the hurt

The Hurt
By Jeremiah Martin
2006

I was born in Cincinnati Ohio, the first Tucker child in a hundred or so fucking years born outside of the state of Kentucky.
The Blue Grass State.
In 1980 (a year before my birth, and two before that of my brother) my father, took his new wife and left his family of coal miners, prison guards and public assistance recipients, to work in a transmission factory on the wrong side of the Ohio River. He was never forgiven.
Despite my genetics I grew into a handsome, athletic teenager, who seemed to never get more than one pimple at a time. I was an honor roll mainstay and played varsity football as a freshman. Life was good all around, even for my brother Patrick, though he had none of my qualities and bore the obvious curse of family resemblance.
Patrick was overweight, wore glasses and ran like an overweight girl who wore glasses. At about two hundred and sixty pounds, he should have been able to bide time on the offensive line, but there wasn’t an athletic membrane in his body. He was weak, soft and smart as hell, all attributes that would normally doom a teenager to a hellish voyage through high school. But he was my brother, and I was the shit, so he was a part of the scene. It helped that when I was seven I caught rocky mountain fever from a tick bite and spent four months in the hospital, forcing me to repeat the first grade. From that point on Patrick and I were classmates as well as brothers and best friends.
He was quick witted and funny when you could get him to talk and he let all our friends cheat off of him. He was like the cool fat kid in an eighties teen flick. (Without, of course, the demeaning, self-loathing nicknames normally given to those characters.) Hell, he even had a girlfriend. She was ugly as a mud fence and played the trombone in the damned marching band, but beggars can’t be choosers, right?
Life was good for both of the Tucker brothers. I was not only a good football player and chick magnet, but I had no problem knocking your teeth into your throat if you fucked with me, or with Patrick. When I kicked the shit out of the varsity’s starting left guard (a two hundred and eighty-five-pound, all talk lump of pussy-flavored cookie dough named Rusty Ackerman) as a eighth grader, my reputation was solidified. Two weeks later I fucked his girlfriend. God only knows what kind of king I would have been if I had been able to finish school in Ohio.
This was not to be the case. On August 3rd of 1997, a little less than a month before our sophomore year, I was walking along Vine Street in a pretty bad neighbor hood. I was completely oblivious to the environment and in a great mood. I even tossed a quarter to a homeless man.
My destination was the small, but adult less apartment of this black chick named Trina, who I had met, and consequently melted at the zoo about a week prior. I had a condom in my pocket and just enough money to get us a joint. I had done two hundred stomach crunches and seventy-five push-ups before leaving the house, and knowing I looked hard and ripped, was very excited to venture outside my race. A characteristic that the down home faction of Tuckers would deem unacceptable and unpatriotic. Fuck them, girls are girls. And girls are fun.
I was standing at a crosswalk about a block from her house when a black guy in a red shirt came running up the street. He stopped about five feet from me, leaned over and rested his hands on his knees. I was watching him pant but thinking of what Trina would look like naked, when another black man came around the corner. He was tall and thick, at least 250 pounds, and he was pissed. He yelled “hey mother fucker!” and the dude in the red shirt took off. The other guy raised a silver pistol and fired three shots. I think it was the second one that shattered my leg.
Predictably, he completely missed the man in the red shirt. I fell and began to scream. As the shooter ran down the street after the man in the red shirt, one of his pavement pounding Nike’s came down on my ankle with a crunch, turning it into what felt like a sock full of gravel. The shoes were yellow and purple and impeccably clean. And though they were untied, the man lost no footing after stomping on my foot. He continued down the street, stepping on my ankle no more an obstacle than running over an empty paper bag with a Ford Ranger.
I tried to drag my self to the steps of the building behind me but when I saw my foot pointing the wrong way I passed out. I woke up in the hospital.
When we got home my father opened a beer and allowed the Kentucky in him to emerge and take over. He quickly and whole-heartedly reacquainted himself with the “n” word. Just like that, Cincinnati was no longer fit for his family.
“Nothin’ like this would ever have happened down home.” He said.
I whispered to Patrick, “No if it had been two methed out rednecks with shotguns, I’d be much better off.” He grinned, knowing better than to laugh in front of my father while every one of his usually dormant, or at least mild, redneck attributes were screaming and demanding to be heard.
