the signal memory for me, literally, a punch in the gut.
i must have been just seven years old, or maybe eight. walking home from school, and that was only a block and a half. We lived on a corner, in a neighborhood of more or less identical post-war ranch houses. Some people displayed affluence by slapping a second story onto them; every couple of blocks was marked with one of these pop-ups. Next block over, an asphalt path cutting between two houses led to the school playground, with the yellow brick school past them. Just ten classrooms; but then, the coatroom between Room 7 and Room 8 was converted to a classroom too, or at least there was a table in it and we had classes there: Room 7 1/2 ... so, my point, a small school, a neighborhood school, and we all knew one another. So I certainly knew him: I knew his little sister, Beth, who was a year younger than me, and she and I had met on the block and played sometimes, and just as we kids all felt how the families with the pop-up houses had displayed some kind of distinction in this homogenous stretch of suburb, so I also knew that Beth's house (less than two blocks from mine) with the kittens tumbling out the broken window and the rusted automobile carcass in the yard had been marked, too, in a different way.
So good young girls were afraid of this boy, Beth's brother, named Greg: a year older than me, and he already, so young, had a cold look in his eye, it seemed. They said he smoked cigarettes. And I was walking home from school, and he came from the other direction on the sidewalk; and when he got to where I was walking, without a word he punched me in the stomach, hard, and kept walking. who knows why? I didn't. I had never told a tale about him, we had never exchanged a dozen words. something about my existence just made him mad, that day. I was doubled over, I was angry, humiliated, I straightened out and went home but of course you just can't forget that.
A couple of times I had restless dreams where Greg cornered me, dreams that at that age I couldn't have recognized were erotic.
But we didn't have anything to do with each other, over the years. Still, it wasn't a big town. The people you knew as a child were the people you saw in high school.
In my high school, if you were one of the people who smoked pot fairly regularly, you had fellowship with the other students who would sneak out to what we called The Dumpsters, but they were not dumpsters--they were empty containers or tractor trailers on the edge of the high school grounds, past the fields, and why the narcs didn't bust them regularly I don't know. But people I didn't hang out with, I'd see them there, and that's how I re-formed a nodding acquaintance with Greg who was continuing on a rather steadier path of dereliction than my own erratic and half-hearted one.
When I was fifteen, he showed up at my house one afternoon with two of his friends, also slight acquaintances, and invited me to go get high with them. Well, why not? We went to the grassy slope behind the development that led out to the creek and the path to Salter's Pond. Sat on the grass and smoked a joint. It was a mild afternoon, shading off to dusk. And then I'm seeing looks being exchanged among the three, and Greg's two buddies are finding they must be off somewhere. Good and stoned though I am, the warning flare goes off in my dozey brain and I jump up and excuse myself, though Greg is showing signs of obvious disappointment and trying to think of some way to convince me to hang around. oh no sir, I skip back to my house quick.
a few days later, i am on the receiving end of one of those ridiculous teenage phone calls in which you know another party is listening in. one of the pals calls to sound me out about whether i'd be interested in being Greg's girlfriend. oh no sir. "well, what do you have against him?" and even at that moment, i'm thinking resentfully of being socked in the gut, though truthfully the tubercular-looking, pale-eyed Greg held no appeal for me anyway. "i've got nothing against him, i don't even know him."
two years later, i was working in the Shop-Rite supermarket as a cashier. one of the other cashiers, Pearl, is a sweet girl. she's tall and thin and just a little anemic looking, with dark blonde wavy hair and mild eyes. and she didn't look much older than me, so i was surprised to find that she was married and had a baby. she talked proudly about her husband, obviously adoring.
and he comes in, with the baby boy. it's him, it's Greg, and i'd never noticed before that Pearl's last name was the same as his: not an outlandish name, though not Smith either. Later I learn, Pearl dropped out of high school with this pregnancy, and there they are, the family. But some other time he comes through my line on purpose, and he's talking to me. He looks like he's more than half used up his life, someone should tell him to button his shirt properly, his chest sunken and his eyes still so bleached and somehow grim, but he's trying to flirt with me practically in front of his wife, and in my peripheral vision I can see her eyes narrowing at me, at me.
