The door closed at the top of the steps, and I practically jumped out of my pants. In a frantic spasm, I coursed through the cellar, twisting and turning as I got caught in a spider web.
“Dad!”
I tripped over a tackle box and held my composure until I looked down at my bloodied knee.
“Dad!”
“Vito?!”
“Ahh!”
My father popped out from around the corner, holding some sort of battle-ax with a red-and-black handle.
“Jiminy Cricket, Vito! You… my goodness gracious, what are you doing down here?”
My articulate explanation was buried beneath my snot-filled sobs.
“Oh man, what’d you do? Here, Dad, take this.” He handed Papa the battle-ax and tended to my knee.
“What… why… why do you have an ax?” I asked between sniffles.
“Oh, that’s a hatchet. Papa’s giving that one to Tony and has another one for you. I’ll keep ’em in the shed at home and show you how to use it when you’re older. Gotta learn to work with your hands. Don’t make me regret moving you to Short Hills, right, pal? Stop playing with your hair. Let’s go upstairs. Isn’t it time for dessert?”
Everyone else had moved on to the tiramisu when the first firework shot off from across the lake and exploded like dragon’s breath in the violet sky. The soft lantern-burst of lightning bugs illuminated my path to the dock, where my uncle was handing out sparklers. I didn’t care much for sparklers and pleaded with my father to get real fireworks, but he said they were illegal in New Jersey (what about those socks across the lake?) and wouldn’t even budge on Roman candles. “They’re made in Pennsylvania, not Italy,” he said, thwarting my attempts to play to his Italo-patriotism.
The line for sparklers grew as the cousins gobbled down their last morsels of dessert. My knee was too sore to wait in line. I picked up a smooth stone and skipped it into the lake. With a running start, Luke whipped his own rock, which made three skips past mine before dropping.
I left the dock and walked toward my sister sitting alone, sparkler-less, on the vineyard swing hanging between the twin oaks as a breeze pushed molehill-sized waves out to the center of the water.
I was swallowed by the sweeping wave of depression as summer passed and the first day of school appeared on the horizon. During the summer break, I got to pretend I was on an island somewhere in the Caribbean or Mediterranean as I lay on the golden sand in Ocean City, the salt drying and tightening my skin as the sun’s rays extracted the ocean water. But my hard-earned tan—I yearned for a natural olive complexion like my father’s—had already begun to fade by the time I was in the car headed back to Glenwood for the first day of second grade. And if the summer simply ending wasn’t enough, I found out that Kader, one of my most loyal brothers-in-arms and protector of gnosis, wouldn’t be returning to Glenwood due to redistricting—Kader would attend second grade at Hartshorn (that’s Harts-horn for you Short Hills purists). I wouldn’t be able to see him again on a regular basis until middle school, when students from all five elementary schools came together like a uniting of the clans.
But it wasn’t all tales of woe. The good Lord answered my prayers and put that sock Pierce Stone in a different second-grade class. Glory be to God, I’m saved, hallelujah! And I didn’t need miracle water or Tom Jones Cleaver’s green miracle cloth either. I would only need to defend myself—unfortunately, weapons were strictly prohibited at school, even if they were made of wood—during that slice of paradise called recess.
My father dropped Karl and me off at the corner of South Terrace and Hobart and waved to Alfonso, the Italian crossing guard who came from Benevento (not far from Avellino, where my family came from humble roots) and barely spoke English.
We plunged downhill to the first day of school like raiders in the valley, ready to pillage Glenwood as if it were an ill-guarded ziggurat.
Karl broke for his first day of first grade, and I continued on to the buzzing nebula of my co-pupils forming around Mrs. Mason. I scanned my classmates, my mirth growing tenfold as I realized what an excellent class it would be. I had Lenny and Andrius, Silas, Maine Ogden, Jeremy Finklestein, Paxton (who had a new tricolored set of beads bouncing in his hair), Louis Martino, and Jack Yamamoto—a Japanese boy who had moved to Short Hills in the middle of last year. And besides the scheming shenanigans of Paxton Shaffer, I had evaded sharing a 1998–99 classroom with the malignants: Brad Knight, the Barriston brothers, and—of course—Pierce Stone.
