All day long, on that day in the sixth grade when my life changed forever and the world became a better place, everything had been smelling and tasting like overcooked eggs. I wasn’t sick exactly; it was more that I was no longer friends with the taste of food. Through the last, abbreviated class periods and the final rehearsals for the annual Saint Vitus Academy Christmas pageant, I could smell eggs everywhere, hard and cheesy on people’s breath; could taste them in the green-sprinkled Christmas-tree cookies they gave us, in the red lipstick that Mrs. Carmody put on everybody’s mouth. Outside, the darkness lay flat against the windows that I had never before seen at night; indoors, everything seemed soaked in yellow dye.

The egg smell got stronger. I could smell it in the not very clean fabric of my Three Kings burnoose with the construction-paper crown fitted over the hood. The air on the stage seemed thick with it, as we stood waiting for the curtain to go up; and then the lights were so bright that we could not see the slanted audience, from which cascaded hand clapping like the sound of water down a wide rapid.

And it came to pass that Jimmy Taurozzi and Ursula Byatt walked from inn to cardboard inn, under multicolored floodlights that threw everybody’s shadow in three directions, with little overlapping rainbows around the edges. How slowly the Holy Family moved, Jimmy with his long shepherd’s crook in one hand, his other arm around Ursula. Even the innkeepers, as they shook their heads to say, “No room,” seemed to be moving like dolls with weak batteries. I could feel pressure building up under my chin, where my hood had been fastened around my face with a safety pin.

By the time the Christ Child had been wrapped in swaddling clothes and placed on Mary’s lap, reclining back so that His eyes closed by a gravity mechanism, I was feeling distinctly ill. Patrick Dizzini read from Saint Luke. Danny McDade, as Melchior, recited, “Shiny gold, the gift I bring / To honor Jesus, newborn King,” and knelt, and laid his box before the manger. I felt a flush of sweat on my forehead; all the hair follicles of my legs were tingling. Keith Wheeler, the only black boy at Saint Vitus, spoke Balthazar’s line: “Frankincense is mine to give, / That way we may all through Jesus live.”

And then the spotlight shifted onto me and my myrrh. I could feel something pressing into the soft tissue beneath my chin; then slowly, as if some higher power were controlling my body, I felt myself bending forward — and in a long arc, sparkling in the multicolored lights, I was sick.

What I remember most is the sound from the audience, the simultaneous gasp of two hundred pairs of lungs inhaling. For five seconds nobody moved, until Ursula Byatt, who had smelled it, tossed the Christ Child into the manger and ran off the stage holding her hand over her mouth. Then, over the rising murmur of the audience, Mrs. Carmody whisked the curtains shut so fast that the bottoms trailed behind in the air.

I was backstage, where I sat on a folding metal chair and threw up some more into an empty steam tray somebody had brought from the cafeteria. As Mrs. Carmody wiped the vomit and lipstick off my mouth with a Kleenex from her purse, I could hear Father Hardy’s foghorn voice over the PA system: “We’re sorry for the unfortunate delay, ladies and gentlemen, and I trust our young Wise Man will be feeling better soon.”

When school started again in January, I was famous. When I walked in the halls of that old school, I could feel people’s eyes on me. “Hey, King Vomit!” guys would shout at me on the playground; or, out the windows if no teacher was in the room: “Hey, Barf-thazar!”

Another kid made up a song: “We three kings of Orient ore: / Bearing gifts, we puke on the floor.”

I realized that I loved it — the hush when I walked into a room and knew they had been talking about me, the whispering between classes from kids going the other way in the monitored traffic: “That’s the guy who threw up in the Christmas pageant.”

But by February I was just a normal kid again. It hurt to be a normal kid again. I used to lie awake nights with the window open a crack, listening to the Connecticut Turnpike, with its long shapeless hush, and thinking of the way the audience gasped that night, and how silent the room was for the seconds that their mouths hung open. When you think about all those people out there in their cars, all the places they’re going, and when you think how nobody will ever be surprised by anything that ever happens, from the moment their cars are brand-new until the time their cars end up in the same junkyard that their previous cars ended up in — when you think about such things, or at least when I thought about them, I knew that I was going to have to do something about it.

