A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (21 page)

He didn't like my other friends, the kids in my D&D group. I'd assumed, without thinking about the matter in much detail, that it was just because he was sort of jealous. Time I spent playing Dungeons & Dragons was time I didn't spend hanging out with him. Then one day Eddie and I happened to run into Patrick. He was just hanging around on a street corner near my house, straddling his new bike, like he was standing guard.

“What are you guys up to?” Patrick asked, after we'd exchanged our initial pleasantries.

“Eddie and I were just down at Goodwill and we found a bag of darts,” I said, showing Patrick our haul: a ziplock bag full of cheap plastic darts with steel tips. “We were gonna go up to his place and mess around with them.”

“Mess around with them how?” Patrick asked.

“Throw them at trees or whatever,” I said.

“Wow,” Patrick drawled. “That sounds like … fun?”

“Don't be a dick,” Eddie said. He'd been quiet up to that point, staring at Patrick's bicycle. Eddie liked to do stunts on dirt bikes, and his great ambition in life was to get the money together to buy an ultra-light Diamondback aluminum stunt bike—not unlike the one Patrick happened to be sitting on. Eddie had been making kind of a show of looking at the bike, but now, suddenly, his attention was on Patrick.

“Oh, yeah, right,” Patrick said. “Don't be a dick. I'll work on that.”

This kind of behavior barely registered with me. This was how the D&D kids talked to me all the time. But I could see right away that Eddie wasn't going to stand for it. My first reaction was to get mad at Eddie because I didn't want him to embarrass me in front of my straight friend. Then everything just kind of happened.

“The hell is your problem?” Eddie asked Patrick.

“The hell is your problem?” Patrick repeated mockingly.

“Eddie,” I said. “Don't worry about it. Come on.”

“Keep that shit up,” Eddie said to Patrick, ignoring me, “I'm gonna kick your goddamn ass.”

“Oh yeah,” Patrick said. “I'm so sure.”

Patrick had three or four inches on Eddie, so maybe he honestly thought this was going to go his way. I just sighed and covered my eyes with my hand, so I wasn't watching when Eddie hauled off and punched Patrick in the ear.

Patrick went sideways and nearly tripped over his bike. When I looked again, he was getting his balance back and looking at me like it was all my fault. Which, I realized, it might be. The punch-Jason-in-the-stomach game had only happened a few weeks earlier, and I'd told Eddie about it afterward. He'd asked me what the hell was wrong with me, and said maybe I deserved to get hit if I just stood there and let them do it.

Eddie had a temper. I'd seen it before. But as events were unfolding now, it dawned on me that Eddie might have been looking for an excuse to kick Patrick's ass right from the minute we ran into him on the corner.

“Why'd you hit me?” Patrick shouted at Eddie.

“Keep talking shit, asshole,” Eddie said. “See what happens.”

“Fuck you!” Patrick screamed at him.

Eddie started moving toward Patrick again, but Patrick somehow managed to spin around and get his bike going. Eddie got a piece of Patrick's T-shirt as he was riding away, and I heard the neck rip. But then Eddie let go and just started chasing Patrick on foot. As Eddie was running, he slowed down and grabbed a few rocks out of the tilled earth of someone's flower garden. When Patrick got to the end of the block he stopped to see where Eddie was, and Eddie started throwing rocks at him as he ran. Patrick rode away. Eddie stayed after him. They kept going like that until they went around a corner and disappeared from sight.

I stood there for a few minutes. When Eddie didn't come back I went home and waited the rest of the day for him to call. He never did. When I called his house, nobody answered.

Eddie wasn't at school the next day either, but I ran into Patrick during lunch.

“What were you doing hanging out with that maniac?” he asked. “He chased me for, like, an hour. Every time I tried to stop he'd throw more rocks at me.”

I just shrugged.

“He told you not to be a dick,” I said. “Maybe you should work on that. You know—like you said you would.”

Patrick shook his head in amazement—at my audacity or my obtuseness I wasn't sure—and walked away.

