“I guess.”
“You guess… Trust me, Vito, you’ll be a great quarterback. Papa was a quarterback. He’ll give you some lessons when we’re up at the lake house next week. Okay? Okay. Show me your hands again.”
It was too cold on Monday, so we had to have recess in the gym. I hated recess in the gym because I couldn’t play football; I couldn’t run away from Pierce Stone.
Pierce Stone knew I saw him tinkle himself in the woods the day we went searching for Hell. But instead of being nice, he resented me for it and used it against me, as if I had been the serpent emerging from the earth.
“Hey Ferraro, I heard your dad is coming to give a talk at school.”
I had no idea that he was coming in for a talk. He didn’t say anything to me this morning while I had my farina—I hated the stuff; it reminded me of alien brains. I usually waited as long as I could before eating it, staring at the slab of butter on top until it melted into that translucent yellow slush.
But my father was always doing stuff like this, according to my mom. One time he didn’t tell her until a week before that we were having the family over for “the vigil”—what my family called Christmas Eve. That week I thought they might get a divorce.
“I dunno,” I said, flipping through one of the stories I had written before my indefinite hiatus from writing. It was about an orc who teams up with a Jedi to kill a tremor king terrorizing a city—I dreamed big back in autumn.
“What the heck do you mean, you dunno? It’s your dad.” I didn’t say anything. “I’m going to see my dad tonight, at his fort,” he continued.
“Your dad has a fort?” I said, looking up from my story. “Is he a general? Does he have soldiers?”
“Yeah, my dad has a fort. It’s just for guys, though. My mom isn’t even allowed there.”
“Well, of course. Where is it? Does it have a drawbridge and… and a moat?”
“No, no moat. It’s in this place called Hoboken. There aren’t even houses there, just blocks of connected doors and windows, but my dad seems to like it. He says he doesn’t have to go to Penn Station to get to work anymore.”
“Hell isn’t in Penn Station, ya know.”
“Well crap. Of course not, Ferraro!” And he stomped away.
That afternoon my father did in fact come to Glenwood to give a talk. We all had to cram into rows in the multi-purpose room. I had to squint to see the small screen of the TV they rolled in on the beat-up beige cart.
“Many of you may already know my son, Vit… Victor. Where are you, pal?” I raised my hand, face red. “There he is,” he said, pointing. Michaela Silves, the girl who wanted to suck my lips off, blew me a kiss. I got redder. “Okay, everyone, today we are going to talk about ‘good touch’ and ‘bad touch.’”
Pierce Stone and the Barriston brothers snickered in the back row.
“Pssst, Ferraro,” whispered Miles Barriston, following orders from Pierce Stone, who was egging him on as quietly as he could. “Sshh, shut up, okay, okay… I heard you like the ‘bad touch.’”
Uproar.
“MILES BARRISTON,” said Ms. O’Donnell in that gritty, lock-jawed voice perfected by public school teachers across the country. “Quiet down this instant.”
I grew redder still as Michaela fluttered her eyes at me. Oblivious to the commotion, my father went on about what kind of “touches” were appropriate from teachers, coaches, etc. In the early ’90s, when we were still living in my old town, a few of the girls on the high school soccer team let one of the gym teachers touch them so they didn’t have to go to class. When it became public, my father was immediately in the crosshairs, because he was in charge of hiring and firing the physical education staff. Between the hearings and meetings and councils, I barely saw him that autumn. My mother thought he would end up crashing into a ditch driving the hour home on those late nights. But after the pedophile was fired and there wasn’t any link between him or any other teachers or my dad, everything went back to normal. Thankfully, a spree of burglaries had been happening around the same time in the “Poet’s Section” of town (where the streets are named things like Byron, Tennyson, and Wordsworth) that deflected attention from the high school. So my father gave this talk every few years to each of the elementary schools to keep the board off his ass.
“Psst, Ferraro,” started Miles Barriston. “This talk is boring as hell.”
I didn’t like Miles Barriston; he was the kind of kid who put his whole mouth on the water fountain spout.
“I swear, Ferraro, if your dad doesn’t stop talking I’m going to diiiiiiie.”
I turned my head toward where they were sitting and said, “Then you will find Hell.” And then I turned it back so Ms. O’Donnell wouldn’t see. I had to squint at what I thought was probably a fat coach wrapping his hands around a young boy’s waist as I ignored Michaela’s blown kisses.
Tom Jones Cleaver only appeared on TV really late at night. I would usually fall asleep before his program, but if I drank too many pouches of Capri Sun or bottles of Stewart’s Root Beer that Tony and George had snuck over from the Geigers’, I would stay up late and watch Pastor Cleaver talk into his bedazzled microphone. He had such big teeth, and they were so white—he probably never drinks root beer. His curly black hair with two silver streaks running along the sides reminded me of a skunk, or my Uncle Angelo.
His church in Texas was much bigger than Saint Rose of Lima over on Short Hills Avenue, where my father took me, my brother, and sister