by Paul Teodo & Tom Myers

I was nodding off. Choking on my drool, I coughed like a cat with a hairball lodged in its throat.

Turning, a lengthy piece of white chalk firmly planted between two bony fingers, she pointed. “Mr. Scracci, are you in need of assistance?” My brain stuttered. I was unaccustomed to being addressed with such formality.

Shaking my head, I gave her my grandpa Carlo’s “evil eye,” trying to back her off. We’d tangled all year, hence I truly believed her offer of assistance was lacked  any real concern for my well-being. And I, to be totally forthright, never had any of her interests in mind. I was a 16-year-old smart-assed punk with a hurray-for-me-and-the-hell-with-you attitude.

“Very well.” She turned back to the chalkboard awash in quadratic equations that would assuredly prompt me to, once again, return to a state of slumber. She tapped the chalk sharply on the slate leaving no doubt who was in control, who commanded attention, and who not to mess with.

Concentration was foreign to me. It was so much work, and it was so intrusive to the circus of events performing in my head;  fantasizing about girls, conducting instant replays on the tv screen of my mind, or wolfing down more red hots than any of my amigos.

There was a knock on the door. Before Miss Peck could respond, the visitor, dressed in khakis, brown wing-tips, blue shirt, and red bowtie, entered, note in hand, striding towards Peck as if she was the finish line. He was a runner; a purple lanyard held his laminated “license to roam” placard dangling from his pencil neck, its big black block letters reading “Permanent Hall Pass.” Runners were sequestered in the office that housed the deans of law and order and administrative staff, who always looked busy and who seemed to do absolutely nothing. He was either an offender, a rule breaker, on a work release program, delivering messages to teachers in lieu of serving detention, or a Christianly high achiever en route to an Ivy League education, or William and Mary, or some other bastion of Evangelical godliness, who would never misuse his position of free-reign throughout the hallways of our edifice of higher education to enjoy himself, such as dropping into the john to smoke a butt, sip a beer, or score points with a “bad girl.” My bet: the Christianly one, given the khakis, wing-tips, and the blue shirt. The bowtie just made him a holy dork.

He handed Peck the note. The class fell silent, knowing full well that such communiqués were always demand notices for a student to be released to the holder for escort to the office of law enforcement.

Peck seemed to enjoy the tension. She dramatically unfolded the note as if it were the decision by the “academy” for best picture. All results of the voting kept in absolute secrecy, only known by the bonded firm of Price-Waterhouse.

Lifting her purple, affixed-to-a-rhinestone-chain reading glasses , she studied the notice. Her eyes swept the page,  lips pursed, reading to herself, she looked up, scanning the room. Would the award go to the Western? The Romantic Comedy? The Art Film that nobody understood but was scared shitless to say stunk? Or was it The Foreign Film starring an Italian actress whose breasts would excite even good Christian boys?

“Mr. Scracci,” she announced with the tone of a staff sergeant, exuding a combination of authority and sarcasm.

What the hell had I done now?

“Go with him.” She pointed at the runner.

“Miss Peck,” I began, conjuring up some wisecrack that had yet to be totally formulated, “if I leave now…,” I paused, searching for the right line of bullshit, “I will miss your class, and you know how much I enjoy your tutelage.”

“Now! Mr. Scracci.” She pointed to the door.

Again with the Mr. What had I done to deserve such reverence?

Me and the runner exited class and headed to the stalag.

“What’s up Howie?” I had developed a habit of calling all males under the age of 18 “Howie” when I was not aware of or had forgotten their name.

Howie picked up his pace, not gracing me with a response.

I tried again. “Where to?”

He glanced back furtively and increased his gait to a near sprint.

“What’s the hurry?”

“Dean’s Office.” His shirt now armpit-damp, given his frenetic pace.

“So Howie.” I was hoping to slow him down, “You doing time, or this is your gig?”

His high-pitched hiss of disdain sealed it for me: this was his religion.

The office was an immense glass box separated into smaller cells by metal beams and glass doors, which segregated the thugs from the support staff. Each tiny space caged a frustrated disciplinarian anxious to instill terror in the name of justice into rowdy teens whose yet formed brains were scrambled, with hormones raging through their pimple-faced, voice-changing, bodies.  Each thug had his name affixed to the glass. Bruno, my crew-cutted football coach, his whistle of authority, ever dangling from his thick neck, with a penchant for overstuffed and aromatic sandwiches, which he devoured as if someone was about to yank it from his meaty paws.

