Another year, another school. I tried to be a good kid. I wanted friends, but I also wanted to be invisible. I was thirteen. I wore the exact same glasses as Dad because I looked around the entire optometry shop he took us to, and every single displayed frame was this way, shiny polished metal with the thin top bar above the bridge, silicone nose pads, the edges of which turned green with collected gunk if you didn’t clean them. Just like Dad’s glasses. I asked if they had anything else and they said no. Dad also told them to add the lenses which turned gray when exposed to the sun because the Ridgecrest summers were rough, 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Always a cloudless pale blue sky occupied by an angry yellow eye. I picked the gold frames because Dad chose the silver ones for himself.
He took me to the barber and said to the fat old gray man who looked at me with hate, Give him the Businessman’s Haircut. So, I resembled a miniature, middle-aged middle manager. Then one day my entire face erupted in red ulcerative pustules which was probably why Dad’s face looked like a greasy moon, and it explained the description of my grandpa in criminal records which stated his complexion was ruddy, face heavily furrowed. Around this time, I also started to realize I wasn’t white, but half-Chinese, and I understood that this was going to be a problem. Some of the more in-your-face kids in school were like, what are you? The girls in the school hallways looked at my fucked-up face and turned away in disgust. Lindy, my dad’s new wife’s niece, two years younger than me, a pretty blonde softball star who got straight A’s, wrote me a little note, stifled a giggle, folded the piece of paper and handed it to me. For a brief second, I thought she was about to reciprocate my crush. In pretty-girl script the note reads You need Mary Kay with a smiley face after it. The face had little dots on it.
Man, but Lindy could throw a ball. Standing on the pitcher’s mound, she whipped her arm, the ball flashed across the batter’s box and the bat swished by and inside the catcher’s mitt you heard a loud POP.
I was just a kid trying to blend into the background. I was trying to get used to this school. I don’t have any friends yet. Someone in English class looked at the Velcro fasteners on my running shoes and he laughed, said they were generic. Later, I asked Dad to get me some Jordans. I didn’t like the colors, red, white and black, but I knew they were supposed to be cool. He said, We’ll go to JCPenney’s this weekend and see what they have.
During our fall middle school assembly, the principal went up to the stage and took the microphone and made his announcements about upcoming school events, including a play, the sock hop, and other things which didn’t interest me.
At the time, I wasn’t the kind to act out, but I grinned when I saw the funny bad boys clustered together, seated in a few rows behind me in the auditorium making jokes about whatever was being said. I looked back and grinned at them. Maybe they’d see me smiling and know that I appreciated what they were doing. I reveled in the teachers’ frustration as they shushed the bad boys but they still kept up their running commentary about whatever speech the principal was giving and they also snickered and whispered as some guy in a tan sports jacket with a big belly came up to the stage to talk about picture day, and then the vice principal talked about the winners of the school’s Olympic events. Someone played the Olympics song on the P.A. system, and they went through and called the winning kids up and they got their medals and a certificate. It took forever.
I wanted to fast-forward through this part of the assembly. Last month, I signed up for the shot-put throw. I’m not sure why I even signed up. I thought it would be easy. I knew how to throw things. Not as fast as Lindy, but yeah. I was a lone ranger wherever I went, at home or at school, so I figured things out on my own. Dad worked a lot at the secret military weapons base near town, and my mom and Dad had divorced, mom went back to Hong Kong and Dad’s new wife who was always home was one of the stupidest adults I’d ever met. Lindy said her ex-husband, a Vietnam vet, used to knock her in the head and knocked her out more than once. Must have knocked her senseless. So yeah, I couldn’t depend on Dad’s wife for solid answers. Except she could go on for hours about how Jan and Paul from TBN’s Praise the Lord show taught her that the Rapture was coming, it would suck up all the good Christians into the air and fly them directly to heaven, and in the chaos the US Government was going to force us to get the Mark of the Beast, a bar code tattooed on our hand which we would swipe over a scanner at the market checkout stand so we could buy our groceries. A cashless society, she said over and over with her widening eyes made bigger by the magnifying effect of her glasses and she pulled at the two big black hairs on her chin, the bristles highlighted by the sunlight coming in from the window; she also said the Antichrist was coming, A European, she spit that word out, a tall and popular and young and good looking man who someone would try to assassinate but it was a setup, he’d survive getting shot in the head and become even more popular and call for a One World Government, A New World Order, and everyone would do whatever he said, which meant the Christians still left on Earth were going to die. Then years later, when things were looking really bad for the Christians, suddenly, the clouds would part, a thousand angels would blow on trumpets, a burst of light would blind us, and we’d see Jesus descending, riding down to Earth on the back of a pure white Pegasus and he’d be waving around a flaming sword as he swooped in and all the bad guys who chopped off Christians’ heads now were truly fucked.
