Alligator Candy by David Kushner Read Free Book Online Page B

fun-loving and easygoing kid, eager to entertain if not be a bit precocious. Sometimes I’d lash out, throwing a tantrum that the teachers seemed to regard as something to be expressed, not contained. Rather than telling me to stop, they would hand me a hammer and a block of wood and tell me to go get out my anger. So there I would be, standing outside the brown round pod, banging a hammer against the wood until someone told me to come back inside.
    Eventually I learned my own coping technique on the schoolyard. It started after kids would come up to me and repeat rumors they had heard about how Jon had been killed. Because I still didn’t know the whole story, I had no idea what to believe. Even the most outlandish suggestions could be true. They said he had been cut up and put in a pickle jar, and that he had been shot with bows and arrows. At first, I would just stand there not knowing how to respond. I pictured a boy in a pickle jar, like something out of a Flat Stanley children’s book, and it didn’t make sense.
    I took solace telling myself they were wrong. My mind clung to the sparse details that I’d retained: he’d been hit in the head, suffocated, that was that. Everything else was just a lie, some crazy rumors that filled my classmates’ heads. Perhaps I actually took the time to respond to them at first, insisting that, no, you’re wrong, nothing like that happened to him. But my responses were not convincing enough, because the rumors, as the months went on, kept resurfacing. Finally, I’d had enough, and decided to simply shut down completely in these moments and act like I couldn’t hear them.
    In that silent space, the world around me would blur and fade—the sounds, the colors, the trees. I was just walking through a thick translucent jelly, isolated, alone. I didn’t want pity, my stomach turned at the very thought. To be pitied was to be denigrated; to be singled out as “different.” I wanted disregard. I wanted to be just like every other kid around me, seemingly unburdened and intact. I didn’t want to be the star of a crime drama; a murder mystery that was fueling all kinds of conversations in the homes of my friends. Every day, on my way to school and back, I would pass the woods where Jon had disappeared. And at some point, a thought occurred to me: perhaps if I hadn’t asked Jon for the alligator candy, he would never have gone that day, and he would still be alive.

15
    A NDY GREW a giant afro. Even for the midseventies, it was impressive, especially on a white Jewish teenager in the suburbs. The hairdo struck me as an architectural marvel, and I used to watch him tend to it in the mirror of our bathroom. It started out long and wet, but then he’d have at it with his wide black hair pick, flicking and snapping over and over and over again until it dried into a frizzy, dark dome that, if it possessed self-luminescence, would have passed for one of those party lights at Spencer Gifts.
    Afros seemed to be everywhere in those days, from Sly Stone and Dr. J to the cast of Welcome Back, Kotter . For Andy, the Jewfro was all about the music it conjured, jazz and funk, and his passion for playing the trumpet. Day and night, I’d hear him behind his closed door, practicing scales on his horn. Before long, there were other skinny, white, nerdy funksters in our house, pushing around the living room furniture so they could practice together.
    Andy named his band Rhythm and began getting gigs around town. Every weekend, we’d pile into our station wagon and head for Shakey’s Pizza Parlor, where Rhythm had a regular show. The station wagon was the perfect roadie vehicle. It was roomy enough to cart the instruments and, for a reason that escaped me, had a mushroom decal by the gas tank. Andy made a point of letting me help the band set up.
    As Andy and the band made their way through Dixieland songs, heavyset Southerners—men in