Chicken Legs

Doug Massey

Chapter One

            I’m fourteen and I have no idea what I want to be when I get out of school. My grades aren’t very good but I sure don’t want to join the Army and get sent to Vietnam. I’m not afraid, but I think the war is wrong. If I dodge the draft my Dad says he’ll hunt me down and shoot me. If your country calls you’re supposed to go. That’s how he feels. It’s kind of funny when you think about it. If I get drafted and go to Vietnam and get shot and killed, that’s good. If I dodge the draft and he hunts me down and shoots me, that’s bad. Either way, it looks like I’m going to be shot.

Whatever my father is for, I’m against. It wasn’t always like that. When I was a little kid I wanted to be a five-star naval admiral. My dad was a chief in the Navy before he retired but when you’re a little kid you don’t think about being anything but the best.

My dad was gone a lot when I was real small. One time he drove into the neighborhood, and waved at me and I didn’t even recognize him. I stood there wondering who that man was and why he waved at me and then he turned into the driveway. He was driving an old Nash that belonged to his father before he died. Then I remembered the car and who that must be and I started jumping up and down and shouting, “Daddy! Daddy!”

I was proud to be James Corbett. I thought my dad was the best and I wanted to be just like him. And then he retired from the Navy.

When we moved here to Virginia Beach, my dad was around all of the time and that’s when I realized how mean he was. In Maine we got spankings with the belt when he was mad at us. The leather belt hurt so bad that my sister, Becky, and I hid it in one of the drawers. After that, he had to use his Navy khaki belt and it didn’t hurt as bad. But we cried like it did so he’d stop. That was the only time my sister didn’t tattletale on me. After awhile we forgot about the belt and, when we were packing up to move, my parents found it.

Becky has always told on me. I learned lots of swear words from my dad. I went out into the woods and said them and even shouted them. Becky heard me and told my mom. I got called in and taken into the bathroom and my mom shoved a bar of soap in and out of my mouth. It tasted horrible and I cried and hated my sister for telling on me. Every time I used a bad word and Becky heard it, she’d run in and tell my mom. I ate Ivory Soap, Dial, Zest and Camay. They were all horrible. Then my mother heard that some kid’s tongue swelled up and choked him to death from having his mouth washed out with soap. So I got spankings for using bad words, too. I hate my sister.

When I stopped wanting to be like my dad, I looked around for something else to grow up and be. For a while, I wanted to be the Chief Justice of the United States except I didn’t know it was called that. I went around saying I was going be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court until a teacher told me I was incorrect. All the other people on the court are called Justices of the Supreme Court but the highest one is Chief Justice of the United States. But they always wear those stupid robes anyway. It doesn’t look like you can run around and have fun in those long black robes.

So far, there are two things I can do well. I can run and I’m good at English. I was going to go out for track last year, but when I started running around the neighborhood to practice, one of the older guys hollered out, “Hey, Chicken Legs!”

Debbie Grotum, a pretty girl who lives in my neighborhood, laughed. I was embarrassed. I didn’t know how skinny I was until that happened. The guys on the track team have to wear shorts and I didn’t want to get made fun of for my skinny legs. So I didn’t go out.

            That’s the unfair thing about being skinny. It doesn’t matter how good of an athlete you are, it only seems to matter how good you look. In gym class, I’m usually not far from the top performers in any activity. There are four or five guys who dominate and then I’m on a kind of second level. Some of the guys in my eighth grade gym class had pretty girlfriends but they weren’t very good athletes. I’d beat them at something, but when I bragged about it in front of their girlfriends, the girls didn’t care. They’d sneer and look me up and down like I was a turd. One of them even said, “Shut up, Chicken Legs!”

            A lot of the older guys are already driving to school. I feel like a loser standing at the corner waiting for the bus. Two guys in my neighborhood, Mark Mitchell and Jeff Owens, have fast cars. Man, I wish I had a fast car like Mark’s blue Chevy SS396 or Jeff’s red Pontiac GTO. They’re always peeling out and laying down rubber as they turn corners. One time Jeff let me ride in his backseat when he took his GTO onto Elbow Road and set up for a run. When he popped the clutch and shot out there, I was stuck to the seat. I couldn’t move my head. The speedometer was over a hundred and ten before he let off. It was so cool.

            Mark and Jeff both have long hair. I’m not allowed to grow my hair long. I want long hair so bad. I have big ears and I’d like to cover them up. When I was real small a lot of the kids called me ‘Dumbo’. And last year when that crowd converged on Woodstock for three days of music, my dad just fumed. Man, I wish I could have been there. Half a million hippies. There was that guy, Wavy Gravy, talking into the microphone and saying, “Today we’re bringing you breakfast in bed.”

