Lunchmeat

by Ben D'Alessio

  “Vic, it’s Paxton. So what’s your move here?” Paxton sounded like a lawyer on the verge of a windfall, salivating over that thirty percent contingency.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Man, this is Julie Fischer we’re talking about here.” He lowered his voice as if suddenly realizing Jenna was also at the party. “Vic, I’m supposed to be neutral here, but I don’t know how any guy could pass up Julie Fischer.”

  I had to pick her. I mean, I liked Jenna, even though I didn’t touch her in the bathroom. But Paxton said it—“any guy” would pick Julie Fischer. I already couldn’t talk openly about masturbating, I didn’t own anything from Abercrombie and Fitch, and I still didn’t have any ankle socks (even though I had asked my mom like five times already), so I had to resort to folding my socks down and tucking the fold underneath my heel. I didn’t go to sleepaway camp in the summer and I wasn’t going to have a bar mitzvah next year, even though I used to celebrate one night of Hanukkah with Jeremy in my old town.

  “Has that fag made a decision?” I could pick that voice out of the Greek chorus—Pierce Stone. There I was, making a decision between two of the hottest girls in the sixth grade and I was still a fag.

  “Hey, hey Vic, you make a decision yet?”

  I heard both upstairs and downstairs groups explode in mirth, and the camaraderiec pop of high-fiving. “Yeah, fine, Julie.” And I hung up.

  I wedged back into the couch and sucked down my Pepsi, which had gone warm from neglect. It was already halftime and Ohio State was up 14-7.

  “You heard about that shit with those Summit guys, right?” said George.

  “Yeah, I played some of them in lacrosse. I recognized the names,” said Tony.

  “That was some fucked-up shit. You hear they shoved a broomstick handle up her ass?” said George.

  “I thought it was a tennis racket?”

  “She was sodomized with a lacrosse stick,” said Karl without turning around from the computer.

  “If you don’t get me a Pepsi I’ma sodomize you with a lacrosse stick, boy!” said George. “Yo, I heard Trevor Stone got one of the pics. Ya know, of the shit that happened.”

  “I don’t want to see that,” said Tony.

  “Yeah, me neither,” said George.

  Jenna wasn’t “cool” with “the switch”—as it was called in the halls of Millburn Middle School—she was devastated, as it turned out. Part of me wanted to do a trade-back, as if the two Deerfielders had been holos.

  In the auditorium, I would sit closer to John Thompson than I ever had before—sometimes right next to him. I can’t lie: it felt good when John asked Pierce Stone to move down so he and I could discuss Monday Night Football together—we didn’t even talk about the game.

  I bought new clothes, put gel in my hair, and by spring, had socks that fell well below my ankles.

  An updated version of the hot list had circulated the sixth grade, and despite my dark-horse ascendance to the pinnacle of the social pyramid, I hadn’t moved on that godforsaken list! I couldn’t explain it. I was with the unanimous number one but remained as stagnant as the Japanese economy.

  I considered my many talents—speed, especially on the football field, writing epics centered around the Middle Ages, Warcraft strategy, Monty Python and the Holy Grail scene reenacting. But Jenna wasn’t aware of any of these talents; she had come to one game where we beat Chatham, but I think she left before I scored my touchdown.

  Julie even cemented my “lack of hotness” suspicions when she said, “Vic, you’re, like, not hot yet, but you’ll be one of those guys who comes home from college and is like, really hot.” I had to wait seven years.

  We walked into “town” Fridays after school and stopped in front of the Starbucks on the corner of Millburn Ave and Main Street.

  “Hey Vic, you’re like, Italian, right?” asked John Thompson’s girlfriend, Jessie Levinson (number two). “I think that’s hot.” Not hot enough. “John’s Italian too.”

  I didn’t think “Thompson” was an Italian name, but maybe it was anglicized from Tompsonini or Tompsonello or something like that. I’m sure my father would’ve told me if John was Italian. He was always pulling Italians out of the closet, like John Cabot and Napoleon, and even that crying “Indian” from the Keep America Beautiful PSA from the ’70s—Sicilian, from Louisiana.

