I
The first day of school was always the worst day of the year for me. All of the freedoms of summer were stolen after eight hours of sleep by the looming threat of books and homework. It honestly made me sick to my stomach. There was only one ray of hope through that drab monotony—when we finally got through to the other side of the calendar, when spring finally decided to spread her wings, she brought with her the greatest game that one could ever hope to be a part of.
My name is Tony Falcone and back in those days I was the starting catcher for the Collingston High School Silver Streaks. That first year at the high school I beat out two seniors for the starting spot. They were not happy, let me tell you. I think Coach Demera gave me the job because he liked my work ethic. I had a decent arm as a freshman, but my greatest asset was my bat. I had hit over four hundred for the last three seasons, and if everything went right I’d do it again. No big time colleges were after me for one reason: I was only five ten. If I were four inches taller, I’d be telling them where I was going.
Coach Demera had led the Silver Streaks to the state playoffs for the last ten years. He has never won the big one though. Even though he hits the sauce a little too much, he’s the best coach I’ve ever been around. There wasn’t anything the man couldn’t teach about the game. Only one thing was keeping us from a state title that year—pitching. Don’t get me wrong: we’ve got guys that can throw, but we just don’t have that one guy that can really go out on the hill and just shove it up the other team’s ass.
My friend Johnny the Killer was our ace. Killer, you say? His last name was really Killman, and the rest will be obvious as the story goes. He threw in the mid-eighties, nice breaking ball, good control. The only problem was—and you can tell this by his name—he doesn’t quite have what you call the pitcher mentality. Example. Last year in the first game of the regional, Johnny got thrown out of the game in the first inning for arguing about balls and strikes. I did my best to befriend the umpire and smooth him over, but when a guy says, “fucking bullshit” on the mound, it’s hard to defend him. After Johnny we didn’t have anybody that stood out. A couple guys threw around eighty, but that’s batting practice when you get to the playoffs. Coach Demera had a knack for developing pitchers. I hoped he’d find a diamond in the rough.
Collingston High was a massive structure, taking up two and a half city blocks lengthwise and a half a block widthwise. The outer walls were made of millions of crimson bricks. A clock tower stood above one of the entrances that joined the main part (containing most of the classrooms) to the second part of the building that housed the gym, pool, weight room, field house, and a few technological classrooms like computer drafting and shop.
The floors in the building were a gray marble, shined to perfection nightly by the janitors. I imagine it had been that way since the building was built in the 3
1930s. There was never any gum or dirt in the hallways, not at the beginning of the day anyway.
The first day of school was the same as it always was. Opening assembly, where we got to hear the new policies of what was and wasn’t allowed. No ball caps during school hours, because the junior gangbangers couldn’t wear them the right way; girls couldn’t have their thongs showing out the back of their jeans because one of us sex-crazed males might decide to rape her; and this one was the best: everyone had to wear a name tag so the prison guards could bust us easier, and somehow it would feel like the Leave It To Beaver days, where everybody knew everybody else’s name. The nametag thing never went over. I threw mine in the garbage one second after it was issued to me, as did half of the student body.
They threatened detentions and suspensions and all that shit. At first they carried through with it; but as time went on, it took up a lot of energy enforcing something that was just plain stupid, so the nametags were scrapped. We inmates finally won a battle.
Was my take on school harsh? You be the judge. My limited understanding of the word “school” was that it was a place where a person went to get educated. To expand his intelligence and to find what he was supposed to do in life. A place to share ideas. The brick building I attended is getting ready to put in metal detectors at the entrances, had two full-time cops present at all times, and a principal that hated teenagers, much less the ideas that fly from their mouths. It had a no-hat policy. It sanctions anyone who shows any kind of physical affection for another. Hats and hugs are deadly these days. It is a place with no religion, no individuality, and no choices. And once you are there, you become part of a system, much like that of another state institution.
II
The cafeteria was in the basement, under the main part of the building. It was very large, holding up to fifteen hundred students a time. In the past, school dances and even large city meetings were held there.
At lunch I sat with Johnny and some other baseball players. Johnny proceeded to tell us how he banged the bejesus out of Heather the night before.
The messed up thing about it was she sat at our table. We would always get there before her, so by the time she sat down, everyone had stupid little grins on their faces. Heather was a real nice girl, and whether Johnny was screwing her or not, she would have been pissed to know he talked about her like that.