            My dad sat there and watched the news about Woodstock and he just shook his head, mystified. Finally, he said, “Probably half of them are draft dodgers. This country is really going to hell.”

In my house we aren’t allowed to talk at the dinner table when the news is on. After we moved here and my dad got out of the Navy, Becky and I would be talking about what we did in school that day and my dad’s voice would boom, “I want to hear the news!”

We were terrified into silence.

When a commercial would come on, my dad would say, “Okay, you can talk now,” but it was hard to pick up where we left off. After a while, we just ate without saying anything. We still do. The room is filled with the news and my father cursing whatever is on that happens to make him angry. And that’s a lot.

Chapter Two

            Every year since sixth grade I’ve looked at my textbooks and seen another edition of the Roberts English series. I see that double diamond pattern on the cover and I want to puke. The teachers talk about Roberts like he’s a genius and how his way of explaining grammar is so helpful. Well, I understand it and I’m good at it and I still hate it.

            Last year, my English teacher, Miss Onion, explained Roberts’ method of diagramming sentences. It was called Trees of Derivation. You take a sentence and make these vertical lines under it and make these blocks and you write in the blocks what that part of the sentence is. You start with subject and predicate and then go to noun and verb, pronoun and adverb, conjunction and determiner and on and on until it’s completely identified.

            Maybe because of all of the reading I’ve always done, I was good at Trees of Derivation. Miss Onion used me to show the rest of the students that it wasn’t impossible. She’d send me to the board and give me a real long sentence to write and then tell me to break it down. Then she challenged the class to think of a sentence to stump me. They couldn’t.

            “James Corbett,” Miss Onion said, “you have a knack for this.”

A smart aleck in the back of the class chanted, “Knick knack paddy whack, give the dog a bone.”

            For a few days, I practiced Trees of Derivation on my own. It feels good to be the best at something. But nobody outside of my English class knew how good I was at it and they probably wouldn’t have cared anyway. Let’s face it, Trees of Derivation aren’t very glamorous. It’s not like breaking loose for a touchdown on the football team or hitting a home run or scoring a hoop in basketball. You don’t letter in grammar. You don’t even get a letter if you win the spelling bee. It does sound kind of funny.

            “I lettered in spelling.”

“Wooo! How strenuous!”

            To me, Roberts takes the fun out of English. I mean, who thinks like that as they write? If you diagrammed every sentence you wrote for a paper it would take forever. I lost interest and now I can’t remember everything about Trees of Derivation. When I write something I just feel that it’s right. If I’m not sure, I don’t diagram it to find out why it isn’t correct. I just write the sentence differently.

            All of the teachers talk so excitedly about Roberts. I look ahead and see the tenth graders don’t have it but they say Roberts is working on a tenth grade edition. It’s kind of creepy. Instead of following me when I don’t want him to, it’s like he’s sneaking ahead of me before I get there. I hope Roberts dies before he has a grammar book for every grade.

            One of my older friends talked about how good the stories were in the literature anthology for eighth grade. He loved “The Problem of Cell 13”. I couldn’t wait to read it. It was as good as he said it was. A smart old man makes a wager that he can break out of a secure prison cell. And he does. And “The Most Dangerous Game” was good, too. A man is shipwrecked on a desert island run by a cruel man and his flunkies and he makes sport out of hunting humans. But this shipwrecked guy happens to be the best hunter in the world and he survives and even kills the mean guy.

            Most of the assigned stories in the literature anthology were so good that I read the rest of them too. Except the poems. I hate poems. Ever since I had to recite “Godolphin Horne” twice in front of my Catholic school seventh grade class, I’ve hated poetry. Everyone had to recite it but the boys weren’t about to put their feelings into it like the girls. We just got it over with. Unfortunately, at home I went around reciting it with enthusiasm. Two months later I got into some trouble and my parents were called to the school. My father told Sister Mary how I went around reciting that stupid poem and made me do it in front of her. Sister Mary was astonished at my delivery and said I had done a very poor job of it in front of the class.

My father told me I had to recite “Godolphin Horne” properly in front of the class the next day or he’d burn my butt. And that stinking nun held me to it. The next day Sister Mary called me up in front of the class and I had to say it. As soon as I started, the class laughed at me.

Godolphin Horne was Nobly Born;

He held the human Race in Scorn

And lived with all his sisters where

His Father lived, in Berkeley Square.

And oh! The Lad was Deathly Proud!