  I made room on the sidewalk for a group to pass by, and a small hand took hold of my right butt cheek. I jumped into a Lexus parked on the street and saw Michaela Silves wink and blow me a kiss over her shoulder.

  “What? What is it, Vic? A spider?” Julie hadn’t seen.

  “Hey! Hey, Julie! Jessie!” Pierce Stone called from the other corner, sucking down the light brown iced tea nectar from the Millburn Deli—Josh Glassman, Mitch Farber, and Paxton followed. He drank from his plastic half gallon, letting it spill on the sidewalk and on his chestnut top-siders. “Hey, you guys see these yet?” He held out his cell phone—he was the first in the class to have one—and displayed the picture to the screams and gasps of the girls: it was a pic from the Summit rape shoot.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you, Pierce?!” screamed Jessie as a Starbucks barista came out to ask us to please keep it down.

  “That’s a lacrosse stick in her ass!”

  “You’re heinous.”

  He proceeded to click through photo after photo of the girl displayed in different poses with various objects shoved in each orifice.

  “You know she has mental issues, Pierce? How could you think this is funny?” said Jessie.

  “What? She’s a retard. I know.” He proceeded to smack his limp right wrist against his chest and exhale, aaduuurrrrr.

  Uproar.

  I shot Paxton a look with Jedi Force intensity. He stopped laughing. But Pierce Stone didn’t stop. And maybe he was intentionally provoking me or my irascibility was glowing in my face, but from my point of view, he was duurrrrring inches from my shnozole.

  I smacked the phone onto the sidewalk. I probably would’ve gone for a death knell stomping as a sonorous “Fatality” shocked downtown Millburn like thunder if the same barista hadn’t picked up the cracked phone from the cement.

  “What the fuck, Ferraro!”

  “Okay, you guys need to get out of here,” said the barista.

  I turned down Main Street as the group, headed by Pierce Stone, followed. “Hey! You know how expensive this phone is? I could sue you! Hey!” I kept walking. I had told Tank I would meet him in the Charlie Brown’s parking lot and we’d go to his house for a sleepover. “Hey! Ferraro! You’re going to pay for this, if you can even afford it!”

  I had my backpack with me, but I still probably could’ve outrun the four of them. I hit the parking lot, but there was no sign of Tank. Pierce Stone turned the corner into the lot, holding his phone and yelling something indecipherable, short of breath. Mitch Farber, Josh Glassman, and Paxton followed.

  When he stopped sucking wind, he stood up and got so close to me I could make out a string of coleslaw still stuck in his teeth. I could’ve knocked those teeth right out of his mouth if I wanted to. My father put a punching bag and a speed bag in the garage, and I proved to be a natural. “Put on some weight, Vito, and you could be the next Rocky Marciano,” he would say. My father taught me the value of the jab and how a fight is won with your feet, not your hands. But he reminded me to only hit someone in the face if you really want to hurt him. I really wanted to hurt Pierce Stone.

  He smacked his limp wrist against his chest, leaving his pink face bare and vulnerable.

  “You’ve got to work the jab, Vito. It’s here. Here. Here,” my father would say as his fist landed inches from my face. “But be careful. Short Hills isn’t like how I grew up in West Orange. Back then, we’d knock the crap out of each other and then make up. Now, they sue. Everyone sues!”

  I clenched my
fists and looked the sock right in the eye and was about to drop one of those lines I fantasized about in bed, like something a paladin would say before smashing his warhammer into the earth, but a car with big shimmering rims screeched into the parking lot. “Eyy, eyy Vic!” yelled Tank, hanging out the passenger-side window. The bass made the pavement shake. “What’s this shit?!”

  Tank popped out of the car with two guys who were either black African or black African-American, but not like Silas. They wore their hats backward and had on these long, crisp white t-shirts.

  I pictured the three of them with wings sprouting from their shoulder blades, like Hussars riding into the fray during the Battle of Vienna.

  “Yo, you good, homie?” asked one of my reinforcements.

  I checked Pierce Stone’s pants to see if he had wet himself again—he was dry. But he slowly inched backward until he was half hidden behind a Mercedes.

  “Yo Vic, get in.” I got in. “Yo, these are Carina’s friends, Pierre and Henri.”

  “What’s good, son?” said Pierre, the dreadlocks spilling onto his shoulders from under his hat.

