“Right,” Rudy said. “And once we’re in, take forever to get to your seat. Then take forever to take out your notebook from your backpack. Then ask someone for a pen or a piece of loose-leaf real loud and ignorant, or pretend to hurt yourself catching a finger while you’re clipping your three-ring binder open and closed, or ask for some hand sanitizer or a tissue ’cause your nose is running. Then one of us, the second we’ve seemed to sit and settle, ask to go to the bathroom. When she says no she’ll think she showed us, and then she’ll go on with her boring-ass lecture.”
“And that’s when we derail the choo-choo,” Jimmy said.
“Oh yeah,” Rudy said.
“Absolute bombardment,” Jimmy continued. “When she gets going one of us asks a question, as if it’s serious business and all, like saying can I go see the counselor.”
“Or the nurse,” Deseronto said.
“Or the teacher of your last class where you left your homework, your pencil case, or your roster sheet,” Rudy added.
“Check,” Jimmy said. “And we have to interrupt on top of each other, like a machine gun, asking questions about stuff she just talked about so she’ll repeat it like a dumb-ass, and then doing an overlap of stuff she thinks might be offensive, but whispering it so she thinks she might not have heard us right, like asking if monkeys really have nuts, or what a clit looks like, or whether bugs have sex and how do they do it. Then when she says, ‘WHAT?’ we cover by asking if monkeys live in huts, or what Brits dress like, or whether bugs have necks, and she’ll know we’re breaking her stones, but she won’t do nothing about it ’cause she has to catch us clean for the documentation to be official.”
“And she can’t write up all of us, anyway,” Rudy said.
“Nope, not every day.”
“Makes her look bad.”
“Sure does.”
“Like she ain’t got control.”
“Damned straight.”
Deseronto picked dirt out of his sneaker tread with a twig.
“Can we throw shit?”
“Oh yes,” Jimmy said, and they laughed.
“But it’s got to be subtle,” Rudy said. He was fingering a zit on his cheek, but it wasn’t ready for popping quite yet. “And her back has to be fully turned. Facing front she can still catch you at the periphery even if she’s looking at her lesson plans or her roll book.”
Jimmy blew out a drag like a hard laugh.
“Periphery!” he said. “What the fuck!”
“And if you do chuck a pencil or a balled of piece of paper and she spins around asking who done it, you don’t have to worry, ’cause she’ll get the wall of silence,” Rudy said, “every time, you can bank on it.”
“Yeah, it’s a no-snitch zone for sure,” Deseronto said, “even for the goodie-goods.”
“It’s a rule,” Rudy said.
“A law.”
“For sure,” Jimmy agreed, and they all bowed their heads in reverence for a moment. It was all good, and Deseronto realized that he was kind of happy for once, well maybe a little, and the rest of the morning was promising at least until noon when he had to rush back home to walk all the dogs. But that was still a few hours away and for now they’d have fun throwing their Swiss army knives into the stump that used to be the tree that Jimmy’s tire swing hung from when he was little. Then maybe they’d take turns shooting his dad’s .22 at cans and squirrels and raid the liquor cabinet for quick sips of Southern Comfort or Jack Daniels or Christian Brothers, whatever would seem the most filled when they finished.
Whatever.
It was suck-ass at the house and it had been all summer, ever since Nurve the Purve told Mama up on the front stoop that he’d caught her little Johnny spying on him down the basement. At first Mama didn’t believe it and then she wouldn’t talk at all, turning her back cooking dinner then leaving the room so Deseronto was forced to eat by himself. A week later she quit her job at the factory and got hired as an assistant to a veterinarian named Dr. Goldstien who had her cleaning out cages, holding the animals still while they got their shots, handing him stuff during the minor surgeries, and making appointments for him, the whole nine yards, or at least that’s what Deseronto had pieced together from the clipped little explanations she offered in passing or the snippets he heard from the other room when she was talking to her boss on the phone. And when people went on vacation and the kennel was filled she was boarding dogs in the house, shoving food in their cages, smacking them hard as shit, even the bulldogs and Rottweilers. Mostly though it was Johnny Deseronto who cared for the animals while she was out of the house running around God knows where. Goldstien paid for her to take a Summer II class at the community college and now when she was home she was always studying up in her room with her ear plugs in, only stopping outside her son’s door for a second or two to holler at him to clean something up, or to leash up the pooches three at a time for a poop run, or to take the train in to 56th Street where there was that outdoor stand with the bootleg movies, the Muslim skin oils, and the gourmet pet food cash and carry dirt cheap, or to turn that ever loving Grunge shit down before she threw the stereo out with the trash in the back alley where it belonged.
