Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe Read Free Page A

have a feeling I had to look up more words in the dictionary than he did.
    I was darker than he was. And I’m not just talking about our skin coloring. He told me I had a tragic vision of life. “That’s why you like Spider-Man.”
    “I’m just more Mexican,” I said. “Mexicans are a tragic people.”
    “Maybe so,” he said.
    “You’re the optimistic American.”
    “Is that an insult?”
    “It might be,” I said.
    We laughed. We always laughed.
    We weren’t alike, Dante and I. But we did have a few things in common. For one thing, neither one of us was allowed to watch television during the day. Our parents didn’t like what television did to a boy’s mind. We’d both grown up with lectures that sounded more or less like this: You’re a boy! Get out there and do something! There’s a whole world out there just waiting for you . . .
    Dante and I were the last two boys in America who grew upwithout television. He asked me one day. “Do you think our parents are right—that there’s a whole world out there waiting just for us?”
    “I doubt it,” I said.
    He laughed.
    Then I got this idea. “Let’s ride the bus and see what’s out there.”
    Dante smiled. We both fell in love with riding the bus. Sometimes we rode around on the bus all afternoon. I told Dante, “Rich people don’t ride the bus.”
    “That’s why we like it.”
    “Maybe so,” I said. “Are we poor?”
    “No.” Then he smiled. “If we ran away from home, we’d both be poor.”
    I thought that was a very interesting thing to say.
    “Would you ever?” I said. “Run away?”
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    “You want me to tell you a secret?”
    “Sure.”
    “I’m crazy about my mom and dad.”
    That really made me smile. I’d never heard anyone say that about their parents. I mean, no one was crazy about their parents. Except Dante.
    And then he whispered in my ear. “That lady two seats in front of us. I think she’s having an affair.”
    “How do you know?” I whispered.
    “She took off her wedding band as she got on the bus.”
    I nodded and smiled.
    We made up stories about the other bus riders.
    For all we knew, they were writing stories about us .
    I’d never really been very close to other people. I was pretty much a loner. I’d played basketball and baseball and done the Cub Scout thing, tried the Boy Scout thing—but I always kept my distance from the other boys. I never ever felt like I was a part of their world.
    Boys. I watched them. Studied them.
    In the end, I didn’t find most of the guys that surrounded me very interesting. In fact, I was pretty disgusted.
    Maybe I was a little superior. But I don’t think I was superior. I just didn’t understand how to talk to them, how to be myself around them. Being around other guys didn’t make me feel smarter. Being around guys made me feel stupid and inadequate. It was like they were all a part of this club and I wasn’t a member.
    When I was old enough for Boy Scouts, I told my dad I wasn’t going to do it. I couldn’t stand it anymore.
    “Give it a year,” my dad said. My dad knew that I sometimes liked to fight. He was always giving me lectures about physical violence. He was trying to keep me away from the gangs at my school. He was trying to keep me from becoming like my brother who wound up in prison. So, because of my brother, whose existence was not even acknowledged, I had to be a good boy scout. That sucked. Why did I have to be a good boy just because I had a bad-boy brother? I hated the way my mom and dad did family math.
    I humored my dad. I gave it a year. I hated it—except that I learned how to do CPR. I mean, I didn’t like the bit about having to breathe into someone else’s mouth. That sort of freaked me out. But for some reason the whole thing fascinated me, how you could geta heart to start again. I didn’t quite understand the science of it. But after I got a patch for learning how to bring someone back to life, I quit. I