Other than these things, Dad’s wife didn’t know shit about shot put or anything else. I would have preferred a dumbassless society.
This was 1987, way before anyone knew about the internet, so you really had to figure stuff out by yourself as back then you didn’t have a chocolate bar-sized supercomputer whispering at you to take him out of your back pocket to google every little thought that popped into your head. A few AI-generated answers and a YouTube video would have shown me that that shit wasn’t for me, and I would have said forget it and not wasted my time training for the shot put.
I thought that all I needed to do was to find large rocks in my backyard to throw them as far as I could the way I’d seen Olympic shot-putters do it on TV. My dog kept trying to run and catch the big rock. I didn’t want to smash his head, so I threw a different, smaller rock to distract him and then threw my training rock. I threw it kind of far, so I figured I was in the zone to do well at school. I supplemented that training with ten bicep curls for each arm using the Challenger Orbatron weight set which Dad bought for me from the Sears catalogue and which usually sat in the garage unused. Each dumbbell weighed about ten pounds. I did a couple of sets of 10 reps for each arm, and I felt tired, and I got bored so I stopped. It was hot as fuck out here in this little town in the High Desert of California. I thought California would be pretty girls, bikinis, beaches, surfers, skaters, palm trees. Instead, it was sand, tumbleweeds, intense wind blasting blinding dust into your eyes, old people next door trying to pay you twenty-five cents to take out their garbage—for an entire week. The heat in a parked car would be so hot you could press down on the dashboard for several seconds and leave a handprint. I went back inside the house to the air conditioning, and I microwaved a burrito and got an ice-cold can of Coke, then sat down and watched hours of cartoons.
My workouts were intermittent until the day of the event. So basically, I trained maybe three times for like ten minutes each time. On Olympics day, I was called out of class and a teacher from another class holding a clipboard asked me what weight I was going to do, and I told her, and I picked up the shot put from a row of them on the ground. I found it surprisingly heavy. She had me stand inside a chalk circle drawn on the ground and then she told me to go ahead and throw the shot put. There was evenly spaced chalk lines marked on the ground, I think they were spaced one foot apart. I threw the shot put and it landed a few inches from my feet, the metal orb leaving a deep pockmark in the sand. She gave me another shot at it, and the same thing happened. Then she said, OK, that’s it, and I saw her scribble something on her clipboard. The whole thing took twenty seconds. She didn’t say anything else to me, just looked at me blankly, as if to say without saying it, You’re still here?
What could she say? Good job, you didn’t crush your own foot in those generic running shoes from K-Mart? I knew I’d made a lame attempt. As I dragged myself back to class with the Charlie Brown song playing in my head, the one where he knows he sucks really bad, I wondered what that teacher thought of me.
I take it back, if there truly was a dumbassless society, I wouldn’t be here, either.
Sometimes, at the assemblies, we had special guests who showed up to entertain and educate us. One year, it was a Christian hair metal band called The Edge, who screamed covers of hit metal songs which somehow didn’t have allusions to sex, drugs and alcohol, and they also sang a few of their own original songs which sounded like real metal songs I heard on MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball. In between songs, the lead singer would stop and talk for a few minutes. His shoulder length blonde hair was teased out into a lion’s mane which he kept out of his face with a fluorescent green headband which had written on it in black lettering, The Edge, and he wore snow leopard print spandex pants, and a sleeveless black t-shirt with the words The Edge across his chest. He was dripping sweat from singing under bright lights. As he spoke into the microphone, his voice dropped a little, he sounded serious. He told us things like Don’t give up hope, work hard in school, don’t do drugs and you’ll succeed at anything. Something he said stabbed me in my chest. I still felt the pain from my parents’ divorce. He spoke openly of his own struggles, his own fuckups. He even sort of hinted at the times in his life when he didn’t want to be here anymore on Earth. That made me want to cry, but I couldn’t cry in front of all these kids as I was already a friendless, crater-faced, half-breed freak who now wore Jordans, the colors of which clashed with my oversized beige corduroy pants, the size picked out because I’d grow into it, and pink and navy-blue striped polo with a chocolate stain on the chest which never came out in the wash. But I looked around at the other kids’ faces. Most were locked in, they were really listening as the singer spoke. I saw at least one boy with long hair crying, sniffling. But I didn’t cry. I think this was the closest I ever got to receiving therapy until my late twenties.