Deseronto sighed, looked out into the woods, and he wondered who owned them. It seemed they acted as a barrier of sorts between the outskirts of Upper Darby and the western tip of the city of Philadelphia, flanking the golf course on the suburban end, back-dropping the rail yard, and then following the elevated train all the way to the first stop at Milbourne. In the back of his mind Deseronto had always wondered why no one ever cut the trees down, why no one ever drained that choked and dirty little creek that was nothing but standing water with leaves floating in it at one point, why no one ever paved over that section between the first and second El stops that looked like the far edge of a forgotten highway in a sci fi disaster movie with overgrowth covering the asphalt, bearding the ancient light poles, and thickening behind into that dense jungle woodland that seemed to have been left for dead between borders.
Deseronto wondered about all kinds of weird shit like this lately, the weird pictures in the windows that we looked at but didn’t really look at after awhile, the weigh stations, the landfills, construction sites, and maintenance areas. Like on a dog food run, he couldn’t sit there during the rumble and screech into the switching yard between the high speed rail and the elevated train without wondering who it was that had originally set the black five-inch cables into the plated and bolted girder points, and who it was that did maintenance on the signal lamps, and if there was a steel storage container labeled “Production Box #1” where were 2 and 3, and who decided on the patterns of the merge and bend of the rust colored rails? Why were the sheds painted different colors as if a code for something focused and specific, and then right across the tracks there were areas left in decay and neglect, old steel poking out of the ground, dirt and gravel, balding wasteland, nothing but scars?
Where did the shit and piss and paper go when you flushed it? How many water mains were under the highway and who was the one keeping count? Where did the storm sewers lead to?
And why did Mama hate him so much?
She didn’t seem to notice or care that he was getting sort of good with things, good with his hands, insane at figuring stuff out that most people didn’t want to bother with, like the manual in the drawer that showed how the stove worked, or the tag on the air conditioner that explained the electric, or the parts breakdowns of the power tools in the middle school metal shop, or the operator’s guide to the commercial heating system he’d found in the custodian’s closet last year when he was roaming the halls cutting Spanish. No dumb metaphors or symbols or all that other Englishy bullshit that kept the answer hidden in a cloud. Just the facts, Jack. No bullshit. Duh.
But there was still no way to deny the fact that most other kids liked romance stories and video games and movies and sit coms, and Deseronto had to pretty much face the idea that he was into the stuff most people ignor
ed. He was ignored. On all fronts. He was gliding through life like the bottom feeder no one was watching.
Except maybe Rudy St. Claire and Skinny Jimmy Whalen, because right after they formed their teacher haters club there behind the woodpile they came up with an awesome idea based on the fact that their pal Deseronto was so recently bent on geeking out over parts schematics.
Jimmy’s old man worked security and maintenance at the Jewish Y out in Havertown, and it also just so happened that Rudy was brought in as a guest a few weeks ago by Ben Zatz, this kid whose Bar Mitzvah he went to last winter. It was there in the pool that he saw old Mrs. Levitz, paddling around with her yellow bathing cap and kickboard, in fact, that’s why they were talking about her now in the first place.
Deseronto fingered out a dime-sized rock stuck half in the dirt and stared into the crater.
“Hey Rude,” he said tonelessly. “Did Levitz go up on the diving board?”
“Yeah, it was gross.”
“Why?” Jimmy said.
“Can you say dimpled cream cheese and flab?”
