Joe College Read online

  My face got hot. I wasn’t an expert on these things, but I had read The Valachi Papers in seventh grade and came away from it with a clear understanding that you shouldn’t say things like “Suck my dick” to people with names like Vito Meatballs.

  “That’s bullshit,” I said.

  “So modest.” Chuckie jabbed the shovel into the sparkling pile of ice. “That’s one of the things I like about you.”

  “I didn’t,” I insisted. “It’s just a stupid rumor.”

  Chuckie must have heard the fear in my voice. He turned around a little too quickly, accidentally tilting the shovel in the process. The ice cubes slid off, raining down on the cracked pavement and scattering like marbles.

  “You didn’t?”

  There was such naked disappointment on his face that I shifted my gaze back to the ground. I wanted to explain that the basic story was right but the details were all wrong, that instead of inviting Mr. Meatballs to perform a sex act, I’d really just advised one of his flunkeys to make a dentist appointment, but the distinction hardly seemed worth making. If the Lunch Monsters felt like making an example of me, setting the record straight to Chuckie wasn’t going to change anything. And besides, I was tired of letting people down. It was nice to be the hero for once, if only for a handful of lunch-truck drivers.

  “Cock,” I explained, crunching an ice cube beneath the heel of my work boot. “Not dick. I told him to suck my cock.”

  Chuckie hooted with laughter and relief.

  “You’re too much,” he told me. Then he shook his head and patted me on the shoulder. “Watch your back, okay?”

  The only other time I’d felt myself in such immediate physical danger was in the spring of my senior year in high school, when I’d gotten myself on the wrong side of a maniacal wrestler named Mark “Psycho Midget” Barnhouse. Though technically not a “little person,” Barnhouse was very short, maybe five foot one, with a strikingly handsome face and an impressive weightlifter’s torso that began just north of his knees. I’m not sure if he was bitter about this lack of proportionality and as a result felt some compensatory need to prove his manhood through violence, or if he was just a vicious person with unusually stumpy legs, but it was widely accepted at Harding, even by football players who towered over him and outweighed him by fifty or a hundred pounds, that it was a good idea to steer clear of Barnhouse. Don’t talk to him, don’t look at him, don’t even think about him. Stay off his radar screen, because you just don’t know what’s going to set him off. He beat the crap out of Phil Derry, this totally harmless band nerd, for wearing an ugly sweater. Steve Mullaney, a well-liked jayvee goalie, ended up with a black eye and three stitches in his lip for taking an especially smelly shit in the locker room while Barnhouse happened to be within sniffing distance.

  The thing that made Barnhouse so singularly terrifying wasn’t his improbable strength, or the obvious pleasure he took in inflicting pain, or his contempt for the widely accepted concept of “fair fighting”—it was his unpredictability. You never knew when or where he might strike. He’d gotten suspended for spitting Tabasco sauce in someone’s eyes in the cafeteria during the first week of his freshman year, and after that had made it a point only to go after people off school grounds. Mike Donlevy opened his front door on Halloween night and got socked in the mouth, right in front of his mother, by a suspiciously short trick-or-treater in a Frito Bandito costume. Dave Repetto got his septum deviated in the bathroom of the Park Cinema during a Sunday matinee of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It was like Barnhouse kept a list of people he needed to beat up in his pocket and selected a name off it at random whenever he was in a bad mood. You could offend his sensibilities in September and not find out about it until April, when Psycho Midget materialized out of nowhere and began smashing your head repeatedly against a car door in the parking lot outside Echo Lanes.

  Barnhouse was a year older than me, so he wasn’t even at Harding anymore when he decided to add my name to the list. The trouble started at the Battle of the Bands, held in the gym/cafeteria of St. Lucy’s school in Springville. My friends and I were pushing our way out with the rest of the crowd when I noticed that Zeke had struck up a conversation with Ronnie Barnhouse, Psycho Midget’s average-sized younger brother. This might have made me nervous under normal circumstances—Ronnie was only slightly less unpopular and belligerent than Mark—but the Squidman had turned us on to some Thai stick that night, and I was distracted by the realization that everyone around me was wearing Two Shoes, a phrase whose comic potential I had grossly underestimated until that very moment. I am wearing Two Shoes, I thought, giggling to myself while Zeke and Ronnie exchanged what appeared to be pleasantries. And you are wearing Two Shoes too.

