Fiction Drew Jackson

Portrait of the Misanthrope as a Young Man, or, Choking Benny Bialowski

The underpants flutter and dive like an erratic and solitary giant moth, alighting for an instant on the shower damp neck of Travis Tratner, the carefully neglected curls of Samuel Sullivan, and the painfully articulated shoulder blade of Mark Mandrake. They soar over the parallel benches that Les Lowe once straddled to hoist little Darren Davenport a full three feet in the air by the waistband of his too large gym shorts. The underpants briefly cling to the revered pitching arm of Gavin Godfrey who snatches them up and chucks them, side arm, into the locker room annex that is the de facto refuge of the boys half of Grindingworks Grammar Academy’s intramural soccer team, the members of which call themselves The Wimp Squad. What the sixth grade members of The Wimp Squad lack in physical agility, they make up for in self-deprecating awareness.

Nels Narten swiftly and gingerly plucks the underpants from the slick concrete floor. He holds them as far away from himself as his lanky arm will reach, pinching the elastic waistband between the very tips of his bony finger and thumb much the same way a reluctant volunteer at Sea World holds a slime coated mackerel over the show tank of a killer whale. “Whose tighty whities?” he asks The Wimp Squad.

“Gotta be Tater Tot’s,” posits Charles Chatworth.

“No way, Tater Tot wouldn’t fit these,” counters Nels Narten. “Tater Tot’s unders are like the size of a Hefty Bag.”

“Kravitz?” suggests Coke Bottles Cardington without so much as looking up from page ninety-seven of Lord of the Flies.

“Those are Fruit of the Looms,” protests Ken Kravitz. “Mine are all Hanes, all Hanes.”

“Nels look, there’s a name in the back,” says Charles Chatworth. And under the sick glow of the fluorescent lights the truth is illuminated for anyone brave enough to peer into the folds of the feral underpants.

“Miles Johnson. Miles, these tighty whities are yours,” says Nels.

“No way douche bag. I…I have mine on.” Miles Johnson hops up onto the bench, and is now taller than any boy in the locker room. He reaches into the waist of his navy blue corduroys and pulls out a good five inches of dazzling white cotton crowned with elastic, like Moses holding out stone tablets, writ small.

“Miles, you stole someone else’s ball huggers. These are yours. Your name’s in them.”

“No,” says Miles too loudly. He feels the wetness at the bottom of his eyes, the unstoppable, unwelcome, pooling seawater and thinks:

“They can see it in my face.”

Miles feels his lips jerk involuntarily like the legs of a gigged frog and sees himself three months earlier in his mother’s sewing room pleading with her not to write his name in each of the twelve pairs of department store underpants with her prized permanent marker. Miles, who had already taken his first drag off of a full tar Marlboro cigarette. Miles, who had already knocked back—almost under the nose of his camp counselors—his first warm swig of Pabst Blue Ribbon from a foil-wrapped can. Miles, who counted among his friends Ned Newsome, who practically had a beard.

Miles feels his molars clash like stone juggernauts and sees himself just yesterday kicking his tainted garment into a pile of soggy towels heaped on the locker room floor, confident that the underpants would vanish forever.

Miles feels in his throat the gagging lump of his own fear and sees himself moments later slogging through the gravel parking lot to the waiting bus, the cold zipper of his khaki trousers scraping against parts of him that had always rested snugly in their bleach whitened cocoon.

“Miles, there’s a skid mark in these,” says Nels. And in a single motion made precise by adrenalin and disgust, Nels launches the underpants through the locker room door and into the presence of young women.

Benny Bialowski, Miles’s best friend, remains to taunt Miles, who has gone momentarily wall-eyed. “Dude, a skid mark?”

“No. No. No. Shut up. Shut up. They aren’t mine.”

“Miles, your name was written right above the stink stripe. Skid mark. Skid mark. Skid mark.”

“OK. OK. They’re mine. But the skid mark wasn’t.”

“Skid mark.” The words become more horrible with each repetition.

The awful et-tu-Brute-ness of it all. Had they not, on the first day of sixth grade, chosen adjacent lockers? Was that not some sort of unspoken pact that it was the two of them against the preps, against the jocks, even, if it came down to it, against rest of The Wimp Squad? Miles’s hands find Benny Bialowski’s neck, and Miles finds himself watching as two thin arms bang Benny Bialowski against his locker, as two thumbs clamp Benny Bialowski’s carotid arteries, as Benny’s voiceless mouth forms the words, “Stop. My mother says I can’t be choked.”

Before Benny Bialowski goes suddenly heavy and slides to the floor twitching and lowing with wide unseeing eyes, he feels The Rapture and is given a brief glimpse of his bright happy future, which includes two standout years on Harvard Law Review and the shady acquisition of a fountain pen crafted from the third metacarpal bone of Learned Hand. Seconds later, Benny Bialowski comes out of it with a key role in the story of how Miles Johnson wound up in reform school, a story he will tell well into middle age to new associates in his thriving law practice over dirty martinis to illustrate the point that it is a well settled matter of law that the mind of a child is not sufficiently developed to form criminal intent.

Before Coach Coldwasser grabs him and drags him to the headmaster’s office, Miles Johnson will marvel at how he, the boy who gassed out two minutes into the President’s Physical Fitness Test one-mile run, turned Benny Bialowski off like a bedside alarm clock. For many years, Miles will haunt the periphery of lunchrooms, known only as the boy who hits too hard. In the fullness of time, Miles will find something that approximates domestic life with a mail-order bride from the war torn no man’s land that is not quite Ethiopia and not quite Eritrea, and decades of light assembly work, which he performs with two thin arms inked in tattoos depicting avenging angels toting Tommy guns, Norse war gods, wailing skulls, copulating serpents, and impossibly busty femme fatales in torn fishnet stockings.

 

 

Drew Jackson lives and writes in Washington, DC. His fiction has previously appeared in Monkey Bicycle and Word Riot.