“I just barfed in my mouth, thanks.”
“Told you.”
Deseronto chucked the stone into the woods.
“We can jury rig the board, guys. Make it a time bomb.”
“How?” Rudy said.
Deseronto shrugged.
“Easy. You just have to know how to get to the connection between the platform and the springs and coils. I mean, it’s just a question of backing off the right bolts or set screws to their last threads. Won’t know exactly what to do until I see it, but all I’ll need is a Phillips or a flat head, maybe an Allen wrench and a set of sockets.”
Jimmy’s wide eyeballs spelled awe.
“Then the board whacks her in the ass the minute she gets near the edge.”
“Or someone else,” Deseronto added. “Doesn’t matter. Either way it’s a hoot.”
“Done,” Jimmy said, pushing up, wiping dirt off his butt and almost dragging his jeans down with it, they were hanging so low to begin with. “My dad keeps all that crap in a white pickle barrel in the equipment shed. He closes up Friday nights and he’s always complaining that he has to police the grounds. He’s always bitching that he ain’t no trash man. We’re gonna volunteer, hook the keys, open the equipment shed, and get Johnny the goods.”
“And what if he gets caught dicking around under the diving board?” Rudy said.
Jimmy pushed one of his nostrils closed and blasted snot out through the other. It wasn’t clean, and he had to wipe.
“No way,” he said. “Dad don’t like the pool. Says it’s full of disease and germs. Says he gets foot fungus even through his hiking boots in there, and he made them sign a part of his contract that says he’s only responsible for the dry areas like the weight room, the gym, and the aerobics classrooms upstairs. Shit, he’ll vacuum the front foyer and the TV area like an old maid, but he won’t count the pool noodles, right? Go figure.”
“Safe enough for me,” Deseronto said. “No risk, no fun anyway.”
“It’s a go, then,” Rudy said.
“Tonight’s the set-up, tomorrow we go in and watch,” Jimmy agreed. They were both grinning like fools. Deseronto met their good cheer with his eyes, but he couldn’t quite make his face join in like some happy little camper. No more cracking himself open like that, yes ma’am—no ma’am, sharing prayers with God, smiling for pictures.
Mama wouldn’t look at him anymore. She used to wake him up in the morning with a gentle shake on the shoulder and a little “good-boy” scratch above the ear, but now she just pounded on his door a few times. She used to fold his clothes and put them on the chair for him, but now she just dumped a wrinkled pile in a basket out in the hall. She used to make his lunch, but now she just left him shit in the fridge.
Like he did so often of late when dwelling on his mother’s neglect, he pictured Julianna Conigliaro’s dark exotic pussy. It was his go to, his fail safe, and while he felt guilty as hell about spying it between the slats of the closet so to speak, in a way he knew it was better that way, forbidden, disconnected from anything but its own strange and delicate symmetry.
Pictures in the windows.
Flashes only revealing parts of the human body.
A mother’s neglect.
Woods.
Tonight he was going to go into the Jewish Y up on City Line Avenue, sneak into the pool area, and rig a diving board to malfunction, but for the moment he couldn’t get a strange thought out of his head. He didn’t quite know why this particular idea had come to mind, but gazing out into the forest he suddenly realized how easy it would be to slip in there at night without being seen. You could even bring a flashlight and a duffel bag. Bury shit under the overgrowth.
You could live at the edge of the city and be the king of a forgotten woodland.
And they wouldn’t find the body parts for three hundred years.
BRUSHSTROKES:
PART 3
And I was running, asshole, I remember it like it was yesterday, running down the blue and white tile corridor, totally stoked, eyes wide, heart pounding. Rudy and Skinny Jimmy were still changing back in the locker room ’cause I had been quick about it, chucking my shirt and ditching my sneaks under a bench, no bathing suit, just the cut-off jean shorts I wore into the place. They probably had a rule about not wearing your undies in the pool, as if the mesh liner of a Hawaiian style bathing suit was a better filter for the microscopic shit-specs left in your asshole or something. They probably had a rule about running in the halls too, but I wanted to be the first in, to break the smooth plane of water with a humongous cannonball, anoint the space, soil the field. Then when the old heads came in, I’d be waiting there in the middle of the pool, treading water, chin buried just beneath the wavering surface, watching.
