Danny had almond-sliver eyes, just like Scut Farkus. Just like Zap. He peered at you through them in a perpetual squint, as if he would spend his entire life driving west into the glare of the setting sun. I knew he was mean, because I knew who he was. Had I never met him, though, the eyes would have been a dead giveaway. You just can't trust a kid whose irises you've never seen. I only saw his eyes open wide one time in the two years I knew him and even then it was only because of shock and blunt force trauma.
It was not simply the almond-sliver eyes that made Danny's white-trashedness so menacing. It was the freckles. He didn't have the cute freckles, either. He had the kind that made him look filthy. Little Orphan Annie had the cute freckles; the type that were symmetrical and distinct and not so numerous that they obscured the true pigment of her alabaster skin. Danny had the blotchy, splattered freckles that look like your windshield after a homeless man tries to clean it with tepid, dirty water and yesterday's classified ads. You're pretty sure there's clear glass under there, but it's hard to tell through the streaks of caked on dirt.
Danny had a giant head and a skinny little neck. One night several years back, I was perusing old class photos with a girlfriend to whom my mother had just related the Danny Story over dinner. She got to my 2nd grade class picture and asked, "which one is Danny?"
"He's the one that looks like a rugby ball perched on top of a traffic pylon." She picked him out immediately. My mother likes to remind me of the Danny Story and, better yet, tell it to company when she feels like I'm getting a little too big for my britches.
I threw Danny into the pile of leaves on Friday. The following Monday, his reign of terror began.
On the old wooden jungle gym during playtime before school, he tried to push me off the top of the slide while I waited my turn. During 4-Square at recess, every time someone hit the ball in his square he would fire it as hard as he could at my head trying to get me out. I would call "No Headsies" and he would yell and scream that I was still out because I didn't call it before I got cracked in the skull. If I tried to climb the big oak tree in the back of the yard, he would wait until I was just about to put all my weight on one foot to boost myself up and he would grab the other, free foot and try to yank me down.
I felt the true force of Danny's reign of terror during lunch. The uninterrupted 40 minute break allowed him to focus his fatherless rage squarely on me and the bounty that was the contents of my He-Man lunchbox.
That Monday, my mom filled the Skeletor thermos with Campbell's Chicken with Stars. My favorite. She supplemented the soup with a pack of gummy fruit snacks, a tropical-fruit Capri-Sun, and an apple to assuage her guilt for turning my lunch into a giant salt-and-sugar bomb.
I felt Danny behind me...waiting. At first I thought he was just eating his lunch like the rest of us. That was foolish of me, in retrospect, because Danny was poor and unloved. He never had lunch. He had soda and maybe a candy bar--sometimes beef jerky from the 7-11 around the corner where his mother would stop each morning for a pack of smokes and a couple of Quik-Picks.
Then I thought maybe he was just waiting for me to finish so he could pester me around the playground for the balance of the lunch period. I decided to eat slowly. First the gummy snacks, one piece of carnauba waxy goodness at a time. I extended the experience by trading a couple of the purple gummy morsels (I hated purple) to the only black girl in the school for one of her cheese-and-crackers. Then I ate some of the apple. I would have eaten it all but my mom, once again, tried to sneak a McIntosh past me instead of my usual Fuji. It took 5 years and a blind taste-test for her to believe I could tell the difference.
I gave the rest of the McIntosh to Tate, a painfully shy 4th grader who spent the lunch period against the fence, sitting in the bark chips Joan used under the swingset in place of sand. Today, he is the shy kid. In 1985, he was the weird kid against the fence. I was going to throw the apple away, but Tate regularly ate food out of the garbage can so I thought I would save him a trip.
Back from the bark chips, I sat down in front of my lunchbox and unscrewed the top from my Skeletor thermos. I put the cup/lid flat on the bench and began pouring my Chicken with Stars. That's when Danny pounced--like a poverty puma.
He wrenched my elbow and slapped the bottom of the thermos, spilling the remainder of its piping-hot contents into my lap. I jumped up screaming, waving my hands frantically in front of my crotch. Marge, the teacher on lunch duty that day, rushed over and, with her arm securely around my heaving shoulders, ushered me inside to Dr. Joan: Masochist Woman.
I spent the next two hours in Joan's office, in my underwear. I spent it sobbing into my little striped t-shirt and relating the torment I had suffered that morning. Joan listened while she washed my pants. She nodded when she was supposed to nod and she shook her head when she was supposed to shake her head. I was starting to feel better when the dryer buzzed, signaling the end to my safe haven. Joan twisted my brown corduroy pants onto my uncooperative little legs, walked me up to "Ken"s classroom, and left me with another pearl of wisdom: "next time hold on tight to your thermos cup."
Thanks Joan.
"Ken" welcomed me back with a bearded smile. Danny welcomed me with a shit-eating grin. When school was over, I went out back to find my lunch box. It was sitting in Tate's ass dents against the fence, half-full of dirt and bark chips. I never found the Skeletor thermos.
Posted by nils at 8:49 PM