The Book and Revelations

Revelations
In the fourth grade a new boy moved to town.  To the rest, he came from somewhere exotic. Kansas.  He was taller than the rest of us and wore very short shorts, white and almost obscene.  

I was told to show him the ropes.  Our fourth grade teacher had too much to do.  Mrs. Eichenger wore oversized glasses, bifocals, the plastic kind that came in impossible colors like periwinkle, rose and sunflower.  She had a gamey smile and oversized front teeth.  Her hair was short, but not "Let's Get Physical," fashionable.  She was a butchy broad back when lesbians were mysterious manly misfits, all fish and no bicycle, before the Portias invaded intent on showing the world they still knew how to ride.  

She knew I would show him what was expected, or at least what I did, the strange self-starter with schoolwork that I was; if he did even half of what I showed him, she would have one less headache.  That morning I showed him the laminated reading comprehension cards we worked on for an hour a day, at our own pace.  They were grouped in clusters of 30, and color coated.  The only reward for progression, was the exploration of colors more impossible than our teacher's dyke eye-ware.  

If you read fast, like the only Asian in the entire school and I did, you were moved through a bewildering array of hues beyond the reach of our pre-catalogue imagination, strangers to even Crayola. Fuck brown sienna and tangerine.  

Tanya the Asian and I were onto bigger frontiers, leek and santa nella blue.  Kansas boy and his tight white shorts would never break ahead of the pack, but six inches of height and a Mormon smile made up for all that, and he was a Catholic.  

As recess approached Kansas sidled up to our teacher and asked if he could spend recess in the basketball courts and shoot hoops alone, instead of playing a conscripted game of kick ball with the rest of us.  

Our Recess activities were assigned on a weekly basis and participation was coerced by the threat of "the book."  "The book" was a clipboard passed from classroom to classroom after recess.  Anyone that was bad or broke a rule had their name put int he book.  "The book," was meant to sound ominous, but it was never made clear what happened to you if you your name was put in the book, or where it went at the end of the day.  

The book was not about substance or procedure, it was about public humiliation, the Catholic School equivalent of the scarlet letter.  The sisters and our lesbian teacher read the names of our classmates whose names appeared in the book.  My classmates had their moral failure proclaimed in some twisted Romper Room exercise.  

My name appeared in the book once.  One of the wealthier kids brought pomegranates to school in his lunch and we got into a pomegranate fight, covering ourselves and the restroom walls in red when we should have been playing kickball. I was responsible for having the ridiculous fruit banned from school altogether. I watched  Sister Alice scrawl my name in the book with gnarled rheumatoid claws, threatening to break the pencil she used, scrawling my name in disappointed rage. I was altar boy "a" and was not supposed to be in the book, a disgrace.

To my surprise, the boy in the tight shorts managed to secure the accommodation, his cleft chin and dimples casting a spell not even a woman who only wore pants could resist.  When he came back to me and my fancy colored laminated cards, he asked if I wanted to join him.  I doubted any such thing would be allowed, but did not protest since he volunteered to ask, to push it with the new teacher on his first day.  

He waited for the bell to ring and the class to empty before asking her if I could go.  The three of us were the only people left in the classroom.  

Then, With the stupid naiveté of a nine year old, he said, "Eric wants to know if he can play with me."  

I was used to the idiocies of my classmates and their absolute ignorance of anything sexual, of innuendo, or of the pervasive adult hysteria surrounding children and sexual knowledge.   

"He wants to what?"  

Her fact contorted under the plexiglass shield and she looked up in my direction in accusatory belief.  Not only did not she see tight pants as the nimrod he was, but the story was immediately plausible.  Me, her lilac level reader, was out to fondle these innocent farm raised balls.  

In disgust I broke rank, belied my knowledge of the adult world.  

"No, not like, to play horse, the game with the basketball."  

Her face winced with embarrassed and disgust.

"Oh, ok," was all that she could muster. 

But she reviled me for catching her in the act, wallowing in a soup of inappropriate assumptions.  I knew that my classmates were not the only one's that considered me a faggot. She never forgave me for my transgression, and ignored me like some pomegranate eating Eve, some unnatural pervert who relished forbidden knowledge and pink cock.  

Later, and for the sheer hell of it, I scribbled her name in the book when no one was looking, having discovered it on Father Riley's desk one Friday while preparing for mass.  How her name got there became an unexplainable mystery and scandal among the faculty, proof that the devil was somehow among them.