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first night without her.
    After my mom left him, my dad spent several years jumping from one bed to another. His binge of one-night stands resulted in the birth of one child, one we know about anyhow, a little girl he barely ever saw. Then he married a woman named Sally who he met at his bar and became the stepfather to her three sons. The whole crew shared a glorified one-bedroom apartment in Southwest Philly with Cha- Cha Chacinzi, who made his bed in a converted closet.
    The night I moved in, I didn’t have a clue about how many drugs my dad was on or how he had to use one to bring himself down from another. But after a few days, I saw enough to know without doubt he was an addict. I saw the white powdery residue on the table, the empty pill bottles by the sink, the little bags in the trash can, the cut straws on the nightstand where he always stashed his weapons. I wasn’t an idiot. The adults tried to hide the hard stuff from the kids, but they were too fucked up to pull it off. They didn’t even bother to hide their drinking or their pot-smoking. Beer was their water; joints were their Marlboros.
    I still don’t know what went wrong when my dad signed me up at Pepper Middle School, but I somehow managed to jump from seventh grade classes to what felt like eighth grade on my bus ride across town. I had no clue what was going on in any of them, but I didn’t care. I had a bigger problem. Pepper was pretty far from my dad’s house, too far to walk, and there were
only two trolley stops anywhere near it. One was in front of one of the worst housing projects in Philly; between the second stop and the school stood a dense tangle of trees and brush where the local crack dealers did their business. I rode the trolley each morning with some of the Italian kids from my dad’s neighborhood. We got off at the first stop to avoid the crack forest, which meant we had to run for our fucking lives through four blocks of projects controlled by the gang called the Junior Black Mafia. We’d run in a pack, hoping there was truth in that old saying about safety in numbers. There wasn’t. The Junior Black Mafia got at least one of us every damn morning. I was usually pretty lucky. I was fast. But not always fast enough.
    I hate to admit it, even to myself, but I came to appreciate John in a weird sort of way after I transferred to Pepper. After years in the ring with a full-grown boxer, I knew how to take a punch. Short of stabbing me or shooting me, there was nothing the gangbangers could do that I hadn’t already survived before.
     
    THE ONLY PLACE I actually felt comfortable was on the softball field. I was the only white kid who made Pepper’s softball team that year. I was the shortstop. Softball didn’t thrill me like hockey or even football, but it served its purpose. I was a pretty good player, good enough I had a hunch my teammates would keep me from getting killed in a pinch, at least until after the season was over.
    After practice one day when I hadn’t been on the team more than a week, I went back into the school. I was hoping the boys’ bathroom would be empty. There had been so many attacks over the years the authorities had removed all the doors from the stalls. At Pepper, you only got to drop a deuce in private if you were the only one in the john. Since it was after four o’clock , I figured I’d have the place to myself. I was wrong.
    The hallway door no sooner thudded shut behind me when a voice said, “There’s another one.” Several guys, I couldn’t tell how many, were crowded into one stall. One of them was glaring
at me. I recognized him; I’d seen him before, hanging with the Junior Black Mafia. When he started moving toward me, I caught a glimpse of the kid on the floor. From the looks of things, the JB Mafiosos had wedged the kid against the toilet to keep him from sliding away when they kicked him. Blood poured from his nose and huge red welts scarred his cheeks. If I hadn’t ridden the