Twenty years ago on this very day, Martin Villa Rosa took first place in the Howard Morris High School Science Fair for his invention of the turnip powered airplane. It didn’t fly and of course it didn’t use actual turnips. TURNIP was in fact just an acronym for some long scientific words that Martin had completely mastered down to the most subtly nuanced shades of meaning, quite impressive for a boy of 16. As for the “airplane” part, well the word was intended as more of a metaphor than an actual airplane. But then, all in all, that was the beauty and genius of its design. His invention worked perfectly and was a brilliant success.
“Thank you for this honor.” He said haltingly from the auditorium stage as he received his nicely framed and suitably curlicued award certificate before the packed assembly which included students, teachers, parents and an aunt who had come all the way from Philadelphia. His mother was there as well, of course (younger sister of the aunt). He also thought he had caught a glimpse of the much admired Marcia Carrier, who set his heart aflutter whenever she came within twenty feet of him. Martin believed that his dad, Harry might be there as well, but sadly just in spirit. He had died two years earlier when the defective rung of a brand new extension ladder suddenly came undone while he was cleaning leaves from the gutters of an elderly neighbor’s two story colonial house. Harry fell promptly to the ground, broke his neck and that was that, so quick, so unexpected. The family received a generous settlement. Although the money was nice, Martin would have preferred to have had his dad instead. He was missed by his family and his community as well. He was always doing something to help out, from collecting mail, watering plants or generally just looking out for things when neighbors were away or sick or old. Martin was very much like him.
“No, thank you Martin for giving us this marvelously innovative invention.” Mr. Turley head of the science department said enthusiastically into his hand-held microphone. “Your project clearly demonstrates the fine-tuned workings of a highly developed and creative mind. If you don’t mind, I’d like for you to please share with us your plans for the future.”
Mr. Turley pointed the microphone suddenly in Martin’s direction. And as Martin lurched nervously forward much too quickly, he practically banged his mouth into its inscrutable black metal face. In that flashing moment, Jerry Goodwin popped through mind, the boy whose head had been playfully pushed into a water fountain spigot in the sixth grade, creating an upside down V of his two front teeth (perhaps) for the rest of time. Until this very moment, he had seen or thought of Jerry Godwin in years.
“Well,” Martin said (regrouping himself ) while vigorously bouncing his head up and down. He was great at science but not so good at speaking. “I just want to, I mean …. (he paused thoughtfully). In the future I will be, hopefully going to college, hopefully, to study engineering and I just want to do some good….and .…uhm…. make a difference in this world, okay?… You know?”
What a cumbersome, high-flown and stupid set of remarks, he thought, so very much unlike the sterling speech he had been practicing for two weeks. But then that was before his own nonjudgmental face in the bathroom mirror. That speech was perfect. That speech even overshadowed by miles the normally troublesome newly emerging reddish eruption on his chin. But now, as he ruminated sorrowfully over his stumbling words, he recalled poor Ms. South Carolina Teen’s famously interesting struggle to explain why so many Americans can’t find the USA on a map. And so starting with the near microphone mishap an entire litany of imperfections and ineptitudes began to spin madly through his head. He felt an unsteadiness in his knees. His arms seemed to flap about uselessly like the arms of a penguin. The runaway jackhammer of his heartbeat pounded relentlessly in his ears. And worst of all at that moment, as Martin obsessively fixated on his ever growing litany of ineptitude and imperfectness. The little red mark seemed in this mind to grow by Vesuvian proportions, seeming in his mind to swell into a great hideous Bella mushroom-like thing, poking up fiercely out of his chin. Now, with this last image, his feeling of embarrassment was so complete that he wished with of his might that he could be anyplace else on this planet other than here on this stage in front of all of these people.
Then all at once something magical and completely unexpected happened. As Martin continued to shrink further and further down into his own very private little mortification valley, suddenly everything changed.
