Death of a Pharaoh (5 page)

Around that time,
I decided that my superhero fixation was a mistake. Sure, I’d divvied out
justice like the time I painted the word ‘WIFEBEATER’ on Mr. Hanover’s homeroom
blackboard and hid it with the pull-down map of the United States. He raised it
in the middle of social studies class and within thirty seconds, a dozen copies
appeared on Facebook. Even after the janitor came in and scrubbed it off, you
could still see a faint outline for the rest of the semester.

A month later, he
resigned and never came back. Only problem, the security cameras mounted in the
hallway recorded me entering the classroom first thing in the morning and they
found the can of spray paint in my locker. I got six weeks detention for that
stunt and my parents had to pay for the cleanup.

My regular trips
to the Principal’s office became a major problem so when I suddenly won a full
scholarship to a private boarding school, my parents decided that a change in
environment might help. I never applied or anything, which seemed strange to
me. They told me it was probably an equality thing, me being black and all. It
meant the end of karate, which sucked and I’d have to be a lot smarter about
ragging on rich kids if I ever wanted to graduate from high school. Worst of
all that was the last time I ever saw my Sensei, David. He closed the dojo
shortly after I left. I couldn’t help but feel that I’d let him down. It
bothered me more than I knew it should.

Despite all my good intentions, it only took three months for me to be
in trouble again. A video went viral among the student body showing a sixth
grader in his school uniform jerking off to a porn movie. He was less than
endowed, and I’m being generous here. What he lacked in size he made up for in
passion; lots of moaning and groaning. Only thing, he sounded like a girl! The
dude didn’t stand a chance. He became the butt of some pretty awful jokes about
his micro-penis and everywhere he went the other students started to imitate
his moans. After a week of torture, he hung himself at home with his school
tie. He had just turned fourteen.

We all frequented
an internet café and video rental place a block from my new school. Many of the
younger kids went there to surf the internet, especially in the absence of
content filters on the machines. For most of the 5
^th
and 6
^th
graders, it meant their first chance to see pictures of naked chicks.

The manager was
cool and if he knew what was going on, he didn’t seem to mind. There were
rumors that if you paid him a dollar, he would let you go into a private video
booth at the back and watch real porn. Some days there was even a line up.
Seems he had a hidden camera in the booth and filmed all the young guys doing
what came natural to any twelve or thirteen year old staring at hard-core sex
for the first time. He wasn’t a pedophile or anything just a clever
businessman, and he´d figured out he could sell the videos to adult web sites.
They proved so popular he was pulling in at least five hundred bucks every
week.

The filmmaker was
clever and nothing in the videos gave away the location. He always made a point
of being out front and visible when someone occupied the booth so nobody
suspected him of being a peeper. Some students put it all together but nobody
said anything. The tragic event didn’t seem to cut into his business and a few
guys even went in there hoping that getting their junk on the internet might
make them popular with the girls. I was sick thinking that another kid might be
outed in public as a wanker and I was determined to do something about it.

If my sudden
interest in porn surprised the video guy, he didn’t show it and only warned,
“Don’t make a mess on the floor.”

The small cubicle
had a chair in front of the video monitor, a box of Kleenex and a waste
disposal basket in the corner. It overflowed with used tissues. It was
disgusting but the perfect place to start a small fire. I knew if I didn’t sit
down the camera wouldn’t record my face but I forgot all about my backpack.

I’d gone online
and learned how to make a smoke bomb with ordinary household stuff. All I
needed was a few feet of PVC pipe, some sparklers like the ones for birthday
cakes, a roll of masking tape and a package of aluminum foil. Just to be
certain, I manufactured two. They were small enough to stuff behind the wooden
box housing the video screen. I stood back to survey my work and noticed the
action for the first time. Some dude with a massive dong was giving it to a
blonde woman up the ass. It looked painful but she didn’t seem to mind. The
scene distracted me for a moment until I heard a knock on the door.

“Hurry up in
there,” a young male voice insisted, “I got class in fifteen minutes.”

