Lessons on Destroying the World

by Gant, Gene

  Twenty minutes later, I was crossing the parking lot of the Southgate Shopping Center, an old strip mall on Third Street made up mostly of vacant storefronts with a few haberdasheries, pawnshops, and wig salons thrown in for variety. I held my right hand palm outward as I walked to shield my eyes against the sunlight blazing down from the cloudless western sky.

  The candy-red Camaro that suddenly roared across my path sent me stumbling backward. The car skidded to a halt a short distance away. Curses sprang immediately to my lips and evaporated just as quickly when I saw the grinning face of a friend through the windshield.

  The dude slid out of the car and wrapped me in a hug fierce enough to choke the air from my lungs. “Mike! I don’t believe it!” He laughed, accenting the hug with several rough slaps to my back. “Good to see ya, man.”

  “Yeah, Tony,” I murmured when the tall, dark-skinned, athletic guy released me. Antonio Reyes and I had been close friends until I quit school in January, just three weeks before my sixteenth birthday. I’d struggled in the classroom since kindergarten, and I had been well on my way to flunking the tenth grade. Not like Antonio, who caught on to such incomprehensible things as differential calculus and subject-verb agreement about as easily as he caught on to breathing. “I’m really glad to see you too.” And I meant it. But I could also feel a twinge of embarrassment worming its way through the happiness. “What have you been up to, man?”

  “Studying,” Antonio replied. “I had enough credits to graduate in May. I got accepted at the University of Memphis. I’m taking a couple of classes there now.” He was wearing white khakis and a white T-shirt, both bearing the Calvin Klein logo. Blessed with a chiseled face, he was better looking than he deserved to be. Girls just about threw themselves at him, but he gently brushed them all off, spouting some crazy bull about saving sex for marriage. He was a big, born-again Christian of the Southern Baptist kind, having switched from Catholicism—his family’s religion—when he was twelve. And that’s why some of the guys at school thought he didn’t deserve his good looks. He didn’t take advantage of them to get his freak on, which is what I definitely would have done if I had his looks, his build, and his height.

  “I thought you had your eye on some big-league college in California.”

  “Yeah, Stanford University is where I want to go. But my mom doesn’t want me out there by myself yet. I’ll go to the U of M until I turn eighteen and then transfer to Stanford. I’m majoring in chemical engineering.”

  Whatever that was. But it sounded like the kind of profession Antonio was cut out for, all science-y and stuff, so I nodded. I couldn’t keep myself from eyeing the shiny sports car. I did that not so much because I liked the car—which I did—but to keep from looking into Antonio’s eyes. I was eleven when I met him, and I was twelve when I had my first kiss—with him. Actually, he kissed me. The kiss made me nervous, and the intense way Antonio was looking at me now also made me nervous.

  “Nice ride.”

  “It’s my dad’s,” Antonio said casually. “I got my license a couple of months ago. He lets me drive it pretty much whenever I want to. I’m on my way to pick him up from work.”

  Suddenly, the mix of happiness, anxiety, and embarrassment I’d been feeling was gone. They were replaced by a burst of jealousy so strong it made me dizzy. I had to take a deep breath to steady myself.

  “Hey, but what about you? How are things going?” Antonio took a step back and looked me over, taking in my grimy jeans, stained T-shirt, and dirty cap. That told him everything he needed to know. Sadness and worry flickered in his gaze, and that brought the shame roaring back.

  I wanted to change the subject. But why bother? Antonio had intelligence, ambition and two living, working, happily married parents on his side. I had never been on a par with him, and I never would be. We both knew that.

  “I’m holding my own, man,” I said, smiling, forcing back the raw emotion that nearly flushed my face. “I’m just happy to hear that things are going so good for you. You deserve it, man.”

  “Thanks, man.” There was still a look of anxious concern in Antonio’s face. He stuffed his hands into his pockets. “Hey, can I drop you off somewhere?”

  “I got some business to take care of here,” I said, nodding vaguely at the shopping center. “I appreciate the offer, though.”

