“Kid, are you really going to fight him?”
I glanced up from my book and saw Lisa looking at me from across the scarred writing table. She was looking at me teasingly with a hint of concern in her penciled eyebrows. My stomach was growling. Almost lunchtime.
At some point, while smoking my morning cigarette in the bathroom, I decided I would cut all of my classes that day and spend the last un-bruised hours of my life in peace sitting in the library. It was like a holy sanctuary in the morning for me to sit by the river and focus my chi. The early autumn light descended gently on the row of writing tables and bathed their battle-scars in warmth, the bookcases seemed bright and happy with their sleeping volumes resting in shadows, and not a soul was in there except the old librarian, who seemed to be unaware of my presence as I came sneaking in past the reference desk.
I had long been familiar with the library, as every proper Asian kid should be. Me and my brother used to get dropped off every Saturday against our wishes before our mom went to work. We were too young to fight back and were still scared of her wrath, so reluctantly we let ourselves be pushed into the children’s section where we would be left for hours until she returned at dinnertime to pick us up again. I would always head straight for the comic book section. I read and reread every issue for hours studying the words like Bible verses, absorbing every punch, every line, and every sound effect in all of their colored expressions caught in the inked frames. Peter Parker was going through some kind of identity crisis and weaved himself into a cocoon on the ceiling, and while he stayed in there having a nervous breakdown, New York City was being run amuck by all kinds of psycho villains. Batman was finally declared crazy and locked up in Arkham Asylum with all the psychopaths that he had put away. He still had his mask on when they put him in the straitjacket. It seemed like all my superheroes were going crazy. Except Archie. Archie was doing fine. Still struggling to ménage with Betty and Veronica.
Comic-books became my life for awhile. Me and my brother both had our separate obsessions during that time. Mine was comic-books, his was basketball. But mine was a secret obsession, a love affair I stole for, a love affair I could not get away with. While my brother was out there in the winter cold dribbling and practicing free-throws, I was in our room pouring over my secret hoard of comics, turning each colored page as if it was made of the most delicate crystal. I had to hide my comics in secret places spread throughout the darkest recesses of our closet to the most unreachable corners behind the dresser. My mother was a born-again Christian, the craziest kind there is. I didn’t even want to think of what would happen if she saw those villains with demonic glowing eyes, dudes in tights with bulging muscles and impossible six-packs, busty heroines flying around in bikinis. What would she think? What would she say? She would say it was the devil! Everything was the fucking devil!
But my obsession with comic-books put me on a path to becoming a super-villain. Before I finally take over the world with evil laughter, the media will note that I used to steal money out of my mom’s purse and ditch Saturday afternoon sessions at Kumon math academy so I could ride the bus over to the comic-book shop on the upper-side of the avenue. Even after my mom came in storming into my room one tragic afternoon, beat my ass and tore up my sacred comics, those sins would die harder than the delicate crystal pages I saw shattered in front of my eyes.
I had been there before, in the library. On the days when class didn’t seem to be part of my plans, I would just duck into the library for an hour or two and hang out until I was ready to return back into the noisy hallways and back into the classrooms. I started cutting class more and more when I realized that the whole system was a lie. I was skipping a lot those days. It seemed like everyday in homeroom, I did this dance with the Man. He’d come around to serve me my detention papers on Monday for skipping Friday. And then he would come back Tuesday to serve me with more detention for skipping detention on Monday afternoon. By Wednesday, he’d slap me with some ISS papers. That’s In-School-Suspension, that’s where they lock you down. Some kids couldn’t handle ISS. They’d come out naked and mumbling, covered in their own feces before getting thrown in the cold showers, squinting at the daylight they hadn’t seen for what seemed like a month when it was really just a day. But if you didn’t mind being quiet for 7 ½ hours it was a holiday. When you had In-School Suspension, they locked you in a little room inside the library and made you do homework. If you did all your homework, then they would tell you to just keep quiet and draw. For me, it was a place to cool out and sit in the dark, a place to hide away from the barking guards and that stinking no-good warden. I’d come out and my friends would ask where I’d been all yesterday. I’d laugh and tell them I was in the hole. Easiest time I ever did.
They say it’s funny in prison how sometimes a book can choose you. You don’t know why you reach for a specific title from the spine, because from the back, all the books look pretty much the same. But I was standing there one day, cutting class of course, and wandering through the bookcases in the far corner of the school library. I was just sort of wandering through the bookcases enjoying the feeling of being lost among all the dusty books. I just liked looking at the books, touching them and walking around in the shadows of the shelves. The dark and enclosed spaces made it sort of feel like a maze. At some point, I was letting my hands brush across the books like a child does when he walks along a chain-link fence, and as my fingers went on drumming across the rows of spines, a book sticking out fell onto the ground. I knew enough to know that when a book falls, it’s really just trying to jump into your hands. The book seemed like it was calling me closer to my destiny, the book made me think about the road and what was out there, the book that made me seem like destiny was closer than I thought. So here it was: the book that began my Education and introduced me to the man behind the Revolution.
