All the Wild Children (9 page)

“Watch where the fuck you walking!”

“I’m sorry.”

“You sure are.”  Laughter.  Then stares.

Don’t make eye contact.

“What you looking at White boy?”

“Nothing.”  Eyes down.  Pulse racing. 

A large yellow bus pulls into the lot.  Scared White faces look out the windows.  An informal line the suburbanites cling together.  The locals push in on them.  Laughing at the pale scared invaders. 

“Josh?”  I flinch.  Regain cool.  Hope no one saw it.

A boy dressed in a Pendleton shirt and hiking boots, touches my arm. 

“Peter.”  Our friendship won’t survive the ninth grade.

“Cool T-shirt.” 

“How was Maine?”

“Cool, my dad’s new girlfriend is a bitch.”  Our eyes dart.  Our hearts jackrabbit.  We struggle to keep it breezy.  A bell blasts.  I almost jump out of my skin.  A lanky Black kid laughs at me.  He is James.  He will be my friend later.  He will die in prison before he is twenty-one.  He is a good kid. 

Across the parking lot, Lark leans on the Ford, smoking Kools, talking shit to a couple older Black guys.  He doesn’t look over at me.

“You know where we go?”  Peter is starting to look paler than normal. 

“They’ll tell us I guess.”  Like misaligned magnets, repulsion pushes the kids apart as the segregated sea moves into Ravenswood.

“Get the fuck out of my seat.”  I look up.  She is huge with small brick colored blood shot eyes.  This is homeroom.  First period.  When I entered the room I hung back, then a pretty, real pretty girl looked up and smiled at me.  It was going to be OK.  Better than OK.  Sliding into the desk next to the pretty girl, I gave her a casual little head nod.  Her hair is shiny and flipped up in loose curls.  She reminded me of Diana Ross, not disco Diana,
Stop in the Name of Love
Diana.

“I said, get the fuck out of my seat.”  The big girl looks ready to hit me.  Looks like she could crush me.

“I don’t see your name on it.”  I look the desk over carefully, hoping the pretty girl is catching my cool.

“I always sit by Verdel, even a dumb ass like you should know that.”  Slapping her meat paws on the desk and chair she heaves.  I feel the airy sense of weightlessness.  She is picking me up.  Her biceps bulge like two Easter hams.  The desk slams down. 

“Chenille, he didn’t know.” 

“Fuck that noise.  Come over here and take my seat.  Uh uh.”  She looks like her next move is a punch. 

“Fine, I’ll sit wherever.”  I grab my backpack and move to the back of the room.  If I don’t look at Verdel, she can’t see my red face.

“Smart move White boy.”  James has a ratty afro and an easy grin.  “One time down at the park I saw Chenille kick this poor bum’s ass, a full grown man, so hard he never did get up, not while we were there at least.  I’m James, but they call me Slim Jim.”

“I’m Josh, and after today I think they’ll be calling me Sissy Boy.”

“Fuck that.  There’s not a cat at this school would go up against that she-beast.” 

The rest of the class is a mushy blur.  Class schedules.  Official campus rules.  Locker assignments.  James tells me which halls to walk down.  Which to avoid.  Where to eat lunch.  Where the kid was killed last year.  James is welcoming me to the new normal. 

I will only last a year here.  I will learn to creep houses with Tomas.  We will plot to take over the world.  We will buy an ounce of hash with swirls of opium in it and sell light grams.  We will buy Turkish hash with state seals branded in it.  We will sell light grams.  We will be badass.  We will drop acid.  I will eat speed in the morning to keep from crashing.  We will carry guns.  I will start every day smoking a joint with Tomas to keep the werewolf size fear from eating me alive.  I will crack when my brother gets hepatitis from a dirty needle and is bedridden.  I will tell my mother I am changing schools because of girls.  A White boy doesn’t have a chance here.  I will change schools because I’m afraid of dying.

