If you pound a person’s head against concrete—even if you’re doing it only so they’ll come to their senses—you will very likely end up hurting them. This is something my mother explained to me early on, the day I pounded Fredo’s head on the asphalt of the school playground.
I wasn’t a violent kid, I want to make that clear. I spoke only if it was strictly necessary, and I didn’t have friends or enemies to fight with. The only thing I did at recess was wait in the classroom, alone and far from the noise of the playground, until class started again. While I waited, I drew. It passed the time, and distanced me from the world. I drew locked boxes and fish shaped like puzzle pieces that fit together.
Fredo was the captain of the football team, and in our grade, things happened and were done the way he wanted. He did what he wanted with other people. Like that time Cecilia’s uncle died and he made her think he’d done it. That’s not good, but I don’t stick my nose in other people’s problems. One day during recess, Fredo came into the classroom, grabbed the drawing I was working on, and ran out. The drawing was of two puzzle-piece fish, each one in a box, and the two boxes inside another box. I got that thing about the boxes inside of more boxes from a painter Mom likes, and all the teachers loved it and said it was “a very poetic device.” On the playground, Fredo was tearing the drawing in half, and the halves in half, and so on, while his friends stood around him and laughed. When he couldn’t tear the pieces any smaller, he threw them all into the air. The first thing I felt was sadness. That’s not a figure of speech—I always think about how I feel in the moment that things are happening to me, and maybe that’s what makes me slower or more distracted than everyone else. Next, my body hardened, I closed my fists and felt my temperature rise. I lunged at Fredo, pulled him down to the ground with me, and grabbed him by the hair. And that was when I started to pound his head against the ground. Our teacher shouted, and another teacher from a different class came to separate us, and nothing else happens in this Fredo story. I’m telling it because I guess that was the start of everything, and when Mom wants to know something she always says, “From the beginning, from the beginning, please!”
In high school I had another “episode.” I was still drawing, and no one touched my pictures because they knew I believed in things like good and evil, and the latter category, which is what people in general spent their time on, bothered me. The fight with Fredo had earned me some respect from the class, and they didn’t mess with me anymore. But that year there was a new boy who thought he was really smart, and he found out that Cecilia had been indisposed for the first time the day before. And at recess he came into the classroom and filled her pencil case with red paint. I saw it all from my desk, where I was quietly drawing. In the next class, when Cecilia went to get a pen, her fingers and clothes got all stained. And the boy started to yell that she was a whore, that Cecilia was a whore like her mother and all the rest, which in a way also included my mother. I didn’t have a crush on Cecilia, but I hit that boy’s head against the floor until it started to bleed. The teacher had to call in backup to separate us. While they were restraining us so we wouldn’t get into it again, I asked him if his brain was draining a little better now. I thought the phrase was inspired, but I was the only one who laughed. They filled my report card with warnings and suspended me from school for two days. Mom was mad at me, too, but I heard her say over the phone that her son “wasn’t used to intolerance and all he wanted to do was protect that poor girl.”