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good guys always win contents: chapter 1 | chapter 2 | chapter 3 | chapter 4 | chapter 5 | chapter 6 | chapter 7 | chapter 8 | chapter 9 | chapter 10 | chapter 11 | chapter 12 | chapter 13 (3.16.04) Chapter 13 I started shaving my head junior year when I saw a picture of myself running a relay race next to a black guy. While the black runner seemed very built and athletic, I looked out of place with a baton in hand and my heavily gelled, spiked hair cutting through the wind. I felt that in order to perform at a higher level, I also needed to look the part. Ironically, although I often joke that I shaved my head after watching American History X, I actually did it to feel more athletic, or in more politically incorrect terms, I wanted to feel black when I played sports. I’m pretty sure Warren felt the same too as we both maintained a shaved head for the rest of high school. We were “yellow skinheads” or “monks with muscles.” When our last football season began, our shaved heads were a blessing as our helmets slid on with ease, and we didn’t have to worry about any hair gel-mixed sweat stinging our eyes. Coming off a very productive off-season, Warren and I felt very optimistic about our last season of high school football.
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Arriving at a good time, I found that nobody had occupied the toilet yet. I grabbed a big stack of brown paper towels from the opened paper towel dispenser and entered one of the two stalls. I was extremely fortunate because a few minutes later, a line would form for the toilets.
I neatly prepared my toilet seat by lining it up with the paper towels. I could never trust public toilets, especially with kids who took wild pisses that totally sprayed the seats. I made sure that I stacked a good amount for extra cushion, but not too much because the toilet might get clogged when I flushed it.
As number two commenced, I noticed a familiar pair of shoes come into the stall next to mine. The slightly bulky white Nike cross-trainer sneakers positioned itself parallel to my feet as its owner sat down. The celerity with which the owner sat down made me wonder if he even took measures to put down paper towels or toilet paper on the seat. I guessed not. Of course, I immediately knew it was none other than Warren.
“Sup Warren, how was your day?” I asked as I heard his initial release into the bowl of abyss.
“It was alright. How’d you do on the calc?” he asked as other sounds accompanied his words.
“I got a 100. How about you?”
“Yeah, me too. It’s pretty easy, the first few tests.”
“Yeah, well, it’s gonna be tough when the shit starts to get harder...”
Warren and I loved our time together in the stall. We caught up on the day’s events, discussed any work we would have to do for the next day, and gossiped about anything funny at school. And all this while just looking at each others’ feet.
“You fags gonna come out soon? I gotta drop a bomb,” Truz yelled, as he banged on the stall.
“Look at those Chinese kids, all talking in their chings and chongs,” Sturch remarked in his silly, clownish way. He was a portly Italian fellow, with a slightly dark Sicilian complexion and played both offensive and defensive line.
“I’m not Chinese, you fat Italian shit,” I replied from the stall.
“Chinese, Korean, Japanese, same shit. All slant-eyed. All eat wice. Ha-yee-yah!” Sturch loved to make fun of all ethnicities and races, so nobody really took his racial banter seriously.
Our football team was an amusing bunch. Racial jokes were part of everyday speech, and each group would invent new ways to make fun of the others. The black kids resorted to their criticism of Asian cuisine, asking how our “cats and dogs” tasted last night for dinner. Warren and I put on our best monkey faces and pretended to pick fleas and feed each other, somewhat pissing off the black kids, but at the same time earning respect for our ingenuity. Our disregard for political correctness was only possible because we ultimately respected each other as people, as cliché as that may sound. We all knew each other to be decent kids with no real reason to hate. If anything, we collectively hated the Indians at our school, who made up half the student body, and yet whose contribution to football was nothing more than a skinny sycophant who would never start a varsity game. Jinal was not a bad kid, and I even respect him for the four years of ridicule he endured as the only Indian on the team. We even added a “Va” to the front of his name to make his name sound more like female genitalia. His skinny frame, dark complexion, and hairy chest earned him nicknames like “Master Splinter” or just plain “Dirty Indian.” But Jinal never thought about quitting, never missed practice, and always kept a team-first mentality. He complimented me after every play and even made excuses for me as to why the play failed. Sometimes, I regretted knocking him over with a stiff arm during practices. But it is one thing to be a nice guy and another to be a scrub. Sturch was the most blatant Indian-hater on the team. When we were juniors, we all received class t-shirts with the names of everyone in our class listed on the back. Sturch highlighted every single “Patel” on the list and wrote “Hit List – 29 Patels” on the back with a black sharpie. As the master of controversy, Sturch never ceased to amuse us.
