Fish Out of Agua:. Michele Carlo
up your ass—me no more questions,
I’ll tell you no more lies,
A man got hit with a bowl of shit…How many times?
One, two, three…
This was where little Janey and I started turning the rope as fast as we could because if we could get Dawn and Nicole out before they got to ten, they would have to take the rope. Then, it would be our turn to jump.
“Hey, let’s play Junkie Tag!” Fat Pat yelled from across the park.
This game was based on the popular schoolyard game Freeze Tag—except St. Peter’s Park was three blocks away from a Daytop Village methadone clinic, whose patients were almost exclusively Vietnam War veterans in their early twenties. They would get their doses, then go back to the park and sit on the back benches, where they smoked cigarettes, cursed the U.S. government, and nodded out. But eventually they’d need to go to the store for another pack, and when one or more of them would stand up to attempt the trek across the street to the deli, that was where the game began. Because, being junkies, they couldn’t travel more than a few feet without stopping for a few minutes, tilting forward or sideways like a troop of bandannaed, army-jacketed-even-in-the-summer Leaning Towers of Pissers.
Whenever they were spotted, the call for Junkie Tag would go out. The most daring child would pick a junkie and run as close to him as possible, with the intention of tapping him and then running back to home base. You got extra points if you could knock the cigarette out of his hand without getting hit back.
“Get the fuck outta here! I catch you, I fuck you up…Aw shiiiit!”
Crazy Vinny, leader of the St. Peter’s Junkie/Vet Association, had swatted at me as I—who had not been invited to join the game but who had run out anyway—knocked the half-smoked Kool cigarette out of his hand as he toppled over. He sprawled on the concrete groping for it.
“Fucking kids. Fucking fuck. Aw shiiiiiiit.”
Why had I done it? I couldn’t tell you for certain. Maybe it was because even though I knew saying nigger was wrong; even though I knew that if Darlinda, my Bloodsister, my best school friend had been here, she would have first cried and then fought them, all of them; and even though I really didn’t want to play that stupid, stupid game—still—I wanted to be invited, allowed, welcomed to play with them and not be their nigger—or Speck. I ran back to my new girlfriends, unsure what was going to happen next.
“Hey, watch me,” Janey said. And she ran up to Crazy Vinny and snatched the cigarette off the ground—a bare inch away from his clawing fingers—then ran back to us and took a triumphant puff.
“Want some?” she asked, offering it around. Nicole, Dawn, and I stared at her, half in admiration, half in disgust.
“Ew! Cooties! No wait. Let me get some,” Fat Pat demanded. And he grabbed the nearly burned-out Kool from Janey’s hand.
None of us thought that was strange. Those were the days where two kids would share a cigarette, three would share an RC Cola, four would share a piece of gum. We called it ABC, or already been chewed. But no one got sick. Kids back then never were sick except for maybe sometimes when your mother would make you climb into bed with your cousins who had the German measles in hopes that you would get it and get it over with so they wouldn’t have to pay for the shot.
“The Parky just set up the Nok-Hockey! Who wantsta play? Come on!”
Fat Pat stuck the cigarette butt in his mouth and waddled to the front of the Park House, where the Parky had set up a Nok-Hockey board on the battered, splintered, lone picnic table, shooing off a couple of junkies who had decided to recline there.
Nok-Hockey was the precursor to air hockey and foosball. It was a wide rectangular board divided by red goal lines, with open slots at each end, and a diamond-shaped wooden block in the center. A kid would use an angled stick or her thumb to bounce the round wooden puck off the sides of the box and through the opponent’s slot to score a point. The first person to score eleven points won; seven-nothing was a shutout. First Janey, then Dawn, and Nicole, and then finally I ran to the group, hoping without hope they’d let me play with them. They did. I was thrilled. And I beat both Janey and Dawn, but lost to Fat Pat, mostly because he terrified me too much to shoot straight.
Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang!…Clang.
The bells of St. Peter’s Church across Westchester Avenue announced the changing of the guard. Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang!…Clang.
It was six o’clock in the evening. Time for us smaller kids to go home. The teenagers, wearing their fringed and torn bell-bottom jeans, were just starting to come out for the night. They clustered around the swings, opening quarts of Schaefer beer and rolling joints. The junkies had all retreated to their back benches. Yes, God was in his heaven and all was right with the park.
As I left, the song the teenagers had been singing stuck in my mind:
I’m a juvenile delinquent, marijuana do or die,
I smoke with the sailors and I drink with the bums
I wait on the corner till my pickup comes…
Oh I’m a juvenile delinquent…
It all became perfectly clear to me—as clear as the early fingernail moon rising above the roof of my building as I said good-bye to my new friends. Maybe I had to be a Speck, but I had been the one to knock the cigarette out of Crazy Vinny’s hand; that had to count for something. Yes, maybe there was a way to fit in after all.
That night my mother went to her window and speeched. Who knew what had happened that day to set her off? Maybe she had an argument with abuelita or one of my titis. Maybe the cashier at Mary’s Market stared too long at her. I had given up trying to figure it out. I tossed and turned as I tried to get to Kittenworld, but it didn’t come that night or the next. It would be a full month before I realized the kittens would never return.
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