Hate Faces

by Jerry Vilhotti

When fever hit nine year old Johnny, he felt he was getting smaller and smaller and then bigger and bigger. Once his thumb grew larger and larger until it became the size of half his body and then his fingers became pinheads. He had refused to go to the room after his mother had felt his genitals to see if his fever had increased. It was an old country thing since the rulers didn't think workers should have such luxury items. Johnny ran to beneath the table.  He dodged his mother's touch for her hands were cold like icicles to the skin.

"No!" she insisted. "No." She hadn't meant the room upstairs. She meant the room downstairs where he was now sleeping alone since his seventeen year old brother had gone off to the same reform school where Lepke had learned many years before the lesson from some sadistic guards that to hate more was to kill easier; that humanity was nothing but so much waste to be flushed away after all the nutrients were used.

... "Len, time to go back to school!" the mother yelled; wishing she were calling him to go for a job since money was more important to her than knowledge. Her favorite expression was: "Get a job!" And if one didn't heed the advice—"Bum!"—was added.

Her favorite son, whom she wanted to be an example of how a real man could have control and not be mesmerized by womanly smiles, told her after lunch he was going to take a short nap and he asked Johnny to join him but the eight year old refused. He didn't want to say why in front of his mother but she insisted he go since he had gone to bed very late the night before and after a half hour his brother got off his ass—angry that he could not penetrate the boy so tense Johnny held himself together—and they hurriedly put their pants on and were off toward school. After a block Leny took a bus downtown to go shoot pool and told Johnny he didn't know nothing or see nothing. Did he understand? Johnny nodded.

The eighth grade teacher sent for Johnny. Her face was the meanest Johnny had ever seen having in it all the hate that had happened between her people whom their rulers considered "niggers"; proud to have been the inventors of a caste system to separate the worthy from the unworthy.

She was hunched over her arms as she asked: "Where is Leonard?" Johnny thought and he thought for he didn't want to get his brother into trouble and after she repeated the question again—only louder—he said: "He left for school!"

"Well he isn't here!" she said attempting to slap him as he flinched back away from her reach which got all the big people to laugh wildly in that certain way Burywater people laughed; nervous with full anxiety.

Leny One N did get into trouble and Johnny was pinched by the principal, who looked exactly like the pictures he had seen of George Washington whom many of the "Founding Fathers" wanted to make a king, and after every twisting pinch on his arm—she asked him if he were going to be like his two time stayed back in the eighth grade hooky playing brother.

Her pinches hurt very much. She wore the same hatred on her face. Johnny wondered to himself if all the people in this place called Burywater, a hundred miles north of his beloved Bronx where he had been born among people who could laugh and cry and still believe a better day awaited, were born with that hate etched on their faces?

After school Johnny went into a woods, where once Mattatuck Indians had roamed before the conquerors came after fleeing the Massachusetts colony's religious Taliban-like leaders and then feeling that they were better Christians than the unfair ones they had escaped from began to massacre the ugly unworthy heathens, to sit for a long time alone. He was most happy when alone. That was the time no one could try and hurt him. Hurt him. Hurt him.

Copyright © Jerry Vilhotti 2003

Calla la Moodonda

by Jerry Vilhotti

Uncle Ear Johnny's father's oldest brother—and his father bore responsibility for the nickname born the day they all went to a movie and Uncle Seppe's ear could be seen covering one-third of it—with whom he would have a rivalry ever since he was five years old and Seppe seven years old coming back from their first day of school and the older boy reciting the Brazilian alphabet in front of his Black godfather and other land owners while Gaetano couldn't so making their father—and Johnny's father would tell all that he wasn't his real father—decided that his first born would be the one to get a schooling and the second of a total brood of seven would begin to learn the art of hard work and would by the age of ten drive a wagon pulled by six horses all by himself delivering goods from their dry goods store through a Brazilian forest ... Johnny's father would often tell his favorite son of the land of his birth how among ferns, brazilwood almost all destroyed, and shrub twice the size of his fourteen year old body he had confronted the sixteen foot snake blocking his path through a forest where streaks of light shone through the many branches of trees becoming themselves more monsters; frightening companions to the snake he was about to kill. He took out his big knife and cautiously slipped between the crooked shapes of trees that were engulfed by twisted fig vines as thick as both his hands joined. He moved softly toward the snake that was pausing to smell the good world about it. the boy ignored the wetness of leaves touching his half naked body and only the cries of a macaw overcame the loud thumping of his heart—which he feared could be smelled by the snake and only the elation he felt when striking the creature's body to gush blood made him throw away his fear. Again, again he struck down on the demon with its slit eyes and crooked tongue that began to strike out at the insane invisible god attacking. Feelng like a man he held pieces of the large snake up to the sky and a mighty toucan three feet in size screeched approvingly from high above in the middle branches of an upside-down tree and as he stood there blue butterflies as big as his face flew over his arm ... When their family returned to the land of rocks and stones and Uncle Ear was in uniform with Poppa Hemingway dodging German and Austrian artillery because he had been born in the land of the Appian Way but Gaetano would tell the drinkers of blood he would not go saying he was a Braziliero therefor not subject to the insanity of going into a war that was going to end all wars as if that expression could dissuade the mortfama, dying of hunger looking for a meaning in their meaningless lives; making greed get in the way of fulfilling a promise never meant to be kept; who worshipped money thinking it was more powerful than any god—believing it was a small price to pay (human life) for the good pseudo aphrodisiac feeling of worth—and in their middle years of life before Johnny was born Uncle Ear invited his dear brother to dinner and when he told his wife Rosaria who was going slowly blind to drop the macaroni into the boiling salty water to be blended with gravy made in the juices of meats so could not be what hyphenated peoples called a sauce. After the eight minutes of cooking to an al dente state of texture—what came out to be a pasta were lady's underwear.

Johnny's father carrier of one of the weakest stomachs in the world never again would eat at his brother's table. Never never again.

Copyright © Jerry Vilhotti 2003