Free Little Boy by Anthony Prato Page B

doubt that Mike was, well, a geek. He was a great guy
who wouldn't harm a fly. Strange thing is, though, Mike never hung
out with anyone but Kyle and me. He was a geek for hanging out with us ! Correction: Us and his Mom. "Momma’s boy,” we’d always
call him. And that’s precisely what Kyle heard me say under my
breath one day when Mike committed one of his usual blunders. Well,
it wasn’t actually a blunder, but it was typical Mike. While
walking down the hall in school with him and Kyle one morning, I
started belting My Way , the Elvis Presley song. As I
finished the final crescendo of the song, as that final "my way"
echoed down the black and blue and beige tiled hallway past Mrs.
Simpkin’s English class, I turned to Mike and said: “That’s the way
Elvis sang it.”
     
    “It’s Frank Sinatra song,” he said.
     
    “No, Pollock, it’s an Elvis song.”
     
    “But Sinatra also sang it,” he insisted. “I
heard it on my Mom's Sinatra record last week.”
     
    Shit. He was right. I searched for a
response. “Go fuck yourself, Mike!” was about all I could muster.
But then, under my breath, I said, “Momma’s boy,” and laughed. Mike
didn’t hear it, but Kyle’s thin lips grinned from ear to ear. From
that point on, I knew that Kyle and I were going to be terrific
friends. On that day we discovered a bond that would gel any two
people together, no matter how dissimilar: a mutual derision for a
mutual third friend.
     
    Although both Kyle and I loved Mike like a
brother, we reveled equally in his nerdiness throughout high
school. Christ, we’d make fun of everything about Mike: his messed
up hair, his pot belly, his sloppy clothes.
     
    He was an easy target, but not too easy. But
the other two members of my high school quintet, Paul and Rick,
were the insult magnets. Mike, however, was just a tad cooler than
them, so Kyle and I considered it our duty to poke fun at him.
     
    And there was plenty about Mike to dis. He
stood about six feet, taller than me, but shorter than Kyle. But
while I was kind of the average-sized member of the group, and Kyle
was the emaciated member, Mike was the fat one. Not rolly-polly
fat, not Jeff and his sister fat, but fat nonetheless. At sixteen,
before he's ever tasted beer, he had a portly beer belly. And
before he'd ever felt a chick's tit, he'd grown his own little pair
of A-cups, the contour of which could be seen clearly through most
any shirt. At school, between those tits there hung an unstylish
pencil thin tie, usually an acrylic maroon one, no matter what
color shirt he wore.
     
    If I had to summarize Mike, I'd say that
looked as ridiculous as Kyle, but unlike Kyle, he longed to look
like me. Kyle was happy with his appearance. His style was being
out of style. But Mike wished he didn't look like himself, he tried
like hell to appear cool and hip. But he was what he was, and
that's what Kyle and I found so hilarious. That's why we made fun
of him incessantly.
     
    This'll sound funny, but most of all, we made
fun of Mike because me and Kyle were his only friends. Our
friendship is reminiscent of an adage my father used to recite: "I
wouldn't join any club that would have me as a member." Applied to
us, Kyle and I picked on Mike because he wasn't sophisticated
enough to have any friends other than two guys who constantly
ridiculed him.
     
    When Mike wasn't being laughed at by me and
Kyle, he was at home watching movies with his mother. Almost every
day, especially on Mondays following a weekend full of
movie-watching, Mike would try to impress the gang by citing all
sorts of extraneous facts about movies he's seen. Sometimes, I'll
admit, his comments were interesting.
     
    At lunch one day when Mike announced that
he'd just seen The Godfather , and that we should all go over
his house that weekend and watch it with him. Reluctantly, we went.
It began as a typical afternoon: Rick's Mom picked up me and Paul.
Kyle, who also lived in Astoria, just walked over