Directly caddy-corner from us I noticed a nerd sitting by himself. He didn’t have a pocket protector or greased back hair with one wild strand sticking up, but you could tell he was a nerd. He was timid and skinny. He read a book while he ate. Like we didn’t do enough of that shit during class! He never looked up from his plate. He never responded to the clutter and noise that filled the cafeteria. He never acknowledged people walking by and never made eye contact with anyone.
I guess I wasn’t the only one noticing the new geek. Jack Rollings decided that on his way back from getting a pop, he would pay the new guy a visit. He stopped and said hello. The new guy just looked at him. Jack called him a retard 4
and took the guy’s milk and poured it on his head. Our whole table busted up in laughter except for Heather, of course, who only shook her head in disgust. I watched the guy use his napkins to clean the milk out of his hair. The geek never got angry. He never cried or ran to tell one of the prison guards. His face never turned red out of embarrassment, although it should have. After cleaning his hair and clothing up, he even went and got more napkins to clean the milk that was splattered on the table and floor.
Over the next week I watched as Johnny and the boys would knock his tray off the table, or spit in his food, or blow their noses with his napkin, or take his books and slide them half way across the cafeteria floor. It got to the point where people moved to our side of the lunchroom to see the guy get picked on. People would keep one eye on their food and one eye on the table caddy-corner from us.
It became the lunch hour entertainment. Even underclassmen were starting to join in on the antics, young punks that would never have thought about picking on someone. I sat down everyday wishing that this guy would move to the other side of the cafeteria away from us, or better yet, not show up at all. You heard people in class talk about what happened to the lunch geek today. Some people felt sorry for him. Some people thought it was a matter of time before he either exploded against this torture (and believe me, as a teenager the worst thing that can happen to you is have your ego damaged or destroyed), or he would be the guy you always heard about killing himself just before prom or graduation. I’m sure the masses would mourn, but only for a day or so, and then it would be on to someone else.
I’m also not sure what I thought about him. He was just some fragile little book geek. You never saw him out, or anything. I knew he worked after school being a janitor’s helper or some shit, but that was it. That was all I knew about him. But there was something about the guy that I couldn’t put my finger on.
There was something about the way he carried himself. He had what my grandpa would have called “the spark” .
The guy would always get the healthy meal—salads, applesauce, fruit, stuff like that. He would always eat one thing at a time before he touched the next. I remember my mom saying something when I was younger about that being a sign of a genius.
The day came in the cafeteria—the day I knew would come—that Johnny and the boys would want me to pitch in with their antics.
“I think you're up, Falcone,” Johnny the Killer said.
“Whatta ya mean, I’m up?” I said.
Johnny pointed with his fork as he chewed his food. “The faggot janitor over there. I think you’re the only one that hasn’t got a piece of the action.”
The other guys at our table gave me some words of encouragement, or peer pressure, whichever you want to call it. I picked up my tray and walked over to his table. I watched the crowd as they watched me. They stopped eating and drinking. Some people were pointing, others were already laughing. I looked down at my tray at the lasagna, can of pop, and garlic bread. I felt a little drop of sweat run from my temple down the side of my cheek. I got to his table, right next to him, holding the tray level with the top of his tray. He knew I was there, but didn’t look up. I looked at my lasagna again, thinking it would be easy enough to 5
smash it in the geek’s face. I knew everybody in the cafeteria was looking at me, I could feel the stares bearing down on me. The geek continued to eat without acknowledging me. I started for the lasagna with my right hand and then stopped.
Something popped into my head, a story we’ve all heard in one form or another.
Mine came in the way of one of those sappy ass emails you get from time to time.
As the story goes, some nerd freshman is carrying home all of his books, walking and struggling with the weight. A popular person (we’ll call him the jock) goes and offers to help the poor nerd. The nerd accepts, and the two throughout their high school years become good friends, even though one is a nerd and the other is a jock. At graduation, the nerd has to give a speech because he ends up being Valedictorian. The nerd tells the story of how his good friend the jock helped him carry his books home four years earlier. Only there’s a twist. The nerd was taking home his books because he didn’t want his mom to have to clean out his locker after he killed himself over the weekend. The moral of the story: We never know just how much our actions will affect someone in the long run. And no matter how untruthful or cheesy I thought the story was, I couldn’t get it out of my head.
I looked at the lasagna.
Then at the nerd.
Then at the crowd.
“You mind if I sit down?” I said.
“Go ahead,” he said back.