He never shook your Hand or Bowed,

But merely smirked and nodded thus:

How perfectly ridiculous!

And on it went. Line after line. By the time I was done I felt like Godolphin Horne when he has lost all respect because of the sin of pride. He ended up a bootblack. I didn’t know what I would end up being but I knew that I wanted to strangle that nun.

            That one year I spent in Catholic school had to be a lot like prison. I had to wear this stupid uniform of blue pants and white shirt and blue clip-on tie. Because of a condition called flat feet, I couldn’t wear loafers or desert boots because they had no support. So I had to wear ugly, leather tie shoes. If being skinny and having big ears and a military style haircut hadn’t pretty much sunk me with the girls, the shoes finished me off.

            Some of the nuns were mean. Sister Lee was this old red-haired nun who taught Math. I would get home and not be able to understand the homework problems. Sure enough, the next day she would call on me. I’d tell her I didn’t know how to do the problem. She’d make me get up in front of the class and do it on the board. I’d get halfway and could go no further. The pretty girls in the class were watching and my big ears were flaming red. I was mad. I didn’t think it was right to make a student get in front of the class when they said they didn’t know how to do the problem.

            Sister Lee was standing against the windows with her arms folded and hidden in that billowy habit. “What’s wrong?” she asked in her scratchy, mean voice.

            “I told you I didn’t know how to do it,” I said loudly. I was really embarrassed and that made me angry.

She pushed off the wall of windows and was propelled toward me by unseen legs that made a whump, whump, whump sound. The affect was hypnotic. I had never seen a running nun. She slapped me so hard the textbook flew out of my hands and my ears made a ringing sound like the recharging flash of a professional camera.

Girls were watching so I couldn’t cry. Instead, I picked up my textbook and stood there, stupidly awaiting what came next. Sister Lee returned to her post by the windows and ordered me to complete the problem. I could not. She muscled me through each agonizing step until the problem was complete. From that day on, my mind closed on Math and Algebra.

           

When I found out I wouldn’t be sent back to Catholic school for eighth grade I was so happy I ran out the front door and jumped off the porch and ran down the street to tell everyone. Reedsville had just built a new junior high school and I would be going there. My life was starting over. I was a condemned man released from death row. The world was a beautiful place again and when Woodstock happened my freedom was confirmed.

            Mrs. Wilson, my ninth grade English teacher, is old but she seems nice. When she gave us a list of the books we would be reading this year, most of the students groaned. We’re going to read Great Expectations, The Red Pony, The Pigman, Lord of the Flies and A Separate Peace. I don’t mind. The way I see it, the more reading we have, the less Roberts we do.

            There’s a girl in my English class who sits on the other side of the room. I didn’t know her name at first but I liked the way she looked. So what if her glasses are a little thick? She has a nice tan and pretty legs. She always crosses them and moves the elevated foot to a fast rhythm like she’s impatient to either learn something new or get out of the class.

            When I noticed her, I listened closely the next time roll was called and learned her name is Kathy Morse. Like Morse code. Maybe that’s what she’s tapping out with that bobbing foot. If I can figure out what neighborhood she lives in, I can accidentally ride my bike or run through there when she happens to be outside. I want to break that code.

            I was staring at Kathy from my side of the room and she must have sensed it. She looked up and caught me. We both blushed. At least it wasn’t a sneer. Maybe she doesn’t mind that I’m skinny and have big ears.

            A lot of the hippie kids are wearing boots now. I don’t have any yet. They finally started making reinforced loafers for people with flat feet and I was so happy to get them. No more tie shoes. I will never wear tie shoes again for the rest of my life. But now loafers are out. I want boots. Mom and Dad say I have to grow out of my loafers first. It’s so unfair. If I can’t have long hair I should at least be able to wear boots. Nobody is going to think I’m a hippie.

            A week into school, Mrs. Wilson explains metaphors and similes. “When someone says their heart is broken, is their heart really broken? No. But it feels like it is. That’s a metaphor. It conveys meaning by enhancing an image or emotion. A simile is a metaphor using ‘like’ or ‘as’; you will find them in many poems and stories.”

Mrs. Wilson sat at her desk and instructed the students to open their literature anthologies. “I’m going to give a double ‘A’ to the student who can find the most metaphors and similes in fifteen minutes. Ready? Go.”

            The class was quiet except for the flipping of pages. I found one, marked it, wrote down the page number and moved on. On some pages I found two or three. I didn’t know how fierce the competition was but I was pretty sure I would be near the top. Whenever I looked at the clock I felt like I was losing time.

