Eighth Grade Existentialism

“Hey, Drake!  Hey, John-NEE!  Get over here—don’t run away from me!”

I was walking home from the New York Public Library branch on 23^rd Street, a warm spring breeze blowing off the East River into my face.  Just a block and a half to go to reach my building and home sweet home.  I had seen Kowalski and crossed to the other side of the street, hunching down slightly in the vain hope he wouldn’t see me, or wouldn’t bother me if he did.

Jimmy Kowalski was the misfit in the eighth grade class at the Church of the Epiphany School.  He was Arthur Fonzarelli before “The Fonz” sprang from the mind of Garry Marshall.  Only Kowalski had a mean streak.  He stood on the other side of the Great Trans-Puberty Divide from most of the rest of us.  He was a mystical figure, as incomprehensible as Beowulf in the original Old English, a mythic half-man, half-boy whose gloomy, lurking presence in the classroom was the turd in the punch bowl.  Whispered rumors said he had been left back—twice.

He leaned against the fence in front of a construction site, his coal-black eyes watching me walk back across to the north side of the street, doing his bidding.  His thick black wavy hair was slicked back into a duck’s ass that the nuns were always telling him to get cut.  A Marlboro dangled from the thin slit of his mouth—he was far enough away from the church and the penguins, as he called the nuns, that he wouldn’t get caught.  The collar of his black leather jacket was turned up on the left side.  Ebony skin-tight chinos hugged his slender hips, held up by a thin black belt like the Puerto Rican guys wore.  The heel of his side-zippered black ankle boot rested in the meshing of the chicken-wire fence behind him.

At his side was Mary Jordan, every bit a soul out of place and time as Kowalski was.  Her dark hair tumbled loosely around her shoulders; her fully-developed breasts were pressed against the soft leather of Kowalski’s jacket.  She wore a plaid skirt that rose above her knees, an almost licentious amount of thigh showing for 1962.  She cut her eyes away from Jimmy towards me for a moment.  I thought a saw a flash of a smile on her face.

She and Jimmy were nearly inseparable after school.  They’d grown increasingly brazen, making out on the corner just down from the school entrance, with the nuns making their way back from school to the convent.  Some kids whispered that they had “gone all the way,” although I wasn’t real clear what that entailed.

I crossed the sidewalk to where Kowalski was standing, feeling his cold, disinterested gaze on me.  “Look, Jimmy,” I said.  “I’m not looking for any trouble here.  I gotta get home.”

Kowalski chucked me on the face, nothing hard, but the gesture carried the whisper of a threat and the sting of condescension with it.  Nothing I wasn’t already familiar with.  “Relax, Johnny.  I just wanna talk to you for a minute.”

I took a breath and let it out slowly, relief tinged with wariness.  “Sure, Jimmy.  But I really have to get home soon.”

“No sweat, kid.  Mary here says you and her got sent down to the principal’s office today.”  The words bounced from his mouth on a cushion of bemusement, as if he couldn’t quite wrap his mind around my getting disciplined.

It was true.  We were practicing the Latin responses in the Catholic Mass, and Mary and I were the only ones not mouthing the verses.  I wasn’t because I served as the altar boy at the seven o’clock Mass every day and could recite the lines in my sleep.  Some mornings, I did.  I suppose Mary wasn’t participating because she seemed to have her struggles with English, let alone a language that hadn’t been used conversationally in centuries.  It was our bad luck that the principal, made one of her irregular “visits” by way of the PA/intercom system at that particular instant.

“Sister Thomas, this is Sister Agnita.”  The identification was redundant; everyone in the school knew her foghorn voice as well as they knew their own mother’s.  “What is the class doing today?”

“We’re practicing the Latin responses to the Mass, Sister,” Sister Thomas said.

“Is everyone participating fully?”

“Yes, Sister.  Everyone except Mary Jordan and John Drake.”  An ice-cold bayonet of fear traversed my spine before thrusting itself into my stomach.

“Send those two down to me.”