  “Okay, but let’s keep in touch, Micah. Just because we’re not in school together now doesn’t mean we’re not friends anymore. We can hook up sometime, play cards, shoot hoops. Maybe you can visit my church.” In school, Antonio had been known as Saint Tony because he didn’t curse, sneak cigarettes, or—as I mentioned before—try naughty things with girls. (And no, beyond that little kiss with me, he did not try naughty things with boys, either. At least, not that I ever saw.) It was no surprise that he was still involved in his church. Not like me. The only way you’d be able to get me inside a church then was if I were dead. Literally.

  Antonio held up a finger, indicating that I should wait. Then he reached into the Camaro and plucked a business card off the dashboard.

  He pulled out a pen and jotted something on the back of the card. “Here. My dad’s shop info is on the front, and I wrote our new home telephone number on the back. My mom got us switched to an unlisted number. I wrote my cell number on there too. Give me a buzz sometime.”

  “Yeah, I’ll do that.” I tucked the card in my back pocket.

  Antonio hesitated, staring into my eyes. “Are you okay, Mike? Tell me the truth, man.”

  I was dumb when it came to schoolwork, but I wasn’t completely stupid. There was no way I’d tell Antonio or anyone else all the details about my current situation. That could land me in foster care, and I was damned if I’d be bounced around from house to house like a stray dog.

  I pasted on what I hoped was a carefree smile. “I’m cool, man. Believe that.”

  I reached out to shake Antonio’s hand. He grabbed me in for another hug instead. He held me a little too tightly and a little too long. I told myself it was just friendship making him do that.

  “Gotta bounce, Mike. Call me.” He let me go with an affectionate punch to the shoulder, slid behind the wheel of his car, and sped back across the parking lot to slip easily into the stream of traffic flowing down Third. I watched until his car rolled out of sight. Then I sighed and turned back to take care of the business that had brought me to the shopping center. No sense in fretting over blessings I didn’t have.

  Straight ahead was the Cash-For-Checks store, occupying a spot that, in some long forgotten day, had been home to an ice cream shop. (Mama told me she and my father had their first date there.) I pushed through the doors and almost sank to my knees from relief as the cool air inside washed over me.

  There were, fortunately, only two people lined up at the cashier’s bulletproof window. In less than five minutes, the cashier was counting out the two hundred and forty-seven dollars from my paycheck (minus the seven-buck check-cashing fee). I rolled the bills into a wad and stuffed them deep in my pocket.

  Anxious now to get home, I stepped outside and broke into a lazy jog despite the heat. Following a quick shower, I could be on Beale Street in an hour. Maybe there I’d be able to shake off my coat of miserable feelings.

  3

  I’M GOING to tell you about Cedric Hardy now. He’s the guy I mentioned earlier who had this crazy thing for me in high school. While I was walking home from the Cash-for-Checks store, I saw a guy on the other side of the street who looked a lot like Cedric, and that started me to thinking about him again. He hadn’t crossed my mind in a long time, but I thought about him all the way home, so that’s why I’m telling you about him now.

  Cedric Hardy was a year older than me, a foot taller than me, and almost a hundred pounds heavier than me. He was overweight, but it looked good on him because he had a lot of muscle too, and he didn’t have one of those big guts falling over his belt like some overweight guys do. He was on the wrestling team. His family had a lot of
money. His dad owned a bunch of beauty supply stores, and his mom was a psychologist with her own private practice. We came from two completely different worlds. He lived in some gated community outside the city, and I lived in a neighborhood of rundown houses. If it hadn’t been for the fact that Herrington High was the top magnet school in the tristate area, and both of our moms wanted us to go there, Cedric and I would have never met. You don’t know how I wish we hadn’t.

  Because Cedric was a year ahead of me, I shouldn’t have had any classes with him. It was just my luck, however, that he flunked his freshman art class because he blew the final. No, he didn’t fail the test, which any idiot could pass; he just forgot to take it. He cut class that day, and because the final made up 50 percent of the grade, the teacher flunked him. Even Cedric said forgetting to take that final was the stupidest thing he’d ever done. But at least one credit in art was required for graduation, so in his sophomore year, Cedric wound up in freshman art class again. With me.

