The Ishmael Gradsdovic Papers, part twenty


In part twenty of the Ishmael Gradsdovic papers, he feels guilty...


7 July 1994

In seventh grade the sock hots are in the gym at lunch, the lights are dim, sit on the bleachers, listen to the new wave when it was new come beeping out like a digital watch alarm in Bananarama and Hayzee Fantazee and Kajagoogoo and Wall of Voodoo.

My idea of a good idea and good karma is to brashly ask girls (this is seventh grade and I still pause before I type the word; my womens studies minor is paying off, eh?) to dance, wait just long enough for the rejection before asking another and move on, discriminating only between boys and girls and adults and students. Inevitably I come across the girl that nobody wants to dance with because she's fat and ugly and everyone makes fun of her. No point being cute about it, every school has at least one such goat, and there but for karmic debt go I.

Enter karmic debt. I'm no stranger to the outcast role, and I think of myself as a basically nice, charitable person. I ask her to dance, she accepts. We dance. I'm not having the greatest time, because first off, she isn't the kind of person I enjoy hanging around (being on the lowest rung of the social ladder often causes one to develop disturbing personality quirks), and second of all, my friends and enemies are watching and are going to demand some sort of explanation. In no small way, a dance, like a marriage, shifts the social status of both parties toward the mean. I'm not high on the scale, but I'd rather not be any lower. This is junior high, after all, and I know what's important here.

But I'm cool about it. It's just a dance, guys. All you're doing is sitting on the bleachers. Get a life. But later, and in confidence to those I trust, I reveal that it was a mercy dance. I was just being nice to the gal. Like the special olympics or something.

Explanation accepted. After all, nothing else makes much sense. They might do the same thing if they were in my shoes, but then again, they probably wouldn't. But it takes all kinds. Poor girl. Fuckin' ugly, though. I feel okay about it. Good deed for the day done, no harm no foul.

Several years later my younger brother is working at the same fast food restaurant as the Poor Girl and for some reason known only to the two of them, the subject of this dance is brought up, and my brother relates to her what I related to him. Told her it was a mercy dance, a dogfight like. I don't know why. My brother is usually extrordinarily kind and treads lightly on people's feelings. Maybe she was an evil boss; I wouldn't be surprised. She's angry; shrugs it off with a series of yelps. Wouldn't dance with me if I were the last man on earth. Always thought I was a jerk.

And so a seed I planted in junior high bloomed into a radioactive mea culpa years later, karma samsara, the wheel turns again. No punch line, no moral, just a stain on the carpet that keeps you from rearranging the furniture, a sharp blade of cruelty wielded like a teenager drives a car in disbelief that the power of life and death could have ever been placed in these basketball hands.




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