We carved with rocks into the window of Mr. Shepard’s Social Studies classroom. I wrote FUCK HOMER because we were learning about the Greeks. Ronny carved a swastika. We all told him he was stupid. Saul and Ami were both Jewish, and so was I, but I wasn’t raised Jewish.
Ronny just thought the swastika was funny.
We kicked over some trash cans, and then walked back toward Saul’s along Middlefield Road.
We passed Simone Chris’s house. She had been my girlfriend in fourth grade. I fought Sam Tuttle for her. He was tall and thin like a scarecrow, and said that he liked her. One lunch, everyone gathered behind the elementary school library, and Sam and I got ready to fight. I kicked Sam in the shin and he fell to the ground holding his leg. I felt awesome.
But I got in trouble, especially because I took karate at the YMCA, and karate was supposed to be for self-defense.
Then Simone broke my heart. She left me for Rio Gereaux, a gymnast. It was fourth grade, but it was still a big deal. I mean, when are things supposed to start mattering? Now, and now, and now.
Before we hit Loma Verde, we passed Unity church. It was where my mom took me when I was little. She was Jewish, but she went to church because she liked the minister, a smiley guy named Stan.
One time at Sunday school I won a Bible in a raffle. It had all of Jesus’s words written in red. Fish, and loaves, and the first will be last, and thy neighbor, and Caesar, and an eye for a tooth, and he killed the fig tree because it wouldn’t give him fruit.
We shot BBs at the Unity church. The BBs made little popping sounds when they went through the church windows. Seeing those little vein-filled bites used to scare me when I was younger. They made me think of anonymous bad people with destructive things in their hands. Faceless and swirling. Now we were the bad people.
We stopped by 7-Eleven and bought some Hostess apple pies. They came in a bright green rectangular wrapper. I paid for Ronny’s. He got cherry flavor and it came in a red wrapper.
Two cops came in as we were walking out. A skinny, young white cop and a fatter, older black cop. They were talking about something. We were twelve years old and it was two a.m. Ronny and Saul had the slingshots in the backs of their pants, under their shirts. The cops didn’t even look at us as we passed.
After we walked out, I looked back. Inside, the cops were buying coffee and laughing. I could see the steam rising from the cups on the counter before they put the lids on.
We walked back to Saul’s eating our pies. They were crescent shaped and glazed. We took big bites and they were very sweet, and we all wanted some milk but we didn’t have any.
A week later the four of us went out with the slingshots during the day. We went to Greer Park, near the 101 freeway. Across the freeway was East Palo Alto.
There were tons of birds in Greer, but we had to be discreet because there were adults with children around.
We traded off with the slingshots, and shot metal pellets and rocks at the birds in the trees. We were bad shots; we hit nothing.
One bird flew away, and Ronny tried to shoot it as it flew. He aimed too low, and the pellet went across the street, into the window of a ground-floor apartment. We ran.
We looked back and a black man was running after us. He was lithe, and serious, and fast. There was no way to get away so we stopped when he was close.
We told him we were just trying to hit birds.
The man didn’t look so mad then.
“Oh,” he said. “Okay. I just have a baby in the house, and it usually sits in its cradle right under that window you shot. She wasn’t there, but, you know, I just can’t have broken glass fall on her.”
We told him that we understood.
Then he let us go.
When we were almost back at Saul’s house, we saw a dove sitting in a tree. While he was still walking, Saul shot a pellet at it and hit it. It fell like a heavy glove, and hit the cement with a dull sound. We walked over. Its round, black eye was open and looking up at the sky. The pellet was in the back of its head and there was a little blood in its smooth feathers.
At the end of the year, we all went to Ami’s bar mitzvah. We weren’t all friends anymore, but we were still nice to one another. At the party I arm wrestled Ronny again, and I could still beat him.
In eighth grade I went to a new school. Jordan Middle School reopened because there were so many kids in Palo Alto. More kids than in the old generation.
Jordan’s old mascot was a dolphin, but we voted and changed the mascot to a jaguar. A dolphin was stupid because there was no ocean around.
But there were no jaguars or jungles around either.
But one time there was a mountain lion that wandered through Palo Alto. It had come down from the hills above Stanford. Eventually it climbed a tree above Juana Briones Elementary School. They shot it so that it wouldn’t eat the kids.
Ronny and Saul stayed at J.L.S. and Ami had different friends, so I made new friends at Jordan. My new friends were Ed and Ivan. Neither of them was handsome.
After school, the three of us would go to Ed’s and sit in his room and listen to Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion and The Best of Bob Dylan, and The Best of Jimi Hendrix, and The Best of the Doors. Ed’s house was near the school, and we would go there and make Campbell’s soup on the stove, and I would put in lots of extra spices like oregano. Ed said that I put in too many, but I liked all the spices.
Sometimes we would smoke tobacco out of the meerschaum pipe Ed’s dad gave him. Sometimes we would take his dad’s liquor from the cabinet. When we took some, we’d put water back in the bottles so his dad wouldn’t know.
We were also friends with Dan and Jerry, but they were jocks and were different. They were more popular with the girls, but sometimes they spent time with us, especially when we were drinking.
We also hung out with Howard Vern. He was anorexic, the only anorexic boy I have heard of. He had an awful body shaped like a pear, with skinny arms and skinny legs, and cellulite on his stomach. We said he was “skinny-fat.”
One time, Ed and Ivan and Howard, and I went over to Ed’s after school. Howard brought a water balloon launcher. Ed’s parents weren’t at home so we drank some Jim Beam, and then we picked a bunch of fat oranges from the tree in Ed’s backyard, and went up on the roof with the water balloon launcher.
When kids rode by on their bikes, we shot oranges at them. Girls and boys.
The launcher launched the oranges hard. It must have hurt when they hit. Tom Prince rode by and we hit him right on his big ass. It sounded like a slap on a face, and even from the roof, I could see his ass ripple through his pants. He got off his bike and started throwing oranges back at us on the roof.
Tom Prince had horrible face acne, which sprouted in small groupings, like piles of bat shit. The piles were always runny because he would pick at them. He was an angry, fat young man.
He threw a bunch of oranges, but he couldn’t hit us. We laughed and laughed at the fat-ass on the ground.
Howard was laughing too.
Then Tom stopped throwing and yelled, “What the fuck are you laughing at, you anorexic fuck? Why don’t you go and slit your wrists again, you fat, pear-shaped piece of shit.”
Howard stopped laughing. He yelled at Tom so loudly he almost fell off the roof. It was funny that Tom called Howard a pear, because Tom was shaped like a pear too. An even fatter pear than Howard. Tom got on his bike and rode off and Howard was still yelling.
We shot at more kids with the launcher. Then we hit a small Asian girl in the head and it made her fall off her bike. We hid on the back side of the roof and peeked over. She was crying when she picked up her bike. But she didn’t do anything; she just got back on and rode off.
When I left Ed’s that evening to go home, the street was strewn with smashed oranges.