Early, early, early. It is 3am Seattle time, and I’m sitting in Newark airport, waiting to board my airplane after a whirlwind two-day tour of NYC. My creative juices haven’t started flowing yet—they haven’t really been flowing for a few days now. My crazy jet setting and lack of scheduled sleep has thrown my head into a crazy land where, as I mentioned yesterday, ice picks are the chosen weapons of torture.

I thought about editing one of my older stories, but for $6.95 for internet access, I resisted looking one up, which was all for the best. I fell into this fun vignette:

So, this kid Charlie, I don’t think I told you about him, he’s a medium-sized kid, the one that sits next to me in the back of my Spanish class and pretends to shoot spitballs with an oversized straw. He got into this fight with Roger, the guy with the nose—a big kid, medium tall with lots of pimples. I didn’t see the fight, but Charlie was walking home with Eddie, and Eddie told me all about it. I trust Eddie. He’s strange but good at telling stories. Eddie is short and his nose always looks like it should be running, there’s always flaking red skin and other yucky stuff around it—now that I really think about it, I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen him blow it or any snot dripping from it. Maybe it’s a skin disease or some other thing.

Charlie and Eddie were walking home together after school. We’re in New York, I should tell you, Brooklyn if you want to get particular, and the day’s a good one. The sky is three-dimensional. Do you know those skies? It’s like looking into s holographic picture where you see depth even though the picture is on a flat piece of paper. Three dimensions are easy to see when there are clouds floating every which way, but that day there weren’t. It was just blueness, and the blueness was three-dimensional. As I said, I wasn’t there that day, but when Eddie told me about the weather, I knew just the day. How did anyone forget such a sky?

Now this Charlie kid, he thought he was pretty smart. He always had that attitude, like when you spoke with him, you’d think he was looking down his crooked nose at you. He was a cool guy once you got to know him, but the first time I saw him, and you should know I’m a nice guy, not judgmental or anything like that, the first time I saw him, I wanted to punch him in the nose. I’m not surprised that his nose was like that, all bent like. Some other guy must have had the same thought and popped him one. I wouldn’t blame that guy, but he probably should have given Charlie a chance like I did. You never know who the good people are until you give them a chance. I stopped acting on those initial itches because they got me into too much trouble. Charlie was a loyal guy, the type who would walk an extra blocks because you had an inkling, or layout some of his cash because you came up a few cents short for the weeks’ comics.

The weather that day was cold. I’ve now lived almost fourteen years next December, and, you probably know this already, but those three-dimensional skies, they only come out on cold days. Those blistering cold days, the ones where any exposed skin turns bright red and your breath looks like exhaust smoke from a car. The weather was cold, but Eddie and Charlie didn’t mind. They were walking home, talking about the kind of stuff that ten-year olds talk about, like movies and junk. I can tell you they weren’t talking about sports because Charlie didn’t know the first thing about sports. He was strange that way. Eddie knew a little about it, having played in little league and everything. But Charlie, I don’t think he ever played on a team. He’s the kid we always picked last in anything we played in the schoolyard. It wasn’t because we didn’t like the guy—I mean, some of us didn’t like him, but most of us thought he was cool. It was just that he was real skinny. Now he’s probably one of the tallest kids in class, but back then, he was ordinary-sized and skinny with wrists so small I could wrap my thumb and pinky around it. If I was drawing him for my comic book, it would take just a few hard lines here and there and you’d know right who I was talking about. That’s if you knew him.

I don’t even think he realized how skinny he was. I’m not sure he thought much about what he looked like. Just to give you an example, so you can have a better idea of what I’m talking about, Charlie wore these plastic braces. Eddie, Charlie, and I were once talking, and Eddie made this real funny comment. Eddie was like, ‘Charlie, you eat cream cheese for lunch?’ We were standing around and talking in the afternoon between classes. Charlie said ‘nah, he had pizza,’ which was a good choice because there were some real good pizza joints around the school. I’m talking high quality. They say it’s the water that makes the pizza good, you know Brooklyn water. I don’t believe they put water in pizza, so I think they’re full of shit, but I’m just telling you what they say. Anyway, then Eddie says, and this was funny, I almost peed my pants funny, Eddie says, ‘Then what’s that gunk between your braces?’ You see, Charlie’s braces always had this white goo around them. I never thought of it before Eddie said something, but it did look like cream cheese stuck there. Eddie said things like that. He was quick, that Eddie. But Charlie didn’t care much about how he looked so it flew right passed him. I was dying, though. That Eddie’s a funny one.