1973, I’m just trying to get from one end of a day to the other without getting killed.  In my English class, Bob Dylan as poetry, I meet Tomas.  He is a half foot shorter than me and fifty pounds heavier.  He has the round face of his pueblo ancestors.  His parents were led by a coyote across the Mexican border.  His father cleans offices and banks at night.  His mother cleans their house in the day.  Tomas is smart, and funny.  We hit it off.  And not just because of the outcast thing.  There aren’t a lot of Mexicans in the school.  No, we actually like each other.  Tomas’s oldest brother graduated from Stanford and is a mover in the Chicano Brown Berets, activists modeled after the Panthers.  He had insisted Tomas educate himself. 

Tomas’s other older brother, Jorge, is an acid casualty, who insisted Tomas learn to get high.  Since I was along he taught me as well.  We sit in his pimped out VW bug and smoke massive joints until everything has a cotton candy glow.  All soft and sweet.  Then we can handle the morning drama.  At lunch repeat.  After school repeat. 

Tomas studies Leopoldo Zea, the theology of liberation and Kung Fu.  He tries to teach me Kung Fu, I am useless.  So he teaches me how to use a knife.  I’ve had some practice, the knife comes easier.  I carry a Buck lock blade knife in my pocket.  We play chicken after school.  You spread your legs apart.  The other guy throws the knife in the dirt between your legs.  You move your foot to where the knife stuck.  The space between your feet shrinks.  It takes more and more control to nail the dirt and not a foot.  Who ever quits first is the chicken.  Tomas and I should never have played.  Neither of us did back down real good.

I hold the Buck knife.  There is less than an inch between Tomas’s feet.

“Come on man, step off.”

“No, you afraid to toss, you step off.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“Neither am I.”

“Tomas, I don’t want to stick you.”

“Then don’t.  Step off, let me win.”

“You know that’s not going to happen, right?”

“Just quit fucking around and throw the knife.”

I do.  It sinks deep into his shoe and foot.  He doesn’t register any pain.  He leans down and pulls the blade out.  He wipes it on his pant leg then hands it back to me. 

“You missed.  I win.”  He walks with a slight limp for the next week and a half.  He never complains.  When I say I don’t want play chicken anymore he calls me a wimp.

Life is a tapestry of intersecting strings.  OK, mine wasn’t so much a tapestry, more of a rat’s nest of string.  The point is these lines intersect each other over and over again.  Each crossroad has the potential to change your life irrevocably.  Most don’t.  Most are impotent.  Turn left, turn right, same outcome.  Buy Levis or Sticky Finger jeans?  Converse or Adidas?  Seems so important at fourteen.  But in your heart you know it carries no real weight.  Then there are those moments you know can send your life spinning off the track.  You feel it somewhere deeper than your bones.
             

KSOL fills all of Ravenswood at lunch time.  A hundred kids with a hundred boom boxes.  Every car in the lot, all bring in the same funk driven soul.  Radio Free East Palo Alto, coming in loud and clear. 
You are the sunshine of my life, Me and Mrs Jones we got a thing going on…  Smile in your face, all the time they try and take your place Back Stabbers...  Strawberry Letter 23...  Get the funk outa my face, get the funk outa my face.  Get. The. Funk.  Outa my face. 
The music was reinforced with impromptu choirs and drums of every size beating out the rhythm.

There are a gang of unofficial rules to learn if you want to survive the day.  Piss at home, you go in the bathroom here, you ain’t coming out.  Same goes for the locker room.  Never dress for PE, take the bad grade, it’s better than a beat down.  At the end of the school year, the last week.  You cut.  It is payback week, it is last chance to fuck up a White boy week.  Peter doesn’t listen, got sixteen stitches in his head.

At lunch time, here are the options. 

1) Go to the cafeteria and risk having your money taken or not have it taken and having to eat the crap they served. 

2) Eat in the library with the other scared White kids, and be branded soft, an easy mark.

3) Hang in the quad with all the drummers and dancers and singers.  Problem, that area is Black only. 

4) Cross the quad fast, cross the no man’s land near the administration building, clear the gate and hit the parking lot, or the burger joint across the street, han
g
with the res
t
of the smokers and druggies.  Tomas and me, go with door number four. 

