By Ed Staskus

   Even though my name isn’t Jack, that’s the name I go by.  My father was a big fan of Wild West movies back in the day. He named me after Wyatt Earp after he saw a movie about some gunfight at the OK Corral. I didn’t have any say about it until I reached the age of reason. My father wanted me to grow up and become a lawman, but we have agreed that is not going to happen. He’s disappointed, but I reminded him that when you have expectations, you are setting yourself up for disappointment.

   I wake up on school days before everybody else, while they are snoring their heads off, stare at the ceiling in the dark, wonder whether the sun did or didn’t explode in the night, and mess around with Blackie. He’s my cat that sleeps at my feet. Sometimes he curls up under my arm with his face pressed into my armpit. I wonder how he even breathes. I shouldn’t wonder, though, since he’s the Chuck Norris of everything that goes on in the neighborhood. Nothing messes with him twice, especially since I never trim his claws.

   When it’s time to rise and shine I throw on sweats. I like going outside first thing, so I always do that right after I get out of bed. Otherwise, somebody would tell me to do something else. Most mornings I walk Scar, our Beagle, although he won’t go out in the rain. We stay on the back porch and chill when it rains. We got him from the Animal Protective League. He’s like a hound with short legs and long ears. He has a bad habit of biting strangers. I never interfere with that. A dog’s got to do what a dog’s got to do. He’s got a chase reflex, too, especially if they’re squirrels, cats, or any dog smaller than him. 

   We jog down Riverside Dr. to Hogsback Ln. and into the Rocky River Metropark, but I have to keep my eyes peeled, because if he sees a badger in the park it’s all over. He doesn’t believe it’s a revenge obsession, but he’s deluded. He got torn up when he was still a puppy. There was a badger with cubs in our backyard, behind the garage, and Scar got too close to them. There was an explosion of yelps, screeches, and barking when it happened. His face was ripped open and we had to rush him to the Animal Clinic.

   I used to eat breakfast with my parents, even though there was always something. “Take your elbows off the table and pass the ketchup. Did you do your homework? Is that a clean shirt?” There would be a quiz about what I did yesterday and what I was going to be doing today. They hardly eat together anymore, anyway. Both of them are always in a hurry to get to work, even though my dad hates his job because of the toads whose business it is. My stepmom teaches at the new middle school down the street. She loves it because she can boss everybody around and make big money doing it. She talks about her paycheck and pension all the time. She made sure all of our neighbors voted her way when a school tax levy was on the ballot last year. Most of them did. She’s not friends with those who didn’t vote her way anymore.

   The first thing I do after I’ve showered and gotten dressed for school is call the Red Door Deli and order a Bagel Bacon Bagel Special. There’s a Chinaman who works there. He has a thick accent. My father is down on immigrants, even though his parents were immigrants, but the Chinaman makes a mean bacon bagel, so he’s in my good book.

   “Hallo!”

   I’m, like, “Hi.”

   “Yes?”

   “I want to order a Bagel Bacon Bagel Special.”

   When he repeats my order, I can barely understand him. “That’s right,” I always say no matter what he says. Everybody there knows me, but he pretends it’s the first time he’s ever talked to me, even though he answers the phone every morning. He’s the one who hands me my bagels at the counter, too.

   The Red Door Deli is across the street from St. Edward High School in Lakewood, in a pint-sized strip shopping center, squeezed between Bubbles, a pit stop for dirty laundry, and Sassy Beauty, a hair salon. I go to the deli every morning and since they know me my main man just hands me my paper bag without a word and I fork over my three dollars.

   What time I get there for my bagels depends, although it’s never later than eight o’clock. It depends on Noah’s father, who drives both of us to school. Noah lives next door. His father works at a garden center in Avon, even though their yard isn’t any better than ours, which is surprising. Noah calls my cell phone when they’re ready to go and I run right over.

   “Pick it up, pick it up,” his father grumbles, shrugging his way into their F-150 Raptor. He always sounds peeved about something, like he’s going to bite my head off if I look at him the wrong way. He drops us off at the Red Door Deli. I get my breakfast. Noah and I walk across the street to school.

   The cafeteria is at the back of the building, which is the new part of the school. We cross the street, squeeze between the chapel and main classroom, and go in through a side door. Our chapel is boss, topped with a gold dome, just like Notre Dame. You can see it from blocks away. It glows in the sun.

   Every morning there are loads of guys in the cafeteria. The TV’s are all on and everybody is watching whatever, which is mostly the news. The flat screens are on every wall except the far wall with the windows. There’s destruction and disaster every morning on the FOX Morning Show, major scariness everywhere, but it doesn’t mess with anybody’s breakfast.

