Pee-Shy

by Frank Spinelli

  “Spinelli. Michelina Spinelli.”

  “Italian, right?”

  “Yes.” She beamed.

  As he continued to charm my mother, my eyes gazed around the center square at all the other boys dressed in those ugly green Boy Scout uniforms. It was at that moment that I realized I was about to become one of them.

  For years, I’d heard about this organization but had no interest in becoming part of it. It was bad enough that I was forced to join the basketball team and Little League baseball. Scouting was completely different. It was more like a club that seemed frighteningly cultish than a team. You had to attend weekly meetings, wear a uniform made of stiff green material, and go on camping trips once a month. Nothing about Scouting interested me, yet by some cruel twist of fate, I was about to become one as payback for my Evel Knievel Scramble Van victory.

  “Is this your son?” asked Bill.

  “Yes, this is Frank, and that’s my husband, Angelo,” said my mother, motioning to us frantically. “We’re shopping for my son. It’s his birthday this month.”

  “Birthday!” said Bill. Then he walked around the table. He stood directly in front of me. That’s when I noticed he was a large man, taller than my father, with even broader shoulders. Bill squatted down to my eye level. “Happy birthday, Frank. How old are you going to be?” His face was just inches away from mine, and his eyes never wavered. Although I found him genuine, I was still unnerved by his attentiveness and disregard for personal space. Unable to maintain eye contact, I stared down at my sneakers, wishing I was home, playing with my Evel Knievel action figure. When I didn’t respond, my mother jabbed me in the back, and I mumbled something unintelligible.

  “Eleven,” my mother clarified.

  “Eleven!” repeated Bill. “That’s a great age. Do you know why turning eleven is so important for a boy?”

  I shook my head, still staring down at my sneakers.

  “Eleven is when a boy is old enough to become a Scout. It’s the age when you are well on your way to becoming a man. So I’m gonna ask your parents to write down your name, address, and telephone number. I’ll be expecting you and your dad the Tuesday after your eleventh birthday at St. Sylvester’s so that we can sign you up to become a Boy Scout. Okay?”

  I don’t remember responding, but I do recall thinking I’d been given a reprieve because I didn’t have to join that day. In the end, we went to Sears and bought Billy the Kid pants. I didn’t make a fuss in the dressing room and tried on as many pairs of pants as my mother chose. For the rest of the day and up until my actual birthday, I intended to maintain a low profile in the hopes that she would forget all about the day we went to the Staten Island Mall and met Bill Fox from Troop 85.

  I SAVED THE BOX FROM THE SCRAMBLE VAN and used it as a ramp for Evel Knievel to jump from my nightstand to the bed. Seated on the plush navy blue carpet that lined my bedroom, I rolled Evel’s motorcycle around the floor, sputtering my lips to mimic the sound of an engine.

  That day, Evel was going to attempt his greatest jump—the Grand Canyon. As he waited, perched on the cardboard ramp, I heard my parents arguing in the living room just beyond my bedroom door. I tried to drown their voices out with my revving sound, but as usual, it was impossible to stifle my mother’s voice, which could be heard over the propulsion engine of an aircraft.

  “Well, you bought it for him,” I heard her say.

  My lips sputtered faster and louder. Evel took off, up the ramp and into the air with great speed, escalating higher and higher. Midway over the canyon, my bedroom door suddenly swung open.

  “He’s here,” my mother exclaimed with wide eyes. There was a manic expression on her face. “Bill, the Scoutmaster, is here. He’s beeping his horn outside. Go see what he wants. Go!”

  I sighed heavily with frustration and stood up. Evel’s jump had to be aborted. I abandoned him and his motorcycle on the floor of my bedroom. Even a picnic table, which I’d set up for his impending victory dinner, was left untouched. Walking down the stairs, I saw a red pickup truck idling outside. It had a storage shed built on the back that looked like a small house. Moving closer, I stopped to press my face against the screen door. A week had passed since we met Bill.

  Slowly I pushed open the door. I noticed a blond boy licking an ice cream cone in the passenger seat. Bill leaned over him, thrusting his head out the passenger window. “Hey, remember me? Do you want to go for a ride?” The blond boy ignored him, consumed with his ice cream—a mound of strawberry—dripping down the sides of the cone and over his fingers. Bill noticed I was staring at it and said, “Come on. I’ll get you one, too.”

