JUSTICE
XI
When I was a boy, I think six or seven, I went to a Polish afterschool center every day. Like a daycare, but not toddlers. My neighborhood was, and still sort of is, a very Polish neighborhood -- All of the delis still smell like cured meats and vinegar, still owned by guys named Jakub instead of Mahmoud, and the one convent in our area keeps a steady supply of stout Polish nuns waddling through the streets. Red-faced old men start sleeping on the park benches around noon, depending on the weather, while the local newspaper has a crowned eagle on a red shield printed on the corner of every cover. If my parents wanted me to go to a non-polish afterschool center, or even a non-polish school, it would require a bus. Instead, I got picked up by the panis and walked to the center every day. The panis -- which I have come to learn is the Polish equivalent to "Mrs." -- were women ranging in their 30s to 50s, who all wore sweater-blouses and ruffly, floral shirts women that age wear a lot of. They spoke little to no English, wore their hair straight down or in tight ponytails, and wore crucifixes like it was their uniform. They each carried cartoonishly long pencils you have to win at carnivals to get. Their sons and daughters attended the afterschool center, and they would spend a lot of time using the sole computer to shop on a Polish website for handbags and coats. In retrospect, it was a brilliant business model -- They were all housewives without degrees, who had not only a place to bring their children, but a social gathering outside of church to gossip, share recipes, and generally do mom things at. I am being as impartial as I can, because they were worse than they sound.
When we'd arrive at the center, we'd be taken to the basement first thing, every day. I can still remember exactly how it looked. Four long wooden tables, pushed together to make two tables you'd use at a danish meadhall reenactment. There was a huge portrait of the then-pope, John Paul II at one end of the room that always scared me, so I averted my eyes from it whenever I could. One side of the room had the entrance and exit, and the other had two soup-kitchen style serving stations. This made sense, because the first thing all the kids would do was eat soup. The pani's children would eat first. They lined up first, and if you tried to line up with them, or before them, they'd shove you to the back. If you protested it with the panis -- or at least, if you were me, and protested in English -- they wouldn't understand you. If you tried to shove them back, one of the panis would hit you on the arm with their giant pencils. So the panis children would eat first. After lunch -- which was always either chicken soup or borscht with buttered bread, which was my favorite part of the center -- we'd go upstairs and play. The walls of the center always creeped me out more than the pope. They must have been painted a decade before I started going there, because they were marred with fingerprints, tomato sauce, and various levels of kid-grime from four feet down. The walls themselves were painted to resemble a myriad of recognizable characters -- Mickey Mouse, Elmo, Spongebob, and Bugs Bunny are the only ones I can still picture -- frolicking in a field of green grass under a cloudless blue sky. It was not the work of Michelangelo, to say the least.
Each of the characters looked like they had been microwaved for thirty seconds, or had suffered a stroke on both sides of their faces. Spongebob's eyes, nose, and mouth took up about ten percent of an otherwise swollen, hydrocephalic head, while Superman's muscular torso gave way to a set of legs that seemed give way to rickets. Mickey, who had no whites to his eyes and a long, impossibly stretched torso, was the worst. But it wasn't the scary cartoon characters that made playtime the worst time. It was Damian.
Damian was one of the pani-spawn. A squinty blonde kid, with one of those naturally hoarse voices children get from frying their vocal chords with screaming. He had little diamond studs in both ears, and a silver crucifix do you knew his mom was a pani. Like his namesake, he was the son of the fucking devil, and the first person to push me over the tipping point of physical violence. In my defense, it wasn't a one-time event that caused me to attack him, but a serious of escalations that in my kid-brain, I thought would continue if I didn't stop them. Maybe they would have. I can remember all three of the strikes with perfect clarity. It's weird what you remember from your childhood. The first strike was my spaceman hoodie. My mom had bought me a white hoodie with nasa patches on it, drawstrings and pockets making it look kind of aerospace-y. After a week of wearing it, Damian asks me to come over to the pani table, where he and the other bourgeoise would gather to draw during playtime. He says he wants to show me a trick, stuffs a hostess cupcake into his mouth, and spits it out on the table. I probably say the six year old equivalent of "That's weird, bye" and turn around and leave. I'm not ten feet away, and I feel a wet smack in the center of my back, and Damian's god-awful chuckle. I take off the jacket, and sure enough, Damian had thrown his cupcake at me like a snowball. I took it home and washed it, but the stain stayed, and my mom threw the hoodie out. The pani I complained to at the time wagged her finger at Damian, telling him what he did wasn't nice -- not bad, or wrong, but not nice. Destruction of property was only minor in the grand scheme of things, and it would have been wrong to hit him there. I knew the difference between right and wrong, and I followed it. The second strike was my caterpillar.
