Kindness for Weakness (3 page)

“Get what you want, bro,” he says. “It’s on me.”

I order blueberry pancakes with three eggs, bacon, and hash browns. (I am practically always hungry, even though I’m skinny like you wouldn’t believe.) Louis has oatmeal, coffee, and a side of ham, all of which he says are part of his bodybuilding diet.

“Louis,” I say, “you think when you’re done training I can start lifting weights with you?” I know it’s a ridiculous question, because I hate to exercise or play sports. But I
would
like to get buff. And if I hit the weights hard enough, I can give a certain someone named Ron a real surprise the next time he gets loaded and thinks he can fuck with me.

“Maybe,” he says. “How come?”

“To get strong.”

Louis nods, stuffing half of the ham steak into his mouth. “I’ll help you, little bro. A few weeks in the gym with me and no one will give you any shit. I guarantee it.”

And I believe him, too, because Louis knows what he’s talking about. I am going to get strong and become a real man, and then I can literally kick Ron’s worthless ass out of the house and save my mother, even if she acts like she doesn’t want to be saved. Is it possible to save someone who wants to go out in a blaze of cigarettes and vodka? I don’t know, but I have to try.

No matter what, I’m happy to be with Louis. For a long time we sit and eat and hang out like two normal brothers. We talk about cool stuff like girls and cars and music and movies. Louis smiles when I remind him about his old BMX bike and the flying trick on the handlebars.

“King of the world,” he says, a flicker of a smile spreading across his face. We sit quietly, both of us trying to see into the fog of a few good memories from before our dad left us and it all went bad. But then Louis’s phone buzzes, clattering across the table, returning us both to the bright fluorescent lights of Dimitri’s and the reality that I am a lost boy pretending to be a man.

“Tomorrow?” he says to me. He stands, reaching for his keys. “Same time, but don’t be late.”

In the morning my feet hit up against the arm of the living room couch. I am growing, but only in the tall skinny way. Louis is just as tall, but all muscle, like he’s been forged out of a block of iron. I’m just skinny. Stretched thin.

If I don’t wake up early, I have to look at Ron in his filthy undershirt and briefs. I have to listen to his garbage about how I’m stupid and lazy and it’s my fault that he has no job and hates his life. And whenever he says those things, I just walk out, except that sometimes he blocks my way and shoves me and calls me a disrespectful little shit. “Look at me when I talk to you,” he says. And if I do it, he slaps me so hard in my face that my eyes water. “You gonna cry?” he’ll say, but it’s not that. Because if you slap someone hard enough in the face, their eyes are going to water and it’s not necessarily tears.

The last time this happened, which was two days ago, he said, “Don’t be such a pussy, James,” and then he hit me again in the same spot. My mother was in the room,
getting ready for work. She stood in her barmaid’s uniform with a pained look on her face, like she was torn between the two of us. Like there was any real choice between an unemployed drug addict and her youngest son.

Ron pointed at her and said, “Don’t give me any shit, Doreen. I’m just trying to toughen him up.” So my mom left the room and sat at the kitchen table, chain-smoking a pack of unfiltered Camels down to her nicotine-stained fingers, waiting to disappear into the bluish haze of her own recycled smoke. She looked used-up way beyond her thirty-nine years. Sad. Tired. Nothing left for anyone else. I bolted out the door, holding the side of my face, squeezing my eyes shut to stop the flow of tears.
I hate my life
, I thought.
I hate myself. When will it end?

Louis tells me to fight back, and I think about it every day, fantasizing about how I might do it if I could become strong and unafraid, but I can’t bring myself to act. It’s like my cells are afraid. They shake and quiver, and then my nerves won’t tell my muscles to move. But even though my mother chooses to have a boyfriend who is crazy and ugly and a loser, I don’t want to cause her any more trouble. So each morning I wake up, roll my blanket, and pull on a sweatshirt and my worn-out sneakers. I walk until I am no longer angry and scared, until I don’t care about the hits and insults. I pound the sidewalk, and in time, the emotion leaks out of me and I am nothing but an empty kid walking.

