Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman (free ebook reader for pc txt) 📗

up my father, did she ever hear about that? By then she was so deep into her relationship with Jimmy Gleason that Lana Gatto predicted they’d get married before graduation. Marianne and I had even stopped talking just before Christmas. Yet it was how I still felt about Marianne months later that triggered the horrible event that made what finally happened between me and Bert seem inevitable.

It must have been a springtime Friday, because the high school dance in the rich town next to ours would have happened on a Friday night. On my way to school that morning I walked past Sarah Hancock Pond and the small dirt lot overlooking Mulberry Cove and the benches for skaters to change into and out of their ice skates, and down on the shore, I saw Marianne making out with Jimmy Gleason. Dangling from her hand pressed to his broad back was a colorfully shiny piece of gift wrapping paper, and just like that I remembered it was her birthday. Back then, I knew the date of Marianne’s birthday. April, it must have been, maybe early May. The world was wet, muddy, bright green, profuse with sweet pollens, inciting that adolescent hormonal buzzing under my skin that every spring made me feel like a walking Van Gogh painting, always breaking out in hives without warning or apparent cause. I don’t think Marianne and Gleason even noticed me as I went past.

That night we drank beer in the swampy woods behind the brick rubber factory that was across the street from the pond. Bonks was the only one of us old enough for a driver’s license because in elementary school he’d been held back, maybe even twice, and he could afford his own car because he worked, before and after school most days, for Hank Riggio and Sons, the contractors. You wouldn’t think someone with the name Bonks would have a nickname, too, but he did. At work his morning chore was to pick up building-site trash and debris and carry it over to the dumpsters, and because one day Hank Riggio decided it would be funny to call him Mickey Dumps, the name stuck. Bonks used to drive us around in his car, but only whenever and wherever Joe “Hose” Botto, son of the master carpenter, wanted him to. We’ll get Mickey Dumps to take us, Hose was always saying. That night in the swamp, Bonks was especially feeling his oats, showing off the new cobalt-blue suede jacket that he’d bought through some shady Hank Riggio connection. But he was especially excited because not only our usual crew was there but Paul Rizza, the varsity football star, was with us too. With his braying laughter, jerky gestures, and squinty grinning around, it was like Bonks thought this was his chance to really get in with the Sinatra Rat Pack now, but only if he could show Rizza he wasn’t just Joe Botto’s chauffeur. It all started when Joe said, What’s a matter, Sleepless, no sleep last night? I suppose he’d noticed I was in a glum mood. Ordinarily even I wouldn’t have been so stupid as to expose anything that personal in front of any of those kids, not even Joe, but I let down my guard and told them about seeing Marianne and Gleason making out that morning and that it was Marianne’s birthday. Typically, I would have finished describing this scene with a fatalistic shrug, but it was still a sorry sad-sack story to have told, and Bonks, seizing the chance to shine at my expense, turned on me and said, Aww Monkey Boy, don’t fucking get started with the Marianne Lucas bullshit again. And he made his idiotic crack about what she’d already done with Ian Brown’s dick, was doing with Gleason’s now, and was never going to do with mine. So just shut the fuck up and crack me open a brewski, he said, grinning around, practically strutting in place. Bonks was lowest on the totem pole among us but knew I was just above him, and this was obviously a ploy to reverse our positions. It being Bonks, I understood that if I didn’t respond, my high school life was basically over, though the possibility of this sort of violence always made me feel nauseous with fear. I stepped toward Bonks with my fist cocked, and he reflexively lifted his arms in front of his face, and though I should have punched him anyway, I shoved him hard with both hands in the chest and he fell backward into the brush, where he thrashed around a bit. When he got back up, he made a show of carefully inspecting and brushing off the muddied sleeves of his suede jacket and said, Fucking Monkey Boy, can’t take a joke. I said, You call me that again, I’ll fucking kill you. Rizza made a sarcastic oooh sound. He couldn’t have cared less about either Bonks or me. Bonks stepped past me toward the cooler and stooped to get a beer, and with his back turned to me, he stood up and opened it. It was a surrender. At least I’d shoved him, and in our unspoken rules and rites of aggression, a shove like that was a challenge to fight.

But Bonks drove us in his sedan anyway—there were five of us apart from Bonks—to crash that dance in the next town’s high school, where in the men’s room Rizza and Joe started a fight right away, Rizza with one of those rich boys in a headlock and pounding his face, splatter of blood on white enamel like a Catholic miracle and it was the sink that was bleeding. Everyone else, except for Bonks, was punching and grappling. Even I grabbed the shirt of a skinny blond boy who grabbed mine and we theatrically pushed and pulled on each other. Suddenly kids were shouting about police and we fled into the crowded gymnasium dance floor, where it seemed like everyone