  Later, when the altercation was re-enacted, I learned that the conversation was anything but pleasant. Zeke had accidentally stepped on Ronnie’s foot during the rush to the exits, and Ronnie had taken offense.

  “Hey,” he said. “You stepped on my fucking foot.”

  “Sorry,” said Zeke, and because he was as stoned as I was, something about this exchange made him giggle.

  Ronnie smiled in return. This was a favorite Barnhouse tactic, to act like your victim’s best friend just before you clobbered him, but Ronnie didn’t have his brother’s discipline, which was one of the reasons people found him merely hateful rather than frightening.

  “You better be sorry,” he said, the surly tone of his voice cancelling out the lulling effects of the smile.

  It was weird, Zeke explained later. Just like that, he wasn’t stoned anymore. His head was clear; he saw what was coming from a mile away. He and Ronnie continued walking side by side, out the doors and onto the lawn in front of the school. They had almost reached the sidewalk when Ronnie put his hand on Zeke’s shoulder.

  “Hey,” he said. “No hard feelings.”

  Even as he said this he was swinging his right fist at Zeke’s temple, but it was already too late. Zeke had ducked out of the way and was in the process of delivering what by all accounts was a beautiful uppercut to the tip of Ronnie’s jaw. I was looking the other way, at this sweet-faced girl I’d been talking to earlier in the night, the sister of the bass player in Sweet Home Cranwood, a country-rock band that had come in third in the Battle of the Bands, behind Spread Eagle and Total Extinction. Martha was her name, and she smiled and waved to me as she headed across the street with her friends. I was waving back, wondering why I hadn’t bothered to ask for her phone number, when I heard the fleshy smack of a landed punch. By the time I turned around Ronnie Barnhouse was flat on the ground at Zeke’s feet, looking like he’d been struck by lightning. Zeke was rubbing his hand and smiling down at Ronnie, as though the punch had been offered in the spirit of friendship.

  “Fucking Barnhouse,” he said, surveying the ring of onlookers that had been called into instantaneous existence by the murmured word “Fight!,” repeated by one person after another until it filled the air like the sound of crickets.

  What happened next must have happened quickly, but for me it unfolded in the slowest of slow motion, as if everyone around me were moving and speaking through an element more like motor oil than air. The words “Fucking Barnhouse” had barely finished vibrating in my ear when a kind of collective gasp rose from the crowd. The next thing I knew Mark Barnhouse had breached the human ring and was striding toward his brother. He was wearing a green-and-yellow varsity jacket with leather sleeves and a shock of hair had fallen over his forehead, concealing one eye. Ronnie was conscious, but clearly dazed, and I remember being struck by the gentleness with which Mark knelt down and helped his brother into sitting position.

  “Ronnie,” he said, in the wooden voice of an actor auditioning for a role he’d never get. “Who did this to you?”

  To my surprise and dismay, the first person Ronnie looked at was me. I’d felt very much the innocent bystander until then, but all at once fear cleared my head, and I saw that a neutral observer might reasonably assume otherwi
se. The ring had formed in such a way that the only people inside it were me, Woody, Zeke, and the Barnhouse brothers. I held up both hands in a gesture of surrender and shook my head, but by then Ronnie’s glassy eyes had shifted to Zeke.

  “Him,” he said.

  “He started it,” Zeke protested, too scared to realize that trying to reason your way out of a fight with Mark Barnhouse was a lot like trying to persuade a dog not to eat a piece of meat on the floor.

  “He stepped on my fucking foot,” Ronnie Barnhouse complained. His voice was full of grievance, like he might never recover from the indignity of having his fucking foot stepped on.

