The summer before ninth grade, I fell in love with fire. On weekends, when my parents were golfing and my two brothers were holed up in their rooms, I would douse one of my few flawed model cars with gasoline, set it afire, and drag it behind my bike, creating spectacular curbside wrecks. One day in the garage I inadvertently dribbled a bit of gas on the concrete, and when I struck the match to light the model, the flame ran along the floor and set the can on fire. While the flames danced on the can’s silver top, the only thing I heard in my head was my father’s order, “Save the house, boy.” I lifted the can and carried it outside, burning my fingers badly. After my frantic phone call, the hook and ladder came, and a slickered man dusted dead the can in two seconds flat. Later my dad joined a shamed me at the hospital, and we watched white pus pockets billow like pup tents on three finger pads where the can’s handle had melted my flesh. Surprise: The hoary little lumps elicited his forgiveness. He was awed by my boneheaded courage. I felt distinguished then, a prince of clowns, wearing a white garden glove on my bad hand.
As class spectacle, I was glad to be saved in the second week when the hall buzz left me for a new student, a 20-year-old seventh-grader. His name was Orrie Wolf, and we were told up front that he was retarded. (I’ve changed Orrie’s name and the others in this story.) Before he arrived, Mr. Kavanaugh, our vice principal, announced on the PA that “Orrie is a special young, ah, man, who’ll make us all a wonderful new friend.” One kid wondered aloud whether guys like that weren’t supposed to stay in the asylum where they’d be protected by guards, and then we too would be protected–we, the normal ones. “Heavens, no,” said my English teacher. “They only lock up the dangerous types and this, ah, boy isn’t dangerous. He’s different from them; he’s only marginally retarded. Mentally lacking, yes, but emotionally deficient? No.”
“In Africa”–he began by clearing his throat and raising his head like General MacArthur–“there once was, oh, a hundred or a thousand greedy game catchers from the zoo who, who took way more animals than they needed.” He paused, scratched his face. “Not two by two but, ah, ten by ten even though it was OK to have a few, a few, but not so many that, ah, they’d all be gone. Elephants are the-the-the smartest animals and they can’t be caught.” He paused and searched the sky, then his words rushed forth all at once. “Never must we forget that all of the lions and tigers and bears were being carried away until oh my, oh my, that’s when the elephants flew in. To the rescue.” Orrie was now spitting like a washing machine on rinse. “Pink elephants, here they come, big, big elephants, and they were very pink, pinker than pigs, in the morning sun, flapping their great ears,” and we all gasped in amazement. Orrie would then flap his arms and we’d hoot with praise. “Before the game catchers could load their guns,” he went on, “the pink elephants had freed every one of the animals–”
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One day I passed Kavanaugh and Orrie talking animatedly in the hallway. They were standing before Mr. K.’s frosted-glass vice-principal’s door. It was propped open, and you could read his black-lettered name backward through the glass. Though Kavanaugh’s eyes said to me, don’t you dare eavesdrop, I listened anyway, walking by very slowly in a crush of bodies, then smacking my head like I’d forgotten something and reversing course.
“But so did, so did other kids and then they said that the test was too hard.”
Because we had no classes in common, Orrie’s escapades came to me secondhand. Most often the stories issued from Randy MoMeyer and Wade Symanski, the two most delinquent and boastful flattopped hoods at Horace Mann Junior High. Randy and Wade duped Orrie into liking them through the sheer amount of attention they gave him. They became Orrie’s everyday pals, picking him up in the morning from his group home, taking him back at night. After school they usually stopped at the Y, where during long games of bumper pool they championed Orrie’s storytelling prowess. While Orrie performed, Randy would slyly roll one red ball right in front of the hole, so when Orrie finished the elephant tale he could tap the ball in and exclaim delightedly, “There you go squirrel, another nut for the winter.”
