Only Love Can Break Your Heart by Ed Tarkington Read Free Book Online

betrayal of the victim’s so-called friends, who stand aside or perhaps even laugh and jeer, loyalty being a far less powerful instinct than self-preservation. Instead of forming a line of defense, they part and flee, like the herd of wildebeests on
Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom
, blithely trotting away as the lion gorges on the entrails of some unfortunate straggler while Marlin Perkins voices airy platitudes about the circle of life.
    Surely Paul had never had to worry about being bullied—or so it seemed when I told him about Jimmy Hutter on one of his quick visits home to do laundry and hit the Old Man up for cash.
    “If the kid messes with you,” Paul said with a shrug, “just kick him in the balls.”
    “In the balls?”
    “Do it quick,” he added. “He won’t expect it. Then sock him in the nose, as hard as you can.”
    Paul explained his plan, which, it turned out, he’d learned from the Old Man, of all people.
    “A firm kick in the balls will double a guy over,” Paul said. “A hard jab to the nose will make him see stars, which will sort of blind him for a minute or so.”
    “Then what do you do?” I asked.
    Paul admitted that the Old Man had said that after the second blow he should run away. The strategy was designed by the soldiers in the Old Man’s unit during the postwar occupation of Japan, for getting out of situations where they might be cornered alone in an unfriendly bar or back alley.
    “Should I run?” I asked.
    I felt certain that Paul had never run away from a fight himself.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “Just sock him again, I guess.”
    He stubbed out his cigarette and hopped off the bed.
    “Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you.”
    On the rug in front of the windows, Paul taught me how to throw a punch.
    “Don’t swing,” Paul said. “Get your dukes up and fire from right beside your head, like this.”
    I mimicked how he held his fists up below his eyes.
    “Plant your feet and get your legs into it,” he said. “Same with the kick. Lean forward so you don’t fall down.”
    Paul demonstrated a few quick jab-cross combinations, followed by short, fast knee kicks.
    “Here,” he said, holding out his palm. “Hit me.”
    I aimed at his palm and punched it as hard as I could.
    “Come on, Rocky,” Paul said. “The Italian Stallion can’t hit like a girl.”
    He took out Led Zeppelin’s first album and dropped the needle on “Good Times, Bad Times.”
    “Try again,” he said. “And yell when you do it.”
    “Yell?” I asked.
    He turned the knob up on the stereo. The floor buzzed with the heavy bass.
    “Yeah. Yell. ARGH !” he bellowed.
    “ AAAAAAAARGGHHH !” I screamed.
    By the end of the album side, I had it down: hard kick to the crotch, cross to the chin, jab to the solar plexus. After Paul left the next day to return to college, I continued my training. Each afternoon, I put on something heavy like Zeppelin or Black Sabbath and practiced, imagining Jimmy Hutter’s face floating in the air in front of me, waiting to be pulverized by my furious fists.
    A few weeks later, the inevitable moment arrived. As I sat at the lunch table among the other nerds, runts, and oddballs, I felt Jimmy Hutter looming behind me.
    “You know what I heard?” Jimmy said, his voice low and menacing.
    “No,” I said.
    “My dad says your dad is one cold-blooded son of a bitch.”
    The other boys looked on, hushed and alert.
    “Is not,” I said, my eyes fixed on the table in front of me.
    “You callin’ me a liar?” Jimmy snarled.
    I looked around, trying to spot Mrs. Goode, the lunch lady, who monitored the twittering crowd through the Coke-bottle lenses of her glasses. Mrs. Goode operated the traffic light used to regulate the noise level. If the children were too loud, the light turned red, which meant Silent Lunch, where everyone would be confined to a chair and could only get up with her permission. I prayed vainly that the chatter would rise and Mrs. Goode