Free I Loved You More by Tom Spanbauer

the queer,” I said.
    Abe Martin was a Mormon, too, so he didn’t get sent to the principal. The principal, Mr. Bagley, who was also a Mormon, was filled with indignation and all sorts of authoritarian outrage. He threatened to call my parents, not to let me be in the graduation ceremony, and a bunch of other stuff. But I could give a shit. I’d finally stood up for myself. And I was higher than a kite. And for a few brief moments in my life there was nobody in the world who could hurt me.
    THE THING THAT pisses me off most about Abe Martin, though, didn’t really piss me off until years later. It wasn’t until after the second time Big Ben knew that this was it and I had to stand and fight that I realized something important.
    I’d spent all my life in a kind of resignation. Shit was always going to happen to me and I just had to learn how to withstand it. Bullies were going to come and go and I just had to brace myself and somehow get through it. For instance, I never once thought of getting even with Abe Martin. I mean he was a real asshole. He didn’t fight me fair. He ganged up on me with his friends. With the intention of ridiculing me as I stood there in the high school hallway with my dick hanging out.
    I defended myself and I succeeded in my defense. And I’d go on that way until the next time I needed to defend myself. Fucking Catholicism, man.
    TWENTY YEARS LATER, another bully. And once again he wasn’t alone. Two this time instead of three. In a basement in New York City. Then, after I picked myself off the concrete floor, we were out in the street.
    Didn’t know for sure what I was doing. Just knew I had to do something.
    But Big Ben knew. It was revenge.
    I’D JUST QUIT my job at Café Un Deus Trois and was a full-time super. The building on Seventh Street, right next to the Ukrainian Catholic church, was a pain in the ass. The sewer always backed up. As soon as I walked in the foyer, which was every morning, if the basement was full of sewerage, I could smell it. Believe me.
    It was a summer morning, because the mimosa tree in front of the church was blooming. The moment I unlocked the front door, I could tell it was bad. When I turned the basement light on and looked down, I couldn’t believe it. Eight to ten inches of human shit and toilet paper lapping over the bottom step. It was a weekend, too, so my boss wasn’t in the office. I immediately walked back to my apartment and put on my Key West shrimper boots. I almost didn’t buy the shrimper boots because they were white, mid-calf, and looked kind of sissy. But as it turned out, those white, mid-calf, solid rubber boots saved my ass with all the shit I had to wade through.
    Down in the basement, the only light was at the bottom of the stairs. I pulled my red bandana over my nose and mouth. Turned on my flashlight. My first step off the bottom stair was the scariest. I had to walk real slow to the sump pump. Just a beam of flashlight in a dark, dingy basement. Sloshing shit-water lapping up against the tops of my rubber boots. Fucking wade in the water, man.
    Thank God that day the sump pump was working. It took a couple hours, but when the pump sucked all the water down, solid waste and TP still covered the cement floor. I didn’t know what else to do, so I went for it. Pulled the red bandana back over my nose and mouth and started scraping. Human excrement down the sewer hole with the heavy duty metal push broom. Stepping careful because that shit was slick. Then I hooked up the hose and hosed down the whole basement. Sprayed out a whole can full of aerosol Lavender Mist .
    But there was another problem that day. It was when I washosing away the shit away from the base of the boiler that I realized. The line on the side of the boiler. Sometime in the night, the shit-water level had reached over two feet high and the boiler had quit.
    Back in my apartment, I left my boots in the hallway. Next to