            “Stop!” Mrs. Wilson said. “How many have twenty?”

Many hands went up.

            “How many have thirty?”

Four hands went up.

            “How many have thirty-five?”

Now there were only two of us; me and Donna Johnson. Donna is pretty enough to be a cheerleader but she isn’t one. She’s in my Algebra class, too.

            “How many do you have, Donna?”

            “Thirty-six.”

            “How about you, James?”

            “Thirty-seven.”

            I beat her. Mrs. Wilson checked our lists and one of Donna’s wasn’t a metaphor and she only had thirty-five. She was really upset about it. I don’t know what made me do it but I said, “Aw, give her one of the A’s.”

Mrs. Wilson looked at me. “Are you sure?”

            “Yeah.”

I was being generous. I had A’s to spare. Donna didn’t even thank me and I think the A’s were counterfeit anyway because I got a ‘C+’ for that quarter. When I saw my report card, I didn’t like Mrs. Wilson very much anymore. Now she looks pale and doughy-faced and her smile is fake. But I hope Kathy Morse was impressed that I won the metaphor/simile contest.

           

           

           

           

           

Chapter Three

            I’m walking down the crowded main hall and there is a noise, like a deep roar followed by a series of grunts, thuds, and heavy breathing. It’s a fight between a white guy and a black guy. They are really going at it and, while they fight, the other black kids form a kind of cordon around them. The white kid is doing well but, when he starts to win, a bigger black kid steps in and punches him in the eye. When he turns to face the new threat, the guy he was fighting gets in a good punch and they go to the floor. As they’re fighting the other black kids kick the white guy. That makes me mad but I’m too afraid to get involved. I don’t see any other white kids step in and try to keep it fair. Finally, two male teachers break it up and haul the fighters to the office. I wonder if the black guys are taught to gang up because white guys ganged up on their fathers.

            I’m not sure what the truth is behind the racial issue. I want to know the truth. I have to sort it all out and I don’t know who to trust. As I’m running along the nearby roads I think back to my experiences with blacks and what I heard and thought about them.

When we lived up in Maine, I had one black kid in my elementary school class and he was real quiet. His name was Ronnie but he wasn’t a ‘black’ then. He was a Negro. I heard his older brother, Derrick, was the fastest runner in the school, so when I wanted to get good at throwing and catching a baseball I asked Ronnie if I could come over to his house and play catch with him. We threw the ball back and forth, harder and harder. His mother watched from a window and she looked like she didn’t like me very much. I wanted to go back but I felt like Ronnie’s mother didn’t want me to so I didn’t.

            The front phonograph album in our record stand was Chubby Checkers. My mom played that a lot. He sang “The Twist”. Everybody loved Chubby Checkers. Then one day my father came home from the Navy base in Brunswick and he was really mad. I was sitting on the floor and my mother met him when he came in the door and he was cussing up a storm about the Negroes. Finally he said, “I wish every one of them would go back to Africa.”

We had a globe we got from saving Coca Cola bottle caps and sticking them to a piece of cardboard so I knew where all the continents were. Africa was far away. In my mind I pictured a long, thick line of Negroes in the air over the globe, walking from North America to Africa.

            But something bothered me about what my father was saying. All of them? Did he really want all of the Negroes to leave? I liked Ronnie and his father was in the Navy just like mine. But maybe my dad didn’t know Ronnie’s dad. There had to be one that he liked.

            “What about Chubby Checkers, Dad?”

            “Him leading them!” he said.

So Chubby had to go too? And in my mind there he was, smiling and singing “The Twist” and doing the dance, and the long, thick, dark line was happily twisting behind him, in the air over the globe, from North America to Africa.

            I was confused. If my dad hated Chubby Checkers most of all, then why did we have his record and why was it the one at the very front of our record stand? That was the first time I realized that my dad didn’t always make sense. A couple of days later, the Chubby Checkers record wasn’t at the front of the stand anymore. I thought it was gone but I found it hidden in the middle.

            If the dark people were Negroes then why did some of the white people call them ‘niggers’ when they were mad at them? And what were the Negroes doing that made the white people so angry? I knew better than to ask my dad about it because he’d just get mad and swear.

            When we moved to Reedsville in Virginia Beach, most of the Negroes lived in one rundown neighborhood called New Beacon. We’d drive through there on our way to church and see them going to their church. They didn’t have paved roads like we did and there was a lot of dust when they drove their cars. But they dressed up real nice and the ones that had cars drove them the short distance to church.

“Look at that,” my mother would say. “They drive that short distance in a big purple Cadillac just to show off.”

