Nutsy Harridan, Burywater born and bred, was always thinking of things to do.

"Come on Johnny — Coon Square is going to eat us all up!" Nutsy said fearfully, looking every which way but down. Ashes of terror dangled in his darting blue crazy eyes.

"Take it easy, gasohol. It was your stupid idea to try and get laid here!" Johnny said disgustedly; knowing he was really in a world of fools and self-haters in this Cape Town of New England, where apartheid might have been invented when the Christian taliban ruled, as they meandered their way out of the ghetto called by Burywaterians fondly: "n****rville"; always insisting they were just joking like a Gopper one day "n****rhead" was erased before bigots could see it before killing unarmed animals with their big phalic shaped guns.

Johnny had gone on Nutsy's "makes" before, but the one that was for real, he could still hear Harridan screaming to the girl while Johnny sat a distance away among the Litchfield Hills woods - having gone first after winning the toss coin that had Nutsy going "sloppy seconds": "I can't do nothing! I got elephantiasis balls!"

Johnny whirled about, thinking a herd of elephants was about to descend upon him. After Nutsy got pseudo-laid, they then began to walk thirteen miles back to Burywater under a hot July sun; leaving the pretty Campville girl behind only half satisfied wondering about "cool city slickers . . . ."

Johnny wondered to himself if Nutsy Elephantine Balls' grandparents hadn't sided with the tea lords backed by the Black and Tans, since Nutsy hated everybody and anything and just as often himself even more.

"Hey, if God was so perfect, why did He fuck up on doing bodily functions that makes us a joke?" Johnny muttered, but Nutsy did not hear. That would have been blasphemous!

There were two kinds of Irish people, Johnny hypothesized; both hating the other intensely, continuing their old fights begun on "the old sod", but he didn't know the why of it until he would be told by his geography teacher, Griffin O'Neil, that the bad guys had been cops for the English Black and Tans while the others who looked a lot like Johnny's grandparents' people in the old country had fought for their identity, led by the fiery Garibaldi with his red hair copulating with winds, just like Johnny was trying to do in a Burywater with its hundreds of crosses stabbing the sky. Ironically, the teacher would always emphasize that he detested nationalism since that concept led to wars and the killing of the disenfranchised and the innocent. Griffin O'Neil spoke always of peace as he pointed to the large map, where countries were at war with each either for religious, territory, oil or feelings of so-called superiority reasons. It would be Mr. Griffin O'Neil that would pass him; enabling Johnny to graduate high school with enough courses passed - even though he had an overall flunking average. He was one of a very few students able to pull that feat off to the chagrin of a vice-principal named Ambrose Macarthy, who on the first day seeing dark curly hair Johnny with his rugged good looks entering his school said: "Tell me future dropout kid, what girl do you want me to introduce you to since they outnumber the boys eight to two and then you can get laid and get out of my fucking school?" Johnny gave him the most shocked expression he could muster; conveying the meaning he had never heard those words "laid" and "fucked" - One upon the Other before ....

Johnny would always heed his seventh-grade teacher Miss Sweeney's advice to always protect his body parts from those who would have liked to devour them greedily, and he would never forget her when he went into teaching making his primary goal be to teach his students how to think which he believed would keep them in good stead for the rest of their lives and not fall victim to all the lies that would fall upon their heads in a guise of truth, and so for the total of fifteen years of time he would do in Burywater, situated by a river that would overrun its banks every twenty years or so to drown those who lived by the tracks in shanty neighborhoods, Johnny could see the polluted river: dying . . . dying . . . dying.

Nutsy Harridan had another bright idea to go to a whore joint in Bridgeport where the women accepting moneys would not laugh at his elephant balls and since he told Johnny he would pay for the night out the two seventeen years-old boys set out for The Sound. When the prostitute tried to steal Johnny's money and he pulled the bills from her teats, the two pimps agreed with his saying that was not honorable that she should try to keep his money after giving her money for the jukebox. Nutsy could be heard screaming all over the house about his big balls.

"WEEEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOO!" Nutsy Harridan said to Johnny as they were indulging in a smoke in the boy's room at Commercial High, where girls outnumbered boys.

Johnny had decided to transfer from Dabingle High and regrettably Nutzy followed his move a week later. Johnny had enough of the freaky guy after the incident when Nutsy asked him if he could join him in a little meeting he was going to have with guys from Alcatraz Trade High who wanted to kill him for being Irish and Johnny said yes; emerging from the front entrance, Johnny saw a mass of guys from the other school. When their leader came to them saying to Johnny: "You crazy taking on two hundred guys?"

When noticing none of the fifty "friends" Nutsy said were going to show up, Johnny said: "Look I know you'll kick our asses but I tell you the first wave will have five guys going down!". Johnny said; not bragging. He believed in what he was saying.

That's when their leader said: "You are crazy for defending this harp who called us retarded for going to a school named after a prison!" The leader waved to the large mass of guys yelling: "Forget it! This guy's nuts too!"

Dabingle's vice-principal would beg Johnny, every morning the two years of his attending, to please get out of his school and let peace begin again. He suspected it was Johnny who orchestrated the falling of all the rows in the auditorium by having all the screws taken out - producing a domino affect of sixty rows falling to a heap - and he strongly suspected the hyphenated American had no business attending his school from which eighty percent of the student body most of whom he would proudly say were of his "race" would enroll in college - cajoled the whole freshmen class to walk the third floor hall in prison fashion while teachers were retreating to their classrooms; looking at them frighteningly from widow panes of their locked doors.

Some insane guys even began throwing hallway monitor desks out of windows and then the cops, the army of the rich, came with guns drawn - making the riot "Take back dignity" suddenly end.

Mr. Moriarity could never get enough evidence on Johnny. It was one of the few times no Burywater guy ratted out.

In fact Johnny had planned the whole event even appointing Joe Big Cherries to bang out rock and roll melodies on the piano and Johnny would marvel at a piano playing R&R singer copying Joe's style to perfection a few years in the future by standing and pounding away at the keys almost out of control.

This weird compulsion of Nutsy to scream funny would get Johnny expelled for two weeks in his senior year at Commercial when Ambrose the vice-principal entered the history class - in which Johnny would meet his future bride blue-green eyed Linda Ann at the June class picnic and marry five months after they graduated - and pointed to the ruggedly handsome Johnny saying: "OK out! You're expelled from my school Johnny Sanque!" Johnny asked: "Why for?"

The answer given was: "Because your friend Harridan is on the third floor screaming weeeeeeooooo like that niggero singer James Brown!"

The history teacher Mr. Percy told all his colleagues later that was the first time in his thirty years of teaching he had ever seen something like that done by an administrator.

Mr. Percy had been the school's football coach. Eight years before he had to cut Johnny's older brother Tommy Tom Tom due to one of his legs was half eaten by polio. He would never forget the crippled kid's moxie and Johnny many years in the future would tell Tom of this hoping to prevent his dying. It would not work His closest sibling born in the same decade as he would die from the polio that would revisit him in the late autumn of his life.

Johnny nodded almost doing the Burywater expression of holding his mouth opened wide while deep furrows spread across his forehead; instead, he left; almost happy for the two weeks of vacation. His older sister Alice would come to plead for him as she had many times before - keeping it a secret from their mother who would hit her offspring in front of the administrators who would nod approvingly but this time Alice would not go to Mister Ambrose. She would go see the compassionate principal Mister Moran who had never forgotten what was done to his people in the "Ole Sod" by haters and exploiters.

He knew he would eventually get used to these people living in a town that would have a river overflowing their heads every ten years or so. He knew. He knew.

Within three years he and Linda Ann would be off to New York City where Johnny would get two degrees as rock and roll blared from their car radio and Burywater was slowing falling out of sight in the rear view mirror.

END 11-5-11