The audience broke into loud applause and cheers. At first, Martin did not comprehend what was happening and stared dumbly back into the blurry swell of mysterious noise. But when he realized that they were cheering for him, he could not help but smile. As the applause continued Martin’s broadening smile threatened to split his face in half. With that, all of his of his fears and perceived failings evaporated. And he became totally filled to the brim of himself with complete and absolute joy. It was then that he knew, without any doubt, uncertainty or equivocation whatsoever, that this particular instant in time was in fact the greatest moment of his entire life.
Time passed, not much, but some.
To a septuagenarian this flowing on of time would be just a whisker’s width in the grand scheme of things. Time accelerates with increasing age and the years seemingly shrink down to mere moments. But to Martin, a young rising adult, eager to get on with life, time crawled. Months could seem like decades.
Martin Villa Rosa, last year’s winner of the Howard Morris High School Science Fair, now 17 and one full half inch taller, carefully adjusted his hat in the mirror. It was a thin red cloth cunt cap that stood four inches high and now laid over at a jaunty angle, just so. The hat matched his short sleeved red shirt and contrasted nicely with his blue denim pants. He leaned against the men’s room sink, into the mirror making some last minute slight, fussy adjustments. Finally satisfied, he stood back from the mirror and put on his apron. It was faded blue denim to match his jeans. Fancy white letters printed in bold angled script across the chest part read:
“Chuckwagon – A Cheerful Respite from Humdrumiddy.”
It was Martin’s 3rd day on the job. He felt he was already making an excellent impression. He knew the importance of making of good impression. His mom and his much beloved and sadly departed dad (rest his soul) had drummed that critical notion into his head since the age of four. He was neat, clean and on time. What more could they want? Soon it would be summer vacation and he would work a full schedule instead of only Saturdays and after school. In a few months he would graduate and would work full-time during the summer before he headed off to college. He had been accepted by several colleges. But Martin’s life energy at this point boiled down to two things that he desperately wanted. He wanted very much to go to the School of Engineering at M.I.T. He was still waiting to hear if he had been accepted. He also desperately yearned for a car.
His mother said that he could have a car if he could pay half of the cost. Although the family was quite well off, especially since the insurance settlement, his mother did not want to encourage any feelings of entitlement. His parents tried to instill I him the notion that good things in life can only be truly appreciated if they are earned.
Of course, he didn’t have a license yet. But that was just a detail. The money, he thought, the money would make the car happen. The money was the important thing. And from his job at Chuckwagon, he would have a fist full of money every week. Before too long the car would be sitting in front of his house, glinting chrome and deep glossy red paint. And there’d still be a little summer left to enjoy it. But it was understood that the car would stay in the garage when he initially headed off to college.
Martin tied his apron, and then tilted his head up to the mirror once more for a final hat check.
‘Yes,’ he thought. It was perfect. His face was so young looking, but quickly losing its cherubness. Soon all of that innocent baby fat would be dissipated. He would look so different in two or three years. Even the dreaded acne would be altogether gone. It hadn’t been much of a problem though, not as bad as some of his friends. The red marks would suddenly appear then flower into great burgeoning ugly white pustules almost overnight. God, they were so hideous.. For years he battled them off, pinching them, salving them mercilessly driving them back until they were dead. It seemed so unfair that the acne had to be on his face of all places, right there for everyone to see. As he scrutinized his face he noticed two small red marks, one just to the left of his nose and the other on his chin. He studied them intently for a moment. Small as they were they were definitely the beginning of something. He was certain of it.
“Hey, Marty!” Someone called from outside of the men’s room.
“Yeah. Coming.”
Martin Villa Rosa one of Harrison High School’s most stellar students turned and walked quickly toward the door. Then he stopped all at once, clumsily, as if all of him didn’t stop at the same time. He reached into his shirt pocket for something. He pulled it out and pinned it onto the front of his apron. It was a name tag that read “Marty.” Next to his name was a picture of big spoked wagon wheel. This was the first time he had ever been called Marty. He liked it. In a sense it symbolized his time of change and crossing over. He read once about an Indian tribes that allowed all the newly minted young men to select their own names. The practice symbolized their passing over to adulthood and their new elevated status in the tribe. With this last change they became actual men, to be respected and admired as such by the entire tribe . Men. Now, he wanted everyone to call him Marty. It was time for him to select a name and Marty was the name he had selected.
