Bad Connection

By

  Amye Archer

In the early 1990’s, someone on the Scranton School Board had the brilliant idea of allowing Scranton High School to dismiss their entire student body from noon to one o’clock everyday for lunch.  During this time, it was assumed by these said board members that students could study, catch up on homework, pump money into the local economy by frequenting the downtown restaurants, and engage in studious behavior with the upmost respect for their community and one another.  This turned out to be a huge error in judgment.

In 1991, during my freshman year at Scranton High School, lunch was like a scene from the Wild West.  Hundreds of teenagers amped up on hormones, caffeine, nicotine, and any other substance they could get their hands on, were set free to roam the streets with no supervision.  Groups assembled, and almost immediately a large cloud of cigarette smoke rose from the center of them. Lowered cars with blacked out windows and booming bass could be seen parading up and down the street, and almost every day there was a huge crowd gathered around two students beating the shit out of one another among screams and cheers of encouragement from the excited onlookers. 

As with any civilization left to its own devices, a hierarchy began to emerge, and soon one group of girls was controlling who did and who didn’t go home with a head wound every day.  These girls were tough.  They smoked pot, cursed like sailors, skipped school, and wore nothing but band T-shirts and leather jackets.  Their leader, Janine Greco, was the one we feared the most.  At four foot eleven, she was built like a sumo wrestler with breasts.  She practically dipped her eyelids in mascara, wore her bangs five inches off her head, and  walked like she was about to engage in hand-to-hand combat at any moment.  Janine looked for any reason to fight, so it was best to avoid her completely.

My best friend, Penny, and I managed to find a balance between being involved in Janine’s group and being hated by them.  We were friendly enough with Janine that she would beat someone up for us, but not too friendly that she would ever rely on us to do the beating for her.  It was a tough tightrope to straddle, but we managed to do it for about three months.

“What’s going on here?”  I approached Penny one day as she stood on the outskirts of a large circle just beginning to take shape around some flying limbs and screams for help.

“That chick called Janine’s cousin a slut.”  Penny answered, casually pointing to the bobbing blonde ponytail being whipped around like a ragdoll by Janine.

“Oh, that’s not good.”

And it wasn’t good, not at all.  The fight escalated to the point of bloodshed before the principal sent an overweight security guard into the eye of the storm.  As Janine was getting carted off to the principal’s office, she continued screaming threats at the crying, bleeding, young girl left sobbing on the sidewalk.

“This isn’t over you fucking whore!  I’m going to find you and kill you.”Janine screamed, trying to kick her way free of the fat man’s grip.  These fights disturbed me very much.  I was not only upset by the violence involved, but the randomness of it all.  Apparently anything could be said at any moment to provoke one of these girls, and that was it, BAM, you were dead.  But what troubled me the most about all of this was that I had just started dating Janine's ex-boyfriend, Sam.  Sam was not only Janine’s ex, he was the ex.  The one: her first love, her obsession, the name written all over her notebooks, the initials we carved into her ankle in study hall.   But that was over a year ago.  Sam didn’t want her, she had moved on, and she was heavily involved with an ex of Penny’s. Sam was okay for the taking, that’s how Penny and I justified it, anyway.

This brings me to the summer I spent in alleys, the summer I was fifteen years old. Any alley would do, a back alley, a side alley, a dark alley, a short alley, a well-known alley, a steep alley, a scary alley, it didn’t matter. I continued living my teenage life roaming the streets with all the other kids from Scranton, looking for beer parties, looking for pot, and looking for trouble, only I did it from the safety of alleyways. If, on the rare occasion I wandered onto a main road for more than a minute, I ran for my life, until the darkness of the next alley shrouded me from plain sight. I did this for six weeks while managing to maintain a relationship with Janine’s ex Sam. 

I was just starting to get used to spending my teenage years next to garbage cans and garage doors when one fateful night in September, Janine wandered into my alley, and my stint as an anonymous creature of the night was over.  Janine threw her arm around me like we were best friends and casually asked  if I had started a rumor about her that she was pregnant.  She told me that “so and so” said I did.  I declared that I had not even heard such a statement made, therefore I could not possibly have started that rumor. In my mind, that should have been the end of it. Logic should have permeated Janine’s anger, leaving her no choice but to shake my hand and walk away, leaving between us a fragile, yet lasting peace.

But, in a shocking turn of events, my proclamation of innocence went unheard, and I was dragged physically, by the arm, to a nearby street corner where there stood a single pay phone enclosed partially by foggy graffiti-laden glass.  A phone, which Janine assured me, we would use to straighten out this simple miscommunication.  As she picked up the phone to call “so and so” to verify my part in the fictional narrative she was using as a basis for this attack, I stood there, doing nothing, in close proximity, waiting for something bad to happen to me.

I wanted to run, knowing what was coming, knowing I was going to bleed from some part of my body before the night was over, but  it was impossible.  Janine had brought with her the new boyfriend and several of his friends, all of whom were guys and stood in a semi circle around us.  Penny stood excluded from the enclave, helpless, extraneous.

Before anyone knew what the person on the other end of the phone said, or if they were even home, Janine grabbed the heavy black receiver and cracked me over the head with it as hard as she could.  That part I remember.  I remember a white flash, followed by a burst of red hot heat erupting like a volcano from inside of me.  I remember throwing her to the ground and punching her in the face.  What I don’t remember is bleeding.  What I don’t remember is a group of guys screaming in amazement that Janine was on the receiving end of a very good and well-deserved ass kicking.  Penny remembers it all. 

