Jack in the Box

Jack in the Box

By Ed Staskus

   My name is Jack, but I go by my middle name, which is Wyatt. My father was a big fan of Wyatt Earp movies back in the day. He wanted me to grow up and become a lawman, but we have agreed that is never going to happen. He’s disappointed, but I reminded him that when you have expectations, you are setting yourself up for disappointment.

   I wake up on school days before everybody else, while they are snoring their heads off, stare at the ceiling in the dark, wonder whether the sun blew up in the night, and mess around with Blackie. He’s my cat that sleeps at my feet. Sometimes he curls up under my arm with his face pressed into my armpit. I wonder how he even breathes. I shouldn’t wonder, though, since he’s the Chuck Norris of everything that goes on in the neighborhood. I never trim his claws. Nothing messes with him twice.

   When it’s time to rise and shine I throw on a sweatshirt. I like going outside first thing, so I always do that right after I get out of bed. Otherwise, somebody would tell me to do something else. Most mornings I walk Scar, our Beagle, although he won’t go out in the rain. We stay on the back porch and chill when it rains. We got him from the Animal Protective League. He’s like a hound with short legs and long ears. He has a bad habit of biting strangers. I never interfere with that. He’s got a chase reflex, too, especially if they’re chipmunks, squirrels, cats, or any dog smaller than him. 

   We jog down Riverside Dr. to Hogsback Ln. and into the Rocky River Metropark, but I have to be watchful, because if he sees a badger in the park it’s all over. He doesn’t believe it’s a revenge obsession, but he’s mistaken. He got torn up when he was still a puppy. There was a badger with cubs in our backyard, behind the garage, and Scar got too close to them. There was an explosion of yelps, screeches, and barking when it happened. His face was ripped open and we had to rush him to the Animal Clinic.

   I used to eat breakfast with my parents. It was always a butt load of something. “Take your elbows off the table and pass the ketchup. Did you do your homework? Is that a clean shirt?” There would be a quiz about what I did yesterday and what I was going to be doing today. They hardly eat together anymore, anyway. Both of them are always in a hurry to get to work, even though my dad hates his job because of the toads whose business it is. My stepmom teaches at the new middle school down the street. She loves it because she can boss everybody around and make big money doing it. She talks about her paycheck and pension all the time. She made sure all of our neighbors voted her way when a school tax levy was on the ballot last year. 

   The first thing I do after I’ve showered and gotten dressed for school is call the Red Door Deli and order two Bagel Bacon Bagel Specials. There’s a yellow man who works there. He has a thick accent. My father hates immigrants, but the yellow man makes a mean bacon bagel, so he’s in my good book.

   “Hallo!”

   I’m, like, “Hi.”

   “Yes?”

   “I want to order two Bagel Bacon Bagel Specials.”

   When he repeats my order, I can barely understand him. “That’s right,” I always say no matter what he says. Everybody there knows me, but he pretends it’s the first time he’s ever talked to me, even though he answers the phone every morning. He’s the one who hands me my bagel specials at the counter, too.

   The Red Door is across the street from St. Ed’s High School in Lakewood, in a pint-sized strip shopping center, squeezed between Bubbles, a pit stop for dirty laundry, and Sassy Beauty, a hair salon. I go to the Red Door every morning and since they know me my main man just hands me my paper bag without a word and I fork over four dollars.

   What time I get there for my bagels depends, although it’s never later than eight o’clock. It depends on Noah’s father, who drives both of us to school. Noah lives next door. His father works at a garden center in Avon, even though their yard isn’t any better than ours, which is surprising. Noah calls my cell phone when they’re ready to go and I run right over.

   “Pick it up, pick it up,” his father grumbles, shrugging his way into their gigantic SUV. He always sounds peeved about something. He drops us off at the Red Door. I get my breakfast sandwiches. Noah and I walk across the street to school.

   The cafeteria is at the back of the building, which is the new part of the school. We cross the street, squeeze between the chapel and main classroom, and go in through a side door. Our chapel is boss, topped with a gold dome, just like Notre Dame. It glows in the sun. You can see it from blocks away.

   Every morning there are a butt load of guys in the cafeteria. The TV’s are all on and everybody is watching whatever, which is mostly the news. The flat screens are on every wall except the far wall with the windows. There’s destruction and disaster every morning on the FOX Morning Show, major scariness everywhere, but it doesn’t mess with anybody’s breakfast.