His voice was very soft; not afraid, but soft. Some people when you talk to them have that crack in their voice, like they’re so nervous to talk their brain short circuits and messes up their voice. That wasn’t the case with this guy. He had a quiet way about him for sure, but he also had a presence. I mean when I walked over to the guy, he had to be thinking the same old shit was coming. But he didn’t flinch. His composure didn’t change. Either he didn’t care or he was that secure.
The first couple of minutes I sat there, there was nothing but silence between us. The crowd’s eyes were still anxious, waiting for me to do something.
Several minutes passed and when the crowd saw I wasn’t going to humiliate the guy, boos began to sprout throughout the cafeteria. Someone even threw an empty milk carton and hit me in the head.
The guy just kept eating, never looking up at me. I started to think this was a bad idea until I saw him do something that I hadn’t noticed before. A girl walked by and he looked up. He watched her go all the way to the pop machines and back to her table. Maybe this guy wasn’t as abnormal as I thought.
“That’s Heather Hawthorne,” I said to him. “She’s the captain of the cheerleading squad. Real good looking, obviously. She’s Johnny the Killer’s girlfriend.”
“Why do they call him the Killer?” the guy asked as he finally looked up from his plate.
“Because if you so much as look at Heather, Johnny’ll kill ya.” When I said that, he cracked a smile. We were making progress now. In the days I’d been watching him, I had never seen him smile. He had a good smile. Not that I’m 6
queer or anything like that, but his smile made other people smile. I was getting ready to give him the old twenty questions when the bell rang.
“Nice talkin’ to ya, man,” I said. “By the way, ya got a name?”
“Roman,” he replied.
I shook his hand. He had a nice firm grip. I heard boos in the background again.
As I watched him walk away, never did I think that that conversation would be the start of something that would change a lot of people’s lives forever.
III
The next day was no surprise. The same old shit. First hour I had PE.
Second hour was Government. Third hour was English and so on. High school was nothing more than repetition. It was a lot like prison in that regard. I guess the only difference was that in high school you got to go home at the end of the day.
When I watched Roman at lunch, this time was no different. Same healthy meal. Never looking up as he ate. Except for when Heather got up to get her pop.
The one thing at lunch that day that was different I guess, was that nobody went and picked on him
After school I was having some severe problems getting my car—a nineteen eighty-seven Ford Pinto, painted baby blue—started.
“You stupid piece of shit. God damn this thing. Start, you son of a bitch.”
As I slammed my head into the steering wheel, I saw Roman walking down the sidewalk next to the parking lot. All of the sudden my cursing stopped. I just watched him.
“Knock the floorboard out so you can be like Fred Flintstone,” someone yelled as they passed by.
“Screw you, asshole!” I yelled back.
As Roman got closer to me, he started to slow down. He held his head slightly tilted upward. It was a warm day and the wind blew right in his face. It was like he had nothing more to care about than the breeze in his face. That might have been the point at which I started admiring this guy. He was so different from me, yet at the same time I felt I had so much in common with him. Roman got directly beside my car and glanced over at the situation as I spat out a few more choice words for the heap I called a car.
“Turn your lights on,” Roman said.
“Lights?”
“Your headlights; turn them on and then wait a minute or so,” he replied.
I really didn’t know what the hell Roman was trying to do, but I didn’t have anything to lose so I humored him. Of course I didn’t wait a minute. But I guess I waited long enough. When I turned the key, my angel started right up.
“Well I’ll be damned. How the hell’d you do that? That’s outstanding,” I said.
“Turning your lights on will some times get the electricity running through. You probably need a new battery or a new alternator,” he said and then walked away. I pulled up beside him as he got to the end of the parking lot.
7
“Hey, can I give ya a lift?”
“No thank you.”
I just sat there for a while and watched him walk down Stephenson Street until he got so far away there was nothing left of him but a dot on the horizon. I turned the opposite direction and headed for home.
IV
Later that night Roman mopped the floor of the hallway next to a row of lockers as Heather walked by. She politely went around the place where he already mopped. Roman glanced up but did not make eye contact with her. As he got to the row of lockers she went down, his mop started to slow. Roman couldn’t help but stare down the long row of pale colored lockers at her.
As she opened her locker, an object fell out and crashed to the floor scattering chaos through the lonesome hallways of the high school. She knelt down and picked up one of the ceramic pieces, rubbing it with her hands. Roman stopped mopping and put his full attention on her. She picked up several of the pieces trying to put them back together, like an infant trying to put a square into the shape of a circle. She stood back up slowly and looked at Roman.
