Teacher, that boy said you was stupid.

“Thank you, Eugene,” Mrs Bryant said. “You see, children, it’s just like I said. People are predominantly good but you don’t know how stupid somebody is until they open up their mouth and tell you, like that boy done.” She pointed at me.

EGGHEAD BY MANUEL IGREJAS 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 45

His name was Eugene Payne but everybody called him Egghead. We were in Mr Blonsky’s 7th and 8th grade class at Lafayette Street School in Newark, New Jersey, but we didn’t talk to each other until one day in the playground I was throwing my Spaldeen high-bouncer against the wall and it got away from me. Egghead was walking by, handed it to me, and presto—Best Friends.

Egghead’s hair was buzzed short and his head was round like a melon but Melon Head Payne was just too much trouble to think of and say and Egghead just seemed to go with Eugene. He had brown skin, the color an old football, sad brown eyes, and a face so symmetrical that he looked like a cartoon character: The Adventures of Egghead. His lips were always slightly parted, somewhere between a sneer and a smile so that you always saw his small, bright, even teeth. He never laughed out loud but if he thought something was funny he hissed through his pretty teeth and released a little puff of steam. I never called him Egghead—that would have been mean.

After school we often went to a dusty pocket park near Penn Station to play stickball or read comic books. I read Batman and The Green Lantern out loud using different voices, Daffy Duck, Bullwinkle, and Walter Cronkite. Egghead liked Cronkite the best and if I was Daffy too long he nudged me.

“Conkite. Do Conkite.” I basked in the steadfast trust of Egghead’s big brown eyes. For a time it was the safest place in my world and, for a time, I was the safest place in his world.

On weekends we played hide and seek in the Art Deco limestone beauty of Penn Station’s echoing chambers. We pretended to be waiting for trains and looked impatiently at the imaginary watches on our bare, bony wrists. I tapped him on the shoulder as if he were a stranger.

“Excuse me, sir. When is the next train to, um, Chattanooga?”

“Chattanooga Choo Choo! Chattanooga! Chattanooooga!” Egghead loved saying it.

I found a copy of Theodore Sturgeon’s novel More Than Human on top of one of the garbage cans on the platform and this magical find, with its lonely heroes and their super powers showed me there might be another dimension beyond the train tracks.

Sometimes we ventured uptown beyond Penn Station, where the skyscrapers, department stores and big movie theaters beckoned. We went to the movies every week. I had a paper route so I always had a little money and Egghead never had any so I treated him, which was OK with me. He was like my little brother, though he was a year older than me. When we saw North By Northwest at the Paramount and I was amazed that Cary Grant wore the same glorious blue/grey Saville Row suit for three days straight, something I would attempt with less success when I grew up. Coming home from the World War II comedy The Imitation General, starring Glenn Ford, we passed the construction site for the new Prudential Building and stared into its crater.

“Did the Germans bomb Newark?” Egghead asked.

“Yes but only uptown,” I said, because you know, it might have been true.

Richard Beymer was the star of every movie at RKO Proctor’s main theater: West Side Story, Five Finger Exercise, and The Longest Day. Did they just keep his name on the marquee and rearrange the words underneath it every week? My father went one flight up to the Proctor’s Penthouse Cinema where he could see racy foreign films with Brigitte Bardot and Marcello Mastroianni.

My family came to Newark on the Portuguese Mayflower in 1925. On paper, we were one of the first families of Newark’s Little Portugal, the Ironbound section, but somehow through a series of mishaps, scandals, tragedies, and just plain stupidity, we were always broke and just this side of the law. The Ironbound was Newark’s other side of the tracks, its Lower East Side. Locals referred to it as Down Neck because of its location at the neck of the foaming Passaic River. It was where the character of Tony Soprano was born and raised and if you saw War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise, the street where the church gets destroyed is Ferry Street, our main street, and that church was, and still is St Stephan’s.

The Ironbound was ethnically and racially blended then in a way that didn’t cause any heavy breathing—yet. Being on the wrong side of the tracks was the grease that made it all seem to work on our narrow streets but the tribes never occupied the same building. Though it was built on a grand scale Newark was now just a tired old city trying to make it through the 20th century in one piece in its work clothes. The trains screeched along the tracks, the factories pounded out their essential widgets and flanges, belched their smoke. There was a layer of grime on everything and on some humid summer days an easterly breeze sent the fumes from the nearby slaughterhouse our way. To me and Egghead, it was paradise.

Our Lady of Fatima, our first Portuguese church, was completed in 1958 and despite my parents’ objections, I was one of its first altar boys, a job I took very seriously. The first born, I was a golden-haired baby then a dirty blond boy, blue-eyed and tall. The church started a Boy Scout troop and I had to lobby my parents to join that too. I had three pretty sisters, Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria.

I didn’t look like the typical Portuguese boy or like anybody else in my family. I had the long, sad face, moist eyes, and the coloring of a bodega Jesus painting, and I was voted most pious-looking two years in a row. I was often pulled out of school to work funerals where my sad Jesus face got me good tips from grateful undertakers.

