Marty’s expression never changed as he reached into his school-uniform suit-jacket, pulled out a miniature flathead screwdriver with black tape across the handle, and held it close to his body like a prison shiv with which to shank poor Melvin in the yard.
Melvin barely reacted as the bull charged forward, slashing wildly with a die-cast metal and a cheap plastic handle more suitable for assembling a spice rack than a street fight. The bull lunged clumsily, bending at the waist. Marty may have wanted to be Melvin’s inimical bully, but he was little more than a bad joke told at recess.
“I’ve had enemies before,” Melvin taunted him, dodging every attack as the bull slashed and missed, lunged and missed. “I’ve had people who didn’t like me before. I’ve had people who wanted to fight me before, but never one so stupid.”
Marty grew redder with every word, angry and more reckless with every insult. If he wasn’t careful, he was going to fall over onto his little pocket screwdriver and make a tiny hole in his twisted heart.
“Fuck you!” Marty bellowed, charging again and again as Melvin dodged or backed away and the other kids formed a circle. The middle-school playground had become a gladiatorial arena.
It had an entirely different look and feel earlier in the period, when Melvin sat alone reading Encyclopedia Brown on a bench during recess.
“Honestly, Melvin, who reads during recess?” he asked. He would have bullied himself if he wasn’t such a book nerd.
“Hey, Melvin!” Sydney Lee-Jackson yelled down at the loner from across the blacktop. The Little Brick Schoolhouse was no place for a bookworm.
“Your mother’s so old she farts dust,” Syd roasted him as the fourth graders barked like seals for the freshest insults.
“That’s an old joke, Sydney,” Melvin responded to her jibe, not even looking up from his book. “Didn’t your racist mother tell you not to talk to me?”
A group of fourth graders let out a collective oooh, and then waited for the come back. It was a low blow.
The first rule of the Dirty Dozens was that you never said anything true about somebody’s mother. Suppose you said so-and-so’s mama had a wooden leg. That would be funny unless she actually did and then it would be a reason to scrap.
Original Syd was the class bully, Queen of the Dirty Dozens. She was always making fun of other people, so that no one made fun of her.
Syd was a skinny girl with a tomboy attitude and a laugh that shot up Melvin’s spine. She was mean but sweet, a child of war and divorce, a mixture of Africa and Asia. An American GI and a young farmer’s daughter. The other girls may have called her ugly behind her back, but Melvin believed she was the prettiest—if not the scariest—girl in the school.
“Stay away from those niggers,” her Asian mother once said about her dark-skinned classmates when dropping her off. “They’re all liars like your father.”
Syd’s mom was a bitter drunk in the middle of a divorce. Everyone heard what she said and Sydney dropped to the floor and tried to fold herself into her torso. Nothing else would do. Later that day she tried to apologize to everyone, to her teacher and her classmates, but then she’d try to disappear again into the floor. Melvin was there. It was hard to watch.
“My mother was drunk, and I said I was sorry,” Syd yelled at him. “What’s your excuse?”
She stormed off.
Early afternoons in the schoolyard, grade four, you were either predator or prey. Regardless of gender or race, from Chicago to Brooklyn, the rules were the same. Being funny was your friend. Getting offended was not. When the bullies started circling, it was the same with all abusers, it was best to make them laugh or else prepare to get your feelings hurt.
Melvin had three bullies in grade four: Marty, the bull, who got left behind, was bigger and stronger, and always tried to start fights; Geoff, the worm, who made foul racist comments, false accusations, and spread heinous lies; and the Original Syd, the girl whose laugh chilled his blood.
“Hey, Melvin,” she started in again, louder and from further away. She knew how to build an audience.
“What?” he hollered back as if annoyed by the attention, steeling himself for another barrage.
“Your mom’s teeth so yellow, when she smile she slow traffic.”
The bullies in his school could never hurt Melvin as much as his step-monster or his birth mom. Bullies hurled insults and got laughs, but they never drew blood, and they never got the response they wanted from him.
