The Domino Effect (2 page)

Turns out the flag I painted was a tribute to some African country. And, in my absence, Genie Martini started going with some older kid named Tommy Destafano. Meanwhile, the big high school had big hallways and lots of strange faces. A couple of my friends went to a Catholic school and the others, still with me, seemed smaller and a little scared in the crowds between classes and in the noisy cafeteria that was about the size of a football field.

In the school yard, things were quieter. There was space and sky and games to play. But there was also something obvious, and that obvious thing was sides. There was an Italian side and a Spanish side. I guess there had been some Latin kids at the high school before, but this year, everyone said, those numbers had changed. A lot. And those kids riding their bikes in the summertime weren’t cutting through; they were going home. Immigration from Puerto Rico was on the rise, big time, and places I’d barely heard of, like the Dominican Republic and Colombia and Ecuador, were sending tons of people, too. And where they were sending them was Queens, and the neighborhood in Queens where most of the Latinos lived was right next to ours and running out of room because of all the new people. So they spilled. They spilled into our neighborhood and the different kids set up sides in the schoolyard.

Like I said, the school yard was quiet, but not a good quiet. Lots of stares and whispers, fingers pointed and posing. It seemed stupid to me, maybe because I’d made a fool of myself and then lost Genie Martini and my summer from that painted bridge move, and maybe, probably, because of what Pop had said, over and over, during those summer days I spent in the house. Either way, I wasn’t having it, so I set out on my own to do my own thing. And that, I figured, was the right thing, too.

With a couple of our guys missing, we hardly had enough for a game, so I found the Latin kids who threw balls against the wall, too. Turns out those kids liked ball as much, if not more, than we did. They were some players, especially the Dominicans, and we had to divide the teams to keep things fair. Afterward, we all went our separate ways, but in the school yard we came together during recess and after school almost every day. No big deal. Just kids playing ball without sides.

The older kids, though, weren’t into ball like we were. They stood their ground, on their sides, and kept inching towards each other. Things began in the hallways, where shoulders collided and pushes followed and, eventually, fights began to break out. Fights in the bathrooms, the hallways, and the cafeteria happened all the time. I stayed out of them and kept doing my thing.

Pop did his thing, too. He talked with the new neighbors in Spanish, welcomed them with handshakes. People from around started to talk about Pop, and some stopped talking to him altogether. I guess they didn’t consider him a stand-up guy anymore. Or maybe they didn’t like the fact that he
was
a stand-up guy. Either way, Pop didn’t care.

The school year went on and the holidays passed. Winter was long and cold and quiet. But things got noisy when spring showed up and the school yard suddenly had two sides again. The difference was that the Spanish side had grown over the winter. Real fights broke out. Fights with chains and pipes and sometimes knives. Kids were getting hurt, for real. Vincent Marino, from across the street, got his neck nearly busted and wound up in the hospital.

This was all older kid stuff, for the most part. Sometimes they’d throw our ball on the roof, and once in awhile they’d take our aluminum bat and keep it for a fight, but they left us younger guys out of it. But that was before Vinnie Marino got hurt. And before the day Pop had this little concert on our stoop.

I’d come home that day from the schoolyard and saw this crowd all around our stoop — little kids and their parents or grandparents spilling out onto the sidewalk. All Spanish. They were watching Pop, sitting on top of the stairs with some bongos, next to one of his musician friends with a guitar. They were doing that Simon and Garfunkel song about “Mama Pajama” and “Rosie the Queen of Corona” and everybody seemed so happy. I never liked that tune. I especially didn’t go for it that day because while Pop and his buddy and everybody else were having a ball doing their thing, Vinnie Marino’s friends were across the street, staring over at Pop with disgust.

Of course, they couldn’t do or even say anything to Pop since he was an adult and we had rules for respect. But when they turned their eyes on me, standing on the corner, watching just like they were, I knew for sure that I was in for trouble.

