Man Talk: Part 2

(Continued from Part 1)

.....“Hey, Spielberg.” A voice, darkened by early manhood, broke his creative trance. He turned around and saw “the Manukyan goons” as David and Paul called them, because they went to Manukyan - a private Pre-K -12 institution on the other side of town where the hardcore Circle folks whose parents had money went. Paul had gone there before he transferred to public school, where he met David, in third grade after it became clear to his mother and father that Manukyan’s shoebox environment left him gasping for breath. The students there wore plaid uniforms, studied in classrooms with posters of Mt. Ararat on every wall, and learned "dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" along with their times tables. Girls were expected to be white lace and the boys were trained to be testosterone meteor showers, as the three that stood before him definitely were. The hulking, excessively hairy leader of the group, Sarkis, loomed over David, and his henchmen Kyle and Tigran stood on either side of the frightened boy.

“I-I-I’m not Spielberg.” He stammered, unable to think of anything better to say.

“I-I-I…...” Kyle mocked the boy’s tortured stutter, to the delight of his two friends.

“What kind of camera did Spielberg use, anyway?” Tigran asked with feigned interest that David’s sarcasm detector was too faulty to pick up.

“Depends.” David lit up; he loved it when people asked him questions about the exact make and models of camera used to make famous films, about which he knew an ungodly amount. “I think ‘E.T.’ was filmed with -”

Before he could tell Tigran the answer, David felt the hard cushion of the concrete wall hit his shoulders and back. The pain took a few seconds to really release its full power, and a groan formed at the back of his throat. But he wouldn’t dare let it loose in front of Sarkis and his small mafia, not even after each boy had taken a turn kicking him and left the area shouting insults that are popular with adolescent boys. Pain, his father had told him once, was weakness leaving the body - and for him, that was enough. It seemed like he was doomed to be forever ostracized for some typo in his being that he couldn’t identify, and pushed around without having it in him to push back. He confided this in Paul later during his yearly vacation at Paul’s summer house on Huntington Beach.

“They used to mess with me all the time when we were little. If I were with you that day, I would have kicked their teeth in.” Paul said, puffing out his bare chest and slamming his foot into the sand.

“Really?” David asked, as he fiddled with the lighter he was using to start a fire for Paul’s charcoal grill.

“.....No. No, not really.” Paul sighed, sounding defeated. His chest deflated back to its normal, skinny state, and he scratched his chin, where a tiny beard was germinating.

“You know Little Michael?” He asked. Little Michael was Paul’s neighbor who, at only five-three, lived up (or rather, down) to his nickname. At school, he barely spoke to anyone and often spent his free periods holed up in the library, but three days a week, he donned his scout uniform and spent his afternoons singing traditional songs until his throat was dry with the other Circle kids, who freely showered him with their respect that so eluded David and Paul.

“Yeah.” David replied, not understanding what this had to do with his worries.

“I remember I got home from rehearsal one day around the same time he gets home from scouts. He had his backpack with him, of course, that twenty-pound monster that looks like it’s from World War II. Well, when I saw him walking up the street towards my house, I called him over like, ‘That’s a nice bag, Michael.’ As soon as I lured him into bringing it close enough for me to see it, I threw it over my fence into Horace’s yard.” Paul paused to control his laughter.

“Are you serious?” David said, eyes wide. “Horace”, the middle-aged recluse who lived next door to Paul, was the Boo Radley of his street - only unlike that gentle fellow, Horace was actually likely to harm anyone who dared set foot on his property. It was rare to see him rear his head outside, which he only seemed to do when any wayward balls or toys from the neighborhood children ended up in his backyard.

“I ran back into my house, and Mike was just standing there.” Paul continued. “All of a sudden, the bag comes flying back over the fence. You should have seen Horace chasing him down the street. ‘I’m gonna kill you!’ “ Paul comically shook his fist. He was in stitches, but David wasn’t. Sure, Little Michael surrounded himself with people who thought David and Paul less worthy than the dirt on their shoes, but the poor kid himself had never even so much as looked at them Paul cross-eyed.

“Why?” David smiled weakly, trying to hide how uneasy the story made him feel.

“Why not?” Paul brushed more sand off of himself, and leaned over, as if to foreshadow the importance of what he was about to say.

“The thing is to hit those people before they can touch you.” He said in the sly whisper of a cool older brother. “Think of it as a condom for your ego.”

“ ‘Condom for your ego’?” David, half repulsed and half amused, shook his head. “This is why I write our scripts and you don’t.”

“Speaking of condoms,.” Paul elbowed David to draw his attention to one of the women, with toned, tanned legs and hair the color of wheat, sitting leisurely in the sand. “Would you?”

David looked up from the fire he was attempting to start and hesitated. Would he, with someone who he had only looked at for a couple of seconds? Something about it felt corrupt, and went against his romantic sensibilities - not that David was too familiar with romance or any of its trappings at seventeen. Unlike Paul and other men-in-training he knew, he felt that carnal pleasure shouldn’t be a final destination - but rather, a rest stop along the way. But he would never tell that to Paul, not unless he wanted to be ridiculed for decades to come.

“You kidding?” David answered with exaggerated gusto, sculpting an hourglass in the air with his hands. “Does she come here often?”

“Every summer. Her uncle has a house here.” Paul spread himself out on his towel. “She’s not kosher, though.”

“Kosher?”

“She’s a full-fledged Circle girl, if I’ve ever seen one.”

“How do you know?”

“What do you mean ‘how do I know’? That’s Nazeli.” Paul said, and when the name visibly didn’t ring a bell for David, he clarified, “The famous Nazeli. From Manukyan.”

It clicked for David. Every time his family discussed always-do-wells in the community, this girl’s name came up. Nazeli teaching orphans abroad. Nazeli speaking at a lecture. Nazeli playing the duduk in an ensemble. He had never met her, but felt like he knew her by proxy, just because of all the stories he had heard. She might be nice, for all he knew, but side-by-side, the two looked like milk and wine, so for David, the question was not “Would he”, but “Would she?”.....

(To be continued)