  Not only was it my freshman year, it was happening at a school a million miles away on the opposite side of the city from where I lived. I didn’t know anybody there (Antonio had started the year at another high school and transferred to Herrington about a month later), I was the smallest kid in the whole school, and I was scared to death. So in all my classes, I hid out in the back of the room, taking a desk on the last row and hoping nobody would notice me. That strategy worked pretty well for me until I got to art class.

  I was one of the first kids in the room that afternoon, and I staked out a desk in one of the back corners. Nobody had paid much attention to me all day. Even the teachers seemed to forget I was there once they finished roll call. Cedric walked in a few minutes later with a scowl on his face, probably thinking of all the things he’d rather be doing than repeating this class with a bunch of nobody freshmen. He was a shaggy-haired guy, with something wild about him. He headed for a desk at the front of the room, and then he spotted me, and he froze.

  The look in his eyes was strange, sort of empty but sneaky at the same time. It made me nervous, and I suddenly got really interested in the blank pages of my notebook, which I started flipping through. Cedric walked slowly over and plopped down in the desk right next to me. He didn’t introduce himself or say anything. I only learned his name when the teacher called it out in taking attendance, and he answered.

  It was hard for me to concentrate on anything that went on in the first fifteen minutes of that class. There seemed to be some kind of pulse flowing between Cedric and me. I thought it was my imagination or that maybe I was getting lightheaded or something. From the corner of my eye, I noticed that he kept sticking his hand in his pocket and fumbling around. That made me even more nervous because I worried that he had a gun or a knife on him.

  About halfway through the period, he kind of leaned toward me and said, really quietly, “Hey.”

  It didn’t feel as if I had any choice but to look at him. When I did, he rolled his eyes down to his lap. Fool that I was, I looked down at his lap too.

  His pants were open, and he was hard and sticking straight up in full display. It scared me that he would show himself right in the classroom with kids sitting around us and the teacher at the blackboard writing out a list of materials for our first art project. It also made me a little angry, because a lot of guys just automatically thought I was gay because I was small and quiet and sucked at sports, and Cedric seemed to make that assumption without even seeing me play football or anything. Why else would he show me his stuff like that? I thought it was stupid for people to just go around assuming things about other people without getting to know them.

  But mostly I was scared and weirded out. Nobody had ever done anything as crazy as that to me before, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. So I just turned away really quick and stared at the teacher and hoped Cedric would put himself away. When the bell rang, I was out of that room like a shot.

  The next day, I took a seat at an empty desk on the other side of the room. The desks around me were already occupied, so that kept Cedric away from me. The girl sitting at the desk beside me made jokes about how when I sat back in my seat, my feet could no longer reach the floor. It wasn’t too bad sitting there because I came back with jokes about how big her feet were, so we laughed at each other, and it was all right. But a couple of days later, Cedric followed me after the class was over. When I got to my locker, he sort of cozied up beside me and pointed at his crotch, and I could see the outline of his hard-on in his pants. He asked, really quietly so nobody else could hear him, if I wanted to touch his thing. Then he laughed when I got nervous and rushed off before I could finish dialing in the combination to my locker.

  After that, Cedric started showing up in unexpected places. One morning, he was standing next to the main entrance when I walked in. He grinned really big and fell in step with me like we were best friends or something.

  But when he talked to me, he kept his voice low, and he said stuff like, “You got nice little ears. I bet a dude could get his whole tongue in one of your ears.” Which was creepy, and what can a person say to something stupid like that? So I never said anything. I’d just keep walking, and he’d keep walking and looking at me sideways and smiling until he ran into some of his friends, and he’d go off with them, and then I could breathe again.