Mrs. Mason herself was an amber goddess with tawny rotini hair, who maybe—maybe—could be put in a similar category as Andrius’s mom. I must’ve been staring or drooling or displaying some other form of ogling, because Michaela Silves literally had to snap her fingers in front of my shnozole to get my attention.
“Victor, I said, how was your summer?”
“Oh! Uh… it was good. Went to a few islands…”
“Really?! Which ones?” She intertwined our fingers and pulled on my arm hair.
“Oww! Oh, well…” I had studied my father’s atlas for months and couldn’t think of one damn island. Then I remembered the fantastic knowledge dart my mother provided for me this summer: Ocean City is an island! I didn’t have to lie anymore. “Ocean City… island, I mean.”
“Oh, where’s that? Like near Turks and Caicos?”
“South.”
“South of Turks? Oh, like near Bonaire?”
“Bonaire?” I had never heard of this island-grail, but it sounded exotic and packed with palm trees.
Mrs. Mason’s soft voice instantly cooed the blathering pod of second-graders like nothing I had ever seen. It would usually take Ms. O’Donnell three “quiet downs” and a seizure-inducing stint at the light switch to get us to shut up. It was too early to tell if that was solely the power of the Aphrodite-like Mrs. Mason or from the lack of malignants in the class. Either way, she saved me from disclosing my Caribbean-free summer to Michaela, who was still holding on to my pinky.
Our desks were arranged in clusters of four in alphabetical order. And they each had a compartment where we could put notebooks and pencils, and, when Mrs. Mason wasn’t looking, I would be able to write passages for my most current epic without having to sneak to my cubby. Lenny and I high-fived three times in a row when we realized we’d be spending the year together.
As I sat at my cluster (Kimberly Fleming and Arjun Gupta completed our pack) I caught myself smiling—something I should do more often, according to friends’ moms and complete strangers—at the thought of a reborn Vic at Glenwood school.
But my jubilance was as short-lived as our recess rugby ruse last year. By October, Mrs. Mason was having complications with her pregnancy, and we were told she would be absent “indefinitely”; they used “indefinitely” with eight-year-olds. I suppose I had been so enraptured by her voice and rotini hair to even realize that she was pregnant on the first day of school. So at eight years old I learned that “indefinitely” meant forever, because I never saw Mrs. Mason again.
The class formerly known as Mrs. Mason’s was subsequently run by a series of substitute teachers, each one glancing at the triumvirate of principals seated in the back of the class like they were auditioning for a Broadway show. The winner was a stout woman with a giant square head who made us do mental math.
She would stand at the front of the class and just start spouting numbers at a staggering pace like a robot: “Three plus four minus five plus six plus nine minus eight.”
“Nine!” shouted Kevin Liu and Matt Dershowitz simultaneously—it had already turned into a two-horse race.
“Six!”
“Eleven! Mrs. Sherman, I was first. Eleven!”
I don’t know how those guys did it. It wasn’t fair that she had all those numbers arranged in that monster head of hers, but I never even got close to guessing right. Sometimes I would watch Arjun’s
lips in front of me and try to read what number he was going to say. It was times like these that I needed Karl.
I often stared out the window that offered a view of the kickball diamond and woods in second grade. Not because I was afraid of the Green Knight galloping out of Hell with an army of serpents, but because I was bored.
Mrs. Sherman ended up separating Lenny from our cluster after he fired a spitball that zoomed across the room and struck Andrius square in the chin. It was a magnificent shot, but Mrs. Sherman thought Lenny had targeted Andrius for being a foreigner and made him sit by himself for the rest of the year. She didn’t want to hear that they walked to school together every day, barring inclement weather, of course, when Andrius’s mom—maiden of my imagination—would drive them instead.
She even made me sit in the hall once—a real cheap form of public embarrassment where any sock with a damn hall pass could mock you as they passed by your desk—for using, well, the word “sock.”
“It doesn’t even mean anything!” I’d shouted, but the box-headed woman would have none of my pleas.
