My name is Bernie and I was always lucky with wishing. Until kindergarten my wishes were about my family. I wished Rhonda my sick sister would get over her cancer. I was what the preacher called a ‘selfish person’, because my parents are basket cases because of the cancer. The cancer was all in her stomach and I was selfish because I didn’t so much care that she was had cancer when she wasn’t knocked out with pain shots and pills, but I didn’t like her screaming. Mostly mother would go off with her to Boston, Omaha or Metro California for operations, and treatments. Then they would come back a month later and moan saying ‘She’s dying and there’s no hope’. Well I had it up to my ears with a lick of hope. So I blurted out one time, “Sure there’s hope!”
“Little ears hear too well.” Mother said to father.
“I get what I wish for, and I don’t wish Rhonda dead!” I said, “And that’s why she won’t die.”
“She’s already lived 6 months past impossible.” Dad said.
“I know cause I’ve been wishing her alive and you know I get what I wish for.” I said.
“He did get a real gun for Christmas Fred!” Mother said, “Try to imagine a five-year old with a 22 pistol!”
“Well he wanted it so bad, and he’s been responsible, and we only shoot it on a range.” Dad replied, and this was something mother threw up to dad all the time.
“Crazy wishes I say,” mother said.
“Mickey would have been crippled if it were not for me wishing.” I said changing a sore subject.
“Oh sure you made Mickey walk again,” dad said, “the doctors never said, he would never walk again. He just didn’t walk awhile.”
“Almost a year,” I told him and that was only last year.” He I knew remembered.
“So what did you do Bernie to make your older brother walk again after he didn’t?” Mother said.
“Well I began wishing it every night after my prayers. Then one day I was flat fed up with him lying around eating and not playing with me, like he once did, and I rubbed his legs all over and wished it with my eyes closed while I rubbed.”
“Did you pray to God son for Mickey to walk again?” Mother said.
“No I didn’t pray, God has too much to do to care about legs not working right, I wished it myself. He began walking after that rub-down. I got almost no credit, but sometimes he plays ball with me now.”
The parents were quite and said nothing for a while and I went in the living room and played a video game, Machine Gun Slaughter On Broadway, one of my all time favorites.
I thought it was just one of those times when you tell something important, and parents don’t hear, their ears often don’t reach down for the sounds of what little people are saying. It’s like, ‘What could that little snot-nose know, all he knows is what we tell him. We never tell him anything so he’s as dumb as us.’
Well I left my program when I heard them arguing in the next room. I got bored with Machine Gun where it got to the place where we shoot the babies that are hiding behind the sheep. You have to shoot about three hundred animals. I like animals better than babies. Babies scream all night. I’m sorry I ever was one.
So I listened at the door, while they thought I was shooting sheep. The machine guns have a good rock and roll beat. I learned dad was on my side, “Damn it Monica you’ve trapsied all over for treatments and you don’t realize Bernie may be right.”
“He’s just a little boy with a vivid imagination and expressing fantasies,” Mother said.
“Bernie never worked you over like he did me. God I had to get him a fucking gun, and it had to be a real fuckin gun!”
“Terrible stupidity! Mostly you’re a responsible person, but that was totally crazy. The doctors would lock you up Fred if we told them, “Oh yes Fred bought a five-year old a real gun. It shoots 22 long bullets.”
“Those people you took Rhonda to in Mexico City were real witch doctors Monica. That mixture of chicken shit and pig innards is really potent when rubbed vigorously on the stomach. That was fuckin CRAZY! I think that venture cost us 4,000 credits? They don’t pay for witch doctors and shit rubbing in our medical policy. The same doctors who would certify me crazy about the gun, would list you as BONKERS for your Mexican shit venture. They would call it, ‘Child Endangerment’ dear.”
“I’ve tried everything!” she said. She had that flat, mournful sound like when our dog Grammy was about dead, and could barely drag herself around on her front two legs. They both sounded like that almost finished dog on its last legs.
“Look I couldn’t eat or work, and my dick was limp until after I bought that fuckin gun.”
“What you’re saying is too scary to believe.”