  “Hey, those are like Ricky Williams dreadlocks. I like them a lot, but my parents say I’m not allowed to grow ’em. I always give myself dreadlocks in Madden.”

  “Ha! Yo Henri. Check this shit—my dude here wants dreads!”

  “Yo, that’d be tight, my nigga. Tank tells us ya ball pretty good? Me and Pierre here play for Irvington High School.”

  “Like, football? Yeah, I’m a running back, which is why I tell my dad I need dreadlocks, because all the best running backs in the NFL have ’em. But he says there aren’t many Italian running backs in the NFL, except for, like, John Cappelletti and Franco Harris.”

  “Franco Harris was a Mario Brother?” asked Pierre.

  “My dad can always find the Italian in someone. I always thought Franco Harris was black African-American.”

  “What other African-Americans are there? Like white ones?”

  “Yeah, our friend Silas is from Africa, and he’s white.”

  “Y’all got a white nigga?”

  “I’m not sure. He is from Namibia.”

  “Where’s that at?”

  “In Africa. So, are you and Henri black African-Americans or just black Americans?”

  “We both Haitian.”

  I remembered finding Haiti—that adorable western slice of Hispaniola—one of the times I’d scanned my father’s atlas and imagined lounging on the island paradise under the palm trees with long, flowing dreadlocks as waves crashed upon the white sand and rushed up the beach, barely reaching our scattered bocce ball set.

  “That is so cool. I wish I was from an island. You guys ever play bocce? I heard it’s called pétanque in French. You guys speak French? My mom knows a little. She says everyone used to take French in school. I’ve always wanted to learn it, but I was good at Spanish at Glenwood so I just stuck with it. My dad says I can’t take Italian until high school. So, you guys ever play bocce—I mean pétanque—on the white sand beaches of Haiti speaking French? You guys ever go back to visit your tropical home?”

  “Go back? I ain’t neva been. Me and Henri, we was both born in Newark.”

  Henri tore through the sloping, snaking streets of Short Hills, going so quickly around blind turns that I caught myself praying in the backseat again, this time the Hail Mary.

  We pulled into the DeVallos’ driveway and took the stairs that hugged around the house right down to Tank’s bedroom door, which stuck out like a hobbit hole in the shire.

  “Yo, Short Hills is gettin’ hood!” said Pierre as he lit a cigarette and tossed the pack to Henri.

  “Eyy eyy, Tanky boy, you want one, my nigga?”

  “Man, you know Tank don’t smoke that shit. He’s a good kid. Yo Tank, get yo sista out tho.”

  My eyes started to itch like I was at the Geigers’, bathing in Mr. G’s smoke.

  Carina turned off her stereo and came outside for a cigarette. I could smell the chemicals of her newly dyed electric-blonde hair as she sat down next to me and sucked down the cigarette like she had been smoking for years, even though she was only fourteen.

  “Freddy, Mom says she won’t be back until Sunday. She’s going to New Mexico with Roger. She left money for you on the table upstairs.”

  “No one calls me that, Carina. And how could you smoke those? That shit is so bad for you.”

  “I wish my ma’s left me some money, yo. You rich kids got the hookup,” said Henri.

  I never considered myself a “rich kid,” but teachers would always tell us we were. They would say it like it was our fault, as if we carried around some pox that could only be cured with pulverizing self-awareness. Don’t get me wrong: there were plenty of rich kids funneling into Millburn Middle School from all the different Short Hills neighborhoods. I just always thought I was different. The Jews went to sleepaway camps in the summer and the WASPs went to this thing called Bartley: “Where boys are molded into men.” There they learned how to court girls and properly hold a knife and fork and ballroom dance and crap like that. Everyone went vacationing to the Caribbean and nobody’s mom worked—some of them even had nannies to cook and clean and take care of the kids while Mom drank wine.

  My mom yelled at a bunch of them once because they gave her flak for not picking up bagels from Bagel Chateau and brought Nature Valley bars for the basketball team snack instead. “These women—don’t work a day in their life and have nothing better to do than… bitch”—she’d look around to see if my father was in earshot—“about the… the god—the damn snack. God give me strength.”