But, when my dad saw Patrick’s smile, he gritted his pink face and I thought he was going to slap him anyway. He didn’t, instead he picked up the phone and dialed long distance to Kentucky. About five minutes into the conversation, his brother mentioned a job running a bulldozer in Carbine and it was settled. We were moving to the Christian side of the River.
I was unhappy about the move. Patrick was destroyed. He was scared to death about the whole process; meeting new people, leaving his girlfriend, but most of all the three or so weeks he would have to go to school without me. He was in kindergarten the last time he had to deal with that.
I was present when all the doctors were talking about which bones were broken and what nerves were severed, but after I heard the bald one say I would most likely never play football again, everything else might as well have been spoken in Sanskrit. So anyone can understand why Patrick’s social fears seemed petty and selfish. I had just been shot by drug dealers and told I would never play sports again and he was sitting in his closet crying like a little bitch, because he was going to have to ride the school bus all by himself. Of course I didn’t say anything like that to Patrick. He idolized me. I was his hero. So I pushed my pride away and listened to him whine, and told him everything would be ok. I told him that we had tough ass cousins so he wouldn’t really be alone. I told him over and over not to worry and that his girlfriend was too fucking ugly for him anyway, and she didn’t even put out. Three weeks of that shit and it finally seemed to work. When we loaded up for the four-hour drive, Patrick was in a good mood.
My father wouldn’t have waited that long but the Cincinnati police didn’t seem to believe that I couldn’t identify the man who shot me. Of course they were exactly right, I even found out a few days after, that the guys name was Lester, ( and I’ll never forget his face,) but if they thought I’d participate in a fucking murder trial, then they thought wrong.
After shattering my leg, and crushing my ankle. Lester caught up to the guy he was chasing (who had ripped him off for about fifty dollars worth of crack) and shot him six times. They never found the gun, but the ballistics matched the bullet that had bloodied up my favorite pair of jeans, so I was vital to the prosecution’s case. Whoever shot me shot the crack-head. Fuck them, I’m no snitch. For some reason, at that time I blamed the cops for what happened. I felt pity for Lester, a forty-year-old crack addict, who still managed to keep his clothes and his shoes clean. I still can’t understand why, though hating cops has always been second nature for me. I guess it was some sort of us versus them thing. And I do hate the police.
I picked three different guys out of the line up with a confused “maybe it was him?” The first two I fingered were sandwiching Lester, who looked nervous as hell (like he just shot somebody, in fact.) I guess I figured that him sweating through that line-up, and knowing he was guilty, was punishment enough. I considered pointing him out with a maybe, just to really scare him. But those crooked ass cops knew it was him, they just didn’t have any evidence, and they might have twisted my words around to fry him, so I stuck with the other guys, more to piss the cops off than to save Lester’s ass. And it worked too, they leaned hard but I never cracked. When the fat one screamed at me to get out, I winked at him and said, “It really sucks to be you right now and good luck with the investigation. Officer.”
Lester was killed a year after that, when he staggered into the street stoned out of his mind and was hit by a Mercedes. The guilt that I could have saved some rich prick’s windshield has never actually affected me. The way I see it I saved the taxpayers of Ohio a lot of money. And at least he died high, which meant he died happy, the pitiful fuck. Though now that I’ve grown up I kind of wish he had lived, so that I could find him and bust his leg and ankle into floating bone chips with a softball bat. If you can’t tell, all the pity I had for him has since evaporated, though my disdain for law enforcement remains concrete.
With the detectives aggravated, but finally willing to understand that I would not help them, they left us alone. We left the Queen City, for Carbine, Kentucky, two days before the first day of school and three weeks into my recovery
The family greeted us with smiles and hotdogs and Old Milwaukee. We were trapped in a festive but concerned sea of Ford Racing and camouflage Bass Master hats. I was some sort of war hero to these people and after all the men were drunk it was decided that a Tucker revenge squad was going to drive to Cincinnati and show Lester some good old fashioned country justice. Apparently that was trailer trash code for getting smashed, telling slave jokes and puking cheap beer all over themselves. It was a fantastic success.
