Some Get-Back
Eric Miles Williamson
I’d been restricted to the trailer for hitting my brother. The entire summer holed-up in a rusty, nineteen-foot Airstream trailer next to the Mohawk station where Pop worked. There was no escape, because he was sure to catch me if I tried to leave. No privileges: I could only go outside to empty the toilet’s holding tank.
I discovered a lot that summer.
I discovered pot, thanks to my friend, Hiro, who’d sneak me joints through the plastic porthole near the rear of the trailer. I discovered acid. I discovered, in Pop’s decanters, Scotch. I discovered mushrooms. I discovered a jazz radio station. I discovered, while reading the letter my mother sent me, that she had been saved by Jesus. I discovered, in the same letter, that my mother had played second clarinet in elementary school, and that’s why I was a good trumpet player. I discovered, from that letter, that everything I’d ever done good in my life was because of her, and everything I’d done lame was the fault of Pop.
From the Funk & Wagnall’s encyclopedia set I kept stashed in the drawers beneath and above my bed, I learned that every scientific theory except the ones we believe in now has been proven false. I learned that if you divide a second in half, and then in half again, and again and again, you can divide it forever, and therefore there’s an infinity between every tick on a watch. I learned that you can know where you are, or how fast you are going, but not both. I learned that you can’t predict the path of a quark, and therefore everything in the cosmos is unpredictable.
I decided I didn’t care about not getting any nookie. I decided I was going to live in the woods in Oregon when I left Oakland and shoot animals and build a log cabin and kill anyone who came near me. I decided my mother must have mated with an intelligent milkman when Pop was at work and produced the zygote that became me, because there was not a chance in hell I was borne of the ape who was allegedly my progenitor. I decided, after reading about Marx, that I was a communist.
I grew ten inches and twenty pounds, and went from being fat-boy to being a monster. Every day of the summer I did pushups for an hour in the morning and an hour at night. I did hundreds of sit-ups each day before noon. I put my hands on the counters and did dips as if the counters were parallel bars. Veins popped out of my arms and neck. I clipped my hippie hair off with a pair of tin-snips. I did a bad job on purpose. I could throw truck tires around like they were Styrofoam life preservers. I could swing the sledge against split-rims like John Henry. I had to start shaving. When I’d cut myself I’d just let the blood run down my neck.
I could hardly wait for school to start.
There were some people I wanted to talk to.
It was the end of summer, it was hot, and the shit stank fierce. I was emptying the holding tank one bucket of chemical-green shit at a time, I was carrying the buckets around the back of the Mohawk station and dumping them in the Ladies Room toilet, I was paying my friend Hiro half of my allowance to help, when the idea came to me.
Even though I was a fat-boy, I was one of the best athletes at Jack London Junior High, because every day for many years I’d been running home from school being chased by herds of cawing Mexicans and blacks. I was no sprinter, fat-boy me, but I could run my fastest without ever slowing down. I could run for hours at full-tilt. If I got a couple minutes’ head start, I could get home to the Mohawk station without being touched. When they caught me, though, they beat me bloody. All of my fingers have been broken from being stomped on. I have an ugly nose. One kid sliced me up so bad I got sixty-eight stitches. I limped for six months when I was in sixth grade. My head’s been knocked so many times, I wouldn’t be surprised if I was permanently stupid.
And if I showed up at the Mohawk with tears in my eyes or limping, Pop would smack me around, too, for being a coward. Unless I could prove I’d taken one out. Proof: my own bloody knuckles.
Being a whitey isn’t as easy as it seems.
When I got home, I worked out. I slung around truck tires at the Mohawk station, stacked them and restacked them. Instead of using the air gun on the lug nuts of the trucks I used a T-bar. I could lay beneath a car and hold up the tranny while someone bolted it on. I could climb the tire racks without using my feet.
But I wanted to make sure not to get the shit kicked out of me by Pop for being a coward. So sometimes—hell, lots of times—I ripped up my knuckles on the sidewalk, scraped my knuckles raw to bone so Pop would think I kicked some ass. I’d have dangling chunks of skin I could flap back over the meat. I’d grind them up good.
