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

as he stood in front of a map of old Europe, it was a creepy-sounding name, it sounded like crawls or ghouls. Even now, it’s painful to consider why Gols struck kids as so apt for me, but it’s not really a mystery. When I was almost three, living with Mamita in my grandparents’ house in Guatemala City after she’d left my father for the first time when I was around six months old, I’d caught tuberculosis, and whether that was the cause, something grossly impeded my physical development. In photographs from elementary school, I’m an emaciated, sallow weakling, sunken eyes, wooly hair, mouth dumbly hanging open, huge ears, a feeble boy raised in a damp, dark cellar by spiders who feed him moths, a boy called Gols. Eventually my limbs began to fill out; slowly I got stronger. By eighth grade I’d even score a few match points for my middle school track team; a year after I’d transform into a boy who won 440 races; in tenth grade, which is when high school began in our town, I’d even try out for football. Yet Gols stuck to me. I had other nicknames, too: Sleepless because I so often looked sleepy, lost in a demoralized stupor, Chimp Face, Pablo, but Gols was the one I really hated.

That snowy morning after Grandpa died, walking with my father through the town square to the bakery that sold bagels, rye bread, and challah, a snowball hit the back of my father’s herringbone fedora in a burst of snow, the hat jumping up and landing almost jauntily tipped forward atop his head, gloved hands clapping falling eyeglasses to his chest. He shoved the glasses back onto his nose, pushed back his hat, and we turned and saw the boy who’d thrown the snowball, Ricky Rossi from my sixth-grade class, sneering baby face in a bomber hat with hanging earflaps. Pitching arm cocked as if about to hurl another as he lightly skipped backward on the snow-covered sidewalk, he shouted, Jew! The boy beside him, who I didn’t even recognize—long, waxy, potato-nosed face under a wool cap pulled low—loudly screeched Gols, and they turned to each other to laugh as if in triumph and spun and ran away. A Norman Rockwell painting, quaint New England town square in prettily falling snow, rascally boys being boys. My father, a half snarl on his face, looked at me, and I tensed, certain he was about to ask, Gols? They call you Gols? What in hell does that mean, Gols? But he turned back toward the bakery into his composed silent grief. With his fedora, thick-framed eyeglasses, and weighty angular nose, he did look pretty Jewish. I’d hardly known my grandpa. He was pretty out of it in his last years and lived in a crowded multistoried Jewish nursing home that I so hated to visit I was only occasionally forced to, though my father went nearly every weekend, often accompanied by Lexi. Grandpa, born in czarist Russia nearly a century before, in the Ukraine, had grown up among Cossacks and pogroms. What must my father have made that morning of having a snowball thrown at his head by a punk kid shouting Jew?

My father liked to make emphatic statements about character. Things like: You can’t hide not having any character, Sonny Boy. If you don’t have any, it always shows. Like a hypochondriac trying to check his own pulse but unable to find it, I anxiously dwelled on this mystery and problem of character. Standing there in that pretty snowfall, those boys having just thrown that snowball and shouted “Jew” and “Gols” and my father looking at me like that, I felt that it was me who’d been exposed as lacking this thing called character, who couldn’t even imagine, no matter how much I brooded afterward, what I could have said or done in that moment that would have demonstrated character, so that even remembering it now I feel frustrated by this sense of an insurmountable lack that seems to have a name; that name must be Gols.

“So why don’t you ever come to any of our high school reunions?” Marianne asked in one of her messages. How long would it take me to answer that. Longer than it will take to eat my sandwich.

That year of eighth grade especially, Ian Brown used to invite me to his house, hectoring me on the phone to come right over, and I’d get on my bicycle or walk. If I cut across that side of town by walking on the railroad tracks, I could make it in about forty-five minutes. The Browns lived out by Fuzzi Motors and the House of Pancakes and the synagogue, in the same kind of split-level house that we did, common in the newer neighborhoods, plasterboard walls and doors, no basements, skeletons of wooden beams resting atop concrete foundations. Ian never came over to my house on Wooded Hollow Road, painted a bright tropical blue with black wrought iron Spanish grillwork underneath the front windows, my mother’s touch. I was happy to have a friend who was as popular at school as Ian, it made me feel as if our destinies were auspiciously linked. That seemed even truer when our school system selected—or classified—both Ian and me as underachievers, meaning that if we didn’t want to be held back, we would have to attend a special summer program. Was there anything good about being an official underachiever? To my father, it was one more shaming of his son for his infuriatingly stubborn refusal to try to do better in school, one more signpost on the bad road he was always announcing in that lowing tone of doom and lament that I was ineluctably headed down: You’re going down a bad road, headed for an ineluctable bad end, Sonny Boy. That’s how I knew the word “ineluctable,” surely no other eighth grader used it as much as I did. But