It was 6:30 p.m. when he walked from the men’s room out into the Chuckwagon dining area. Joel McIntyre stood waiting. It was time for him go home. It was shift change and Marty was his replacement.
“About time you came out of there…”
Marty smiled.
“Look Phil’s got the rag on today so be careful and don’t let the tables pile up, especially, okay?”
“Okay, thanks.”
The new people always got the worst jobs. The old timers got to work behind the counter, doing the burgers, doing the French fries and the shakes and giving orders into the microphone. But he was determined to patiently work his way up. One of the reasons that he came to Chuckwagon was that his girlfriend, Marcia worked there and she was doing well. She liked it. So far, in three days, the newly named Marty had only been behind the counter once and that was for his orientation tour. The place where he worked was out among the tables, emptying ashtrays, throwing away trash, wiping tables, mopping the floor. He’d have to work his way up just like everyone else in the Chuckwagon had done. His father once worked in a restaurant as a busboy. He worked one whole summer cleaning up after the patrons. The next summer he got a job as a waiter. In those days there was big money in waiting tables. Perhaps there still was money in waiting tables. Marty didn’t really know. But he knew that his father worked his way through college doing it. Marty wanted to do the same thing, maybe not as a waiter though. He’d find something that he could do well and he’d have to work his way up. He understood that. But it would be worth it. Plus, he needed the money for his car. Then later he’d need it to help with college expenses. He had a brilliant mind, everyone said so. He hoped to go to M.I.T. That was his dream. He had applied and every day when he got home, his first stop was the dining room table where his mother left the mail. Any day now, any day now it would come. His mother had promised to leave it on the table, unopened. He knew that when the letter finally arrived, he’d be happy and sad at the same time, joyfully filled with dread.
He’d become a first class engineer one day. That was his dream, Martin Villa Rosa, B.S.E., V.I.P. And when he’d come home from building bridges in Zambia, his shiny red car would be waiting in the garage. Life would be good. Life would be fantastic! He could almost taste the wonderful honey sweet promise of it. Although all of that waited for him just, barely beyond his fingertips, it seemed like a million miles. It would not be easy but he would get there.
He walked out into the Chuckwagon’s large crowded dining area. Three long lines of people came all the way out to the salad bar. Almost all of the tables were occupied. And that was one of the things that Marty wondered about. Almost all of the tables were occupied, almost all. The room was jammed with people waiting to give their orders. At this time of day, the room was always jammed. Yet, no matter how many people came to Chuckwagon, there were always a few empty seats. He had only just started working there but he’d been a steady customer for years. Marty could not remember a time when there was no place to sit. It seemed a mathematical impossibility, but there it was. The lines could go clear out to the parking lot, but still there would be at least one empty seat.
He took the red checkered rag out of his apron pocket and went to the first empty table to clean up. It had only been just a few minutes since Joel punched out and already things were hopelessly backed up (trash, trash, trash). One table had a particularly unpleasant collection of used paper ware, napkins soaked with everything from catsup to snot. Plastic utensils stuck to the table top with gummy apple pie residue and burger wrappers translucent with grease and with Chuckwagon “Secret Sauce.” The next table was only slightly better. But instead of apple pie, there was a thin glaze of mustard sticking to the bottoms of everything. Such meticulous disarray, such carefully contrived nastiness surely could not have occurred by accident. People are like that though, he thought. They didn’t care. ‘Leave it there’ they say. ‘People need jobs’ they’d say. Marty had heard them. They said these things openly in front of him as if he were invisible right in front of the big red sign above the tray receptacle that read:
“PLACE TRASH HERE”
There was an arrow pointing to the hard plastic trash cans. People don’t care. They’d just leave their trash in a sticky heap on the tables, despite, the signs. Then again what if they all did do just what the signs wanted. What then? Would Marty have a job at the Chuckwagon? Or would he be home right now, shoes kicked off, laying across his bed pouring over the classified and dreaming in vain about his red car? People did need jobs. He wondered if perhaps he should thank them for their generous gift of slovenliness.