   My father, stepmom, and Billy watch FOX News every night. They agree among themselves that every word the talking heads say is true. It’s doing to them what they say video games are doing to me. It’s making them slow and stupid. What they don’t know is video games make me fast and smart, although my stepmom doesn’t want to hear  it. I’ll leave her in the dust soon enough.

   I wouldn’t want to be on the news being body slammed while inside an airplane hitting a hillside. It’s an instant emergency room, all broken bones. It only takes a second, but forever can happen in a second. Everybody’s so burned up and busted to pieces that dentists have to be brought in to find out who is who.

   One day there was major terrorist news that caught my eye, except it wasn’t on the news. It was on the internet. It was too gruesome for the news. Towelheads captured some scruffy looking people and wouldn’t let them go. It was holy war time. They tied them to posts and blindfolded them. They shot them one at a time, although they didn’t shoot to kill. They shot them in the legs. Then they went back and shot them in the arms. The internet loves blood and guts.

   Our military is totally rad and could take them out, but nobody is going to win that war. It’s an epic fail over there. It’s been going on forever. I hope they try to come here. We would rumble on their butts. It’s cammo, ammo, and Rambo. Our family has plenty of guns in the attic and we have plenty of ammunition, too. I’m not sure about everything we have, though. Billy is the only one who knows for sure.

   “I have two 12-gauge’s, a semi-automatic pistol, a .22 Sig Sauer, a big bore 14-gauge, and an AK-47 semi-automatic,” Billy says, looking full of himself. “I have more, but the rest of it isn’t any of your business.”

   Billy is like that. He’s my older half-brother. He lives on the third floor and doesn’t let anybody in his room. It’s under lock-and-key, starting with his bedroom door. My stepmom is good with it. It wouldn’t be good for me if I tried it. He wears tight-fitting clothes and goes to Cleveland State University. He wants to be a policeman or an army man. He’ll be gone in two or three years. I can’t wait for that to happen.

   His arsenal is technically my father’s, because he bought most of it, but they’re totally my half-brother’s. Billy buys guns for himself now that he’s turned eighteen and become an adult. Before that he wasn’t allowed. He was still a child. He says he’s grown up now. He says lots of things.

   We go shooting on my grandfather’s farm in Michigan. Our family goes to the farm every summer to visit my stepmom’s family. My grandfather says that whenever anybody says you don’t need a gun, you’d better make sure you have one that works. Anything other than the Second Amendment sticks in his craw. “They always want to take guns away from the people who didn’t do it,” he says. Last summer I shot so many rounds off at the farm, at targets, at trees, even at nothing, that I got a blister on my hand.

   I have my own gun, although it’s not exactly a real one. It’s a G & G Carbine air soft gun. It’s not real, but it looks, feels, and  acts like the real deal. It shoots BB’s instead of bullets. Ted Nugent said the BB gun is the most important gun in the history of American weaponry. He should know. He has his own name brand BB’s. Air soft ammo is plastic, not metal. They leave a welt when they smack skin.

   My father bought it for me. He didn’t tell my stepmom. He gets nitpicked on a daily basis. It’s not from Target or anyplace like that. It cost almost four hundred dollars. My friends, Nick and Jake, and I use Grudge Tactical pellets when we’re out shooting each other. The pellets are coated with powder, so they leave a mark on your clothes. 

   Nobody talks about guns at St. Ed’s, not us, and not our teachers. Even though everybody runs guns down, when they say anything at all, Mr. Rote, our religion teacher, told us self-defense is in the Good Book and told us about St. Aquinas and taking care of business. Mr. Rote said it’s best to shoot first and ask questions later. He said the Dalai Lama says the same thing. Nobody asked him who that was, since nobody cared about any Lama.

   “It’s your responsibility to defend your faith, your family, and your country,” he said. “It’s a duty to defend church and country from evil men.” He didn’t say much more than that. He plays the guitar. He’s probably never had a gun in his hands his whole life. What does he know? We don’t have metal detectors at St. Ed’s like they do at public schools, but if anyone ever brought a gun to our school that would be the end. They would be expelled and never be allowed back.

   You can wear pajamas to public school, but at St. Ed’s we have to wear a dress shirt and tie, pressed pants, and black shoes. You can’t even have too much style in your hair. When you’re in a Catholic school there’s more expected of you. If you’re a St. Ed’s man everybody expects you to be a good person. What you do in public school is up to you, which isn’t always a good thing. Not everybody is a good kid, no sir. There are plenty of rotten apples.

