White Riot

Jimmy was the kid that nobody talked to. Nobody.

Especially in Riverdale.

Sheila Barnaby once tried, and she was pretty tough. She wore dark red nail polish and chewed cinnamon-flavored gum with her mouth open. So scared of Jimmy, she looked down when he approached her on the street. The attempted conversation happened two weeks ago in aisle two at Fontaine’s drugstore. They were both looking at sunblock (although she couldn’t really tell, because Jimmy was always wearing the darkest of dark sunglasses), and Sheila had thought to make a remark about how she was going to the beach later that day, but got nervous when Jimmy cracked his knuckles and stared straight ahead at the five choices of sunblock available in aisle two.

Kenneth Rominski, the bagger at Hermann’s Groceries, would snap the brown paper bags less smartly when Jimmy came in to buy his: gallon of milk, jar of peanut butter, loaf of bread, bar of Irish Spring, pound of coffee, pack of razors, dozen eggs, two pounds of hamburger and quart of orange juice every week. He wasn’t sure if Jimmy was looking at him as he bagged the nine items. Jimmy always stood, hands in his jacket pockets, his sunglasses-covered eyes never belying his true line of vision. Uncannily, Jimmy was always at attention enough to grab the grocery bag from Kenneth when the top was all folded and pressed. Kenneth got goose bumps from the seemingly mundane transaction.

Ruthie Eckhardt stopped cleaning out the parakeet cages at Metzer’s Pet Mart every time Jimmy walked past outside, his sneakers sounding like he’d stepped in gum, his pale skin gleaming like the undead, Walkman blaring Stiff Little Fingers out of the cheap headphones affixed around his small cranium. The dull, paint-it-black hair had oddly wispy, duck-fluff roots peeking out from underneath. The tiny parakeets in their cages involuntarily shuddered because Ruthie would suck her breath in sharply each time it happened. Needless to say, the parakeets’ new newspaper became old again, real quick.

Matt Sutton gripped the handlebars of his kickass BMX bike a bit tighter, half wondering if Jimmy would try to mess with him and take his bike again as he rode past him down Beechnut Street. The trees whispered, “no”, but his heart beat like a rabbit-heart, thumpity, thump, pedal, pedal, pedal, coast. Last week, Jimmy wordlessly grabbed his handlebars at the park and gave him a shove, hopped on the bike and took off like a bat out of hell, only to return the bike to a bewildered Matt five minutes later, out of breath and with no explanation. He had half-thrown it at Matt’s feet, and sauntered off, trying to light a cigarette with pale, shaking hands, turning his head in all directions, the setting sun glinting off of his dark plastic frames. Now, Matt shook the hair out of his eyes, trying to look authoritative. "Just try to take my bike, asshole," he muttered underneath his breath as he veered past Jimmy, who held a suspicious-looking brown paper bag in his pasty hand. Jimmy visibly flinched and his mouth turned downward in a state of startled confusion.

Angela Goodwin sidestepped an oncoming Matt Sutton and wondered if she took that third library volume on paleontology of the Paleozoic Era out of her brown shoulder bag quickly enough, she could defend herself against an approaching and suspicious-looking Jimmy. He’d never actually threatened her, but never say never, right? Would she go for the throat or the kneecaps? She glanced at his brown paper-covered mystery object, his sunglasses-veiled face and reached for her book as though it were made of metal, not paper. “Paper, rock, scissors,” she muttered, “pick your weapon,” as she quickly passed him. Jimmy, again, wondered what the hell was up with people talking to themselves today. He felt the gum on the bottom of his sneakers and stopped to scrape his foot on the curb. Angela looked over her shoulder two seconds later and noticed a group of three neighborhood kids rounding the corner behind Jimmy. He was out of her field of vision. She let her breath out and promptly tripped over an uneven part in the sidewalk.

Mrs. Heckler ‘saw’ Jimmy Albinson coming with her three out of five senses. She could smell, taste and hear as keenly as if she were a flawless, newborn, despite her eighty-three years and terminal blindness. She could smell Jimmy’s Irish Spring sweat under his blue, gabardine zip-up jacket on the May breeze heralded by the wind chime on her porch, she could taste the faint whiff of his open-bottle brown bag on the moisture-laden spring air and hear the swish of the gabardine, the soft thud of rubber sneaker soles and the soft and quick breathing of an out-of-shape punk. She could hear the held-breath breathing of the three pursuers.

Her neck twisted and rose like a bird’s. Mrs. Heckler wasn’t afraid of anything because everything and everyone was afraid of her. “Fools, fools!” she muttered.