Our first few days in Carbine were like an extended family reunion picnic and actually a little fun for us, but when Patrick got home from his first day of school I was reminded we were in hell. He was crying and red-faced and had three different kinds of gum in his hair.
And I was stuck in a chair with a cast from my hip to my ankle.
That first day he didn’t want to talk about what had happened or who was bullying him, so I didn’t push it. But the next day it got even worse.
It started as soon as Patrick got on the bus. “Hey fat-fuck” a boy from the back yelled. “Can I feel those tits?!” Everyone laughed. The seats were assigned and Patrick’s was three from the back on the left, directly in front of the red-headed boy who put all the gum in his hair the day before and had taken to calling him “fat-fuck.” Patrick ignored the boy and said nothing. The abuse continued throughout the ride and into the school day. The boy walked up to Patrick in the lunchroom and spit into his chili-macaroni then sprayed a thin layer of saliva through his gapped teeth, all over Patrick’s glasses and face. Again, everyone laughed. But Patrick did nothing, said nothing, just wiped his glasses, and dumped his tray.
It wasn’t until he got home that he would vent. He would tell me in detail, how everyday this red headed monster named Troy White would find new and more painful ways to humiliate him. I begged him to stand up to Troy White.
“But whatever you do, don’t go to the teacher, it will only make it worse.”
I told him every day that things were going to be very different when I got on that bus.
“Can I tell him to leave me alone or you’ll kick his ass?”
“No, that won’t work. If you want to tell him to fuck off, then do it. Hell, an ass whippin’ don’t hurt that bad and he might surprise you and be a total fucking pansy, but don’t tell him your big brother is gonna kick his ass; it’ll make you sound like a pussy. When I bust him in the mouth I want it to be a surprise.”
“Ok, but I don’t know how long I can take it.”
“Well, if you can’t stand up to him, then ignore him, he’ll get bored…but remember, no matter what you can’t tell on him.”
The tough ass cousins I had told Patrick about had turned out to be anything but, in fact Greg, my Uncle Tom’s oldest son, was in the expressive dance club and wore black fingernail polish and a dog collar. Patrick would have to do whatever he had to do to get by until I was ready to come to school and set it all right.
Things went on the same way for the next month and a half. Everyday a different story. Patrick was miserable. His grades were down and so was his energy. All he wanted to do was eat and sleep. He wasn’t washing regularly and an army of oily acne had taken over his face. I tried to keep him going, but Troy White was like a starving dog that never lost its taste for Patrick’s humiliation.
Patrick had taken my advice. He couldn’t stand up for himself, and he never went to an adult for help. His only defense was his uncanny ability to fall into a deep dreamless sleep in any circumstance. So, each day when the abuse began, Patrick would float off into sleep. The first couple of times he did this, Troy White tied his shoelaces together and when he woke up and tried to move out of his seat, he fell on his face. But after a few days, as I had predicted, Troy White got bored. But this defense didn’t work in the hallways or in the lunchroom. And Troy White upped his effort to make up for the lost time Patrick spent sleeping on the school bus.
I don’t really wish to recite the list of things that Troy White did to my brother to make his life hell. Anyone who went to high school and either witnessed, performed or received these types of things can imagine. I would say that most of them were stereotypical bully antics, but all were vicious and most disturbingly, relentless.
Then my leg was put into a walking cast and the doctors told me I could return to school the next week. I assured Patrick that it wasn’t my legs Troy White needed to worry about it was my fists. You’d have thought it was his birthday.
On the Friday before the Monday on which I would finally be going to school, Patrick came home smiling and excited, he said, ‘Troy White asked me about you today.”
“Really, what’d you say?”
“Well he asked if it was true you were shot by drug dealers…I said yes.”
“And what’d he say?”
“He said that don’t make you any less of a faggot, and it don’t impress him none.”
“Really? Well we’ll see”
“That’s what I said, I know you told me not to say nothin’, but I couldn’t just let him stand there and call you a fag, I told him he wouldn’t have the balls to say that to your face. And if he did, you’d beat it in for him.”
“Then what’d he say?”