Life is strict. To be a kid in Connecticut is to live in a world protected against anything you could imagine doing to make it more interesting. It is a state without firecrackers, without condom-dispensing machines, a state where for some obscure tax reason even the mail-order jokes that the Johnson-Smith company advertises on the inside back flap of comic books may not be shipped.

So many contests, so many offers were “void in Connecticut” that it was all I could do to think up a few jokes within the family, at least, while the outside world went on as usual. I used to help my sister Kathy with her homework, and sometimes when she wasn’t looking I would insert the word fuck into one of her answers. Or I would slip a raw egg, wrapped in wax paper with a twist of salt, into her lunch box.

It didn’t matter that I never got to see the results of any of these tricks; just to know that somewhere out of my sight and hearing a teacher’s mouth was dropping open, or at a lunch table Kathy was trying to mop up the egg mess while her friends laughed — just to know those things made me walk through the day with a sort of glow, like the feeling of having an important letter in the mail. And at the end of the day, when Kathy would come home so angry that her face would be blotched with tears, I would be happy, not because I didn’t like her, but because it was her job, in the absence of anybody more important, to be the carrier of my jokes into the world.

I discovered that it did not hurt to put a grasshopper into my mouth. At recess I would go up to Mary Ann Blossom or Julie Conklin, saying, “Help me, I think my tooth is broken!” and she would come close to look, and as I opened my mouth the grasshopper would jump out into her face. Girls would shriek so loudly when I did this that all other noise on the playground would stop.

“It’s Burt Osborne,” everybody would say.

I never wanted to hurt anybody. But I knew I couldn’t avoid it. The days of the week kept marching single file, their school uniforms even duller than the ones we were forced to wear; the turnpike traffic kept rushing all night, like something that’s dead and doesn’t know it yet. I wrote a fake letter to Kathy’s pen pal in Scotland, saying that we all hated her guts. At the dinner table I passed Kathy the empty milk pitcher, pretending to strain with the weight, and when she took it from my hand, ready for it to be full, she involuntarily threw it behind her and broke the dining-room window.

At school the grasshopper situation got so bad that girls were refusing to go outside after lunch. Other boys had picked up the habit of putting grasshoppers in their mouths. Father Hardy finally had to make an announcement in front of the school assembly.

“We have a new rule, effective immediately. . . .” He spoke from deep within his bronchial tubes, drawing out the syllables of each word into long, tremulous musical notes — the same voice he would become locally famous for using years later in his public “Death Masses,” in which God was implored to strike down Senator Lowell Weicker.

“There will be noooooooo catching,” he said, “of grasshoppers.”

There were things in my family that we weren’t supposed to talk about. We weren’t supposed to talk about whose fault it was that my father had an ulcer. We weren’t supposed to talk about why I was switched to public school after the sixth grade (although my parents often mentioned that the high-school system had a better reputation than the elementary). Sometimes at the dinner table it seemed that anything I could imagine saying would have rubbed somebody the wrong way.

On Valentine’s Day of my first year at Avon Junior High, the choral-music teacher had us stand in a circle to play a game in which each of us had to think of the title of a song with the word love in it. Then, when our turn came, we each had to sing the song’s title; and the first person to fail to come up with a legitimate song would be out of the game.

The music class was a big group, since the music classes were forced to combine three regular classes in one room. I was halfway around the circle from where we began, from “Why Must I Be a Teenager in Love?” to “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,” from “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” to “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” Soon it was almost my turn. I could feel my mouth going dry, could feel the burden weighing down on me. I knew I had no choice but to be Burt Osborne, to take that roomful of people and give them something to think about all day long, as I must take control of every room I walk into, must let my reputation become a giant bodyguard escorting me down every lunch-smelling corridor.

I took a deep breath. And then, in a spastic, tuneless melody of very high and very low notes, I sang out to the multitudes:

“I love to eat boogers!”

I want to tell you, the laughter from that class burst into the air of that room with such plosive force that it would not have surprised me if the windows had broken. My ears rang. Girls were turning red, not so much from embarrassment as from the sheer pulmonary exertion of laughing at Burt Osborne. The class laughed so loudly that, as Mrs. Winikoff led me down the hall to the principal’s office, teachers and students crowded the doors of neighboring classrooms, wondering what had happened. All the way down the hall, I could still hear that room ringing with laughter, until we turned a corner and the sound was lost.