The Chuckwagon was crowded even more than usual it seemed. So, Marty busied himself with the tables and the trash until without any warning at all, the restaurant was suddenly empty. It was strange how that worked. He would dash about between and among the endless hordes of messy, cackling eaters. Then as he frantically wiped one more table or retrieved one more stack of plastic trays, he’d look up and everyone would be gone, like magic. It was eerie.
At 8:00 p.m. Marty was outside emptying two trash cans into the Dempsey Dumpster. Afterwards, he washed them, wiped them clean and carried them back inside. As he came through the front door something strange was happening. There were three patrons in the restaurant, all standing by the counter looking in his direction. They should have been turned the other way. Also, all of the people behind the counter stood stiff and quiet, like a squad of soldiers at attention. It looked so odd. He observed that Phil was ashen; the blood had drained completely from his face. He noticed all of these people first. Then as the door slid quietly shut behind him, he noticed the two men in the center aisle. They were directly in front of him, perhaps 20 feet away. They wore dark clothes and their backs were turned to him. They didn’t hear Marty come in. At that moment he knew what was going on. The realization hit him all at once. Involuntarily, he dropped the cans noisily onto the tiled floor. Both men turned sharply. The men had pistols which they held out far in front of them with both hands. He didn’t see the pistols until the men turned around. One man fired his pistol two times hitting Marty once in the neck. The man who fired had round had large frightened eyes and a forehead bubbling over with perspiration.
After the shots were fired, the two men ran immediately past him and were outside, empty handed, before Marty hit the floor. The din of anxious voices and rushing feet rose up around him. He heard someone yelling something about an ambulance. But the words were garbled and almost lost among all of the other noises. His apron was covered with red blood. More of it and more it came. Phil Rose, the manager, bent over to help, his ghost face hard frozen. Two of the girls from behind the counter cried and made horrible faces at the spring of blood that puddled on the floor beneath Marty. Phil didn’t know what to do and Marty was beginning to go white from blood loss.
Soon, but much too late, the ambulance came. The paramedics listened to his chest. They pounded here and there and felt about. They performed CPR. In a few minutes they were finished. Martin Villa Rosa, winner of last year’s Howard Morris High School science fair was dead.
And all of his dreams died with him (or did they?)
A day and a half later, the two robbers were arrested without incident as they sat with their shoes off, eating corn chips, so thoroughly engrossed in a movie on television that they did not hear the police SWAT team until it was much, much too late. They never got to see how the movie ended. The next morning the two were perp-walked to the court room for a bail hearing. That very popularly satisfying event was shown on the evening news. The one who had fired the fatal shot was identified as unemployed construction worker Wilson Brickman, age twenty four. Ironically seven years earlier while, he himself was attending Howard Morris High school and, had participated in the school’s science fair. He was in a group project and the group had finished fourth. At the time Brickman, was said to have been enthralled with science. The robbers were arrested based upon a tip from Brickman’s mother who had seen the Chuckwagon video pictures on T.V. and recognized the cap that she had given him for his birthday two weeks earlier. During a police interview, Brickman stated that he had purchased the gun from someone in a shopping center parking lot.
It was all very sad. Marty was well-liked at the Chuckwagon, even though he had only been there three days. He had known some of the other employees from school. Phil, the manager, had the Chuckwagon flag flown at half staff for an entire week. During that time the employees all wore black ribbon pins on their lapels. It was a balancing act. Phil wanted to commemorate this horrible, tragic event. But at the same time he didn’t want the Chuckwagon to take on the look of a sad dreary place hung with clouds of despair. It was after all supposed to be a happy place, “a cheerful respite from humdrumiddy .” That was the Chuckwagon’s newest slogan and opinions about it ranged from “moronic” to “brilliant.” But people remembered it and so it did its job. Their previous slogan, “Good Grub for the Grabbin,” had been discontinued in response to complaints by a local citizens group that felt it encouraged thievery among the youth of the community.
