We didn’t know if his name was Jerry or Jeremy, and we never bothered to find out. To do so would have granted him personhood, and an upsetting place in our tenuous, paper-doll world. He appeared in third grade like someone else’s bizarre afterthought, a rangy kid with constantly roaming eyes and constantly wet lips, red like a cherry going to rot. His clothes were too dirty and too small and his voice was too shaky and too loud. We called him one name or the other, or a mash-up of the two that the meaner kids among us would pronounce to sound like “germ-y.” He ate alone. He sat alone. At recess he swung from bars and periscoped into tunnels and slipped down slides alone. Jerr/my was persona non grata from birth, a designation the universe would seem to make indifferently and never bother to correct.
Because we were only eight years old we didn’t know a lot things. That his family didn’t always have a home. That his father molested his sister. That such things often leave permanent stains. We sensed the poison of his life in some animalistic way and resorted to juvenile tactics to keep him from infecting ours: bullying and ostracizing and calling him names. He was kooky, disruptive, animated. In middle school he took up the clarinet. Even the band teacher rode him into the ground, blaming Jerr/my for every untimed or untuned screech emitted from the woodwind section. We let it slide, even though we knew we’d messed up that high C ourselves, our fingers too thin and too small to cover the holes and depress the small raindrop shaped keys.
We populated eighth-grade homeroom like walking advertisements for alternative rock bands, our t-shirts declaring moody affiliations with Nirvana or Pearl Jam or Green Day. Our desks were the heavy old-fashioned kind, solid wood top connected to wood and metal chair, one glorious industrial unit. The teacher made some off-hand remark to Jerr/my about his homework, or being loud or being late. Jerr/my hauled his newly enlarged frame out of one of those desks and hurled the beastly object toward the door, shattering all five panes of glass and any notions we had of him ever fitting in. Fuck this place! Fuck all of you! Everyone ALWAYS gives me a hard time and I’M DONE! He was a wild scarecrow, scarlet face matching bruised fruit lips, oily sawdust-colored hair falling into tear-choked eyes, saliva flying. It’s hard to silence a room full of rebellious eighth graders. We were rendered mute and dumbstruck and (although none of us would ever admit it) slightly afraid in our sturdy seats. Jerr/my crunched over the broken glass and slid away through the haze of our generalized shock, clutching textbooks he probably never cracked again because that would be his last day of school.
Two years after the infamous chair incident we saw him at the local water park with a girlfriend who appeared pregnant. He seemed to be happy, in a way. His speech and laughter was easily higher in pitch and intensity than that of anyone else in the immediate vicinity. His motions were still jerky and abrupt, as if he would always and forever be on guard for the next verbal or physical insult. In all likelihood he was on drugs, but so were many of us, escaping from our own lives into chemically enhanced worlds. It was the last time we would see him. He could be dead or alive, or maybe something sadder in between; a human being in a chronic blue exile.
I hate that we never knew his real name.
I hate that we were young and naive and too caught up in the fragile mechanics of our own childhood struggles to grant him a seat at our table. I hate that the adults in his life failed him a thousand times over with a thousand small cuts, and that his parents likely induced the deepest and most numerous of those gashes. I hate that his story ends in a failing Midwest water park, surrounded by uncertainty and decay, like one of the abandoned slides snaking the periphery of the property. A sun-faded plastic tube, jutting out into thin air 20 feet off the ground, startled, arrested, nothing but the lithe brown grass waving carelessly below.