“My grandmother gave me it when I was four years old. It was a Precious Moments cheerleader. They don’t even make this one anymore. I never used to bring it to school. But when she passed away I brought it here because it me made me feel closer to her. That probably sounds stupid.”
“Not at all,” Roman said.
Johnny the Killer walked up.
“What are you doing? I’ve been waiting out there for ten minutes,” he said.
“I just broke the cheerleader my grandma gave me,” she answered looking down at the shattered pieces.
Johnny looked down at the mess on the floor. “Well don’t worry about it, the janitor will clean it up. I’ll buy you a new one; let’s go, the Vette is out there running.” Johnny didn’t realize that the janitor he spoke of was the one he had been picking on for the last eleven days.
Heather looked at the broken pieces of the cheerleader not wanting to leave them. Another minute went by and she grabbed her jacket out of the locker and slowly shut the door. “I’m sorry for the mess, but he’s my only way home.”
Roman just nodded and out she went to the silver Corvette.
V
Friday. All of the cheerleaders were dressed in their outfits and the football players with their jerseys. Fridays were different than the rest of the week.
Especially on game days. Especially when it was the first home game day. People weren’t so lethargic. Even the prison guards were in a better mood. It also helped that we were on a shortened schedule because of the first pep rally.
Ten minutes before the first bell rang Heather walked to her locker, unlike her other cheerleader friends who were skipping around the joint. She opened her locker but didn’t notice it at first. She reached in to put one of her books on the top shelf of the locker and there it was. She took the book back down and stared in 8
amazement. The cheerleader she had smashed into a million pieces was standing eye level right in front of her. A tiny string was tied around its waist and the other end of the string was tied to the back of the locker. She undid the string and put the cheerleader in her hand, turning it over and over. The missing little fragments she thought she would see or feel were not to be found. The little statue looked as if it had just come out of the box. A smile brightened her face. And as the bell rang, she wrapped the little string around the cheerleader’s waist and stood it gently back in her locker.
By this time I was spending the last half of the lunch period sitting at Roman’s table. It was curiosity that kept me coming back. We would talk about numerous things. Actually I did most of the talking, and Roman would comment here or there. He made me feel so stupid sometimes ’cause anything I would bring up, he would know a lot more about it than I did. Sometimes he’d get to talking so far over my head that I couldn’t even converse with him. I couldn’t really tell if he enjoyed my company or if he was just humoring a dumb ass. He never told me to leave. So I guess that was a good sign
Anyway, I started that day at lunch as I always did sitting at the table with my friends, caddy-corner from Roman’s table. We were already seated and eating when Heather came up. Johnny would always turn his head toward her and make some stupid kissy face. Every time, without fail, Heather would stop briefly and give him a quick kiss on the cheek. It had been that way for as long as I could remember. But not this time. This time she didn’t even look at Johnny. She passed him by like he was invisible and went over to Roman’s table. The guys at the table looked at each other and then at Johnny. You have to understand that in four years of high school she had sat at this very table every day. So when something as little as this happened everyone was on edge, even maybe a little excited. School is so boring that people just look for something to break the monotony.
As Heather sat down next to Roman, Johnny’s face went from kissy-kissy to pissy-pissy. He was obviously not happy. I had seen the stare he was giving Roman all too many times; some blows usually accompanied it to the head and stomach of the person it was aimed at. This was not good. I’d seen Johnny beat the ever-living dog shit out of countless victims in the past. You don’t earn the rank of Killer just because your last name is Killman. Nobody ever came close to whippin’ him. I can’t even remember a time when somebody got a good lick in on him. I started to feel a little bit scared for Roman, but at the same time something told me that he would be all right.
Roman looked at Heather as she took the seat next to him, which was more than he ever did for me. I guess you really couldn’t blame the guy; I mean here was a girl that every person in the school with a penis thought about at least ten times a day. She was the real deal. Guys never really talked to her though, on account of what could happen to them if Johnny found out.
“I hope you don’t mind if I sit next to you. That was a very nice thing you did for me. It must have taken you hours to put it back together. I don’t have the words to thank you. How did you get it back together?”
9
“I used ceramic glue,” Roman said. “It didn’t take as long you would think. Besides I like puzzles.”
“Why would you do something like that for me?” she asked.
“The look in your eyes when it broke. I know the feeling,” Roman replied.