I don’t remember any men, including my dad, talking like that singer, ever in Ridgecrest. Dad was a Marine who fought in Vietnam. Back then, I never saw him cry, even if we watched a sad movie. I was afraid I was too much like a girl, too weak. One time, he lost his shit when he caught me in my bedroom lying on my bed crying and writing on a piece of lined paper a list of the things that his wife was doing to me, talking to me like I was an asshole, making my Clive Barker book, The Hellbound Heart disappear, I’m pretty sure she also took my Ultima 6 game manual, the Compendium filled with runic symbols, the cover with the glowing Ankh shooting out lightning at winged demons. I couldn’t find those books anywhere. I couldn’t play the game without the manual. It had code words in it which I needed to look up as I progressed through the game. My quest as the Avatar, the chosen one, the warrior who fought fiercely with a sword and shield alongside my party of loyal followers Shamino, Dupre and Iolo, was forever suspended. She denied any involvement. Dad asked, What’s that? picked up the list without asking, read through it, shouted in his drill instructor voice, STOP THIS BULLSHIT, threw the paper down on the bed, then walked out. I sat up in bed and for a minute I looked down at the now wrinkled sheet of paper. I balled it up and threw it away.
That night, I jammed my erect penis into the opening of his new wife’s minced garlic jar and put it back in the fridge, so I guessed we were even.
At last year’s spring assembly, someone named Melissa Gilbert came to speak to us. The principal had announced she played Laura, the daughter of Michael Landon’s character Charles, on the hit show Little House on the Prairie, which I remember watching as a young kid. But that was years ago. I squinted at her face illuminated by the stage lights. I didn’t recognize her because she looked like she was already in her thirties. It felt kind of special to have an actual celebrity here, all the way from Hollywood, which is where I assumed all the actors lived. From our town, it was a three-and-a-half-hour drive to Los Angeles. We were in the Mojave Desert, in the middle of nowhere. But her being here also felt like a letdown, because I think we would have been more impressed if Michael Landon himself, or David Hasselhoff from Knight Rider had shown up. She gave her own uplifting speech, the struggles she faced as a teen, and the funny boys made a farting sound. The teachers shushed them, but it was too late, a bunch of us snickering, but we eventually settled down.
After everyone got their stupid medals, the principal announced, Today we have a very special guest. A magician and sword swallower. A man in his thirties dressed like Batman’s butler stepped onto the stage, the spotlight making his oily parted hair shine like Dad’s black patent leather shoes from The Marines.
I had seen sword swallowing on TV, so I was aware of what was supposed to happen. I thought about the mechanics of it, and how it was supposed to work. Dad had this hardbound collection of books at home which explained the technical aspects of many things, topics such as how steam engines worked, which was confusing to me, I still couldn’t grasp what was being explained in these books, so I just looked at the pictures, flipped through the Bible paper thin pages of cutaway diagrams of these machines from a hundred years ago. In the same series of books, there were explanations of how some magic tricks worked. I scrutinized the diagrams and read the entries about each trick which interested me: chopping a woman in half (mirrors), disappearing a woman on stage (a trap door), levitating a woman and passing large rings over her body which proved there were no ropes or wires suspending her above the ground (this trick mystified me for years, but I knew even then that there was no such thing as magic, so of course there was some trick to it that I hadn’t yet fully understood). There was also an entry on sword swallowing. The entry had a cutaway image of the sword swallower’s internal organs. It showed the sword’s trajectory, how the swallower lifted his head, so his eyes, nose and mouth pointed towards the sky, like when you eject candy from a PEZ dispenser by flipping Spider-Man’s head. The sword entered the swallower’s mouth, passed down his esophagus, went down into his stomach. The sword’s tip appeared to rest near or at the bottom of the magician’s stomach. A sentence in the entry stuck out, that the sword, if improperly inserted, could pierce your heart, and you’d instantly die.