Football season was very interesting, with its ups and downs, drama, and bizarre happenings. Although I could probably write a book’s worth of football stories, I’ll keep it brief here. Our team went 4-6 and missed the playoffs; but on an individual level, I was able to rush for over a thousand yards and rank fairly high among the running backs in my county. Warren started the season off great with a pair of touchdown catches in the opening game, but a crushing blow by a linebacker on a slant pattern during mid-season shook his confidence, as he never played up to his full potential for the rest of the season.
Football found its way into our academic lives as well, at least in the case of me and Warren. One day, during football practice, our head coach, Coach Z, told us to come see him after practice. Warren and I wondered what the reasons could be and worried throughout practice. After changing back into our school clothes at around six o’clock, when our practices usually ended, Warren and I walked together to the coaches’ office. The office was a small, cozy room with yellow walls and a row of green lockers for the football coaches to use as personal storage. Our coaching staff was a dynamic group that, given its Italian predominance, could have been Tony Soprano’s crew sitting around at the back office of Bada Bing. Coach Z was the head man, of short, stocky build, fifty-some years and curly brown hair. He commanded a Vince Lombardi-like presence with his wisecracks and anecdotes. Then we had the older coaches: offensive coordinator Coach Lee, who was known for his sudden bursts of animated absurdities like humping the air when he liked what he saw, and defensive coordinator Coach Dubay, who was silent and explained assignments with a solemnity of a war general preparing his troops for an upcoming battle. The younger coaches were Coach Ronco, who threw bullets at the receivers he coached, and Coach Riggi, the intense running backs coach who devised daily torture methods for the ball-carriers. Coach Dicocco, besides being the freshman team’s head coach, was also our strength coach and responsible for putting muscles on our frames. Coach P served the pivotal role as the guidance counselor who made things right for kids in terms of eligibility and class schedules.
As Warren and I walked in, it was a familiar scene. The coaches sat around their table watching game film and poking fun at each other.
“Goddamn those liberals. I heard Hilary’s beating Lazio in the polls,” I heard one of them remark on the New York Senate campaign. The pervading political sentiment was undeniably conservative, and I felt a bit squeamish because my views tended to lean towards the left.
“Well, well, well – if it isn’t our Asian duo,” Coach Z welcomed us. “Hey, guess what Warren told me he ate yesterday. Warren what did u eat again?”
“Ox-tail soup,” Warren replied, knowing that he was only inviting more ridicule.
“Ugh, ox-tail?” Coach Z made his disgusted face and continued to laugh as did the other coaches.
“Yeah Coach, we have it to sometimes too, and it’s pretty good,” I offered my own opinion, but knew it would only fuel the laughter.
“Out of all the parts you can eat from an ox, you need to eat the tail?” Coach Z said, “You need to be fixed up with some of the lasagna my mother makes. Now, that’s real food. No wonder you guys stay so small; you guys eat animal tail!”
Warren and I could only laugh along, but in our minds, we knew that our Asian cuisine would keep us alive well beyond the sixty years it would take for the Italian to eventually succumb to a heart-attack from all that parmesan cheese and meatballs.
“Ok, so here’s the deal,” Coach Z said, now shifting his tone towards seriousness, “My boneheaded son got himself into an accident and he’s fallen behind in his school work. I was wondering if you guys could help a little. You know, just look at some assignments and see if you can do them. Nothing too hard, just some pages.”
Being labeled early on as the “smart Asian kids,” Warren and I had the reputation of garnering good grades and being quick-thinkers. Our SAT scores were already known publicly. Coach Z’s son was a student at a pretty low-level college, so perhaps that was why Coach Z thought Warren and I could produce acceptable work at such a level. Warren and I raised no objections and obliged.
In no time, I was writing an eight-page term paper for his son’s sociology class. I didn’t even know what the course was about, let alone the word “sociology.” But somehow, I managed to bullshit well enough that Coach Z kept coming back for more. Warren also expended his free time to partake in this extra-curricular experience. Sometimes, we had to read these thick packets and answer questions. I actually enjoyed this one packet about why Indians worship cows and thought it was funny because a lot of Indians lived in my town.
Now, had it been a blatantly exploitative situation, Warren and I would have found a way out from the burden of extra academic work, but we figured that something good was in store for us and maybe our intelligence was also a reason we started every game.