 I fumbled
for the lighter in my pocket. The first of the sparklers ignited just when the
actor did. I opened the door and found Errol McKinley standing with his hands
in his pockets looking frustrated. I told him the video screen had gone blank
and I could smell smoke. The bombs worked even better than they had in the
instructional video and before I made it to the front door, everyone was
yelling fire and the manager picked up the phone to dial 911. I tried to look
innocent as I blended into the crowd gathered outside. Errol seemed real
pissed. Black smoke poured out the windows when the fire truck pulled up.

As I’d hoped, the
fire inspector found the camera and the sophisticated peephole for filming. He
called the police and they seized the manager’s computer, raided his home then
arrested him for child pornography. They also salvaged the last tape and
identified my backpack. That along with the school blazer and the black skin of
the arsonist narrowed down the potential pool of suspects.

I remember the
call to go to the Headmaster’s office and the detective waiting to speak to me.
They went to my home and discovered the cut up pieces of pipe and the empty
boxes for the sparklers. It was my first arrest. By some miracle, they didn’t
expel me from school. My parents managed to hire an expensive lawyer and since
it was my first offense, I got probation that consisted of three months of
supervised detention at school.

The police charged
the video store manager with numerous counts of manufacturing and possession of
child pornography and a judge convicted him to five years in prison. He’d have
gone down for a lot longer, but since he never touched any of the kids or even
induced them to masturbate, he got off easy. The video store shut down right
after the fire and the owner of the building quickly turned it into a fancy
coffee place. The infamous private booth lived on as one of those urban legends
that never seemed to die. All sorts of people swore that at least two famous
Hollywood actors had been filmed there as teenagers with their peckers in their
hands, even though neither of them ever lived in the area and at the time they
would have been the right age it was a Mexican restaurant, not a video store.

My most recent
escapade disappointed my parents; they had hoped that the change of schools
would keep me out of problems. They threatened to send me to a boot camp for
troubled teenagers that summer, so I promised to make more of an effort. I
ditched my vigilante persona and settled into a draconian study routine to fill
up the time in detention. Several of the school’s more colorful characters
shared my shelf-lined prison. Those of us doing hard time, meaning a detention
of more than a month, tended to sit every afternoon at the same table in the
Humanities section away from the prying eyes of the Head Librarian, Mrs.
Robinson. Everyone called us the Folsom Four.

Susan was the
oldest of the group, born and raised in White Plains and WASPY to the core! She
bounced from one private school to another a whisper ahead of a litany of
crimes ranging from seducing a male teacher to getting caught with a large bag
of marijuana in her locker. Her parents invented wealthy and her father simply
wrote large checks to get her into a new school every time. The family called
themselves Republican since the days of Lincoln and her father even went so far
as to resign from his country club when the Clinton’s joined.

Susan was
attractive but styled her hair a bit weird and dressed in a kind of ancient
Egyptian gothic that made her look vaguely like Elizabeth Taylor in the movie
Cleopatra, except with green cat-like eyes. She wore a large cross-like, symbol
called an ankh on a chain around her neck and preferred her men dead and, if
possible, mummified.

Barely a month after
Susan transferred in, Brittany the head cheerleader and the most popular girl
in the school, called her a freak in front of everyone in the cafeteria when
she sat at the ‘cool’ table by mistake. Brittany and her minions made Susan’s
life miserable for a month. Susan sucked it up and made a plan.

One day she
patiently waited for her nemesis to finish cheerleading practice. Since
everyone ignored her anyway, she had no problem slipping a dose of Rohypnol, a
date rape drug, into Brittany’s personal water bottle. Susan knew the route she
took every day after school. She followed her through the park and pulled her
into the bushes after she collapsed. Susan had enough time to retrieve the
stray dog she had befriended two weeks earlier. A mutt she called Jasper. He
started to jump up and down on his leash, with his long tongue slobbering all
over, when she showed up where she had left him tied that morning.