  I shook my head.

  “You mean you don’t like ice cream?”

  “I don’t like strawberry.”

  Bill hung his head and laughed. The blond boy looked at him strangely. “Okay. You can have any flavor you want. Deal?”

  I smiled and walked toward the truck.

  Bill made the blond boy move over as I got in. “Do you like Carvel ice cream?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay then. We’re off to Carvel.”

  Bill put the truck in gear. We headed down Endor Avenue and turned right at the corner. Up close, the blond boy was noticeably smaller than me. His hair was parted in the middle and hung uniformly in one length over his head. Not like mine, which was thick and curly. I would have killed to have hair like his. He didn’t look familiar, but I assumed he was a Scout. His T-shirt displayed the word ZOOM across his chest, and immediately I recognized the font from the television show of the same name. I wanted to ask him whether he watched ZOOM, but he seemed disinterested in me and thoroughly engrossed with his ice cream.

  “We just came back from Carvel,” said Bill. “Then I realized we were in your neighborhood. So I thought we’d stop by.” I half-listened to what he was saying because I was distracted by how different my neighborhood looked riding up front in his truck. It felt as though I was on a parade float. “Have you given any more thought about joining the Scouts?”

  “Kind of,” I said, looking out the window, hoping Diane and Karen were outside playing so they would see me. “I’m still not eleven. So I have time to decide.”

  “You haven’t had that birthday yet?”

  “It’s next week. My mom is taking me to Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour with some friends from school. The waiters wear straw hats. When it’s your birthday, they sing a special song and bang on a drum.”

  The blond boy, unfazed by my presence, remained focused on his ice cream, lapping up the sides of the cone.

  “You have a nice mom. You know that? And she really wants you to be a Scout. I think that would make her really happy.”

  “And the person whose birthday it is gets a free hot fudge sundae,” I continued.

  Bill let out a hearty laugh and banged his hands against the steering wheel. “You really can’t wait for that birthday, huh? Well, I’m gonna expect to see you one week from this Tuesday. Okay?” He turned the truck into the Carvel parking lot. Through the large windows, I could see a teenage boy behind the counter dressed all in white. A family was waiting patiently as the boy held down a silver lever, catching a thick, velvety braid of vanilla ice cream in a cone.

  “Do we have a deal?” asked Bill.

  I nodded.

  THAT TUESDAY CAME QUICKLY. Suddenly I found myself being driven by my father back to school to attend my first Boy Scout meeting. Instead of boys and girls dressed in blue and white school uniforms, an army of ants was huddled together in those hideous green outfits. Bill was there, carrying on like the mayor with other adult men surrounding him.

  One of the senior Scouts explained that the troop was divided into smaller groups called patrols. Each patrol had a leader. Senior Scouts were older boys who oversaw each patrol. They reported to the assistant Scoutmasters, and everyone answered to Bill. I was escorted over to the table where my patrol was gathered. The leader was Kevin Davis, an eighth grader from St. Sylvester’s. The other
members included Louis Minitoni, an obese boy who was in my homeroom; Joseph Longo, or “Pip Squeak,” as he was also known because he was smaller than anyone else his age; and Achilles Salmone, who had to repeat the fifth grade and was one of the few black boys who attended St. Sylvester’s. Except for Davis, we were a bunch of misfits. I felt even more out of place because I was the only boy not wearing a uniform. My parents didn’t want to invest the money until they were sure I was going to stick with it. With my track record, that was reasonable.

  My bedroom closet was a museum of artifacts from previous activities my mother had enlisted me in against my will. I owned my fair share of uniforms, baseball gloves, balls, and even an athletic cup, which neither of my parents knew how to explain. I spent years fighting my way off team sports because I wasn’t athletic. I would have preferred my parents allowed me to spend the money on books or art supplies. But my mother was determined to make me a jock, and when that didn’t happen, she turned her attention to the Boy Scouts.

  Kevin greeted me with a hearty handshake. He instructed me to sit down next to Minitoni, who offered me a welcoming nod. Looking at the others, I felt trapped. How I wished I could have been home with Evel Knievel instead of sitting here with this hapless group.