My heart was beating faster than a hummingbird’s on speed as I slowly walked down the four flights of stairs, Mary trailing silently behind me.  When we arrived at her office, Sister Agnita was standing in the hall just outside her door.  She was short and heavyset.  She was dressed in black from her bonnet to her floor-length skirt, the only relief a white collar choking her thick neck and a silver cross with the crucified Prince of Peace nestled on her bosom.

She waddled up to the two of us, forcing our backs to the wall facing her office.  She stared at me, her ice-blue eyes blazing.  “Sister Thomas says you weren’t doing the responses to the Mass?  Is that true?”

The option of lying never even occurred to me.  “Yes, Sister.”

“Why?”

“Sister, I serve Mass every day.  I hold the Communion plate in front of you each morning.  I know the lines by heart by now.”

The first I knew she had slapped me was the searing sting on my left cheek that dislodged my glasses from my nose.  Tears of humiliation and pain and anger began to well up in my eyes.

Sister Agnita turned to Mary Jordan.  “Were you saying the Latin responses?”

“N-no, Sister.”

I saw the nun’s right hand begin to swing upwards.

“Don’t!  Don’t hit her!”

I couldn’t believe I had just said that.  I had confronted the Supreme Authority at the Church of the Epiphany School and told her not to discipline a student.  But amidst the fear I felt, I somehow knew I had done the right thing.

“What did you say?”

I cursed my prepubescent, boy-soprano voice for its warbling reediness, but I continued regardless.  “I asked you not to hit Mary.  My mother has always told me it’s not right to hit a girl, that it’s a sign of weakness.”

My head swam in a sea of adrenaline as I looked at the principal’s face, a kaleidoscope of black bonnet, blue eyes, and beet-red complexion.  I braced myself for what was likely to come.

Sister Agnita stared at me for a few seconds, and then regained control of herself.  “Both of you, get back to the classroom this minute.  And I’d better not hear any reports of misconduct about either of you for the rest of the year.”

I looked at Kowalski, wondering how he might take offense.  I shrugged and said, “Yeah, Jimmy, we did get sent to the principal’s office.”

He draped a leather-clad arm around my shoulders.  I cringed involuntarily, but the gesture was friendly, not threatening.  “Hey, relax, Johnny.  I’m not gonna hurt you.  Mary says you stood up to Sister A for her, stopped the old bag from hittin’ her across the face.”  I could smell the acrid tobacco smoke on his breath as he spoke.

I pulled away from him.  “Yeah, Jimmy, I guess I did.  It’s not right to hit a girl, even if it’s by another girl.”

He looked at me.  “You don’t like me, do you?”  His voice was neutral, genuinely seeking an answer, not baiting me.

“I don’t not like you, Jimmy.  I don’t know you, and you scare me a little, like you do a lot of the kids.  We’re two different people, Jimmy.  I’m an altar boy; you’re, well, um… not.”

He looked at me and took a deep draw off the Marlboro.  He blew the smoke out of the corner of his mouth without lifting his gaze off me, the gray-white cloud missing my face by a few inches.

“Yeah, Johnny.  You’re right.  We’re two different people.”  He took another drag .  “Well, I wanna tell you something.  From now on, you don’t have to worry ‘bout nothin’ from me.  You did right by my girl with that ol’ bag, and I ain’t gonna bother you ever again.  OK?”  He stuck out his hand.

I shook it.  “Sure, Jimmy.  Thank you for that.”

“No sweat, buddy.  You’d better get on home, now, huh?”

“Yeah, I should.”  As I turned to go, Mary leaned over to me, pressed against my arm, and kissed me on the cheek.  “Thanks,” she whispered.

I started walking down the street when Kowalski said, “Hey, Johnny!”

I turned.  “Yeah?”

“Whatcha wanna do when you get outta school?”

I looked at him, thought for a minute, and said, “I don’t know yet, Jimmy.  I haven’t figured it out yet.  You?”

He shook his head and flipped his cigarette into the street with his thumb and forefinger, an arc of small red sparks trailing the spent butt.  “Nah, I ain’t figured it out either.”

© 2009, Kenneth M. Rhodes