“He said ‘fuck you and your faggot brother too’. And then he punched me the chest and blew spit all over my glasses, like he always does. I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it, but Monday is gonna be great, I can’t wait to see you tear him a new ass, I can’t wait to see you pound that bastard into the ground!”
“Neither can I.” I said softly.
I couldn’t just stand there and let him call you a fag.
That weekend was a long one for me. Patrick waited on me hand and foot, and seemed to at least be on the verge of being himself again. I spent most of my time trying to look normal when I walked. The black cast went from my knee to my foot, protecting my ankle that was taking longer to heal than everything else. Fucking crack-heads.
Sunday night I slept maybe four hours.
Waiting for the bus in front of our shitty rented trailer, Patrick was rubbing his hands together and bouncing from foot to foot. I smoked three cigarettes and tried my best to look cool. When the big yellow machine came into view, Patrick cracked his knuckles like it was going to his hands busy in a few minutes. I flicked my cig and ran my tongue across my teeth. The flashing lights went on and the bus slowed to a stop. The door shrieked open and I followed Patrick on board.
Patrick fell into our seat and Troy White stood up. “So, this is the fag that’s gonna whip my ass huh?” He said chewing a toothpick and every bit as ugly and nasty as Patrick had described him. I remained standing. “Well, fag, what’s it gonna be?” He was covered in tiny red freckles and his yellow teeth looked like god tossed them in his mouth from across the room. He was wearing a worn out Toby Keith T-shirt, and cheap dirty jeans.
Patrick had turned around and was on his knees with his back against the window, watching. Troy White readied his fists at his side. His hands were dry and cracked and flaky at the knuckles.
“Why? ‘Cause you called my brother a fat-ass? Look at him he’s a fucking fat joke, I can’t go startin’ fights with every dude that points that out.” Troy White relaxed and smiled, Patrick started to say something. I said, “Sit down and shut up FATrick” Troy White and everyone else erupted with laughter. Patrick’s face went dark and he looked at me like our mother just died. He sat down and put his head in his hands. Something in my chest popped like bubble gum and slid like a slimy squid tentacle into my stomach. My mouth went dry. I could hear him whimpering and mumbling to himself, but I did nothing.
“Hell, you’re nothing like your loser brother, c’mon you can sit with me.” Troy White said with a smile. At this point I still could have salvaged the situation by sucker punching the bastard, I was well aware that if I got him on the ground my cast would serve as a very effective weapon. Then I could have told Patrick how it was all an elaborate scheme to catch Troy White off guard and then beat the shit out of him. But I didn’t do any of that.
I made it worse.
“FATrick, that’s killer, I wish I would have thought of that.” Troy White said and slapped me on the back. Patrick was silent and Troy White continued, ‘Well looks like he’s asleep already. He’s such a pussy, we fuck with him just a little bit and he goes straight to sleep, hell, most of time the driver has to wake him up. If he weren’t such a planet, they’d probably take him back to bus garage.”
I laughed and hated myself. Ten minutes later Patrick hadn’t moved.
“You can do anything to him, he won’t wake up, see.” Troy White said and flicked Patrick in the head with his middle finger. No reaction. I laughed again and hated myself more. Then for reasons I will never understand, I said the two words that precede most of the horrible mistakes made by juveniles or those with juvenile personalities. “Watch this.”
Then I took a black permanent marker out of my trapper keeper and stood up. Everyone leaned in anxious to witness. Patrick’s eyes were closed but it was obvious he’d been crying, his head was tilted back but against the window pointed both up and out. His breathing made it look like he was indeed asleep. I pulled Patrick’s shirt up as far as I could get it, exposing his bread white belly, folded over itself and riddled with fresh red stretch marks. The girls hissed in disgust, the boys laughed. Then I drew two circles around his nipples, and wrote FATrick in four-inch letters above his navel. Before sitting down I smacked him hard on the stomach, leaving a pink fading handprint. A girl said,”look at it jiggle.” And again everyone on the bus laughed at my wonderful brother. I sat and talked with Troy White about getting shot, smoking pot and how much he hated just about anything you could think of, until we pulled into the school. Troy White got up and said, “See ya in class, dude,” and walked off the bus. I sat and waited on Patrick. When everyone was off, I moved to what should have been our seat and pulled his shirt back down, then I shook him. “Patrick wake up. It’s time to go in. We’re there.” I shook him harder and harder and he remained still. My first thought was that he was pissed and ignoring me, he had the right to be, and I almost left him there. But the bus driver came back and said,”Not this again, don’t this boy get no sleep at home?” and then he put his hand on Patrick’s shoulder and wiggled it, “wake up buddy.”