Starting that very next day, trouble came. Every day, these older kids would spit on me in the halls and scratch clever things on my locker like “dead man” and “traitor” and “Spic lover.” Real geniuses. And these bright guys waited for me after school, too. Most afternoons, around 3:00 in the school yard, I took a pretty good beating. The worst part wasn’t the beatings, though. I got used to them. The worst part was knowing that the beatings were coming, and even worse than that was not knowing what kind of stuff would appear on my locker and who, exactly, was doing those things. It felt like
everyone
was against me. My friends disappeared, either moved away or afraid to be seen with me. My mother went crazy, talked to the people she knew, but no one put a stop to what they were doing to me. My father cleaned me up most afternoons and talked about sticking up for what I believed in. So I did.

I did my own thing, until I was walking home one day towards the end of the year and these kids come up from behind on bikes, but I didn’t turn around. A few of them rolled past and I started to relax, thinking they were gone, when all a sudden, out of nowhere, something cracked off the back of my head. There were bright lights for a second and a clatter off the ground. The sound of an aluminum bat.

I remember lying on the filthy sidewalk, blood running across my face and into my mouth. It tasted like pennies. Dirty pennies. And that, for the most part, ended my first year of high school.

Second Year

T
he run-in with the baseball bat got me a week in the hospital and a shaved head. The wound was more like a gash than a cut, so they had to clear all my hair away to help keep things clean as it healed. Good look, especially for a kid, though I didn’t feel all that young anymore. I felt numb, more than anything, and had this feeling that something important had been taken from me, but I didn’t know what.

From home, I took all my tests and finished the school year. My mother finished law school around the same time, and Pop, the teacher, was done for the summer, too, so we got a bungalow at the end of Long Island in a village called Montauk, where the locals fished for sharks and rode the waves.

It was a long, hot summer of nothing. No fun with friends, no crazy excitement pumping through my veins. I felt the opposite of invincible (vincible?). My folks kept trying to get me to talk about what happened. And to understand that I hadn’t done anything wrong. They wanted to know how I felt, but I couldn’t really tell them that I didn’t feel like a comic book hero anymore. Besides, I didn’t really know. When I thought about it, no words came. So we spent our days at the beach where Pop floated past the surf and I sat on the sand, unable to swim and afraid of sharks I couldn’t see. I felt afraid of other things, too, like the packs of kids kicking around town. They looked at me funny, in my sneakers and jeans and a hat I had to wear to cover my scar.

My mother took the train into the city most days to interview for law jobs. She came back soon enough with a position that started in the fall. But she kept taking that train out of Montauk, and she came back another day with news of a new house in Queens. She’d given up on the neighborhood where she’d lived since she was 8 years old. At first, she wanted to fight. I’d hear her argue with my father at night, dropping names of the guys from around that she knew – guys that she’d grown up with who were nice to us but maybe not so nice in general. She said they could find out, easily, who did this to me, and then they could make things right. But Pop wasn’t having it. He was no pacifist, and he taught me, all my life, to defend myself. We had a heavy bag in the basement and he showed me how to punch and move, protect myself, which I did, best I could, for as long as I could. Pop just wasn’t into the idea of payback, of sending another kid to the hospital. He wanted all this to end.

So when summer was over, we went back to Queens, but to a new neighborhood and a new house. It was a big place, too, looked like a castle, Tudor or something, three floors, stand-alone, with a driveway and a one-car garage and a shaded patio out back. We were separated from the neighbors by bushes instead of alleys. The neighborhood reminded me of towns I’d seen outside the city, with tall trees and green grass. People passed but didn’t stop to talk.

I took a room on the very top floor, with slanted walls, a little stained-glass window and a spot to sit under the widow’s peak. I’d be in the window most of the day, slouched with my feet on the opposite wall, playing Springsteen CDs and reading comic books in the colored light. My parents would come up once in awhile to check on me. Make sure I was OK. I wasn’t. But they didn’t know how bad it was. They kept saying things would be normal for me again once school started.