The magician paced the stage, the spotlight following him. He made his wand disappear. He pulled an endless series of interconnected multi-colored scarves out of his jacket sleeve. He had someone pick a card. A fireball shot out of his fingertips. Then he went to the side of the stage, and someone handed him the sword, he pulled it free from its scabbard, and he held up the sword for all of us to see, a shining, gleaming blade, much smaller than Conan the Barbarian’s, but thicker than the pointy one brandished by Zorro. He turned the sword this way and that as it gleamed under the lights. A long, thin blade, silver so it must have been steel. He touched it, slapped it. It wasn’t retractable or rubbery, it was real.
The auditorium got quiet as the magician tipped his head back, opened his mouth wide, carefully inserted the sword into his mouth, eased the sword down his throat little by little until the only thing you saw was the hilt sticking out of his mouth and he released the handle and slowly held out both of his white gloved hands and those hands fluttered as if they gestured for us to applaud. We clapped. I looked around and saw transfixed eyes, gaping mouths, some girls hiding their faces. The funny boys were guardedly amazed, then they cackled and hooted. Like the girls, I admit I also was a bit nervous as this didn’t look comfortable or safe to do. But this man was an adult, so he knew better than me what was right and possible to do.
As the applause died down, the magician gripped the handle and in one, slow, smooth motion, removed the sword from his body. He smiled broadly, and as we applauded, he took a white cloth from a pant pocket and wiped down the sword.
He asked for a volunteer from the audience, specifically a teacher. He used a hand to shield his eyes from the lights, and he scanned the crowd. He called out to an adult who was being prodded by other teachers to go up there. Come on, don’t be scared, the magician said, as the teacher made her way up the steps and stopped and turned to face us in the blinding light as she took her place by the magician’s side. The magician said, I’m going to swallow this. Then, when I give you this signal, I want you to pull the sword from my mouth, in one smooth motion, straight up, exactly how I did it earlier, okay? Carefully.
The woman nodded, a nervous smile on her face. Her eyes were obscured by the lights’ glare off her glasses.
The magician asked, Okay. Are you ready?
The teacher nodded again. She looked like she was shrinking away from him.
Again, as if to make sure she was listening, he repeated his instructions to her, to us, and then, after a beat, he looked up at the ceiling and plunged the sword into his mouth, it went down, down until the hilt again rested at his lips, and he gradually held his hands aloft. A second later, with his left hand, he gestured at her, then used his gloved index finger to point at the sword’s handle resting on his lips.
The teacher approached, stiff-legged. She stopped a foot away from the man looking up at the ceiling with a full-length sword holstered inside his body. Her arms were pressed straight down against the sides of her body.
The magician side-eyed her, then glanced at the audience, then his eyes darted back to the teacher.
I heard an adult murmur by the stage, maybe it was the principal.
The magician’s left hand gestured again, this time with urgency as he motioned to his derelict assistant that she needed to pull out the sword.
She reached out and quickly drew her hand back as if she touched something hot. His signals evolved into frantic gesticulation. The magician’s face turned pink.
The assistant let out a little cry, clamped her hands to her mouth.
The magician let out a loud retch, quickly pulling the sword out of his mouth. He bowed with a flourish, his eyes teary and red, his smile a flat line. He wiped down the sword with the cloth, wiped his lips, stuffed the cloth back into his pocket. Snatched one end of the string of scarves lying on the stage. The teacher backed away from the magician, turned and left the stage, her head bowed. I saw the dark silhouette of her head bobbing along until she sat down. Without a word, the magician ensheathed his sword and quickly left the stage by exiting behind the curtain, the scarves trailing behind him until they too disappeared backstage. The spotlight jerked, tried to follow him but he was too fast.
A few claps, then the room went silent.
From behind me, I heard loud retching noises. I laughed out loud, laughed hard. Other kids laughed. I felt like part of something even if it was just for a second.
A teacher hissed: William, Christopher. Come here.
The funny boys slithered out of their seats and slinked towards the teacher, their faces doing their best to convey contrition, but I saw one of the boys’ eyes roll around in his head. The other boy’s mouth looked like he was holding in a laugh. The overhead lights turned on, I heard the principal say we were dismissed, and we shuffled towards the exit to our classes.
Hey, you, shouted the teacher.
I turned and saw she was pointing at me. I must have given her a face. She said, Yes.
You.
Get over here.