I was too chicken to ever hit the Mexicans and the blacks back. I was too chicken because every time I’d hit one of my own brothers, Pop had beaten the shit out of me. “You’re bigger than they are,” he said. And then he popped me. “That’s what it feels like when someone bigger hits you.” The thought of hitting someone had always terrified me. My brothers, Clyde and Kent, could cry at will. They could just be standing there pumping gas or scooping dogshit with the shovel and if they felt like it they could just break out in sobs and tears. “T-Bird hit me,” they’d say. I’d deny the charge, and get popped double for lying as well as for beating up my brothers.
Pop had two rules.
1. Take one out with you.
2. Remember.
“Never, never forget,” he said. “You keep a list. Your ‘Get-Back’ list.”
He reached behind the marble-topped counter in the shop and pulled out an old pad of paper. He showed it to me. The words were written in pencil, faded and smeared and smudged with grease and oil, and on the pad was a list of names, with columns, and the columns were “Date” and “Offense.”
“A list,” he said.
I noticed my mother’s name was on the list. In capital letters. Big.
His father’s name was on the list.
His boss’ name.
Nixon and Agnew.
The offenses were vague: Shame. Too many. The Night. Cops. A woman’s name.
The dates went back to before I was born.
“Never, never forget. Never. You keep a list, so you can be sure. And before you get even, you wait until they have forgotten what they did to you. Then there’s two ways to proceed,” he said. “One: remind them of what they did to you when you’re nailing them.”
And then Pop looked up from beneath the hood of the car he’d been working on, and he smiled big and his eyes shimmered with joy, “And Two: make them think you’re doing them a favor while you’re destroying them. Someday, when they’re groveling, when they’re drooling on themselves and vomiting in the gutter, when they have the gun to their heads and they’re ready to check out, they’ll look back and know it was you who orchestrated everything, you who were the puppeteer, you who were pulling their strings. And when they pull the trigger anyway, and they know it was you that brought them to this, then, THEN you have proper get-back. It might take you ten, maybe twenty years to get the right and perfect chance to shell out some get-back. But remember, get-back isn’t worth the while unless it’s forever, unless it’s the final payment.”
Pop put his list back under the counter, and he stood there for a second with a blank face, stood there as if time had stopped and he were somewhere else, as if he had vanished. And then his lips began slowly to curl and twist, to slide upwards on his face and into a smile and he said, slowly and with a voice that sounded like the first time he’d used his true voice instead of making sounds he’d thought he wanted people to hear, “Payment,” he said. “Payment in full.”
I kept a list. It was a long list. It could take me the rest of my life if I waited for the right moments. I would never be bored.
Pop was on my list.
Things weren’t much better for Hiro, since he was Japanese, and a shrimp. When we were running home, we’d split up, we’d use specially designed escape routes, we’d hide in warehouses and in tunnels beneath the railroad tracks and we’d duck into corner markets and try to wait the Mexicans and blacks out. But it didn’t matter to them how late they got home from school. No one was waiting for them anyway. They didn’t even know who their parents were.
So Hiro was a Japanese shrimp, I was a fat-boy whitey, we both wore black-rimmed glasses, and there was no way either of us was ever going to get any nookie. Nookie was almost something mythological. It was something I’d never get. The school’s fat-boy four-eyed punching bag is not the likeliest candidate for nookie. I asked six different girls, four Marias and two Lucys to the seventh grade dance. Five of them said no, and Maria Luna thought it was so hilarious and ridiculous that I’d asked her, that she went into the cafeteria ahead of me and told everyone. When I walked through the doors, everyone was laughing. I mean they were really laughing. They were choking on their food laughing. They were having a good old time.
Maria Luna went on my list.
Kids coming home from school had seen me going in and out of the trailer next to the Mohawk station. They were on welfare, but at least they had apartments. I was trailer-trash that didn’t even live in a trailer park. And they’d seen me emptying the buckets of slimy green, chemically-treated turds. Someone would spot me, and then they’d round up all the kids they knew, and soon I’d have an audience, all of them laughing and holding their noses and squatting along the sidewalk as if they were dropping loads for me to haul away to the Ladies Room toilet.