 

29

We had a lot of boat people at my school. That was the term we used for refugees from Southeast Asia. They numbered about sixty, in a school with just under four hundred students. I knew a lot of them were Vietnamese. Others were Laotian, Cambodian, and Thai. I had no idea where any of the Southeast Asian countries were, except that I knew they were somewhere in the Pacific. I was vaguely aware that a lot of the boat people had arrived in the United States on what amounted to rafts—that they'd taken rowboats and sampans and canoes and pushed them into the water on the other side of the ocean, then navigated halfway around the world to get to the United States. I knew they were trying to get away from a war. I assumed it was the American war in Vietnam and that it had just taken them a really long time to get to the United States. I wondered, sometimes, how they carried enough food and water in a rowboat to cross the Pacific, but I didn't give any of it much serious thought. They were tiny little brown people who didn't speak my language, and I found them annoying.

Once, in fourth grade, I'd tried to bully one of them. It was a conscious decision on my part. I wanted some social status, and I knew none of the white kids would care if I bullied one of the refugees. I didn't understand the exact mechanism that would turn cruelty into social status, but it seemed to work for all the kids who'd bullied me so I decided to give it a shot. Not very Han Solo of me, but I was sick of taking shit off people. So I took a page out of Dickie Seever's book and pushed one of the refugees while we were in line to get back into the school after recess.

He was half my size. Like, actually half my size. Five or six inches shorter. Half my weight. He turned around and gave me a confused look, like he wasn't sure what had just happened.

“Get the fuck out of my way,” I said. And I pushed him again.

I had an impression afterward that I'd stepped on something, like a land mine, that exploded when messed with. He screamed something in his own language and jumped on me. I couldn't work out a blow-by-blow afterward. It was just a blur of surprise and pain. He pulled hair. He bit. He scratched. He tried to jam his thumb into one of my eyes. He punched me in the head, ears, and face about a hundred times in the space of about forty-five seconds. At some point I managed to dislodge him and throw him a few feet away. He bounced up and came right back at me like something out of a bad dream. I turned around and ran fifty or sixty feet, then checked over my shoulder to see if he was following me.

He was still in line, but he was standing, looking at me, with his feet apart. Fists clenched at his sides. Breathing hard. Most of the American kids in the line were pointedly ignoring me. The refugee kids were all giving me the same blank look as the kid I'd pushed. Alert. A little expectant. The look of someone at sea, watching a storm cloud on the horizon.

I went in last after recess that day. Not surprisingly, the fight didn't garner me any additional social status. And after that I tried to stay as far away from the refugees as I could.

Except, of course, that when I got to Mr. Fields's class in the fifth grade, he started his own cultural exchange program.

The refugees weren't usually in the mainstream classrooms. They were in what were called bilingual classrooms, though usually the classes were at least trilingual. And the classes tended to cover multiple grades. There was a mixed fifth and sixth grade class like ours one floor down, and Mr. Fields worked out a deal with their teacher to have our classes spend some time together.

It started with a food exchange day. We all filed down the stairs, each of us carrying one serving of our favorite food for the other class to sample. We brought peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, hot dogs, macaroni and cheese. Some kids brought potato salad. Cold chicken. I usually went home for lunch and ate Top Ramen, so I didn't bring anything. The Southeast Asian kids brought cans of stuff I didn't recognize at all. The cans had writing on them that wasn't English. I tried some of the canned food, thinking, How bad could it be? and was surprised to discover that it could actually be horrifyingly bad. I started with a red thing that might have been a beet slice but that turned out to taste like raw potatoes and lye. The Thai kid who'd brought it looked at me expectantly.

“Is this how I'm supposed to eat it?” I asked him. “It's not usually … cooked? Or something?”

“No,” he said. “That's how we eat it.”

“It tastes … a lot,” I said.

He smiled and nodded.

After the food exchange day, we went down to the bilingual classroom about once a week. Usually there was a project of some kind—pointing out where we were born on a globe or something—and then some socializing.