“Yeah,” my father said, “and their house is probably a shack. Why don’t they get a less expensive car and work toward a better house?”

I didn’t know what the truth was about the Negroes. In Maine I didn’t see many of them and the ones I did see weren’t scary. But down here I was scared of them and I didn’t know why. Was it because there were more of them? Was it because they were better fighters? Was it because they were angry at white people? Why were they angry?

Martin Luther King was on the news a lot when we moved to Virginia Beach. He spoke so loud and clear. Was what he believed in right? What did he believe in?

I never got much chance to listen and think about it because whenever he was on the news my father would shout, “I wish somebody would get a gun and shoot that black son of a bitch!”

And then someone did.

            “Good!” my dad shouted when he heard it on the news.

            The next day, in my sixth grade classroom, the teacher, Mrs. Snowden, was almost crying. She said we had lost a great man and she wanted all of us to write down what we thought and felt about Martin Luther King’s assassination. I wrote that I was glad and they should shoot a few more like H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael because that was what my dad said and I thought he told the truth. Only one other student wrote similarly. Mrs. Snowden was shocked. The way she shook her head and looked at me and the other boy told me something was wrong with my views.

            There was a lot of rioting when Martin Luther King was killed. We didn’t have any of it here, but his being killed coincided with the integration of our schools, which seemed to fuel a lot of anger. That was when I started hearing that Negroes didn’t want to be called Negroes anymore. They wanted to be called ‘Blacks’.

Now most of the blacks have Afro hairstyles. They carry these long-toothed combs called picks in their back pockets and handbags. A lot of them have used bleach to write words down the legs of their blue jeans. “Black Power” is common. There are others I don’t get and when I ask they just shrug me off.

It doesn’t make sense that we brought the blacks here as slaves and now that some whites are mad at them for demanding their rights, we say they should go back to Africa, as if they came willingly in the first place. That was centuries ago. What would they go back to? But a lot of them act like they don’t care about school, like it’s just a place to go and have fun. Still, a lot of white kids act like that too. I know a bunch of hippies who skip school all the time and smoke pot in their cars in the parking lot.

If hippies and blacks have a common enemy—what they call ‘The Establishment’—then why aren’t they friendlier to one another? Is it even possible to beat ‘The Establishment’? My dad says the blacks have their rights now and they should just shut up. Do they have their rights? I know they can vote and there’s a couple of black people whose families have moved into one of our nicer neighborhoods. One of them is our class president, Colton Crawfield. Colton is big and wears an Afro but he is really smart and he doesn’t talk that jive that most of the black students do. He’s on the football team and in a lot of the scholastic clubs. I see him carrying a French book.

Two of the bigger black guys, Ronald Davidson and Derek Hunter, are in my gym class. They can beat me in every sport except running long distances. After a quarter of a mile, I pass them.

A lot of the black students greet one another with a raised fist, like the Black Panther salute. The Black Panthers are a militant group that wears sunglasses and black berets and carry weapons sometimes and march a lot. I was watching the ’68 Olympics in Mexico City when Tommy ‘Jet’ Smith won the gold in the two hundred meter dash and John Carlos won the bronze. On the medal podium, while the national anthem was being played, they looked down and raised their gloved fists in protest. There was a big stink over that. They were sent home from the Olympics. I think they kept their medals though.

Now Muhammed Ali is fighting again after the government took away his heavyweight title three years ago and banned him from boxing. My dad hates him so much. He says Ali has a big mouth and is a coward for dodging the draft. I like Muhammed Ali. He dances when he fights. He’ll be bobbing up and down and then his feet will go into a rapid series of steps and he unleashes a flurry of punches that make the other guy’s head go back and forth like one of those hula dolls in the back windows of cars.

Just before they stripped him of his heavyweight title for refusing the draft, Ali said, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me ‘nigger’.” I think I see what he means. Why should you go and fight for a country that discriminates against you? I read that when he won his Olympic gold medal in nineteen-sixty, he returned to his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. He was refused service by a white waitress and then encountered an angry, racist white motorcycle gang. Disgusted, he threw his gold medal into the Ohio River.

I’m glad he’s back but he seems a little slower than he used to be. He only dances sometimes now. But he still is loud and funny and spouts bad poetry. He used to make rhymes about what round he would knock the other guy out in but he can’t knock them out as much as he used to.

I notice that a lot of the black guys try to fight like Ali. Only a few of them seem to like ‘Smokin’ Joe Frazier, the current heavyweight champ. Ali and Frazier are headed for a showdown. I hope Ali wins.