And as if Mrs. Mason being ripped from my heart didn’t take enough of a toll on my fragile psyche, the genius overlords of Glenwood Elementary made the unforgivable decision to integrate the tables at lunch. Now the class formerly known as Mrs. Mason’s was “free” to mix with the pupils comprising Mrs. Kowalski’s and Mrs. Greenberg’s second-grade classes—and therefore I was once again thrust into the gauntlet with the malignants.
“Hey Ferraro, is that ham made of rubber?” Pierce Stone inquired as he leaned into the middle of the table just so he could get a look at my face, red as a jersey tomato.
He was referring to the slices of ham that were one of the three integral ingredients comprising the trifecta famously known as the Lunchable—including cheddar cheese and toasted crackers. I had begged my mother to pack the boxed lunch in an effort to assimilate into the Glenwood lunch scene, but my plan had backfired, and now Pierce Stone wanted to see if the round slice of ham would stick to the ceiling.
“Hey, if it falls, we’ll just feed it to Louis.”
Uproar.
Perhaps I could’ve just changed tables and avoided the Short Hills clobberings altogether; if only it were that simple. The multi-purpose room, with its aforementioned faux-wood tables, resembled the long trestles where burly men of the sword gathered to feast on pink pork and mead. The paladin Uther the Lightbringer wouldn’t get up and move to another trestle before he’d finished his dripping ham leg. Vercingetorix, defender of Gaul, enemy of Rome, wouldn’t rise from his bench and move to the chair “over there” to finish slogging his ale. If I ever aspired to become a true hero like these men I had to stay put, no matter the consequences.
I skipped the after-school viewing of Monty Python and the Holy Grail with Karl that day—we were down to three showings a week—and met my mother with a full head of steam while she was unloading crumpling bags of groceries in the garage.
“Are you trying to embarrass me?”
“What? Victor, what are you saying? Don’t just stand there; help your mother with these bags, will ya?”
“No. I won’t lift a damn finger until…”
“Hey! You listen to me, kiddo. I don’t care how your friends talk to their parents, but I work my butt off every day… and…” I knew she was angry because she sucked in her bottom lip and exaggerated her F’s. She would always use this line when I complained that something wasn’t fair: “Fair? Fair is a four-letter F-word.” I didn’t really know what she meant, but I still understood. “What is it this time? Did that son of a…” She stopped herself, even though my father wasn’t home, as if conditioned to watch her Philly mouth around her children. “Did that Pierce Stone kid bother you again? I swear I’ll… Ya know what, Victor, honey, give me those and go take a hot shower. Then we’ll talk.”
I listened to my mother and took the shower. When my father got home I explained to him my rubber ham debacle.
“Why is he eating this junk, hun? We’ve got this big container of my mother’s pasta fazool (translation: pasta e fagioli, pasta and beans) right here in the fridge,” he said as he poured himself a glass of Italian Water.
“How am I supposed to send him to school with that? He can’t heat it up.”
“They don’t have a microwave at his school? With what we pay in taxes. Vito, my friend, what do you want then? Look here, I got some prosciutto, some gabagool that’ll go great with some…”
“Just turkey.”
“Turkey? Turkey with what? Nana gave us this spicy mustard that’ll… Hun, you know my mother makes delicious German food too, right? Okay, so we got this mustard…”
“Mayo, on white.”
“Maanuggia! You sure you’re my kid? Because I don’t know a Ferraro who would eat that scumbadeetz.” (Translation: garbage, crap.) “We sure as heck didn’t in West Orange. I’m gonna set something up with you and Gianluca. His mother is a nice woman, from Sicily. Here, look here, I’ve got some nice mortadella from Calandra’s…”
“I’m sick and tired of talking about lunchmeat!”
“Eh oh! You better cool it, pal, or you’ll get moonAtz. Don’t look at me like that. I’ll give you more crack than Harlem,” he said, laughing, and then dove back into the fridge.