Consternation over Marty’s death was relentless. Gun control advocates made their appearances on various television programs, pointing out vociferously how the world was coming apart at the seams because of gun violence and pronouncing time and again that more restrictive gun laws are needed.
Second Amendment advocates retorted with equal vociferousness that all the laws in the world would not stop a determined felon.
Brickman had reportedly been a good kid at one point and showed some real promise. But seemingly, it was never nurtured or encouraged. Rudderless and without purpose, Brickman simply drifted further and further away into an increasingly dark world of drug and crime.
Martin Villa Rosa’s funeral was well attended and covered by all the local media. Snippets of it were shown on the local T.V. news.
“Martin is not dead. He is alive with God!”
Reverend Lawrence T. Humboldt, Pastor of the Cherry Hill Community Church spoke stirringly from the pulpit before the large assemblage of mourners.
“And he has also been reunited with his late, beloved father, Harry. Martin’s eternal spirit is now in a new home, in Heaven, where all things are possible. And so I know that he is smiling down on us at this moment. And I know that he is saying, ‘Don’t worry about me. I am fine….’
Marcia Carrier spoke shyly at first, until she got warmed up.
“Marty was studying to get his driver’s license and he really, really wanted to get a car. He dreamed of getting that car, a red car probably but definitely a convertible. He said we’d go riding around. I was looking forward to it. I’ll bet, right now, at this minute, he’s probably cruising down those wonderful golden streets of Heaven in a brand new red convertible with the top down! He’s cruising where the smooth roads go on and on forever! … Where it never rains and no one even needs a driver’s license. I think that’s true. That’s what I believe. That’s what I think…”
Robert Turley, Head of the Science Department of Howard Morris High School said, “He was a brilliant young man, a great student. Martin was headed for M.I.T. Mrs. Villa Rosa told me that his acceptance letter came in the mail three days after his death. Now, isn’t that ironic. Sadly, he never got to see it….”
An older gentleman walked slowly up to the microphone, after pausing from time to time to lean on his Hurry Cane and catch his breath.
“Hello,” he said finally, “I’m Tom Slater. The Villa Rosas have been my next door neighbors ever since they bought their house, over 20 years ago. Twenty years. Boy, the time goes by…”
A sudden new glaze of new tears swept up quickly across the surface of his blinking red and watery eyes. He stopped to dab at them and to blow his nose in a great lump of wrinkled white handkerchief. Then he placed it carefully back into his jacket pocket.
“….Although people still tell me that it wasn’t my fault, still, I can’t help but believe that I was responsible for Harry’s death. After all, He was killed while in the process cleaning MY gutters. He was doing ME a favor. Falling off that ladder to his death was his payment for being a good neighbor. And that is exactly what he was, a good neighbor and a good friend. Isn’t that ironic?”
“You know, Mr. Turley also talked about irony a few minutes ago. And I’ll tell you something else that is ironic. On the day Harry Villa Rosa died cleaning my gutters, he was actually filling in for his son, Martin, uh, Marty. He had some kind of school assignment he had to finish that day. You know a couple of weeks ago MARTY asked me to do him a favor. I said ‘sure.’ And he said, ‘Mr. Slater, could you please call me Marty from now on?’It made me laugh that he would ask me that. But, it was important to him, so I said ‘sure, no problem.’ He had cleaned out those gutters several times before and I had offered to pay him. He always refused. He said, ‘We have to look out for each other.’”
Marty was a good kid and he was growing up to be a good neighbor and a good man, just like his dad.”
