Dread & Hard Shell Tacos

We weren't particularly cruel people, despite our plans for Chuck and despite Ryan's deep and violent disdain for Chuck.

For Ryan, Chuck was a convenient enemy. All the failings of his family and his days at school could be blamed on the meager personality of Chuck. Chuck was, in a way, the formal Enemy.

With an animosity so slow growing that it eventually became part of the natural order, Ryan could not help but see Chuck as something to be wiped off his feet.

Chuck was a rung lower than Ryan on the social ladder. In elementary school, social hierarchy is much more concrete and purely social than in later years.

Adults can count on money, clothing, and hair style to signify their class. Social position is so codified and entrenched that it almost ceases to matter on a personal level. One need not shun another due to class or category because there is no possibility of infection, no chance that affiliation will send the wrong message. The message is open for everyone to see.

Children have their markers too, but position is a much trickier and precarious thing. Infection is possible. Talking to the wrong person - being nice to the wrong person - can knock you down a peg so fast there is no possibility of intervention.

You had to be a sociopath not to recognize "who was who" in an elementary school setting.

Ryan knew where he stood. But he was ambitious too. Though his ambition was modest, it was violent.

All of his passions, however humble, were violent.

*

So many hours were spent in the conception of our Anti-Chuck plan that the sessions took on a life of their own. They became referential of themselves only, so that when Chuck came over to me at the end of the school day he was able to ambush me and took me by surprise.

"My mom says I can have you over again," he told me. "Want to come over this weekend?"

We were at the coat and boot rack getting our cold weather gear on. Chuck was already suited up in a light blue puffy jumpsuit that looked like something out of a Japanese cartoon.

I looked at him and didn't say anything for a while. His nostrils flared. He was going to tell.

"I'll have to ask my mom."

"Ok. Let me know tomorrow."

There was a definite threat in his squeaky, nasal voice.

With Chuck, there was no pathos. He was defeated from the start. The family name was synonymous with undignified, irrational pride. The pride of those with no recourse but pride. The pride of those who have nothing to be proud of, who have been told through subtle social signals that their presence is not required or wanted, who have been told the same thing through blatant social signals.

Any pathos would have meant they had to leave town. Any sympathy extended to them would have burst the bubble of their Great Indignity and pierced the veil of their Babylonian Pride.

As it was, I knew that my mom would make me go to Chuck's house. To be nice. To atone.

And I'd have to eat those hard shell tacos I hated so much.

*

Dad dropped me off after lunch.

I waited for him to say something to put this visit into perspective, to temporize it.

"Call us," was all he said.

I felt I was being punished, persecuted. This was cruel and unusual. My own dad giving my feelings short shrift, feeding me to the wolves. I was Isaac on the stone and this time Abraham was going to go through with it.

Chuck was at the door and had the afternoon all worked out. We'd play computer games on his father's computer in his parents' bedroom and try to swat his little brother away.

The little brother, Christopher, was a major nuisance. We could only drive him away so far. He'd stand picking his nose watching us like a puppy just out of arms reach. Several times I got up to use the rest room and "accidentally" hit him in the head. If I succeeded in showing him it was an accident, he wouldn't cry. If he thought it was intentional he'd start threatening to tell his mom.

"Go ahead," Chuck said. "Then she'll make you stay away from us."

This collusion with Chuck caused me pain. I wanted to lash out at both of them.
Taking sides with Chuck was the kind of self-betrayal that gives you insight into why the caged animal chews at its own leg. Not for hunger. Not for desperation even. It is the only violence available. This collusion with Chuck caused me pain. It the kind of self-betrayal that gives you insight into why the caged animal chews at its own leg. Not for hunger. Not for desperation even. It is the only violence available.

I suggested that we go downstairs to the basement. Chuck a five foot basketball hoop and some mini-basketballs.

Christopher followed us, as per his role as sucker-fish to our whale. Things could get ugly. I didn't care.

We started to play basketball and Christopher stayed out of the way. He could probably see that I was about to start chewing on my leg if I had to. He didn't want to be my leg. So to speak.

Chuck would take the abuse. He wanted it. When I had the ball I kept ramming into him and knocking him down onto the cement floor.

He started to get mad and tried to knock me over, but I stepped to the side and pushed him so that he careened away from the basket and hit the cement wall of the basement.

This was what I needed. A great physical therapy. My breath came easy now and I forgot all about the tacos that I would have to eat.

"Chucky! Dinner," came the call just then, as it would have come in hell, at the moment of escape. "Come wash your hands."

His mom had the habit of addressing only her kids, as if the visitor were not there. Resentful of that exclusion and wishing that it would be real and that I could not be there, I restrained myself only with a supreme effort from tripping Chuck as he went up the stairs. In holding myself back I accidentally knocked Christopher off the first step behind me.

When he started to cry I convinced him it had been an accident. The repetition, the self-betrayal, the muck of this arena of cranky doom would prepare me for nothing in life.

No time would come where I had to pretend fun and wait for opportunities to hit someone.

Then again, I'm still young. And life is strange.

*

I went up the stairs slowly, dreading the sickening crunch of hard shell tacos made with ground beef powdered with "taco seasoning". Grated American cheese, chopped iceberg lettuce, and sliced tomatoes set out each on their own plate for us to buffet upon harassed me, each in its turn as I looked from plate to plate, discovering an affront with every one.

Ketchup and lettuce and cheese went onto my tacos, lasting only through the first bite when the shell broke open along the spine and the contents spilled out onto my plate, some bouncing onto the floor and rolling into dark places where they palpitated and cooled invisibly, uneaten, little emblems of my yearning, morsels of my distaste.

After dinner I was offered a knock-off Twinkie - some Little Debbie brand, plastic slice of yellow and goo that tasted fake and wrong. I knew those treats and I passed.

Indignity. "Fine," Chuck's mom said, "You guys go play."

Her voice was like the more articulate version of Charlie Brown's mother. A constant complaint of squawks and burbles, high-pitched argument against weight of parenthood and neighborhood life. She was the backwater against which her own voice-rebelled. The leader of the movement against her family.

Around the house, she was always in a "moo-moo", the shapeless Hawaiian dress of the non-descript wife whose lack of personal identity chided her. No one could see the chiding under the dress. This was dual symptom of the disease of her social standing.

The chiding and its invisibility.

*

When the time came to call for my ride, dad was out, gone to pick Muddy up at his friend's house, and mom said that she was in the middle of something. I was going to have to wait for a half an hour.

"I'll be outside," I told her so that Chuck and his mom could hear me.

"No. Did you hear me? It's going to be at least twenty minutes."

"Ok. Bye," I said into the receiver. "She'll be here soon."
Technically, this was true. Time was a relative concept.

My coat and boots were at the door. I sat down and pulled on the boots, looking out the window expectantly. I rushed to put my coat on, said goodbye and left.

*

The snow was crusted over with ice but there was enough of the white of it to brighten the night. I could see my way without a problem as I headed in the direction of my house.

The ruts of footprints on the front lawns I marched through were perfectly shaped, like Platonic forms of footprints belonging to that ideal world where the stamps were made, the molds that the wax of flesh and reality were poured into by divine hands, by chance or fate or whatever did the pouring out of the materials of this world.

The sky was clouded so that only the North Star shone. Breathing was pleasant again outside of that house. I kept walking and made it half way home by the time my mom's car appeared in the near distance.

I hoped that she wouldn't ask why I was walking in the cold when it was only ten degrees out. I hoped, but I knew she'd ask.