December Park(8)

“I won’t.”

I showered and dressed hastily in jeans, a Nirvana T-shirt, and a hooded pullover. I was of less-than-average height and possessed the body of a runner, though I was not a natural athlete. My features were dark and classically Mediterranean, not in a movie star way but in the contemplative, brooding fashion one typically associates with the juvenile delinquents in movies from the 1950s.

Adults regarded me as rigidly courteous, well-meaning, and considerate yet slacking on my potential. These adults were always calling me handsome, but I was never able to see it. My nose was too big, my hair stiff and wavy when short but greasy and disobedient when long, as it was now. My hands were small, and I’d once had a doctor who’d seemed surprised when I told him I could play the guitar.

Despite my awareness of having descended from a line of full-blooded Italian Americans, it never occurred to me that I was any different than the majority of the kids at Stanton School or in all of Harting Farms until last year. This realization struck me just before school let out for the summer as I went around to a number of the local businesses filling out applications for a summer job.

At a frame shop on Canal Street, Mr. Berke, the potbellied proprietor with a deeply grooved face, had told me to sit in his office with him while he reviewed my application. He grumbled to himself the entire time, and at one point I even saw his eyebrows creep toward his hairline.

“Is there something wrong?” I had asked, sweating in my nervousness.

“Yeah.” He set the application down on his desk, which sat between us in the cramped little office. He pointed to the nationality section. “You checked the box for Caucasian.”

“Doesn’t that mean white?”

“Yeah. But you’re Italian, ain’t you?”

“Well, yeah . . .” My gaze flitted down to the application. Perhaps there was a box for Italian American I had missed? But no, there was no such option. When I looked up at Mr. Berke, I couldn’t read his expression.

“This would be you here,” he said, jabbing a finger on the box beside the word Other. “See, you’re an Other.” His smile was humorless and caused the grooves in his face to deepen. “See that? See how we cleared that up?”

“Oh,” I said.

When I had gone back to the frame store a week later to check on the status of my application, Mr. Berke gave me that same humorless smile and informed me that he had decided he wouldn’t be hiring any summer help this year after all. Of course, I took him at his word, which was why I was confused when, weeks later, I learned that Billy Meyers, who sat next to me in homeroom, was working there.

Briefly, I had considered telling my dad what had happened. But then I thought I would be more uncomfortable relaying the story to my father than I had been sitting across from Mr. Berke in his stuffy little office, so I let the issue drop.

I dug my Nikes out of the closet and laced them up while I sat on my bed. All around me, my bedroom was devoted to my passions, the walls sheeted in posters of old Universal movie monsters and the more modern psychopaths such as Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger. A glow-in-the-dark bust of the Creature from the Black Lagoon stood atop my dresser, surrounded by Star Wars figures that appeared to be protecting it as if it were some holy idol.

There were a few videocassettes piled underneath my nightstand, movies like Jaws, Gremlins, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, along with some old Springsteen record albums and cassette tapes. A Fender acoustic guitar leaned against the wall in one corner beside a poster of John Lennon wearing his signature circular glasses.

But mostly my bedroom was a shrine to books. There were lots of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Robert McCammon, Peter Straub, and Ray Bradbury, since horror stories were my favorite. Yet there were more than just a few classics among the pulp, like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Stoker’s Dracula alongside Shelley’s Frankenstein, and a handsome collection of Robert Louis Stevenson novels in hardcover.

On my desk sat an old Olympia De Luxe typewriter, its sea-foam green and ecru metal body like the two-tone chassis of a 1950s Chevrolet. A few of the keys stuck from time to time, and the letter O had a tendency to punch holes in the paper if struck too hard, but the De Luxe was my most prized possession. I loved it more than my bike.

Set neatly beside the typewriter was the recent article from the Harting Farms Caller, the local paper, where my name was printed in stark bold font as the winner of the newspaper’s creative writing contest. Paper-clipped to the article was a manila envelope addressed to me, and inside the envelope was a check for fifty bucks. Next to the newspaper article was the thirteen-page single-spaced winning story titled “Fishing for Chessie.” It concerned two brothers living along the Chesapeake Bay who decide to try and catch Chessie, the Chesapeake’s version of the Loch Ness Monster. The boys never catch the beast, though at the end of the story, they see its giant gray humps rise out of the water.

It was a simple enough story and was apparently just what the Caller had been hoping to read, but the one I’d wanted to submit was a horror story called “Fear.” It was about a boy who learns an alternate reality exists between the first and second floors of his house. The entrance to this alternate realm is accessible through a linen closet, and the boy, who is the hero of the story, learns that there is a monster who occupies this realm and feeds on young children from his neighborhood. Eventually, the boy confronts and destroys the monster.