After the football season, Warren and I were rewarded with a bunch of student-athlete scholarships. I even got to be on television as Scholar Athlete of the Week for New Jersey’s news station. I guess another reason I didn’t feel so bad about doing the extra work was that there was no real pressure to produce perfect work – we were mere high school kids writing up college-level papers; and the fact that he came back to us for more told me that his son could not have done any better on his own. Very bizarre but if it made us feel any better, we would boast that we helped a college kid to cheat.
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“Hold up. Ok. Nice. I got $78 million dollars.”
“Oh, lucky. Ok, let’s write the scores down and at the end of class, we’ll add up the top five scores and see who wins.”
“And no cheating Fat Boy style. I know he does that $5,000 loan thing over and over again on the first day.”
I tapped away furiously at my graphing calculator as I sat in my third row seat in calculus class. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Wally in the next row, calculator brought close to his face, deeply lost in the crime world of Dopewars. Intrigued by a simple game that asked which drugs we wanted to purchase and sell and in which cities we wanted to do our business, Wally and I assumed the roles of ambitious drug lords almost every day in our eleventh period calc class.
“Alright, there’s only five minutes left in class. We should start to total our scores now,” I said to Wally as I looked up at the clock. And for the first time that day, we would actually do some quality math, adding the millions of dollars we had accumulated as drug dealers. I felt that Dopewars was a very educational game. Aside from the fact that it glorified the selling of narcotics, I felt that it exercised business decision-making and quick calculations. The game was intense as it included working with loans that had interest, dealing with fluctuating drug prices, and managing unexpected spikes in supply demand. The best part about the game was the wealth that could be had under my own name. Albeit imaginary, the feeling of seeing “Peter - $120,000,000” was a satisfying experience.
These memorable moments of calculator gaming were made possible by a very special teacher who I can still picture vividly in my mind. Mr. Fouratt was a short man, probably nearing his sixties, with a nice, round potbelly spilling over his belted pants. His hair covered his head like a monkish bowl haircut, but he parted it a bit to the side. It was grayish in color with a mix of some dark strands. What I found most memorable about Mr. Fouratt’s appearance was his glasses. I don’t quite remember his frames – they were most likely black or brown of the thick variety – but I do remember his lenses: thick and distorting. You know those funny glasses that you put on and your eyes look really weird in them? Well, Mr. Fouratt’s glasses were a functional version that hardly ever came off. On rare occasions that he did take off his glasses, either to rub the top part of his nose or to wipe his lenses, I felt like I was staring at a mole. Mr. Fouratt’s eyes looked much smaller without the thick lens, and his rotund, yet short stature radiated rodent-like qualities. The emergence of the Fouratt mole always elicited quiet snickers among my classmates.
Even more curious than his appearance was his apathetic, weathered attitude towards teaching. Having been a teacher to unmotivated, uninterested high school seniors over the years, Mr. Fouratt had himself become passionless in his profession. Senioritis, which was a phenomenon that resulted from completion of college applications and a general longing for no more work, plagued most of my peers towards the end of December and especially after winter break. Mr. Fouratt was brilliant in that he expected senioritis on the first day of class. In his monotonous and melancholy voice, he gave his daily lectures in an automated fashion. He didn’t even look at the students or cared that half the room was deep in slumber. Even better, he made all homework assignments “optional” so that there would actually be no point in doing any of them. As soon as I heard him tell our class about his lax homework policy, I regretted stealing the heavy calc textbook on the first day of school; there would be no need for one. Of course, we would still need to be evaluated: this was to be accomplished by three tests given each marking period – a total of twelve tests for the entire year.
The first marking period in calc had been very easy because of its introductory material, so minimal effort, and minimal cheating, was required to maintain a decent grade. As the second marking period began, and students became increasingly negligible of their work, many of us began to lose complete track of the material being presented in class. While Wally and I passed our time making drug loot, I heard stories from Fouratt’s other classes, such as Head and Fat Boy’s poker games in the back of the classroom or Warren’s class-long naps that commenced as soon as he sat down. We were poster boys for a time of decadence: constantly seeking diversions and disregarding all the fundamental principles of valued education. If senioritis had a starting point, it was in calc class. Mr. Fouratt had marvelously performed the feat of sparking the decline in our intellectual capacity. We didn’t want to know anything anymore. But of course, we still wanted the good grades.
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