A Spastic Eating Lunch

Ch. 12 of An Evening With God

As a product of Sonora, Mexico, which had produced the famous Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Fernando Valenzuela, Calvin’s dad Humberto had grown up adoring baseball. He’d begun playing catch with Calvin not long after Calvin, always athletically prodigious, began walking only 30 weeks after being born. By seven, Calvin was already the second or third boy picked for teams when the 9-, 10-, 11-, and 12-year-olds in the neighborhood began organizing pickup games in the big vacant lot across Highway 18 from Home Depot, where many of their dads congregated every morning hoping to be offered a day’s work. When word got around that there was going to be a San Rodrigo Little League, Calvin begged Humberto to sign him up for it, but Humberto, a firm believer in obeying the rules, told Calvin he’d have to wait until he was nine. During his wait, he became the first boy chosen for the vacant lot games. Humberto not only signed Calvin up to play in his first season of eligibility, but volunteered to help out the manager of whichever team Calvin wound up on.

Humberto enjoyed having a couple of cold beers at the Hot Spot on Friday nights with fellow day laborers. Only a few of their sons played in the new Little League because enrollment had cost $50, a large sum to a day laborer who never knew for sure that he’d get another day’s work. In the week before the official start of the season, he’d told Calvin that he’d seen Bud Timmons, whose son Rex was one of Calvin’s teammates, at the Spot.

Bud's construction company was the team’s sponsor. In exchange for buying their uniforms and basic equipment, he’d got to name the team the Builders. Though Bud’s various foremen commonly hired Latino dudes from the Home Depot parking lot, Humberto had never worked for him, as he understood from some of the others that the company’s accountant’s math could be bad, always in Timmons Builders’ favor. That is, they underpaid, and never promptly. There was a Trump Pence bumper stickers on Bud’s truck, and he’d been heard, with too many beers in him, to speak ill of “wetbacks”.

In the Builders’ first two games, Calvin got seven hits in eight at-bats, including the first two over-the-fence home runs hit in the League’s brand new Timmons-built ball park. Rex Timmons struck out all six times he came to the plate, and Humberto suggested he come to the team’s Wednesday afternoon practice early so for some one-on-one instruction.

On the Friday night before the second weekend of the season, Humberto came home early from his weekly cold beer with a black eye, blood on his jean jacket, and the right side of his face conspicuously swollen. With one too many margaritas in him, Bud Timmons had decided he was offended by Humberto’s offer to instruct young Rex, and a pair of the white dudes who worked full time for his construction company had beaten Humberto up in full view of several of Humberto’s friends. Given that a couple of those friends had forged documentation, and a couple more no documentation at all, there would be no going to the police.

The president of the new league phoned before the Builders’ next practice to tell Humberto that it was probably a good idea for Calvin to withdraw from the team. He regretted that he was unable to refund Calvin’s enrollment fee.

No one could keep Calvin off the middle school team, or teams. He was the quarterback of his 7th and 8th grade football teams, the top scorer and best defensive player on their basketball teams, and both the star pitcher and best hitter on the baseball teams. He set a school record in the 100-yard dash, and got very good grades. San Rodrigo High School’s football and basketball coaches were commonly seen at his games, licking their lips and trying to figure out how to get him to play their respective sports, rather than the other guy’s.

Anglo and Latinx kids didn’t mix very much at Dolores Huerta Middle School, which the Anglo kids and their parents referred to as Dolores, as though to de-hispanicize it. Because of his athleticism, Calvin wasn’t required to prove himself with his fists, as most of his male classmates had been or would be, everyone’s assumption being that someone who could hit a baseball as far as he, would be a formidable boxer too. The closest he came to having to prove the fighting ability that everyone took for granted was when he discouraged a pair of white 8th graders from harassing a girl with a weird name — Limmy or something? He stepped between them, smiling, and asked the boys if they knew that he and Limmy were friends. Angus, the smaller but meaner one, seemed to consider more drastic action, but settled for asking, “Why don’t you mind your own business, Calvino?”

“Good question,” Calvin said, not allowing himself to be antagonized by the vowel Limmy’s tormentor had replaced at the end of his name. “I guess because I know Limmy’s a nice person, and there are twice as many of you as there are of her.” The smile never left his face. He seemed to be doing his best not to embarrass the two boys.

At San Rodrigo High, Calvin ceased to be brown, as he was eagerly annexed by the school’s mostly white jocks. The two coaches agreed on an arrangement by which he wouldn’t have to continue practicing with the football team, whose starting quarterback he quickly became, in the final two weeks of the season. That allowed him to begin practicing with the basketball team. But then the school’s coaches of baseball and soccer, both played in the spring, began growling at each other. They flipped a coin and determined that Calvin would play soccer — fútbol — in 9th and 11th grades, and baseball in 10th and 12th. The coaches agreed that Calvin was the most notable young athlete San Rod had produced since Junior Blumenthal, and, unlike Junior, not a raging asshole.

Rex Timmons’ arrival at SRHS inspired less excitement than Calvin’s, but didn’t go unnoticed among the school’s thugs, many of whom had bought splurge or comparable recreational substances from Rex. He’d become enormous — 6-3 and 215 pounds — and was mean, and so was recruited by the school’s wrestling coach, more widely known, because no one paid much attention to wrestling, as San Rodrigo’s drivers’ ed instructor.

The Jock Block, that portion of the school cafeteria tacitly reserved for the school’s athletes, among whom Calvin had become pre-eminent, got a court jester. Pepe Vasquez was tiny and not at all athletic, but hilarious, and unable to take no for an answer. The first few days he approached the Block, one or another of the jocks would urge him, “Don’t even think about it.” On the fourth day, he didn’t sigh and head for another table, but told the linebacker who’d tried to dissuade him, “I’ve been thinking of little else all week, big boy, and decided to take my chances.” The linebacker’s fiercest glower didn’t keep Pepe from putting his tray down. He and Gorman, the senior quarterback whose job Calvin had taken, got up from the table looking as though they might try to drown Pepe in a boys’ room toilet, only for a previously unheard voice to be heard.

