hen I was a kid my parents protected me from the world. I never even had to worry about getting along with babysitters. Mother and Father never went out. Occasionally, though, Mother would leave the house for an hour or two. One of her customers, old and infirm, was a homebody. She considered herself a fashion plate and insisted that Mother come once a week to hem her dresses.
I was ten, a month shy of my eleventh birthday. I liked to sit on the porch waiting for Mother to come home from her weekly excursion. As long as I could spread my comic books before me, I was happy. I was crazy for comic books, especially the ones with superheroes, the defenders of truth, justice, and "the American way." I liked the way the hero invented a second identity to conceal his heroic self, as if a defender of justice must always wear a mask, protection against not just the bad guys but also the law. Superheroes operate outside the law, sometimes above it like Superman, flying around the world swooping down here and there to dispense justice. My favorite hero was the Count of Monte Christo. He was an ordinary guy dealt an extraordinary injustice, then got his revenge and his treasure.
On one of Mother's absences Mike Zermansky, a brawny thirteen-year-old from the neighborhood, stopped by the house. He said he was thirsty and I invited him inside. He followed me into the kitchen, chattering on about Annabelle Laughlin, the twelve-year-old girl next door with the budding breasts we all wanted to get our hands on.
Once inside, he told me not to bother with getting him a drink. He wanted to see the house. No one had ever asked me for a tour of our home, and I thought maybe it would be fun to pretend I was an official tour guide, like the friendly old man at the wax museum.
When we got to my room he plopped on the bed, testing the mattress like it was a trampoline. I asked him if he wanted to see my games, but he said games were for little kids and he wasn't a kid anymore.
He got off the bed and stood in front of the full length mirror on the door. He lowered his pants. He wasn't wearing underwear. I was standing behind and to one side of him and could see his gargantuan thing from two different angles. Next, I remember lying next to him on the bed, remember him touching me, remember seeing my thing grow big, though not as big as his got. Nothing else happened. I felt a little something, but not enough to mean anything. Out of boredom or disappointment, he slid off the bed and left. I stayed and straightened the sheets and blanket and waited for Mother to come home. When she did, I told her nothing.
Every week, Mike came over when Mother went to see the customer. And each time he was a little more determined. He used petroleum jelly, baby oil, his own spit, and finally his mouth. I lay there and stared at the ceiling, counting the lines where the paint had cracked. When I got tired of counting, I thought about superheroes.
When Mother returned home after Mike's fifth visit, she said she wanted to have a talk with me. I said I didn't feel like talking. I knew she was suspicious. Mothers have a way of knowing. Maybe I wanted her to figure out what was going on. She later found a semen stained piece of toilet paper behind the clock radio in the shelf of the headboard. I guess Mike had put it there while I was staring at the ceiling.
Mother gave me permission to skip dinner that night. I heard her and Father arguing in Yiddish. My older brother, who understood some German, came up to the room and said in the serious patronizing way older brothers talk to younger brothers, "You should know better than to jack off and not throw away the evidence." I smiled and agreed to be more careful.
When Mike came over the next time he never made it inside the house. As he turned off the sidewalk to approach the porch I told him to stop. He laughed and continued walking. I took the rock I had gotten from the tulip bed and threw it as hard as I could. It struck him in the forehead and he did a three-sixty, falling to the ground like a dying top. I thought he was dead. I hoped he was dead.
I sat on the steps and stared at him. His face was tilted to one side, flush against the pavement, blood flowing from the gash in his forehead and dripping from his nose. Then I heard a groan and knew he was alive. I was disappointed. I wanted him to lie on the ground until the ants crawled through his eyes and used his brain cells to build a colony, or if the ants didn't find his skull appealing lie there until Mother and Father came home or a neighbor arrived on the battlefield and praised my courage and marksmanship.
Mike struggled to his feet. Tears and snot mixed with the blood running down his face. His shirt and pants were torn. He stumbled toward his house, looking like one of those wounded soldiers in the old wartime newsreels, shell shocked into numbness, eyes rolled up into his head, leaving behind him a spotted trail of blood. I retrieved the rock and returned to the porch and my comic books. I was reading Captain Marvel when Mother and Father drove up.