  At precisely 7 P.M., Bill strode up to the front of the gymnasium. The entire assembly came to order as a hush fell over the crowd. The meeting was about to begin. “Attention, everyone, please recite the Scout Oath,” he instructed. With that one order, all the boys stood up with their right arms bent at ninety degrees, holding up their three middle fingers.

  “On my honor, I will do my best . . .”

  Silently, I watched the other boys. I was nothing like them, and worse still, I was now one of them.

  CHAPTER 15

  A Boy Like Me

  HE DIDN’T SPEAK MUCH IN GENERAL, even when Mrs. Schiavone asked him a question in class. Hiding behind his Elemental Science textbook, only his tousled brown hair was visible.

  “Mr. Duran,” said Mrs. Schiavone. “We’re waiting.”

  Craning his neck over the textbook he propped up to hide his face, Jonathan looked like a turtle peering out of his shell. His face was angular, and his tortoiseshell glasses were far too large for his face. Behind them, his eyes maintained a distracted far-off gaze. This boy spent a disproportionate amount of time in the library reading. I was sure he hadn’t heard the question, because from where I was sitting, I could see Jonathan was hiding one of those creepy horror paperback novels he always read in class.

  “Mr. Duran!”

  This time Jonathan flinched, realizing Mrs. Schiavone was speaking directly to him. He looked around. Everyone’s eyes were on him, and he began to shake like a wet puppy after a bath.

  “Uranium,” I whispered. “Just say ‘uranium.’ ”

  I don’t know why I took pity on him that day. I hadn’t reached out to him since he’d joined our class at the beginning of the year. Unlike the rest of us, who began as first graders, he was a transfer student. His sudden appearance that first school day in September raised quite a few eyebrows. Even before Mrs. Schiavone introduced him formally to the homeroom, the students were buzzing about in the school yard before the morning bell, wondering who the new kid was.

  I distinctly remember overhearing Daisy Dickenson tell Angela Pascal that Jonathan lived next door to her. “He used to go to P.S. 48. Maybe he flunked out.” This caused Angela to gasp, and soon news spread through the school yard like a virus on the breaths of the other children: the new boy was slightly retarded. That morning, after Mrs. Schiavone made a brief introduction, Jonathan darted directly toward his assigned desk, which was diagonally ahead and two rows away from mine. Within seconds, he dissolved into the background. He stayed that way for the next several months, occasionally popping up to answer a question in his high-pitched voice, but for the most part remaining invisible.

  That was until now.

  “Uranium,” I murmured again through closed lips like a ventriloquist.

  Jonathan returned a blank stare in my direction and for good reason: we had never spoken before. However, I knew that if I didn’t intervene, this situation was going to escalate. Mrs. Schiavone was clearly on a warpath that day. I knew she was in a bad mood the minute I walked in that morning and noticed she was wearing slacks.

  It was another of Chris Reynolds’s observations. He told me once that Catholic schoolteachers had to wear skirts or dresses. “Just remember if you see a teacher in pants then that means Aunt Flo’s in town,” he said, “and they’re going to be in a wicked bad mood.” Of course, I didn’t get the reference, so I asked Josephine what that meant.

  “Who told you about Aunt Flo?” she asked.

  “Some kid at school.”

  “Who’s Aunt Flo?” asked Maria.

  It was a Saturday afternoon, and my sisters were lying in bed reading magazines. They shared a bedroom, but very little else. Maria was the eldest. She was taller than all of us and very pretty, with long dark hair and wide, chocolate-brown eyes. She was like a second mother, an instinctively nurturing person, who wanted to become a teacher. Throughout my childhood, Maria taught me many things, especially how to dance with a girl and how to order dinner on a date. I watched many young men come by the house to take Maria out while I sat on the stairs and spied as she introduced them to my parents. She never exuded the self-confidence I thought she should have, owing much to her being overweight, and perhaps that’s the reason why she never dated any boy for very long.