The ass-kickings were the worst when report cards came out. At Jack London Junior High, if you got caught with A’s on your report card, the beating was especially bad, and then the ridicule that followed was even worse. The girls? They didn’t want nerds: they wanted real men, men who could protect them at the laundromat when they were washing the family clothes, men who were already sixteen and had Camaros and Firebirds and Monte Carlos. And we had plenty of sixteen year olds in the eighth grade, kids who couldn’t speak much English, kids who’d flunked plenty of grades. Our basketball team was ten kids, six-foot mutants—virtual retards—with drivers licenses and stringy goatees. Our team would scare the shit out of the other teams, showing up for games in their Bondo-mobiles, all of them drunk, making sure that at least five of them fouled-out each game, and fouled-out in style. They used to send the opposing teams home bloody. One of the local schools—from the fancy side of town—wouldn’t even come to play our team. They’d forfeit every time we came up on the schedule. The more our school’s goons flunked out, the better they were in sports, since each year they stayed behind, they got another year older than the other kids. Hiro and me got younger every year, and the odds of us getting any nookie when everyone else was six feet tall and drove cars and smoked pot and snorted coke and had good part-time jobs at the canneries and UPS and the loading docks surrounding the rim of the bay—the odds of getting laid if you were a little whitey fat-boy who got A’s in school were nil. Zip. How can you compete with those kinds of guys? At my school, flunking was the epitome of cool. So when report cards came out, Hiro and I would be absent.
I’d grown, though. I had grown, and I had a list.
Emptying those buckets of shit, the kids from my class watching as the green slop lapped onto my blue jeans, the sky Oakland gray and the breeze curling and twisting and eddying around the courtyard of the Mohawk station’s brick-surrounded lot—cigarette wrappers swirling and me and Hiro dodging dog turds as we walked through the alley behind the station with the plastic buckets so heavy our shoulders drooped—emptying those buckets and watching the faces of the kids, the girls, two of whom I’d asked to the seventh grade dance and who’d rejected me, I decided what must be done, and to whom, and just how—and how splendidly—it would be done.
I was a kid with a plan.
I was glad when school started. The only kids who recognized me were the ones who came every Saturday to the shop to watch me empty the buckets of turds. I had cuts on my face and my hair was so short I didn’t need to comb it and I was bigger than everyone by twenty or thirty pounds. Some of the flunkees were taller than me—Joe Gonzalez, Joe Borges, Joseph Alvarez—but they were skinny dudes with sunken chests and pointy heads. I could take them out in a flat second.
And they knew it. When I walked down the hall, my hair shorn ragged like Cro-Magnon Man, and my arms pumped up like hamhocks, people kept out of my way. And I liked it that way, and I encouraged it—I made my eyes look crazy. My eyes are gray like old plaster. I made them look creepier, though. I kept my eyes wide open and bulging like I was insane, like I’d never before blinked them and never would again. I had dry eyes that looked like they saw something beyond the world out there, something that would spook normal people but that I was in cahoots with.
Number one on my list was Alphonso. Alphonso Joseph San Miguel.
So I made it my personal mission to make friends with him.
I’d read this book by a Chinese writer named Sun-Tzu that Hiro had loaned me. It was his father’s book. His father had been in the relocation camps in World War II, and he was six-foot five and over two hundred pounds and there wasn’t a person on the planet that could look at him without knowing that if they crossed him they’d pay the final payment. Even his name, Shig, sounded like an ancient Japanese weapon, like a sickle or a sacred spear used to ram enemies. You could tell that he’d dice you up clean and nifty, and he wouldn’t do a victory dance afterwards, no—he’d stand up straight and he’d pull out a handkerchief and he’d wipe the blade clean and walk slowly away, as if he’d just found a good parking place downtown and paralleled without nudging a bumper.
When Hiro handed me Sun-Tzu, he said, “Read this.”
“Books are for queers,” I said.
“Not this one,” Hiro said. “Look,” and he turned to an dog-eared page.