Charlie lived on Gravesend Road, right off the Avenue P. I don’t think he liked living much at Gravesend. Don’t get me wrong, there wasn’t a cemetery or anything there, although I guess that would have been pretty cool. Charlie always said that name it Gravesend because someone famous died there or something. It would have been cool if there was a dangerous curve with one of those 100-foot drops, but there wasn’t. Charlie always thought it might have been a shootout between the police and gangsters over prohibition. Charlie was into gangsters and knew the names of all the famous ones, including how they died or where they went to jail, and who caught them. But for everything Charlie knew, he couldn’t find a reference to what happened on Gravesend. I guess we just lived in a boring part of Brooklyn. Charlie’s block was cool because he lived right near a park. It wasn’t a good park like Bedford park or the schoolyard, but it was somewhere to hang out when we got bored hanging out in Charlie’s basement.

Now Roger’s house was a few blocks away from Charlie. He lived on Avenue R with his parents. Roger didn’t have any brothers or sisters and his parents were all over him. When I’d go to visit, and I only visited him once or twice when we were much smaller, his parents treated me great. Most other parents, my parents included, think friends are something you have to put up with, but only put up with for so long. They’re nice to us for a bit, but once you overstay your welcome or eat one too many times at their dinner table, they begin to drop hints like don’t you have your own home, what, your food is not good enough, get the hell out of here, stuff like that. But Roger’s parents, they couldn’t wait to feed me. Roger’s father was a husky guy. He shaved his head completely shaved and had these ingrown eyeballs, the type that you were sure would disappear completely, eye socket and everything, when he shut his eyes. His mother was a tall lady with a very long face, which she had unfortunately passed on to Roger. I remember her because she was quiet during dinner and wore a large amount of make-up. I’m not sure why, but most other moms didn’t wear make-up.

Roger yelled at his parents during dinner that night. I yell at my parents, plenty. I do, and I find I have to do it more and more as they grow older. It’s as if they can’t even hear me anymore. I hear old people start going deaf and senile, I just didn’t think it would happen to my parents so soon. But Roger, he yelled at his parents, not because they were nagging or bothering him or telling him to do something unnatural, which is why I yell at my parents. No, he was yelling at them because they didn’t get stuff just the way he wanted it. And his parents took it. They sat there all quiet like and didn’t say a word. His mother event tried apologizing but then he yelled at her for interrupting him. It was weird.

That night we ordered food from this place called Brennan & Carr, an old-style roast beef joint. Before joining Roger for dinner, I never ate from there. My parents didn’t believe in taking us out to dinner. Back then, we had to suffer with my mother’s terrible cooking except when we went on long drives usually somewhere far away. Now I get to go there frequently. My mother doesn’t cook as much anymore, probably because of that impending senility. Brennan & Carr has this great roast beef sandwich, but at the time, because I didn’t know better, I ordered a cheeseburger. The cheeseburger is not bad, but it’s not as good as the roast beef. For the roast beef, they dip the bun in this big vat of gravy, and then dip the roast beef in the same vat with a slice of cheese slapped on it. It’s delicious. So the one time I went to Roger’s house, his parents called ahead our order on the telephone, and went to pick it up. Roger ordered two roast beef sandwiches, fries, and an order of mozzarella sticks.

