Suckerpunch: (2011) by Jeremy Brown Page A

me and tossed me in.”
     
    “Before they grabbed you, did you know they did that there? The fighting?”
     
    “Sure.”
     
    “Stupid, why didn’t you go another way?”
     
    “They didn’t own the street. I walked that way before they showed up.”
     
    Marcela looked at the ceiling and made an appeal in Portuguese.
     
    While she was distracted, I picked a piece of lettuce out from between my teeth.
     
    Marcela said, “You know what I think? I think you wanted them to grab you.”
     
    Shit.
     
    “You probably strolled by, stopped to tie your shoe. Hey, I think maybe you rang the doorbell.”
     
    “That’s ridiculous.” The electricity in the house had been shut off.
     
    “No,
you
are. Why didn’t you go home and watch TV?”
     
    “Believe it or not, that pool was safer than my house.”
     
    “Okay. I believe that,” she said. “But still, go to the library. Play fútbol.”
     
    “I’m not saying I didn’t have choices. I didn’t make the smartest ones, but that doesn’t mean I deserved to get jumped. I just went about my usual business, and one day they decided to interfere. Three of them grabbed me off the sidewalk and took me around back and dropped me in the pool. There were probably thirty or forty kids standing around the edge, yelling and spitting and flicking butts at me.
     
    “They shoved each other around to see who would fall in. Finally one kid did, the fifteen-year-old, taller than me with some fat on him. He stood as far away from me as he could and started hitting me in the head, big looping things that slapped more than punched, you know?”
     
    Marcela nodded. She had her glass in front of her but wasn’t drinking.
     
    “I remember thinking, ‘This guy hates getting hit. And he thinks he’s whipping me, but I’m standing here taking it. Is this how kids hit?’ I barely felt it. It took me a while to realize I could fight back—this wasn’t some drunk who’d throw me out the window if I tried. So I did. And, man, I never saw that kid again after that day. I think his family moved to Ohio.”
     
    Marcela said, “But you went back.”
     
    I shrugged. “I just kept walking home. Some days they grabbed me. Some days they didn’t.”
     
    “Which days did you like better?”
     
    I looked at her and knew I had lost the argument. I didn’t care. “The pool.”
     
    Marcela mumbled and attacked her salad for a while. When it didn’t fight back enough, she straightened and shook her head. “So, what, you beat up the whole gang? One by one?”
     
    “If I say yes can we change the subject?”
     
    “No.”
     
    I said, “I didn’t fight anyone from the gang after the first time. Well, there might have been a few. They had more fun watching me against other kids they brought in.”
     
    “Just random kids pulled off the street.” Marcela was nodding to herself, and I thought she was going to flip the table over. “But not like you. No, those poor boys didn’t want to fight. Didn’t
like
it.”
     
    “Will you calm down? They were from other gangs, smaller ones, trying to get in with the Bulls. If they got past me, they had to fight one of the gang members. Or several. It was kind of random.”
     
    Marcela cooled off a notch, but I was still on the endangered list. “How many got past?”
     
    “I don’t know. Less than half.”
     
    She asked, “Did you kill any of them?”
     
    “Marcela.”
     
    “Yes or no?”
     
    “No.”
     
    She leaned across the table. “Gangs kill people.”
     
    I moved forward almost close enough to touch foreheads and said, “I was never
in
the gang.” Marcela stared at me, and I saw the green flecks in her eyes and forgot what we were talking about. She leaned back and I rallied. “They kept me around for fun, but otherwise white boys weren’t welcome. When they got tired of watching me beat on kids from other Hispanic gangs, they started looking around for other races. Black kids, Asians, Indians. From India,