Eppelman doubled as an honors English Lit teacher, whose  wool sport coats smelled of mothballs, and was rumored by many to be fond of torturing student-criminals using Medieval methods, viewing them as just desserts for fires being set in a trash cans, bottles of Mad Dog being discovered in a “Howie’s” locker, or lonely hunks of aromatic dog-shit resting precariously on a window ledges in the Science Lab. And Router, who served as a shop teacher. Router was the most curious as Router was a she. A no-nonsense, I’m on to your shit, kinda woman. She was fair, but didn’t coddle you. If you were wrong, which all teens were (that was their biological, developmental, responsibility), she would point it out, leave no room for excuses, and ask you “what the hell are you doing?” And not wait for a response. No “ifs, ands, or buts” about it, Router was a hard-ass.

Howie pointed to Router’s office.

Shit.

✶

I raised my hand to knock. She beat me to the punch. The door flew open. “Scracci, get in here.”

No Mr. from her.

“Sit,” she said, as if I was an unruly dog.

Router took a seat behind her desk. She picked up a thick file and thumbed through it. I waited, figuring since it was her party she should make the first move.

More time passed. I told my foot to calm down and my gut to stop acting so bijigitty.

“Do you know why you’re here?”

Finally.

“No clue,” I said.

“Have you ever heard of the National Honor Society?”

“Nope.”

“I would think not.”

I said nothing in response, learning from all the legal tv shows my old man watched that criminals who were about to be interrogated for any illicit deed they were suspected of committing, should answer the question only, and offer nothing else.

“Well, Scracci,” still no Mr.? “The National Honor Society is a prestigious organization for high school students. It acknowledges outstanding academic achievement, high moral character, and community service.”

“Okay.”

Again recalling Perry Mason and his sidekick Della Street’s counsel to their clients. Offer nothing.

“You qualify academically, but your attitude is not up to standards. Therefore, we are disallowing your induction into the Society.”

I looked over her shoulder through the glass. I noticed Bruno, his whistle still dangling from his thick meat-like neck, hunched-over, wolfing down a sandwich. Pepperoncini? Salami? Mortadella?

“What do you have to say for yourself?” Router leaned over her desk.

I couldn’t contain myself. I mean, it was like when Joey Farillo hit the cop car with the snowball and they nailed me for it. I told ‘em it wasn’t me. The cops were grilled me hard, trying to get me to rat out the perp. I acted like they had broken me. Showed ‘em a phony tear. They got all happy and shit. ”So who was it, Kid?” they snarled. And without skipping a beat, I blurted, “Your momma!” Needless to say, my disrespect for their mothers did not sit well with the men in blue. I walked away with a shiner that I blamed on an errant encounter with a door knob when my good mother, acting as if she was in total shock upon seeing my purple eye, screamed, “Frankie, what happened?”

“I’m waiting.” Router stood up, my fat file still in her hand.

I looked at her, and then it just came gushing out. Like a geyser, uncontrolled, but very pointed. “Bullshit.” I could feel the smirk tighten across my face. Enjoying my utterance immensely, I repeated, with more gusto, this time. “Pure bullshit.”

She slammed the file onto her desk. “That’s what I’m talking about!”

“Whataya mean, Ivanka?” I had learned her first name from another delinquent who’d clued me in to it subsequent to one of her rigorous interrogations.

“You can leave. We are done here.”

“C’mon, what’d I do?”

“You got a good head on your shoulders, but that head is shoved very far up your ass!”

She stopped me in my tracks. I needed to regroup. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that. But I hated hearing it. So I flipped to attack mode in my mind with a fuck her and her stupid society, instead of using her pointed observation as an offer of assistance and a back-handed compliment.

“You know what you can do with your stupid Honors or Society!”

“Scracci, you’ve got a lot to learn.” She threw open her door and pointed for Howie to escort me back to Peck’s prison.

I was gonna blow her a kiss goodbye, but I figured I’d stepped in enough shit for the day.

✶

For the next two years, me and Router had our share of run-ins. But I still made it through and graduation was only a few days away.

“Frankie, you goin’?”

“Where?”

“The assembly.”

“When?”

“Wednesday.”

“Why’d I wanna go to that?  It’s bad enough I’m goin’ to graduation.”

“Last fling kinda thing. Four years in prison and now we’re free.”

“I gotta work. I start Monday, at the Mill. The graduation thing is Thursday, and I’m takin’ the day off for that. I ain’t losin’ another day of pay for some assembly.”

“You serious about this?”

“Yeah. She’s the one.”

“You’re 18.”