The next day I was sent to the school psychologist, who asked me what town we were in and who the president of the United States was, and told me to draw a picture of a person, any person I chose. I drew a man with the top of his head removed just above the eyebrows and a city of skyscrapers growing from the flat surface where his brains would have been. The detached dome of his head floated above, and from that dome, held by strings like the lines of a parachute, hung a tiny bicycle. When the psychologist asked me about the man, I told him the man’s name was Doctor Keroojalolly, and that he had taught me how to rob banks. I could see the doctor’s earnest, well-meaning, baffled face looking at me, drained, his head tilted like a dog’s with the effort of understanding, his eyes empty. It was wonderful that I could have such power over someone so much bigger than me. I told him that my parents drank out of the toilet. I said my house was patrolled by flying pumpkins.

I never wanted to hurt anybody. At least, I never wanted to hurt them badly. When my father went into Good Samaritan because his ulcer had become perforated (because of me, it was understood without saying), it seemed appropriate somehow that I was not allowed to come see him. During visiting hours Kathy and I waited at home, with all the lights on, not saying much, eating Swanson’s fried-chicken dinners, then wandering around the house. Kathy was crying. She didn’t understand the difference between an ulcer and cancer, so she thought he was going to die. I wanted to hold her in my arms and tell her everything was all right, but I knew she didn’t trust me. I wanted to tell her that I was sorry about all the raw eggs, but I knew I would do it again, someday when Dad was better.

When I say I never wanted to hurt anybody, I say it with the full understanding that I have hurt every person in my family and most of my friends. But you have to understand what it’s like to live within earshot of the Connecticut Turnpike. So many nights with all that untouchable machinery going by, so many Mondays when I hadn’t done my homework. The way the dead air of schools hangs like the blankets you see draped over the furniture in an abandoned house; the way summer plods into fall, never into anything else, and all the stores run back-to-school sales; the way airplanes seem to take hours to come out the other end of a cloud; the way people drive so carefully that you can stand for days at the busiest intersection in town without seeing a single accident — all these horrible, dead, dusty, inert facts together droned on forever, all night, in the voice of that turnpike, telling me that I was on this earth to make it the kind of place people would remember living on even after they were dead.

Think of the pale and bloodless faces of teachers who don’t know what to do about you, the traffic seemed to be whispering to me. Remember where you are: the bottom of the world, Stratford, city of people who drive very carefully, who slow down on bridges because the sign says the bridge freezes before the road. They are not even cowards. To be a coward you have to have fallen from something greater, have to have failed. These people are less than cowards. They are timid.

My father got better. For some reason Kathy’s pen pal had stopped answering her letters. Mom no longer covered the meatloaf and the spaghetti with her special tomato sauce that I had always loved; by doctor’s orders a bland white sauce replaced it.

Spring came, and soon it was time for the annual Avon Junior High spring concert. The seventh-grade class was giving a choral reading of a poem called “The First Springtime,” by Mary Matthews Cheney. We rehearsed for weeks, practicing how we would alternate between group lines and individual lines.

My solo line was: “And the moon shone down on the water!” Mrs. McManus, the chorus director, had instructed me to draw out the word moon as long as I could, with my round mouth itself imitating the shape of the full moon, so that, coming after Kim Prozeller’s line, which was “And the Lord held the wind in His fingers,” my voice would ring out: “And the mooooooooooon shone down on the water!”

The moment I realized what Burt Osborne had to do, I sat up straight in my bed in the middle of the night, with the low breath of the turnpike droning outside the open window. It was not a decision. It was not anything I had to debate with myself about. It came upon me suddenly, irrevocably, like the moment in the poem we were reciting when God said, “Let the warm sun shine,” and the custodian turned all the spotlights on.

Not that I wasn’t scared. The thought made my mouth go dry in rehearsal, when I considered the power I had, power over all those empty seats in front of us. Every time I spoke my line about the moon, I could feel a cold chill run through my scrotum, something icy and off balance, the same acrophobic thrill I get if I think about jumping off a cliff.