“It’s that damn kid at his school and those other brats. I’ll tell ya, if that crap was going on in my neighborhood, someone would just clock ’em,” said my mother as she shuffled the clanking pots and pans around underneath the counter.
“Eyy! Can you not, hun? I went over with the kid when you’re allowed to hit someone. Right, pal?!” he called after me as I sought refuge in the basement. “Plus, hun, not all of us grew up in Germantown. You Philly kids are brutal!”
“Yeah, that’s right. Don’t you forget it.”
I had started to believe that my entire second-grade experience was a wash. My beautiful, intelligent teacher was taken from me, the malignants seeped into my one period free of Mrs. Sherman’s ballistic arithmetic attacks, Lenny was removed from my cluster, and anytime I attempted to add a plot twist to my however slowly moving epic, Arjun would make faces from his desk, completely blowing my cover.
But then came the spring, and inside me another renaissance blossomed. I was starting to think that the blooming flowers had magical powers. This rebirth wasn’t just an internal rebirth and it wasn’t just from the blooming foliage and opening day baseball, but it was a rebirth compounded by an external influence—so external it was from all the way across the other side of the map in my father’s atlas. And like the ’60s had the British Invasion, the late ’90s faced the Japanese Infiltration, and with it, Glenwood Elementary discovered Pokémon cards.
I bought my first pack, a “starter pack,” at New World Manga in Livingston, where my cousins Markey and Luke lived, along with Matt Dershowitz’s uncle and Jeremy Finklestein’s bubbe. Although the cards in the perfect rectangle foil pouch were the same in every starter pack and therefore there were no surprises (Karl got one the day before me and I shuffled through them like an addict), it was still a cathartic experience to slightly turn my first holographic (a.k.a. “holo”) in the light and watch the shiny paper dance and sparkle.
Machamp became my new champion. Why the blue, four-armed humanoid with rippling muscles had elected to fight barehanded instead of wielding weapons, I would never understand—he could hold four swords or axes or maces if he wanted to—but Karl said he was a great Pokémon nonetheless.
But the real fun, the real thrill that would get the heart pumping as we walked through that glass door with the chiming bell overhead, was to pick up a couple of “booster packs” from the goateed gentleman behind the counter.
The contents of these packs were completely random. Three packs could equal three holos—or zero. And those in the former camp felt like King Arthur for the day, gay and spry, while those
in the latter sulked and pouted and refused to cooperate when deciding on dinner options.
I thumbed through my cards with a Cheshire cat smile as we sat at our booth in Burger King. I could barely get through two bites of my oversized chicken sandwich before repeating their names in soft whispers: “Venusaur. Scyther, Nidoking. Venusaur. Scyther. Nidoking.” Man, oh man, did that feel good.
The cards we bought were in English—you were supposed to use them to play a game, after all—but they sold Japanese ones, too, that just seemed so damn authentic. My mother wasn’t having it, though. She said my grandfather would be rolling over in his grave if he knew I was trading cards written in Japanese.
“Hey Mom, did he fight with a sword like a samurai when he was in Japan?” My grandfather had “island-hopped” the Pacific during the war—not as glamorous as it sounds, I would later discover.
“No, honey,” she said. “We’re Americans, we fight with guns.” I still liked to imagine my grandfather in a black-and-gold kimono, wielding a shimmering katana as he battled Japanese infantry.
At Glenwood, the jubilance around Pokémon cards barely lasted the week. By Friday’s recess, I had lost Venusaur, Scyther, and Nidoking in three separate transactions that all remain a menacing blur. Jack Yamamoto was instantly thrust into the position of arbiter for all transactions and his say was final, sealing the deal with a stern, “No trade-backs.” He rendered his decisions from on top of the jungle gym as we stood in the wood chips in clusters and soaked it up like he was Christ on the mount. He even “translated” the cards written in Japanese and made rulings on those, too. But we had no way to check if he was just making stuff up because no one else at Glenwood knew Japanese. Paxton even insisted that Kevin Liu read the cards as a way to balance Jack’s unchecked powers, but Kevin cried that he couldn’t read Japanese at all. Paxton said he was lying and believed he and Jack were in cahoots.
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