“Hey, Melvin,” Sydney yelled again, with both the bull and the worm at her back.
“Leave me alone. I’m trying to read,” Melvin insisted.
“What are you reading?” Syd asked, probing for weakness or actually curious. Geoff immediately drowned her out.
“That’s what your mom said last night when I was banging her,” the worm gloated. “Leave me alone. I’m trying to read.”
His timing was awful but he knew the rules; you were either banging his mom or his mom was too ugly to bang. The dozens were escalating. It would only get worse.
As far as Melvin could tell, the point of the dozens was to insult another kid until he cried or wanted to fight—or to tell a joke so funny the entire schoolyard pissed its pants and you became a legend.
Melvin was exceptionally unskilled at the dozens, and Sydney was the funniest girl in his grade. Melvin had a massive crush and he was about to get his feelings hurt.
Sydney was annoyingly pretty. Even when she chuckled like a jackal with a fresh kill, she was beautiful. Sydney Lee-Jackson was a tomboy with a wicked sense of humor, a razor-sharp wit and a smile that hid more pain than even Melvin could imagine. He was her favorite target.
“Hey, Melvin!” She said his name again like it, alone, was an insult. “Your mom’s so dirty that even soap doesn’t work.”
“What does that even mean, Syd?”
“I don’t know. Ask your mom.”
When Syd yelled loud enough, she drew a crowd. The main difference between a bully and the dozens was the loud laughter of the weak willed. Only weak people hid behind bullies.
Geoffrey, the worm, was a skittish child with a stutter—except when he was being mean.
“Melvin’s mom’s so old her phone number is two,” he said.
Sydney laughed loudly, and it carried across the blacktop Serengeti like a warning to the weak. Geoff the worm and Marty the bull followed her everywhere. Like hype men on a rapper’s stage, they laughed at every one of her jokes and the show had just begun.
“My mother’s not old,” Melvin said somberly. “She had me when she was fourteen.” He purposefully misunderstood the rules by taking the joke literally.
Sydney Lee crossed the blacktop swiftly and met his gaze with disappointment that matched his seriousness.
“You’re so fucking weird,” she diagnosed him quietly, then turned back to the audience. “Maybe so. But she’s stupid too.” Sydney announced, egging on the crowd.
“How stupid is she?”
“Melvin’s mother’s so stupid she studied for a pregnancy test.”
Young boys grabbed their faces as if watching an older man get kicked in the nuts, while Sydney told joke after joke about his mother’s intellect.
“She left her keys in the car and had to get a hanger to get her family out.”
“Do you like me or something?” Melvin asked her quietly.
“What? No.” She was caught off guard. “Why do you keep saying that? Nobody likes you. I don’t like you. You suck.”
Marty the bull noticed Sydney’s discomfort and did what he did best, he stepped over the line.
“Your mother’s an ugly cunt,” he said.
Nobody laughed.
“I just said your mother’s an ugly cunt,” he repeated. “What are you going to do about it?”
Melvin moved closer. “For one,” he said calmly, “my mother is beautiful. Who here’s seen my mother?”
Several kids nodded in agreement.
“She’s young and she’s pretty. She could have been a model if not for me. But as far as her being a cunt,” Melvin smiled. “I’m going to have to agree with you there. My mother is a cunt.”
“Oh shit,” Sydney exclaimed covering her mouth. “He said it himself.”
“Melvin’s mother is a cunt,” some anonymous girl yelled, then wished she hadn’t.
Melvin’s peaceful demeanor continued to drain the energy from the game. He and Syd were the youngest kids in the class, having both skipped grades. They were eight. Everyone else was nine—except Marty, who was probably eleven or twelve or thirty-two and in need of a shave.
The Bull had little idea what was happening, only that it made him uncomfortable. During the commotion, it was the Worm who passed the sharpened screwdriver to his bully brother, but it was Marty who was confused, angry, and instantly armed.
