The Reader's Eye on Television

Author

By Ollie

Publish Date

June 15, 2006

When I was eight, I ripped the skin off my right arm. I had been riding bikes with Timmy Sanguinetti at the churchyard. It was a day of us tear-assing all over. We had seen how fast we could go before rounding the corner behind the chapel and crunching through the gravel. Our front tires would sink in the powdery dust of the lot to where we'd almost have to jump off our seats, but we'd pedal through to the other side.

Across the street from the churchyard was my house, and if I'd known I was going to peel off the skin of my right arm, I'd've peeled it off right there in my driveway instead of riding over Sunset Hill and down Greeley Road to do it. Hell, if I'd've known I was going to crash my bike so far away, I'd've probably just went inside and watched TV instead.

We checked all the doors to the church that day. Tim said one time somebody'd left the back door beneath the chapel open. He said there was a refrigerator standing inside the hall and that he'd snooped through it to see if there was anything inside worth eating, but there'd been only a jar of green olives. Timmy hated green olives.

The door at the top of the stairs that ran along the side of the church was closed, too. So we sat on the cold concrete steps and wrote stuff with a piece of chalk that'd been left there by some other kid. We wrote the names of the girls we liked and then scratched them out with our shoes. Since we were on the topic of girls, we argued about how Transformers made other Transformers.

I contended, and still do to this day, that Transformers do it , and Timmy said they just built other Transformers from spare parts and scrap metal.

"They're a race of beings from another planet," I said, my proposition as plain as day. "That means they do it." Timmy thought we should ride over to ask Monkey, since Monkey was two years older than us.

It was over on Greeley, by the school, and about a block from Monkey's that I hit a huge pothole in the asphalt and got pitched over the front of my handlebars and tore my right arm down to the red meat.

Monkey's mom screeched her tires over to my body, loaded me into her brown Toyota Corona with the tinny doors and drove me home with my bike in the trunk. The next few days I sat on the carpet in front of the TV with a wet rag over my torn skin that I'd move around to keep from sticking to me, and I drank chocolate milk through a straw.

WHAT I WILL AND WON'T WATCH THIS WEEK