Mostly unaware to all of this: parakeets, Paleozoic Era volumes and "paper, rock, scissors," BMX bikes, and brown paper bags, Jimmy Albinson, shrouded in his black sunglasses, clutched his brown bag tighter at the neck when he walked past Mrs. Heckler’s porch, even though he very well knew that old Mrs. Heckler probably had no clue that he was drinking on a public sidewalk.

Still, he rushed past. “It’s too early!” Mrs. Heckler crowed from her porch. She intuitively was attempting to shake off the three following the slight, sunglassed and pale seventeen year-old with her vocal display.

Jimmy didn’t catch any of this. CRAZY, he thought. Too early for what? It’s one o'clock in the afternoon. What a wack-job, he shrugged, thinking, My life sucks enough already, I really don’t need an old crazy bugging me on a Saturday.

Further down the street, the three boys stopped for a millisecond, feeling the unseeing eyes of Mrs. Heckler on them, then continued on, cutting diagonally through the impatiens planted by Geronimo Musselli, the eccentric neighborhood physicist and artist who was on vacation in Naples, down the caving pavement of the alley and into the warm, garbagey smell environment of the alley garages, no noises, save for a baseball game on an AM radio here and there and a couple small, authoritative dogs expressing their Napoleon complexes in fenced-in disdain.

Three boys versus one. The largest of the three was a Gene Wilder type of punk, dealt a crappy head of hair and a crappier dose of teenage acne. He first grabbed the brown-bagged Newcastle out of Jimmy’s surprised hand, then flew the other fist into Jimmy’s small, pointed chin. The second kid pushed Jimmy from behind; the Newcastle bottle flew and shattered, contained inside the bag. The third, as a typical third person does, kept lookout. All wore an unassuming costume of mommy-bought clean T-shirts, jeans and sneakers.

“What’s the matter, punk?” Gene Wilder sneered as Jimmy thudded into the warped concrete, “Gonna cry over spilt beer?”

Jimmy said nothing. He knew it was inevitable. It usually took about two years…he’d been in Riverdale for just under two.

The second one, skinny and slack-jawed and big-toothed, joined in, “Not so tough now, huh, Mr. Fancy Pants?” he mouth-breathed. He kicked Jimmy in the back. The third one, slightly chubby and red-cheeked, pretended not to be nervous, but tapped his right hand against his right hip, his fingers hooked into the belt loop of his jeans and tried to glare at Jimmy, but the sun was too bright in his eyes, and he just glared, in general.

Jimmy winced. Alright, just get it over with, he willed.

“How about some mud all over those Fancy Pants?” Gene Wilder offered, scooping up a convenient clump of rain-soaked sod from the side of the alley and pitching it at Jimmy’s curled-up knees. What fancy pants? Jimmy thought of the normal, boot-cut jeans he was wearing. Now, covered in mud. He held his breath, waiting for more mud to be added to them.

He knew that if he got up and ran, it’d all be over. It had happened once before. He luckily had run past that kid with the BMX, and had taken it for a cruise to lose his assailants that time. Now, not a BMX in sight to rescue him.

Another clump of mud hit Jimmy in the side of the face. Still, he did nothing. What could he do at this point?

This non-reaction reaction pissed Gene Wilder off to no end. Skinny & Slack-jawed echoed the curly-haired fury. They went at Jimmy from both sides, his already-askew headphones cracking in half, his Walkman and cassette dying in a sad chorus of broken plastic. His right shoulder hit the pavement now littered with brown shards of glass and black plastic as his sunglasses slid off only to be crunched like a large, black beetle under Gene Wilder’s white-sneakered foot. This made Gene Wilder laugh. The famous black sunglasses. Jimmy closed his eyes. The sun pierced through his eyelids like a laser.

Another fist to the face and Jimmy’s eyes shot open despite the laser-beam light. The light was white-hot and uncomfortable: those sunglasses had been on for a good reason. He’d worn them outside almost every day of his slightly vampiric life. Gene Wilder and Skinny and Slack-jawed froze and jumped back as though Jimmy were a human electric cattle prod. “What the fuck?” Gene Wilder whisper-hissed.

Jimmy’s pink eyes blinked hesitatingly back at him with a delicate, albino stare. Three pairs of eyes blinked back at him: brown, blue and black. He wondered when it’d be a good time to tell his parents that they might have to move, again…maybe this time, though, things would be different. He wouldn’t get death threats from the older, superstitious neighbors, rocks thrown at him from the football team, whispers of the worst names imaginable from everyone from age three to age eighty-three. Jimmy opened, then shut his naked eyes twice only to see the soles of three pairs of sneakers and three pairs of jean-clad legs run, run, running as fast as they could, first to get away and second to tell everyone, “Guess what???”