The food came in brown paper bags, with the sandwiches, fries, and sticks wrapped in the restaurant-grade tinfoil. Speaking of food, that tinfoil always reminds me of the grilled cheeses I now order from the various diners. While the roast beef from Brennan & Carr is good, the cheeseburger in those fancy tin wrappings, those are amazing. Roger’s mother brought the food to the table and his father took out the drinks and silverware. As his mother distributed the food there was a problem. Brennan & Carr only gave us three roast beef sandwiches, and both his parents had ordered one. You should have heard him screaming. It was like his parents had stabbed him or something. I thought his father was going to run away from the table and cry or something, he was that upset. My father would have backhanded me if I had said the things that Roger said. He didn’t curse, probably because we were still too young to know the good ones, but he called his mother a whore and his father a balding has-been. I sat there astonished. I would have taken notes and tried it on my own parents, but I knew better. Besides the back-handing, I’d probably spent the rest of the month locked in my room with my computer broken into tiny bits. I guess it had something to do with being an only child. Charlie and I both come from bigger families, I have a brother and a sister and Charlie has two sisters, and our parents wouldn’t put up with what Roger dished out.

Roger and Charlie live close to each other, and from what I knew, they were on and off friends. Some years in school, they talked, and I think I even saw them at the movies together. Eddie tells me this great story about Roger and Charlie—this other great story, not the one about the fight, which I will get to eventually. All three of them grew up together and when they were young, they were all good friends. When Eddie and Charlie visited Roger in his house, Roger wanted to play ninjas. Roger was always talking about ninjas and from what I saw when I went to dinner at his house, he owned a large collection of ninja weapons, like shurikens (the whirly ninja throwing stars), tzis (the three-pointed unsharpened knives made famous by Michaelangelo, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle), grappling hook and rope, and a few katana (ninja short swords). Roger also owned a crossbow. Now, I’m pretty sure that crossbows were not ninja weapons, but I think he made an exception because of its black color. So, Charlie and Eddie were playing ninja with Roger in his bedroom when Roger whipped out his crossbow. It was fully loaded and he swung it around, pretending to shoot Charlie and Eddie. Eddie saw right away that he did not want to play this game with a loaded crossbow, and he ducked behind Roger’s bed. But Charlie wasn’t that smart or maybe he didn’t realize that the crossbow was loaded, and he continued to throw his fake kicks and punches. When he got close, Roger shot him. The bolt hit Charlie’s leg. He was lucky that Roger hadn’t put on one of the sharp arrowheads that came with the crossbow. Even without the head, the bolt left a red, circular mark on his leg, a large welt that turned all shades of black and blue a day later. From what Eddie told me, they ran and ran from his house. His parents didn’t know what happened and they wanted Eddie and Charlie to stay, but Charlie and Eddie were running too fast to answer them. After that, Eddie and Charlie stopped visiting Roger’s house. I can’t blame them after Eddie told me the story. Roger has always been a little screwy, if you know what I mean.

After that incident, Roger and Charlie’s relationship took a turn for the worse. From what I’ve been able to make out, at first the relationship wasn’t bad. They weren’t friendly at school, but they didn’t seem to hate each other. Now, I have to tell you something about Charlie. He’s one of those guys who when they find something funny about somebody, something they can latch on to, like, you know, someone wears jogging pants all the time or has a large head, Charlie keeps the joke going. And going. And going. He just doesn’t quit. Someone like me would maybe say it once or twice and we’d get our laugh, but then we’d think of better or funnier things to say. I’m not saying Charlie was worse or meaner than other kids were. It’s just that Charlie really dug in on you. He found the weakness and then stuck his knife into you and started twisting it, all slow and painful, if you know what I mean. It wasn’t good enough to wound, Charlie was all about the torture. I can respect torture, just not repetitive boring torture.