I didn't tell them about the sexual assignations, but I confessed to what I had done to Mike. I even described the path of the rock, saying it flew through the air like out of a slingshot. They didn't have time to interrogate me further. A blue and white Chevrolet, red light flashing, screeched to a stop in front of the house. I recognized Officers Bundy and Morrissey as they got out of the car. A year earlier they found my cat, Wyatt Earp, sleeping in a garbage can and returned him to me. My brother raced in front of Mother and Father and told the officers I was in no condition to speak, so shaken was I from Mike's unprovoked attack. He had the facts reversed and the cops knew it, having come from Mike's house where they had calmed the overwrought Mrs. Zermansky, back from the local church's Sodality meeting.
Officer Bundy, a middle-aged woman with a scar across her right cheek, explained to Mother why she had to take me downtown to Juvenile Court. Officer Morrissey, younger than Bundy, ran his hand through my hair. This was my first experience with the law or its agents, but I wasn't scared. In fact, I was kind of excited. I wanted to enjoy the legal process like I enjoyed a cops and robbers show. I thought of Bundy and Morrissey as real life detectives from Dragnet or Highway Patrol.
My brother stayed home while Mother, Father, and I rode in the backseat of the squad car. Mother clutched my hand and held back tears while Father plowed through his catalogue of German obscenities. Then he said, "I remember when the Nazis took away the children." I had seen Nazis in the movies and on television. I wasn't worried; Nazis had blonde hair. Bundy's hair was brown and Morrissey's was black.
When we got to the courthouse, Officers Bundy and Morrissey took us to the courtroom. Except for the lobby of the Union Terminal, it was the biggest room I had ever seen. As we waited for the judge, Father studied a painting on the wall. He said it was a portrait of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a Fifth Century BC Roman general and statesman. I was amazed that someone would name the city after an ancient Roman.
I even had a lawyer representing me. I felt honored, felt I had arrived, was now a true citizen. Like my other ideas, my notion of lawyers came from comic books and television. Lawyers belonged to one of two categories: sleazy, greasy-haired men in pinstripe suits who were mouthpieces for gangsters or old men with receding hairlines who sat behind gigantic desks in musty offices and asked out wealthy widows. My lawyer, though, worked for the public defender's office and didn't fit into either category. For one thing, he wasn't even wearing a suit; he wore khaki pants and a plaid sport jacket with a ripped lining. His black shoes were scuffed and spotted with some kind of white goo. He was fat and the back of his shirt hung out of his pants, the shirt slapping at his ass like a waiter's apron. He had difficulty breathing and couldn't complete a sentence without swallowing his words.
Mother and Father told the lawyer that Mike had attacked me. They couldn't come up with a credible motive, however, except to say that Mrs. Zermansky had set Mike against us because Mother had accidentally ripped one of her dresses. The lawyer belched and looked at me for confirmation, but I lowered my head like I was ashamed I had wet my pants. I knew from shows on television that I had a right not to incriminate myself and, besides, I didn't think that Mike introducing me to sex was a defense to attempted murder.
The judge continued the case for a week so my lawyer could prepare my defense. When we got home Father lectured me about the evils of violence and Mother said she'd never leave me alone again. Afterwards, I dragged my brother upstairs and made him join me in a fast-draw contest with my imitation Roy Rogers six-shooters. I figured I'd better get in my practice before Father confiscated them.
For the hearing, Mother made me wear my brother's bar mitzvah suit and one of Father's ties. Mother wore one of her customer's dresses. Father put on the suit he used when he became a citizen. He called a taxi. I had never been in a taxi.
The driver cruised along Mitchell Avenue to Reading Road, tracing my bicycle route to Schlancer's drug store, where I regularly used my allowance to buy comic books, Chuckles candy, and Double Bubble gum. Then down Reading Road past the corner where Mother had left me stranded when she went to the Laundromat, the synagogue where two years later I would celebrate my bar mitzvah, over a hill past the Pontiac dealer where Father bought his car-I asked him why we were taking a taxi when he could have driven, but he wouldn't say-and into downtown, a place of foreboding tall buildings, dark movie theaters where strangers lurked, a place that I knew must be the center of the universe, a dark and dangerous place like the moon, cold and airless, where the next breath would be your last.
