Twerp (3 page)

So when I say I hate Shakespeare, I mean it. Lots of guys say they hate him, and what they mean is they hate the stuff he writes. But I don’t only hate the stuff he writes. I hate
Shakespeare
for writing the stuff. I hate the
guy
, William Shakespeare. If I met him on the street, I’d just keep walking. Because you know, you just
know
, while he was writing the stuff he was writing, he was thinking how clever he was. He was sitting at his desk, writing the words, and he could’ve just said what he meant, but instead he prettied it up until it could mean everything or it could mean nothing or it could mean whatever the teacher says it means. That just drives me bananas. So if keeping this thing going gets me out of
Julius Caesar
, then count me in.

Heck, I’ll write a whole book if it gets me out of Shakespeare.

January 26, 1969

Well, I guess the joke’s on me. No
sooner had I put that last sentence to paper, “Heck, I’ll write a whole book if it gets me out of Shakespeare,” than I ran smack into writer’s block. That’s what Selkirk called it. One minute I was writing like crazy, and then … 
pffffft
. Nothing. I must have stared at those thirteen words for six hours—off and on, not six hours straight—and tried to come up with the next line, but it was as if my brain was spitting cotton. As if my skull was a movie theater and the audience was sitting there, waiting to watch the next movie, and I could hear the sound of crickets. It got to the point that I was about to throw in the towel, and I said so to Selkirk, but he told me about writer’s block and said to keep going, even if
what I wrote didn’t make sense, or even if it wasn’t connected to what came before.

So …

Not to brag, but it’s a well-known fact that I’m the fastest kid in the sixth grade. Which means I’m the fastest kid in Public School 23, Queens, which only goes up to the sixth grade. That’s 997 students, and I can outrun every last one of them. I once outran Mike the Bike—
on his bike
! I raced him the entire length of Ponzini. It wasn’t even close. He said he eased up at the end because he was afraid of crashing into the side of the building. I told him I’d race him again, out on the street, and he said no. So that was that.

What it reminded me of was that old John Henry cartoon, you know, the steel-driving man versus the steel-driving machine. Except I didn’t drop dead at the end. Yeah, I know. It’s a stupid cartoon. It’s also kind of prejudiced against Negroes, if you look at it in a certain way. Like when John Henry’s mother says, “Pleezed to know ya, son. I’ze your maw!” That’s just not right, the way it shows John Henry and his mom and his steel-driving friends speaking such bad English. But as stupid as the thing is, it makes me bawl like a baby. (It’s not that I cry a lot. The pigeon and the cartoon are just exceptional things, which is why I’m talking about them.) Even though I know what’s going to happen, even though I’ve
got the entire ending memorized, when that preacher says, “John Henry didn’t die … no, he just stopped living in his mammy’s shack, and he started living in the hearts of men forever and a day,” that kills me every time. Even just writing about it chokes me up.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter. My main point is that I’ve done worse things than the thing with Danley Dimmel, and one of those worse things was causing a car crash. I’ve never told this story before, not even to Lonnie. It happened a couple of years ago, so I figure enough time has passed. It also ties in with what I said before about outrunning Mike the Bike. That wasn’t a big deal to me, or at least not as big a deal as the kids around here made it out to be, because I’d been outrunning
cars
for years. No lie.

Here’s what I’d do: I’d wait on the corner of Parsons Boulevard and Thirty-Third Avenue. There’s a traffic light there, so it was always a fair start. Then, when the light turned green and the car took off up Parsons, I’d take off on the sidewalk, and it was a race for the entire block to Thirty-Fourth Avenue.

Parsons is chewed up pretty good around there, scattered with potholes, so the driver would have to be nuts to step too hard on the gas. What I’m saying is, I know I can’t beat a car on a level road. I’m not so stuck up as to think
that
. But with the potholes, I’d always pull ahead about two-thirds of the way up the block, and then we’d
go neck and neck until I got to the corner at Thirty-Fourth Avenue, where there’s no traffic light … and that’s when I’d shoot out across Parsons, in front of the car. If the car had to slam its brakes, I counted that as a loss. But if it kept going without braking, I counted that as a win.

Except there was this one time I was going up against a brown Ford LTD. The driver was a Negro guy with a huge Afro haircut, which I noticed but didn’t think too much about. I
should’ve
thought about it, though, because it meant he wasn’t from the neighborhood and likely didn’t know how chewed up the road was. So me and the LTD were going neck and neck the entire block, and I could hear him banging and skidding on the street next to me. When I shot across in front of him, he was so close that I could feel a gust of heat from his grill.