At the same time, Lark runs with Tanner, a skinny midget from Atherton.  No really, he is under five feet tall, rock star hair and clothes, cute as hell, girls love him.  But he is a midget.  Father is a doctor or some other cash machine job.  Never saw the father.  Saw the manse, they have big bank.  Tanner is a teflon junky.  Someone else always overdosed, someone else died or went to jail.  Tanner is bullet proof, and the little fucker knows it.  He plays pool down on the razor, bets on a game, doesn’t have a dime in his pocket.  If he loses they will kill him.  He loses.  He lives.  Don’t ask.  I don’t know.  When we got caught for creeping houses, Lark and I are arrested for grand theft, felony B&E.  Tanner’s name is never mentioned.

Lark also runs with Sammy, Donald Green and Lovelace.  Three hardcore ghetto princes.  They never roll unstrapped.  Everyone knows them.  Most fear them.  Lark makes a point that I am seen in the parking lot with them.  I am traveling under a diplomatic seal from then on, at least with the criminal set.  Doesn’t do a lot for me on campus, but in the parking lot I am solid.

Saturday.  Tomas and I take the train to San Francisco.  We go to Market Street and buy badass platform shoes.  I get a grey felt pimp hat.  I have a brown leather pimp coat.  Tomas has a tan one.  We look in store windows as we walk by.  Our reflections are badass, Superfly.

THE FIRST POTENT CROSSROAD

Tomas and I are walking back from lunch, we’re both a wee bit high.  Tomas shoulders me.  I bounce off a locker.  He laughs hard.  He coughs.  We don’t notice we have crossed into the quad.  We haven’t shown respect to the natural order of Ravenswood.

“You know where the fuck you are, boy?”  He’s big but dope skinny.  He has the slur and ashy skin of a junky.

“Yeah, do you know?”  His friends are not in any better shape.  There are three of them.  A finger hits Tomas’s chest and shoves.

“This look like bean town to you, you see your sister sucking my dick?  No?  Then what the fuck are you doing here?”  Tomas doesn’t answer.  He is in battle mode.  Coiled.  Ready.  I’ve seen him drop full-grown men in Kung Fu class. 

I slip my hand into my jacket pocket. 

“You gotta pay the toll you wanna cross our yard.”

They aren’t looking at me.  Tomas is clearly the threat.  If it goes pear shaped, they will gang drop him, then me. 

I snap the Buck knife’s blade open.  My hand curls around the handle.  I focus on the neck of the young man standing next to me.  I am ready to bury the knife in his throat.  I know I will.  If Tomas swings, I will stab.  It is the only option that doesn’t end up with us in the hospital or morgue.  I am calm and detached.

The ashy junky is getting aggravated at Tomas’s unemotional face.  He spits. 
A
lugi
e
runs down Tomas’s cheek.  If it is going off, this will be it.  But Tomas simply looks at the junky and smiles ever so slightly.

“Come on J, let’s roll.”  He turns, exposing his back to the junky and his pals.  It says take me if you think you can, cause I ain’t worried.  They can read it as well as I can.  I step past them and Tomas and I walk down the hall.  When we are finally out of the free-fire zone I close the Buck knife.  Tomas hears it click shut and nods.  He wipes the spit from his face with a bandana from his back pocket. 

“Man, I was sure you were going to take his ass out.”

“J, he’s a junky.  Why do I care what he thinks of me?  You on the other hand, you spit in my face and I will rip your liver out and feed it to Torso.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Good.” 

And like that, it is over.  We move on.  There is plenty more day to try and get through.  You get hung up on the past, you won’t be present.  And that can get a fella killed.

In hindsight I recognize that was the crossroad I could have turned left and stabbed that kid.  There’s no turning back.  I go to jail.  A White boy who killed a Black boy.  They have to toss the book at me or they have riots.  Whatever the outcome.  My life is completely different.

“Homes, did you hear that crazy shit went down in Belton’
s
clas
s
?”  James is smoking, leaning against Jorge’s bug.

“I didn’t make first period.”  I had been getting high.

“Homes, Lovelace and another cat drew down.”