An Explanation Letter
I will tell you an especial event. That, one morning, I think it was a Saturday, I woke up and I was pretty sure who was stealing things from our backyard. If I ever left a single thing out in that yard, like a bike or a bike helmet or a soccer ball or a chapter book, it would be gone the next day, or that day. I would walk inside to take a pee or to get something from my room, and then when I came back out—gone. Absolutely gone. I did not know what it was. I’ll admit, I did not know what. I was a small little kiddie then and I didn’t know that that trio of skinny little boys living behind us who always accidentally threw their football into our yard and then came to retrieve it… I didn’t know they were the instigators of foul play. I didn’t know they went peeking over the plastic slat fence for goodies and then chucked the ball over like Oh woops!
But I woke up that morning, one Saturday I think—and I don’t know what cranial fusing went popping away and working during that night—but I woke up because the garbage truck was grinding outside and slamming cans down, and right then I was pretty goddamn sure, but not completely sure, it was those brothers. Then I saw them.
I saw them take my new plastic bat and wiffle ball, which was a set! Those filthy sneaksters, all clumping up some shed in their disgusting yard and then the poke of their heads above the fence. Well I saw them. They had already tossed the football into the yard and were now just throwing themselves over the fence so they hit the ground hard on their bare feet, but quietly. And they went. Like I already said. They went and took my new plastic bat and wiffle ball, them together being a set. A set. They took them and then climbed our recycling bin and trash can, which they had probably placed next to the fence a long time ago, to make for convenient exits. I heard some clunking over in their yard.
But they were gone.
I saw this from my parent’s bedroom window a couple hours after I woke up and was pretty goddamn sure.
And I got Anna and Alisha and Jacob Harnett to camp out by the side of my house with a pile of dense and jagged rocks and bait in the form of my Razor scooter so that when they came hopping into my yard, preceded by that football, we mass
A
Curred
Them.
We massacred them. Eight million nasty rocks making nasty cuts and bruises, just raining, firing toward’em so that the youngest brother started crying. And I had a huge butcher knife from the kitchen, my own little operation, which I used after I had scrambled over to their trademark football, to rip that thing apart! Ha-ha! Shredded it, up and down and sideways. And I put in some human damage when I got one kid in the nose with a heavy rock and the bridge of it split open and he bled all down his face, into his mouth. So when he yelled the blood bubbled out.
I tell this to people today and I say, “And they never fucken came back! Never. Not at all.” If I still talked to Anna or Alisha I’d say, “That was a glorious victory!”
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I haven’t had a victory like that ever afterwards. That one was such a literal, obvious event I could force right down my own throat: here I won! Winning there was like winning in a soccer game, in a baseball game Mets v. Phillies, Giants v. Dodgers. One side DROPS TO THE GROUND. And the other side—the other side has lemon lime Gatorade in sweating orange coolers and fat, hairy coaches that scream and scream with a voice that’s gone already. It has a locker room that smells like sweat and looks like the inside of a cloud with wet surfaces and people slippin up happy. When I won that rock on man victory I knew I won it and I could share such a stunned look with Alisha Allen before laughing to death with my bare knees on the patio bricks.
That’s the event I want to start with since that is what the momentum is, shaping itself inside me. It is me writhing on the bricks in sadistic delight because I bashed some kid’s nose apart with an especially picked out rock. He tried to say something, he tried to say some unwanted and possibly smart-ass thing, but blood only bubbled from his mouth. How could you ever feel bad about hurting someone again? You want the delight sifting back through your veins. You want your heart pounding itself into your hiccupping throat as you laugh on your elbows and your tummy in your dusty T-shirt.
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That is what I say to myself sometimes, or to people who need an explanation maybe. I punched Dominic Something in the nose a couple months after the rock fight and guess what? I saw his face after the punch and I punched him again. I saw the blood after that and I punched him again. Guess what? I punched Jacob Harnett in the teeth and then I ran away. Guess what? I ran as hard as I could down my block, for as long as I could and then I came crashing to the ground like I was a fallen Goliath and the ants saw me and they said, Oh shit. I see them seeing me. They’re thinking, Oh no. Oh no. I fell messily to the ground and laid on my back on the tar looking up at the sky. The sky was panned out in whitey blue, because that’s how it is here, year round. It’s dry and thin and bland, and blue like one straight sheet of ice. I looked at it and rolled over, ug, ug, ug. I was happy, a piggy on the ground.
So where am I going with this?
I threw Milo Ward’s own basketball at his head and he said, “Who does that?” I bit Joey’s arm so he bled. I did- I did- I did a lot of things.
What happened, though, was I got hurt back. Hits here ad there. And one day I found myself knocked out under the big, shaggy trees next to the railroad tracks, thinking I was going to die, I was going to die. It was midday, by the railroad tracks, and no one was there but me: I was going to die. I thought I was going to die because my mind and my stomach seemed to be absorbing themselves into the ground and my limbs were inanimate objects. This is why I thought I was going to die. Dying is a state of nothingness and I was so very almost there. The only existence within my body was an emotion balling under my lungs, in that part of the stomach that gets the brunt of nausea, the part of the stomach that seems to generate the vomit. There was the emotion of anger and happiness, I mean, adrenaline. Adrenaline ringing from the tummy and absorbing itself into my meat and blood. I am such a violent, violent person. I heaved myself up with broken bones and melted fat and limped home.
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I want to tell you I’m knocking back and forth. Knocking into things, getting knocked. I’m a marble, I’m a nickel, I’m a pen cap—being shaken in a bottle. Sympathize with me. Push me, shake me. Sympathize with me. Feel sorry for me. I punch people, they punch back. I bite people, I throw things at them, and I find myself dying under the trees the bums like to hide in by the railroad tracks. Left for dead by anyone, by Milo, or Dominic, or Joey, or Jacob, or maybe those three brothers again. I punch, they punch back. Where are those clean victories at?
You don’t push someone over, you give them the momentum to come back at you.
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Some people I still talk to. They tell me that if I wanted to win so bad, I should’ve just joined a sports team.
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I would like to say that I am not the Texas Highway Killer or Ted Bundy or The Green River Killer. Or some crackpot stairway killer, a coffee cup killer, keyboard at the laptop killer. I’m not any scary or cute name harboring the implications of a .357 caliber whatever in front of an anonymous, androgynous person that you give your sane heart to. But what I did do, I figured out and now appreciate the fact, that the only way to get someone down so that they stay down is to kill them. You have got to punch Dominic in the nose and not stop and not stop. You have got to cold blood kill Dominic. You have got to kill Milo, Jacob Harnett, Joey. I did. I did, I did. Them, then others, and I never felt so good. You have got to.
People tell me, you know, You should’ve just joined a sports team.
