Excerpt from Braille Rainbow "The Check-Out King" He died in his mid-twenties (typically, nobody seemed to know what of). Got himself safely underground before the rest of us had had our first cancer scare. But he was always slipping past the lens, way over at the cropped edge of the class picture or dead in the centre in an egg of glare. He might be at the vortex of a scrum or rumble or flopped down in the field beyond the goal posts, oblivious to calls to return, watching (perhaps) an ant traverse a blade of grass. In those days no work meant you failed. "Have you finished, Earl?" the teacher asked when his head sank onto his arms. "No." "Have you started?" "No.
" Everyone, even she, laughed. Everyone except Earl. He rode out humour the way a pine tree rides out rain. A cipher makes a tricky victim: he may become a black hole or a mirror. Our bully picked him out only when he'd run through everyone else repeatedly. Earl didn't confront, didn't retreat. He stood there and one punch knocked him flat. He lay for a while with his face to the sky (so long that some of us looked up too--just blue and fluffy clouds) and then he got up and walked away toward wherever he lived, getting small slowly, with every few steps bringing a hand to his face and flinging a ribbon of blood down at the dust.
"Bill Had" Two deaf parents who taught him sign language which he forgot after they died. Next to mine, the best beat-up old denim jacket in the crew. Small hands for such a big man. Thick dark hair, greenish-brown eyes, and one of the handsomest faces I've seen outside of movies. A talent for mimicry. An irritating habit of taking things too far. An endearing one of apologizing when he did. Small learning and large curiosity.
A pretty short attention span. An unshakeable belief that women ejaculated when they came. Many girlfriends. Dozens of friends, including ex-girlfriends. A part-time DJing job where he met many of his friends and girlfriends and scored high-quality drugs. Inoperable colon cancer at age 28. A cop costume so good it almost got him beaten up by Halloween partyers who had flushed their dope until he shared out his own which was better. A filthy apartment piled with pizza boxes.
A grin no one could resist. Nimble feet, with which he performed amusing untrained tap, soft shoe, and jig. Zero ambition. Occasional mean moods but no cruel bone in his body. A Jimmy Cagney routine in which while singing "Yankee Doodle Dandy" he ran at a wall and up it and back- flipped off of it, landing on his feet, which never should have worked because Cagney was a shrimp and Bill was linebacker-sized but I saw it, many times, from 1981 to 1985, during the long afternoons when the galleries were empty.