by Luke de Castro
Now, see, I grew up in the kind of neighborhood where they had metal chains on the basketball hoops instead of normal nets made of nylon, because if they had normal nets then people would cut them off just for the fuck of it.
There were lots of Korean people in my neighborhood. One time when I was thirteen I walked home from school and came across some Korean kids who were hanging out by this construction site where a new house was going up. There were like eight kids there and they had a TV set and a VCR plugged into one of those thick orange extension cords. They were drinking beer and watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the plywood skeleton of this half-built house. I knew some of the kids from school, but a lot of them were older. The biggest kid — Kam Sin — came up to me with a bottle of beer and said: "Eat shit."
I said: "What?"
"You heard me," he said. "Eat shit. Now get the fuck outta here!"
I was small and he was big, but I said: "No. You eat shit."
He said: "What?"
"You heard me," I said, mocking him, and that's when he threw the beer bottle right at my face. It bounced off my cheekbone and crashed on the ground, spraying me with beer and glass. I stumbled around and he hit me in the head with his fist. Then I ran as fast as I could. While I was running, I could hear the other kids laughing and I could hear Kam Sin saying Bye-bye, beauty queen! Bye-bye now!
My mom wasn't supposed to be there, but when I got home, there she was.
"Oh my god!" she said. "What've you been doing?! You reek of beer!"
"Look," I said, but she was not listening. She just screamed at me and told me to wait until Dale got home. Just wait, she said. Dale was my step-dad.
Dale came home later and I could hear them talking about me in the kitchen. Then Dale came into my room and said: "Come here."
"No! Get out!"
"I said come here!"
"Fuck you," I said. "You're not even my real dad! Just fuck off and go watch The Deer Hunter!" Dale was a Vietnam vet and had tattoos up and down his arms. He grabbed me by the neck with those arms and really went off. He called me names while he beat the shit out of me. Faggot and cunt. All this was nothing new.
When he was finished he said: "Go to bed." It wasn't even eight o'clock.
I snuck outside that night and found myself a rock as big as my fist. It was black and hard and heavy and when I hefted it in my hand I knew that I held something good — something serious. I went back in the house and got a thick wool sock out of my drawer. I put the rock inside and tied the end of the sock real tight. Then I put it back in the drawer and went to bed.
The next day was Saturday. Nobody was home when I woke up. I looked in the mirror by the bathroom door and there were marks all over my face and neck. Red marks. I ate breakfast, got dressed, and took the sock out of the drawer and stuffed it down the front of my jeans. Yeah, yeah — it looked like I had a giant cock. Then I went out.
It was simple. I knew they'd be there and there they were — the same Korean kids from yesterday at the same place, doing the same shit, except this time they were watching a James Bond movie. I couldn't tell which one. They're all the same, anyway.
I walked right up to Kam Sin. "Hey, motherfucker," I said. "I thought I told you to eat shit. Why the fuck aren't you eating shit, bitch?"
"Oh. Beauty queen," he said, and he started to say something else, but I was out with the sock fast, whipping into his face. Three times. Hard. It made a sound. A wet sound. Like a grapefruit. Like a grapefruit hitting a concrete wall. His hands flew up to his face and he went down. He kind of rolled around in the dirt, weeping. The whole world was quiet for a second. Just a long, slow second of no sound at all, apart from the sound of crying.
One of the other kids began to say something. The kid said: "Whoa, man... now... just..." But that's all he ever said.
I walked down Kincaid, stopped at the bridge over the river, and threw the sock as hard as I could. It arced and spun end over end — sort of hanging in the air like some kind of weird kite — and before it splashed into the water and was lost forever, I could see that the toe of the sock was stained dark red with human blood-like it had been dipped in a bucket of paint. It was cool, I thought, with the blood and everything. Nothing ever came of it; no cops, no social workers, no calls from angry parents. And none of those other kids ever fucked with me again.
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