“The old man went to war when he was 18.”

“Different times.”

“Like I said, she’s the one.”

“You set a date?”

“Nope. Gotta make some dough first. That’s why I’m at the Mill. $2.85 an hour plus shift diff and overtime. I should be set in a year. It’ll be small thing, at the VFW. The old man’s got an in.”

“You should go.”

“I got no time for an assembly. What the hell do you assemble?”

“It starts at 10. You work 3-11. You’ll have time.”

“What is it with you?”

“Fuck it. You’re like talkin’ to a wall.”

That was Joey. He always tried to set me straight. Get me to do shit I didn’t wanna do, usually on the side of the law that was opposite of my inclination. Sayin’ it’d be good for me. Joey was going places, at least he said he wanted to go places. And it wasn’t anywhere near Avenue L or J. It was far, far away. Me? I knew my place. The Mill.

✶

Stella and I met at a dance. Some guy was botherin’ her. I stopped him. It wasn’t’ much. No fists or nothin’, just a couple a words and a shove or two. He came at me, but I had my guy behind me. Once he saw my deputy, he backed off.

So that was thatI had this thing in my head that no girl’d like me unless I did something special. So when the asshole started botherin’ her, I got my chance. . I was Prince Charming and she was the damsel in distress.  After that, me and Stella were tight. She was at a Catholic School and I was public.

She wasn’t pregnant or anything, but we both thought it was time. I mean, in South Chicago, guys and girls got married right outta high school all the time. The girls’d get a job at a cleaners or a restaurant and the guys’d go to work in the Mill.

Love at first sight. Or something like that.

✶

Joey got to me. I mean, he was a smart guy. Maybe it’d be fun. Maybe I could give Peck or Router some grief just so I could end our relationship on a sour note. I decided to go. The old man would be at work and my ma too, and Stella would be in school. I’d get in, and I’d get out. Zim, bam, boom.

I’d go home about midnight from the Mill, dead tired.  So I set my alarm, giving myself time in the morning to scrub my crusty skin and blow the mud outta my plugged nose.

I popped an eye open as the radio flipped on. “It’s going to be a hot one today. 93 by 10 a.m.” Bob Sirott was new on CFL and he had his squeaky kid overwhelming enthusiasm for such a ghastly temperature on this miserably humid day was not what I wanted to hear. I clicked him off before he could spread anymore joy.

I searched for my cap and gown. I’d heard you had to wear them if you were coming to this shindig. The gown was rolled up in a ball in my closet and the cap’s cardboard brim was busted, given my proclivity for whipping it through the air trying to outdo the neighborhood Frisbee freaks. I figured my natty attire would not sit well with the fashion hounds who would also be attending this ceremony. Good.

Hydration. That’s what I was in need of prior to showing up to this oven-like event. The Mill was always 110 or more and sweat poured outta me like a fountain while I toiled away, trying to stay out of sight of my hard-ass foreman. So to sit through this thing, I’d need liquid, and lots of it. I threw open the fridge and there they were, barely visible, winking at me. Two fat bottles of Schlitz. Quarts. The old man would buy two a week, but somehow, way in the back, hiding behind two overstuffed purple eggplants and an aromatic vat of sausage, peppers, and garlic, were the brewskies, resting on their sides. So if I liberated these big boys from behind the leftovers he’d, in all likelihood, never realize they had gone missing.

I dug through the junk drawer for a church key and found one that displayed the insignia of the old man’s favorite haunt. Cholak’s. Yes, that Cholak, Edward, Moose, Cholak, the wrestler. He had a joint on 103rd. A big moose head nailed to the wall, and a horn made of an antler that The Moose would blow into whenever someone would drop a tip into his pickle jar, trying to replicate the animal in heat. Gave the place some tone, now you call it ambiance.

Moose’s giveaway worked perfectly on the bottle cap and I chugged the entire brew in four or five gulps. The cold beer caught me off guard and made my head spin. An empty stomach and a quart of beer was what the experts on Avenue L called a “cheap high.”

I looked up. It was time to go. The brew just made me sweat more; I was dripping, to be exact. So I stripped down naked and grabbed my wrinkled robe. Realizing I had not finished the other bottle, and knowing additional hydration would be needed, I searched for a roll of duct tape. I figured if I could tape the other quart to my body and cover it with my robe I’d have a “take out” beverage to tide me over during the proceedings. A straw would be needed, however, to discreetly suck the beer from its open nozzle.

While the gown covered my beverage well, the hat made me look like an idiot.

