ONE
It is Christmastime. I am at some religious gathering of people I know but can’t name. I am well liked by all of them. There is a rafter along the top of the room and a woman comes in yelling: Where is he? Everyone turns to look at her. She is built like a teapot, wearing an apron, and dragging a small boy with bangs by his wrist. His hands are bloody. Nobody answers. I know he’s in here. I saw him come this way. There’s no where else for him to go. The boy she’s looking for is hiding in the rafters 10 feet away. He is a street urchin type and has no family that we know of. He stands up. I didn’t do anything wrong he yells to her. You come down here. She is threatening and has not yet let go of the arm of her son. Come down here and be punished for what you did to my boy. He retreats so that half of him is obscured by the shadow of the rafter. Come down here gypsy child. She addresses the crowd, seated in neat rows faced away with their necks arched back to listen. Did you all know that? His mother was a gypsy. He told my boy here and then he put a gypsy curse on him and pushed him down.
This of course isn’t true, not completely. We know this from earlier when we saw it happen: SCENE - The boy is 10 but looks 8. there is a circle of children around him, a combination of girls and boys, though it is hard to tell who is what. They are ash blonde and dirty and he is dark haired and dirty and clutching onto something that they are trying to tear away from him. They push him around the circle, from one end to another and at some point, this thing in his hands falls, something resembling a snow globe without the water, a crystal ball with a message inside. He drops it and it shatters on the ground and stares at it for only a moment before the tears come and the other kids giggle some sort of satisfaction and he is desperate to get out of there, and pushes the son, the one we’ve already seen, to make enough room to leave. The son falls, lands hard on his back and the others go “ooooh” and chuckle some more. And the son isn’t hurt really, just embarrassed and angry, and goes to stand, placing his palms on the ground near him for leverage, forgetting about the broken glass. The boy hears his scream as he’s running away and runs faster. The mother hears his scream from the kitchen of her house, where she is washing dishes. She runs out towards the sound. The boy stands there, half obscured by shadow staring down at the angry mother. And for some reason she says, I bet you don’t even know the names of my children. And he does, and recites them, Billy, Bobby, Billie Jean, Bobbie Sue, Beebee, Baby, and Bubba. When they’re listed out, it sounds like an insult and the mother fumes further, mutters some threat along the lines of I’ll teach you to be different. I step in and begin a speech that starts with a proclamation of my Jewdom, but quickly unfolds to be something much more religiously deviant. I wander from room to room, saying that Jesus is no one, I don’t think he even existed in any form, man or god. I call the Bible a piece of fiction. I say these things, and I mean them, but I am saying them for shock value. Some people turn away from me, but most listen. And I ask what these would beliefs would matter on a daily basis, in daily interaction. If what I believe in changes who I am, who I have always been to these people. And when I am finished wandering from room to room, giving different incarnations of this speech, which sounds brilliant in my head, but mostly offputting out loud, the gypsy boy has had plenty of time to escape and although I am still widely accepted, I know it is time to move on. TWO I am on the run still, and always. I am sitting at an outdoor restaurant one step above fast food. The table is the green, grated four curved benches around a circle. I am sitting across from a boy who I do not know very well. The two others we are with, an older man and a young teen girl have gone inside to get more food. The boy is finished with his food, and I am still eating my sandwich, but it is falling apart in my hands. The boy is simple and crude and not completely unlovable. He is bored with wandering and bored with sitting and asks for a kiss, posing the request as a cure for boredom rather than any sort of romantic sentiment. With my mouth half full, I lean over the table and give him a peck on the lips, then return to chewing. No, a real kiss he says and I tell him I’m still eating. He licks his lips, says my sandwich looks pretty good and starts picking at without asking, as though we have known each other for years. And somehow this disarms me, humanizes him. I smile. Okay, come here I say, motioning him closer. And he smiles and we kiss the awkward sort of kiss where both people are smiling too much for it to really be a kiss at all. Let’s go, I say and he doesn’t ask where, but follows. We pass the other two people in our group as they head back to the table and we tell them we’ll be right back and know that we will never see them again. THREE This boy and I are in a room off the side of some main highway. There’s a long white stucco wall with doors along the back of the building, and we are behind one of these doors, giggling insincerely and being generally ridiculous. There is a sound from outside, of a police car pulling up, an older officer in tan like a state trooper. Stay here, I tell the boy, giving specific instructions to wait so long before following me out. I kiss him on the forehead, and I know it is goodbye, but he does not. I walk around the side of the building, evaluating which car to take, settle on a white pick up. As I drive away, I could see the door opening in my rearview mirror. I’m not looking. |