Make the enemy’s road long and torturous, the underlined paragraph read. Lure him along it by baiting him with easy gains.
“And this,” Hiro said, and he showed me another passage.
Know the other, know yourself, and the victory will not be at risk. Know the ground, know the natural conditions, and the victory will be utter.
I nodded. “Sounds good to me.”
“It’s my father’s favorite book,” Hiro said. “He keeps it on the nightstand in his bedroom. He gave me a copy after the Chavez brothers pounded us last year. He gave me a copy of the book and a new chess set.”
So I swiped a copy of my own from the Oakland Public Library downtown, and during my summer on restriction, when I wasn’t working out, and I read the book over and over. The Art of War. The Art of War. The Art of War. The Art of War. I nearly memorized the sucker.
The first item of business when school started was to lull my enemies, to infiltrate their camp, to make them believe I was one of them.
I set out to make friends with Alphonso.
Lunchtime the first day of school, I walked up to his table in the cafeteria and sat down.
“This table isn’t for faggot culeros,” he said. “Puta madre mojon gringo maricon.”
He looked at me. The other Mexicans looked down at their sloppy joes and coleslaw.
“Maybe you,” I said, “should leave. You know, I saw your mother on San Pablo Boulevard,” I said, “with the other whores,” and before I knew it he was across the table with his hands around my neck.
But I was ready for him. I’d rolled pennies from Pop’s change bucket and my fists banging on his head were like hammers. It only took two punches to knock him dizzy and sprawling across the slop on the table. He looked up at me, and his eyes were twitching. He was breathing funny.
I took the rolls of pennies from my fists and peeled the paper and sprinkled the pennies over his face.
The cafeteria was silent.
I leaned close to his ear.
“Together,” I said, “we can kick some holy ass.”
After school, when I was walking through the parking lot toward home, I saw Alphonso. He was standing next to his ’68 GTO. He was only in seventh grade, and I was in eighth, but he was three years older, and had his driver’s license.
“T-Bird,” he said. “Come over here. I’m needing to talk some words with you.”
I walked over to his GTO. It was bondo-gray and had a set of Krager mags and 50-series monster BF Goodrich tires on the back, 60’s in the front, raised whites.
He opened the passenger door. I got in.
“I could cut you up like a pig,” he said. “Like a gringo pig.”
We drove.
“My little goat the cabron has a four-barrel Holley double-pumper, traction bars, and glass-packs,” he said. “I got the upholstery done in TJ.”
The diamond-tuck job was crushed-red velvet. Everything was diamond-tucked. The door panels, the glove compartment, the dashboard, even the floorboards. The inside of the trunk was diamond-tucked. It was a serious car.
“I builded the fucker my own self, the fucker,” Alphonso said. “My little Goat, my cabron.”
“It’s boss,” I said. I pulled a joint from my wallet. “Thai stick,” I said.
“Panama Red,” he said, and he took a joint from his shirt pocket and he lit it and smoked, then passed the joint to me. He smiled, and smoke leaked out from where one of his teeth was missing.
“How do you know so much about cars?” I said. “My pop works in a gas station and I live next door to it, and I don’t know half as much as you.”
I passed the joint back. I was getting stoned, and I felt good. I almost forgot I was sitting in a car with Alphonso Joseph San Miguel.
Rumor had it he’d killed someone.
He leaned his head back and exhaled. We smoked with the windows rolled up so we could inhale the clouds over and over. The windows were crusted yellow with pot tar. I scraped my fingernail against the windshield, and rolled a brown ball of resin between my fingers.
“I work at Santos Rentals,” Alphonso said. “Seven dollars a hour. I can fix anything made of metal.”