I was really moving through the pages when my World History class came in. I knew the class was scheduled for library that day, but it was one of those reading sessions when you start reading a book that seems like it’s singing your song, and before you know it, you’re only 50 pages in and two hours have passed easily. I was planning to be out of the library before my class showed up, a day free of any academic effort, marked only by the bloody nose that awaited me at lunchtime. But the book got me, and I couldn’t put it down.
Our assignment that week had been to research a figure in history, write a brief report and to do a presentation. The main part was the presentation. I figured I would play my usual position, stay out of the actual research, and when my team was done, I would contribute an awesome poster. But as fate would have it, this project would be a little different from my usual sleepy slacking. On Monday four days earlier, all the kids in our class were put into pairs. It was pure imagination that I might’ve been but reality had that I was, paired up with Lisa Vanessa. When the teacher called our names together my heart began pounding instantly. It was the type of situation where I just didn’t know what to do, and my mind immediately began playing with alternate realities. Without saying, she was the prettiest girl in our class, perhaps, the prettiest girl in our grade. I wouldn’t venture to say she was the prettiest in our school because she still had two more years to take that crown. But she was so pretty she was once on a Neutrogena commercial, you know, the ones with water splashing on the girl’s face in slow-motion. I felt a sort of nervous happiness, something warm doing a little diddy-bop inside my soul with a little spin at the end. I never figured we would actually be engaged in any sort of conversation just the pattern of my life the way it had it, but here it was a perfect opportunity to talk to her and get to know about all the things that made the eyebrow on her pretty face get a little higher.
It was soon after the names were finished getting called that our class packed up and headed over to the library. In the hallway, my classmates started whispering to me like mice in a dark kitchen to try to get Lisa Vanessa into the closet. I brushed them off like so many tsetse flies to my hippopotamus. They were idiots. True, I had never been in the closet before but I knew enough to know that you don’t just take a girl like Lisa Vanessa into the closet. You got to do more than that to win a kiss from a girl like Lisa Vanessa. But I wasn’t even thinking that far ahead. That would just be arrogant. I was more like picturing us up in the library sitting close together with our heads almost touching, reading over huge pages with tiny little words. We could act frustrated and say out loud how boring it was and talk about how much we hated World Cultures. And I would be able to find out and share in all the things that she hated and say funny things about them and she could touch my arm while she laughed. I would hold her hand over ice-cream, touch her leg in the winter, and then we could kiss in the end. I don’t know.
I don’t know. Because when I glanced across the room to gauge her reaction to us being paired up together, she was working on lacquering her perfect French manicure. I attempted a little eye smiling and was met with a cold look coming from her blue eyes and spent half the class just trying to recover from the breeze.
When we arrived at the library, it was a mad race for most of the kids to get the best computer in the lab. Lisa nonchalantly chose a writing table for us instead and proceeded to then work on smoothing out her nails with the soft side of a file. Quietly like an obedient dog, I sat down across from her and stared blankly out towards the sunny window behind her which gave a mediocre view of the woods behind the school. I couldn’t think of anything to say to her, and so I proceeded to stare in silence at a couple of birds fluttering around a bird-feeder.
“So, who should we pick for our project,” I said finally deciding to speak.
“What?” she asked. It seemed I had already troubled her enough with my presence, and the effort of responding to my questions was an irritating chore.
“Who should we write the paper on?” I asked more cautiously.
“It’s up to you,” she replied and then added, “I’m going on the computer.”
As I watched her leaving me, I could feel myself sinking deeper into my chair hoping nobody witnessed our lame exchange. I felt like the kid at prom whose date abandons him to hang out by the punch bowl. I immediately began to bury my sorrows in the project. I got up from the table and headed over to the bookcases where some other kids were pouring over the books so at least I could look less alone and seem productive. But soon, after trying to read over their shoulders and being met with discouraging glances, I retreated back to the far corner bookshelves of the library so I could regroup my position with Lisa.
As I wandered back and forth between the bookcases, the Shogun suddenly struck me with the hard slap of a kung-fu master.
I see what you doing. Yeah, I see you. You trying to be real cordial and nice with that fine little thang. Don’t give me that, I seen you looking. Well looka here, boy. You need to stop being nice, and start getting nasty. Show her that dance move we been practicing. Yeah, that’s the one. Uh-huh, uh-huh, to the left, to the left, to the right, to the right, now dip, now glide. You got it! Show you right!