“Why didn’t you jump in and help me?”  I asked her days later. 

“You didn’t need it!  You were like the Incredible Hulk; I never saw anything like it!”  Penny explained.

And I was, she was right.  Several eyewitnesses, of which there were many, since this was a busy street corner in a high traffic area, said aside from a few kicks to the head with her high heeled boots, I was dominating the teenage boxing match.  Janine didn’t stay for long. She soon scrambled out from under me and started running down the street, clumsily clutching her leather jacket as she struggled to run in her high heeled boots.  Penny said I chased her for a good fifty feet screaming like a crazy woman for her to “get back here and finish getting her ass kicked.”  Apparently, she didn’t feel up to accepting my invitation, hopped in her boyfriend’s car and took off.  The fight was over.  But not for me.

Having never been in a physical confrontation before, I did not know what to do with all of the rage and adrenaline cursing through my veins.  I needed to hit something or someone, so I did what any rational person would do.  I started beating on the side of a minivan that had the unfortunate luck to be parked right next to the payphone.   It felt so good, hurling the entire weight of my body into a large metal sheet, which was just crumbling and buckling under the pressure.  For those five minutes I was Superman, I was Captain America, I was euphoric: screaming obscenities at the top of my lungs.  I was in shock.

“Um, Amye?  You’re bleeding.”  Penny said to me as I continued my onslaught of brutality against the motionless minivan.  “Oh My God.  Amye!”

I turned and looked at her.

“Oh my God.  Uh, you are really, really bleeding.”  Penny was panicked.  She ran out into the street and started to flag cars down, she was screaming for someone to stop and help us.  Suddenly, I started to calm down, the adrenaline draining from my veins, and I felt the heat in my eyes and on my face.  I looked at my clothes, I was covered in blood.  My hair, my face, my clothes, my hands, it was everywhere.  I started to scream.  Two young guys in a big red car picked us up and drove Penny and me to my house.  I remember apologizing over and over for bleeding all over the guy’s car.  It was nice and shiny, and I remember commenting on a new car smell before spitting a mouthful of blood onto the floor behind the driver’s seat.

“Oh fuck dude!  She’s getting it all over!”  The passenger noted to the driver.

My house was only a few blocks away, and when we pulled in front, the two young men just dumped us out, barely waiting for us to shut the door before pulling away.  My front porch was wooden, and Penny and I clamored up the five stairs like elephants, causing my sister, Jennie, to alarmingly open the door.  She did not like what she saw.  There I stood covered in so much blood that Jennie later told me that she thought my eyes had been gouged out. 

The boys who had dropped us off were at the end of the street waiting for the light to change.  Before a word could be said, Jennie flew out the door.  With her black hair flying behind her like a flag, she ran towards the car screaming threats that made no sense, like:  “You think you’re bad asses?  I’ll shove your fucking faces down your throats.”  And “That’s it…drive away in your fucking car, you fucking scumbag asshole, you better run!” 

As Penny ran after Jennie to explain what had happened, my mother leapt to her feet and begin to scream hysterically.  She ran towards me and started to feel my head like a blind person would, searching for my features, my small, thin nose, my small lips, my in-tact moving eyeballs.  As she was mapping my face, my father, who had been tucked away at his art table in another room, came out to see what was happening.  He took one look at me and grabbed his keys from the kitchen table.

“Jesus Christ!  I thought I wouldn’t have to deal with this shit with daughters!” he sighed, “come on, let’s go to the hospital.”  he said, and led me out to the car.

It took me a good hour to fully realize what had happened.  On the way to the hospital, with Penny in the backseat and my father driving, my hysteria continued.  “She is such a fucking whore!”  I was screaming.  Penny stayed deadly still in the backseat.    It was the first time in my life that I said “fuck” in front of my father.  But he just stared straight ahead and said “That’s it Honey, let it out.”  I felt like I had a license to kill.  “She’s a fucking bitch!  That fucking skank!  Mother fucker!”  It was awesome, I was enraged, I had kicked someone’s ass, and now I was cursing in front of my father.  “That motherfucking cocksucking whore!  That stupid cunt!”  I yelled over the slow melody of the Eagles’ Desperado.  “Okay, that’s enough, Aim.”  My father whispered.

I had to get six staples in my head, right along my hairline which would forever change the direction of my bangs.  When I got home I remember how comforting my mother was, leaning me over our claw foot tub and washing the blood out of my hair.  There was something so soothing about having my hair washed by my mother.  Her smooth, thin hands like velvet paws on my forehead, stroking back the matted black mess that had become my hair.   The water ran red for almost ten minutes. 

The next day Janine called to apologize.  She said she was upset over my relationship with Sam, but she realized now she had to get over him.  She told me my blood was inside her shoes and that she had to ring out her socks when she got home.  We laughed at the thought of me bleeding all over her on the street corner the night before.  Then I told her I was HIV positive and hung up.  Seven months later she gave birth to her daughter, Amber.

[12/09]

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Amye Archer is a graduate student working towards her MFA in Creative Writing at Wilkes University.  She is also an assistant editor of OakBend Review. Amye has written poetry, short stories, a novel that will never be finished, and many truths on bathroom walls.  Some folks who have been kind enough to publish her work include Pank Magazine, The Ampersand Review, The Battered Suitcase, WritersBloc, and Gloom Cupboard. Her chapbook, "No One Ever Looks Up," was published by Puddinghouse Press. Amye has three-year-old twin daughters, and shares her life with her brilliant husband, Tim. You can see samples of her work and read her blog at www.amyearcher.com.