Nothing.
I began to get scared so I stood up and screamed “PATRICK! WAKE UP!” I shook him again, hard. His head bounced against the window and he slumped over onto the seat.
The bus driver called for an ambulance.
They carried him off of the bus, put him on a stretcher, and then covered his face with a blanket. All I could think about at the time was, "Please let someone wash that off his belly."
I’ve spent the last ten years dissecting that day and trying to figure out what was going on in my head. At one point I hoped that he had died after I wrote on him, because I didn’t want to have to live with the added sin of the desecration of his corpse on my list. But now that doesn’t matter to me so much, all I hope for now is that he didn’t realize what was happening. The thought of him lying there silent as I pulled his shirt up in front of everyone, and knowing it was me, it’s too much.
Too much.
Most of the doctor’s I’ve seen say that the gunshot is what made me afraid of Troy White. That the trauma I suffered distorted me and made me a pussy. But I remember the fear, it was a selfish, childish fear and had nothing to do with being shot in the leg. Each day as Patrick would tell me the horrible things Troy White had done to him, I would become just a little more intimidated by him and a little more unsure about myself. By the time I got on that bus I was petrified. I was afraid that I’d have to go through it too, that I wasn’t the jock with the rep any more, just brother to a fat slob and cousin to dancing queen freak. I wasn’t afraid of getting my ass kicked, I was afraid of not being cool, of not fitting in. And in order to be cool and to fit in I killed my brother. I broke his heart and it stopped working. I hurt him so bad he gave up.
I spent the next couple of years in tears, and chickening out of suicide at the very last second. Then during my first futile attempt at attending college the headaches started. Pounding headaches that began in the back of my head at the base of my neck and spread to my sinuses often making my nose bleed. Soon after that I began to see redheaded people everywhere I looked. People I knew were blonde or brunette would suddenly have bright strawberry hair. Then the redheaded people began to snarl at me and call me fat. Before long every person I saw was Troy White and they were laughing at me and holding permanent markers. I would run to my dorm room and hide in the closet until my head stopped pounding, then go find some way to get wasted; pot, beer, whisky or acid, I didn’t care. Coke made it worse, so I stuck to downers and alcohol.
One night after 30 different Troy White’s accosted me and called me fat, I ran back to my building, intent on sleeping in my closet in the fetal position. On my way there a Troy White came up to me. He smiled and his teeth were sharp like little spikes and the color of burnt French fries. The slimy liquid that had dripped into my stomach that day on the bus jostled like it was alive and I felt sick. Without a thought, I punched him in the jaw. Troy White hit the ground but didn’t stop smiling, so I stomped on his face until the smile faded and he turned back into a sophomore named Stephanie that I had met the first week of school.
Murdering Troy White made me feel like a new man, and cured my headaches for almost six months.
Then they came back.
I killed my second Troy white with a hunting knife. After that I quit school and lost count.
After a while killing them no longer made them leave me alone. They were simply everywhere. So, on the same day I saw a police sketch of myself on the news, I loaded up my car and my shotgun and I drove across the country to Carbine, Kentucky. I spent three wonderful hours in an old beaten down mobile home, slowly extracting the life out of an older fatter, but authentic Troy White. I was prepared to murder his family if I had to, but predictably neither his three ex-wives nor any of his thirteen kids lived within twenty miles of him. He kept bringing them up, but I am certain they are better off without him. And I know that watching them die would not have affected him the way it would a normal father, anyway, so their absence did not dampen the afternoon.
That was my last happy day.
The sight of the real Troy White covered in blood with Patrick’s name carved into his belly pacified me for about seventy-two hours.
Then he came back.
I’m sorry Patrick but I guess he’s too strong for me, buddy.
I will keep trying though, I will.
But he’s everywhere.
In fact, this morning I shaved Troy White’s face, and brushed his nasty teeth.

~The End~