“I finished with my mopping ahead of schedule, and had some time to kill.”
“You don’t even know me,” she said.
“I know you. Your name is Heather,” Roman said.
“What’s yours?’
“Roman.”
“That’s it, just Roman?”
“Swivel,” he responded.
“That’s a very unique name, Roman Swivel.”
Johnny watched their conversation for several minutes but finally saw enough and jetted out of his chair on a straight line for Roman’s table. He grabbed Heather under her arm and lifted her up out of the chair. His knuckles turned white from grabbing her so hard. Roman looked at The Killer’s hand but remained seated. Heather wiggled her way free and WHAP! The cafeteria turned into a morgue. You could have heard a mouse fart on the other side the room. Heather slapped him so hard the gum he was chewing flew out of his mouth and landed on my lap.
“Asshole!” she yelled as she picked her bag up and walked away.
Johnny just stood there staring at Roman. Roman looked back at him but at the same time took a bite of his applesauce. It was almost like Roman dared him to do something. I’ll tell you this: if it were any other guy in that chair, he would be cleaning his pants out instead of shoveling applesauce into his mouth.
“I’ll deal with you later janitor boy,” Johnny said.
With that, the cafeteria turned back into a beehive. I sat there stunned for a second or two and then picked the gum off my crotch. It was like nothing had ever happened when I next talked to Roman. I didn’t bring it up and neither did he. I asked him if he was going to the football game. He said he had to work, but told me to go to room 339 if I wanted. That room was on the third floor right behind the football field. I had a feeling that Roman would be watching the game from there.
I sat in the pep rally thinking about how mad Johnny was and how Roman never lost his demeanor when Johnny came over to him. It doesn’t sound like a big deal but believe me it was. You just don’t fuck with Johnny the Killer. He would get even with Roman. Somebody had to pay for embarrassing him and it wasn’t going to be Heather.
VI
Game night.
The sun had just set about forty-five minutes ago. The air was crisp and clean. If it hadn’t been for the bright lights overlooking the field, you could have counted every star in the night sky. I got there about an hour before game time.
You had to if you wanted a good seat. I sat where I always did in the front row of the north end zone with the rest of the baseball players. Coach Demera made it 10
mandatory that we attend all home games and sit together. It had been that way even before I got to high school.
By halftime we were up a touchdown. Johnny and a couple of the other guys went to sip on a whiskey bottle out in the parking lot. I, on the other hand, was going to talk to Roman. I could see a couple of rooms on the third floor of the school had their lights on. Room 339 was one of them I imagined.
When I entered the room I saw Roman on his hands and knees. He wore dingy gray pants and a shirt that matched. There was a nametag on his chest that read: Roman Student Janitor. One of the desks was overturned and Roman scraped gum off of the bottom side with a putty knife. He worked fast. Once one desk was done he went directly to the next without hesitation.
“Christ man, do they make you do this kind of work all the time?” I asked.
“When you’re low man on the totem pole you really don’t have a choice.
Besides this is great work. You should see some of the toilets I’ve cleaned in the past.”
“Why in the hell don’t you get a job waiting tables or something? This work sucks!”
“The money is good and I like the hours,” Roman responded.
“What are your hours?”
“Seven to midnight.”
To tell you the truth, I don’t think Roman really liked the hours or the pay for that matter. I think he liked what he did. Cleaning things up. Turning chaos into order. Another sign of a genius my mom used to say. Roman was a neat freak, and this kind of work, believe it or not, was a stress reliever for him. Not that Roman ever showed any signs of stress, but that was my take on the situation.
Later I would find out that was not the only reason he worked that god-forsaken job.
“Pretty good game huh?” I asked.
“I haven’t been watching but I’ve been listening. It sounds like our defense is playing better than they have been,” Roman said as he continued to scrape.
It kind of surprised me that he said that about the game. If I had guessed, I would have told you that Roman wasn’t into sports. But he was right on the money about our defense. If our “D” played well, we were in every game.
The PA announcer came on during halftime and told the crowd that the cheerleaders would now be performing their routine at mid-field. When Roman heard this, the scraping stopped. He went over to the window and watched.
“You need to forget about her, man,” I said, looking on with Roman.
“Why?” he asked back, still caught up in the routine.
“She’s taken first of all. If Johnny thinks you are after her, he’ll kick your ass up and down that hallway and use your head for a mop. Believe me I know.
I’