Why was I going to this thing? Answering that could get me in trouble. Pondering the question would do me no good. But maybe I just wasn’t ready…. Shut your yap, asshole! You’re gettin’ married, you’re workin’ at the Mill, and that’s your life.

✶

As soon as I hit the door, I saw Router. She eyed me with the look of a presidential guard and locked on  like radar. The place was packed with robed-up students laughing, talking, and maniacally signing. Yearbooks.  I didn’t have one and I didn’t need one. Router took a step, then another, wading intently through the throng of giddy soon-to-be graduates.

“Scracci!” Her voice broke through the chaos. “Scracci!” she repeated.

She charged with purpose and anger like a hunter, and I was her prey. She parted the  ocean of teens and we came face to face. What the hell, I’d see what’d happen. So, I gave her a warm welcome, which was contributed to, heavily, by the beer. “What’s shakin’, Ivanka?”

“Scracci, what do you think you’re doing?”

“Assembling,” I said, my swollen tongue crippling my response.

Router paused, then stepped closer. Her nose shot up in the air like a hound greeting the new neighborhood mutt. She sniffed twice, paused, then glared at me. I was a dead man. “I smell alcohol,” she barked. The once-chaotic hallway fell silent.

I tried not to breathe, surmising that stalling oxygen intake and exhalation would keep me safe. No use. I was busted. “You’ve been drinking.”

I did not respond. Offer nothing, just as Perry Mason had advised.

“What’s that?” She pointed to the straw poking up from under my wrinkled robe.

In one fell swoop she grabbed the zipper affixed to my graduation gown and ripped it straight towards the ground. And there I was, buck naked with a quart of Schlitz duct-taped to my chest, a white plastic straw spouting from its nozzle.

“Scracci, you’re out of here! Now, this minute! Out!” She grabbed my arm and yanked me towards the door, pushing the robed-up, capped-up, tassled-up teens out of her way. She was a woman on a mission, pushing me through the door and out into the blazing sun. I squinted hard, totally disoriented, the sunlight an affront to my sensitive eyes, then finished my beverage. Ripping the tape off my skin I wept, hair follicles tearing from their roots. I tossed the empty Schlitz big boy into the trash and proceeded to walk home, genitals swinging freely in the breeze.

✶

It was a struggle to fit the key into the lock.  My eyesight had been seriously impaired from the alcohol and the blinding rays of the sun. After four or five poorly-placed jabs, I was able to cram the key into the lock and push open the door. The couch beckoned me, and I accepted, plopping down on the sofa, spread-eagle, and promptly falling into a drunken slumber. Thoughts of sugar plums were not dancing in my head.

✶

I was awakened by an icy splash to my face, cubes dribbling down my naked torso, soothing – only slightly – my fiery hair follicles. Over me was the old man, a bucket in his hand, his face angry, crimson. My ma next to him, in tears.

“The fuck’s goin’ on?” The old man, a man of few words.

“What happened, Frankie? Are you all right?” Ma, aware that at this moment only the slightest amount of sympathy for her wayward son would be acceptable.

“Router told us.” The old man stood over me like an executioner ready to flip the switch.

“Router?”

“We went to the assembly, Frankie,” Ma said, her voice sounding as if she were blocks away.

I tried to sit up. He pushed me down. “I took time off work, a goddamn vacation day.”

“Me too, Frankie,” Ma said, dabbing her tears, her voice still deferring to the old man. “The Honors.” A gold tassel dangled from her hand.

“Honors!” I yelled indignantly. “What the fuck are you talkin’ about!”

The slap was deserved. The crack echoed throughout the room. The next one caught the tip of my nose and ripped open my nostril.

My father hovered over me like a ref, and I was down for the count. “Cover yourself.” He said, pointing at my naked torso.

“Miss Router called us.” Ma took a step closer. “She said you were getting a gold tassel. You were in the National Honor Society. We were proud. We took off work to come.”

“But you got tossed, boozin’.”

I was puttin’ the pieces together through the Schlitz haze. I had to regroup, my nose thumping, blood dripping to its beat. “Can I sit up?”

“Keep your ass down,” the old man said.

“That stuff is bullshit. It don’t mean nothin’. I’m graduating tomorrow. I got a job, a good job,” I forced myself to say, “in the Mill.”

“You gonna marry that girl?”

I’d been asked that question a lot lately. Somehow, this time seemed different. But I couldn’t back down. “Yeah, for sure,” I heard dribble from my mouth, half-heartedly.

“You got your head up your ass.” He rubbed his face like a guy who’d just finished welding a pipe without a mask.