   I don’t watch too closely. It’s all just a lot of crap, a sour lollipop without the handle. But sometimes I pay attention, especially if the news is about an airplane crash, since I’m always in the middle of major crashes when I play video games.

   My father and stepmom watch FOX News every night. They agree among themselves that every word the talking heads say is true. It’s doing to them what they say video games are doing to me. It’s making them slow and stupid. What they don’t know is video games make me fast and smart, although my stepmom doesn’t want to hear it. I’ll leave her in the dust soon enough.

   I wouldn’t want to be body slammed while inside an airplane hitting a hillside. It’s an instant emergency room, all broken bones and gore. It only takes a second, but forever can happen in a split second. Everybody’s so burned up and busted to pieces that dentists have to be brought in to find out who is who.

   One day there was major terrorist news that caught my eye, except it wasn’t on the news. It was on the internet. It was too gruesome for the news. Towelheads captured some scruffy looking people and wouldn’t let them go. It was holy war time. They tied them to posts and blindfolded them. They shot them one at a time, although they didn’t shoot to kill. They shot them in the legs. Then they went back and shot them in the arms. It was weird. The internet loves weird.

   They filmed it while they were doing it, too. They are sick butt turds. Our military is totally rad and could take them out, but nobody is going to win that war. It’s an epic fail over there. It’s been going on forever. I hope they try to come here. We would rumble on their butts. It’s cammo, ammo, and Rambo. Our family has plenty of guns in the attic, and we have ammunition, too. I’m not sure about everything we have, though. Billy Boy is the only one who knows for sure.

   “I have two 12-gauge’s, a semi-automatic pistol, a .22 Sig Sauer, a big bore 14-gauge, and an AK-47 semi-automatic,” Billy says, looking smug. “I have more, but the rest of it isn’t any of your business.”

   Billy is like that. He’s my older half-brother. He lives on the third floor and doesn’t let anybody in his room. It’s all under lock-and-key, starting with his bedroom door. My stepmom is good with it. It wouldn’t be good for me if I tried it. He wears tight-fitting clothes and goes to Cleveland State University. He wants to be a policeman or an army man. He’ll be gone in two or three years. I can’t wait for that.

   His arsenal is technically my father’s, because he bought most of it, but they’re totally my half-brother’s. Billy Boy buys guns for himself now that he’s turned eighteen and become an adult. Before that he wasn’t allowed. He was still a child. 

   We go shooting at Scooterz-N-Shooterz in Uniontown and on my grandfather’s farm in Michigan. The family goes to the farm every summer. My grandfather says that whenever anybody says you don’t need a gun, you’d better make sure you have one that works. “They always want to take guns away from the people who didn’t do it,” he says, cackling like something is stuck in his craw. Last summer I shot so many rounds off at the farm, at targets, at trees, even at nothing, that I got a blister on my hand. It was big and nasty.

   I have my own gun, although it’s not exactly a real one. It’s a G & G Carbine air soft gun. It’s not real, but it looks feels acts like the real deal. It shoots BB’s instead of bullets. Ted Nugent said the BB gun is the most important gun in the history of American weaponry. He should know. He has his own name brand BB’s. Air soft ammo is plastic, not metal. They leave a welt when they smack skin.

   My father bought it for me. He didn’t tell my stepmom. He worries about smackdown on a daily basis. It’s not from Target or anyplace like that. It cost almost four hundred dollars. My friends, Nick and Jake, and I use Grudge Tactical pellets when we’re out and shooting each other. The pellets are coated with powder, so they leave a mark on your clothes. It’s not just some toy. It’s fully automatic and awesome.

   Nobody talks about guns at St. Ed’s, not us, and not our teachers. Even though everybody runs guns down, when they say anything at all, Mr. Rote, our religion teacher, told us the church says self-defense is cool, and told us about St. Aquinas and taking care of business. Mr. Rote said it’s best to shoot first and ask questions later. He said the Dalai Lama says the same thing. Nobody asked him who that was, not that anybody cared about any Lama.

   “It’s your responsibility to defend your faith, your family, and your country,” he said. “It’s a duty to defend church and country from evil men.” He didn’t say much more than that. He plays the guitar. He’s probably never had a gun in his hands his whole life. What does he know? We don’t have metal detectors at St. Ed’s like they do at public schools, but if anyone ever brought a gun to our school that would be the end. They would be expelled and never be allowed back.

