Once I was happy but now I’m forlorn.
When I finished, Penny was lying back down on the floor. I got up and looked up the stairs. There was nothing there that you could see.
* * *
Just before the end of the school year, Shannon’s school put on a talent show. It was 1976, the year of the American Bicentennial, and the centerpiece of the show was a group called the Belles of Liberty. I was seventeen. The Belles of Liberty was a group of about twenty-five girls on roller skates, including Shannon, who wore red-white-and-blue uniforms and sang while they skated.
For the talent show, the girls at Shipley got my friend Bunting to act as emcee, and he introduced each of the acts as they came up. There was Lisa Trousdale, who sang “Take Me Home, Country Roads” on the guitar, and Shell Stockhousen, who had a ventriloquist’s dummy. There was Sarah Marshall, who juggled. Maria Henderson sang “Comes a Train of Little Ladies” from The Mikado.
The climax of the show was this: Bunting was to introduce Zero and our other friends Darryl and Larry. Larry had left school earlier that year after he unexpectedly punched out all the walls in his room. We didn’t know why. The boys were going to be doing some sort of comedy routine—specifically making fun of my mother—during the middle of which I was to jump out of the audience and say, You guys really have a lot of nerve, I think the girls who’ve been putting on this show deserve an apology. At which point I was going to throw a shaving cream pie into Darryl’s face. The Belles of Liberty would then roll out on the stage, each one with a cream pie, and everyone would throw them at each other while “The Stars and Stripes Forever” played on the loudspeakers.
At the appointed hour I was sitting in the crowded auditorium, surrounded by girls, listening to my friends do their act. At the last minute, though, they’d cleverly changed the object of their derision from an abstract one—my mother—to something more immediate. That would be me.
My friends came out on the stage and said, “Hey, that Jimmy Boylan’s a real fag!”
I sat there in the audience. I guessed this was my cue.
Some of the girls nearby were already looking at me, wondering why I wasn’t saying anything.
So I stood up and I said, “Hey, what’s the big idea? You really have a lot of nerve. I think you owe everybody here an apology!” This was supposed to be really funny, but in fact there were tears in my voice as I spoke the words. No one was laughing.
I walked up onto the stage. It was really quiet.
Then Darryl hit me with a pie. I was blinded by pie even before I got to the pie table at center stage. Darryl creamed me so hard that I could literally see nothing, and I was unable to wipe the frosting out of my eyes.
And then the Belles of Liberty rolled in from offstage. I couldn’t see them, but I heard them. There were twenty-five girls onstage in roller skates, and everybody was throwing pies. “The Stars and Stripes Forever” started playing on the PA.
Another unfortunate thing that had happened was that Darryl had hit me so hard with the pie that my nose began to bleed. I stumbled around the stage, my arms outstretched, a blind thing.
I stood in the middle of the stage at an all-girls school, in a spotlight, sightless, my face covered with white frosting. From my nose a bright red river of blood gushed into the white cream. All around me orbited two dozen girls on roller skates, including Shannon, the girl for whom I’d written my first poem. The music of John Philip Sousa played overhead.
Pies flew through the air, aimed first at the Belles of Liberty, then at the audience. People started screaming. I heard the sound of folding chairs overturning as the audience fled toward the exits. Some of the Belles of Liberty lost control and roller-skated off the edge of the stage and landed on the folding chairs. Others wiped out onstage and lay on their backs with the wheels on their skates still spinning. Someone else grabbed on to the curtain to keep from falling, and there was the sound of material ripping. Part of the curtain fell down. I took off my glasses to try to wipe my eyes again and they slipped out