His inexplicable nickname. He didn’t earn
that racist sobriquet by looking Chinese, he looked
feral, looked rabid fisher
cat feral, scowling, skulking high
school hallways, stalking his longhair
hippie pacifist
prey: me. He hailed from Beech
Creek, that piss hamlet up Bald Eagle
Valley. He reeked of rage. You could tell
his old man horse-whipped him
with a belt, he took it out
on me with snarling punches, sneering
fist-jabs, slams
against lockers, eyes slitted
in menace. Hissing get a goddamn
haircut as his girlfriend — what did she find
amorous in his dogged, sullen
fury when hitting a kid who pledged
not to hit back? — smirked
in her cat’s-eye glasses and permed
bouffant. After graduation in ’71
he hitched in the Marines. To kill “gooks.” Saw in boot
camp for the first time black
men. Chink growled in the chow line
I ain’t eatin with no niggers.
Jogging the next morning, rounding
a road curve he saw looming in fog
a nightmare squad of bullish black Marines:
Who you callin nigger they inquired
while smashing him blood-dazed
and senseless in the beating I longed
to give him myself but couldn’t admit
in those days of noble self-deceit, of pride
in my public non-violence. I chuckled
when I heard the story second-hand. Only
now with four decades passed behind me
do I not explain his pummeling by those black,
tormented, and wrathful grunts as just
deserts, taste of his own medicine, karma
or recompense for suffering he gave to me. I see it
just as suffering. The human hurt. That thing
we do eternally, each to the cringing other.
