reason at all. Dóri got a black eye and was so frightened that he dared not leave his house for days. Dóri and I discussed it inside and out. It became the only thing we talked about. What were we going to do? Could we do anything to make it stop? Could we somehow speak out? Could we join together, like Black and White, and throw some punches ourselves? Wouldn’t they just respond by punching us harder? I was certain, however, that things could not go on this way, with the situation deteriorating, always getting worse. We were shit-scared the whole time and didn’t dare do anything, didn’t dare go to Bústaðir, didn’t dare go to the shops, didn’t dare go to school, didn’t dare take the bus, even. It hung over our heads at all times. We’d begun to call it hell, hellish hell — everywhere was hell.

I had a knife, a dagger that I had gotten for free when I was in the Scouts. Since I’d gotten so scared, I started carrying the knife with me when I went out of the house because it gave me a little security. I’d managed to borrow Mom’s sewing stuff and stitch the sheath of the knife safely into my jacket. I thought to myself that if Biggi ever managed to trap me so I couldn’t get away, I could threaten him so that he would run off. My sense of security increased day by day as I wore a knife hidden under my clothing. But I never told anyone about it. The knife was an absolute last resort.