Today is especially cold, so I pull my hood tight around my face and walk faster. I usually wander for a couple of hours until school starts. Or I sit in the student activities
center at school, reading books from Mr. Pfeffer, my English teacher. So far this year he’s given me
Rule of the Bone
, which is kind of like
The Catcher in the Rye
, but only if Holden Caulfield lived in a trailer and had a Mohawk. And he gave me
I Am the Messenger
, which is about an underage taxi driver who accidentally stops a bank robbery. I read those two books cover to cover the way my mother smokes her cigarettes, lighting new ones off the burning tip of the last, reading only to lose myself in the words and disappear.

Sometimes when I walk, I take Lake Shore Drive past Tim Hortons, wishing I had enough money for a doughnut and a mug of hot chocolate. I always brace myself against the cold wind that blows off the lake from Canada, but that never helps. Half freezing, I follow Erie’s shore, which looks empty and abandoned. The lifeguard stands and overturned aluminum fishing boats have been tagged by graffiti and covered in bird shit. I walk by Pangolin Park with its empty ball fields and volleyball pits, and past streets named after strange animals: Ermine, Genet, Lemming, Jerboa, Armadillo, Serval.

Other times I go to Canadaway Creek to watch fishermen wading into the current, slow-moving brown and green figures blending with the water, becoming a part of it. They wave their lines in circles above their heads like they’re gathering forces or working magic, and I imagine that one day, when I am older, I will buy a set of waders and a fishing pole and join them. I won’t even care if I catch anything; it will be enough to stand among them in the rushing water, a kind of quiet meditation to put my
mind at ease and help me remember that the world isn’t such a shitty place after all. Or if it is, it will remind me that I can still come here and forget that I’m hungry and have no friends.

But today is different because I have money, so I walk in a totally different direction, to Rusty’s Diner for breakfast. The waitress is this pretty twenty-something-year-old with blond hair that’s piled up on her head in a really nice way. She’s not at all like the girls at my school with their low-cut jeans, belly button studs, and back tattoos. She looks good, though, and as crazy as it might sound, I wonder what it would be like to kiss her. She’s got the beginnings of lines at the edges of her eyes, which totally disappear when she smiles, so she looks young and happy, but only when someone makes the effort to make her smile. I’m guessing this doesn’t happen very often at Rusty’s, because some old guy in a highway worker’s uniform is already giving her a hard time.

“Do you even remember what I ordered? Because it sure as hell wasn’t a Western omelet.”

She apologizes and takes his plate away as a silence falls over the half-dozen tables. I want to tell that guy to shut his mouth and not talk to pretty women like that. I want to look him in the eye and make him apologize—“Now say you’re sorry, asshole!” But I don’t do anything, because that’s movie stuff and I’m not that guy. I don’t know what to say to make her smile and do that thing where her eyes light up and her face changes just because she’s found a little bit of happiness in an otherwise crummy day. Still, it’s good to imagine, and I get lost in a fantasy where she
touches my arm and says, “James, are you going to take me away from this awful life? I know I’m a little old for you, but I really think we can make it work.”

Crazy, I know.

“Are you ready to order?” She’s standing over me with her little pad, and I’m embarrassed because of the stupid shit I have been thinking. “Do you need some more time?” she says.

“No. I know what I want.”

She taps her pad, smiling, waiting for me to find my wits and speak again.

“Bacon and eggs, please. And French toast.”

“My, you must be hungry. Anything to drink?”

“Coffee. Black.” I don’t know why I say this, because I’ve never had coffee before. But all the guys at the counter have steaming mugs, and I want to look like a regular guy. She fills my cup.

“I’ll get your food out in a minute, hon.”

Nobody has ever called me that and it feels nice, even if she probably says it to everyone. I’d like to say something nice back to her, but nothing comes to mind. Then my food arrives and I dig in because I’m starving, and the guy next to me at the counter, an old-timer in a red plaid shirt and suspenders, slides me a bottle of ketchup and hot sauce without saying a word. I like this, too, and decide it’s a sign that I belong here, that I can come back whenever Louis pays me. Maybe the waitress and I will get to know each other’s names. I’d like that.

“Can I get you anything else, sweetie?” she says.

I shake my head because I’m full, and also because I
am struck dumb by the nice things she keeps saying. I know these are not romantic things, but still, it feels good. Without thinking, I blurt out, “You have really nice eyes when you smile.”

