I Woke Next to the Corpse by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

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And then, there was the time that Toro detonated some ash cans in the high school locker area. He had often told me, as I issued no follow up to a proposed subject which didn’t interest me, that he and his family were quite the experts at picking locks and that those used in high school were easy. I once said that maybe he should consider transferring his picking skills to his beezer, and he just slowly shook his head quietly up and down a few times, as if to say; “Okay, I owe you one, fucker.”

The combination locks required by the school all used a three number sequence and the vast majority of the lockers themselves were against outside walls where there were no classrooms. As a

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consequence it would have been unusual for a teacher to just happen to be there to notice anything.

Toro took my disinterest in his lock fiddling skills as an indication that I didn’t believe him. He must have felt as if he had something to prove. One day he told me that he was going to set off an explosion in a locker after he picked the lock. He had chosen Sangiovanni’s, as “Sangi” had done various well-known things to promote his desire to be voted class comedian. These things had included Sangi inserting a copper penny into a coat room fuse box, which had produced a temporary school black out, a small fire produced by the sparks, and a half electrocuted Sangi; no one particularly caring about the latter. In addition to his acne decorated puss and wide thick glasses which would catch an occasional zit pop, Sangi was also semi-famous for the time he got to Algebra class early and made everyone freak out in fear that German bomb explosions were going off underneath them.

It wasn’t particularly difficult to accomplish this as the classroom sat on a graded incline; a bleacher in effect; the teacher’s desk at the low point, and the student desks rising in stepped increments to near the high windows just below the ceiling. The space under the bleachers must have been initially

I Woke Next to the Corpse