  That was when Mark Barnhouse transformed himself into Psycho Midget. You could see it happen, and the sheer theater of it was weirdly compelling. He stood up, puffed out his chest, and placed his hands on his hips, in a posture borrowed from Mighty Mouse. It was disturbing to realize how handsome he was, like a movie star or model, from the waist up. He stared at Zeke for a couple of seconds, giving him time to get good and scared, and then took a couple of swaggering steps forward. To his credit, Zeke didn’t retreat, even when Barnhouse got within striking distance.

  “Go ahead,” Barnhouse invited him, extending his right foot rather daintily, until the toe of his work boot was almost touching the rubber tip of Zeke’s Converse All-Star. “You wanna step on someone’s fucking foot, step on mine.”

  “I don’t wanna step on anyone’s fucking foot,” Zeke muttered.

  “Step on it, you pussy.”

  Zeke looked at me, silently begging for help. I shook my head, trying to look apologetic. I had already been accepted to college, and the last thing I wanted in the few remaining weeks of my high school career was to find myself on Barnhouse’s shit list.

  “Come on, big man. Step on my fucking foot.”

  Zeke turned to Woody this time, and Woody shamed me by responding to the call, shuffling into the danger zone with obvious reluctance and placing his hand on Zeke’s elbow.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s just get the fuck out of here.”

  “Yeah,” I added, though later none of my friends claimed to have heard it. “Let’s just get the fuck out of here.”

  The only person I’d seen do what Barnhouse did next was Moe of the Three Stooges. Reaching up with astonishing quickness, he grabbed hold of Zeke’s head with one hand and Woody’s with the other and cracked them together. There was no hollow-coconut sound effect, though, just the sickening thud of solid objects colliding and a moan of disbelief from the crowd as my friends collapsed on the grass, clutching their skulls and writhing around in agony.

  Now it was Barnhouse time, two wounded adversaries just begging to be finished off. He kicked Woody in the ribs and then turned to Zeke, who had struggled onto his hands and knees and was looking around in animal bewilderment, a trickle of blood working its way down his forehead. Barnhouse had his back to me, but I could see from the way he was lining himself up—carefully, like a placekicker studying the goalposts—that he was preparing to deliver a savage kick to Zeke’s face with his work boot.

  There was no way out for me. I could already hear the story as it moved through the halls of Harding, how I’d just stood there and watched it happen. It would be better for me to get my own teeth kicked in than to be forever remembered for that. Releasing a puny war cry of misery and regret, I rushed across the lawn and grabbed Barnhouse from behind, wrapping my arms around him like the sleeves of a straitjacket and locking my hands tight against his abdomen with all the panicky, adrenaline-fueled strength I could muster, apparently knocking the wind out of him in the process.

  “What … the … fuck … ?” he gasped, screwing his head around as far as it would go in an attempt to ascertain my identity.

  Like Zeke, I found myself in the grip of an uncontrollable desire to reason with him.

  “I’m not fighting with you,” I explained slowly and carefully, as if speaking to a toddler. “I’m just trying to keep you from hurting my friend.”

  “Fuck you,” he replied, twisting his torso from side to side with furious energy, trying to fling me off his back. My grip began to loosen and I pulled tighter, my fists digging into the cavity below his rib cage. His body went limp again.

  “What … the … fuck … ?” he repeated.

  I almost laughed out loud when I realized what was happening. Without meaning to, I had given Barnhouse the Heimlich maneuver. As I recalled from tenth-grade Health class, this simple but remarkably effective lifesaving technique worked its magic by abruptly forcing the air out of a choking person’s lungs, thereby dislodging stuck food or other obstructions from the windpipe.

  Barnhouse caught his breath and resumed struggling; I administered another Heimlich. It was amazing to feel the strength leave his body at my command, to fold him in two with a single jerk of my fists.

  “You’re … a … fuc … king … dead … man,” he informed me.

  After a minute or two went by, my exhilarating sense of mastery began to wear off, and I faced up to the difficult reality of the situation. I couldn’t hold Barnhouse in this Heimlich embrace forever, but I couldn’t let him go either, especially since he seemed to have fallen into the throes of demonic possession. He was bent over in my arms, groaning and cursing and thrashing his head from side to side. I couldn’t see his face, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he was foaming at the mouth.