My lawyer met us on the courthouse steps. With his tousled brown hair he would have looked like just another fat kid but for his ability to use big words that terrified me. He said that unless I confessed to being "incorrigible, in need of therapeutic counseling," I would be sent away-he didn't say where. Mother grabbed my hand and took me down the steps, out of hearing of Father and the lawyer. "Now, meine schoenum punim," she said, kissing my face like I was a newborn, "this is what you must do. You must confess that you are bad. It is our only hope." I looked at her eyes; I'll never forget the sadness in them. "Tell him I'm bad," I said. "Yes, meine schoenum punim." Defeat, capitulation, surrender. That's what I learned that day, the size and shape of law's heavy footsteps.
I stood before the judge and tried to look guilty. The judge, a hulking giant whose smallish face seemed to be hiding between his square shoulders, grabbed one end of his robes and swung it over his back like he was a Roman emperor and wanted to impress Cincinnatus. But he didn't impress Mother, that's for sure. Before he could open his mouth, Mother was on her toes, wagging a finger at him. "I want to give you a piece of my mind," she said, exaggerating her accent so much she sounded like a German general. "I know people like you, plenty of people like you. We came here to escape from people like you. You are a judge, but you have no right to judge my son. He had good reason to throw the rock."
I was surprised by Mother's violation of her own advice. There I was, with an expression that said how bad I was, and she was attacking the judge.
"You should ask permission before you address the court," the judge said.
"The last person I asked for permission was a guard at the Austrian border. No more; I ask permission never again."
The judge jerked his head like a spasmodic crane. A man in a uniform started across the courtroom toward us. I thought we were going to jail, not just me, Mother too. Father was sitting in the first row, looking as if he wished he were somewhere else. But as the uniformed man approached us Father stood and said "Your Honor," nothing more. He delivered those two words with such respect coloring his rich baritone that the judge nodded and the uniformed man stopped as if someone had yelled halt.
The judge reminded Mother that it was fortunate I hadn't killed Mike, but his sudden monotone told me that he was fed up with the case. He looked away from Mother's combative eyes and said to me, "Whatever provoked you to throw the rock, you must learn that violence is never a solution to a problem." I didn't mind what he said. It's what Father had said. But his next remark was uncalled for, at least by the light that I used to see the world. "You must never break the law." I wanted to show him my comic books, point to those drawings of my heroes breaking the law whenever necessary to save the world. But I knew he wouldn't understand. He was wearing a robe, not a cape. He wasn't a superhero.
On the way out we ran into Mrs. Zermansky. She was wearing one of those veils, the kind Marlene Dietrich wore when she wanted to be an over-the-top femme fatale, fool you into thinking her face was more mysterious than it really was. She stuck a sculpted pink fingernail into Mother's arm and said, "They should put your child in jail, where he'll have to behave himself."
Mother took Mrs. Zermansky's hand and squeezed it so hard her rouge-covered cheeks got redder. "Listen to me," Mother said, using the tone of voice that would send me scurrying to my room in fear, "you tell your perverted son to keep his hands to himself."
I was mortified. I knew mothers always know everything, but did she know what Mike had done? How could she know it was his semen on the toilet paper?
While Mother and Father stood in the street trying to hail a cab, I sat on the front steps to the courthouse. Officer Bundy came over and asked how my cat was doing. I said, "Fine," the typical one-word answer from a kid who trusts no one. Then she asked me what happened between Mike and me. I responded with the other useful one-word response: "Nothing." She said, "You should remember that we have laws against that sort of thing." That sort of thing? Did she know what Mother knew?
In the taxi going home, Father said to Mother, "A good thing the judge didn't know about his comic book collection. He would have sent him away. Gott in Himmel! What would he do without his comic books?"
On my birthday Father came home from work with a huge carton. He said my present was inside. He helped me open it with a butcher knife while Mother complained we were ruining her cutlery. Inside the box were several leather-bound notebooks, like the kind in which you keep family snapshots. "What are these for?" I asked, disappointed that my birthday present was so useless.
"Bring me a comic book," Father said.
I ran upstairs and got my favorite comic book, the one that tells the story of Superman's childhood on the planet Krypton.
Father took the comic book and slid it into one of the books, carefully fastening it under the cellophane binder. He smiled and kissed my forehead. "You won't have to worry now. These books will keep your comics forever."
[END]
© Herbert Beigel 2001