And that’s the way it went for a month. Every day after school we’d smoke a joint in Alphonso’s Goat, and we’d tell stories about our families. I told Alphonso how my mother used to ride with the Hell’s Angels, and he thought that was really cool. I told him how my father used to play trumpet in the Oakland symphony, and he told me how his grandfather used to play violin in a mariachi band in Mexico. He told me how his father was illegal, and how his father and his uncle shared a green card between them, how sometimes he’d have to stay at his uncle’s apartment for a month at a time when the federales were getting feisty, and he’d have to pretend that his uncle was his father and his aunt was his mother. He told me how some day he wanted to build dragsters himself, how he wanted to make the world’s lightest rail so the horsepower/weight ratio alone would compensate for any problems he might encounter with aerodynamics.
One weekend, when he didn’t have to go to work, we drove out to Berkeley and walked out to the end of the Berkeley Pier to smoke a joint. We stayed there until sunset, the bay shimmering orange and purple, the fog in the distance matted atop the Golden Gate and San Francisco. You could hear the seagulls crying happy over the garbage dumps, and you could hear the tugboats hooting their foghorns. A pelican dove into the water and came up with a fish and slowly lifted itself into the air, flapping hard and heavy. A yacht slowly slipped past, and the people on it were having a party, dancing on the deck and throwing their empty champagne glasses into the water. They looked really happy.
“My papa’s a wetback,” he said. “In Mexico, he was an engineer. He went to the college in Mexico City and he designed bridges gringo tanks rolls across when the Mexicans buy them and bring them home. But when he gets to America and tries to become the engineer, they make him go to junior college to get the American credentials, the gringo papers. He failed that fucking freshman English every time he taked it, every motherfucking time, every semester for ten years, twenty times he took freshman fucking English, twenty times he fucking flunked. His English not good enough to build bridges? His English not good enough to draw blueprints? His fucking Ingles? Fuck college. Fuck the fucking college and the fucking school. So he’s just a wetback. But I’m not. I’m not a wetback because my papa worked hard all his life to hide from the federales. In Mexico he was a government inspector, he was a boss, he told people what was right and what was wrong. Here, in the fucking America, he’s a garbage fucking man.”
Alphonso looked out at the yacht and shook his head.
“When you throw something away, my father is the pinche mierda that picks it fucking up,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be sorry for me. I’m no fucking wetback, and I can fix anything made of metal. And I’m going to make the fastest dragster ever did the quarter mile. My childrens will be motherfucking proud of their papa reata.”
The fog was sweeping toward us. The sun behind had set. The bay clicked from orange and purple and red to battleship gray. We stood silent a long time.
“You know,” he said. “Even though you a fucking gringo and you get A’s and shit in school, you okay, man. In my book, you okay.”
I shouldn’t have felt flattered, but I did.
I still had plans. In P.E. the first fall sport was wrestling. Wrestling was especially suited to my needs.
For wrestling, Coach Butler made us weigh-in on the scales while he noted down the numbers on a pad. There were only three guys heavier than me, all of them fat-boys, geeky nerd friends of mine—Nelson Van Sickle, my science partner; Chaim Goldstein, the school whiz at anything that had to do with math; and Load Hansen, who played tuba in band. All two hundred pounders. Coach Butler grouped the four of us together, and we were #1 Mat. As your weight got lighter, you moved down mats, all the way down to #15 Mat. The goal was to move up mats by beating the people at your starting mat. If you were a loser, you moved down mats and wrestled lighter and lighter kids, until you got to #15, where the runts were, Tito Campos, Joe Garcia, Joseph Guiterrez, and my friend Hiro. Since I was on #1 Mat, my job was to fend off challengers.
That’s not what I had in mind, though.
Master Sun said, Better to seem to lose the battle and actually win, than to seem to win the battle and actually lose. Sometimes the seeming loser is in truth the victor. One must know the definition of victory before one engages the enemy.
I won by losing.
Everyone on my list was on a mat beneath mine, and so, to get to them, I had to lose.
During wrestling month, I’d pretend to wrestle, and then let myself get pinned, and down a mat I’d go. Until I met with someone on my list, someone who’d pummeled me years before, sometimes someone who’d knifed me or stuck my head in a toilet four or five years before, and when I got to them on the mat, I’d crush them. I’d smash their face into the mat with my forearm against the back of their neck, I’d twist their arms behind their backs until they screamed so loud that everyone else stopped wrestling and Coach Butler had to pull me off.