Coming through the archway they’d see me too, acting tough like they didn’t, like they were streetwise or street-smart and expected this half grown Injun with his hair slicked down to be waiting for them all in the middle of the pool like a hunter in the brush. They’d know something was wrong, but they wouldn’t bark about it, same as they didn’t complain about the black guys Jimmy had told me about who’d bought memberships and taken over the basketball courts. That would make them racists, and the more that people let the prejudice build up inside about the poor folk who seemed to be spreading all around them like oil on the floor, the less they wanted to show it.
Of course, Jimmy and Rudy were gonna join me and while I would have rather watched it minus the hype at this point, they were in it with me like brothers.
I tore ass down the hallway of tile and banged through the thick wooden doors. The Halogens were still coming up and the place had a dim, dreamy feel to it, as if the edge of the horizon was about to pull the sun up over its shoulder and sing a hymn or something. There were shadows coming off the stacks of boogie boards, plastic rafts, and inner tubes to the left of the lifeguard tower, and the row of empty beach chairs looked like a pew. Even the shallow end seemed mysterious, with this neglected pair of black goggles laying there by the handrail at the edge of the slow waking fairytale.
The water was a glass treasure sitting in the middle of it all with the diving board sticking out over the far edge, so thin and flat and motionless in its own sort of dark geometry, suspended in time, the reflections beneath it angled and slanted through to the lane stripes.
It fucked with everything that made sense about balance, and I guess that was the point. See-saws had the base in the middle and bridges and stairways had supports at both ends. Diving boards probably came from some low-life’s cure for boredom, drawn up on a napkin and first used as a dare. Somehow though, we’d come to trust this lopsided piece of dipshit engineering like it was a natural blur in the landscape, and it was just the ultimate rude rush to think that a science teacher was possibly gonna be the one to cause the last step in the failure, now wasn’t it…
Last night when Mr. Whalen brought us ou
t to the equipment shed we couldn’t stop laughing, snorting, joshing, fucking around. The floodlight over the shed door that worked on an auto-dimmer and fade up for night time was burnt out and because the glow of the streetlamp filtering through the trees from Haverford Avenue was sort of weak and spotty, Mr. Whalen had tripped in a divot crossing the baseball field. That just about killed us. I laughed so hard my eyes teared up. Rudy couldn’t catch his breath, bent over, hands on his knees. Jimmy actually dropped to the ground and curled up into a fetal position, kicking into his high-pitched machine gun laugh like a mental patient. Mr. Whalen stalked away all cussing and spitty and by the time we caught up to him he was limping into the darkest part of the shack, looking for the litter sticks and mumbling that the points were sharp and us fucking kids better not get to poking each other with them, or worse, popping the tires of the mini-bus or the golf carts or the maintenance truck parked behind the trash dumpsters.
What. Did he think we were hoodlums or something?
It wasn’t long before Mr. Whalen returned to the facility, and as he walked away I saw Jimmy in him, the skinny vision in his coveralls always limping back to sweep up somewhere. It bummed me out a little, but the pickle barrel with the carpenter’s belt draped over the lip showed the sweet side of things, the fact that for every push broom there was a power drill, for each piece of lint you had to vacuum up there was a crafty little bit tip you could shove into a screw-gun.
I sat there in the dirt in front of the equipment shed pawing through the bucket, fingering the anchor packets, opening the drill bit cases, pulling the trigger on the Makita cordless mini circular saw, counting up the sockets in the dented yellow carry case. Jimmy and Rudy were in the outfield playing spear chucker with the litter pickers, and I don’t really recall a lot of details as I dodged between my two pals, jogged over to the main building, peered around the corner of the back entrance, and snuck past the hydro message table. It was all in a haze, all mist and cotton candy.
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