“Your mother’s an evil cunt,” Marty growled stepping closer.
But was she, though?
Melvin’s mother was a teenager when a grown man left her with a little boy. She wanted to be an actress and a singer.
Everyone always thought she was pretty.
She hated the gods for her misfortune,
but hating God doesn’t make one evil.
If gods were that fragile, we’d all be currently living in hell.
She wanted to be the main character in her own story instead of the main character’s mother. Not evil.
She tortured, traumatized, and more than once threatened to kill the boy by drowning him or throwing him from a window, and it was universally accepted that killing a child was evil—
but she never did it. So, perhaps she was evil, but she didn’t start that way.
Sydney wasn’t evil either, even as she held the devilish laughter of children in her hands and had become the villain of the schoolyard.
“Your mother’s so nasty she has to wipe her feet to go outside,” she said.
Sydney inadvertently taught Melvin about comedy. She came to school reciting new albums from Bill Cosby or Woody Allen. She was the only other person in his grade who loved comedy albums as much as he did.
She was the master of the punchline pause. She would hold the last word in the air with a sound like a dying frog in the back of her throat, like a squeaky screen door slowly swinging closed—then slammed shut.
You had to wait for it.
Melvin learned how to anticipate quiet moments when the maximum number of people could hear a joke. He learned to enunciate clearly. Nothing killed the laughter faster than a “What did he say?”
“Screw you,” Marty growled. He wasn’t a comedian. His jokes were hateful, and he lacked empathy. “Your mother’s a whore,” he concluded.
Melvin hadn’t seen what the Worm had passed the Bull, but Marty couldn’t help but touch it every few seconds, like his father had just given him a crisp twenty and he was checking to see if it was still there.
Melvin knew it wasn’t a birthday present.
When Melvin Hawthorne was eight, it was a screwdriver. At twelve, a switchblade. At fifteen, a chain, a bat, a sword, throwing knives, brass knuckles. At seventeen, an unloaded pistol pointed at his chest as if it were ready to take his life. But those were nothing like the fingers pointed at him once he became an adult.
Bullies always had to have something.
“Your mother’s a lesbian,” Marty screamed.
He assumed he’d gone too far. Everyone knew you had to throw down once someone said someone else was gay, but Melvin didn’t move.
This annoyed Marty even more and he pulled the weapon early and lunged, driving Melvin back until his heels hit the benches and there was nowhere else to go.
Marty the Bull was at least three times Melvin’s size which made all the little boys’ eyes widen, in anticipation of blood.
Melvin’s stepmonster was a martial arts instructor who had taught him how to defend himself by beating him up. Nothing scared him.
Melvin crow-hopped forward with his arm cocked but instead snapped a front kick. The screwdriver flew from Marty’s hand and vanished into the crowd.
Marty swung wide, looking to grapple with the smaller boy, Melvin hopped back for another kick but he tripped and fell on his ass.
It wasn’t the bloodbath that everyone wanted. But it was something to talk about over lunch.
The Bull stood above Melvin, triumphant, having done absolutely nothing but the stories would say different.
Nuns poured out of the school swinging yardsticks and the playground returned to chaos with kids running in all directions to escape the stinging wood.
“Your arm’s too short to box with God, son,” Marty proclaimed as he ran away.
“Your mother’s a fucking lesbian whore,” Geoffrey chuckled and checked if he was being chased.
The nuns swung sticks at boys as well as girls who hadn’t done anything wrong but were running away slower than the others.
Melvin never ran. He climbed back onto his bench, opened his book and pretended to read. Encyclopedia Brown wouldn’t solve the case on his own.
His external calm hid a rapidly beating heart that was noticed by an elderly sister.
“What are you up to, villain?”
It didn’t matter. He was already in trouble. She grabbed him by the ear and carried it into the Mother Superior’s office. The only real beating he took was the one nobody talked about.
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