Most of the words in my life-long arsenal of obscenities I learned from Johnny Gomez. He and I were partners during the 4th grade. We drifted together through no natural inclination; rather, it was a matter of necessity. We were both fat, outcast, disrespectful of authority and a good way smarter than the Dominican nuns who taught us. As one of those loveless brides of Jesus once said, Johnny and I deserved each other.

To amuse ourselves during the long hours of being read at, over, under but never to, we developed a game. It involved no skill, no cleverness, but a great deal of honor. We would write a bad word backwards on a slip of paper. After that, we would pass it to the partner, who would unscramble the word and was duty-bound to speak it in a voice almost loud enough to be detected by the Nun. If the Nun happened to seek out the source of the commotion that generally followed, the speaking partner was on his honor to hide the mystery word. If caught with it, he was to take full responsibility, which invariably meant detention.

Now, most of the words were routine Saxonisms for body parts and functions. But, one day, I received from Johnny a word I did not recognize. He howled from across the room as I, wide-eyed, virtually bellowed the offending syllable not once but many times, amazed at the reaction it invoked.

Later that day, after detention, I met Ruth Ann Rudd behind the school. The late March wind shearing across the frozen river had graciously reddened both our faces even before I asked her whether or not the word was as dirty as the class's response to it had indicated.

"To some people, it's dirty," she said, adding thoughtfully, "but to others, it isn't."

That was my first taste of ambiguity, and I wasn't too sure I liked it.

I started at St. Elizabeth's School midway during the 4th grade, my father having transplanted the family from Detroit to Shawnee, Michigan, with the idea that he would prosper in his own insurance agency there. St. Elizabeth's was, I suppose, a typical small town Catholic elementary school. We had a modest red brick building which stood, one story, between the red brick convent and the red brick church. On the far side of the church stood the rectory, the mysterious retreat of the parish priest, a bourbon-belching Irishman who loudly smacked his lips when swilling Eucharistic wine and terrified us by numbering aloud our failing grades before the entire class when report cards were issued. Father Tom Collins--I swear that was his name--regularly approved of my grades, except for those in Conduct and Effort.

We also had a typical assortment of nuns, all Dominicans, from the young, innocent and pretty novice Sister Alice, who never took final vows, to careerists like Sister Victor, whom we called Sister Moldy because of the prominent mole on her chin, the sole hair sprouting from which she would regularly and absently tug. Ruling the convent with an iron rosary was Sister Ann, an ogre. My mother once said of her, cryptically, that she "liked the younger nuns." It was rumored that her favorites were allowed to stay up late at night, drinking wine. All our nuns wore the ankle-length habits with the blocky headpieces and the long black veils of the Order. We called them Penguins. What I recall most clearly about them is that they always smelled very strongly of laundry starch.

Our school, as I've said, was typical. Typical, too, was my plight. I was a plump little stranger, transplanted from the Big City, an oddity not to be trusted. The majority of students had already formed social cliques from which I was excluded. By default, then, I wound up with the children of Mexican farmworkers who, through the absence of Jews, Blacks, Arabs, Asians or any other ethnic group, were our town's put-upon minority. Our clique consisted of Angel Alaniz, Johnny Gomez and his two cousins, Mary Garcia and Nellie Villanueva, and me, the little gringo. Johnny was our general, and he quickly promoted me to his lieutenant because of my reckless sense of humor and bone-headed willingness to do anything to get attention. My dirty-word recitations were considered hysterical. My imitation of a bullfrog during choir rehearsals for a Christmas concert brought down the house and sent Sister Victor running from the gym in tears of rage. Spy movies were then in vogue, and I did a fairly accurate parody of macho swagger. I regularly referred to the prettiest of the older girls as agent 36-24-36. That never failed to get a belly laugh out of Johnny Gomez, and his was a considerable belly indeed.

Bound together by laughter and the code of the backwards word, Johnny and I became school pals, though we never saw each other after the school day ended. The boundaries of our friendship, though unspoken, were clear. We ate lunch together, tormented girls together and, when necessary, took our punishment together. Frequently seated at diagonal ends of the classroom for reasons of public order, we invented chain humor, usually beginning with a standard--a Helen Keller joke, say, or a leper story--and by the time it reached the far end of class a dozen retellings had mutilated it so wretchedly that it became all the more hilarious. In this way we were also able to disrupt many more desks than our own, a source of some pride.

Our punishment was generally mild. Only once do I recall physical violence coming into play, but the memory disturbs me still. In a strange reversal, Johnny was my lieutenant in the 4th grade crossing guard. I'd been chosen Captain, no doubt out of sympathy, the Sisters feeling that giving the new boy a position of responsibility would endear him to the other students--this representative of their understanding of human nature. Our mission, fortunately, was quite minor: We were to stand at the doorway beside two 8th graders to make sure that at the final bell the hoards of shrieking escapees would not go tearing madly across the front lawn and into traffic, but would instead be shepherded along the walk toward the parking lot, where their mothers awaited them in glistening Buicks and Fords.