The car screeched. I knew I was safe because the sound was trailing off behind me. But when I glanced over my shoulder, I saw the LTD spinning out. I stopped and looked back. It was careening sideways toward the sidewalk on the west side of Parsons Boulevard. I watched it in disbelief. As the LTD jumped the curb, the guy had let go of the wheel, and he was holding his hands over his face. He’d given up trying to control the car. He was bracing for the crash. It came a second later. He hit the fire hydrant on the corner. The sound was just hideous, a sudden
pow
—like a paper bag popping, except much worse,
much louder. I saw the guy’s Afro jerking to the side, and then, a second later, he dropped out of sight.

I know it was a stupid thing to do, because I could’ve gotten in trouble, but I ran across the street to make sure he was all right. When I got to the car, he was slumped across the front seat, holding the side of his head and moaning.

“Hey,” I called in to him. “Are you all right?”

He didn’t answer. He just kept moaning.

“Hey … hey …,” I said.

“I’m all right,” he mumbled, but he had a bad cut on his forehead. I could see the blood under his hand.

“You should get out of there,” I told him.

“No, man, I’ll be all right. Just let me be.”

“But you’re hurt.”

“Let me be, man.”

I wasn’t listening to him. I started tugging on the driver’s-side door. Except it was jammed shut. I couldn’t budge it. The guy looked like he might have been able to kick the door out himself. He was young, maybe twenty years old, and the huge Afro made him look strong. Getting out of the car, though, seemed like the last thing on his mind. He was staring at his right hand, which was covered with blood, as if he was trying to figure out whose blood he was looking at.

That was when I heard the first siren. It was a couple
of blocks away, coming from the direction of Northern Boulevard.

“Oh, man,” I heard him moan. He tried to straighten up, but it was no use.

“Just keep still,” I told him. “The cops will get you out.”

“Oh,
man
!”

“They’ll be here in a minute,” I said. “But I’ve got to go.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m … I saw what happened.”

“There was a kid who ran out in front of me.”

“Sorry, I didn’t see that. I just saw the crash.”

“It was the kid’s fault.”

“I’m sorry … I’m so sorry.”

He turned his head to face me. It took a lot of effort. I wanted to cheese it, but I felt like I should look him in the eye, like I owed it to him. There was blood gushing out of his forehead, clotting on his eyebrows and running down the bridge of his nose. As soon as he got a good look at me, he knew who I was. But he wasn’t even mad. He muttered under his breath, “Oh, man!”

Then he just kind of smiled.

“I have to go,” I said to him.

“You’re a fast little dude.”

“I’m so sorry ….”

“For a white boy, I mean.”

“Really, I have to go.”

“Do what you got to do.”

As soon as he said that, I took off across Parsons Boulevard and ran as fast as I could up Thirty-Fourth Avenue. I wasn’t a half block away when I heard the first police car pull up. But I didn’t look back. It was like the story in the Bible, where the guy’s wife looks back at Sodom and Gomorrah, and God turns her into a pillar of salt. That was how I felt. Like if I looked back, the cops were going to figure out what happened and come after me. Which I guess doesn’t have much to do with the pillar of salt thing, now that I think about it, except it shows why you shouldn’t look back.

But here’s the kicker. It turned out
the car was stolen
. The guy came out of the accident all right, but he wound up in jail. I found out from the cops themselves. Two of them showed up in a squad car the next morning, asking around for witnesses. I was feeling real guilty and thinking about telling the truth, but then one of them mentioned the stolen car, and at that point I decided to lie through my teeth. Probably, I should’ve told the truth. But what was the point? He wasn’t in trouble because he’d
crashed
the car. He was in trouble because he’d
stolen
the car. I had nothing to do with that. The crash was only the reason he got caught. Still, it’s not as if I felt good about it.

That was the last time I raced a car up Parsons Boulevard.

January 31, 1969

You should’ve seen the look on Lonnie’s
face when I told him I was getting out of doing a book report on
Julius Caesar
by writing stories about myself. He didn’t even believe me until I showed him what I had so far. He read the entire notebook, start to finish, and when he handed it back to me after school, he was real impressed. That made me feel good. Lonnie’s not the kind of guy who blows smoke. He tells you the truth, whether it’s going to hurt or not. Getting a thumbs-up from Lonnie meant more to me than getting an A on an English assignment, if that’s what you decide to give me, Mr. Selkirk. (Hint, hint.)

