Revenge
A Dish Best Eaten Cold
My mother had spoken with Dr. Bailey after my myelogram; however, I had a splitting headache and went straight to bed and stayed there until the next morning. In short, the doctor had suggested a week in an elevated pelvic traction that would stretch my back and hopefully allow the L-4 (fourth lumbar disc) to return to its original place. The traction would not involve surgery — or, at least, forestall surgery for an undetermined time. Dr. Bailey was about to depart for a skiing vacation in Colorado and would return in two weeks when I would enter the Queen of the Valley Hospital Not great news, but not bad either.
So I went back to working for my father. His office overlooked First Street, Napa’s primary east-west thoroughfare. The street was lined with a variety of shops, luncheonettes, drug stores, the local newspaper’s head office, and the city library. The manager of the shoe store came outside for a cigarette. From his haircut, I knew he was Wilbur Wilson. I had a frightening relationship with him at Ridgeview Junior High School in 1955 when I was twelve and he was around seventeen.
The Napa school system was unique. Most California school systems were 6–3–3: six years of grammar school, three years of middle or intermediate school followed three years of high school. Napa’s was 6–4–2; the four in the middle was junior high. Even back then, I thought that mixing twelve-year olds, who were about to enter into puberty, with sixteen and seventeen year olds was a bad idea.
The tenth graders were altogether different: many of the boys shaved daily, some of them had cars, a lot of them smoked, several girls were going steady and wore their boyfriend’s ring on a chain around their necks; word got around that some of them were having sex with the ring-bearing boyfriends. From a two-room school out in the country, the older students were strange and somewhat threatening. The wisest path I determined was staying out of their way of the older students, especially the Earth Angels.
The self-described school service club was the Earth Angels (a popular song back then about a girl; one can hear it on You Tube). I would never know why they took the description of a girl in that song. Their service was selling ice cream cups on hot days for fifteen cents. The mythology surrounding the Earth Angels was that the Dean of Men, Mr. Solomon, founded the club along with two or three of the real trouble makers who invited their friends to join. A brilliant stroke of penology: convincing the aspiring hoodlums into one basket where Mr. Solomon could keep an eye on them.
The Earth Angels dressed like Fonzi of the Happy Days television show: motorcycle books, tight Levis, T-shirts, a leather bomber jacket with the collar up. And if that look wasn’t enough, their fantastic haircuts were the touchstone of their anti-establishment brotherhood. The haircuts were called DAs, short for a duck’s ass. Over the ears were the duck wings were combed back to achieve the DA, the tops often were ratted and up to the individual’s creativity. All that hair required excessive applications of hair cream to achieve their shimmering statements. Fonzi was cool and upbeat, but the Angels were sullen like a pissed-off Jimmy Dean with a threatening scowl. Their sartorial statement? Simple, they were giving middle-class values the finger. We got the message; the Earth Angels were mad, bad and dangerous to be with.
I was watching Wilbur Wilson when my father approached, “What’s so interesting?”
I pointed to Wilbur, “I was twelve in the junior high’s men’s room when that guy, he was in the tenth grade, threw my speller into a urinal.”
“Steve, you’re a lot bigger than you were back then, and it looks like he stopped growing in the tenth grade. You know what the Irish say about such humiliations?”
“Don’t get angry, get even.”
“There you go,” he said and patted my shoulder. “I’ve got a luncheon to attend.”
Early in the seventh grade, on a Thursday morning, I was peeing in the men’s room. The room had two rows of urinals; the second row was attached to the brick wall behind me. I had put my speller on top of the brick wall. Wilbur Wilson and two of his Earth Angel pals entered and headed toward the mirrors. But Wilbur stopped to push my speller off the wall and into the urinals. He must have known the only seventh and eighth graders had spellers, and none of those boys were about to go up against an Earth Angel.
So I finished, pulled the speller out of the urinal, and was rinsing it off in one of the sinks. Wilbur and his friends were too busy combing their hair and smoking Lucky Strikes to notice me.
As I was drying off the speller, Wilbur put down his cigarette grabbed me by the collar, “Look, Squirt, if you report this to anyone, I’ll find out and hunt you down. Got it?”
“Yeah, I’ve got it, don’t worry,” I said.
He let go of my collar, stood back and gave me the once-over; I was wearing a pink and white-checked shirt, khakis and brown and white saddle shoes. Wilbur said, “I guess you didn’t get the news. Where did you go to grammar school?”
“The Browns Valley School.”
“That’s out in the sticks; so your dad’s a farmer?”
“No, he’s a real estate appraiser.”
Wilbur looked at his buddies who had finished combing and said, “What the hell is a real estate appraiser?” The Earth Angels shrugged their shoulders and smirked. “Well, I don’t know either. Now where was I? Oh, yeah, only queers wear pink on Thursday. Do you know that?”
“No.”
“Do you know what a queer is?”
“No.”
“Are you queer?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
The Earth Angels thought that was funny and laughed at me. Wilbur said, “I haven’t got time to explain that. Now here’s the heads-up, I don’t like queers; if I see you wearing pink on Thursday, I’ll put your head in a toilet and flush it. Comprende?”
“Si,” I said.
He grabbed my collar again, “You’re wise-assing me?”
“No, I thought we were speaking Spanish.”
Then Earth Angels were laughing at Wilbur; that was a bad portent that haunted me every Thursday during that school year.
