An Accidental Sportswriter Read Online Free Page A

months later—I kept renewing it, and it often traveled in my fag bag—I swaggered past Science and flipped You and Heredity the bird. Just try to put Richard Halliburton at the bottom of your chart. He’ll carve his way to the top. And I’ll be right behind him.
    Richard and Bobby are on their way, bullies. Watch out! Someday . . .
    And then the day arrived.
    It seemed no different from any other day. The S.P. class was coming out of school at three o’clock with the usual mixed feelings. School was over, which was supposed to be a liberation, but school was where most of us found an intellectual arena and a sanctuary from the less forgiving world of the street.
    Outside Halsey, the hoods capered around us, kicking at bags, calling us names. My bully Willie found me and said something routinely stupid. As usual, my smart-aleck reply made the other hoods laugh. Willie pushed me. I stood my ground and sneered at him. Willie kicked my bag out of my hand.
    And then—was it because Rose and Barbara, two girls I especially liked, were watching, because my hand really hurt this time, because Richard Halliburton had truly given me hope?—I snapped.
    I hurled myself at Willie, just launched all that butterfat, double blubber, right into him. I was a rotund rocket of rage. We both went down, and, incredibly, I was on top. Had I known the rules of engagement of the after-school fight, I would have sat on his stomach and slapped him until he cried uncle or he would have thrown me off and beat me up yet again.
    But how could I, who had never had a fair fight, know the rules? There were no rules in my mind, just survival and payback. All in or don’t bother.
    I jammed my fat knees down into his chest until his lungs were bursting for air. I grabbed fistfuls of his greasy hair and yanked until he began screaming, and then I began to bash his brains in. Literally. I bounced his skull on the cold gray sidewalk as if it were a pink rubber ball.
    I smile as I write this.
    What release, what joy, what an out-of-body experience!
    I never heard Mrs. McDermott screaming “Robert! You’ll hurt him!” because I was bellowing “I’m gonna kill you!” and my friends were cheering and Willie was crying and the hoods clapped. Then a shop teacher peeled me off and laughed as he put a steel-tipped toe in my rear. Dr. Nussey grabbed me and hustled me away. I thought he was trying not to smile.
    I kept looking back over my shoulder. A kid was lying on the ground. Where was the bully? My fury had clouded the moment. It took days and the accounts of my friends before I pictured what had happened and a long time before I understood it. Of course, Willie never bothered me again. Nobody at Halsey or high school ever did. Sometimes even now, when I’m taking a beating, hard times, chemo, a death, when scabs harden and my insides shrivel, I think of Willie. His memory reminds me that I survived then, I can survive now.
    That same year at Halsey, my short story “Planetary War” appeared in Forest Trails . I was a published writer! It’s hard to say which was the more important defining event. Three years later, as an unfat high school junior, I screwed up the courage to ask Myriam, by now the editor of Forest Leaves , Forest Hills High School’s glossy literary magazine, to a school play and pizza. It was my first date.
    The relationship with Myriam didn’t take, but my relationship with Willie has been sustaining. My bully lives forever in a little room in my mind, which I visit whenever I need to remember that every so often you have to go up against the Beast.
    My Special Progress class is still in session, mostly through a Yahoo! group (I started a Facebook group but just can’t seem to recruit too many of those old folks), and we get together at least once or twice a year for lunches and dinners in Manhattan. There have been reunions in Santa Fe, Washington, D.C., and