Now, burdened by the responsibility, I reasoned--and to this day I think correctly--that Johnny and I should leave final period a few minutes before the bell so that we could assume our posts and be ready to manage the first graders, whose classroom was adjacent to the front doors while ours was at the far end of the hall. Mrs. Wilkens, a lay teacher and attendant during final period, accepted our reasoning. We had been leaving five minutes before the bell for about a month when we were captured by Sister Ann, dragged by our ears back to class, and presented to Mrs. Wilkens who, shuddering at Sister's fury, denied ever giving us permission to leave class early. The liar! As a result, we were detained after school in the main office. We joked casually, nervous but in no way prepared for what was to come.

Sister Ann swooped in like a Valkyrie--you could feel the otherworldly chill all about her--and entalloned Johnny by the front of his shirt. She began then alternately shaking him and backhanding him across the mouth. I didn't understand what she was trying to get him to confess to--whatever it was, it seemed to having little to do with the day's infraction. But Johnny was unable to get anything coherent out. His throat was choked with sobs, and when he did manage to get a few strangled words past his lips, those words were in Spanish, which only fueled Sister's rage.

"In English!" Sister Ann shrieked.

And the more he tried to stop it, the more his language--a language of warmth and comfort--came pouring out, the trickle become a torrent. This, of course, only caused Sister Ann to shake faster, strike harder.

Standing back to appraise her work, she glared down her long nose at the red-faced and quivering Johnny Gomez and said, sneering:

"Why don't you take it like a man, like Robert, here."

She dismissed Johnny Gomez, but ordered me to stay. My knees felt like sponges. I shuddered. What had this woman planned for me? Was I to be beaten? Worse? Was she going to make me stay up late and drink wine with her?

Sister Ann stood behind the huge wooden desk, beneath a photograph of the Pope, and looked down at me. As Johnny Gomez's footsteps faded into the distance so, it seemed, did her rage. Her face now looked deeply saddened, even pained.

"This business, Robert. It was Gomez's idea?"

"Yes, Sister." The words were very close to my tongue, and the idea of regret a very long way away.

"Come here, Robert," she said. "I want to show you something." She sounded almost motherly. I remembered that some of the sisters--the younger ones--would often call her mother.

I stepped closer. I felt nauseous. The smell of starch was overwhelming. On the desk was a large book, bound in black and red leather. It was very impressive. Sister Ann thumbed through it, looking over the tops of her wire-rimmed glasses, running one white and gnarled finger from top to bottom of the page. She stopped. She rotated the book so that I could see its contents, lay it across the desk and, finger still resting where it had, demanded that I look. I closed my eyes.

I had expected to find beneath that finger a passage from the Bible, something detailing the punishment for boys who left class early. At the very least, I thought she was revealing to me some school rule which, bound by the thick leather, would have nearly as much moral weight.

"Look," she demanded.

I opened my eyes. I had never seen such a book. There were many, many lines of several colors, breaking the page into neat, ordered columns both horizontally and vertically. I looked for a long while trying to make sense of the chaos of names and numbers. Then, directing my eyes along the white finger, I recognized my family's name. Beside it was a silver star, the kind good students often had plastered to their foreheads for work well done. Also beside our name were a series of numbers and dollar signs. Then the finger moved, and my eyes with it, to the name Gomez. There was no star. Some of the columns had no numbers. Only some years later did I learn that in this book the sisters kept a record of the Sunday donations made by each family in the parish. It was the Order's humble version of Heaven's somewhat larger ledger.

"Do you understand, Robert?" Sister Ann asked.

I lied: "Yes, sister."

"You're a good boy, Robert." She said in a hushed and serious tone. "Keep to your kind."

I ran out of the office. I found Johnny Gomez in the boy's room. His eyes were blood-red from crying, his face was flushed crimson, and his shirt hung out over his pants. The bottom buttons were missing, and part of his large, dark belly glistened in the florescent light.

"She hit you, too?" Johnny said. He looked me in the eye.

"Yeah," I said. "A lot. She hit me a lot."

"Where? Where'd she hit you? In the face? Where?"

"In the face," I said, but then tried to cover myself: "But not so much. She used the stick, mostly."

I rubbed my ass, feigning soreness.

"Yeah," Johnny Gomez said. "Yeah. Right."

That night I got out my bike and rode toward where I knew Johnny Gomez and his family lived. I had never been to that part of town before. No route my parents ever took had passed that way. I rode slowly--there were some icy patches along the streets--until I came to the edge of town. There the street lights stopped, and the road turned to dirt. I got off my bike and walked it, stumbling sometimes when a drifting cloud swallowed up the quarter-moon. Twenty minutes beyond the edge of town, the dirt road crested. Below, circled with a broken wood fence, stood the home of Johnny Gomez.