   You can wear pajamas to public school, but at St. Ed’s we have to wear a dress shirt and tie, pressed pants, and black shoes. You can’t even have too much style in your hair. When you’re in a Catholic school there’s more expected of you. If you’re a St. Ed’s man, or if you go to St. Ignatius, or any Catholic school, everybody expects you to be a good person. What you do in public school is up to you, which isn’t always a good thing. Not everybody is a good kid, no sir. There are plenty of rotten apples.

   When I was in middle school big kids would make fun of small kids with learning disabilities. They picked on the younger specimens. They would walk right up to them, start being mean, and push them around. They would go after the ones with ADHD or Tourette’s, edge on them, and make fun of them.

   From sixth grade on it was all about bullying kids who were shy or different, especially in gym class. There was a posse of bullies, led by Tristan and Justin. They were complete dirtbags. I would try to help, as long as the monsters weren’t there, the ones who say they don’t punch you in the back, they punch you in the face.

   “You shouldn’t act up like that,” I said them whenever I could.

   “Shut up.”

   “Leave them alone, make fun of somebody else.”

   “Yeah, sure, beat it.”

   They wouldn’t stop. It wasn’t like they were in class, so they could keep doing it and doing it. They thought they were so superior. That’s how they got the stupid kids to like them. That’s the thing about Catholic schools and public schools. Guys don’t do that at Catholic schools. I’m sure some do, but not like that. So many public school kids are dipsticks. They learn English by watching cartoons. 

   If a teacher at a Catholic school got wind of bullying like that there would be no problem seeing the trouble you were in. All hell would break loose. When you’re in a Catholic school there’s a lot more expected of you. You’re expected to be a better person. You have to take charge of yourself and carry the cat by the tail. It’s a big change when you leave public school for good. It was a big change for me. I didn’t go to a parochial grade school. I went to a public school. I didn’t have eight years of dress rehearsal.

   The food is better at St. Ed’s than it is at public schools, where it’s mostly grown in boxes and cans. Their cooks carry X-Acto knives instead of spatulas. At St. Ed’s we have real cooks and we’re served real food, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. No sugar drinks are allowed. The milk is low fat. It doesn’t pay to be fat at St. Ed’s. It’s the Breakfast of Champions, but I still bring my Bagel Bacon Bagel Specials most mornings, because we don’t get enough food.

   There are rules about everything, even about how many calories we’re allowed. I don’t get enough for cross-country and the football players always bellyache about their portions. Football is the most important thing at St. Ed’s. Everybody knows where the goalposts are. We won states last year, so this year we are the defending state champions.

   When school started in the fall we were 5th in the USA Today poll and 6th in the ESPN poll. That’s in the whole country, not just Ohio. That’s how good we are. At St. Ed’s it’s either football season or it’s waiting for football season. We say it’s faith, family, and touchdowns. Sometimes it almost seems like it means more than Heaven and Hell. It puts pep in everybody’s step when we win. I tried football in grade school, but it didn’t work out. I was under-sized and then I broke my collarbone. Now I love running.

   The football players boycotted lunch one day. It was a big stir. My friend Rick, who is a 6-foot-3-inch 220-pound linebacker, said he burns more than 3,000 calories during three hours of weight training and practice after school. “We are getting hungry even before the practice starts,” he complained to one of the vice-principals. “Our metabolisms are all sped up.”

   “I could not be more passionate about this,” the food supervisor said, making a speech the next day before lunch. Grown-ups are always making speeches, masterminds on their soapboxes. “I want to solve this problem,” she said, looking smug and serious. She had everybody fill out cards about what we did and didn’t like about our meals. We all laughed about it. Everybody knew nothing was going to change. They’re always trying to put it over us with their plans and schemes. Grown-ups do what’s good for them, not for anybody else.

   Our cafeteria is the nicest one I’ve ever seen. There are skylights over the atrium, polished wood floors, oblong tables, and ergonomic chairs. Everything is super modern. Somebody’s father died and he gave the school a ton of money, millions of it, the minute he was six feet under. The whole school is up-to-date, even though it was built in 1949, on land that used to be a feeding stop for cattle trains. Back then if you got a detention you had to help dig out the new basement with a shovel. Punishment was being made to be blue collar for the day, made to work with your hands.

   When I check my cell phone and it’s 8:25 I wolf down what’s left of my Bagel Bacon Bagel Specials and pop up fast because my first class is at 8:30. Being late for Mr. Rote’s Roman Catholic religion class would be the worst thing I could do to start my day. If I did there would be persecution. When we hit the hallway it’s every freshman for himself and God against all.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

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