The Gork

Though it happened by chance, I ended up seeing Wicked tonight, a musical that takes place eight times a week just one and half blocks from my apartment.

Say what you will, it is quite something and of course, highly profitable.

Besides all the annoying tying in of the book-movie story, which does get cumbersome in Act II, I believe the play is pretty smart and extremely dark. It has a dystopian, in the oppression sense, view of society. The only honest person turns evil because of the callous rejection by her peers. The young green woman, Elphaba, is fully ridiculed based on something as shallow as her skin color. Kids are cruel. Conformity is essential. Beauty is everything. Plus, it isn’t so great to have a conscience or standards. Et al. When you do not conform to what society is doing, even if what society is doing is completely wrong and twisted, you basically end up having to die, or at least having to fake your death. Being different leads to expulsion from the mainstream and this is enough to get you killed.

Which reminds me of The Gork. The Gork’s real name shall be withheld but she had a very Italian last name, one you might run into on a “Vote for ______ for councilman” in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. She lived next door to the M’s, another Italian family. Both of these houses were blue collar and a hair rough for me. I am half Italian, from a basically lawful family, and I was amazed to learn that the M family had some sort of mob dealing at some point, small potatoes, but the father was spending weekends in jail. Strange.

When we first moved to our town, this young woman, The Gork, whom I hate to call such a name and it was not yet her name so let’s stop that for a second and let’s just call her Theresa for now, started to come around. You know what happens when you first move in somewhere. You make friends as quickly as possible because you have to and often the person already living in the neighborhood who needs friends the most is so happy there is a new person in town that she jumps in to be friends with you. Theresa did this very thing to my sister and was also curious about me.

Theresa was extremely tall for her age of twelve years old. She was also fat and had a face that could stop Greenwich Mean Time. Her eyes were very close together. She had no chin. Her teeth were not only buck, they were also in the shape of a V, the two front teeth practically at right angles to each other. She was, in a word, a bit of a monster. But she was so sweet. She was like Baby Huey. We had a patio area and she sat on the foot of a lounge lawn chair, one of those with the tubed plastic slats that would leave zebra impressions on bare skin. When she was finished drinking her iced tea and it was time for her to go home for dinner, she could barely get up. My mother was there, smiling kindly. We all pretended it was no big deal, this issue with gravity. But being from a thin family, we were all horrified. Theresa had the deepest impressions on her thighs that I had ever seen caused from our yard piece. She went home, her sweet high voice saying goodbye. She was desperate to return after we all had dinner. We were cautious to let her completely in so we did not say to come back right after everyone finished eating.

After she left, I asked my mother how someone so young could be so big. She said some people were like that and that she really is so sweet, don’t we think? She was. I felt so sorry for her I wanted to cry. But I hung tough. I was eleven after all. It was time.

Apparently, there was some sort of riff between Theresa’s family and the M family. A feud if you will. An Italian feud. Sometimes I think Theresa’s family ratted out the guy in the M family that was doing weekend time in jail. I don’t know. But it was basically 1970s bad blood and would have been interesting if I didn’t find it so repellant.

After a short while, my sister got in with the more dominant kids in the neighborhood, which included one of the M girls (and I got in with the younger M girl) and it became socially clear that if my sister and I wanted to join in reindeer games that Theresa would have to be dropped. Which she was. Plus, she was younger than my sister, older than me, so she was not a perfect fit anyway. We all let Theresa go with the excuse, Well, she’s not in my grade.

When I was in the Seventh grade and Theresa was in the Eighth, we took the same bus to Junior High. Junior High was set up so that everyone had their own locker but you went to different classes every forty-five or fifty minutes. Our bus would get in about fifteen to twenty minutes before homeroom. I had always been a horrific book worm and very shy. But by the time I got to Junior High I came out of my shell aided by having some obvious musical talent, a certain can-do spunkiness, a pack of cigarettes, a bag of weed and the willingness to party with the people who liked to party. We clanned up greatly.

Though the different groups did not mix much--and in those days there were really only three, the cool kids (smokers/stoners), the jocks (the jocks) and everyone else (smart kids, Jewish kids, kids who climb on rocks)—there was one thing that drew members of all stripes together, at least the boys. And this was what was known as “Going Gorking.”

Someone nicknamed Theresa The Gork. It was sort of brilliant in that it was an absolutely horrible name for someone who was not a pretty young girl, but a full blown, overweight, very tall, uniquely faced, towering monstrosity. The Gork’s locker was at the bottom of the stairs in “The new wing”. The stairwell was closed off by glass doors, the kind of glass with the crisscrossing wire in it in case someone punched it. Many of the Eighth grade guys, especially the potheads from Sloatsburg and certainly the mean lacrosse players and then a few others who just had to get out their aggression, would stand on the stairs during the first fifteen minutes of the day, at least forty of them, and as The Gork would open her locker they would start yelling GORK! GORK! GOOOOOOORRRRRK! as if baiting a wild dangerous creature. And Theresa, this being the only attention she ever got, really, would stand there and take it…then, she would make a game out of it, would run after the boys up the stairs (she was twice the size of any of them) and they would all go screaming, running away from her up to the second floor. She would go back to her locker and start opening it again and the boys would reposition themselves all up and down the stairs, leaning over the railings and The Gorking would recommence. I watched a few times, as I was friends with some of the cooler kids of the eighth grade. But I could not believe what was going on and all I could think of was how nice she was to my sister when we first moved in.

I also thought that if I was Theresa, The Gork, I would not survive. I did not know how anyone could survive that. She was a good sport, running up the stairs after those boys, ready to kick their asses, sort of. I noticed that she took extra long to open her locker. I think she liked the attention. But then it would get too much for her and she would throw things, breakdown and cry. Eventually, the assistant principal put an end to The Gorking but long after the damage was done, I imagined. In her teen years there was no way she could shake The Gorking that had happened to her so many mornings in a row. In high school, The Gork became a very heavy smoker, not unusual, grew heavier and developed (or always had?) some health issues. Everyone forgot about her. When she was in her early twenties she had a heart attack and died.