I will not describe the house. By the standards of poverty we have now come to accept as routine, I doubt the house would seem all that shocking. But I was shocked--a feeling reinforced by the memory of Sister Ann's leather-bound book. The ruin of a home, the missing numbers, the beating all had some interconnection. I felt it, though I did not understand it. It was something obscene. It was something so horrible it could not be written, backwards or forwards. It was something even I would not say aloud.

Forgetfulness is any child's most important resource, and I soon forgot the incident. So, I believed, did Johnny Gomez. In a matter of days our mischief was reborn, the chain of humor resurrected. But I was growing tired of the games. Even the few obscenities I had mastered in Spanish failed to excite me. I had, you see, fallen in love.

Irene Mudget, despite the dissonance of her name, was the most beautiful girl in the 4th grade, and she had money. Precisely the way wealth complements physical beauty I still do not understand, but Irene's money seemed not so much the cause of her great looks, but rather a reward for them. I was dazzled. Irene had lustrous, wavy, shoulder-length blonde hair, and the fragrance she strewed like many small flowers as she passed was clean and pure. Her eyes were sapphires. Her smile was perfect--white, radiant, assured. Everything she did, she did well: Irene Mudget walked with grace, skipped rope elegantly. The other girls must have envied her to the sweet marrow, but they could hardly hate her, since never did her assurance surface as arrogance. Her betterness was always expressed with the uncondescending good will that characterizes real royalty in its dealings with the common.

I say I was in love. Can a 4th grader fall in love? I believe so. Poised between true childhood and the hormonal eruptions of adolescence, a long way from the lacerations that make adult relationships the wonder they are, a 4th grader is particularly qualified to fall in love. I saw, untainted, a physical beauty that must surely have been a product of some inner light, as if the human form were a sort of three-dimensional screen into which was projected the image of the soul.

I loved, perhaps for the only time in my life, with the sole right reason: I loved her because she was good.

And what was I? A fat cipher, at best; at worst, class clown. Knowing that never in a jillion years would a girl like Irene Mudget pay mind to me, I took desperate measures. Even at my young age I had seen some poetry. Most of it was passionate doggerel composed to the Virgin Mary, begging intercession. I was, I thought, ready to beg the divine intercession of Irene Mudget.

This is the text, complete, of my first literary production:

Your lips are like cherries,
your teeth are like pearls.
Oh, Irene!
You're such a girl!

Those lines, hastily scrawled on a half-sheet of three-hole binder paper, I folded into a tight mat. I remember anxiousness, a lump in the throat and its twin in my stomach. I probably sweat--I have always sweat. On the cover I wrote the name Irene as clearly as I could, in what I thought a formal script. I then tapped the shoulder of Ruth Ann Rudd, who sat in front of me. I whispered "pass it on," and slipped the packet alongside the desk and into her hand.

Midway through its journey, my little poem found itself in the hands of Johnny Gomez. I felt relief. There were only two more students between him and Irene Mudget, and these were girls on our side: Nellie Villanueva and Mary Sanchez. Johnny eyed the note, the large script, the name. He turned, with difficulty, toward me, and I motioned with my hand for him to pass the note along. Instead, he grinned whitely, opened the note, read it, and began to laugh.

He laughed. He laughed wildly, hysterically, as if that note contained the filthiest of backwards obscenities. Sister Victor, scribbling figures on the blackboard, turned silently. The entire class seemed to inhale at the same moment. Johnny Gomez went on laughing, oblivious in rapture.

Within moments, Sister Victor was there: black and white, monolithic, redolent. She stood above Johnny Gomez, swaying, a tower of anger. She put out her hand. Johnny Gomez hesitated for only a moment before handing over the note. From that time, he would never again turn to face me.

As I waited for my vulgarity to be made known to the entire class, I did not hate Johnny Gomez any more than he hated me. Though we had had many small things in common, a great space had always separated us. But now even that had been partly bridged by the sorrow of knowledge. We had stood together before the infinite pettiness of God. Together, we had come to know that no man can trust his brother.

I was not afraid. I watched Sister Victor's eyes dilate, the veins rise in her neck, her flesh turn purple. But I saw much more than this. I saw a world unfold. I saw humiliation, certainly. I saw each word of my poem scissored by Sister Victor's lips before a leering class. I saw the dozens of 4th grade faces, twisted with ugly laughter, follow me for weeks across the playground, down the dark halls: "Loverboy!" they shrieked. "Poet!" Among those faces, I saw my dream of Irene Mudget crumble.

And I saw--I believe I saw--the many years of silences, the future fit for the likes of me and Johnny Gomez, collapsed into one mass--black, white, monolithic. Had I then known, I would have raised my voice in praise of a kind: for there, in Sister Victor, I saw all the disparate shards of a life gone wrong cemented together with the bitter starch of disappointment.