“Your sist-ah isn’t trying to kill you, Gerald. Don’t exaggerate.”
4
ONE OF THE first things they told me at anger management class was that I should get regular exercise. I thought about training on the equipment Dad had in the basement and then you-know-who dropped out of loser college for the first time and moved home, so we packed up the treadmill, the weight machine, and the Ping-Pong table and moved them to the corner of the garage.
When I explained that my home weight room now housed my number one trigger, my anger coach suggested that maybe I go to a real gym. At first, my parents would drop me at the gym a few times a week. But then I saw a different gym inside the real gym—a boxing gym. I decided then that I should go there, because, you know, I liked to punch shit. When I told my coach that I’d joined a boxing gym, he sighed but eventually agreed—with one rule. No actual boxing. As in, no hitting other people. I was thirteen and a half and I’d already hit enough people, so I was fine with that.
The guys who train at the gym are nice, I guess, but there’s this one new guy. He’s got issues. Postal code FS all the way. He looks at me sometimes and smiles that provoking smile. I know what it means because I used to use it.
His name is Jacko. I have no idea what his real name is. He’s Jamaican, but not really, because his accent is fake. His parents moved to Blue Marsh when he was three and he’s a middle-class kid now—dreaming he could be as poor as his parents were so he could be as interesting as they are, telling stories about their fishing village and living in a shack with a tin roof or something. That’s why he fights, I bet. Because being middle-class is boring as hell.
Anyway, I don’t know why everyone is okay with me being in a boxing gym. The whole idea is pretty ironic. I mean, if I couldn’t kick your ass before, I sure as hell can kick your ass now. And that’s what I think about every single minute I’m in the gym. Kicking ass.
K-I-C-K-I-N-G A-S-S.
There is part of me that wants to kick that Jacko kid’s ass so bad, I wouldn’t mind going away for it. In jail I would be able to kick more ass and more ass until someone bigger than me killed me. And it’s all anyone expects of me at this point, right? Jail or death, I guess. Jail or death.
I pound the punching bag. I pound it until I can’t feel my fingers. Sometimes they swell for days. This sunny Sunday morning, they crack and pop, and I think about how badly damaged they’ll be when I’m old and how I’ll have to get cortisone shots like my great-uncle John, and I don’t care. I jump rope for about fifteen minutes and then I hit the speed bag—my favorite because it has rhythm and it puts me in some sort of trance.
I like the trance. It unwraps me. For fifteen minutes I am unbound from the layer of plastic wrap I’ve been wrapped in my whole life. I can see better, smell better, hear better. I can feel. Sometimes the speed bag makes me want to cry, it’s so good. I don’t cry, though. I just lose the rhythm and wrap myself up again—head to toe.
Before I walk to the parking lot, I go into the room next door—an abandoned warehouse room that used to have a mail-order business in it. When I started coming here, the company was still operating. Now all that’s left is the shelving units and the little cubicles from the offices.
It’s dark.
I walk in fast toward one of the cubicle walls. It’s the only drywall in the whole redbrick place. Then I slam my fist through it, but that isn’t enough, so I pound another hole, too, lower down because I’m starting to run out of space.
My hand stings and my knuckle is bleeding, but it feels good. When I stand back, I count the holes. Forty-two.
By the time I get home from boxing-not-boxing, Dad is long gone to his Sunday open houses and Mom is showered after her usual two-hour Sunday-morning walk and is in the kitchen, doing kitchen-y things. She loves doing kitchen-y things. If my mom had her way, she would live in the kitchen and everything would be happy. And if it wasn’t happy, she’d whip up a batch of something and then it would be happy. Or she’d just walk more. You pick.
After I take a shower, I sit down and she puts a plate of breakfast in front of me. Scrambled eggs, turkey bacon, and a glass of water. Mom has a new centerpiece and it reminds me of Nanny. I must have crapped on this table ten times, easy. Maybe more.
“Did you have a good workout?” Mom asks.
“Yeah. I’m getting really fast on the speed bag. I love that thing.”
“Good for you,” she says. In a good way.
“Yeah.”
“I’m glad you found that gym,” she adds. “I never knew it was there.”
Mom puts her fork on the edge of her plate and downs a handful of some weird pills—supplements and vitamins and whatever chronic power walkers eat to make them not disappear into thin air. I’d say at five foot two, she’s now easily under a hundred pounds.
“I’m heading out to do some early Christmas shopping today,” she says. “Dad will be back around four. Any chance we’ll see you for dinner?”
Right when I’m about to answer, the rhythmic sound starts in the basement. Ba-bang-ba-boom-ba-bang-ba-boom. Mom automatically gets up, runs the water in the sink full blast, loads the dishwasher, and then starts it, although it isn’t even half-full.
“Nah. Double shift today. Won’t be home until after the hockey game. Probably as late as ten. I’ll catch dinner there.” I look at the clock. It’s ten thirty. I have to be at the PEC Center at eleven. “Shit. I’d better go now.”
A few years ago, if I’d said shit so casually in front of my mother, she might have scolded me about my language. Now she says nothing. I’m not even sure if she heard me over the dishwasher and the ba-bang-ba-boom-ba-bang-ba-boom.
“Leave your plate. I’ll get it,” she says. “Have a great day.”
“Thanks. You too.”
Isn’t it sweet? Isn’t it lovely what Nanny did for us? Eleven years ago, my mother was cleaning up my crap from that same table. Now she offers to clear my plate because she knows I have to get to work on time. How polite and thoughtful we all are! What acceptable behay-vyah.
5
THERE’S THIS GIRL.
She usually works register #1, and I like it that way because I always work #7 and she’s far away from me and I don’t have to nervously squeeze past her to get to the kids’ meal boxes or the candy. We have to do a lot of squeezing in stand five because there’s only about four feet between the counter and the hot tables where the cooks put all the food we have to serve up.