“I’m the heavyweight champion of the world!” Charlie crowed. “The King! The King!”
Oleg — I could only see his profile from where I was in the back of the arcade — was still stooped over on the orange chair, trying his luck with Mrs. Broomdale.
“Got her socks off yet?” Charlie hollered over to him.
Then, just as Oleg was about to yell something back, George, the owner of Fun Village Arcade — stringy, fiftyish, Italian, always wore the same red golf shirt with a green collar — stomped up to him from behind his counter. George was red-faced, trembling, and had a black Louisville Slugger firmly gripped in his right hand.
“You think-a-you live here, huh?” he demanded in a shaky, high-pitched voice, standing over Oleg.
Oleg had a spitting habit back then. You’d walk with him down the sidewalk and he’d stop at every crack, tilt his head toward the ground, and aim a glob of spit in between. He’d spit at street signs and stop signs. From his second-floor bedroom above Nicky’s Diner he’d launch spit out his window onto passing cars and pedestrians below. He’d spit on the basketball court at Kingston Park after every shot he made. He’d spit at pigeons and squirrels, wandering cats, dogs, raccoons. He’d spit in your house if you didn’t watch out. Couldn’t go two minutes without hoarking or dribbling some kind of saliva out of his mouth.
“Huh?” George croaked, and with his free hand undid the top button of his golf shirt, exposing a bundle of wiry brown chest hair. “You think-a-you live here?”
Oleg stared straight ahead, chalk-white.
Everybody in the arcade — there were only six of us; the other three were Korean kids with dyed red bangs — had turned their attention George’s way. Never before had I seen him fuss about the cleanliness of his business. It wasn’t a clean place, especially the floor: the green-and-white-checkered linoleum was dusty and cracked, littered with cigarette ash and Pepsi stains. It looked as if it hadn’t been washed in years. Probably hadn’t been washed in years. Probably had never been washed.
The George we knew was passive, lazy, spent his work hours leaning back on the white plastic lawn chair behind his counter, feet up, watching soccer games and Italian sitcoms on the small, fuzzy-screened television set he’d placed atop three grey milk crates in the corner of the room. Now and then he’d laugh real hard at something he saw on the TV, but other than that he rarely opened his mouth. You asked him to give you quarters for your loonie — he opened up his cash register, took four quarters out, and dropped them into your hand. You ordered a beef patty — he fetched one out of the oven, wrapped a napkin around it, and put it on the counter. Nothing more.
“You gonna act like-a-that? Like-a-some dog … like-a-some dog?” George bent down to Oleg’s level, looked him hard in the eye. “You gonna act like-a-some dog in your mother’s … your mother’s … your mother’s own house, huh?”
Oleg was a statue.
Small drops of sweat were sliding down George’s cheek, along his stubbly neck, and into his chest hair, making it glisten. “Huh?” he screeched, and smacked the tip of his bat against the small puddle of saliva on the floor next to Oleg’s orange chair. “You gonna act like-a-that, huh? You gonna act like-a-some dog, like-a —”
“No,” Oleg said.
George opened his mouth to say something but seemed to forget why he had confronted Oleg in the first place and just stared at him, lips hanging apart, dumbfounded.
“No,” Oleg repeated, appearing as if he were trying to hold back a sneeze.
The whole place was quiet save for the electronic jingles coming from the arcade machines.
Then George stood straight, took a step back from Oleg. “No?” he said. “This is no your house, huh?” He flung an arm in the air, indicating the whole arcade. “You no gonna spit like-a-some dog in your house?”
“No,” Oleg said.
“No?”
“No.”
“Huh?” George said, smacking the barrel of his bat into his empty palm. “What’s you gonna tell me?”
“This isn’t my house,” Oleg said, still staring straight ahead.
“No. This is no your house.”
“No,” Oleg said.
“You gonna spit in my house?”
Oleg peered up at George. “You live here?” He wasn’t trying to be a smartass. It was just a stupid, nervous question, but it was the wrong thing to say, because George grinned widely when Oleg said this, wrapped his free hand around the Louisville Slugger, choked up the way kids do in little league, and took a fierce swing — an aimed-to-kill swing — at Oleg’s head.
Oleg dodged backward just in time so that the bat missed his ear by an inch and smashed straight into the screen of the mini-arcade box, spraying plastic and bits of wire all over the floor.
“You see, huh, what’s-a-gonna happen when you have no respect?” George bellowed wildly, regaining his batting stance. “You see, huh, what’s-a-gonna happen, huh, when you spit like-a-some-dog in somebody house, huh?”
Oleg was trapped against the wall, turned sideways to protect his crotch, hands shielding his face.
“Huh?” George roared. “You see what’s-a-gonna happen!” And he took another swing, vertical this time, as if he were chopping wood.
Oleg stretched his body flat against the wall and sucked in his stomach. The tip of the bat grazed his brown T-shirt and drove hard into the orange chair. George stumbled forward from the force of his monster swing, and Oleg, grasping the opportunity — as swift as Pinball Clemons dodging a tackle — slid past him and bolted out the front door.
George didn’t chase him. He watched him exit. Watched the door swing shut. Then he turned back to the green table, breathed in deeply through his nose, and took another swing, this time aiming at the arcade box, and knocked what was left of it onto the floor.
“What’s-a-gonna-happen, huh?” he whispered to himself, gazing at the broken, tangled, buzzing machine sombrely, flushed, as if it was his pet dog he’d just beaten. Then he turned to the kids in the back. “Get out.”
Stunned from the whole fiasco, we didn’t move.
“Get out!” he repeated with more volume, and before we had time to go anywhere, he was chasing everyone toward the front door, swinging his bat like a madman, threatening to murder all of our mothers and grandmothers and sisters and daughters if we ever stepped foot in his business again.
The next Sunday, after our house-league basketball game at Saint Joseph’s Community Centre, the three of us returned to Fun Village Arcade. George didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow. Oleg — he’d just reached a season high, scoring fifty-six points — cautiously walked up to the counter and asked George to change his loonie for four quarters. Like a robot, without taking his eyes off the TV, George popped open his cash register, reached in, picked out four quarters, and dropped them into Oleg’s hand.
Charlie nudged my shoulder, winked, then hoarked a thick green loogie onto the floor. “Stupid wop,” he whispered, and we walked to the back of the arcade to play a game of Tekken, one-on-one martial-arts combat.
Only half, darling.
“Hell you looking at, buddy?”
No answer.
“What, you don’t speak English? No speak-ee, you?”
Run. Run away.
“Huh? No