There was only one thing I wrote that Lonnie didn’t like. He said I made it sound as if the pigeon dying was
his fault. Which it wasn’t. I was the one who chucked the rock, so I’m the one who killed the pigeon. Lonnie only put the idea in my head.

Now that
that’s
cleared up, I’ve got another story to tell. Lonnie’s the one who reminded me of it when he read about the writer’s block I had last week. He said I should write about the time Quick Quentin lost his eyebrows.

The thing about Quick Quentin is that he’s just a great guy. That’s an ironical nickname, by the way. He’s a slow runner. Plus, he talks kind of slow. But he understands what he has to understand. He lives in the Hampshire House down by Union Street—which is also where Eric the Red and Howie Wartnose live. (That’s not Howie’s real last name, obviously. His real last name is Wurtzberg, but Lonnie called him Wartnose once and it stuck, even though he has a regular nose.)

That’s our group: Lonnie, me, Quick Quentin, Eric the Red (because he has red hair), Howie Wartnose, and Shlomo Shlomo (because his mom always calls him twice for dinner). Lonnie’s the one who thinks up nicknames for us. So far I don’t have one, unless you count Julian Twerp. He called me that a couple of years ago after I intercepted a pass he threw during a football game. He was just frustrated. He didn’t mean anything by it, and it never stuck. I’m sure it only came to him because “twerp” sounds like my last name, Twerski. But it hurt, kind of,
since that’s also what Amelia calls me when she gets in a bad mood. Twerp. Anyway, I’m sure Lonnie will come up with a good nickname for me sooner or later. That’s what he does. It’s one of the things that keeps us tight as a group. I mean, it’s not like we’re an official club. You don’t get a membership card or a decoder ring. It’s nothing like that. But it’s hard for an outsider to join in because there’s so much history. The time Quentin lost his eyebrows is a good example.

It happened on the playground out behind the Hampshire House. After Ponzini, that’s where we hang out most often. We’d hang out there even more, but it’s a regular playground with a swing set, a slide, and a couple of seesaws, so there’s always moms and their kids hanging out too. I don’t hold it against them. That’s where I’d want to hang out if I were a kid. What I mean is, that’s where I’d want to hang out if I were a
tyke
. My granny would always call me her “tyke” on account of I’m younger than Amelia. That made me a tyke, at least in her eyes. She was still calling me that when she passed away a couple of years ago. Except by then I was ten years old. What could I do? She was seventy-five years old. Even if I could change how she thought about things, what would be the point? She didn’t mean it as an insult. Now she’s dead and gone, and she’s not going to come back to life, so it’s a dead issue.

Well, the day Quentin lost his eyebrows was the fifth of July last year. I remember the exact date because it came right after the Fourth of July—which, I guess, is a stupid thing to say because the fifth of July always comes right after the Fourth of July. But the Fourth last year was a total washout. It rained from morning till night, so none of us had a chance to shoot off our fireworks, and on the fifth we were still walking around with pockets full of firecrackers and cherry bombs. Lonnie, I remember, had a couple of M-80s—which means he had, like, a half stick of dynamite in his jacket pocket.

The weather on the fifth wasn’t much nicer than on the Fourth. It was overcast and real hot, which worked out well for us because the playground was muddy and the benches were wet. That kept the moms and their kids home. The entire back of the Hampshire House was ours. I remember it was Lonnie, me, Howie Wartnose, and Quick Quentin. Plus, Bernard and Beverly Segal were there. Bernard and Beverly are brother and sister. They hang out with us sometimes—mostly because Howie has been sweet on Beverly since the first time he laid eyes on her three years ago. He’s never been the same since, and that was back in
third grade
. I mean, it just ruined him. There are times you can see his eyes go out of focus. That’s what it’s like. One second he’s good old Howie, yakking it up, and then the next second, he notices Beverly Segal
walking up the block, and he’s like a zombie, shuffling his feet back and forth, staring down at the sidewalk or straight ahead at nothing. You want to tell him to let it go. Because of him, the rest of us have to put up not only with Beverly—who’s all right by herself—but also with Bernard, who’s still in fourth grade and almost as big a waste of human ingredients as Victor Ponzini.