A Bad Idea I'm About to Do (7 page)

On this particular night, Koozo showed up and trumped everyone.

“They're called nigger chasers,” Koozo told us as he held out a handful of cheaply made explosives. This blunt language was shocking, even from a guy who seemed as unhinged as Koozo did.

“Ah, they just look like bottle rockets,” someone chimed in from the back of the crowd that had gathered around Koozo. “Who cares?”

“They're not bottle rockets,” Koozo snapped. “They're nigger chasers. You see that eye on the side?” He pointed to a drawing that looked vaguely like the logo for CBS broadcasting.

“Yeah. What about it?” someone indignantly asked.

“That eye looks for anything dark,” Koozo growled. “And it's like a heat-seeking missile that goes after anything black it comes across.”

I remember shifting uncomfortably, and thinking to myself,
This is fucked up, even for our neighborhood.

But before I could completely formulate that thought, someone decided to challenge Koozo's claims of the darkness-chasing qualities of his racist fireworks. A faceless member of the crowd shouted out the one contentious phrase certain to cause trouble among any self-respecting group of preteen males.

“Prove it.”

Everyone “oohed” at the prospect of Koozo being challenged. Koozo got angry. He squinted his eyes and puffed out his chest. He told everyone to back up.

“Let's see . . . let's see . . . ,” he said quietly, looking for a worthy target. His eyes locked onto my house. “There! Mr. Gethard's wearing a black shirt.”

Everyone, myself included, turned to see my father gardening on our front lawn. Apparently, the mental effects of my grandfather's car crash had finally worn off and my dad was again finding peace in helping some of Mother Nature's creatures grow.

“Now wait a second,” I said. “Don't even—”

I was cut off by the taunts of the kids I was standing among. Koozo threw a pile of fireworks onto the ground, wiped the sweat from his palms by rubbing them across his dingy shorts, and removed a lighter from his pocket. He went down to one knee in front of the fireworks, and took on the serious facial expressions and body language of a World War II infantryman about to fire mortar shells at the enemy.

“Koozo, man,” I said, “it's my dad.”

My protests fell on deaf ears. Everyone ignored me as the anticipation of Koozo's airborne attack on my father grew. I glanced over to Gregg, who shrugged his shoulders. There was nothing we could do to stop it. We could only wait to see how it turned out.

Koozo lit the first firecracker and pointed it toward my dad. It shrieked through the night, a trail of light marking its path as it headed straight for the old man, only to get caught up in the branches of a small nearby tree. It exploded in a shower of sparks.

My dad flipped onto his back, his eyes wide in terror. He raised the hand-sized pitchfork he had been working with, waving it defensively at no one. Just then, another firework exploded above his shoulder, causing him to spin wildly, searching the
horizon for his assailant. His eyes spotted Koozo as the maniacal boy/man leaned down to light yet another missile. My dad twisted onto his stomach and crawled down the hill that marked the edge of our property. As quickly as he could, he leapt behind the corner of our house.

When he stuck his head out moments later, another firecracker careened past him, exploding against the wall of the Scagliozzis' home next door. My dad used this as his opportunity to flee. He vaulted over the low-lying bush that ran along the walkway to our front door. He leapt up all three stairs and flung open the door, falling forward into our porch just as another firework whipped past him, narrowly missing his feet as he finally escaped into the safety of our home. Moments later, Koozo fired off one last rocket for good measure, though my father was long gone. It exploded in front of our house, and was followed by an eerie silence and the smell of gunpowder.

“See?” Koozo said with no small amount of glee in his voice. “Black shirt. Chased him that whole time. Nigger chasers.”

A
s years passed, Koozo appeared less and less frequently. My final encounter with him occurred when I was almost done with high school. It had been a good three years since I'd seen hide or hair of him.

One afternoon, my brother and I were fiddling around with a police scanner (don't ask why—the answer is that we're losers and dorks) when we picked up someone broadcasting on a CB, inviting truckers to congregate at Our Lady of Lourdes church. This was our church, only three short blocks from our home. We snuck down to Lourdes to see what was going on. There were
four or five full-blown eighteen-wheelers circled in the parking lot. In the middle of this ring of big rigs, sitting on the hood of his car, was Koozo, grinning and gesticulating wildly as he shouted to the truckers in their cabs. From our distance we couldn't hear what he was saying, and, creeped out by the whole scene, we didn't stick around long enough to figure out what his intentions were in summoning them.

Years later, my brother Gregg and I were talking about how we grew up.

“Dude,” I said, “if you had to describe Koozo in three words, what would they be?”

My brother answered without thinking twice.

“Greaseball,” he said. “Caughtie. CB radio advocate.”

I was so surprised that he didn't say “moped.”

After his afternoon trucker rendezvous, we never heard from Koozo again. I never saw Koozo grow up or knew him as an adult, and I'm glad I never did. In my mind, he still exists as he was—the scourge of the sewers and the terror of the treetops. I'd like to believe that out there in some peaceful suburban neighborhood he's running a terrified child over with a moped right now.

 

PS: There is a neighborhood secret that I am one of only a handful of people to know. I feared Koozo immensely at certain times in my childhood and never had the guts to come forward when I should have. Maybe it's too late to make amends now—I'm not sure. But a person's got to try, even fifteen years after the fact, I guess. So Mike Tenkman, if you're reading this, it was Koozo who stole and killed your leopard gecko.