Lafayette Street School was two blocks away from my grandmother’s house where we sometimes lived, depending on our finances. Whenever the Newark Evening News, New Jersey’s best newspaper, wanted to do a story about the city’s cultural diversity, they would send a photographer to our school because we had an exotic mix of Italians, Poles, Lithuanians, Irish, Puerto Ricans, Blacks, Galician Spaniards (Gallegos), and the last survivors of Newark’s once lively Chinatown, the Eng cousins. Immigration laws had just been eased and more Portuguese poured into the neighborhood. We were called Pork Chops. Those who resented the Portuguese invasion called us Zekes. We could refer to ourselves as Pork Chops but we never, ever used the Z word.

My tiny, iron-willed grandmother was forced into an arranged marriage as a teenager and had to flee Portugal with the husband she hated to escape his gambling debts. He looked like a monkey, beat her, and four daughters later when she was 27 she divorced his sorry ass. This left her a dangerous, fallen woman, often whispered about by the genteel fishwives of the neighborhood. Whenever she went to church, she wore a wide-brim charcoal hat and with her head held defiantly high, jaws clenched and nostrils flaring, sailed majestically down the aisle like the Queen Mary of Fuck You. When she was tired of a subject, she would imperiously snap, “Ponto Final!” (Period. The End.) And that was that!

With four daughters to raise she worked at a suitcase-handle factory, did embroidery and took whatever piece work she could get. She eventually bought the biggest house on the block, formerly the mansion of the Shickhaus family, famous for their hot dogs. It was three stories tall and built on a grand scale, with spacious rooms and high ceilings. The blooming garden was filled with roses of every color, all kinds of vegetables, fig trees, and a grape arbor. My grandmother turned the two upper floors into a rooming house for single immigrant men who filled the factories and ditches of the neighborhood. My handsome father, fresh from Portugal and the Merchant Marine, was one of them, and that proximity resulted in my parents’ turbulent marriage.

My father wasn’t modest about his looks, and his swordsmanship was legendary. My grandmother told me that he was once stabbed in the left buttock as he tried to climb out a bedroom window by a husband who came home too soon. He worked in a leather-tanning factory days and was a bartender at night. He sometimes didn’t come home for a few days at a time. In the evening he often went out in Italian suits from The Swank Shop on Ferry Street and it was my job to polish his selection of size 10 Florsheims. With his baby face and big brown eyes he was charming and popular out in the world, but at home he had a violent, unpredictable temper. He once pounded the kitchen table so hard that a full soup tureen flew into the air and hit the ceiling. I was afraid of him and tried to avoid him the little bit of time he was home. When he wasn’t around, I was the man of the house.

My mother was a compact, wiry bundle with sparkling, lively brown eyes, and the long expressive face of a great comedienne. She read classic novels and loved British films, anything with Alec Guinness and Trevor Howard. She had the wilful temperament of a Bronte heroine and my father was her Heathcliff, her reach for the stars of passion. She was hooked on his bad boy sizzle and he on her unconditional love. Though her body was often confined to shabby, small second-floor apartments with four kids, her adventurous heart was running along the misty moors, chasing her Heathcliff with her wooly wild hair cascading behind her. Her sharp tongue and love of language united one sweltering Fourth of July when non-stop firecrackers turned our beloved dog into a whimpering, quivering mess. My mother ran to the window and shouted to anyone within earshot: “Why don’t you take those firecrackers and shove them up your mother’s ass!”

Despite all the troublesome elements, a palpable current ran between my parents and they made each other laugh. It was only when I saw La Dolce Vita as an adult that I understood my father’s short, hectic life. He wanted to be Marcello Mastroianni splashing with Anita Ekberg in the Baths of Caracalla, not working in a factory saddled with four kids he barely knew.

Egghead envied me for having a father on hand, no matter how scandalous and inattentive he was. His father was in North Carolina with a whole new family. His mother lived uptown in the Stella Wright Homes, the Projects. She had nothing to do with Egghead. He was sentenced to living with the smoldering, short-tempered Miss Irma, who was nicer to me than she was to him. And she wasn’t very nice. Egghead called her Auntie. After the second time I met her, he confessed that she was his grandmother but she didn’t want that known.

She was a big scowling woman in a grimy robe and a head rag watching very loud television, eating Ritz Crackers with margarine, and Nilla Wafers. She never cooked and sometimes shared a Swanson TV dinner with Egghead. No wonder he was always hungry. She noticed me looking at her and said. “What you buggin’ at, Bright Eyes?” Like my grandmother, she liked to say disparaging things about Egghead’s parents to anyone who would listen.

“Damn your Mama and her goofballs. She left me holding the bag,” she would mutter, and let it hang in the air. Was Egghead’s mother hooked on silly balls, stupid men, or drugs? Was Egghead the bag?

Sometimes in the evening, I saw Miss Irma on Ferry Street, stuffed into a shiny dress with her ample cleavage overflowing, heading to a bar in her spiky heels. She topped off the whole ensemble with a glorious and elaborate copper-colored wig—Oh, Miss Irma! Did she go to the bar where my father worked? Did he fuck her too? That would make this a spicier story and I wouldn’t put it past either one of them.

