Dating : Humpty Du

Momma said to me once, she said ‘you know Willson, kids, they can be cruel. Crueler than most grown-up folk, ’cause they don’t know the depth of the hurt they cause, and what’s worse, Willson, what’s worse is they don’t care.’ And momma, what she was is right.

She called me Willson, with two l’s, named me for the rotten asshole that knocked her up on her fifteenth birthday, then drove his busted up pickup truck over a cliff once he found out. My pops, see, he was a coward, but he was brave enough to top himself before the feds came calling. He was forty-one. The state, hell, even the other Johns in the clink, they don’t take kindly to kiddy-fiddlers much. In jail, they know you touched up a kid, you’re on a one-way trip to shiv town. A sharpened toothbrush. A stray t-bone bone. Hell, even if you didn’t touch up a kid you’re liable to find yourself stuck and bleeding in the cafeteria, but guys like my pops, guys like that are first in line. Persona non grata. Stuck pig walking.

Anyways, momma, she called me Willson, Will’s son, after that no good motherfucker, almost like she done it out of spite, so that even his drowned spirit couldn’t escape accountability for what the living flesh had done. The kids at school though, they called me Humpty Dumpty, on account of me being all lumps, bumps, and no grace. ‘Them kids, they can be cruel,’ momma said, but really, really they was just working with what they was given.

When you grow up a fat kid in a rough neighbourhood, you learn a thing or two about how the world works: the popular kids stay popular, no matter what; the burners can go either way; and most important, if it’s you that’s the fat kid, it don’t matter worth a fuck what you do, you’re still the fat kid. Could be I was the biggest dicked motherfucker in school, and I’d still ‘that fat fuck with the horse dick’. Problem was I didn’t have no horse dick, or much of anything going nursery rhyme. Only thing was they changed the nursery rhyme: on account of I was so fat, they for me, anyways. They called me Humpty Dumpty on account of the chins, the lumps, the flesh spilling out of my shirt. Humpty Dumpty, that unlovable lump of fuck, that was me, just like the said that I couldn’t get upon no damn wall, and I’d crush it if I did; brick or no brick. ‘Kids, they can be cruel,’ momma said.

So one day, one day I decide I’m gonna show them all who can’t sit on a wall, so I climb up on the brick wall at the school, don’t I. Up there, top of the wall, some three, four, maybe five feet, I never was any good at measurin’ things, so I don’t know for sure how tall it is. But what I do know is that on the other side of that wall is a drop so big you won’t come out of it happy. The wall ain’t real wide though, and my size 13’s, they don’t fit too good on that wall, but I’m out to make a point, ain’t I. So I get up there, and I holler, ‘look who’s Humpty Dumpty now, motherfuckers!’ And the whole school, see, it’s recess, they all look over at me. Right when my fat ass overbalances. Right when I become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Right when I fall off that damned wall the long way down.

‘And all the king’s horses

And all the king’s men

They couldn’t put the cracked pavement where

Humpty hit it

Together again.’

That’s what the kids sang, even when I was laying in the hospital wing. ‘Kids, they can be cruel,’ momma said.