Charlie started in on Roger’s nose. Roger’s nose was one of those rare characteristics that we didn’t talk about at school. It was so freakishly large that it was just too easy. Its width was normal and its proportions from the tip to the top would have been normal if Roger’s head was larger, but it wasn’t. The nose didn’t fit his face. It was huge, starting almost above his eyebrows and ending with a hook downward that covered the top part of his upper lip. When we were real young, we of course took our jabs at it, but that died off quickly because it showed a lack of imagination. To make fun of Roger’s nose was like making fun of the sun because it shined too bright. His nose was who Roger was and we accepted it. Sure, we’d say things like, the guy with the nose when we were describing him, but it was more like a characteristic, just as we’d call Peter the Chinese guy just so you’d know who we were talking about. But a few weeks after the night with the crossbow, Charlie started talking about Roger’s nose. Anytime Roger came up, Charlie would make a fist and put the thumb side of his fist over his own nose. It wasn’t an accurate betrayal, because, to be honest, Roger’s nose was larger than Charlie’s skinny fist, but we laughed. Charlie was careful to make the Roger nose only behind Roger’s back, but because everyone started doing it, Roger eventually saw it, and I’m sure it didn’t take him long to track down who had started it.

Charlie and I are both going to be comic book artists. We’ve known it for as long as we’ve known each other. Charlie is a whiz at coming up with new superheroes and writing stories and bubbles. Me, I’m more of the artist. I draw the frames with my trusty [special comic pencil] and ink it with my [special comic inker]. We try to get a comic book done every few month. This year, we hope to start publishing photocopies of the books to our friends and family. I don’t think we’ll make much money, but if it can help pay for our huge comic book collection and the ink and paper and all the rest of the junk you need to draw them, then it’ll be worth it. While Charlie mostly writes the story, he is particularly good at drawing caricatures. And this is what got him in trouble with Roger. He started drawing one of Roger, and I’ll admit it, it was pretty damn funny. He would start with a small semicircle, almost like a nose, and you’d think, sure he’s going to draw a pretty big sized nose for Roger, and the semicircle was big, but not huge. Then he’d draw a humongous second semicircle connected to the first one, and the nose would look tiny. The first time I saw it, I didn’t get it. But then he’d look at you, and Charlie’s face was thin, real thin, but he could make these strange, exaggerated faces, like pulling his lips really wide apart or separating his eyebrows and then crossing his eyes. He was always pulling stuff like that. So after he drew the two semicircles, he would look at you and his face would be calm, no looks or gestures or anything, and that would surprise you because you’d be expecting something. With his face expressionless, he’d bring up his fist to his nose to give the sign of the Roger nose. And then he’d start laughing. Once he started laughing, it sometimes took him a bit to stop his shaking enough to start drawing, but when he did, boy was he right to laugh. He put a dot in the small semicircle for the eye, a half-circle for the mouth, and a few sticks for the body coming out of the smaller semicircle. The huge circle is Roger’s nose! Damn, it’s funny even thinking about it now. But as I told you before, Roger couldn’t leave funny enough alone. He performed that drawing for just about everyone in the class, sometimes multiple times, and began putting it on all the wooden desks. Roger was bound to see it, and he did.

Roger isn’t much of a get in your face type of guy. He’s intense but he broods. He’ll start talking about someone for a while, and he might give that person nasty looks, but he’d be unlikely to approach him and start an argument. Part of the reason might be because he usually lost those arguments. He was not quick on his feet and except for the dingers he hit his parents with, which, when I look back are probably ones he’d been practicing for a long time, his insults always end up rather flat. Charlie, on the other hand, is great at insults. While he is repetitive, when he gets started and you get him off his stock material, he can really take someone’s eye out. Roger probably did the smart thing by not approaching Charlie in the schoolyard about the drawing and the Roger nose. Hell, even I, and not to be immodest but I’m quick on my feet, try not to get into words with Charlie where others can see us. It just always ends badly for his Charlie’s opponent. So Roger bided his time.

The rumor around school was that Roger had started taking karate lessons. It made sense with Roger’s love of ninjas.

***

If you made it this far, then I’m impressed. Thanks to the long flight and the early rising, I spent many hours trapped in airports and airplanes, and what better to do when trapped then dreg up some memories, manipulate them to make them more interesting, and turn them into a story. I’m still going strong, and only landing or hitting the end of my battery will stop me from continuing. Where was this creativity and inspiration when I was trying to write a measly 2,000 words?

After reading through it, I might drop Eddie and just put the narrator in Eddie’s place. I don’t think Eddie is adding much to the story, but I’ll let this first draft stew for a bit before I make a major change like that.