Again, a reference to my cranium as it related to my rectum.

“What about college, your scholarship, football. You love it.” Ma was working me good, pulling out all the stops.

“I got a good job!”

“You’ll be busted up before you’re thirty. The Mill will beat you down.” The old man’s way of offering concern.

“Me and Stella….” I could feel the lump in my throat, my defense weakening. I would soon be in tears or in a rage, lashing out to inflict damage on those who I loved the most, but felt I needed protection from.

“You’re a fuckin’ kid.”

“Kid?!” I was headed to a very bad place. What does a rat do when cornered? “Fuck you! What about you! You ran the streets of LA till the war broke out. You were a liar, thief, and a cheat. The fucking Nazis saved your dumb ass. Don’t give me your bullshit wisdom! You can’t even read!”

It was as if I had thrown the icy water in his face. I thought for a moment he was gonna take another shot at me. I sure deserved it, but he didn’t. I had hurt him, and for that I was sorrier than I had ever been for anything. He stepped back as if I had smacked him. I’d never seen the old man look so old.

“Do what you want,” he said, and walked out.

Ma wiped her tears, her eyes trailing the old man. She then turned to me, “Frankie, he loves you. And he is a good man.”

Problem was, but I wasn’t.

✶

It’d been 5 days since the assembly fuck-up. The house was like a morgue. Nobody’d talked to nobody. I worked as much overtime as they threw at me just to stay away.

I was lacing up my boots, getting ready for work, making sure the metal plates covering my toes were firmly in place, to protect my heat-rashed, scabbing feet from the errant steel that fell regularly from the cranes sliding back and forth overhead. I was a gopher in a purple hard-hat that identified me as just a common laborer.

The phone rang.   

“Yeah.” I wasn’t in the mood.

“I’m sorry,” Stella said.

More than I want to say here and now.

She found another guy. A beach boy. While I was working in the Mill, preparing for our life together  she’d been going to the Dunes with her friends. That’s where she met him. A fucking beach boy.

I hung up. I didn’t need to hear anymore.

✶

Walter Cronkite always sounded serious. He had a voice that demanded you believe everything he said. The old man watched him every night at 6, channel 2. He couldn’t read, but he knew the score. If he’d had more than a glass of his Schlitz he’d yell at Walter. He’d scream “War is hell and anybody who starts one with anybody should have his balls cut off!” His time in the Big One was horrific. Normandy. The Battle of the Bulge. The Hertgen Forest. Couldn’t talk about it, but you could feel what he went through from his eyes. He’d start to say something. His voice’d drift off, and his eyes would almost leave his body. A blank stare and a sullen head shake would end the conversation.

Cronkite was going on and on about America, recruits, and the draft was the only way. I believed him. I didn’t wanna be one of them . Canada was an option. Maybe that scholarship could be an option too.

✶

“You visited one of them?”

“Yeah, Hillside, and a few others,” Joey said.

“What’s it like?”

“Nice.” He said more after that, but I didn’t hear him. All I heard was Nice.

“You thinkin’ about college, Frankie?”

I did not respond.

“Frankie?” he said again.

✶

I went home and rummaged through the letters and brochures crumpled in the bottom of my dresser drawer. I’d never heard of Hillside College. It looked green, clean, peaceful.  Nice. They were interested in me both as a student and as a football prospect. But academic achievement was their main focus. They referred to my good grades, high test scores, and horseshit-attitude membership in the National Honor Society.

I was backed in a corner.

✶

So I jumped in. With both feet.

✶

Graduation Day at Hillside. No cap and gown. No Schlitz. Just a diploma and a ceremony. I would get through without being an asshole. Four years at Hillside was nice. It was way more than nice. It was a world I had not lived in before.

“Glad you made it here.” Joey said, standing in our dorm room dressed in his cap and gown.

“Wouldn’t have if it wasn’t for you.”

“And Router,” he smirked.

“Yeah, Router,” I said reluctantly.

And the old….

“No robe for you, Frankie?”

“Nah, not my style.”

“Your Ma here?”

“Yeah.”

A thin ray of brilliant sunlight slid through our dorm room window, illuminating a picture that had been resting on my bookshelf the past four years. Ma took it of me and the old man right before I left, his arm uncomfortably wrapped around my shoulder, my yellow tassel dangling from his gnarled fingers, an awkward smile spread over both of our faces.

Joey’s eyes shifted back to me from the photo. “I wish he coulda been here, Frankie.”

“He is, Joey, he is.”