  It wouldn’t have been so bad if Cedric had just stuck to showing me his hard-on and saying crazy things. But then he started touching and grabbing. Like one afternoon, in art class, I was standing at the cabinet where the supplies were stashed looking for charcoal pencils, and I dropped my sketchpad. When I bent down to get it, Cedric rushed over and smacked me on the butt. The smack was loud, and it really hurt. I looked around, embarrassed, and a bunch of other kids and the teacher were all looking at me with these puzzled expressions on their faces, which let me know that they heard the whack but didn’t actually see what happened.

  This one guy who sat closest to the cabinet saw it, but he just laughed and hissed, “Yeah, spank that bitch!” as Cedric went laughing back to his desk.

  Cedric would come out of nowhere, when I least expected anything like that. I’d be walking down the hall between classes, and suddenly his big, long arm would be around my neck, strangling me, and he’d pinch my cheeks or pull my earlobes. I’d be moving through the serving line in the cafeteria with my tray, and Cedric would slip in behind me and squeeze my ass. He always squeezed really hard, so that it was as painful as he could make it. Sometimes other kids would see him do it, and they’d just laugh when he laughed or give me disgusted looks, as if I was the one doing dirty, mean things.

  What could I do to stop him? Punch him in the mouth? I know how the argument goes: Fight back, and even if you get your ass kicked, at least you’ll make a bully think twice about coming after you again. Yeah, right. I’ve always been small, and I’ve always been bullied, and I have fought back because I can’t stand people walking all over me. No matter how hard I fought, though, the bigger person (sometimes I got bullied by girls) always won, and I was tired of getting my ass kicked. So I sucked it up and hoped Cedric would get bored with me and move on to torture somebody else.

  But he didn’t. Months passed, and he kept touching me and grabbing me and saying awful things to me. It carried over into the next school year. He was so damn strange. Mom died a week after Thanksgiving that year, and I spent six days at home crying a lot and missing her, and when I came back to school after her funeral, Cedric was the only kid other than Antonio who offered me any sympathy. Sometimes, Cedric would see other guys making fun of me or giving me a hard time, and he’d make them leave me alone. Then there were other times when he’d yank me up by the collar, drag me into the bathroom, and shove his hand down the back of my pants. He was always so rough with me, and I started wondering what I’d done to make him hate me so much. Things just kept getting worse, until one day he got me in the bathroom, pressed my face against the wall, put his hand down the back of my pants, do
wn in my underwear, and shoved his finger into me.

  That was more than I could stand. It got me so angry, so humiliated, that I cursed and started crying. I was so alone, and I wanted a girlfriend. I wanted a nice, sweet girl to touch me and make me feel sexy, to make me feel special. I had once even fantasized about doing to a girl some of the things Cedric was doing to me, just in a different, not disgusting way. The way Cedric did those things felt completely wrong. He had a great face and a great body. I admired guys with take-charge attitudes, and the irony is that, under other circumstances, I probably would have looked up to Cedric. But he made me feel dirty and wrong. He made me feel bad about myself, as if I was nothing, and I couldn’t understand why he did that. I was afraid to go to school because there was no way I could avoid him. I was so full of shame that I couldn’t tell anyone, not Antonio, and especially not my dad, who wasn’t around anyway. But when Cedric stuck his finger in me, I just couldn’t take it anymore.

  I fought like a wild dog and got away from him. He came after me as I ran out of the bathroom. I was afraid he was going to grab me again, and who knew what he would do to me if that happened, and there was Mr. Gardner, the history teacher, standing outside his classroom, yelling at kids to stop running in the hall. I ran up to him in a panic and shouted for him to help me, and I turned, pointing at Cedric.

  By the time I turned back, Cedric had stopped and retreated, disappearing into the crowded hallway. Mr. Gardner could see how upset I was, and he barked at me like a drill sergeant, demanding that I tell him what happened. I didn’t tell him, though. I couldn’t. I was too ashamed and afraid. If I told a teacher what Cedric did to me, the teacher would want to tell my dad. It would have been a total disaster if the teachers tried to reach my dad.