Hit Me

Abstract

Hit Me Gregory Spatz (bio) Sweet was fastest at the game of knuckles, almost undefeatable, with an uncanny sense of how to feint, how long to wait between strikes, and when to drive his knuckles into the flesh of an opponent's fist, rapid-fire, whap, whap, whap, whap. He'd roll back the sleeve of his jacket to show the shiny circular scar he'd burned into himself with the hot rim of his pot pipe sometime the previous year—a way to mark himself apart, piss off his mom, ask for attention, demonstrate the lasting seriousness of his dedication to being a fuckup, or maybe to prove once and for all that everything was a joke and there was no reason for anything. My Satanic vaccination, he called it sometimes. I don't even fuckin remember, I was so high, he'd say at others. He'd make a fist and stick it into the circle of friends, waiting for any one of them to accept the challenge. Fist to fist. Feint, fake out, and hit until you whiffed, fist driving through air, then take your turn being hit until you dodged a blow. A game so pure in its primitiveness it never failed to draw them around in a ring. Twin fists hovering, beating, and pressed together like sharks' heads, or like flesh ball-peen hammers raining down blows, one boy or the other howling with pain and laughter at each direct hit because it stung a little but never that much, not until later, hands barely able to hold a pen, an ache spreading through the fingers and forearm, the skin along the backs of their hands mounded with blue-yellow bruises. "Yee! Fuckin-A YEE!" Sweet would yell, until someone in the group yelled it back like a rallying cry, "Fucking motherfucker YEEEEEEE!" they'd yell back and forth, the rush of sensation tweaking through Sweet from his thighs to his throat like a compressed spring releasing, making him dizzy, buzzing all the bones in his head in concert with the same impulses by which he knew, almost without looking, how to anticipate every move in the little theater of pain made by his fist and another boy's, the rest of them standing around watching—Come on, come on, bunch of pansies—striking, striking, being struck. Will met Sweet and his crew selling Sweet a dime baggie of his uncle's weed at lunch earlier that year. He threw in an extra joint for good measure and then smoked it with them to be sure they liked it. Harsh crap, stems and brown dust and curls of gold leaf concealing seeds that sometimes popped or flared in your face mid-toke, threatening a mini-conflagration. A taste like Scotch tape and burnt glue that Will masked with flavored rolling papers—strawberry, raspberry—but a good clear head high to last for hours. Shit. You can't get shit this good for three times as much money in New York, Will said. Straight from Mexico. Acapulco Gold. A-co-pokey Gold. Plenty more where that came from! Maui [End Page 138] Wowie too. You just say the word. These guys weren't Will's type really, but he was new in this backwater New England town, this school, needed friends, and there was something about Sweet. The first time he saw him cuss out a lunchroom monitor and do a kind of scrambled handspring dive over the lunchroom table and leapfrog a chair before turning to yell "Fucking YEEE," and slam open the crash bars of the door going outside, he thought, Interesting. Also, Out of control. Also, Good times. He was like some kind of living cartoon character, always flipping up his eyelids to leer jelly-eyed as a zombie, pulling the over-flexible skin of his face in ways to make you think it was a rubber mask about to peel off, shaking his head hard enough to make his cheeks and ears flap and rattle with a motorboat sound. He had stumpy, rotten brown teeth pitted with resinous-looking decay, a short, orange tongue with a cleft tip. That day, their...