  Josephine, on the other hand, was cute, with dark eyes and plump lips and a mole above her lip like me. She shared my father’s sharp humor, and being the middle child and second daughter, she felt competitive with her older sister. She realized that if Maria was the pretty one, that left little room for anything else other than being the smart one, which she wasn’t. So she became the street-smart daughter, the one who was thin, and the one who couldn’t wait to move out of the house, regardless of whether she got married. When people used to ask me which sister I liked more, I always said Maria because she was nice, but in reality, I knew Josephine was more fun.

  That afternoon, Maria had just returned home from working all day at the bank, where she was a teller. Still dressed in a white blouse, dark skirt, and black tights, she massaged her feet as she flipped through her latest edition of Vogue. Josephine sat up once she realized neither of us knew who Aunt Flo was.

  “Seriously, Maria, you’ve never heard of Aunt Flo?”

  Maria looked up from her magazine and shook her head. “I’m not in the mood for guessing games,” she said. “Who’s Aunt Flo?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Josephine, bouncing on her bed. “Maria! You can’t be that dense? Aunt Flo! Flow, like a river, flow. I just had a visit from Aunt Flo. You will see Aunt Flo next week. She comes once a month . . . We use napkins when she comes.”

  When it finally clicked, Maria blushed with embarrassment. “Oh,” she said, rolling onto her side.

  “What?” I said, stamping my foot. “I still don’t get it.”

  “Aunt Flo means a girl is having her period, stupid,” Josephine explained.

  “Oh,” I said, but I still hadn’t made the connection between a girl’s period and the need to wear slacks when Aunt Flo came to town. My knowledge of menstruation was limited to the extent that I knew a girl couldn’t go swimming if she was having her period.

  When I arrived in class that morning and noticed Mrs. Schiavone wearing gray polyester pants with a matching vest, I immediately caught Chris Reynolds’s eye. He looked at me and winked. I giggled.

  Mrs. Schiavone cocked an eye at me. “Silence when you enter the classroom, Mr. Spinelli.” I quietly walked to my desk. Since the beginning of the school year, I had been the brunt of her fury many times. I had no intention of pissing her off that day. She enjoyed making boys squirm until their faces turned red. Often she chose one victim a day and picked on him relentlessly until he either cried or became s
o insolent that she made him stand in the corner.

  “Mr. Duran!”

  This caused Jonathan to shudder. When he refused to respond, she began to march down the aisle toward him. Jonathan’s eyes bugged out of his head, but it was too late. Within seconds, she had descended over him like a giant float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Then, with one fell swoop, she reached down and ripped his Elemental Science textbook out of his hand, releasing that tawdry paperback into the air. For a few fleeting seconds, its faded yellow pages flapped desperately like a bird trapped in a cage, before it settled on the ground with a quiet thud. Now the entire class was privy to Jonathan’s secret. The cover of his book displayed a voluptuous blonde being ravaged by a menacing figure with red eyes. The title, written in Gothic print with lime green letters, spelled out THE INCUBUS.

  The classroom was silent except for a few quickly stifled gasps. All eyes were now on Mrs. Schiavone, whose expression was a mixture of shock and disgust. This discovery catapulted the situation beyond simple disobedience into sacrilege. Being a Catholic schoolteacher, it was her duty to reprimand him to the fullest extent. Regardless of whether this was his first offense or not, Jonathan had done something morally wrong. He was reading a blasphemous book.

  “What is this?” asked Mrs. Schiavone incredulously. As she bent down to retrieve it, her behind ballooned inside her polyester pants. A mild, yet discernible wave of giggles bubbled up from the far corner of the classroom. Immediately, Mrs. Schiavone stood up and continued. “What is this?” she repeated. Jonathan’s face was the color of a glistening plum. “Don’t you have better things to read than this filth?” she said, squeezing the paperback into a tight cylinder. “Go stand in the corner,” she demanded. “Now!”

  Jonathan oozed out of his seat and walked toward the back of the classroom with his head held down. Even though it was appropriate for Mrs. Schiavone to banish him to the corner, I saw a look in her eyes that made me think it hurt her to do so. If it had been anyone else—Bobby Staudinger, or better yet, Seth Connelly—Mrs. Schiavone would not have thought twice. But it was Jonathan, the quiet boy who never made trouble and always did as he was told, who now had to pay the price for Aunt Flo’s visit.