Thanks Shogun! I knew he was right, but it made no sense. What dance move? Anyways, why was I trying to be so nice to her? Pretty girls don’t want that. I had to impress her somehow. Damn it. I wanted to just stop caring so much, because who am I, that I should be trying so hard to win her attention. But then again, just looking at her made my heart ache. No, be strong. Ok, we’ll compromise. We’ll be ourselves. You be Frank and she’ll be Susie. Do the project, and if you happen to impress her and make her fall in love with you, then so be it. But we’re not going to do all this, being sweet and super-nice guy act. We know and she knows it’s just weakness, for soft skin and perfect shampoo-commercial hair. Alright Frank, do what you do and be Frank.
I was all charged up when I came back to the table ready to show this girl how indifferent I could be to her beautiful bitch. But no sooner did I approach our table and see her in plain view then did my sudden rush of bravado begin to deflate. Rocky, one of the football players in our class was sitting in my seat. As I approached our table with an armload of books, I suddenly felt so weird and useless.
“What’s up Kid?” he said congenially and pulled out the seat next to him.
“What’s up,” I replied and carefully placed the huge stack of volumes on the table.
“Whoa! You gonna read all these?”
“Nah. Just breeze through them, find some good pictures I guess. Who’s in your group?”
“I don’t know, Melissa and Steve,” he replied. Rocky was that kind of kid. He would always begin a thought with I don’t know, and then tell you the answer. It just so happened that he and Lisa Vanessa were part of a club. It was the good looking club where members never did any school work because they were so goddamned good looking and other kids would do it for them. How I longed to be in that club.
“So what’re you doing?” Lisa teased him.
“Me? I’m the leader. Leader gets to take it easy, ya know?” he sat back smiling. “What about you, you’re just doing your nails.”
“No Rocky,” she said playfully, “Kid was getting our books. Right Kid?” and then she looked at me as if we were sharing a secret. My heart froze and I couldn’t speak.
“Kid, is it true you’re fightin’ Bassanio?” Rocky asked suddenly.
“Yeah, you heard about that?”
“You’re fighting who?” Lisa asked with her eyes growing wide.
“Kid’s fightin’ Bassanio. Kid, are you for real? You’re going to get murdered.”
“Maybe,” I said quietly, “but some of us choose to die standing up.”
“I don’t know Kid. I don’t know. You’re one crazy kid.”
On the day of our presentation a week later, I attempted to bring the Revolution to our World Cultures class. My quiet attempts at insurgency up until that point, though appreciated by the knuckleheads, were unmet with the results I was searching for. It wasn’t until a week after the fight, the day of our presentation, that I finally brought the Establishment down a few notches. Ms. Canton was so overwhelmed by the strength of guerilla posters and street knowledge that she tripped and fell backwards into her desk. It was on that day that the class finally went crazy. After that, we lost all respect for her. World History was like Lord of the Flies everyday, which we had to read for English and were perhaps unconsciously inspired by. Paper wars would be waged and homework had completely ceased to come in. Even the nerdy kids found themselves making excuses as to why they didn’t do it. Ms. Canton became exasperated and would at some points, completely abandon her lecture and have us constantly working together on group projects just so she didn’t have to raise her voice anymore. She became an empty shell of a teacher and would find any excuse to bring us to the library just so we would shut up.
At some points I looked at the meltdown our classroom had become and felt a little bad about it, but I stood firm in my rationalization that I was boycotting history for its ridiculously brief dedication to Asia and Africa which focused, for the most part, on wood-carving and the art of jar-making. See kids? See how much you can learn from this broken jar?
“I don’t know.”
“Come on Kid, are you really going to fight him?”
I still remember the way she was looking at me, like I had never seen a girl look at me before. Since that moment Rocky asked me if I was really going to fight Bassanio, Lisa couldn’t let it go. We sat close with our heads almost touching and I felt my spirit waving its head back and forth like it was Ray Charles playing the piano. She touched my arm on Friday, and I got to look down her shirt a couple times.
“Kid, are you really going to fight him?”
I looked at Lisa Vanessa and smiled.
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll tell my brother to do something,” said Lisa taking one of my hands into hers all melodramatic.
“Don’t worry about it.” I said.
Lisa and I used to make fortune-tellers out of notebook paper and made up stupid futures like ‘you will eat a monkey’s butt and die’. Our futures always resulted in death. Why that shit was funny I can’t remember. You know that feeling when something is so stupid but somebody makes it funny for you. Life is funny like that.
Lisa did her nails and I drew on the desk.
“Blow,” she said as she held out her hand. I blew on her French manicure lightly until she said harder, harder!