The panis would take us on trips to the park -- the one I mentioned earlier with sleeping men too drunk to return home to their wives -- every friday. As I often did on these trips, one particular friday, I was playing alone in the grass. I had found a caterpillar. I can still remember it perfectly too. Blue, with fine white hairs and yellow splotches down its back. It would rear up on its hind legs to say hello, or at least, this is the personality a lonely boy imprinted on it. Damian and his two cohorts -- who failed to ever traumatize me and didn't get their names burned into my memory -- saunter over to me and ask what I found. Damian had been playing with a plastic samurai sword he bought, as pani's children were allowed to bring toys from home, while the other two had sticks. I was a naive kid, so I proudly show them my caterpillar, who I had named Legolas. I wasn't popular. Without a second thought, Damian asks why I named him Legless, and plucks him from my hand to inspect him. Before I can say "Don't", he rips Legolas in two, and he and his crew respond as if it was a three part comedy. I rarely hear people laugh like that, truly guffawing. I scream, and try to put Legolas back together, and Damian sees this as a deeply personal insult. He and his two friends hit me with their sticks and sword, and stomp on the twitching remains of Legolas. I still hadn't hit him then. I cried, and told the panis. This time, Damian couldn't have his sword until we got back to the center. I still couldn't hit him, even though he had hit me. I was a gentle boy, the type to tie flowers together and name caterpillars. I had sisters and cats at home, and I assume Damian had brothers, or dogs. Neither would excuse his behaviour, but I like to think it would explain it.
The third strike was one of those cats, Musha. We called him Emperor Mushusu sometimes. An old black cat with fangs and green eyes, who would hide in our overhead cupboards and leap out when we opened them. I loved that cat. During the end of the school year, the panis would get a little more enthusiastic, and we would have more movies, field trips, and "special days". One of these was show-and-tell, a classic American tradition. I decide to bring my best friend, our cat Musha. Originally, everything had gone well. Musha would let people pet him, the panis would coo over him, and the other children who never spoke to me would ask to pet my cat as politely as possible. Even though that day is tied to this memory, I still remember enjoying how that made me feel. At some point, I had my back turned for a few moments, probably to draw a frog or tie my shoes or some dumb, trivial kid action long enough to distract me. I look around for Musha and can't find him, and then I turn a corner and see Damian, eye-to-eye. He is holding Musha in the air by his neck, giggling his usual giggle while Musha tried scratching at his wrists and making an awful sound like a goose. I can still see him choking the life from my cat, and the heaviness in my legs as I froze. I didn't stay frozen, at the very least. That was one strike too far, and I leapt out and grabbed him by the throat. He drops Musha, and only a few seconds of our fighting pass before a pani -- Damian's mother, to be precise, throws me to the floor. After we explain ourselves, we both have to apologize to one another. I can still see Damian's squint, and his see-saw sounding apology. You know the kind kids do, or at least, there must be a language equivalent. Saah-reeee. The kind of apology you give for showing up three minutes late to work.
That had been the final strike. After Musha was put in his cat carrier, I went into the "cubby", a large walk-in closet where we would hang our backpacks and coats, and I waited. I kept Musha in the cubby with me, not only for safety, but because I wanted him to see. I kept one eye at the crack of the door, and would go "Pssst" to Damian every time he passed by. After the third or fourth attempt, he noticed me. He comes to the closet, closing the door behind him -- To this day, I'm thankful he did that, because this fight would've been broken up too early if he hadn't. I don't remember what he started to say, but it took me long enough for Damian to begin a sentence before hitting him. First it was a right hook, and I could hear the wail start brewing in his throat. I grabbed him by the neck with my other hand so that he couldn't scream, and I kept hitting him with the other, as hard as I could. As he began to bleed, the scream he was trying to let out became a sort of low gibbering noise, like a gurgle with nothing in his mouth to gurgle on. I remember exactly how it felt when his nose seemed to deflate under my hand, and I remember thinking the words "I broke his nose" even in the moment I was hitting him. I kept hitting him, and hitting him, and hitting him. His face was covered in blood, starting from his nose, dripping down onto his shirt. I lacked the self control of an adult, and as the door was flung open and I was pulled off of Damian, I grabbed him by the ear and tore out one of those diamond earrings. That was when he really started screaming.
The panis had to separate us, but they had nowhere to put me, no office or time-out area or anything like that, so they closed the door to the cubby and called my mom. I sat there in the closet with Musha and listened to Damian's horrible screaming, the screaming that tore his throat to a scratchy whisper, and I smiled. My mom arrived later, having found her son locked in a closet and hearing that the other boy choked the cat she had for over a decade, and spared Damian not an ounce of sympathy. Damian's mother, who had been threatening to sue earlier, was now being told by my Italian battleaxe of a mother that she was going to watch a demolition team tear down her business after the legal battle she would put them through, and she became much less sure of her and her son being in the right. I never saw Damian after that, but I kept his earring for many years until it got lost in a move. I don't have the earring anymore, and I don't have Musha, but I still have a kind of courage you can't get until you throw a beating on someone.
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