Jasper loved to
nuzzle warm damp places, a habit Susan had discouraged up until today. He also
adored yoghurt, especially peach flavor! The resulting ninety-second video
starred Jasper giving a spaced out Brittany what appeared to be sloppy canine
cunnilingus, even if it wasn’t real. She woke up hours later on the grass with
a severe headache but no memory of how she got there. She dragged her bike home
and slept for twelve hours.

The next morning,
she stopped in to see the school nurse before homeroom, who for some strange
reason insisted she receive a rabies shot. None of her friends would even look
at her in class and her bubble-butt boyfriend, the star quarterback of the
football team, broke off with her via a text message calling her a ‘crazy
bitch’. By lunch, she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She had never
experienced life as a social outcast. Someone finally took pity on her and
showed her the video. She changed schools the next day.

Tony Zamora emigrated
from Mexico as a kid.
He
became involved in Latin gangs in his early teens and supposedly reliable
sources suggested he had several tattoos depicting the faces of his murder
victims on his back. He denied it but no one remembered ever seeing him without
a shirt.

By some miracle,
he managed to leave that life behind to get an education. A year ago, walking
home from school, a gunman stepped out of a car and shot him in the right knee.
Tony refused to rat on the shooter. He understood that it was revenge for
abandoning the gang. He was grateful they hadn’t killed him. He recovered but
still walked with a slight limp.

His other claim to
fame came from his legendary ability to escape from custody on the numerous
occasions the police arrested him as a juvenile; twice after being cuffed in
the back of a police cruiser, once from county lockup and another time from the
courthouse right before his scheduled arraignment.

One day he was at
his locker, minding his own business, when a senior started a fight with a much
smaller student in the hallway. The bully slapped the kid a few times,
challenging him to strike back. The little guy cowered in fear. It probably
would have ended in nothing but Tony suddenly slammed his locker shut, walked
over to the aggressor and clocked him with a solid right hook. Two teachers had
to drag him off the guy. The loser had a shiner for a week. He was smart enough
not to press charges, saying it was all a misunderstanding. Tony still got
detention.

Alexander dressed
like Justin Bieber in drag, which didn’t look that different to be honest. He
wallpapered the door of his locker with pictures of the cherubic teen
heartthrob, but on the outside. Alex used to get beat up a lot. Despite the
abuse, he refused to stop wearing nail polish to class. Some of the jocks gave
him a real hard time. He dreamed of becoming a makeup artist and nobody even
spoke to him except just before Halloween. His costumes rocked.

After an important
football game, he showed up at the team’s victory house party in a spectacular
drag outfit that could have fooled a gynecologist. No one recognized him under
the wig and makeup. In one of the bedrooms, he performed oral sex on six
members of the team while they all laughed and snapped pictures of each other
with their phones. Alex told them she was a reward from a grateful alumnus.
Hardly the first time anyone had sent a whore to a team party. Within an hour, the
event was all over Facebook racking up an impressive number of likes from
jealous classmates.

Later that night,
the mystery blonde bombshell performed a live striptease in front of a webcam,
all the way down to his hairy butt and everything else. The football team lost
every game for the rest of the season. Several of the players transferred out
of the school district. A few remained in denial and swore it had been a real
chick all along. The principal didn’t have a clue what to do with Alex. If he
expelled every student who went down on star athletes, there wouldn’t be a
cheerleading squad. Three months’ worth of detention might at least protect him
from revenge seekers.

We couldn’t have
been more different as a group and I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t some
tension between us at first. Still we faced almost three months together in the
library every afternoon for two hours. We needed each other not to go crazy
with boredom. By the end of four weeks, we bonded and for the first time in my
life, I found a group of friends. All of us had gotten into trouble for taking
justice into our own hands, some of us with more or less imagination. We were
outcasts from the rest of the student body and by the time our sentences
finished we were best buddies. I think Tony and I grew the closest. I knew all
of his terrible secrets and the real meaning behind the tattoos. If I ever
found myself in a desperate situation, I’d want him to have my back.