There we were at last, the slanted seats full of people on the last Parents’ Night before the end of school. The auditorium hummed with low voices and rumbled with the lowering of hinged seat-bottoms. We stood on three different riser levels.

 

When God invented springtime,
He looked around at the bare, gray ground,
At the white branches, and the black branches,
And a few birds high in a cold sky.

 

Our voices were an airy hush of poetry: the first voices of the frogs, the sprouting crocuses, the gathering green. I could feel the vulnerable little audience like a trapped bird. I was just as afraid for them as I was for me. God sat upon his throne. Burt Osborne stood trembling on his riser, knowing that nobody in the whole assembly would ever forget this moment. My cue was coming closer. And there it was — Kim Prozeller’s clear, meticulous, almost prissy voice:

“And the Lord held the wind in His fingers,” she said.

I drew in my breath, and changed the world:

“And there was a big piece of SHIT hanging out of His ass!”

The sound that rose from the audience in the seconds following the delivery of that line was more than just the sound of three hundred mouths suddenly inhaling. I could feel them gasp, could feel the whole auditorium go suddenly short of oxygen. Everything stopped. We just stood there. Everybody in the world was staring at me with their mouths hanging open, those drained and empty faces, as the seconds went by, the whole world squirming under the thumb of Burt Osborne.

It was such an important moment in the history of making the world a more interesting place that I would like to construct a time diagram of it, like the diagrams of the first nanoseconds after a nuclear explosion such as the Left used to stick up on bulletin boards when Reagan was president.

 

One second after line is spoken:

Absolute silence. The echo of the words is absorbed by the soft cloth of everybody’s fathers’ sports jackets.

Two seconds:

A collective intake of breath, with a high, wheezing overtone, as if they had all sat down on a block of ice.

Five seconds:

Silence again. Everything hangs there. Smithsonian Institution vaporized. The other kids in the chorus don’t know if they should keep going.

Ten seconds:

They don’t keep going. Shifting from foot to foot on the risers, they look for direction to Mrs. McManus, who is crying. A murmur starts up in the audience: “Did you hear what he said?” Some of the girls crying, some of the boys laughing now. The curtain closes.

 

The ride home in the car that night took place in the most profound silence of all the silent treatments in the life of our family. Kathy sat up front with my parents. Wind whistled through the half-open windows of the car the way it whistles through the halls of an abandoned house.

Alone in the back seat, I felt weightless, as if all the responsibility of being Burt Osborne had been lifted from me. The side of my face still burned and tingled where Mrs. McManus had slapped me. Technically, that’s illegal in a public school, but I could hardly blame her. All I could do now was sit back and surrender myself to the long regimen of punishments to come: the summer school, the grounding, the sequestered meals, the canceled allowance, the psychiatric appointments.

I wish I could say that I feel worse about the trouble I caused: my father’s ulcer, Mrs. McManus’s quitting, the lost pen pal. But really, what I regret more than any of those things is that this night was the craziest I would ever let things get. What I’m sorriest about is that I didn’t keep going, that I left so many potential jokes to dry up without ever having been played on somebody. It’s horrible, at this late date, to think that I never put glue in anybody’s hat, or lined anybody’s shoes with flypaper. In college, my friends and I did all the standard things, of course: threw bags of red paint at visiting speakers, phoned death threats to the director of our school’s ROTC program. But it wasn’t as much fun; nobody’s mouth ever dropped open.

What I’m saying is that I could have done a better job of being Burt Osborne. There was a period of two days in college when, I’m reasonably sure, I could have made my roommate’s girlfriend believe I was a werewolf. Or in drama club when I played Hamlet, I could have changed it around, could have quit procrastinating and killed Claudius in the first act.

We drove through the spring evening. Street after street passed in silence. In the light coming through the windshield I could see the dark shapes of my parents’ heads, with Kathy’s smaller head down low in the seat between them. They all seemed to be leaning close together, so that sometimes, in silhouette, it looked as if the heads of my mother and father had become attached to Kathy’s head and had turned into a pair of giant Mickey Mouse ears.

This story originally appeared in Story magazine.

— Ed.