Before the funeral, in the hospital where Marty had been taken after being shot, there was the issue of organ donations. Harry Villa Rosa had been an organ donor. And so Donna graciously allowed Marty’s underage organs to be parceled off as if he were a 57’ Chevy parts car. She knew that Marty would not have objected. He had been surprisingly pragmatic for young man anxiously poised on the precipice of adulthood yet still brim full of the irrational notions of youth.
She never knew who received what. But she daydreamed that perhaps a six-year-old aspiring ballerina in Oxford, Mississippi would be able to achieve near perfect sight for the first time in her life. She dreamed that a sadly infirmed Gulf War vet could be made almost entirely new by a heart and lung transplant (thank you for your service). She dreamed of the skin to be had and the bone, and the kidneys and the liver and all the other numerous things that she had no understanding of at all. She thought of them as seeds from Marty’s body, scattered across the land. And when she thought of these things she smiled. Through the agony of her grief, she smiled and she felt better.
Despite the organ donations, as she stared down at his deceased and unnoticeably depleted body on funeral day, she thought Marty looked “good” and at peace. He looked terrific. But make no mistake Donna Villa Rosa knew that he most certainly was dead. She had no expectation that he would suddenly open his eyes, smile up at her with that particular quizzical look of his that she had always found so endearing, and say, “Hi mom. What’s going on?” He looked “good,” that is to say as good as a dead person could look. But clearly notwithstanding how “good” he looked, she knew full well that to gaze upon his still, inert face was to see the look and the solemn finality of death itself and its unequivocal truth.
Who knows what Marty might have accomplished if not for his untimely death? Who can truly assess the entirety of what Wilson Brickman took from the world in that one stupid, cruel, selfish, awful moment; a moment that he would live on and on to regret for the rest of his life. And such was his unremitting grief at the institutional stunting of his own blossoming life and his honest and continuing remorse over his incontrovertible sin, that six years into his life sentence at Brushy Mountain State Prison he attempted suicide three times. On his last, the most undeniable of the three, he was truly surprised when he awoke in the prison hospital. He took that as a sign and decided to turn his incarcerated life in a new direction. He threw himself passionately into this pursuit and in the following years became a very effective counselor of young offenders whose efforts contributing greatly to the rehabilitation of some of the most recalcitrant prisoners at Brushy Mountain. Also, ironically, he intentionally never watched the end of that long-ago movie. That unfinished movie in some convoluted way was symbolic of the unfinished nature of his good work. At least that is how explained it to Diane Sawyer in television years later from his prison cell.
In the weeks that followed Marty’s death, Charles “Chuck” Eiserman, founder and CEO of the Chuckwagon, a regional chain of 157 restaurants, spearheaded a movement that resulted in the formation of the Martin Villa Rosa Foundation. It was created to help, nurture and support promising inner-city science students to achieve their academic and career goals. Their slogan, often seen on their signature green and white tee shirts was, “We just want to do some good.”
And over time, they did.
Martin’s untimely death caused him to miss out on many things, most particularly, his own actual life. He never got his red car at least on this plane of existence. He never got to see his M.I.T. acceptance letter of or celebrate his ultimate victory over the dreaded acne. He missed out on all of the many years of challenges, sadness and joy, blustery autumn days, Caribbean vacations, standing on line in the supermarket and most of all, the bringing to fruition of a budding life of great promise. And he left behind a wife who never existed and children who were never to be born.
When Martin Villa Rosa won the Howard Morris School Science Fair award, he said clumsily, “I just want to do some good.” Although he was unable to witness the success of his life, his all too brief existence on this planet most certainly did result in many good things, probably enough good things to fill up a true entire lifetime. He just never got the opportunity to walk up on the stage and receive his award.//
About the Author
Leonard Henry Scott is a Bronx born graduate of American University and retired Library of Congress Employee. who presently resides in National Harbor, Maryland. His fiction has appeared in Mystery Tribune, Piker Press, Sci Phi Journal, The Chamber Magazine and elsewhere.
About the Author