My parents didn’t talk to me about it, just took me into Rhonda’s room with her asleep. She was pain-pilled and patched out cold in her pink jommies. She didn’t even see me to know that it was me that got her stomach well. I rubbed her stomach for 30 minutes, but I think now that it would have only been necessary to touch her a bit.
The doctors took credit for getting her well, they forgot that she was hopeless before. She just got all well, and one guy named Doctor Simerfinkler said about her, “The body sometimes just heals itself. It is often self-correcting.” Of course he added that all the radiation treatments were ‘helpful’. They caused my sister to be bald. I wanted to call him an ‘idiot’ but mother always tells me to ‘be nice’.
My mother and father knew I cured my sister, but they were in denial of that stark fact. If a baseball bat hit them over the head they would say, “That looked like a ball, it couldn’t have been a strike.” They were standing on both sides of Rhonda’s bed when I preformed the MIRACLE, and now deny I cured her, PARENTS ARE BLIND!
It was a family secret about ’lucky Bernie’ until kindergarten and John.
I was next to the smallest boy in the class. The smallest kid was Mick. It was like Mick was a kid dwarf . I was twice as big as Mick, but not quite half as big as John.
John didn’t look five. The teachers didn’t even think he was five. His arms were bigger, like his legs, and John beat up Mick in the bathroom every day. No one defended Mick and all the teachers were women so we had to go to in the bathroom without any adult. The firm rule was girls were not supposed to watch boys piss and shit, and we were barred from going in and watching girls do it. I really never wanted to see girls piss and shit, except that it wasn’t allowed so something must be good about it. There must be something they were hiding.
So once Mick got both his ears blacked and his nose busted in one day. Of course he wouldn’t tell who did it. It was a tattler-tale to let the teacher know you got beat up in the bathroom. We didn’t want to, ‘Go to teacher and tell.’ Little girls were known to do that, not growing men. I told nothing and Mick gt beat every day. I saw it, and may have even laughed with the others, glad it was him and not me. In kindergarten kids are at the mercy of the bigger kid.
Well Mick became me. His parents took little Mick out of kindergarten. I was next in line as the next smallest. At first John would trip me in the hall, or when I walked by his desk to the pencil sharpener. He was a total ass-hole, I hated him.
In the bathroom I became Mick, but I fought back and went home black and blue. The best I did was tear his shirt. John was poor, and his mother fixed his torn shirt and he wore it to school patched. That was my small victory at first.
It was required every kid had to be toilet trained to be in kindergarten. Well you had to be retarded to be in five-year old kindergarten and still shit and piss your pants. So I wished away John’s control. I had learned with Mickey and Rhonda that I needed to somehow touch the person some kind of way to affect them. So in the bathroom I had my dickey out at the pee-wall-pan and John came by and kicked my leg, thinking I would pee on myself, but I turned and peed on him. Well that was a really dirty water way to reach and touch him.
Then he really beat me, it was so bad that the principal called my parents and they took me home. He beat me all around my head, it hurt really bad, and I was so very mad.
Anyway he had to go back to class with peed pants, my pee.
I had to wait till my parents left their office and drove over to the school. While I waited I wished hard that John would shit his pants. He shit his pants and stunk up the place before I went home. It was Great!
When John got up to be excused for the bathroom shit ran down his pants, and the floor was messed. It was like a trail down the hall, like a slime bug that leaves a trail to the bathroom
I knew I would be going back to school and John would be there in a diaper. They would not kick him out of school for a shit medical problem. John would be in school in his diapers, and I would still be small. Even if I told teachers, like a little girl he would still constantly heat me. He might even figure out that I caused his problem.
In the car going home I wished John, Rhonda’s cancer, and Mickey’s non-working legs. I closed my eyes and wished as I put mother’s kleenex against my bleeding nose.
John came to school for a while, but he had to be pushed out early to go home in his wheelchair, because of his stomach cancer screaming. When I was near his wheelchair I alway gave it a little shove. Of course when no one else was watching. like in the bathroom when he was trying to transfer to a toilet seat.
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