Max Osborne

Have you heard about Max Osborne, the kid with a name like a movie star? He fell from a great height.

When we were in fifth grade, a condom made its way into the middle of the schoolyard, unwrapped, loose, in no hurry, its body blown about by the breeze but its bottom resting in the greatest tranquility down on the astroturf. A circle of curious children just a handsworth of years from sexual awakening formed soon around the foreign body; Max calmly motioned through and touched it. By the time the crowd realized what had happened and the shrieks began—“Max has AIDS! Max has AIDS!”—the good son of house Osborne was already well to the other side of the yard, where he wiped his hand on the great off-gray wall and grimaced at the sunlight for a bit. Not too long later, he was by proctor pulled aside and given a piece of mind, sent away to the nurse’s office. The nurse wiped him down with isopropyl and gave him a band-aid.

The other day, he fell down and they found him. He had drunk, and he was fallen down backwards, through an open window and out of the apartment and out of the heating and the pink wall-washer lighting and onto the dirt sprinkled with dead grass and salt to soak up the snow eight stories below. Where will we find him now?

He will always have a place with us. Yes, one of our finest, in our hearts, yes, our hearts, of the very finest, says Joãozinho Shapiro, of American Preparatory School at Himmelberg College, highly-regardedest Midtown East school, known amongst locals as American Prep, spoken always in high esteem. Summer program entrance exams are to be held daily this coming winter break: remember that on average 29% of attendees later gain admission to the school, more than five times the regular rate of admission. Do not forget to enroll your children by this Wednesday or you could be robbing them of the opportunity of a lifetime. Standard Himmelberg College rates apply: contact your student’s guidance councilor about free or reduced fee testing if he/she is eligible for free lunch.

In their trophy case perhaps, the honor roll, the papers on the walls of his Rhetoric class, until a greater student kills him a second time by sheer wit.

And then you, all of you, still there in the place where we were, in your math textbook with the answers written in it by careless students every year from September to May and then desperately rubbed down with pink erasers every year in late June lest the school pay a hundred and twenty dollars for a new one. Therein is every subject in secret covered (therefore are the nerds so aloof); thereabouts can you learn all you need to know in life:

Harold and Mary stand on a racetrack. Harold starts at 10m down the track and runs 3.6 m/s. Mary starts at at the beginning of the track and runs 4.8 m/s. Who is further ahead after ten seconds?

Puritans all: the problem gives us that paradigm when we are young and impressionable. Or can it could it be the other way? Do they those writers consider this? Max Osborne starts milesmiles ahead and never budges an inch. Where is he now? I have heard that a great industrialist once found an error in that sort of book and de(com)manded himself to be right until it was so all along. Be wary.

Or the WELCOME ADMITTED STUDENTS poster in the prestigious private school that poor Osborne’s parents couldn’t afford but itself couldn’t afford to make adjustments to its own materials when he was made to decline his admission. Yes, WELCOME ADMITTED STUDENTS ANNO 2008-2009: that great green-pink posterboard that will remain deep in a box in a closet in a basement in José da Fonseca Young Person’s Academy in The Bronx for no less than twenty-eight years, at which point a less-distinguished alumnus, nostalgic for the good old days and wondering just where things went wrong, will fetch it along with a bushel and a peck of other materials from those dingy closets in order to write a sweeping history of the school from its foundation to his very own graduation in the class of 2015: the same class from which Max Osborne would have graduated as valedictorian and gone straight down the gilded road to the annals of history had he attended. This alumnus will even include good Osborne’s name in the book not once and not twice but thrice, wondering just who this Max was and why nobody seems to remember him before shrugging and opting to fabricate a short history to cement such over. It will be okay: good Osborne himself will never protest now.

We can ask Johnny thereover, be he still of this world. When we used to leave school together those years ago, many for us but few for him, he would be:
— You ain’t all that, kid, aye? Look, motherfucker, I got all these years on you. You’d understand in my place, he’d say.

And we’d be walking away and he’d suddenly: — Kids gotta learn res-PECT, man. Ye, whattyawannabe? Doctorprofessorengineer and you don’t like to THINK ‘bout THINGS? bout PEOPLE? Ye mussg’n get yr life together, boy. Ye will disappoint that fine rich bloodline.

And the less one understood the more was one more insulted.

— februaryfourththtwentythirteenSOUTHBRONXNY latelastnight — identifiedas Max Osborne ofamericanpreparatoryschoolathimmelburgcollege — eighthstoryhighrise — plummeted — ontothefrozendirtandgrass — (and hereto highlighted in usedmarkerhueyellow) survived —

and condemned that rich bloodline of his, beautiful and strange, to a purer fate, beautiful and strange. We will find him in the dying mediums for lack of the little boy genius to keep the Osborne line current. Watch the subway papers pushed on you outside Lexington-53rd for the next few months. It will begin CARETAKERWANTEDALLCAPS and end in the sort of confessional that will propel it by force into a paperphile’s most bestest clippings (I know these exist for my father has told me so). We cannot bear any longer to somethingsomething—

and so it is so, that it is so, that so has it come to pass. And so has he I do here swear to you.