I got sent to Mr. Hanover, the Vice Principal, who told me that I was a rough ball of clay, and it was education’s job to shave off the rough edges.
When I got all the way down to #12 Mat, I met up with Francisco Alvarez, who only weighed ninety pounds. We were in “referee position,” Francisco on his knees and me behind him, and I whispered into his ear, “You remember in fourth grade when you punched me in the mouth in basketball practice?”
“No,” he said.
“You chipped one of my front teeth,” I said. “You don’t remember? I had to go to the doctor?”
“I don’t remember,” he said.
“I do.”
When Coach Butler blew the start whistle, I picked Francisco up into the air over my head and slammed him down so hard I knocked him unconscious. Coach Butler had to slap him around to get him to come to.
And when he came to, I was standing over him, smiling.
I started a trend. Everyone started losing. No one cared about winning anymore. All the fat-boys, all the big nerds and geeks, started losing and moving down the mats to the lower mats and pounding the runts when they got there, following their enemies from mat to mat by losing and winning as necessary. It got so bad, with no one really caring about winning or losing, that Coach Butler had to cancel wrestling and move us to weight lifting, where we wouldn’t have to touch each other.
We didn’t get to play football that season.
But I got to cross six names off my list.
Alphonso helped out a lot, too. It was like having my own private hit man.
“Anyone fucking with T-Bird Murphy,” he said, “fucking with Alphonso. I don’t care how old we are, and where we living, if the motherfucker fucks with you, he fucks with Alphonso. And if you don’t tell me, you, too, fucking with Alphonso.”
All I had to do was say that someone had looked at me cross-eyed, and it didn’t matter if it was one of his other friends or not, he’d shred them. I was helping Alphonso with his homework, and he was teaching me about cars and engines and electrical systems and fuel combustion, and if anyone fucked with either of us, they were meat. So I’d put the finger on a kid who’d thrown a football at the back of my head in sixth grade, and Alphonso would break his finger or slap him rummy in front of his friends. I could have asked Alphonso to assassinate someone, and he would have done it for me, his amigo gringo.
On my way to school one morning, as I was walking through the shop to put back the dogshit shovel, Pop pulled me aside. He was working under the hood of an old Chrysler Newport.
“The toilet in the trailer stinks like shit,” Pop said.
“Sorry,” I said. “I forgot the chemicals this week.”
“Sorry,” Pop said. “Empty the fucker.”
“After school,” I said.
“Notice you have a new friend,” Pop said. He slipped the wrench and banged his knuckles against the manifold. “Son of a bitch,” he said. Blood seeped through the grease on Pop’s knuckles. “Son of a bitch.”
“He’s not really a friend,” I said. I rolled up my sleeve and showed Pop my scar. “You remember when I got this?”
“Sixty-eight stitches,” Pop said.
“Alphonso,” I said. “My new friend.”
Pop smirked. He smirked and looked at me over his glasses and he just stared at me, smirking. And then his smirk widened into a grin, a full smile, both rows of teeth showing. “Get out of here,” he said, and I looked back before I turned the corner and saw Pop, and he was standing in the middle of the lube bay, wiping down his hands with a red rag, and he was watching me, and he was still smiling.
Things around Jack London Junior High had changed for me lately. I still had my geeky friends, and we still did all the geek things together—chess club, band, California Junior Scholarship Federation meetings, study-group at lunchtime, drama club. But now no one else would talk to me. They wouldn’t even look at me. When they’d see me coming down the hall, they’d look down at the floor and they’d back off, scattering. The school seemed much more spacious.
In P.E., I could do just about anything I wanted. During basketball, I didn’t mind fouling out, and so when I had the ball, I’d just run over anyone in my way and do a lay-up. Rebounding, I’d swing my arms and elbows, and one time I smacked a Jarimallo so hard in the mouth that he bit off the inside of his cheek. There was blood everywhere, and I got sent to the Vice Principal’s office again.
“You’re a straight-A student,” he said. “Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Fighting all the time, doing what,” he said.