“Leave him alone, guys.”

It was Calvin, feeling his oats for the first time, not throwing his weight around, but voicing his objection to the older jocks’ violent intentions as though they were all in on a private joke. The two older jocks looked at each other. Pepe seated himself.

“So you’re…what…on the badminton team?” Calvin asked him, not mockingly, but as though feeding him a straight line.

“Well, I was,” Pepe said, “but I got shitcanned for using steroids.”

Calvin beamed in amusement, and there was a new kid on The Block.

And a new male member of the student body no one failed to notice — a tenth grader named Willy Reuschel whose parents had apparently decided that his being a spastic shouldn’t prevent his being mainstreamed, educated among non-afflicted kids his age. For the first couple of hours at SRHS, everyone watched silently in horror as he twitched and grimaced and writhed involuntarily. But by lunchtime the school sadists were no longer immobilized by their new classmates’ disability, and intent on making Willy suffer for it.

It was Pepe who alerted his new friends at the Jock Block to what was going on outside, where the loser kids who brought their lunches from home ate. Rex Timmons and three of his friends or customers had sat down on either side of Willy and were dying laughing at the spectacle of him eating his lunch.

As he jumped to his feet in the cafeteria, Calvin seemed alone in feeling someone should intervene, but Pepe was right behind him.

As Willy struggled to eat his lunch, two of the thugs on one side would distract him while their colleagues on his other side spat into his carton of milk, or into his bag of corn chips. Seeing which, Calvin quickened his pace and called, “Hey, hold up a minute, guys.”

Wearing a look of deepest disgust RexTimmons asked. “Why don’t you mind your own business, brownie?”

Calvin smiled and said, “I’d like to do exactly that, Rex. But I don’t think I can unless I know y’all are giving our new classmate a nice welcome.”

“How about we’ll give him any kind of welcome we friggin’ well want to give him?” Rex said. “Or is he your long-lost twin brother or some such shit?” He looked to his three fellow goons, but didn’t get the affirmation he was hoping for. Two of them seemed not to have been comfortable with torturing Willy.

“I think what I’ll do is take Willy into the cafeteria and introduce him to some of my friends,” Calvin said.

“He’s happy right where he’s at,” Rex said. He turned to poor Willy, convulsing with ever less self-control as things grew ever tenser. “Ain’t you, spas-boy?”

Calvin was five inches shorter than Rex, and probably 60 pounds lighter, and still smiling. He addressed Willy. “Need any help getting up, dude? There’s some guys I’d like to introduce you to.”

Rex repositioned himself between Calvin and Willy. “How about you take your little boyfriend back where you came from, brownie, before you get hurt?” Half his little goon squad had slinked off, leaving only one to admire Rex’s intransigence.

“Ooh,” alleged boyfriend Pepe said. “Toxic masculinity. I love it. Any more tricks up your sleeve, big boy? When do you start using the F-word?”

Rex was confused. “Fuck?” he asked, his eyes still locked to Calvin’s.

“I’m guessing he means faggot,” Rex’s remaining acolyte said. “You know what? Maybe we should cool it, dude.” Rex seethed wordlessly.

“You don’t want to continue with this, Rex,” Calvin said, with the utmost serenity. “I remember what your old man did to my old man. I’ll do worse than that to you if you don’t step aside.”

“Fuck you, dude,” Rex said, reddening as he did what Calvin had suggested. “Fuck you and whatever little greaser motherfucker snuck you into my country.”

With nothing more needing to be said, Calvin said no more, but led Willy toward the cafeteria.

“I should have twisted the little fuck’s head off,” Rex told his fellow goon, whose expression incited Rex more eloquently than words could have hoped to.

“Give it a rest, dude,” Fellow Goon said. “Give it a fucking rest.”

In the cafeteria, Calvin introduced Willy to several friends and classmates, and failed to introduce him to the several others who, unnerved by Willy’s condition, by his twitching and grimacing, or by the enormous effort he had to make to speak, suddenly remembered pressing business elsewhere when they saw Calvin glancing their way.

With just a minute or two to go before the bell would propel everyone toward his or her fifth period class, Calvin had the very strange experience of introducing Willy to Priscilla Dougherty, with whom he had English. He’d smiled at, but never spoken to her before, as he’d rarely observed anyone speaking to her. He’d never seen her dressed in anything but black, and she was generally seen, as far as Calvin could tell, as stuck up, though Calvin’s guess was that she was actually very shy, an impression reinforced by her alarmed expression when Calvin led Willy to the corner of the cafeteria where Priscilla hid in a book every day after eating alone.

“We have English together,” Calvin said, to put her at her ease.

“I know,” she muttered, looking around as though trying to determine an escape route. “What do you want?”

“To introduce you to a new friend of mine,” Calvin said, noticing that, for the first time in their brief acquaintanceship, Willy had become still, had ceased to twitch. And a shy smile had replaced his grimace.

“I know who he is,” Priscilla said, smiling in spite of herself. Calvin had never seen her looking anything other than either fearful or miserable. Willy offered her his hand, as steady as Calvin’s own, and as she took it, her smile broadened.

“You’ve met before then?” Calvin asked delightedly.

Priscilla and Willy beamed at each other, in a way that made Calvin afraid one of their smartass schoolmates might yell, “Get a room!”

“Can’t you see?” Priscilla asked him, not taking her eyes off Willy. “He’s God, dude.”

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