H
er name was Samantha. Like most of the girls who spoke to me during high school, she was in the marching band. She played piccolo, meaning she had more rhythm than she did self-esteem. As an extension of these issues, she somehow managed to be both bulimic and chubby at the same exact time. And for some undefined reason, she constantly smelled of birch beer.

Needless to say, I was in love.

I sat directly behind Samantha in Ms. Flynn's sophomore English class. We didn't talk much, until the day I almost vomited directly on her face.

English was the first class of the day, and I had a bad habit of having to use the bathroom just as class was starting. I couldn't help it. My digestive tract was and is notoriously unstable. I interrupted class dozens of times before Ms. Flynn, who on most days was so nice and understanding it actually seemed sinister, put her foot down. She informed me that I would no longer be allowed to leave her class to use the restroom. I respected her enough to grin, bear it, and wait to use the restroom until after class.

While I understood Ms. Flynn's point of view, I knew in my heart that human biology stops for no English teacher. I respected her wishes and stopped asking for the hall pass, but understood deep down that the stage had been set for disaster.

“Ms. Flynn,” I said one morning, almost a month after she had handed down her edict, “I really need to use the bathroom.”

“Chris,” she said, “I'm sorry. But I can't. We talked about this.”

Unfortunately, she didn't realize that on this particular day I didn't have to “use the bathroom” at all—I had to throw up. Violently. And more importantly, immediately.

I raised my hand again, praying she would see the terror in my eyes.

“Chris, you can't go,” she said.

“But—”

“No!” she said, glaring at me. “I said no, and I meant it.” I had been put in my place, publicly. Stifled giggles filled the room. I had no choice but to tough it out.

No one wants to be the kid who gets yelled at for taking too many shits,
I reminded myself through gritted teeth.
No one.

My resolve lasted less than a minute. After a few seconds, I felt it: a wave of vomit suddenly rising from the depths of my stomach. At that moment, as my cheeks quickly ballooned with bile, Samantha spun around. Accompanying the rising tide of puke was a noise that every kid recognizes as the unmistakable prelude to throwing up. But Samantha, with her self-inflicted bouts of vomiting, was especially attuned to the sound and knew better than anyone exactly what it entailed. Her eyes widened. Somehow I managed to hold the steaming liquid inside my mouth. We made direct eye contact, and despite my own panic, I tried to convey that everything was going to be fine.

When you are fifteen, shy, and strange, you develop an acute awareness of the reactions of everyone around you to
you
, particularly of those you have a crush on. It is thanks to this that I will never forget the look on Samantha's face. I have never seen a woman react to me with as much disgust as Samantha did when she realized I was seconds from spewing hot stomach acid all over her cute, slightly pudgy face. It's strange, but I think the vomit filling my cheeks actually helped my confidence with women in the long term. I've found a certain strength in being absolutely sure I will never leave a worse impression on a woman than I did that morning as I loomed over my crush with puke ready to fly.

With cheeks full of throw-up, I calmly walked to the front of the room, made eye contact with Ms. Flynn, and yarfed the contents of my stomach into the garbage can.

No one even laughed—a surefire sign that something in a high school environment has gone from odd to fucked up. Ms. Flynn stood frozen in the center of the room, the chalk she had been writing with now resting in her trembling hand.

I wiped my sleeve against my vomit-covered chin.

“
Now
do you want to let me go to the bathroom?” I defiantly asked before strutting out of the room—without a hall pass. At that point it was easily the coolest thing I'd ever done.

Two things happened as a result of that incident. The first was that Ms. Flynn felt horrible, and for the rest of the year let me use the bathroom whenever I asked.

The second was that Samantha thought I was somehow cool for nearly vomiting on her face and then mouthing off to a teacher. Maybe it made me seem rebellious. Maybe she'd been waiting for a big-headed nerd with a dark side to come into her life. Or maybe seeing me vomit made her attracted to someone
within whom she saw herself. All I know is that the incident made her oddly fascinated with me.

Shortly before the end of that year, fueled by my newfound vomit-driven confidence, I decided to put all of my cards on the table.

“Samantha,” I told her one evening over the telephone, “I have to tell you something.”

“Oh no,” she said. “Do you like me or something?”

This was not the ideal response, to say the least.

Samantha let me down gently. I knew it was coming. While I'd been busy playing “Magic: The Gathering,” she'd been actually dating. She routinely told me stories about how she spent her summers at the Jersey shore, which I imagined for any girl meant drinking vodka hidden in water bottles and hooking up with older dudes. As far as my imagination was concerned, she may as well have been regaling me with tales of her performing oral sex for the first (and second through eleventh) time(s) underneath the boardwalk.

Regardless of how much of it was actually true, rather than feeling jealous I found myself wanting to save Samantha from this wild-child lifestyle. I wanted to give her a sense of stability, the chance to build a relationship not out of boardwalk-driven hysteria but out of our mutual respect and devotion to each other.

Also, I wanted in on that blowjob stuff.

Samantha and I continued to talk on the phone, at least once a day. But we both knew it would soon be coming to an end—I was set to attend a three-week-long summer school debate program at Georgetown University. In my mind, this only further illustrated our differences. I was into talking heatedly about political issues. I assumed she was into getting drunk and kissing wieners underneath a series of wooden planks. It was never going to work.

Or so I thought. The night before I left, Samantha gave me a tearful phone call.

“Why do you have to go?” she asked through sobs. “I'm going to miss you.”

“I'm going to miss you, too,” I said. “But I am going to learn so much about debating. And that is definitely going to serve me well in the future.”