“They’re the thugs,” I said. “They’ve been beating the hell out of all of us for years now. You know that.”
Mr. Hanover shook his head.
“You can’t just run around taking justice into your own hands,” he said.
“Where’s the justice supposed to come from, then?”
“Justice?” he said. “Justice? How long have you lived in this country, justice.”
He stood up. He walked over to my chair and put his hand on my shoulder. He lowered his voice. “Look,” he said. “I don’t give a damn what you do to the little shits.”
I looked up at him.
“Just don’t do it on school property.”
He sent me home for the day. When I walked past the idiot math class, I peeked in and caught Alphonso’s eye. He asked for a hall-pass and came out to meet me.
“Suspended,” I said.
“No big,” he said. “Why?”
“Nailed a Jarimallo.”
Alphonso nodded in approval. “Fucking bueno.”
“I have to do some work on the trailer,” I said. “Pop wants me to fix the shower pump, and I don’t know what the hell to do.”
“Let’s go,” Alphonso said. “I will help you.”
Alphonso parked his Goat next to the trailer.
“You live here?”
“And my father and my two brothers.”
“Fuck,” Alphonso said. “I didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know what?”
“I didn’t know gringos,” he said, and he fished for a word or two, “I didn’t know gringos were poor, too.”
“Let’s fix that pump,” I said. “I’ll go get the toolbox.”
Pop stopped me. “What are you doing home from school?”
“Alphonso’s going to help me empty the holding tank, and in return I told him he could use your tools to work on his car for a while. Please?”
“If I need them, that’s the end of playtime with the tools.”
I wheeled Pop’s huge red Snap-On toolboxes through the lube bay and around the side of the station to the trailer. Alphonso was smoking a cigarette.
“You know,” Alphonso said, “I gave you your first real battle wound, didn’t I?”
I rolled up my sleeve and showed him my scar.
“That’s a good scar,” he said. He nodded proudly. “A good fucker, that scar. I’ll show you my first cabroncito.”
He lifted his T-shirt and showed me his chest. It was mapped with scars, red ones, white ones, black ones. It looked like he’d been whipped, too.
“You see this one?” he said. He drew his finger along a small white scar the length of a tire valve. “This little fucker was my first one, and just look at the fuck. It’s nothing. If I show people this scar, they think nothing. It’s a pussy scar, and I got it making play-fight with my brother. No nothing in this scar. But yours,” he said, and he walked over to me and lifted my shirt sleeve and ran his finger along mine—and the way he did it, the way he touched my scar, was as if he loved that scar, as if the scar were not a part of me but a creature living on its own in the world, a splendid and beautiful creature that Alphonso was petting, that Alphonso was in awe of—“yours is a scar, a scar earned in battle. Some day you will tell your childrens and your grandchildrens that you were scarred by Alphonso.”
“Let’s get to that pump,” I said.
I showed Alphonso the part of the trailer where the problem was, underneath, and he lay on his back on the asphalt and shimmied himself between the truck tires I’d arranged that morning.
“Tight fucking fit under here,” he said.
“Get your head all the way up against the tire,” I said.
“Got it,” he said. “It’s dark, though. I can’t see a fucking thing.”
“I’ll get you a flashlight,” I said.
I wheeled the toolboxes over his legs, and I put a flashlight in his hand.
“See anything?” I said.
“It doesn’t look like there’s anything under here that has to do with a pump,” he said.
“There’s not,” I said.
“What?”
“There’s not,” I said. “I just wanted you under the trailer, pinned.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Do you understand what the word ‘shit’ means?”
“What the fuck you talking about?”
“When you knife little fat-boys, they don’t forget,” I said. “They feel like shit,” I said. “They feel like this,” I said, and I reached under the trailer and I pulled the handle and the shit flowed. Every shit I’d taken that week, every shit of my brothers and Pop, every turd of their girlfriends and even the turds of some of the preferred customers—slipping and sliding onto Alphonso’s face.
I stood back and listened to Alphonso curse, and man did he curse. He cursed my father, my mother, my cousins, my aunts and uncles. He cursed every member of a hundred generations of Murphys. He cursed us back to Adam and his whore wife Eve.