She touches my arm and says, “You just made my day, sweetie. If you were ten years older, I’d tell you to pick me up after my shift.”

“So what time is your shift over?” I say, wishing I could press a button and gain ten years.

She winks and glides away to the other customers. I leave a five-dollar tip and hustle out of there for fear of what other stupid things I might say.

At school, Earl, the morning janitor, pushes his cart slowly, humming along to the oldies songs on a small transistor radio he keeps bungeed to a mop handle. Earl looks impossibly old, too old to work, but I don’t think he minds, because every time I see him, he is humming and happy to see me.

“Morning, boy,” he says, shaking my hand. “You got my coffee, right? Two sugars.”

I put my hands out to show that they’re empty.

“All right, then,” he says. “Tomorrow you owe me two coffees and … and one of them egg sandwiches. With cheese and bacon on it.”

He laughs to let me know he’s kidding, but tomorrow I
will
bring him coffee and an egg sandwich. Because I know what it’s like to be hungry and thinking about what you’d like to eat. I’ll surprise him, and he’ll say, “What’s this?” And I’ll say, “It’s just breakfast, Earl.” And he’ll say, “Naw, boy, you don’t need to do that. You keep your money.” But
I’ll insist, and maybe he’ll have a great morning because I have a job now and I can afford to buy Earl a cup of coffee.

I walk down the hallway with a dozen or so robotics club and band students hurrying to their Advanced Placement classes. They carry violin and trumpet cases, and pieces from computer circuit boards, talking excitedly about scales and concertos and bits of programming code. They laugh and slap each other’s backs and stumble into each other on purpose in the way that kids are always touching each other.

I am ashamed of how badly I want what they have. Am I really that different? So different that I will have to walk these halls alone, friendless, for another two years? I wish I was good at something like sports, or an instrument, or even smoking cigarettes, which isn’t really a skill or an interest but at least it’s something to do, something I could have in common with other kids who smoke. If I smoked, I could go right now to the green steel bridge next to school and say to a kid sitting on the railing, “Can I bum one of those?” and they would nod ever so slightly, looking impossibly cool and aloof. And I would lean back against the railing, too, blowing out my indifference to the world in perfect smoky rings. But I can’t do it, because it makes me cough like a spaz, and I don’t know the first thing about being cool or aloof.

I turn away from the group of computer and band kids and go in to Mr. Pfeffer’s dark empty classroom. I take a seat, suddenly exhausted even though it’s only eight-thirty. Maybe it’s because I am finally full and warm, and for the
moment, there’s nothing for me to worry about. I put my head down and close my eyes, but after what seems like only thirty seconds, Mr. Pfeffer bursts through the door with his gray-black beard and booming voice. “James,” he says, flipping on the lights. “How’s my favorite writer who doesn’t write?”

Mr. Pfeffer insists that I am a talented writer who just hasn’t realized it yet. Why he thinks this, I’ll never know; I haven’t done anything with my life that is worth writing about, and I haven’t written a word outside of his class assignments. I told this to Mr. Pfeffer, but he waved his hand and said, “It’s voice and perspective, not experience. There are plenty of books by charming bastards who can’t get out of the way of their own talent. The world needs more voice and perspective. Yours will do, when you’re ready.”

I pick my head up, rubbing my eyes, grateful that my favorite teacher, a man I admire and look up to, likes me, even if I don’t understand why.

“Here.” He pulls two bottles from a mini fridge under his desk. “Have a root beer, and let’s talk like real men about
The Sea Wolf
.” He assigned the book by Jack London last week, daring any student to prove to him that it’s not the absolute greatest American adventure novel ever written. It’s about Humphrey Van Weyden, otherwise known as Hump, an intellectual and self-described sissy who gets plucked out of the sea by a sealing schooner. Van Weyden thinks he’s been saved … until he meets the captain, a brutal madman named Wolf Larsen, who forces him to stay aboard and serve as cabin boy. I’ve only read a few
chapters, but I can tell Van Weyden is going to have to fight Wolf Larsen for his life. It’s that kind of a book, which is to say, it’s awesome.

I twist off the bottle cap. The ridges dig into my hands, and I do my best not to show that it hurts. “Do real men drink root beer, Mr. Pfeffer?”