  “Let … go … fuck … face …”

  “I’d like to,” I told him. “But I can’t.”

  By that point, Barnhouse was completely doubled over, and was addressing me from the vicinity of my left knee. He slumped even further after the next Heimlich. forcing me into an uncomfortable crouch. I didn’t realize that this was a calculated strategy on his part until I noticed a strange tightness and a sudden burning sensation on the meaty part of my calf.

  “My leg,” I told the crowd, speaking in the calm voice of a golf announcer. “He’s biting my leg.”

  The smart thing would have been to administer another Heimlich, but it’s hard to be smart when someone’s gnawing on your leg. I unlocked my hands and reached for his face, raking my fingernails across his eye and down as much of his cheek as I could find. He kept biting, though, so I did it again, this time forcing my fingertip against his eye like I was trying to push it through the socket and down into the sinus cavity. The pressure on my leg let up abruptly; Barnhouse was rolling on the ground, holding his face and wailing, “My eye! My fucking eye!”

  “You shouldn’t have bit me,” I told him sternly.

  Gingerly, he removed his hand from the wounded eye, blinking like a flashbulb had just gone off. His eye was still there, but his cheek was scored by scratch marks, four parallel gashes traversing his cheek on a diagonal.

  “Shit,” he said, looking at his hand. “I’m bleeding.”

  Ronnie Barnhouse picked himself up from the ground and went over to examine his brother’s wounds. By then, both Woody and Zeke were back on their feet as well.

  “Come on,” Woody said, grabbing hold of my arm and pulling me toward the sidewalk. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I turned my head, taking one last look at Barnhouse before slipping through the crowd and away from further trouble. He was kneeling on the grass, holding a pristine white handkerchief to his cheek and glaring at me. I remember being surprised by this; Barnhouse hardly seemed like the kind of guy who carried a handkerchief.

  “You’re a fucking dead man,” he told me again.

  I took him at his word. For the next two and a half months, I never left my house without first picking up a smooth gray-and-white striped rock that I kept stashed at the base of a sugar maple in front of our house. In the event of what I saw as an all-but-inevitable revenge attack by Barnhouse, my strategy was simple: I would wait until he got about ten feet away and then I would show him the rock. If he still kept coming, I would throw the rock at his face as hard as I could, and then accept the consequences. I promised mys
elf that I wouldn’t chicken out, that I wouldn’t let myself run away or beg for mercy or take a beating without fighting back. After all, the only thing Barnhouse had on me was a psychological edge. He was willing—even eager—to hurt me; if I could make myself just as willing to hurt him, the playing field was leveled, and maybe even tilted in my favor, since Barnhouse operated on the assumption that his victims would be paralyzed by fear and were therefore easy prey.

  Because deep down I doubted that I was really capable of throwing a rock at someone’s head—even Barnhouse’s—I spent a lot of time mentally rehearsing my counterattack. Over and over that summer, I lay in bed imagining my enemy’s approach, feeling the cool weight of the rock in my hand, forcing myself step-by-step through the sequence of events in which I’d have to let it fly. I could get that far, but I could never quite cross the border of visualizing the impact, of figuring out what would happen—how I’d live with myself—if the rock actually made contact with its target. I understood this failure as a potentially dangerous weakness and tried my best to conquer it. But all this futile mental exertion really accomplished was to make me hate Barnhouse even more than I already did. It wasn’t enough for him to terrorize me; he had to poison my mind with fantasies of violence and troubling questions about how far I was willing to go to save myself.

  Luckily for me, I never had to find out. A few days before that Fourth of July, the Barnhouse brothers got bored and decided to play hot potato with a lit M-80. Ronnie lost; the tiny bomb exploded in his hand, blowing off two fingers and the thumb, a small piece of which was later reattached by doctors using revolutionary microsurgical techniques.

  From what I heard, Mark changed overnight. He walked around pale and chastened and was often seen at church, sobbing as he prayed. Whenever he bumped into people he’d beaten up, he apologized and volunteered to let them take a swing at him, just to even the score. He was so sincere that a couple of people actually took him up on this offer, though later they felt lousy about it.