The shit and piss and puke and spit spread out on the asphalt beneath the trailer like gurgling tar, and Alphonso kicked his legs and punched at the undercarriage of the trailer but he couldn’t get loose.
Then, suddenly, his noise stopped. His legs went limp and I couldn’t hear anything.
“Alphonso?” I said. “Alphonso? Alphonso?” But no response. “Alphonso!”
I ran to the lube bays. Pop was there, and Pete Arvey was pumping gas on the island. “There’s been an accident,” I said.
“What,” Pop said.
“Alphonso’s choking.”
Pop looked at me. He winked. “Got him good?”
“Pop,” I said, “he might be dead.”
“Son of a bitch,” Pop said. “Son of a bitch.” And he called Arvey and he went to the trailer and Arvey and me followed. Pop pulled the toolboxes away, and he grabbed Alphonso’s ankles and he pulled. Alphonso was limp.
“It was an accident,” Pop rehearsed. “You were emptying the tank and he got caught and he drowned. By the time you figured out what was happening, he was gone. You didn’t know. It was an accident.”
“It wasn’t an accident,” I said. “It wasn’t an accident,” and I slammed Alphonso’s chest with my fists knotted together. He lay there corpsed. I slammed him again, and I slammed him a third time, and he coughed, and runny browned shit bubbled from his mouth and trickled down his cheeks. I sat him up and slapped his back, again, again, again, and I slapped his back again. His eyes, when they opened, couldn’t see a thing.
“Alphonso,” I said.
His head hung like a drunk’s.
“Alphonso,” I said. I slapped him. “Alphonso!”
Arvey heard the station bells ring, and went to take care of a gas customer. When he came back, he had a ten-pound sledge hoisted over his shoulder. We stood around Alphonso, Pop, Pete Arvey and me, and Alphonso stood slowly up, and he began taking off his clothes, his shirt, shoes and socks, his pants, his shorts. He stood there naked, dripping. You could see the scars on his chest through the slime. It looked like they were bubbling, like they were heated up and boiling through the shit and piss and vomit.
He walked toward us and we moved away and let him through, and he walked through the alley behind the station and cut right. A few minutes later he was back, and he’d wrapped himself in the rolling-towel from the restroom. He looked like an Incan warrior, his hair wet and slick and black, his brown skin glistening with water.
“You don’t know a fucking thing about fighting, little gringo,” he said. He looked each of us in the eye. Then he stared at me. “You might be big, but you will always be a little gringo.”
Pete Arvey switched his sledge hammer from one shoulder to the other.
“Tomorrow,” Alphonso said, “tomorrow, my gringo fucking amigo, I will be clean.”
And he walked off, left his Goat there next to the trailer and just walked off, buck naked under the washroom towel, walked down the street and into Oakland.
In the middle of the night I heard Alphonso’s car start and drive off.
I didn’t tell Hiro about what I’d done. I didn’t tell anyone. Pop, though, would tell everyone who came into the station. He kept changing the story around to make it funnier—and he left out the part about nearly killing Alphonso. Once he got the story completely fixed up, he thought the Alphonso event was just about the funniest damn thing that ever happened.
For the customers, he’d put on a Mexican accent and he’d tell the story, and when he got to the end, he’d say, “Tomorrow, my gringo fucking amigo, I will be clean,” over and over again, and everyone would laugh so hard their stomachs would hurt. “Tomorrow, my gringo fucking amigo, I will be clean,” he said, and an old dude laughed so hard his choppers shot right out of his mouth and onto the ground. “Tomorrow, my gringo fucking amigo, my teeth will be clean,” Pop said, and everyone laughed some more.
Alphonso never did come back to school. During Christmas break, I went by Santos Rentals, and they told me he’d quit. I didn’t know where he lived, or where his uncle lived.
Eventually I started telling my own version of the Alphonso story.
In my version, I made Alphonso beg like a coward.
In my version, I left out the part where we’d become friends.
“Some Get Back” first appeared as a chapter in East Bay Grease. Picador USA. 1999.