  But the teachers would throw a blanket of privilege over all of us, even the kids who didn’t take Caribbean vacations and whose parents worked to afford their little houses in Millburn or an apartment above Buncher’s downtown, like my friend Jabes—we called him Jabie—who came to Millburn from that other slice of island paradise, the Dominican Republic. Jabie’s mother never seemed to stop working, and sometimes when we would go eat our deli sandwiches at his apartment across the street, we could hear his mom snoring from her bedroom after her shift like a troll under a bridge.

  Maybe I was a rich kid. I didn’t really know, to be honest, but I did know that when we drove down Springfield Avenue through Irvington, or on I-78 East to get to the Portuguese restaurants in Eastside Newark, that I loved those neighborhoods with tight houses that had porches and sidewalks where everyone could just walk around and hang like in Hey Arnold! I didn’t know, though, that last week two boys about my age were casualties of a drive-by at the corner of Stuyvesant and Lyons Ave.

  “Those two little dudes was just mindin’ they own business,” said Henri.

  “I bet it was Jermaine and his crew. He got beef with Ali and the rest of 21st Street.”

  “You guys better be careful,” said Carina as she exhaled the smoke from her filtered cigarette. “We don’t have to worry about drive-by shootings here.”

  “Don’t you worry about us, C. You know me’s and Pierre works good-good with all the crews.”

  “Hey, do you guys have guns?”

  “Ha! Nigga, I’m always strapped!” Pierre turned his hand sideways and simulated the hammer with his thumb.

  In the past year, I had attended so many bar mitzvahs I thought I could recite the Torah myself: Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech haolam… I was jealous of them, not because of the attention or the money or the immediate manhood—Josh Glassman said he got, like, twenty thousand dollars for his bar mitzvah—but because of the photo montages they would show as everyone enjoyed their dessert. I wanted to show everyone pictures of me and Tony and Karl and George in the Geigers’ basement or on the front steps of the house we rented in Ocean City.

  Sometimes, if the celebration was at a hotel, I would leave the party and wander the hallways by myself. One time I even
took my shoes off and sprinted from end to end like Deion Sanders returning a kickoff from goal line to goal line.

  Not to say I was always bored at them or anything. I had my first kiss at Alex Liebersfeld’s bar mitzvah, with Carly Feldman. It was okay, but the real memorable part of that night was when Alex’s uncle tossed a set of keys to my father, who was waiting to pick me up by the door in sweatpants and a New York Jets satin starter jacket, to fetch “the silver Beamer convertible.”

  “I’m not working tonight,” my father said calmly as he handed the keys back to the unfazed gentleman.

  At the start of eighth grade, I had already dated Stephanie Hinkle, Julie Greenberg, Carly Feldman, Julie Fischer again, Jen Weichselbaum, another short stint with Jenna Tisch, and now Jessie Levinson—John Thompson’s ex-girlfriend.

  “Why don’t you date a nice Italian girl?” my father would say, to which I would remind him that from November 2003 to February 2004, I dated Julie Esposito, but Julie Fischer had told Stephanie Hinkle that she liked me again, so right up until the start of lacrosse season, I dated number one. Then she dumped me for this new kid from White Plains who was the friend of a friend of a camp friend’s friend.

  I also hadn’t smiled in fourteen months. Despite my best efforts at protest, I got trapped in those ubiquitous silver braces suctioned onto each tooth with hot glue. My teeth had grown in jagged and on top of each other like a mako shark’s. Sometimes I’d pick out food stuck in the metal and give it a sniff—a dreadful habit—and my lips would curl. That first night, I could feel the wire pulling each tooth into a single-file line like a row of Red Coats forming up to attack the Continentals.

  Karl was skinny now—he just stopped eating. He didn’t need braces; instead his eyes triple-aged and he needed glasses to see pretty much anything.

  I was skinny too, but that’s because I had a growth spurt and couldn’t keep on any weight. Hovering close to six feet, I was cut and sinewy like an Egon Shiele portrait. No matter how much complete garbage I shoveled into my mouth, I wouldn’t gain a pound. I even went on a hobbit-like diet, with dinner at home around six, dinner around nine with the Geigers, and then a midnight snack, and still couldn’t break 175 pounds.