One day me and another kid from my class, a girl named Joanna, were talking to a group of kids from Cambodia. Somehow we got onto the subject of our families, and one of the Cambodians, a girl about my age, said she was staying with some other people who had come to the United States from her village because her family was dead.

We knew these kids were coming from a war zone, but we weren't really clear on what that meant. Most of us had never heard someone say that their entire family was dead, and the novelty of it surprised Joanna into asking a question she might not have asked otherwise.

“How'd they die?” she asked.

“You know big animal?” the girl asked, making some kind of weird gesture with her arm, holding it in front of her face and kind of waving it around.

Joanna and I exchanged a look and shook our heads.

“Big!” the girl said. “Big animal!”

“Oh,” Joanna said, in a moment of pure inspiration. “You mean elephants?”

“Yes!” said the Cambodian girl. “Elephants. Other soldiers came at night. Shot guns.” She mimed shooting into the air. “Elephants ran over my house.”

Joanna and I looked at each other. Looked at the girl. And I was pretty sure I must be misunderstanding her. Because the picture I had in my head was just ridiculous. So I asked some questions to prove to myself that the thing I was thinking was just wrong.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “You don't mean they shot their guns and scared the elephants? And the elephants ran over … your family?”

One of the other Cambodians translated. The girl looked at me and nodded.

“And that's how your family died?” I asked.

She nodded again.

“Were you there?” Joanna asked. “In the house?”

“Yes.”

I laughed nervously, and Joanna glared at me. The Cambodian girls actually seemed less offended. Maybe they'd seen that reaction before.

I thought about the elephants for the rest of the day. I thought about them on my walk home, and I thought about them while I watched TV that afternoon. And, sitting there watching TV, I had what I regarded as a genuinely adult thought: I realized that this girl's family had been trampled by elephants in my lifetime. And odds were good I had been sitting somewhere watching TV when it happened. It occurred to me, right there, to wonder who else was getting trampled by elephants while I was watching TV. How many little kids were being orphaned or killed, right that minute, while I was sitting there watching TV?

I asked my dad about it that night, over dinner. He said little kids were always being orphaned and killed. He snapped his fingers when he said it.

“It's happening now.” Snap!

“And now.” Snap!

“And now.” Snap!

“How can that be true?” I asked. “How do we … do stuff? While that's happening?”

Dad narrowed his eyes at me and shrugged. “That's just how it is. People can't worry about stuff like that all the time. We have to live.”

I heard what he said, but his voice was full of other things—things that had been growing between us, but that we didn't talk about. I was becoming a proxy for his anger at the rest of the world. The subtext of a lot of his stories lately had been that I was going to grow up to be straight—to be the kind of guy who told him he was gross for kissing other men, and who didn't care if little Cambodian girls got their entire family crushed to death by elephants. Maybe I already was, I thought, remembering the kid I'd pushed while we were in line after recess.

I didn't ask my dad any more questions that night. I went to bed, and I thought about the girl from school, and the elephants, and the boy I'd bullied. I fell asleep counting my sins.

 

30

Dad was going out a lot at night. Three or four nights a week, he'd come home around five in the evening, get into his party clothes, and head out until two or three in the morning. I was ten years old now, and I wasn't supposed to be afraid of the dark anymore, but I still followed the same routine I'd used when he was working for the Hodads, after we moved out of Marcy's house. I'd turn on the TV as soon as I got home and leave it on until I had to go to sleep. I'd collect all the knives in the house and put them under the couch. When bedtime came around, I'd check all the doors and windows. Then I'd put the knives back in the kitchen and turn the lights off, starting with the ones farthest from my room and working my way back until I climbed into bed. I had trouble falling asleep when I was home by myself. I always wanted to go back to the TV. It made me feel like there was someone there with me. Someone who'd notice if something bad happened to me. But Dad got mad if he came home after my bedtime and I was still awake, so I just had to lie there, alone in the dark, and wait for sleep to come.