The Lacuna

Drill is cleaning and display of firearms, not so different from cleaning dishes.

Mathematics: the worst. Nothing past the tablas de multiplicar will ever fit in this calabash. Algebra, a language spoken on the moon. For a boy with no plans to go there.

Sunday, January 24

Notes on how to speak in America:

1. Do not say “Pardon me.” People in books say it constantly. Here, they ask who sent you to prison.

2. Shouting “Go fry asparagus!” won’t make them leave you alone, as it would in Spanish.

3. “Beat it” means Go fry asparagus.

4. “Punk” means fluter. Also: chump, ratso, and “sure it ain’t the YMCA.”

5. “Mexico” is not a country, but a name. Hey Mexico, comeer.

The United States is the land of the square deal and the working stiff. Even though the newspapers say nobody has a job, and deals are not very geometric.

The boys move in cloudish groups, like schools of fish on the reef. In the hallways the groups approach, pass by, and join up again behind, as if you were a rock, not a sentient being. A splay-legged thing dangling in the wrong world.

February 21

So many people are sore at President Hoover, he had to chain up the gates to the White House and lock himself in. According to the boy named Bull’s Eye. Yesterday a one-armed vet tried to break through the gate, got his ass beat up, and was hauled off to the hoosegow, where the one-armed man received his first square in a fortnight.

6. A square is a meal.

Bull’s Eye pinches newspapers and cigarettes from the Officers’ Mess. When he pulls the papers out of his jacket in the lavatory, the boys crowd around. They can’t wait for him to read his made-up headlines in the loud voice of a news hawker: EXTREY, HEXTREY! CHICKEN LIVER HOOVER CRAWLS UNDER PRESIDENTIAL BED! MRS. HOOVER TO GET SOME PEACE AT LAST!

The real name of Bull’s Eye is Billy Boorzai. He isn’t a regular student. He was, until his pop lost his job at a radio shop and his mam lost her marbles. Now he takes classes only half the day, then works in the kitchen and mops the lavs. At night he reads what he has swiped from teachers’ desks, getting his education on the lam, he says.

Bull’s Eye has admirers but no friends in here, he says, his friends are all on the outside. He gets to leave the grounds because of his job in the kitchen (the mess). The cooks send him to the butcher’s, the canvas man’s, even the gunsmith’s sometimes. He says the cooks need firearms for self-defense, the food is that bad.

February 28

A logic problem: is the tedium of maths class better or worse than the tedium of maths detention? Being held prisoner in the library with an algebra book is not improving. But, that great hall full of books is not punishment, either. For certain it is safer than outdoors with boys shoulder-banging at American football, screaming in the language of Gee Whiz and Your Old Man.

March 13

Every morning Bull’s Eye stands naked in the lav, shaving his face. He looks twenty. He says he’s only the same age as everybody else here, plus a few hard knocks. He says you grow up fast when the South Sea Bubble bursts and your dad gets the boot. He doesn’t go home either. We have that in common: dads who won’t look a son in the eye. He says it’s good as any reason for friendship.

It’s the only one so far. The boy called Pencil in the next bed will talk if no one else is around. The Greek boy named Damos says, “Hey Mexico, comeer,” but he also says, “Hey Brush Ape.” Bull’s Eye told them to watch out, the kid from Mexico is ace at firearms, maybe he used to ride with Pancho Villa.

Now they use that name: Pancho Villa. It took a while to recognize it because they pronounce it something like Pants Ville: Hey, Pantsville, comeer! It sounds like a location, one of the hanging-laundry neighborhoods you see from the train to Huichapan.

March 14

Lucky Lindy’s baby is kidnapped, and everyone is afraid, even boys locked up in a brick school. For the hero who flew across the ocean, a terrible crash. The newspapers say any child is in danger if Lindbergh could be that unlucky. But this country already had bad-luck people everywhere, sleeping in the parks, wearing newspapers for coats. The people who have good cloth coats look out the trolley windows and say, Those bums need to buck up. Unlucky Lindy makes them afraid because it happened to a hero.

March 20

Bull’s Eye smells like peeled potatoes, cigarettes, and the mop bucket. When the others go home on Saturday, he says, “Hey-Pancho-Villa, you are cor-di-ally invited to assist me with my labors.” These include scrubbing the lunch mess, running with the wet mop in the commissary, jumping on it, and sliding across the floor between the long tables. And so forth. The assistant receives no pay except getting his head squeezed inside Bull’s Eye’s elbow and his hair scrubbed with knuckles. That is how boys touch here, Bull’s Eye especially.

March 27

Military strategy is interesting. Running an army is similar to running a household of servants. Mother is good at that kind of warfare, she has instincts for reconnaissance and the surprise attack. Officer Ostrain says the United States has the sixteenth largest army in the world, ranking leagues behind Great Britain, Spain, Turkey, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and many others. (Mexico was not mentioned.) Our poorly equipped military seems to offend Officer Ostrain to the limits of his brass-buttoned endurance. He says it’s a disgrace that General MacArthur and Major Eisenhower have to stand on Pennsylvania Avenue waiting like common citizens for the Mt. Pleasant trolley car, to get to the Senate chambers.

The boys say they have seen them and Major Patton also, playing polo on Saturdays at Myer Field. They want to grow up to have ponies like the generals, and sport them around polo fields on Saturdays with Sally Rand riding behind, her breasts bouncing like footballs. That is why they never plot an escape from the academy.

April 10

The K Street market is like a piece of Mexico. The fish hawkers sing the same as on the malecón, but in a kind of English: four-bits a mack-rel, la-yay-dies! Old women with teas and herbs promise to cure any ailment. The air smells like home: charred meat, salt fish, horse dung. Going there today was like bursting through the surface of water and finally breathing. After being in a tunnel of dark, for thirteen Sundays.

The outer part of the market has stalls selling leather goods, teakettles, every earthly thing for anyone that still has a nickel to rub against a dime. Inedibles are sold on the outside of the market, comestibles in the interior. The knife grinders with big naked arms stand at the entrance to the butchers’ avenue. Oystermen in white aprons wheel full carts up from the wharves. The cilindro man has one missing ear, and a monkey in a blue cap to dance to his organ music. Women sell figs and roses, eggs and sausages, chickens and cheese, racks of dressed rabbits, even live birds in cages like the market in Coyoacán. One woman sells conejillos de Indias. Bull’s Eye says they are not called Indian rabbits here, but Guinean pigs. He has no good explanation for it, and agrees they are probably more rabbit than pig.