   When I was in middle school big kids would make fun of small kids with learning disabilities. They picked on the younger specimens. They would walk right up to them, start being mean, and push them around. They would go after the ones with ADHD or Tourette’s, edge on them, and make fun of them.

   From sixth grade on it was all about bullying kids who were shy or different, especially in gym class. There was a posse, led by Tristan and Justin. They were complete dirtbags. I would try to help, as long as the monsters weren’t there, the ones who say they don’t punch you in the back, they punch you in the face.

   “You shouldn’t act up like that,” I told them whenever I could.

   “Shut up.”

   “Leave them alone, make fun of somebody else.”

   “Yeah, sure, beat it.”

   They wouldn’t stop. It wasn’t like they were in class, so they could keep doing it and doing it. They thought they were so superior. That’s how they got the stupid kids to like them. That’s the thing about Catholic schools and public schools. Guys don’t do that at Catholic schools. I’m sure some do, but not like that. So many public school kids are dipsticks. They learn to think by watching cartoons. 

   If a teacher at a Catholic school got wind of bullying like that there would be no problem seeing the trouble you were in. All hell would break loose. When you’re in a Catholic school there’s a lot more expected of you. You’re expected to be a better person. You have to take charge of yourself and take the bull by the tail. It’s a big change when you leave public school for good. I didn’t go to a parochial grade school. I went to a public grade school. I didn’t have eight years of dress rehearsal. It was a big change for me.

   The food is better at St. Ed’s than it is at public schools, where it’s mostly grown in boxes and cans. Their cooks carry X-Acto knives instead of spatulas. At St. Ed’s we have real cooks and we’re served real food, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. No sugar drinks are allowed. The milk is low fat. It doesn’t pay to be fat at St. Ed’s. It’s the Breakfast of Champions, but I still bring my Bagel Bacon Bagel Special most mornings, because we don’t get enough food.

   There are rules about everything, even about how many calories we’re allowed. I don’t get enough for cross-country and the football players always complain about their portions. Football is the most important thing at St. Ed’s. Everybody knows where the goalposts are. We won states last year, so this year we are the defending state champions.

   When school started in the fall we were 5^th in the USA Today poll and 6^th in the ESPN poll. That’s in the whole country, not just Ohio. That’s how good we are. At St. Ed’s it’s either football season or it’s waiting for football season. We say it’s faith, family, and touchdowns. Sometimes it almost seems like it means more than Heaven and Hell. It puts pep in everybody’s step when we win. I tried football in grade school, but it didn’t work out. I was more bantam than bulky and then I broke my collarbone. Now I love running.

   The football players boycotted lunch one day. It was a big stir. My friend Rick, who is a 6-foot-3-inch 220-pound linebacker, said he burns more than 3,000 calories during three hours of weight training and practice after school. “We are getting hungry even before the practice starts,” he told one of the vice-principals. “Our metabolisms are all sped up.”

   “I could not be more passionate about this,” the food supervisor said, making a speech the next day before lunch. Grown-ups are always making speeches, masterminds on their soapboxes. “I want to solve this problem,” she said, looking smug and serious. She had everybody fill out cards about what we did and didn’t like about our meals. We all laughed about it. Everybody knew nothing was going to change. They’re always trying to put it over on us with their plans and schemes. Grown-ups do what’s good for them, not for anybody else, not even other grown-ups.

   They got our cafeteria right. It is the nicest one I’ve ever seen. There are skylights over the atrium, polished wood floors, oblong tables, and ergonomic chairs. Everything is super modern. Somebody’s father died and gave the school a ton of money, millions of it, as soon as he was six feet under. He was probably trying to make it up to God about something. The whole school is up-to-date, even though it was built in 1949, on land that used to be a feeding stop for cattle trains. Back then if you got a detention you had to help dig out the new basement with a shovel. Punishment was about being blue collar for a day, made to work with your hands. St. Edward High School in 2011 isn’t about working with your hands, unless it’s tapping on a keyboard in the computer lab.

   When I check the time on my cell phone and it’s 8:25 I wolf down what’s left of my Bagel Bacon Bagel Special and pop up fast because my first class is at 8:30. Being late for Mr. Rote’s Roman Catholic religion class would be the worst thing I could do to start my day. If I did there would be crime and punishment. When we hit the hallway it’s every freshman for himself and the almighty against all.

Excerpted from “School Days.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC, from stickball in the streets to the Mob on the make.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City, 1956. President Eisenhower on his way to the opening game of the World Series. A hit man waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication