My Sex and Violence

I had this Puerto Rican friend Al, good looking kid, but really stupid. Growing up, the Cubans in Miami used to make Puerto Ricans the butt of countless stupid jokes; the equivalent of Polish jokes in the US a few generations back. In 2007, it’s easy to feel disgusted about racism and social stereotypes from just a few years ago. But racism in the neighborhoods where I grew up was just a fact of life. Every race or culture had their stereotype, and Puerto Ricans had a reputation for stupidity.

Al and his family were the personification of the stereotype. Al’s little sister would tear the heads off her Barbie dolls and kill her pets. Their ugly brown little lap dog was just mean. His mom drove a silver Buick Riviera, and would run around the house in mismatched designer clothes and dye burned hair screaming at the top of her lungs.

Al’s father always wore a blazer with blue jeans and penny loafers. He was a good looking guy just like his son, except he was involved in some sort of shady business that was a mystery to all the kids in the neighborhood. He drove a silver Cadillac with the first cell phone I ever saw. A big white rotary house phone bolted between the two front seats. It was identical to a house phone, only it was in the car.

Even though Al’s family was tacky and insane, you wouldn’t know Al was stupid by looking at him. As long as he kept his mouth shut, he looked almost normal. He was after all a good looking kid. But alas, he was the dumbest of the bunch. And if there’s one event that really personified this, it was The Trampoline Incident.

My friend C had a trampoline in his back yard. When we jumped two or three at a time, even as kids we had enough sense of self preservation to give each other our space. Trampolines could be dangerous, and none of us wanted to end up like that drooling quadraplegic kid at school that everyone tried to ignore. So we NEVER invited Al to come jump with us. We knew better.

One day tough, the single transistor in Al’s skull must have somehow misfired, and he figured out that we were trying to get rid of him so we could go jump on the trampoline.

He called me on it immediately: “Hey FRAAAANK!” (that’s not my name, but that’s what he would call me.) “Are you guys going to jump on the trampoline?”

“No Al, we’re not”

“Can I come jump with you guys?”

“No Al, you can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re stupid Al, and the trampoline is dangerous. And when C and I start tandem jumping, you’re going to want to do it too. And you’re going to do something stupid like try to jump over me, but it’s not going to work, and somebody’s going to get hurt. Now if you’re stupid enough to break your neck on the trampoline, I don’t give a shit. But I’m not going to let you break mine.”

“But FRAAAANNNK! I promise I won’t try anything stupid! I promise!”

As a 14 year old kid, I completely missed the irony of a stupid person promising not to act stupid.

“No”

“FRAANNK please!! Please!!!! Please!!!”

Jees. He looked so pathetic. As I squinted into his big kid/puppy eyes, I felt a little thing inside me collapse slightly. Al really did want to jump. I looked at C and he shrugged. “I’m not jumping with him.”

“OK fine, Al, you can come jump on the trampoline. But I swear, if you try anything stupid, I’m going to kick you in the fuckin’ face. OK?”

“OK.”

So we shuffled across the nicely mowed lawn and started jumping. Al watched C and I go at it in tandem, and how C, with his larger body mass could catapult me about twice as high by timing his jumps just right. It really is difficult to do justice to the feeling of jumping on a trampoline at five PM on a warm sunny day. Your eyes squinting at the sun in the blue sky, the wind in your hair, and that sense of weightlessness you chase til your lungs burn in your chest and you have to take a break. It felt pretty good.

And then it was Al’s turn.

“Hey Al” I said. “When we tandem jump, don’t try to jump over me alright? It doesn’t work that way. If you try to jump over me, I’ll fly up into your crotch and somebody will get hurt. I know you’re going to be tempted, but don’t try it OK? It’s against the laws of physics and you could break my neck.”

“Yeah no problem.”

“I’m fuckin serious. Al. If you try and jump over me I’m going to kick you in the fucking face.”

“Yeah man. I got it.”

So Al and I start jumping tandem. First we jump together, synchronized, then slowly we start jumping sequentially. I’m up at the apex of my leap, flying in the sky, as Al, at the bottom of his leap springs up from the trampoline. I feel the wind rushing around me as I come down and make contact, prepping for another leap, just as Al hits his apex and then, wait a second, what’s he doing?

Al is right above me coming down with this big stupid smile on his face. For a split second, time stood still and I could read what was passing for a thought in Al’s peanut of a mind. “Since we’re jumping sequentially, while ‘Frank’ is down there, I can jump over him and land on the other side. It’s going to be so cool!”

But it wasn’t cool. It was stupid, and against the laws of physics. So much so, that just as I achieved maximum upward momentum and he achieved maximum downward momentum, my head went right into his crotch. And so as to drive home the point that this was against the laws of physics, my neck made a wet crackling sound as it smashed into his testicles.

“Aeiiiiii!” was all I heard from Al as he crumpled up into a ball in mid air. My limp body bounced into the trampoline pad as my neck snapped over the edge and the rest of my body followed. I flipped over the frame and landing face first in the grass.

I lay there perfectly still. As C ran towards me, I couldn’t hear a thing. It was like the movies when the sound goes out after an explosion. The pain was so intense that my body shut down and I felt nothing. All I could think about was the fresh watery smell of those blades of grass pushing against my cheek, and how because I had felt sorry for Al, and had caved in a moment of weakness when he pleaded with me, that I was now destined to be that drooling quadraplegic kid in school that everyone tried to ignore. If I would have had the ability to feel anything at that moment, I would have hated myself for being weak.

Slowly though, the pins and needles started shooting through my body, and the severe pain in my neck and back let me know with little subtlety that I was not paralyzed.

C helped me up, as his parents came running outside. They had seen the dramatic spill and my ears could vaguely make out C’s dad screaming that he had warned us not to try to jump over each other. My cheeks flushed red, embarrassed that C’s dad thought I was so stupid, that he would have to repeat the obvious to me. The burning in my face hurt more than the throbbing ache in my neck or the pins and needles waking up in my body. And for making me feel this way, at that moment, I hated Al more than anything in the world.

After mustering the strength to stand up, we found Al crumpled up in a ball in the grass on the far side of the trampoline. He must have also flipped off the frame and fallen on his head. As I limped over, I could hear him whimpering in pain. Something about his neck and his balls. Sure enough, one arm was stretched down to his crotch where my head had cannonballed his testicles and the other was on his neck.

“Frank, I think I broke my neck.” He whined. And suddenly it hit me. Something from deep inside me, some ancient built in kid instinct wrapped in contempt whispered in my brain that Al was lying. He was pretending to be hurt so that we wouldn’t be so hard on him for doing exactly the stupid thing we had told him not to do. He was trying to weasel out of his responsibility by making us feel sorry for him. Instead of compassion for his suffering, though, as I looked down at his crumpled egg of a body lying in the grass, an intense disgust erupted inside me. Maybe it was that I hated myself for having caved in the first place and letting him jump with us. Maybe it was that this kid and his kind really were stupid. Or maybe it was something else. Whatever it was, I took a step back, wound up, and kicked Al in the face as hard as I fucking could.

His head shot back with snap, and… No seriously, I didn’t kick him. A part of me wanted to, but another part of me imagined the lawsuit and the fact that there were three witnesses. Besides, an event like that on my permanent record would really have screwed up my chances of getting into a good college. So instead of kicking Al in the face like I had promised, I swallowed my pride, and with that little twinge of self hatred a man gets when he breaks a promise, I turned around and walked away. “You’re a fucking cocksucker Al, I’m glad you’re hurt. You’re never jumping on the fucking trampoline with me again.”

“But my neck is broken.” Al whiningly insisted. Eventually, when C and I walked away, and he realized we weren’t buying it, he got on his bike and rode home to his whacked out screaming family.

If this would have happened to me as an adult, I would have stopped socializing with Al after that incident. But we were 14, and somehow, our friendship recovered.

I learned an important lesson the trampoline incident that day. Never let your compassion for a dangerously stupid person let you forget that they are a dangerously stupid person, and not to be trusted with your well being.

Years later, after Al and I lost touch, someone shot Al’s good looking father in the face and killed him. Drug deal gone bad.
But years before all that happened, and just a few months after the trampoline incident, Al introduced me to his girlfriend Belinda (not her real name), which I promptly stole. But that’s another story.

M