1983
The First time I met Johnny Vellotta he hit me in the head with a rubber snake. He did it before I’d had a chance to meet all the other kids standing there. It was 7:30AM at a bus stop in the fall of 1983. First day of grade 3, at a new school in a new country. Everything was new except the way I unfailingly absorbed all the awkwardness in a 10 meter radius. He had a sidekick. A shadow puppet named Patrick. He was a short, thick wristed, freckled little gangster with narrow eyes that never seemed to show the white parts. His hair hung like a dark ceramic cereal bowl around his face. Every day began with a special acknowledgment from this menacing duo. If they passed me in the hallway, whatever I was carrying was knocked out of my hands onto the floor. They developed a technique of hitching their middle finger behind the knuckle of their thumb and then flicking it out to deliver a staggeringly powerful clip to one of my enormous ears that stuck out like satellite dishes. It was a sport they flourished at, displaying a sleight of hand that I almost had to envy. Of course, I had the reflexes of a turtle and never saw it coming.
It was only a matter of time before they found out about my dumb fear of frogs. I can't explain my frog phobia. It was completely irrational, but the sight of one sent me into a panic. One day at school Johnny noticed me jump after seeing a frog leap out of the grass near my leg during recess. I knew instantly he'd clocked my reaction and soon there were frogs in my backpack, in my jacket, and once I reached into my desk for a pencil case and slid my hand over the warty corpse of a large flat toad. 1983 was a lesson in cruelty from a boy whose oddly shaped head looked like a lima bean with a military buzz cut. I started having what I later learned were panic attacks. I kept that to myself. Hiding it wasn’t easy at school but I had the very particular misfortune of having this fifth grade tormentor living right smack-dab next door to me. It was like a slow-drip of battery acid on my already knackered nerves. One day I noticed Johnny and Patrick were watching me from the bushes between our houses. They were whispering to each other and planning something. To this day I have no idea what they were up to. After that I mostly stayed inside and stuck to drawing.
The worst part was that he would show up at my house and ask my mother if I could come outside to play. Once outside, he would take me to another location and suddenly lash out at me or push me down a hill on my bike. I started hiding whenever there was a knock on the door. I remember him smiling on the porch all soft and mannered like Little Lord Fauntleroy for the benefit of my mother. I was too ashamed to tell her what was really going on because I didn't want her to know that I was such a loser at school. My mom worried about me sitting at home all day, drawing. She was always trying to lure me outside and pushing me to talk to other kids. When Johnny came knocking, she acted like a birthday parade was waiting for me on the doorstep. I know she was always concerned and just wanted me to have a childhood but her excitement at the prospect of anyone showing an interest made me feel a little like the elephant man.
I remember Johnny standing on my doorstep, looking past my mother to meet my eye, smiling with his rattle snake teeth. His voice around my mom was practically an octave higher. It was unsettling to hear his speech completely stripped of sarcasm. I would always come back from those afternoons completely traumatized. I didn’t share a lot of what happened to me in those years with anyone, including my mom. I funnelled all those anxieties into my drawings of women. Where I was a timid, ineffectual alien life form, the women I drew were towering and ferocious. They held a space of supreme confidence and authority. Sometimes they were even threatening and dangerous. I drew them at home, at school, and wherever my parents took me, a sketchbook came along, filled with menacing vamps and sirens.