Egghead didn’t like coming to Hayes Pool with me. But what else would he do? Hayes was a public pool at the far end of the Ironbound near the entrance to the Pulaski Skyway, a long walk from home. It was usually dirty and jammed with screaming kids, and you learned to negotiate the big, jagged cracks in its turquoise bottom. I never really learned to swim but loved being in the water and always jumped into the middle of the pool where I spent a lot of time underwater, pretending I was deep-sea diver. Egghead never wanted to get wet and sat on the side, staring into space. I noticed that his bathing suit said Fruit of the Loom on it and was really just a pair of black boxer shorts.

One noisy afternoon when I was resurfacing, I looked at him sitting at the edge of the pool with his worried face. What the hell was he thinking about? He looked like a boy trapped in a well 50 feet deep, his soul struggling to reach the surface with nothing to hold on to. While I was looking at him, some roughhousing kids accidentally knocked him into the pool. He splashed frantically and blindly in every direction, eyes bulging with terror. His flailing arms pummeled me, his fingers tore at me as I walked him to the steps. Did I push him into the pool with my powerful mind like a character in a Theodore Sturgeon story just because…because he was sitting there moping in his sad underpants bathing suit? What was the word for that power? Right, telekinesis. It was the first time I saw real terror and I’m reminded of it whenever I see a doomed wildebeest trapped in a crocodile’s jaws on Nat Geo Wild.

Egghead looked like a doomed wildebeest in school too whenever Mr Blonsky scanned the back of the classroom. I was one of Mr Blonsky’s favorite students and Egghead was almost invisible to him. Blonsky looked like a soft-hearted Stalin with his short gray hair, crinkly eyes, and forest of nose hair. He was a dedicated teacher and if you showed any promise whatsoever he pushed you to do better. Otherwise you collected dust in the back of the class, like Egghead did—and wondered what everybody was talking about.

IQ tests were all the rage. Three other kids and I, The Brains, had scored over 130. Three of us were Portuguese, I’m proud to say. The other Brain was the handsome Paxton Phipps. His skin was the color of a sand cookie and his hair had a ginger blush in it. His eyes were brown and gold and twinkled when he flexed his enormous dimples. Paxton Phipps! Even his name was charismatic. He dressed better than the rest of us, in crisp white shirts, pants with sharp creases, and shined shoes. Everybody, white and black, boy and girl, had a crush on him.

“Why are you wasting your time with Shithead?” Paxton asked in one of our many marathon evening phone calls. He had no use for Egghead and wouldn’t listen to any defense of him. “He’s so ugly he hurts my feelings,” Paxton said, quoting Moms Mabley. He played me her albums over the phone. They were filthy and hilarious, like a sneak peek into a dark grown-up world.

“Ain’t nothing an old man can do for me but bring me a message from a young one,” Moms said. I repeated that line to my mother. She liked it when Paxton called.

“Is that Paxton? Tell him I said hello.” She met him when Paxton and I starred in a class play where I played a sap who got his hand stuck in a mailbox and Paxton was a slick reporter. After the play my mother gushed at Paxton like a star-struck fan but with me she said my performance was “a little hammy”. She usually referred to Egghead as Poor Egghead or if she was feeling flinty, Mortimer Snerd.

After school Paxton waited at the corner until a gigantic Chrysler Imperial picked him up. I think he lived in a different neighborhood but one of his parents worked nearby so it was easier for them if he came to Lafayette. He just disappeared in the middle of 8th grade and the phone chats stopped. Paxton! It is a mystery to me that such a remarkable boy with such a remarkable name—Paxton Phipps!—was never heard from again. Like Theodore Sturgeon, Paxton was a glimpse of another more intricate and stylish world.

One day we had a substitute teacher, a round-thirtyish black woman, Mrs Bryant. She must have been a devout churchgoer who longed to take to the pulpit because she preached fractured Bible stories to us all day long.

“Jonah was afraid to preach to the people of Nineveh but I am not afraid to talk to you, predominantly.” She liked the word predominantly. I wasn’t exactly sure what it meant, I think she was using it incorrectly.

“When I look at your faces, I can tell that you are good children, predominantly”.

“Wasn’t that teacher stupid?” I said to Egghead as we walked to gym class. He said yeah, which was his response to just about everything. When we got back to our classroom, Egghead, for the first time ever, raised his hand.

Mrs Bryant looked at her seating chart and said, “Yes, Eugene?”

Egghead stood up and pointed at me. “Teacher, that boy said you was stupid.” He smiled, hissed and sat down.

“Thank you, Eugene,” Mrs Bryant said. “You see, children, it’s just like I said. People are predominantly good but you don’t know how stupid somebody is until they open up their mouth and tell you, like that boy done.” She pointed at me.

After school, I walked away from Egghead in a huff. He caught up with me.

“Why did you do that?” I asked.

“Do what? I didn’t do nothing.”

“Just go away,” I said. He didn’t go away but got in step with me.

“Predominantly,” he hissed. “I like that word. Predominantly!”