I went to a Catholic school, pretty close to home. I hated the place right away — way too strict and the only girls around were nuns — and those nuns could give those older kids from the neighborhood a pretty good fight. I kept to myself. At some point, in the middle of the first semester, I stopped speaking altogether, which drove the nuns crazy. They’d ask me questions in class and I’d just sit there, silent. So after school, they’d put me on the roof to clean out garbage cans as punishment for
not
saying anything. Nuns. One day, after throwing everything I could get my hands on from the roof into the teacher’s parking lot, I ran home, straight to the garage. Pop had band practice that day, and Ma worked late every day. We’d moved the heavy bag there, to the one-car garage, and I punched it with my bare hands, moving the weight around pretty good. Through heavy breathing, I could hear the tear of my knuckles across the canvas. Pale spots began to show up on the bag, and I decided to cover the thing with my blood.

After the canvas bag was good and polka-dotted, I sat on a crate and ripped off the stupid sweater and shirt they made us wear at school. Sweat dripped off my chin. My knuckles throbbed and burned red like they’d been dragged over sandpaper. It felt kind of good, but not good enough. I walked up to the garage door and punched out a window pane. The sound of shattered glass, and the slashing of my hands, got me what I wanted. I punched out all the rest of them, too, sending glass everywhere. Afterward, it looked like my fist had been rammed in a blender.

My hand gushed and I watched it bleed, letting the blood drip to the floor. For some reason, I’d wanted to feel and see myself bleed again. I licked a wound and tasted the dirty pennies. A puddle of blood formed on the floor between my feet. Then I wrapped my hand in the school sweater and went inside. With a pack of my mother’s smokes, I went to the attic, sat in the colored window and sucked cigarette after cigarette until my tongue blistered.

Later, I heard the sound of someone coming upstairs. Pop showed up in the doorway and wiped away the air. “Have you been smoking in here, young man?” he asked in this hokey voice. Then he saw my hand.

He dragged me to the hospital. Afterward, I ended up at a different kind of doctor. But not at first. At first, I went ballistic at home. All that I’d been holding in came pouring out, and I was a long way from silent. Pop and I fought almost every night, nearly coming to blows on a couple of occasions. I’d cost him his cool, and there was something satisfying in that. Something small, though, I had to admit.

Eventually, I cooled down and cursed him quietly, letting him know through silence that I hated him. I blamed Pop for everything that happened. It had sort of come to me slowly over the summer and then through the school year and in the silence of my room; then in a rush as I sat there bleeding in the garage. The words I couldn’t find came out in anger toward Pop. I figured if I hadn’t gone along with his helping-people routine… if I hadn’t listened to him and been his son… if I hadn’t put so much faith in him and in doing the right thing, and hadn’t told him the truth about the Spics and the bridge, I’d still be back in the old neighborhood, with my old friends, and Genie Martini with her great set of lungs, instead of being alone in the attic, attending some crappy Catholic school where there were no girls and not a friend in the world. I’d finally figured out what was bothering me, what had been taken away, and the fact of it was this: Pop had cost me my chance at being a kid. Not a runny-nosed kid with untied shoes, but a real kid who did all the things I had been doing, with girls and friends and whatnot, until Pop and his philosophy of doing the right thing took it all away.

My mother was in the middle. Pop railed at her that I needed to get straightened out, but she worried about her son. Usually, growing up, she was the tough one, but with this noise between me and Pop, she tried to stay calm, begging me to behave before Pop did something crazy like toss me out of the house.

I think the counseling was her idea. I fought it, of course. Un-uh. No way. Un-uh. But they gave me two choices: the psychologist or military school. And while the idea of going away was tempting, it wasn’t going to be some place with all guys, where you get your head shaved at night (my hair had just grown back) and your face chewed off all day. I’d rather stay at home with Pop and the nuns, so I passed on the drill sergeant and took the head doctor instead.